Foreign Faces
V. S. PRITCHETT
Contents
1 The Offensive Traveller
2 Czecho-Slovakia
3 Poland
4 Hungary
5 Bulgaria
6 Romania
7 Madrid
8 Seville
9 Turkey
10 Iran
1
The
Offensive Traveller
I am an offensive traveller. I do not mean that I arrive in a foreign country in a state of arrogance and start complaining about the beds, the plumbing, the food, the transport, the prices. I do not refuse to drink the water. I do not see bacteria everywhere. I do not say: “The country is wonderful, but you can have the people.” I do not suspect everyone who speaks a foreign language of being a thief. I do not scream that I cannot get a good steak in Morocco—steak travellers are the hypochondriacs of motion—a decent haggis in Naples or an edible chop suey on Ascension Island. I do not complain of the lack of Night Life in English villages or of the absence of thatch in Ohio. One thing, of course, does annoy me: other tourists. Clear the Americans out of Paris; throw the Germans out of Venice; rid Majorca and the Costa Brava of the British. I say that loudly. If I had lived in Canterbury in the Middle Ages I would have said the same about those palfrey loads of pilgrims. To the inhabitants I am as obliging as a Portuguese. By being offensive I mean that I travel, therefore I offend. I represent that ancient enemy of all communities: the stranger. Neapolitan girls have crossed themselves to avert the evil eye at the sight of me. (And of you, too, hypocrite lecteur.) And rightly: We are looking on the private life of another people, a life which is entirely their business, with an eye that, however friendly it may be, is alien. We are seeing people as they do not see themselves. I say “we”, but I do worse than this. I not only look. I make notes. I write.
It is now forty-two years ago that I wrote my first impressions of a country not my own and began my career as a traveller who causes offence in print. I began to be paid for insulting others. I remember the first occasion. There was—perhaps there still is—a local train that runs from Cork to Blarney (significant destination!) and the country people piled in bringing their chickens with them. I mentioned the fact because the journey was a jolly one in a country then torn apart by Civil War. I was accused of bringing the new Irish nation into ridicule. No Irish man or woman ever brought a chicken into a train. If he or she did, a foreigner ought not to mention it. I was playing up the Victorian charm of a nation determined to be Victorian no longer.
I moved on to Spain where I was accused of saying there would shortly be a vacant throne: there was, but in this my offence was without distinction. Everyone was saying it. Who were my friends? Abominable intellectuals like Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, Baroja—people who were notorious Europeanisers, objectors to bullfighting and kindly disposed to education, parliaments, football and walking in the mountains. I migrated to the United States; my talent really developed. One summer evening I was sitting on the jetty of a small New England town listening to the distant voices of some old fellows jawing and whittling away. I could not hear what they said but on that peaceful evening the sound was like one of the pleasantest sounds in nature: the cawing of returning rooks. I was a fanciful youth. I mentioned the sound in print. Uproar. I had conveyed that New Englanders among all human animals, had not yet evolved the power of speech, forgetting in my smug British way that English speech has been compared to the hissing of geese.
With this incident, I realised that I had been born with a remarkable gift. I exploited it. There were the Swiss, for example; I praised them for their domestic contentment. They objected at once: did I not know that their family life was as awful as that of any other people? Was I insinuating that they lacked a capacity to suffer? A young Swiss came to my office in London to assure me that a Swiss could suffer, if he got half a chance, as much as any man on earth. I praised Scandinavian architecture. These Nordics were indignant that I had not mentioned their high suicide rate. In time, the Germans spoke out. When I said that the Germans loved flowers I was clearly insinuating that they were “sissies” and one reader got in a nasty dig at me: “Don’t the British love flowers too?”
The mayor of a town in South America said I obviously intended an affront when I said they had just installed traffic lights. My gift was developing fast—so fast that I was invited to a discussion on the Welsh character in a small Welsh town and there I made the sort of mistake that comes from over-confidence. I was asked to insult the Welsh, because the meeting had fallen into the doldrums of self-praise. The meeting took place in a small room, indeed one of the company, a learned shepherd, had to lie on the floor at my feet. He stared expectantly, waiting to spring. My speech was brief, even trivial. All I said was that the Welsh were touchy, hot-tempered, hypocritical and given to lying. No more. The shepherd sprang—but not at me. He sprang at the audience and in a beautiful lamenting voice, as if he were declaiming from Jeremiah, he shouted:
“What this Englishman has just said is true! We are liars, we are hypocrites . . .”
You observe my error. I learned the lesson and, as a result, reached the peak of my offensive career. It was during the war. I had written a film script showing that the ordinary Englishman and the ordinary Frenchman were natural allies and friends. I presented a flighty and talkative Englishman, keen on beer and girls, and a silent, industrious abstemious Frenchman, dignified and scrupulous. You notice my cunning? I had reversed a sacred myth. The film was banned as anti-Allied propaganda and insulting to both parties. I could go no higher.
As an offender of foreigners I recognise that my place in a long tradition is a humble one. Unlike Shakespeare I have not made fun of foreign accents. I have not made fun of Frogs, Taffys, Wops or Polacks. The nonchalance of Mark Twain and the narkiness of Henry Adams are far beyond me. Mrs. Trollope being rude to Americans, Nathaniel Hawthorne being rude about the British, Bernard Shaw making a laughing-stock of both, are far above my level. I could not equal Bemelmans on Ecuador, though I did get a broadside from a politician in that country—the eighty volcanoes of the lovely place have, perhaps, contributed to the sensibility of its public men— and I have not debunked Spain like that brilliant Italian scholar, Mario Praz in Unromantic Spain. None of these great offenders can, of course, vie with Tobias Smollett whose Travels Through France and Italy is the supreme classic of offence. Smollett had the fine art of excusing a vice by substituting a worse one. Of the French he wrote:
If their acts of generosity are rare, we ought to ascribe that rarity not so much to a deficiency of generous sentiments, as to their vanity and ostentation, which, engrossing all their funds, utterly disable them from exerting the virtues of beneficence.
Taine’s view of the British seems to have been that they were a kind of brute cattle with addled heads and censorious habits, living in steam. I say nothing of Dr. Johnson and the Scots. He spoke it at a time when the inns of northern England had “Scots go home” chalked on their walls.
I must not claim too much for my gift for offence. I could not have been born at a luckier moment. In the eighteenth century it was impossible to offend anyone. Today, more people are offendable than at any other time in the history of the world. The number increases. There are two reasons for this, one of them practical: the other harder to define. The first is that more people travel and annoy one another. People whose blood boiled only once in a lifetime can now have it brought to the boil every night of their lives in books, on television and in the cinema. Why are they offended? They are rightly offended by errors of fact. But why are personal descriptions and interpretations offensive to them? I think the tendency of modern society is to make us think there ought to be only one view,
that there is a mysterious standard eye or opinion like the standard inch. That very unobjective word called “objective” is constantly used. This is natural: we, the offended, are fed on the single view of propaganda, advertising and myth.
But the second reason for the increase in the number of the offended is more important. More people are offended because more are insecure. More people in the world are uprooted and unsure of themselves. There are more chips on more shoulders. It began with the industrial revolution, the break-up of long-settled patterns of life in which people felt so assured that they did not care what was said about them, good or bad. In some countries the industrial revolution has only just begun. If I want to stir up chauvinism or hysteria and tickle an inferiority complex I go to the big cities; the countryman or the man of the small town which has no new buildings cannot easily be moved. A fisherman, a Spanish shepherd, a German woodcutter, a man working on the fields, regards the people who write about him or interpret him with amusement, contentment and even pity. He is strong in his own world and often better educated, in the true sense of being able to draw on stored experience, than those who have merely new knowledge. But in the new countries and new towns it is not so. Doubt is much stronger. “What do you think of our new telegraph poles?” a Japanese student asked an English poet who was teaching him Gray’s Elegy. The greatest tact was required in the poet’s reply. It is offensive in such places not to mention the latest thing. The enormously high buildings shooting up in some unlikely parts of the world may be monuments to modern art, hope and endeavour; they are also monuments to an inferiority complex. The newer the country the more noticeable the chip, the more certain the aggression. Even when the assured do not condescend to the ill-assured, it is resented that the assured does not know that he is assured. If two assured well-rooted peoples meet—the French and the Spaniards for example—the comedy has the most delicate dryness, though as far as offence is concerned the French easily win. I have found mayors the most ready of all people to take offence, if their towns are small.
A new country or régime regards interpretation or criticism—anything except the official view—as antisocial. And some countries are not as old as they think they are. The Germans are an ancient race; their influence on European institutions has been enormous from the time of the Roman Empire. They are pre-eminent in modern science. They have great vitality and often combine an extraordinary precision in work with a powerful, if not always determinable, emotional force. Everyone has observed this. But as a nation, the Germans are very young. They are, like the young, affronted, if their estimate of themselves is questioned. And when Germans—or British, or Italians, or any other people— become racial minorities in other countries, they become more chauvinist, more resentful of criticism or interpretation than their relatives in the homeland. The Italians in Buenos Aires, the British in Chile, the Irish in Sydney or New York, are far thinner-skinned than the people they have left behind. Self-criticism is the beginning of maturity. One of the harshest books ever written by a foreigner about another country was George Borrow’s The Bible in Spain. It was translated into Spanish, about forty years ago, and was praised by most of the Spanish critics because they recognised in Borrow a fanatical enemy, a man who, they said, might have been one of themselves and not a Bible-punching heretic. They disagreed with every word he wrote; what they admired was his intolerance.
More offence is caused by praise than blame. The Spaniards hate being called romantic by the French, the Irish hate being called fanciful, the British hate being called solid, the French hate being called volatile, the Italians hate being called clever and the Portuguese dislike being praised for anything at all and quickly tell you how all “your” things are better than theirs. What really offends is the destruction of a myth. I remember Alberto Moravia saying a month or two ago in London that a young Neapolitan saves up enough money to buy a Vespa in order to dash across Europe to Scandinavia where (he has been told) passionate, aristocratic girls of surpassing intelligence and beauty are dedicated to free love; while at the same moment, young love-starved Scandinavians are dashing south to Naples where, they understand, the dark beauties of the South will come out of palaces into their arms. Both parties would clearly be happier in puritan London where—Billy Graham tells us—the parks are one vast bedroom. It is hard to decide here who are the offended parties. The best thing to do is to declare all parties undersexed. That causes enormous offence. Northern Italians have been saying this successfully of Southern Italians for generations. There are other myths: that Americans talk of nothing but dollars, that the British are strangled by their class systems, that the Germans don’t laugh, that every Frenchman keeps a mistress, that the South Americans are always shooting each other.
Being an offender I am myself easily offended. Where is my weak spot? There is no single place. I am a weak spot all over. I just dislike being looked at. As the coachload of tourists passes me with their cameras in my own country I feel myself swelling into one fevered wound. Has it come to this, I say, as their cameras click, that I have degenerated into a native, a local character daubed with racial characteristics, liable to remind people of what they have read, interesting for my folk customs, my peculiar diet, my curious clothes? Am I being taken for a Dickensian porter, a lord, Mrs. Grundy’s husband, a slippery pickpocket, a town crier, a folk dancer, a decayed Empire builder? Or much worse, the supreme insult in fact: am I being studied as an example of the typical? Is someone going home to write about my habits and deduce from them the unlucky attributes of my nation? If you catch me, I am tempted to say, I shall have my revenge. I shall do as I have been done by in many, many countries. I shall be a most misleading guide.
2
Czecho-Slovakia
We had just landed at Prague airport.
“Tovarish So-and-so! Tovarish Somebody Else! Mr. Thomson! Monsieur Le Brun! Herr Schneider!”—at intervals the girl in the khaki uniform sang out our names from the window of the Passport Control, in a high, sweetish voice. Slaves of anxiety, the Czechs give Communists and Capitalists their correct titles. I had travelled in a Czech plane from London; among the passengers were a dozen spick-and-span Czech schoolchildren ; and now the hot, glum little hall of the airport with the inevitable show-cases of folk art was filled with men in jerseys and open-necked shirts, carrying briefcases and bundles. A local plane from Bratislava, on the Hungarian border, had just come in. Lanky or burly, the men wore brown berets which sat on the tops of their heads like little puddings. These men looked like people off the land or out of factories.
This was my first journey to a country behind the Iron Curtain. We had flown out of the flash and wealth of Brussels, over the neat red-and-white towns of Germany, and knew we were over Czecho-Slovakia when the blobs of forest thickened and the villages and towns were straggling and grey-roofed. The curtain is as much a curtain of words as of iron, for there were no Western periodicals on the plane. (The authorities do not mind the Westerner bringing in his own newspapers, but he will never be able to buy them in Czecho-Slovakia. The only ones he can buy are the London Daily Worker, L’Humanité and L’Unità). One had been told that the Customs and Currency control system were severe, but this turned out not to be so. My luggage was not opened. There were Customs Officers who spoke German, French, English and Russian and I have no doubt they could have rustled up a Chinese-speaker, for Chinese was—at that time—the new language snobbery in the satellite countries. I got my money from a clerk who seemed to know London as well as I did. We even talked about the weather. For at that moment a thunderstorm broke, the Czechs put on the standard plastic raincoats, we packed into a shabby bus, bulged on our seats, and splashed our way through the cement-coloured suburbs, across the wide, curving river into Prague. “One of the most beautiful capitals in Europe; provincial since 1914; Kaput since Hitler’s war,” a Czech friend had said in London. Was that what I would find?
Central Europe was unknown to me before the war. Of Czecho-Slovakia s
ince 1947 I knew only the story of the Czech and Polish dogs. They had met at the frontier. The Polish dog was going to Czecho-Slovakia, he said, to get something to eat. The Czech dog said he was going to Poland because he wanted to bark. After Romania, Czecho-Slovakia has lived under the most rigid of the Communist régimes, until 1963. I was there in ’61.
But the hotels of Prague are full of Western tourists, as well as Russian, Korean, East German, Hungarian and Polish visitors; among the businessmen one finds Turks calling up Istanbul, one finds Egyptians calling Cairo, and Indians sending cables about cotton and machinery to Bombay, Americans, Argentines, West Germans and British.
A large number of American Czechs come to visit their relatives. Czecho-Slovakia is an industrial country, envied by all the other satellites, for it has a big start in the race for economic self-sufficiency. Since the slight thaw of 1956 when the Czech students protested against Stalinism, and since the discovery that the tourist industry pays handsomely, I don’t think that much check is kept on the ordinary traveller. The tourist is certainly not followed or shadowed. But two journalists who had driven in from Poland that evening asked, “What’s happening here? We’ve been given the full treatment: we were followed all the way from the frontier.” One has no need of a guide, indeed guides are as hard to come by in the summer as motor-cars are. It is true that the Czechs are a little puzzled by a traveller who does not belong to a coach party, a conference or a trades union group. One is treated with awe and respect if one is alone, for one represents Western Currency in its most reckless form. To be a writer is also something. Writers have always had enormous prestige in Central Europe and Communism is a book religion.
One of my first impressions of the Czechs did not change and indeed was enhanced. They are exceptionally concerned to help and to be kind to strangers. Are you happy? Can I take you to the bus or get you a taxi? Are you worrying about anything? Were you happy yesterday afternoon? Are you sure being alone does not give you Angst? What can they do? Have you any complaints? Do you want another pillow? This eagerness to oblige is a characteristic of small countries whose language no foreigner can be expected to speak; but with the Czechs, as with the Portuguese, the need to oblige rises out of a deep and curious national craving. Throughout their history they have craved for help from friends, they long to be loved. I met a good many Czechs—especially Party members—who spoke of the Czechs’ “inferiority complex” and who feared that this sensibility to others had gone to the length of neurosis and had turned them into the lackeys of international acquaintance. They are a morbidly cautious race surrounded by more spirited peoples. History has trapped them.
Foreign Faces Page 1