by Tony Judt
In my turn—and to find my place—I too talked. For party pieces I would remember words, perform them, translate them. “Ooh, he’ll be a lawyer,” they’d say. “He’ll charm the birds off the trees”: something I attempted fruitlessly in parks for a while before applying the admonition in its Cockney usage to no greater effect during my adolescent years. By then I had graduated from the intensity of polyglot exchanges to the cooler elegance of BBC English.
The 1950s—when I attended elementary school—were a rule-bound age in the teaching and use of the English language. We were instructed in the unacceptability of even the most minor syntactical transgression. “Good” English was at its peak. Thanks to BBC radio and cinema newsreels, there were nationally accepted norms for proper speech; the authority of class and region determined not just how you said things but the kind of things it was appropriate to say. “Accents” abounded (my own included), but were ranked according to respectability: typically a function of social standing and geographical distance from London.
I was seduced by the sheen of English prose at its evanescent apogee. This was the age of mass literacy whose decline Richard Hoggart anticipated in his elegiac essay The Uses of Literacy (1957). A literature of protest and revolt was rising through the culture. From Lucky Jim through Look Back in Anger, and on to the “kitchen sink” dramas of the end of the decade, the class-bound frontiers of suffocating respectability and “proper” speech were under attack. But the barbarians themselves, in their assaults on the heritage, resorted to the perfected cadences of received English: it never occurred to me, reading them, that in order to rebel one must dispense with good form.
By the time I reached college, words were my “thing.” As one teacher equivocally observed, I had the talents of a “silver-tongued orator”—combining (as I fondly assured myself ) the inherited confidence of the milieu with the critical edge of the outsider. Oxbridge tutorials reward the verbally felicitous student: the neo-Socratic style (“why did you write this?” “what did you mean by it?”) invites the solitary recipient to explain himself at length, while implicitly disadvantaging the shy, reflective undergraduate who would prefer to retreat to the back of a seminar. My self-serving faith in articulacy was reinforced: not merely evidence of intelligence but intelligence itself.
Did it occur to me that the silence of the teacher in this pedagogical setting was crucial? Certainly silence was something at which I was never adept, whether as student or teacher. Some of my most impressive colleagues over the years have been withdrawn to the point of inarticulacy in debates and even conversation, thinking with deliberation before committing themselves. I have envied them this self-restraint.
Articulacy is typically regarded as an aggressive talent. But for me its functions were substantively defensive: rhetorical flexibility allows for a certain feigned closeness—conveying proximity while maintaining distance. That is what actors do—but the world is not really a stage and there is something artificial in the exercise: one sees it in the current US president. I too have marshaled language to fend off intimacy—which perhaps explains a romantic penchant for Protestants and Native Americans, reticent cultures both.
In matters of language, of course, outsiders are frequently deceived: I recall a senior American partner at the consulting firm McKinsey once explaining to me that in the early days of their recruitment in England he found it nearly impossible to choose young associates—everyone seemed so articulate, the analyses tripping off their pens. How could you tell who was smart and who was merely polished?
Words may deceive—mischievous and untrustworthy. I remember being spellbound by the fantasy history of the Soviet Union woven in his Trevelyan Lectures at Cambridge by the elderly Trotskyist Isaac Deutscher (published in 1967 under the title The Unfinished Revolution: Russia 1917-1967). The form so elegantly transcended the content that we accepted the latter on trust: detoxification took a while. Sheer rhetorical facility, whatever its appeal, need not denote originality and depth of content.
All the same, inarticulacy surely suggests a shortcoming of thought. This idea will sound odd to a generation praised for what they are trying to say rather than the thing said. Articulacy itself became an object of suspicion in the 1970s: the retreat from “form” favored uncritical approbation of mere “self-expression,” above all in the classroom. But it is one thing to encourage students to express their opinions freely and to take care not to crush these under the weight of prematurely imposed authority. It is quite another for teachers to retreat from formal criticism in the hope that the freedom thereby accorded will favor independent thought: “Don’t worry how you say it, it’s the ideas that count.”
Forty years on from the 1960s, there are not many instructors left with the self-confidence (or the training) to pounce on infelicitous expression and explain clearly just why it inhibits intelligent reflection. The revolution of my generation played an important role in this unraveling: the priority accorded the autonomous individual in every sphere of life should not be underestimated—“doing your own thing” took protean form.
Today “natural” expression—in language as in art—is preferred to artifice. We unreflectively suppose that truth no less than beauty is conveyed more effectively thereby. Alexander Pope knew better.1 For many centuries in the Western tradition, how well you expressed a position corresponded closely to the credibility of your argument. Rhetorical styles might vary from the spartan to the baroque, but style itself was never a matter of indifference. And “style” was not just a well-turned sentence: poor expression belied poor thought. Confused words suggested confused ideas at best, dissimulation at worst.
The “professionalization” of academic writing—and the self-conscious grasping of humanists for the security of “theory” and “methodology”—favors obscurantism. This has encouraged the rise of a counterfeit currency of glib “popular” articulacy: in the discipline of history this is exemplified by the ascent of the “television don,” whose appeal lies precisely in his claim to attract a mass audience in an age when fellow scholars have lost interest in communication. But whereas an earlier generation of popular scholarship distilled authorial authority into plain text, today’s “accessible” writers protrude uncomfortably into the audience’s consciousness. It is the performer, rather than the subject, to whom the audience’s attention is drawn.
Cultural insecurity begets its linguistic doppelgänger. The same is true of technical advance. In a world of Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter (not to mention texting), pithy allusion substitutes for exposition. Where once the Internet seemed an opportunity for unrestricted communication, the increasingly commercial bias of the medium—“I am what I buy”—brings impoverishment of its own. My children observe of their own generation that the communicative shorthand of their hardware has begun to seep into communication itself: “people talk like texts.”
This ought to worry us. When words lose their integrity so do the ideas they express. If we privilege personal expression over formal convention, then we are privatizing language no less than we have privatized so much else. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” Alice was right: the outcome is anarchy.
In “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell castigated contemporaries for using language to mystify rather than inform. His critique was directed at bad faith: people wrote poorly because they were trying to say something unclear or else deliberately prevaricating. Our problem, it seems to me, is different. Shoddy prose today bespeaks intellectual insecurity: we speak and write badly because we don’t feel confident in what we think and are reluctant to assert it unambiguously (“It’s only my opinion . . . ”). Rather than suffering from the onset of “newspeak,” we risk the rise of “nospeak.”
I am more conscious of these considerations now than at any time in the p
ast. In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them. They still form with impeccable discipline and unreduced range in the silence of my thoughts—the view from inside is as rich as ever—but I can no longer convey them with ease. Vowel sounds and sibilant consonants slide out of my mouth, shapeless and inchoate even to my close collaborator. The vocal muscle, for sixty years my reliable alter ego, is failing. Communication, performance, assertion: these are now my weakest assets. Translating being into thought, thought into words, and words into communication will soon be beyond me and I shall be confined to the rhetorical landscape of my interior reflections.
Though I am now more sympathetic to those constrained to silence I remain contemptuous of garbled language. No longer free to exercise it myself, I appreciate more than ever how vital communication is to the republic: not just the means by which we live together but part of what living together means. The wealth of words in which I was raised were a public space in their own right—and properly preserved public spaces are what we so lack today. If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have.
1
True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest, What oft was Thought, but ne’er so well Exprest.—Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism (1711)
PART THREE
XVIII
Go West, Young Judt
America is not everyone’s destination of choice. Few people wake up and say to themselves, “I’ve had it with Tajikistan—let’s move to America!” After the war my parents despaired of England (a widespread sentiment in those dreary years); but like so many of their British contemporaries they looked naturally to the Dominions. In the high streets of my childhood, grocers and butchers advertised New Zealand lamb and cheese, Australian mutton, and South African sherry—but American products were rare. However, plans to settle in New Zealand (and raise sheep?) were scotched by circumstance and my father’s TB scars. I was duly born in London and was nearly thirty before my first visit to America.
Everyone thinks they know the United States. What you “know,” of course, depends a lot on how old you are. For elderly Europeans, America is the country that arrived late, rescued them from their history, and irritated with its self-confident prosperity: “What’s wrong with the Yanks?” “They’re overpaid, oversexed, and over here”—or, in a London variant alluding to cheap ladies’ underwear provided under a wartime government scheme: “Have you heard about the new Utility drawers? One Yank and they’re off.”
For West Europeans raised in the 1950s, “America” was Bing Crosby, Hopalong Cassidy, and overvalued dollars flowing copiously from the plaid pants pockets of midwestern tourists. By the 1970s the image had shifted away from the cowboy West to the Manhattan canyons of Lieutenant Kojak. My generation enthusiastically replaced Bing with Elvis, and Elvis with Motown and the Beach Boys; but we had not the slightest idea what Memphis or Detroit—or southern California for that matter—actually looked like.
America was thus intensely familiar—and completely unknown. Before coming here, I had read Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, and some of the extraordinary short-story writers of the South. Between this and a diet of 1940s-era film noir, I certainly had visual images of the United States. But nothing cohered. Moreover, born like most Europeans in a country I could cross on foot in a matter of days, I had absolutely no grasp of the sheer scale and variety of the place.
I came to the US for the first time in 1975. Upon landing in Boston, I was supposed to call a Harvard friend with whom we were to stay—but the pay phone required a dime, a coin I could not even identify (Kojak never used them). I was bailed out by a friendly cop, much amused at my ignorance of American coinage.
My English wife and I were planning to drive across the country to Davis, California, where I had been invited to teach for a year. I had thought to buy a used VW Bug, but the first salesman I met talked me into a 1971 Buick LeSabre: gold, automatic, nearly eighteen feet long and capable of ten miles per gallon with a following wind. The first thing we did with the Buick was drive to a pizzeria. In England pizzas were still scarce—and small: a large would have been seven inches across and a half-inch deep. Thus, when the boy behind the counter asked what size, we responded unhesitatingly: “large”—and ordered two of them. We were somewhat nonplussed to be presented with two huge cardboard boxes, each containing a sixteen-inch Chicago-style deep dish meal for ten: my first intimation of the American obsession with size.
Short on funds, we headed west—stopping only to refuel ourselves and the ravenous Buick. The first American motel I ever stayed in was in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The rates seemed so implausibly low that I tentatively inquired whether we might upgrade to a room with a shower. The desk clerk, after pretending not to understand my accent, explained with undisguised disdain that “all our rooms got showers.” To a European ear this was implausible: it was not until we saw it that we actually believed him. Intimation #2: Americans have a thing about clean.
By the time we reached Davis, via Rapid City, South Dakota (“Where the Range War ended”) and Reno, we had acquired considerable respect for deep Americana, if not for American cars. This is a “big” country—big sky, big mountains, big fields—and beautiful withal. Even the incontrovertibly ugly aspects are somehow domesticated by their setting: the gas stations and cheap motels that stagger for miles west of Amarillo would spell doom to any European landscape (their Italian counterparts outside Milan are grotesque), but in the greater scheme of West Texas they blend romantically into the evening haze.
Since that first transcontinental drive I have crossed the country seven times. Old established settlements—Cheyenne, Knoxville, Savannah—have continuity on their side. But who could love present-day Houston, Phoenix, or Charlotte? Desolate heaps of office buildings and intersections, they bustle misleadingly from nine to five before dying at dusk. Ozymandias-like, such exurbations will sink back into the marshland or desert whence they arose once the water runs out and gasoline prices them out of existence.
Then there are the ancient coastal settlements, reassuringly grounded in the country’s colonial past. Penniless once in New Orleans (mugged in a laundromat), I got an offer to drive a car to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a first-team line-backer of the Pittsburgh Steelers. The vehicle was a long, lean American muscle car, the hood depicting a grinning tiger spread lasciviously across a fur coat. Predictably, we got stopped every fifty miles: the motorcycle cop who pulled us over would swagger up to the window, ready to dress down some overconfident dude in his speeding pimpmobile . . . only to discover a little Cambridge tutor and his terrified wife. After a while we got to enjoying the effect.
Once, in North Platte, Nebraska, I experienced a negative epiphany. In the middle of nowhere, hundreds of miles from anything resembling a city and thousands of miles from the nearest salt water: if I felt cut off, surrounded by eight-foot-high fields of corn, what must it be like to live in such a place? No wonder most Americans are profoundly uninterested in what the rest of the world is doing or what it thinks of them. Middle Kingdom? The Chinese didn’t know the half of it.
The little towns and settlements dotting the landscape from the Mississippi delta to southern California present a sobering picture. Driving northwest from Dallas toward remotest Decatur on the Texan plateau, each settlement would be represented by a gas station or two, a dowdy (often shuttered) motel, the occasional convenience store, and little clusters of trailer housing. But there was nothing to suggest community.
Except the church. To a European eye, as often as not, it was little more than a warehouse topped by a giant cross. But the building stood out among the strip malls and ribbon housing. Religion is not just the only game in town—it is often the sole link to anything recognizably social, to a higher striving. If I lived in such a place, I too would join the Elect.
But in my line of business I would not have to. By far the best thing about America is its universiti
es. Not Harvard, Yale, e tutti quanti: though marvelous, they are not distinctively American—their roots reach across the ocean to Oxford, Heidelberg, and beyond. Nowhere else in the world, however, can boast such public universities. You drive for miles across a godforsaken midwestern scrubscape, pockmarked by billboards, Motel 6s, and a military parade of food chains, when—like some pedagogical mirage dreamed up by nineteenth-century English gentlemen—there appears . . . a library! And not just any library: at Bloomington, the University of Indiana boasts a 7.8-million-volume collection in more than nine hundred languages, housed in a magnificent double-towered mausoleum of Indiana limestone.
A little over a hundred miles northwest across another empty cornscape there hoves into view the oasis of Champaign-Urbana: an unprepossessing college town housing a library of over ten million volumes. Even the smallest of these land grant universities—the University of Vermont at Burlington, or Wyoming’s isolated campus at Laramie—can boast collections, resources, facilities, and ambitions that most ancient European establishments can only envy.
The contrast between the university libraries of Indiana or Illinois and the undulating fields almost visible from their windows illustrates the astonishing scale and variety of the American inland empire: something you cannot hope to grasp from afar. A few miles south of Bloomington’s cosmopolitan academic community lies the heartland of the old Ku Klux Klan, much as the peerless literary holdings of the University of Texas sit implausibly amidst the insularity and prejudice of the hill country that surrounds them. To the outsider, these are unsettling juxtapositions.