At Home and Abroad

by V. S. Pritchett

  The paradox is that this gaiety is both decorous and high-spirited—at ten or eleven at night O’Connell Street in Dublin is gayer than any city of provincial England—but it can turn, if the black mood comes on and the drink is flowing, into fighting. Why do you see so many black eyes in the Irish quarters anywhere? There comes a moment when the Irish face turns dour: “Would you mind repeating what you just said?” The inflection is unmistakable. One lives on a hair trigger. Is Ireland really so light-hearted? Country life is lonely, the priests keep a sharp eye on dances and social gatherings. The rain pours off the brim of your hat, the cold gales blow. I have often spoken to Basque fishermen who turn up in Kerry from time to time and who are appalled by the melancholy of the people, their puritan religion and their suspiciousness. They are shattered by the number and squalor of the pubs and by the sharp tongues of the girls. And the Irish fisherman thinks the Basque a fool for sailing as far as Ireland and even as far as Iceland. The Irish fisherman lives for the day.

  The cure for melancholy, for listlessness and boredom is violent action, and in Ireland this is embodied in sport. The horse has always been the heroic solvent of Irish evils, and I half believe that any Irish man or woman would as soon be a horse as a human being. After all, in Gulliver’s Travels, Swift portrayed the Houyhnhnms as an equine master race, though in fact he was satirizing the rational man. Animal spirits of the athletic, hunting, racing, chasing kind; the rushing of the blood; the excitement of dangerous physical effort; the actual suffering and pain—these awaken and delight. The Irish hunts are known for their recklessness. The knowledge of horses is immense; the animal is worshiped and cared for as no human being is. Of course, there is money in the horse, and the favorite kind of money: luck or the money of the long-headed deal. But the mere sight of the animal excites the whole population.

  The annual Horse Show in Dublin is a national feast and it is run by an ancient society—the Royal Dublin Society—which spends the rest of the year sponsoring lectures on the arts and the sciences—an extraordinary uniting of study and stable. The crowd contains every type that Ireland has to show and astounds by the individuality of the people: they are no sheeplike mass. They could be mistaken for no other nation. The sun stings, the rain drives—but an Irish crowd is indifferent to the weather; it has to be. One notices the clear eyes, the pink skins or those delicate ivory skins of the raven-haired types; but no skin leathery or dead. Whatever else the climate does to the people, it gives them complexions that cannot be concocted and bought in London, Paris or New York. And on this occasion the national kindness and generosity come out, and the instinctive democracy. The gasps of admiration before fine jumping are expert and ecstatic, the groans of sympathy for an unlucky rider are deeply felt. There is no derision for the stupid mistake. And in that week Dublin is up all night and one of the most energetic spots in the world. “I’m not going to the ball tonight. The Galway Blazers have arrived,” a friend of mine said. “I don’t want my arm broken.” The city becomes like a great country house by the sea, in the old days, alive with hospitality.

  To the outsider, all this has the natural ease of life in a happier age and suggests that, if we except the northeast corner at Belfast, a good deal of Irish life is really going on in a lost early Victorian paradise. It has, for this reason, a sort of mannerly innocence on the surface—very different from the life of industrial countries. It is without the sinister and nasty things we are used to. Even the appalling slums of north Dublin, where every fanlight is smashed and the children swarm on the stairs, are Victorian—indeed Dickensian. There is another, deeper innocence which is most difficult to define but which the Irish themselves lay claim to; a form of mysticism. The foreigner is aware of something fey and “elsewhere” in the personality even of those large, scowling, truculent, black-haired, pale-faced Irishmen, or in the shrewd eyes of plump old Irish ladies, or the young girls whether they are wan or spirited.

  The Irish are proud of their chastity of spirit, of a “holiness” that runs through their life from their imagination to their religion and their sexual morality, even when they are patently and professedly unholy. To them the Americans and the British are overfed libertines and materialists. The Irish ate better than the rest of Europe during the Second World War, but food is of no great interest to them. It was the only European country where you could see anything approaching the traditional figure of John Bull. Although thought of as the land of hunger, Ireland is a country where, perhaps owing to the climate, appetite declines. Poverty—the island has few minerals, no oil, little coal or iron—and their peculiar Roman Catholicism, which is puritanic and removed from the urbane religion of the Mediterranean, may account for the inner austerity of the Irish. But, in fact, both in the north and the south, Protestantism has a similar character, being moralistic, nasal, prating and forever watchful.

  Religion has great authority in the authority-loving Irish mind, and Latin paganism has little part of the religious inheritance. Although the Irish respond to France, Spain and Italy, it is more as matter of cultural or aesthetic pride than of deep affinity; and the Irish cleric, like the exile, has usually the spirit of the mission. This in no way conflicts with Irish “wildness”—mystics, it has been noted, have a cynical vein and a power of dissociation—but something in the Irish temper is shy of the sensual man. The odd thing is that the Catholics are still afraid of the influence of what they call Protestant “libertinism”—as they see it in England and America—and that the Protestants dread Catholic “corruption”; both parties in Ireland are equally shockable and, at heart, on guard.

  What any traveler in Ireland notices is the emptiness of the land. It is underpopulated; its population declines at a time when, in every other country, population is increasing; and emigration is not the sole cause. The average age of marriage in Ireland is later than in any other civilized country—thirty-four for men, twenty-nine for women—and the marriage rate is the lowest in Europe. A study published a few years ago declared that only 30 percent of the population were married. The people had become either so canny or so continent that they did not want to breed.

  Did the Famine have a traumatic effect that has lasted generations? Is poverty the cause? Hardly. The poorest countries breed fastest. When the Irish marry, their families are large; it may indeed be the fear of the inevitably large family that holds the Irish bachelor back.

  Among the peasantry, is the land system the cause? One of the charming sights of the country is that of a man and his wife and their son working together in their little field, “saving the hay.” But where are the other sons and daughters? The farm can support only one son. The others have gone away. The remaining son is really a hired laborer; only when his parents are dead—and they will live to a great age—will he have the farm, and he cannot easily marry before he does. The girl whom he may be courting will be courted for years and will be mature before she bears a child. And anyway, she will not be married unless she brings a dowry. You can pick up the local paper and still read one of those “comic” Irish breach-of-promise cases; they are in fact bleak:

  Miss X said she never saw the defendant until he was introduced to her by Mr. Y. He came to matchmake and had a bottle of whisky and the young man asked her to marry him. She told him she had £100 fortune, £140 being asked but £40 was knocked off by the matchmaker. She was over 30 but under 40. But neither party turned up when the ring was to be bought.

  The young man said he would marry her any day if he got the money. Was there no love at all in it? asked the judge. “Ah. Sorra much,” says the old reluctant Lochinvar, for the cash was not forthcoming. Loud laughter but it is a sad tale.

  But the Irish are not all peasants, and according to John O’Brien’s book, The Vanishing Irish, the reluctance to marry is general in Irish communities all over the world. Some people blame the country priests, the denunciations of courtship and of the dances where boys and girls can meet, and the religious rage against sex. And Irish rage is re
al authoritarian rage. One would have thought that Irish alcoholism was a far more serious difficulty than sexual promiscuity. Quebec has many resemblances to Ireland, but there the population increases and love is not dishonored. Yet those who blame the Irish Church must remember that its priesthood springs from the Irish peasantry.

  The country is made for men, not for women, and the personable fellow in the small towns or in the Irish districts of London prefers to hang about with his pals, to gamble, follow sport and cut a figure. You rarely see a woman with him. There is a long tradition of the spendthrift husband who “lives like a gentleman,” like Joyce’s father or O’Casey’s Paycock. The house is kept together by a hard-pressed, strong-minded mother who is idealized by the son whom she rules like iron, right into old age. The very vocal, easygoing and gallant spirit of Irish life covers an inner caution and pedantry; and one is more struck by the jeering between the sexes than by their amity. Yet the evocations of love in Irish poetry are tender, romantic and nostalgic; and perhaps nostalgia explains a lot, for it is an emotion that fills all Ireland like the air one breathes. The songs are made out of it; and it is more than the nostalgia of a scattered race; it is the nostalgia perhaps for lost centuries, the unearthly distractions at the back of the minds of a very realistic people. One has to reconcile this with the dashing Irish gallant and famous Irish amoureuses who crop up in European and South American history—though scarcely ever in Ireland itself.

  The legend of holy Ireland has always seemed a paradox in a people who oscillate between idealism and cynicism. As idealistic rebels, fighters for liberty, visionaries of liberation and justice, soldiers of fortune, they have had a gift at once noble and strangely personal. They have a passionate sense of principle, and their intransigence comes from their devotion to an abstract idea. In the management of the British Empire, they almost always showed more intelligent personal sympathy and curiosity than the British, who are more responsible but less responsive.

  The Irish constitute one of the world’s great secret societies, with branches everywhere. It is a very public secret society, visible to all, with no special purpose beyond preserving the racial imagination of a scattered people, and with no mysteries beyond the general family mystery of being Irish. But this secret society does unmistakably have a Grand Master. He is no less a figure than the Devil himself, to whom their cousins the Scots are also profoundly attached. Literature and speech proclaim him. In Scotland he is no more than the “puir wee devil” who has had a terrible time at the hands of Scottish theologians and needs all the help any dear kind soul can give him. In Ireland, he is stronger; he is a brave boy, full of life, who gets on with everyone.

  The Irish habit of mind owes everything to the insight that all men and women have a bit of the devil in them, and that it behooves us all, therefore, to admire the devil first of all, then to be charitable and—if we can’t do this—at least to take the precaution of being extremely polite. The devil is good luck, bad luck, the incalculable, the incurable; inseparable from you like your ragged shadow. In one sense he does not need to tempt you. You tempt him. You take him over for a spell. It amuses him. He was bored in Hell.

  I once spent some hours with an Irish priest, and when I told him I came from London, he told me he had been brought up in Chicago, where his father had been a politician. “He was so corrupt,” the priest said, “that he would even give an Englishman a job.” You catch the accent of the Grand Master in that little speech, and the ethos of the secret society. It is because they are a secret society that the Irish have preserved their singularity in lands other than their own. Where indeed most of them live.

  [1963]

  9

  The Americans

  in My Mind

  The inhabitants of the United States are the most restless and gregarious people in the world, a race of nomads voracious for sights and facts, who turn up in tens of thousands everywhere from the Angkor Wat to Stratford-upon-Avon, from Moscow to Colombo. They are the only race to upset the balance of nature by achieving sexual inequality, and their docile males, wearing cameras as accessory sense organs, follow obediently their vivacious and moaning females. This moan (my American women friends frankly say) is a “secondary sexual characteristic,” and is persistently mentioned in the novels of Henry James. American soldiers even took their cameras into battle with them in the Pacific war, according to the author of From Here to Eternity.

  Caricatures of this kind can be done of any people seen out of their environment, but what are they like at home? Of the Americans, that is difficult to say. The European who arrives in the United States is astonished—and assuaged—to find it full of Americans who no longer look alien and who have homes of their own. But generalizing about the American character or temper is a perennial international game; in the last twenty years or so it has become an American industry. I have read more books by Americans on the American scene and character during this time than by writers of any other nation about themselves; and one thing has struck me immediately—what for generations we Europeans have called the boastfulness of Americans was really the self-dramatization of a lonely people, an acute and often painful consciousness of themselves.

  Any foreigner who goes onto the international stage and offers a few quips and asides about the American character ought to state his qualifications. I have only one. I was, for a moment, nearly an American. Last year, at the Pennsylvania Railroad station in Philadelphia, I was mistaken for the governor of Texas, to whom apologies. My disqualifications are serious. Man and boy, over a period of forty years, the total of my several visits to the United States amounts to only fourteen months. These have been spent mostly in the East, never in the Deep South, never in Texas, never in the Middle West except for two days of blizzard in Chicago, which I could hardly see. It is true that I have watched the Chinese mists crawling over the branches of the live oaks in California, but in that ebullient state I have lived mostly in the shelter of the skeptical universities. Though they may have their twenty thousand students, they are nevertheless islands in the rough-and-tumble of American life. My most curious American experience was walking, when I was young, through the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee roughing it and collecting unusual words. This was hardly typical. But is anything American typical?

  My America is a personal fantasy, a chaos of impressions: I see a continent of suburbs, of prettily painted small buildings, sharp roofs, glossy sunsets. I see enormous invading armies of pines and firs, drab cities, quiet and beautifully shaded towns, garish highways slicing through what is (for a European) an empty countryside. I see New York, a mortal Babylon, a collection of the stumps of a petrified forest by day; by night a lantern hanging from the sky. I see San Francisco scattered like confetti around its Bay. As for the people, they are a bizarre procession made up of all nationalities and with serious, unrevealing faces. Either they look like boys and girls or they are middle-aged—how and when does that sudden jump occur? A brisk and specialized population, one would say, with that jerky walk one used to see in old-fashioned films. I have sat with tobacco chewers in the country stores; I have tried for a word from silent, elderly conductors on trains. I have interrupted overworked professors at their typewriters. I have been bowled over by the charm and earnestness of students. I have eaten strange rice dishes on my knees in the bright and tidy homes of motherly ladies. I have been delighted by the waltzing bandleaders in the parades. I have had sensitive conversations with Puerto Ricans and have had abrupt relations with dictatorial children. I have had highbrow talks with cab drivers.

  And then, there are my restful personal friends who think, talk and feel much as I do and who differ from me only in being more patient and considerate than Europeans are, who talk rather more slowly, who sound lonely outside their work, and who are more interestingly worried than I am. They have “problems.” Their nerves are tauter; they are more “strung up” than I. They are boundlessly hospitable. They perpetuate the eighteenth-century do
ctrine of Benevolence. They are excited in welcome, enthusiastic in farewells. Always on the move themselves, and inclined to loneliness, they have perfected the rituals of greeting and parting. I see some puritanic British racing motorist has lately said that American good wishes are transitory. You are soon forgotten. Henry James said in one of his short stories, “The Point of View,” that indeed American social life was a process of “innocent jilting.” Possibly: America expects you to keep moving on your own because that is what America was invented for; and it expects you to be serious and flexible about it.

  My final disqualification is that I am British. We British tend to imagine that, because we were founder members, have the same language, literature and close bonds of religion and law, America will be simply an extension of ourselves into greater space. This is not so. We are simply the descendants of the first of the many European father figures whose rejection in every generation has made American civilization different from all others in the world—a civilization that is at odds with itself about the principle of authority. We are islanders packed in to a density of, say, seven or eight hundred to the square mile; Americans are continentals, land-mass people, only fifty to the square mile. We live intensely, privately; Americans relax in the ease of great space. In America (again as Henry James said) everything is for “the people,” not for the “person.”

  In some respects American life has more in common with the life of central Europe, of the northern European plains and indeed of Russia than it has with British or Western European life. Food is very German; technology and efficiency are German; higher education—with its great influence—is basically German; the brightness, workableness and cleanliness of American homes is German. Americans, like Germans, live by the will. Even a certain emotionalism, a certain aggressiveness, a self-torment and modesty are German. (I say nothing of the male haircut and the specializing mind.) These influences are, of course, due to immigration but only partly so: the real influence is that of the great land mass on energetic people to whom living by the will has been an imperative demand. How else could they have constructed a powerful country so rapidly? And from a blueprint.