by George Mikes
A continental gentleman seeing a nice panorama may remark:
‘This view rather reminds me of Utrecht, where the peace treaty concluding the War of Spanish Succession was signed on the 11th April, 1713. The river there, however, recalls the Guadalquivir, which rises in the Sierra de Cazorla and flows south-west to the Atlantic Ocean and is 650 kilometres long. Oh, rivers … What did Pascal say about them? “Les rivières sont les chemins qui marchent …” ’
‘Dr Hoffmeyer is absolutely brilliant’
This pompous, showing-off way of speaking is not permissible in England. The Englishman is modest and simple. He uses but few words and expresses so much – but so much – with them. An Englishman looking at the same view would remain silent for two or three hours and think about how to put his profound feeling into words. Then he would remark:
‘It’s pretty, isn’t it?’
An English professor of mathematics would say to his maid checking up the shopping list:
‘I’m no good at arithmetic, I’m afraid. Please correct me, Jane, if I am wrong, but I believe that the square root of 97,344 is 312.’
And about knowledge. An English girl, of course, would be able to learn just a little more about, let us say, geography. But it is just not ‘chic’ to know whether Budapest is the capital of Roumania, Hungary or Bulgaria. And if she happens to know that Budapest is the capital of Roumania, she should at least be perplexed if Bucharest is mentioned suddenly.
It is so much nicer to ask, when someone speaks of Barbados, Banska Bystrica or Fiji:
‘Oh those little islands … Are they British?’
(They usually are.)
How to be Rude
It is easy to be rude on the Continent. You just shout and call people names of a zoological character.
On a slightly higher level you may invent a few stories against your opponents. In Budapest, for instance, when a rather unpleasant-looking actress joined a nudist club, her younger and prettier colleagues spread the story that she had been accepted only under the condition that she should wear a fig-leaf on her face. Or in the same city there was a painter of limited abilities who was a most successful card-player. A colleague of his remarked once: ‘What a spendthrift! All the money he makes on industrious gambling at night, he spends on his painting during the day.’
In England rudeness has quite a different technique. If somebody tells you an obviously untrue story, on the Continent you would remark ‘You are a liar, Sir, and a rather dirty one at that.’ In England you just say ‘Oh, is that so?’ Or ‘That’s rather an unusual story, isn’t it?’
When some years ago, knowing ten words of English and using them all wrong, I applied for a translator’s job, my would-be employer (or would-be-not-employer) softly remarked: ‘I am afraid your English is somewhat unorthodox.’ This translated into any continental language would mean: EMPLOYER (to the commissionaire): ‘Jean, kick this gentleman down the steps!’
In the last century, when a wicked and unworthy subject annoyed the Sultan of Turkey or the Czar of Russia, he had his head cut of without much ceremony; but when the same happened in England, the monarch declared: ‘We are not amused’; and the whole British nation even now, a century later, is immensely proud of how rude their Queen was.
Terribly rude expressions (if pronounced grimly) are: ‘I am afraid that …’ ‘unless …’ ‘nevertheless …’ ‘How queer …’ and ‘I am sorry, but …’
It is true that quite often you can hear remarks like: ‘You’d better see that you get out of here!’ Or ‘Shut your big mouth!’ Or ‘Dirty pig!’ etc. These remarks are very un-English and are the results of foreign influence. (Dating back, however, to the era of the Danish invasion.)
‘Chameau!’
How to Compromise
Wise compromise is one of the basic principles and virtues of the British.
If a continental greengrocer asks 14 schillings (or crowns, or francs, or pengoes, or dinars or leis or δραχμαí or πева, or whatever you like) for a bunch of radishes, and his customer offers 2, and finally they strike a bargain agreeing on 6 schillings, francs, roubles, etc., this is just the low continental habit of bargaining; on the other hand, if the British dock-workers or any workers claim a rise of 4 shillings per day, and the employers first flatly refuse even a penny, but after six weeks strike they agree to a rise of 2 shillings per day – that is yet another proof of the British genius for compromise. Bargaining is a repulsive habit; compromise is one of the highest human virtues – the difference between the two being that the first is practised on the Continent, the latter in Great Britain.
The genius for compromise has another aspect, too. It has a tendency to unite together everything which is bad. English club life, for instance, unites the liabilities of social life with the boredom of solitude. An average English house combines all the curses of civilization with the vicissitudes of life in the open. It is all right to have windows, but you must not have double windows because double windows would indeed stop the wind from blowing right into the room, and after all, you must be fair and give the wind a chance. It is all right to have central heating in an English home, except the bathroom, because that is the only place where you are naked and wet at the same time, and you must give British germs a fair chance. The open fire is an accepted, indeed a traditional, institution. You sit in front of it and your face is hot whilst your back is cold. It is a fair compromise between two extremes and settles the problem of how to burn and catch cold at the same time. The fact that you may have a drink at five past six p.m., but that it is a criminal offence to have it at five to six is an extremely wise compromise between two things (I do not quite know between what, certainly not between prohibition and licentiousness), achieving the great aim that nobody can get drunk between three o’clock and six o’clock in the afternoon unless he wants to and drinks at home.
A Balkan bargain
English spelling is a compromise between documentary expressions and an elaborate code-system; spending three hours in a queue in front of a cinema is a compromise between entertainment and asceticism; the English weather is a fair compromise between rain and fog; to employ an English charwoman is a compromise between having a dirty house or cleaning it yourself; Yorkshire pudding is a compromise between a pudding and the county of Yorkshire.
The Labour Party is a fair compromise between Socialism and Bureaucracy; the Beveridge Plan is a fair compromise between being and not being a Socialist at the same time; the Liberal Party is a fair compromise between the Beveridge Plan and Toryism; the Independent Labour Party is a fair compromise between Independent Labour and a political party; the Tory-reformers are a fair compromise between revolutionary conservatism and retrograde progress; and the whole British political life is a huge and non-compromising fight between compromising Conservatives and compromising Socialists.
How to be a Hypocrite
If you want to be really and truly British, you must become a hypocrite.
NOW: how to be a hypocrite?
As some people say that an example explains things better than the best theory, let me try this way.
I had a drink with an English friend of mine in a pub. We were sitting on the high chairs in front of the counter when a flying bomb exploded about a hundred yards away. I was truly and honestly frightened, and when a few seconds later I looked around, I could not see my friend anywhere. At last I noticed that he was lying on the floor, flat as a pancake. When he realized that nothing particular had happened in the pub he got up a little embarrassed, flicked the dust off his suit, and turned to me with a superior and sarcastic smile.
‘Good Heavens! Were you so frightened that you couldn’t move?’
About Simple Joys
It is important that you should learn to enjoy simple joys, because that is extremely English. All serious Englishmen play darts and cricket and many other games; a famous English statesman was reported to be catching butterflies in the interval between giving up two Europ
ean states to the Germans; there was even some misunderstanding with the French because they considered the habit of English soldiers of singing and playing football and hide and seek and blind man’s buff slightly childish.
Dull and pompous foreigners are unable to understand why ex-cabinet ministers get together and sing ‘Daisy, Daisy’ in choir; why serious businessmen play with toy locomotives while their children learn trigonometry in the adjoining room; why High Court judges collect rare birds when rare birds are rare and they cannot collect many in any case; why it is the ambition of grown-up persons to push a little ball into a small hole; why a great politician who saved England and made history is called a ‘jolly good fellow’.
They cannot grasp why people sing when alone and yet sit silent and dumb for hours on end in their clubs, not uttering a word for months in the most distinguished company, and pay twenty guineas a year for the privilege.
Birds of a feather
The National Passion
Queueing is the national passion of an otherwise dispassionate race. The English are rather shy about it, and deny that they adore it.
On the Continent, if people are waiting at a bus-stop they loiter around in a seemingly vague fashion. When the bus arrives they make a dash for it; most of them leave by the bus and a lucky minority is taken away by an elegant black ambulance car. An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.
The biggest and most attractive advertisements in front of cinemas tell people: Queue here for 4s 6d; Queue here for 9s 3d; Queue here for 16s 8d (inclusive of tax). Those cinemas which do not put out these queueing signs do not do good business at all.
At week-ends an Englishman queues up at the bus-stop, travels out to Richmond, queues up for a boat, then queues up for tea, then queues up for ice cream, then joins a few more odd queues just for the sake of the fun of it, then queues up at the bus-stop and has the time of his life.
Many English families spend lovely evenings at home just by queueing up for a few hours, and the parents are very sad when the children leave them and queue up for going to bed.
Get thee behind me
Three Small Points
If you go out for a walk with a friend, don’t say a word for hours; if you go out for a walk with your dog, keep chatting to him.
There is a three-chamber legislation in England. A bill to become law has to be passed by the House of Commons and the House of Lords and finally approved by the Brains Trust.
A fishmonger is the man who mongs fish; the ironmonger and the warmonger do the same with iron and war. They just mong them.
‘And will you be going to Cruft’s this year as usual, Florence?’
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II. HOW TO BE A PARTICULAR ALIEN
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A Bloomsbury Intellectual
They all hate uniforms so much that they all wear a special uniform of their own: brown velvet trousers, canary yellow pullover, green jacket with sky-blue checks.
The suit of clothes has to be chosen with the utmost care and is intended to prove that its wearer does not care for suits and other petty, worldly things.
A walking-stick, too, is often carried by the slightly dandified right-wing of the clan.
A golden chain around the ankle, purple velvet shoes and a half-wild angora cat on the shoulders are strongly recommended as they much increase the appearance of arresting casualness.
It is extremely important that the B.I. should always wear a three-days beard, as shaving is considered a contemptible bourgeois habit. (The extremist left-wing holds the same view concerning washing, too.) First one will find it a little trying to shave one’s four-day beard in such a way that, after shaving, a three days old beard ration should be left on the cheeks, but practice and devoted care will bring their fruits.
A certain amount of rudeness is quite indispensable, because you have to prove day and night that the silly little commonplace rules and customs of society are not meant for you. If you find it too difficult to give up these little habits – to say ‘Hullo’ and ‘How d’you do?’ and ‘Thank you’, etc. – because owing to Auntie Betty’s or Tante Bertha’s strict upbringing they have become second nature, then join a Bloomsbury school for bad manners, and after a fortnight you will feel no pang of conscience when stepping deliberately on the corn of the venerable literary editor of a quarterly magazine in the bus.
Ars longa, vita brevis
Literary opinions must be most carefully selected. Statements like this are most impressive. ‘There have been altogether two real poets in England: Sir Thomas Wyatt and John Ford. The works of the rest are rubbish.’ Of course, you should include, as the third really great, colossal and epoch-making talent your own friend, T. B. Williams, whose neo-expressionist poetry is so terribly deep that the overwhelming majority of editors do not understand it and refuse to publish it. T. B. Williams, you may proudly claim, has never used a comma or a full stop, and what is more, he has improved Apollinaire’s and Aragon’s primitive technique by the fact that he does use question marks. (The generous and extravagant praise of T. B. Williams is absolutely essential, otherwise who will praise you?)
As to your own literary activities, your poems, dramas and great novels may lie at the bottom of your drawer in manuscript form. But it is important that you should publish a few literary reviews, scolding and disparaging everything and everybody on earth from a very superior and high-brow point of view, quoting Sir Thomas Wyatt and anything in French and letting the reader feel what you would be able to do if you could only find a publisher.
(Some practical advice. It is not difficult to have a few literary reviews published. Many weeklies and monthlies would publish anything in their so-called literary columns, if it costs nothing. You must not call your action unfair competition with qualified reviewers; call it devotion to the ‘cause’. Almost every paper has a cause – if yours has not, invent one, it is quite easy. And it really does not matter what you write. I remember one B.I. writing of a significant philosophical work and admitting in the opening sentence that he did not understand it; still, I suppose the review passed as buoyant and alarmingly sincere.)
T. B. Williams
Politically you must belong to the extreme left. You must, however, bear a few things in mind:
1. You must not care a damn about the welfare of the people in this country or abroad, because that would be ‘practical politics’ – and you should only be interested in the ideological side of matters.
2. Do not belong to any party, because that would be ‘regimentation’. Whatever different parties achieve, it is much more interesting to criticize everyone than to belong to the herd.
3. Do not hesitate to scorn Soviet Russia as reactionary and imperialistic, the British Labour Party as a conglomeration of elderly Trade Union Blimps, the French Socialists as ‘confused people’, the other Western Socialist parties as meek, bourgeois clubs, the American labour movements as being in the pay of Big Business; and call all republicans, Communists, anarchists and nihilists ‘backward, reactionary crypto-fascists’.
You should also invent a few truly original, constructive theories too, such as:
Only Brahmanism can save the world.
Spiritualism is a factor, growing immensely in importance, and a practical, working coalition between ghosts and Trotskyites would be highly desirable.
The abolition of all taxation would enrich the population so enormously that everybody would be able to pay much more taxes than before.
Finally, remember the main point. Always be original! It is not as difficult as it sounds: you just have to copy the habits and sayings of a few thousand other B.I.s.
Mayfair Playboy
Fix the little word de in front of your name. It has a remarkable attraction. I knew a certain Leo Rosenberg from Graz who called himself Lionel de Rosenberg and was a huge success in Deanery Mews as a Tyrolean nobleman.
Believe that the aim of life is
to have a nice time, go to nice places and meet nice people. (Now: to have a nice time means to have two more drinks daily than you can carry; nice places are the halls of great hotels, intimate little clubs, night clubs and private houses with large radiograms and no bookshelves; nice people are those who say silly things in good English – nasty people are those who drop clever remarks as well as their aitches.)
In the old days the man who had no money was not considered a gentleman. In the era of an enlightened Mayfair this attitude has changed. A gentleman may have money or may sponge on his friends; the criterion of a gentleman is that however poor he may be he still refuse to do useful work.
You have to develop your charm with the greatest care. Always laugh at everybody’s jokes – but be careful to tell a joke from a serious and profound observation. Be polite in a teasing, nonchalant manner. Sneer at everything you are not intelligent enough to understand. You may flirt with anybody’s wife, but respect the ties of illegitimate friendships – unless you have a really good opportunity which it would be such a pity to miss. Don’t forget that well-pressed trousers, carefully knotted ties and silk shirts are the greatest of all human values. Never be sober after 6.30 p.m.
Nice versus nasty
How to be a Film Producer
A Little foreign blood is very advantageous, almost essential, to become a really great British film producer.
The first aim of a British film producer should be to teach Hollywood a lesson. Do not be misled, however, by the examples of Henry V or Pygmalion, which tend to prove that excellent films can be made of great plays without changing the out-of-date words of Shakespeare and the un-film-like dialogues of Shaw by ten ‘experts’ who really know better.