Heresies and Heretics

by George Watson

  The poem disturbs in that it shows how powerfully Eliot, too, valued the principle of lineage – what Theodore Roethke in his notes once memorably called ‘the terrible energy of the dead.’ In 1942, as Lowell tells in his 1965 obituary of Eliot, they stood together on a busy street-corner in Harvard waiting for the lights to change; and Eliot suddenly turned to the twenty-five-year-old Lowell and said: ‘Don’t you loathe being compared with your relatives?’ adding emphatically ‘I do.’ No doubt a return to Harvard brings on such experiences. In fact one of Eliot’s reasons for leaving New England for England seems to have been to escape the lineage-trap to which American poets in that age were easy victims. But ‘East Coker’ suggests that Eliot never really did escape it. Lowell, whose honest answer to Eliot’s question might have been ‘No, not at all,’ compares himself with his relatives till the cows come home; and in our only conversation he talked at length about his father’s total and deliberate ignorance, as a naval officer, of an ancient university called Harvard situated just across the Charles River from their home in Boston. Interesting, in a way. But not exactly the most interesting thing one might have talked about; and one sensed in that conversation with Lowell, as in the poems themselves, an airless, self-lacerating consciousness unready to look at the world around it in Keatsian gusto or indeed at all, unready to see anything outside the tribe as possessing more than an alien and unassimilable significance. The poetic tradition that stretches from Whitman to Robert Lowell is a highly introverted and endogamous tradition: it starts with itself, as a subject, or with its tribe or nation, and seldom gets much further. Frost’s ‘Birches’ is not really about birches: it is about Frost being the sort of person who does not swing on them and who wishes he were.

  Berryman once called Eliot’s doctrine of poetic impersonality ‘perverse and valuable.’ That doctrine was voiced long ago in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), and Berryman may have meant no more than that it is valuable to be told that poetry can be extra-personal. This is what Eliot said:

  Poetry . . . is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But of course only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

  The implications of all that are wide-ranging – not least in the invigoratingly egotistical implication that not everyone has emotions worth talking about and that Eliot does. That implication, though perhaps faintly disagreeable, may after all be accurate, and it would be over-delicate to shy away from it. It may be right – not everyone has emotions worth escaping from; Eliot, as recent biographers have plainly shown, was a tragic figure, and did. But his stance is also highly American. The American poet of that age was proud in his possession of notable emotion – highly conscious of being special, whether as an individual, like Eliot, or as a member of a family, like Lowell, or as a citizen of an emergent nation like Whitman. Escaping from all that into a world of things, or events, or great ideas, as Eliot proposed, can indeed look perverse, as Berryman remarked, in the sense of wildly unexpected; and for just that reason, valuable.

  ____

  Somehow or other, external reality does not look as interesting to the American poet as it does to a European. That calls for some explanation. I do not know that we should neglect the obvious; and one explanation, to be blunt, is that it looks less interesting because it is. Pound once remarked that America was ‘very like what England would be with the two hundred most interesting people removed.’ That is a cry from the heart – the heart of Philadelphia. Most literary Americans in the past century have been suburbanites, all too conscious of leading lives heavily cushioned from events.

  How are we to write

  The Russian novel in America

  As long as life goes so unterribly?

  as Frost memorably asked in ‘New Hampshire.’ It is a good question, as rhetorical questions go, and Frost’s dilemma is real. Nor can a suburban civilisation like the American, strikingly successful as it often is in its own terms, sensibly invite chaos, plague or famine just to give its poets bigger things to write about. It is when you have little else to worry about, I suspect, that you worry about self, family and national identity. That is in no way a matter for national shame or national regret. A bountiful land has fed its people, housed them handsomely, rewarded its heroes and its poets. But at some cost, it must be said, to those who seek or dream a kingdom of the stars.

  13. The Rain in Spain

  The whole strength of England, Bernard Shaw once remarked, is that most people are snobs.

  That sums up what is often taken for granted, and it masks two assumptions seldom brought to light. One is that it is silly or worse to be a snob; the other is that only the English do it, or do it well. There are foreign lands that use the word gentleman as if they had neither the word nor the thing, though they have both, and for as long as anyone can remember England has been the whipping-boy of the world for those who seek moral credit by claiming to treat everyone alike.

  ____

  Shaw had already noticed plenty of snobbery in his native Dublin, as Oscar Wilde did before him, before settling in London at the age of twenty in 1876, and he speaks of it in his letters. But not in his plays and prefaces, in which he nails the English to the wall again and again as class-ridden nincompoops. Just before the first world war he wrote Pygmalion, a play the 1950s musical My Fair Lady was based on; and both play and musical hammer home the point that to promote yourself from the lower orders in English society you have to change your accent, and that to change it you need a lot of technical training by a phonetician like Professor Henry Higgins. ‘The thing has to be done scientifically,’ Shaw says in his preface, ‘or the last state of the aspirant may be worse than the first.’ Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, the cockney flower-girl, chant a vowel-exercise about the rain in Spain that stays mainly in the plain until the flower-girl who must some day pass as a lady finally gets it right. Higgins is triumphant: ‘By George, she’s got it.’

  ‘Bernard Shaw is greatly improved by music,’ T. S. Eliot remarked coolly to Rex Harrison after the first London night of My Fair Lady, but the musical is no less emphatic about snobbery than Pygmalion. Enlightened societies everywhere claim to behave otherwise. In ‘Do We Have a Class Society?’ in We Write for Our Own Time (2000) Henry Steele Commager patriotically claimed that the whole concept of class is un-American, belonging as it does to the Old World, and spoke ominously of the English as being branded at birth on the tongue. The article first appeared in 1961, at a time when President John F. Kennedy’s Harvard accent was exciting comment but before President George W. Bush’s version of Texan was widely known, and its patriotism is impressive. Mark Twain knew better, and in an explanatory note at the start of Huckleberry Finn in 1884 he itemised the several kinds of Missouri accent used by his characters, black and white, in case anyone should think they were all trying to talk alike and not succeeding. Regionally defined accents with implications of status are commonplace in the wider world, and most people who choose to switch accents neither use nor need a phonetician like Higgins. In professional life, especially, it is so common to switch that you sometimes ponder the significance of staying as you are. Commager may have been misled into thinking class accents distinctively British by the accidental fact that a British accent, or something like one, is a status-symbol in American usage. I recall an incident in an Australian university when a student production was being cast; it called for a character with an Australian accent, which proved astonishingly hard to fill. But then anyone aspiring to a career in theatre is likely to use what is called Received Pronunciation in an audition unless told otherwise. Accent change is nothing to be embarrassed about. It amounts to a freedom to reinvent yourself on the threshold of adult life, and people often do it readily and without help. It is fun, after all, to be anyone you want to be – as the Germans say, Stadtluft macht frei.

  Not everyone, fortunately, is a dogmatic e
galitarian. Gladstone publicly called himself an inequalitarian, a word he claimed to have invented, though it was not speech he mainly had in mind, arguing that if equality ever came to England he would be in favour of abolishing it. That is brave talk for a Liberal statesman, even granting that the situation is unlikely to arise. Henry James, who settled in London in the same year as Shaw, though more mature in years, gloried in social diversity, and his own speech was not perceptibly American; in 1879 he wrote a book about Nathaniel Hawthorne who, back home in America, had laboured to write fiction in a land without London clubs, Ascot race-meetings with ladies in picture-hats and an hereditary House of Lords. That does make it sound tough for Hawthorne, even if he spent four years (1853-7) as U.S. consul in Liverpool. But James, less courageous than Gladstone, allows his native land a shred of comfort. At least Americans are not snobs, he argues, or not much; his fictions repeatedly remind you that they marry for love rather than for worldly gain, and the honour of the nation is preserved.

  So there is something wicked about snobbery, beyond a doubt, and whatever it is it is something unmentionable. The taboo has lasted longer than the one against sex, as Paul Fussell discovered when he began writing Caste Marks: Style and Status in the U.S.A. (1984). Even before it appeared, he tells the reader, the book was felt to be outrageous, and he was made to think he was doing something unclean like beating baby whales to death surrounded by the bodies of baby seals. Class is widely felt to be embarrassing – perhaps evil. Some thirty years earlier Lionel Trilling in The Liberal Imagination (1950) had attacked on two fronts – the sex taboo (‘The Kinsey Report’) and the class taboo (‘Manners, Morals and the Novel’) – with frank talk about both, and his account of Kinsey might still shock today, when few people are as permissive as they pretend to be. His blast against snobbery is even more disturbing: he calls it ‘pride in status without pride in function,’ adding that it is an uneasy pride – ‘Do I really belong?’ It is parvenus who are snobs, on the whole, not dukes and earls. All very plausible, in a worrying sort of way, though the assumption that what you do is intrinsically more important than what you are is vulnerable too.

  The real weakness of American fiction, Trilling goes on, is that Americans, sensing a wide gap between aspiration and reality, seldom want to look at themselves. They have a resistance, he remarks, to examining their own society, conscious it might easily prove demeaning to take full notice of how in practice they think and live. They go abroad, so to speak, to be snobs, fearfully braving the challenge of a notorious social minefield known as Europe. ‘It is as if we felt that one cannot touch pitch without being defiled,’ which as Trilling remarks may indeed be so. ‘Americans will not deny that we have classes and snobbery, but they seem to think it would be indelicate to take precise cognisance of these phenomena,’ which is a lot more worrying as a point than his account of the Kinsey report and the average orgasm-capacity of the American male. Class has replaced sex as the great taboo of our times; and as taboos go it looks set to last.

  Snobbery needs a whipping-boy, and England was elected a long time ago. People go there to seek it out. Wilde and Shaw were Irish; Trilling American; and continental Europeans like to talk as if class accents do not exist in French, German or Italian. The English, amazingly, take it without demur. On the rare occasions when they answer back and quote instances of class accents elsewhere they are told it is all different back home, which is beside the point, since nobody ever suggested otherwise. The varied accents used by native speakers in France and America may not mean the same thing as in England, but they still mean something – so it must be an exaggeration to say that only the English have class accents. To claim an accent system to be different is to admit that it exists.

  Hypocrisy implies shame. If Victorians were hypocritical about sex it was because they thought it wrong, and if people are hypocritical about class it is because they think it wrong too. It is interesting to ask why that might be thought.

  ____

  One promising answer is that a lot of people think class-consciousness is undemocratic. That is an odd thing to think. All democracies have class-consciousness, whether expressed by speech, manners, dress or all three; so, it seems likely, does everyone else. I have lived in three continents and visited another three, and there has always been class along with the symbols of class. To ask what a classless society would look like might be worth doing after a good dinner, but it is hardly worth the energy of a serious enquirer. It is impossible even to imagine.

  In totalitarian states, in any case, class was theoretically abolished, which does not readily suggest that social equality is democratic. Hitler’s Germany, which officially discouraged polite and traditional forms of address, was insistent that National Socialism had done away with all that forever: one people, one state, one leader. Like the Soviet system, where you were supposed to call people comrade, it claimed that inequality was the badge of the great plutocracies of Western Europe and North America, decadent and ripe for plunder. All that came out better than you might expect. The decadent defeated the heroic. The most startling lesson of the twentieth century was that democracy is strong as well as virtuous, dictatorship weak as well as evil. Hitler and Nazism were defeated, then Soviet communism. None of that suggests that class in the traditional sense is fragile or incompetent. Both Churchill and Roosevelt, unlike Hitler and Stalin, were born of aristocratic families with a long tradition of public service and a background of great country estates.

  There is another point which, being obvious, is easily overlooked. Snobbery makes life interesting, and anything that does that asks to be preserved, much like Old Master paintings or Ming vases. It is one thing to scorn the relics of the past, another to abolish them. Social differences may be a guilty pleasure, unlike works of art, but they are still a pleasure, as many a conversation overheard on a bus will prove. They provide amusement, like the plays of Wilde and Shaw. And they plainly do not forbid political democracy, so it is idle to say they are undemocratic.

  Democracy, we are now discovering, can be dynastic no less than monarchy. The Nehrus have only recently ceased to rule India. There were high hopes for Winston Churchill M. P., grandson of a prime minister, though they were dashed in 1997 by his losing his seat in the House of Commons. There may be another Bush or Kennedy, or even a Roosevelt, heading for the White House. When I lived in the Midwest there was a lady who was said to be descended from George Washington. That must have been an exaggeration, since Washington had no children, but she was doubtless a relative, and her name was never mentioned without somebody saying so.

  Matters did not stop there, even in the democratic Midwest. There was an upper crust that sent its children to school back east and to the Ivy League, and they spoke in accents readily distinguishable from those around them. Though a small minority they had supplied every state governor down to the 1920s, when the sons of immigrants were finally admitted to governors’ mansions. There were clubs, hotels and apartment-houses in America that were restricted till the 1960s, and skin colour determined military service in U.S. forces till the Korean War. As Trilling suggested, nobody has to go to England to study snobbery, and nobody ever did. It is all around us.

  That American democracy emerged out of all this and survived has a lesson to teach. British democracy too emerged out of an aristocratic predominance in government that lasted until the early twentieth century, both in cabinet and parliament. Trollope’s political novels study that world in detail. All British cabinets had aristocratic majorities down to the Liberal victory of 1906, though a surprising number of prime ministers were social outsiders such as Canning, Disraeli and Gladstone. If British democracy starts around 1867, with Disraeli’s Second Reform Act, and American democracy at much the same time after the Civil War, it took a good half century in both countries to bed down before the populace was allowed to rule. The American Senate was not popularly elected until 1913. The great fear was mob rule: ‘The people is a
great beast,’ said Alexander Hamilton.

  In neither country did the gentry have or seek a monopoly of power. When Ernest Bevin became foreign secretary in England in 1945 – a horny-handed union boss chosen by a gentlemanly Labour premier Clement Attlee – he summoned a senior diplomat into his vast and sumptuous office on his first day and remarked defiantly: ‘I suppose this is the first time a man like me ever had this job.’ The diplomat, with infinite polish in his voice, replied: ‘I am sorry to contradict you, Foreign Secretary, in our first conversation, but you are mistaken. You have forgotten Henry VIII’s Cardinal Wolsey, a butcher’s boy.’

  It is still something to be a gentleman, if that means good family connections and manners and conduct to match. A character in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies (1930) once complained ‘They’re simply not gentlemen – that’s all it is, only one’s shy of saying it nowadays.’ But then there is usually no need to say it. The demarcation-lines that Waugh esteemed are still there, though a little blurred – but then they always were blurred. The well-born commonly mask their inherited privilege by being affable, the ill-born by pretending not to care. But a surprising number of people in high office have (or had) relatives who were there before them. Republics do not differ from monarchies in that respect, as the Nehru dynasty in India showed, and the White House has its instances too, not to mention high finance. No wonder a popular American TV series was called Dynasty.