by Ian Buruma
Despite its outlandish passages, however, The Englishness of English Art is a fascinating document, particularly where the author tries to reconcile his heart with his head. For example, Pevsner was fascinated by eighteenth-century English gardens. Without mentioning the classical European (or Chinese) inspirations of English garden-parks, Pevsner describes the picturesque, the serpentine lines, the follies, and other irregularities as typically English. Like others before him, Pevsner connects this quasi-spontaneous, informal style to English liberties. There is nothing wrong with this; the designers and owners of the parks did so themselves. But then he gets carried away. Palladian houses set in rolling parklands are examples of typically English compromise: an edifice of reason in nature, uniformity surrounded by spontaneity, formality blending with eccentricity—what Pevsner calls the “spirit of place.” He pushes this concept further and points out how leafy London squares of the early nineteenth century are extensions of the picturesque. From there it is but a small step to Hampstead Garden Suburb and other pseudo-rustic Arcadias on the edges of town.
As a good modernist, he cannot quite bring himself to praise the suburbs. But in a remarkable leap of the imagination, Pevsner claims that the English genius for informal, picturesque, irregular arrangements must be harnessed to modernist city planning. From the Palladian house in the countryside to informally arranged tower blocks, with or without lawns: it is an ingenious idea. And it explains why Pevsner can praise Sir William Holford’s brutish concrete blocks around St. Paul’s, or the housing estates in Roehampton, as “picturesque.”
All Anglophiles, from Voltaire to Hayek, wanted England to show Europe the way to liberty. Pevsner was no exception. He writes: “… what has been said about English character shows that no country is aesthetically better provided to solve [urban problems] and thereby leave its imprint on other countries than England. If English planners forget about the straight axes and the artificially symmetrical facades of the academy, and design functionally and Englishly, they will succeed.” Englishly, that is, according to Dr. Pevsner’s idea of the English: polite, picturesque, moderate. Pevsner’s Anglophilia drove him into the camp of “modernism with good manners.” The compromising character that had stopped British modernism in its tracks around 1900 was now held up as a model for the rest of Europe to follow.
Europe failed to comply. And that was a good thing too. For however “English” British architects and planners tried to be in the construction of postwar Britain, the results have, by and large, been miserable. Too many cities have been wrecked by feverish mood swings between modernist brutality and gimcrack nostalgia. Notions of zeitgeist and Volksgeist are probably less to blame than the stinginess and philistinism of parochial committee men. And commercialism—Hayek’s vaunted marketplace—has been a far more powerful force than socialism, or indeed any form of idealism, in changing the face of Britain. Still, the modernist doctrine, with or without good manners, which Pevsner did so much to promote, has not worn well.
And yet there was something noble about Pevsner’s attempt to fuse his idea of the modern with his idea of England. Even though his idea of England was conservative, the fusion he attempted was not. He stirred things up and showed the British modern possibilities without losing sight of their past. He was, above all, looking forward in a country that, after 1945, has too often been tempted to look back. Pevsner, with all his flaws, was a proud member of an irreplaceable generation of cosmopolitan Europeans without whom Britain would be a far drearier and more provincial place.
Pevsner died in 1983. I wanted to see where the man who came to England with Bauhaus on the mind was buried. It would not be in a Jewish cemetery, to be sure. But I had imagined a functional, modern crematorium, somewhere in North London. In fact, N.P. lies in the graveyard of a very old church in Clyffe Pypard, a village in the heart of England, near where he and Lola had owned a weekend cottage.
Pevsner described the church in The Buildings of England: “ST PETER. In a lovely position below a wooded stretch of the cliff. Perp W tower, ashlar-faced, stair-turret higher than the battlements. Pinnacles. Perp nave and aisles and S porch.” It was, in Pevsner’s view, over-restored by Butterfield in 1874. But the seventeenth-century pulpit is exceptionally fine. And there is a white marble statue inside the church of a carpenter named Thomas Spackman, who died in 1786. He is dressed in “ideal clothes with a long flowing mantle and holding an eloquent pose.” Below him are two marble children, reading and writing, courtesy of Spackman’s donation of one thousand pounds for a master to teach the children. The monument, Pevsner adds, “displays plenty of the tools of the carpenter’s trade, a gratifying sight in an age of such snobbery in monuments.” A very Pevsnerian note, this.
I walked to the back of the church, to look for the graves. In the tall grass, sturdy tombstones, some of them dating back to the eighteenth century, stood about higgledy-piggledy, like casually maintained but still serviceable teeth. All around me was a perfect vision of rural England: green, gentle, polite hills in the distance, the ancient butterscotch stones of St. Peter, the picturesque village, the smell of hay and grass, and the quiet hush of wind in the trees. You wish it would never change, and yet you wish it would. I can understand why people would want to do something radical to it, something modern, or run away from it, far away across the ocean. And yet I feel its charm, what Auden called “the temptation” to bask in nostalgia. And there, between stone crosses, lie N.P. and Lola. Their black granite stones are as simple as can be, sober, without any decoration. Hers reads:
LOLA PEVSNER
BORN KURLBAUM
1902–1963
And his:
NIKOLAUS
HER HUSBAND
1902–1983
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
THE MAN IN THE
TWEED COAT
WHEN I ARRIVED IN LONDON, IN 1990, THE BUBBLE WAS about to burst. House prices were starting to crumble. The Thatcher era would end in her own public tears. After a decade of economic boosterism, during which men and women with more ambition than finesse had been encouraged to roll the dice and go for it, London felt harsher than before. I had been living in Hong Kong, not a sentimental place. But even there I had never seen quite the same look of contempt that disfigured the coarsely handsome features of a young man in a double-breasted suit as he tossed a few coins down the dark stairwell of a tube station in the rough direction of another young man, huddled in a blanket, with a sign saying he was hungry. This was not necessarily a sign of class hatred. The two men could well have come from the same neighborhood. But one had gone for it, and the other, for whatever reason, had not.
I came to London to write about foreign affairs for The Spectator, a publication that was so self-consciously English it could have been edited by Anglophiles, rather than Englishmen. The “Speccie,” and its editor at the time, Charles Moore, always bordered on self-parody. The office, a fine Georgian house in Bloomsbury, was emblematic of civilized, upper-bourgeois ease. The receptionists, with old or at least long family names, spoke in trilling accents some Americans still find charming. The interior decoration had the feel of a well-worn but superbly cut suit: frayed Persian carpets, Victorian desks, a black trunk that had once belonged to Lord Salisbury, lamp shades at rakish angles, like Winston Churchill’s bow ties.
I first met Charles Moore when he visited Hong Kong, in whose fate he took a patriotic interest: Britain had to do the right thing by its colonial subjects. I waited for him at his hotel. Just as he descended from the lift, dressed in a dove-gray tropical suit, a Jermyn Street shirt, and a discreetly dotted tie, a band of Scottish bagpipers started up a pibroch in the lobby. This was, in fact, a daily event at the Hong Kong Hilton. Charles had had no hand in it. But it seemed, somehow, just right.
Charles was only in his twenties then, fresh out of Eton and Cambridge. Yet he looked and spoke like a man from an almost vanished world. His England, and that of The Spectator, seemed to me like P. G. Wodehous
e’s England, that is to say, an amusing invention that could still be marketed with some success. The ads in the magazine, for “silk racing umbrellas,” or eighteenth-century furniture, or handmade shoes from Lobb’s, could only have been enjoyed vicariously by most people, even Spectator readers. There are people, of course, who shoot, and have their shoes made at Lobb’s, and dream about a country still governed by landed gentlemen. You see them in the party pictures of the Tatler, patting horses or lifting squealing debutantes above their shoulders at country house balls. They exist, but, like Charles himself, they look a bit like characters in an old play that has gone through many revivals.
In the 1990s, a new ad appeared in The Spectator for a clothes shop named Hackett, after its owner, a clever young entrepreneur. In the beginning, still in the Thatcher years, Hackett sold only secondhand clothes: old tweed suits, dinner jackets, waistcoats, and the like; family hand-me-downs for those whose fathers had never worn a dinner jacket. It was more a costumer than a men’s shop. Then Hackett thought of something better: he would have those costumes made from scratch, complete with instructions on the proper way to wear them. Thus the style of an old upper class was reinvented by and for Thatcher’s children.
Charles was perhaps not exactly a poseur. But I could never gauge the degree of self-consciousness with which he played his role as the young squire, the twenty-something High Tory, the Old Etonian about the Beefsteak Club. To what extent was his class act conscious? Perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps it was just me, coming in from the outside, who felt as though I had stumbled into a bizarre play without knowing all my lines, or even quite what role to adopt.
The other thing that puzzled me at first was how Moore’s squirearchy fit in with Margaret Thatcher’s vulgar poujadisme, her strident go-for-it ethos, her provincial disdain for old institutions of privilege such as the bar, or Oxford and Cambridge. Charles, and most of his writers, were keen supporters of Mrs. Thatcher. The sentimental views of patrician High Tory “wets,” who believed that gentlemen owed patronage to the working classes, that money was not something one discussed in public, and ambition was for foreigners and cads, were treated with dry disdain. Hayek was the high priest of Moore’s Spectator. Going for it was good. And yet the fogeyish world of the Speccie was, at least on a fantastical level, all about privilege, old money, old schools, old families, old silver, and old gentlemanly wit.
I was flattered to be in this odd Anglophiliac world, with its weekly lunches and its summer parties, where one found oneself in a suffocating crush of braying people, trying not to spill one’s drink over someone else’s linen suit. Even eating barely edible meals—washed down with superb wines—at gentlemen’s clubs, making small talk with retired Tory cabinet ministers gave me a certain thrill. Yet I soon realized that I might be in this world but would never be of it. I could never quite shake my fear of striking a false note. There was, for example, the day I turned up for a Spectator lunch in a thick tweed jacket, with the color and substance of congealed porridge, suitable for a shooting weekend in Scotland perhaps, but decidedly not for a Spectator lunch. I thought it looked suitably English.
It was a sunny November morning, unseasonably warm. The fire in the editor’s office, on the first floor, was blazing. Within seconds of walking into the room, in my tweed jacket, I knew disaster would strike. Slim, elegant, pale-skinned people in understated suits were standing around sipping sherry. The most remarkable thing about them was not the clothes they wore, or the sound of their pealing voices, chiming with the tinkling of crystal glass. No, it was the fact that they looked so cool; these people were bone-dry with not a pearl of perspiration in sight. While talking to an Amanda (just flown in from Cape Town) and a Simon (something in the City; went to school with Charles), I felt it coming, like tropical rain. Rivulets trickling from my temples became rivers by the time they hit my collar. My light blue shirt went navy, my hair was plastered to my forehead. I retired to the lavatory to mop myself with toilet paper, with the result (I discovered later, with a horrified glance in the gilt-framed hall mirror) that I returned to the editor’s drawing room with bits of paper stuck to my face, as though I had been wounded or treated for some dreadful skin disease. The other guests politely declined to notice.
Lunch began. The roast was served, the talk flowed, the port went round the rosewood table. I was sitting opposite the writer Frederic Rafael, who was telling Kingsley Amis, in his most affected, Disraelian drawl, that he, Freddy (Charterhouse and Cambridge) Rafael, would “never understand you English. You English are really too, too extraooordinary.” I could see a twitch of intense irritation pass across Amis’s face. It was no more than a flicker of the eyelashes, but it was enough to tell me that ancient prejudices had been severely tested.
Another guest, I cannot remember who, was quoting General de Gaulle. The question was: Why didn’t de Gaulle want Britain to join the Common Market? Well, said de Gaulle, because he realized that England was not part of Europe. If England joined the Common Market, then, said de Gaulle, England would be lost. And Europe would be poorer for it. There was a brief lull in the conversation. There was nothing left to say. Everyone agreed. Then, suddenly, apropos of nothing really, Charles said something that put him forever on the other side of an invisible wall. He said, with absolute seriousness: “Ian, tell me, which Bible do you use?” The word “use” was especially fine. I understood what the poet James Fenton had meant when he called The Spectator “camp.”
Charles was succeeded as editor by Dominic Lawson. The camp Tory style of the magazine remained, but there was a definite shift in mood. A new publisher was hired. His Spanish name and American accent were much mocked behind closed doors, and his slicked-back raven hair, radiant smile, eternal tan, and the too-perfect cut of his Prince-de-Galles suit gave him away as an exotic. But he was skilled at bringing in expensive ads for champagnes and diamond necklaces. The go-for-it spirit was more visible under Dominic’s editorship; ambition, youth, and the importance of money were more openly acknowledged. Fashion became a factor.
Dominic’s background was in some ways grander than Charles’s. His father had been one of Mrs. Thatcher’s senior cabinet ministers, one of those to whom Harold Macmillan referred when he said Thatcher’s government contained more Old Estonians than Old Etonians. But Dominic was less of a romantic about England than Charles. Perhaps because he saw it more clearly. Dominic came from a family of successful immigrants. Although he was as British as Charles, others might not always see it that way, which added a keen edge to his will to succeed in society. It also gave him a subversive streak, an instinct for outrage. I was still at the magazine when Dominic’s interview with Nicholas Ridley caused a stir. Ridley was Mrs. Thatcher’s minister for trade and industry. With some journalistic skill Dominic got the old aristocrat to vent his heartfelt but highly undiplomatic prejudices about the Germans. Ridley had to resign. Dominic was proud of his feat yet professed to regret its consequences. Perhaps he did, perhaps he did.
The joy of getting on in English society is to feel included, to join the club, to open doors that are closed to others. One afternoon in May Dominic and I decided to watch the cricket at Lord’s. Dominic was a member of the MCC, for which the waiting list is so long that most aspiring members can only hope to be accepted in their dotage. His magic pass allowed him to bring one guest. We went up to the pavilion—members only, of course. At the entrance was a stout man with a bulbous red nose. His manner was officious. His Cerberus role was to keep nonmembers out. He took his time, enjoying his brief moment of authority, turning Dominic’s pass this way and that, asking him questions about precisely who I was. Something about the man, his nose, his puffed-up airs, sent me into a silent rage. After we had finally been let in, my rage became more vocal. Silvery heads in the Long Room swiveled in our direction. And Dominic said to me, with a patience my outburst hardly merited: “But don’t you understand? This is the whole point of being a member. This is what English life is all about.”
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nbsp; He was right, of course. And it was while working with Dominic that I realized my basic error. I had been deceived by appearances. The world I had entered briefly was not just a theatrical fantasy. Mrs. Thatcher’s poujadisme, the go-for-it spirit were not inimical to Spectator Toryism. Moore’s affected squirearchy needed the man with the foreign name and the slicked-back hair to bring in the cash. The resilience of the British class system is due to this marriage of new money and old style. As Tocqueville already observed, the British upper class acts as a sponge for talent and ambition. Snobbery can act as a spur to personal achievement. The Spectator is one of those British institutions that lends aristocratic airs to bourgeois striving. And in fact, Mrs. Thatcher’s assault on class privilege was always more apparent than real. She herself affected, in the most theatrical and rarely convincing way, the mannerisms of a class to which she wasn’t born. She was, in a sense, the man with the slicked-back hair. People mocked her affectations, but she provided the money for the go-getting new rich, and the gentlemanly old rich too. And so she enabled the age-old show to go on, and on.
It was a show that I eventually grew tired of. Observed from a distance, the Spectator style was quaint and amusing. And there was much that I admired: the debunking of Utopian nonsense, the satirical view of idealism, the intellectual cheekiness. And like Tocqueville I could see merit in snobbery as a tonic for individual enterprise. But perhaps I was too much of an Anglophile to live with the real thing for too long. For under the cheekiness was a complacency, a philistinism that I found irritating. The English social order, celebrated in The Spectator, may be more civilized than most political arrangements in the world, but that is not saying much, or at least not enough. In the end I felt ill at ease with young people who had never thought of trying anything else, who had walked only on well-trodden paths, whose main aim was to conserve the system in which they had got on, and who looked at any alternative with amused contempt.