Perhaps the real threat to freedom of speech in the United States is not one to freedom but to speech. Perhaps the nation will end up free to say anything it likes while being incapable of saying it. Nor is logical precision a strength of American students. Many of them have had their brains severely addled by an overdose of media. Perhaps they should all have a compulsory first year in which they learn nothing but how to think and speak straight, ridding themselves of the language of texting as a clinic purges its patients of cocaine. Despite all this, no more generous, open-minded and enthusiastic group of students can be found in the world. American students tend to be courteous, responsive, cooperative, eager to acquire ideas and ready to criticise anything whatsoever, not least themselves. They are also the last group of students on the planet who are prepared to speak up in class.
Irony
I once wrote a piece for the New York Times that included a few mild touches of irony, only to be informed by a startled journalist on the paper that irony was unacceptable in its columns. One should be as wary of writing for a journal which bans irony as one should for one which seeks to ban immigrants. There are English journals, by contrast, in which the use of irony is almost as compulsory as the use of commas. Pieces can be sent back for being insufficiently insincere.
It is a mistake to think that Americans do not understand irony. Yet though they may respond to it, they rarely initiate it. They also occasionally blunt its edge by too blatantly sarcastic a tone. For a puritan civilisation, irony is too close to lying for comfort. A renowned American philosopher once told me of a discomforting time he had spent at an Oxford High Table. Throughout the entire evening, he had no idea whether a single word that was said to him was meant to be serious or not. “Dammit!” he exploded to me, “I’m an American!” And this was a philosopher for whom irony was a precious moral posture, though he did not seem to appreciate the irony.
One of the gravest moral defects of Americans is that they tend to be straight, honest and plain-speaking. There have been various attempts to cure them of these vices, including the establishment of clinics where they can receive intensive therapy for their distressing tendency to mean what they say. Even with compulsory daily readings of Oscar Wilde, however, it is hard to rid them of the prejudice that there is something admirable about what you see being what you get. (“I live in constant fear of not being misunderstood,” Wilde once remarked, a statement it is hard to imagine on the lips of Pat Robertson.) For puritan types, appearances must correspond with realities, the outer present a faithful portrait of the inner, whereas irony involves a skewing of the two. To the puritan mind, appearances are acceptable only if they convey a substantial inner truth. Otherwise they are to be mistrusted as specious and superficial. Hence the familiar American insistence that what matters about a person is what is inside them. It is a claim that sits oddly with a society obsessed with self-presentation. There is no room here for what Lenin called the reality of appearances, no appreciation of just how profound surfaces can be, no rejoicing in forms, masks and signifiers for their own sake. Henry James writes in The American Scene of the country’s disastrous disregard for appearances. For the Calvinist, a delight in anything for its own sake is sinful. Pleasure must be instrumental to some more worthy goal such as procreation, rather as play on children’s TV in the States must be tied to some grimly didactic purpose. It can rarely be an end in itself. The fact that there is no social reality without its admixture of artifice, that truth works in terms of masks and conventions, is fatally overlooked.
The philosopher Wittgenstein once remarked that “A dog cannot lie, but neither can he be sincere,” meaning among other things that sincerity is as much something you acquire socially as a large bank balance or a reputation for reclusiveness. Jane Austen knew well enough that to be natural, rather like being ironic, is a form of social behaviour one has to learn. For her, observing the social conventions was a question of respect and consideration for others. No ceremony could be less empty. Nothing is more artificial than a cult of shambling spontaneity. People who are self-consciously blunt, plain and forthright are in the grip of an image of themselves quite as much as people who think they are Elvis Presley or Mother Teresa.
Language for the puritan is at its finest when it clings to the unvarnished facts. This prejudice has given rise in the States to a thousand creative writing classes in which sentences like “And then we rolled into town still hauling the dead mule and Davy said how about some fried eggs and he was still kind of sniggering at the thought of Charlie hollering at that goddam prairie dog and we landed up at Joey’s place with the sun still warm on our backs and the coffee was good and strong” are judged superior to anything that overhyped Stratford hack ever managed to pull off. The United States is one of the few places in which stylelessness has become a style, cultivated with all the passion and precision of a Woolf or a Joyce. It is against this current that the likes of Bellow, Toni Morrison and Adrienne Rich are forced to swim.
It was not always thus. Jeffersonian Virginia was renowned for its oratory and rhetoric. The genteel class of New England were praised for what one observer called their “intellectual vigour, exalted morals, classical erudition, and refined taste.” Elegance was in high regard. A fluency of speech and manner was thought by some Americans of the period to provide a bulwark against the dangers of demagoguery. There were those, to be sure, who regarded rhetoric as suspect. It was a form of manipulative speech typical of the ruling powers of the Old World, and thus out of place in a genuine democracy. Even so, a nineteenth-century American writer praised “the chaste and classical beauty” of the nation’s finest legal scholarship. The lawyer, wrote another commentator of the time, will exhibit “that combination of intellectual power, brilliant but chaste images, pure language, calm self-possession, graceful and modest bearing, indicative of a spirit chastened, enriched, and adorned” by a study of classical civilisation. It is a far cry from Judge Judy.
Henry James thought that America lacked mystery and secrecy, that its landscapes were all foreground, but found just such an air of enigma in Europe. This was not, he considered, by any means wholly to its credit. Civilisations which prize the mannered, devious, playful and oblique generally have aristocratic roots, since it is hard to be mannered, devious and playful while you are drilling a coal seam or dry-cleaning a jacket. And aristocratic social orders, as James was to discover, can be full of suavely concealed brutality. A dash of American directness would do them no harm at all. A culture of irony requires a certain degree of leisure. You need to be privileged enough not to have any pressing need for the plain truth. Facts can be left to factory owners.
Even so, there are times when irony is the only weapon one has at hand. Take, for example, those freakish right-wing Christians in the States who brandish banners reading “God Hates Fags” and gather to rejoice at the funerals of servicemen and women killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. Such people relish nothing more than for some passing liberal to engage them in indignant debate, denouncing their bigotry and homophobia. To do so is surely a grave mistake. Instead, one should ask them why they are such a bunch of liberal wimps. Why are they waving their banners when they could be acting as the Lord’s avenging arm by wiping his enemies from the face of the earth? Why don’t they actually do something for a change, have the courage of their convictions, rather than standing spinelessly around? Why are they such a gutless bunch of whingers?
One of the classic forms of American humour is the gag, which marks its distance from the seriousness of everyday life rather as wearing a baseball cap marks the fact that the American male is on vacation. Wearing a baseball cap signals “I Am Enjoying Myself” even when you are not, rather as a bishop’s mitre signals “I Am Holy” even when he is indulging in indecent fantasies beneath it. Humour in this view represents a holiday from reality, rather than a consistent stance towards it. Nobody is likely to mistake it for the real world. Most gags do not force you to reassess your relationship to real
ity.
For a certain kind of English patrician, by contrast, irony is less a figure of speech than a way of life. As a highly Europeanised American observes in Henry James’s The Europeans, “I don’t think it’s what one does or doesn’t do that promotes enjoyment. . . . It is the general way of looking at life.” The gentleman’s amused, ironic outlook on human existence is a way of engaging with the world while also keeping it languidly at arm’s length. It suggests an awareness of different possibilities, one beyond the reach of those who must immerse themselves in the actual in order to survive. The aristocrat can savour a variety of viewpoints because none of them is likely to undermine his own. This is because he has no viewpoint of his own. Opinions are for the plebs. It is not done to be passionate about things. To have a point of view is to be as uncouth and one-sided as a militant trade unionist. It would be a threat to one’s sang froid, and thus to one’s sovereignty. To find the cosmos mildly entertaining has always been a sign of power in Britain. It is the political reality behind Oxford and Cambridge wit. Seriousness is for scientists and shopkeepers.
One of the finest exponents of the English language in the United States today has been the art critic T. J. Clark. Another was the late Christopher Hitchens. Both of them came to the country from England. It can be claimed that to write as well as this, with such tonal subtlety, verbal self-assurance and exquisite play of light and shade, you need a well-established cultural tradition in your bones. In England, that culture has often enough been snobbish, malevolent, and supercilious. The novelist Evelyn Waugh had all of these vices to excess, yet they are also related in complex ways to the splendour of his style.
That permanent house guest of England, Henry James, pressed the nuance and ambiguity of English writing to the point where his prose threatened to disappear up its own intricacies. Among other things, it was a way of putting some daylight between himself and his plain-speaking native land, as was his habit of sucking up to a set of boneheaded English aristocrats. Nothing, not even Communism, could be more anti-American than James’s mannered, fastidious, overbred later style, horrified as it would be at the very idea of telling it like it is. Like James, the English upper classes value a certain verbal obliquity. This is because to talk confessionally is considered unsophisticated, and people of this rank would rather be thought wicked than naive. In this, they are at one with the natives of Paris. You would not ask someone like this on first meeting how many children he had, not because it is impertinent but because it is hard for him to return a stylish reply.
The style, they say, is the man. A friend of mine in New York once gave a copy of my Literary Theory: An Introduction to a friend of hers, an American woman who belonged to that wretched minority of creatures on the planet who have never heard of me. On handing the book back to my friend, the woman inquired “Is he gay?” No, said my friend. The woman pondered for a moment. “Is he English?” she asked.
Satire
Most Americans are too straight-talking to make effective satirists, though many of them have become resigned to others being satirical at their expense, not least about their ineptness as satirists. Commentators can also be too deferential to power to feel easy about mocking it. It is hard to imagine a U.S. television interviewer putting the same embarrassing question to a squirming politician sixteen or so times over, as a BBC journalist once famously did. As for the Irish, they have about as much respect for their politicians as they do for their paedophiles.
Even when political pundits on American TV engage in rowdy debate, there is usually an unspoken obligation to grin and make up at the end. They must leave the impression that their squabbling is basically good-humoured. Perhaps this is written into their contracts. Political debate, after all, is only entertainment. A touch of polemic is good for the ratings, but too much of it would make viewers feel uncomfortable, a capital American crime. What America calls hard ball is soft ball in Europe. Public debate in the States, at least in the media, is generally more emollient than it is in Europe, keener to emphasise points of consensus, more fearful of outright conflict. The bunch of brawling schoolboys known as the House of Commons would probably be arrested for civil disorder in the USA.
In many a British academic conference, there is blood on the floor by the end of the first afternoon. Exchanges can be barbed, even quietly vicious. Americans, however, will tend to preface their criticisms of your lecture with a courteous reference to “your very fine paper,” rather as U.S. politicians who clash with each another on television are often careful to record the respect in which they hold each other’s views. There is less mutual bootlicking in Europe. In some ways, this courtesy is a deeply attractive aspect of American culture, even if it is not always best suited to establishing the truth. The genuine niceness of some Americans can be hard to distinguish from a certain blandness. The difference between radicals and others is that radicals suspect that the truth is generally discreditable. It is thus rarely in the open, and a degree of abrasiveness is required to dig it out. What you see is highly unlikely to be what you get.
Blandness, however, hardly characterizes the nation as a whole. On my first visit to New York, where I had come on the audacious mission of teaching two hundred nuns, I wandered into a gift store, browsed a little and then headed for the door. My exit was blocked by a large man with a drooping moustache who was standing with his back to the door. “Okay, so what ya gonna buy?” he asked. I realised after a moment that this was the proprietor and gave him a feeble, English-upper-class-idiot sort of smile. “Come on, what ya gonna buy for Christsakes?” he repeated menacingly, refusing to shift from the door. It was not until some time later that I realised that this visceral aggression was what some New Yorkers regard as humour. It is certainly a lot preferable to arch banter, self-conscious joshing and Boy Scout heartiness.
Being inept at satire or irony does not of course mean lacking a sense of humour. On the contrary, the United States is marvellously rich in comedy. It represents one of its major contributions to world civilisation. The British are thought to be a humorous bunch, but nothing in their media today can outshine Seinfeld, Family Guy, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Office or the early episodes of The Simpsons. The British, however, excel at whimsy, which is less common in the States. Because they value eccentricity, they enjoy a vein of humour which is quaint, fanciful and capricious. Some years ago, there flourished briefly in Britain a Gnomes Liberation Movement, whose project was to abduct ornamental gnomes from people’s gardens and return them to their owners on the payment of a ransom of candy. Owners who refused this blackmail would sometimes find their kidnapped gnomes lying decapitated on their doorstops, a sinister rim of red around their severed necks.
There are other instances of such humour. The Guardian newspaper usually conceals a spoof in its pages on April Fool’s Day, which one year appeared in the “Help Wanted” advertisements. There were job ads such as “Dynamic coordinator required for forward-looking project delivering quality service for supervision of progressive resources redistribution,” which turned out on closer inspection to mean nothing at all. It would be hard to imagine a quality U.S. newspaper engaging in this practice. Work in the States is a serious business.
TWO
The Outgoing Spirit
Angels and Demons
There is a kind of American speech which sounds too inflated to Europeans. At its least inspired, American English is a language soggy with superlatives: great, fantastic, awesome, amazing, wonderful, incredible (but not, on the whole, superb, formidable, splendid, or magnificent). One sometimes wonders if there has ever been an American who was not a very wonderful person, with the possible exception of Charles Manson.
The novelist Milan Kundera writes in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting of a vision of the world he calls angelic—or, somewhat less politely, “shitless.” This way of seeing is full of beams, smiles and high-minded platitudes, averse to all that is dark-tinged, recalcitrant or disagreeable. The angelic march cheerfully fo
rward into an ever rosier future, radiant and wide-eyed, disowning all complexity and ambiguity in their triumphalist self-conviction. Kundera is thinking of the ideological rhetoric of the East European Communist states, which were still alive and kicking at the time he was writing, but the point has a bearing on the world’s most powerful capitalist nation as well. To the European mind, high-pitched rhetoric suggests among other things racist rants and ranks of goose-stepping warriors. Americans are in love with spectacle, but in the wake of Nazism, spectacle in Europe can never be quite the same again. Instead, in Britain above all, there is ceremony, which is rather different.
The opposite of the angelic for Kundera, predictably enough, is the demonic, by which he means the language of the cynical and nihilistic, one with too little meaning rather than (like the angelic) one stuffed with sonorous clichés. There is enough demonic discourse in the States to suit anyone’s taste, but the fact remains that the official rhetoric of the country (which, one should stress, is far from the discourse of everyday life) is too pious, elevated, hand-on-heart and histrionic for us jaded Europeans. A dash of the demonic would do it no harm. The demonic can be found in the edgy, abrasive, sardonic speech of New York Jews, which is much closer to the Irish than it is to the Midwest. When they hear angelic American speech—“this great country of ours,” “let freedom ring forth,” and the like—most Europeans simply stare at their shoes and wait for it to stop, as some people do whenever Schoenberg comes on the radio. Many Americans, to be fair, find this kind of language just as excruciating.
European political discourse is much more downbeat. You might get away with a reference to freedom, but certainly not to God. Suggesting that the Almighty has a special affection for your nation would sound as absurd as claiming that he has a special affection for gummy bears. Phrases can be tested for their shitless or angelic quality by seeing whether the opposite would make any sense. The Republican politician Mitt Romney solemnly established a Committee for a Strong and Free America, as opposed to a Committee for an Enfeebled and Enslaved one. (“Strong,” incidentally, is a favourite American word.) Angelic discourse goes hand in hand with the high seriousness of the American public sphere. Political life in the States is colourful but earnest. It is hard to imagine a goat, nudist, flamboyant cross-dresser or can of baked beans being put up for political election, as they might be in the United Kingdom. Politics can be a circus, but not exactly a carnival. Michael Moore’s attempt to have a ficus plant elected to Congress is a magnificent exception.
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