Sentimentality
Overseas observers often feel that there is a compulsion in the States to get everything instantly out in the open. No doubt there is a streak of puritan confessionalism in this habit. But it is also part of the emotional forthrightness of Americans, in contrast to the shyness of the British. Other nations sometimes regard Americans as lacking in complex inner depths, which is of course a mistake. But the mistake is a significant one. It is not that Americans exist only on the surface, but that their surface is where their depths are supposed to be. They seem to have a more untroubled passage between inner and outer, a greater fluency in translating the one into the other, than Scots or Swedes. Puritans may find spectacle and razzmatazz distasteful, but this is not because these things are on the surface. It is because they are surfaces which fail to manifest any depths.
The shy and socially awkward, who are plagued by a gap between their internal and external worlds, probably fare less well in the United States than they do in, say, Ulster or Malaysia. Since the easy expressiveness of Americans is a great aid to social intercourse, it is mostly a virtue. The country values honesty, directness and spontaneity, which are not quite so high on Europe’s list of moral priorities. They are virtues to which Europeans tip their hats but fail to get excited about. At the same time, honesty and directness can involve the tiresome assumption that keeping things to yourself is morbid and unsociable. One should share one’s emotions as one should share one’s cookies. In a country which dislikes the idea of living in a house which is attached to someone else’s, one’s inner space is constantly at stake in the public sphere. In this view, whatever is unexpressed has no real existence. What is inside you is valid only if it is externalised. This is why foreign visitors to the United States can be astonished by how quickly two of its inhabitants can progress from meeting each other for the first time to exchanging steamy details of their sex lives.
It is partly because their feelings are more out in the open that Americans are more sentimental than the British. It is acceptable for them to indulge their emotions in public with a certain theatrical touch, which is less true of their transatlantic cousins. Almost all Oscars received by American actors need a thorough rub-down with a towel by the time they leave the stage. The British are sentimental about animals but not much else, while the Irish are scarcely sentimental at all. Perhaps the harshness of their history plays a part in this tough-mindedness. Irish children are notably more mature than British or American ones. Generally speaking, the Irish do not suppress emotion like the British, but they do not wallow in it either. European politicians are rarely to be found moist-eyed and broken-voiced, with a catch in the breath and a lump in the throat. Some of them are more likely to be found hurling each other across the debating chamber. American politicians, by contrast, are occasionally to be found sobbing in public, as are American judges, bishops, police chiefs, newscasters, and business executives. This is partly because American feelings are near the surface, but also because in the case of politicians, crying in public can be something of a vote-catcher.
Americans like their leaders to be human, a quality which one demonstrates by sobbing or saying something folksy. Being a republic means demanding a government which is in touch with everyday emotion. Americans tend to be suspicious of the aloof, clinical and impersonal. This is why U.S. popular culture almost always portrays crazed scientists, invading aliens and demonic psychopaths as speaking in sinisterly robotic tones. The nation is instinctively humanistic. Many American movies are about the conflict between an anonymous political or technological order and the rugged, warm-blooded individual. The opposition is in fact deceptive. Historically speaking, it was rugged individualism which gave rise to technocratic systems indifferent to human feeling.
Sentimentality and the Family
Sentimentalists tend to believe that the more emotion you display, the more human you are, but the reverse can be the case. I have seen concentration camp survivors in Germany reduce an American audience to tears with an account of their experience, while remaining impassive and level-voiced themselves. The idea that emotion is an adequate response to such horrors is absurd. They lie in a region as far beyond sentiment as the theory of relativity. Those who can sob and wail are the lucky ones. It may be that some American business types and politicians are sentimental because sentimentality is the emotional mode of those unaccustomed to genuine feeling. Rather as broad humour is the only kind of comedy appreciated by the humourless, so stagey, broad-brush emotion is the speciality of those who are not often called upon to cope with the subtle motions of the heart.
“Family,” as I noted earlier, is a mantra-like American word, guaranteed to evoke a flow of profit and a flood of warm feeling. To find this domestic piety in such a robustly Christian nation is odd, since the New Testament displays a marked hostility to the family. Jesus, Mary and Joseph are a curious parody of one. As a child, Jesus wanders off to teach in the Temple, making it clear to his distraught parents that his public mission takes precedence over his domestic affections. He is careful to point out that his apparent father is not his real one. His parents do not seem to be among his immediate comrades, though his mother shows up at his execution and his brother James ran the church in Jerusalem (he, too, was later to be executed). When a woman in the crowd calls out a blessing on the womb that bore Jesus and the breasts that suckled him, he responds with an acerbic put-down.
At one point, his family members want a word in his ear while he is on public business, but Jesus tells them peremptorily to wait. A few of his relatives even try to lay violent hands on him, claiming that he is “beside himself.” Perhaps they regarded him as a dreadful embarrassment, hardly an unusual attitude among family members. Having a family himself would simply have interfered with his mission. It had nothing to do with hostility to sex. His commitment was to humanity as a whole, not to his uncles and aunts. A prospective disciple who asks to say goodbye to his family before joining Jesus’s movement receives the rough edge of his tongue. Another who asks to be allowed to bury his father before joining up is abruptly advised to let the dead bury their dead. The phrase would no doubt have horrified the Jews around Jesus, who regarded burying the dead as a sacred duty. It might well have sounded to them like a moral obscenity.
Jesus has come, he declares, to tear family members one from the other and set them at each other’s throats. A follower of his, he insists, must hate his parents. Some of his disciples today might find this the least arduous of his commandments. If they had been around at the time, advertisers and politicians would have fallen over themselves to shut him up. As it is, the Roman state did it for them, probably at the bidding of a badly rattled colonial ruling elite. Jesus’s attitude to the family is good neither for business nor political stability. The American cult of the family is part of the country’s religious legacy. Domestic bliss is a key feature of puritan ideology. It is not at all central to the New Testament.
It is also strange to find American Christians so grimly preoccupied with sex, since there is almost nothing on the subject in the New Testament. One of Jesus’s most loyal comrades seems to have been a prostitute, and he himself shows tenderness to a woman from Samaria with a disreputable sexual history. Since Samarians counted as fairly low-life figures among the Jews, the fact that he has dealings with her at all is pretty remarkable. He does not rebuke the woman for her exotic sexual career, but offers her the waters of eternal life, which she gratefully accepts. In general, the New Testament is fairly relaxed about sexuality. This is one of the many ways in which its adherents have betrayed it.
The Unromantic Irish
One can contrast American cosiness about the family with certain traditional domestic attitudes in Ireland. In the nineteenth century, there was little romantic or sentimental about Irish domestic arrangements. American families are important among other things because they provide an emotional refuge from a harsh public world. The more cutthroat and anonymous social life bec
omes, the more one may expect a cult of domestic affections. In traditional Ireland, by contrast, the domestic unit was locked directly into the socio-economic world. This was known as the family farm. Relationships between family members were governed among other things by economic necessity. Marriage was more a matter of dowries and matchmakers than candle-lit dinners or erotic love. Many of the Irish were lucky to get a dinner at all, candle-lit or otherwise. Fine feelings were for those who could afford them. Sexual reproduction was geared to producing children who would work on the land, as well as provide for their parents in their old age. Celibacy might be enforced on those children who did not inherit the farm. Otherwise they might be compelled to emigrate, or become priests or nuns. Dividing a small farm between too many family members raised the spectre of hardship and even famine.
Visitors to Ireland should remember that though we are all Irish in the eyes of God, the Almighty designed the Irish nation with a specific purpose in mind, namely, as a place for other people to feel romantic about. The Irish are adept at exploiting this role, though they do not feel in the least romantic about themselves and would not be caught dead wearing an Aran sweater or drinking Irish coffee. In fact, the country was recently thrown into blind panic by a malicious rumour that Irish pubs might actually be coming to Ireland. The Irish drink Guinness, of course, but Guinness is not really Irish any longer. The brewery is owned by an international corporation. A number of things that seem to be Irish, such as Irish stew or the founding of Dublin, are not Irish at all. The Irish might, however, engage in such activities as singing “Danny Boy” or saying “Begorrah” (a word which nobody in Ireland has ever been known to utter) simply to please the tourists, rather as lunatics in eighteenth-century London would froth at the mouth and slash at their wrists when visitors came to view them, only to resume their usual demure demeanour once they had gone.
It should be said, incidentally, that one key difference between the Irish and the British is that on the whole the Irish like Americans, whereas generally speaking the English do not. Ireland’s affection for the United States is hardly surprising, given the loyal support the country has shown its people over the centuries. In the years after the Great Famine, whole villages in the west of Ireland would have sunk without trace had it not been for the New York Police Department. It was the money its Irish officers sent back home which kept them afloat. The distance from Dublin to Boston is in many ways shorter than that from Dublin to London. Flying to the aid of a downtrodden, semi-destitute country stands as one of the United States’s great historic achievements, along with Emily Dickinson and magnificent bacon. (These, however, are to be weighed against its lamentable ignorance of the teapot, which is largely a consequence of never having owned India.) There are aspects of Northern Irish culture (golf, snooker, huge meals, guns, obesity, theme parks, violence, paramilitaries, puritan values, Evangelical fervour) which closely resemble parts of the States. Most U.S. presidents with Irish backgrounds have been from Ulster, the northerly part of the nation.
Innocence and Experience
It is because they are so outgoing that Americans can seem so innocent. However much experience they accumulate, there can still be a freshness and directness about them which seems deeply non-European. Whatever great stacks of human life they already have under their belts, they always seem eager for more, and we associate eagerness with the innocent rather than with the jaded and overbred. It is not, of course, that all Americans really are innocent, any more than all Europeans are devious and decadent. It is rather that straightness and openness are childlike qualities, and childhood and innocence, despite the best efforts of Sigmund Freud, are still thought to be closely allied. Being crafty and deceptive are complex social practices that children have yet to pick up. The day when a child learns to dissemble marks a milestone in its progress towards adulthood, though it would seem strange to celebrate it with a visit to the circus.
Striving to recapture a lost innocence is a staple theme of American culture. Perhaps all civilisations are nostalgic for Eden, but America has more reason for this hankering than most. It has never lost its sense that there is something synthetic and unreal about civilisation. Regaining the happy garden was a constant preoccupation of the early Puritans. There is, however, a paradox about trying to recapture lost innocence, not least in literature. To write about childlike innocence is inevitably to betray it, since there is no writing in paradise. Language is the sign of a fallen adult world. It signifies that you have been cast out of the happy garden, and does so in the very act of trying to scramble back into it. You cannot get behind language in language. The child’s innocence is not meaningful to the child itself, so that trying to retrieve it is less like trying to unearth a buried state of being than like trying to remember what happened last night when you were leglessly drunk. The reason this is so hard is that the brain was probably not laying down memory traces at the time, so there is really nothing to recall. Just the same is true of the child’s spontaneity and lack of self-consciousness.
America’s love affair with innocence thus involves a degree of self-deception. It also involves an erasure of history. History is guilt, which is one reason why children, who do not languish under the burden of time, seem so guileless. For adults to recreate this condition means continually wiping out their history and treating every moment as though it were miraculously new. In a well-worn American phrase, it is a matter of being born again, though this particular rebirth has to happen all the time. The only way you can recapture the innocence of the child, who is out of time, is to move so fast that you live in a perpetual present. As Henry James comments in an essay on Hawthorne, “A large juvenility is stamped upon the face of things [in America], and in the vividness of the present, the past, which dies so young and had time to produce so little, attracts but scant attention.” You can try to outwit time by moving at such speed that every moment is discarded almost before it is done. The trick is to keep cutting the present off from the past. In this way, you can try to deny the fact that the past is what we are made of, and that there would be no present without it. One of the several problems with this way of living is that it is not clear how what is reborn every moment can be said to be you. Personal identity involves a degree of continuity.
We are speaking here of the time of capitalist endeavour, in which whatever is not here and now is dead and done with. History is just so much junk to be jettisoned. It obtrudes its ungainly bulk between the self and the real. Yet it is hard to deny that you can also learn from the past about how to succeed in the present. The ideal condition, then, is to reap the benefits of experience without being wrinkled and withered by it, so that you can remain eternally fresh. Or, as they might say on Wall Street, to have a sizeable store of accumulated capital behind you, but in a way which leaves your hands absolutely free to buy, sell and invest in the present. In the end, however, it is impossible to absorb one’s past and shuck it off at the same time. America has a hunger for experience coupled with a desire to abolish it and start again from scratch. It must simply live with this contradiction as best it can.
Henry James in The American Scene sees certain houses in New York as proclaiming that they do not care in the least what becomes of them once they have served their purpose. They are as indifferent to the future as they are to the past, since neither stretch of time has any immediacy about it. Yet since each present moment is already melting into the future, there is no such thing as a perpetual present. Nothing is here and now. In any case, this whole conception of time forgets that the past contains precious resources for the present and future. Nations which have nothing to live by but their contemporary experience are poor indeed. To liquidate the past is to help sabotage a finer future. This is one reason why the association between progress and prosperity can be so deceitful.
Eden, then, is something of a con-trick, as it turns out to be in Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit. The hopeful young Martin, arrived in America to make his fortune, is shown
the blueprint of a noble city called Eden which is being raised in the wilderness. The plan shows the settlement to be full of banks, churches, factories, hotels and cathedrals, some of which are still to be completed. Since Martin is an architect, he spends his last few dollars in buying into the scheme, and sets off in pursuit of this utopia. It turns out to be a cluster of rotten wooden huts set in a fetid swamp. For the Dickens of this novel, though not for the Dickens of American Notes, America itself is a fraud, full of pious hot air and long-winded rhetoric, populated by braggarts and snake-oil salesmen who rave about freedom yet are driven by greed.
In Praise of American Tourists
Americans tend to be open to experience, and among some of them this takes the form of an eagerness to see the world. It is true that American tourists may not always be mathematically certain of what building they are standing in front of, or even at times what country they are in; but they will explore the dullest landmarks, listen attentively to the most tedious of guides, and labour their way up and down the most unforgiving flights of stairs. Their energy is extraordinary, as is their willingness to listen and learn. The natural American tendency is to say yes to things, whereas the natural British tendency is to be cautious. If visitors from Oregon and Omaha do not always grasp the intricacies of Roman Britain or the English Civil War, it is not for want of trying. They are a tourist guide’s delight. They tend to be endearingly respectful of foreign customs, and touchingly afraid of giving offence.
Across the Pond Page 6