Oh, to Be English! - Review

National Review, July 26, 1999 by Christopher Hitchens

Mr. Hitchens, a columnist for Vanity Fair and The Nation, is author most recently of No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton.

Anglomania: A European Love Affair, by Ian Buruma (Random House, 304 pp., $25.95)

'We Englishmen are Very Proud of our Constitution, Sir," announced Mr. Podsnap in a hortatory moment. "It was Bestowed Upon Us By Providence. No Other Country is so Favoured as This Country." Perhaps sensing the capitalization that Dickens was placing in the mouth of his character (and perhaps bridling at it), Podsnap's Continental victim inquired:

"And other countries? They do how?"

"They do, Sir," returned Mr. Podsnap, gravely shaking his head; "they do-I am sorry to be obliged to say it-as they do."

The joke, at first blush, appears to be on poor old Podsnap, who is so wedded to John Bull and his tight little island that he is unaware that the English don't really even have a proper constitution, in the written and lapidary sense of the term. Wogs, for him, begin at Calais. But here's an even better joke, with the excellent Ian Buruma to relate it. Voltaire, Herzen, Mazzini, Marx, Herzl, Hayek-all of them in varying degrees came to respect, if not indeed to prefer, an insular society that had a reliable tradition of liberty even if it lacked such crucial and-I am sorry to be obliged to say it-Continental preconditions as an interest in theory or an attachment to grand ideas. English Marxists like myself used to break our rotting fangs on this paradox or contradiction, which was intuitively if not explicitly understood by the old emigre German-Jewish polymath who developed such agonizing yet historic hemorrhoids in the British Museum.

Nikos Kazantzakis's travel book England, written in 1939, is not mentioned by Buruma but came up with the three essential beliefs that constitute the "Anglomania" on which he concentrates. These are the beliefs in the concept of liberty, the idea of the gentleman, and the numinous influence of Shakespeare.

Not every Anglophile-and please note the distinction-was magnetized by all three. The Anglophile Voltaire, for example, despised Shakespeare almost as much as Tolstoy later did. Marx could quote Shakespeare by the hour but found the "gentleman" notion a risible one. Theodor Herzl mistook the cad Disraeli for a gentleman but hoped that the youth of a future Jewish Palestine would be taught to play cricket.

It's probably essential to come at this subject from a slight angle, and Ian Buruma possesses a perspective that fits him very well for the task in hand. He is Dutch on one side of his family, German-Jewish on the other, and has since his teens made England a base from which to compose well-wrought analyses of China and Japan. Polymathic and polyglot, he might be termed a rooted cosmopolitan. His Dutch family looked on England as the brave nation that brought deliverance from Nazism; his Jewish family helped make it a safe haven for a later generation of refugees; both wings had a fondness for English style and manners that at times verged on affectation. Thus, while Buruma appreciates the liberty and hospitality of "Britain" in a way that natives of the rain- sodden archipelago often do not, he is alert to the mere aping of Englishness, and this, I take it, constitutes his distinction between Anglophilia and Anglomania. He shrewdly points out that even ur-Englishmen can degenerate into foppish parodies of themselves: Buruma amusingly describes working at the tweed- infested offices of The (London) Spectator. Also instructive is his portrait of the trying-too-hard F. A. von Hayek, who became more of a caricature gent than even T. S. Eliot.

The founding text of the Continental fascination with England is Voltaire's Letters Concerning the English Nation, in which he sets out some themes- religious toleration, social and commercial mobility, the ease and spaciousness of English gardens-that recur in the observations of Frenchmen as various as Taine, Tocqueville, and Baron de Coubertin. (They also find their counterpoint in the work of Anglophobes, like the Catholic fascist Charles Maurras, who regarded the English as little better than mongrelized and shop-keeping Jews.)

Giuseppe Mazzini, who based himself in London while planning feverishly for the unification of Italy, was converted to Anglomania. At the instigation of Metternich and the Pope-the same alliance later delineated by Marx and Engels in their Manifesto-he was subjected to British police harassment and mail- tampering. At once, Dickens and Carlyle and Macaulay leapt to his aid; both houses of Parliament held spirited sessions, the vile foreign practice of snooping was denounced, and Mazzini's portrait was sold in the streets as that of a popular hero. On his brief but decisive return to Rome in 1849, this hot- blooded Mediterranean democrat wrote: "I think very often under these radiant skies of the London fogs and always regretfully. Individually speaking, I was evidently intended for an Englishman."