English Voices Read online

  ENGLISH VOICES

  Also by Ferdinand Mount

  NON-FICTION

  The Theatre of Politics

  The Subversive Family

  The British Constitution Now

  Communism (ed.)

  Mind the Gap

  Cold Cream

  Full Circle

  The New Few

  The Tears of the Rajas

  FICTION

  Tales of History and Imagination

  Umbrella

  Jem (and Sam)

  The Condor’s Head

  A Chronicle of Modern Twilight

  The Man Who Rode Ampersand

  The Selkirk Strip

  Of Love and Asthma

  The Liquidator

  Fairness

  Heads You Win

  Very Like a Whale

  The Clique

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2016

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © 2016 by Ferdinand Mount

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Ferdinand Mount to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

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  ‘From this amphibious, ill-born mob began

  That vain, ill-natured thing, an Englishman’

  Daniel Defoe, The True-Born Englishman, 1701

  CONTENTS

  Introduction: The Amphibious Mob

  VOICES IN OUR TIME

  Kingsley Amis: the craving machine

  Alan Bennett: against splother

  Muriel Spark: the Go-Away Bird

  V. S. Naipaul: no home for Mr Biswas

  Hugh Trevor-Roper: the Voltaire of St Aldate’s

  W. G. Sebald: a master shrouded in mist

  John le Carré: spooking the spooks

  Elias Canetti: the God-Monster of Hampstead

  John Osborne: anger management?

  Professor Derek Jackson: off the radar

  Germaine Greer: still strapped in the cuirass

  EARLY MODERNS

  Rudyard Kipling: the sensitive bounder

  George Gissing: the downfall of a pessimist

  Virginia Woolf: go with the flow

  Arthur Ransome: Lenin in the Lake District

  E. M. Forster: shy, remorseless shade

  Arthur Machen: faerie strains

  Fred Perry: winner takes all

  M. R. James: the sexless ghost

  Wilfred Owen: the last telegram

  John Maynard Keynes: copulation and macroeconomics

  DIVINE DISCONTENTS

  Basil Hume: the English cardinal

  The Red Dean

  Charles Bradlaugh: the admirable atheist

  Mr Gladstone’s religion

  The rise and fall and rise of Methodism

  IN SEARCH OF ENGLAND

  Pevsner in Berkshire

  Oliver Rackham: magus of the woods

  The last of Betjeman

  Ronald Blythe: glory in the ruts

  The suburb and the village

  Mark Girouard and the English town

  SOME OLD MASTERS

  Thomas Hardy: the twilight of aftering

  Charles Dickens: kindly leave the stage

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge: a wonderful leaper

  John Keats: what’s become of Junkets?

  Samuel Pepys: from the scaffold to Mr Pooter

  Shakespeare at Stratford: the divine pork butcher

  THE GREAT VICTORIANS

  Sir Robert Peel: the first modern

  Lord Palmerston: the unstoppable Pam

  Walter Bagehot: money matters

  Lord Rosebery: the palm without the dust

  Arthur Balfour: a fatal charm

  OUR STATESMEN

  Margot, Asquith and the Great War

  Churchill’s calamity: day trip to Gallipoli

  Oswald Mosley: the poor old Führer

  Roy Jenkins: trainspotting lothario

  Denis Healey: the bruiser aesthete

  Harold Macmillan: lonely are the brave

  Edward Heath: the great sulk

  Margaret Thatcher: making your own luck

  Notes and references

  Acknowledgements

  Picture permissions

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  INTRODUCTION

  The Amphibious Mob

  The English have always had a fierce sense of themselves. As they waded up the beaches, our ancestors were apparently shouting ‘Engla-Lond, Engla-Lond’, as if the World Cup had already started. In King Alfred’s day, women who adopted Danish hairstyles were attacked for being un-English. The Venerable Bede of Jarrow, in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, finished as early as ad 731, laments the vices of his countrymen, notably sodomy, adultery and drunkenness, but also picks out their positives such as stoicism, telling the story of a fellow Tyneside monk bathing in a freezing river with blocks of ice all round him and someone calling from the bank that ‘it is wonderful how you can manage to bear such bitter cold’, to which the monk replies, like any true Geordie, ‘I have known it colder.’

  Further back still, according to the Roman historian Tacitus, our ancestors were already making their own suburbs, ‘refusing to have their houses set together like the Romans and preferring to live apart, dotted here and there where spring, plain or grove has taken their fancy, each leaving an open space round his house’. The point is not so much how accurate these stereotypes were but rather how, from very early times, observers were fascinated by the quiddities of the English.

  Modern historians do not care for this kind of thing. In the eyes of scholars as diverse as Eric Hobsbawm, Ernest Gellner and Linda Colley, national identity is mostly an artificial construct. According to Benedict Anderson, national communities don’t just grow, they have to be ‘imagined’. From a very different viewpoint, Hugh Trevor-Roper claimed that ‘Scottishness’ was largely invented by Sir Walter Scott. Colley argues in her influential Britons that you can see unmistakable evidence through the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of politicians and propagandists pushing the idea of Britishness, for fear that the Union might founder without this ideological buttressing. Even so, Colley does not deny that the idea of Britain was knocking around way before the union of Parliaments in 1707 and even before the union of the Scottish and English Crowns in 1603. And if Britishness is not quite such a latecomer as all that, Englishness is something else.

  Patrick Wormald, that brilliant alcoholic depressive who lit up Anglo-Saxon history for all too brief a
period before his early death, contends that a sense of Englishness was always present, as thick as the fog, as pervasive and pungent as the drains, long before the Norman Conquest and long after it, enduring through that conquest and then through all the twists and turns of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation: ‘the onus probandi lies on those who would deny that such a sense remained embedded in the bulk of the English population throughout this long period. Unless a sense of English identity had penetrated towards the roots of society, it is very difficult to understand how it survived at all.’ Wormald contends, not without passion, that ‘there is evidence of a remarkably precocious sense of common “Englishness” and not just in politically interested circles. It is arguable that it is because “Englishness” was first an ideal that the enterprise launched by Alfred, his children and his grandchildren was so successful.’

  In other words, the people in Wessex, Mercia and the rest were consciously and cussedly English for a long period before these territories were unified into a political realm called England, although that realm is itself remarkably ancient in both its boundaries and its monarchy, more ancient perhaps than any other significant realm in Europe, and more continuous if not unbroken in its duration. After the breaks – the Norman Conquest, the Commonwealth – the English simply re-emerged, not unaltered by the trauma but convinced that they were in essentials the same people they had been before.

  This persisting sense of identity has rarely been bolstered by any feelings of racial purity. The English might think of themselves as different, but they have not gone in for myths of a unique genetic origin. English churchmen believed that mankind developed from a single common ancestor, the theory of monogenesis, as opposed to polygenesis, the belief that men originated in separate races and that, as a consequence, the differences between those races were ineradicable and important. The most notorious English racialist, Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927), found so little support for his theories in England that he made his career in Germany and took German citizenship. Pseudo-scientific racial theories never stood up to the facts of common observation in this country. An English crowd looks so diverse – tall, short, blond, dark, ginger, blobby, aquiline, eyes of every colour.

  Quite early on, in fact, the English became proud of their mongrel heredity. Daniel Defoe’s satire, The True-Born Englishman (1701), was an instant and lasting bestseller which went through forty editions in as many years. In it, Defoe mocks those of his fellow countrymen who object to foreign-born rulers such as William of Orange. Who, after all, were our ancestors? ‘Auxiliaries and slaves of every nation’ who had followed in the baggage train of the Romans, then the plundering Saxons and Danes, followed by waves of Picts, Scots and Irishmen, finishing up with the Norman heavies:

  All these their barbarous offspring left behind

  The dregs of armies, they of all mankind.

  From this amphibious, ill-born mob began

  That vain, ill-natured thing an Englishman.

  As Jonathan Clark points out in Our Shadowed Present, the way the English usually described themselves was not ‘true-born’ but ‘free-born’. Their heritage was not genetic but political. The ‘amphibious mob’ prided itself not on its ancient bloodlines but on its ancient liberties.

  Of course they thought themselves not only different, but superior. Most nations do. But their claims to superiority were often tinged with self-mockery. In the heyday of Empire, the Victorian bourgeoisie guffawed at W. S. Gilbert’s parodies of patriotic ditties:

  He is an Englishman!

  For he himself has said it

  And it’s greatly to his credit

  That he is an Englishman!

  Gilbert even asserts ironically that there is an element of choice in the matter:

  In spite of all temptations

  To belong to other nations

  He remains an Englishman!

  Nor have the English been conspicuously pleased with their nation and themselves, except perhaps under the first Elizabeth and in the high Victorian age. More often the dominant tone of English discourse is one of regret, of nostalgia rather than self-congratulation. In Albion, his vast sprawling enquiry into the origins of the English imagination, Peter Ackroyd identifies Bede as the first English writer, typically brooding on ruins and relics of the past and already, in the early eighth century, exuding that melancholy characteristic of these rainswept islanders. If there is a theme common to English writers from Bede to Betjeman, it is this regret for the past. The best has already come and gone and will not come again. Shortly after the Norman Conquest, a scribe charmingly known as the Tremulous Hand of Worcester sighs over the demise of Old English: nobody teaches the language properly any more, the people are lost and wrecked.

  Only a gross imperialist like Cecil Rhodes would think of claiming that ‘to be an Englishman was to draw first prize in the lottery of life’. In any case, it was always possible to buy a lottery ticket. In fact, from Disraeli onwards, paeans to Englishness have so often come from historians and political writers who are not English by descent. The philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin, who was born in Riga and as a child witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution from his parents’ apartment in St Petersburg, writes of the historian Sir Lewis Namier, born Ludwik Bernsztajn in Poland to a Jewish land agent who had converted to Catholicism:

  He was not disappointed in England. It took, as he had supposed, a humane, civilised and, above all, sober, undramatised, empirical view of life. Englishmen seemed to him to take account, more than most men, of the real ends of human life – pleasure, justice, power, freedom, glory, the sense of human solidarity which underlay both patriotism and adherence to tradition; above all they loathed abstract principles and general theories.

  From almost everything that Berlin wrote and said, it is clear that these are Berlin’s own sentiments too. It was, I think, his experience of England that helped to shape his crucial insight, that political theories and principles do not by nature fit neatly with one another and that wisdom consists in learning to live with the conflicts between them.

  In the writing of English history, it has so often been incomers who have constructed the most vivid pictures of the way we were. Who has inked in our image of the Tudors more forcefully than G. R. Elton, Sir Geoffrey Elton, born Gottfried Rudolf Ehrenberg in Prague? In the introduction to his little book The English (1992), Elton touchingly records: ‘I was well over seventeen years old when I landed in England on St Valentine’s Day in 1939, and I knew virtually nothing of that country, not even its language. Within a few months it dawned upon me that I had arrived in the country in which I ought to have been born.’

  What then are the characteristics of that country that were so immediately attractive to the young Ehrenberg? What makes or made it so enviable to be English, either by birth or by adoption? It is an inconvenient truth that just as our characteristics are not exclusive to us, neither are they unchanging. That sober, tolerant country which entranced Berlin, Namier and Elton had, three centuries earlier, been notorious for its sectarian ferocity and its terrible civil wars; one king had his head cut off, another was driven into exile. Fifty years later, the country was still being convulsed by violent uprisings in support of the exiled dynasty.

  Neither our sexual mores nor our religious habits are constant, either. If the Victorians were pious and prudish, the Georgians were unbuttoned and tepid in their devotions. As for our supposed aversion to sexual display, what about Shakespeare’s bawdry or the bare bosoms of Sir Peter Lely’s beauties? English phlegm was unknown to the hot-tempered gallants of Restoration England. The stiff upper lip seems more like a by-product of Empire than an enduring feature of the English face; it crumpled terminally at the funeral of Princess Diana. In the 1930s, English bohemians fled their suffocating homeland, or ‘Pudding Island’ as Lawrence Durrell called it, for a climate where they could take their clothes off and let their hair down. Now foreigners flood into London, because it seems to them the least inhibited met
ropolis on earth.

  Is there in fact any specific quality in life, or art or literature that we can pin down as intrinsically, enduringly and uniquely English? Ackroyd claims, for example, that the English have a special relationship to trees and hate seeing them cut down. Odd, seeing that we have cut down more of them than almost any other nation. Aren’t the Germans rather more notoriously in love with their forests, even naming their gâteaux after them? One of the most famous lines in French nursery rhymes laments that ‘we shall go no more to the woods, the laurels are cut down’.

  Even where one can identify some cultural trait that appears idiosyncratically English, there always seem to be exceptions. The ‘serpentine line of beauty’ recommended by Hogarth certainly does apply to the English tradition in gardening – all meanders and no straight lines – but can you apply it to English architecture, the single unique style of which we happen to call perpendicular? Our Georgian terraces are anything but serpentine, certainly not when compared with the fantastic curlicues of Bavarian rococo. On none of these supposedly English qualities – understatement and modesty, sexual unease, or enduring love of the eclectic and the countryside, aversion to order and straight lines – can the English claim exclusive copyright.

  But there are two ancient and continuing features of English culture which do have a solid claim to be peculiar and fundamental: the common law and the common language. The two are crucially interlinked, and between them, I would argue, are constitutive of Englishness.

  At first sight it may seem bizarre that the most famous – and best – description of what the English common law does should come from a poem. But then it’s a bizarre poem. It has no title. Alfred Tennyson simply begins with a question:

  You ask me, why, tho’ ill at ease,

  Within this region I subsist,

  Whose spirits falter in the mist,

  And languish for the purple seas.

  In other words, why the hell should he stay in England? And he answers himself with a paean to the liberty and tolerance of a country