New wave of emotion resounds over the pond
Mort Sahl, the American satirist, once described Oliver Stone, the celluloid historian manqué, as “the kind of person who describes accidents to witnesses”. That phrase came to mind last week when a writer on The New York Times, marking the 20th anniversary of a tragic death in Paris, said that in the last two decades the British had thrown off their famous reserve. “Centuries of stiff-upper-lipped repression,” she wrote, opening the Bumper Book of Clichés at the appropriate page, “boiled over in a great howl of collective anguish.” Steady the Buffs!
According to this breathless lady, we are “more inclined to value gut feeling over expert opinion, even in such matters as Brexit”. Ah yes, “expert opinion”. The kind, say, favoured by The New York Times, which runs at least one piece a week about the follies of British withdrawal from the European Union, for the benefit of those readers in Poughkeepsie who evidently talk of little else. Well, there’s not much of note happening in America, is there?
How others see us can be an interesting game to play, and there is something to be said for oak-smoked qualities that help define a people. We are – or were – notable for emotional restraint, and that is nothing to be ashamed of. It can be a source of strength. In times of crisis, Dr Aziz said in Forster’s A Passage to India, “There is nobody quite like the British”. The peoples of Europe, who owe us so much, have long known that.
But to use a single trait to define a people is a failure of imagination. If the lady from New York looked hard enough she would find as many stiff upper lips in the Midwest as in the Vale of Belvoir. We did, after all, cut off a king’s head in 1649, which should suggest even to an American republican there is more to this land than emotional repression.
There are other traits she might recognise. Not all English people have been defined by restraint, particularly when drink is taken. The English, Shakespeare wrote in Othello, are “most potent in potting… your Dane, your German, and your swag-bellied Hollander are nothing to your English”. As the hoteliers of Ibiza, sadly, may confirm. “Centuries of stiff-upperlipped repression” indeed. Which centuries did the lady have in mind?
A cinema in Memphis has withdrawn Gone with the Wind because a few “patrons” have complained about the film’s suitability for modern audiences. Although it has delighted millions of people since 1939, it has been enlisted as a combatant in the culture wars that zealots wage so mercilessly. However warily you tread, it’s difficult not to give offence to those folk (often white) who want to be offended. “Negro” is out, though it isn’t that long ago when black people were happy with it. “African-american” is the preferred term, but a century ago it was held to be deeply offensive. Even the word “coloured” brings a charge of racism. Yet there is in America a National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples. The zealots have come for Mark Twain and William Faulkner, whose novels feature the N-word, and John Kennedy Toole’s glorious comic romp, A Confederacy of Dunces, will probably be next. Dunces – that’s the word. Gone with the Wind has given more pleasure to more people, black and white, than almost any other film. Let it be.
Moeen Ali, the England allrounder, has said, yet again, that being a Muslim has made him a better cricketer. That’s wonderful to hear. No doubt those years as a chorister at St Paul’s Cathedral School helped Alastair Cook concentrate so fiercely at the crease that he is now England’s leading run-scorer in Tests. Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims: the England team has accommodated them all without fuss. The England players love having Moeen Ali among them, and spectators cheer him to the echo. They see a cricketer first, then a Muslim, which in sport is the natural order of things. So much for Islamophobia. Christians tend to get a rougher ride. Jonathan Edwards, the triple jumper, was once denounced by a columnist as “a creeping Jesus of the sandpit”. Another columnist, who happens to live with a cricket writer, has referred to “little icky Christianity”. Now there’s tolerance for you!
‘We British are – or were – notable for emotional restraint, and that is nothing to be ashamed of’
At the end of a Prom the other night something revealing happened. Semyon Bychkov, having conducted a fine performance of Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony, closed his score and bowed to it, and to the musicians of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, before he turned to face the audience. It was nothing less than an act of reverence, which, in our irreverent times, had the power of summer lightning. One might say it was a very Russian moment. Russian musicians admire the magic of music more than their performance of it, however brilliant. But, more than that, it was the acknowledgement of ritual. We have come together for a common purpose, Bychkov appeared to say; a sacred purpose. Great music is always more than “entertainment”. Sometimes it may not be “entertaining” at all. Reverence: we need more of it, all of us.