Americans will never understand the arcane rules of British society

The Sussex brouhaha brought to mind the scope for mishap caused by our different ways of talking

None of what follows should be regarded as an intervention in – or even a comment on – the Great Royal Matter of recent days. I don’t know any more than anyone else about what was said to whom and with what intention, within the monarch’s family. Nor do I have any particular sympathy, being a half-hearted republican who finds the whole brouhaha rather absurd.

What I can claim to know something about – and which the events in question brought back to my mind with particular freshness – is the enormous scope for mishap and misunderstanding that is presented by the differences between British and American attitudes and expectations, especially those involving things that should be said or not said. Having grown up in the United States and spent my entire adult life (happily and gratefully) in Britain, I still find myself occasionally startled, or caught out, by misapprehension. The arcane rules on what can, or should, be uttered in plain, comprehensible words elude me to this day.

There is, for example, a perverse resistance to the notion that things should be explained – fully and unambiguously – even in situations where such an explanation might save everyone time/trouble/ embarrassment/confusion.

Take the case of new employees: in any moderately sized American workplace, they would expect to be given detailed instructions not only on their duties and responsibilities, but where the essentials of daily work life are to be found, and how the company or institution’s systems and lines of communication operate. In a large workplace, this will probably take the form of an official orientation tour and possibly a “buddy” arrangement where the new recruit is assigned a member of staff from whom to seek advice. Questions from the newbie are encouraged and will be answered willingly: such curiosity is not regarded (as it might well be in Britain) as attention-seeking or a nuisance, but as a sign of commitment and enthusiasm for the job. The frequent exchange of information is regarded as an essential part of professional behaviour.

Although such practices are catching on in Britain, they face an uphill push against the old establishment notion that one is expected to know how things work/ what to say to whom/what is expected of you. This is very much, of course, to do with class. The rules – which seem so obscure and paradoxical to innocent Americans – are devised precisely to sort the people who Know How to Behave from those who don’t. Having to wander around looking for the office stationery cupboard or being completely in the dark about basic meetings procedure is apparently a small price to pay for the self-regarding pleasure of being instinctively confident.

It is not just working life that is assumed by Americans to require straight talking. Commonplace exchanges, too, are helped by the explain-as-clearly-as-you-can principle. I once heard an American woman at a London railway station ticket office say, “I realise I can’t get a train directly from here to [wherever] but …” and then make her inquiry. By preceding her question with that clarification, she probably saved at least 10 minutes of talking at cross purposes.

This universal rule about making yourself clear rests, I suppose, on the egalitarian principle: everybody in the US is, in a sense, a newcomer or directly descended from someone who was. Everybody is making his own way in society and must make an effort to be comprehensible to people who come from very different origins. Nothing can be taken for granted as part of the inherited cultural understanding. This is not, for all its openness and apparent honesty, necessarily a happy state of mind: the amount of open aggression, anxiety and neurotic self-obsession in US society has become, in its new extreme, narcissistic form, quite grotesque. The British view of it as self-indulgent and unhealthy is almost certainly right. It often strikes me that Americans are warm but not necessarily kind, where the British are kind but not necessarily warm.

And yet, there is something about the almost phobic British resistance to talking – or even mentioning – personal matters that still seems very odd to me. I find it extraordinary that one can work with people, often for years, without knowing whether they are married or have children (which would be pretty much inconceivable in the US where never mentioning your private life would be thought bizarre or suspicious.) Or that it could be considered inappropriate to express concern about a colleague or a friend. To pay a compliment, or offer advice, can be objectionable if it is judged intrusive or patronising – not that anyone will ever tell you that you have transgressed: you will just be marked down as crass.

In the US, it is normal (and expected) to ask after people’s families among casual acquaintances. There is an assumption that family feeling is part of our common humanity and therefore open to discussion even between strangers. In a New York toy shop once, I fell into conversation with a woman about my grandchildren. She said that she knew the arrival of the first one was very special, but were the later ones as exciting? I explained that my first had been a boy and so the second being a girl was a new and unique experience. It occurred to me later how completely natural that unreserved exchange, with someone I did not know, had felt.

This willingness to talk about feelings has been subsumed now into the new narcissism in which emotions are the only arbiter of truth – which gives credence to the British rejection of the whole idea. That is a real shame because there was something of great value in the US tradition of freely describing how you experienced what was happening to you. When Americans said, “Do you want to talk?” (which they did all the time), they did not mean about the weather. And that invitation to confide was a notable, almost universal feature of everyday life long before it became the property of mental health campaigns. You shouldn’t actually have to be desperate – or neurotic – to want to talk or to be heard.

‘Do you want to talk?’ was part of US everyday life long before it became the property of mental health campaigns