February 9, 2013 |
I have many friends who are, admit it or not, Anglophiles. They come off as slightly English in their manner and, the more you get to know them, the more you see that they are as thoroughly steeped in the aesthetics, lore and manner of the Britons as two bags of Typhoo in a kettle of hot water. You realise right off that there is something different about them, but it may take you a while to realise that they are living in their own private Islington. They insist on spelling color colour and theater theatre.
Sometimes we can hear Anglophilia in their speech. An artist who is a very good friend of mine is taken for a Brit by many people when they first meet him, and they tend to be puzzled when they learn that he was born and raised in New Jersey. Actually, he sounds a lot like the late Gore Vidal, also wholly American born. That very articulate, nuanced and deliberate American speech pattern is almost extinct, but if you study old film from the 1920s, 1930s or 1940s you frequently encounter that way of speaking. It was a sort of upper-class accent encountered in Manhattan or parts of New England that could be taken for a British accent by rustics. Mr and Mrs Franklin D Roosevelt were good examples. But such elegant speakers are an endangered species today, and nearly all Americans drawl and refuse to enunciate precisely. That grand old accent is like the top hat, white tie and tails – a sign of a wealthy class that now disguises itself as regular, wearing jeans and, like, jeez, you know, talking normal, right?
Anglophiles aren’t like Francophiles or Italophiles. They aren’t motivated by a certain slant on food or wine or architecture. Anglophiles get into the very essence of Englishness. It’s not just about clothes, or decor or food (rather thankfully), it’s about a zeitgeist. It’s a nostalgia for a more civilized civilization. Anglophilia is a revolt against America, or against that pop political philosophy: “American exceptionalism”. Proud Republican entrepreneurs of the Great Plains can chant “USA! USA!” all they want in their cowboy hats and red, white and blue face make-up, but American Anglophiles know that that’s all advertising and self-delusion. America is not the Jehovan “City upon a Hill”. It’s not the Roman Empire with technology. It’s the half-abandoned industrial park of the West, the last refuge of the huckster and the scoundrel, the biggest credit-card bill on the planet. America has no real culture, so its cultured minority leans on the roots from which we sprouted before shrivelling.
Anglophiles love England because, for them, it represents better values, a more genteel, less aggressive, more subtle and nuanced, less polarised, more bemused, less angry, apparently superior but ultimately more inquisitive world. A world where democracy takes the form of a queue, not an elimination tournament. Anglophiles seek a deeper and more refined culture, the rather private and discreet road not taken when the umbilical cord snapped 200 years back.
American politicians live or die by their willingness to proclaim America the greatest country in the world, but secretly they know that Britain’s form of democracy is superior. Oh, if only a government could fall we wouldn’t have had to endure the near bankruptcy of the last Bush regime. And the few orators in Congress drool over Parliament, where there is actual argument, unlike American Congress, where members drone on to an empty chamber, reading a speech for the written record.
It’s easy to spot Anglophiles. They’re the ones in Harris Tweed, beeswax-polished brogues and woollen socks so charmingly rustic that twigs may appear to be caught up in the weave. They prize norfolk jackets, wellingtons in the garden, and argyle socks. If they sport a tartan or a significant necktie, they know its name, and they may even have an excuse for wearing it. If you mention their raglan-sleeve overcoat, they may go into a digression on Lord Raglan and his role in the Charge of the Light Brigade. They can also discourse on Lord Cardigan and Lord Lovat and their sartorial significance. Anglophiles wear woollen caps and schoolboy scarves and drive sports cars with wooden frames and side curtains. They shave using a brush and soap. They like to play darts and billiards without the pockets. They love dogs and horses. They prefer shotguns to semiautomatic military conversions.
Anglophiles should not be confused with preppies, quite a different species of American snob. Preppies are simply those who attended or aspired to Ivy League colleges and dress and behave in the manner of those who got into those schools through legacies – that is, on family. Their Englishness has been watered down over the generations, even if they are pure WASPs. Preppies like English Tudor houses, privet, and maybe Kate Moss, but their idea of English has more to do with Ralph Lauren. They don’t get Stephen Fry and refuse to accept that Hugh Laurie really talks that way. Preppies are Buffy, Muffy, Chip and Todd, not Hugh, Alistair or Sidney. They don’t like Monty Python and never indulge in self-deprecating humour.
American Anglophiles drink tea. They take tea with milk (often PG Tips), not coffee. They have an old shilling in the kitchen to put in their annual Christmas pudding. Sometimes they are golfers, but even if they aren’t active sportsmen they follow Arsenal or Chelsea. Their Anglophilia is usually reflected in the eccentric or recherché style their homes are decorated in or in the weird car they drive. That’s an easy way for Anglophiles to meet on another. “Say, that’s a smashing Morris Minor you’ve got. I drive an Alvis myself. My wife drives a Riley.” Or dogs – “Nice sussex spaniel, I have a sporting lucas terrier myself.”
Anglophiles broadcast their affections in the way they entertain, drinking Pimm’s No 1 Cup or Laphroaig or Big Wally Porter, and serving you stuff you’d rather not know about, such as spotted dick or toad in the hole, or worst of all, Marmite.
Often, an Anglophile will fall for an Anglo-Saxon and marry into the tribe, or enjoy a pattern of affairs with transatlantic persons. And yet my Anglophile friends, who could all probably reside in London or some delightful corner of the English countryside if they wished, continue to live in America. Why? Perhaps they find the real England slightly disappointing. It’s unsurpassed as a reference point and as a stockist, but for the committed Anglophile, the Platonic England, the place in his head, may be superior to the real thing. American Anglophiles may actually feel competitive with the English. When the American crew was up against Britain and Australia in the Olympics, American Anglos were rooting for America. We could beat the English at their own game! Same with soccer. Raise your Boddingtons and chant: USA, USA, USA!
Actually, you don’t have to raise your Boddingtons because American Anglos now think that they can brew just as good a pub ale as the Brits, and they give them naughty names, such as Bear-Ass Brown, Monkey Wrench, Old Jail or Shenanigans. Drinking such pints lends the Anglophile a slight air of eccentricity, and eccentricity, peculiarity and whimsicality is what Americans tend to lack.
I have to admit that I, too, am, to a degree that is higher than I care to admit, an Anglophile. I’ve sat through Irish jokes in London, and I wasn’t really offended. These are simply translations of American Polish jokes. I know that the Brits really love Ireland. That’s why they own so much of it. Hell, the Pogues live in London, so I’m not going for any of the Irish anti-English stuff. That’s for Americans whose only connection to the old sod is through their bloodline. I mean, as an O’Brien I am theoretically descended from the first high king of Ireland, and I am also descended from Niall of the Nine Hostages (like 2% of the men in New York City), but I am also suspected to be carrying the DNA of William the Conqueror and a Holy Roman Emperor or two. I am Anglo-Irish, but I think that there were some Iraqi Jews in the mix, dating back to pre-Islamic times. In fact, I think I’m also descended from Venus, via the Julian dynasty, but that’s all water under the bridge. Who knows what happened late at night 1,000 years ago? We are all mongrels, and perhaps best judged by our tendencies than our pedigrees. I live in New England and in the English language, and my pinkie curls when I drink my tea. So, perhaps my friends and I are the reason that the sun still doesn’t set on the Empire.
For me, Anglophilia started with the British invasion. You Really Got Me really got me. The Yardbirds, the Stones, The Animals, The Kinks, the music and the style of the musicians really captured the imaginations of the best minds of my generation. It was the way they dared to try what Americans would never have done: give in to our inner black. Mick Jagger made it acceptable, by proxy, to imitate Don Covay or Slim Harpo.
Then there was the fashion. The way the bands looked with their hair and their cool slim suits, and the birds with their miniskirts. We wanted to go to London and fucking swing, like the photographer in Blow-Up or Michael Caine in Alfie. We watched black and white British New Wave movies and wanted to fuck Charlotte Rampling and Julie Christie, even Rita Tushingham, so we grew our hair long and bought tweed jackets.
American Anglophiles are usually intellectuals, which is forbidden in America, and they get together over drinks to talk about things Americans can’t talk about, like how maybe the Brits actually did pop art first. We like Richard Hamilton, Peter Blake, RB Kitaj, Allen Jones, Hockney, but most of all we like Lucian Freud and Bacon. We’re sceptical about Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. They seem a bit… American. We love British writers. My main man is Wyndham Lewis, for my money a more important writer than that Irishman Joyce. Robert Graves rules! Ian Fleming is the greatest guilty pleasure. Martin Amis is okay, but give me Kingsley any day. And Graham Greene, Derek Marlowe, Nancy Mitford, Caroline Blackwood, PG Wodehouse, Stella Gibbons, Joyce Cary. I am a Restoration nut and I guess I’ve seen The Libertine with Johnny Depp and about 20 times, counting halves. I’m an intolerable crank on the subject of Oxford as Shakespeare, and will bore anyone who will listen out of their minds. I’m saving that for another piece. But I will admit that I just finished Granby, an 1826 novel by Thomas Henry Lister, and I was laughing out loud. There’s a delightful character allegedly based on Beau Brummell himself.
Speaking of dandies, the funny thing about the English is that the men tend to look better than the women. Sexy as they can be, the women often look upholstered. London ladies generally lack the je ne sais quoi of Parisians or the impeccable smartness of the Milanese. But one finds even mid-level fellows in London infected with the virus of dandyism.
And any real dandy is an Anglophile who knows precisely what Brummell stood for. My suits and shoes come from London. I’m still wearing my Anderson & Sheppard suits from the 1990s, and I considered the greatest cobbling achievement of the past 500 years George Cleverley’s Butterfly loafers.
I lived in London for a month and the adjustment came very easily. I didn’t take to tea or ale, but I thought it was very healthy to have to rent one’s telly, and that there wasn’t much to watch on it anyway. I had been in the habit of watching Mary Tyler Moore at 3am in New York, but in London there was only snooker on at that hour. I slept better.
I happened to fall in with a whole fully formed social set, and although being an outsider was a little daunting, everyone was a good sport about me, and watching them was spectacular. I attended New Year’s Eve at Andrew Logan’s Tower of London loft. The Clash were there, along with everybody else, and we watched a very large table of liquor and wine crash to the floor during a fistfight between Johnny Rotten and Vivienne Westwood. There was nothing quite like that in New York.
My friend Duncan Hannah is a wonderful painter. His pictures are sort of timeless, but they seem to hover over the 20th century with a lovesick attachment. His favourite subject matter is the English, from D-Type Jags to schoolgirls in uniforms to Penguin paperback covers (such as England Made Me by Graham Greene) to Cunard liners to actresses forgotten by all but him, such as the early Hitchcock leading lady Nova Pilbeam. Duncan and I both have houses in the same New England town named after a certain famous English town. His abode is a cottage with an attached studio that looks like it should be in the Cotswolds, and it’s filled with English furniture, English pictures and memorabilia, and even an English girlfriend, an art director who has a sideline selling things you can only buy in England to Anglophile Americans. Handsome Duncan has modelled himself after Augustus John and Walter Sickert, the great English painter of the Victorian era, whom some suspect of being Jack the Ripper. Duncan doesn’t go for the Ripper theory and neither do I. That’s a feminist fantasy based on the complex gothic naughtiness of his work.
Duncan is the perfect American Anglophile. He creates an island of the island wherever he may be. And yet he persists in living in America. He, like all my Anglophile friends, could live their dream, if he really wanted to, yet invariably the Anglophile stays in the USA, home of the corn dog. Perhaps we are afraid of what would happen if we had unlimited exposure to their treasured island. Perhaps we are afraid that Englishness is so contagious that they would quickly mutate beyond recognition. Don’t laugh. It happens to Americans. I have seen it. New Yorkers move to London and, before you know it, they’re inflecting differently. Lilting upward at the end of sentences. And enunciating with suspicious precision. They suddenly toss out English words, even when they come back to visit us. “I was almost hit by a lorry, and my heart was still pounding when I got into the lift.” They come over to my flat and go to the loo. They call dumpsters skips. They throw spanners into the works instead of monkey wrenches. They hang it up in the wardrobe. They eat courgettes and rocket instead of zucchini and arugula, and they eat them smugly.
And these aren’t just impressionable nobodies I’m talking about. I’m talking about rich people. And famous people. We all know what happened to Madonna: her Midwestern twang suddenly turned Sky TV presenter-esque. Real Anglophiles don’t affect a British accent. They just want to fuck people who talk that way. I think there’s nothing sexier than a really proper Oxford accent, especially on a girl who can pole dance. It’s like digging chicks with glasses. That fabulous contrast between mind and matter!
I will admit to having had several English girlfriends. I think it was the accent that started it each time. One was described to me by a famous English director as “the sexiest Jewess in London”. Another was a brilliant and mad fashion designer no longer residing on this planet. There could have been more. I find English girls particularly sexy. Maybe for the same reason I like girls who wear glasses. They seem to have… range. For me, demure is more exciting than voluptuous. English girls warm up nicely. I have had a 20-year crush on Kate Moss. She will make a fantastic dowager.
Years ago I was being courted by Jann Wenner to join Rolling Stone magazine, which involved many phone calls that went through his secretary, who had a British accent that I found irresistibly sexy. I thought she was very flirty and couldn’t wait to meet her. I should have waited. Her sexiness was 100% sonic and her carnal aspect was an utter disappointment. But sometimes sound is enough, and since then, I’ve encountered many British people in business whose role is to give the corporate equivalent of phone sex. There’s no secretary that can compete with one that speaks with a BBC accent.
In fact, the American media is nearly dominated by Brits. American tabloids are run by refugees from Fleet Street, while on the upscale side, Condé Nast stocked up on British editors years ago, and many of them are still at it, at Condé Nast or elsewhere. And though the company’s apparent flagship, Vanity Fair, is edited by an American, it is in love with the royal family, the peerage (especially those convicted or suspected of crimes), Savile Row and the Kray twins. But who can blame them? The Windsors are more fun than the Kennedys, who can’t be naughty without ending up in rehab, or the deadly boring Bush dynasty. If only America had aristocrats who could pull off those funny hats.
We do worry about England. We worry about you getting fat from fast food like Americans and getting too many TV channels and getting interested in American football, but we think you’ll probably pull through. My personal hope is that, if the political situation in America worsens, New England will separate from the rest of the states and apply for a renewal of our colonial status. I think we’d make excellent, even exemplary British.
by Glenn O’Brien
