I have no problem with the English. In fact, I usually fall into a tongue-tied swoon when one of them talks to me with that clipped, holier-than-thou, E. M. Forster accent, the one that makes the speaker sound unbelievably witty and unattainable. I usually lose my power of speech in the face of that accent.
So generally, I feel inferior around the English I’ve met. Cowed. Dumb. Entirely uncultured. Oddly, I don’t mind. But some people find the English more offensive. One such person is A. A. Gill, whose book, The Angry Island: Hunting the English, was just reviewed in the Globe. The reviewer included many excerpts from the book, which as you’ll have guessed, picks mercilessly on the English.
The best writers have that magical ability to create detailed pictures with their words. Gill appears to be one of these writers. Consider the excerpts:
“I’d better come clean. You may have suspected I don’t like the English. One at a time, I don’t mind them. I’ve loved some of them. A lot of my friends were born here between the cliff and the wall. It’s their collective persona I can’t warm to. The lumpen and louty, coarse, unsubtle, beady-eyed, beefy-bummed herd of England.”
He had me at “beefy-bummed.”
“Collectively and individually, the English are angry about something. The pursed lip and the muttered expletives, the furious glance and the beetled brow are England’s national costume.”
Gill isolates one “achievement” of the English: “Their heroic self-control. It’s the daily struggle of not giving in to your natural inclination to run amok with a cricket bat, to spit and bite in a crowded tea-room, that I admire most in the English. It’s not what they are, but their ability to suppress what they are, that’s great about the English.”
Of the English “queue,” or line up as we call it in Canada, Gill attests: “The English queue because they have to. If they didn’t they’d kill each other. The pressure of boiling anger in the average post office is only contained by the shared knowledge that this is as fair as can possibly be arranged in this life. They would rip the head off of Mahatma Gandhi if he tried to renew his TV licence ahead of them.”
I love a good dose of acerbic writing. Martin Amis is one of my faves. Unfortunately, while I delight in the precision and cutting blows of writers like Gill, I have to consider that the person behind such writing is very likely horrid. The Wikipedia entry on Gill seems to support this possibility. In particular, Virgin Atlantic’s Richard Branson's summing up of Gill as “a complete and utter prick” gives me pause.
Yet artists don’t always feed on things lovely and warm. Tension, friction, and darkness are frequent motivators. Humour, especially, often sources unkind impulses.
So what to do with a widely despised man who I almost certainly wouldn’t like, but whose wordplay makes me chuckle aloud?
You know, some things were simpler in the days before the Internet. Too much knowledge interferes with a perfectly good read.
Thanks Rohin. I've gone a little pregnancy-mad lately in my posts, but I aim to restrain myself more in the future (I blame the hormones). What's your blog?
k.
Posted by: kiley | April 04, 2008 at 05:46 PM