emphatic about all three things. Whereas a man like William F. Buckley, say, despite being a white Irish Catholic, radiated the very sort of demeanor for which the word WASP had been coined to begin with. So, for the matter of that, did the dapper gentleman from Richmond, Virginia, Tom Wolfe. Could it be, then, that WASP was really a term of class rather than ethnicity? Q.E.D. Those other white Anglo-Saxon Protestants of the less polished kind had long enjoyed a colloquial description all of their own. It was the good old word “redneck,” and those it described were concentrated in what H.L. Mencken had unfeelingly called “the hookworm and incest” belt of Anglo-Saxondom. Thus, to be English in America was, if one had enjoyed something like an Oxbridge education and spoke in tones acceptable to the (then) BBC, to be in the upper middle class almost by definition. As Sir Ambrose Abercrombie explains the system of stratification in America later on in
There’s an interesting corollary to this, which is that the hyphenation question is, and always has been and will be, different for English immigrants. One can be an Italian-American, a Greek-American, an Irish-American and so forth. (Jews for some reason prefer the words the other way around, as in “American Jewish Congress” or “American Jewish Committee.”) And any of those groups can and does have a “national day” parade on Fifth Avenue in New York. But there is no such thing as an “English-American” let alone a “British-American,” and one can only boggle at the idea of what, if we did exist, our national day parade on Fifth Avenue might look like. One can, though, be an Englishman in America. There is a culture, even a literature, possibly a language, and certainly a diplomatic and military relationship, that can accurately be termed “Anglo-American.” But something in the very landscape and mapping of America, with seven eastern seaboard states named for English monarchs or aristocrats and countless hamlets and cities replicated from counties and shires across the Atlantic, that makes hyphenation redundant. Hyphenation—if one may be blunt—is for latecomers. It’s been very absorbing (the term I hope is the apt one) to see the emergence of another non-hyphenated immigrant group. Those from south of the Rio Grande are now seldom if ever known as Mexican-American, say, let alone Salvadoran-American. They are, instead, “Hispanic” or “Latino.” And they, too, were in many ways forerunners rather than latecomers.
The two things that my English background and youth had most featured—anxieties about class and the decline of empire—helped me to negotiate and explicate these subjects, both of which lay under a certain ban of “denial” or reticence, to an American readership. It so happened that as I was finding my feet in New York, the Public Broadcasting System (sometimes known as “Petroleum’s British Subsidiary” because of the salience of its
Having sponged on my unimprovable friends Gully and Peter for long enough, I became the tenant of a walk- up on East Tenth Street, on the north side of Tompkins Square, found for me by the seemingly omni-connected Ian McEwan, and there I had a desk with a view across town of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. My landlord had a good library in this small apartment, and the neighborhood, then very poor and grungy and old-style ethnic with a traditional emphasis on Ukrainians, also featured several decent writerly cafes and restaurants. There was a coffeehouse called Di Roberti’s, to which W.H. Auden had been known to shamble in his carpet slippers from St. Marks Place. (Auden: almost the only Englishman to have successfully mutated into an American, or at any rate certainly into a New Yorker. A previous occupant of his rather ramshackle old apartment building had been Leon Trotsky, who could have made a considerable American if things had been very, very different. One day, perhaps, we will uncover some of those old New York movies in which he was cast as an extra.) I felt I had accomplished one rite of New York passage myself, by getting horribly mugged on my own front steps within a few months of moving in. I can still remember the burning shame of having not resisted, despite the assurances of the girl I was escorting that I had done the sensible thing. I shall never forget the choking horror of seeing the knife-wielding psycho turning back, having had second thoughts about not stabbing us after he realized that we had seen him too closely for too long, and the desperate haste with which we slammed the street door behind us just in time, seeing him still menacing us and snarling through the glass. I coldly knew at that moment that if I had had a weapon on me, I would unhesitatingly have shot him dead. He was white, incidentally, though at the police-precinct the surly cops laboriously showed me a whole album of deep-black perps, before asking me if I was sure the assailant hadn’t been “light Hispanic.” By the time I’d said “no” to that, too, they obviously suspected me of being a bleeding-heart liberal.
The tempo of life in Manhattan seemed something like twice what it had been in London and, however late I went to bed, I invariably woke up early and couldn’t get back to sleep. I was reading more and writing more, and furthermore writing for a new audience (of both editors and subscribers) after the over-familiar clientele of the United Kingdom. Yet I was also getting asked more, by papers “back home” (as I swore to try not to think of it) to write about the United States. And what a subject America was: an inexhaustible one in fact, begun by written proclamations and assertions that were open to rewriting and revision and amendment, and thus constituting an enormous “work-in-progress” in which one might hope to play a tiny part. It came to me that this was perhaps why I had felt such a strong push and pull of both emigration and immigration: that the need to write and the magnetic attraction of America had been two versions of the same impulse.
One reason for my varied nightlife in New York was my friendship with Brian and Keith McNally, the two brothers who had opened the Odeon restaurant (now and always to be immortal in a certain
Brian it was who woke me very early one morning, sounding almost like a movie version of a Blitz-era Ealing Studios Cockney and inveighing against a “fuckin’ diabolical liberty.” This turned out to be, once my disordered senses had cleared, the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands. Far from home and fairly far from being Thatcherites, we were at one in the belief that under no circumstances could anybody put up with being pushed around by a crew of Buenos Aires brownshirts.
The aggression, for which my still-vivid visit to Argentina had helped prepare me, was the occasion for a fascinating division of forces and clash of opinions on both sides of the Atlantic. It seemed obvious to me that the military junta would never have dared attack a British territory unless it had been given some sort of “green light” from Washington. Indeed, it was at once reported that Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Reagan’s UN ambassador and a leading apologist for anti-Communist dictatorships, had graced an Argentine diplomatic reception on the very night of the invasion. General Alexander Haig, Ronald Reagan’s vain, preposterous secretary of state, was also in his usual engorged condition of being crazy for anything that was militaristic, sadistic, and butch in a uniform. But the assurances given to Haig’s equivalents in Buenos Aires had all been predicated on the assumption that the British would not fight for a stony archipelago at the wrong end of the world. I abruptly realized, for reasons that I believed had little if anything to do with my blood and heritage, and despite the impediment placed in the way of my becoming more American, that I would be unable to bear the shame if this assumption proved to be correct.
In my new cohort around
