Anglomania

Ian Buruma
ANGLOMANIA

Ian Buruma was educated in Holland and Japan and spent many years in Asia, which he has written about in such books as
God’s Dust
and
Behind the Mask
. He has also written a novel,
Playing the Game
, a fictional biography of K. S. Ranjitsinhji, the Indian prince who played cricket with the MCC in Edwardian Britain.
The Wages of Guilt
, an exploration of how Germany and Japan have come to terms with their aggressive pasts, was published in 1994.

ALSO BY
Ian Buruma

NONFICTION

Behind the Mask

God’s Dust: A Modern Asian Journey

The Wages of Guilt:
Memories of War in Germany and Japan

FICTION

Playing the Game

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, APRIL 2000

Copyright © 1998 by Ian Buruma

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, in 1998, as
Voltaire’s Coconuts, or Anglomania in Europe
. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1998.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Random House edition as follows:

Buruma, Ian.
Anglomania/by Ian Buruma.
p. cm.
1. National characteristics, British—Foreign public opinion, European. 2. Great Britain—Foreign public opinion, European. 3. Great Britain—Civilization—European influences. 4. Europeans—Travel—Great Britain—History. 5. Europe—Civilization—British influences. 6. Great Britain—Relations—Europe. 7. Europe—Relations—Great Britain. I. Title.
DA110.B975  1999
941—dc21  98-27387

eISBN: 978-0-307-82896-5

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

TO ANN BURUMA

AND

G. M. TAMAS

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many people helped and inspired me during the writing of this book. There are several in particular to whom I would like to offer my special thanks. Conversations with John Ryle, Noel Malcolm, Ann Buruma, Graham Snow, Timothy Garton-Ash, Richard Nations, and Michael Ignatieff were invaluable in sharpening what began as a vague idea. Historical research was deepened and enriched by Michael Raeburn, Susie Harries, and Eva Neurath. Leo van Maris pointed me in the direction of valuable sources. Nicholas Philipson, Ian Jack, and Tom Nairn offered insights into Scottophilia. Ian Sutton and Emily Lane kindly shared their memories of Nikolaus Pevsner with me, as did Pevsner’s son and daughter, Dieter and Uta. Walter Blue and Lore Vajifdar helped me with my chapter on the refugee children. Michael Ignatieff, James Fenton, Leon Wieseltier, Stephen Beller, and Ann Buruma read various parts of the manuscript. Noga Arikha went through the final draft of the book with warm sympathy and a sharp eye. I could not have wished for better and more patient copy editors than Peter James and Martha Schwartz, a keener editor than Jason Epstein and his assistant, Ulf Buchholz, and more supportive agents than Andrew Wylie, Sarah Chalfant, and Jin Auh of the Wylie Agency. But even with the help and encouragement of all these people, I would have had a hard time finishing any task without the loving support of Sumie, my wife.

C
ONTENTS

Cover

About the Author

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgments

1.
CHURCHILL’S CIGAR

2.
VOLTAIRE’S COCONUTS

3.
GOETHE’S SHAKESPEARE

4.
FINGAL’S CAVE

5.
THE PARKOMANE

6.
GRAVEYARD OF THE REVOLUTION

7.
SCHOOLDAYS

8.
A SPORTING MAN

9.
WAGNERIANS

10.
JEWISH CRICKET

11.
THE ANGLOMANE WHO HATED ENGLAND

12.
LESLIE HOWARD

13.
DR. PEVSNER

14.
THE MAN IN THE TWEED COAT

15.
THE LAST ENGLISHMAN

SOURCES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C
HAPTER
O
NE

C
HURCHILL’S
C
IGAR

I
T WAS IN
1960
,
OR POSSIBLY
1961
,
AT ANY RATE BEFORE
the first Beatles LP, that I went shopping for cheroots with my grandfather. He was over in The Hague on a visit from England. I was about ten. I was born in The Hague. My father was Dutch and my mother English. To me a visit to Holland by my grandparents felt like the arrival of messengers from a wider, more glamorous world.

My grandfather, who had served as an army doctor in India during the war, liked Burmese cheroots. These were hard to come by in Holland, but if there was one shop in The Hague that was likely to stock them, it was a tobacconist named de Graaff.

G. de Graaff was an old-fashioned family firm. A portrait of the founder, a man with elaborate whiskers and a stiff white collar, hung on the wall behind the counter. We were served by the founder’s grandson, a small, dapper man in a three-piece suit, with the slightly fussy manners of an old-fashioned maître d’. He opened some boxes of cigars for my grandfather to sample. One or two specimens were taken out, to be pinched and sniffed. A purchase was made. I don’t know whether they were Burmese cheroots. But I can remember vividly the
look on the tobacconist’s face when he realized my grandfather was an Englishman.

De Graaff said he had something special to show. He smiled in anticipation of my grandfather’s pleasure. “Please,” he said, and pointed at the wall, where Cuban cigars were stacked. And there, in an open space, between pungent boxes of Coronas and Ideales, hung a framed glass case containing two long, cinnamon-colored cigars, dry as old turds; one had been partly smoked, the other was untouched. The case had been sealed with red wax. At the bottom was a copper plate bearing the simple inscription 1946,
SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL’S CIGAR.

I found out more about the famous cigar on my second visit to the shop, almost forty years later. The old de Graaff was dead. His son, a tall man with a somewhat ostentatious gray mustache, showed me the glass case, the two cigars, and a letter from Queen Wilhelmina’s court marshal, in which de Graaff was thanked for his supply of fine cigars. They had been presented at the queen’s lunch for Winston Churchill. One of the cigars had been lit by Churchill himself and passed through his very own lips. The other came from the same box. The partly smoked cigar had been put away because lunch was served and the queen couldn’t abide smoking in her presence. However, the two precious relics were saved for posterity by Churchill’s butler, who passed them on to one of the queen’s footmen, who presented them to de Graaff, who then had his solicitor draw up the document to vouch for their authenticity.

My grandfather would have been amused and, being a patriot, probably touched by this gesture. Then again, in those days he might have been accustomed to such small tributes being paid to being British. Through the late 1940s and 1950s, and even in the 1960s, the British were considered a superior breed in places like The Hague. For the British, together with the Americans and the Canadians, had won the war. So had the Soviet Union, but the Red Army was never anywhere near The Hague, and besides, the Red Army was, after all, the Red Army.

The British are no longer regarded as a superior breed, even in The Hague. The image of Britain as the land of war heroes is disappearing. Now when the British return to wage war in Europe, they come as soccer hooligans: history repeating itself as a beer-flecked horror show. But I still grew up with the image of British superiority, which gave me
vicarious pleasure as well as the kind of slight resentment one might feel toward a very grand parent. It was an image that owed a great deal to snobbery, but to something else, too, something more political in origin: a particular idea of freedom. The characters in this book—Europeans who loved or hated Britain—were either attracted by the ideal of British liberty or disgusted by it. Since I am one of my own characters, and the one I probably know best, I shall start with my own account, about growing up in The Hague, and about my grandfather, whom I worshiped with the intensity of which only little boys and religious fanatics are capable.

My grandfather, Bernard Schlesinger, was the son of a German-Jewish immigrant, which explains, perhaps, his particular brand of patriotism. I would watch him as a child, during the summer holidays, as he worked in his Berkshire garden, picking vegetables or pruning the fruit trees, dressed in corduroys and tweeds. Even though he was in fact a pediatrician in London, he seemed to belong to the landscape: the fields, smelling of hay; the villages, smelling of horse dung and smoke; and the large Victorian vicarage that my grandparents bought after the war, smelling of candle wax and polished oak. This was his home. He would talk to me about the importance of loving one’s country, and how he loved England. I did not understand the depth or the nature of his love. I was never unhappy in Holland, but from quite an early age it was a place I always thought of leaving. The world seemed more promising elsewhere (a state of mind that, once entered, will never leave you in peace). But to my grandfather, England was not only the country he was born and raised in; after Hitler, it was, in his mind, the country that saved him, and his family, from almost certain death.

To be
saved
. Can the feeling of liberation ever be transmitted to those who have always been free? My father, who was forced to work in a German factory during the war, was liberated in Berlin by the Soviet Red Army. His memories of freedom regained are set to the sound of Russian dances and Ukrainian folk songs (after the Stalin Organs and the Flying Fortresses). But his case was unusual. For most Dutch people, freedom came from the West. As a child I read stories of the so called
Engelandvaarders
, the men who sailed for England, in yachts, dinghies, even rowboats, anything that would float across the North Sea, to freedom. In the stories—though not in real life—they invariably
made it and came back as heroes in Spitfires. Our ideas of England, or America, or Canada, were inseparable from the idea—rather abstract, to us—of freedom.

It is impossible to imagine quite what it must have felt like: the erotic rush of being freed. In the Netherlands, and elsewhere in Europe, the sexuality of liberation was not only subliminal; it was blatantly, frenetically acted out. Local men were pale and skinny from years of hiding, fear, and malnutrition. The sight of smiling GIs, lolling on the back of their jeeps, smoking Lucky Strikes and chewing gum, cannot have offered a greater contrast to the more familiar sight of marching German soldiers, stamping their boots and bellowing songs in perfectly drilled formations. Americans and Canadians, well fed, smartly turned out, and tanned from the Italian sunshine, liberated Holland to the swinging beat of Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood.” The British Tommies were perhaps weedier, knobblier, shorter. They carried less cash and could not show quite such immaculate teeth when they smiled their victory smiles. But the girls still adored them.