A COMMUNICATION
A GOOD WORD FOR ENGLAND
Mr. Martin Green's "Thoughts About Two Homes From
Abroad" (PR, Spring 1957) seems to me both perceptive and chal–
lenging, but to need some qualification here and there.
I take Mr. Green's general feeling to be that, although things in
both England and America are pretty bad at the moment, America
is, on the whole, a land of greater promise for the future. Writing as
an Englishman with some experience of America, I cannot, frankly,
agree.
True, America is much less stuffy than England. There is less
formality here, and less fuss about social conventions: no one cares
how you hold your knife and fork or even whether you use them at
all, and
if
you want to take a half-eaten steak home for the dog–
why, nobody minds about that either. It is true that there is great
pressure making for competitive acquisitiveness and social conformity,
but the American class structure is somehow less divisive (because less
sure of itself?), as it is certainly more fluid, than the surviving English
class structure. And I am happy to share, too, much of Mr. Green's
enthusiasm for the American university teacher: liberal, cultured, hard–
working, more aware of the world outside the university than his Euro–
pean counterpart, and less inclined than he to preciosity, he seems to
me to be, at his best, a very special and very valuable kind of person.
It is true that most of these teachers seem to have learned the lesson
of political caution only too well: there are very few now who will
take an open stand on any really controversial issue, although it is just
this kind of example that their students most need and, I believe, would
most readily respond to. But if there is hope in the American future,
it may well be, as Mr. Green suggests, with the young university teachers.
However, I do not choose to see England as so irrevocably doomed.
On the whole, of course, Mr. Green is right: the national life there
has gone flat and dull, the more sensitive minds are fighting against
rather than with the larger movements of social and technological
change, and no one has much sense of direction or of purpose. Everyone
