CLANCY SIGAL
Goodbye Little England
Author's Note:
I wrote this as I was packing my bags to go back to America for
the first time , seriously , in over thirty years. In Britain , my adopted homeland ,
Mrs. Thatcher was still vibrantly, or virulently, in charge at the time of writing.
I'm not sure what the country under the new Prime Minister, John Major, is like,
except that almost everyone I know is poorer in pocket and possibly even sorrier
in spirit now that The Great She has departed ... but for how long? At the
moment, Mr. Major enjoys a remarkably good press. The Opposition has not
yet laid a glove on him; he is still untested in the sort of bruising up-the-slippery
ladder struggle that shaped Mrs. Thatcher. But nothing much has changed. There
is still the eternal squabble over whether Britain is a European nation or not.
And the
U.
K. still is the cutting edge of post-industrial decay, the nation that –
if we but heard her cries - could teach us much about the surly graces of capi–
talist catastrophe .
What did Karl Marx and Freud have in common? They both slept with
their housekeepers. It's taken me thirty years to figure this out. Suddenly,
the two mental giants who have ruled my life come into sharper focus.
It's exhilarating, and also shattering, for your gods to fail. At last, it's
time to grow up.
I did it all here, in Britain.
And now it's time to go. Back to the United States, where I'm a
gastarbeiter,
a "guest worker," in my own country. Going where the
money is, and where a jobbing writer like me can be a "Professor of
Journalism" without blushing. It's not only the gravy. A sense of timing
maybe. Or the intolerable London rents, abysmal telephones, unpre–
dictable weather, Northern Line blues, fat smug Chancellors of the Ex–
chequer telling us to tighten our belts. Or an old longshore lament that's
been ringing in my ears recently: it's time to go, I heard them say
I
I
heard them say, It's time to go ... for now.
It was only an interlude, I told myself. A weekend to visit the
Tower of London and Buckingham Palace, a few days extra to see
Stratford-on-Avon and the Lake District. Then back to Hollywood
where
J.
Edgar Hoover's FBI waited patiently for me to break.
"You'll cooperate," they'd predicted . "They all do-in the end."
