{"id":117058,"date":"2017-10-25T11:00:12","date_gmt":"2017-10-25T15:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=117058"},"modified":"2017-10-26T16:06:29","modified_gmt":"2017-10-26T20:06:29","slug":"learning-decipher-love-british-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/10\/25\/learning-decipher-love-british-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"On Learning to Understand (and Love) British Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It was the kind of story that enchants me, it seems so unlikely, and so often happens.<\/span>
\n<\/span><\/i>\u2014Margaret Drabble, <\/span>The Garrick Year<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The night I met my husband, I should have been in Paris. I had made the necessary plans. But you know how these things happen: a misread date in the calendar, the late realization of a prior commitment\u2014in this case, a ball with a ticket too expensive to write off as a loss, and of course I know how ridiculous that sounds. I spent the week prior trying to sell my spot; no one would have it. So Paris was cancelled\u2014delayed, I thought\u2014and we met, and all the rest, and now I live in England, a country I thought I knew well, but which, it turns out, is as foreign to me as Bolivia or Slovenia or Mars. \u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When I decided to move here three years ago, I had assumed London would be much the same as New York, perhaps just slightly better-read and more anaemic. But when I arrived, I found that comparing New York to London is like comparing a corset to a straitjacket<\/span>. England and America may be kin, but they are not kindred spirits. I felt so dislocated that there were days I wished we didn\u2019t even have language in common. Then I could track my progress through Duolingo and assign the shortcomings of my assimilation to a trick of grammar, instead of what I knew was to blame: my stubborn, unmistakeable, unfailing Americanness, which hung over every interaction like a bold neon diner sign.<\/span><\/p>\n

In truth, I never thought of myself as particularly American until I left America. Suddenly it seemed to be my most defining character trait. I take sideways statements of sarcasm head-on, in earnest. I laugh too loudly, for too long, at offhand comments meant only to demonstrate wit, not humor. When asked, How are you? I answer in stream of consciousness\u2014too honest, too eager, too keen to share. At restaurants, I am a minor nightmare: sauce on the side, substitute fries, and\u2014may the Lord forgive me\u2014I cannot help but send the steak back if it\u2019s overdone, which, in England, it almost always is. I am utterly oblivious to the subtle judgments that pass around me, yet terribly obvious\u00a0when I make my own. I go on and on about self-improvement, and my goals, all of which are, by English standards, unattainable, and unseemly to discuss. <\/span><\/p>\n

Though I once thought of myself as shy and observant, here I translate as brash and demanding. I am, in short, an American woman in London. While my love-borne exile has taught me a good deal about my own country\u2014compared to the rest of the world, we are deluded, egomaniacal dreamers\u2014until recently, I had no guide to the covert intimacies of the English: the ease with which they categorize each other before they speak a word (I have seen an Englishman correctly predict, across a room, another\u2019s educational background from childhood onward), the upside-down language they use to indicate approval (\u201cthat will do\u201d) and disdain (\u201cshe\u2019s <\/span>perfectly lovely\u201d<\/span><\/i>), the paradoxical mix of socialized medicine and affordable education in a society that constantly emphasises the importance of knowing\u2014and sticking to\u2014one\u2019s place. For years, <\/span>Peep Show <\/span><\/i>was the closest thing I had to a Rosetta stone. <\/span><\/p>\n

Then, on the bookshelves of a particularly well-stocked Oxfam, I found Margaret Drabble. The name itself is funny and English, and I saw it repeated across a row of well-worn orange spines. The covers of those 1970s Penguin editions were psychedelic, so outdated as to be back in fashion: holograph-like photographs of heavy-lidded girls with bangs (a \u201cfringe\u201d), imprinted across hallucinogenic fractals. The brief back cover copy on these paperbacks promised \u201csweat, sexual ecstasy, anguish, letdowns and all.\u201d Naturally, I bought the whole shelf.<\/span><\/p>\n

As I tore through Drabble\u2019s early novels on my rides on the stuffy underground, I was shocked into recognition. In Drabble\u2019s narrators, I heard my own voice. I saw my own choices. In <\/span>The Millstone, <\/span><\/i>the out-of-pattern decision that leads to an eternity; in <\/span>The Garrick Year, <\/span><\/i>the dangerous hunger for uncertainty\u2014that prerequisite of desire\u2014borne out of marriage; in <\/span>Jerusalem the Golden, <\/span><\/i>the measurement of distance between home and adulthood, between mothers and men; and in <\/span>A Summer Bird-Cage, <\/span><\/i>that spark you feel when recognized in advance for what you long to become. I saw, in Drabble\u2019s narratives, the shape of my own want and confusion, and at last it didn\u2019t feel foreign. It felt female.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Margaret Drabble.<\/p><\/div>\n

And of course it did. Born in 1939, in Sheffield, to a middle-class family\u2014another funny English misnomer\u2014Drabble is primarily known for her prolific chronicling of the tensions of a generation of women whose education outpaced the range of their choices. Her heroines are the ambitious graduates of good universities, second-wave feminists whose lives can never be derailed because the tracks aren\u2019t laid. In Drabble\u2019s novels, any choice\u2014to sleep around or to marry, or both; to keep the baby or to drink the abortive bottle of gin; to leave a job for a man or a man for your sick mother; to follow your husband to a new town or to leave him and take a bubble bath with his best friend\u2014is a game one plays: not a misstep but, simply, movement. It is clear from interviews done through her six decades of writing life, including her <\/span>extraordinary<\/span><\/a> conversation with Barbara Milton for The\u00a0Paris Review<\/em>, that Drabble doesn\u2019t quite believe in free will as such. In a Drabble novel, my abandoned trip to Paris would not be painted as the accidental catalyst of a life moved into alien territory but, instead, as an inevitable result of my character. As Drabble writes in <\/span>The Millstone<\/span><\/i>, \u201cI don\u2019t believe in principle. I believe in instinct, on principle.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In loving Drabble\u2019s novels, I have come to love England, and the English, who, as Drabble writes in <\/span>Jerusalem the Golden<\/span><\/i>, so often hide their more-lovable flaws in \u201ca confusing blur of bright indistinct charm.\u201d\u00a0To experience the headiness of those days in London in the 1960s through Drabble\u2019s eyes is to\u00a0fall in love with the same paradoxes that drive me mad on a daily basis. In <\/span>A Summer Bird-Cage<\/span><\/i>, her first novel and my favorite, the protagonist, Sarah, is gossiping with an acquaintance at a house party. (Most of the 208-page novel takes place at parties. Four illustrative chapter titles: \u201cThe Invitation,\u201d\u00a0\u201cThe Party,\u201d\u00a0\u201cThe Next Invitation,\u201d\u00a0\u201cThe Next Party.\u201d) \u201cCivilized behavior\u00a0is sick isn\u2019t it?\u201d the acquaintance riffs. \u201cI must confess that even I felt at times that it would be a lot better if somebody hit somebody.\u201d\u00a0Indeed! Later Sarah marvels at the English knack for self-effacement: \u201cHow or why can a person appear so little to be what they are? I cannot understand it: how should I, when my every instinct is for self-revelation, my every desire to strip myself and spill myself before the eyes of others?\u201d In Drabble\u2019s work, these glimpses of delicious British emotional barbarism peek out like bright spots against a gray London sky. The heroine of <\/span>Jersualem the Golden<\/span><\/i> has \u201ca vision of some other world where violent emotion could be a thing of beauty,\u201d and when she successfully seduces her friend\u2019s married brother, she gets a hit of adrenaline, and can see \u201cno end to the possibilities of mad aspiration.\u201d Mad aspiration! My heart races reading Drabble. She makes me suspect that there is an intensity of feeling in the English that would put my American bravado to shame, were it to ever break the dams and burst forth. <\/span><\/p>\n

In fact, Drabble\u2019s novels make me suspect that the \u201cAmerican\u201d quality I\u2019ve blamed for my sense of isolation on this damp island is, in fact, a distraction from a more common experience of women my age, in any age: there\u2019s a fighting urge to disturb the mold\u00a0of one\u2019s life, as it sets. I had never heard of Maggie Drabble before I found her books, but now she is my patron saint of \u201csudden confidence,\u201d her novels my relic to keep the faith in those \u201cmomentary illuminations\u201d of English feeling. It is that intimacy, after all, that has moored me here. (Imagine if I had come for the stability of the pound!)<\/span><\/p>\n

Again and again, Drabble\u2019s work deals with two edges of the same sword: the feeling of being \u201ctrapped in a human limit for the first time,\u201d and of being, within that limit, utterly displaced and untethered. On this, Drabble perfectly captures the brief payoffs you get if you, say, leave all your plans and move abroad for love\u2014or if you\u2019re any woman in any impossible situation you\u2019ve half chosen for yourself. \u201cAt least from time to time I get something that I would never get were I not so displaced,\u201d she writes in A Summer Bird-Cage<\/i>, \u201cthe sudden confidence, the momentary illumination of feeling, ships passing and moreover signalling in the dark. It\u2019s all compensation, I suppose. But then I wouldn\u2019t have most of the things that it\u2019s compensation for.\u201d In the end, I suspect Drabble isn\u2019t teaching me to love the English after all: she\u2019s teaching me to love what is inevitable, to love it as the English do.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jennifer Schaffer is a writer living in West London.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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