Anglophilia, like pornography, is one of those things that are hard to
describe but you know when you see them. With the marriage of the vague,
amorphous Prince William and the seemingly unemployable Kate Middleton,
Anglophilia is on full display all over the world, particularly in the
U.S. As two diabolically bland human beings plight their troth, or
whatever one does with a troth, Anglophiles from Chappaqua, N.Y., to
Redondo Beach, Calif., have a thrilling opportunity to drop to their
knees, moisten their tongues, pucker up their lips and grovel before the
British upper classes.
Anglophilia is an obsession not with the English per se but with that
stratum of them best described as positively smashing. It is
characterized by a fixation on the royal family, a fascination with
vintage porcelain and a tendency to confuse a drawing-room accent with
actual intelligence. Anglophiles hope that their sons will grow up to be
the type of swell chap who would willingly forsake his kingdom for love
— like Edward VIII — and that their daughters will one day achieve
the quiet grace and dignity of Emma Thompson. Anglophiles get all weak in the knees at the very mention of Beatrix
Potter, Peter Pan and Tilda Swinton. At heart, they despise their
compatriots, believing Americans are loud, rude and afflicted with poor
taste, which makes them vastly inferior to the British, who at their
worst are merely cheeky. Americans are indeed loud, rude and afflicted
with poor taste, especially in northern New Jersey. But just hang around
London’s Leicester Square on a Saturday night and watch 20,000 drunks,
lechers, sluts and gangsters parade through town, and see whether the
English are any better. Cheeky, my ass.
There is nothing wrong with liking the English. I have been married to
an Englishwoman for 34 years and find the folks from Blighty, at their
best, to be tough, determined, resourceful, wickedly funny and much
better cooks than they are given credit for. At their worst, they are
vulgar, dim, crass and useless, like Sarah Ferguson. You have only to be
in a room or a marriage with an English person to understand how the
English conquered the world; nothing deters them, and you cross them at
your peril. Hitler found this out the hard way in 1940. But I didn’t marry my wife because she reminded me of someone named
Cordelia in Brideshead Revisited. I married her, I suspect,
because she embodied all the virtues that can be found in the English
masses but rarely in the British upper classes and almost never among
the royals. Moreover, if I had been an Anglophile of the kind who
obsesses over regattas and going to Ascot, she would never have married
me. Those types of people are not her cup of tea. Her father worked in a
ball-bearing factory. Forget about revisiting Brideshead; people like my
wife don’t get to visit it in the first place.
The most galling thing about Anglophiles, who worship a class of people
that many English people hold in contempt, is that they are oblivious to
what makes England great. The English have given the U.S. many wonderful
things — our legal system, King Lear, Keith Richards, Jane
Eyre, Graham Greene, Iris Murdoch, Fawlty Towers, the
Protestant Reformation, Twinings’ English Breakfast Tea — but these
are not the things about England that Anglophiles admire. Anglophilia, a
demented form of cultural fetishism, is directed not at the things that
make Britain great but at those — bowler hats, Harrods, people with
names like Bonham-Carter — that make it twee.
