Picked-Up Pieces by John Updike

education-oriented households who are given rooms of their own and plenty of time for model airplanes. Only ample neglect brings such dreamy, disdainful poise. They are masterful flirts and have the miraculously steady hands of rhinoceros hunters and of women who apply eye make-up first thing in the morning. Shaw doubted that England deserved its great men; I wonder if it deserves its women. But what land does? “You Americans,” said Lady Pynchme, “you are so romantic. You all think your little dolly is Helen of Troy.” “You mean,” said I, startled, “she’s not? What, then, is she?” “Simply a jolly good lay,” was the answer. Two things shocked me here: the dog-food ads on television and the language of the upper classes.
    Great Men
. The British seem to prefer, in leaders, rogues or men with a streak of the rogue. Henry VIII, Charles II, Nelson, Disraeli, Lloyd George, Churchill. If a rogue is unattainable, the next best thing is a nonentity. An earnest, clever man like Harold Wilson is universally distrusted.
    Class Warfare
. The only phenomenon in the United States comparable to the catting, at an English party, between an
arriviste
working-class intellectual and a swinging duchess is the banter, at a Manhattan conclave, between a liberated Negro and a liberalized lady of Southern birth. The hostile tension of sexual attraction. Maxim of human behavior: we want to fuck what we fear. The primordial drive toward cross-fertilization.
    All those “pleases” and “thank you’s,” which the fresh visitor mistakes for elaborate courtesy, in fact prove, like the chirps of birds, to be warningsestablishing territoriality. Those fierce fences and high brick walls, sometimes enclosing scarcely a square yard of cement. The passion for separation and class distinction leads to absurdities: a fourpenny post it costs money to delay, an A classification at the cinema that compels parents to accompany their children to puerile films.
    The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint’s self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.
    The beheading of Charles I, the repeal of the Corn Laws: the only times an
idea
has entered English politics. A king easier to restore than foreign markets.
    America is a land whose center is nowhere; England one whose center is everywhere. In America every town has its Chamber of Commerce; here every shire has been the site of a poem.
    Christianity has been disposed of by giving the clergy a social status, a part in the pageant. After Trollope’s novels, there can be no apocalypse. An odd number of steeples with their tips cut off, like daggers made safe for children to play with.
    Americans love England. For every tulip that comes up in Hyde Park, a tourist lands at Heathrow. I have not spoken to one American resident in London, not counting my eight-year-old daughter, who wouldn’t like to stay. And there are thousands, thousands of those mysterious men “in oil,” with their haircuts transparently cleaving to their skulls, with their expensively dressed wives, whose very good legs and taut figures are disappointingly capped by tan, hard, rather cross faces. (What do we
do
to our women, I ask myself, that is so brutalizing? What happens to our magnificent teen-age girls, with their clothes allowances, their fuzzy sweaters, their convertibles and batons and “steadies,” to give them as adults such a bitter, pushy narrowness and voices from which all melody has been squeezed?) America is uncomfortable now. On the continent fascism or anarchy reigns. Here things are civilized, cheap, pretty, educational, clean, green. Here the police and the poor are polite. The bully of the seven seas is in danger of becoming a nation of gigolos and tourguides. In the newspapers, imbalance of trade and impending bankruptcy; in the restaurants, girls dressed like houris and men with nugget