The Patriot Malgré Lui

DEREK and Ronnie are twins. Their father was a British officer and their mother a nurse, and the two of them constitute the one souvenir of the war that has not yet lost its interest. All the rest, — tin hats and revolvers, trench maps and army orders, Times broadsheets and a copy of the Peninsula Press, a few medals, and the sword that never did anything more useful than cut wedding cakes, — all have become mere impedimenta, shrinking at every trek of the small family. But Derek and Ronnie keep the war problem up to date.

They timed their arrival for the fall of 1918. Londoners, as to the manner born; but of what a London they were citizens only vague memories hint, for at the age of three they came to America.

And of all countries for boys to be happy in, commend me to God’s own. Its land is a boy’s land — full of undefined possibility, with no need to be tidy or careful about anything. Its pleasures are boys’ pleasures — motion, things happening, doing something, going somewhere. Its public life is gregarious boyhood writ large; nowhere will you get so swift an insight into the national psychology as in watching a crowd of boys at play. Its heroes are boys’ heroes — naïve, visionary, arrogant, brutal. Not always in life, perhaps (though these qualities may all be virtues in their time and place); but read its fiction — read what Derek and Ronnie read. And watch the movies.

And now they are to return to England. A process rather of instinct than of deliberation has dictated the break-up of the family, the dispatch of Derek and Ronnie in quest of some obscure good that is not to be had here. And now that the decision is made, it seems worth while to try to put into rational terms the feelings that have forced it.

Were their father the bull-necked patriot of current mythology, there would be no problem. No question could then arise as to the comparison of values. But their father was a heretic at Cambridge, a congenital free lance in the army, politics, and the civil service, to whom America has brought the happiest and best years of his life, with fair promise of more to come. Moreover there can be no question, so far as reasonable foresight can determine, but that the boys’ careers must lie either in North America or in Soviet Russia. That is surely obvious enough to need no arguing. Further, to turn them into little English public-school gentlemen is certainly no part of the intention. That type, admirable as it is and has been, becomes increasingly an anachronism: its qualities less and less relevant to the civilization of the twentieth century, its limitations more and more conspicuous — even in England. What, then, can be those things in which America as an educational environment is deficient and England preferable?

Let me attempt to set them briefly in order.

First, a very simple definite fact. Derek and Ronnie need men to teach them — all-round, well-bred, satisfactory men. On an income of less than five thousand a year they cannot have that in America. And the more I think about it the more important seems that consideration. The school-teacher represents the world to the child — this world, not the Kingdom of Heaven: its problems, its pressures, its demands, its opportunities. Women cannot do that, and it is not altogether a father’s job, either. His rôle is to give some human imitation of the providence children nowadays resolutely refuse to seek in the empyrean: the sort of providence one sees in Outward Bound rather than in the Old Testament (there is none in the New). As I have seen it these eight years, American fathers put up a pretty good stand at this end of the wicket; but the womanridden educational scheme has consequences on which much — some of it quite unsavory— could be written.

Next comes the historical sense. Now this is very likely prejudice. I suppose it is unreasonable to expect the historical sense in a nation founded on a revolution and with a population density only one twentieth that of England. At all events, it is lacking. The lack of it possibly makes for strength in certain spheres (diplomacy, despite much to the contrary, is not one of them); but it does not make, anywhere, for understanding. Even if one allows the American assumption that there are many things in the world it is simply not worth while for an American to try to understand, the fact remains that no American institution of importance— from football to the gold standard or the labor injunction — can be understood without a due sense of historical process. I say ‘sense’ advisedly; for it is a matter of feeling as much as of thinking or knowing, something acquired as much from the speech and manners of people as from things seen or read in books. In it, or near it, lie the roots of culture, tolerance, patience — all those qualities which constitute wisdom in human affairs.

One more specific deficiency — and it is with deficiencies, be it remembered, that I am solely concerned. I doubt whether anywhere in the United States the elements of self-expression are taught effectively: handwriting that has speed, legibility, and character; grammar, scope, and accuracy in the use of words. Derek and Ronnie have been undergoing a ‘progressive’ education in which very much value is put on self-expression; but they have not acquired these rudiments of it, and their English runs distressingly to clichés and stereotypes. The explanation, it seems, is twofold. Adequate expression in any medium demands meticulous care in training and long practice, involving some drudgery, under discipline. The progressive educators, with their reliance on spontaneity, are up against an insoluble paradox in this matter. But there is a second and more fundamental cause of failure. Adequate expression — adequate in the European sense — is literally not valued in America: neither by the teachers who are supposed to impart it, nor by most of the writers who are supposed to have acquired it. Neither for esteem nor for cash is it a sine qua non. The result is that in the vast majority of schools serious effort in this direction has been openly abandoned— and with it the last defense against the commercialization of what should have been the cultural life of America.

Now comes a broader issue — the question of character. To set down quite naïvely the deficiency that needs making good — well, the word that comes to my mind is ‘soft.’ This is perhaps surprising: softness is not commonly considered an American trait, least of all just now. In trying to explain, let me say that the cue comes straight from the behavior of Derek and Ronnie, though I am going to state the matter in broader terms.

It is the natural outcome of the American environment. Most of the problems that arise in the American scene have been — ostensibly, at least

— essentially simple, to be solved — again ostensibly — by a vigorous application of techniques that are also simple. The vigor of the application has been a substitute for the elaboration of the technique. In reality, the problems have perhaps not been — certainly are not now — at all simple, and the solutions have proved only pseudo-solutions; but so ample is the margin in every direction that things have got along passably none the less.

Take any major issue of American affairs from Roosevelt to Coolidge, and the same tendencies reveal themselves

— a tendency to treat all problems as either simple in their elements or capable of drastic simplification, and a habit of tackling them by a vigorous application of techniques that are really quite rudimentary. The result is what I call softness — an indisposition, or an inability, steadfastly to face situations that will by no means admit of this simplification, and an indisposition, or inability, to apply techniques of finer temper and greater subtlety. Under the apparent vigor lies this essential weakness — a weakness that has been many times manifest in the past thirteen years.

Now take Derek. Derek has acquired the technique of success in American boydom. He puts on a big sweater and an aggressive manner, “bums around’ with the gang, can say, ‘Is that so?’ with the special intonation attributed to police and gunmen (I’ll wager Elizabeth’s England was full of such expressions) — and most of the time he gets what he wants. That is because the things he wants are pretty much the same as what the other fellow wants, and the other fellow instinctively understands the simple technique by which they are to be acquired. Whether it works on the particular occasion or not, the result is never a fiasco, and Derek’s self-esteem is seldom injured.

But with Ronnie it is different. Ronnie likes curious detail and the discovery of the unusual. While Derek pounds away on the piano, Ronnie prefers the sound — and the movement — of his violin. The things Ronnie wants are largely what the rest do not want; they do not fit into the accredited technique, and Ronnie cannot go after them without implying — however unconsciously — an adverse judgment on the gang values. The result is that a good deal of the time Ronnie is relegated to younger children, or solitude, or the grown-ups. And the mischief is that Derek, Ronnie, and most other people are convinced that Derek is the stronger. To all appearance it is so; but in a trying situation Ronnie will be going strong, quietly and evenly, long after Derek’s vigor and morale are exhausted.

Now this is good for neither of them. Left alone, Derek will grow up in the secure self-esteem of his pseudo-strength, unaware — until too late, perhaps — of its limitations. And Ronnie, even if his self-esteem does not suffer by the prevalent objectification of an inadequate scale of values, will have the handicap of a constant psychological tension which may eventually weaken him to the point of a colorless submission or a painful subjective confusion. For both of them the final result will be some failure of potential capacity.

I am not saying that this situation would not arise anywhere else, though its terms would not, in contemporary Europe, be so simple or emphatic. Even in boydom, social techniques are not as rudimentary. But there is the added advantage of a plunge into a world of different values, the effort to adapt and to understand. And there, from a parental point of view, lies the root of the matter.

Personality itself is perhaps just a bundle of valuations; however tattered and out-at-elbows it may be, we have no choice but to cherish it. To the stay-at-home or the tourist, other lands are necessarily just foreign countries — more or less interesting spectacles devoid of inner meaning. That is why they pall so rapidly. If England is to be more than that to Derek and Ronnie, the time is now or never. What it is all about, what fragment of eternal meaning it may have uttered, may not be, from a strictly utilitarian point of view on American soil, a very important matter. But the expatriate has no choice of opinion; and the rest is perhaps, after all, mere rationalization.

There is one risk involved in the success of the somewhat costly experiment: the risk that Derek and Ronnie may have, in a certain sense, no fixed home anywhere. But is not that, since the war, the fate of all us Europeans?