June 11, 2015

Finest Hour 101, Winter 1998-99

Page 36

By Richard M. Langworth

Over Here, by Raymond Seitz. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, hardbound, 376 pages, regular price £20/$35, CC/ICS member price $24. Also available in paperback


Winston Churchill was always careful never to criticize America publicly. When reporters asked if he had any complaints, he would often reply, “toilet paper too thin, newspapers too fat.”

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Privately Churchill was less reticent, although he always maintained a decent respect for the two kindred countries which in the end both claimed him as a citizen. In 1945 he said he had heard a British peer state that Great Britain would have to become the forty-ninth State of the American Union, while an American congressman was saying that America should not be asked to reenter the British Empire. “It seems to me,” he remarked, “that the path of wisdom lies somewhere between these two scarecrow extremes.”

Churchill went on to recite his familiar prescription of “a fraternal relationship between the two great Englishspeaking organizations.” He worked hard to establish that relationship, succeeding only partially. But it is probably reasonable to conclude that Churchill was right when he said that if Britain and America are together, they are usually in the right, and if they are divided, one of them is almost always wrong!

We were fortunate to have with us at the November Churchill Conference a keen practitioner of Anglo-American relations. Ambassador Seitz delivered the First Churchill Lecture, excerpted in this issue and published in full on our website. His book should be read by every American in Britain—and every Briton who wishes to delve beneath the stereotypes and really understand Americans.

Seitz is very careful about that over-used term, “special relationship”; not because it is wholly invalid but because, he suggests, it is barely adequate. “When I think about official relations,” he writes, “I find the term doesn’t begin to capture the breadth and depth of what otherwise goes on between us.” Churchill at Harvard in 1943 mentioned the high points: law, language, literature. Seitz fills in the details: Britain is the largest foreign investor in America. Six million Americans and British visit each others’ country per year, and in the same amount of time there are 3 1/2 billion minutes of Anglo-American telephone conversation.

There is another important aspect to his book, and that is its value in the realm of statesmanship. Raymond Seitz is, uniquely, the only career foreign service officer ever appointed to the State Department’s top Ambassadorship, the Court of St. James’s, where he served two Presidents of opposite parties. He is frank and appealing on the implications of such a role, how it affects one’s performance. He offers almost a textbook course on what an Ambassador to London does when confronted, say, by an Ambassador to Dublin who declares that her turf includes Northern Ireland.

Over Here acknowledges earlier commentators on Anglo-America, most of them much more biased than its author. Harold Nicolson, Seitz recalls, said that an American is “not the sort of person we like.” Samuel Johnson was “willing to love all mankind, except an American.” Anglophobe James Russell Lowell, by contrast, commented that Americans are “worth nothing except so far as we have disinfected ourselves of Anglicism,” and the American drama critic John Mason Brown, responding to a tactless toast proposed by an English host, said: “Mr. Chairman, you have observed that while you don’t care for Americans in the mass, individual Americans are delightful people. With the British, I find the reverse is true.” But, Raymond Seitz adds, “Neither country knows as much about the other as it pretends to.”

Over Here is, I think, the best American view of Britain since Robert Deindorfer’s Life in Lower Slaughter, a 25year-old book by a friend of mine, gone now, God bless him, a copy of which I presented to the Ambassador. Bob Deindorfer moved in 1973 from large, filthy New York to Lower Slaughter, Gloucestershire, and charmingly noted, in a different sphere of course, many of the same things as Mr. Seitz: the blase British attitude toward antiquity and one-track roads, the soft beauty of an English spring, the sound of an English choir, the pulse-quickening sight of a spire above a country village. He compared these to the large scale, wholesale-sized American countryside and eight-lane throughways, the can-do attitude that nothing is impossible and the best is yet to come.

Both the Deindorfers and the Seitzes made the same decision, as the former put it in 1974: “to stretch our foreign assignment a bit longer, while wondering how long, psychologically if not tactically, bone-deep Americans can remain abroad before renewing their subscription.” But Ray Seitz can’t fool us. He’s hooked, like many before and no doubt after him, by British ways, British scenes, British politics, British manners, British life. He gives himself away on the flyleaf of his book, which pictures him in a suit of English cut before a Regency fireplace on a flowery carpet, surrounded by three large dogs. He’s a goner.

Alvin Toffler, the author of Future Shock, had a comment about Bob Deindorfer’s book which amused Raymond Seitz:

“If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s an Anglophile, but unfortunately, I love the British. Which is why I found this book a lovely, insidious attack on my precarious certainties. Anyone who has dreamed of hiding out in England during the decline and fall of Western civilization will enjoy this book—and deserve what he gets when the barbarians knock.”

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