Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies.

Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies

Christopher Hitchens. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22.95. This is a surprisingly insightful, generous-spirited, informative, and honest book about the Anglo-American "special relationship" and its psychological effects on each side.

It may seem a little graceless to dwell on the surprise factor, but it's relevant in this case--as it was with George Will's Men at Work. As Joseph Nocera pointed out in The New Republic, Will's book about baseball was vastly superior to his normal writing about politics because Will had, at last, bothered to go out and act like a reporter. Hitchens has in the past been known for a certain flipness--and for playing to the notorious American weakness for British "culture" and "style." The free-loading British journalistic character in The Bonfire of the Vanities is generally assumed to be modeled on Hitchens as well as Alexander Cockburn. But in this book, Hitchens is witty and genuinely funny rather than arch, and he laughs at (among many other things) the games anyone with any kind of British accent can play in the U.S. He says that the breathless host of a CNN chat show, "Sonia Live," asked him for the latest rumors about Charles and Di. "When I said that I thought the whole thing was a press bonanza and that the obsession with monarchy was beginning to bore even the British, the tempestuous Sonia was appalled. 'Mister Hitchens,' she intoned in reproof, 'how can you sit there with that lovely English accent and say such a thing?'"

About half the book concerns the process through which, from the 1920s to the 1960s, the United States "took receivership" for the British empire. During the Margaret Thatcher era, the British government has often acted as if it were honored merely to stand on the same side of international issues as the mighty United States. The Economist, which has become a kind of voice-of-Britain to the American elite, now makes it sound as if the world could want no better hegemon than America has been. But Hitchens shows that this was not at all the British attitude when there was still a chance of limiting American power and sustaining Britain's worldwide influence. For instance, in 1927, when Winston Churchill was Chanceloor of the Exchequer, he spoke to his colleagues in the Cabinet with a bluntness that future British politicians simply could not afford: "We do not wish to put ourselves in the power of the United States. We cannot tell what they might do if at some future date they were in a position to give us orders about our policy, say, in India or Egypt or Canada, or any other great matter behind which their electioneering forces were marshalled."

The book contains a long, poignant section on the wartime correspondence between Roosevelt and Churchill; as the years go by, Churchill moves from the hope that he can manipulate the naive Americans to the galling realization that he must beg for their support. For instance, when Roosevelt decided late in the war to transfer captured Italian ships to the Soviet navy, Churchill was stung. "Considering Great Britain has suffered at least 20 times the naval losses of your fleet in the Mediterranean and has been fighting the Italians since June 1940, we had hoped to be consulted or at least informed beforehand." He dashed off this protest to Roosevelt--and then, doubtless with a sigh, went back and carefully deleted it from his message.

From time to time, Hitchens writes, American leaders could be flattered or tricked into doing what Britain wanted, but generally they observed Britain's diminution with a gimlet eye. Americans now grumble that Japan and Germany should act more grateful for past favors done, but Hitchens implies that they are being much more considerate of America's distress than the U.S. was of Britain's.

In the era of "Masterpiece Theatre," and of Vanity Fair, and of the Ralph Lauren "I am an Edwardian aristocrat" catalogs, and of American fawning over Britons as different in merit as Steven Hawking and Robin Leach, it is hard for most Americans to remember that the cspecial relationship" ever contained elements of deep strain. But Hitchens shows that anti-British sentiment has been significant until quite recently, when England ceased to be a serious competitor. During Wordl War I, the idea that Britain should be left to stew in its imperialist juices was an important isolationist theme. Hitchens says that Churchill always resented Roosevelt's refusal to visit Britain after the U.S. entered World War II. But Roosevelt told him that "England must be out for me for political reasons," and he "never forgot the reserve strength of anti-British and 'anticolonial' feeling" in the United States. Even Life magazine, owned by the stoutly pro-British Henry Luce, published an "Open Letter to the People of England" in 1942, notifying them that "one thing we are sure we are not fighting for is to hold the British empire together."

Now that Britain has been reduced to a theme park in America's imagination, the United States has, Hitchens shows, let English culture become a prop for the worst and most un-American forms of social behavior. This is Hitchens's other main subject: the way that Americans start sounding and acting like Englishmen when they want to set themselves apart from others in their own country. Britain obviously did contribute some democratic impulses to America, Hitchens points out: ". . . the astonishing and germinal moral energy of Thomas Paine; the Welsh coal miners who fled their grim valleys and whose said place names still dot the map of Pennsylvania. But these are preeminently not the sorts of image that leap to mind when the word 'Brit' is uttered in today's America." When Harold Macmillan concluded that the shift of power from Britain to America had irreversibly occurred, he started talking more and more often about the "special relationship," which, Hitchens says, Macmillan intended "to be a relationship between conservative forces. The Americans were to supply the capital, and the British were to provide the class. This would give the British imperial manner a fresh lease, and lend some much-needed tone to the grandiosity of the American century." The United States can be friendly with Italy or even the Soviet Union without necessarily wanting to take on Italian or Russian social traits. Hitchens suggests that a similar critical distance would be healthy in America's view of Britain.