The Desire not to be English

Alan Bennet:

“22 August. There are different ways of being English, one of which is not to want to be English at all. I doubt if anyone French is ever ashamed of being French – however deplorable the government might be. Disaffected though he or she may be, to be French is still the best thing in the world.”

It is curious, this peculiarly English desire not to be English, to escape not just England but being English. Admittedly, it is only a small minority, usually artists and writers. But I wonder what it consists of. Martin Amis is an example. He’d rather not be English, he famously said, and cited the continuing existence of the royal family and the public’s obsession with celebrity. Bennett himself once confessed he was ashamed to be English at the time of the Iraq war. There is a kind of shame on behalf of the Others, the Others who support the war, defer to Royalty and the ruling class, read the tabloids, consistently elect a Conservative government etc. One is exempt from these things but experiences shame nonetheless.

If one genuinely is exempt from these things, which are traits of the Others, then we might ask a naïve question. If one is generally happy with one’s tastes, habits, relationships, desires, then what does it matter whether one is English or not? Is it not an external classification? What makes this classification so adhesive? Is it perhaps based only on a misunderstanding of that tricky word "being"? If Amis is a republican, and a man of letters; if Bennett is vocally opposed to the war, if I am a socialist, then why am I implicated in or by what the Others do?

It is in part a discomfort with the way one is perceived by the non-English, the disfiguring gaze of non-English others, who see you inevitably through the filter of the general category. It is in some sense also you they are talking about when they laugh at English emotional repression, monoglot insularity, political conformism, comically misplaced exceptionalism. In feeling shame, one has already identified with the gaze of these Others, and become a kind of ambassador apologising on the English’s behalf.

This apologetic shame may itself be “very English,” as perhaps is (as Bennett intimates) this desire not to be English itself, the stubborn and problematic self-dislike, the futile grumbling against the unchangeable fact of birth and upbringing, as if it were a fatal malady, an inescapable curse.

John Berger, over the years, cited a number of reasons for leaving England and moving to a village in the French Alps, but one of them was that the English found him “a bit too intense”. I wonder if, in the imaginations of the writers and artists who have left,  "English” is in part a codeword for this intensive deficit. And the desire to be not English is in effect a desire to experience the world in a qualitatively different way, a way incompatible with staying in England.

There is the suspicion that to be English is not to be replete with a national character, with a living culture that one can then reject, but a recognition that these things are absent:

“The English, of any people in the universe,” wrote Hume “have the least of a national character, unless this very singularity may pass for such.” If pressed, and asked in what their national character resides, they will reply in clichés, such as “fish and chips” or “the Queen” or “a sense of fair play”, tourist gimmicks, shells of received wisdom, the signs and shows of a national character which does not exist.

If this is right, or nearly, then perhaps the desire to be not English is not simply symmetrical with a desire not to be French, to use Bennett’s example. Not the recognition of a set of positive values, a sufficiency of culture, but the heady sense of an absence, an insufficiency, and an imperative to reinvent oneself.