Every NRO staffer has his moment. David Frum stage a putsch against Harriet Miers' nomination to the Supreme Court in 2005, and he won. (Miers, who? I can hear you mumbling.) Jonah Goldberg gets out of bed in the morning to point out instances of liberal authoritarianism masquerading as multiculturalism, political correctness, etc. Now Jewcy's favorite English gentile John Derbyshire has found his thunder-and-grumble metier. It's the "saps and worms," "insults to the Queen's uniform" that are the 15 British sailors let go by Iran last week. This post would rank high in any "And that will be England gone" anthology:
I caught the tail-end of that old England—that bumptious, arrogant, self-confident old England, the England of complicated games, snobbery, irony, repression, and stoicism, the England of suet puddings, drafty houses, coal smoke and bad teeth, the England of throat-catching poetry and gardens and tweeds, the England that civilized the whole world and gave an example of adult behavior—the English Gentleman—that was admired from Peking (I can testify) to Peru.
It's all gone now, "dead as mutton," as English people used to say. Now there is nothing there but a flock of whimpering Eloi, giggling over their gadgets, whining for their handouts, crying for their Mummies, playing at soldiering for reasons they can no longer understand, from lingering habit. Lower the corpse down slowly, shovel in the earth. England is dead.
Andrew Sullivan confesses to a "soft spot" for this reactionary refrain, and I confess to having my own, too. This is the postwar loss of empire elegy reproduced, albeit in more selfconscious fashion, by someone from a generation that arrived too late to really lay sentimental claim to it. In his "Is Kevin MacDonald Right About the Jews?" dialogue with Jewcy editor Joey Kurtzman, Derb mentioned a comment once passed about Orwell — that he was obsessed with 1910 — and now I think this must have been self-revealing. Derb is obsessed with 1945, or at least was until Faye Turney and company set fire to the tattered fabric of the Union Jack and drop-kicked the bust of Churchill, disillusioning him for good.
What poverty will come to discourse of British conservatism once voices like Derb's no longer exist. Christopher Hitchens has written very well on what's commonly (if mistakenly) called the 'Larkinesque' strain to this mode of feeling, conveniently enough in a remarkable essay on my favorite poet Philip Larkin. I derive no small pleasure from the fact that this was originally printed [$] in New Left Review:
I have never had any difficulty in comprehending the appeal of Larkin to some part of the British (not so much the English) consciousness. This is because I recall, with very little trouble, the tone of my own father’s table talk. (Readings of the old Peter Simple column in the Daily Telegraph, or of the Denis Thatcher epistolatory parody in Private Eye, have the same effect upon me, and I simultaneously envy and mistrust those who fail to see the authentic seriousness of such jocularity.) What are the psychic and biographical ingredients here?
For the interwar petty-bourgeois and functionary generation, these would include a consciousness of life—indeed youth—passed in the exigencies of the Depression, the Second World War and the subsequent age of austerity. To this would have to be added the strain imposed by the ‘scholarship or nothing’ fork in the education system; itself very often an enforced choice between over-work and conformism on the one hand and relegation to menial or bureaucratic work on the other. With the privileged above and the forces of craft unionism below them, it is a mercy that more of this class did not turn to fascism than actually did. In the post-war period, though, their rancour was sublimated into a diffuse but persistent drizzle of complaint. End of Empire and Commonwealth immigration were disliked for their own sake, to be sure, but probably more formative was the sense that these momentous decisions had been taken without anyone’s permission—without, as it were, a by-your-leave. Juvenile delinquents and wildcat strikers were a Poujadiste staple, as, briefly, were ‘revolting students’ in the 1960s. (Especially painful to comrades of this journal will be Larkin’s August 1969 letter to Brian Cox, commenting on a contemporary piece of pedagogic repression by saying ‘Isn’t it splendid about that young swine Blackburn?’). The nearest this mentality came to acquiring a leader was in the advent of Enoch Powell, and its most acute anatomist has been David Edgar, most particularly in his play Destiny.
Beneath the unstable political manifestations lay a profound, inchoate sense of loss about the erosion of the English countryside, the diminished prestige of the nation and the amoral amnesia of the Affluent Society. No doubt there were elements of vicarious envy behind the scorn and disapproval: my father never read Larkin’s ‘Annus Mirabilis’, which locates the beginnings of sexual freedom ‘Between the end of the Chatterley ban/And the Beatles first LP/(Which was rather late for me)’, but I can recall him saying wistfully that he was sorry to have missed the Permissive Society. Actually, I don’t think he read much poetry at all. But I could have given him ‘Going, Going’ (‘And that will be England gone’) or a half-dozen other mournful laments, and seen them strike a chord. As with Larkin himself, there were moments of antic subversiveness, where it was suddenly doubted that a dutiful life spent on the pursuit of traditional obligations had been worthwhile, or had been appreciated by those superiors in whose service it had been passed. Andrew Motion’s biography tells us, of that celebrated emblematic photograph, that it ‘shows Larkin sitting demurely, ankles crossed, on the large sign which says “ENGLAND”; immediately before posing he had urinated copiously behind the word.’
There was one large difference between my father and Larkin, which was that my father spent most of his life wearing the King’s uniform; an honour that Larkin steadfastly, not to say assiduously, declined. Very occasionally, though, and usually bearing some relationship to the state of the decanter and the lateness of the hour, one could hear them both taking leave to doubt that the Second World War—the ‘Finest Hour’, the ‘Valiant Years’, the special source of cross-class pride—had really been ‘worth it’, succeeded as it had been by an era superpower triumph and money-worship. I want to return to this trope but for now it’s enough to say that the proneness of English culture to this sort of pessimistic chauvinism is a subject insufficiently explored. That is why many on the Left have condemned themselves to experiencing major phenomena—the Falklands fever; Mrs Thatcher herself—as a surprise. The stubborn persistence of chauvinism in our life and letters is or ought to be the proper subject for critical study, not the occasion for displays of shock.
More conveniently, I just discovered that Derb posted Larkin's "Homage to a Government" right after the one cited above.
we love to slumber within your house minimal man or woman