On wanting to belong
Reflections of a frustrated patriot
When I was young, I had the privilege of dating the daughter of a former Cabinet Minister and current member of the House of Lords, and no I won’t tell you who.
She was a lovely individual and we passed some good times together before my move to Berlin. Just before I moved out there permanently, she took us to her local sports club, where her family had membership, for a couple of afternoon coffees. I distinctly remember sitting there in the upmarket surroundings on a chilly summer’s day and thinking, ‘If I were extremely successful in the UK, this would be the kind of lifestyle I could perhaps afford. And I don’t want it.’
Years later I told that memory to an older German woman at a party and she said, ‘Du warst sehr weit’, you were really ahead in your thinking.
I suppose I was. But I live in the UK again now and, though I really would like to feel part of things in a profound sense, I still feel ineffably on the outside. Of course, this may be my problem and not Britain’s; like most people who write seriously, I tend to observe and keep a certain distance from things. However, I don’t actively choose to cultivate any distance from my country, and yet somehow a slight alienation keeps creeping back in, in little things like drinking less alcohol than many of my compatriots, in bigger ones like not achieving success and recognition in my native country.
I suspect that our attitudes to our countries are determined not just by some diffuse, unquenchable, innate attachment to our native environments but also to the experiences we have there. The better things go for us in our countries, the more we love them, and after spending thirty of my forty years in the United Kingdom, the same old problems keep coming up. Our love for our countries can be, rather than the divine and selfless love we feel for a child, caveated and conditional; both Auden and Orwell compared England to a difficult family, after all.
Occasionally you will see a left politician issuing a call for their tendency to show more patriotism. This of course shows a faulty approach from the get-go; love of your country is something you feel, not just a switch you flip when you need votes1. The further irony is it is often follows an unsparing articulation of the UK’s being in a right old state, meaning the politician is either appealing to love of an idealized abstract future (which they are set to realize), or, as is more unlikely, appealing to the people to love the specific state of disrepair the country finds itself in. In that respect the performative disdain for the country that some on the English left perform – by no means unique, despite the claims of Orwell - is at least a logical response to such a state of affairs.
However, perhaps we do need to make exactly this conscious effort to love our countries. If I’m not mistaken one of the Ancient Greek words for love πρᾶγμα or pragma referred to the love seen in both mature marital love and is also the root of oru modern ‘pragmatic’. Or we might even reference στοργή, storgē, the love between children and parents or for a bad football team that always disappoints. I can certainly love my country like the latter. So I may be simply making a category error in what type of love patriotism involves here. Perhaps I am trying to love England like a lover while I should love it pragmatically or storgically - responsibly, with light notes of exasperation.
It adds to a sense of apartness when you are asked if you are in fact from elsewhere. For some time after having moved back to the UK, I would be asked if I were South African, the years spent in Germany apparently having shifted my accent. However, even before that I seemed to give off, and by this stage I’m unsure how much I’ve cultivated, an air of ‘foreignness’. I remember on the playground Bernadino Labatte, himself from an Italian family, saying to me ‘You’re not English are you’ – attempting, I realize now, to connect with a fellow person of continental roots. But, despite a Belgian grandfather, and allowing that my Mum grew up in Wales and my Dad is Welsh, I am English – it is England which has formed the main background to my life.
John Osborne articulated that he had been given God’s two greatest gifts of being English and heterosexual; as befits a slightly less lucky man, I am neither entirely English nor entirely heterosexual. Still, I do feel it would make life easier if the coincidence of my birthplace overlapped with it feeling fully the right place for me. To tell you the truth, it was easier to feel fully English when I lived abroad; I would listen to the Guardian Weekly’s Football Podcast and bring over voluminous jars of Marmite.
Indeed, much as I’d do anything to adapt to wherever I lived, I came to feel I’d never really be anything else than English. While at the same time I’m also now too shaped by divergent experiences from my countrymen to feel wholly at home in the UK either.
But this bifurcation is in part, again, the result of the choices we made some time ago and how they have made us the people we are, leaving aside the question of whether we made those choices because of who we are anyway. Certainly for me one of the big choices was that I needed to learn another language.
When I went to Oxford to read English, one of the first comments I got from my tutor, by no means given unsympathetically, was to remark how much of the stuff I was reading was not originally in English. The other kids were showing up mad about Austen and Tolkien and I was into Turgenev and the French-language author Samuel Beckett. My interest in non-Anglophone cultures blossomed into serious language learning, and, stimulating though that journey has been, I can say honestly that nothing has made me feel more distanced from my compatriots than becoming multilingual.
This requires a little elaboration.
Firstly, on a very practical level, as a linguist you spend a lot of time doing something which your compatriots, ‘blessed’ with the world language, don’t bother with; the standard attitude of educated English people to languages is learning enough of something to make a socially acceptable failure of it, or mispronouncing words for the purpose of jokes. I remember when I first started really learning German a friend asked me ‘But won’t you just have to translate all the words back into English anyway?’ – as if the networks of our brain had a default factory setting to English.
As a result, to most monolingual Brits, there is no real distinction between signifier and signified; a chair is not just a word for a chair but describes the objective nature of a chair itself. There might be some banter about how you pronouncer ‘chair’ in various reasons, and the odd dialect word, but there’s no doubt that you are a person for whom a chair is a chair.
Whereas for people with serious knowledge of languages a chair is as much as a chaise or a Stuhl as it is anything else; chair is just the term of one language for it, albeit perhaps the one you grow up there. Your use of language becomes one remove further back in that way. Or rather you see reality and a Rolodex of possible linguistic responses to it (responses you command to a greater or lesser extent).
Adjusting your attitude to reality in this way is a pretty fundamental shift, particularly if you’ve gone through with voluntarily as opposed to having a direct need to. You can no longer share what is one of the most defining experiences of your adult life with your compatriots, and in addition you have something in which you take pride which is not unduly celebrated in your culture; at its worse, there is even cultural suspicion of people who’ve made the effort to learn another language, as if it’s a slight lack of a vote of confidence in England and the English to learn the language of another place.
Yet surely this is compensated by the economic benefits of multilingualism? Mmm. Undeniably, it’s nice to get paid for language skills, but I can’t say they’re particularly valued in the UK, or perhaps at a more fundamental level they are not understood. I am regularly rung up by British employers asking whether I can write German-language copy for them, ignoring that to learn and speak a second language well is not the same as writing it as a native. And of course, this creates immense camaraderie with the minority of Brits who do speak another language - many of my friends are multilingual Brits - whether by heritage or choice.
Furthermore, the languages I have learnt are European ones, designed to facilitate working and moving around Europe. I’m not sure British culture understands how normal this kind of multilingualism as parcel of ‘being a good European’ is in continental Europe2; that this is your continent and you’ll naturally acquire a few of its languages as a result of the connections you develop across it. At present the UK seem to be rather more stuck debating first principles of where our island actually is.
It follows that this is the part of the essay where I tell you that I finally felt at home when living abroad; and, by and large, I did. And of course, I enjoyed significant success abroad, which, following my own logic, made me feel at home.
Yet I was young when I lived abroad, and what we are prepared to wear just to live somewhere different is greater then. I certainly enjoyed the intellectualism and seriousness of German culture, and the respect that country puts on creativity, right down to paying artists properly. I also reached a sense that the level of success there was limited and defined by my status as a foreigner. So that, and this is perhaps the best thing living abroad gave me, I no longer see moving abroad as a magic bullet either. There is no perfect elsewhere.
Yet I also can’t claim that the legacy of my living abroad has been entirely positive once I’m back. I definitely feel my life has seen me come to, as much as being part of many places, belonging to none. Perhaps I don’t belong to the UK more than other places; that could be a fair way of putting it.
And there’s a further crucial reason I’ve never felt that at home in the UK: I’ve always done lots of different things. I’ve written, performed, directed, done comedy, even at one stage written songs, and there seems to be a real suspicion here of having more than one hat. (Contrast the US). There seems to be a real hostility in British culture to polymathic inclinations, certainly in the arts (‘Who do you think you are?’). You encounter a cultural sense that there’s something unmeritocratic and undemocratic about having ‘more than your go’, allowing that the deep democratic inclinations of this country are one of the things I respect most about it.
In Germany a cross-disciplinary artist comes along and gets given a theatre, often in their hometown, to do ‘research’; in the UK the first thought is, ‘How can we cut this person down to size?’ This kind of cultural attitude always reminds me of the English football player Joe Cole, who could have been and at times was a wonderfully creative technical player for England, but was gradually transformed into an industrious left-sided midfielder who ‘battled’. This was seen as progress.
Still, I’m here. And always looking for silver linings. The UK is an exceptionally beautiful country and full of tolerant people who raise money for charity and like animals. In my habits and aesthetics, I am content in England, eating kippers and going for walks in drizzling rain. We have perhaps the strongest condiment game in the entire world. You can take train journeys on the late summer days, and I do prefer to live in a place where cricket is an ongoing concern.
But there’s another part of me that isn’t satisfied by Englishness; that, for all the virtues of these islands, doesn’t think it’s great for people like me, you know, artistic types.
Yet perhaps it shows that I am truly English that I persist in my bloody-mindedness here despite conditions that would have your average German auteur weeping into his Dinkelkorn. Indeed, I remain convinced I’m some kind of asset for the country just in my presence – rather than deciding, as I’ve been advised many times, to go back to the continent. After all, there’s not too many like me around here these days.
Paul Mason’s articulation of his lack of desire to be English is more honest in this regard.
A joke of mine is that by speaking English, French and German I am in the UK an exceptional linguist; on the continent, I’m just Swiss.
This has me imagining a cross-stitch depiction of a cottage with a cosy garden out front, and the text: home is where I can legally remain indefinitely.
Another very interesting piece, James and, being half-German and having spent a number of years in my twenties living there, one with which I can empathise. I’m never quite sure whether the sense of detachment I feel is due to my dual heritage, or whether it’s down to the fact that, growing up in the 60s I, like many others at the time was always wary of nationalism of any kind and therefore more inclined to think of myself as a ‘citizen of the world’ than of one country. We were brought up (and to some extent taught) by people with memories of world war and a determination never to let it happen again. We were also influenced by the ‘spirit of 68’ - protests against US war in Vietnam, the student movement, CND, etc. Sadly that spirit has all but disappeared for most, but not all of us.
That knowledge thing is interesting as well. I’ve often felt that the UK has an anti-intellect/knowledge/education bias, as encapsulated by Gove’s infamous comment that we’ve had enough of experts, whereas German culture has always held those things in much higher esteem.
But these are all things most of us learn to live with, sometimes less than comfortably, and ‘home’ becomes more of a best-fit for our lives than anywhere else.