Harold Orlansky has been in England for the past year on a Social Science Research Council fellowship, studying the establishment of a new English town. Mr. Orlansky is an anthropologist who earned his doctoral degree at Yale University. Alfred Werner, who here discusses the work of the artist Yankel Adler, has written book reviews and art criticism in many magazines here and abroad. Mr. Werner has lived in America for the past ten years. An exhibition of Yankel Adler’s paintings is being held this month at the Jewish Museum in New York City.

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I give you a strictly worm’s eye view of London, with no pretensions of raising my head an inch above the ground.

In fact, I am living in the basement of a bombed out house, formerly the mansion of Sir Henry G—. The dashboard outside the door says “Sir Henry’s Bedroom” and “Sir Henry’s Bath,” and there are signs for Her Ladyship too. These were the servants’ quarters—a long row of them. We have the front room, where the silver was once kept in a wall-sized safe that can’t be opened since the bomb jarred its fittings. Behind that is a small room, then a very large one with a deep sink, then the kitchen, and tiled pantry, the dumbwaiter for lifting food to the airy denizens two, three, four, or five stories above and, beyond all this, and removed from the quiet noises of the park-lined street, the music room, walled with mirrors etched with violins and musical notes. This is only the basement, and it goes on this way floor by floor, getting grander all the way. Or it did, once. Today the rain comes down through five floors behind us, vandals have gutted the lead roofing and plumbing, the beams show charred in the ceiling, and the music room is empty, its floor coated with fallen plaster, and its mirrors clouded or broken.

That’s not the whole story of England today, though some Tories may think it is. I’m sure Sir Henry is living comfortably elsewhere, and the odd company of artists, majors, clarinet players, doctors, clerks, students (and, too briefly, a luscious Swedish model) who inherited his place are very happy here, thank you, and fortunate to have such quarters between Victoria Station and the Royal Albert Hall. But it’s part of the story.

At this date it’s no news that London was bombed, though I wonder how the Nazis ever found it under the fog and blackout. They say the Thames gave it away, and I can’t blame the Thames. Imagine Astoria raised to the nth power, interminable reaches of suburbia; neatly packaged houses, garden plots, and smoke-manufacturing-from-soft-coal units in three million little homes, twelve million tidy rooms each with its fireplace and chimney pot: an empire’s heart, in which the sun was never seen. Understandable if the river tired. Now this city is pockmarked from man’s old disease, and few persons think it has developed any lasting immunity.

I have gone to two meetings, Hyde Park, bought Freedom, Socialist Appeal, and the Socialist Leader, had dinner with a member of the gentry at his moated 13th-century estate, brown ale with a genial anarchist who heats his room by burning disliked books, and twice lunched with an historian in government service, once at an Italian and once at a Chinese restaurant. The evidence is that English restaurant food is inedible, that rations from Tasmania, Argentina, and other exotic places only just keep the natives faintly alive, that alcohol has been taken out of beer and fantastic taxes placed on any drink in which it remains, that Conservative housewives drool uncontrollably over the ads in American magazines (Life is making a big mistake by deleting domestic advertisements from its international edition), but that despite all these tribulations and many more than can be crammed into an overstuffed sentence, there is not going to be a revolution. No one is even thinking of a revolution, aside from the professional ideologists of the Left (mind and nature being what they are, some people can always be found who are thinking of anything, from which perfectly innocent fact the hosts of unsuccessful messiahs seem to draw solace), and everyone is going about his life as much as possible as he did before the war.

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The stock explanation of the extraordinary psychological normality of the English, in the face of great material affliction, is the English character. The French, I am constantly told, would never put up with it: why ripping up the cobblestones on the Champs Elysées and throwing them at the police several times a year is as much a part of French character as taking an hour and three-quarters for lunch—and look at their black market!

Now, having been forced in the past to read most of the “scientific” literature on national character, and being of the opinion that it is mainly tripe, but still preserving my scientific objectivity (being nearsighted, I find this is best preserved by removing my eyeglasses), I took it as my duty to make a thorough investigation of the subject in the course of three weeks in Paris and three months in London.

I must confess that my first impressions overwhelmingly confirmed popular and scientific prejudices. Paris is wonderfully French. The Follies girls wear nothing where American girls wear doodads (I have yet to determine what English girls wear in these circumstances, but my hypothesis is woolen underwear); the motor and bicycle traffic is shamelessly libertine, so that an expert New York jaywalker (who crosses the streets of other cities contemptuously) is quite confounded by a few eccentric contraptions on a desolate boulevard (He does not realize how much his former skill owed to the predictability of mass-produced autos driven in lane. In Paris they have never heard of lanes; there an American car stands out like a bathtub at a soap-box derby.), and, before the spring flood of Americans knocked the bottom out of the market, it was impossible to walk near the Opéra without being propositioned by a dozen teeps to do bisnèss in dollars, gasoline coupons, cigarettes, and other effluvia of tourists.

In London, contrariwise, though traffic goes the wrong way, propriety reigns supreme: John Queue Public lines up unprotestingly for the cinema (some people even queue for aesthetic reasons, not wanting to go in during the middle of a show), buses (After a parade, I have seen a self-organized queue two blocks long wait half an hour for a bus, with only a few persons at the tail deserting the collective enterprise for the Underground. Compare this performance with that of six persons waiting for a bus at Madison Avenue and 42nd Street.), ration books,¹ restaurants, groceries, newspapers, tobacco, and what not, with no pushing and no policing. There is no black market outside the American Express office in Haymarket.

The customs officials will not be bribed, and a Labor MP was recently bounced for accepting some schnapps from a too oily operator. An abundance of lengthy notices and regulations in public places direct the patient masses to appointed ways and paths (and Norwegians receive stares for talking loudly in a subway car, and Americans receive glares for going down an empty “Up” staircase when the “Down” one is crowded). The subway conductor leans out from his station at the end of the car to see that nobody is decapitated when he closes the doors, and at 10 AM and at 4 PM he presses with his left hand while holding a cup of tea with the right. The clerks who work in the City arrive punctiliously each morning like ballet dancers in homburg or derby, black jacket, stiff white collar, pin-striped pants, walking stick, gloves, and the Times,and you should see the pink robe and furred helmet of the gentlemen in the foyer of the Bank of England. It is “cheerio” (or even, I shudder to repeat, “cheerie-bee”), the “Royal” mail, “bahstard,” and “bloody.” In short, England is deplorably English. Even the slovenly brats in the slums talk with an English accent.

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This, I repeat, was my first impression, and I could have written a book on the basis of it at least as scholarly as Gorer’s American People. But, as Herbert Spencer relates, “There is a story . . . of a Frenchman who, having been three weeks here, proposed to write a book on England; who, after three months, found that he was not quite ready; and who, after three years, concluded that he knew nothing about it.” My subsequent impressions have confused me.

Take the matter of printed notices. True, they surround you, you can’t escape them even in the public toilet where, at a moment which, in the most raucous state in the Union, would be sacrosanct, a scroll of notices unrolls: “And now, please, wash your hands.” Mass-Observation sociologists, however, report that almost nobody pays any attention to notices and instructions—especially official ones. Thus, during the war, an intensive government poster campaign exhorted people “When walking after dark tonight, For safety’s sake wear something White”; but Mass-Observation found that “From the beginning to the end of the campaign there was no appreciable improvement whatever and during the whole period an average of only one person in a thousand was wearing a white arm-band after dark in London.”

Elsewhere, Mass Observation publishes the treasonable information that football pools occupy the attention of half the adult population, that “devotees of jazz outnumber many times to one those who have the slightest awareness of Beethoven or Mozart,” and that “Britain is predominantly populated by readers of 2d. bloods and sensational stories, who never think about Shakespeare.” They add: “This is not of course a peculiar characteristic of Britain.” But what, then, remains of our unique British Character?

As for the queues, after a while you will begin to observe the most un-British conduct creeping in. True, people queue for buses, and there can be no experience more destructive of American individualism than to be late for an appointment and yet constrained to keep your feet still and assume an air of imperious unconcern at the end of an endless queue; but when the bus heaves into sight, the ranks break and it is each man for himself and trample the weak underfoot, just like back home. Indeed, the Times published a complaint the other day that Parisians treat disabled war veterans more considerately in local transportation than do Londoners (in the Paris métro special seats are reserved for mutilés and femmes enceintes—which may be why the French birthrate has recently broken all 20th-century records). The anxious speed with which natives rush to and from work and jostle each other in crowded places is refreshingly reminiscent of New York.

On the always interesting subject of sex, it appears that the English gentleman still retains the gentlest thoughts of the English gentlewoman. The Sunday Times wants to ban Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead because “No decent man could leave it lying about the house, or know without shame that his womenfolk were reading it.” But “surgical rubberwear” and “hygienic goods” are advertised and sold as openly as can-openers in special stores concentrated, appropriately enough, throughout the amusement area; and the Register-General reported a few years back that “one-seventh of all the children now born in this country are products of extra-marital conceptions, or . . . nearly 30 per cent of all mothers today conceive their first borns out of wedlock.” On the streets, women of all classes walk about as unhampered as are the French by the American female’s stays and structural steelwork. The breeze is practically Latin. In evening hours, the painted women bargain openly with their clients along Shaftesbury Avenue and Picadilly; their business prospers, perhaps, because it is one of the few not regulated by the Board of Trade.

As for the black market, there is more of that than quickly meets the eye. As in France, the grocer and butcher wield new powers, and dispense them in accordance with the inducement. An extortionist rent racket thrived quite openly until recently obliged by law to adopt various disguises, and before the end of clothes rationing there was a widespread traffic in coupons. Warren Street is said to be the ground of an automobile black market and, of course, free trade in all goods flourishes in the cavernous 19th-century world which survives exuberantly in Whitechapel and the East End. Admittedly the black market has not assumed the same importance here as in France, but it is doubtful if National Character provides the explanation. The Economist points out, for example, that “The whole structure of the French economy, with its excessive number of independent producers and distributors and its reliance on food deliveries from small farms instead of from concentrated and easily controllable imports, makes control far harder to exercise than in Britain.” Again the dry voice of reason interrupts a soulful tune.

Dare we conclude that Englishmen are human, that they exist in history and economics, in a material world with material afflictions and satisfactions, and that the tea and the weather (beastly as both of them are) and all things nice do not suffiice to establish a species which breeds true?

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This report was begun in an idle moment several months ago, and set aside in the press of more serious matters. It obviously needs an end, and the history of my house in the interim may provide one.

It is now Summer. I moved into these quarters last November, and about the same time workers began the job of repairing the war damage (the flow of water from the roof was reported accurately enough above—it was months before they stopped that). For a while a vital hallway door carried the sign: Please Exercise Caution—floor missing other side of this Door. Apparently this measure did not suffìce, because the door was subsequently nailed shut. The workers had a three months’ contract, but they still show no signs, portents, or intentions of finishing the job and, I believe, they have settled into a comfortable routine in which repairs will exactly match the rate of natural collapse. They have converted the music room into a cloak room and storage space for tools, and someone has chalked two large ships with smoking funnels on the wall. Each morning I am awakened by a horrible racket of hammering, crashing plaster, splintering boards, rattling buckets, and a cheerful voice singing “Buttons and Bows.” Follows a long pause for tea; a brief and diminished din and bustle; an enormous interlude for lunch; and the short afternoon, punctuated by bouts of tea and song, is devoted to sweeping away the debris and restoring the house, at 4 pm, to the exact condition that existed in the morning.

The reconstruction of London does not proceed everywhere at this imperceptible pace, but the task is Herculean and the men who undertake it, let us agree, are human. The rubble has long been tidied away, but the ruins remain. Birds nest in rusted fireplaces hanging high on adjoining brick walls: the homes which they heated are gone. Crippled men putter along the streets in three-wheeled motorized chairs. Hyde Park cannon fire a Royal salute, and memories reverberate. The war is over, the war is with uš. London is a fathomless world, gutted often and recouped. God knows which way its fortunes are now tending.

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¹ It is encouraging to note, however, that whereas in 1944, 527,000 persons lost their ration books and in 1947 1,054,000, currently they are being lost at the rate of 100,000 a month.