On Billy
Bragg's and Colin MacInnes's England, Half English
Colin MacInnes's 1961 book,
English, Half English, opens with an essay about Tommy Steele.
Now half forgotten, Steele was then "the English Elvis",
and his phenomenon allows MacInnes to comment on a notable curiosity
of late 50s British pop music. "The battle for a place among
the top twenty", he observes, "has been won by British singers
at the cost of splitting their personalities and becoming bi-lingual:
speaking American at the recording session, and English in the pub
round the corner afterwards." Referring to Steele, MacInnes notes:
In his film or when,
on the stage, he speaks to his admirers between the songs, his voice
takes on the flat, wise, dryly comical tones of purest Bermondsey.
When he sings, the words (where intelligible) are intoned in the
shrill international American-style drone. With this odd duality,
his teenage fans seem quite at ease: they prefer him to be one of
them in his unbuttoned moments, but expect him to sing in a near
foreign tongue: rather as a congregation might wish the sermon to
be delivered in the vernacular, and the plainsong chanted in mysterious
Latin.
The essay, "Young
England, Half English", was originally written in December 1957,
when a certain group of Liverpool lads was still known as the Quarry
Men. At least in their early career, the Beatles too would exhibit
a similar "odd duality": their vocals, and often the songs
themselves were American while the band's film and press presence
was unmistakably English. However, the 60s were to see a British pop
cultural explosion that brought the English vernacular distinctly
to the fore. From the Kinks and the Who through the Jam, Sex Pistols,
the Clash, Blur and Pulp (along with countless others), Englishness
proved its popularity and marketability, a trend more recently mined
by the government under that Third-Way recycling program known "Cool
Britannia".
With only a few exceptions,
MacInnes's accusation of pop bi-lingualism could never be applied
to the long career of Billy Bragg. Bragg has, since his 1983 mini-album
Life's a Riot with Spy vs. Spy, worn his Essex origins—and
accent—as unmistakably as a workingman's flat cap. Almost twenty
years and numerous albums later (not counting EPs and assorted other
projects) he has delivered English, Half English. The first
album of completely original material since 1996's William Bloke
sees Bragg in his typically ambiguous mode, alternatively taking to
the barricades or weeping heartbroken into his beer. However, it is
also a self-conscious musical exploration of his most constant touring
companion: Englishness.
By no means all of MacInnes's
commentaries address what it meant to be "English" in the
late 50s. The book collects eighteen of the author's essays originally
commissioned for The Twentieth Century, Encounter, New
Left Review, Satire Review and Cahiers des Saisons.
Its contents twist and shout to the tense rhythms of late 50s culture,
connected by, if anything, the changing face of English (he rarely
uses the term "British") life. For instance, he emphasizes
the explosive potential of an age of relative prosperity and the increasing
influence of other cultures:
The nineteen fifties
were an astonishing decade: during which England, under the twin
shadows of the Bomb and its own sharp imperial decline, has
altered more radically than it did in the silly twenties, the dreadful
thirties, or in the certainly heroic but, in essence, static nineteen
forties. Some of the changes in our social climate have been negative,
frivolous and mean; but others have brought life and hope and what,
since the nineteenth century, what was unknown in England—a
realization that tradition, by which we set such store, must, to
have meaning, be constantly re-made.
The remaking of tradition
has long been Bragg's specialty: Blakean imagery, Kipling's poetry,
proto-Left legends, traditional political balladry and inter-war politics
have all made appearances on his earlier albums. That connection to
the past is only amplified by the liner sleeve's quotation from George
Orwell's 1941 essay "The Lion and the Unicorn":
Englishness is continuous,
it stretches into the future and the past, there is something in
it that persists, as in a living creature. What can the England
of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what
have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your
mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen
to be the same person.
Having honed his flair
for British history and cultural nostalgia, Bragg went on to do admirable
service in the refashioning of American tradition. On 1998's Mermaid
Avenue, Bragg, along with Midwestern alternative traditionalists
Wilco, resurrected and made newly relevant the spirit of Woody Guthrie,
a musical icon whose image had fossilised into that of a mere dustbowl
balladeer. As Bragg's view returns homeward, the new album marks both
a continuation and a new departure.
Bragg is far more directly political than MacInnes; however, both
are joined by a malcontented engagement with English identity. As
the narrator in MacInnes's 1959 novel Absolute Beginners notes,
"It's because I'm a patriot, that I can't bear our country".
In taking on patriotism, Bragg maps out a two-front war. First, he
calls for the dismantling of Britishness,
made irrelevant in his view by the end of empire and fragmented through
devolution.Then, he confronts the resulting void with a new—and
at the same time old—multicultural Englishness.
"Take Down the
Union Jack" and "England, Half English" are the most
explicitly "English"-themed tracks, but, in their different
ways, other songs address the concept more obliquely. "Distant
Shore", for instance, is in the voice of an asylum-seeker: "The
natives are hostile whatever I say / The thing they fear most is that
I might want to stay", it intones, inverting the imperial imagery
of colony and metropole. "Baby Faroukh" mixes in African
influences to its infectious guitar rhythms. "St. Monday"
reaches back into the history of English working-class traditions
to praise the unofficial "holiday" belonging to pre-industrial
work patterns.
Trying to pin down what
that Englishness actually is, of course, poses a problem. Listing
certain institutions or character traits risks the sort of tourist-brochure
cataloguing satirised in Julian Barnes's 1998 novel England, England.
Orwell took a decent stab at it in his 1941 essay,
but Both Bragg and MacInnes, in general, avoid making any specific
lists. Instead, Bragg's songs seem to imply English multiculturalism
either through their world-music tinged sounds or in lyrics pointing
out the cultural mixing of neighbourhood, diet, tradition and language.
In a February 2002 interview,
he declared "I'm not interested in a narrow definition of warm
beer and Benjamin Britten. It's about a shared space, and you can't
pick and choose within that." MacInnes's essays are similarly
vague on what Englishness really means, being content with apt generalizations.
In "See You at Mabel's", a piece on English drinking clubs,
he writes, "In England, the war between Cavaliers and Roundheads
is eternal. All English institutions reflect the compromise between
the saints and sinners, between the Salvation Army and the Music Hall
views of life". A look at "Pop Songs and Teenagers"
includes the pithy observation that "England is, and always has
been, a country infested with people who love to tell us what to do,
but who very rarely seem to know what's going on".
Clearly, MacInnes's writing
could be crisp and direct, mixing a cutting humor with incisive cultural
critique. (At one point, he observes, "when an educated English
voice is turning bitchy, it's a quite specially unpleasant sound,
besides being fucking silly, and an utter drag.") It could, however,
be uneven, a pattern repeated in Absolute Beginners, the first
of his "London novels" that continued with City of Spades
and Mr. Love and Justice. Biting social commentary, painted
in swift, sharp strokes, now and then break through the essentially
contrived plot framework and pop culture detailing. The unnamed protagonist,
a photographer and teenaged devotee of the hip scene, moves through
a London milieu of mixed ethnicities, classes, drug preferences and
sexual orientations. Adrift in a world of scooters and coffee bars,
he strikes one as a stylish, proto-Mod Holden Caulfield. The story
essentially sets up his wry observations on 50s culture, and various
characters voice opinions that reappear, almost verbatim, in England,
Half English. The books give the author plenty of opportunity
to make observations on England and the English. For instance, a Jewish
writer explains his notions to the narrator:
"I tell you a secret:
England is dreadful, and the English—they're barbarians. But
three things of theirs I cherish most sincerely—the lovely
tongue they thought up God knows how and I try hard to write in,
and the nosey instinct of their engineers, and seamen, and explorers
and scientists, to enquire, to find out why, and their own radicals
that bounce up every century to flay and slay them never mind the
risk. So long as they have those things I'm glad to be with them,
and will defend them…and everything else I can forget."
But what comes out most
strongly in the book are two arguments: one, that youth culture was
creating the potential for a classless and multicultural society,
and, two, that England, in particular its capital, was the product
of cross-cultural influences. When "Mr. Cool", a "coloured
kid" and neighbour, speaks of growing tensions between whites
and blacks, the narrator responds with disbelief:
"I couldn't take
any more of this nightmare. I cried out, 'Cool, this is London,
not some hick city in the provinces! This is London, man, a capital,
a great big city where every kind of race has lived ever since the
Romans'."
Nonetheless, things get
worse, and the book vividly depicts the terrible, simmering eruption
of racial violence, dramatising the 1958 Notting Hill riots. The book
concludes with the narrator's departure in search of country with
less of a "colour thing":
"Because, in this
moment, I must tell you, I'd fallen right out of love with England.
And even with London, which I'd loved like my mother, in a way.
As far as I was concerned, the whole dam group of islands could
sink under the sea, and all I wanted was shake my feet off of them,
and take off somewhere and get naturalized, and settle."
Bragg's call for an engagement
with Englishness, particularly on the part of the Left, is both timely
and welcome. It is timely, because the external and internal pressures
on Britishness (present from its birth) have only increased in recent
decades. Although the decline of the nation-state can be exaggerated,
the influence of multinational conglomerates, global economic treaties
and European integration is unmistakeable. From within, devolution,
though only partial, in combination with long-standing nationalist
sentiments have weakened a British identity that, in any case, was
never fully hegemonic in every corner of the four nations that have
coexisted, not always amiably, on a small European archipelago.
Bragg's message is welcome
because, in this context, English nationalism will unavoidably become
more of an issue, and it is better that the Left influence that rise
rather than allowing the Right (and most of all the Far Right) sole
proprietorship of national
self-image. The hesitancy to participate in the nationalist debate
is fruitless: avoidance won't make it go away, and whatever the ambiguities
and difficulties of defining Englishness, they pale in comparison
to those of "internationalism".
Nonetheless, questions
remain. Bragg's insistence that Great Britain is "just an economic
union" is, at least in its origins, true. However, since 1707
"Britain" has accumulated a great weight of legal, cultural
and social interconnections and historical meanings. These are difficult
to dismiss and not all of them are necessarily bad, arguably no worse
than those attaching to "England", which, in any case, always
supplied the lion-and-unicorn's share of Britishness. Furthermore,
the Welsh, Scots and Irish also to varying degrees contributed to
aspects of Britishness—such as the Empire—that one is so
tempted to forget. Quite apart from the fact that Britain's moves
toward a more federalist constitution are something very different
than the end of the Union, taking down the Union Jack can in no way
wipe the slate clean.
Mention of the Empire brings
up another, sad irony: the multicultural society that Bragg and MacInnes
celebrate is in large measure a legacy of the Empire they both despise.
This is not to suggest that the Empire had noble aims, for the creation
of a multi-ethnic metropole was certainly never a goal of its architects
and rulers. However, that connection complicates the easy distinctions
between imperialist "Britain" and tolerant, multicultural
"England". Although the subjects of Empire fought many conflicts
against their colonial rulers, millions also fought two major twentieth
century wars for them in the name not of England but of Britain. Such
service was to strengthen moral claims for independence and for immigration
rights. The Commonwealth, with all of its legal and cultural interconnections,
has certainly helped to ensure that Britain's former colonies remain
imprinted by British culture. At the same time, however, the remnants
of imperialism opened the door to a counter-flow of people and influences
that became most noticeable after 1945. This was the world that MacInnes
explored, the multi-ethnic Britain in part signalled by the arrival
of West Indian immigrants on the Empire
Windrush in 1948. Britishness has been, however ambivalently,
a model for immigrant efforts for integration and identity, and, moreover,
it has provided a sometimes useful discourse in claiming equal rights.
MacInnes put much hope
in two factors for creating a tolerant society: youth and commerce.
The young people he presents are not interested in the distinctions
of class, race or sexual preference; instead, they're digging—together—new
records, clothes, films, food and lifestyles. That his confidence
was misplaced is suggested by the decades that followed, pointing
to the problems of market
multiculturalism and to the fact that young people create their
own inequalities, many of which mirror or even intensify those of
the surrounding society. Bragg, as one might suspect, is more critical
of commerce. He also has been more sceptical
of the staying power of youth as a force for cultural change. However,
he seems perhaps a bit overconfident that the fact of difference—pointing
out that England has always been a mix of cultures—leads to the
acceptance of difference. "Mixture", after all, implies
more than simply sharing the same space. This is not only an issue
of majority racism—though that remains a key problem—but
also of minority self-isolation. Last summer's race riots—which
bear a depressingly close similarity to the one dramatised forty years
ago by MacInnes—point to the continuing alienation
among white, black and Asian communities.
As the election fiasco
in France, the still-small but noticeable success of far-right parties
in on the Continent, and the attempted resurgence of the British National
Party suggests, such problems are widespread. Multiculturalism is,
simultaneously, Europe's opportunity and tinderbox. The emerging constellation
of social tension and anti-immigrant politics suggests that celebrating
diversity is not, on its own, enough to build a sense of social cohesion.
A further step may be in the development of national identities that
can coexist with trans-national loyalties, provide positive associations
for people of all backgrounds and can frame both cultural agreement
as well as disagreement. Ignoring the problem
in the hopes of avoiding a painful social and cultural debate doesn't
make it go away, and cedes votes—either through choice or apathy—to
the purveyors of hate. The issue of national identity is, of course,
only a part of the problem; however, whether "English" or
"British", having a multicultural society—in the sense
of cultures peacefully coexisting—is something different than
simply having a society of many cultures.
