Monday, April 29, 2013

England Ascendant


About a year ago, I wrote a script for a graphic novel called “Doctor Falk,” which I’m trying to talk a pal of mine into drawing. It’s about a scientist of the supernatural who lives in London.

The story is loosely based on the life of a real person. There actually was a guy named Chaim Samuel Jacob Falk. He was born somewhere in Eastern Europe (opinions differ as to where), fled (for various supposed reasons) to London in the 18th century, and set up shop as a magician, sorcerer, and wonder-worker—a “practical Kabbalist.” Sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it’s not. The fact that it isn’t is sort of the kernel of the story.

That’s where the resemblance between the real guy and the character I made up end. Beyond that, I’m proud to say I did absolutely no research whatsoever.

I let another friend of mine (I do have more than one) read it for his opinion. After he finished it, he looked at me and said, “Boy, you really have a thing for England, don’t you?”

Here's a sketch I did of Doctor Falk with a proper Holmesian pipe. 
His reaction surprised me, because that genuinely wasn’t what was in my mind when I wrote it. Dr. Falk—the real Dr. Falk, and, by extension, my character—actually did flee his shadowy origins in Eastern Europe to live in London. Consciously, I didn’t think of England as anything more than a backdrop, a setting, the place where Falk does his weird stuff. So I re-read my own script (which I hate doing. Benjamin Disraeli once said he had a horror of reading his own books: “It is worse than masturbation”) in light of his comment. Turns out he was right. I do have a thing for England. It’s as obvious as the nose on my face.

Unwittingly, I’d peppered “Doctor Falk” with all kinds of quotes, allusions, references, and homages to England and the English imagination. Falk himself veers perilously close to being a pastiche of that most English of characters, Sherlock Holmes: the cold, tweedy, sexless, emotionally-deficient, quirky, yet heroically patriotic and morally upstanding wizard of Baker Street. The central conceit of my story—a brilliant eccentric living in the center of London whom desperate people consult for help—would not have been possible without having read Conan Doyle’s. Matter of fact, I actually ripped off a few lines verbatim from Holmes (“This looks like one of those tiresome social summonses that calls upon a man either to be bored or lie,” and “[I am going] To smoke. It is quite a three-pipe problem, and I beg that you will not disturb me until morning’) and stuck them in Falk’s mouth.
Here's a sketch I did of Doctor Falk in his study, a
subterranean chamber underneath his shop.

And along the way, I shoehorned in bits and pieces from Shakespeare, Disraeli (like I did a few paragraphs above. Did you notice?), The Lion in Winter, Dickens, Smollett, Thackeray, Tintin (not technically English, actually—created by Herge, a Belgian, but lots of the stories take place in and around Tintin’s friend Captain Haddock’s country-home of Marlinspike Hall. Come on. Does it get any Englisher than that?) and Robert Louis Stevenson. Falk goes to Stonehenge, hobnobs with British aristocrats with names like Lord Aethelthwaite, the butchers of Hogbristle Square (okay, I made that place up, but it sounds an awful lot like the kind of place you’d find in England), and is finally rescued by the brave sailors of the Royal Navy.

Even more revealing is a squib of a paragraph I stuck in the creative brief, to give a bit of a visual guide to the artist:

The London where he lives is a gloomy, foggy, dark, Gothic place with tons of weird little details half-hidden in the fog and darkness. It’s exaggeratedly English, Dickensian—quirky and eccentric, full of grotesque people and stone buildings leaning over at crazy, dangerous angles; silhouettes of castles and cathedrals against the moon. Signs advertising the kinds of shops and places that people THINK might exist, but don’t really; streets with ridiculous Englishy-sounding names like Dunwhistle on Tyne, Old Baptist’ry, High Harlotry, Hogbristle Market, etc. A decent amount of ravens and the kinds of places where ravens might live.

In other words, England as imagined by someone who’s never actually been to England.

Essentially, this script that I wrote about a profoundly non-English guy—a (probably) Ukrainian Jew—is a paean to Great Britain. A tribute to England. Why I was so struck by this, I don’t know. It should have been obvious.

I once had a professor, Fred Stopsky, whose parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland, who said that the first time he went to England, it felt like home. It struck me, because here was a guy who had not a dash of England in his background. His family’s trajectory had been a straight shot from the shtetl to Brooklyn. And yet, England felt like home to him. And I remembered his remark as I reconsidered my funnybook script, because he’s right. Even if we’ve never been there, somehow, for most Americans, England is home.

I could pontificate on the power of a shared language (although the English might debate whether we actually share a language at all), on the cultural bonds between Brits and Americans, or on the idea that Great Britain and the United States constitute one great Anglo-American commonwealth, irrespective of different governments and the ocean and centuries that separate us, the central thesis of Kevin Phillips’ book The Cousins’ Wars. I could mention the interesting hypothesis that the American Civil War was merely the last battle of the English Civil War, that epic struggle between the industrious, middle-class Roundheads and the aristocratic Cavaliers.

But all that aside, there’s no denying how deeply and profoundly the English imagination has influenced, and continues to influence, the American one.

The typical bookish American child, as I was myself some millennia hence, spends very little time in mythical America and a hell of a lot of time in mythical England. Sure, we’ve got Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, and cowboys and Indians—all red-blooded American kid stuff. But we spend far less time rafting down the Mississippi of legend than we do in the England of legend.

Instead, we travel with the Pevensie children through the wardrobe door to Narnia or join the Fellowship of the Ring in Middle-Earth which, while, admittedly, are non-existent countries, are still about as British as it gets. Or we travel with Alice down the rabbit hole or though the looking-glass. Or we picture ourselves standing on Platform 9 ¾ , donning black robes and attending Potions, Care of Magical Creatures, and Herbology with Harry, Hermoine, Ron, and Neville at Hogwarts, that perfectly idealized version of an English public schools. Or we check each candy bar we open for a golden ticket that’ll let us tour the Chocolate Factory with Charlie.

When we get a little older, we move up to Robert Louis Stevenson and Daniel Defoe (whose characters we identify with as fellow-Brits marooned on distant islands, and, with them, we dream of returning to the Blessed Plot) and Sherlock Holmes and John Galsworthy. We wish there really was a Drones Club where we could hang out with Bertie Wooster and have Jeeves sort out the disasters of our own making and pick out our clothes for us. We wander the dusty, crumbling hallways of Gormenghast with Titus Groan. And we take Neil Gaiman’s hand, and let him guide us across the vistas of his imagination, a world that may initially appear as terrifyingly phantasmagoric as any we’ve ever seen, but which, at its foundation, remains as comfortingly and as unalterably English as Surrey.

The truly geeky among us graduate to Doctor Who—not even human, but nonetheless about as quirkily, and stereotypically, English as a guy from Gallifrey with two hearts can be, what with his long scarves, tweedy coats, bow ties, and cricket gear. Our sense of humor derives, almost in totality, from Monty Python, part of that great old British music-hall tradition. And we remain glued to our screens to see who dies next on Downton Abbey.

I suppose that’s why, when, as a high school graduation present, my grandmother (whose own family history mirrored that of Professor Stopsky) took me to England for a week, it hardly felt like I was in a foreign country at all. I felt as though I was coming home, back to the very place that had spawned the imaginary landscape in which I’d spent my childhood.

This is not to say that we love the place unreservedly. There’s a lot about English history and culture—and current policy—for progressives like myself to despise. We can detest what was done in the name of King and country during the colonial period. We can mock their outdated class system and deride them for being a bunch of effete crumpet-monkeys. We can blame them, with some justification, for how they handled their custodianship of Palestine, resulting in many of the headaches the Israelis and Palestinians now suffer. We can discern, in the New Atheists’ (like Dawkins and Hitchens) disdain for the religious tendencies of the less advanced peoples of the world, echoes of the same arrogance and certainty of British superiority of colonial times. And we can excoriate the cowardice and hypocrisy of Tony Blair and his servile second-fiddle role in Dubya’s sacred mission to stamp out terrorism in the wrong country. And those of us of Irish descent have a hell of a lot to hate the Brits for.

But regardless of the tragedies of national histories,  if you’re an American kid who likes to read, you simply won’t be able to escape become a citizen of the England of the imagination. Even if you’re from one of the countries and peoples who suffered under the colonial boot, eventually it’ll suck you in. Ask Salman Rushdie who, his Muslim Indian roots notwithstanding, is about as properly British as a guy can get, from his posh BBC accent to his penchant for two-tone Oxford shoes he mentioned in his memoir Joseph Anton—a strangely revealing choice of footwear, if one puts any stock into semiotics at all.   

As justified as our anti-England vitriol may be, we simply can’t help but be Anglophiles at our core. How can you hate, in any consistent and thoroughgoing fashion, the place that spawned you, that gave form and landscape to your imagination, that informed your sense of story, and peopled it with the best characters ever created?

Peter S. Beagle, in his foreword to The Fellowship of the Ring, wrote, “We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers—thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams.” Maybe that’s England’s final triumph, its most fully-realized colonization. It may be a second-rate power in the temporal world, reminiscing about the day when Victoria Regis et Imperatrix ruled an empire on which the sun never set, but “Rule Britannia” never stopped playing in the empire of the imagination, and probably never will so long as the species survives.

Now you’ll pardon me as I reflect on this with a spot of tea.

1 comment:

  1. You're making me hungry for tea and scones, you effete crumpet-monkey, you!

    ReplyDelete