Anglomania (40 page)

Hayek’s idea was but one concept of England, however. Spengler, and even Hitler, also admired a particular English way of life: the imperialist life of the British
Herrenvolk
, bearing the white man’s burden. Hitler’s favorite movie, which he watched over and over at his retreat in Berchtesgaden, was
Lives of a Bengal Lancer
. He always hoped he could win the English gentlemen round to his Aryan cause. (And some English gentlemen were only too happy to be won round.) But of course Hitler and Spengler were great planners. What they despised about Britain was precisely what Hayek admired: the pursuit of private interest. They liked the idea of British heroes but couldn’t bear British traders. Hayek, on the other hand, saw British traders as the heroic defenders of a life he most admired, which was libertarian, well mannered, and deeply conservative.

Hayek wanted to conserve his ideal English way of life, or even restore it. He wrote that the British were fortunate to be “lagging behind most of the European people.” To him, British socialists, such as
the Webbs, were bafflingly obtuse. By bringing Britain up to date, so to speak, by worshiping “foreign gods” such as Hegel and Marx, or Stalin, British socialists were either ignorant of “British virtues” or perversely trying to destroy them, like hooligans throwing stones at a beautiful old mansion. The British, Hayek said, didn’t realize how different they were from other peoples, except perhaps from the Dutch. A planned economy would crush the independent spirit of the British people as surely as a planned city would crush the lively commercial spirit of London. That is why, in 1944, he wrote his most famous book,
The Road to Serfdom
. He wanted to warn the Anglo-Saxon world against taking the Russo-German route. He also wrote it “to see how well I could write English.”

Hayek was right to criticize the Utopianism of the British Left. And his analysis of German socialism paving the way for National Socialism by undermining liberal institutions was acute. But although he never saw himself as a Tory, his Anglophilia was undoubtedly reactionary. He was so keen on his idea of England that he ended up idealizing English conservatism. He didn’t want his beloved island of refuge to change; indeed, it had already changed too much. Reading Hayek, you get the impression that any planned attempt to reduce social and economic inequalities in Britain would lead straight to a Continental hell. He idealized the “English way of life” and the English love of custom and tradition to an absurd degree. But fate has a way of delivering poetic justice. When Hayek decided to abandon his family after the war, in order to marry his cousin, the traditional-minded English were so outraged that he was socially ostracized. Hayek escaped yet again, not from political tyranny this time but from the English love of custom and tradition. He fled to the United States, where he began to write yet another book about freedom,
The Constitution of Liberty
.

And that would have been the last most of us would have heard of this distinguished Viennese Anglophile if Mrs. Thatcher had not adopted him for her cause. It was a strange meeting of minds. Mrs. Thatcher was hardly a cosmopolitan figure. Her Methodist childhood in Grantham was provincial. Her view of the world beyond England, or even Grantham, must have been narrow in the extreme. There was, however, one little window that opened briefly: her sister had a pen friend, a Jewish girl in Vienna, named Edith. After the Anschluss in 1938, Edith came to stay with the Thatchers in Grantham, en route to
South America. Her stay had been organized by the local Rotary Club. Mrs. Thatcher’s father, Alderman Roberts, was a keen Rotarian. We don’t know exactly what Mrs. Thatcher learned about European events from Edith. But she mentions in her memoirs that she knew Hitler was up to no good as soon as she heard that he had crushed the Rotary Clubs. Call it ignorance, or a keen insight into the importance of “civil society,” but one thing is certain: Edith’s shadow would continue to haunt Mrs. Thatcher’s perspective on Europe. She would always see the Continent through the eyes of a frightened refugee.

By going to war with “Europe” and fighting the “un-English” tendencies among her political opponents at home, Mrs. Thatcher wrapped herself in Hayek’s idea of England as though it were her personal Union Jack. She made the émigré’s fetish of Englishness into a dogma. Hayek actually favored a “Federal Union” of European nations. But he was an Anglophile who wanted Britain to liberate Europe, while Mrs. Thatcher was a nationalist, and a strident one at that. When Hayek wrote
Road to Serfdom
, Germany was the center of an expanding totalitarian empire. When Mrs. Thatcher came to power, she often behaved as if she were fighting the same enemy in Brussels. Under her prime ministership, a wind of zealotry howled through Arthur Koestler’s Davos. While she was supposedly standing up for traditional British values, she was in fact, partly by design, partly by adopting Hayek’s own radical libertarianism, damaging the very thing Hayek had prized most about England: that genteel, vaguely nineteenth-century place between the Cambridge High Table and a Bateman cartoon.

W
HEN
W. H. A
UDEN
left England for the United States in 1939, he said it was because England was no place for a poet (Heinrich Heine had made the same point a century before; a lovely place to visit, a rotten place to write poetry). “The English,” said Auden, “have a greater talent than any other people for creating an agreeable family life; that is why it is such a threat to their artistic and intellectual life. If the atmosphere were not so charming, it would be less of a temptation.” This statement is clearly untrue: family life is no more or less agreeable in England than it is in, say, Italy, and England has a rich artistic and intellectual
life. But one can see what he meant. Artists and intellectuals often feel unappreciated in a liberal, commercial society. Public indifference to their work is usually ascribed to bourgeois mediocrity. It may simply be that given the choice in a free market, most people would rather be entertained than lectured, or shocked, or disturbed, or bored. And yet, the other arrow often slung at bourgeois society is precisely that it is boring. Stable, peaceful Davos, devoid of zeal or radicalism, is dull.

Pevsner never used the word “dull” in his descriptions of the English character. But his explanation for the lack of “greatness” in English art certainly suggests as much. “England dislikes and distrusts revolutions,” he wrote in his
Englishness of English Art
. “That is a forte in political development, but a weakness in art.” He returns to this theme often: “A decent home, a temperate climate, and a moderate nation. It has its disadvantages in art.” England, he says, just to give an example, has no Rembrandt. This is perfectly true. But Rembrandt’s Holland was as temperate, as decently housed, and as moderate as England, in fact, more so: Cromwell’s Roundheads were rampaging across England while Rembrandt was painting in peaceful Amsterdam. But, as with Auden’s remark, you know what he meant.

Particularly in his younger years, Pevsner tried his best to rectify the situation by preaching to the English about their lack of taste. He tirelessly promoted modern architecture, design, town planning, and art education. He championed the new age, carried by Italian futurists and German socialists, an age of speed, mass building, mass communication, and mass art. But his own dogmatic theories would have made this a somewhat quixotic enterprise, for however much he would have liked to modernize the English, their supposedly matter-of-fact, middle-of-the-road, stick-in-the-mud character would always ensure that any new departure would be watered down by compromise and nostalgia.

Even though Pevsner regarded himself as a socialist, and always voted Labour, he was naïve about political affairs. So naïve that he sent his children on holidays to Germany as late as 1939. A British citizen without a drop of Jewish blood would have been foolish to do the same thing. Yet here was Pevsner, a Jewish refugee without a British passport, allowing his children to go back to Hitler’s Reich. His son, Dieter, just managed to escape in September 1939. But by the time his daughter,
Uta, applied to the British embassy for a visa, the last British diplomats had already left Berlin. So she was stuck for the rest of the war. Her parents’ anguish can only be imagined. But it shows that Dieter was right: Pevsner must have felt more German than Jewish.

Art and design, not politics, were Pevsner’s true domain. He saw politics in terms of design. He thought it was his “moral duty” to improve society, as a critic of art. Art should serve the people, be socially useful. He wrote: “Not one of the subjects is less essential, not one can be neglected, neither slum clearance nor the renovation of school buildings, neither the levelling up of class contrasts nor the raising of standards of design.” In 1935, as a research assistant in the Department of Commerce at the University of Birmingham, he set off on a survey of British industrial art, 90 percent of which he dismissed as rubbish. Many firms refused to see him. One manufacturer thought he was a foreign spy.

There were other signs that alien modernists were not always welcome. The German architect Peter Moro received a commission in 1938 to design a house near Chichester. Being near Portsmouth, it was in a restricted zone, and Moro had to report to the police every time he visited the site. One day, a photographer for the staunchly modernist
Architectural Review
(to which Pevsner contributed many articles) took pictures of the house. He was oddly dressed, looked a bit “foreign,” and was immediately picked up as a possible spy. Some months later a land mine was dropped near the house and blew out the windows. Soon everyone was whispering the news that a German architect had deliberately built the house in the shape of half a swastika, to help Luftwaffe bombers find their way to Portsmouth.

Pevsner was interned as an enemy alien and almost put on a transport ship to Australia. He was fortunate; one of these ships was sunk by German torpedoes. After his release, Pevsner took a job clearing bomb debris in London. But then his luck turned. In 1941 he was asked to edit the
Architectural Review
, and he resumed his efforts to modernize and elevate British taste. He did this—and would continue to do so all his life—by implementing German ideas, both practical and philosophical, in Britain.

Germany excelled in cheaply produced books on history and art. There were the Georg Dehio guides to German architecture, and the
richly illustrated Blue Books, and the handy Insel paperbacks on all manner of subjects. The Ministry of Information, in charge of British propaganda, took the first cue from German publishing by modeling its Britain in Pictures series on the Blue Books. Several Viennese refugees were hired to design and produce them. Allen Lane’s Penguin paperbacks were based on the Insel books. When Lane asked Pevsner, during a weekend in the country, what he wanted to do after the war, Pevsner didn’t hesitate for a moment. He would do a complete series of guides to the buildings in England. They would be the British version of the Dehio guides. Lane took a puff on his cigarette and told Pevsner to proceed. To ease the traveling, he provided him with a 1933 Wolseley Hornet.

Pevsner’s method was both simple and efficient. First his assistants would dig around in libraries, making notes of everything they could find about the buildings of a given county (Cornwall was the first). These were transcribed on sheets of paper and tagged onto clipboards. Then Pevsner’s secretary would mark all the buildings on Ordnance Survey maps. And finally, Pevsner and his wife, Lola, with one or two assistants, would board the Wolseley, armed with clipboards, maps, and county histories, and cover sixty to eighty miles a day, every day, for two months, April and August, from eight-thirty in the morning till six-thirty in the evening. Pevsner drove the car once, but loathed it. So Lola became his regular chauffeur.

The
Buildings of England
books would have been dry without Pevsner’s opinionated voice. You always know where he stands. He approved of things that are now regarded as modernist disasters. The dull, minimalist, concrete development around St. Paul’s Cathedral, by Sir William Holford, is praised as “a brilliant essay in the English tradition of informal planning.” Only a critic whose Anglophilia was as blinding as his modernism could possibly say that. He is dismissive, on the other hand, of the quirky decorative talents of Lutyens. Number 68 Pall Mall with its eccentric columns and pediments, is “irritating.” Nonetheless, a finer appreciation of the English character could temper such feelings. Six years before entering Number 68 Pall Mall in his guide, he discussed it in the
Architectural Review
. The first time he saw it in 1930, he had found the building not just irritating, but “silly.” Then, in time, he began to understand the English love of follies. To appreciate
folly, he said, “a degree of detachment is needed which is only accessible to old and humane civilizations. Sir Edwin Lutyens was without doubt the greatest folly builder in England.”

The main thing about
The Buildings of England
, however, is its art historical rigor. N.P. was impatient with English amateurism. Until the opening of the Courtauld Institute, art history had never been taught as an academic subject in Britain. Writing about art and architecture was, often in the best sense of the word, an amateur’s occupation. Foreigners, mostly from Germany and Austria, would change all that. Sir Ernst Gombrich, Rudolf Wittkower, Edgar Wind: the list is long. But in the case of Pevsner, the amateurs sometimes liked to hit back. John Betjeman, who rather cultivated the image of the
flâneur
carried along by his enthusiasms, ridiculed Pevsner in private. Some of Betjeman’s friends, such as Peter Clarke, a founding member of the Victorian Society, did so in public.
Punch
, a magazine that was singularly unsympathetic to modernists, and foreign modernists in particular, gleefully published his poems. One was entitled “Lieder aus der Pevsnerreise.”