The Atlantic Ocean Read online

  The Atlantic Ocean

  Essays on Britain and America

  ANDREW O’HAGAN

  for my daughter Nell

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction: The Atlantic Ocean

  Scotland’s Old Injury

  The American Dream of Lee Harvey Oswald

  The Killing of James Bulger

  England’s Flowers

  Saint Marilyn

  Tony and the Queen

  7/7

  On the End of British Farming

  Cowboy George

  Four Funerals and a Wedding

  The Glasgow Sludge Boat

  Celebrity Memoirs

  On Lad Magazines

  On Hating Football

  Poetry as Self-Help

  My Grandfather’s Ship

  After Hurricane Katrina

  The Faces of Michael Jackson

  England and The Beatles

  The American Way of Sorrow

  On Begging

  The Garbage of England

  Brothers

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Introduction: The Atlantic Ocean

  OCTOBER 2007

  When you grow up by the sea you spend a good deal of time looking at the horizon. You wonder what on earth the waves might bring – and where the sea might deposit you – until one day you know you have lived all that time between two places, the scene of arrival and the point of departure, like a ghost on the shore. When I look back at my childhood on the Ayrshire coast, I recall a basic devotion to the idea that human nature and national character are as unknowable as the weather’s rationale. Nevertheless, in those years I yearned to know whatever I could know and I fell in love with the Atlantic Ocean, imagining I saw it as somehow suspending very wonderful promises about freedom and democracy. That water had once made the world seem reachable, made life seem plausible, and standing there I watched the infrequent ships and thought of the Ireland my people had come from and the America so many of us were coming to be absorbed by. They were each out there, the past and the future, the great hunger and the maddening feast, and the Atlantic itself seemed capable of whispering these stories into the coves.

  I was born on 25 May 1968. It was the high point of a certain kind of idealism – Paris witnessed the biggest of its student riots that day – and by the time I came to stand by myself on the beach at Saltcoats I was merely a representative ghost. The country at my back, and the Britain beyond, had already given up both its industries and its idealisms and much of its community to a brand-new notion of the individual. That is who we were at the end of the 1970s. I was a post-industrial Scottish child, wide eyed in the Winter of Discontent, and the ocean I looked out on was no longer streaked with ships fresh from yards on the Clyde or with vessels hot for the British Empire. My mother’s father, Charlie Docherty, had once glided down that waterway on the Captain Cook, a ship bound with tons of merchandise for Sydney Harbour. Michael O’Hagan, my father’s father, had sailed the other way round on HMS Forfar, which was torpedoed off the west of Ireland and sunk in the winter of 1940.

  That was life beneath the waves. Breaking through them in my younger days, when the coast was clear and the air smelled of vinegar, was a pack of nuclear submarines based at Faslane. The Cold War was very neighbourly round our way: from my perch on the sea wall the Atlantic would now and then show evidence of the world that Britain was turning towards. Those submarines – Resolution, Repulse, Renown, Revenge – arrived with stealth and ascended like shadows to darken the old horizon: their fearful weapons systems were American and suddenly so were we. For a few ominous months in the early 1980s, of course, the Atlantic was the star of the show in an old-fashioned and bloody demonstration of outmoded imperial selfhood, the battle for the Falklands. Yet in the days of Revenge and Repulse – or vengeance and repulsion – the famous ‘task force’ came on like a tribute fleet, a horrible anachronism, steaming with alacrity towards the frozen nether regions of the South Atlantic, the vessels as ghostly in their own way as the lost ships of my grandfathers.

  I have beside me as I write a group of postcards from the early days of our fifty-first statehood. They sit on my desk like snapshots of the Thatcher revolution, each one pointing in some way towards America and a burgeoning comedy of death and celebrity and inequality. They point to a future coalition of the willing: an evangelical lust for Christian ideals spanning the oceans; a capacity for wonder at the depth of feeling attached to one’s own righteousness. They show cruise missiles and closed coal mines, Princess Diana and Greenham Common. And you can’t look at the cards without thinking them a cultural presentiment of a very special relationship: a new kind of America and Britain is inscribed in the images of Ronnie and Maggie. Most of all the cards are stepping stones across the sea: we observe in them what we learned from America about masking our guilt at how Christians behave when it isn’t Sunday. They show the progress of popular sentiment and the forming of an instinct for gross spiritual compromise – they show how far we will go in order to love the marketplace. That’s right: they show the birth of New Labour.

  We must, at some level, have been greatly impressed by the simple brutality of the dollar, the way it could change old civilisations, just as Ronald Reagan smiled his smile and held his nerve and bankrupted the Soviet Union. After the 1980s, and the birth of Cool Britannia, it was well understood that the Argie-hating Sun would come out for New Labour, and when it did the relationship felt right and proper, for the meaning of democracy had changed in those years to become a treatise against outsiders and a passionately sentimental ideology. And so we woke up in the era of Tony Blair to find that Britain was not a comforting land on which to rest our ambivalence. It was a place where every politician had cut his cloth to suit the fashion of the times, cut it in the US style, so that we dressed ourselves no longer with an austere but fair sense of who we could be as a nation but with a belligerent certainty about who we are not. We learned to hate our enemies not for their criminal acts but for their metaphysical differences. ‘You are either with America or you are against us,’ said George W. Bush, and Britain was already by then another country. And so was America. By the time I had written the last of these essays, America was no longer a place admired by the world. People tried to blame America’s enemies for that – foreign and domestic, left and right – but the sadder truth is that it was America’s friends that did her harm. Even yet, as the idiots who supported that bad and stupid war scan the room for exits and blame the left for their greater wrongs, we find that Blair’s version of brotherhood cost America dearly. He can say what he likes, and so can those soulless people in his government who stood silent to save their jobs, but Britain was the bad brother that goaded its sibling into psychosis.

  It is easy for people to say that opposition to this kind of America – to this abuse of an idealistic, generous, open notion of America – is the same as blanket anti-Americanism. I won’t even bother with that, because I know, and readers of these essays will know, that it is quite another America I would want to befriend into decency. I am talking about the one that gave me belief as a child, the one that seemed to provide a fair chance and a good laugh, the one of the best movies and the perfect novel. I am talking about the America once imagined by Scott Fitzgerald, the one that many people have broken their hearts trying to hold on to, the one commensurate with our capacity for wonder. Let the lazy snipers seize their opportunity and call those of us appalled by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld anti-American, for they know nothing of America that is worth defending. Let it be said that America lost its friends and gained an ally – for that is the story of a modern traged
y.

  Jay Gatsby watches the beautiful green light at the end of Daisy’s wharf, and the Atlantic waters that lapped under the beams there and under that famous green light were the waters of my own Atlantic too; they had come from the shores of a hopeful and once idealistic Britain. We share many things and I have always believed in our brotherhood, which is why it is sad to see us fall hopelessly together into that element that Scott Fitzgerald knew by heart: an utterly terrible grandness of delusion.

  I found my way to London and began writing essays and books in the 1990s. I wanted to raise a smile and raise my game and sing some new notes if possible. I bow before the traditions that made this kind of writing and many of them are resolutely Scottish. It was the Edinburgh Review under Francis Jeffrey that first demonstrated how a very good journal could be more important every few weeks than several decent novels, and I believe I found that same quality of hospitality at the London Review of Books. As a novelist, I have perceived no contradiction between one literary activity and another and have cared for the great journals all my life: they contain a tincture of the very lifeblood of the culture, and the best ones find it natural to civilise our politics while taking steps to finesse our understanding of society. The best ones add to our stock of liveliness while proving anxious to upgrade the power, the precision, and the beauty of the language. They resist cant and play with fire. The essay and the long reported piece are forms with the most daunting exemplars in the traditions of both Britain and America, and I argue for the forms, not for myself, when I say we must fight at all costs to uphold their status.

  This book opens with an essay about Scotland. I am now and then accused of being disloyal to Scotland – or of not liking it very much – by people who consider it an insult for authors to do anything other than praise the place where they come from. The Scottish writers I grew up loving and learning from – Robert Burns, James Boswell, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Galt, whether at home or abroad – would immediately have dismissed this for the terrifying nonsense that it is. A healthy literary culture would never expect its writers to reproduce the conceited forms of self-congratulation that every nation has at its disposal. There are those who like writers best when we are at our most agreeably banal. Yet it is our job to interrogate the culture as much as ourselves, and to enjoy a drink in the pub afterwards. Anything less constitutes a mockery of tradition, an insult to what one might call an international sense of discovery, a completely unforgivable slap in the face of the thoughtful reader, and a betrayal of the writer’s talent. There will always be those who view the honest attempt to write carefully as something equal to a tantrum of self-importance, and there is nothing very much I can do about these people, who require writers to embody some patriotic principle. They are not my kind of readers or writers or pass-keepers: we are citizens of the world before we are subjects of any nation, and novels are not editorials and essays are not policy. Scotland is rich in both innocence and experience, and I begin this collection with an essay about my native land that might demonstrate how naturally a certain passion of regard can sometimes live beside a quantity of dismay.

  ‘I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church,’ wrote James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ‘and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can.’ But the buckling of freedom’s meaning and the perversion of journalistic ethics have themselves become large parts of life in the last few decades. Nowadays, an emetic populism is taken to stand for common sense; a communal blaming and a self-pity is held in our culture to answer most persuasively to the call of truth. The common reader, wherever she exists, has never been so common, and George Orwell would whiten to address the mob that now scans the Daily Mirror and each night flicks between the bouts of gladiatorial combat happening on every other channel.

  A kind of political idealism fell about the beaches of my youth like so many echoing and departing voices, and many of the essays in this volume take up the story from there. To me a book of essays might be bound by an atmosphere as much as by a theme – as any volume of prose or poetry might be – and so I make no great claims for this book’s utility as a summary of relations between Britain and America. Rather, the book might constitute a journey into the space between us, both a comedy of errors and portrait of a marriage, as both an argument about empire and a slow drama about the meeting of fame and ordinary life. The shots fired by Lee Harvey Oswald may have marked the beginning of an ending for particular public hopes and certain private dreams, but so in another way was the killing of James Bulger and in another way again the mountain of flowers that gathered in the streets for Diana.

  It was writing about the death of that Liverpool toddler that gave me my start at the London Review. We had all seen the pictures of the child being abducted from the Strand Shopping Centre and later the footage on television of the two ten-year-olds – at that time called Boy A and Boy B – being hounded by a mob holding up nooses as the children’s van arrived at the court. I thought at the time that those images represented a new moment in the history of the community I grew up in, the northern working-class, which seemed for the first time hand-in-hand with the tabloids in a grim attempt to force unreason on top of unreason. Nobody was talking about the boys’ backgrounds, the economic conditions of their lives or their education or their neighbourhood. They were simply exceptions, ‘Devil Dogs’, and their own community rose up to say they should be put down. John Major then said the second most chilling sentence ever spoken by a British prime minister. ‘I think it is time for us to understand a bit less and condemn a bit more.’ (The first most chilling was from Margaret Thatcher, his predecessor, who said ‘there is no such thing as society’.)

  I said to my editor I could recognise so much about the boys: their way of talking, their backgrounds, how they inclined towards one another as they walked. I was twenty-five, but my childhood seemed near to hand: it was filled with the essential dangers and abuses and lacks that had run to quite a different course in the cases of Boy A and Boy B, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to understand the world that made them and sustained them and now rejected them. ‘Confessions of a Literary Journalist’, said the Guardian when it reprinted the piece I wrote for the London Review. But liberal opinion was split in two over the Bulger case, and no amount of confession, no attempt to identify the sources of the boys’ terrible act, could stand muster against the barrage of tabloid hate that rained down on them. I kept thinking of those two ten-year-olds who lived a mile or two from the silent docks of Liverpool, two boys who dogged school and watched American horror films rented by their parents about murderous dolls that must be destroyed. Around those boys we watched the beginning of a new social marriage in Britain: the conjoining of tabloid spite with underclass sentiment, a precursor of a new kind of populist energy that would run free and wild in the Blair years. I believe it started there, with the nooses and the moral panic, with the indecent joy of condemnation and the CCTV. It will be remembered that it was the British newspapers who appealed to Lord Justice Morland to have the names and pictures of the two boys released and he did so with the public’s support. At this point one had to face the fact that Britain was a very different country from any in Europe: those terrified boys, who had done a terrible thing, aged ten, not only faced the full rigours of an adult trial but had their faces printed on the front page of the Daily Mail at the end. Even today it is difficult to imagine any other judge in Europe being successfully pressed by the media to name Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, thus seeing three lives destroyed instead of one.

  The conjunction of killing and celebrity is not so modern if you think of Jesse James or the Brothers Kray. But not everybody in the Wild West – or, indeed, in the Wild East End – could have shared the ultramodern propensity to see other people’s suffering in the media as something of an enhancer of one’s own general feelings of well-being. While we were becoming like a
part of America, many of us learned how to forget the idea of a common decency. Slowly, in the years that stretch from the first term of the America-loving Thatcher to the last term of the America-loving Blair, we saw a grand entrenchment of those rich and those poor. American’s influence on Britain, so good in many ways, put a stretch on this polarisation – Reagan’s notion that a good society was a place where some stayed poor so that others could be richer – and for all New Labour’s handsome talk about a ‘classless society’, we now know that deep inequality is a condition we take for granted. The have-nots make it worse by seeming so much to revel in their deracinated culture, so glued to Sky TV and sugary products they do not see how they are becoming a by-product of richer people’s happiness. This is something of the culture I grew up in and the point is not to condemn but to understand it, as John Major said we should not.

  Several essays here try to map the way we have drifted towards the American manner of society. When I saw those poor people – and I mean poor people – stranded in the Superdome in New Orleans after the hurricane, I immediately packed a bag and crossed the Atlantic. There was no doubt in my mind. There is still no doubt. It was about us, too. We share an experience we can scarcely put a name to: many millions of people now exist for whom life used to be defined by work and is now defined by leisure. I’d say the complex losses and gains involved in that alteration hover over these essays. Leisure made us enjoy ourselves more, but who are they, these selves that are enjoying to death?

  The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina might have shown the world that the dream once described by Martin Luther King was cold in the glare of Bush’s America. Michael Jackson continues to get whiter, and poverty in Britain is thought by some to be a lifestyle choice. We have lived together through the unlessoning of Vietnam and come out the other side with a higher regard for the power of media images and a smaller regard for human life. I have been moved by interest and by accident into the way of these developments and I wanted my own personal accounts of them to settle here together.