How to be a Brit Read online

  Contents

  Preface

  HOW TO BE AN ALIEN

  Preface to the 24th Impression

  Preface

  I. How to be a General Alien

  A Warning to Beginners

  Introduction

  The Weather

  Soul and Understatement

  Tea

  Sex

  A Word on Some Publishers

  The Language

  How Not to be Clever

  How to be Rude

  How to Compromise

  How to be a Hypocrite

  About Simple Joys

  The National Passion

  Three Small Points

  II. How to be a Particular Alien

  A Bloomsbury Intellectual

  Mayfair Playboy

  How to be a Film Producer

  Driving Cars

  Three Games for Bus Drivers

  How to Plan a Town

  Civil Servant

  Journalism or the Freedom of the Press

  If Naturalized

  HOW TO BE INIMITABLE

  Coming of Age

  I. New English

  How to be Prosperous

  On Trying to Remain Poor

  How to be Class Conscious

  The New Ruling Class

  How to Avoid Travelling

  On Wine Snobbery

  On Shopping

  How to Save the World

  How to be Free

  In Praise of Television

  On the Art of Conversation

  On Advertisements

  On Politics

  How to Stop Road Traffic

  II. Old English

  How to Take Your Pleasure Sadly

  On Not Knowing English

  On Not Knowing Foreign Languages

  On Not Knowing Anything

  On the Decline of Muddle

  How to Die

  On Being Unfair

  On Minding One’s Own Business

  Sex

  How to Avoid Work

  Everybody is Hungarian

  HOW TO BE DECADENT

  For Some Time There’ll be an England …

  On the Elegance of Decay

  Old and New

  Language

  Food

  Drinks

  Shopping

  Sex

  On Cat-Worship

  On How Not to be Reserved

  On the National Passion

  On Not Complaining

  Bank Holidays

  Buses

  How to Get Lost in London

  How to Panic Quietly

  On Fiddling Through

  The Generation Gap

  Is the Economy Really on the Mend?

  How to Lose an Empire

  How to Become a Colony

  On Ceasing to be an Island

  Envoi

  A Letter from André Deutsch

  Follow Penguin

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  HOW TO BE A BRIT

  George Mikes was born in 1912 in Siklós, Hungary. He studied law and received his doctorate at Budapest University. He became a journalist and was sent to London as a correspondent to cover the Munich crisis. He came for a fortnight but stayed on and made England his home. During the Second World War he broadcast for the BBC Hungarian Service where he remained until 1951. He continued working as a freelance critic, broadcaster and writer until his death in 1987.

  In 1946 he published How to be an Alien, which identified the author as a humourist, although he had not intended the book to be funny. It sold more than 450,000 copies, and with How to be Inimitable and How to be Decadent became How to be a Brit, which has sold more than 90,000 copies.

  His other books include Über Alles, Little Cabbages, Shakespeare and Myself, Italy for Beginners, How to Unite Nations, How to Scrape Skies, How to Tango, The Land of the Rising Yen, How to Run a Stately Home (with the Duke of Bedford), Switzerland for Beginners, Tsi-Tsa, English Humour for Beginners, How to be Poor, How to be a Guru and How to be God. He wrote a study of the Hungarian Revolution and is the author of A Study in Infamy, an analysis of the Hungarian secret political police system, Arthur Koestler: The Story of a Friendship and The Riches of the Poor: A Journey round the World Health Organization. On his seventieth birthday, in 1982, he published his autobiography, How to be Seventy.

  Nicolas Bentley was born in Highgate in 1907 and educated at University College School, London, and Heatherley School of Art. He was an artist, author, publisher and illustrator of more than sixty books – including works by Hilaire Belloc, T. S. Eliot, Damon Runyon, Lawrence Durrell and many others. He died in 1978.

  Preface

  Back in 1945, when André Deutsch was trying to build up a new publishing firm, he asked me if I had anything for him. I told him that I was fiddling about with some little essays which were linked by a basic idea: how to be an alien. Why I was staying on the Isle of Wight I can no longer remember, but I must have been doing so, or why would he have come there to collect the manuscript?

  He enjoyed what he read, but told me that there was not enough of it for a book. So I sat down one afternoon and added five thousand more words. If anyone had said to me that I ought to take more trouble, since forty years later this book would still be selling about thirty thousand copies a year in paperback, not to mention going into a new hardback edition for which I would have to write a preface – well, I would have told that person, gently but firmly, that he or she ought to have his or her head examined. Indeed I would probably have said the same thing if told that I would still be here to write anything in forty years time, and that André would still be around – though disguised as a distinguished old boy – to publish it.

  How to be an Alien was a cri de coeur, a desperate cry for help: oh God, look at me, I have fallen among strange people! ‘But it’s such a funny book,’ people say. Perhaps it is. I hope it is. But it’s not unknown for shrieks, moans, whoops and ululations to sound funny to the uninvolved.

  In due course I added two further shrieks to that first one: How to be Inimitable in 1960, when we had started to slip but still had an Empire and refused to acknowledge much change; and How to be Decadent in 1977. All three books were illustrated by my great and much-missed friend, Nicolas Bentley.

  During all those years since 1945, something rather curious was happening: as I strove to stop being an alien and to become a true Brit, Britain was striving to cast off its peculiar and lofty insularity and become one with the aliens, a part of the Continent (almost), just another member of the E.E.C. It often seems to me that I have failed in my endeavour; but compared with Britain I have succeeded gloriously.

  GEORGE MIKES

  April 1984

  HOW TO BE AN

  A HANDBOOK FOR BEGINNERS AND ADVANCED PUPILS

  ‘I have seen much to hate here, much to forgive. But in a world where England is finished and dead, I do not wish to live.’

  ALICE DUER MILLER: The White Cliffs

  It’s easy

  Preface to the 24th Impression

  The reception given to this book when it first appeared in the autumn of 1946, was at once a pleasant surprise and a disappointment for me. A surprise, because the reception was so kind; a disappointment for the same reason.

  Let me explain.

  The first part of this statement needs little amplification. Even people who are not closely connected with the publishing trade will be able to realize that it is very nice – I’m sorry, I’d better be a little more English: a not totally unpleasant thing for a completely unknown author to run into three impressions within a few weeks of publication and thereafter into another twenty-one.

  What is my grievance, then? It is that this book has completely changed the pictu
re I used to cherish of myself. This was to be a book of defiance. Before its publication I felt myself a man who was going to tell the English where to get off. I had spoken my mind regardless of consequences; I thought I was brave and outspoken and expected either to go unnoticed or to face a storm. But no storm came. I expected the English to be up in arms against me but they patted me on the back; I expected the British nation to rise in wrath but all they said, was: ‘quite amusing’. It was indeed a bitter disappointment.

  While the Roumanian Radio was serializing (without my permission) How to be an Alien as an anti-British tract, the Central Office of Information rang me up here in London and asked me to allow the book to be translated into Polish for the benefit of those many Polish refugees who were then settling in this country. ‘We want our friends to see us in this light,’ the man said on the telephone. This was hard to bear for my militant and defiant spirit. ‘But it’s not such a favourable light,’ I protested feebly. ‘It’s a very human light and that is the most favourable,’ retorted the official. I was crushed.

  A few weeks later my drooping spirit was revived when I heard of a suburban bank manager whose wife had brought this book home to him remarking that she had found it fairly amusing. The gentleman in question sat down in front of his open fire, put his feet up and read the book right through with a continually darkening face. When he had finished, he stood up and said:

  ‘Downright impertinence.’

  And threw the book into the fire.

  He was a noble and patriotic spirit and he did me a great deal of good. I wished there had been more like him in England. But I could never find another.

  Since then I have actually written about a dozen books; but I might as well have never written anything else. I remained the author of How to be an Alien even after I had published a collection of serious essays. Even Mr Somerset Maugham complained about this type of treatment bitterly and repeatedly. Whatever he did, he was told that he would never write another Of Human Bondage; Arnold Bennett in spite of fifty other works remained the author of The Old Wives’ Tale and nothing else; and Mr Robert Graves is just the author of the Claudius books. These authors are much more eminent than I am; but their problem is the same. At the moment I am engaged in writing a 750-page picaresque novel set in ancient Sumeria. It is taking shape nicely and I am going to get the Nobel Prize for it. But it will be of no use: I shall still remain the author of How to be an Alien.

  I am not complaining. One’s books start living their independent lives soon enough, just like one’s children. I love this book; it has done almost as much for me as I have done for it. Yet, however loving a parent you may be, it hurts your pride a little if you are only known, acknowledged and accepted as the father of your eldest child.

  In 1946 I took this manuscript to André Deutsch, a young man who had just decided to try his luck as a publisher. He used to go, once upon a time, to the same school as my younger brother. I knew him from the old days and it was quite obvious to me even then, in Budapest, when he was only twelve and wore shorts, that he would make an excellent publisher in London if he only had the chance. So I offered my book to him and as, at that time, he could not get manuscripts from better known authors, he accepted it with a sigh. He suggested that Nicolas Bentley should be asked to ‘draw the pictures’. I liked the idea but I said he would turn the suggestion down. Once again I was right: he did turn it down. Eventually, however, he was persuaded to change his mind.

  Mr Deutsch was at that time working for a different firm. Four years after the publication of this book, and after the subsequent publication of three other Mikes-Bentley books, he left this firm while I stayed with them and went on working with another popular and able cartoonist, David Langdon. Now, however, André Deutsch has bought all the rights of my past and future output from his former firm and the original team of Deutsch, Bentley and myself are together again under the imprint of the first named gentleman. We are all twelve years older and Mr Deutsch does not wear shorts any more, or not in the office, at any rate.

  ‘When are you going to write another How to be an Alien?’ Deutsch and Bentley ask me from time to time and I am sure they mean it kindly.

  They cannot quite make out the reply I mutter in answer to their friendly query. It is:

  ‘Never, if I can help it.’

  London, May 1958

  GEORGE MIKES

  Preface

  I believe, without undue modesty, that I have certain qualifications to write on ‘how to be an alien’. I am an alien myself. What is more, I have been an alien all my life. Only during the first twenty-six years of my life I was not aware of this plain fact. I was living in my own country, a country full of aliens, and I noticed nothing particular or irregular about myself; then I came to England, and you can imagine my painful surprise.

  Like all great and important discoveries it was a matter of a few seconds. You probably all know from your schooldays how Isaac Newton discovered the law of gravitation. An apple fell on his head. This incident set him thinking for a minute or two, then he exclaimed joyfully: ‘Of course! The gravitation constant is the acceleration per second that a mass of one gram causes at a distance of one centimetre.’ You were also taught that James Watt one day went into the kitchen where cabbage was cooking and saw the lid of the saucepan rise and fall. ‘Now let me think,’ he murmured – ‘let me think.’ Then he struck his forehead and the steam engine was discovered. It was the same with me, although circumstances were rather different.

  It was like this. Some years ago I spent a lot of time with a young lady who was very proud and conscious of being English. Once she asked me – to my great surprise – whether I would marry her. ‘No,’ I replied, ‘I will not. My mother would never agree to my marrying a foreigner.’ She looked at me a little surprised and irritated, and retorted: ‘I, a foreigner? What a silly thing to say. I am English. You are the foreigner. And your mother, too.’ I did not give in. ‘In Budapest, too?’ I asked her. ‘Everywhere,’ she declared with determination. ‘Truth does not depend on geography. What is true in England is also true in Hungary and in North Borneo and Venezuela and everywhere.’

  I saw that this theory was as irrefutable as it was simple. I was startled and upset. Mainly because of my mother whom I loved and respected. Now, I suddenly learned what she really was.

  It was a shame and bad taste to be an alien, and it is no use pretending otherwise. There is no way out of it. A criminal may improve and become a decent member of society. A foreigner cannot improve. Once a foreigner, always a foreigner. There is no way out for him. He may become British; he can never become English.

  So it is better to reconcile yourself to the sorrowful reality. There are some noble English people who might forgive you. There are some magnanimous souls who realize that it is not your fault, only your misfortune. They will treat you with condescension, understanding and sympathy. They will invite you to their homes. Just as they keep lap-dogs and other pets, they are quite prepared to keep a few foreigners.

  The title of this book, How to be an Alien, consequently expresses more than it should. How to be an alien? One should not be an alien at all. There are certain rules, however, which have to be followed if you want to make yourself as acceptable and civilized as you possibly can.

  Study these rules, and imitate the English. There can be only one result: if you don’t succeed in imitating them you become ridiculous; if you do, you become even more ridiculous.

  G. M.

  * * *

  * * *

  I. HOW TO BE A GENERAL ALIEN

  * * *

  * * *

  A Warning to Beginners

  In England* everything is the other way round.

  On Sundays on the Continent even the poorest person puts on his best suit, tries to look respectable, and at the same time the life of the country becomes gay and cheerful; in England even the richest peer or motor-manufacturer dresses in some peculiar rags, does not shave, and the country be
comes dull and dreary. On the Continent there is one topic which should be avoided – the weather; in England, if you do not repeat the phrase ‘Lovely day, isn’t it?’ at least two hundred times a day, you are considered a bit dull. On the Continent Sunday papers appear on Monday; in England – a country of exotic oddities – they appear on Sunday. On the Continent people use a fork as though a fork were a shovel; in England they turn it upside down and push everything – including peas – on top of it.

  On a continental bus approaching a request-stop the conductor rings the bell if he wants his bus to go on without stopping; in England you ring the bell if you want the bus to stop. On the Continent stray cats are judged individually on their merit – some are loved, some are only respected; in England they are universally worshipped as in ancient Egypt. On the Continent people have good food; in England people have good table manners.

  Sabbath morn

  On the Continent public orators try to learn to speak fluently and smoothly; in England they take a special course in Oxonian stuttering. On the Continent learned persons love to quote Aristotle, Horace, Montaigne and show off their knowledge; in England only uneducated people show off their knowledge, nobody quotes Latin and Greek authors in the course of a conversation, unless he has never read them.

  On the Continent almost every nation whether little or great has openly declared at one time or another that it is superior to all other nations; the English fight heroic wars to combat these dangerous ideas without ever mentioning which is really the most superior race in the world. Continental people are sensitive and touchy; the English take everything with an exquisite sense of humour – they are only offended if you tell them that they have no sense of humour. On the Continent the population consists of a small percentage of criminals, a small percentage of honest people and the rest are a vague transition between the two; in England you find a small percentage of criminals and the rest are honest people. On the other hand, people on the Continent either tell you the truth or lie; in England they hardly ever lie, but they would not dream of telling you the truth.