The Horror of the unBritish

            A huge subcategory of English fiction exists whose subject is what happens to Brits when they find themselves in a non-British world. You will have your own favorites. I have mine.

            The subject came up while I was reading a book by Sylvia Townsend Warner that begins thus: “Though the Reverend Timothy Fortune had spent three years in the island of Fanua, he had made but one convert.” When I read the sentence I thought of another clergyman, the Anglican bishop Mr. Heard, who encounters the island of Nepenthe in the Mediterranean, Norman Douglas’s almost tropical, delightfully-peopled version of the island of Capri, warmed by the sirocco that gives the book its name, South Wind (1917). Heard doesn’t quite know what to make of the pagan goings on there. Mr. Keith, a prolix Scot and longtime resident of the island, says that “Northern minds” tend to become unhinged on Nepenthe.

            Warner’s book is titled Mr Fortune’s Maggot (1927), “maggot” here used in an archaic sense to mean a whimsical fancy, a hobby-horse, or a comic obsession. Her book is a gentle comedy that satirizes British imperialism in the person of the missionary Mr. Fortune, while so many of the books and stories in this category subjugate the humor of their satire to a darker view.

That’s true of the story of the very different missionary, Mr. Kurtz, who goes off to bring civilization to the heathen savages of Africa but finds himself converted to their practices instead, in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). And companion pieces to Heart of Darkness could be Conrad’s short story, “An Outpost of Progress” (1896) and Somerset Maugham’s, called just “The Outstation” (1926). Though different in many ways, both stories show us Englishmen who finally become so unnerved by their surroundings at the uncultivated edges of the empire that they kill themselves or each other.

We have American counterparts to the subgenre in the innocent American trying to understand the wicked Old World or the inscrutable East in most of the novels of Henry James, in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1955) and The Third Man (1949), and in Lederer and Burdick’s The Ugly American (1958). But we have a tradition of more comic versions of the innocent American meeting the Old World in Twain’s The Innocents Abroad (1869), Cornelia Otis Skinner and Emily Kimbrough in Our Hearts Were Young and Gay (1942) and Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado (1958).

When Americans encounter the real outback, it doesn’t unhinge them. At least when Henderson goes to Africa in Henderson the Rain King (1959), he does prodigious deeds despite being something of a schlemiel, and he narrowly escapes becoming the King of the Wariri. And the American way is to wade in imagining one understands the other culture and do more damage to them than to oneself, as in the ugly American model.