Eager Anglophiles

BY

G-- I do love the Ingles," wrote Voltaire. "G-d dammee, if I don't love them better than the French by G--!" That's too many appeals to heaven from such a skeptical deist, but Ian Buruma takes him at his word. In his discursive feuilleton of a book, Voltaire's Coconuts, or Anglomania in Europe (Weidenfeld & Nicolson; 326 pages), Buruma observes the great philosophe wishing the world could be more like England and declares him "the father of Anglophilia."

The book's title is a teaser. What attracted Voltaire was England's political system, its liberty, rationality and sense of fair play. As a man of reason himself, he believed England provided a model that could be adopted in other countries. But he foresaw objections along the lines of: Would you expect coconuts to grow as well in Europe as they do in hotter climates? Can a political system that guarantees individual liberty be grown in just any soil? Voltaire's answer was yes, and because such coconuts took a long time to ripen even in England, the sooner they were planted the better.

It's an interesting, even heart-warming idea and as long as Buruma sticks to politics he is persuasive. England, or more accurately Britain, for centuries provided a safe refuge to Continental liberals, philosophers and eccentrics who might have landed in jail if they had stayed home (Voltaire originally admired Blighty from inside the Bastille). England was tolerant enough, free enough to let agitated foreigners say what they liked. Part of the secret of that openness was that English aristocrats and gentlemen were not interested in change and the other classes were not interested in revolution. Karl Marx lived in London for 33 years largely ignored, even by English socialists.

Father of the form or not, Voltaire's Anglophilia was limited. He was fascinated by England's political thought, not its culture, arts or cuisine. Others felt the same: Heinrich Heine said you could send a philosopher to England "but on pain of your life not a poet." So this is a far more idiosyncratic book than Buruma's previous one, The Wages of Guilt, a penetrating study of the contrasting ways Germany and Japan have dealt with the legacy of their World War II crimes. Here he wanders into dim corners in search of Anglomania, and finds it in almost anyone who is drawn to some aspect of Britain. He offers a series of essays on illustrative figures he concedes "might seem superficial, or frivolous."

Well, yes. There's the Dutch tobacconist who has preserved and displayed the remnant of a cigar once smoked by Winston Churchill. There are the French, Dutch and Italian dandies turned out in blue blazers, club ties and brogues. As film producer Alexander Korda once remarked: "All Hungarians love the English. It is their snobbism, and I am a snob." Prince Hermann von Puckler-Muskau fell in love with English gardens and Pierre, Baron de Coubertin, a creator of the modern Olympic Games, thought that sports in general and Rugby School in particular were the foundries that produced the healthy gentlemen who ran the Empire. Kaiser Wilhelm II, who "was never able to reconcile the blood of two nations running through his veins," appears in a special category: "both an Anglophile and an Anglophobe."

Buruma's ruminations are so colorfully allusive that they turn gray in spots. He writes, for example, of a garden in Germany that it is "more than a fantasy of England; it is a fantasy of Europe, for it is a German vision of an English vision of antiquity, based not only on Milton's poetry and Rousseau's ideas, but on the classical landscape paintings of Poussin and Claude Lorrain."

Part of the time Buruma uses the book to explain things to himself, for he too has a multinational blood supply. He was born in the Hague, the son of a Dutch father and British mother. His mother's family was of German-Jewish background but quickly became impeccably British. "My own idea of England," he writes, "is a stuccoed Victorian vicarage with a huge lawn, but as soon as I picture it in my mind, I realize that I'm looking at my grandparents' house."