Blythe Spirit

At the suggestion of James Marcus at House of Mirth, I have been reading Ronald Blythe’s The Age of Illusion (1963), a social history of England from the end of World War I to the start of World War II. If that sounds like an unpromising premise, I can report that, with some 80 pages under my belt, the average laugh-out-loud frequency is twice per page, despite Blythe devoting the first chapter to the Great War and its unimaginably pointless slaughter. This era and setting I, like a lot of Americans, probably know best through novels -- Waugh, Powell, Green, even P.G. Wodehouse. Though Blythe devotes most chapters to a representative historical figure and includes seven pages of sources, his tone is closer to these fiction writers than to academic history.

The second chapter, “The Salutary Tale of Jix,” is devoted to Sir William Joynson-Hicks (1865-1932), a character new to me. Mencken would have loved him. Widely known as “Jix,” he was a Conservative politician who served as Home Secretary, a temperance advocate, compulsive talker and megalomaniac obsessed with cleaning up the morals of his countrymen. He also defended the killing of 379 Indians at Amritsar. Here’s Blythe on “Jix” and his version of homeland security:

“Gradually, the mid-Victorian busybody was evolving into a familiar twentieth-century leader. He used hypnotic catch phrases. For instance, he never said aliens, he always said undesirable aliens, and he said it so often that stupid people began to hate foreigners for reasons they couldn’t express. His worship of visas helped to turn a document of convenience into a prized possession. He saw himself as the watchdog of the sceptred isle and anyone he didn’t care for he dubbed Bolshevist and shipped back home.”

And here’s Blythe on one of Jix’s henchmen, Station-Sergeant Goddard:

"Goddard was the bluest-eyed boy in the vice squad. He had been in the police force for twenty-eight years and had specialized in raiding night-clubs since 1918. The fervour he brought to his task and the success by which he had been rewarded had taken the station-sergeant out of the ordinary chap-with-a-job-to-do category and put him among the vocationists. His nose was so keen that he could pick up the chypre-and-bubbly scent of a new club almost before the first member had sidled past its chucker-out."

James wondered if a book similar to Blythe’s had ever been written about the United States, and nominated Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station as a contender. That’s close, but Wilson was too credulous about the Workers’ Paradise, plus his sense of humor was, let’s see, limited. I’m only guessing here, but The Age of Illusion, which James describes as “wide-angled social history,” may represent a distinctly English genre, like Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (James' suggestion). We Americans are simply too serious about ourselves, regardless of our political persuasion. Even history has to be good for us, like broccoli. For all of that, parts of Blythe’s book read like a roman a clef (or histoire de clef) of the United States today. You decide who “Jix” represents and who stands in for Neville Chamberlain.