"Through no wish of my own I have become the protagonist of a Jamesian problem. Do you ever read any Henry James, Mr. Schultz?"
"You know I don't have the time for reading."
"You don't have to read much of him. All his stories are about the same thing--American innocence and European experience."
"Thinks he can outsmart us, does he?"
"James was the innocent American."
"Well, I've no time for guys running down their own folks."
"Oh, he doesn't run them down. The stories are all tragedies one way or another."
"Well, I ain't got the time for tragedies neither. Take an end of this casket. We've only half-an-hour before the pastor arrives."
-- The Loved One
I am about embark on a trans-Atlantic adventure in part to see if my Anglophilia withstands actual Anglos at close proximity. "You don't understand," said my expat friend Ben, who's lived in New York for five years. "You like the ones you meet here fine, but we're the ones that got away." Maybe. But then I've also liked, at distance, the ones who chose not to get away and rather made a point of pride of the fact. Both Amises (one who alighted in Tennessee--of all places--for an academic stint and one who called America, borrowing a line from Bellow, "the moronic inferno"), at least three Waughs, a Larkin (who said that the United States was two cities interrupted by "vast deserts of bigotry"), a Stoppard, a Bennett, and only the one Powell (who pronounced it "pole.")
But from Paine to Dickens, there have been Brits who've toured our humble little experiment in exceptionalism and found much of interest and comfort but not quite enough to keep them from returning home. To this category we must now add Stephen Fry who, like his great mentor and on-screen embodiment, has nothing to declare to Customs except his genius:
"Stephen Fry in America" is an outgrowth of a six-part BBC miniseries of the same name, and organization of the book is closely related to the show. Through nine months of filming, on and off, he at least sets foot in all 50 states, and often navigates American waters. He works a lobster boat off Eastport, Maine; sails off Newport, R.I. in an America's Cup winning vessel; canoes the Mississippi River; tours a nuclear submarine in Connecticut; ferries across Lake Champlain to New York; and swims with dolphins off Florida.
He also descends into a West Virginia coal mine, ascends in a hot-air balloon over North Carolina, goes hunting with plaid-wearing weekend warriors in upstate New York, canvasses New Hampshire with presidential hopeful Mitt Romney and does turning doughnuts on a Texas beach in his trademark London big black cab.
The coal mine was an act of all too obvious homage:
Then I had to open a new vein, or lode, which with a silver drill I brilliantly performed, amidst unanimous applause. The silver drill was presented to me and the lode named "The Oscar." I had hoped that in their simple grand way they would have offered me shares in "The Oscar," but in their artless untutored fashion they did not. Only the silver drill remains as a memory of my night at Leadville.
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