Okie Anglophilia

One of the first books I can remember buying Joey was England, England by Julian Barnes. I knew nothing about the book when I bought it, and I don't know much about it now. It was a case of judging a book by its cover, which I realize you're not supposed to do. I was browsing through some Barnes & Noble or Borders somewhere, looking for a gift for a brother whose tastes I but dimly understood (this was about eleven or twelve years ago, just as Joey and I were starting to show one another our adult selves), when I spotted a slim paperback decorated with a whimsical collage of English kitsch (Shakespeare's portrait, the Union Jack, Big Ben, a double-decker bus, etc.). The blurb on the front cover from the New York Times said, "Wickedly Funny," a blurb on the back cover from the San Francisco Chronicle called it "a wonderfully nasty satire," and that's pretty much all it took. I bought it because I liked to buy Joey gifts that were wickedly funny (or at least ones with pretensions to wicked funniness) and because I thought he probably enjoyed nasty satires, but in my memory the main reason I bought the book was because it was about England. Joey, I believed, had a thing for England.

Looking back, I really don't know why I thought this. I had recently spent a year in Ireland, and Joey and our mother had come out to visit me, but we didn't go to England on that trip. Joey had spent a few days in London during a high school trip, and he may have expressed a fondness for that city and a desire to return, but I really can't remember. (What I do remember is that on that same trip he had visited Paris, where he and a friend were ogled - or perhaps worse - by a creepy French guy in a Burger King bathroom. Or was it a McDonald's?) It may just be that I assumed he was interested in England because I was. Or it may be that England was a natural object of admiration for two boys trying to kick off the redneck dust of Oklahoma, a land of quirky sophistication to which our imaginations defaulted when we thought about places we'd rather be living, simultaneously familiar and exotic, sort of like France but without the foreign language requirement.

Whatever the reason, I bought him the book, and thus began the Doyle brothers' long and companionable romp through the garden of American Anglophilia. Ours was not the Windsors-and-Winston Anglophilia of the American mass media; we didn't give a toss about the Royals or Churchill, and Austen and Shakespeare were only nodding acquaintances. We preferred an altogether less obvious form of Albion-immersion: reading the latest Booker Prize winners, getting our news from the Guardian, listening to the Kinks and the Stone Roses (Joey loved the Kinks and the Stone Roses), posting jokey Facebook statuses about David Cameron and Nick Clegg, peppering our conversation with arch English slang. We renamed our mother's dog using the principles of cockney rhyming slang: his Christian name (of which we rather disapproved) was Blaze, so we rhymed it with glazed, and rechristened him Donut.

One of Joey's favorite Englishisms was "balls," as in "Oh balls!", a phrase spoken in frustration or dismay. It's a replacement for words like damn, crap, and so forth, and he frequently employed it while driving. He got the expression from me, and I got it from my college friend Raj, who picked it up during his junior year at the University of Bristol. It's a sort of riff on the much more common English expression, "bollocks!", but whereas "bollocks!" is too English-sounding and therefore too obvious, "balls!" is subtle and funny without sounding pretentious. This is the sort of thing we went for.

We never visited England together, but we did do so separately. In the summer of 2008, after exploring the Continent for a few weeks with me and Tina, Joey headed up to England on his own for a few days. He visited a friend in London, bashed off to Liverpool, and had some tips for me when I went to London in January 2009 to do research. He sent them to me in a longish email entitled "In Case Yer Not Feeling English Enough." Among other things, he pointed me toward a chocolate store at the Spitalfields Market (he called it Spittlefields); a pub called The George in the East End; and an Oxfam bookstore in Notting Hill where the clerk had agreed to knock two pounds off the price of two books when Joey didn't have enough cash. He also told me about a tweed-wearing man at the Oxfam store who complained loudly about the length of novels and proclaimed "there ought to be a tax." Joey said, "I got the feeling he was a regular." Joey was a fine connoisseur of used bookstores.

Of course, we consumed heaps of British popular culture. I had gone through an "All Things Great and Small" phase as a young boy; he went through a similar phase later in life. He told me how he regretted not seeing the movie "Notting Hill" on his first visit to London, when it was playing at the Notting Hill Cinema, and he subsequently developed a taste for charming English rom-coms,especially if they starred Hugh Grant. Approximately fifty percent of our music listening was done with British bands, and we both got sucked into cheesy British sci-fi (i.e., "Dr Who") through our geeky girlfriends. As with the occasional Anglisicism (not just balls but also dodgy, quid, loo,  knackered, wanker, and so on), allusions to these cultural objects infused our conversations and contributed to the brotherspeak in which we indulged whenever we were together. They were like a shared secret code.

Our transactions with England weren't identical, of course. I became, well, a British history professor (although my primary training as an Irish historian complicates the picture a little), and Joey became a great fan of English soccer (he was a Liverpool supporter). This led him to a more general interest in European and World Cup soccer, an interest I will never possess, although I do enjoy watching the odd match. I expect my career will continue to whip me through England with some frequency: I was just in Oxford last summer, on another research trip, and I even popped over to London one night to catch one of Joey's (and my) favorite bands, Okkervil River (who are, alas, from Texas). Prior to the show I ate a currywurst at a little German sausage shop called Herman Ze German on Villiers Street, and if I could have I would have sent Joey an email directly afterward recommending that he go there the next time he was in London. Joey loved a good currywurst.

But to return to Julian Barnes: I never did read England, England, but a few weeks ago I finished another book of his, Nothing to be Frightened Of. It's a nonfiction work, part memoir, part literary history, part meditation on mortality. Actually, it is all meditation on mortality - the memoir bits and the literary history bits are just different paths into the subject. It is the most death-focused thing I have ever read (and I say this as someone with a sub-specialty in genocide studies), and one of the most troubling, and one of the most reassuring. It begins as a set of reflections about the death of Barnes's parents, but it quickly becomes an exploration of the ways writers, philosophers, Christians, and scientists have tried to understand (and accept) death. It offers no easy uplift or cheap inspirationalism - the title is a play on words, for to Barnes death is precisely a "nothing" of which one should rightly "be frightened". Barnes is clear-eyed and frankly terrified about the prospect of his eventual annihilation, but he's also ironic and self-deprecating, wise, humane, practical, and open-minded the limitations of his own knowledge. Which is to say, he's very English about the whole thing. And as he tries to piece together his past, to make sense of his parents' death, and to understand his own mortality, he turns to his older brother, a philosopher living in France, who is unsentimental and (so he says) untroubled by the idea of his own extinction. At different points in the book the two brothers compare memories and ideas, and it becomes clear that they have spent their (now quite advanced) lives alternately bickering with and reinforcing one another's identities. They are not identical, but they share a nearly identical past, and that helps them situate themselves in the world.

It is a tremendously good book, and it made me want to read everything Julian Barnes has ever written. The first thing it led me to do was to listen to a recent (and rare) interview Barnes did with the Canadian Broadcast Corporation's "Writers and Company" radio program. I recommend it highly. Before long I will probably read Barnes's most recent book (the winner of this year's Booker), The Sense of an Ending, which explores the (often distorted) stories that we tell ourselves about our own lives. And someday I will find Joey's copy of England, England, which is almost certainly in our mother's attic, and I'll read that, too.