Dear Nick:

Thanks for your February 9 post. How can I help get you out of your editor’s chair for just long enough each week to write regularly? You have a fan here. And I’m not alone.

I will for quite a long time owe you conversational royalties for the line about good writers as “people who can use the English language in ways that we should want to remember.” I especially appreciated the use of the imperative there.

[Note to readers of this open post: No, Nick does not sign my checks, so don’t even think that I have any other agenda here than the one plainly stated. Ahem.]

Now to your central point, as I understand it, that “within the structure of our popular culture, class has been obliterated. We, regardless of our income, watch the same shows and films, listen to the same music, go to the same clubs (in atmosphere, if not exactly the same ones), do the same drugs, etc.” British authors, as you say, “won’t let this idea go.”

Two things.

Thing one: they can’t, and they probably won’t. Because for good or ill the issue remains a constitutive element of the very cultural air breathed there, popular and not — with the same sort of effects as CO concentrations over London have on the public health. With the same historical sources, and probably just as long-lasting.

Thing two: in that sense, class issues in the UK probably have their closest US analog in race. With the same sort of long-lasting distortions of any notion we might otherwise harbor of our common humanity.

Okay, three things.

Thing three: I’ve often wondered, as you do, about why we play and replay, to significant box offices, viewership and readership those scenes with Lord Larry — PBS is now even now assembling UK productions of some classic screen texts as “The Complete (or is it “Compleat?”) Jane Austen — when, after all, the Lord Larrys and our heroines’ predicaments have long since turned to vapor.

I have a hunch, but I’d like your take on this, that we simply do not know how to give proper names to the contemporary forms that distortions to our common humanity take under the influence of fundamental social divisions. We knew the shape they took then, though, and perhaps there’s a slim hope that we’ll learn something about now from the then. Or take strength from our heroines, less victims than fighters.

And so, here, we will watch replays of “From Montgomery to Memphis” a few more than a half-dozen times this month.


Posted by
G.E. “Skip” Lawrence