How To Be A Brit: by George Mikes.

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 How To Be A Brit: by George Mikes. 

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Discovering works of this author was a blessing when it happened at a time when one needed it most, what with difficult years ahead and not much to look back at either, and it was largely due to someone who brought sunshine and shade from glare, both; his brother working with Penguin in London, coupled with his own love of books that was independent of the brothers fortuitous job, amounted to his larger access to books, even though he didn't depend on the brother for more than occasional chat about Penguin publications. 

So I found a wonderful first, How To Be An Alien, and loved it, and was fortunate enough to find more wherever I could through next couple of decades or so - How to be Inimitable, How to Scrape Skies, How to Tango, The Land of the Rising Yen, How to Run a Stately Home (with the Duke of Bedford), Switzerland for Beginners, How to be Decadent, How to be Poor, How to be a Guru and How to be God by George Mikes. 

One that remains most in memory, is a chapter about currency in Israel, and its conclusion. 

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Unfortunately most of his works aren't available on Amazon, and it's unclear if that's because Penguin is unwilling to consider the loss for younger readers, or turns up their British nose, at a multinational concern that makes books available to readers at far less cost and trouble, than involved in going to a good bookstore after finding one that one can access, being able to order the books one wants and then having space enough at home to store them. 

One is fortunate enough to have found and read them long before the era of internet, but one would still like them on one's tab, apart from other excellent British authors - James Hilton, A. J. Cronin, Agatha Christie, P. G. Wodehouse, .... and yes, one is glad that classic authors such as Jane Austen, Bronte sisters and Thomas Hardy are available on internet, as are most living ones; but still, so should be these comparatively more recent ones, of early to middle decades of twentieth century. 

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Quoted, from blurb, of English Humour for Beginners: (by George Mikes):-

"George Mikes was born in 1912 in Siklós, Hungary. Having studied law and received his doctorate from Budapest University, he became a journalist and was sent to London as a correspondent to cover the Munich crisis. He came for a fortnight but stayed on and made England his home. During the Second World War he broadcast for the BBC Hungarian Service, where he remained until 1951. He continued working as a freelance critic, broadcaster and writer until his death in 1987. 

"English Humour for Beginners was first published in 1980, when Mikes had already established himself as a humorist as English as they come. His other books include How to be an Alien, How to Unite Nations, How to be Inimitable, How to Scrape Skies, How to Tango, The Land of the Rising Yen, How to Run a Stately Home (with the Duke of Bedford), Switzerland for Beginners, How to be Decadent, How to be Poor, How to be a Guru and How to be God. He also wrote a study of the Hungarian Revolution and A Study of Infamy, an analysis of the Hungarian secret political police system. On his seventieth birthday he published his autobiography, How to be Seventy."

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Quoted from Preface of How To Be A Brit: 

"Back in 1945, when André Deutsch was trying to build up a new publishing firm, he asked me if I had anything for him. I told him that I was fiddling about with some little essays which were linked by a basic idea: how to be an alien. Why I was staying on the Isle of Wight I can no longer remember, but I must have been doing so, or why would he have come there to collect the manuscript? 

"He enjoyed what he read, but told me that there was not enough of it for a book. So I sat down one afternoon and added five thousand more words. If anyone had said to me that I ought to take more trouble, since forty years later this book would still be selling about thirty thousand copies a year in paperback, not to mention going into a new hardback edition for which I would have to write a preface – well, I would have told that person, gently but firmly, that he or she ought to have his or her head examined. Indeed I would probably have said the same thing if told that I would still be here to write anything in forty years time, and that André would still be around – though disguised as a distinguished old boy – to publish it. 

"How to be an Alien was a cri de coeur, a desperate cry for help: oh God, look at me, I have fallen among strange people! ‘But it’s such a funny book,’ people say. Perhaps it is. I hope it is. But it’s not unknown for shrieks, moans, whoops and ululations to sound funny to the uninvolved. 

"In due course I added two further shrieks to that first one: How to be Inimitable in 1960, when we had started to slip but still had an Empire and refused to acknowledge much change; and How to be Decadent in 1977. All three books were illustrated by my great and much-missed friend, Nicolas Bentley. 

"During all those years since 1945, something rather curious was happening: as I strove to stop being an alien and to become a true Brit, Britain was striving to cast off its peculiar and lofty insularity and become one with the aliens, a part of the Continent (almost), just another member of the E.E.C. It often seems to me that I have failed in my endeavour; but compared with Britain I have succeeded gloriously. 

"GEORGE MIKES 

"April 1984"

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Quoted from my review, writtenduring the time I wrote what I thought of various books read over decades, as remembered after decades: 

Mikés has no equal when you would like an introduction to a country, a culture, with loads of on the mark observations and humour. How To Be An Alien is an excellent introduction to the whole series, probably not written as such but developed into one, with memorable books later on Israel, South America and so forth. About Germany there is a comparable one, written probably much earlier, by Jerome K. Jerome named Three Men On A Bummel, the sequel to his Three Men On A Boat (To say Nothing About The Dog). 

Still, that does not mean to say that there is any less of originality in Mikés version or less humour or less anything. Mikés is wonderful and incomparable in a way that is accessible to more readers, with a universal readability - while the earlier Jerome K. Jerome remains very English, which has a different flavour to be enjoyed.

October 16, 2008. 

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He begins with an almost unnoticeable reply to the title, printed high up in tiny letters on an otherwise blank page after the preface:-

"It’s easy"

and carries on to the next page with the opening chapter, nonchalantly. 

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Then comes preface to 24th impression. 

"The reception given to this book when it first appeared in the autumn of 1946, was at once a pleasant surprise and a disappointment for me. A surprise, because the reception was so kind; a disappointment for the same reason. 

"Let me explain. 

"The first part of this statement needs little amplification. Even people who are not closely connected with the publishing trade will be able to realize that it is very nice – I’m sorry, I’d better be a little more English: a not totally unpleasant thing for a completely unknown author to run into three impressions within a few weeks of publication and thereafter into another twenty-one. 

"What is my grievance, then? It is that this book has completely changed the picture I used to cherish of myself. This was to be a book of defiance. Before its publication I felt myself a man who was going to tell the English where to get off. I had spoken my mind regardless of consequences; I thought I was brave and outspoken and expected either to go unnoticed or to face a storm. But no storm came. I expected the English to be up in arms against me but they patted me on the back; I expected the British nation to rise in wrath but all they said, was: ‘quite amusing’. It was indeed a bitter disappointment. 

"While the Roumanian Radio was serializing (without my permission) How to be an Alien as an anti-British tract, the Central Office of Information rang me up here in London and asked me to allow the book to be translated into Polish for the benefit of those many Polish refugees who were then settling in this country. ‘We want our friends to see us in this light,’ the man said on the telephone. This was hard to bear for my militant and defiant spirit. ‘But it’s not such a favourable light,’ I protested feebly. ‘It’s a very human light and that is the most favourable,’ retorted the official. I was crushed. 

"A few weeks later my drooping spirit was revived when I heard of a suburban bank manager whose wife had brought this book home to him remarking that she had found it fairly amusing. The gentleman in question sat down in front of his open fire, put his feet up and read the book right through with a continually darkening face. When he had finished, he stood up and said: 

"‘Downright impertinence.’ And threw the book into the fire. 

"He was a noble and patriotic spirit and he did me a great deal of good. I wished there had been more like him in England. But I could never find another. 

"Since then I have actually written about a dozen books; but I might as well have never written anything else. I remained the author of How to be an Alien even after I had published a collection of serious essays. Even Mr Somerset Maugham complained about this type of treatment bitterly and repeatedly. Whatever he did, he was told that he would never write another Of Human Bondage; Arnold Bennett in spite of fifty other works remained the author of The Old Wives’ Tale and nothing else; and Mr Robert Graves is just the author of the Claudius books. These authors are much more eminent than I am; but their problem is the same. At the moment I am engaged in writing a 750-page picaresque novel set in ancient Sumeria. It is taking shape nicely and I am going to get the Nobel Prize for it. But it will be of no use: I shall still remain the author of How to be an Alien."

"‘When are you going to write another How to be an Alien?’ Deutsch and Bentley ask me from time to time and I am sure they mean it kindly. 

"They cannot quite make out the reply I mutter in answer to their friendly query. It is: 

"‘Never, if I can help it.’ 

"London, May 1958 

"GEORGE MIKES"

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Then comes the knockout preface, setting the tone for the book. 

"I believe, without undue modesty, that I have certain qualifications to write on ‘how to be an alien’. I am an alien myself. What is more, I have been an alien all my life. Only during the first twenty-six years of my life I was not aware of this plain fact. I was living in my own country, a country full of aliens, and I noticed nothing particular or irregular about myself; then I came to England, and you can imagine my painful surprise. 

"Like all great and important discoveries it was a matter of a few seconds. You probably all know from your schooldays how Isaac Newton discovered the law of gravitation. An apple fell on his head. This incident set him thinking for a minute or two, then he exclaimed joyfully: ‘Of course! The gravitation constant is the acceleration per second that a mass of one gram causes at a distance of one centimetre.’ You were also taught that James Watt one day went into the kitchen where cabbage was cooking and saw the lid of the saucepan rise and fall. ‘Now let me think,’ he murmured – ‘let me think.’ Then he struck his forehead and the steam engine was discovered. It was the same with me, although circumstances were rather different. 

"It was like this. Some years ago I spent a lot of time with a young lady who was very proud and conscious of being English. Once she asked me – to my great surprise – whether I would marry her. ‘No,’ I replied, ‘I will not. My mother would never agree to my marrying a foreigner.’ She looked at me a little surprised and irritated, and retorted: ‘I, a foreigner? What a silly thing to say. I am English. You are the foreigner. And your mother, too.’ I did not give in. ‘In Budapest, too?’ I asked her. ‘Everywhere,’ she declared with determination. ‘Truth does not depend on geography. What is true in England is also true in Hungary and in North Borneo and Venezuela and everywhere.’ 

"I saw that this theory was as irrefutable as it was simple. I was startled and upset. Mainly because of my mother whom I loved and respected. Now, I suddenly learned what she really was. 

"It was a shame and bad taste to be an alien, and it is no use pretending otherwise. There is no way out of it. A criminal may improve and become a decent member of society. A foreigner cannot improve. Once a foreigner, always a foreigner. There is no way out for him. He may become British; he can never become English. 

"So it is better to reconcile yourself to the sorrowful reality. There are some noble English people who might forgive you. There are some magnanimous souls who realize that it is not your fault, only your misfortune. They will treat you with condescension, understanding and sympathy. They will invite you to their homes. Just as they keep lap-dogs and other pets, they are quite prepared to keep a few foreigners. 

"The title of this book, How to be an Alien, consequently expresses more than it should. How to be an alien? One should not be an alien at all. There are certain rules, however, which have to be followed if you want to make yourself as acceptable and civilized as you possibly can. 

"Study these rules, and imitate the English. There can be only one result: if you don’t succeed in imitating them you become ridiculous; if you do, you become even more ridiculous."

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The illustrations are superb, beginning with the illustration of the last sentence above, regarding imitating and being ridiculous. 

My personal favourite has been the most memorable one of the English country gentleman chatting to his dog as they walk together, with the dog containing his wrath and suffering in silence. This illustration accompanies a two sentence chapter, about the proper English way, regarding treatment of intimate human companion versus that of one's dog. 

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Mikes goes on by beginning the book with elaborating on differences between English and continental people, customs, spirits, and so on. The high point is when an entire chapter consists of:- 

"Continental people have sex life; the English have hot-water bottles."

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One could go on, but the reader ought to have pleasure of reading the book. Oh, wait - no, one can't describe or quote his reference to the famous declaration by Queen Victoria about her not being amused; it has to be read in the original! 

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1975 - January 25, 2021.

Penguin Random House

ISBN: 978-0-141-92701-5

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