“They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.” Ian McEwan’s 2007 novel On Chesil Beach sets out a familiar stall in its opening lines. The story revolves around a fateful night of non-consummation between newlyweds, played in the new movie adaptation by Billy Howle and Saoirse Ronan. We have seen their condition many times before: it’s called Englishness. It begins with a stiffness of the upper lip but soon extends to the entire host organism.
In her 2004 book Watching the English, social anthropologist Kate Fox identified the symptoms as “discomfort and incompetence in the field (minefield) of social interactions … embarrassment, insularity, awkwardness, perverse obliqueness, emotional constipation, fear of intimacy and general inability to engage in a normal and straightforward fashion with other human beings.” As the newlyweds of On Chesil Beach well know, it is not sexually transmitted.
It is no coincidence that On Chesil Beach is set in 1962, the year before poet Philip Larkin famously thought we’d cured this condition by inventing sexual intercourse. But the English disease continues to be transmitted via prestige cultural products (Booker-grade literature, polite period dramas, class-fixated miniseries). In the 1980s and 90s, it was incubated in the films of Merchant Ivory, such as Room With a View, Howards End and The Remains of the Day. From there, it was carried into the present day by the likes of Hugh Grant, Jeremy Irons, Emma Thompson and Ralph Fiennes. Not to mention authors such as McEwan and Julian Barnes, whose respective stories Atonement and The Sense of an Ending also dealt with repression and its tragic consequences.
Then there is Daniel Day-Lewis, who portrayed the magnificently stiff Cecil Vyse in Merchant Ivory’s A Room With a View (compared to his excruciating kiss with Helena Bonham Carter, On Chesil Beach is the Kama Sutra). In last year’s Phantom Thread he displays a more monstrous variation of the condition: he’s outwardly charming but fastidious and repressive, intolerant of confrontation or loud toast-crunching, and abetted by the withering looks of his sister, played by Lesley Manville.
These movies often hark back to the 1940s’ golden age of English movie stiffness; classics such as Brief Encounter and A Matter of Life and Death, where the romance is all the more passionate for being constrained by clipped vowels and terriblay correct manners. But looking around today, you would never guess Larkin’s 1963 watershed ever happened. You’d never realise we’d had A Hard Day’s Night, or kitchen-sink dramas, or film-makers such as Ken Russell, Nicolas Roeg, Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman, or even Mike Leigh, whose Mr Turner gave us an altogether earthier version of 19th-century England. All of them helped unbutton the national character, but in our fixation with all things past and posh, we’ve buttoned it back up and made it our national export.
Intriguingly, it is often outsiders who are best placed to deal with the affliction of Englishness. Ismail Merchant and James Ivory’s position as both foreigners and closeted gay men gave them a certain perspective on it. Remains of the Day was written by the Anglo-Japanese Kazuo Ishiguro, with the butler portrayed by Anthony Hopkins, who is Welsh. On screen, Judi Dench’s Queen Victoria has twice been cured, first by Scot Billy Connolly in Mrs Brown, then by her Indian subject Ali Fazal in Victoria & Abdul. None of this is to deny that this aspect of the English character has some basis in reality, but in constantly re-examining it, we are endlessly perpetuating it.
On Chesil Beach is in UK cinemas from 18 May
