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I Discover the English (1934)

by Odette Keun

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314,093,212 (2.25)3
Recently added bybluepiano, thorold
1930s (1) Britain (1) comic (1) eng (1) essays (1) ger (1) illus (1) London (1) socialism (1) stories (1) travel (2)
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I'd no idea who Odette Keun was when I bought this book because of its intriguing title and because it was a pre-war Tauchnitz edition — with their dire warnings against attempting to import them into the UK and their blurb text in three languages, these English-language paperbacks published in Leipzig have a kind of exotic period charm.

It turns out that she's still a pretty elusive person to track down, even in this age of Google and Wikipedia. It's easy enough to find out that she was the lover of H.G. Wells from about 1923-1932 and that they lived together in a villa near Grasse in the south of France, entertaining the literary elite of the day. But the rest is rather vague and sometimes contradictory. She was Dutch; her father was a French diplomat; she was born in Turkey; she was an Austrian writer (the one "fact" about her that seems to be genuinely wrong); she was a journalist and possibly a spy during the First World War; she was a communist and involved in the Russian revolution; she spent some time in Tiflis in Georgia; she was a prisoner of the Cheka ...

In 1934, when she wrote this book, she was in her late forties, and had just finished training as a nurse in a Swiss hospital with the idea of setting up a District Nurse scheme in an unidentified British colony (somewhere in Africa?). This scheme seems to have fizzled out from lack of official support, and as far as you can tell from the book (she's a bit vague about it), she had come to London to take a further medical training course of some kind (at the London Polytechnic?) and to do volunteer social work in poor districts.

The book is pretty much what it says: an account of England (or rather: London) and its people as seen by an intelligent Continental visitor. There's a lot of trivial stuff: London bus conductors and shop assistants are much politer than their colleagues in Paris; English cooking is a crime against humanity; the men are addicted to sloppy casual dress; the women wear good clothes badly; London architecture is unfailingly dreary; houses are impossible to live in because of the prejudice against central heating that necessitates an inefficient open coal fire in every room, with its attendant dirt and cold draughts. Exactly the sort of thing you would expect from a French bourgeoise.

But she also gets beyond this sort of superficiality occasionally, for instance when she's comparing an afternoon of enjoyable heckling at Speakers' Corner (delightfully described) to the much more serious politics that goes on in the "real world", or when she's talking about the way people live in the poorer quarters of London, or the way British squeamishness about sex means that although it's one of the very few countries in Europe where there are no political or religious obstacles to birth control, young people still have to find out the hard way because their teachers and parents won't enlighten them. Speaking of sex, Keun confirms the French belief that English men are no good in bed with an air of authority that strongly suggests her practical research wasn't limited to one elderly English novelist. She mentions showing her draft chapter on sex for comment to a wide selection of Englishmen (including the gasman and a man from the council who came about the bins), but she doesn't say whether she put them to a practical test...

Ultimately, she finds London a very agreeable, relaxing place to be, but feels that there's an element of escapism about the British way of life. They aren't fully grown-up, she feels; they can't take decisions; they don't have strong emotions.

An interesting and amusing period piece, but it probably won't tell you anything very new about London in the thirties.

PS:
A colleague has now pointed me to a useful article about Keun by Ruud Beeldsnijder in the journal Onvoltooid Verleden (February 1999). Apparently she was Dutch, but from a predominantly French-speaking expat family. She grew up in Turkey, was educated in an Ursuline convent in Holland and spent two years as a Dominican novice in France, but gave that up to travel. In 1920 she went to Georgia, becoming a close ally to the revolutionary government there, trying to drum up sympathy for them in the West by her writings. She wasn't very successful in this, but she did evidently manage to annoy British intelligence. When she visited Istanbul in 1921 they arrested her, confiscated her notes and Dutch passport, and put her on the first boat to Russia, where she spent some months as a prisoner of the Cheka before she was able to make contact with the Georgian mission in Moscow and return to Tiflis. In early 1922, after considerable diplomatic pressure from the Dutch government, the British allowed her to return to the West (but tried to get the Italians to arrest her instead). With this in mind, it's remarkable that she had arrived at a relatively positive view of the British only ten years later, and in fact lived in Britain from 1939 until her death in 1978. ( )
2 vote thorold | Jan 23, 2012 |
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