Today I want to introduce an old friend of mine — the book, not the writer, whom sadly I never met. Margaret Halsey published With Malice Toward Some in 1938, based on letters that Halsey (an American) wrote to her family when she and her husband lived in England.
The book is a fond, acerbic, bemused and sometimes who-are-these-people look at the English of the late 1930’s. I’ve probably read this book a dozen times, and I still laugh out loud. I like that it is often pointed but never mean-spirited: I hate the irony of our current days in which something must be hurtful in order to establish the writer as a person of “wit.” There’s enough real contempt and diminishment of others in the world, why should anyone make a career out of it?
And Halsey’s a good writer: concise, observant, a wonderful sense of rhythm, and the ability (that I especially prize in writers) to be particular; to create moments that feel alive and immediate seventy years later. She fell in love with the English countryside and many of the people. She hated the food, marveled at the social customs, and found herself constantly surprised by the reality of a culture whose differences were far greater than she had expected. The Peg Halsey of this book is a vibrant, funny woman, curious and open and adventurous. She’s alive in her world, and it’s fun to be there with her.
My plan over the next little while is to occasionally share some of Halsey’s pithier moments with you, just because I like them and hope they will please you. It’s no bad thing to start a Monday with a smile.
June 7th
While Henry has gone to buy chocolate bars and reading matter, I am sitting in the waiting room of the Southampton station of the Southern Railway. My eyes, I am afraid, are going to fall right out of their sockets before the end of the day — I have been looking at everything so strenuously. It took a long while to get off the boat, and involved a great deal of standing in line and filling out cards and blanks. There is something about filling out printed forms which arouses lawless impulses in me and makes me want to do things that will have the file clerks sitting up with a jerk, like putting in
RELIGION……Druid…..
Today, when one of my blanks said OCCUPATION, I wrote down none, though I suspected this would not do. A severe but courteous official confirmed this impression. So I crossed it out and wrote parasite, which, not to be too delicate about it, is what I am. This made the official relax a little and he himself put housewife in what space there was left. “Be a prince,” I said, “Make it typhoid carrier.” But he only smiled and blotted out parasite so that it would not show.
— from With Malice Toward Some by Margaret Halsey
And this one’s for Nicola, who had remarkably similar experiences from the other direction when she first visited America. Ask her sometime about the salad dressing. Or the vinegar.
June 8th
Today Henry and I and some of the faculty from the college lunched at an Exeter restaurant. It was a bad lunch, half cold and wholly watery, and in order to keep body and soul together, I asked for a glass of milk. The waitress was staggered.
“Milk?” she said incredulously.
“Why, yes,” I replied, almost equally incredulously. “A glass of milk.”
She wheeled off in the direction of the kitchen. In three minutes she was back again.
“Please,” she asked, “do you want this milk hot or cold?”
I blinked a little and said I wanted it cold. The Englishmen who were with us looked amused. “You Americans,” one of them said, with a spacious tolerance. We resumed our conversation, and in a short space the waitress made a third appearance. She had a hounded expression.
“Do you,” she inquired desperately, “want this milk in a cup or a glass?”
“Just roll it up in a napkin,” I answered thoughtlessly, and then was sorry, seeing how embarrassed and confused she was. I started to make amends, but she suddenly bolted and I never saw her again. Another waitress came to take the dessert order, and the milk project was tacitly abandoned.
— from With Malice Toward Some by Margaret Halsey
Enjoy your day.
This got me chuckling! Thanks, Kelley.
My pleasure! I always wonder what the actual English will think of things like this.
I’m ashamed to say I had forgotten about Peg Halsey, and I’m so sorry to find that she has died. I remember buying a used copy of “With Malice Toward Some” from the used-book table at the University of Tampa annual book sale back in the 1970s. I still have that book. One of my favorite entries is later that same June 7th Sunday. She is walking through Salisbury Cathedral (pages 11-12). She says … “Mine is not a tender nature, and ordinarily there is the same amount of sentiment in my disposition that there is in Caesar’s Commentaries, but I have a sense of the past which could be laid out flat and made up into awnings. There is no stained, battered, worn-down, gouged-out, hard-featured chair or table I will not have a fondness for, if I am assured it is an antiquity, and to stand on a piece of pavement which is being held up by the three remaining handfuls of Jane Austen or Edward the Confessor seems to me a breathtaking privilege.”
T and I went to see Easy Virtue this past weekend and your post is right in tune so enjoy. I do believe Noel Coward is making a comeback this summer. Oh yeah, this clip is truncated but there is a longer version somewhere.
And I was a Neo Druid all through college.
Mum, I almost quoted that passage in the post because it’s just so wonderful — thanks for adding it here. I’ve got about halfway through the book now (for the umpteenth time), and keep laughing out loud and reading bits out to Nicola, who by the seventh round or so is visibly being patient, bless her. I do love this book.
rhbee, lovely scene, thanks for the clip. I will look forward to the movie.
I love the tango. I dislike the dance competition “production tangos,” but the dance itself is something fabulous between two people who a) can do it and b) really mean it.
I enjoyed these too. In fact I ordered the book. Someone took the time to upload a picture of it here.
Oh cool! I hope you enjoy the book.
The sad/amusiing part of her observations is that it really hasn’t changed. I lived in the UK till I was 19; took the kids over there for 2-3 years on the 90’s & lived in a small village outside of Hexham in Northumberland, close to Hadrian’s Wall. Newbrough had a couple of old streets with stone houses and a later , perhaps 60’s, suburban addition of 2 or 3 more short streets. There’s an ancient pub on the corner at the crossroads and opposite the pub, the old manor house where Lady Ord was still living… The pub had kennels at the back which housed the beagles for the local hunt. Lady Ord had an old, white mare & was ancient herself but still rode to hunt – slowly. ; ) When she rode past the villagers would all doff their caps or tug their forelocks – I was literally astounded.
The kids were still in primary school and had been used to informal Aussie ways – you can imagine the contrast with the schools over there. They were called by their surnames, punished if their socks were dropping or if they “daydreamed” in class. The books set for English lit were the exact same books I’d been set 30 yrs previously – there was NO modern literature on the curriculum.
One more briefly – a friend of Ingrid’s lived in the South Tyne valley where her family had farmed for generations. The farm was a show-piece – beautiful enclosed garden, immaculate fields and out-buildings. The whole South Tyne valley though, still belongs to Lord Allendale and has done since Magna Carta – so that family and all of the other landholders in the valley who improve and nurture the land can never “own” their farms. It’s a common story.
I was so frustrated living there, I think the other women in the village saw me as an outrageous rebel – and really, I’m not…
Thank you for this treat! A friend suggested this book just a week ago. Hard to find but found your blog which will have to tide me over till my used copy comes in the mail. Am the American wife of an Englishman (living in US) and love these stories. And this one sounds like a hoot! Thanks for sharing tidbits.
My copy arrived in the mail! Cover is different to the one Jennifer posted a picture of. Mine is a 1959 reprint and has this delightful note on the cover, “Still teh freshest, wittiest, and most readable introduction you can find to the English and certain of their neighbors.” That last bit is a hoot! And today I came across the article in the NY Times from just after her death in 1997. Here’s a link: http://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/07/arts/margaret-halsey-86-a-writer-who-lampooned-the-english.html
I discovered Margaret Halsey through Florence King, who does similar things with her native culture, the American South, in Southern Ladies and Gentlemen and in her delightful memoir, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady.
And another hilarious look at the British is Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island. Bryson lived there for several decades and married an English woman.