#1925Club: Karel Čapek’s Letters from England

Karel Čapek’s Letters from England (1925)

“’You must begin from the beginning,’ I was advised, but as I have now been for ten days on this Babel of an island the beginning has got lost. What am I to begin with? Fried bacon, or the Exhibition at Wembley? Mr. Shaw, or the London policemen?”

That is how Letters from England begins: with a question, a touch of irony, and a hint of affectionate confusion.

When I first opened the book, having just finished Still William, I was amused to read his account of the Wembley Exhibition of 1924.This was the spectacle that William and his Outlaw gang try to imitate as a money-making scheme with predictably hilarious results.

Karel  Čapek (1890-1938) is usually best remembered for coining the word robot in his play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). He was already one of Czechoslovakia’s leading writers when he visited Britain in 1924. His Letters from England, was first serialized in Lidové noviny, a Czech daily newspaper and was published in book form in 1925. It records his visit in a series of witty and reflective sketches – a blend of travelogue, essay, social commentary, and gentle satire.

Toward the end of his life, Radio Prague’s Oswald Bamborough reported on his latest work The White Disease, a 1937 play sending up Nazi Germany.

“The theme of the play is this. A terrible unknown malady, a kind of white leprosy, has attacked humanity. The only medical man in the world to find a remedy for the disease has a profound hatred for warfare. He refuses to part with the secret of his discovery unless the nations of the world agree to perpetual peace.”

The Letters

Each “letter”  is a chapter that captures a facet of British life: London’s fog and traffic, Oxford’s timeless rituals, the gardens behind suburban houses, the grim sprawl of East London, the beauty and poverty of the Scottish Highlands, North Wales, Exeter and Dartmoor. Čapek’s tone is humorous and humane. He writes as a philosopher-observer, more interested in national temperament than in politics. His book is illustrated with his own pen-and-ink drawings, which add a light, personal touch to his commentary.

London 
Čapek’s first impressions are vivid and contradictory. He is astonished to find that “England is really so English.” The countryside seems “like a depopulated park,” while London strikes him as “a jumble of architectural styles with a distinctive smell.”

“As regards London itself, it smells of petrol, burnt grass, and tallow, thus differing from Paris, where unto these are added the odour of powder, coffee, and cheese. In Prague each street has a different smell; in this respect there is no place to beat Prague.”

London, he says, is less a city than “a kind of vast and misty landscape… even the monuments are modest, as though afraid of disturbing the fog.” Čapek captures both the grandeur and the reticence of the capital – a place that seems monumental and self-effacing at once.

He is amazed by the traffic.

The Sights

Čapek tours London’s museums, Madame Tussaud’s, Kew Gardens, the Zoo, and Richmond Park, where he notices both deer and courting couples. His amusement fades when he visits the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley.

This spectacle – a “commercial cornucopia” of imperial products – leads him, half in jest, to wish for “a machine gun” to clear a path through the mobs of schoolchildren. But his real criticism is moral: amid all the merchandise, the “spirit of the four hundred million coloured people” of the Empire is entirely absent. “Everything is here,” he writes, “except the spirit.” The exhibition is a tribute to trade, not people. 

He finds the traditional English Sunday very dull until he discovers Speakers’ Corner at Hyde Park with its ranters, ravers, preachers and backdrop of sheep. He makes a disparaging comment about the sound of women’s public speaking voices. 

The East End
data-start=”1957″ data-end=”2245″>His visit to East London reveals a grimmer side of the capital—“miles and miles of grimy houses, hopeless streets, Jewish shops, gin palaces, and Christian shelters.” He is appalled by its unending poverty: “The horrible thing in East London is not what can be seen and smelt, but its unbounded and unredeemable extent.”

English gardens
He is taken by the national devotion to gardening:

“Every Englishman has a little corner of paradise behind his house. It is not big, but it is loved… This is not vanity, nor display; it is simply love.”

For Čapek, the English garden is a private Eden – an emblem of contentment, modesty, and domestic peace.

English reserve
He describes the English as restrained but dependable:

“The Englishman does not embrace, does not exclaim, does not gesticulate. But if he takes you by the hand once, he will take you by the hand again; and if he smiles at you once, it will be the same smile for ever.”

Their emotions, he notes, “are not loud, but they are steady.” His tone is gently humorous, yet genuinely admiring.

Cambridge, Oxford, the North, and on to Scotland.

He continues north to Cambridge,

Oxford and the industrial regions, before reaching Scotland.

“Oxford is like a museum where everything is still alive,” he writes. “It is the art of not changing while the world changes around you.”

He sees in Oxford both continuity and absurdity – the ability to preserve the past by turning it into daily ritual.

In Scotland, he admires Edinburgh and the austere beauty of the Highlands, describing Skye as “beautiful and poverty-stricken… the huts so prehistoric they might have been built by the late Picts.”

North Wales

“In other respects Wales is by no means so strange and terrible as its place-names. One place is called Penmaenmawr, and the only things there are quarries and the seaside. I do not know why some names produce a magical effect on me ; I had to have a look at Llandudno and I was profoundly de¬ pressed ; firstly, it is pronounced otherwise, and then it is only a pile of hotels, rocks and sand, just like any other seaside resort of this island. So I crept down to Carnarvon, the chief town of the Welsh ; it is so far away that the people in the post office there know nothing about our country, and at seven o’clock no evening meal is to be had there. I do not know why I spent two whole days in such a place. There is a very old castle of the princes of Wales there ; I should have drawn it, but I could not get it on to the paper ; so I drew at least one tower of it, where an autonomous parliament of jack¬ daws was just sitting. Never have I seen and heard so many jackdaws ; I tell you, you really must go to Carnarvon.”

Harbours

He has definite opinions about harbours:

“The finest one is Plymouth, which is beautifully bored out between rocks and islands, and where they have an old harbour in the Barbican with real sailors, fishermen and black barks, and a new harbour beneath the Hoe promenade with captains, statues and striped lighthouse.”

And lots to say about the writers with whom he met and stayed including H.G.Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and G.K.Chesterton.

Čapek’s book belongs to a long tradition of works in which foreigners comment on the British and their peculiarities and eccentricities. It reminds me a little of Yoshio Markino, with his affectionate portrayals of British – especially London – eccentricities, and his expressed fondness for their ways and their weather, especially the fog!  Markino, of course, was the finer artist. The Hungarian George Mikes continued the tradition with How to Be an Alien in 1946, and decades later Bill Bryson made his own contribution with Notes from a Small Island in the 1980s.

Robert Burns said it best:

This is my fifth post  for the #1925Club hosted by Stuck in a Book and Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings.
The other four are Gentlemen Prefer Blondes , Still William.. Witness for the Prosecution, and Collected Poems of H.D..