"Understatement is not a trick, not a literary device: it is a way of life."
George Mikes
There is a newspaper clip from the London Evening Standard, 6th of June 1944, framed in a pub I frequent. I didn't notice it at first; I was far too busy being busy, but then I did.
It reads, “Landings on the beaches are proceeding at various points at present…”
A framed print on a wall is easily missed, but imagine these words on paper between your hands, just picked up from the front step. You return to the table, slippers on your feet, buttered toast congealing next to cold coffee, the house quiet because you just sent your son/husband/brother et cetera et cetera off to conquer something they couldn’t describe, couldn’t articulate or in any way prepare for because they did not know themselves.
Neither did you. You are overwhelmed by the unknowing of it all.
Reread the words.
“Landings on the beaches are proceeding at various points at present…”
Furthermore:
“The obstacles constructed in the sea have not proved so difficult as was apprehended.”
It was D-Day, rewritten as an almost absurd understatement that provides minimum comfort to its reader, although, to be fair, not too much discomfort.
The lines invoke a wonderful truism coined by Hungarian immigrant George Mikes in his exploration of British culture: “The English have no soul: they have the understatement instead.”
Ah, the understatement. Something about the war, in particular, pulls out literary treachery that is the understatement (and bombastic, nationalistic overstatement):
“Six feet tall was not an ideal height for airplanes,” wrote Roald Dahl in his memoirs Going Solo upon arrival at the Royal Air Force training camp. Dahl was a whopping six feet six inches tall.
Not only was height not “ideal,” his size forfeited any comfort the little airplane might have afforded and made it almost inoperable. While flying on active duty in WWII, Dahl could only breathe with a scarf around his neck and face, ducking down into the cockpit occasionally to take breaths.
Six feet tall not ideal height for airplanes.
In the same period, he wrote to his mother, an individual of warm importance to Dahl throughout his life, “I’m having a lovely time; I never enjoyed myself so much. Flying is grand; instructors are terrific…It’s all great fun.”
Far be it from me to aim for anyone’s culture, especially one that I’ve come to love, so I’ll let Mikes do it instead:
The English have no soul: they have the understatement instead. If a continental youth wants to declare his love to a girl, he kneels down, and tells her that she is the sweetest, the most charming and ravishing person in the world […] In England, the boy pats her adored girl on the back and says softly: ‘I don’t object to you, you know.’
If he is pretty mad with passion, he might add: ’I rather fancy you, in fact.’
If he wants to marry a girl, he says: ’I say . . Would you?. .’
If he wants to make an indecent proposal: ‘I say . . . What about . . .?From George Mike’s How To Be a Brit
Mikes (pronounced Me-kesh) was born in 1912 in Hungary but lived his adult life in England as a journalist and writer. His outside-in perceptions might be correct. That is to say, he’s dead-on accurate.
In his insightful and occasionally self-excoriating memoirs, Englishman Stephen Fry also tosses out classically British gestures of affection and understatement like crumbs to pigeons. Like when his parents sent him off to boarding school 200 miles away at age 7 (a dramatic event for any child, stiff-upper-lip or not):
The loudness and hattedness of Other Parents were not conducive to the particular Fry tokens of love: tiny exertions of pressure on the hands and tight little nods of the head that stood for affection and deep, unspoken understanding. A slightly forced smile and bitten underlip aside Mummy always left the platform outwardly resolute, which was all that mattered.
From Stephen Fry’s Moab is My Washpot
Is Fry being understated about the lack of understatement from his parents? One imagines his actual feelings at the moment were significantly bolder, more profound, and messier.
A desire to reduce emotions to minimal bland words rather than swim their fullness. I recall a particular poem by the American poet Robert Lowell on his father's death. The latter was a man who never opened up about anything being remotely wrong and was heard to utter his dying words, “I don’t feel well.”
This gentle understatement not only caps off the poem but also caps off a life lived and extinguished.
Father’s death was abrupt and unprotesting,
His vision was still twenty-twenty.
After a morning of anxious, repetitive smiling,
His last words to Mother were:
‘I feel awful.’
From Robert Lowell’s “Terminal Days at Beverly Farms”
And then there is John Steinbeck, who wrote in his writing journals:
Let’s get down to earth. this book I’m working on is just a book like any other. Let’s work on it and not get wild. If it flops it flops, and that is that.
The “book” (which Steinbeck did not refer to as a “novel” until after it was published) was The Grapes of Wrath, one of the great American novels and the bedrock of Steinbeck’s Nobel Prize award two decades later. What can we read into his words? Was it understated grace or merely the dampening of expectations?
Perhaps individuals were expected to add a dose of humility when writing personal journals. Even Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius introduced his Meditations with a self-description: ‘a male, mature in years, a statesman, a Roman, a ruler.”
The fact that we are still reading this “ruler” today suggests more than a byline ever could. The understatement can indicate humility, thrift, and subterfuge (while all the while knowing the opposite to be confirmed). Perhaps Aurelius intended as much.
At the same time, the use of understatement, at least in Western cultures, owes less to cultural instinct and more to the fact that our human need to self-express is paired with language that lacks the sophistication to meet these self-expression needs.
“I’m fine, it’s fine” means the exact opposite. Do we have the language to say more? Do we have the language to listen?
There is a beautiful Welsh word, hireath, which loosely means an intense longing to return to a place of memory, almost paralyzing homesickness towards an inexpressible object. (A Welsh colleague informs me that even all these words do not come close to their meaning, and hireath does not exist in English.)
The French have a similar phrase, mal du pays. Which again refers to an impossible longing. How would those soldiers approach D-Day landings have described their emotions towards home, towards what was to come?
With images rather than words.
Language is a barometer of emotion, both felt and repressed, conscious and unconscious. It is a sophisticated and complex thing practiced by billions of people simultaneously to connect, commune, and exhale ourselves into one another. It measures the rise and fall of the human spirit through all the terabytes of time we call a life. It uses meaning, subtext, subterfuge, and precision.
What do we say when words fall short? When can we not accurately convey the full embodiment of a situation?
We bury this complicated, muddy, hairy, funny thing that is the entirety of emotional truth in mundane words and innocuous phrases. We verbally shrug off any hint of importance.
Or so it would seem.
What the British (and other cultures that regularly use understatements as a way of life) know is that often the understatement is so monotonous, so utterly stripped of accessory, that its very presence suggests – no, proves – something of significant meaning.
“Landings on the beaches are proceeding…”
“Six feet tall was not an ideal height for airplanes….”
“Is it any wonder that since then, sleep tends to elude me?” are the words written by Elie Wiesel about his first nights in Auschwitz after becoming aware that human beings were being thrown into furnaces. This knowledge, even writing years after the fact, eluded full expression. The first time I read that, the stark lack of emotion was so jarring, so unbelievably not enough.
The understatement, unique in this way, takes that rising and falling barometer of human beings and sets it to naught. No one would read these lines and imagine anything but a giant truth hiding behind the paltry wall of words. A big truth so beyond comprehension that language – Wiesel’s or anyone else’s – ill-prepared him to communicate. No one would fall to feel deeply upon hearing/reading Wiesel’s understatement, “sleep tends to elude me.”
His words were enough, after all.
The understatement is fine.
Do we do it in treachery? In cheek? Do we know that the understatement, by its very existence, suggests the presence of something even bigger unsaid? So is it laziness, or rather habit? An amygdala shutdown that overrides our articulation?
Yes? Yes. Some. All? Does it matter?
The understatement is delicate. That is to say; it does the job.