Bentley Nicolas - How to be a Brit

PENGUIN BOOKS

HOW TO BE A BRIT

George Mikes was born in 1912 in Sikls, Hungary. He studied law and received his doctorate in Budapest University. He became a journalist and was sent to London as a correspondent to cover the Munich crisis. He came for a fortnight but stayed on and made England his home. During the Second World War he broadcast for the BBC Hungarian Service where he remained until 1951. He continued working as a freelance critic, broadcaster and writer until his death in 1987.

In 1946 he published How to be an Alien which went into thirty editions and identified the author as a humorist, although he had not intended the book to be funny. His other books include bber Alles, Little Cabbages, Shakespeare and Myself, Italy for Beginners, How to Unite Nations, How to be Inimitable, How to Scrape Skies, How to Tango, The Land of the Rising Yen, How to Run a Stately Home (with the Duke of Bedford), Switzerland for Beginners, How to be Decadent, Tsi-Tsa, English Humour for Beginners, How to be Poor, How to be a Guru and How to be God. He wrote a study of the Hungarian Revolution and is also the author of A Study of Infamy, an analysis of the Hungarian secret political police system, Arthur Koestler: The Story of a Friendship and The Riches of the Poor: A Journey round the World Health Organization. On his seventieth birthday, in 1982, he published his autobiography, How to be Seventy.

Nicolas Bentley was born in Highgate in 1907 and educated at University College School, London, and Heatherley School of Art. He was an artist, author, publisher and illustrator of more than sixty books including works by Hilaire Belloc, T. S. Eliot, Damon Runyon, Lawrence Durrell and many others. He died in 1978.

GEORGE MIKES

Nicolas Bentley drew the pictures

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How to be an Alien first published by Andr Deutsch 1946

Published in Penguin Books 1966

Copyright 1946 by George Mikes and Nicolas Bentley

How to be Inimitable first published by Andr Deutsch 1960

Published in Penguin Books 1966

Copyright George Mikes and Nicolas Bentley, 1960

How to be Decadent first published by Andr Deutsch 1977

Published in Penguin Books 1981

Copyright George Mikes, 1977

Published in one volume as How to be a Brit by Andr Deutsch 1984

Published in Penguin Books 1986

Copyright George Mikes, 1984

All rights reserved

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-192701-5

Back in 1945, when Andr Deutsch was trying to build up a new publishing firm, he asked me if I had anything for him. I told him that I was fiddling about with some little essays which were linked by a basic idea: how to be an alien. Why I was staying on the Isle of Wight I can no longer remember, but I must have been doing so, or why would he have come there to collect the manuscript?

He enjoyed what he read, but told me that there was not enough of it for a book. So I sat down one afternoon and added five thousand more words. If anyone had said to me that I ought to take more trouble, since forty years later this book would still be selling about thirty thousand copies a year in paperback, not to mention going into a new hardback edition for which I would have to write a preface well, I would have told that person, gently but firmly, that he or she ought to have his or her head examined. Indeed I would probably have said the same thing if told that I would still be here to write anything in forty years time, and that Andr would still be around though disguised as a distinguished old boy to publish it.

How to be an Alien was a cri de coeur, a desperate cry for help: oh God, look at me, I have fallen among strange people! But it's such a funny book, people say. Perhaps it is. I hope it is. But it's not unknown for shrieks, moans, whoops and ululations to sound funny to the uninvolved.

In due course I added two further shrieks to that first one: How to be Inimitable in 1960, when we had started to slip but still had an Empire and refused to acknowledge much change; and How to be Decadent in 1977. All three books were illustrated by my great and much-missed friend, Nicolas Bentley.

During all those years since 1945, something rather curious was happening: as I strove to stop being an alien and to become a true Brit, Britain was striving to cast off its peculiar and lofty insularity and become one with the aliens, a part of the Continent (almost), just another member of the E.E.C. It oftens seems to me that I have failed in my endeavour; but compared with Britain I have succeeded gloriously.

GEORGE MIKES April 1984

A HANDBOOK FOR BEGINNERS AND ADVANCED PUPILS

I have seen much to hate here, much to forgive. But in a world where England is finished and dead, I do not wish to live.

ALICE DUER MILLER : The White Cliffs

It's easy

T HE reception given to this book when it first appeared in the autumn of 1946, was at once a pleasant surprise and a disappointment for me. A surprise, because the reception was so kind; a disappointment for the same reason.

Let me explain.

The first part of this statement needs little amplification. Even people who are not closely connected with the publishing trade will be able to realize that it is very nice I'm sorry, I'd better be a little more English: a not totally unpleasant thing for a completely unknown author to run into three impressions within a few weeks of publication and thereafter into another twenty-one.

What is my grievance, then? It is that this book has completely changed the picture I used to cherish of myself. This was to be a book of defiance. Before its publication I felt myself a man who was going to tell the English where to get off. I had spoken my mind regardless of consequences; I thought I was brave and outspoken and expected either to go unnoticed or to face a storm. But no storm came. I expected the English to be up in arms against me but they patted me on the back; I expected the British nation to rise in wrath but all they said, was: quite amusing. It was indeed a bitter disappointment.