With the distance provided by a few years spent in America, I can better understand what some of my German or French acquaintances have always complained about: the English being reclusive, London a dirty, expensive, overcrowded mess, and so on.

And yet, London — or rather, my London — hasn't changed all that much. I still have a romantic idea of the city and of what constitutes being English, while I'm fully aware that I'm not and never will be; one can become American but one can never become English. My idea of Englishness is quite different from conservative images of England in the good old days of empire, even though it may have similar cultural roots. It is much more an impression of the heart, as it were, than one derived from reality or even from books and films.

This dawned on me when I read, just before returning to London, my friend Karl Heinz Bohrer's memoir Granatsplitter ("Shrapnel"). Now one of Germany's leading intellectuals, he first visited England as a young man and much later settled there. Our experiences couldn't be more different. Bohrer came to the country soon after the war and was most impressed by the serenity of the English, by a certain manliness and panache combined with a comforting sense of stuffiness. (When he is introduced to Laurence Olivier at a swanky dinner party, he tells the great actor with touching, if slightly clumsy, formality: "I like you very much.") 

And yet, there are aspects of Englishness that I can relate to, even if they are clearly no longer extant as a cultural norm: the sense of being in a world that is appealing because it is so foreign and exclusive — the opposite of embracing. While I suspect that the downright welcoming atmosphere one finds in America is more appealing (and probably healthier, too), I'm happy to have made it through England's rites of passage, if only because it brought me closer to myself.