19 October 2014 Last updated at 00:01

A Point of View: Why are our

obsessions never the things we're
best at?

The English love football, but it doesn't love them back, says Adam
Gopnik. Why are our obsessions never the things we're best at?
I am back in London, a city I love - love more, I think sometimes, than the
people who live in it do these days - and where I've lived at times in my
life, and where my football club, Chelsea, now reigns. When I first
supported Chelsea, back in 1973, the side was made up of pale-faced

Englishmen and ruddy-faced Scots. They all wore tiny, tight shorts and
had that strange shaggy, discouraging 70s hair - mullets, they were
called. You only had to watch them, on a smoky Saturday morning, to tell
at once that they had been raised to a peak of fitness on diets of beer,
bad whiskey and boiled potatoes, each provided extra pace by a
pack-a-day cigarette habit. They were thrilling until, loaned to their
national sides, they played other countries and you found that they
weren't, really. It didn't seem to matter.
Now Chelsea is owned by a billionaire from Russia and made up of
several millionaires from Spain and West Africa, with a couple of
Englishmen left over to cower on the sidelines, wearing fake suntans
and curly black wigs and hoping to be taken for Brazilians. This strikes
me as a completely positive change, making them much more exciting to
watch - but some of the local flavour is gone, including the peculiar local
flavour of not being very good.

Chelsea squad 1972: "made up of pale-faced Englishmen and ruddy-faced Scots"

My enthusiasm means that I end up talking to my London friends a lot

about football, and I am struck to find them still just a bit aggrieved about
England's failure in this past summer's World Cup, even though it was
indistinguishable from England's failures at the previous 12 World Cups.
The reason for this is apparent to me, at least, and I have shared it with
my English friends, though for some reason they seem reluctant to
embrace it.
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A Point of View is usually broadcast on Fridays on Radio 4 at 20:50 BST and repeated
Sundays, 08:50 BST
Adam Gopnik writes for The New Yorker
Or listen to A Point of View on the iPlayer
BBC Podcasts - A Point of View

It is simple. The English lose at football games because they are not
good at playing football. They think they are because they are very good
at watching football. That's a skill unto itself. When I follow the Guardian
live football blogs, the jokes are terrific - far better than they ever are in
the parallel French football blogs. But England loses all the same. Simon
Gray, in one of his wonderful diaries, describes observing the poet and
editor Ian Hamilton's passionate, self-annihilating habits of watching
Spurs. A Parisian playwright and a Parisian editor would never do that
together - none of them, or very few, live and die with Paris Saint
Germain. The English football lovers convince themselves that their
passion for football is so intense that it must express itself on the pitch. It
doesn't. The intensity of their attachment to watching makes them
naturally assume that their fellow-countrymen are equally good at
playing. They aren't. But the illusion persists. It will rise again in four
years.
This is, I think, a general principle. I am on my way shortly to my
previous hometown of Paris. Now, nothing is truer than that the French
love writers and admire literature. To be a writer in France is to be
blessed with a reverence that no British or American writer can ever
hope to attain except in France. Yet, let us be honest, you probably have
not actually read a novel by a working French novelist in a long time though you may well have read in college an obscure bit of French
theory about books by a French book theorist. The French talk

spellbindingly about great literature more often than they actually make
it.

Nobel prizes notwithstanding, are the French better readers than writers?

The French, right now, are not very good at writing books. But they are
matchlessly good at being literary. This is why, as happened just this
week, they keep winning the Nobel Prize for Literature even though the
writers who win it are the authors of extremely - and, it must be said,
often deservedly - obscure books. The last French Nobel laureate, for
instance, was an exceptionally tall man, who spoke six languages, and
looked like a cross between Henry Fonda and Max Von Sydow. I was
delegated to interview him for PEN, the writers organisation, when he
came to New York and I barely came up to his shoe tops. In my best
double breasted suit, I looked like a ring boy at a wedding. He was
eloquent, gently humorous, and truly planetary in consciousness. I would
have voted for him in a second as President of World Literature - despite
the truth that I was then and still am struggling to finish any of his novels,
which tend to have all the excitement of the narration of a UNESCO
documentary. I am still not sure how good a writer he is. But I know that
he was a great literary figure, and that is, after all, one of the things the
Nobel Prize is there to reward.

French letters in the Magazine

France once had a great literary culture, and most French people would say it still
does. But if so, how come their books don't sell in the English-speaking world? Is it
our fault or theirs? (Why don't French books sell abroad, December 2013)
TV series Game of Thrones is frequently compared to fantasy creations such as the
Lord of the Rings, but it owes an equally large debt to a cult French historical novelist
little heard or or read in English (The cult French novel which inspired Game of
Thrones, 4 April 2014)

Call this The Constructive Fallacy Of The Secondary Activity - or

perhaps, The Delusion of Mastery Through Proximity. The very worst
case of this is one I know at home. No one talks more about democracy,
republicanism, self-government and liberty than Americans. But in truth
Americans have no special skill at self-government - they are only good
at dramatising their struggle for it. In many respects, the United States is
the least democratic of the big democratic countries. The entire
Constitution, fetishised by Americans to a religious degree, is designed
to keep the country from ever actually becoming a representative
democracy.

The Senate, in which tiny rural states are given as much power as the
large metropolitan ones - so that Wyoming has as much weight as
California - is a permanent barrier against the majority of Americans ever
having their interests fully represented. The system is absurdly tipped
against cities, by design, and remains wildly unrepresentative - which is
one reason why we have some of the richest farmers, and some of the
worst inter-city train travel, in the developed world. The presidency is the
site of the most passionate and expensive electoral contests in the world
- but then turns out to be an office of almost absurdly limited powers,
except in wartime, which may be the simplest explanation of why
American presidents so often start wars.
Continue reading the main story

The path to glory... may be to find the thing you like most but do least
well, and then do something that is almost like it
Americans are not very good at practising democracy - but we are very
good at advertising democratic ideas which makes us also imagine, God
help us, that we are good at spreading democracy, with the results we

know. What Americans are uniquely good at is the rhetoric of republican

virtue. British people mostly mumble with embarrassment when you
praise their parliamentary traditions - well, the British men I know best
mostly mumble in embarrassment if you praise their anything - but they
do have the Indian parliament to point to with post-colonial pride.
One could persist in this line of inquiry. English people, for instance,
wrote so many sex farces for so long in response to the absence of sex
in English life - essentially the same reason, in reverse, that explains
why there is so little good literary food writing in France. Our natural gifts
are never the subject of our obsessions. No one obsesses over what
they do best. Obsession is the subject of what we long for most.

The English sex farce - a response to the absence of sex in English life?

There seems, in other words, to be many kinds of talent at large in the

world. Among them is a natural talent for doing things. Another, a talent

for dramatising things that we do only with great difficulty. There is a

natural talent for performance, of the kind given to the Maradonas and
Messis, and there is an acquired talent for the self-conscious
presentation of what the talented perform naturally. This need not be a
small thing! The self-dramatising, presentational talent, though it
includes lowlifes and small fry like critics and weekly radio commentators,
also includes fully equal kinds. Being a great conductor, a Bernstein or a
Klemperer, seems no less a talent than being a great composer. The
composer makes the music, but it takes the conductor to dramatise it
properly.
People always tell you that the path to glory lies through doing what you
do best and love most. But for the rest of us, there may be another kind
of wisdom. The secret is not to find the thing you do best and then do it
more. It may be to find the thing you like most but do least well, and then
do something that is almost like it. From this secondary, self-dramatising
activity, you may still make a primary life. You may lose at the World Cup,
and yet see your books on football conquer the world. You may write
poorly, but represent literature well. Like the Hobbit Bilbo accompanying
the dwarves, knowing full well in his heart that he is no burglar, but going
on into the dark mountain as if he were, we all make our lives from our
longings more often than from our natural talents. But then the longing
becomes another kind of talent, and suddenly, there! The dragon is
dead.
A Point of View is usually broadcast on Fridays on Radio 4 at 20:50
BST and repeated Sundays, 08:50 BST - or catch up on BBC iPlayer
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