How to be a Brit

remarking that she had found it fairly
amusing. The gentleman in question sat down in front of his open fire, put his
feet up and read the book right through with a continually darkening face. When
he had finished, he stood up and said:
    ‘Downright impertinence.’
    And threw the book into the
fire.
    He was a noble and
patriotic spirit and he did me a great deal of good. I wished there had been
more like him in England. But I could never find another.
     
    Since then I have actually
written about a dozen books; but I might as well have never written anything
else. I remained the author of How to be an Alien even after I had
published a collection of serious essays. Even Mr Somerset Maugham complained
about this type of treatment bitterly and repeatedly. Whatever he did, he was
told that he would never write another Of Human Bondage ; Arnold Bennett
in spite of fifty other works remained the author of The Old Wives’ Tale and
nothing else; and Mr Robert Graves is just the author of the Claudius books.
These authors are much more eminent than I am; but their problem is the same.
At the moment I am engaged in writing a 750-page picaresque novel set in
ancient Sumeria. It is taking shape nicely and I am going to get the Nobel
Prize for it. But it will be of no use: I shall still remain the author of How
to be an Alien.
    I am not complaining. One’s
books start living their independent lives soon enough, just like one’s
children. I love this book; it has done almost as much for me as I have done
for it. Yet, however loving a parent you may be, it hurts your pride a little
if you are only known, acknowledged and accepted as the father of your eldest
child.
    In 1946 I took this
manuscript to André Deutsch, a young man who had just decided to try his luck
as a publisher. He used to go, once upon a time, to the same school as my
younger brother. I knew him from the old days and it was quite obvious to me
even then, in Budapest, when he was only twelve and wore shorts, that he would
make an excellent publisher in London if he only had the chance. So I offered
my book to him and as, at that time, he could not get manuscripts from better
known authors, he accepted it with a sigh. He suggested that Nicolas Bentley
should be asked to ‘draw the pictures’. I liked the idea but I said he would
turn the suggestion down. Once again I was right: he did turn it down.
Eventually, however, he was persuaded to change his mind.
    Mr Deutsch was at that time
working for a different firm. Four years after the publication of this book,
and after the subsequent publication of three other Mikes-Bentley books, he
left this firm while I stayed with them and went on working with another
popular and able cartoonist, David Langdon. Now, however, André Deutsch has
bought all the rights of my past and future output from his former firm and the
original team of Deutsch, Bentley and myself are together again under the
imprint of the first named gentleman. We are all twelve years older and Mr
Deutsch does not wear shorts any more, or not in the office, at any rate.
    ‘When are you going to
write another How to be an Alien?’ Deutsch and Bentley ask me from time
to time and I am sure they mean it kindly.
    They cannot quite make out
the reply I mutter in answer to their friendly query. It is:
    ‘Never, if I can help it.’
     
    London, May 1958
             
GEORGE MIKES

PREFACE
     
    I
believe ,
without undue modesty, that I have certain qualifications to write on ‘how to
be an alien.’ I am an alien myself. What is more, I have been an alien all my
life. Only during the first twenty-six years of my life I was not aware of this
plain fact. I was living in my own country, a country full of aliens, and I
noticed nothing particular or irregular about myself; then I came to England,
and you can imagine my painful surprise.
    Like all great and
important discoveries it was a matter of a few seconds. You probably all know
from your schooldays how Isaac Newton discovered the law of gravitation. An
apple fell on his head. This incident set him thinking for a minute or two,
then he exclaimed joyfully: ‘Of course I The gravitation constant is the
acceleration per second that a mass of one gram causes at a distance of one
centimetre.’ You were also taught that James Watt one day went into the kitchen
where cabbage was cooking and saw the lid of the saucepan rise and fall. ‘Now
let me think,’ he murmured — ‘let me think.’ Then