Across the Pond

by Terry Eagleton

  If one thing is valuable, and so is another, then it is arithmetically self-evident that to have them both is even more of a good thing. Sikh turbans are cool, and so are Scottish kilts, so why not wear them both together? Why not have it all rather than settle for half? The European instinct is for either/or, while the American impulse is for both/and. Americans are open to new configurations of experience, while Europeans suspect that the new will simply turn out to be a recycled version of the old. America is a genuinely path-breaking nation which has always had the boldness to embrace the unfamiliar. This, however, has come to mean that newness in the States is a value in itself—a curious belief, since fascism was an innovation in its time, and the Spanish Inquisition was remarkably up-to-date. The course of human history is strewn with repellent novelties.

  If something is good, then it also follows that it is good to have as much of it as possible. Limits are taboo in this sense as well. Why settle for a steak as big as your fist when you could have one the size of Chris Christie? The American appetite is in this sense no more restrained than American speech is reticent. The nation sees little beauty in sparseness or symmetry. Amplitude is valued over leanness. Extravagance wins out over elegance. Nor does the country seem to appreciate the fact that appetites can be pleasurably enhanced by being curbed, as the naked body is more seductive when it is suggestively veiled. If there is so much obesity in the United States, it is among other things because the idea that you should eat only as much as is good for you suggests a standard independent of one’s appetites, which is a distinctly suspect notion. There can be no objective yardstick in the marketplace. You cannot get outside your own desires and judge them from an external standpoint, since desire is what you are made of. Desire is its own measure.

  SEVEN

  The Fine and the Good

  Old and New Worlds

  Europeans are fine, while Americans are good. This, at least, would seem to be the opinion of Henry James, who knew both civilisations from the inside and never ceased to compare them. Europe for James is the home of style, form, evil, civility, enjoyment, corruption, surface, experience, artifice and exploitation. America is the land of innocence, substance, earnestness, integrity, barrenness, nature, monotony and morality. The European self is diverse, fuzzy at the edges, saturated in history and culture; the American self is raw, solid and unified, and lives in an eternal present. As puritans, Americans are hyperconscious of evil, but they are largely free of it themselves. The strenuous moral conscience that alerts them to it also shields them against it. As an American character remarks in The Europeans, those around her have nothing to repent of and yet are always repenting. James himself comments of Emerson’s writing that it has “no sense of the dark, the foul, the base,” which one might have thought was more of a compliment than a criticism. Yet it is not intended to be.

  Even so, James associates Americans with evil in the sense that their innocence and good nature tend to attract it. The fresh-faced American heiress on the loose in Europe can easily fall prey to civilised predators. The problem with Americans, as James sees it, is that they are innocent yet avid for experience, which makes them especially vulnerable to being abused by wicked adventurers. It is hard to have an innocence which also looks out for itself. If Americans were guileless but stayed at home, or if they ventured abroad but had a sharp eye for deceivers, all would be well. It is the combination of innocence and a hunger for experience which is so dangerous, not least if you happen to be fabulously well-off. So, as long as there are rapacious types around, there will also be a need for tedious, high-toned moralists.

  In this as in other ways, moralist and immoralist are sides of the same coin. The good tend not to be stylish and amusing, and this can count heavily against them. They are commendable but not charming. But this may be the price they have to pay for not injuring others. It is a fearsomely steep price, not least in the eyes of the supremely stylish James, but you cannot quarrel with it in the end. In the end, the good must win out over the fine. Yet it is the fine who make life worth living. If you have to choose between style and substance, then you must go for substance. But the fact that you have to choose in the first place suggests that something is amiss.

  Europe is a civilisation rich in experience, but one that is somehow tainted. Guilt and corruption are never far from the coruscating surfaces of social life. Because they are more “aesthetic” than Americans, more taken with form, pleasure, and a dazzling play of appearances, Europeans look at the world with the detached, wryly amused stance of an artistic observer, and this can prove morally irresponsible. They can also treat other people as aesthetic objects. Art is the fullest way to live, but it is never far from exploitation. It is also never far from a sort of sterility, one which is ironically close to the way James sees so much everyday American existence. Art must radiate a sense of how to live; but it may be that the artist can achieve this only by devoting himself religiously to his art, and thus, ironically, failing to live himself.

  Art for James is a constant self-sacrifice. It involves giving the self away, not noisily asserting it in the manner of entrepreneurial America. If being an artist means not living to the full, then art is a kind of failure and vacancy, as well as a supreme expression of human life. It is not on the side of the success ethic. There is thus a sense in which art is un-American. It is also un-American because it involves the tragedy of the unfulfilled self. Yet this may not be the whole story. One of James’s most acute insights is his sense of how close self-abandonment may be to a kind of selfishness. It is hard to say whether some of his characters are behaving with beautiful disinterestedness or brutal egoism. They may be either martyrs or monsters. So art, which involves self-sacrifice, may not be all that far from self-interest after all.

  If Europe and America were simple opposites, things would be relatively straightforward. But for James this is by no means true. Culture of the European kind is the product of leisure, and leisure is the product of labour. Only by the kind of Protestant work ethic for which America is renowned can you pile up enough wealth to set people free for the higher things in life. Only if the many toil away in their workshops can the few stroll the art galleries of Florence and Vienna. In this sense, civilised values rest on violence and exploitation. The European virtues are dependent on the American ones. The two places are not such opposites after all. Civility means the kind of gracious living that has lost sight of its own murky origins. If it could recall them—if it lacked this saving blind spot—it might not be able to survive.

  The point is to have so much money that you don’t need to think about it. Having an enormous amount of wealth sets you free from wealth. It grants you the time instead to note how the fragrance of lilies drifts through the gathering dusk, or how the light from a stained glass window dapples the ample bodice of a duchess. So, the more the American values of industry and self-discipline thrive, the more the European virtues will flourish. Yet the opposite is true as well. The more ruthlessly acquisitive people become, the more civilised values come under siege. The process of amassing wealth threatens to undermine the fine living that can result from it. Life is more agreeable if you are rich, but actually making money is not particularly agreeable.

  James moved in the kind of social world in which you can see that a man and a woman must be having an affair because when you come across them alone in a drawing room, he is sitting down while she is standing up. Yet in the chilling words of his secretary, Theodora Bosanquet, “When he walked out of the refuge of his study and into the world and looked about him, he saw a place of torment, where creatures of prey perpetually thrust their claws into the quivering flesh of doomed, defenceless children of light.” In this cut-throat civilisation, the only way to avoid harming others may be to renounce life altogether. Or it may be to live vicariously, through the consciousness of others, as the artist does. Art is a way of engaging with life while keeping it at arm’s length. It is the bitter fruit of never having really lived.
It combines the American virtues of austerity and self-restraint with the European values of fine living.

  Divided Nation

  James, who died in 1916, was not to know that American and European values would become even more interwoven in the century after his death. One of the most striking paradoxes of the United States is that a nation of austere, industrious men and women gave birth to a culture of liberal values and rampant hedonism. In the end, all that draining of swamps and hacking down forests resulted in one of the world’s great civilisations. It also resulted in Hugh Hefner and Ben & Jerry. Or, to put the point differently, industrial capitalism eventually yielded to consumer capitalism, as it did elsewhere in the world. Elsewhere, however, the contrast between the two is not always so glaring. Italy and Greece are consumer societies, but these nations were not founded by men in white collars and tall black hats who believed that enjoyment for its own sake was the work of the devil.

  There is no mystery about how men in tall black hats ended up as cigar-chewing Hollywood moguls. Entertainment is big business. Adventure was converted into enterprise. You could consecrate the profane realm of pleasure by absorbing it into the sober domain of commerce. Rather as Henry James explored reality through the arm’s-length device known as art, so you can engage with humour, drama, and sensual enjoyment through the arm’s-length device known as profit. You must not wallow mindlessly in the senses, but it is alright to do so if it serves an abstract, rational end beyond itself, namely, the expansion of your capital.

  The problem, however, is that consumer values in the States have not simply taken over from productive ones. For one thing, the consumer industry itself needs to be produced. For another thing, puritan values are far too robust to yield to strip joints without a struggle. They continue to flourish side by side with liberal and consumerist ones, which is what makes the United States such a chronically schizoid culture. How its citizens are required to act in the bedroom or boardroom is not at all how they are expected to behave in the disco or shopping mall. Regulation is taboo in the marketplace but mandatory in the home, school and public sphere. This is by no means true only of the United States, though it appears there in most graphic form. Modern capitalist societies make contradictory demands on their citizens, depending on whether they happen to be in the chapel or the casino. They call for conflicting kinds of subjectivity.

  This is why the quarrel in Henry James between the pleasurable and the dutiful, or the liberal and authoritarian, is as relevant today as it was a century ago. It is just that it no longer takes the form of a clash between America and Europe. The conflict is much nearer to home than that. A new nation has been born in America, one far less hidebound than the old, but the old one survives alongside it. The centred, repressive, self-disciplined ego of production and puritan values is at war with the decentred, liberated, consumerist self. The two cultures can negotiate compromises from time to time, but there is no possibility of a perpetual peace between them. In some ways, their respective inhabitants are as alien to each other as the natives of Borneo are to the citizens of Berlin. No wonder the politicians keep loudly proclaiming that there is only one America. Whenever one hears declarations of unity, one knows that the situation must be dire indeed, rather as whenever one hears appeals for harmony one knows that someone’s interests are under threat.

  Modest Proposals

  What should Americans do to be saved? They should start calling children children. They should try to think negatively. They should discover how to use a teapot. Learning how to mock themselves would be an incomparably greater achievement than landing on Mars. They should stop selling themselves as the finest country in the world because there is no such thing, any more than there are Gorgons and goblins. There should be compulsory courses for all college freshmen in how not to mean what you say. Americans should press their astonishing ignorance of abroad to the point where they can no longer invade other people’s countries because all maps have been destroyed and all knowledge of geography made a criminal offence. They should stop underestimating elegance. They should learn that true power springs from a compact with frailty and failure. They should try to get on friendlier terms with their bodies.

  Above all, they should stop making such a song and dance about salvation. They should try to be less moral, idealistic, earnest and high-minded. They should take a break from all that uplifting, inspiring, healing, empowering, dreaming, edifying and aspiring. Then they might be more admirable people. In many respects—in their friendliness, honesty, openness, inventiveness, courtesy, civic pride, ease of manner, generosity of spirit, and egalitarian manners—they are admirable enough already. But Americans are the first to admit that there is always room for improvement. It is an honourable puritan doctrine.

  The good news about the citizens of this kindly, violent, bigoted, generous-spirited nation is that if ever the planet is plunged into nuclear war, they will be the first to crawl over the edge of the crater, dust themselves down, and proceed to build a new world. The bad news is that they will probably have started the war.

  Acknowledgements

  I am grateful to my friend Ray Ryan and my literary agent Georges Borchardt, both of whom helped with admirable efficiency to ease this book into the world. I must also thank John Glusman and Tori Leventhal at W. W. Norton for their splendidly scrupulous editing of the manuscript, and two of the Americans I hold in captivity, Willa Murphy and Oliver Eagleton, for saving me from some embarrassing blunders. I would like to be able to thank the other two captives as well, but at present they are both illiterate.

  About the Author

  TERRY EAGLETON was born in Salford, England, in 1943. He attended Trinity College, Cambridge, where he earned both an MA and a PhD. He is the author of more than forty books, including Why Marx Was Right and the seminal Literary Theory: An Introduction, as well as a novel, a film script, plays performed in London and Dublin, and a critically acclaimed memoir, The Gatekeeper. Eagleton has taught at Oxford, Cambridge, and the National University of Ireland, and most recently at the University of Notre Dame. He currently resides in Dublin with his wife and children.

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2013 by Terry Eagleton

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Eagleton, Terry, 1943–

  Across the pond : an Englishman’s view of America / Terry Eagleton.—First edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-393-08898-4 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-0-393-24033-7 (e-book)

  1. Popular culture—United States. 2. British—United States—Anecdotes.

  3. Eagleton, Terry, 1943–—Travel—United States. 4. Popular culture—

  Great Britain. 5. United States—Social life and customs. 6. Great Britain—

  Social life and customs. 7. National characteristics, American. 8. National characteristics, British. 9. English language—Variation—United States.

  10. English language—Variation—Great Britain. I. Title.

  E169.Z83E24 2013

  306.0973—dc23

  2013000340

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