Across the Pond (17 page)

If everything is as good as everything else, then all these things can be exchanged with one another. In economic life, this is known as the market. Nothing is more hostile to hierarchy than the commodity. No way of life is more diverse, pluralistic and transgressive than capitalism. It is as promiscuous as a porn star and as non-discriminatory as the most tender-hearted liberal. In its all-generous spirit, it wishes to exclude nobody and nothing. It treats all doormen like arch-dukes if they are potential consumers. A can opener is as good as a defibrillator if it can reap you as much profit. It is never easy in the United States to draw the line between generosity of spirit and sheer sloppiness, the open-minded and the scatterbrained.

America was originally considered a wilderness. It was a random, chaotic chunk of reality in which there were no established relations between things. You could thus make of these things more or less what you wanted, as God himself could for some medieval thought. They had come loose from any set pattern, and could be permutated as you saw fit. This, no doubt, is one source of the eclecticism of modern American culture, which pitches different bits of reality indifferently together. In this sense, there is a connection between the Puritan world view and surf ’n’ turf. Eclecticism goes a good way back in American history. In
American Notes
, Charles Dickens describes a meal he had with a number of Americans that consisted of “tea, coffee, bread, butter, salmon, shad, liver, steak, potatoes, pickles, ham, chops, black puddings, and sausages. . . . Some [of the Americans] were fond of compounding this variety, and having it all on their plates at once.”

An even more bizarre compound was recently consumed by an American citizen. It consisted of two chicken-fried steaks with gravy and sliced onions; a triple-patty bacon cheeseburger; a cheese omelette with ground beef, tomato, onions, bell peppers and jalapenos; a bowl of fried okra with ketchup; one pound of barbecued meat with half a loaf of white bread; three fajitas; a meat-lover’s pizza; one pint of Blue Bell ice cream; a slab of peanut-butter fudge with crushed peanuts; and three root beers. This was the last meal of a death row prisoner in Texas awaiting his lethal injection, a demand so outrageous that it led to calls for the custom of tailor-made last meals to be abolished. One likes to imagine that the prisoner in question was a satirist. Perhaps he intended to beat the needle with a carefully timed coronary.

Like a popular singles bar, the United States is a place which teems with infinite possibility. It does not just contain pockets of fantasies like Hollywood and Disneyland, but is in some ways a full-blown fantasy in itself. In America, de Tocqueville remarks, “something which does not exist is just something that has not been tried yet.” Fictions are just facts waiting to happen. The nation does not accept that a shadow may fall between the conception and the execution. Because the mind is what matters, anything you dream up is as good as done. All you need is will-power. This is one of several ways in which America is a godly nation. God, too, is thought to manifest no gap between the possible and the actual. His thoughts are his deeds. He does not sit around biting his fingernails and wondering whether to bring Jack Nicholson down with a nasty bout of flu.

The line between fact and fantasy continually wavers. Fiction can be truer than reality, as the career of Charlie Sheen exemplifies. Sheen, who despite his dishevelled private life is an immensely talented actor, is much more real in front of the cameras than he is in reality. Reality for him is largely fantasy. It is only when he is acting that he can be himself. Only the act of transporting himself into fiction can impose enough discipline and coherence on his personality for him to come truly alive. Otherwise he dissolves into a soggy mess of conflicting moods and impulses. His shambolic off-stage persona is a mere shadow of his genuine, fictional self. Those who have too few restraints tend to fall apart, which is not what the doctrinaire free marketeers want to hear. Some bits of American reality strike an observer as blatantly fictitious. One hears that there is to be a federal investigation into whether Donald Trump is a real or imaginary character. The Dickensian resonance of his surname points to a likely conclusion. One or two celebrities who have been frozen out of Britain for illicitly masquerading as real people have made their mark in the United States.

It is a commonplace that Americans tend to describe what happens in the real world by reference to movies. Life exists to imitate art. An American to whom I once showed the half-­timbered Tudor buildings of Stratford-upon-Avon high street exclaimed: “Great shot!” Artistic dreamers try to tell it like it is, while hard-nosed Wall Street stockbrokers manifest a kind of communal madness. Life in the transnational corporations becomes more surreal than a Buñuel film. The world of business was once associated with sober realism, but nowadays it is closer in some respects to a crazed religious cult. From time to time, it acts out the economic equivalent of collective suicide. Corporate executives are admonished to ignore unpalatable facts and disavow inconvenient problems. Mao would have been proud of their delusional zeal. Realism is socialistic and unpatriotic. There are times when self-deception and megalomaniacal self-belief oust rational decision-making altogether. To complete the inversion, religious cults hire teams of chief executives, remove crosses from their churches in case they send too negative a message, and rebrand worshippers as customers.

Scientists who hold that there is an infinity of different universes envisage a situation in which anything that can happen, will happen. Somewhere in the so-called multiverse of the astrophysicists, someone looking unnervingly like you, maybe even endowed with your name, is at this moment reading these words, written by someone looking uncannily like me. Perhaps there are an infinite number of such acts occurring right now. This, to be sure, has some depressing implications. It means, for example, that there is an infinity of Mel Gibsons and Paris Hiltons. There is also an unlimited number of Michael Jacksons, not all of them dead. But it is not all bad news. Somewhere in the cosmos, someone looking suspiciously like Bill O’Reilly is at this very moment wearing a Fidel Castro outfit and arguing the necessity of soaking the rich. On earth, this infinity of worlds is known as the United States. Among other marvels, it contains a world which looks just like ours but where everything is bigger. This is known as Texas.

Whereas Jesus multiplied loaves and fishes, the United States multiplies options. No restaurant in Britain would ask you how you liked your fried eggs, any more than they would ask you what exotic national costume you would like your waiter to be dressed in. Choice in the States is a paramount value. “I’ve made my choices” is a common American phrase, meaning among other things that one is the author of one’s own existence rather than ignominiously shaped by circumstance. Life is a self-authoring narrative in which, unlike Oedipus or Anna Karenina, you get to decide what happens to you. It is therefore all the more surprising that there is so little political choice in the country. In fact, the United States is a one-party state. There is the Democratic capitalist party and the Republican capitalist party. The diversity of political options hardly rivals the variety of candy bars.

Somewhere at this moment, some American, perhaps several of them in different places, is trying to sell life insurance to a Vietnamese orphan while wearing a false red nose, clown’s flippers and a loud check suit. In the United States, anything that can be imagined, however outlandish, has an excellent chance of existing. “I can think of it, therefore it exists” is the American version of Descartes’s dictum. If you can think of making a new kind of ice cream out of tea leaves soaked in squirrel’s urine, you can be sure that someone in the States is trying to patent it at this very moment. One can imagine a musical in which the staff of a restaurant burst into song every time one of them is tipped, but in the States this actually happens. The country represents a constant translation of the subjunctive (what might happen) into the indicative (what is the case).

If there is no order in the world, and if all its parts are equal and interchangeable, then you can will into existence any combination of these parts you like, and the act of willing makes it acceptable. The United States is the kind of place where one expects to find hairdressers selling sea food, or pastors doubling up as plumbers. In one sense, this is a distinct improvement on Britain, where you might find yourself having to buy a flashlight in one store and a battery for it in another. Americans tend to sling together items that Europeans would keep strictly apart. They do not understand that it has been ordained by a wise, all-loving Creator that while marmalade is acceptable at breakfast, jam (or jelly) is not. If you want to wear canary yellow trousers with an electric blue blouse, there is nothing to stop you. If you want to believe in Marx and the tooth fairy simultaneously, then go ahead. There are no natural fitnesses in things, no given constraints that must not be transgressed. Things that should not be put together, like the Oval Office and persons of low intelligence, sometimes are. Occasionally, things that should be put together are not. Some Americans are ignorant of the natural law that forbids the wearing of jeans without belts. The widespread American use of the word “whatever” indicates that precision and distinction are not held in the highest regard. It betrays how close the indiscriminate is to the indifferent. De Tocqueville thought such eclecticism was also true of American English, which mixed the vulgar and the refined without discrimination. It came, he thought, from the pitching together of social strata which in Europe would stay strictly separate.

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.