European capital has been flung into it with both hands for years. Not ours, though. . . . We can sit and watch. Of course, some day we shall step in. . . . We are bound to. We shall run the world’s business whether the world likes it or not. The world can’t help it—and neither can we, I guess.
Conrad’s well-chosen imagery here contains the three distinct themes of Roman evocation, the white man’s burden (“The world can’t help it—and neither can we”), and Manifest Destiny as the natural successor to older, feebler empires. Holroyd talks almost like Rhodes, who was boasting at this very time that he would annex the planets if he could, and rather like Monroe when he muses: “Europe must be kept out of this continent, and for proper interference on our part the time is not yet right, I dare say.” As a character, Holroyd hardly appears in the novel, yet in an extraordinary way he possesses its action and by the end he and America possess Costaguana, too. With a tip of his hat to Admiral Mahan, the garrulous English clubman Captain Mitchell buttonholes later visitors to recall how “the United States cruiser, Pow-hattan, was the first to salute” the new flag and the new dispensation of the San Tomé mines.
In 1904, when Nostromo was published, few English or American elements were making the effort to see beyond the present. In the United States itself, the WASP aesthetic was celebrated that year by the foundation of the National Academy of Arts and Letters. Its membership, like that of all the best London clubs, was restricted— in this case to fifty deserving persons. Among the privileged fifty were John Hay, who had been the confidant of Rhodes and Kipling while en poste at the Court of St. James’s and who remained a great prop to Henry Adams; William Dean Howells, student of Rome and another admirer of Kipling; and the Reverend Henry van Dyke, professor of English at the recently renamed Princeton University. Van Dyke is now chiefly remembered, if at all, for his view that Sinclair Lewis was too coarse to be awarded the Nobel Prize.
At almost the same time, the father of John Dos Passos wrote a book called The Anglo-Saxon Century, in which he called for an open acknowledgment of the cultural and national affinities between the two peoples, and suggested their reunification in a new, benign world empire. Dos Passos senior was a Wall Street lawyer of the classic type, was on easy terms with the vast quantity of English capital then invested in the United States, was very committed to the world of the club and the Ivy League, and wanted only an alliance with England in foreign affairs while, at home, he could employ its patina of slight but definite superiority.
But an immense change was impending. Probably Henry James’s The Question of the Mind is the last innocent statement of pure Anglophilia in its coincidence of language, manners, ethnic solidarity, and commitment. And it, too, was written very slightly out of synchronization with the events it engaged with. By 1916, the last chance for a nonantagonistic Anglo-Americanism was dissolving or had dissolved. You can’t have empire without war, and although war can bring with it great enthusiasm and solidarity, it also brings the reaction to these things. The modern school of American writing, made possible by the war, was quicker to see this than the Stars and Stripes/Union Jack/Red, White, and Blue crowds who cheered Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt and “preparedness.” While men like Dos Passos senior had welcomed the import of toxins from old Europe’s imperial war making, others like his son received quite a different education from the unlooked-for collision “over there.” As Marcus Cunliffe puts it very aptly:
One of two things seemed to have happened in the Great War to the male American writer of the 1920s. Either he enlisted before the arrival of the main American forces (Hemingway, John Dos Passos, e. e. cummings, all in ambulance units) in which case he tended to conclude that the war was a nightmare which ought not to involve him. Or he failed to get overseas, like Scott Fitzgerald, or James T. Farrell’s “Studs Lonigan,” or the cadet in William Faulkner’s Soldier’s Pay, or Faulkner himself, whose war service was confined to RAF training in Canada. In that case he felt doubly cheated, having known only the backwash of disillusionment. In Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers (1921), in cummings’ The Enormous Room (1922), and in some of Hemingway’s work, the hero is an American, looking on at a war fought by other people, for slogans which he as a detached observer sees to be sham.
It was above all as a result of the Great War—logical terminus of the Rhodes-Kipling-Roosevelt-Hay worldview—that antibodies to uncritical Englishness and Anglophilia began to incubate. These were initially of two sorts—the humane internationalist variety and the nativist, robustly modern one. In the first category belongs Randolph Bourne, a child of the short-lived “Progressive Era,” who at first had thought that the outgrowing of English modes and limitations was not much more than a process of maturity, of evolving toward an authentic culture in the New World. But he was to come to see this as a matter of urgency. Before the outbreak of war, visiting England during the time of George Dangerfield’s “strange death” of liberalism, he responded warmly to things like the women’s suffrage movement but found that the country itself seemed “very old and weary, as if the demands of the twentieth century were proving entirely too much for its powers, and it was waiting half-cynically and apathetically for some great cataclysm.” As he wrote to a friend: “It pains me to think how we have allowed ourselves to be hypnotized by England: we need to see it as the stupid, blundering, hypocritical beast it is.” But these rather trite impressions of a country past its zenith were succeeded by a much more cutting and bitter style once England’s war had engulfed the United States. In essays for The New Republic and The Dial, influential far beyond their small circulations, he argued fiercely against the “cultural humility” of America in the face of reverently imported referees like Matthew Arnold. It was time, Bourne felt, to “express the soul of this hot chaos of America” in a “new American nationalism.” The contest with Anglo-Saxon complacency and Victorian values seemed to him to be one and the same, and he hailed the advent of Theodore Dreiser in particular as an author who captured “an America that is in the process of forming.” At a time when dissent was being squashed in the press and in the universities (Columbia announced that its purpose was to turn out “thinking bayonets” via a special course on Western civilization), Bourne intensified his prewar position that “the good things in the American temperament and institutions were not English but are the fruit of our superior cosmopolitanism.” As the war ground on and became more chauvinistic, he defended a thesis of his own that owed something to William James, who had written that “the pluralist world is more like a federal republic than an empire or a kingdom.”
He was therefore engaged on all fronts, not just against the ideas of empire and kingdom (symbolized by Great Britain) but against the ideas of racial and class superiority that would be necessary to rivet these ideas on the United States. Meeting hyphenation head-on, he announced that the despised hyphenates and immigrants were in fact the best insurance against a “tasteless, colorless fluid of conformity.” For its pains in publishing Bourne’s vision of “Trans-National America,” The Atlantic Monthly was deluged with accusations of treason. Even its Bostonian editor, Ellery Sedgwick, wrote privately to Bourne to inquire: “What have we to learn of the institution of democracy from the Huns, the Poles, the Slavs?”
Undaunted, Bourne moved further into opposition and in his most celebrated essay, “The War and the Intellectuals,” published by The Seven Arts, bluntly described the partisans of the war and its glories as “English colonials.” His untimely death in 1918 did not prevent him from exerting a formative influence on the “Lost Generation” of new, young American writers. In the period of worldliness and “realism” that followed the war there were to be further, more demotic sallies against the hegemony of the old WASP literary establishment and the forces that it stood for. This, too, had its effect in lending a distinctive tone to the sorts of reaction against British political influence that were to become widespread.
There was, in the determined un-Englishness of men like Theodore Drei
ser and H. L. Mencken and F. Scott Fitzgerald, a certain ethnic resentment, too, of the sort that Bourne might well have found raw. Still, raw as it may have been, it was energetic. “I wonder why you do the climber so well,” wrote John O’Hara to Fitzgerald. “Is it the Irish in you?” Fitzgerald replied: “Being born in that atmosphere of crack, wisecrack and countercrack I developed a two-cylinder inferiority complex. So if I was elected King of Scotland tomorrow after graduating from Eton, Magdalen and the Guards, with an embryonic history which linked me to the Plantagenets, I would still be a parvenu. I spent my youth in alternately crawling in front of the kitchen maids and insulting the great.” What is striking here is surely the presumed knowledge of English form, and the assumed usage of English imagery, to denote the sufferings of class and to convey the sense of deracination. Jay Gatsby and Nick Carraway are present somewhere in that discontent. Remember also what Fitzgerald wrote to Edmund Wilson from London in 1921. “God damn the continent of Europe . . . It is of merely antiquarian interest.” In a quarter of a century at most, he asserted, New York would be “the global capital of culture” because “culture follows money . . . we will be the Romans of the next generations as the English are now.”
Irish self-consciousness, never that difficult to arouse, was at any rate slightly easier to express than German self-pity. But H. L. Mencken and Theodore Dreiser, giants in the dawning age of realism and the modern dry-eyed approach, had both undergone stupid persecution by the anti-“hyphenation” forces during the First World War, and had undergone it not for their pro-German sympathies (which were admitted) but for their German identities. Dreiser’s novel The Genius was the subject of an astonishing series of attacks, all of them baiting him for his origins, and one assault in particular from Stuart Sherman, professor at the University of Illinois, who accused him of depicting characters who were neither Anglo-Saxon nor moral. Attacked by Mencken, who took up the case with a satire called “The Dreiser Bugaboo,” Sherman riposted by saying that Mencken, after all, was an admitted admirer of Joseph Conrad. He appended a list of all the bad elements known to him who possessed German names—among them Alfred A. Knopf and Louis Untermeyer. Poor Mencken himself was denounced for exhibiting “a Teutonic-Oriental pessimism and nihilism.” After America’s formal entry into the war, Professor Sherman issued an official pamphlet belittling German culture and calling for a boycott of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.
These disordered attacks, combined with vulgar bans on the music of Beethoven and the foolish attempt to call sauerkraut “Liberty Cabbage” and German measles “Liberty Measles,” created a durable antipathy which, after the war, was expressed in the highly popular pages of The Smart Set. Mencken, who had complained of a much earlier period in his life that American children’s comics had taught him “an immense mass of useless information about English history and the English scene, so that to this day I know more about Henry VIII and Lincoln Cathedral than I know about Millard Fillmore or the Mormon Temple,” unmasked his batteries quite early. In The National Letters in 1920 he ridiculed the old gang who had missed Sinclair Lewis and had stuck fast to the docile, tepid conventions of New England and the American Academy. “One never remembers a character in the novels of these aloof and de-Americanized Americans; one never encounters an idea in their essays; one never carries away a line out of their poetry. It is literature as an academic exercise.” And he took his revenge on the period of anti-German xenophobia by crowing with some truth in 1923:
It is, indeed, curious to note that practically every American author who moaned and sobbed for democracy between the years 1914 and 1919 is now extinct. The rest have gone down the chute of the movies.
When Hemingway began publishing fiction, he dedicated it to Mencken, thus showing the extent to which a new style had set in. There was a shadier side to this style, as we now know from Mencken’s posthumously published letters and as might have been guessed from his quarrel with Alfred A. Knopf (also a victim during the Great War for having the wrong-sounding name) about Nazism. In brief, Mencken and his publisher fell out over the question of whether Hitler had a point. But this was a deformity in Mencken personally, and even in retrospect seems to have had more to do with a thwarted, soured German-Americanism than with anything like full-blooded Nazi sympathy. It formed part of the levy or tax that was exacted by the legacy of 1914-18 and by the hubris of the British in trading upon American ethnic rancor.
Dreiser went the other way into near-unconditional fellow traveling, and as late as May 1940 wrote: “If England is not a totalitarian state there never was one. It has been for the last three hundred years a landed and primogeniture-legalized and titled and high-financed autocracy. The clerk and labor classes in England have no more opportunity to express themselves democratically than the Germans, the Russians or the Italians.” It was stupidity on this scale—very popular at the time on the American left and right as well as in the isolationist Midwest—which, once superseded, led to the revival of pro-British emotion as a consequence of the Second World War. This time, though, the emotional support came with a definite tariff, as Churchill was to find.
It was in fact in reaction to another Dreiser diatribe that George Orwell wrote in June 1944 that “the American imperialists, advancing to the attack behind a smoke-screen of novelists, are always on the lookout for any disreputable detail about the British Empire.” Orwell had very recently been much irritated by Dreiser’s description of the English as “a nation of horse-riding aristocratic snobs” and, living as he did in a battered and rationed London, wasn’t having any of it. Yet he spent much of his own time stressing disreputable details about the British Empire, and even at the height of the war defended the nationalists of India and Burma. So it is impressive to remember that there used to be real tension, even at a time of supposedly warm alliance, over things like class and empire. These matters, then, signified still-existing rivalries and drew upon racial and ethnic jealousies that had been well fertilized. Only the decline in the relative weight and strength of England has allowed good temper and nostalgia to become so general.
If there were ever any Greeks in this relationship, they were the dexterous, cynical, or teasing authors who sought, in the post-1945 period, to warn the United States against becoming too Roman, too solemn, and too top-heavy with grim self-imposed “burdens.” Allowing for the grand exception of Gore Vidal, a native Hellenist among American proconsuls, most of these authors were Englishmen who either had some personal colonial experience or who could read the signs of pomposity or self-deception. The best-known of these is of course Graham Greene, who has been justly celebrated for an ability to choose the right place and time from Cuba to Vietnam, and who has been repeatedly excluded from the United States by the bafflingly unironic provisions of the McCarran Act. (He exacted a feline post-imperial revenge by coming to Washington once as a diplomatically immune member of the Panamanian delegation at the signing of the Canal Treaty.)
Greene in The Quiet American describes a United States embassy in Saigon in the 1950s where “even their lavatories were air-conditioned.” He brings us Joe, the Economic Attaché who while patronizing one of his female staff says: “She likes it. None of this stuffy colonialism.” In Ways of Escape he argued journalistically that the British learned more than the Americans did from Dien Bien Phu; deciding as a result to pull out of Malaya. Anthony Burgess, in the final volume of his Malay trilogy, The Long Day Wanes, implies the alternative conclusion that the Americans intended to replace the British in Malaysia also. Syed Omar, the old colonial retainer, needs a new master and goes to the U.S. Information Service building. “This had formerly been the British Residency: the Americans paid a generous rent to the Sultan for its use.” Syed Omar is given a van, on which is painted a picture “in the most beautiful Arabic script, called Suara Amerika (The Voice of America).” The newspaper of this name has to be delivered to illiterate villagers, who receive Syed Omar with hospitality and who “never tired of laughing at the picture of th
e eagle shaking claws with the tiger.”
Still in Asia, site of so much Anglo-American jealousy in the Churchill-Roosevelt period, we find J. G. Farrell describing the seduction of an old English merchant house by an Anglicized American officer in The Singapore Grip, and J. G. Ballard depicting the American takeover of Shanghai from the Japanese and the British in Empire of the Sun. His choice of the decisive moment has a cornucopia falling from the belly of a B-29:
Tins of Spam, Klim and Nescafe, bars of chocolate and cellophaned packets of Lucky Strike and Chesterfield cigarettes, bundles of Reader’s Digest and Life magazines, Time and Saturday Evening Post.
All of this a long way from the time when American policy in China was described as that of “Britain’s jackal.” Forgotten altogether is Kipling’s admonition to any fool who might “try to hustle the East.”
As Fouad Ajami might have predicted, the American monuments to this episode—the brief period of United States global hegemony—are in political prose rather than in fiction or poetry. But the titles give off something of a farewell to the trumpet—Ropes of Sand, The Best and the Brightest, All Fall Down, A Bright Shining Lie. In the sly but important contribution of English letters to the prosaic, preoccupied world of American policy agony is a subtle trace of the remains of a grand alliance. The relationship will persist, of course, as it has to. But the things that give it persistence are the very factors, limiting by their nature, that prevented it from developing in a more even, various, and possibly durable way. The stress upon blood, upon class, upon empire as the chief test of a national will has been depleting. Its returns show a strong tendency to diminish. Whatever shape the world is now assuming, the time when it could have been governed as an Anglo-American condominium is long past—even when one remembers that this fantasy of Rhodes and Kipling was still being deliberated at Fulton in 1946. For the United States, the appropriation of Englishness has become principally a matter of style and taste, of the sort that could easily be superseded in a generation. For the United Kingdom, or the English, the claim to a “special relationship” with a transatlantic superpower has lost much of its force and savor as the axis of the old Atlantic Charter has rusted on the hinge. The world of Churchill and Roosevelt, to say nothing of the world of Mahan and Hay and the Adamses, has become a historical curio.
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