Across the Pond by Terry Eagleton Read Free Book Online Page A

wit. Seriousness is for scientists and shopkeepers.
    One of the finest exponents of the English language in the United States today has been the art critic T. J. Clark. Another was the late Christopher Hitchens. Both of them came to the country from England. It can be claimed that to write as well as this, with such tonal subtlety, verbal self-assurance and exquisite play of light and shade, you need a well-established cultural tradition in your bones. In England, that culture has often enough been snobbish, malevolent, and supercilious. The novelist Evelyn Waugh had all of these vices to excess, yet they are also related in complex ways to the splendour of his style.
    That permanent house guest of England, Henry James, pressed the nuance and ambiguity of English writing to the point where his prose threatened to disappear up its own intricacies. Among other things, it was a way of putting some daylight between himself and his plain-speaking native land, as was his habit of sucking up to a set of boneheaded English aristocrats. Nothing, not even Communism, could be more anti-American than James’s mannered, fastidious, overbred later style, horrified as it would be at the very idea of telling it like it is. Like James, the English upper classes value a certain verbal obliquity. This is because to talk confessionally is considered unsophisticated, and people of this rank would rather be thought wicked than naive. In this, they are at one with the natives of Paris. You would not ask someone like this on first meeting how many children he had, not because it is impertinent but because it is hard for him to return a stylish reply.
    The style, they say, is the man. A friend of mine in New York once gave a copy of my Literary Theory: An Introduction to a friend of hers, an American woman who belonged to that wretched minority of creatures on the planet who have never heard of me. On handing the book back to my friend, the woman inquired “Is he gay?” No, said my friend. The woman pondered for a moment. “Is he English?” she asked.
    Satire
    Most Americans are too straight-talking to make effective satirists, though many of them have become resigned to others being satirical at their expense, not least about their ineptness as satirists. Commentators can also be too deferential to power to feel easy about mocking it. It is hard to imagine a U.S. television interviewer putting the same embarrassing question to a squirming politician sixteen or so times over, as a BBC journalist once famously did. As for the Irish, they have about as much respect for their politicians as they do for their paedophiles.
    Even when political pundits on American TV engage in rowdy debate, there is usually an unspoken obligation to grin and make up at the end. They must leave the impression that their squabbling is basically good-humoured. Perhaps this is written into their contracts. Political debate, after all, is only entertainment. A touch of polemic is good for the ratings, but too much of it would make viewers feel uncomfortable, a capital American crime. What America calls hard ball is soft ball in Europe. Public debate in the States, at least in the media, is generally more emollient than it is in Europe, keener to emphasise points of consensus, more fearful of outright conflict. The bunch of brawling schoolboys known as the House of Commons would probably be arrested for civil disorder in the USA.
    In many a British academic conference, there is blood on the floor by the end of the first afternoon. Exchanges can be barbed, even quietly vicious. Americans, however, will tend to preface their criticisms of your lecture with a courteous reference to “your very fine paper,” rather as U.S. politicians who clash with each another on television are often careful to record the respect in which they hold each other’s views. There is less mutual bootlicking in Europe. In some ways, this courtesy is a deeply attractive aspect of American culture,