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STEPHEN SPENDER
a certainty staring the rest of the world in the face for a hundred
and fifty odd years. (There are in fact two American futures: one,
the immense material potentiality of power and wealth, the other the
uncertain spiritual future.) However, the American future remained
a growing menace for Europe, while, for Americans, the European
past spelled entanglement. Culturally it had snared American writers,
through the English language and tradition, unless they deliberately
freed themselves from it. Historically it involved America in European
tragedies - for example two world wars.
James, as 1 have pointed out, sees Americans as less corrupt
than Europeans, though they are tainted by their money: and at the
end the taint becomes, in
his
unfinished novel
The Ivory Tower,
vile.
However it
is
a masculine taint. American wealth is gain, rape, some–
thing torn out of the earth or from other men, or the results of vile
operations in unnameable materials. The origins of the wealth of
Newman, Mr. Verver and the young Bostonian heir Chad are kept
secret, partly because American utilities in James's novels seem to be
so basely utilitarian that they are, one supposes, mere utensils - pots
or pans or worse (I always imagine Mrs. Newsome, Chad's mother,
in
The Ambassadors,
sitting on a pile of chamber pots), but even
more because "business," manufacturing, are men's secrets.
The gainers from
this
concealment are not james's readers but
his heroines. The strand connecting them with guilt by association
with the paternal sources of money has been neatly severed, and his
Daisies and Millies and Maggies emerge as innocent victims. On the
other hand, James associates European wealth with the more odious
traits of women: their avarice, intrigue and willingness to use their
own bodies for the purpose of gaining wealth
is
shown in the por–
traits of two English young women, Kate Croy and Charlotte.
Edmund Wilson, coming to England in 1945 as
New Yorker
correspondent, found James's account, in
The Wings of the Dove,
of
the relations between Americans and English "deadly" in its exacti–
tude; and he contrasts the "American disinterested idealism, indis–
criminate amiability and carelessness about money," with "the des–
perate materialism that is implied by position in England." Money
for the Americans, Wilson writes, "is a medium, a condition of life
like air. But with the English it always means property." Wilson was
surprised to find so much confirmation in English life of the English
