Anglophiles and Americaphobes

...Today, since even the most ardently British critics concede the best poetry in the English language is written in the United States, traditional English disdain toward American literature commonly manifests itself as virulent resentment and hostility the helpless, "Little England" rage of a once great empire against the upstart colony turned world power...

...In sum, what might have been a major critical investigation is an eccentric grab-bag filled with unequal parts of treasure and junk...

...no country gentlemen, no palaces...

...Yet Spender's ostensible purpose is more fastidious: to explore the constantly altering area of Anglo-American literary relationships that has obsessed, infuriated and confounded writers on both sides of the Atlantic for almost two centuries...

...the pace is shuffling and indecisive, marred by a strangely viscous indolence...

...To one's immense surprise, Spender concludes with an elegiac lament for the vanished Britain preserved by Forster in Howards End and by Virginia Woolf in Between the Acts...

...only when Spender turns to the English branch of his inquiry does he appear to be on secure intellectual ground...

...Had Spender concentrated on his beautiful and moving defense of civility and tradition, what a fine book this might have been...

...Bridges, Hardy, Edward Thomas) and the prewar British novelists of "poetic sensibility" (Forster, Woolf, Lawrence, Joyce) who despised the thumping social realism of Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy...

...Against the objectivity imposed by modern society, which captivated the "novelists of saturation" like Bennett and Wells...

...Now Spender is writing with vigor and purpose about a subject close to his mind and heart...

...Spender invokes the rich subjectivity of the poetic novelists, with their intensely self-conscious devotion to English tradition, their lyrical feeling for the English countryside, their fertile involvement in the English past, their incorruptible commitment to privacy and individual values, their concern for the survival not of modern society but of "the smaller civility of personal relations...

...Unfortunately, he consistently undercuts the strength of his mature judgment with a messy web of ill-fitting rhetoric, specious Anglo-American generalization, and the obligatory glib sniping at America's "bubble-gum" culture...

...The spectre haunts Europe still though Americanization has become the undisputed way of the world And in Spender's case gives rise to such hackneyed and simple-minded comments as, "In America where everything is bought, the present sets a price ticket on the past...

...And only in this last section of the book-"English Threnody and American Tragedy" does Spender come strongly to grips with his real theme, one that has little to do with the love-hate relations of England and America, except as a means of emphasis...

...Once home, they were haunted by what Spender calls the spectre of Americanization, fearing "the dissolution of European methods and ways of thinking, and of the European past, into the American present...

...Both Spender's exposition and his argument are too casually discursive, digressive, ragged...

...The proof of its feasibility he read in his own work, and with a characteristic loftiness explained to his brother William, in 1888: "I aspire to write in such a way that it would be impossible to an outsider to say whether I am at a given moment an American writing about England or an Englishman writing about America...

...no Epsom nor Ascot...

...As Spender's title implies, the relationship between England and America has been a passionately neurotic one all along, a record of endlessly shifting phases of devotion and discord...

...Lacking a crucial lucidity of structure, Love-Hate Relations is an anomaly An elegiac tribute to continuity and order that is itself a model of their opposite...

...And the book itself is riddled with typographical howlers...

...The discussion is unfocused and monotonously rambling...

...Writers & Writing ANGLOPHILES AND AMERICAPHOBES BY PEARL K. BELL Stephen Spender's new book, Love-Hate Relations: English and American Sensibilities (Random House, 318 pp., $8.95), is a curious potpourri of criticism, literary speculation, cultural history, autobiography, testament of faith...

...Generally, however, he is more intelligent than this, recognizing that Europe is not untainted in matters of materialism...

...But his treatment of the novelist is on the whole too amorphous to be persuasive, and James eventually comes to seem a manipulated instrument, invented for the sake of a wobbly argument...

...Spender identifies this nowness as peculiarly American, yet here he is being somewhat unjust...

...To be sure, his putative Anglo-American theme is almost entirely abandoned, but except as it offends one's sense of order, this is no great loss...

...At its most adolescent, in the first half of the 19th century, the U.S...

...no literature, no novels...

...This phrase is Emerson's, and it should be pointed out that he applied it to his own country, not, as Spender mistakenly suggests, to England A country the American philosopher described as "an old exhausted island" that "must one day be contented, like other parents, to be strong only in her children...

...was crippled by its overwhelming sense of inferiority toward English culture, often expressed as rudely compensatory arrogance...

...authors to the present situation, in which "European thoughts are American thoughts...

...with its antinomian contempt for the solacing continuity of tradition and its mind-blowing absorption in the intensities of nowness...

...The reader is done with the forced, dutifully learned tone and the wearying divagations of the earlier chapters...

...Instead, Spender notes admiringly, they "returned to their tradition, but had become able to question the way in which they were making use of it...

...no cathedrals, nor abbeys...

...He hops erratically from one writer to another, one era to another...

...To his credit, Spender brings a cool perspicacity and fairness to his study...

...In his romantic tribute to the Georgian poets, Spender shrewdly remarks that although Pound and Eliot, the expatriate American firecrackers, "woke the English poets out of their complacent dream," the British were unable to assent to Eliot's extreme view that all of Western civilization was in ruins...

...no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow...

...Yet for every self-reliant Emerson, confident that the future belonged to the U.S., there were countless others who agreed with Henry James' famous enumeration of the items of high civilization absent from American life: "No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty...

...The nose-wrinkling English who visited America added insult to injury...

...How can one explain the shift from years of timorous Anglophilia on the part of U.S...

...How long after the winning of its political independence did the United States remain a cultural colony of the mother country, and how did the nation's writers attempt to change this state of affairs...

...Love-Hate Relations reads like a tape-recording of some rather maundering lectures that was rushed, unedited, into print...

...Indeed, English intellectuals tend to be so automatically malicious about the U.S...

...The national label seems in any case less important and relevant than his humanistic creed: Moral energy must be measured not by its ability to explode (and destroy) but by its capacity to sustain, preserve, endure...

...The trouble with Love-Hate Relations is not a matter of attitude and opinion, but of structure and organization, a bungling of priorities...

...At the heart of Spender's historical chapters is the great Anglo-American figure of Henry James, who is seen as a kind of monumental transatlantic balance wheel attempting an impossible conciliation between the America he found suffocatingly provincial and the Europe he lived in with majestic ambivalence...

...In his very English way, Spender now affirms the indispensability of the civilized past in the life of the present, and thus rejects the apocalyptic obsessions of the "orgasmic culture...

...Out of his large-minded optimism James prophesied a future "melting together" of England and America into "a big Anglo-Saxon total...

...for 50 pages at a throw he loses sight entirely of the subject stated in his title...

...they were articulately appalled by the barbaric manners and the uncontainable, graceless, intimidatingly rough landscape...

...What truth about the metamorphosis of a uniquely American language lay behind Oscar Wilde's mot that Americans and English are divided by the barrier of a common tongue...

...At the age of 65, with the trendy battles of radicalism and modernity firmly consigned to memory, Spender has come to feel unexpectedly at home in the conservative, nostalgic world of the Georgian poets (Hous-man...

...that it would seem virtually impossible for any British critic to maintain an un-equivocating detachment toward the topic of Anglo-American cultural relations...

...While the wealth, power and civilization were all on the eastern side of the Atlantic, England seemed to have "the immense advantage...

...This brilliant, unattainable goal is the key to Spender's admiration for James-"the center of the English-American language...