The Outgoing Spirit - Across the Pond: An Englishman's View of America - page 32

As Henry James comments in an essay on Hawthorne, “A large juvenility is stamped upon
the face of things [in America], and in the vividness of the present, the past, which dies so
young and had time to produce so little, attracts but scant attention.” You can try to outwit
time by moving at such speed that every moment is discarded almost before it is done. The
trick is to keep cutting the present off from the past. In this way, you can try to deny the fact
that the past is what we are made of, and that there would be no present without it. One of
the several problems with this way of living is that it is not clear how what is reborn every
moment can be said to be you. Personal identity involves a degree of continuity.
We are speaking here of the time of capitalist endeavour, in which whatever is not here
and now is dead and done with. History is just so much junk to be jettisoned. It obtrudes
its ungainly bulk between the self and the real. Yet it is hard to deny that you can also learn
from the past about how to succeed in the present. The ideal condition, then, is to reap the
benefits of experience without being wrinkled and withered by it, so that you can remain
eternally fresh. Or, as they might say on Wall Street, to have a sizeable store of accumulated
capital behind you, but in a way which leaves your hands absolutely free to buy, sell and
invest in the present. In the end, however, it is impossible to absorb one's past and shuck it
off at the same time. America has a hunger for experience coupled with a desire to abolish
it and start again from scratch. It must simply live with this contradiction as best it can.
Henry James in The American Scene sees certain houses in New York as proclaiming
that they do not care in the least what becomes of them once they have served their purpose.
They are as indifferent to the future as they are to the past, since neither stretch of time has
any immediacy about it. Yet since each present moment is already melting into the future,
there is no such thing as a perpetual present. Nothing is here and now. In any case, this
whole conception of time forgets that the past contains precious resources for the present
and future. Nations which have nothing to live by but their contemporary experience are
poor indeed. To liquidate the past is to help sabotage a finer future. This is one reason why
the association between progress and prosperity can be so deceitful.
Eden, then, is something of a con-trick, as it turns out to be in Dickens's Martin
Chuzzlewit . The hopeful young Martin, arrived in America to make his fortune, is shown
the blueprint of a noble city called Eden which is being raised in the wilderness. The plan
shows the settlement to be full of banks, churches, factories, hotels and cathedrals, some of
which are still to be completed. Since Martin is an architect, he spends his last few dollars
in buying into the scheme, and sets off in pursuit of this utopia. It turns out to be a cluster of
rotten wooden huts set in a fetid swamp. For the Dickens of this novel, though not for the
Dickens of American Notes , America itself is a fraud, full of pious hot air and long-winded
rhetoric, populated by braggarts and snake-oil salesmen who rave about freedom yet are
driven by greed.
In Praise of American Tourists