At an end-of-summer Conroy gathering on the family farm in upstate New York, I submitted a copy of Terry Eagleton’s cleverly provocative appraisal of their country and its people to two of the younger members of the clan, which migrated there from Co Clare early in the nineteenth century. Sasha Conroy, a lissome blonde with the formidable intellect of a doctor of jurisprudence, and her equally vivacious and brainy sister Sophia, a medical student, felt able to assess the work after skimming through a couple of chapters.
Terence Francis Eagleton, the author of more than 40 generally respectedbooks, including Why Marx Was Right and Literary Theory: An Introduction, was brought up as a Catholic in Salford, Lancashire, with deep roots in Galway, now lives in Dublin, and holds professorships from time to time in England, America and Ireland. A devout socialist, who believes our future will be "socialism or barbarism", and a republican, he scorns new atheists and right-wing evangelists alike, and regards Britain's monarchy as a ludicrous anachronism. Across the Pond is subtitled "An Englishman's View of America", but he certainly isn't exclusively English. Having spent many years in England, America and Ireland, I think I can recognise his jaded international stereoscopic points of view.
The dogma of his magisterial, supercilious polemical thesis is leavened with wisecracks. If his observations were taken entirely seriously he might seem to be trying to subvert that beloved old Anglo-American special relationship. However, the overall impression is of only a potboiling tease. Being well acquainted with Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, Eagleton knows how easy it is to irritate Americans with critical descriptions of their character, behaviour and modes of expression. In his introduction, he attempts to disarm American readers by saying that "some of my best friends are Americans. My wife and three of my children, for example." In further attempted mitigation of attacks to come, he adds: "when I make large generalisations about the British, Irish and Americans in this book, my comments must occasionally be seen as involving a degree of poetic licence and a pinch of salt." Those conciliatory words cut no ice with Sasha and Sophia, let alone mustard.
“So he’s married to an American,” Sasha said. “Why doesn’t he just pick on her? Why does he have to pick on our whole country? Maybe he should send her back. He’s a pompous sourpuss.” A harsh judgement, perhaps, but academia isn’t the only place where vituperation sometimes transcends reasonable discussion.
The legendary melting pot, which is supposed to mix immigrants of all ethnicities into a state of national homogeneity, is not actually completely effective. There are lumps of nonconformity, some in ghettos voluntarily populated by people clinging to each other and their cultural origins. Eagleton, while portraying stereotypes, acknowledges their arbitrariness and subjective bias, with examples close to his present home. “The Irish,” he writes, “do not take kindly to being told that they are dirty, idle, feckless, lying, drunken, priest-ridden brawlers.” On the other hand, “many Irish people are rather gratified to be told that they are genial, charming, witty, eloquent, poetic and hospitable, even though this is just as much of a stereotype.” Anyway, this is his book, so he can express as much prejudice as he likes, and the results may be quite amusing if you take his licence with a bushel of salt. Consider some typical pronouncements:
“Generally speaking, American students are a delight to teach. Yet they are not always able to voice a coherent English sentence, even at graduate level. Some of them are easy to mistake for Turks or Albanians who have only just arrived in the country and are still struggling with the language.”
“It was a communal act of willing that brought America about in the first place. . . . It is not just a country like any other, but a project, a vocation, a mission, a destiny, a spiritual enterprise. Nobody thinks this about Belgium.”
“God is a very fine American because he is such a fantastic success. He knows everything, can do anything, can hire and fire his underlings as the fancy takes him, and despite being omnipotent is admirably upright.”
“The American dream of immortality sounds like the fantasy of those so deeply in love with life that they cannot bear to relinquish it.”
“If sport is so vital to American life, it is because it writes large the qualities most valued in everyday existence: strength, heroism, glamour, spectacle, self-discipline, stamina, recklessness, a winning spirit, a consuming desire for wealth, and ferocious competitiveness.”
"In the United States, Christianity needs to be sanitised, modernised, de-Judaised and Americanised, a project which is known among other things as the Mormon Church. The scandal that Jesus was a scruffy, unhygienic Jew from a part of the globe bereft of bath tubs and chocolate chip cookies must somehow be rectified. So must the fact that he is even more remote from us in time than Gary Cooper."
“For some Americans, feeling good about yourself is a sacred duty. . . . ‘I weigh four hundred pounds, smoke four packs a day and have just taken a machete to all three of my kids, but I still feel good about myself’ is the kind of declaration that might win you a spontaneous burst of applause on certain American TV shows.”
“Perhaps the United States invades other countries as a way of giving its citizens a much-needed geography lesson. Deciding to flatten Baghdad is a great incentive to finding out where it is.”
“The United States is a chronically schizoid culture. How its citizens are required to act in the bedroom or boardroom is not at all how they are expected to behave in the disco or shopping mall. Regulation is taboo in the marketplace but mandatory in the home, school and public sphere.”
By the time I finished Eagleton’s tongue-in-cheek diatribe, I sympathised with Sasha and Sophia, and not just because they are my granddaughters.
Patrick Skene Catling has written novels and books for children.
