From Bank to Riverbank: Kenneth Grahame and The Wind in the Willows (The Weekend Australian)

I don’t suppose many people noticed – what with the global economy in crisis and the imminent collapse of the entire world order – but one financial institution did something rather touching last month, something quirky, even whimsical. No, this wasn’t Westpac’s decision to pass on the interest rate cut to its customers but rather the decision of the Bank of England to honour a former employee who was also a famous children’s author. The author in question is Kenneth Grahame and the exhibition at the bank’s museum was to mark the hundredth anniversary of his greatest book, The Wind in the Willows, published after he left the bank, in mysterious circumstances, in 1908.

In fact, it was Grahame’s only great book, though Pagan Papers (1893), The Golden Age (1895) and Dream Days (1898) had brought him admirers both at home and abroad. US President Theodore Roosevelt had requested autographed copies of his books and had even invited him to the White House. And despite the fact that The Wind in the Willows appeared to conflict with Roosevelt’s loathing for what he called the ‘Brer Rabbit School’ (stories confounding people and animals were, he’d argued in a magazine article, bad natural history and bad literature), the Commander-in-Chief was soon won over by this tale of a rather high-strung Mole, a boat-mad Rat, irascible Badger and Toad with an acute case of ADHD.

Like A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, The Wind in the Willows started life as a story told by a father to his son. Alistair Grahame was a tempestuous child (sickly and completely blind in one eye, his mother spoiled him terribly) and it was in order to calm him down that Grahame began to tell him stories. In 1907, it was decided that Alistair, or ‘Mouse’ as he was affectionately known, should take a holiday with his governess. So that he wouldn’t miss his stories, Grahame promised to commit them to paper and send them to his son in instalments. These early ‘drafts’ were later collected in First Whisper of ‘The Wind in the Willows’ (1944), introduced by Grahame’s widow, who also records how in 1907 ‘a lady-agent for an American Firm of Publishers arrived in a taxi from London at the house in Berkshire where we were living, to proffer a request that Kenneth would write something for them on any subject and at any price he desired.’ Grahame, who was then still working at the bank and hadn’t published a book for nine years, replied that he was a spring, not a pump. But Elspeth dug out the animal stories her husband had sent to their holidaying son, and the rest, you might say, is literary history.

Despite its sentimentality, and possibly because of it, Grahame’s anthropomorphic tale is still a hit with adult readers. To be sure, The Wind in the Willows emerges from a sort of Edwardian cult of childhood, in which men were wont to behave like boys, even as boys, at school especially, were required to conduct themselves as men. In her excellent book, Inventing Wonderland, Jackie Wullschlager describes the phenomenon: ‘The fashions of the day were for the great outdoors: for hearty, tweed-clad men smoking pipes, tramping across the Downs, for plunging into cold rivers, disciplining boys, shooting animals and building empires …’ Conn and Hal Iggulden’s Dangerous Book for Boys is partly an attempt to recapture this spirit, which manifested itself most obviously in books about children written for adults. Grahame himself had written such stories, in which children escape from their elders into the countryside, and in which a spirituality focused on nature has come to replace Victorian piety.

These twin obsessions with childhood and nature came together in a fascination for the mythological figure of Pan – most famously, of course, in J. M. Barrie’s 1904 play, Peter Pan, but also in The Wind in the Willows – specifically in its central chapter, ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’, in which Mole and Ratty go in search of the Otter’s infant son, Portly. But while ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ may be the spiritual heart of the book, it is certainly not the emotional heart, which lies in the wonderful descriptions of friendship, food and ‘messing about in boats’ that contemporary readers will recognise as authentically Grahamesque in tone. And, at the risk of reducing the book to the psychological foibles of its author (it is the fate of children’s authors, it seems, always to invite the biographical fallacy, perhaps because they come to us pre-shrunk), I will add that I think it very likely that The Wind in the Willows is the work of a man in the grip of an overwhelming sadness. ‘It is not pleasant’, writes Roger Sale in his chapter on Grahame in Fairy Tales and After (1978), ‘to think of The Wind in the Willows as the work of a man becoming increasingly miserable, but such seems to have been the case.’

The Bank of England’s curator, John Keyworth, suggests that while precious little is known about Grahame’s time as a senior bank clerk, ‘it is very likely that his thirty-year career had some influence on his writing …’ What kind of influence he doesn’t specify, but it’s fairly clear, to me at any rate, that such influence as the Bank of England had on Grahame’s fiction was entirely negative, except insofar as it inculcated a desire to flee it imaginatively. In his collection of stories, Pagan Papers, stockbrokers escape to the countryside and a cashier becomes a turnpike-man, while in The Golden Age the narrator remarks that ‘Monkeys … very sensibly refrain from speech, lest they should be set to earn their livings.’ As for The Wind in the Willows itself, Grahame’s Arcadia is a world without work; the unemployment rate is 100%.

Well, not quite 100%. It’s true that when the book begins Mole is busy spring cleaning his house, though it isn’t long before he throws down his brush and decides to go for a walk instead. ‘Hang spring-cleaning!’ our hero exclaims, as he takes his leave, not only of housework, but of all of life’s responsibilities:

Hither and thither through the meadows he rambled busily, along the hedgerows, across the copses, finding everywhere birds building, flowers budding, leaves thrusting – everything happy, and progressive, and occupied. And instead of having an uneasy conscience pricking him and whispering ‘Whitewash!’ he somehow could only feel how jolly it was to be the only idle dog among all these busy citizens.

It is to this spirit of freedom from toil that Ratty answers, somewhat expediently. Indeed, this affable layabout and poetaster is, one feels, the character with whom the author most strongly identifies, or rather would like to identify, for he is the closest, physically and spiritually, to the languorous freedom, the liberty, of the river. Having grown up in a village in Berkshire, Grahame had always loved the Thames, which he clearly came to associate with freedom, especially freedom from responsibility. And it is this freedom from responsibility that The Wind in the Willows celebrates. It is a summertime picnic on the riverbank comprised entirely of comfort food.

Although the book begins with a departure, home, and not the open road, is the real hero of The Wind in the Willows. In Chapter V, ‘Dulce Domum’, Mole and Rat pass through a village on their way back from the Wild Wood. It is a winter’s night and the light from the windows fills them with a sense of longing:

[I]t was from one little window, with its blind drawn down, a mere blank transparency on the night, that the sense of home and the little curtained world within walls – the larger stressful world of outside Nature shut out and forgotten – most pulsated.

It is, of course, this sense of cosiness that E. H. Shepard’s illustrations, with their thick black lines and close cross-hatching, capture so agreeably. In fact, the book remained unillustrated until late on in Grahame’s life (‘I love these little people, be kind to them’, he implored), but they are now as much a part of the book as Sir John Tenniel’s illustrations are of Alice in Wonderland. The illustration on page 25 of my edition (Egmont Press) is especially resonant of this sense of snugness, with Rat and Mole sitting close to the fire, the light from which only barely manages to keep the surrounding darkness at bay. These characters don’t reside; they nest.

This is the home life Grahame never had and it isn’t hard to identify a double helping of wish-fulfilment in these scenes of domestic ecstasy. His mother had died when he was young and his father packed him off to live with his maternal grandmother in Cookham Dean. (‘It is easy to surmise’, writes Roger Sale, ‘that Grahame came to idealise childhood because his own was anything but ideal.’) Nor was Grahame’s married life a picture of familial bliss. Indeed, there is every reason to think that his marriage was an unhappy one.

Just listen to Grahame’s own descriptions of the atmosphere of The Wind in the Willows and you will hear a man who has given up on the dream of romantic love altogether. Animals were used, he wrote at one point, ‘to get away … from weary sex problems’. The book was ‘clean of the clash of sex’ (‘clean’!); its ‘qualities, if any,’ he told Roosevelt, ‘are mostly negative – i.e. no problems, no sex, no second meanings …’ Male company is what he craved and the book underlines this time and again. Such women as pass through The Wind in the Willows – the gaoler’s daughter, the woman on the barge – do so as rude mechanicals only. Home, for Grahame, has nothing to do with family life or female company, all of which smacked of responsibility. It has to do with friendship between men – such, indeed, that the very furnishings seem to be imbued with camaraderie:

The ruddy brick floor smiled up at the smoky ceiling; the oaken settles, shiny with long wear, exchanged cheerful glances with each other; plates on the dresser grinned at pots on the shelf, and the merry firelight flickered and played over everything without distinction.

Such passages underscore the sense of male friendship as something special and this is the theme of Grahame’s great book. What is The Wind in the Willows, after all, if not the story of an intervention? ‘When are you going to be sensible,’ says Rat to Toad, ‘and think of your friends, and try to be a credit to them?’

With the notable and enjoyable exception of Toad – the very type of the Hooray Henry – all of the principal characters in the book are paragons of middle-class solidity. Indeed, the book is deeply imbued, not with snobbery, but a kind of class fear. In 1903, Grahame was shot at by a robber at the Bank of England and it’s possible that he projected his anxieties onto the lower-class Stoats and Weasels, with their ‘little evil wedge-shaped’ faces (thus are the undernourished cast). I am not the first to remark upon this. Jan Needle’s satirical novel Wild Wood (1981), illustrated by the great cartoonist Willie Rushton, retells the story of The Wind in the Willows from the point of view of the Stoats and Weasels, who, after taking over Toad Hall, turn it into a socialist collective.

In summary, then, we can see how the world of The Wind in the Willows reveals much more than its middle-aged creator intended. Reading it now, I have to say, it strikes me as a very sad book trying as hard as it can to be happy. One line sticks in my mind above all: ‘“Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wide World,” said the Rat. “And that’s something that doesn’t matter, either to you or me.”’

Review of Liver, by Will Self (The Sydney Morning Herald)

Will Self, Liver (Viking; $49.95; 277pp)

The C-word is much in evidence in Will Self’s latest collection of stories. Indeed, in the Plantation Club – a drinking establishment intimately modelled on Soho’s famous Colony Club – ‘“cunt” in its nounal, verbal, adjectival, adverbial and even conjunctive forms was the root word of an entire dialect, the main purpose of which was to communicate either extreme disapprobation or, more rarely, the opposite.’ However, it is to three other C-words that the book owes its real capacity for shock, and, indeed, its power to disgust. Cirrhosis; cancer; and Hepatitis C.

All, of course, diseases of the liver, an organ close to the author’s heart. For while Self has been ‘clean’ for nearly ten years, his history of alcoholism and intravenous drug use has left him only too aware of how lucky he’s been to escape this grim trio. His latest book is about those less fortunate, and Self, as one would expect, is explicit. Like those lurid images of diseased human organs printed on the front of cigarette packets, Liver spares the reader nothing.

The book comprises four short stories. The first, and best, is Foie Humain, which features the establishment mentioned above, the owner of which, Val Carmichael, is perpetrating an alcoholic gavage on his barman and lover Hilary. (A gavage is the process of force-feeding geese in order to enlarge their livers.) The second, and longest, is Leberknödel, in which Joyce, who is suffering from liver cancer, travels to Zurich in search of relief in the form of an assisted suicide, a mission handily symbolised by the tailfin of the Swissair plane, which, our hawk-eyed narrator notes, is a perfect inversion of the medical cross. The third is Prometheus, in which the eponymous Titan is recast as an advertising copywriter subject to regular visits from an eagle that feasts upon his ailing liver. And the fourth is the charming Birdy Num Num, set in a squalid London drug den and narrated by the Hep C virus, which, like the denizens, loves to party.

Needless to say, Self is concerned not only to explore the subject of the liver but also to exploit its metaphoric potential. ‘Blood and bile flowed through the veins of the liverish city; coiled conduits that merged, then branched out into the biliary tree of Soho.’ Indeed, Self’s fiction, concerned as it is to transform societal toxins into art, has certain affinities with the organ itself. But while bile is Self’s strength it is also his weakness in that it leaves him open to the charge of misanthropy. Why, one wonders, does everything in Selfland have to be so incredibly ugly? (‘When the Tosher was in town he toshed all day at his studio, which was above a sanitary-ware manufacturer in Peckham Rye …’ Why not a florist’s in Muswell Hill?) Self, we know, is a Grumpy Old Man whose Grumpiness is inextricable from his genius, but his wrong-end-of-the-telescope view of humanity often results is a lack of empathy that can leave him seeming excessively arch and his characters decidedly more flat than round.

Still, he is a wonderful stylist, alive to the vertical richness of language in all its gaudy variety. From Joycean coinages such as ‘evergloomy’ to the street tmesis of sharp-talking ad men (‘astro-fucking-nomical’) to the stomach-turning descriptions of disease, Self’s high style is vivid and vigilant, such that the adjective ‘Nabokovian’ might not be entirely misplaced. Only occasionally does he go overboard. ‘Joyce shivered in the shiny arrivals hall, then shook as they shuffled along the shushed shopping concourse.’ It seems to me that any editor working half as hard as that sentence would have killed it immediately.

Not that Self, a wordaholic lurching from one slurred strophe to the next, is due for an intervention just yet. On the contrary, he’s a joy to read, and Liver, despite some notable excesses, is a vital organ in the Selfian corpus.

Road to Nowhere (The Weekend Australian, Nov 08)

Delia Falconer (ed.), The Penguin Book of the Road
Penguin; $35; 385pp

It is interesting to reflect on the ways in which literature is influenced by particular modes of transport. Might it be the case, for example, that the decline of traditional English metres is dimly related to the decline of train travel, with its anapaestic clickety-clack? (John Betjeman, a noted choo-choo tragic, was also an adept of the running rhythm.) And, if such a case can be made (and I make it semi-seriously), might not the now-ubiquitous car have had an effect on our literature as well? If so, then what effect has it had? Jokes about autobiography aside, what do we mean by ‘road literature’?

As Delia Falconer rightly says in her preface to The Penguin Book of the Road, the answer will vary from country to country. ‘[Australia’s] road stories may not subscribe to the triumphalist grandeur or existential wildness of the American tradition, or share its generic self-awareness (they are often part of other stories rather than ‘road stories’ per se), but they do something different and perhaps more interesting – they seem to always look back over their own shoulders.’ In the US, Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson gave a psychological (and psychedelic) twist to the frontier experience of previous generations. In Australia, by contrast, the road appears as something ‘haunted and hyper-alert’. ‘Things shimmer, sensations are heightened; relationships become slightly unreal, even characters’ relationships with themselves.’ Falconer’s sense is that Australia’s road literature is in fact very closely related to the ghost story. That two of the pieces included here, William Hay’s ‘An Australian Rip Van Winkle’ and Barbara Baynton’s ‘A Dreamer’, are also included in The Anthology of Colonial Australian Gothic Fiction (MUP) lends a generous dollop of credence to this view.

Normally, an anthology such as this would be judged on the strength of the pieces within it and not on the extent to which those pieces support the anthological principle. However, I found it almost impossible to separate text and overtext in this instance. Falconer calls Australian road stories ‘a unique and under-appreciated sub-genre of our literature’. But a genre is ‘sub’ by definition. Indeed, this sounds like a fancy way of saying that the road is wholly peripheral to many of the pieces included in the book. Her own contribution, ‘The Republic of Love’ – a magnificent prose threnody for Ned Kelly spoken by the ‘tart of Jerilderie’ – barely mentions the road at all (though Ned, we assume, is on the hoof when he and Mary aren’t on the job). Similarly, Malcolm Knox’s ‘Virginity and its Promise’ (extracted from his novel Summerland) is a wonderful evocation of childhood to which the road is nothing more than a stubbornly unsymbolic backdrop.

On the whole, it is the fiction extracts that prove the least successful inclusions. Novelists take pains to delineate character, to set the scene, to establish mood. To isolate a chunk of novel on the pretext that a road runs through it will inevitably look like insensitivity, especially if that road is just scenery. Moreover, by making the road the focus, Falconer accords it an importance or a resonance that may not have been in the novelist’s mind. To this extent, the best of the extracts are Gillian Mears’s ‘The Burial and the Busker’ (extracted from her novel Fineflour), in which the road is clearly employed as a symbol, and Tim Winton’s beautifully written ‘North’, an extract from his novel Dirt Music, in which the road does indeed play a crucial role in setting the tone of eerie menace.

Short stories are a better way to go. Dorothy Hewett’s ‘Nullarbor Honeymoon’, with its modulations of voice and tense, is a well crafted and unsettling piece, while Peter Carey’s early short story, ‘American Dreams’, is a joy to read. There are also some very accomplished vignettes from memoirs and autobiographies, including a lovely bit of slapstick from Clive James’s Unreliable Memoirs (some business with a billycart) and a harrowing extract from Peter Rose’s 2001 memoir, Rose Boys, describing the day his footballer-brother was crippled in a terrible accident. Another reminder of just how dangerous life on Australia’s roads can be is Robert Hughes’s ‘A Bloody Expat’, from his memoir Things I Didn’t Know, in which the Nissan Pulsar Hughes was driving when he crashed into an oncoming car is ‘folded around me like crude origami’.

There are some very good things in this anthology. But too much is taken out of context. Perhaps it would have been an idea to include some poetry along with the prose. Les Murray’s ‘Driving Through Sawmill Towns’ would have been a fine inclusion – one that would have chimed with Falconer’s description of the Australian road as ‘sexy, dangerous, nostalgic, harsh, mysterious and unnerving’.

Dante Meets Derrida (Sydney Morning Herald, Nov 08)

John Kinsella, Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography
UQP; $26.95; 409pp

To attempt to update or relocate a foundational work of world literature is a bold and highly perilous enterprise. Of course, there have been striking successes: Joyce’s Ulysses; Derek Walcott’s Omeros. But there have also been conspicuous failures. Ezra Pound was channelling Dante as he sweated and fretted over his Cantos. The result, as Clive James noted recently, was ‘a nut-job blog before the fact’.

John Kinsella’s latest poem, a ‘distraction’ on Dante’s Divine Comedy, could also be reasonably described as a blog, though as to its nuttiness I make no judgment. In fact, it’s a sort of diary of a year, largely but not exclusively centred on a five-and-a-half-acre block of land in the Wheatbelt region of Western Australia. This block of land is at the base of a mountain – conveniently for the Purgatorio canticle, which, in Kinsella’s version, comes first (with Paradiso second and Inferno last). Colonised by paragliders – dark angels in Kinsella’s schema – this landscape serves as a microcosm for the Heaven of prelapsarian nature and the Hell of human contamination. Thus, Kinsella is able to indulge his so-called anti-pastoralism, with its emphasis on salinity, pollution, pesticides, over-clearing and other atrocities, even as he goes ‘up close’ (his phrase) on the tawny frogmouths and blue-tongued goannas.

The closer the better, in my opinion. Kinsella is always at his best when he sets himself to describe the familiar in new and unfamiliar ways. (Only Kinsella, Harold Bloom once remarked, could transcendentalise a chilli pepper.) Specific instances that caught my ear were the life buoys described as ‘cored sunsets’ and the ‘bulb of carcass’ to which a roo has been reduced by a passing car. I also liked the following description of moths in a sandpit during a rain shower. Note how the vowel sounds in the second line manage to convey a sense of burden:

Their wings heavy with rain,
dust is running off like sludge.
The terrace of sand a desert

of the drowning and the drowned.

If Kinsella could write like that all the time he would be a very fine poet indeed. Unfortunately, a fidgety aestheticism always seems to get in the way. Not content with his star player status, Kinsella wants to be a commentator too, and the deaf poetics of the Language School inform his vision like so much mist. Essays about Kinsella’s poetry have titles like ‘National Geosophical Lexicon’ or ‘John Kinsella’s Poetics of Hybridity’ and some of the poems in this collection read like invitations to such nonsense. (‘I am seeking / out the epistemological ambiguity of owls …’) The structure remains loyal to the original, we are told, ‘at least on the subtextual level’. Even as we speak, battalions of academics are slowly moving into position …

Moreover, Kinsella’s Derridean poetics aren’t much help to his politics. When, in ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, Shelley let fly at Castlereagh, Castlereagh knew he’d taken a hit. ‘I met Murder on the way – / He had a mask like Castlereagh.’ Take that! By contrast, Kinsella, a black belt in obscurity, strikes a series of spectacular poses but forgets to land the killer blow. Two dramatic monologues aimed at Messrs Abbott and Costello, that double act from the previous administration, are exemplary in this regard:

Chin up, wading out of Piss Christ,
wading through mushy-culturalism,
I demanded tougher oaths,

more compact make-overs.
I buoyed the congregation,
I mined the vast emptiness,

I removed the clutter of forests
and deleted any over-particulars,
I annexed and annulled the twilight zone.

Somehow I doubt the former chancellor, counting the money from the sales of his memoir, will be laid low by that assault.

But Kinsella is no satirist. He is, in my view, a nature poet who believes he is a philosopher. That the philosophy has begun to take over from the poetry is a development much to be regretted. I think Kinsella should get back to the dugites, and leave Deconstruction to the academics.

US and Them (Sydney Morning Herald, Nov 08)

Ronald Wright, What is America?
Text; $34.95; 368pp
~
Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World
Allen Lane; $34.95; 292pp

Every book has a snagging-point, some detail to which the mind returns and which seems to define the book as a whole. For me, reading Ronald Wright’s What is America?, this point came on page 122, in the form of a genocidal aside from a nineteenth-century Vermont lawyer: ‘Indians’ bones must enrich the soil before the plough of civilised man can open it.’ Ring a bell? If so it’s possible you are thinking of a quote from a rather more enlightened pen. ‘The tree of liberty’, wrote Thomas Jefferson, ‘must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.’

Neither Jefferson nor the tree of liberty makes much of an appearance in What is America? Indeed, Wright’s aim is precisely to puncture the (as he sees it) all-too sanguine view of US origins and moral purpose taken by its institutions. Jefferson did not, needless to say, advocate genocide against native Americans. But he did recommend ensnaring them in debt as an effective means of acquiring their land. And it is that side – the underside – of US history that Wright is at pains to emphasise.

To begin in 1776 is thus to begin half way through the story. The key date is 1492, when Columbus set sail from Palos de Frontera. Indeed, Wright talks of ‘the Columbian Age’, by which he means the era that originated with the Spanish conquests of Mexico and Peru and that may only now be coming to an end. To cut a very long story short, the loot from these conquests allowed the Spanish to pursue their military ambitions elsewhere. However, its military ambitions beggared it, with the result that much of the wealth moved north, oiling the wheels of the industrial revolution and drifting back across the Atlantic as the British colonised the American north. As Wright puts it: ‘Having grown at compound interest in the Old World … the stolen wealth of Mexico and Peru had now returned to the New.’

Meanwhile, the early settlers in America had been busy wiping out the natives through a combination of disease and conquest. (In this sense at least, the ‘land of the free’ and the home of the Brave were opposing idylls.) In England, the Puritans had been pacified by Anglicanism. In America, by contrast, Puritanical zeal and an imperial ethos had ‘jumped together’ into a vision of divinely sanctioned expansion. It is, Wright asserts, this expansionist vision that has informed US actions ever since.

‘[T]his is an eccentric book,’ writes the author in his introduction. If by ‘eccentric’ he means ‘one-sided, and consequently flawed’ he’s bang on the money. To seek ‘the centre by its edges’ is one thing; to make a show of completely ignoring the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution is another. For Wright, the US is in thrall to its origins as a hotbed of religious bigotry. No doubt he’s got the beginnings of a point. But by leaving out the explicit separation of church and state in the Constitution, he is leaving out the very thing that prevents the lunatics taking over the asylum.

In The Post-American World, Fareed Zakaria takes a more benign view of the US’s rise to dominance, though the editor of Newsweek International is no Pollyanna when it comes to its prospects. Indeed, his principal goal in this book is to chart what he calls ‘the rise of the rest’ (of India and China in particular) and to urge upon his adopted country the need to prepare itself for the future. The world is unipolar no longer. For the first time ever, Zakaria argues, we are witnessing genuinely global growth.

What will the ‘rise of the rest’ entail? The tendency has been to believe, or to hope, that free trade and democracy co-evolve. China has dealt a blow to this view, though Zakaria urges us not to panic. For now, it suits the Communist Party to forge ahead with economic reform without the pandering and inevitable delays that characterise advanced democracies. In the long term, however, political despotism may prove incompatible with economic stability. If so, it is to be sorely hoped that the Government of the People’s Republic of China opts for the latter and not the former.

For Zakaria, it is the political prospects of the US that are of immediate concern, and here his book proves extremely prescient. It is fashionable contrarianism, Zakaria suggests, to sneer at calls for bipartisanship. In reality, however, the US system is not designed for partisan politics, a point underlined by the recent chaos surrounding the Wall Street bailout package. And a hugely important point it is too, since US fortunes will depend on an ability to respond to events imaginatively and quickly. For now, says Zakaria, a ‘can-do’ country is saddled with a ‘do-nothing’ politics.

US stocks are down, no question. But historians and commentators who paint the US as a nation of Moose-shooters and Mayflower screwballs are only painting half a picture. Zakaria offers a degree of optimism, but his optimism is tinged with caution. Both the optimism and the caution are welcome. For my part, I think that Jefferson was right and that the US is still ‘the world’s best hope’, though it’s possible I’m simply hoping for the best.