This chapter reads The Golden Bowl and The Waste Land as semaphores for the felt weakening of twentieth-century British and European ascendancy. James’s exquisitely managed novel and Eliot’s encyclopedic poem are not just documents of disintegration, but new totalizations on new architectonic principles. In their respective treatments of shattering, salvage and re-composition, they point to new world orders still only partially emerging into view during the decades immediately after World War I. American wealth and the transfer of art from Europe to America is The Golden Bowl’s subject; The Waste Land is concerned with the collapse of European culture and coherence. However, as James became 'the master' of the English novel and Eliot 'the Pope of Russell Square' American attempts to manage what Europe could no longer do became as evident in cultural as in political fields. After World War II, the United States would proudly reclaim these émigré writers and establish new 'Great Books' and “World Literature' courses to reflect its ambitions as the Cold War era’s major superpower.

“The Artist as Clerk” moves from the reinvention of national debt under John Maynard Keynes to examine the role of debt, literary and financial, in the high modernist work of T. S. Eliot. As a young bank clerk at Lloyds of London, Eliot’s assignment was to parse the German debts adjudicated by the Versailles Treaty’s terms. It briefly recalls the structural role of debt in the liberal crises of interwar Europe, then connects those crises to the unbearable material and poetic debts that burden Eliot’s poetic line. Debt work makes its way to the very heart of his major postwar poetry, in the arid indemnities of “Gerontion” and in the conjunction of clerk, desk, and typist at the heart of The Waste Land. In Eliot’s interwar essays we see a parallel confrontation with economic and political liberalism, an interest dramatized in the incomplete Coriolan sequence.