What links these books?

The experience of being American abroad and the experience of abroad having Americans in it.

Tell me about Innocents Abroad.

In 1867 Mark Twain accompanied a group of American Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land. As part of this excursion, they also enter Russia and various places in and around continental Europe. He sends them up marvelously – their pretensions, their messianic belief that they were better than anyone else in the world and their inability to understand what was going on around them. It’s a wonderfully wry look at a certain type of American who is striding the world, probably at just about the stage where America was about to take over the world.

Are American travellers still like that?

Since then far more Americans have been abroad and America has fought two world wars. When Americans leave home now, they don’t really leave home any more. They come to places that have been taken over by the American world economy and they will see the same things abroad that they will see at home: McDonald’s, Starbucks, chain clothing stores. All of these things will be very familiar to them, whereas in 1867 they were coming to strange lands without outlets to American culture.

It’s really a compilation of articles Mark Twain wrote whilst abroad. He doesn’t seem that impressed in many of them by what he’s seeing around him.

Mark Twain wasn’t very impressed by anything, actually. He was a very funny character. In Baalbek he noted that every jackass from Missouri to New York had carved their initials into the temple of Jupiter. He was taken to the court of the Czar where he was singularly unimpressed by the figure of the Czar, and Lake Galilee, which he compared to Lake Tahoe, comes out as nothing much more than a mud puddle. And the kings of Israel, he realises, were just a bunch of local village headmen.

So was there ‘no place like home’?

Luckily he didn’t trivialise quite to that degree about anything. He didn’t tend to moralise; in fact, he didn’t like moralising.

Daisy Miller was published nine years later, about Americans settling in Europe rather than travelling through it. It follows Daisy Miller who goes to Switzerland and Italy where she is courted by the socially superior Winterbourne. What kind of American is Daisy Miller?

This is a very Jamesian view of the innocent American abroad corrupted by the old world and, in Daisy Miller’s case, killed by the old world. She represents this ideal of an American ignorant of the lurking dangers in that old world, typified by the miasmas of the Colosseum which finally kills her, but also the love that this man has for her which is powerless to save her.

It is another self-image that the Americans tend to have; that they are always pure and simple and when they go to places, subsequently like Vietnam, it is Vietnam that corrupts them, not the other way round. It’s completely wrong but that is a lingering self-image.

Isn’t she also a victim of the other Americans abroad and their own set of social aspirations?

Daisy was pure and not a gossip like them. In fact, she’s almost not a human. She’s a theory, a Jamesian idea of a virginal creature that can only suffer, who could only be corrupted. She is warned not to go the Colosseum at night with the mosquitoes, but she does it anyway and she dies. But it isn’t the Colosseum or the mosquitoes that kill her. It represents the idea that it’s not a place for someone as good as you. You don’t have the immunities that others have.

Tell me more about the social climbing.

She has aspirations to rise in an old world context, which can only be self-defeating in a Henry James novel. He was quite a social climber himself and actually became British and decided he didn’t really like being American any more. He, like TS Eliot, became very anglicised and felt more at home in Britain than in America. There was a larger literary culture, literacy levels was higher and there were more writers. The writers were usually localised in London, while they were spread out in America and there wasn’t such a like-minded community.

Some people still care a lot about social mobility. There’s been a long tradition of American heiresses marrying impoverished titles so that the Americans get a bit of respectability and the Europeans get some money. This still goes on.

So Henry James’s pursuits were more intellectual than social?

He, like his brother William, was a very intellectually engaged man and a very sharp and perceptive observer of people’s customs and behaviour.

Do they get it wrong?

Daisy got it wrong to the extent that it was fatal to her and crushed her spirit. They do get it wrong but lots of people get it wrong. There are social oafs not just in America but also in lots of countries.

Tell me about Catch 22.

It’s one of the funniest books ever written. It’s about the insanity of military life and the absurdity of a big institution. Heller was very good on the absurdity of big institutions.