My fifth chapter analyses a very different kind of vow: what philosophers refer to as a wicked promise – a pledge to do harm. I argue that the self-defeating logic of such promises explains the peculiar form of James’s last completed novel, The Golden Bowl. The world the wicked promise conjures into being is described by one character as “Evil – with a very big E,"a world in which keeping one’s word becomes almost inconceivable. This explains why the novel ends with another promise altogether– that made by the Prince, who waits to see what world Maggie has prepared for him. The fact that this promise comes due beyond the end of the text suggests the limits of a promise to which no obligation attaches.

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.