Bradbury1978 ExpatriateTradition

Second Countries: The Expatriate Tradition in American Writing
Author(s): Malcolm Bradbury

Source: The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 8, American Literature Special Number (1978), pp.
15-39
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association
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Second Countries:
The Expatriate Tradition in American Writing
MALCOLM BRADBURY
Universityof East Anglia
'Ah, off to Europe!' Hudson exclaimed with a melancholy cadence as they sat
down. 'Happy, happy man!'
(Henry James, RoderickHudson,1876)
'Americans should never come to Europe... it means they never can be happy
again. What's the good of an American who isn't happy? Happiness was all we
had'.
(James Baldwin, Giovanni'sRoom,1956)
I
Almost every country and culture in which the arts have been seriously
pursued has produced its literary exiles; its voyagers, expatriates, and
emigres. Particularly since the Romantic period, though also repeatedly
before it, a large part of literary experience and of literary creation itself
has taken place outside the native land of the author. Today this is a marked,
recurrent feature of literature. Surveying the world of Nabokov, Beckett,
Borges, of Mann, Brecht, and Joyce, George Steiner reminds us, in his book
Extraterritorial (1972), what a large part of modernist literature has been
written by the writer 'unhoused'. A marked element of geographical displace-
ment lies behind modern writing and, Steiner notes, this has frequently been
not just a geographical but also a formal and a linguistic condition; modern
art has been shaped by distance, multilinguality, and Babel. This, he
remarks, is appropriate; is art speaking to the modern condition as we have
come to feel it; is a response to 'the problem of the lost centre'. But it is not,
he stresses, a new phenomenon: the Romantic notion of the writer enracineis
perhaps more the exception than the rule.1
Certainly foreign residence does seem a recurrent condition of writerliness.
The troubadour, the sentimental traveller, the taker of the educative
wanderjahr, the travelling scholar, the artist-voyager journeying to some
mythic destiny, the political exile, the provincial hungry for the capitals of
1 George Steiner, 'Extraterritorial' in Extraterritorial:Paperson Literatureand the LanguageRevolution

(London, 1972).
i6 The ExpatriateTraditionin AmericanWriting
art; these are old and familiar figures in literary history. Writers are often
less than reliable citizens of their nation, and frequently carry in their
minds a map of the world, an imagistic or fantastic or writerly geography,
on which the capitals and the frontiers seem at odds with the familiar political
atlas. Doubtless one thing that makes this such a possible affair is that, in the
profession of letters, travel and long foreign residence are not difficult
undertakings. Needing minimal equipment (an intelligence, an imagination,
paper and pen or typewriter) and financed often by the oblique economics
of patronage, royalty, or private income, the writer has less to bind him than
most of us, is freer to chose his working location in the context of pleasure or
stimulus, and is more disposed to mythicize and justify the activity, to
attach a dramatic value to it. This has much to do with the internationalist
sensibility that belongs to the arts, with its speedy communications, its
rapid transmissions of style, its pace of evolution. Yet it is also a matter to
which much anxiety attaches, on the part of writers themselves, and on the
part of those who speak for the native culture from which they have departed
or been ejected.
If we examine the matter further, we may find two main reasons for the
tendency. One, the easier to understand, is that of the writer dislodged or
displaced by factors within his own society, the writer pushed (by political
censorship, the threat of trial, the consequence of revolution, or, more
subtly, by the sense of irrelevance) to leave his country in disquiet or disgust
and find freedom of expression elsewhere. Outright compulsion, the writer
ejected, like Dostoevsky, Nabokov, Brecht, Mann, Solzhenitsyn, from his
homeland by pressure, fiat, or political upheaval, is one of the commonest
causes of literary migration. But there is another form which is based on the
romantic act of choice. This is the case of the writer pulled, drawn by factors
in another society, some sensibility, opportunity, or stimulus which makes
him believe he can write better there, find art or fame or publication. Here,
presumably, is the difference between the exile and the expatriate. In some
cultures, like the English, the disposition of writers to settle or travel for
long periods abroad has been taken as a normal state of affairs; in others,
it has been a matter for anxiety. This is especially notable in post-colonial
nations of democratic disposition which wish to see a national art developing,
but witness instead an internationalization of art, its capitals lying not in the
nation's boundaries but in some more magnetic centre. The United States
began as a post-colonial nation; it also developed a strong expatriate tradi-
tion - one that, moreover, persisted long beyond the immediately post-
colonial stage, through many phases of cultural evolution, many periods of
style, many different sets of assumptions about the nature of the arts and
their creative sources, many different stages in the balance of international
power. It also developed an anxiety on the issue, and that too has persisted.
If literary expatriation is, indeed, commonplace (witness the number of
English writers of the last two centuries who could scarcely be prised loose
MALCOLM BRADBURY I7
from Italy, Greece, or Provence), then, it seems, American cultural commen-
tators have never been able to take it as such: it has been a recurrent matter
for comment, debate, accusation, and, of course, analysis.1
The interesting fact then is not just the number of American writers and
artists who have chosen, for whatever reason, to live and work outside their
native land, but the degree of tension and attention this has drawn. There is
no doubt at all that intellectual and artistic expatriation has played a remark-
ably large part in American cultural development; there is equally no doubt
that there has been a temptation and a pressure for Americans to see Ameri-
can writing and thinking as necessarily anti-expatriate, as new, independent,
freed from Europe, created distinctively on native grounds. Thus one of the
reasons for the anxiety and the drama, both within the writers themselves,
and in the domain of political thought and public opinion which has dis-
cussed their choices, is that so many of these expatriates have chosen Europe
as their destination - a choice regarded by many commentators, from the
eighteenth-century onward, as a fundamental violation of the American
direction and the American dream, a movement in the wrong direction,
back into history, despotism, and obscurantism. In terms of a familiar
American cultural mythology, they were examples of the failure of American
society to declare its own mental independence. Despite this drama, and
perhaps indeed becauseof it, the tradition has been not only influential but
remarkably persistent. In the eighteenth century, in the period of colonial
America, American artistic and literary groups grew up, not surprisingly, in
London, Paris, Rome, and Florence. But they have lasted. One of the
remarkable spectacles of the I920S was that a large part of an entire new
literary generation shifted to Paris; even now, long after American art has
been reckoned to have 'come-of-age', and when the phenomenon of reverse
expatriation, of European writers migrating to the United States, has become
entirely commonplace, such colonies persist. It is thus a situation that has
transcended, too, the dominance of particular phases of style and sensibility,
shaping the pattern of American literary development through stylistic
tendencies as various as Romanticism and Naturalism, Modernism and
Post-Modernism - so constituting an essential, if certainly not the only,
American tradition.
Among the many modern general studies of the topic are Marius Bewley, The ComplexFate
(London, 1952); Van Wyck Brooks, America'sComingof Age (New York, 1948) and The Dream of
Arcadia: AmericanWritersand Artistsin Italy, 1760-x915 (New York, 1958; London, 1959); Henry S.
Canby, Turn West, Turn East: Mark Twain and HenryJames (Cambridge, Mass., I951); Malcolm
Cowley, Exile's Return: A LiteraryOdysseyof the r92os (revised edition: London, 1961); The American
WriterandtheEuropeanTradition,edited by Margaret Denny and W. H. Gilman (Minneapolis, 1950);
Ernest Earnest, ExpatriatesandPatriots: AmericanArtists,Scholarsand Writersin Europe(Durham, N.C.,
1968); Clarence Gohdes, AmericanLiteraturein NineteenthCenturyEngland (New York, I944); Alan
Holder, Three Voyagersin Searchof Europe:A Studyof HenryJames, Ezra Pound,and T. S. Eliot (Phila-
delphia and London, 1966); R. B. Mowat, Americansin England (London, 1935); Ferner Nuhn,
The Wind Blew from the East (New York, 1942); Discoveryof Europe,edited by Philip Rahv (Boston,
1947); ChristofWegelin, The Imageof Europein HenryJames (Dallas, 1958); Nathalia Wright, American
Novelistsin Italy: The Discoverers(Philadelphia and London, I965).
i8 The ExpatriateTraditionin AmericanWriting
The American literary experience in Europe has thus been intensive and
continuous, with even the most dauntlessly American of writers braving the
European experience for their own ends, discovering themselves or some-
thing outside themselvesin the process, and building up a complex sequence
of responses to the European-American cultural relation. They afford a
fascinating series of vignettes; of Joel Barlow dying on the retreat from
Moscow, of Washington Irving stopping old ladies in the German forestsand
asking them for their budget of folktales,of James Fenimore Cooper examin-
ing in detail the operation of the European class system among different
grades of servants,of Hawthorne leaving his poky consul's office in Liverpool
and looking at the apple-cheeked English girls on the Birkenhead ferry, of
Melville, in the same city, staring down on poverty in cellars, of Emerson
inspecting Carlyle'sjaw, and reading Goethe in Naples, of the older Henry
James, solemnly educating his children in Europe but feeling so stifled by
class consciousnessthat he longed to be back in a cabin among the Indians,
of MargaretFuller begging Rome to turn its back on the past, of HenryJames
fils dining out 107 times in a London season, or sitting in a hotel where the
curtains were splendid and the food bad and remarking that England had
too much of the superfluousand not enough of the necessary, of Bret Harte
wearing the blazer of the Royal Thames Yacht Club, of Stephen Crane,
living at Brede Place, Sussex, but wearing a six-gun, of Henry Harland
writing his novels of an Italy in which, James said, cardinals were a part of
the furniture, of Henry Adams bowing before the dynamos at the Paris
Exposition,of Edith Wharton omnivorouslyand flamboyantlytouringEurope
in what James called her 'wondrouscushionedgeneralcar', of Gertrude Stein
being mistaken for a bishop in Spain, so that peasantsqueued up to kiss her
ring, of Ezra Pound sitting with a few friends in a Kensington teashop
founding the Imagist movement, of Eliot drawn to Anglo-Catholicism and
the English rose-garden,of Ernest Hemingway boxing with Scott Fitzgerald,
Morley Callaghan, and any other writer he could find in Paris, trying to
win that way, of Fitzgerald himself writing
there was no one at Antibesthis summerexcept me, Zelda, the Valentinos,the
Murphys,Mistinguet,Rex Ingram, Dos Passos,Alice Terry, the MacLeishes,
CharlesBracket,Maude Kahn, EstherMurphy,MargueriteNamara,E. Phillips
Oppenheim,Mannes the violinist, Floyd Dell, Max and CrystalEastman,ex-
premierOrlando,Etiennede Beaumont-just a real place to roughit and escape
fromthe world.1
The tradition has been massive and it built into a fashionablesensibility of
migration; Ernest Hemingway left Paris in part because many Americans
read his book The Sun Also Rises (1926) and promptly decided to become
expatriate writers in Paris, whether they wrote or not, so swamping the
1 Scott
Fitzgerald to John Peale Bishop, 21 Sept. 1925, in Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up,edited
by Edmund Wilson (Norfolk, Conn., 1945), p. 272.
MALCOLM BRADBURY I9
'serious' writers. And it has, of course, become a topic for gossip, reminis-
cence, sentimentalization. Indeed, if a considerable part of the commentary
on expatriation has been the social and political criticism of those who
objected, another substantial part has been the memoirs of those who went;
sometimes it seems as if every living survivor of Paris in the I920S managed
to get his version on to the record.' But, beyond the criticism and the reminis-
cence, there are much more important matters: the entire question of the
impact of the European experience on the actual writing of those who, for
shorter or longer periods, chose to live in Europe. A good proportion of
American works of fiction, poetry, criticism, aesthetics, and history have
been written in Europe, as Van Wyck Brooks has noted; many had their
first publication there. Brooks remarks on the number of American books
written in Paris
from the days of Franklin, Jefferson and Joel Barlow to the days of Hemingway,
Dos Passos and Fitzgerald. There Cooper wrote The Prairieand Irving Tales of a
Traveller,and John Howard Payne HomeSweetHome.Henry Adams followed the
precedent of Jefferson's Notes on Virginiawhen he had his Tahiti privately printed
in Paris, where Stephen Vincent Benet wrote John Brown'sBody.Writing in Paris
is one of the oldest American customs. It all but antedates, with Franklin, the
founding of the republic.2
Equally substantial lists could be made for Rome and, especially, for London.
But not only were these books written in Europe; they were also deeply
shaped by the European experience and were very frequently reflections on
or refractions of the expatriate theme itself. 'It is a salient fact of American
fiction that much of it has been set in foreign parts: most of Melville, James,
and Hemingway', Harry Levin observes. 'Among the rest, nearly every
important novelist has managed to write at least one expatriate novel.'3
This deep penetration of the act of voyage into the matter and the manner
of the writing (not just fiction) that has emerged from it has given the expat-
riate affair much of its intensity; its dramatic, indeed its mythological, status.
American writing has been much concerned with the very idea of America;
but the contrast and connexion, the interpenetration and the space, between
it and Europe has also been an essential concern. A theme with political
power, it has raised the deepest questions about the nature and sources of
art. Henry James, in a famous letter, spoke of the American's 'complex fate,
. . one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious
valuation of Europe'; he was recognizing, as throughout his work he does,
1 Among the many volumes of memoirsare: Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare

andCompany
(London,
1960); Morley Callaghan, That Summerin Paris (New York, I963); Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable
Feast (New York, 1954); Robert McAlmon, Being GeniusesTogether(London, 1938); Samuel Putnam,
of AliceB. Toklas
Paris WasOurMistress(New York, I947); and GertrudeStein, TheAutobiography
(New York and London, 1933).
2 The Worldof WashingtonIrving (London, 1945), p. 256n.
3 'StatuesfromItaly: TheMarbleFaun'in Refractions:
EssaysinComparative (New Yorkand
Literature
London, I966).
20 The ExpatriateTraditionin AmericanWriting
the presence of a complex mythological funding. American writing has, it
has long been recognized, tended away from a literature of social realism,
settled mores, textual sureness, towards the romance, the mythopoeic, the
reflexively self-made. And it has appropriately enough been interpreted in
the light of a number of mythological complexes; the idea of the New Eden,
the ideal of the wilderness and the frontier, the dream of success or of self-
reliance. But within that complex, often functioning for contrast and tension,
there has also been an 'image of Europe', of like intensity and mythic power.
It is notable that this massive fictionalization and mythicization of America
is as much a social as a literary force, and that its roots lie in the European
mind; as historians have urged, America was colonized and developed
according to the mental and epistemological assumptions of Europe, was
'invented in the image of its inventor',1invested with Renaissancefabulation.
The European myths about America deeply entered the process of settle-
ment, and acquired yet more intensity once the United States had declared
their political Independence. But now came a transaction in reverse: the
mythical reinvention of Europe by Americans.Indeed perhapsthe Americans
more than any other nation (with the possible exception of the Russians)
needed Europe as idea, as a continental abstraction, not always under-
stood by the residents of the separate European nations, states, and federa-
tions, divided as they were from each other by nationalism, ethnocentricism,
territorial rivalry. But to the American mind Europe could be an imagina-
tive entity by process of polarization: the Old World, set against the New
World. Though the topography was always further refined, especially
after immigrant groups from many sources settled in the States, and though
the Protestantwas discriminated from the Catholic, the Saxon and Nordic
from the Gallic, the Anglophone from other language blocks, the Americans
had a general Europe for their superstitiousvaluation.
Europe thus became a mythic force very centrally invested and interpreted
in literature itself, by American writerswho did not go to Europe (and who,
like the General in MartinChuzzlewit,travelled in print but not otherwise,
and lived on images and stereotypes) but, increasingly, by writers who did
travel, to explore and penetrate the experience, to live out or to divert the
myth. This too is a matter to which much analysis has been given; all too
often, though, the European matter has been defined as one of those deter-
mining themes by which the 'exceptionalness'of American writing may be
seen. But it was not always spirited nationalismthat generated the issue. For
Europe has been more than an image or a metaphor in American writing;
it has also been an alternative perception on life, and it has raised, finally, a
question about the relationshipbetween nationality and culture. Europe has
1 Edmundo O'Gorman, The Inventionof America
(Bloomington, Indiana, I96I). I have examined
these images in much more detail in three essays entitled 'Dangerous Pilgrimages: Transatlantic
Images in Fiction, I, ii and ii', in Encounter,47, No. I2 (December I976); 48, No. 2 (February 1977);
48, No. 4 (April, I977).
MALCOLM BRADBURY 21I
been centralized in American texts as an intense creative presence. Thus

Cooper's novels are a complex refraction of Europe against America, America
against Europe, with a growing complication of types and vision. He wrote of
American subjects with a European eye, European subjects (in The Bravo
(I831), The Heidenmauer(1832), etc.) with an American; and when, on his
return to the States, he reflected on the matter in HomewardBound and Home
As Found (both 1838), he wrote almost without nationality, from a mid-
atlantic position, a fact that earned him much unpopularity. Washington
Irving, more successful in preserving his American reputation, also had a
sufficiently mid-atlantic stance to make him an 'English' classic in schools,
where many young readers assumed him to be an English essayist. Later, of
course, James aspired, he told his brother, to write 'in such a way that it
would be impossible to an outsider to say whether I am at a given moment
an American writing about England or an Englishman writing about
America (dealing as I do with both countries), and so far from being ashamed
of such an ambiguity I should be exceedingly proud of it, for it would be
highly civilized'.
Thus, on the grounds of the frequency, the persistence, and the cultural
intensity and anxiety of expatriate experience, we may discern a tradition
of sorts in American writing. The problems arise when we try, as many
scholars and critics have done, to order and systematize this complex sequence.
For, in the end, it is hard to make the connexions: between, say, Hawthorne
as consul in Liverpool and Henry Miller down and out in Paris; between
Longfellow's Wanderjahreand Henry James's 'choice for life'; between Edith
Wharton's politely social residence in the Rue de Varennes and the ex-
ambulance driver expatriates of the next generation who flooded into
twenties Montparnasse and left as suddenly; between Henry Adams, deferen-
tial to the Virgin and Chartres, and black exiles like Richard Wright,
James Baldwin, or Eldridge Cleaver; between those who found 'our old
home' in England and those who, like Stuart Merrill and Francis Vield-
Griffin in the I89os, adopted the French language as well as French symbo-
lism; between the sentimental traveller and the outright repudiator of nation
or nationality. One could fairly argue that there is no tradition at all, with
motivations, lengths of stay, destinations all so various; or urge that there
are at least two distinct species - those who travelled to take back what
they gained, and those who deliberately repudiated the American inheritance.
Indeed this variation may explain why it is that, of the expatriate experience,
we appear to have two distinct and different versions. One is a derivative of
Emerson's dictum that 'we go to Europe to be Americanized'. Here an
interesting recent text is Harold T. McCarthy's The Expatriate Perspective:
American Novelists and the Idea of America (Rutherford, N.J., I974), which
recognizes the variant tradition of novelist-expatriates - the 'Romantic
Realists' (Cooper, Melville, Hawthorne), the 'American Jacobins' (Mark
Twain, Henry James), the 'Neo-Transcendentalists' (E. E. Cummings,
Hemingway, Henry Miller), and the 'Native Sons' (Richard Wright, James
Baldwin) - but finds throughout one repeated motif: in their writings, these
authors 'came to a realization of their Americanism'. This emphasis (a
variation of the Whig interpretationof history) evidently contains its element
of truth, consorting as it does with one very well distilled American ideal of
cosmopolitanism;that the American is, by virtue of the award of history, all
mankind, and his art registersnot only his quarrel with but his assertionof
the ultimate American sensibility; as Melville puts it in Redburn,'we are the
heirs of all time, and with all nations we divide our inheritance'.
But not surprisingly,since this is what makes for the inward and the public
tension that has always been there in the expatriate debate, the opposite
view has been urged. By this judgement, the expatriate record has in fact
been one of the writer's alienation, his subtle quarrel with his country,
sometimes qualified and checked, sometimespressedto outright repudiation.
'We're the disinherited of Art!' cries James's artist in The Madonnaof the
Future(I873), 'We're condemned to be superficial! We're excluded from the
magic circle! The soil of American perception is a poor little barren arti-
ficial deposit!'. It is an attitude carefully qualified by James, here, in Roderick
Hudson(1876), and in his life of Hawthorne(1879); the American, finally,
possesseshis 'joke', his special lien on the future, his awareness that disin-
heritance may be a kind of divine modern award. But it is a deep-rooted
motif, going back to the outward statements about 'poverty of materials' in
American society for the artist made by Irving and Cooper, to Hawthorne's
sense that 'romance and poetry, ivy, lichens, and wall-flowers need ruin to
make them grow', and to their evident inward anxieties about the pressure
on the American artistic imagination and the claims that Europe made upon
them in their writer's role. And it passes forward, to an enlarged sense of
exile, to Pound's complaints about his 'half-savage country, out of date',
and his feeling of 'Artists broken against her, I Astray, lost in the villages',
to Harold Stearns' famous dictum of the twenties to the American artist,
'Get out!', to the cultural accusationsof the twenties, the starkerchargesof the
I930s in Henry Miller, the growing feeling that the American dream had
gone sour. Writing in the vein of the times, in The Ordealof Mark Twain
(1920) and The Pilgrimageof HenryJames (1925), Van Wyck Brooks represen-
ted the American artist as faced with two hopeless choices; sterility at home,
an abstract aestheticism abroad. And in the I950s, when the sense of a
pervasive, dissenting blackness running through the whole tradition of
American writing was strong, the argument returned; was not the record of
American art the record of a perpetual quarrel with the country, and a
repeated desire to get out of it?
Of course both views have their truth, according to which writers are
emphasized and which of their ambiguous, if not divided, statements on the
question are pushed into the foreground: equally both views are aspects of,
expressionsof, the terms of the long debate. But perhaps we are now past the
MALCOLM BRADBURY 23
time when it is useful to consider the expatriate affair according to one or
another of these sets of terms. Perhaps the most important thing to remember
is that these are developments within history, changing according to historical
circumstance, and also according to prevailing aesthetic assumptions about
the origin of art and the character and responsibilities of the artist, shifting
from Romantic, to Realist, to Modernist perspectives. It is also worth
stressing that these developments are indeed aspects of a broad process that
has affected writing in many countries, not just the United States: if we look
with more comparative eyes, we will find that American expatriation,
though conducted within a remarkable and complex mythological and
sociological context, which indeed gives it its representative interest, is not
entirely exceptional. In many European countries the same movement
towards an expatriate, which often means an avant garde, model for the
artist is very marked; and it is useful to record what Solomon Fishman
observes, in his part-sociological study of the American writer and his back-
ground (The Disinherited of Art: Writer and Background (Berkeley, I953)):
'It is the nature of literature both to fall short of and to transcend national
culture; the perfectly national work does not exist.' The progressive dis-
affiliation of the artist from the nationalistic model of his enterprise is
therefore a part of the story.
It is also worth noting that the celebration of literary internationalism, the
invocation of the international republic of letters, is as old as the American
republic itself. The recognition that literature and culture are not necessarily
national, but are, in some sense, international institutions, that the serious
writer, both by virtue of his act of writing and his mode of occupancy of the
role of writer, responds both to the options and pressures of his own culture
and to more broadly conceived aesthetic and epistemological obligations, was
strong in both Neo-Classical and Romantic thought. This is the spirit of
Goethe's Weltlitteratur, of Arnold's 'Now to get rid of provinciality is a
certain stage of culture . .. for it brings us onto the platform where the best
and highest intellectual work can be said fairly to begin',1 and surely of
Hawthorne's remarking, of London, 'Being in the great metropolis of the
world, it is every man's home'. With the emergence of Bohemianism and the
Avant Garde, it was intensified, became an idea of necessary exile; hence
Nietzsche's 'As an artist no man has a home in Europe save in Paris', or
Stephen Dedalus's determination to sever the bonds of family, nationality,
and religion in order to go off and 'forge the uncreated conscience of my race'.
The divergence between social needs and aesthetic goals within a culture is
an old issue, but in the history of the modern intelligentsia and the modern
artist, anxious about social position and ideological stance, committed to
oblique postures in modern structures of social organization, the matter has
1 Matthew Arnold, 'The Literary Influence of Academies', in Essays in Criticism: First Series
(London, I865).
sharpened. One result has been a growing attachment to those detached,

stateless communities of art, the Bohemias or the cosmopolitan villages,
which become trading centres and contexts of value for the culturally
dislocated, out of which much of modern art has come. The sociological
ambiguity of the Bohemian and the Modernist artist is thereforean essential
part of the expatriate issue, and the singular alliance between Americans
and the experimental tendencies of art is a key element of its significance.
In Europe this process had fairly clear social and class origins; and Bohemia
had an ideological face. But American aesthetic isolation tended to derive
from different factors; it was more preoccupied with the pure salvation of
art. One of the briefest but best discussions of American expatriation, by
R. P. Blackmur, noted that one essential fact of American cultural life has
been the sense of culture displaced; writers have adopted the emigrd style
because the cultural capitals have been abroad, and the emigrd style and
sensibility has therefore had special force.1 One can argue, indeed, that
because American writing was founded late and the writer found himself
exposed, without tradition, patronage, or cultural centres, it offers an exem-
plary, well-documented case of the modernizing process and the modern
sensibility in literature.
II
The habit of American literary expatriation indeed has obvious origins
in the circumstances of America's founding; so has Europe's persistence as
a point of reference.The American colonies were post-Gutenbergcommuni.
ties, founded in historical daylight, lacking that accretion from folk-sources
that, according to late Neo-Classic and Romantic theory, was a source of art.
Chartedthrough acts and assumptionsof late RenaissanceEuropeanthought,
settled by Englishmen, Dutchmen, and Frenchmen, orientated eastward,
they were also well endowed, as colonies go, with cultural resources.Learned
cadres existed; in the New England theocracy the ministry, in Virginia the
planter-aristocracy.Universities were established early; Harvard College
had a printing press by 1639; science and theology flourished,and there was
close contact with England and Europe on such matters. It has been urged
that they were remarkably cosmopolitan colonies,2 though in a sense they
were enriched provinces, part of an Atlantic civilization encompassing two
1 R. P. Blackmur, 'The American Literary Expatriate', in Foreign Influencesin AmericanLife,

edited by David F. Bowers (Princeton, N.J., I944). This key essay is reprinted in R. P. Blackmur,
The Lion and the Honeycomb:Essays in Solicitudeand Critique(London, I956).
2 On the cultural life of the
colonies, see S. E. Morison, The IntellectualLife of ColonialNew England
(New York, 1956); Kenneth B. Murdock, Literatureand Theologyin ColonialNew England(Cambridge,
Mass. and London, 1949); Louis B. Wright, The CulturalLife of the AmericanColonies,1607-1763
(New York, 1957). The most interesting discussion of cosmopolitanism in a 'debtor-culture' is Howard
Mumford Jones's admirable Americaand FrenchCulture:175o-1848 (Chapel Hill, N.C. and London,
I927)-
MALCOLM BRADBURY 25
continents.1 But though they acquired high cultural aspirations and strong
mythic associations, they developed little in the way of basic literary institu-
tions; a literary profession, a literary language, a system of patronage and
publishing. For these functions, literary facilities and literary productions in
England served: London was the clearing house of the American arts. With
Independence, itself a product of Enlightenment and educated minds, the
issue became apparent. As in many post-colonial societies today, needing an
indigenous art based on national themes and values, yet one also of mature
global appeal, the problem of cultural independence was central. The Found-
ing Fathers reflected much on the subject. They felt that, given the cyclical
course of empire, America must rise in cultivation as the course of culture
made its way westward. Franklin reflected on the topic before Independence:
Why should that petty island [England], which compared to America is but like
a stepping-stone in a Brook, scarce enough of it above water to keep one's shoes dry;
why, I say, should that little Island enjoy in almost every Neighbourhood, more
sensible virtuous and elegant Minds, than we can collect in ranging i oo Leagues of
our vast Forests? But 'tis said the Arts delight to travel Westward.2
However, until they did, Franklin noted, 'our geniuses all go to Europe'. To
John Adams this seemed sensible, since the arts seemed related to the
monarchical corruptions: 'It is not indeed the fine arts which our country
requires', he wrote, 'the useful, the mechanic arts are those which we have
occasion for in a new country as yet simple and not far advanced in luxury,
although perhaps too much for her age and character.'3
But the cry for a Declaration of Literary Independence was strong: the
fear of dangerous 'foreign usages' and ideas in the arts caused concern; the
romantic nationalist thinking of Herder and Mme de Stael suggested the
need for an heroic expression of the American people; after all, history and
destiny had come to Americans.4 On the other hand, Neo-Classic standards
emphasized the universal in art; and a tension arose in aesthetics over the
question. The situation generated much writing, largely inferior: a literary
complex populous with Indian squaws, katydids, prairies, gophers, and
1 Michael Kraus, The Atlantic Civilization: Eighteenth-Century Origins (Ithaca, N.Y. and London,
I949)-
2 Benjamin Franklin to Mary Stephenson, 25 March 1793, in The Writingsof BenjaminFranklin,
edited by A. H. Smith, io vols (New York and London, I905-7), IV, 192.
3 For an admirable discussion of Adams's fear of
'luxury' and its consequences for the arts, see
Neil Harris, The Artist in AmericanSociety; The Formativerears, 179o-1860 (New York, 1966). Adams
did, it should be added, share the recurrent conviction that the arts would move westward: 'There
is nothing, in my little reading, more ancient in my memory than the observation that arts, sciences,
and empire had traveled westward; and in conversation it was always added since I was a child, that
their next leap would be over the Atlantic into America.' Quoted in Benjamin T. Spencer, The
Questfor Nationality: An AmericanLiteraryCampaign(Syracuse, N.Y., 1957).
4 For their effect, see
Spencer, The Questfor Nationality,Chapter 2. Spencer also notes, however,
that 'an "original" literature therefore was likely to imply for even the most zealous literary patriot
not a startling mutation but rather a reordering of European ideas, a purification of Old World
genres, or a realization of the literary dreams of ancient cultures in the ideal atmosphere of the New
World'.
heroes of the Revolution arose, but hidden behind the mask of novelty and
democratic values was a deep dependence on European modes and aesthetics.
There was also a growing sense among the emergent literary class, following
the Revolution, of divided purposes. Without a defined cultural role for the
writer, without a developed literary profession, without even copyright
protection for authors, such people had to make the role of writer, and
found no significant support. In fact, in ceasing to be a colony, the United
States had become a province. Writers, needing reputation, criticism, artistic
innovation and stimulus, needed the city. They had before them the
experience of American painters, especially West and Copley, who, needing
models and exposure to ateliers, new painterly theories, and patronage, went
by necessity to London or Florence as expatriates.' As one analyst has noted,
'like most later generations of American authors, this first generation often
considered itself "lost" and traced its plight to a society whose values were
too confused and crude to sustain a mature literary art.'2
Over the years, then, the desire for a declaration of literary independence
intensified, and it continued into the twentieth century; in one mood or
another, from one source or another, Neo-Classic, Romantic, Transcendenta-
list, Realist, Naturalist, and Modernist, they abound in American letters.
But the repetition suggests the problems. In a provincial and then in a
cosmopolitan situation, total independence was scarcely possible. And the
very fact that the European movements in thought and style (Transcendenta-
lism is, of the list above, the only distinctively American brand name)
penetrated to America by process of intellectual and aesthetic inevitability,
and by virtue of a shared thought-world, suggests what is true; that American
writing was symbiotically bonded onto the onward development of European
letters, if only because art and the mind are not walled by frontiers. This
provoked divided sensibilities which run through much American literary
experience: and so the romantic condition of the separation of the writer
from his audience and his cultural obligation was indeed felt very early and
with particular sharpness in the United States. One aspect of it, to become
increasingly important as a serious artistic cadre emerged (as it clearly had by
the I84os), was an inbuilt anxiety about being a writer in America, so,
apparently, perpetuating a European mode: Hawthorne crystallizes this
particular anxiety in the 'Custom-House' preface to The Scarlet Letter,
1 Among the early group of artists in London were West, Copley, Gilbert Stuart, William Dunlap,
John Trumbull, Robert Fulton, Mather Brown and, later, Washington Allston, Charles Leslie,
and Samuel F. B. Morse. There were other artistic colonies in Rome, Dusseldorf, Florence, and Paris.
HenryJames, in his book on the American painter William Wetmore Storey, notes their importance
as precursors: 'there are occasions when it comes home to us that, so far as we are contentedly cosmo-
polite to-day and move about in a world that has been made for us both larger and more amusing,
we owe much of our extension and diversion to those comparative few who, amid difficulties and
dangers, set the example and made out the road'. Henry James, William WetmoreStoreyand His
Friends,2 vols (1903: reprinted London, I957), I, 3. Also see Harris, The Artist in AmericanSociety.
2
Spencer, The Questfor Nationality,p. 58.
MALCOLM BRADBURY 27
representing his guilt about the solitude and the temptations of the aesthetic
imagination. Earlier, Cooper, like many others, had reflected on the practical
obstacles to the emergence of a literary class and an independent writing,
remarking on the popularity of English books, the lack of protection of native
writers through copyright laws; and, beginning that familiar litany which
was to pass on to Hawthorne and James, the poverty of materials ('no annals
for the historian; no follies ... for the satirist; no manners for the dramatist;
no obscure fictions for the writer of romance'), a poverty which constituted
a social advantage over Europe, and a literary disadvantage: 'However
useful and respectable all this may be to actual life, it indicates but one
direction to the man of genius.'l
In practical terms, this direction was towards Europe, which is where
many writers went from the post-Revolutionary period onward. They went
with very different purposes and for very different periods; Irving in I818,
John Neal in 1823, Cooper himself in 1826, Longfellow in the same year,
N. P. Willis in 1832, Emerson and Holmes in I833. Some were journeys of
Wlanderjahr,of young education; some were simply extended, if symbolic
travels, on a familiar grand tour principle: 'Spend the winter as diligently
reading as you have the summer riding and in the spring you will be fit to go
to Europe', noted William C. Preston.2 Some, like Neal, Irving, and Cooper,
were abroad for considerable periods: others made relatively short visits,
like Hawthorne's in the I85os, when he was consul in Liverpool, but with
very deep effect. For often the visit exposed, in those who were seriously
writers, the gap between national obligations and displaced cultural sources.
If there were practical reasons (the working of American political patronage,
above all the copyright advantage of ensuring an English publication and
reputation), there were deeper consequences: a recurrent inner quarrel
marks most of these writers. James Fenimore Cooper could write from Swit-
zerland: 'We shall never get to be the thoroughly manly people we ought to
be, until we cease to look to European opinions for anything except those
connected with the general advancement of the race', and could also observe
that 'if any man is excusable for deserting his country, it is the American
artist'.3 Hawthorne was similarly split: 'As regards going home', he said
after his stay in England, 'I alternate between a longing and a dread', and
so his letters prove: here he is speaking of weariness with the old, with the
value of the burning of ancient cities, and there remarking that 'the United
States are fit for many excellent purposes, but they are certainly not fit to
1James Fenimore Cooper, Notionsof the Americans:Picked

up By a TravellingBachelor(London and
Philadelphia, 1828).
2 edited by M. C. Yarborough (Chapel Hill, N. C.,1933). On the many scholarly
Reminiscences,
visitors who visited Europe, see Orie W. Long, LiteraryPioneers:Early AmericanExplorersof European
Culture(Cambridge, Mass. and London, I935).
3 Letter to L. Bradish, I6 August I828, in LettersandJournals I820-I833, edited by C. F. Beard,
2 vols (Cambridge, Mass., I960), i, 287; and England (London, 1837), also published as Gleanings
in Europe: England (Philadelphia, I837).
live in'.1 These writers all had a conviction of the distinctiveness,or the need
for the distinctiveness,of American writing, the desire for artistic nationality
torn by internationality; thus Melville, who could assert that America as a
nation was the world's need, 'the advance guard, sent on through a wilder-
ness of untried things', and yet also reflect, in all justice, 'I feel I am an exile
here'.2
The attractions, and indeed at times the necessities, were clear. It was a
period when American writers were conscious of the close artistic ties that
bound them to English and to European writers, especially the Romantics;
publication, income, and prestige were easier to obtain; the European
capitals, for a society still strikinglyagrarian, representedthe big city. Above
all, according to contemporary aesthetics, Europe seemed to possess the
intrinsic materials of art, the romantic impulses, the 'storied and poetical
associations', the folk-tradition, the active discussion of literature; and, in
England especially, there was that glow of old kinship which Hawthorne
characterizedin his heir to Redclyffe, who begins to feel 'the deep yearning
which a sensitive American - his mind full of English thoughts, his imagi-
nation of English poetry, his heart full of English character and sentiment,
cannot fail to be influenced by, - the yearning of the blood within his veins
for that from which he had been estranged'.3If England offeredthe hereditary
past, 'our old home', France offered romantic and revolutionarysentiments,
Germany the romantic-scholarly,Italy the classic and the numinous sense of
art. The tendency was indeed to mythologize Europe as art, and at the same
time to pastoralize and dehistoricizeit. In the romantic way, a transcendent
impatience with historicalprogressand motion runs, if ambiguously,through
much early American writing, and has much to do with its disposition to-
wards the mythic. If one version of the timeless arcadian place was the
frontier,placed in a perpetually enacted American future, then the other was
Europe, given enchanted existence as a perpetually enacted American past.
Thus many Americans turned to Europe much as English Victorian poets
looked, in their turn, to the medieval English past - both in order to escape
from and to illuminate and judge the 'principle of the sovereign present'.
Europe could become a version of romantic history, of a past glowing yet
capable of being re-achieved by travel. One result of this was that large
parts of Europe's own modernizing and industrializingdevelopment, at this
stage in advance of the like processesin America, were simply not visible to
1 Nathaniel Hawthorne, Letter to Fields,

I860, quoted in Mark Van Doren, NathanielHawthorne
(New York, I949), and letter to Ticknor, I860, quoted in Caroline Ticknor, Hawthorneand His
Publisher(Boston, 1913).
2 Herman
Melville, quoted in Matthew Josephson, Portraitof the Artist as American(New York,
I930).
3 Hawthorne wrote two unfinished romances about England, The AncestralFootstep(written I858)
and DoctorGrimshawe'sSecret(written I860-6I). My quotation is from the latter, published posthu-
mously by Julian Hawthorne (Boston, 1883) and republished and edited by E. H. Davidson as
Hawthorne's'DoctorGrimshawe'sSecret'(Cambridge, Mass., I954).
MALCOLM BRADBURY 29
American writers. Europe was un-Hegelian, associated not with contem-

porary development but with historical stasis; to this England was a possible
exception, as Emerson noted. This divided view gave American writers a
double sensibility, two courts of appeal. As a result, travel to Europe could
be seen as a sacred visitation but not as a total commitment; hence very few
of the American writers of this pre-Civil War period went, finally, deep into
the psychology of expatriation and made the total choice of Europe, though
some painters did. They took long periods in Europe, identified it with the
artistic and cultural parts of themselves, invested deep. But eventually, like
Hawthorne's artists in The Marble Faun, they returned to the American
shore, and in his mood:
We defer the reality of life, in such cases, until a future moment, and when we shall
again breathe our native air; but, by-and-by, there are no future moments; or, if
we do return, we find that the native air has lost its invigorating quality, and that
life has shifted its reality to the spot where we have deemed ourselves only tempo-
rary residents.'
III
After the Civil War, however, the pattern changed markedly, the polarities
shifted, the tensions of choice became sharper. The war was the victory of a
new industrial over an old agrarian America; it produced a period of
economic takeoff, a movement into modern monopoly capitalism, a redistri-
bution of wealth and power. Old conflicts were exhausted: America itself
was in process of becoming a massive industrial power competing and
trading directly with Europe; it was also importing European labour on a
large scale through immigration. With accumulating wealth came an ex-
panding leisure class, a displacement of the old east coast patrician groups,
a desire for culture as a property; and culture, whether it was the traditional
life of the educated classes, or the new possessions sought by the nouveaux
riches, Mark Twain's 'innocents abroad', meant Europe.2 As America thus
became more 'realistic' (and the mode of realism became the voice for its
literary expression) so Europe became that much more 'romantic' (and
often invoked romance treatment in literature). In the land of what Henry
James called 'the busy, the tipsy, and Daniel Webster', Europe could be
identified not only with cultural and traditional values absent in the United
States but also with the American past that was being lost. And, just as in the
marriages of the period realistic American money married romantic European
rank, merging future and past, currency and culture, so, in serious writing,
Europe became an ideal cultural organism to set against the American 'real',
1 The MarbleFaun (I86o), Airmont edition (New York, 1966), p. 313.

2 In The Wind Blew From the East: A Studyin the Orientationof AmericanCulture(New York, 1942),
Ferner Nuhn comments on this tendency, noting that Americans now found themselves in a position
to buy culture from a Europe 'with her beautiful old house at last in order, the bloody past more or
less buried, and all its objects of art nicely arranged and put under glass'.
a place of form and density with which materialism and process could be
supplemented. The new social problems, the new and open commitment to
rampant materialism, the massive effect of immigrants on American urban
and political life, the melting-pot mood of American society, also renewed
the sense of Anglo-Saxon affiliation. For the displaced groups, England,
especially, became a point of reference.1
Under these changing pressures the issue of expatriation ('literary absen-
teeism', W. D. Howells called it) became once more important. The European
temptation enlarged: the three key figures in fiction at the time, Howells,
Mark Twain, Henry James, all struggled intensely with the question.
Howells, consul in Venice between I86I and 1865, rejected the expatriate
Circe ('I find myself almost expatriated, and I have seen enough of uncoun-
tryed Americans in Europe to disgust me with voluntary exile . .but with
what unspeakable regret I shall leave Italy'2) but he maintained a long
correspondence, especially with James, on the issue. He had chosen, he
felt, the lightness of America, the 'smiling aspects' of American life, the
field of true, democratic realism. Mark Twain, who spent some eleven
years in Europe, opted similarly: he found the lure of European culture
artificial, and played his American 'joke' against it; but the ambiguities
persisted. He touched on the topic repeatedly in his fiction, in such works as
InnocentsAbroad and The AmericanClaimant: 'I would rather live in England
than America - which is treason', he wrote on his visit of I8723; the ambi-
guity is compounded deeply in A ConnecticutYankeeat King Arthur's Court
(1889), a direct assault on William Morris's medievalism, against which
Twain sets the 'volcano' of American industrial democracy through his
figure of Hank Morgan, the Connecticut machineshop superintendent.
But though he begins trying to redeem Arthurian backwardness and slavery,
he ends up exploding it all in a technological holocaust, and becomes not a
redeeming but a destructive figure. And when, later, both Howells and
Twain felt an increasing disillusion with American life in the I89os, both
renewed their attention to Europe, seeing American democracy rushing into
a brutal, demoralized, naturalistic void. Though they did not expatriate,
they felt the sense of cultural displacement that could push American writers
across the Atlantic, and it is over these years that the American literary
population in Europe becomes large and striking.
There were many reasons: the sense of social displacement; the pursuit of
the aesthetic realm as such, as in the expatriations of Berenson and Santayana
1 For this sense of cultural displacement see, for

example, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Our Hundred
Days in Europe(Boston, 1888), where he sees a process of 're-migration' to Europe: 'As the New
England characteristics are gradually superseded by those of other races, other forms of belief and
other associations, the time may come when a New Englander will feel more as if he were among his
own people in London than in one of our seaboard cities.'
2 From The Life in Lettersof WilliamDean Howells,
quoted by James L. Woodress, Jr, in Howellsand
Italy, (Durham, N.C., I952), p. 46.
3 Quoted by Justin Kaplan, Mr Clemensand Mark Twain
(London, 1967), p. I53.
MALCOLM BRADBURY 3I
to Italy; and the closening ties between Europe and America as a result of
greater trade and transatlantic contact, including tourism, greatly facilitated
by growing wealth and short steamship passages. The most notable chooser
of Europe (and the most complex) was of course James, who, in the Centen-
nial Year of 1876, opted directly for the world of European manners and
forms, for the 'capital' sensibility, for the commitment outright to art. He had
tried first Italy, but rejected its 'golden air', which he found over-aestheticized,
and then Paris, the Paris of a Flaubertian formalism, before electing for
London, the 'murky Babylon', the biggest and most contingent of the
European capitals, the place where there was most to observe, where the
intimations of life were strongest. 'I feel no more at home in London than
anywhere else in the world', he noted the next year, voicing a recurring
anxiety. 'To tell the truth, I find myself a good deal more of a cosmopolitan
(thanks to the combination of the continent and the U.S.A. which has
formed my lot) than the average Briton of culture; and to be - to have
become by force of circumstances - a cosmopolitan is by necessity to feel a
good deal alone'.' But that cosmopolitan note was an essential part of his
expatriation, which became a lifetime's commitment; James is the first
major American writer to resolve the old problem by turning his 'enlarged
and uplifted gape' before Europe into 'a banquet of initiation which was in
the event to prolong itself for years and years'.2 'My choice is the Old World
- my choice, my need, my life', he noted in 1885. 'There is no need for me
today to argue about this; it is an inestimable blessing to me, and a rare
good fortune, that the problem was settled long ago, and that I have nothing
to do but act on the settlement.'3 'Acting on the settlement' meant, of course,
a deep psychic involvement in the European experience, conceived as a path
to an international perception of life and an outright mastery of appropriate
form.
James's expatriation has often been portrayed as a conservative withdrawal
from a democratic, commerical America into a traditional, mannered Europe;
this is somewhat to mistake it.4 James was indeed drawn by the social texture
and rewards of London life, by the density of forms and manners. 'It is on
manners, customs, usages, habits, form, upon all these things matured and
established, that the novelist lives', he told Howells; he noted, in his I879
book on Hawthorne, the 'barren' artistic soil of America, though he also noted
the American 'joke' - that these things were not the only reality, were only
1 Letter to Grace Norton, 7 August 1877, in Lettersof HenryJames, edited by Percy Lubbock,
2 vols (New York, I920), I, 54-5.
2
(A Small Boy and Others;Notes
Henry James, The Middle rears (I917), reprinted as Autobiography
of a Son and Brother;The Aiddle rears), edited by F. W. Dupee (New York, I956), quotations from
pp. 551 and 573.
3 The Notebooks Henry
of James, edited by F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock (New York,
1947), p .23.
4 This is the
emphasis of Alan Holder in ThreeVoyagersin Searchof Europe:A Studyof HenryJames,
Ezra Pound,and T. S. Eliot (Philadelphia and London, I966). Also see Christof Wegelin, The Image
of Europein HenryJames (Dallas, I958), which considers James's change in attitude.
relatively real. The element of cultural repudiation was strong, and it became
finally a repudiation of citizenship; he took British nationality on his death-
bed. On the other hand, as his novels and letters make clear, he distrusted
aesthetic-patrician withdrawal, warned Edith Wharton to write of America,
and felt that his own case was based on distilling the meaning and social
balance of a particular period in which, for the American writer and for
serious art, the cosmopolitan commitment was essential. The task he set
himself was the old American ideal of becoming the world writer, of cosmo-
politanizing literature itself, by fleeing the province, and putting oneself in
the centre of artistic and social interaction. This meant refining, over a life-
time, the polarity of Europe and America. If the international theme in the
earlier novels is indeed roughly created on contrasts, between American
innocence seen as both simplicity and ignorance and European experience
seen as both wisdom and corruption, between self naked and self clothed,
it is a theme transformed in his later writing. The last three great novels
resume this 'international theme', which he abandoned for his middle work,
by transfiguring it; it was through the refractive relationships of the trans-
atlantic consciousness that he could penetrate beyondthe social, examine the
justaposition of individual consciousness and material goods, and see, in the
end, a world of consciousness struggling with the solid hardness of material
and usage. The result is symbolism, a motion from unrealized consciousness
into forms or impressions which presuppose an epistemological anxiety:
James becomes the cosmopolitan modernist sacrificing not to traditional
culture and substantiated morals but to form arduously won from a lowered
history. James, in a sense, repudiated European as well as American culture
and penetrated, in a modernist way, its uneasy existence, its displaced sub-
stance, its moral and aesthetic incoherence, at the same time realizing that
principle of artistic separateness that was to matter so much to twentieth-
century sensibility.
In this, he was deeply in tune with the times. For the pattern of expatria-
tion itself was further changing, searching not for the European social
capitals but for its radical Bohemias. By the I89os the dominant literary
movement in the States was Naturalism - which was Realism scientized,
made into a more analytical instrument for dealing with the mass and process
of American life, but also Realism rendered more aesthetic, given a reflexive
technical emphasis. It was a radicalized art symbiotically linked with
aestheticism, an avant garde product of a Europe itself in mental and
cultural ferment. Many American writers of this generation sought the
advanced circles of the modern, moving to the avant garde capitals (the
aesthetes' London, the symbolists' Paris) to refine their work and radicalize
their lives, choosing, as James Gibbons Huneker put it, between American
bathtubs and European Bohemia. They included Harold Frederic, Henry
Harland (who shifted from writing American-Jewish realist novels under the
pen-name Sidney Luska to being a fully-fledged London aesthete, editor of
MALCOLM BRADBURY 33
The rellow Book, his eyes fixed appropriately on Paris and Italy), and
Stephen Crane, who had good reason to leave the States for England after
scandal occasioned by his common-law marriage to a former madame, but
was tempted there by the aesthetic recognition given him in English circles
by Conrad, Wells, James, and others. Perhaps the most interesting example
of divided claims involved, those of an American realism attentive to the
modern and of a European aestheticism attentive to form and impression,
was Henry Blake Fuller, the Chicago novelist who regularly moved, in fact
and imagination, from his skyscraper city to Italy and back again, writing
realistic novels about Chicago which influenced Dreiser, and dense, high-
toned romances set in Italy (The Chevalierof the Pensieri-Vani, etc.).l Given
this changed emphasis, it is not surprising that American writers, like
English ones, increasingly looked not to London but to Paris, or took the
two cities as a necessary pair, the capital and the anti-capital of the modern
arts, as Henry F. May has put it.2 Stuart Merrill and Francis Viele-Griffin
became French Symbolist poets; and just after the century's turn two striking
settlers took residence in Paris, representing the two strands of the period's
expatriation. Edith Wharton, in I907, settled in the Rue de Varennes to a
politely liberated life as her unhappy marriage disintegrated; Gertrude Stein,
in I903, arrived to take atelier residence in the Rue de Fleurus and to
become the American priestess-patroness of the Post-Impressionist and
Cubist movements in painting, later noting that Modernism, France and
America all went together in Paris, 'where tradition was so firm that they
could look modern without being different, and where their acceptance of
reality is so great they could let anyone have the emotion of unreality'.3
The relations between these two Europes, the traditional, cultural Europe
and the Europe of Modernism and experiment, became the important issue
for the American expatriates who came between the turn of the century
and the war, and who became sometimes the innovators, certainly the
assimilators and transmitters, of Modernist art. If the burst of experimentalism
that swept across the European arts had its origins in the mental and aesthetic
ferments of the culture-capitals of the continent, it had its transmission
through the activities of the many expatriate writers who moved from many
countries to these capitals at this time.4 And among these the American
expatriates were a group of great significance. In Paris, Gertrude Stein
1 The expatriation of Harland, Frederic, and Fuller is discussed in detail by David Cheshire and
Malcolm Bradbury, 'American Realism and the Romance of Europe: Fuller, Frederic, Harland',
Perspectivesin AmericanHistory,4 (1970), 285-310. On Stephen Crane's 'expatriation,' see Eric Solo-
mon, StephenCranein England: A Portraitof the Artist (Columbus, Ohio, 1964).
2 Henry F. May, The End of American Innocence:A Studyof theFirst rears of Our Own Time (London,
1960).
3 Gertrude Stein, Paris France(London, 1940) p. 18.
4 I have
explored the attraction of the European cultural capitals for modern expatriates in 'The
Cities of Modernism', in Modernism,edited by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, Pelican
Guides to European Literature (Harmondsworth, I976). The topic is also extensively explored in
other essays in this book.
transmitted both her own experimental sense and her tastes as a collector of
modern art and writing back to America, notably through the Armory Show.
In London, the equivalent figure was undoubtedly Ezra Pound, that
exemplary product of the study of comparative literature, who arrived in
I908 to be near Yeats and who set to work to produce radical upheaval in
literature both in England and the United States. He was, in part, drawn by
a sense of the European tradition as an organic past, though he assumed
its passing and, like T. S. Eliot, who came in from Marburg to London in
I914, assumed that it could be recovered only 'by great labour.' It was a lost
past, recoverable only in the imagination, but needed to cleanse the tools
of art and to afford a basis for both criticizing and remythicizing the
barren present. Thus even the recovery of traditionalism was an avant garde
task, part of the activity of'making it new'. Europe was necessary: as he noted
in Patria Mia, America was 'hardly a nation, for no nation can be considered
historically as such until it has achieved within itself a city to which all roads
lead, and from which there goes out an authority ... So far as civilization is
concerned America is the great rich, Western province which has sent one or
two notable artists to the capital. And that capital is, needless to say, not
Rome, but the double city of London and Paris'.1 In London, he observed
Paris, finally inventing, in the French style, two movements, Imagism and
Vorticism, in order to make the experimental tendencies cohere both
aesthetically and socially. He was more successful than he might have guessed:
both guided much subsequent English and American achievement in poetry
and painting. Pound also found or pre-empted little magazines, served as
'foreign editor' on two key American experimental papers, and gathered his
'troops' into action. Indeed the 'new poetic' in London between I908 and
the twenties depended heavily on the expatriate contribution, from Joyce,
Shaw, Conrad, James, and Wyndham Lewis, and from the directly American
contingent, which included, in addition to Pound and Eliot, 'H.D.' (Hilda
Doolittle), John Gould Fletcher, and, less directly, Robert Frost. Pound
later claimed that 'all the developments in English verse since I9I0 are due
almost wholly to Americans', and there is considerable truth in the claim.2
Pound and Eliot later took different expatriate paths, both involving a cul-
tural repudiation of the United States. Eliot's version of an 'organic unity
of cultures' demanded direct spiritual investment. It drew him towards a
commitment to the European mind, and to an ideal of a spiritual redemp-
tion of the waste-land present that expressed itself in taking up British citizen-
ship and Anglo-Catholicism; he stayed on in England after the war and
became a central force in modern British poetry. Pound's ideal of a redeemed
cosmopolitan civilization founded on a sound fiscal base was vastly more
1 Patria Mia (Chicago, 1950), p. 47. This essay was written by Pound prior to I913, was part-
printed in Orage's New Age in that year, then subsequently mislaid for years by a publisher.
2 'How to
Read', in LiteraryEssays of Ezra Pound,edited by T. S. Eliot (London, 1954), pp. I5-40.
MALCOLM BRADBURY 35
eclectic; it took him first to Paris, then to Rapallo, finally to support for the
modern Confucius, Mussolini.1
So, as Pound had left America in I908, in I920 he left London, feeling its
cultural exhaustion, drawn by Paris's 'intellectual life' and its role as 'the
laboratory of ideas; it is there poisons can be tested, new modes of sanity
discovered'.2 As it happened, Pound's move roughly coincided with, and
affected, one of the most significant phases of American literary expatriation.
For an extraordinary and creative generation of writers and intellectuals had
been developing in the United States during and just after the war, in part
stimulated into responsibility and intellect by it; and a large part of this
generation expatriated themselves en masse by taking ship for Paris. The
shift of attention from London to Paris is itself notable, and represented a
marked change in attitude. It had to do with a disillusionment with Anglo-
Saxon civilization as this had developed in the United States, with English
literary domination; above all a disillusionment with an idea of Europe
as the essential focus of civilization. It was a shift that had been growing in
intellectual America during the pre-war years, as a condition of what Van
Wyck Brooks called 'America's coming-of-age'. It had been sharpened by
the war itself, in which many of those who came in the twenties had served,
either as combatants or ambulance men; the war had expanded their
provincial American horizons (many were from the Middle West), given
them a sense of the intensities of experience lacking in the States, made them
doubtful of Puritanism and social pieties, but also exposed the paradox of
cultivated Europe. This Europe was therefore not the place of high cultural
resources but of emotional and artistic opportunities; and, since their
predominant vision was one of a world disintegrating in values and losing
moral security and superiority, they recognized in the decadences and
disorders of Europe a metaphysical state of affairs truer to their experience
than that revealed in the booming economic Babbittry of the United States.
The tendency was, in fact, more than a sequence of individual experiences,
for many writers involved were in Paris for quite brief periods, and the
episode largely finished when the Great Depression in the United States cut
down on their financial support and also required an intellectual reappraisal.
It was, indeed, a movement with a degree of corporate allegiance, though each
given individual inevitably interpreted the episode differently and gained
more or less from it. It had a strong social dimension and a strong fashionable
1 Alan Holder, in Three Voyagersin Searchof Europe(cited above), usefully distinguishes between
Eliot's and Pound's different versions of Europe as 'tradition' and 'cosmopolitanism'. He notes that
Eliot's version is more strongly based on the power of institutions and forms and their capacity to
generate spiritual values, Pound's on a more omnivorous and more comparative view, though also a
more chaotic one, based on the personal assimilation of all past and present cultures that 'matter'
and that offer models of effective fiscal order in which art is maintained.
2 Ezra Pound, 'Paris Letter', Dial,
71 (October, 1921), 456-63 (p. 457). This is cited by Warren I.
Sussman as an interpretation of the significance of the expatriate Paris of the I 920s in his invaluable
study of this topic, 'A Second Country: The Expatriate Image', Studiesin Languageand Literature,
3 (Summer, I961), 17I-83.
constituent; it had a distinct aesthetic momentum and a clear generational

definition; it also was articulated, at least by some who went, as a direct act
of protest against the current tendencies of American life in the Coolidge-
Harding years.
In fact there have, again, been two main lines of interpretation of the
phase. To some observers it has been seen predominantly as an act of protest;
a gesture of 'rejection', asserted against American Babbittry and its expres-
sion, in small-mindedness, provincialism, prohibition, the elements that were
fashionably defined as 'American puritanism'.' This element is undoubtedly
there, though the protest was ambiguous. It condemned the lack of idealism
and progressivism in American life; the false rhetoric of a materialistic era;
the feeling of division between monetary and cultural needs, between physical
wealth and spiritual poverty. But it simultaneously assaulted the small-town
view of America, the world of Winesburg and Main Street, and the new
urban-technological processes: it was an appeal against the past and towards
the future, and against the future and towards the past; it was conscious both
of the traditionalism of the States and its disorientating futurity. Europe itself,
as alternative, was therefore also both past and future, wasted in its culture,
but innovating in its arts throughits disorder and decadence. Harold Stearns's
cry, after editing Civilization in the United States (1922), which in effect
concluded that there was none, was 'Get Out'. Yet it was a radicalism of
behaviour of form that ensued, rather than an effective political attack:
indeed the separation of art from culture and therefore from political action
was widely cultivated: craft and innovation became the issues, and cultural
disorder and artistic separatism were accepted as inevitable. Thus if the
expatriates felt pushed out by America, they felt pulled in by the Bohemian
resources of Paris, which could be regarded as an improved extension of
Greenwich Village towards which a significant portion of American life had
moved, in a process of artistic urbanization, with cheaper prices and no
Volstead Act prohibiting drinking. Hence this could be interpreted less as
a protest than as a basically economic arrangement, as other observers have
suggested -- notably Malcolm Cowley, who called these writers 'valuta
expatriates' and watched them as they followed the favourable rates of
exchange across Europe.2 Certainly most of them were beginning writers,
living on small private incomes; many were shortly to achieve success with
the American audiences whom they felt were incapable of recognizing their
work, and found themselves moving from the small press/little magazine
1 This view that the expatriation of the twenties was a gesture of protest and rejection is strongly
advanced in Frederick J. Hoffman, The Twenties: AmericanWritingin the PostwarDecade(New York,
1955). For new historical judgements on the twenties see Henry F. May, 'Shifting Perspectives on the
i92os', Mississippi ValleyHistoricalReview,43 (December, 1956), 405-27; and The AmericanNovel and
The Twentiesedited by Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, 13,
(London, 1971).
2Exile's Return:A LiteraryOdysseyof the 1920s (New York, I934: revised edition, New York, 1951;
London, 196 ).
MALCOLM BRADBURY 37
environment that Paris afforded to literary fame and fortune, returning from
their stint in Bohemia to an America now acceptable because it had accepted
them.
Indeed it is the corporate nature of the expatriate tendency in the I920S
that is one of its most striking features. For what was expatriated were not
only writers but the supporting institutions of writing and Bohemia: small
press publishers, little magazines, bookshops. There was a strong expatriate
cameraderie, sufficient to discourage some expatriates from learning French
or going much further into France than certain expatriate cafes, like the
Dome and the Rotonde. Many saw Paris as a short-term apprenticeship,
and there was a strong atelier dimension to the activity, with Stein, Pound,
Joyce, and Ford as tutorial masters. It is, of course, this generational aspect
and its strongly American cast that comes through in the novels representing
the experience, The Sun Also Rises (I926) exploring a generation anxiously
consuming experience in a world seen as void of communal values, and
TenderIs the Night (I939) which explores a yet deeper psychic crisis amid a
disorderly history and a destroyed economics. Yet at the same time Paris
was indeed Pound's 'laboratory of ideas'. It became, in the I920S, the great
expatriate centre for and the clearing house of the Modernist arts in their
more displaced form, drawing in Russians, Italians, Germans, Austrians,
Poles, Englishmen, Irishmen, Roumanians, and Spaniards, bringing to-
gether a multi-lingual community with a massive kitty of modern styles:
Symbolism, Futurism, Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism. It was this displaced
fund that was, in different ways, assimilated by the many American writers
there (some of them decisively important talents) abstracted from its
direct historical cause, made into contemporary form. Magazines abounded
with movements and radical innovations, revolutions of consciousness or of
the word, so that an already existing Modernist disposition in these writers
was activated by various Europe-based developments. The American writers
were, in effect, expatriates to expatriation, to an artistic melting pot, and
were key figures in the transaction whereby Modernist principles moved
westward towards New York. By the I930s, American culture could accept
this new globalism by virtue of the technical and behavioural innovation
that the I92os had, indeed, produced; could accept the writers who expressed
it, and accept, as emigres, many of those Europeans who, out of the further
growing displacements of Europe, consequent on the rise of Fascism, became
themselves expatriates to America. A few American expatriates stayed on in
Europe in the 1930s, notably Henry Miller, committed to immersing himself
deep in the decadence; but for many American writers of the I930S the sense
of the divergence of art from cultural and historical process diminished, chan-
nelled into the Marxist view of useful alienation. By the time the expatriate
pattern resumed again, after the Second World War, it was two-directional,
a product, too, of the era of the jetflight and the Fulbright, of an evolving
international Bohemian culture that attracted a whole youth generation, and
of a phase in which literary nationalism came to mean less and less under the
transformations of the modern global village, the internationalization of
media and cultural distribution, the convergence of culture.
IV
Living today, as we do, in this global village of formal and intellellectual
convergence, we can perhaps profit by reflecting on the way the tradition of
American literary expatriation as a long process, constantly readjusting and
re-balancing itself, has worked towards such internationalization. The assump-
tion that a literature is most realized when it is most national is politically and
emotionally a very understandable one. But the tendency of literary study has
too long and too narrowly been to emphasize the national tradition, the native
characteristic, the context constituted by national boundaries, and so to be
mystified by those who transgress them; hence writers are often assimilated
into the tradition they appear to have adopted or influenced (James, Eliot,
Conrad, and Joyce become 'English' writers, Malcolm Lowry 'Canadian',
Auden and Isherwood and Aldous Huxley ambiguously 'American'). This
can, I think, lead to misleading judgements about the character of literary
culture in society. The national boundaries of literature are of serious signifi-
cance, especially when they also involve a linguistic boundary; certainly
writers tend to deal with the most proximate reality, to engage with and
invest in the ideologies and the political debates and options of their origi-
nating society, to work within the national frame of linguistic and epistemolo-
gical reference, to be conditioned and shaped by moral and emotional
options generated in that social order, to derive from a cultural matrix for
which 'nation' is a convenient concept. But art's occasions are also frequently
trans-national; and the sense of a compendious alternative geography of art
has been a deep and significant part of its sociological character, its imagi-
native potential. The important question, therefore, is not only how a litera-
ture is culturally involved in and culturally evolved from its society, but how,
too, it may be independent of it.
This raises the question of how modern societies of democratic disposition
both generate and repudiate their arts: how, that is, they grant a permission
to artists to pursue independent thinking, to cultivate freedom, to commit
themselves to deviant or hostile action, yet at the same time create, in the
culture and also in the artists themselves, a considerable uncertainty about the
role of the arts and the relevance and function of those who practise them.
Here the expatriate is instructive, if only because he does demonstrate, in a
dramatic way, the tensions about location and nationality, obligation and
independence, which mark modern art. From the escapers, like the speaker
of Tennyson's 'Locksley Hall', yearning for 'some retreat . . where my life
began to beat' to the imaginative voyagers, like Joyce's Stephen Dedalus,
cutting ties of family, nationality, and religion to 'forge in the smithy of my
MALCOLM BRADBURY 39
soul the uncreated conscience of my race', we have seen an elaborate range of
divorced sensibility that indicates an elaborate quarrel with nationality,
expressing itself in ideals of romantic voyage, of cosmopolitanism, of necessary
exile, of chosen deprivation. Indeed, among such expatriates, the sense of
deprivation and banishment has been quite as strong as the notion of being
advanced into deeper cultural possessions. The case of American writers has a
special force because, as was inevitable in a society in which deliberate expat-
riation in the other direction was structural, and the question of nationality
and 'Americanness' much debated, strong claims were made upon the arts
for the creation of a national mythology. The founding sensibility of the
American arts was to a considerable degree romantic; and it was the romantic
artists throughout the west who celebrated those two elements (the national
sources of art, and the writer's role as independent seer) which generated the
expatriate tension. Yet the migrational tendency has been a central feature of the
evolution of the kind of arts we now have; throughout the nineteenth century
the mode of exile had great power, and the founding sensibility of Modernist
art is surely that of the writer as internationalist and traveller, moving, as so
many of our writers did, through the European capitals, drawn into social
unsettlement, encouraged into the avant garde coteries of the cities by mental
and stylistic pressures that demanded accounting as well as by disquiet with
provincialism, traditionalism, the stable order of forms. A good part of such
art has been made outside the national boundary, and it calls on the critic to
set aside his nationalist perceptions and master the cosmopolitan sensibility,
as well as the sociological pressures on art which have produced it. Today, to
a large degree, that cosmopolitan sensibility has rooted itself in the United
States, which has not only produced the Americans who wrote in London, or
Paris, or Berlin, but has drawn in the Germans and Englishman and French-
men who wrote in New York, or Los Angeles, and for whom we ourselves
must give both credit and blame for our own cosmopolitanized sensibilities.

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Second Countries: The Expatriate Tradition in American Writing

Author(s): Malcolm Bradbury

1 George Steiner, 'Extraterritorial' in Extraterritorial:Paperson Literatureand the LanguageRevolution

1 Among the many volumes of memoirsare: Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare

been centralized in American texts as an intense creative presence. Thus

sharpened. One result has been a growing attachment to those detached,

1 R. P. Blackmur, 'The American Literary Expatriate', in Foreign Influencesin AmericanLife,

1James Fenimore Cooper, Notionsof the Americans:Picked

1 Nathaniel Hawthorne, Letter to Fields,

American writers. Europe was un-Hegelian, associated not with contem-

1 The MarbleFaun (I86o), Airmont edition (New York, 1966), p. 313.

1 For this sense of cultural displacement see, for

constituent; it had a distinct aesthetic momentum and a clear generational

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