How to Be An American Writer, Part 9: Conclusion

In this series of blogs, I’ve talked about four different approaches that American writers have taken toward U.S. society:
1) Expatriates
2) Populists
3) Internal exiles
4) Critics and satirists

I don’t mean to suggest that these approaches are mutually exclusive. In fact, I think many U.S. writers partake of two or even all of these attitudes at one time or another in their literary careers. On the other hand, there are American writers who don’t fit into any of these categories.

In this blog, I’m going to try to make some generalizations and draw some conclusions about these four approaches.

The Balance among These Approaches Has Changed

An interesting sidelight to these four approaches is how the balance among them has changed over the years. In the 1920s, for instance, there were probably as many leading American writers living in Europe as in the United States. These days, there are very few expatriate writers, and even the ones who do live abroad often spend only half the year overseas. For instance, the poet Marilyn Hacker lives in Paris, but only part-time. Why this shift away from the expatriate writer?

The Expatriates Won

Well, for one thing, I think the expatriates won. They waged their struggle to convince Americans that the customs and tolerance of Europe and the Mediterranean are in many ways more conducive to the good life. Nowadays, almost every American city contains elements of what used to be only available in sophisticated Europe—a diversity of lifestyles, for example. Not to mention the espresso machine; the croissant; yogurt; shallots and radicchio; artisan goat cheeses; fine wine, beer, and liqueurs. And the profusion of art galleries. It’s not necessary anymore to be an expatriate to partake of all these pleasures. There’s a quite a lot of what you can get of Paris or Florence right at your local Whole Foods Store, café, or gallery.

But the Populists Are Now the Largest Group
Looking at the lists of American writers and which ones take which approach, I think it’s safe to say that the populists are by far the plurality now, if not an outright majority. Why? The resurgence of writing by women and by people of color and in the LGBTQ community has re-energized writing about moments that matter in everyday U.S. life and the stories of Americans. Not only that, the victory of the expatriates in terms of lifestyles has made it largely unnecessary for U.S. writers to go abroad in order to find the tolerance, sophistication, and artistic ambiance they sought in 1920s Paris. 

There Are Fewer Literary Satirists and Critics

I think the ranks of the satirists and critics have also thinned compared to previous decades. Television and the Internet have become more likely venues for satire and criticism than literature. Satire and criticism are so time constrained—what’s funny or politically astute this week is not necessarily even comprehensible in a few months. So why try to immortalize it in literature? I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it has to be done now with more of an eye to what is universal in the satire or the criticism than was the case in the past. Literary reformers are sometimes the victims of their own success, and the conditions they protest change and sometimes even disappear.

So, Where Does This Leave American Writers?

Should we be booking passage on the next cruise ship to Europe in order to hang out at a Left Bank café? Should we wave the flag on Main Street? Should we retreat to a homestead where our only neighbors are grizzlies? Should we mercilessly mock all that is sacred in American life? The point of these blogs is not so much to recommend any of these approaches. Instead, I’m hoping that you will recognize in some of the writers I’ve discussed some impulses of your own, and come to know them better.

I think that each of the four approaches that I’ve described has its strengths and weaknesses, and we can learn something about our selves as writers from considering those.

Expatriates—Strengths and Weaknesses

The strengths of the expatriate, for instance, are sophistication and tolerance. The expatriate usually accepts a range of human facets and pursuits more comprehensive and accepting than what is often welcome in much of the United States. The weakness of the expatriate, from my standpoint, is that this stance can lean toward snobbism, or even elitism with regard to Main Street. There is a sort of disdain for the common American in some expatriates that risks losing what is genuine and democratic in the U.S. experience.
Read more about U.S. expatriate writers >

Populists—Strengths and Weaknesses

The strong point of the populist, on the other hand, is an appreciation for exactly the quality that the expatriate is somewhat indifferent to—the authenticity, camaraderie, and egalitarian impulses of America. Along with the populist attitude goes enthusiasm for the diversity of U.S. society. The weak spot of the populist, I would say, is a certain naïveté, a willingness to ignore what is materialistic and gruff in American society.
Read more about U.S. populist writers >

Internal Exiles—Strengths and Weaknesses

The forte of the internal exile is uncompromising, high principles. The internal exile has the ability to tell the truth about America’s destructive and overly mercantile tendencies. Sometimes the internal exile has an inspiring prophetic side. The internal exile is also sometimes an advocate for nature over wanton human development. The downside of the internal exile is a sort of misanthropy—painting all of the urban experience with a brush that is too wide and too negative. I think some internal exiles are open to the criticism that they are blind to the benefits of diversity in the United States.
Read more about U.S. internal exile writers >

Satirists and Critics—Strengths and Weaknesses

The satirist or critic’s strong point is being able to instruct at the same time he or she makes us laugh. The satirist does not let cultural icons go unchallenged. There is a bravery in that willingness to take on the powers that be. The Achilles’ heel of the satirist, for me, is an occasional blindness to the small, meaningful moments that the populist celebrates. There can also be elitist undertones to some satires or criticisms of American life.
Read more about U.S. writers who are satirists and critics >

Whichever approach to being an American writer feels familiar and comfortable, consider learning from the other approaches as well. Whatever the approach, it’s crucial to appreciate what is true in the other viewpoints.

How to Be an American Writer

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2—Henry James and the Expatriates

Part 3: U.S. Expatriate Writers (continued)

Part 4:  Populists and Walt Whitman

Part 5: Thornton Wilder as a Populist

Part 6: Populist Writers: The Beat Generation, Women Fiction Writers, and African American Writers

Part 7: Internal Exiles

Part 8: Satirists and Critics

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

How to Be an American Writer, Part 2: Henry James and the Expatriates

Leaving the U.S. for Leverage

U.S. writers have reacted to Puritanical and materialistic trends in American society in various ways. One way is just to get out, otherwise known as being an expatriate, living outside the U.S.

But leaving the country is not just a form of escape. It gives an author an alternative framework and value system to evaluate U.S. society. “Give me a lever and a place to stand, and I will move the world,” Archimedes stated. Well, if the lever in this case is literature, certain authors need a place to stand outside our society in order to have leverage to budge it.

Expatriates Outside England and France

U.S. expatriate writers have mostly gravitated to England and France, with some exceptions. There have been a few American writers who have clustered in Morocco, such as Paul and Jane Bowles, and William Burroughs. There’s also Ezra Pound grumbling at the Grand Canal in Venice. The poet Cid Corman lived for many decades in Kyoto, Japan, running an ice cream and cake store with his wife. (I had a letter of introduction to Cid Corman when I visited Japan in 1986, and he asked me to meet him at the store, where I was hoping to learn from his many years of experience as a writer—mostly I learned about ice cream). But, in general, the refined and urbane cultures of the U.K. and Paris have been the draw.

Henry James, the Quintessential Expatriate

To me, the quintessential American expatriate writer is Henry James. James, who was born in 1843, spent much of his life in Europe, including a lot of his childhood. He came from a stellar family. His older brother was the philosopher of spirituality William James. His younger sister was the diarist Alice James—the literary press Alice James Books is named for her.

Henry James

Henry James ultimately purchased and renovated an eighteenth century house in the town of Rye in Sussex in the U.K., where he settled and lived his last twenty years, till his death in 1916.

Henry James wrote twenty-three novels, scores of short stories, many books of criticism and travel writing, and several plays. When I was assigned his novel The Ambassadors in college, I dismissed him as something of a fuddy-duddy. James writes in a way that can seem overly formal these days. Few of his sentences would fit on the screen of a smartphone or a phablet. His plots move as slowly as a rowboat crossing the Atlantic Ocean. I just didn’t have the patience when I was younger to wait him out.

Getting to Henry James by Way of Tehran

My interest in James was finally kindled, oddly enough, by way of Iran. A couple of years ago I read Azar Nafisi’s book Reading Lolita in Tehran. In this engaging memoir, Nafisi tells the story of a secret study group of Muslim women who met in her home in Iran after the Islamic Revolution in the late 1970s, defying the 1984-like rules of a government that literally burns books. These women risked prison merely by taking part in a reading group.

Interestingly, one of the writers who spoke most directly to these young women, forced to wear the burka in the streets, was Henry James. James created bold women characters like Daisy Miler who weren’t afraid to flaunt convention by going on an outing in public with a man who is not a family member. This was the sort of “crime” that these women in Tehran were sometimes accused of. The penalty in Iran if caught was to be whipped and ostracized from society. For the women of this reading group, Henry James was a profoundly revolutionary writer. In reading about the lives of these women in Iran, I realized how shocking James was for the readers of his day—not that whipping was a common penalty in New England in 1900, but ostracism was certainly a danger.

The Ambassadors

Among James’s subversive women characters is Maria Gostrey in The Ambassadors. Maria is a free spirit, a woman in her thirties who lives by herself in England. That sort of life is almost unimaginable to the novel’s main character, Lambert Strether. His fiancée, a widow from a powerful banking family in the fictional town of Woollett, Massachusetts, sends Strether, the “ambassador,” to France to bring back home her wayward son, Chad. Chad has spent entirely too much time sipping delicious burgundies, eating triple cream cheeses, browsing painting exhibitions, and worst of all, consorting with a widowed French woman who is older than he is. Strether’s mission is to yank this young man back to Woollett, where he is supposed do what all young men of his class are destined for: marry a girl from a family just like his and make gobs of money.

When Strether first meets the freewheeling Maria Gostrey, there is an interesting culture clash, where American enterprise meets the good life of Europe. To begin with, she suggests they go for a walk together in the garden of the hotel where they're both staying Remember, she is an unmarried woman. Here’s how James describes their encounter:

He looked repeatedly at his watch, and when he had done so for the fifth time Miss Gostrey took him up.

“You’re doing something that you think not right.”

It so touched the place that he quite changed color, and his laugh was almost awkward. “Am I enjoying it as much as that?”

“You’re not enjoying it, I think, so much as you ought.”

“I see”—he appeared thoughtfully to agree. “Great is my privilege.”

“Oh, it’s not your privilege! It has nothing to do with me. It has to do with yourself. Your failure’s general.”

“Ah, there you are!” he laughed. “It’s the failure of Woollett. That’s general.”

“The failure to enjoy,” Miss Gostrey explained, “is what I mean.”

The failure to enjoy. I think James hit the nail on the head there. The problem with puritanical, entrepreneurial culture in the U.S. is that there is really no space for enjoying the pleasures of an individual’s choosing.

Another book that deepened my appreciation of Henry James is a recent novel about James’s life in Europe called The Master by the Irish writer Colm Tóibín. I recommend it if you are at all interested in James.

In my next blog, I’ll talk about the American expatriate writers of the 1920s like Fitzgerald and Hemingway; the lesbian, gay, and bisexual side of the expatriate literary world; and contemporary expatriates such as David Sedaris.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 

How to Be an American Writer, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Praise and Lament