How to Be an American Writer, Part 3: U.S. Expatriate Writers (continued)

The roster of U.S. expatriate writers is a distinguished one. It includes Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, Paul Bowles, Jane Bowles, Natalie Barney, Djuna Barnes, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Baldwin, and Chester Himes. In the 1920s and 30s, almost the entire U.S. literary world decamped to Paris and the French Riviera, where F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and many others spent a good part of those decades. Of course, part of their interest in the urbane, sophistication of Europe might have had to do with the fact that one could drink alcohol legally there, which was not true in the U.S after the passage of the Twenty-first Amendment in 1920, the beginning of the Prohibition era. Another reason behind the expatriate lifestyle may have been the fact that it was much cheaper to live as an artist in Europe than in the U.S. in the 1920s.

Djuna Barnes

One interesting undercurrent in expatriate writing is the high percentage of gays and lesbians among the authors who left the U.S. Western Europe has long been ahead of our country in its embrace, or at least tolerance, of gay and lesbian lifestyles, and of LGB subject matter in literature. A majority of the expatriate writers I’ve mentioned have been gay or lesbian or bisexual, including Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin, Natalie Barney, and Henry James.

Even though the U.S. has become somewhat more sophisticated, the expatriate strain in American writing continues to this day. The author David Sedaris is a contemporary expatriate writer. Sedaris, who is openly gay, has purchased and renovated a cottage in Sussex in the U.K. and often writes critically of American naiveté, comparing it unfavorably with English and continental sophistication. All of this might start to sound familiar to those who read my last blog, which discussed Henry James.  

David Sedaris

Here’s David Sedaris’s critique of the attire of American travelers, from his essay “Standing By,” which appeared in The New Yorker, and which you can hear him read in his audiobook, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls:

“…everywhere I go, someone in an eight-dollar T-shirt is whipping out a cell phone and delivering the fine print of his or her delay. One can’t help but listen in, but then my focus shifts and I find myself staring. I should be used to the way Americans dress when travelling, yet still it manages to amaze me. It’s as if the person next to you had been washing shoe polish off a pig, then suddenly threw down his sponge, saying, ‘Fuck this. I’m going to Los Angeles!’”

I’m always reminded when I take an airplane about how we Americans look when we travel. To be frank, it’s often not a pretty sight. Compared to U.S. citizens, Europeans and other nationalities are much better dressed and show much more respect for others in the way they present themselves, both in airports and in general. That European savoir faire is hard to find in the United States, and it’s not just a question of wardrobe. It’s also an outlook on life, an appreciation of beauty and elegance. I think the hunger for those qualities is part of the motivation of the expatriate American writer.

How to Be an American Writer

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2—Henry James and the Expatriates

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

Part 9: Conclusion

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

Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast

Until recently I’d never read Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, his memoir of expatriate artists in Paris in the 1920s. It’s a time period that fascinates me, partly because there was such a hive of English-language literary talent in that beautiful city during that decade. Hemingway’s recollections include personal anecdotes about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Ford Madox Ford, and others.

Ernest Hemingway

Some of the writing in A Moveable Feast is stunning. Hemingway has the ability to describe an incident that yanks you right into the experience. His long, breathless sentences give you the sense that he can’t wait to tell you about what he has seen. There are wonderful passages where he describes skiing in Austria:

“I remember the smell of the pines and the sleeping on the mattresses of beech leaves in the woodcutters’ huts and the skiing through the forest following the tracks of hares and of foxes. In the high mountains above the tree line I remember following the track of a fox until I came in sight of him and watching him stand with his right forefoot raised and then go carefully to stop and then pounce, and the whiteness and the clutter of a ptarmigan bursting out of the snow and flying away and over the ridge.”

Pure poetry. I also love the passage in the book about a boy who led a small herd of goats through the Latin Quarter each morning, making the rounds of the alleyways, playing his pipes to advertise his wares. The boy would milk a goat on demand for a customer, who brought a pail or pot to collect the milk.

There are many sections of this book, though, that make me wonder why a person would write such negative observations about his friends in a public work of literature. Hemingway praises the writing of his buddy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, but he savages Fitzgerald personally. Why write down an incident where Fitzgerald told Hemingway in a bar that his wife, Zelda Fitzgerald, thought his penis was too small? Hemingway recounts how he had Fitzgerald pull down his pants in the bathroom to verify that his anatomy was adequate, and then took him to the Louvre to compare his parts to the classical sculptures. Funny, maybe, but so belittling to his friend (in more ways than one!). Not to mention the tell-all accounts of the drinking binges of F. Scott and Zelda.

The only people Hemingway has much good to say about are his wife, Hadley, whom he admits to cheating on at the end of the book; his son, whom he calls by the cute nickname of Mr. Bumby; and Ezra Pound. Hemingway repeatedly describes Pound as a “saint” in A Moveable Feast. It may be true that Pound raised funds to support the writers he admired, such as T.S. Eliot, but it seems extremely odd to beatify Pound, who made virulently anti-Semitic radio broadcasts and told U.S. troops they were fighting on the wrong side in the battle against fascism in World War II. Since Hemingway compiled the manuscript of A Moveable Feast after the war ended, he couldn’t plead ignorance of Pound’s actions.

All of these oddities in A Moveable Feast are a strong reminder of the changes that have taken place since Hemingway’s time. The out-of-control machismo that Hemingway championed in almost all his writing rings very false now. It makes Hemingway look like a kind of schoolyard bully wannabe. Not only that, the machismo dates much of Hemingway’s work. All that makes me wonder what Ernest Hemingway could have been if he had used his enormous talent with more generosity and compassion.

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

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