eng 290: american ex-pat writers, part two

As we discussed last week, the two main waves of American ex-pat writers in Paris visited in the twenties and in the fifties. One important note is that some of the most famous Paris-inspired writing from the Lost Generation was actually published much later. Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, a memoir of his time in Paris in the twenties, was, according to Adam Gopnik, "the ultimate fifties echo of the Paris twenties" (xxiii). An interesting publishing note: A Moveable Feast was "published posthumously in 1964" (Gopnik xxiii). When Hemingway died (he committed suicide), he didn't consider the book finished. Motoko Rich explains that "[Hemingway's first wife, Mary] created a final chapter that dealt with the dissolution of Hemingway’s first marriage and the beginning of his relationship with Pauline, building some of it from parts of the book he had indicated he did not want included" (Rich). This newest edition is an attempt to restore the book more in line with Hemingway's wishes. Whichever version we read, this is a remininiscence about earlier days, an attempt to capture the Parisian moment of the twenties from tha vantage point of the fifties and sixties.




In the 1930s, American Jazz, and a wave of African American writers traveled to Paris. Gopnik notes that the French fascination with American jazz has endured (xxv). As for the writers, they too succumbed to the illusion that Paris offered more freedom than at home. James Baldwin, however, introduced a note of reality, and, according to Gopnik, "wrote, ruefully, about the disillusioning reality of being a black man in Paris, the good city of equality that turns out to be just as treacherous as New York" (xxvi).




Artists in Montmartre, Life Magazine, 1960



After World War II, American writers and artists once again flocked to Paris, "drawn to a city they had never seen but already knew through the writings of the generations that preceded them," as Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno notes in The Continual Pilgrimage: American Writers in Paris, 1944-1960 (3). This wave of writers was inspired by both the promise of Paris and their experience of the city through the earlier wave of writers covered in last week's blog entry (Sawyer-Laucanno 4). One of the biggest attractions was a sense of "artistic enfranchisement"—that is, writers and other artists felt accepted and even celebrated for being artists while in Paris (Sawyer-Laucanno 4). Sadly, this was not necessarily the case back in the United States.



This wave of writers, once again a diverse crowd containing the academic and "bohemian," the realist and experimental, attracted both positive and negative attention at home and abroad. Sawyer-Laucanno notes that though French graffiti declared "US Go Home," many French felt much more connected to this group of American ex-pats than there predecessors, because this wave connected more with French people and culture (6). Publications like the venerable Life magazine attempted to capture the ex-pat experience, but often wound up romanticizing or bohemianizing the artists (5).




Paris remains an important piece of American literature in the mid-late twentieth century because it "nurtured this generation immeasurably by providing an environment that encouraged the art and artists. translated into personal experience, this meant belief in the value and viability of writing, and beyond that belief in oneself as a creative person" (9). A sense of recognition and encouragement, a culture that celebrated artistic achievement and offered greater personal freedoms (especially for African American and homosexual writers)...this is Paris' gift to these artists. Their literature, in turn, is their gift to us: an insight into American literature and culture, created outside of the limiting bounds of post-war America.




William S. Burroughs, in a Paris Cafe, 1959




Writers and Artists reunite in Paris, 1959




Since the storied days of the fifties, much writing about Paris has focused on one of my favorite topics: food. Julia Child's monumental work, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, co-written with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, transformed home cookery in America, and made the pleasures of the French table irrevocably part of the American consciousness. With the recent release of the film Julie and Julia, based on Julie Powell's blog project, the allure of Paris and French food has strengthened.







Works Cited

Gopnik, Adam.




Rich, Motoko.




Sawyer-Laucanno, Christopher.

eng 290: american ex-pat writers, part one

In 1928, American composer George Gershwin created his famous symphonic tone poem, An American in Paris. In 1951, MGM released the musical An American in Paris, starring Gene Kelly and Leslie Carron along with Gershwin's tunes. The original music, and the later film, match the two main "waves" of American ex-patriate writers and artists who crossed the Atlantic to experience French culture.

Of course, Americans had traveled to Paris before the Lost Generation, as Ernest Hemingway and his contemporaries were called, and after the later Beat Generation, as Jack Kerouac and others of his time were called.

Today, we're going to explore the overall appeal of Europe, and Paris in particular, to American writers, and discuss some of the earlier writers to create in the City of Light.

Famous Americans Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin visited Paris in the 18th century, remarking on the "looser" mores of the French. Jefferson, especially, found French values lacking. In a letter written to Charles Bellini in September of 1785, he remarks: "Much, much inferior this [pursuit of temporary passions] to the tranquil, permanent felicity with which domestic society in America, blesses most of its inhabitant; leaving them to follow steadily those pursuits which health and reason approve, and rendering truly delicious the intervals of those pursuits" (15). At the same time, Jefferson praises "European politeness" and urges his fellow Americans to "adopt" some of these manners (15). Finally, he finds French taste in food and the various arts to be superb (15-16). Suspicious of interpersonal pleasures, but enamored of the more intellectual aspects, Jefferson's response remains a primary American reaction to French culture.

As Adam Gopnik remarks in his introduction to Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology, Americans traveled to Paris to be happy. This pursuit of happiness generally followed one of two paths, "one essentially bourgeois, the other bohemian" (xiv). Jefferson, Henry James, and Edith Wharton clearly fall into the former category, as they sought "hatue-bourgeois civilization of comfort and pleasure and learning and formal beauty" (Gopnik xiv). In contrast, the bohemians like Bejamin Franklin, Henry Miller, and Jack Kerouac, "tried to have as much fun in Paris as [they] could" (xv). Such distinct categories, however, don't hold. Gopnik observes that Americans found themselves switching roles as their visits progressed. Either way, Paris promised both a kind of established social order and reverence for formal aesthetics, as well as a hedonist playground for exploring the pleasures of everyday life.

Paris also represented established European wisdom, in contrast to the young, "innocent" America. Paris offered history, perspective, and tradition that the still youthful America lacked. Because of French culture's emphasis on art and aesthetics, the country, and Paris in particular, was a kind of Muse for American writers and artists, according to Harry Levin (8). In discussing Henry James' novel The Ambassadors, Levin describes American culture as "an absence of storied landmarks, the lack of literary 'paraphrenalia,' the thinness of America's cultural atmosphere" juxtaposed with "the Old World's shrines and treasures and salons" (9). Europe provides context, especially for writers.

James and Wharton both lived for considerable stretches of time in Paris, and both created novels and short stories in which characters confronted the tension between Americanness and Europeanness, all against a backdrop of propriety and social mores.

After the destruction of World War I, Paris's avant-garde, bohemian streak flourished. The British Library Online Gallery devoted to American Literature in Europe, 1850-1950, explains that "The inter-war period saw the rise of Montparnasse as the hub of the city’s artistic community, its bars and cafés resounding to the pulse of “hot” jazz music and intellectual debate." Cafe culture, artistic creation, and intellectual inspiration attracted the Lost Generation writers, who saw a freedom and liveliness in Paris that was not present in American cities at the time.

The Lost Generation, a term first used by Gertrude Stein and then adopted by Ernest Hemingway, expressed the collective feelings of "doomed youth, hedonism, uncompromising creativity, and wounded—both literally and metaphorically—by the experience of war" (British Library). The British Library website offers an impressive list of the works of American Modernist writers who wrote and published in France between the World Wars.

While the writing differs--Hemingway's spare minimalist prose versus Stein's dada-esque pieces that rejected traditional aesthetics and meaning--the overarching Modernist sensibility prevailed. Modernist writers, including but limited to American ex-pats in France, sought to experiment and to "make it new," to quote poet Ezra Pound. Dealing with a world torn apart by the first World War, writers and artists played with form and content, and tried to capture the fragmented nature of reality, all the while creating a new whole. T. S. Eliot's landmark modernist poem The Wasteland winds down with these words: "The fragments I have shored against my ruins." Modernist writers wanted to put the pieces back together, but realized that they needed new ways of doing so. For the American ex-patriate writers, Paris (and in Eliot's case, London), offered more possibility for modernist play than the United States.

Sitting in cafes, visiting in Sylvia Beach's English language bookstore Shakespeare and Company, traipsing through the museums, and debating with other writers and intellectuals, the Lost Generation writers found a literary community in Paris during the period between the wars.

Ernest Hemingway in Paris, 1924, from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, courtesy of wikimedia commons.

Works Cited

British Library. Online Gallery. American Literature in Europe, 1850-1950. 21 April 2010.

Gopnik, Adam. "Introduction." Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology. Ed. Adam Gopnik.

New York: Library of America, 2004. xiii-xxxiii.

Levin, Harry. "Introduction." The Ambassadors. Henry James. NY: Penguin, 1986. 7-29.