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.