The Great Expatriate Writers

203 Pages·1992·19.693 MB·English

by  Stoddard Martin (auth.)

THE GREAT EXPATRIATE WRITERS
Also by Stoddard Martin
WAGNER TO THE WASTE LAND: A Study of the
Relationship of Wagner to English Literature
CALIFORNIA WRITERS: Jack London, John Steinbeck, The
Tough Guys
ART, MESSIANISM AND CRIME
ORTHODOX HERESY: The Rise of 'Magic' as Religion and its
Relation to Literature
THE SAYINGS OF LORD BYRON (editor)
The Great Expatriate
Writers
STODDARD MARTIN
Palgrave Macmillan
© Stoddard Martin 1992
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1992
All rights reserved. For information, write:
Scholarly and Reference Division,
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10010
First published in the United States of America in 1992
ISBN 978-1-349-21856-1 ISBN 978-1-349-21854-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-21854-7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Martin, Stoddard, 1948-
The great expatriate writers / Stoddard Martin.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-312-06861-5
1. English literature-Foreign countries-History and criticism.
2. American literature-Foreign countries-History and criticism.
3. Literature-Exiled authors-History and criticism. 4. Authors,
Exiled-Biography. 5. Stendhal, 1783-1842. I. Title.
PR125.M37 1992
820.9'920694-dc20 91-25431
CIP
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium
w. B. Yeats
Contents
Author's Note viii
1 The Expatriate Tradition 1
2 Byron 19
3 Stendhal 39
4 James 60
5 Maugham 85
6 Pound 108
7 Greene 130
8 A Vanishing Breed 151
Notes 173
Index 185
vii
Author's Note
This book concentrates on what Henry James called 'the inter
national theme'. It represents a further development of, and com
plement to, studies undertaken in my previous critical books. The
first of these explored important motifs in European modernism, the
second the literary tradition of my native American state, the third
various strands of immorality from the French Revolution to the
present, the fourth some movements toward enlightenment. The
reader of all five books may see a cumulative development in them.
The reader of this book on its own may find in it too a progressive
interweaving of themes, echo-patterns and perhaps even fugal ele
ments.
I note this in warning. An academic book is not ordinarily expected
to have style; perhaps it is not even desired. Be that as it may, I have
attempted a kind of symphonic development here; and the reader is
left to judge whether that is not appropriate to a work which follows
certain continuities through the works and careers of a succession of
great writers. Like all my books, the present volume may be read
best at speed. The reader should get the effect of a sweep of tradition
as it passes through time; for the expatriate idea has never been a
static one, it has been and remains in dynamic motion - as, indeed,
the mind of the enthusiastic reader and critic should be as well.
Of work by previous scholars, I have tried to follow in the steps of
F. R. Leavis and his successors, as well as other critics who have
favoured the panoramic view, such as Edmund Wilson. Down here
below Parnassus, I have been helped by suggestions from Virginia
Smyers and Roger Stoddard of Harvard University, Deirdre Toomey
and Warwick Could of Royal Holloway and Bedford New College,
University of London, Anna and Colin Haycraft, the late Virginia
Moriconi, Cay Clifford, and a number of other friends who have
given moral support, including Sarah Shuckburgh, Christine Salmon,
James and Daphne Jameson, Lynne and William Wilkins and not
least my publisher'S editor.
viii
1
The Expatriate Tradition
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first definition of an
expatriate might bel someone who is driven or banished from his
native country. This definition dates from the latter half of the eigh
teenth century and conjures visions of Casanova thrown out of
Venice or aristocratic emigres fleeing the Reign of Terror. In the
nineteenth century, it became fashionable for romantics to dabble in
revolution, be hounded out of their fatherlands and roam across
Europe like the Wandering Jew. Jews themselves contributed to this
fashion by the spectacle of their flight from prejudice and pogrom. In
the early twentieth century the fashion continued, becoming more
widespread as actual revolution and war sent aristocrats, Jews, kulaks,
socialists, communists and finally old fascists scurrying away from
regimes bent on wiping them out, or at least muzzling their expres
sionistic urges. Still, when we speak of an expatriate nowdays, most
of us have in mind the second OED definition: that is, a person who
withdraws from his native country and/ or has renounced his alle
giance. An expatriate is a voluntary exile in our view. He has decided
to live in Spain because it is sunny, or the taxes are lower, or he finds
some deep attraction in the culture of bullfighting. He is not remotely
similar to the Iranians who fled Khomeini or the Nicaraguans who
left their own country with the advent of the Sandanistas. These are
the driven and banished of now: inheritors of traditions of ancien
regime emigres or White Russian exiles from the Soviet state. We do
not, as a rule, refer to them as expatriates. That term is reserved for
rich Europeans living in Manhattan or rich Americans living in
Switzerland, or northern Europeans who have left for the south, or
artists who for the sake of individual expression have seen fit to live
away from where they were born.
It is this type of expatriate that this book is about. As a result, it
does not directly concern Karl Marx or Wagner, thrown out of Ger
many; Lenin or Solzenitsyn, in exile from Russia; Schoenberg or
Thomas Mann or scores of artists in flight from the Nazis. While
there was an element of elective withdrawal and renouncing alle-
1
2 The Great Expatriate Writers
giance in such cases, these figures were principally unwilling exiles:
men driven or banished from their countries. Most continued to
concern themselves with the affairs of those countries, devoting
years to brooding over the national hubris which had driven them
hence. Forced emigres of this kind do not become citizens of the
world easily or quickly, if ever. Citizenship of the world is not what
they are looking for so much as triumphant return in the third act of
their hero's progress and vindication of their true patriotism over
the aberrant kind which made their homelands foreign to them. An
exile is a Russian or German or Jew living in another country but
dreaming of going back to Russia or Germany or Israel. An expatri
ate in the pure sense is someone who has left his country behind and
does not long to go back to reform it but wants to establish a new life
elsewhere with other loyalties. Tax exiles from England who intend
to go back when the rates are favourable fall out of the category.
Americans who left their country in the 1950s in disgust at McCarthy,
or in the 1960s because of the Vietnam War, are moral exiles rather
than expatriates proper: shades of the Victor Hugos and Bakunins
who went to far places the better to rail against antipathetic regimes.
Most of them have gone home long ago. And going home constitutes
cancellation of one's visa to the new land of expatriation. It proves
that what might have appeared as aspiration to transnational
detachment actually boils down to temporal exile or an extended
voyage of discovery.
A traveller, in short, is not an expatriate. Among novelists, then,
there are many we can exclude. E. M. Forster, for instance. A Room
with a View is about tourists. They go to Florence, long to live there,
yet come back to England in the end. Being abroad appears to help
them arrive at a better understanding of themselves; but it is as
Englishmen that they went and as Englishmen that they return, if
somewhat broadened by the experience. Something similar applies
to A Passage to India, which is not a novel about expatriates either,
though it may be closer to it. The book is about colonialism; and
again the effect of being abroad is measured by whether it helps to
achieve better Englishness. Forster is engaged in a critique of his
own people. Foreign behaviour and experience are used as stand
ards of contrast and, as such, have secondary importance. Forster is
not concerned principally with what it might be like to become a
citizen of another land, nor did he live out of England for an ex
tended period himself. Thus he is little more of an expatriate writer
than he was an expatriate.