Finding America
I have always dreamed of far off places. When I was a child, my mind often played in its own imaginative world of medieval castles and underwater palaces, with a backyard and wealth of Lego’s at my disposal. As objects of my imagination, I cannot say whether these mystical lands remained or whether they morphed into something entirely new every time I revisited them, but I do know that I reverted back to this transient place between my ears every time I needed to escape from reality—my place “out there”. But as I grew older, my preoccupation with foreign lands rooted itself in that very reality I had originally attempted to escape. Now, I found myself spending innumerable hours scouring atlases and exotic photography collections—anything to satiate my curiosity of what lay beyond. I suppose it’s no coincidence that I am now beginning to embark on a journey East, to provenance, where I will spend the next four years of my life.
I recently happened upon Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises as I was cleaning through my garage and I was struck with an irony: the beloved novel, though set in 1920s Paris and, later, the Spanish countryside, hardly references America, yet Hemingway is lauded as a genius in American literature. His eminent compatriots too, lived abroad—and later become known as the expatriate writers. Initially, this appeared a paradox, and so I decided to delve into a study of the expatriate movement—authors who too seemed to be preoccupied with the elsewhere—in search of an answer to my question: what is it about the intrinsic qualities of the expatriate’s literature that makes it so American? And furthermore, how did their evidently flourishing environment—immersion in the Post-War European condition—prove to be so amenable to the creative process—gifting them such insight to their masterful prose? I didn’t exactly expect to find what I did, though I believe it personally fitting. But first, I needed to preface my investigation with a backdrop that would give context and meaning to the expatriates’ masterpieces.
The Great War—otherwise known as the First World War—signaled the advent of a new art: the modernists’ mechanized war. Political dignitaries attempted to justify the war to their peoples with nationalist propaganda; and to an extent, they succeeded for quite some time (Bourne). But to the common solider—especially the young, educated middle-class male—the ebb and flow of the war, the reasons that dictated the constant tumult, remained largely ambiguous. Perhaps, even had the soldiers been acutely conscious of the background politics that give him his plight, those reasons would not have mattered much. Under those circumstances, the justifications still might still have faded, providing null consolation, just as they truly had for the 65 million mobilized. What the soldier faced was largely inhuman—it was machine. And so when America entered the war in 1917, the men in the ubiquitous trench must have perceived no strategic progress, but simply as an arrival of more troops, more bodies. On the Western Front, American soldiers reinforced these “elaborate and sophisticated trench systems and field fortifications” but were met with “dense belts of barbed wire, concrete pillboxes, intersecting arcs of machine-gun fire, and accumulating masses” of artillery barrage (Bourne). No longer could maneuvers be won with the naiveté of human tenacity. By the end of 1915 those “pre-war assumptions” were rendered completely false, as soldiers of “high morale were repeatedly flung into battle by commanders of iron resolve”. Franz Kafka called it “a tremendous lack of imagination” (Mikolavich). The “principal instrument of education was artillery”—a weapon that exacerbated, widened the chasm which split man from man—a new art form that could only reveal itself as a pale ghost, haunting men’s dreams. And that ghost took the lives of 8.5 million in the end (Bourne). Men who were spared by that damned “war of illusions” were calamities of something greater, something afflicting not only the body, but the mind; and its reverberations echoed throughout the world as those tragic heroes, those praised soldiers, scattered and returned to both old and unfamiliar homes.
Return to America—assimilation to a life of peace and prosperity—was never quite realized by many. Perhaps a large number were disconcerted with the social turmoil and shallowness back in the United States; perhaps a number simply preferred to remain in their new European home. Emerging victorious from a world war it had fought for a relatively short time, America found her horizons economically auspicious (Mikolavich). She shied away from many of the global problems that still shook much of devastated Europe, and turned inward, into an isolationist state. Evidently, the stock market soared and her Dollar rose to unparalleled heights. Living in Europe proved extremely profitable for many Americans, as scores poured off the ships in awe of a liberal, albeit cultured Paris. And this is both where and when life became the exile’s big party. Paris soon exploded as the cultural capital of the world. The writers, who settled in Montparnasse, or “the Quarter”, soon became eminently known as the Parisian expatriate writers, as they embarked on a modernist journey full of experimentation (Carpenter). The city was alive with a spirit of unabashed giddiness. Many artists and cultural dissidents emigrated from America in order to stay largely aloof from the growing baseness back home. While America—a “country which was neither gay enough nor cultured enough to deserve their presence” reveled in its intoxication, Paris provided a certain sophistication to the debauchery that existed at home (Aldridge 12). They needed some place, someplace where they could honestly express what they felt and live as they felt they ought to live. To the expatriates, the “idea of exile, like the idea of the religion of art, grew out of their need to sustain the motions which the war had aroused in them, to keep up the incessant movement, the incessant search for excitement” (Aldridge 12). Writers and painters and musicians collided in bars, street-side cafes, and bookstores. The sophisticated, reborn world seemed to converge in this city. In, A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway, a symbol of his generation, seems to describe his beloved Paris as he would a fond acquaintance:
There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy (221).
I asked Janice Doane, a Professor of 20th Century American Literature, what Paris must have meant for these blossoming painters of the written word. Her office, at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California, lay in a hallway classically collegiate. Student workers and other professors bustled in and out—enlivening an already quirky and vivacious atmosphere—indicative that something intellectually steaming was going on there. Professor Doane’s orderly stacks of anthologies, references, literary criticism, and fiction covered the wall adjacent to a rather large poster paying tribute to the expatriate feminist Gertrude Stein. A few warming rays spilt through the window. The leaves on the trees rustled in the warm breeze outside. She leaned back in her chair: “I was so interested and fascinated that there was a center of art and culture where so many people did meet and collaborate. It was a center for people from all over Europe and the world. It must have been so excited and stimulating to your own creativity. And if we know about that sort of thing we’ll want to recreate it someday”. Professor Doane hints at her fondness and respect of Montparnasse, for “it was not an elitist thing. A lot of poor people came from all over”. I further inquired, asking her why she believes it so relevant, important to study expatriate literature. Gazing up at Gertrude’s contemplative, firm countenance on the wall, she said, “Just to know you can form communities—American communities—that aren’t all focused on some sort of materialistic interest, but on literary and artistic interest. America was always the way modern societies were just starting to become. It had always emphasized a beginning again, starting again—inventiveness and innovation. And I think that’s the most American strand of what’s going on in Paris at that moment”. That was indeed true: the great American Ernest Hemingway arrived in Paris in 1921 with a deluge of other prominent figures—Malcolm Cowley, Thornton Wilder, Robert McAlmon, Sherwood Anderson—and promptly joined the literary scene that was already thriving (Fitch 42). Just two years earlier, Sylvia Beach had opened Shakespeare and Company—the first American bookstore that would soon be frequented by the literary expatriates. After Sylvia Beach began publishing American work, a slew of others followed suit; soon little magazines, serving “primarily as nurturers of art and secondarily as forums for the evaluation of this modern art”, sprung up and published some 80% of the world’s most important 20th century poets, novelists, and critics (Fitch 61). These little literary magazines provided eager writers with a beloved cohesion by which they could explore the innovations of their compatriots with ease.
If the array of publications is to be accredited with distributing the prose, Gertrude Stein—Doane’s personal idol—must be partially commended for making the prose what it is. “Gertrude Stein,” writes Hemingway in A Moveable Feast “was very big but not tall and was heavily built like a peasant woman” (14). As more and more writers began to acquaint themselves with one another—by means of the literary magazines—Ms. Stein’s residence at the infamous 27 rue de Fleurus evolved into a sort of authoritative workshop (Carpenter 25). Gertrude commanded a forward presence and was often told as outspoken and, at times, on the verge of haughty. She did not attempt to conceal her dislike of certain writing and people (such as Ezra Pound) and proved quite frank in her criticism. After reading Hemingway’s, now highly respected, short story “Up in Michigan”, Gertrude commented:
“It’s good,” she said. “That’s not the question at all. But it is inaccrochable. That means it is like a picture that a painter paints and then he cannot hang it when he has a show and nobody will buy it because they cannot hang it either”
“But what if it is not dirty but it is only that you are trying to use words that people would actually use? That are the only words that can make the story come true and that you must use them? You have to use them.”
“But you don’t get the point at all,” she said. “You musn’t write anything that is inaccrochable. There is no point in it. It’s wrong and it’s silly” (Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 15).
Hemingway further expounds their discussions—how Gertrude wished to be published—and would be—in the Atlantic Monthly but that he was not a good enough writer to be published with them. Regardless of her somewhat harsh, always vocalized opinion, Gertrude attracted flocks of visitors to her art-laden flat at the 27 rue de Fleurus who wished to speak with her or have her read their writings, hoping to gain some profound insight from the obviously reputable woman (Carpenter 25). But what Gertrude gave them was not an objective basis upon which to expand their writing; rather, she advocated “indulgence in pure technique” (Aldridge 14). Prose was no longer simply a form into which the writer filled his content; it became an entirely new concoction, one that blended both form and content to create an entirely new idea of masterpiece. This avant-garde approach spawned from the modernist credo—“make it new”. Essentially, the expatriate writer was working twofold “to create a new form of the novel and to say something new with it” (Mikolavich).
I sat down with Keith Mikolavich, a professor at Diablo Valley College, in his home in Oakland, California to discuss his reactions to the expatriates and the experimentation inherent in their work: “It’s not just a new story, but a new form,” he explained, “In [Hemingway’s] The Sun Also Rises—that’s just a masterpiece—one-eighth of it is stated and seven-eighths is implied. That’s American: it’s radical, it’s new, it’s constantly experimenting”. As we picked up the subject of Ernest Hemingway and his fortune as an accomplished American writer, I began to understand his place as a figure—though his greatest novels hardly ever reference his homeland—in American literature. And so I asked Professor Mikolavich about his favorite expatriate author:
“Ernest Hemingway, especially. Out of all the expatriate writers he’s the one I have the most affinity for.”
“Why do you think that is?” I said.
“It’s because he’s very American and also misunderstood. He’s a lot more complex than a lot of people try to make you believe. He’s a consummate stylist; after Hemingway, everybody had to write sort of like him and then remake themselves. He was one of the greatest practitioners of the English sentence. He could write a short declarative sentence that had so much meaning, pregnant with meaning.”
Ernest Hemingway was certainly not alone. Gertrude Stein, along with countless other writers “renounced their native traditions and took on the traditions of pure art” (Aldridge 16). They grew rebellious and took arms against a sea of Old World presumptions. A search for absolute truth began and is consequently reflected in their styles. Despite their collaborations at the 27 Rue de Fleurus and all across Paris, each sought, with this newfound technique of limitless experimentation, to define himself apart. It was a conscious revolt—individual revolutions comprising a wholly revolutionary movement. The frenzy of such freedom and rebellion was embraced by the Dadaist philosophy (Aldridge 16). Dada contained nearly all the aspects upon which the exile literary movement was based—rejection of once common values—and relished in the pervading sense of loss as a result of World War I. It did not advocate any special course of action to remedy the broken American society that had failed them; it did not aim to purge societal injustice—an injustice which had brought upon them the calamities of a distraught war—in any sort of way. Anarchy within Dada was indeed prevalent and the disintegration of any specific doctrine allowed for all to be accepted. It relinquished the traditional view of art as merely societal aesthetic pleasure and made art into the medium with which the expatriate writers could befuddle society and adopt an extreme view of individualism. Dada justified nothingness, justified polar experimentation. But Dada was severely anti-war and justified itself on the theory that since an orderly society could justify war (World War I in this case) of senseless, all things senseless were permitted. Dada was destined to destroy itself, yet Dada, in spite of its “monstrous wastefulness and hollow disdain”, became “a stimulus to action for others, for an entire age”, attributing to the restless spirit that defined the Roaring Twenties (Aldridge 19). It allowed for Hemingway to write an absolutely true sentence, Gertrude Stein to reinvent her own form. While rejecting the classical American values that had preceded them, Dadaist values converged and realized “the best and worst possibilities of the exile ideal”—manifesting themselves in the literature that came out of that era. And ironically, perhaps that is why that literature is so quintessentially American. Not only did it permit a generation to redefine itself and the form of literature, but it came as a revolution. And revolution—that redefining of oneself—has been at the core of America’s history since her primordial days—her entrance to existence by means of the Revolution. It is one aspect that defines Americans and its prevalence can be traced throughout our literature; “you can be anybody you want to be and it doesn’t matter who your ancestors were or what your heritage is” says Professor Janice Doane.
But that rugged spirit is somewhat subtle in expatriate literature and it took me some time to find it. I only first began my excavation of expatriate literature recently; my perfunctory, compulsory readings of assorted short stories and vignettes earlier in school were, regrettably, hardly insightful, much less inspirational. And so I read an assortment of novels and short stories by two of the most emblematic writers of their time.
Though his greatest novels—most notably The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms—are set in the rolling hills of Italy, the bustling streets and forlorn cafes of Paris, and the bull-fighting rings of the Spanish countryside, Ernest Hemingway stands an acclaimed symbol of both expatriate literature and 20th century American literature. Hemingway, at the age of eighteen, enrolled in the Red Cross and was shipped to Paris when America entered World War I in 1917 (Carpenter 53). He had been forbidden from enlisting in the army due to his poor eyesight, but the young Hemingway was eager to join the action. After gallivanting about a bombarded Paris—a city that had been shell-shocked by German artillery—for a few months, he was deployed to the Italian front, where he was to drive army ambulances. It was here that Hemingway was wounded by enemy shrapnel, though the exact details are not known. After enduring his wounds, he was then sent to the Red Cross hospital in Milan where he was treated until he returned to New York in 1919 (Carpenter 54). He lived there briefly until he met his soon to be wife Elizabeth Hadley Richardson. After acquiring a job with the Toronto Star as a sports correspondent, Hemingway, together with Hadley, embarked on a Parisian escapade, entranced by the literary spectacle that he would soon join.
Hemingway delineates the effects of World War One on the common soldier in A Farewell to Arms. Frederick Henry, our protagonist, is an American serving—coincidentally—with an Italian ambulance unit and “as a spiritual nonparticipant, he is able to hold himself aloof from the war and its politics” (Aldridge 6). For nearly the entire first half of the novel, Frederick Henry finds himself sitting aimlessly behind the lines, waiting. The war continues on, elsewhere, a mere abstraction in his mind. He wanders about the little Italian town where he is stationed, detached from the war and its reality—“This war … did not have anything to do with me. It seemed no more dangerous to me … than the war in the movies” (Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, 67). But the war gives him some aim, some purpose for he waits patiently, conscious that the war will bring him something—honor, love, pride. When the war does come, it hits him blindly from behind and he doesn’t expect its coming. His mountainside village is bombarded, and its people obliterated into bodies by an adversary who cannot be seen, who cannot be humanized. At once they are enveloped in a sweeping wave, and after it crashes down upon Frederick Henry and the little men alongside him, they are left disorderly and confused in its wake. Both the second part of A Farewell to Arms and the entirety of The Sun Also Rises beautifully accounts the aftermath that follows. For Frederick Henry, “where the war had once stood as an objective order upon which he could project and give meaning to his private confusion while at the same time losing nothing of himself, it was now a destructive forced that threatened to rob him of himself altogether” (Aldridge 9). He realizes his impotency in the face of such unbridled recklessness, and suddenly he is no longer thwarting the war from his external self; rather, the war now exists within him and he is mentally powerless to stop it. In The Sun Also Rises, the war-torn mountains of Italy are replaced by the cool streets of Paris, but the impotency remains. Jake Barns and his compatriots frequent the Parisian bars, cafes, and clubs without alacrity for social responsibility; they drink to vulgar ends and don’t seem to do much else. Lady Brett—Jake’s lover from long ago—has cut her hair short—a symbol of her yearning for freedom from social repression. And the two still love one another but “they can’t consummate it because of his wound—the war took his manhood away. But they’re still trying to make sense of love in a world in which they can’t consummate it” (Mikolavich). Jake Barns seems to symbolize an evolved Frederick Henry who is trying to settle down, but can’t seem to do so, perhaps because he “has been hurt by the war and he’s trying to make sense of the new world as it moves from the old world. He’s trying in a sense to fight for a kind of morality” (Mikolavich). Later in the novel, Jake Barns, Brett and company venture southward to Pamplona, Spain to witness the holiday fiesta and savage bull fights. But it is here that the eruption occurs. Brett starts an affair with a young Spanish bull fighter; Jake’s best friend Robert Cohn gets into numerous fist fights with the locals over trivial matters; Jake’s temperament falters and he shows signs of cracking up. The band of friends disperses as surges of emotion go to war with one another and the company can no longer stand the sight of each other; the war—both physical and emotional—has destroyed them. Herein exists a tragic element to Hemingway. He masterfully presents the human condition in its most frail form. The existential question becomes, what do we do now? Hemingway doesn’t exactly give us an answer, although—through his Nick Adams stories in In Our Time—“growing up … is a process of learning to endure” (Aldridge 27). Reading Hemingway, “there is a lot about manhood—how to achieve a sense of manhood in a time like this. And there is a lot of impotency. The impotency of ‘you’re not in control’; you’re very vulnerable actually; the world makes you that way” (Doane). Hemingway and his despondent generation, coming out of World War One, felt profoundly alienated from their fathers’ generation (ibid). They were deeply astounded that an old world sense of life—a society that instilled implicit faith in the logic of things, that promised honor and stability—could give birth to such a reckless monster. Upon understanding the full extent of that notion, suddenly, we become so “incredibly marked by the war and our sense of vulnerability, a new sense of vulnerability in the world” (Doane). And therein lies Hemingway’s brilliance.
The literary expatriate movement of the 1920s, as aforementioned, spawned a slew of experimenting writers, all developing new forms and formulating their own unique styles. A testament to this is the breadth of writers who sought to convey the same, if not particularly similar, messages, but did so with opposing approaches. Ernest Hemingway wrote with reserved detachment, never with flustered exclamations. His characters almost speak retrospectively, pondering something long past (the past from a retrospective lens, being the present). But while the beauty of Hemingway’s prose lies in its simplicity and truth, F. Scott Fitzgerald employs a style deeply colorful, full of vivid imagery and phrases which seem to transcend their own meaning (Bruccoli). Fitzgerald was born in Minnesota and grew up in America, marrying Zelda Sayre just before he was to be sent overseas. However, the war ended and it wasn’t until 1921 when the Fitzgeralds first went to Europe. Young and unabashed, they lived an “extravagant life as young celebrities”, writing and drinking, and partying for much of the boisterous decade (Bruccoli). But as the decadence came to a close for the nation in 1929, so did Fitzgerald’s own success. Although remnants of his work remained popular and well appreciated, Fitzgerald slumped—in the 1930’s—into a period known as “the crack-up”, in which he and his wife were incessantly “ill, drunk, in debt, and unable to write commercial stories” (ibid). The life of F. Scott Fitzgerald itself almost mirrored the tragic rise and fall that can be found in his writing.
Fitzgerald witnessed firsthand the glamour, the material wealth and the abuse that ran rampant throughout the Roaring Twenties. Yet he also saw the source of its grandeur, its enticement. Those who returned from Hemingway’s war often met displaced wives and matured children with an air of passive indifference—strangers in their own homes. Perhaps this is why they became so afflicted by excessive intoxication and consumption: in attempt to reconcile with an irreconcilable past, the tragic solider lingered between two worlds, torn by the impossibility of returning to either one completely. Gertrude Stein coined them, “the lost generation” (A Movable Feast 29). Superficiality pervaded the 1920s; a thin cloak of drunken revelry masked the pain and suffering. The real tragedy of that era was their suffering was marred by a veil. And when the veil ripped, torn in two, then, then we experienced Fitzgerald’s “crack up”. Though Gatsby did not return from the soldier’s beloved war, the burden of an existence between two immovable world’s throbbed in his soul so that with every action, every move, he became somehow closer, yet farther from realizing his dream, the American dream. The Great Gatsby—arguably Fitzgerald’s greatest piece of work—represents his distrust of the American dream—“the idea that this is the place to come if you want to invent yourself” (Doane). But Gatsby, an affluent yet simple Midwestern youth, who searches to recreate his idyllic love with Daisy but never realizes it, is Fitzgerald’s greatest hero (Aldridge 49). Fitzgerald recognizes a society that is wrought with corruption and infested with material greed. He admired Gatsby, for the parties and wealth were simply the means by which Gatsby attempted to bring back Daisy—“that theme of hope and beginning again” (Doane). Ultimately, he fails. That is Fitzgerald’s mark—that disillusionment. It arose from an alacrity to forget Hemingway’s vulnerability. But in the end, as demonstrated in Babylon Revisited—the story of a man who returns destitute to a decrepit Paris—the vulnerability is still there. The convivial frivolity has subsided; the parties have moved elsewhere; and the American Dream, and its promise of doing the impossible, now appears a façade.
Sometimes I find it a bit odd that I should be so captivated by the expatriates and their degeneration, their loss of self. The idea of the rugged individual has always remained prevalent in American literature, but reading Hemingway and Fitzgerald, I’m left with a sense of self disillusionment. But perhaps that in itself is American—finding oneself again. Professor Janice Doane believes it is. The expatriate movement had always seemed apart from the entirety of American Literature in my mind and so I asked her, “what connects the Transcendentalists, for example, to the expatriates, who are writing in foreign nations nearly a hundred years later?” She paused, and responded, “I think that’s where the whole great idea—Emerson’s idea—of self reliance originated. The American is the person who doesn’t rely on his past, on tradition, or anything his ancestors have done”. Professor Keith Mikolavich would agree: “what is quintessentially American?” He asks, “perhaps it’s that lone, rugged individual spirit. We as Americans are sometimes idealistic and believe the world is good and we need to fight evil”. And as I’ve learned from the Lost Generation—a generation that is spiritually in trouble, wonders about its own moral compass—dealing with identity is a large arduous process that requires quite some care.
As my senior year comes to close and I head off for college somewhere altogether foreign, I can’t help but wonder what I will encounter and what I will do with my life before me. Over the next year, and certainly for years to come, I can only expect to face quite a bit of difficulty defining myself—not only as a human being, but as an American, and as an aspiring writer. I’m surprised by my newfound affinity for Hemingway—his beautiful simplicity to convey so much with so few words—and for Fitzgerald—his passion and playfulness with those words. Perhaps it’s only natural that I should find myself attracted to Americans who are inventing themselves and expressing that through the writing, as I embark on my own journey to do the same. Soon the green hills of Walnut Creek will turn golden, and then brown. Leaves will fall from the trees and, picked up by the whimsical winds, scatter about—crinkled in the street. The fledglings in the bird house I made when I was young will take flight. And then I will set sail.
Works Cited and Consulted
- Aldridge, John W. After the Lost Generation. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1951. Print.
- Bourne, John. “About World War I.” Welcome to English « Department of English, College of LAS, University of Illinois. Web. 22 Apr. 2010. .
- Bruccoli, Matthew J. “A Brief Life of Fitzgerald.” University of South Carolina. Web. 22 Apr. 2010. .
- Carpenter, Humphrey. Geniuses Together: American Writers in Paris in the 1920s. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988. Print.
- Fitch, Noel Riley. Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: a History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties. New York: Norton, 1983. Print.
- Fitzgerald, F. Scott, and Matthew J. Bruccoli. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 1996. Print.
- Fitzgerald, F. Scott. Babylon Revisited and Other Stories. New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1996. Print.
- Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. New York: Scribner, 1957. Print.
- Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribner, 2003. Print.
- Hemingway, Ernest. The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New York: Collier, 1986. Print.
- Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926. Print.
- Personal interview. 13 Mar. 2010.
- Personal interview. 8 Apr. 2010.
- Photo by Brent Heighton / Used with Permission