Expatriate Identity in Literature

Definitions and Background

The issues raised by the history of American literary expatriation must begin with the question of how closely writers can be associated with their country’s cultural experience. Some literature seems indelibly linked to its national origin—for example, the novels of Thomas Hardy (such as The Return of the Native, 1878) to southwestern England, Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (1957) to Russia, or William Faulkner to his imaginary Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. Conversely, some literature seems absolutely untethered to national roots—the novels of Joseph Conrad, for example, a Polish émigré writing in English of experiences gained in sailing voyages around the world.

The question then becomes, how important is it for writers to be living in their native countries in order to produce their best work? Exiles (people who have been forced from their countries for political reasons) and expatriates (self-exiles, or those who have voluntarily left) have often produced great literature while living away from their countries of birth: The nineteenth-century Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev lived much of his career in France. Isak Dinesen, the Danish short-story writer, lived from 1914 to 1931 in Kenya, Africa, although she published all of her fiction after that period. The French poet Arthur Rimbaud lived the last years of his life in Africa, while the Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson died on his beloved island of Samoa.

Expatriation or self-exile can be undertaken for political reasons (for example, a disagreement with a country’s government), or it can be caused by perceived cultural lacks in the native country. The artists who fled Nazi Germany to come to California, for example, were clearly political exiles or political expatriates: writers such as Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht, composers such as Kurt Weill, and film directors such as Billy Wilder. The cultural effect produced by this influx of talent in the 1930s is incalculable. The ideas and talents of these artists influenced American art in a number of ways, and vice versa. On the other hand, the British novelists—Evelyn Waugh and Aldous Huxley, for example—who came to Hollywood in the same period were apparently lured by what appeared to be easy living. There is no guarantee that expatriation will produce great art: The Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes continued to produce remarkable fiction while living in the United States; the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was less successful.

Exile and expatriation are conditions that have existed since the beginnings of literature: The famous Roman poet Ovid was exiled away from Rome. James Joyce lived most of his creative life outside Ireland, which inspired his work. Physical distance from one’s native country may give writers a perspective they did not have before; travelers often comment on the fact that they see their own country more clearly from a foreign land. Certainly, some of the best descriptions of the United States have come from foreign visitors: Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835, 1840) and Charles Dickens’s American Notes (1842) are two accurate depictions of the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Exile and expatriation can be crucial in infusing art and literature with new ideas and spirit. Living in another culture, artists and writers are able to break free of insular, inherited habits and traditions and thus expand the possibilities of their own art. The number of American artists (the painter Mary Cassatt, for example) who lived in France at the end of the nineteenth century is proof enough of that fact.

The issue of expatriation has defined American literature. Many American writers have lived abroad at one time or another—usually, although not exclusively, in England and France—and the effects of those years of expatriation are incalculable on the development of American literature. In fact, it is easier in tracing that literary history to list those writers who did not live abroad during some important part of their career. For every Henry David Thoreau or Emily Dickinson who stuck close to home, there was a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow or a Margaret Fuller wandering Europe for long stretches. Expatriation has not only affected artists, but become a theme in their art as well: The identities of writers and the subjects of their writings often undergo significant transformations because of their expatriate experiences.

The Nineteenth Century

From the beginning of American literature, writers and artists have returned to Europe to renew their art. Except for Native Americans, all American writers have cultural origins somewhere else. The dominant culture of the Atlantic seaboard was British, and colonial writers showed their dependence upon English sources, imitating British literature in form and genre, if not in subject.

Two major American fiction writers, Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, spent considerable time abroad, Irving for twenty-four years, and Cooper for eight. Irving in fact wrote a number of works in Europe, including a biography of Christopher Columbus, and a romantic travel book on Spain called The Legends of the Alhambra (1832). He is most important as the father of the American short story, and it is significant that of the thirty-two tales collected in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., of 1820, only six (including “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle”) have American subjects or settings. Cooper was less influenced by European living—although his five Leatherstocking Tales (such as The Last of the Mohicans, 1841) certainly followed the British novel in form. His expatriation resulted in weak novels and the superior nonfiction work Notions of the Americans (1828). His repatriation in 1833 turned Cooper into a social satirist, and he became increasingly critical of his own country.

Nathaniel Hawthorne had published his best novels—The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851)—before he was appointed consul to Liverpool, England, in 1853. He returned to the United States in 1860, and his last novel, The Marble Faun (1880), reflects those years in Europe. Its setting is Italy, but its characters and themes continue to reflect Hawthorne’s preoccupation with the consequences of sin and guilt.

Europe was influential on perhaps the best American novelist of the nineteenth century, Henry James, who lived most of his adult life in Europe. His major novels—from The American (1877) and The Portrait of a Lady (1881) through The Ambassadors (1903) and The Golden Bowl (1904)—are all set in Europe, and one of his central and compelling themes is the intersection of American innocence and European maturity. It is this clash that propels the plots of his major works, and which gave James his own literary identity.

The realist William Dean Howells spent the Civil War as consul in Venice, but his major novels were written later. Harold Frederic lived for many years in England, and his best novel, The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896), shows its influence. Edith Wharton, a disciple of James, lived in France from 1907 until her death, and, while her most important works are set in the United States, the influence of her European emigration can be seen in, for example, The Age of Innocence (1920). The poet T. S. Eliot emigrated to England in 1914 and became a British subject in 1927. Expatriation broadened the cultural identity of many American writers.

The 1920s

The major period of American expatriation occurred after World War I. A number of writers—including the poet E. E. Cummings and the novelist John Dos Passos—were in Europe during World War I, and stayed. Part of the reason was that the United States in the 1920s seemed an alien place; after contact with the artistic riches of the Continent, and the devastation the war had wrought, the narrow, small-town values of the United States seemed parochial and provincial. In addition, a dollar could carry a writer much further in postwar Europe, and a number of writers—most notably Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald—made the journey to Europe to live. They became what Gertrude Stein called the lost generation, but they found something of inestimable literary value in their European sojourns.

Stein, like the poet Ezra Pound, had actually been in Europe since before World War I, and the two became the mentors for the many younger writers who began to appear after 1920, encouraging, editing, and publishing their early efforts. Although Hemingway would later disparage Stein’s influence in A Moveable Feast (1964), she had a great effect on the style of the younger writer. His first collection of stories, In Our Time (1925), was published while he was living in Paris, and reflects the early European influence. While some of the stories focus on a young Nick Adams growing up in the Midwest, at least half—including “A Very Short Story,” “Cat in the Rain,” and “Out of Season”—concern Americans living in Europe in the aftermath of World War I.

Hemingway’s later work showed the same international dimensions. His first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), is set in Paris and Pamplona, where American characters discover their identities—or lack of them—in interaction with European citizens and geography. Likewise, A Farewell to Arms (1929), which takes place during World War I, concerns the protagonist’s attempt to carve meaning out of a world which has seemingly lost it. Hemingway’s later works—For Whom the Bell Tolls (1939) and The Old Man and the Sea (1952)—continued to reflect Hemingway’s nomadic life.

Other American writers, including Katherine Anne Porter, Hart Crane, and Archibald MacLeish, spent much of the 1920s and 1930s abroad. Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (1934)—considered by many critics his best work after The Great Gatsby (1925)—deals with Fitzgerald’s expatriate years and reflects the issues and ideas that concerned the lost generation.

After the Lost Generation

American writers have continued to find cultural homes in Europe. Many went abroad in disgust with American cultural policy and practice in their native country. African American writers, like their counterparts in music and art, found Europe a much more comfortable place to establish their artistic identities than their racially troubled homeland. Richard Wright spent many years in France and, while the books he wrote in expatriation never matched his earlier work (the novel Native Son, 1941, and the autobiography Black Boy, 1944), he was an important model for other African American writers such as James Baldwin, who lived in self-exile in France and Switzerland for many years and whose fiction and nonfiction often reflect Europe. The distance allowed Baldwin to see even more pointedly the limitations of his native land. Other writers found solace elsewhere—Paul Bowles and William S. Burroughs in North African cities such as Tangiers. Katherine Anne Porter lived in Mexico. Maya Angelou spent several years in Ghana during its early years of independence. By the end of the twentieth century, in fact, as technology and travel made the world a smaller place, American writers were choosing to live in many locations, often alternating years at home and abroad. Personal and cultural identity, as writers have demonstrated, does not depend on geography. In fact, expatriation may—as in the cases of James, Hemingway, Baldwin, and Angelou—actually sharpen the artist’s perspective of his or her homeland.

Bibliography

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