Introduction
The Naked Lunch by William Burroughs was one of many major works of American literature that were first published in Paris
Although the British Library is principally the national library of the UK, its collections are also home to a vast collection of works by celebrated American authors. Many of these writers travelled, worked, and published extensively in Europe. One of the most striking currents in transatlantic cultural history during the twentieth century was the migration of several generations of American writers and artists to Europe, their creative odysseys mirroring the parallel deployment of multilateral armies during two world wars. While their nineteenth-century predecessors like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Henry James, retreated to the “Old World” to search for the European roots of the “New”, a second wave of creative talent left the United States to join the vanguard of international Modernism. It was this dynamic group of Americans who became known as the “Lost Generation”, many of whose careers were launched in the inspiring turmoil of inter-war Paris.
The following pages trace the careers of some of these influential “transatlantic” authors through the Library’s rich and fascinating holdings of unique literary treasures. From handwritten manuscripts of celebrated works in their early stages, through letters sent across the Atlantic between author and publisher, to rare editions of the final printed books, these pages point towards an ongoing process of transatlantic cultural exchange and controversy. The documents discussed represent only the tip of iceberg: further exploration of the Library's printed books, manuscripts, and Sound Archive, will continue to reveal the rich results of this intercultural exchange as it continues through the second half of the twentieth century to the present day.
Nathaniel Hawthorne and “Our Old Home”
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The Marble Faun by Nathaniel Hawthorne (British Library MS. Add. 44889). These images are from a copy of the author's manuscript, professionally bound as a gift for Hawthorne by his friends in England, with watercolours added to the frontispiece. This rare item, along with Kerouac's On the Road and other American literary treasures, will feature in a new display in the John Ritblat Gallery from 4 July, 2007. |
Europe has long exerted a fascination for American writers and artists. All the way back to Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper (the writers behind the tales of Rip Van Winkle and The Last of the Mohicans), and on through Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Mark Twain, the transatlantic pilgrimage—often described as a voyage back to “our old home” (the title of a work by Hawthorne)—was a long-established feature of American literature. For many major American writers, Europe represented a complex model of aesthetic refinement, beauty, and historical depth, decadence and moral doubt.
The classic American myth of Europe as the site of “Romance” is elaborated in the uncanny writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne. In early works like The Scarlet Letter (1850), with its evocation of Puritan society, along with The House of Seven Gables (1851), and The Blithedale Romance (1852), Hawthorne masterfully recreated both the hopes and ideals, and the mystery and dread of the new American nation. Hawthorne was one of America’s first great fabulists, a writer who depicted the country’s stark origins and the ambiguous legacy of Puritanism and Transcendentalism. Hawthorne also spent a prolonged period in Europe as a traveller and later as the US Consul General in Liverpool—the main port of American access to Europe, and “gateway between the Old World and the New”.
Hawthorne published his final novel, The Marble Faun, Or The Romance of Monte Beni in 1860. This late masterpiece, set in a picturesque but degenerate Italy of classical art, decadence and disease, contrasts the moral naivety of its American characters with the doomed, amoral aesthetes of Rome. The American title "The Marble Faun" was changed in the British edition to "Transformation: or the Romance of Monte Beni", much to Hawthorne's dissatisfaction. One of the British Library’s most impressive literary treasures by a foreign author is an original manuscript of The Marble Faun in the author’s hand, “rewritten and prepared for the press” during his stay in England in 1859 (BL MS. Add. 44889, 44890).
In his celebrated Preface to the manuscript, Hawthorne notes the importance of its European setting to his creation of the “Romance”—a literary form which he much preferred to the more prosaic novel:
Italy, as the site of this Romance, was chiefly available to the Author as a sort of poetic or faery precinct, where actualities would not be so terribly insisted upon as they are, and must needs be, in America. No author… can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land…. Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens, and wall-flowers need ruin to make them grow.
With these words, Hawthorne drew attention to what would become the abiding preoccupations of American “transatlantic fiction” in the decades to come.
Henry James and Edith Wharton in Europe
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Letter from Henry James to Frederick Macmillan, 5 April 1908
British Library MS. Add. 54931, ff. 268-271
Copyright © The British Library Board |
| Image from a very rare "yellowback" or pirate edition of Henry James's The American published in London in 1877.
British Library 12602.cc.3
Copyright © The British Library Board |
The period following the 1860s in America was one of conspicuous wealth and excess that has come to be known as the "Gilded Age". Immediately following the horrors of civil war, this was a time of renewed national confidence and social reconstruction, of world fairs and industrial innovation, of the growth of international travel and the leisure class. In fact, these were also the formative years of the transatlantic tourist industry, when genteel Bostonian families like the Jameses, the Lowells, the Holmeses, and the Adamses, would enjoy grand, leisurely tours of London, Paris, and Rome, Baedeker guides in hand. The complex interaction of American “innocents abroad” (like The Gilded Age, the title of a novel by Mark Twain ) with the longer-established societies and cultures they found in Europe became one of the defining features of American literature in the later nineteenth century.
One writer in particular bequeathed to the next generation a distinctively “transatlantic” form of fiction developed in response to his own anxious expatriate status. In novels like Daisy Miller (1878), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Ambassadors (1901), and The Wings of the Dove (1902), Henry James repeatedly explored the opposition of European and American values. Early on, his characters and plots tended to dramatise the conventional contrast between European experience and American innocence. Towards the end of his life, however, the author began to question this simple opposition, and replaced it with a much more nuanced play of perception and point-of-view. Although James ultimately resented being seen as an “American abroad” (he became a British citizen in 1915), his exile’s perspective helped pare away the commonplaces and illusions of this first truly transatlantic era. Some of these themes and tensions emerge from a letter—one of many in the Library’s extensive holdings of James’s correspondence and manuscripts—in which the novelist procrastinates to Frederick Macmillan, his future publisher, about the delay on a promised, but never-completed, volume entitled London Town:
Then came the immense distraction of my going to America—which raised an immense barrier, that of a different, an opposite association and interest; and from which I returned saddled, inevitably, with too portentous complications.
Henry James, to Frederick Macmillan, 5 April 1908; BL Ms. Add. 54931
One of these “complications” was to be his “publication of an elaborately revised and retouched and embellished and copiously prefaced and introduced Collected Edition of my productions”. The so-called ‘New York Edition’, was eventually published in 24 volumes on both sides of the Atlantic by Macmillan in 1907-1909. The British Library holds a full set of the New York Edition (012705.d.31), together with more than 130 letters between the author and his publisher in the extensive Macmillan Archive (Add. 54931), discussing arrangements for the publication of his work".
Another expatriate, Ezra Pound, perhaps came closest to the truth of James’s enduring power and influence. In a memorial volume published after “The Master’s” death, Pound paid tribute to James’s “great labour… of translation, of making America intelligible”, and above all the “whole great assaying and weighing, the research for the significance of nationality”. Pound recognised that James’s “analysis” of these “national qualities” had become especially pertinent in his own time of international conflict:
As Armageddon has only too clearly shown, national qualities are the great gods of the present and Henry James spent himself from the beginning in an analysis of these potent chemicals; trying to determine from the given microscope slide the nature of Frenchness, Englishness, Germanness, Americanness, which chemicals, too little regarded, have in our time exploded for want of watching. They are the permanent and fundamental hostilities and incompatibles. We may rest our claim for his greatness in the magnitude of his protagonists, in the magnitude of the forces he analyzed and portrayed. This is not the bare matter of a number of titled people, a few duchesses and a few butlers.
Ezra Pound, “A Shake Down”, in The Little Review, “Henry James Number”, August 1918, vol. 3, ed. by Margaret Anderson and Ezra Pound (Cup.503.ee.1).
Even if they were not aware, or did not care to acknowledge the fact, it was in terms framed by Henry James’s fiction that the next generation of literary expatriates—the “Lost Generation”—understood their own ambiguous position as Americans in Europe.
In fact, one of the most important and influential authors who trod directly in James's European footsteps was his friend and fellow expatriate Edith Wharton. Wharton's work is well represented at the British Library, as might be expected of another novelist published by MacMillan on both sides of the Atlantic (her correspondence with the company alone runs to some 200 letters; Add.54956-54957). Indeed, as Hermione Lee's recent biography makes clear, Wharton was in some ways James's protegé, both in experience and literary concern (Lee, Edith Wharton, 2007; BL: m07/.17334 DSC). Her fiction often depicts American characters travelling in a semi-mythical Europe, characters at once displaced from their American roots but also confounded by the myriad complexities and corruptions of the "old world". In fact, like Gertrude Stein, Wharton made Paris her home in the early years of the twentieth century and became a prominent literary hostess: Theodore and Eleanor Roosevelt visited during their world tour in 1909-1910, as did many other American notables of the period, including the Vanderbilts and the Tafts. Wharton was no less hospitable to the French avant-garde, entertaining poets and writers including Bourget, Valéry, Maurois, Gide, Rilke, Rodin, and Cocteau. Between them, James and Wharton presided over this seminal period of transatlantic travel and cultural exchange, and left a sophisticated record of the stimulations and anxieties of a generation of highly privileged, cosmopolitan American expatriates.
Expatriates at the Fin de Siècle Before the “Lost Generation” of American writers, artists, critics, and fellow-travellers descended on the city in the wake of the First World War, Paris—like much of Western Europe—enjoyed a thriving belle époque of creativity and innovation. For Paris, this was a period of conspicuous consumption and luxury, of shopping arcades and boulevards, of the flâneur and the birth of photography. As with virtually every European cultural movement from 1850 onwards, American travellers and expatriates were closely involved in the artistic developments of this transitional period. As well as Henry James, the era also belonged to aesthetes and symbolists, flamboyant Europeans like Stephane Mallarmé, Joris-Karl Husmans, Marcel Proust, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Valéry, Oscar Wilde, and Algernon Swinburne, alongside intrepid Americans like Henry Harland, Stephen Crane, John Singer Sargent, and James McNeill Whistler.
One of the characteristic projects of the so-called “Wilde years” (although Wilde actually distanced himself from the publication) was The Yellow Book. Conceived by the consummate Art Nouveau illustrator, Aubrey Beardsley, and American expatriate novelist Henry Harland, The Yellow Book quickly became a lavishly designed handbook for aesthetes on both sides of the English Channel. The artists and writers who contributed were of the highest calibre, from Beardsley himself, Sargent, and Walter Sickert, to Max Beerbohm, Edmund Gosse, H.G. Wells, W.B. Yeats, George Gissing, Henry James, and many other lesser known figures, including a surprising (for the time) number of women writers and illustrators. For its provocative content, the publication—which ran for 13 issues, from April 1894-April 1897—relied on the inspiring partnership of Harland and Beardsley, and owed its continuing existence to the vision of publisher John Lane, future founder of The Bodley Head press in London. While Beardsley was unfortunately removed from his post as regular illustrator and art editor in 1895—apparently tainted by his close association with Wilde—the inclusion of work by so many esteemed modern artists and writers, and the sharp, satirical style, effectively predicted the direction of the early Modernist movement in the first years of the twentieth century.
Henry Harland himself was an archetypal representative of the new cosmopolitan, transatlantic class. An itinerant traveller, role-player, and protegé of some of the key literary taste-makers of his time (James included), Harland’s own contributions to The Yellow Book took the form of short, highly stylised stories and tales, and waspish commentary on the London literary scene (often written under his nôm-de-plume “The Yellow Dwarf”). In common with many of his generation, Harland died young, of tuberculosis, in 1905, not long after his cryptic European romances, The Cardinal’s Snuff-Box (1900; 012641.aaa.21), The Lady Paramount (1901; 02637.aaa.14), and My Friend Prospero (1903; 012628.d.30), had begun to receive the approving attention of fellow writers. It is interesting to note that although Henry James regretted his involvement in so apparently frivolous an enterprise as The Yellow Book, he continued to contribute, largely because he held Harland in such high regard: “I hate too much the horrid aspect & company of the whole. And yet I am to be intimately—conspicuously—associated with the 2nd number. It is for gold & to oblige the worshipful Harland” (Henry James, letter to William James, 28 May 1894, quoted in Henry James: A Life in Letters, [1999; YC.1999.b.4469]).
Another expatriate from America who made a name for himself in Europe towards the end of the nineteenth century was Stephen Crane. Although chiefly celebrated nowadays for The Red Badge of Courage (1895; Cup.503.l.56), an innovative, naturalistic retelling of “an episode of the civil war”, the young American was much more popular in his day, blazing a romantic trail through the European salons and drawing-rooms of the fin de siècle. Once again, as with Harland, Crane won the early support Henry James, as well as the coterie of proto-Modernists who convened near the latter’s Kent retreat, including Joseph Conrad, Ford Maddox Ford, Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, and John Galsworthy. In effect, Crane—whose fresh, journalistic clarity of prose and rugged “Yankee” style endeared him to the locals—became an honorary member of a predominantly English group of prose innovators. Like Harland, Crane died young (at 29 years), in Europe, and left a large and varied body of fiction and journalism which would came to have a significant influence on the work of later kindred spirits like Hemingway, Steinbeck, Jack London, and Upton Sinclair.
The "Lost Generation"
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Gertrude Stein, A book concluding with as a wife has a cow: a love story (Editions de la Galerie Simon: Paris, 1926), published first in Transition magazine, and embellished with lithographs by Juan Gris. This famous, and famously rare, collaboration between the two great Modernists will feature in the exhibition, 'Breaking the Rules: The Printed Face of the European Avant-Garde, 1900 - 1937'. |
Like many other cities in Europe, Paris was devastated by the Great War. As has been widely acknowledged, the war was one of the world’s first highly mechanised conflicts. After decades of excitement and futurist dreams on both sides of the Atlantic—typified by the Great Exhibitions in London, Paris, and Chicago from 1851—the War reflected the dark, disturbing underside of technological invention. Some of the artists and authors who remained in Paris after the cessation of hostilities had served in this unprecedented clash of civilisations; others had reported on the events and the terrible political and humanitarian upheavals afterwards.
If the War highlighted alarming aspects of twentieth-century innovation, Paris also somehow clung to its reputation as the capital of bohemian culture. The city had long been famous for its philosophical intrigues and artistic inspiration, its avant-garde tastes and flamboyant personalities. 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.
All this colour and creativity was so different from the austere materialism of American cities (mainly New York and Chicago), as depicted by “Naturalist” writers like Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, and Upton Sinclair (all of whom would make their way to Europe in due course). As the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses suggested in 1922, the Parisian cultural scene was more permissive of literature which confronted established mores and codes of behaviour. Culturally as well as morally, Paris in the 1920s remained one of the most exciting, sophisticated cities in the world. Capital of the avant-garde in all its forms, the city played host to any number of intersecting artistic cliques including Modernists and Cubists, Dadaists and Futurists, Expressionists and Surrealists. These were the years of Picasso and Modigliani, Braque and Duchamp, Stravinski and Satie, Diaghilev and Cocteau. Radical developments in the visual and performing arts were mirrored in the Continental literature of the time, from the surrealist shock tactics of André Bréton and Guillaume Apollinaire, to the textual experimentation of Joyce and Beckett. It was into this vibrant, inspiring foment of idea and innovation that the self-imposed exiles of America’s “Lost Generation” flung themselves. Young radicals like Ernest Hemingway, Hart Crane, and Ezra Pound, and, a little later on, Henry Miller and Anais Nin, published some of their most powerful and controversial works in the city.
On the face of it the sobriquet of “Lost Generation” seems an odd collective description for a group of writers and artists who were among the brightest flowering of American literary talent yet to emerge on the international stage. In fact, it was Gertrude Stein—the scene’s abiding spirit and prominent literary hostess—who coined the phrase in conversation with Ernest Hemingway (“you are all a lost generation”). However, it was undoubtedly the latter’s use of the phrase as the epigraph to The Sun Also Rises (New York: Scribner’s, 1926; 12711.c.22), his epochal novel of wild years spent in Paris and Spain, that popularised the expression and made clear its apocalyptic overtones. The phrase—and Hemingway’s book—depicted this generation as characterised by doomed youth, hedonism, uncompromising creativity, and wounded—both literally and metaphorically—by the experience of war. To varying degrees, these virtues and vices were to be found in the life-story of nearly every member of the Lost Generation. Aside from their wild lifestyles, though, what is most striking is the astonishing range, depth, and influence of work produced by this community of American expatriates in Paris.
This outburst of creativity was supported by an explosion of small-scale entrepreneurialism in the creative arts. Much of the literature produced by the American Modernists was published by small presses also run by expatriates, including Shakespeare & Company, Contact Editions, Black Sun Press, Three Mountains Press, Plain Editions, and Obelisk Press. A list of the canonical works of inter-war American literature produced in Paris, following the landmark publication of Joyce’s Ulysses by Shakespeare & Co. (owned by Princeton expatriate Sylvia Beach 1 ) in 1922, provides a key to the literary future of the United States:
- H.D (Hilda Doolittle), Palimpsest (Paris: Contact Editions, 1922; 12651.i.54)
- William Carlos Williams, The Great American Novel (Paris: Three Mountains Press, 1923; Cup.510.fac.4)
- Ezra Pound, Indiscretions (Paris: Three Mountains Press, 1923; Cup.510.fac.1 [mislaid])
- Ernest Hemingway, in our time (Paris: Three Mountains Press, 1924; Cup.510.fac.6)
- Robert McAlmon, Village: as it happened through a fifteen year period (Paris: Contact Editions, 1924; Cup.410.f.1246)
- Djuna Barnes, Ladies Almanac (Paris: Contact Editions, 1926; X.519/20735)
- Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (Paris: Contact Press, 1925; X.520/32188)
- Hart Crane, The Bridge, A Poem (Paris: Black Sun Press, 1930; Cup.510.fa.15)
- Archibald MacLeish, New Found Land, Fourteen Poems (Paris: Black Sun Press, 1930; Cup.400.c.22)
- Ezra Pound, Imaginary Letters (Paris: Black Sun Press, 1930; Cup.510.fa.16)
- ________. A Draft of XXX Cantos (Paris: Hours Press, 1930; Cup.510.fac.14)
- Nathanael West, The Dream Life of Basso Snell (Paris: Contact Editions, 1931; Cup.410g.725)
- William Faulkner, Sanctuary (Paris: Black Sun Press, 1932)
- Ernest Hemingway, The Torrents of Spring (Paris: Black Sun Press, 1932)
- Dorothy Parker, Laments for the Living (Paris: Black Sun Press, 1932)
Katherine Anne Porter, Hacienda (Harrison of Paris, 1934) - Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (Paris: Obelisk Press, 1935; Cup.804.bb.5)
- Henry Miller, Black Spring (Paris: Obelisk, 1936; Cup.804.p.6; Durrell 124)
- Anais Nin, House of Incest (Paris: Obelisk, 1936; 12623.k.28)
- Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn (Paris: Obelisk, 1939; Cup.804.bb.8)
- Anais Nin, Winter of Artifice (Paris: Obelisk, 1939; 12631.r.6)
Notes
1. James Joyce, Ulysses (Paris: Shakespeare & Company, 1922; C.116.g.17). Supporting the manuscript holdings of the many authors who surrounded her, the British Library also holds a substantial collection of correspondence and other manuscript material related to Sylvia Beach and her proprietorship of the Shakespeare & Company bookshop in Paris. According to André Chamson, Beach’s library and bookstore did “more to link England, the United States, Ireland, and France than four great ambassadors combined”; Chamson, quoted in Hugh Ford, Published in Paris: American and British Writers, Printers, and Publishers in Paris, 1920-1939 (1975; X.981/10131).
From the Great Depression to the Cold War
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Title page to Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller showing the Paris address of the book's publisher.
British Library Cup.804.bb.5
Copyright © The British Library Board |
| Nabokov's Lolita, which first appeared in two volumes in France.
British Library Cup.805.a.5
Copyright © The British Library Board |
The period of the Lost Generation’s ascendancy and influence lasted barely a decade, and began to wane after the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression which followed in the early 1930s. Like their European counterparts, American Modernists such as Stein, Pound, and Williams had initially pursued formal literary innovation at the expense of political or historical context; as William Carlos Williams put it in The Great American Novel, “Clean, clean he had taken each word and made it new for himself so that at last it was new, free from the world for himself” (1923; 17). Now, though, the Depression years and the alarming growth of Fascism and Communism required public intellectuals to address the political tide, to take sides and make allegiances. Many, including George Orwell, André Gide, and Arthur Koestler, Dreiser, Steinbeck, and Dos Passos, turned to the left, and looked to the Soviet experiment in Russia for solutions to the economic and ethical crises of the 1930s.
The “Roaring Twenties” of hedonism and experiment in Paris were replaced by the chastened Depression years, and the arts reflected this change, as a new sprit of realism took hold in American (and European) fiction. This was also an era when American literature turned to face inwards again, when authors returned from their European travels and focused on alarming domestic developments. Characteristic titles from this depressing decade were Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925; YA.1986.b.1522), Michael Gold’s Jews Without Money (1930; X.808/6212), Dos Passos’s USA (1938; 12718.cc.22), Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939; Cup.410.f.84), and the portraits of rural deprivation in James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941; 1960; 10153.ff.26).
“American tragedies” of all kinds—wildcat strikes in the cities and poverty and hardship in the Dustbowl—would continue to preoccupy American writers and intellectuals at least until 1941, when the Japanese strike on Pearl Harbour forced the United States out of isolation and into international affairs once more. Again, throughout the 1940s-1950s, another wave of North Americans, many in Europe for the altogether less hedonistic purpose of fighting Fascism, found their way to Paris. Again, following in the pioneering footsteps of Stein, Hemingway, et al, the list of authors who either wrote or published first in Europe reads like a who’s who of the post-war era: James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, William Burroughs, Paul Bowles, Truman Capote, Leonard Cohen, J.P. Donleavy, Joseph Heller, Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, Henry Miller, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, Mordecai Richler, Philip Roth, J.D. Salinger, Edmund Wilson, Thomas Wolfe, and Kurt Vonnegut. Like their forebears in the inter-war years, many of these writers, once again scarred by horrific experiences of Europe at war, found dark inspiration in the surreal spectacle of the continent’s descent into chaos.
One of these writers, Henry Miller, had, in fact, been in Europe for longer than most, and his time in Paris spanned the 1930s, that anxious decade after most of the expatriates left, and the forces of Fascism mustered across Western Europe. Sometimes threatening to overshadow his literary achievements, Miller’s influence as a social libertine and radical cannot be underestimated. In often ill-tempered partnership with Jack Kahane, head of the Paris-based Obelisk Press and another pioneer of “free expression”, Miller eventually brought forth his rancorous reflections on exile and debauchery in Tropic of Cancer (1935). Paradoxically, this was an era both of literary experiment and unprecedented censorship, when controversies around their work forced Joyce and Lawrence, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Anais Nin, Lawrence Durrell, and Radclyffe Hall, among others, to seek the support of courageous small presses, often in comparatively liberal Paris as opposed to London or New York.
I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.
Last night Boris discovered that he was lousy. I had to shave his armpits and even then the itching did not stop. How can one get lousy in a beautiful place like this? But no matter. We might never have known each other so intimately, Boris and I, had it not been for the lice...
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The opening of Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller The enduring product of this torturous process of censorship and publication are a number of novels now regarded by many as among the cornerstones of the Modern movement. In its confessional sensibility and embrace of extreme experience, sexual freedom and violence, Tropic of Cancer was defiantly one of those pivotal works. It would also prove hugely influential, with many of Miller’s post-war successors on both sides of the Atlantic, among them the Beat Writers and Existentialists of the early 1950s, responding to his unrelenting search for creative and sexual freedom, and his nihilistic pleasure-drive. Again, even during the relative “down-time” of the 1930s, it seems that the inspiration of Paris, with all its dark corners and dirty secrets, just as much as its glittering social life, was a vital ingredient in the mix from which Miller, and these later acolytes, would emerge.
Another émigré—from Russia, to Europe, then America, and finally back to Europe—who took full advantage of Paris’s more permissive publishing regime was Vladimir Nabokov. In fact, his best-known, and most controversial English-language novel, Lolita, would be published by the city’s Olympia Press three full years before it was released in New York by Putnam’s. As many critics have pointed out, Lolita represents the epitome of the author’s career-long love-affair with everything polyglot and cosmopolitan, and a late-flowering work of experimental Modernism, in the tradition of Kafka and Borges. Its subject-matter—European émigré Humbert Humbert’s obsessive pursuit of his prepubescent muse across the mental and literal landscapes of 1950s’ America—essentially reverses the direction of one of the age-old features of “transatlantic fiction”.
Click above to read in full the opening of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
From Hawthorne, through Poe and Twain, it is Henry James’s innocent American heroines like Daisy Miller, Isobel Archer, and Milly Theale, who most resemble virginal precursors to Nabokov’s Dolores Haze, the quintessential American teenager of the 1950s. Again, it is ironic, but oddly appropriate given the history sketched above, that Nabokov—a White Russian who became an American citizen in 1945—achieved much of his formidable reputation outside his adopted country. In this, too, he resembled James, Stein, Hemingway, and all those other pioneers of the American avant-garde who sought to test prevailing concepts of American innocence in the cauldron of European experience.
Further Reading
This select bibliography lists secondary and critical works of relevance to the study of American literature in general, and the 'transatlantic theme' in particular, available at the British Library. A much wider range of titles can be found by searching the Library's catalogues.
German Arciniegas, America in Europe: A History of the New World in Reverse. Trans. Gabriela Arciniegas and R. Victoria Anegas. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1986.
BL Shelfmark: 86/09036 DSC
Bradbury, Dangerous Pilgrimages: Trans-Atlantic Mythologies and the Novel. London: Secker & Warburg. 1995.
YC.1995.b.4337
Peter Conrad, Imagining America. London: Routledge. 1980.
X.809/45887
Marcus Cunliffe, In Search of America: Transatlantic Essays, 1851-1990. London; New York: Greenwood. 1991.
YC.1991.b.3182
Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Criterion. 1960.
11881.r.44
Hugh Ford, Published in Paris: American and British Writers, Printers, and Publishers in Paris, 1920-1939. New York: Macmillan. 1975.
X.981/10131
A.N. Kaul, The American Vision: Actual and Ideal Society in Nineteenth Century Fiction. New Haven; London: Yale University Press. 1963.
W.P.4495/7
Alfred Kazin, On Native Ground: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock. 1942; 1956.
X989/77273
Hugh Kenner, A Home Made World: The American Modernist Writers. London: Boyars. 1975.
X.989/52089
R.W.B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1955.
11872.ff.22
Jayne E. Marek, Women Editing Modernism: “Little” Magazines and Literary History. Lexington, KT: University Press of Kentucky. 1995.
YA.1997.a.13656
Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford University Press. 1964.
X.519/963
Albert Parry, Garrets and Pretenders: A History of Bohemianism in America. New York: Dover. 1933; 1960.
10153.gg.33.
Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill & Wang. 1982.
X529/64613
Steven Watson, Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Garde. London; New York: Abbeville Press. 1991.
YC.1993b.3306
Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930. New York: Scribner’s. 1931.
11823.tt.16
Van Wyck Brooks, America’s Coming of Age. New York: Octagon Books. 1915; 1975.
76/14999 DSC
Larzer Ziff, The American 1890s: The Life and Times of a Lost Generation. London: Chatto & Windus. 1967.
x.909/11372
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During both waves, the expatriates added much to the energy and excitement of the cultural life of Paris, thereby drawing even more expatriates (and, inevitably, tourists). They formed their own communities, living mostly on the Left Bank of the Seine with the center of gravity shifting from Montparnasse in the 1920s to Saint-Germain-des-Prés and other areas closer to the river in the 1950s and 1960s. Within these neighborhoods, the expatriates had their favored meeting places, most importantly cafés. In the 1920s and 1930s, these included the Dôme, the Select, the Rotonde, and others in Montparnasse. In the period after World War II, allegiances shifted more to cafés such as the Flore, Aux Deux Magots, the Mabillon, and the Pergola in the Saint Germain-des-Prés area or the Tournon, a short walk away, across from the Luxembourg Palace. 
