The Continual Pilgrimage: American Writers in Paris, 1944-1960

More broadly, this is a tale of two countries: France and America, and how artists are perceived in each.American expatriates living in France, especially Paris, between the great wars, are well known - Hemingway, Pound, Wolfe, Stein, Miller, Fitzgerald, Cummings, Elliot - just to name a few. What is not as well known or realized is that the exodus continued well into the '60s with Black writers Wright, Baldwin, and Himes, with the Beats, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Corso, Burroughs, with mainstream writers, James Jones, Irwin Shaw, Terry Southern, and William Styron, and with academics such as W.H. Auden, Ashbery, Mathews, Brion Gysin, and many many others. What brought them all to France, especially Paris?Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno's account of American expatriates in France reads like a novel. He enters the minds and hearts of the various authors - their inner thoughts and motivations - in a seemingly effortless narrative, drawing on a vast scholarship. He has read all of their works and letters as well as news and magazine articles of the times. Gertrude Stein was thought to be peculiarly anti-semitic as she sided with the Vichy government, the irascible Hemingway had a vendetta against James Jones (author of *From Here to Eternity*) and Richard Wright noted that "I've learned more about America in one month in Paris than I could in one year in New York." In addition to chronicling little-known facts and anecdotes about the first wave, the author continues the saga with later writers.He covers all kinds of writing. A most interesting chapter deals with an obscure (in America) experimental French author, Roussel, and the American writers influenced by him - Ashbery, Mathews, Burroughs, Koch. They reinvented what the Dadaists had begun 40 years earlier, a turning of images in cinematic variation, a "systematic derangement of the senses."Paris is "artistically electric" they agree. Racial prejudice isn't a factor in France (except for the French treatment of the Algerians) but only Baldwin seems to have been upset by this. Where but in France could Ferlinghetti wander into a cafe and find a paper tablecloth with a poem written on it, (signed by Jacques Prevert). "For Ferlinghetti, this was the France of which the legends had been made. On leaving the cafe, he took the tablecloth with him. The incident was prophetic. Fourteen years later, City Lights [in San Francisco] would issue Ferlinghetti's translation of Prevert's 'Paroles'".Where but in France would landlords lower the rent when they discovered that their tenants were writers or artists? "In short," says this author, "Paris empowered, granted permission to be an artist in a way the United States never had. In the accounts of almost all of the writers profiled in this book, Paris was equated with artistic freedom, with the ability to experiment, to succeed, even to fail, without feeling oneself to be a social deviant [while] In America, they felt, one was more often measured by