Alex Zwerdling
Improvised Europeans: American Literary Expatriates and the Siege of London
New York: Basic Books, 1998. Pp. 383. $35.00
Reviewed by Udo Nattermann
Employing “cultural history, discourse analysis, literary criticism, and biography” (xiii), Alex Zwerdling examines the lives and works of Henry Adams, Henry James, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot in order to show that they constitute an intergenerational group with “the sense of a shared identity and a cumulative group achievement (and defeat)” (63). Zwerdling focuses on biographical and historical similarities. All four writers received an unusually broad education, belonged to well-established families, and, in spite of promising futures awaiting them in America, chose to spend a considerable part of their lives abroad, in London. Moreover, they were deeply influenced by two turn-of-the-century developments: the influx into the United States of large numbers of new immigrants and America’s ascent to global prominence. These geopolitical changes, Zwerdling claims, explain the four men’s expatriation, which might “be seen as a way of achieving abroad what no longer seems possible at home” (59). Leaving their mother country, they escape from an environment increasingly dominated by immigrants and upstarts alien to Anglo-Saxon culture, and find refuge in London, where they enjoy being regarded as representatives of the new world power.
Zwerdling elaborates on these push-and-pull factors by depicting crucial steps in the four men’s lives. He convincingly describes their dislike for Jewish, Irish, and Eastern European minorities, but he entangles himself in contradictions when he underscores the significance for their careers of America’s expanding power. For instance, Zwerdling suggests that Adams could easily find respect in London, where the “international class was small enough to recognize its members instantly. It subsumed distinctive elements of national or individual identity under shared social rituals” (65). In other words, what really mattered was class affiliation and not, as Zwerdling emphasizes in his preface, the “new opportunities [that] opened up for … disaffected Americans as potential global players” (xi). Being citizens of an America-on-the-rise was not for Pound and Eliot, either. The former had only scorn for a mother country he considered hopelessly provincial and, as Zwerdling admits, “made the most of his inscrutability” (221); that is, Pound did not foreground his membership in the powerful American nation. And Eliot tried to erase his American roots by assuming a flawlessly English appearance. His poetry, Zwerdling observes, is devoid of localisms and Americanisms, hiding the cultural background of its author. In short, the prestige of being an American did not play so significant a role in the four men’s careers as Zwerdling would have us believe.
Zwerdling is at his best when he comments on the workings of cultural alienation and cosmopolitanism in individual texts, especially those of James: “A Passionate Pilgrim,” Zwerdling contends, can be regarded as “a political allegory urging Anglo-American rapprochement” (141); Washington Square is “a critique of James’s own patronizing tendency to read types with epistemological confidence” (149); and “Lady Barverina” is saved from a tragic end because character differences are overcome through “a sense of racial identity” (175). Such illuminating observations are refreshing in a book filled with details we already know from countless biographies.