BOOKS

The Crazy Boatloads

By BRIAN MOORE

His-roRY has not quite repeated itself. When one reads of the passionate, naive manifes- toes in Malcolm Cowley's 'literary odyssey of the 1920s,'* the high ambitions and the search for artistic values which sent the 'lost generation' to Paris, one cannot help feeling a touch of envy. It would seem that the difference between the American artist's pilgrimage to Europe in the Twenties and in the Sixties is the difference be- tween first love and the obligatory initial visit to a brothel.

Moneyed by a grant from Fulbright, Guggen- heim or Ford, the American painter now goes to France for a holiday : he knows that the action is all in New York. Similarly, the young American writer abroad shows little interest in the prose experiments of Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute and Simon; he tends to dismiss Britain's younger novelists and playwrights as boring social realists (we finished with that stuff twenty years ago), and as for Sartre, Beckett, Genet or Ionesco, he has dug them already off-Broadway. It seems that American writers, in three short generations, have moved from the provincial (we haven't yet pro- duced any writing that could be called major) to the parochial (the only stuff worth reading nowa- days is coming out of America).

Yet, year after year, the hegira continues. Why? Europe is no longer a Best Buy. Living costs in Paris are not noticeably cheaper than in New York. In London, a roundabouts-and-swings situation exists where a writer's necessities such as liquor and cigarettes cost much more than in the United States.

The exiles of 1920 were fleeing, Mr. Cowley says, from 'the dullness and philistinism of Ameri- can life.' America in the Sixties is sometimes philistine, never dull. New York is not Mel- bourne. The fleshpots of Las Vegas provide a dolce vita to rival that of Rome. As for the islands of escape to which so many of the Twenties exiles fled, they have vanished like a mirage. The young American writer, on deck as the boat from Bar- celona nears Ibiza, sees a contingent of the colourful bearded natives of Washington Square waiting to greet him at the dock. The bigger Beats have moved on to the Cannes Film Festival for kicks, chicks and—most important—free pub- licity. The isles of Greece are like Nice. Corfu is a holiday camp. As for Spain, well, man, Mexico is cheaper, closer and just as beautiful.

Why, then, do they come? Is it simply because America the generous provides so much money for her artists and writers to travel and study abroad? Is it because her writers feel they must visit Europe in order to reject it? Or simply be- cause more Americans than ever before in history now can and do save enough money to spend a summer in Europe? If, as the American sociolo- gists tell us, a European junket has become a powerful status symbol in the average US com- munity, has the expatriate bit become a status symbol for the younger American writer?

*EXILE'S RETURN. By Malcolm Cowley. (Bodley Head, 18s.)

Whatever it is, how different it all seems from the good word sent back by that first American expeditionary force in 1920. Sailing in search of values, those exiles found valuta : Tuesday, in Hamburg, you might order a banquet for eight cents; Thursday, in Vienna, the price of a week's lodging was twenty American cigarettes. Escape meant freedom. According to Mr. Cowley, the first tenet of the Greenwich Village religion of art at that time was : They do things better in Europe. England and Germany have the wisdom of old cultures; the Latin peoples have admirably preserved their pagan heritage. By expatriating himself, by liv- ing in Paris, Capri or the South of France, the artist can break the puritan shackles, drink, live freely and be wholly creative.

What more could an innocent ask of abroad? On its river side Greenwich Village was bounded by the French Line pier. It was go, man, go. First to sail were the artists and writers, priests and true believers. They had read Proust and Flaubert, Rimbaud and Mallarmd. France was their Jeru- salem: they would see Picasso plain. But even as these first exiles returned in varying states of dis- illusion, a lemming rush of art salesmen, dancers, movie actors and literary camp followers crowded ashore at Le Havre. 'By 1928,' wrote Scott Fitz- gerald, 'Paris had grown suffocating. With each new shipment of Americans spewed up by the boom the quality fell off, until towards the end there was something sinister about the crazy boatloads.'

But even in the realm of craziness 'they do things better in Europe.' Mr. Cowley vividly catalogues the sights which met the arriving Americans. Man Ray was photographing ar- rangements of watch springs, ball bearings and kitchen matches; Max Ernst clipped illustrations out of mail-order catalogues, shuffled them into designs and exhibited them as pictures; Tristan Tzara had his poems printed in the typography of advertisements for nerve tonics. Louis Aragon, the Big Dada of them all, promised that if his name was once more mentioned in Les Nouvelles Litteraires he would wreck the edi- torial. offices: his name was mentioned; the offices were wrecked. In such company the American newcomers must have seemed a bunch of provincial squares.

Yet in the end, as Mr. Cowley's book shows, it was the squares who made the larger con- tribution. Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Thornton Wilder were internationally known novelists be- fore they were thirty. Little magazines such as Broom and Secession failed to transplant Dada ideas to the alien soil of New York. And the sixteen expatriate writers who signed transition's much-discussed proclamation ending in 'The plain reader be damned,' are, with the excep- tion of Hart Crane, minor and forgotten figures.

By 1933 the party was over. Everyone was back in the States. Amid Marxist rhetoric and the shut factories of 1934, Mr. Cowley's participant record of the great migration seemed, when first pub-

lished in New York, a footnote to a dead era. It was not. Revised and republished in 1951, it can be bought today in any American drug stores Its publication now, in England, is proof of its continuing value as a cautionary tale.

For though American writers no longer come to Europe humble, half in love, willing to wor- ship, a few of them still manage to write well about the expatriate experience. Yet somehow all these novels of exile, from Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises to William Styron's Set This House On Fire, have the atmosphere of a long, exhausting, drunken party. They end in hangover. For most of the exiles, now as then, exposure to Europe merely leads to a rediscovery of America; a new way to see and write about home. And often the end of the journey, the euphoric return to Green- wich Village or a Connecticut farm, coincides with the terrifying realisation that the country of their boyhood is lost for ever. As Hemingway put it : The barn was gone now and there were only stumps, dried tree-tops, branches and fireweed where the woods had once been. You could not go back.'

In the Twenties the returning exiles were changed, changed utterly, by this self-knowledge. As they sat glum in New York, Mr. Cowley says 'we took our little portion of the easy money that seemed to be everywhere, and we thereby engaged or committed ourselves without meaning to do so. We became part of the system we were trying to evade, and it defeated us from within, not from without.' In the end, they were, in Zelda Fitz- gerald's phrase, 'lost and driven now like the rest.'

Still, it was first love while it lasted. It is easier to feel sympathy for the American exiles of the Twenties than for the surly, hedgehog, parochial figures who fly over to case Europe in the Sixties. But how much of this new parochialism is America's fault? How much is Europe's? Today's American writers move warily through foreign parts, aware that they are not, like that other generation, loved and in love. Their country is now the major political and military power of the West; they must answer for The Bomb, Cuba, Laos and tomorrow's headline. Their literature is now much admired—and often, as in Sartre's dramatisation of the Faulknerian mythic land- scape—much misunderstood. Is it so surprising that these writers are parochial and quick to snap, forced as they are to defend things they do not always believe in, simply because their questioners are so clearly hostile to them as Americans.

No wonder that the pilgrimage is now more like a quick time in a brothel than the lingering in- fatuation of first love. The religion of art in the Twenties may have been foolish; it may, as Mr. Cowley says, have led 'toward an infinitely bust- ling futility, a dance of fireflies in the twilight.' But while it lived, Joyce, Hemingway, Tristan Tzara, Aragon and Ford Madox Ford were not nationals of their countries but members of a brotherhood. Now that it is dead, an ugly literary nationalism replaces it. 'Why do French and Eng- lish intellectuals attack everything America stands for, yet treat Russia with kid gloves?' a young American writer asked me recently. I had no answer. Besides, he was going home. Next year's American writer may be even more surly and parochial after hearing this young man's caution- ary tale. And yet, those European writers who visit America today are met with hospitality and friendliness; they are listened to; they are made welcome. Is it possible that the next generation of American writers will forgo the European ex- perience altogether? Could it be true that anti- American ism is becoming the anti-Semitism of tile English and French intellectuals? If pricked, will a Yank not bleed?