The Britsh Library: American Literature in Europe, 1850-1950 [

The Britsh Library: American Literature in Europe, 1850-1950 [https://www.bl.uk/american-literature-in-europe/] 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. 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. 2 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. 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 3 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". 4 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).

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