THE EXPATRIATE EXPERIENCE, SELF CONSTRUCTION, AND THE FLÂNEUR IN WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS’ A VOYAGE TO PAGANY

Patrick Gill

A Thesis

Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

August 2007

Committee:

Kimberly Coates, Advisor

Erin Labbie Gill ii

ABSTRACT

Kimberley Coates, Advisor

This thesis looks at the representation of expatriation in American literature and

questions the extent to which it encompasses the various types of experience for

American expatriate authors in the 1920s. In this project, I look at A Voyage to Pagany, a

fictional expatriate account from the devotedly American William Carlos Williams and

set it apart from other works of that era. I argue that Williams reappropriates the figure

of Charles Baudelaire’s flâneur in his work to show that the true expatriate experience is

not specific to milieus inhabited by artists but is contingent upon the act of writing. By

excavating the tradition of the flâneur in his work, Williams questions the idea that the

flâneur is specifically a Parisian figure. As opposed to theorists, such as Walter

Benjamin, who are adamant in their stance that the flâneur must be Parisian, Williams prioritizes the wandering artist’s occupation with writing over the artist’s national allegiance. In Williams’ novel, the expatriate must move away from the writing circles of Paris in order to fully engage the imagination and enact the process of writing.

The trajectory of Pagany is such that the figure of Dev Evans, the novel’s

protagonist, equates his travels and his position as a foreign inhabitant of Europe with his

role as an artist. Evans performs the role of author in the same manner as Baudelaire

conceived it during the mid 19th century. By so doing, Williams presupposes postmodern

discussions on flânerie by theorists such as Michel de Certeau and Marc Eli Blanchard,

which read the act of flânerie as movement within a city construct. However, Williams’ Gill iii text goes on step further in positing flânerie as movement, or in the case of the American

expatriate, flânerie as travel. This stance calls attention to more recent theorists such as

Zygmunt Bauman and Stefan Morawski, demonstrating Williams’ ingenuity. Williams’

forward thinking also distances him from his American expatriate contemporaries, who

proved relatively stagnant in their approaches to authorship. Although Williams’ account

will remain relatively unknown when compared to works such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s

Tender is the Night and Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, Pagany asks us to

reconsider our preconceived notions on expatriation, their relationship to the cities that

hosted the American visitors, and how the traditions of Europe become integrated into

artistic works during the period.

Gill iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Dr. Kimberly Coates for her dedication to my thesis, which developed over the entire 2006-07 academic year and went through multiple transformations. Her availability and critical eye helped me to see the potential behind my work while keeping me focused on achieving a more coherent body of work. Also, I would like to acknowledge Dr. Erin Labbie and her commitment to my growth as a scholar. Without her guidance I would not have made the strides that I have during my short two years at Bowling Green State University. Both Dr. Coates’ and Dr. Labbie’s help on this project was invaluable and I cannot show my appreciation enough. Finally, I would like to recognize the people who made this accomplishment possible through their continued devotion to students’ needs within the English graduate program: Dr. Kristine

Blair (Chair of the English Department), Dr. Thomas Wymer (English Graduate

Coordinator), Mary Ann Sweeney (Graduate Secretary), and Jessica Wade (Secretary to the Chair). Gill v

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………….... 1

CHAPTER I: BAUDELAIRE’S POSITIONING OF THE FLÂNEUR………….. 8

CHAPTER II: WILLIAMS’ RESPONSE TO THE AMBASSADORS...... 22

CHAPTER III: FLÂNERIE AND THE MOVEMENT AWAY FROM PARIS….. 27

CHAPTER IV: CONCLUSION…………………………………………………... 49

WORKS CITED…………………………………………………………………... 51 Gill 1

INTRODUCTION

After the reception of William Carlos Williams’ A Voyage to Pagany in 1927, the

author had a difficult time finding a critic who examined both the text’s content and style.

His poetry-like prose along with the novel’s blending of narrator and protagonist

occupied scholars with the text. For the New York Herald Tribune Books, Marley

Callaghan wrote, “I think that Dr. Williams has practically disregarded all structure, not deliberately, but as though he wrote a book without giving consideration to any such problem. In form it is somewhat like a diary, very beautiful, but not an adequate pattern for a first-rate novel” (Callaghan 114). In this fashion, Williams’ unconventional style precluded any discussions on the text as one with substance. Critics ignored the import of Williams’ quasi-autobiographical work of fiction, disregarding Williams’ tendency as a writer to the continual process of self-construction. For example, Pound’s response in

The Dial focused on overarching themes of Williams’ writing career, yet he scarcely

mentioned the novel in doing so. As it stands, the novel remains a largely undocumented

artifact of an American approach to art overseas.

In the thesis that follows, I evaluate A Voyage to Pagany by engaging themes of

flânerie and travel as they relate to new expatriate approaches taking place within the

text. Up to the present critical standpoint, scholarship concerning the expatriate

experience in Europe has been specific to the development of art overseas insofar as it is

concerns the milieus of Paris and London: the effects that these expatriate writers had on

those metropolitan hubs and the reciprocal effects that were bequeathed unto them.

Despite the accepted understanding that American writers engaged the ancient structures

and customs of Paris, most scholars have ignored the figure of the flâneur in theoretical Gill 2

discussions concerning expatriation. The flâneur proves important for the American

experience overseas because he directly engages the locale of Paris as if each facet of the

city is new, and his relation to travel allows him to move beyond the schools, cafes, and

bars that typically host discussions on art. By foregrounding Williams’ concerns with

flânerie that arise in the text through the character of Dev Evans, I position A Voyage to

Pagany as a novel that moves beyond the idea that expatriation always necessitates some

vital connection with the more prominent European milieus. Furthermore, in the process

I show how Evans’ performs the act of writing through his travels and prefigures

discussions that move flânerie away from its birthplace of Paris. Evans acts out the

process of writing by calling attention to the figure of the flâneur, demonstrating the

inseparable link between one’s travels in a foreign continent and one’s writing.

A Voyage to Pagany loosely reflects Williams’ travels to Paris and across Western

Europe in 1924. Williams was adamant that his book was not an autobiographical

account of his travels to Europe1; however, the situations that gave rise to the novel

demand consideration because the connections between his novel and his Autobiography

are strong enough to warrant it. Williams’ 1924 trip came about in response to the

pressures growing around him as a writer. Practicing medicine was taking its toll on

Williams, the little magazines in New York appeared insignificant when compared to the

abundance of activity taking place in Europe, and overseas pressures from his

compatriots were building in the years leading to his journey. America offered little

promise for his efforts at this time, which meant that turning to Europe was his only

viable option. A trip to Europe would appease his friend Pound and perhaps quell his

1 He wrote to Sylvia Beach that a Voyage to Pagany was novel that was fiction, but one in which he occasionally took part. Gill 3 fear that maybe things were better over there. Publishing in Europe was also a possibility, seeing as Bill Bird and Robert McAlmon were working hard to get new

American names circulating around the Left Bank (as they did with Ernest Hemingway).

Pagany, therefore, partially reflects Williams motives for travel and its import in his life.

Williams challenged his enduring loyalty to America in an attempt to establish a new form of American writing overseas. Due to the close relationship between his journey and his craft, Williams blurred the lines he heretofore rigorously enforced between the poetry of the American terrain and his national allegiance. He believed that to live in Paris was to at least somewhat forgo the exercise of establishing a strictly

American approach to art, partially due to the Parisian artistic traditions predating those of America. Williams saw that American art needed to consciously dislocate itself from the burden of century upon century of universalized artistic approaches that had little impact on the American experience, much in the manner that Whitman had done before him. Moreover, Williams upheld the idea that art was specific to the artist’s location because it existed in direct relation to the artist’s process of creation. He believed that the art object would both shape and be shaped by the extraneous forces surrounding it. “This refusal to hold on to the past and concern for the future,” Williams’ scholar John Beck believes, made for “constant struggling to attain a middle ground, a sense of balance and control over forces that seem uncontrollable and hopelessly unstable” (Beck 3). Poetry would need to be temporal in nature; it could only capture an object as it was at that instant, and then it would need to undergo a continual process of reevaluation. Art was only as enduring for Williams as the forces that had come to shape the thing itself. With this in mind, the continual reconceptualization of poetry would mean that there should be Gill 4 a close relationship to the American land if it was to remain a product of the writer’s homeland.

We might imagine that Williams turned his back on goals essential to his self construction as a writer by leaving America, but the role of the American expatriate is crucial to understanding the link between Williams’ Americanism and his travels.

Although Dev Evans was not technically Williams’ persona in the novel, the protagonist’s role largely reflected Williams’ beliefs on expatriation. As active readers, we acknowledge Williams’ presence behind the work, and see that Evans is performing the author’s stance on expatriation at the time. To ignore the link between the author and protagonist, as fallible as it may be in most cases, would be to deny the active role

Williams plays in the continual reconceptualization of his work. If we should completely ignore the link between author and protagonist we would also ignore how the novel came into existence. Williams, as a traveler, immersed himself in traditions of the continent, engaged the imagination through his experience, and used that storehouse of information for generating ideas in the creative process. He started a journal that would become the beginnings of A Voyage to Pagany—as he regarded it, “not merely to arrange things prettily” but to compile loose threads of thought (Mariani 229). Williams partially constructed Evans (both a doctor and a writer) to reflect on his own travels; the artist’s struggle to make sense of the raw data he collected became reflected in the character’s struggle to make sense of the cities he encountered. The novel emerged out of thoughts conceived on both sides of the Atlantic, but was always contiguous with the writer’s authorial position coming through the text. Gill 5

As most Williams scholars acknowledge, the projects Williams undertook during his lifetime were central to his self construction as a writer. Scholars often take into account Williams’ entire writing ouput when reflecting on his work, and they note that at times Williams “tries on” various roles as author. John Lowney, for instance, believes that “William Carlos Williams’s ‘splendid struggle to plasticize all various selves’ has produced repeated attempts to locate the Williams amid the multiplicity of his literary

projects” (Lowney 25). Seeing that the expatriate traveler is only one role that is

working toward the greater end of Williams autobiographical sense of authorship, readers

may be able to account for his need to fictionalize his European journey. Pagany’s

European itinerary, predominately arranged by successive city stopovers, illustrates the

fact that “Williams’s readers have had to account for the multifarious contradictions that

disrupt any unified construction of his poetic stance” (Lowney 25). In Paris, Williams

met with fellow writers,2 went to the opera, and even got drunk a few times, the latter of

which was not a usual occurrence for him.3 In his autobiography he says that “The Paris

of the expatriate artist was our only world,” a statement that elicits points of contradiction

elsewhere in his writing (Autobiography 190). By stabilizing certain moments in his

lifetime (even through fiction), Williams is working toward a comprehensive body of

work, and this somewhat complicates the notion of a completely separate author and

protagonist in Pagany (although readers should attempt to keep the two separate).

Somewhat in reflection of Williams’ travels, the idea of the American expatriate

is crucial to understanding this link between one’s Americanism and one’s travels.

Through Pagany, Williams proves he is an American who needs to get at aspects of

2 Some notable meetings took place between Williams and Gertrude Stein and him and James Joyce. 3 Williams has oft been quotes as saying that drink did nothing for him. Even in this text, the semi- autobiographical character of Evans claims that he gets his whiskey from writing, not drink. Gill 6

Europe that have yet to be undertaken by other American writers. The role of the expatriate varied greatly, as Malcolm Bradbury states in Dangerous Pilgrimages: “They went there, as Americans long had, to experience ‘experience,’ though the experience in question varied greatly (it meant anything from acquiring the great European cultural heritage to getting drunk); or they went to carry forth the new experience of Americans to the innocent and benighted Europeans” (334). Many of Williams’ compatriots made their way overseas due to the War, the prospects of art, the exchange rate, and to escape problems within America (puritanical laws and values, racial oppression, and gender inequalities, etc.). However, Williams’ voyage was different because it was not a response to any one of these motives. In a survey done by Frederick Hoffman, he found that of about 85 writers “Most were in their twenties, a third were from the Midwest, often from small towns. Many were college graduates, a significant number had seen war service in Europe. Some had private incomes or academic scholarships. About a third were dependent on editing, writing, or daily journalism” (Bradbury 337). Williams was from an older generation than the likes of Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Malcolm

Cowley, or any number of the young men to whom these findings applied. Based on these facts, we will recognize that Williams was different from what Malcolm Bradbury saw as the collective experience of expatriates—“a complex world of personalities, salons, cafés, exhibitions, performances, magazines, presses, artistic meetings, drinking bouts and suicides” (330-1).

Williams’ experiences overseas varied greatly from other expatriates’ experiences, and to confuse matters, Williams’ role as an expatriate was not the same as his protagonist’s. The essential connection between Williams and his character Evans Gill 7

was that neither writer (real and fictional) took to the European continent to experience

“experience.” Based on this fact, Williams appears to be distancing himself from those

other writers Bradbury speaks of. Experience was important to Williams’ aims, but it

was not the end-all motive for traveling. Although Williams remains more loyal to

America than Evans does in the novel, Williams is able to secure his position on writing

in a foreign continent by speaking through the figure of Evans on some level. Williams

thus equips Evans with an American approach to poetry central to rendering art from

travel.

In what follows I show how Williams promotes the interrelated facets of artistic

inspiration, art, and the praxis of life in Pagany. The close connection between writing and daily life is central to the writer’s stance on American expatriation, and Williams therefore constructs a link between the engaged expatriate writer and the figure of the

flâneur. As an expatriate, Evans needs to get close to the cities, their structures, and their

ways of life in order to come to terms with his own purpose as a writer. Like

Baudelaire’s flâneur, Evans occupies an insider/outsider position that allows him to

become part of the crowd while at the same time exposing dilemmas concerning other

expatriate approaches to Europe. The figure of Evans also looks ahead to the idea of

flânerie as movement away from the streets of Paris, which has come to the fore with the

theories of Michel de Certeau, Marc Eli Blanchard, Zygmunt Bauman, and Stefan

Morawski, demonstrating the writer’s tendency to break from traditional modes of

thinking. By aligning flânerie with movement away from city structures, the writer also

esteems movement as the central connection to expatriation, positioning travel as central

to maintaining one’s American allegiance while engaging the imagination in new locales. Gill 8

CHAPTER I: BAUDELAIRE’S POSITIONING OF THE FLÂNEUR

To understand how Williams is using the figure of the flâneur, we need to go back

to Charles Baudelaire’s initial characterization of the flâneur. Baudelaire establishes the

flâneur at a time when the aristocracy was losing its grip on the French due to the

establishment of democracy. Early to middle nineteenth century France was a time that

brought with it many changes, and Baudelaire was able to document those changes.

During his short lifetime, Baudelaire witnessed the last of the Bourbons with Charles X,

the last king of France in Louis Philippe d’Orléans, the Second Republic after the

Revolution of 1848, and finally the Second Empire under Napoleon III. Baudelaire

articulated the attributes of the figure he termed the flâneur during the reign of Louis

Philippe and the Second Republic of France. The flâneur, partially resembling the dandy

by Baudelaire’s definition, took to the streets with passion that was directly connected to

his artistic output. From Baudelaire’s point of view, the flâneur was not equivalent to the dandy because, although their pursuits were parallel in terms of individual cultivation, only the flâneur sought an end that was not specific to the self—the end product of art.

Baudelaire constructed the idea of the flâneur in much the same manner as Oscar

Wilde constructed the idea of the dandy. Both figures existed in some form prior to each

writer’s respective coining of the term, but their writings solidified and greatly furthered

each conceptualization. The dandy of Baudelaire’s Paris was independently wealthy and

dedicated to his own happiness. For the dandy, the pursuit of happiness was an esoteric

art form: “Dandyism is institution beyond law, itself has rigorous laws which all of its

subjects must strictly obey, whatever their natural impetuosity and independence of

character” (Baudelaire 27). Not only did the institution of dandyism concern itself with Gill 9

dress and fashion, but it also stressed the importance of attitude. The dandy took an aloof

or blasé attitude to the streets by creating a certain amount of distance from those he

considered below him. The dandy’s actions were a continuation of the aristocracy,

upholding the class system that was deteriorating due to the rise of capitalism. The

dandy, by embodying features of the aristocracy on his person—through manners,

clothes, and attitude—created separation between himself and the common man. Jerrold

Seigel explains this act of distancing in his account of nineteenth century Paris: “When

the barriers to entry into the aristocracy were relatively permeable, the need for clear

external signs of belonging to it was all the greater, and the association between

aristocracy and personal cultivation made it easier for aristocrats to absorb the new

energies coming from below” (Seigel 100). Whereas the dandy confined himself from

common citizens, Baudelaire’s flâneur was occupied with commoners because they

opened the flâneur’s eyes to new scenarios taking place on the streets which could be

used for artistic purposes.

Baudelaire’s flâneur was attracted to the dandy’s occupation of continuous

refinement because he himself was occupied with a parallel pursuit as an artist.

Baudelaire believed that the flâneur’s relationship to art was very near to that of the dandy’s relationship to fashion. The ever shifting crowd, which I will discuss in the following paragraph, becomes for the flâneur the source of inspiration for his artwork.

For Baudelaire, “The evaporation of the self—into crowds, into nature, into causes, into

other people, into states of natural or induced reverie—was an essential part of artistic

creativity” (Seigel 116). Baudelaire characterized the flâneur as “an ‘I’ with an insatiable

appetite for the ‘non-I,’ at every instant rendering and explaining it in pictures more Gill 10

living than life itself, which is always unstable and fugitive” (Baudelaire 22). In artistic

terms, the flâneur used this intimate relationship to life on the streets in order to render

what proved “eternal” from the transitory spectacle of the everyday. So much visual

information was contained in the spectacle of the streets that the artist had to filter and

refine the images that would become his finished product. He had to capture a composite

moment based on hours, or even days, of satiating his visual appetite. Baudelaire sees

this as a process of marking the salient points of an object in order to engage the

memory4 (Baudleaire 15-6). Seigel agrees by saying, “To be able to recreate the world of

experience the artist had to have identified himself so fully and intently with the world

outside that he could reproduce objects in it from within himself. Art did not proceed

directly from nature but from an image imprinted on the brain” (Seigel 116). The process

of rendering fruits of the imagination required that the flâneur establish a new

relationship to the people of the streets: to fully identify with the crowd, and, at the same

time, choose points of reference from which images would directly follow.

In opposition to the dandy, the flâneur could not choose to remain aloof to the goings on around him as an artist. Baudelaire himself, for instance, was so moved by the actions of the masses that he took up arms of revolution in the July Monarchy.

Baudelaire’s own actions may be extreme, but his conception of the flâneur as a social

being remains nonetheless. The flâneur’s social nature was signaled by where he took up

habitat, on the streets and in crowds. Benjamin says, “The mass was the agitated veil;

through it Baudelaire saw Paris” (“On Some Motifs” 168). In Marc Eli Blanchard’s

4 In speaking of Monsieur G., Baudelaire says that he “brings an instinctive emphasis to his marking of the salient and luminous points of an object (which may be salient or luminous from the dramatic point of view) or of its principal characteristics, sometimes even with a degree of exaggeration which aids the human memory; and thus, under the spur of so forceful a prompting, the spectator’s imagination receives a clear-cut image of the impression produced by the external world upon the mind of Monsieur G.” Gill 11

words, “Constantly moving with the city itself, [the flâneur] is interested in the

appearance of phenomena. What he is looking for is to begin with the city” (82).

Baudelaire found the means to cultivate his art in crowds. This realm of existence proved

essential for his purposes, for one reason, because it housed the collective spirit of the

transitional “moment” of modernity, the shift from the aristocracy to high capitalism.

The flâneur was capturing a capricious moment in his artwork, and the shock of

modernity which broke through to the city’s inhabitants was essential for his creativity.

A different type of social existence emerged with the shift to capitalism, and with it, a

different sort of thinking became necessary. Baudelaire accounts for this in his depiction

of the flâneur, and Benjamin reflects this in his analysis of Baudelaire’s prototype: “As

Baudelaire and Benjamin understood so well, flânerie posed the fundamental problem of the ways of knowing and being that are possible, even necessary, in the modern city”

(Paris as Revolution 81). Gone were the days where the public sphere seemed to contain a harmonious state of affairs. Now, the streets were characterized by unnamed peoples moving as a multifarious organism generated through commerce. Benjamin says of crowds that they “do not stand for classes or any sort of collective; rather, they are nothing but the amorphous crowd of passers-by, the people in the street. This crowd, of whose existence Baudelaire is always aware, has not served as the model for any of his works, but it is imprinted on his creativity as a hidden figure” (“On Some Motifs” 165).

Baudelaire’s flâneur attempted to channel that hidden figure in his poetry, and for the

next half a century, this hidden figure served as a sense of creative inspiration and

disillusionment for the flâneur, often both at the same time. Gill 12

Baudelaire’s poetry documented the restructuring of city in the shift from rural to urban existence. Before the city’s renovations, “The city that Louis-Napoleon took over as emperor was a rat-maze of poorly connected, narrow, disorienting streets, medieval in character, with a centuries-long accreation of tightly packed buildings falling into decrepitude” (Kunstler 8). Baron Haussmann was contracted by Napoleon to provide a new face for the grands boulevards in Paris. The result was that a new spectacle was created for the modern citizen and wanderer. With the resurfaced boulevards came arcades, which were open-aired urban shopping centers. Vanessa R. Schwartz characterizes the arcades by saying that “the newly built passages or arcades, located

either directly off the boulevards or just slightly to the south of the boulevard

Montmartre, attracted fashionable society. Early mini-malls of the luxury trade, the

arcades were described as ‘a city, indeed a world in miniature’” (19). The streets and the

arcades served as new landscapes for the denizens of the streets. Benjamin says that the

city splits Baudelaire’s flâneur into dialectical poles. It opens up to him as a landscape, even as it closes around him as a room” (The Arcades Project 417). The city provided

visual appetite for the wanderer, but it too was filled with controlled spaces that limited

his agency as a wanderer. The Haussmannean reformation imposed structural limitations

on the flâneur’s agency because the city streets were designed to direct and redirect movements of crowds. Benjamin claims that “the person who travels a street, it would seem, has no need of any waywise guiding hand. It is not in wandering that man takes to the street, but rather in submitting to the monotonous, fascinating, constantly unrolling band of asphalt” (519). The limitations for travelers imposed by Haussmann’s reformation are a given, but the extent to which they overtake the artist is subject to Gill 13

debate. Theorists such as Walter Benjamin find the rupture of modernity to be

disempowering for the artist based on the fact that the artist becomes drawn into the

spectacle of modern Paris and loses any transgressive power he might have previously

attained. Similar to Benjamin, Ferguson states, “Far from empowering the walker in the

street, the altered urban context disables the individual. Distance and inactivity no longer

connote superiority to the milieu, but suggest quite the opposite – estrangement,

alienation, anomie” (“The Flâneur On and Off the Streets” 33). However, I want to

question the extent to which the flâneur’s response to modernity has to be

disempowering by looking at Baudelaire’s depiction of it. Clearly, the poet must account

for the shocks of modernity, but I see Baudelaire positioning himself so that he has some

sense of agency in his work. This position informs Williams’ own approach to Paris in

the fictional account of Pagany.

Williams depicts Evans as being consumed with the goings on of Paris early on in the novel, the hustle-and-bustle of the city and how he will adapts himself to his new life as an expatriate. Evans is concerned with his relationships with other Americans and how he should present himself, but he also renders the solitary nature of the flâneur in

order to keep from getting caught up in the limited experiences of his countrymen and

women—going to the opera, getting drunk, giving speeches, etc. Evans is able to utilize

his Americanism and his position as a traveler in much the same way as the flâneur

procures agency in the streets, by engaging the structurization of life in Paris, but

maintaining enough distance from it through one’s keen awareness of the pratfalls of that

lifestyle in order to dedicate one’s adventures to art. Gill 14

One of the ways in which the flâneur procures agency from the grips of the

modern city is due to his socioeconomic position. The flâneur is a figure of independent

wealth, which means that he has the resources with which to pursue the occupation of

artistry, or in some cases, idleness. Many flâneurs inherited money; just as many

detached themselves from social obligation. In Baudelaire’s case, his resources were a

product of both. In Rosemary Lloyd’s biography of Baudelaire, she notes that at a certain

age, when Baudelaire “attained his majority” of inheritance, he received an allowance.

Baudelaire also borrowed money from friends and acquaintances without paying it back,

and when taken to court, he “took no part in the legal proceedings leading up to [it],

ignoring the summons to appear at court, and angrily refusing to discuss his affairs before

‘a group of strangers,’ as he put it (70-1). As we see in Baudelaire’s case, the flâneur’s

independent means are essential to his subject position. He was able to pursue

adventures within the bustle of the city without having to take part in its exploitative

nature. For Schwartz, the flâneur occupies a position of power, and this is in no way separable from his freedom of movement. To attempt to make space for a female

flâneur, or flâneuse, or the working class flâneur, would be to overlook socioeconomic

aspects that made flânerie possible. Schwartz says that flânerie “is a shorthand for the

mode of modern urban spectatorship that emphasizes mobility and fluid subjectivity,”

and that “[t]he flaneur is not so much a person as flanerie is a positionality of power—

one through which the spectator assumes the position of being able to be part of the

spectacle and yet command it at the same time” 5 (9, 10).

5 Schwartz therefore questions Foucault’s notion of interiorization and the model of the panopticon, claiming that the flâneur’s subjectivity was part of role as spectator even at the street level. The panopticon, discussed in Foucault’s Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, usually champions an unseen source of power (the government, the law, or in physical terms, a person structurally situated above Gill 15

The flâneur, due to his mobility as a man of independent wealth, moves in and out

of crowds with ease, which creates a dialectical relationship of distance concerning the

flâneur’s position in relation to crowds. This tangential relationship to crowds is vital

because it exhibits the distance the flâneur sets himself off from the common man while

at the same time allowing us to recognize that the link to crowds is essential for his

artistry. In this sense, the true flâneur is by no means a loafer. In Ferguson’s words,

“This boundary of the imagination and the intellect within a street setting both justifies

the flâneur’s literary claims and sets him apart from the vulgar idlers and gapers

(badauds, musards) with which the uninitiated might confuse him” (Paris as Revolution

88). Like Schwartz discusses, the flâneur engages the crowd from a position of power. I

further believe that Baudelaire creates an in-between space that is not always operating

from the power position. Baudelaire’s description of the true artist lends itself to the dual

role which takes place when the flâneur engages the streets: “For the perfect flâneur, for

the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude,

amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be

away from home yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the

centre of the world” (9). The act of seeing the world and being in the midst of it are not

mutually exclusive, but take place simultaneously through the act of flânerie. As many

critics have noted, this dual position can be irreconcilable with the flâneur’s goals as an

artist, for example, when Baudelaire realizes that he is as much a part of the problems he

is attempting to expose in his poetry. Ross Chambers comments on this, saying,

“Suddenly, in the late Baudelaire, the ‘I’ who speaks (in) a poem becomes a more

another), but Schwartz is suggesting that the flâneur can counteract the interiorization of these sources of power often felt by the modern citizen. Gill 16 dubious and even problematic authority: a ‘Parisian prowler’ and ‘man of the crowd’ whose aloofness and melancholia, which enable him to see the problem that escapes others, also make him part of the problem he sees: an observant ‘eye’ indistinguishable form a socially embattled ‘I’” (102). But here is where we need to distinguish the different connotations surrounding flânerie taking place in nineteenth century Paris.

Arguments depriving the flâneur of agency are often based on the fact that the flâneur, as an artist, was either unaware of his position as a commodity, or that he failed to recognize the way in which those figures of the crowd were caught up in the allure of commerce. Since the flâneur made his home in the heart of the multitude, and made use of that space for inspiration, the flâneur’s art often became a secondhand product of those citizens who passively accepted their subjugated position. Benjamin presupposes that

Baudelaire’s flâneur was prone to getting caught up in the spectacle of the city during his intellectual pursuits. Ross Chambers, however, also recognizes Baudelaire’s awareness coming through in his poetry. In Chambers’ words:

[T]he aesthetic theory that is implicit in [Baudelaire’s] poetic texts, which now

became increasingly ironic and allegorical, tends to make of the poet, as a denizen

of the city, a kind of engaged (better: embattled) social observer, one who is

concerned on the one hand to seek out and report on the symptoms that betray the

pathological character of the city as social formation, while somewhat troubled,

on the other hand, by what it might mean for a poet to play such a role (102).

The roles which are available to the flâneur, and seem to be at odds with each other, are that of omniscient wanderer and interlocutor for the masses. If the flâneur identified too strongly with the masses, he was susceptible to the dangers of the city, and if he detached Gill 17

himself from crowds, he would be deprived of inspiration for his art and, more

importantly, lose that close relationship with the city. Ferguson nicely provides for two

readings of the flâneur, which allows us to distinguish between the true flâneur—the true artist—and an ordinary one. “The walks about Paris that supply the artist-flâneur with

material for study,” she says, “may well prove disastrous for the ordinary flâneur unable

to maintain distance from the city and hence unable to resist its seductions.” She

continues:

The original pejorative connotations of flânerie resurface to characterize the

individual at the mercy of the city. Where the ostensible idleness of the artist-

flâneur masks the vital intellectual activity of the true artist, the false artist is

necessarily a false flâneur, whose inactivity derives from the inability to

channel—that is, to use and comprehend—the desires roused by the city. In other

words, the false artist lacks the detachment required for creativity (Paris as

Revolution 90).

Here, the flâneur is active in his pursuits as an artist, and his actions echo the rigorous process involved in distilling art from the sights of the city. Ferguson also describes the true artist by saying, “The highest flâneur understands the city; the ordinary merely experiences it. Here, in other words, is one more indication of the great importance and even greater difficulty attached to the process of actually comprehending the nature and meaning of modern Paris” (90). Although there remains a danger for the flâneur in becoming part of the crowd, the figure can achieve some distance, or middle position, in his awareness that his is an active pursuit. Gill 18

Evans takes to the task of achieving such a position during his tenure in Paris.

Similar to the true flâneur, Evans seeks to map out the possibility for a new expatriate

experience in Paris. He does this in the novel by reappropriating tenets central to

flânerie. Like Baudelaire, Evans’ hopes to engage in self-refinement as an artist in order

to get closer to the cities, structures, and inhabitants that he encounters. Art and the

imagination are indeed directly related to his experience in this reading. Evans

temporarily takes on the role of the expatriate, and has traveled for different reasons than

other Americans. He, therefore, establishes an artistic approach that fits his purposes

without leading to the pitfalls of other expatriates, much in the same manner that

Baudelaire established a true flâneur in order to procure agency on the streets. As an

American traveler, Evans is also taking tropes of flânerie beyond the streets of Paris after his arrival. This goes against unending scholarship that claims flânerie to be a strictly a

Parisian activity. However, Evans is bringing to the European continent different

motives for his actions than Baudelaire and his followers. Evans needs to distance

himself from other expatriates because his journey is concerned with travel and

experiencing Europe, meaning that the act of distancing himself from the milieus of Paris

requires that he take Baudelaire’s flâneur away from his birthplace.

In order to understand the move Williams makes concerning the dislocation of

Evans from Paris, we need to look at more recent theories on flânerie that discuss the

flâneur as being derived from but not necessarily specific to Paris. While Baudelaire’s

flâneur was specific to the streets of Paris, the ideas explored therein have been since

appropriated and disseminated by theorists discussing the idea of walking in the city, not

exclusively walking in Paris. Blanchard discusses the city as a fictional construct. He Gill 19

says, “To the poet…the fictionality of the city is not only logical. The city stands as the

locus, the repository of his parole poétique. And because it offers itself as a collection of fragments linked more by their relation to him, the poet, the locator, than by their own internal coherence, it is also the prime object of his desire” (99-100). In Blanchard’s account, the poet’s imagination and his choice of movement are central to the city’s construction, meaning we should not uphold Paris as the home of the flâneur and ignore

other locales in relation to the poet/wanderer. Blanchard also says:

If in the mind of each citizen there is indeed a narrative of the city, its structure,

its plots are not applicable to others. In this sense, no place, no monument to the

city can really be said to have a function determined a priori on paper. Whatever

the actual a priori function (a market, a park, an avenue), what brings the place

into consciousness is the fact that encounter with the people in the place makes it

different in reality from what it is supposed to be on paper, if only because the

individual assertion of this presence by every single one of those people in it

negates—better demands—the negation of a place for others, and with this

negation, the negation of all other people (75).

Similarly, Michel de Certeau, in The Practice of Everyday Life, maps out the ways in

which citizens can reclaim some agency by working within modes of speech discourse in

and beyond cities. De Certeau equates walking with our understanding of speech acts.

This, of course, denotes some sort of choice on the part of the walker/speaker. This

stance also, like Blanchard, recognizes the disparity between one’s freedom of movement

and those boundary markers presented on paper or through social mores. De Certeau

says, “At the most elementary level, it has a triple ‘enunciative’ function: it is a process Gill 20

of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian…; it is a

spatial acting-out of the place…; and it implies relations among differentiated positions,

that is, among pragmatic ‘contracts’ in the form of movements” (98). De Certeau

champions the walker’s choice in relation to the city. He says “if it is true that a spatial

order organizes an ensemble or possibilities (e.g., by a place in which one can move) and

interdictions (e.g., by a wall that prevents one from going further), then the walker

actualizes some of these possibilities” (98). In this way, the walker is not subjected to the

structures that surround him—“he makes them exist as well as emerge.” De Certeau

continues, “But he also moves them about and he invents others, since the crossing,

drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, transform, or abandon spatial

elements.” The qualities of walking are presented with possibilities that are typically

associated with verbal rhetoric. In this way, “the walker transforms the spatial signifier

into something else. And if on the one hand he actualizes only a few of the possibilities

fixed by the constructed order (he goes only here and not there), on the other he increases

the number of possibilities6…and prohibitions7…He thus makes a selection.”

Most theorists who discuss flânerie and its function in post-modernity believe that

the flâneur can create or appropriate the structures for his own purposes. Scholars such as Zygumnt Bauman and Stefan Morawski see flânerie, beginning with Baudelaire,

emerging out of necessity due to the decline of artistic-intellectual elites in society: “The

process of decline triggered [defense] mechanisms and one, significantly, was the

flâneur’s investigative spirit which enabled the artist-intellectual to resist [society’s]

transformations, either by assimilating them partly and taming them or by fighting back

6 de Certeau says, for example, “by creating shortcuts and detours.” 7 For example, “he forbids himself to take paths generally considered accessible or even obligatory.” Gill 21

or else by impeaching their heralds and mechanisms” (Morawski 193-4). These forms of

appropriation and bricolage depict how far flânerie has moved away from the streets of

Paris. It has since become equated with exposing and attempting to destabilize various structures of power. While Williams was less interested in undermining the powers of the state in Paris, he was concerned with exposing the American expatriate movements in

milieus favoring the Parisian lifestyle to artistic undertakings concerned with the end

product of art and its relation to movement. Like these postmodern scholars theorize,

Evans needs to break away from the artistic restraints of expatriate circles in Paris in

order to expose and critique what had become an unequivocally accepted means of

existence. Gill 22

CHAPTER II: WILLIAMS’ RESPONSE TO THE AMBASSADORS

Williams’ text is operating in response to the earlier account of American

expatriation in Henry James’ Ambassadors. Williams sets his work against the backdrop

of James’s novel and the social scenarios contained therein. Harry Levin touches on the

connection in his introduction to the 1970 edition of Pagany. Levin notes that Williams

was not an enthusiast of James’ work, but when Williams looked back upon his novel, he

noticed James’ influence8 (xx). Pagany responds to the individual’s need to break free

from the social stagnation that Paris presented to its foreign inhabitants. Henry James’

Ambassadors establishes the trope of American cultivation in Europe, the naïve

American depicted as one indebted to the social workings of his European affiliations.

Evans differs from James’ protagonist Strether in the way that he refuses to adopt

Parisian culture, a process that would end in the artist’s detachment from his

surroundings. In this manner, Pagany critiques the insulated American expatriate

experience. This insulated existence is a continuation of the Jamesean American, the

figure who now undergoes a process of self-cultivation but still appropriates Parisian

mannerisms.

James’s Parisian novel looks at the life of the middle-aged provincial American in

Strether. Ironically, The Ambassadors is very much a coming of age story for his aged protagonist. James focuses on the cultural, intellectual, and psychological development of Strether, and his methodology predates that of Williams in this sense (the latter writer

8 Levin writes, “Looking back upon A Voyage to Pagany, Williams wondered whether it might conceivably have been influenced by Henry James, who was never one of his favorites. He need not have worried, for we cannot imagine Dev getting into one of those dark entanglements that seduced Roderick Hudson and menaced Christopher Newman. There may be some resemblance to Lambert Strether in the belated curiosity for finding out what one may have missed by living in Woolett rather than Paris. But no Jamesian personage would have made the westward crossing so happily, or found so much that was genuinely poetic in the American scene.” Gill 23

also working with a middle-aged character’s development as it relates to the foreign

continent). At its very core, The Ambassadors is a novel that unveils the modern world

of Paris by continuing to frame and re-frame the experiences of its characters in fixed

settings. The characters’ intentions, allegiances, and candidness of speech are all subject

to a particular sitting quarters, and, oftentimes, nothing further. Strether finds himself

caught in the urban world of Paris, unfit for it, but eventually able to function within it

with relative ease. Strether’s transformations in Paris arguably allow him to gain a sense

of urbane independence in Europe; however, Strether remains reactionary to the city, and

more so, to those around him.

The essential difference between Strether and Evans is that Strether undergoes a

process of cultivation by remaining in Paris and learning the accepted cultural

mannerisms of the present day city, while Evans undergoes a parallel process as a writer

by mining the cultural history of the city and simultaneously looking beyond the present

day mores to his own independent means of self-cultivation. In Book VII, Strether

admits to Miss Barrace that he does not have a life outside of those cultivating him,9

which he again admits in Book X (203). In response to her characterization of him as the

hero of their drama, Strether says, “‘I think that must be why the hero has taken refuge in

this corner. He’s scared at his heroism—he shrinks from his part’” (348). Likewise,

Strether’s transformation is a product of the influence of characters such as Miss Barrace,

as he claims no part in it beyond his recognition that something has altered him. “These

displacements throw the emphasis of the novel onto supplementary relationships, and

onto the operation of signs and frames” (Hutchinson 84). Underlying the lifestyle James

9 He says, “‘Well [Waymarsh] thinks, you know, I’ve a life of my own. And I haven’t!’,” which he concludes by saying “‘No—not of my own. I seem to have a life only for other people.’” Gill 24 epitomizes in his use of customary speech in privatized rooms is the world of the streets that ultimately are foreclosed to the protagonist.

While Williams excavates the figure of the flâneur in Pagany, James presents a world where his central character becomes barred from the cultural traditions of Paris because of the distance Strether maintains from the streets. When Strether takes to the streets, he finds that the past it contains has now since faded for him despite his sense that some quality of it still lingers. Strether seeks out this last spirit of youth that he associates with the flâneur:

He wasn’t there for his own profit—not, that is, the direct; he was there on some

chance of feeling the brush of the wing of the stray spirit of youth. He felt it in

fact, he had it beside him; the old arcade indeed, as his inner sense listened, gave

out the faint sound, as from far-off, of the wild waving of wings. They were

folded now over the breasts of buried generations; but a flutter or two lived again

in the turned page of shock-headed, slouch-hatted loiterers, whose young intensity

of type, in the direction of pale acuteness, deepened his vision, and even his

appreciation, of racial difference, and whose manipulation of the uncut volume

was too often, however, but a listening at closed doors (75).

We recognize that Stether’s inability to find the spirit has to do with the absence of it within himself. Strether comes to the realization that boundaries of age or era do not set him apart from the lost figure; rather, his newfound “type” sets him apart from this tradition. The presence of Miss Barrace and other characters concerned with development of Strether in The Ambassadors are similar to Jack Murry and other

Americans Evans encounters in Pagany. The difference, however, is that Evans walks Gill 25 away, quite literally, from those who seek to help him become acclimated to his new environment. Evans establishes his independence from his compatriots early on in the novel, which allows him to find some comfort away from the drawing rooms of bourgeois Paris. Specifically, Evans finds comfort in places that promote the newness of his environment, such as the streets. Evans has to call forth the figure of the flâneur because he is isolated from the world of other Americans, which is easily accessible for him, but he still wants to maintain a sense of intimacy with the Parisian culture.

Even though the similarities between Strether and Evans are obvious—both characters have long-standing roots in provincial America; each has an overwhelming need to “try out” Europe; and, for each, the intimacy with women symbolize an indeterminable future directly tied to each man’s homeland—the differences between the two are fundamental to the aims of each author. Strether’s time spent in Paris becomes occupied with shedding his long-standing American roots, while Evans’ sojourn is one to experience Europe at all costs, especially if that result is one that will allow him to mine the city structures for unrefined inspiration. Evans’ journey as an expatriate is more concerned with his time in Europe and less preoccupied with America, as in the case with

Strether. In Spring and All, Williams says, “a man, starved in imagination, changes his milieu so that his food may be richer” regardless of the implications (134). In accord,

Evans gives himself up to this cultural immersion for the purposes of his writing in

Europe. Strether never can because he never has similar motives for doing so. The

Ambassadors is an important point of reference for reading Pagany because it touches on many of the themes that Williams explores in his text. The Ambassadors also provides an Gill 26 earlier look at American expatriation in Paris, which Williams updates to fit his approach to Europe with the publication of Pagany.

Gill 27

CHAPTER III: FLÂNERIE AND THE MOVEMENT AWAY FROM PARIS

A Voyage to Pagany is concerned with travel, as its geographical organization of

chapters indicate. Despite the novel’s concern with flânerie, more of the novel deals with

the Evans’ travels away from the city of Paris than it does with his exploration of the

birthplace of the flâneur. In other words, a small (but important) portion of the novel

undertakes issues concerning the expatriate experience Evans seeks to distance himself

from, while the greater portion of the novel focuses on those tropes of mobilization, or

walking and travel as flânerie. Evans eventually returns to Paris, but his time spent in

Paris the second time is short-lived, with Evans thinking “Back to Paris! And

then…home” (235). He also thinks of France, not Paris specifically, as the “blessed

home of all wanderers,” signaling that the city is no longer the native home of the figure,

but it has become something more national or universal as a consequence of his

adventures (235). The latter, more extensive, portion of the novel concerns Williams’

aims in his reappropriation of the flâneur, but his starting point of Paris is equally important in establishing American accounts of expatriation, those established by James and continued by his contemporaries in the novel. By establishing Paris as the initial site of flânerie, Williams is engaging those themes of his work necessary to step out from

behind demobilizing traditions of the American expatriate artist.

The narrator of Pagany introduces the theme of flânerie at an early moment in the

text. Before Evans has even reached Paris, the narrator describes the protagonist’s

actions with Baudelaire’s flâneur in mind. On the train to Paris, Evans sits like a child drinking in the scene. If we recall, Baudelaire’s famous description of the flâneur is that

of a man-child. In his words, “The child sees everything in a state of newness; he is Gill 28 always drunk” (8). Evans watches with eagerness out of the window even though he is not quite sure what he is searching for, showing his child-like approach to the country.

The difference between the child and the man-child is discussed by Baudelaire, and also echoed by Williams in the early moments of the book. Baudelaire says that “genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will—a childhood now equipped for self-expression with manhood’s capacities and a power of analysis which enables it to order the mass of raw material which it has involuntarily accumulated” (8). Evans depicts this in his desire to get at the city and its structures but also in his detective-like inquires that establish his analytic purposes. He is not so much a tourist as he is an investigator of the city based on his former experiences there. We learn from the text that

“At this time of life Evans was less inclined to stop the parade to think than formerly. He was always straining out of windows. And now for the third time in Paris he stared and stared into the gloom of the rue du Havre in an excited frame of mind. Had it changed?”

(14). As opposed to passively taking in the scene, Evans arrives to France equipped with the use and means for analysis.

We see that Evans’ experience will be closely linked to cultures that he now inhabits, even if only it is for a short time. Without a country to look back to (as America drops away from his mind as he reaches France) Williams is forced to come to terms with his purposes in Europe. Like Baudelaire’s approach to art, these initial motives seem specific to Paris and all that the city has come to represent for artists. Paris helps Evans work toward this end: “Paris wipes all frivolity aside and stares in. What are you made of? What are you made of? What are you made of?” (14). Opposed to seeking the guidance of his compatriots, Evans engages the city on his own terms. In the back of his Gill 29

mind is “the stern morality of certain legendary great French families” and “the cold

aloofness from the loose life of Montmartre.” However, these two sides of Paris have

little bearing on his initial aims as a foreigner inhabiting the city. To openly

acknowledge these realms of existence, and at the same time look beyond them, is to

claim a different approach to the city than those plotted out for French inhabitants of the

day. In recognizing the legendary French families, the American expatriate

acknowledges aristocratic traditions that still remained keenly alive, at least in the French

consciousness. And by acknowledging the aloofness of Montmartre, the expatriate

recognizes the role he or she is expected to take as an American in Paris. Martin

Halliwell claims that for the American expatriate Paris “becomes a symbolic site for

freedom, and, as a consequence, self-exile becomes both an expression of American

alienation and a means to aesthetic fulfillment” (114). Yet, for some expatriates, as for

Evans, Paris “represents a paradoxical sense of freedom beyond control” (Harding 32).

In his character’s first encounter with the city, Williams looks toward the tradition of the

flâneur in his encounter with France, which was at odds with the aristocracy and had

gone somewhat ignored by American encounters with the city due to his contemporaries’

promotion of a new sense of freedom distinct from the Parisian past.

From the beginning of scholarship on Pagany, the protagonist’s nationalism has been a point of contention for scholars. In my reading, Evans is taking up a tradition that is historically Parisian by calling back to the flâneur’s active engagement with the city,

but some scholars champion Williams’ avowed Americanism and his relation to his main

character in their readings. For example, in “William Carlos Williams and Europe: The

Trans-Atlantic Construction of America,” Bryce Conrad says that through the novel Gill 30

“Williams recognized that for him, to go back to Europe, to discover its pagan origins, was to rediscover the lost ground of America” (3). However, Williams’ devoted

Americanism shouldn’t be attributed to his novel when reading this work. We should see that the author’s socio-historical position seems to be at odds with that of the protagonist.

What is important is that Evans is enacting an expatriate experience from the beginning of the text, thus allowing for the possibility of forms of travel that are as closely aligned closer to the European continent as they are to America. From the moment Evans sets sail, he claims the Atlantic to be “home of the wild gods in exile,” and we find that he is leaving behind some of his more recent past in traveling abroad (3): “It was, in effect, to him each day as it had happened to the ship one night, a ten foot section of the handrail forward had been torn off and was gone, only the twisted iron stanchions remained; with him the same, each day something of his immediate past the sea struck at and carried away” (4). As Evans desires to be on shore, everything else melts away, and he is said to be returning home to Pagany, alluding to the fact that maybe this state expatriation is his home. Evans later recognizes that the act of writing is sufficient for a “homeland.”

Accordingly, at an early moment in the text Evans allows for the possibility of giving himself up completely to the task of exploring the continent and using it for his craft.

The evening of his arrival Evans feels as if he has to go out for a walk; he claims he could go anywhere, but he specifically chooses the Boulevards. He walks through the city “admiring the fabric of it” (17). He walks the avenue de l’Opera, and “was filled with a strangeness inexplicable—satisfying—by it all. It was, as far as he could gather it, walking.” The flâneur is clearly at work in this initial encounter with the city. The depiction of Baudelaire’s flâneur manifests itself in the way that Evans takes to the Gill 31

streets. The flâneur Baudelaire claims is much more than a wanderer, and, equally, more

than an artist. The mind of the flâneur actively engages the activity that it encounters. In

Baudelaire’s words, “[the flâneur] is a painter of the passing moment and of all

suggestions of eternity that it contains” (5). For Baudelaire, “the majority of artists are

no more than highly skilled animals, pure artisans, village intellects, cottage brains,” and

what separates the flâneur from them is the way that the flâneur gives himself up to his

surroundings for the purposes of the imagination and for art. Similarly, Evans finds

pleasure in the little delights of Paris. Figures ranging from a street crier for a play to a

woman selling mimosa make an imprint on him. Paris proves pleasurable for him

because the streets are alive, even during day-to-day activities. As I will later explore, his

role as a traveler allows Evans to experience Paris more thoroughly than perhaps he

otherwise could. Evans is a man of the world, and his movement through his new

surroundings is central to our understanding of him in relation to Baudelaire’s flâneur.

Evans’ purposes in Paris and their connection to movement can be deduced from the structures that he encounters along the streets. In an early encounter on the streets of

Paris, Evans ruminates on the inextricable relationship between poetry and the boulevards. Seeing the opera house, he calls forth an anecdote regarding the poet

Verlaine. Memory is here triggered through acts of flânerie. He remembers that “When

the poet Verlaine had died and from his poverty-stricken room they were bearing his

body up the avenue, a state funeral, to bury it, as they approached the Opera, suddenly the

great golden lyre was seen to totter in its fastenings and fall!” (17). Verlaine’s poetry,

equal parts hedonism (usually ending in violence) and equal parts religious redemption,

was reflective of the dual nature of the poet’s own life. Verlaine also was very much Gill 32 indebted to Baudelaire. Keeping this history in mind, Verlaine’s approach to poetry, and, before him, Baudelaire, arguably paved the way for avant-garde movements that blurred the spheres of art and life. It is significant, then, that Evans reflects on the fact that the lyre is again fastened in its place. By recognizing the equation between art and life,

Evans initially finds comfort in his position of mobility in France. The connection between art and movement throughout the streets is central to the American poet’s need to break away from some of the demobilizing tropes of expatriation that had since been secured by Americans in Paris. Evans even reflects on this while walking, “How much one escapes…how much of lying, how much of stupidity!” (17). We can imagine that he means those aspects of America and American expatriate life that he finds so displeasing, like the cold aloof Parisian attitude that many of his compatriots imitated.

Evans establishes the task of writing in his travels and notes how it differs from the approaches to writing of his compatriots. Evans prioritizes writing over the comfort that a city such as Paris could offer him (as it did his countrymen). To identify too strongly with the milieus of Paris would lead to his getting caught up in the expatriate scene, but not necessarily the goal of writing itself. From Evans’ point of view, têtê-à- têtês, drinking bouts, and gazing out of coffee shop windows were deviatiosn from immersing oneself, as a writer, into this new culture. We must keep in mind that Evans travels overseas partially for a medical conference in Vienna, but he confesses that his profession as a doctor served as the means to fund his first love, writing. Evans interrogates his position as a doctor as he would critique many of his fellow expatriate writers: “A man sitting at the table of his laboratory day after day inventing 606 or anti- meningiococcus serum, in what way is he different from the man sitting day after day Gill 33 sipping alcohol at the table of the café?” (116). This equation with his first profession signals that as his pilgrimage progresses, it becomes more and more consumed with writing.

Baudelaire’s flâneur championed the artist as a figure engaged with the city yet distant from the aspects of it that would distract the end product of writing. Keeping this in mind, what proves most difficult for Evans is achieving some sense of distance from the social circles and customs of Paris not conducive to writing. When discussing the

American traveler, Dana Brand claims that “there is a natural analogy between the conventional situation of the flâneur and that of the American traveler in Europe” (67).

She proceeds by saying that the “American in Europe, like the flâneur, is a detached and interested observer, interpreting and appreciating a world in which he does not play a part.” The problem that Williams’ exposes with his character is that the American traveler is now more closely aligned with the country than he or she has previously been.

In the past, like Brand notes, the traveler did not play a part in the world he or she inhabited, but now, due to the rising number of established Americans in France, the

American naturally came to take part in the city’s goings on. Seigel says:

Americans in Paris were natural Bohemians: free of ties to the surrounding

society and culture, ready to devote their lives to their own self-development, able

to participate in the city’s pleasure while acting out their independence from

tradition and convention, and predisposed to a life of liberated fantasy by virtue of

having left their everyday identities, with their attendant restrictions, on the other

side of the Atlantic (368). Gill 34

The problem was that the American inheritors to the flâneur, such as Evans, did not necessarily want to free themselves from the surrounding culture, nor leave their identities behind. While these sentiments may appear paradoxical, this is actually how we have come to view expatriation today. In this case, an American expatriate travels to a foreign locale with his established identity, but the traveler is expected to remain open to the possibility that his identity will be altered (perhaps drastically, depending on how much he chooses to give himself up to the new culture). However, as Williams’ narrator depicts, Evans contemporaries aligned themselves with bohemian Paris and sought freedom that was concerned equally with self-control as it was dereliction.

Evans is taken through introductions consisting of meet-and-greets and dinners by his compatriots, and these efforts work against the ends that he seeks as a writer. The danger that Evans recognizes in equating life with art is shown in movements when life is viewed as taking place in drawing rooms, restaurants, and bars, where meet-and-greets and drinking bouts become equated with experiencing the city. This type of existence was derived from the idea of Bohemia that factored prominently in nineteenth and twentieth century Paris. For Elizabeth Wilson, “Bohemia attracted its self-chosen citizens for many different reasons. It was a refuge, a way station, a stage. For some it was a permanent home, for others a transient port of call” (73). The greatest effect that this lifestyle had on the movements of Williams’ day, however, is the centrality of the social sphere to the conception of art. Seigel says, “As vanguard movement developed…they took over themes and activities that were rooted in Bohemia, identifying art as much with the life of the artist as with the production of special objects, and transforming artistic practice in ways that made the dramatizations of a personal Gill 35 relationship to society ever more central to it” (295). Wilson looks at the effect bohemia had on visitors to the city and the reciprocal effect those visitors had on Bohemia. The spectacle becomes inseparable from the tourists, travelers, and expatriates who gathered in the districts of Montmatre and Montparnasse, where previously “Bohemia” seemed to lie on the outskirts of the city, attracting only those citizens who made an impact within that small sphere. Now Americanism became implicated in the who’s who spectacle of

Paris and attributed it with an importance that it had not previously attained.

By looking Williams’ own trip to Europe, we can see how Evans’ disapproving response to the social scenarios surrounding him gets shaped. The actions of Williams’ compatriots were devoid of art, which is the side of Paris Williams presents to readers in

Pagany. During his own journey, Williams critiqued his compatriots’ aloof attitude toward writing and their affected lifestyle which they equated with art. For example, during an evening out at the Soirée de Paris with McAlmon, Bryher, and H.D., Williams

“couldn’t shake his self-conscious awkwardness, watching the American expatriates trying to outdo each other and the French with their affected ennui and indifference”

(Mariani 236). Williams realized that the social distance many of his compatriots secured from their inspirations would be ineffective for his efforts. Likewise, in Williams’ novel, where many Americans had sheltered themselves in drawing rooms, bookstores, and coffee shops in order to take to the task of writing, Evans finds a need to penetrate the buffer his compatriots placed between their inspiration and their art.

We discover that the spectacle of Paris goes against Evans’ aims as a writer:

“Evans was a man who enjoyed writing. He wrote because he loved it and he wrote eagerly, to be doing well something which he had a taste for, and for this only did he Gill 36 write. As far as wishing to advance his acquaintanceship by his writing, or to advance himself, it never entered his mind” (42). Yet this is what his friends wish to do for him.

Jack Murry,10 Evans’ compatriot and friend, attempts to establish Evans in Montmartre.

Evans respects Murry because of his strengths as a writer. Evans and Murry even had a goal to establish a new American form of writing, but the supper scene in Pagany distances him from his friend. At the Dome, Jack points out various celebrities and explains their “various degrees of distinction, success, despondency; rich, starving, lewd or whatever it might be” (40). These exercises in name-dropping are at complete odds with Evans’ aims as a writer. We recognize that Evans “wanted to write—that was all, and not to have written, but to be writing. He got his whisky that way, he got all he ever got from that. To be feeling it in his mind and his fingers as it flowed out. And there in secret he lived” (15). While, initially, it made no difference to Evans that Murry had not written anything as of yet, by the end of the night he asks his friend, “Why don’t you do something?,” a stab at Murry’s idleness as a writer. The sense of alienation Evans feels pervades much of Paris for him; in Paris, away from the streets, Evans is forced to inhabit social circles and act as if he were a writer as opposed to enacting the process of writing, a difference that may have seemed subtle to many of his compatriots, but proves to be the deciding factor in his need to leave. On his way to Carcassonne, Evans thinks, “Thank

God, Paris was behind,” but this has little to do with his appreciation for the city and its tradition of flânerie and more to do with his inability to sustain the artistic roles vital to the flâneur.

10 Jack Murry is likely a figure representative of Robert McAlmon, Williams’ younger friend who he met in Paris during his travels overseas. Gill 37

Moving away from Paris, the novel focuses on the American traveler’s movement into and through various European cultures, and how that movement relates to one’s interests in love, one’s national identity, and one’s theories of art. The two latter issues are those of most concern for my purposes because they are the issues that diverge conceptually from what we might deem as, comprehensively, the expatriate experience.

The emerging non-national identity11 of Williams’ protagonist (perhaps reflecting

Williams’ uncertainty about American writing and its prospects in Europe), and the

character’s direct analyses of how European culture would affect that identity, are at the

core of the novel. For Williams, his protagonist’s experiences are part of his own self-

construction as a writer. They demonstrate his beliefs fundamental to American

expatriation. Williams’ stance, as critics have supposed, seems to have been fairly clear.

Peter Brooker states, from Williams’ viewpoint, that “It was a mistake for American

artists to imitate France when they should seek a comparable identity of their own” (52).

This statement still holds true when we look at the artist’s and protagonist’s need to

encounter the continent in order to move beyond France. Of course, the author could

have constructed a new identity in America comparable to that of France, but by taking

the task to other areas of Europe, Williams is making this identity specific to expatriation.

At this point in time, neither A Farewell to Arms nor Tender is the Night, the seminal

works dealing with modern accounts of expatriate life east of Paris had been published.

Many of the possibilities for expatriate Europe had yet to be explored because Europe,

away from its metropolitan hubs of London and Paris was somewhat undocumented from

an American standpoint.

11 Evans is American but does not claim this nationality by the novel’s end. He, rather, eludes any strict adherence to an American or European allegiance. Gill 38

The move away from Paris allows Williams to utilize the Baudelairean figure in ways that seem tailored to his approach to art. This reappropriation of the flâneur goes

against some of the tenets later set forth by scholars such as Benjamin. For Benjamin “it

is not foreigners, but they themselves, the Parisians, who have made Paris the promised

land of the flâneur” (The Arcades Project 417). Yet, even Baudelaire recognized that

flânerie could be taken up elsewhere, as he made readily apparent in his friendship with

Poe and his translation of “Man of the Crowd.” For Baudelaire, the act wasn’t

specifically about national inheritance as much as it was about rendering art from

inspiration that had become fugitive with the structuralization of modernity. Modern

Paris, distinguished by the prominence of commerce, led to the privatization of city

dwellers and Williams takes this idea with him as he constructs his chapters on Genoa

and Vienna. He depicts what can happen to a city impoverished of culture with the decay

of urban centers of the city, as is the case with Vienna:

[T]here was more than that of neglect about the city. Few motor cars were

running, the stores were empty—the people themselves seemed subdued,

impoverished. Taxis were scarce. Everyone rode upon the street cars and most

who rode were of the laboring class. There was no flash, no aristocratic flash

anywhere, no jauntiness. It was perhaps more the lack of this than anything else

that impressed Evans so unfavorably (Pagany 140).

The commentary underlying the juxtaposition of Vienna with Paris is that the city’s spark can fade if its citizens come to identify too strongly with its structures. The same can be said about the artist rendering the city in an era of high capitalism. The artist’s personal approach to the city—seeing the city’s structures through the veil of the crowd—is at risk Gill 39 when that vision is from the perspective of the consumer-citizen. Like Aragon, Breton, and Soupault, Williams’ contemporaries, Williams sees that his writing must transcend the boundaries of the specific milieu in order to avoid the risks present therein. To remain in Paris would paradoxically contradict Baudelairean tropes of flânerie— movement as the means to expose and exploit the issues of his day and distancing as agency of the artist—but Wiliams revises those tropes in his work because of the changes that have taken place in Paris from an American standpoint. Williams’ American flâneur isn’t an artist distinctly implicated in the happenings of the city because the flâneur-like qualities of Evans are more tangential than those Benjamin seeks to uphold. Williams takes the traits that maintain the original drive of the figure, but is able to make them reflect Evans’ position in so doing. Nietzsche’s definition of a wanderer equates nicely with Evans’ mindset in moving beyond the structures that had to this point been vital to the figure of the flâneur:

He who has attained to only some degree of freedom of mind cannot feel other

than a wanderer on the earth—though not as a traveler to a final destination: for

this destination does not exist. But he will watch and observe and keep his eyes

open to see what is really going on in the world; for this reason he may not let his

heart adhere too firmly to any individual thing; within him too there must be

something wandering that takes pleasure in change and transcience (203).

In this manner, Evans is keeping his mind open to the possibilities that present themselves with travel, whether they be in terms of improvisation or inspiration. The focus here is not on how Evans directly exposes dilemmas present in the art of his Gill 40 compatriots, but with regard to his self construction and how the flâneur’s mindset renders this mobility through spaces and images fruitful for his work.

The process of travel is much richer than simply sightseeing because the expatriate traveler is in many ways still indebted to the flâneur of the city in his enterprise. For the flâneur of the city, “crushed by the architecture, stifled by the crowd and ignored by the unsophisticated aggregate of his contemporaries, his neighbors, even his readers, he can, in the company of passing and recurring figures whom he recognizes and covets—children, ragpickers, prostitutes, and drunks—enjoy his rejection from society” (Blanchard 100). Looking through the veil of Europe, Evans can experience desolation that comes from distancing oneself from one’s compatriots. Evans surrounds himself with women who are opposed to America and/or the idea of living in America, while he knows that he will eventually return. He also engages cities that appear in opposition to the comfort of Paris. In a town just before Marseilles, Evans and his companion Lou feel like they are a thousand miles from the world, “from Paris,” and we learn that the “streets of the town were desolate. The stores were dark, dead. The lovers looked down one narrow alleyway. It seemed an emanation from some impossible world” (53-4). Similarly, in Genoa, Evans sees nobody in the streets and wonders if he is traveling in the right direction. At this moment he feels dead, “yet his limbs, endlessly weary, would not lie down” (54). He thinks to himself, “Darkness and despair: These are my home. Here I have always retreated when I was beaten, to lie and breed with myself”

(93). Like, the city flâneur, this sense of alienation from physical surroundings allows him to explore what is unexplored in himself. He can plumb the depths of his conscious in order to render his trials fruitful for writing. This act reminds Evans that his journey is Gill 41

an individual one, especially in the sense that writing is the immediate goal, along with

documenting his experiences from an authorial point of view. The distance Evans travels

separates him from the Paris of his contemporaries, and it maintains that keen awareness

of artistic inspiration.

We can see the hyper-awareness of Baudelaire’s flâneur reflected in Evans. For

Baudelaire, the spleen was a state of consciousness that the poet underwent in the city

because of the shock of modernity. The spleen is arresting in the sense that it allows for the walker to undergo a state of full consciousness, but it is also productive in the sense that it engages the phantasmagoric aspects of the city that could lead to the citizen’s paralysis. The citizen of modern Paris is always at risk of becoming a commodity or a

“type” to be characterized and categorized in the collective consciousness. Baudelaire’s

spleen is a defense for this: “In the spleen, time becomes palpable; the minutes cover a

man like snowflakes. This time is outside of history, as is that of the mémoire

involontaire. But in the spleen the perception of time is supernaturally keen; every

second finds consciousness ready to intercept its shock” (“On Some Motifs” 184). The

poet is combative in this sense, which is important for Williams’ protagonist as he travels

to the heart of uncertainty. In Baudelaire, the engagement with modernity leads to the

creative process. Benjamin says, “[Baudelaire] speaks of a duel in which the artist, just

before being beaten, screams in fright. This duel is the creative process itself. Thus

Baudelaire placed the shock of experience at the very center of his artistic work” (163).

As Benjamin tells us, the connection between the masses and shock is inextricable. The

shock of modernity engaged Baudelaire’s creativity and forced him to write about the

problems he was experiencing firsthand as he observed the masses. For Evans it is not so Gill 42 much the masses as it is some reality underneath the structures that he must extract as an artist. We see this in Pagany in Rome, which is significant because this is the most ancient city the writer encounters, but even Rome cannot remain unaffected by modernity.

Evans is in a splenetic state in Rome, a state which directly relates to his process as a writer. Like Baudelaire, shock becomes directly related to creativity for Evans. The narrator describes Evans’ need to write in Rome:

At home, in the pension, sullen and lonely—beaten by his oppressive thoughts—

he sat down and began to write. It was in Rome, in fact, during these days, that he

most made [a partner] of his writing—that desire to free himself from his

besetting reactions by transcribing them—thus driving off his torments and going

often quietly to sleep thereafter (108-9).

In this description, the narrator describes the relationship between writing and the tranquil effect it has on Evans. Writing out of necessity, Evans is able to finally go to sleep. In his descriptions of Rome, he wants to capture everything so not to leave anything out that would lessen his vision of it. He “confuses his least important thrill of the moment with permanence, wants to omit no word, no small itch—in his desire to be explicit, to catch it—fleeting past (thus he writes in a fever of impatience). Reality he sees under the lacquer of to-day” (109). Each word becomes of the utmost importance as he attempts to get at what is real underneath the phantasmagoria of today. For him, “to create is to shoot a clarity through the oppressing, obsessing murk of the world,” which is not avoidable even in Rome (116). Gill 43

By engaging these shocks of consciousness, Evans is able to reflect on his own position and its relation to his movement away from Paris and other Americans. Evans’ nationality thus cannot be extracted from the shock of modernity. As a traveler, Evans encounters places unknown to the American expatriate of Paris, all the time considering their relation to his subject position as an American. Travel provides the distance necessary for Evans to reflect on the life in Paris that he is leaving behind with bigger concern for his Americanism, which is at stake in the entire journey. These two issues, which seem somewhat dissociated at times bear upon each other at the core of the novel.

Williams was attempting to shed light on the vortex that Europe presented. This required taking those themes central to authorship, insofar as they concerned travel, so that the writer could approach new countries in such a way that he could isolate material for art, analyze it, document it, and eventually make it manifest on paper. The first step in the enunciative process which Evans enacts is that of walking. When Evans sets himself down to his profession at the Villa St. Denis, he also makes it a point to explore his surroundings with his then companion Lou. We learn that “Each day it would be something new to be done or seen” (71). Juxtaposed with the leisure of his contemporaries in Paris, at this early moment in the trip, Evans cannot differentiate between his down time and time used to procure knowledge about the countryside. For de Certeau, “Walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects, etc., the trajectories it ‘speaks’” (99). These qualities of walking lend themselves to the poet/traveler of Evans. In fact, Williams presents a work where flânerie is more specific

than walking in the sense that it deals specifically with travel in relation to the shock of

experience of modernity that Baudelaire explored. Gill 44

The movement to Rome allows for the expatriate to experience a sense of freedom that he had heretofore been unable to attain because of his close proximity to other expatriate circles of Paris. Evans experiences a new sense of life in relation to the city of Rome that he had not felt in the expatriate capital of Europe. Because of this vivacity around him, he feels “a quiet happiness beginning far off” (112). He feels certain pressures loosening, and part of the reason is that he is able to make some sense of his position as an expatriate by moving away from the only expatriate world he had known after visiting Europe three times in his life. Evans grasps the reasons why Paris is disagreeable to him. The central reason is the purposelessness of many of his compatriots’ motives for traveling. Many made the journey to no end, both in their writing and their attempts to escape something, and found that they couldn’t again return home. This forces him to explore his own reasons for travel—“he was in Rome, in Rome while passing back to the point of his departure” (116). The city takes him back to the outset of his journey, as if the beginning of it and the furthest point traveled are necessary in discovering what separates him from the many other Americans settled on the continent. Evans recognizes that “Paris…yes, for some it was a way. Not for him”(115).

The separation between Evans and his compatriots’ is Evans need to write and the fact that writing defines him, not any national inheritance. Evans speaks to this point by saying, “The place of my birth is the place where the word begins”(116). By enacting the processes of creativity derived from the flâneur but distinct from Paris, Evans is able to

finally come to terms with his motives for travel and their relation to his craft.

The problem that arises at this point in the novel is that the American traveler

cannot sustain a life devoid of obligation. In many ways, what allowed Evans to walk out Gill 45

from behind the American expatriate’s shadow was his need to undertake some

responsibility, but this was a responsibility to himself as an artist. Now, after satiating his

imagination and writing some initial thoughts, Evans is presented with the task of making

sense of what he has passed through. Leaving Rome, Evans realizes that “there was little

antiquity left for his labor,” and in Venice he speaks of the “uselessness of beauty” (127,

128). Clearly, these responses are concerned with the imminent return to his first

profession, to publishing, to America.12 Vienna, the location of the medical conference and one of the reasons why Evans has traveled, reminds the writer of the stagnation that is an unavoidable part of the creative process. Evans has to fund his first love of writing through a profession in which “he had no intimates among its members,” similar to how the Baudelaire’s flâneur had to retire every evening to his room to write down all that he encountered in the streets (148); the traveler has to once again return to the world that he was attempting to escape in order to render his experiences fruitful. In Vienna, Evans sees coffee houses that are similar to those in Paris, where men and women sat “as if never intending to move,” alluding to the importance Paris will once again have to his journey, despite his need to break away from the American culture taking place there

(141).

At this point in the novel, Paris comes as a relief to his journey to the center of the continent and the digression in Vienna, which entails his profession, not necessarily his passion. Despite Williams need to expose the problems that the Parisian milieu posed to his expatriate aims, he recognizes why it remains important in his development as a writer. While Paris may not be the ideal city for Williams to set up residence, Paris is the place from which he is able to arrive on his European journey and again depart. The city

12 The third section of the book is entitled The Return as well. Gill 46 marks a temporary intersection between the realms of America and Europe. Paris is a precise point of engagement and departure with the continent, and consequently it serves as stable ground in his journey. Paris stands in as a reminder that the journey across

Europe is not an end in itself, but relates to the greater purpose of the writer’s self construction. The same can be said about what it represented in the author’s life. If the end product is writing, and to a greater extent, the character’s self construction within that writing, then Paris serves as a reminder that as the writer once set out, he would again need to return and at that point make sense of what he had just gone through. In

Mariani’s words:

It would, [Williams] knew, take years to map the geographic and psychological

terrain he’d just tracked through. It would all need to be assimilated, evaluated,

made part of the imagination. But to do that he would need the more familiar

perspective of Rutheford and America. In short and in spite of everything, he

would need the necessary vantage of the one place he could still call home (241).

In this manner, Paris comes to signify the inevitability of a return to America within the novel. Just as it represented a need for Evans to break away from the overwhelming grasp the city held on its American writers, it too represents the utility Evans has in making a new space for himself as a writer by playing with established notions of expatriation.

The different experiences Evans undertakes complicates our typical notion of expatriation. As with Williams’ friend McAlmon, or even Pound in the earlier years of his life, the expatriate can be viewed as an emigrant with allegiances to his or her native land, in this case America. The emigrant was also expected to contribute to the culture of Gill 47 the city, province, and/or nation in making his or her home there. Bradbury says of

1920’s Paris, “Arriving Americans were no longer naïve spirits from a safe simple world, but critical bearers of the message of change” (340). In making their permanent or not- so-permanent residences in the city, these expatriates affected Paris as much as the locals.

Williams’ fictional encounter with Europe throws off these conventional notions of expatriation, seeing as his protagonist never settles in a city long enough to contribute to the cultural complexity of it. Williams’ actual encounter with Europe did provide him with the raw material from which to construct Pagany, but he, like Evans, struggles to actually make his experience one that is widely read. Evans’ sister says, “You don’t care about success. No, because you don’t even know what success is—[America] has tainted you so” (241). Williams struggled with promoting his efforts after his journey to Europe, apologizing for what he considered merely an attempt at a novel. Yet, the point that we need to consider is that this journey made on its own terms opens up new ways to view expatriation as it relates to authorship.

Evans never limits himself to culturally prescribed notions of what it means to be an American or to be an American expatriate, which is why the return in his journey is important. Based on his account of the American expatriate experience, he does not need to provide a choice between the bohemian circles of Paris13 or the unexplored antiquity of central Europe. Where he will reside is unclear, and that seems to be precisely the point.

In Paris, Evans states “I can never be at home here…there is a deep loss in me that comes of my inheritance. Years ago I was lost—I am not of this club” (240). Yet, neither does he claim America as his homeland. He goes on to say that he belongs to the sea. This

13 Evans’ sister berates him for never “shelling away at the core” like other inhabitants of Paris and the expatriates who emulate them. She points out Evans’ faults as a writer to Gill 48

reference to the sea, an allusion back to the opening of the book and a reference that

foreshadows its end, reinforces the notion that Evans does not have a home per se.

Brooker relates this issue directly to Williams’ purpose in writing the novel: “To bring a

different eye to writing meant seeing America differently. At stake was the idea of

modern writing and cognate national or transnational identity; what it meant, in other

words, to be an American or European author, or a third thing somewhere in between”

(51).

Williams did, we know, question whether or not he should set up his practice on

the outskirts of Paris and make a home of it14 (Mariani 239). In the limited account of his

experiences within the novel, Williams offers the impossibility of truly choosing a place

to call home. As Evans approaches America, he notes that “this is the beginning.” These

two realms of his life seem still to exist in isolation of each other, but this leaves us with

the notion that he can again return to Europe, see the continent anew, and make it a part

of his own self-construction. The real testament to Williams’ work is that he left open

this possibility for other Americans to follow. With Pagany, no longer was Europe solely regarded as a place where elite American artists gathered, but the work established

Europe as a continent which allowed for the expatriate experience of individual exploration, especially as that experience related to writing.

14 Mariani tells us that a week before Williams and his wife Floss left Europe behind, he thought about making a life of it there. He says “After all, wasn’t this the real world? The virus had hit him too.” Gill 49

CHAPTER IV: CONCLUSION

Williams uses the flâneur to provide a framework for his novel, and simultaneously draws a parallel to the figure some seventy years later. In this way,

Baudelaire’s figure very much acts as the driving force of his novel when there is perhaps little moving it along. The travelogue-like approach and circular nature of the journey seem to suggest that Williams’ aims were tenuous in relating some of his journey as a work of fiction. As Brooker says, “At one level, as this tells us, Williams didn’t know for sure what direction he was going in, until this novel and the writing contemporary to it told him” (53). Williams seems to be attempting to do so much in Pagany that perhaps his writing of the novel was the only way to make sense of his experiences, and he has so many ends in mind that the readers have been somewhat confused in pinpointing those specific goals. Yet, this study should tell us otherwise.

The fact that Williams brings the figure of the flâneur to the fore of his novel yields important results for us analyses on the expatriate experience in Paris. Firstly, we can better conceive of how Williams’ self construction in these vignettes depicts a new

American experience in Europe. Interestingly enough, while many of his compatriots saw themselves as successors of Baudelaire and the Paris that he envisioned in his poetry,

Williams proves to be as, and in most cases more, indebted to Baudelaire than his countrymen and women. Williams, an American with long standing roots in Rutheford,

New Jersey, positioned as a writer against the European tradition of art, and devoutly

American throughout his eighty year existence, makes us rethink what it means to engage new approaches to art in a foreign country without firmly rooting oneself there. Gill 50

Secondly, and most importantly, Williams reaffirms the close connection between writing and travel. The key to reading Pagany has less to do with understanding the ins

and outs of the author’s life than it does to understanding the performative nature of the

text. The figure of Evans is performing acts of writing through his travel, showing the

inseparability between his travels and the creative process of his work taking place at that

time. Evans appears to have few goals set out for himself at the outset of his journey,

which can be disconcerting for readers attempting to follow the logic of his movement,

but, through his actions, Evans is clear on what should be entailed in the expatriate

experience. By reading Evans as an artist, and recognizing the close connection between

his devotion to art and the figure of the flâneur, readers will find that Evans’ journey is

explorative in nature. If readers can approach Pagany with this in mind, they can then

appreciate the process of writing taking place within the text and its close connection to

the cities and countryside the author inhabits, because this is the purpose of Williams’

novel. By no means will Williams’ first fictional work achieve classic status in expatriate

literature, but it serves (and will continue to serve) as a document on an individual’s

attempt to write in a foreign locale while taking in all the sensory data that comes with

the intricate process of experiencing new cultures. Gill 51

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