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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.

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