Arts & Letters IMPROVISED EUROPEANS: We forget how young. We remember American Literary Expatriates Pound as the remote and deranged old man and the Siege of London. who had favored the Fascists, not as a prod- By Alex Zwerdling. Basic. uct of Idaho and Hamilton College and the 425 pp. $35 University of Pennsylvania. James and Eliot Europe barely registers on our cultural linger in our minds as they were in their radar these days, but there was a time when seniority, grave, oracular, marmoreal. But all it would have filled the entire screen. three were still in their twenties when their Politically and culturally, the United States work began to win critical attention. Eliot spent the 19th century in Europe’s shadow. published “The Love Song of J. Alfred To England especially, America was the bois- Prufrock” at 27 and “The Waste Land” at 34, terous, untutored rebel, the offspring per- after it had been revised and shaped by the ceived as something of an embarrassment. barely older Pound. In his mid-thirties James But by the early 20th century, the upstart wrote The American, The Europeans, and had become mighty, a cultur- Daisy Miller. al achiever in its own right, They all aspired to separa- and the imperial parent was tion from their American ori- tottering. gins and association with the Zwerdling, a professor of superior European culture. English at Berkeley, portrays They wanted to be placeless this grand reversal through cosmopolites who could the personal encounters move with facility among the with England and the literatures and traditions of Continent of four great the world, their work free of figures in American mere national affiliation. literary life—Henry Adams, “The birth of Anglo- Henry James, Ezra Pound, American modernism as a and T. S. Eliot. The four fall self-conscious movement,” into two roughly contempo- writes Zwerdling, “owes a raneous pairs, and their col- great deal to the overlap (and lective lives extend from the the shared assumptions) of first half of the 19th century these displaced Americans.” to the second half of the James M. Barrie (left) and But they achieved their cos- 20th. The concatenation is Henry James in London, 1910 mopolitanism at a price. The striking: Adams and James youthful genius released by were friends; late in his life, immersion in the foreign James knew Pound; Pound was a friend and yielded eventually to regret. The recovery of creative adviser to the young Eliot. their origins and of what they had forgone Derived from a letter of Adams to James, became for them “a necessary act of self-pos- the term “improvised Europeans” is used to session.” What Zwerdling says of James hints characterize a particular type of mid-19th- at the common loss: “As he reflects on his century American, “molded by Boston, own life and those of artists who have made Harvard, and Unitarianism,” and “brought similar choices, he becomes aware that the up in irritable dislike of America.” dream of his youth—to write about, and for, a Zwerdling employs the term in a more cosmopolitan world in which the issue of his expansive sense for his literary expatriates, national identity is unproblematic—has not who felt compelled to come to terms with been realized. He has had to settle for less, themselves, their talents, and their ambitions much less.” by moving to Europe. Adams was mature Zwerdling mixes social and cultural histo- when he lived for a time in Paris and ry, literary criticism, and biography in expert London, but the others were young when measure to construct an absorbing narrative they went abroad and had their imaginations of these divided lives. He draws on the major fired by the Old World. published works as well as on letters and 104 WQ Summer 1998 journals and unpublished materials, and he assignments in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. It is always agile in controlling the disparate is sometimes enlivened by blow-by-blow sources. When he turns to the human con- accounts of libel suits and literary feuds, sequences of his characters’ decisions to and there are humorous moments. Invited stand apart, the book even manages an effect to Senegal to speak on breast-feeding, rarely associated with academic criticism Waugh discovers after weeks of research these days: it becomes moving. that the invitation had been misheard; the —James M. Morris subject of his talk was to be not breast-feed- ing but press freedom. Because the speech WILL THIS DO?: was to be in French, Waugh could not even An Autobiography. describe the misunderstanding to his audi- By Auberon Waugh. Carroll & ence, “since ‘la liberté de la Presse’ bears no Graf. 288 pp. $24 resemblance to ‘le nourrisson naturel des Each week in London’s Spectator and bébés.’ ” Sunday Telegraph, 59-year-old Auberon Slapped together out of the 1991 English Waugh writes battle dispatches from the los- edition, the book is full of anachronisms— ing side of the class war, praising such van- not just dead people referred to in the pre- ishing upper-class folkways as fox hunting, sent tense, but thematic anachronisms as ethnic slurs, and drunk driving. The author well. Here, as in his columns, the British of five novels, he appears frequently as a tele- class system obsesses Waugh. Will This Do? vision pundit, edits the monthly Literary catalogues, ad nauseam, his and his friends’ Review, and writes regularly on wine. But his houses and pedigrees, and laments the own writing has not proved a vintage that shiftiness of the working classes. The near- travels well. While Waugh is among the decade since the book first appeared has best-known right-wing men of letters in seen the rise of televised politics and the Britain, foreigners know him, if at all, only as collapse of the Tory Party, changes that the eldest son of novelist Evelyn Waugh have corroded the class system in ways no (1903–1966). workers’ party could ever have dreamed of. “Being the son of Evelyn Waugh was a The world Waugh lovingly chronicles here considerable advantage in life,” Waugh not only holds little appeal for the notes, with some overstatement. For all of American reader; it’s of waning relevance Evelyn’s friends who helped Auberon (John in Britain too. Betjeman, Graham Greene), there were —Christopher Caldwell plenty of others who stood in his way (Anthony Powell, Cyril Connolly). Evelyn THE DREAMS OUR STUFF IS himself had little interest in family life, tak- MADE OF: How Science Fiction ing meals alone in the library when his Conquered the World. children were home from boarding school, By Thomas M. Disch. Free Press. and, “with undisguised glee,” holding lavish 272 pp. $25 parties to celebrate their departures. When In the late 1960s, science fiction was divid- rationing was lifted just after World War II, ed into two warring camps. The Old Wave the government promised every child in wanted the genre to continue following the Britain a banana—a legendary treat. traditions established by Isaac Asimov, Robert Neither Auberon nor his two sisters had Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke, depicting sci- ever eaten one. On the evening the three entific advances and their human conse- bananas arrived, his mother placed all of quences. The New Wave, by contrast, wanted them before Evelyn, who wolfed them SF (which they maintained stood for “specu- down with cream and (heavily rationed) lative fiction”) to raise its standards and aspire sugar. “From that moment,” Auberon to become avant-garde literature. The Old writes, “I never treated anything he had to Wave stressed science; the New Wave stressed say on faith or morals very seriously.” fiction. Other than the occasional adventure Thirty years later, it’s hard to tell who (serving with the Royal Horse Guards in won. The best writers—such as Gregory Cyprus, he mishandled a machine gun and Benford, Kim Stanley Robinson, and shot himself six times), this autobiography Stephen Baxter—produce high-quality fic- largely chronicles Waugh’s free-lance tion that’s scientifically accurate, satisfying Books 105.