! ! ! QUEER AMERICAN EXPATRIATE WRITERS IN FRANCE AND THE BIRTH OF THE GAY MODERNIST SUBJECT BY CHASE FOSTER DIMOCK DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature with a minor in Gender and Women’s Studies in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2014 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Nancy Blake, Chair Professor Dale Bauer Professor Emeritus Cary Nelson Professor Kathryn Bond Stockton, University of Utah ABSTRACT This dissertation is a comprehensive critical history of forgotten or neglected queer American writers in the international expatriate community in France who used their time in the French mainland and colonies to construct early narratives of gay identity. This project argues that French literature and art, which had already articulated discourses and paradigms of queer sexuality through writers like Proust, Gide, and Colette, and French cultural spaces in which a vibrant underground queer culture was present, were integral to the imagination of American gay identity and culture in the early to mid 20th century. This dissertation contends that through modernist French and European philosophies and literary movements such as surrealism, psychoanalysis, orientalism, and existentialism, queer American writers were able to imagine and express queer identity and desire in ways previously unspeakable in an American context. By considering unpublished manuscripts from the archives and reevaluating overlooked queer- themed works from the Lost Generation era through the 50s in France, this study uses this new history of queer writers in France to explore the wide range of queer expression in pre-Stonewall American literature before it would eventually be consolidated under the term “gay.” ! ii! Dedicated to the Memory of Dr. Lawrence Schehr ! iii! ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible without the generous support, guidance and resources of many people. I want to first and foremost thank my dissertation director, Dr. Nancy Blake, who not only advised me through every step on the dissertation process, but who also has been there for me as a student since my very first day of class at the University of Illinois. I would also like to thank Dr. Dale Bauer and Dr. Cary Nelson, members of my committee from the English department who have so magnanimously devoted time, intellect, and personal care to my maturation as a scholar of American Literature. They treated me like one of their own. Dr. Kathryn Bond Stockton, the final member of my committee deserves a huge debt of gratitude for stepping in to fill the place of the late Dr. Lawrence Schehr. Her intellectual generosity and knowledge of lgbt studies were incalculably important not only to the content of my study, but also to my emotional state after the loss of Dr. Schehr. I am especially grateful for the 7 years of support from my fellow graduate students in the Program in Comparative and World Literature whose constant friendship and openness to creative and intellectual thought greatly expanded the possibilities of my research and confidence as an educator. Last, but certainly not least, I recognize and appreciate the immense support, love, and guidance supplied by my family: my mother and father who have supported my entire academic career with their own hard work and insistence that I pursue my dreams, my brother and sister who have always been there for me as peers, and my four grandparents who have nurtured my intellect and soul since I was an infant. ! iv! TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION....................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 2: HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXT.....................................................19 CHAPTER 3: ROBERT MCALMON..........................................................................................88 CHAPTER 4: CHARLES HENRI FORD...................................................................................161 CHAPTER 5: PAUL BOWLES .................................................................................................228 CHAPTER 6: FRITZ PETERS....................................................................................................283 CHAPTER 7: CONCLUSION....................................................................................................367 REFERENCES ...........................................................................................................................372 ! v! CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION In her short story “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene” from 1922, Gertrude Stein is widely credited as the first American author to use the word “gay” to refer to a specifically homosexual relationship. Based on a lesbian couple Stein knew in France, the woodblock artists Ethel Mars and Maud Hunt Squire, Miss Furr and Miss Skeene find happiness with one another as they cultivate their voices together in Paris (Stone 2002). That the very first American fiction to express homosexual romance as “gay” was written by an expatriate in France about artists who were able to realize homosexual desire and develop as artists in Paris speaks to how the American expatriate movement in France helped shaped the evolution of gay identity and queer literature in America over the 20th century. In true Stein fashion, she repeats the word “gay” countless times, exploring every possible connotation of the word and the dynamics of the queer relationship it described: They were in a way both gay there where there were many cultivating something. They were both regular in being gay there. Helen Furr was gay there, she was gayer and gayer there and really she was just gay there, she was gayer and gayer there, that is to say she found ways of being gay there that she was using in being gay there. She was gay there, not gayer and gayer, just gay there, that is to say she was not gayer by using the things she found there that were gay things, she was gay there, always she was gay there. (564) Unlike her birthplace in Oakland, California which she famously dismissed saying, “there is no there there,” there was a “there” in France—a place where people could be “gay there”. Not only could one be gay there and “find ways of being gay there”, one could cultivate a voice there in order to speak one’s gayness and one could do “gay things” there. Published in the same year as 1 the expatriation of the first author profiled in my study, Robert McAlmon, Stein’s five pages on cultivating a gay voice in a space where one could be gay is an invitation to all other expatriates to come and find their own gay space, gay voice, and gay things to do in France. Stein’s repetition only subtly hints at the gays things in France with the slight variations in connotation, yet at its theoretical core, she illustrates the backbone of my dissertation argument: France provided a space where Americans could cultivate a gay voice using modernist innovations in literary form and cull inspiration from the different style of living that French culture offered. While Gertrude Stein has made her way into the canon, and over the last few decades scholarship on other lesbian, American expatriates such as Djuna Barnes, Natalie Clifford Barney, and H.D. could fill a library, similar attention has not been paid to the gay American men of the expatriate movement in France. In this dissertation, I synthesize a critical literary history of queer American expatriate writers in France during the interwar period. This critical history explores a period of American queer writing during which the now common discourse, culture, and politics of gay identity in America had yet to exist or were in a state of becoming. Thus, a great part of this study is devoted to the question of where and how queer literary expression among American modernists found inspiration, conceptual models, archetypes, and literary conceits for imagining the kinds of queer desire and sexual identities that coalesced around the culture of “gay” in the second half of the 20th century. Queer writers of this era were particularly inventive because they had to formulate language to express facets of same-sex desire and gender non-conformity that come today nearly prefabricated with specific terminology and a canon of literature and art to which contemporary generations look to inform and navigate gay identity. 2 Modernism as a literary movement provided an innovative method of writing that allowed for queer writers to express desire and depict the extravagant spectacle of the gay culture in forms that illustrated the changing face of the modern world through prose and poetry that defied conventions of form, temporality, and subject matter. Modernist art and modern culture had a mutualistic relationship—new forms of expression were invented to represent new and emerging cultural identities while individuals emerging into these evolving cultures (be it the gay community, the urban migration of African Americans to the North, or the influx of immigrant populations) looked to modernist innovation to inform and define one’s self and community. In Gay New York, George Chauncey refers to the “fairy” of this interwar era, a gay man who combined signifiers of masculinity and femininity on his body, as a bricoleur—a skilled appropriator of clothing, behaviors, and language from a variety of cultures and classes cobbled together to formulate an identity that expressed his gender and sexual