SOPHISTICATES ABROAD

...Charged with treason for pro-Fascist radio broadcasts from Italy during World War II, he was judged psychotic and spent twelve years in a Washington hospital for the criminally insane...

...So did the eight books James published in England between 1877 and 1879: During the 1878-79 season, James dined out 140 times...

...That America should surpass England in wealth and power was bad enough...

...He wrote poetry, but did not think much of it until he met Ezra Pound, who informed his new protege that he was sensational...

...His father admonished him that Europe "unfitted Americans for America," and young Henry admitted as much after his first London year: "Three more years of this, and I shall never pass my life in America, nor permanently anywhere else...

...During the next twenty-four years, he would be abroad more often than not, roaming the world with a pied-a-terre in Paris...

...By 1920, T.S...

...it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach...

...Louis in 1953, he honored the achievements of Poe, Whitman, and Twain, and declared that it was Americans—Pound, Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, E.E...

...English sympathy for the Confederacy infuriated the younger Adams, and he gloated over Union triumphs...

...Henry Adams (1838-1918), grandson and great-grandson of American presidents, served in London during the Civil War as private secretary to his father (whom Lincoln had appointed to represent the United States...

...The American response to such English criticism often struck a plaintive note, but by the end of the nineteenth century, Americans had become more confident in their defiance...

...After unhappy sojourns in Paris, New York, and Rome, he found in London the home he had been looking for...

...It is on these writers that Zwerdling concentrates his impressive new study in comparative national temperament, the history of taste, and literary ambition...

...One knows that they are the dominant people and that they are against all delicate things...

...It is only magnificent...

...or looks at an American picture or statue...

...Eliot, whom Pound had discovered and launched, worried that all British doors had been closed to Pound...

...And while the real English sniffed and pronounced him "overdone with manner," William Carlos Williams assailed Eliot for walking out on his native literature: Abandoning "the western dialect," Eliot had undermined the efforts of American poets...

...Americans reviled the one and the English dismissed the other, both regarding James as an outsider...

...Early in his career, James made his subject the contrast between Americans and Europeans, and, Zwerdling notes, the hallmark of such novels as Roderick Hudson is their "ethnological typecasting": Americans of resplendent innocence collide with worldly Europeans whose morals are smudged at best...

...The presence of "large undigested lumps of foreign races" was what made him gag...

...Matthew Arnold, who visited in 1883, found Americans wanting in "awe and respect...

...Ezra Pound and T.S...

...Pound planted himself in Paris for a few years, then moved on to Italy...

...America was becoming more heterogeneous by the moment...

...Henry Adams and Henry James had already beaten Holmes to the mark...

...The English, who were accustomed to dishing it out, proved ungracious about having to take it...

...And yet, despite his early resistance, London eventually won him over...

...But these are minor imperfections in an admirable book about Americans, exquisite in mind and darkened in soul, who yearned for a place they could call home...

...Charles Dickens came to America in 1841, hoping to see democracy in its glory, and went home profoundly disenchanted...

...In 1882, he wrote of his adopted city, "It is not a pleasant place...

...So too, Zwerdling overstates when he contends that James shows that "the moral categories for evaluating people" are "useless...

...He stayed in England six more years, and when he returned to America in 1868, as he wrote in the Education almost fifty years later, "His world was dead...

...There was big talk about "the great ideal of Race Union," as one enthusiast put it...

...In time, the English learned to admire the Americans...

...By almost anyone else's standards, Adams enjoyed remarkable success: Harvard professor, editor of the prestigious North American Review, perhaps America's premier historian and autobiographer, anonymous author of a bombshell political novel called Democracy, potent counselor to Teddy Roosevelt's administration...

...In "American Literature and the American Language," a lecture delivered in St...

...Every "furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the ghetto" was better suited to make his way in this new world...

...And when William Dean Howells extolled James in 1882 as the principal novelist writing in English, the British uproar was deafening...

...When he did return to the United States, it was not by his own will...

...In 1890, "soaked with the kerosene of American ideas and interests," Adams headed off, vowing to return "whenever the nausea leaves me...

...Pound (1885-1972) went to London in 1908 because he wanted to make the biggest splash in the biggest hurry in the place where nobody could miss it...

...moral complication is not moral obliteration...

...that Americans thought they wrote better books was unendurable...

...Still, when he argues that England grew to respect America simply because America became too powerful to belittle, he overlooks democratic changes occurring in England herself...

...Cummings, Hart Crane, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate—who had been the pathbreakers in twentieth-century poetry...

...Henry Adams, who was Arnold's host in Washington, judged him "a melancholy specimen of what England produces at her best...

...When T.S...

...As Oliver Wendell Holmes said in 1887, "The time may come when a New Englander will feel more as if he were among his own people in London than in one of our seaboard cities...

...Indeed, later in life he declared his appreciation of the literature he had left behind...

...Stringent immigration legislation in the early 1920s cut the yearly intake of southern and eastern Europeans from 600,000 to 20,000...

...Eliot would follow...

...The remarkable novels that appeared between 1901 and 1904—The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl— were clearly designed to nobody's specifications but his own, conceding nothing to the taste of Boston or New York or London...

...Algis Valiunas is Greenacres, Florida...

...Pound spoke of himself as an exile: The immigrant hordes that had taken over his former home...

...Americans and Englishmen have always had a knack for getting under one another's skin...

...In 1886, James brought out The Bostonians, a novel about America for American readers, and The Princess Casamassima, a novel about England for English readers...

...He apostrophized one uncomprehending reviewer: "You fungus, you continuous gangrene...

...Americans thought he lampooned his countrymen as rubes and hayseeds...

...But by then, certain delicate spirits had already found their native shores uninhabitable...

...Like Pound, Eliot did not think of America as his...

...Speaking in 1890 at a conference on the subject "Do Americans Hate England?," Andrew Carnegie declared it unthinkable that the richest country in the world, superior in manufacturing, mining, and commerce, should pay England the tribute of envy...

...In 1832, Anthony Trol-lope's mother wrote a bestselling book denouncing Americans as a gang of shoving, shouting, swilling, tobacco-spitting yahoos...

...Yet the brighter he shone, the more contemptuous he became...

...Such noble intransigence was to become the defining feature of literary modernism—although in cases like Ezra Pound's, it's hard to distinguish from insolence or even insanity...

...it was, after all, Americans who existed for English amusement...

...James's renditions of this international theme, which achieved considerable moral complexity in Portrait of a Lady and The Europeans, made a name for him—but to a disturbing number of readers that name was mud...

...Zwerdling's book is rich and convincing...

...His critical study of Hawthorne was greeted with particular horror in America, most notably for the famous list of the dozens of social institutions that James thought a novelist needs and America lacks...

...Nor was there any going back to America...

...Theodore Roosevelt insisted that every married couple of "native American descent" owed it to their country to produce at least four children...

...Trembling but defiant, James determined to write "for one's self alone," as he told James Whistler...

...In The Education of Henry Adams (1918), he remembered himself as "a young man who felt at home in England—more at home there than anywhere else...

...Henry James (1843-1916) was a friend of Adams's, and the letters of introduction Adams provided helped James to enter London literary circles and fashionable society...

...He spoke and wrote the King's English, worked in a distinguished English bank, became a director of a leading English publishing house, wore spats, carried an umbrella perfectly furled, and decked himself out in what Virginia Woolf called his four-piece suit...

...Philosophy and America gave way to poetry and England, where Eliot would spend the rest of his life...

...SOPHISTICATES ABROAD American Writers in London By Algis Valiunas If simply to be an American is "a complex fate," as Henry James once declared, then the fate of an American who chooses to live most of his life in England must be something more than complex—maybe compound complex, like an especially nasty fracture...

...But by the standards of the Adams family, he fell short...

...Henry James remarked that they did not much care for being mocked from the American viewpoint...

...English reviewers objected to the lordliness with which his Americans took command of the Old World...

...It would like to improve if it knew how...

...But it was not distaste for indigenous poetry that drove Eliot away...

...But such talk was already out of date by the time it appeared...

...In 1820, Sydney Smith sneered, "In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book...

...or goes to an American play...

...In 1882, three-quarters of America's immigrants came from northern countries and only about one-eighth from southern and eastern Europe...

...The sociologist Edward Ross warned that "the Caliban type" was defiling the American future...

...but we ought not to be harsh towards the poor little island...

...in 1900, the numbers were nearly reversed...

...The Spanish-American War in 1898 made them proud of the former colony that was about to become an imperial power and do its part in spreading Anglo-Saxon civilization around the world...

...Eliot (1888-1965) arrived in England in 1914, he was a Harvard doctoral student in philosophy, off to spend a year at Oxford...

...In Improvised Europeans: American Literary Expatriates and the Siege of London, Alex Zwerdling, a professor of English at Berkeley, has written a book of uncommon interest about the fate of men like James during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries...

...Writing tirelessly (eight books and a hundred magazine pieces from 1908 to 1914), getting to know everyone sympathetic or useful, and seeing countless friends into print, he took the city by storm...

...They only made matters worse...