Gertrude Stein and Richard Wright: The Poetics and Politics of Modernism

2 Innocents Abroad: Gertrude Stein's Paris France and Richard Wright's Pagan Spain

And so I am an American and I have lived half my life in Paris, not the half that made me but the half in which I made what I made. Gertrude Stein Paris France and Pagan Spain extend our understanding of expatriation as a way for American artists to achieve an aesthetic, emotional , and social distance from their native land. These two texts invite us to think about the other side ofthat distance, Europe in this case, as more than merely a vacuous "euro-world" visible only to the extent that it remains clichéd. To ignore the destination ofthese narratives is to miss too much. For example, Judith Saunders equated Stein's use of Paris in Paris France to Thoreau's use of Waiden Pond in Waiden. Although Stein and Thoreau use these places as mirrors, the qualitative difference between Paris and Waiden Pond is crucial; it would be difficult for even the most gifted narcissist to turn Paris into a pond. More important is that Paris places Stein at the center of the modernist movement. Stein's Paris France, as opposed to Waiden, depends on the alternative culture and its values to make its points. The other country provides a rich and densely textured alternative to one's native land so that every aspect of daily life will become an occasion to note the differences. Key to expatriation for Stein and later for Wright is the way in ^^BRrude Stein's Paris France and Richard Wright's Pagan Spain Innocents Abroad: 2 28 Síein'* Pari, [ranee anJ WriqLl'f Pagan ípain which the foreign context underscores the idea that social and aesthetic values are constructed. This is not to argue that the French are less racist than Americans, but the fact that many AfricanAmericans noticed howmuch better they were treated in France was enough to undermine the authority of American racial ideology. Stein notes how aesthetic values are culturally specific. Recalling why so many young Americans found themselves in Paris in the first two decades of this century, she wrote, "Of course they came to France a great manyto paint. . . and naturally they could not do that at home, or write they could not do that either. They could be dentists at home . . . Americans were a practical people and dentistry was practical" (19). The implications of cultural relativism for the marginalized such as Gertrude Stein and Richard Wright are crucial . At the beginning of this century, American society barely noted the presence of Jewish, lesbian, or African-American writers, much less what they had to say. In the unfoldingAmerican epic theywould get scarcely a line. In this context, Gertrude Stein's meditations on Paris in Paris France and Richard Wright's account of Spain in the early 1950s, Pagan Spain, are illuminating. In these narratives, Stein and Wright escort us on their journeys and in the process reveal much more about themselves as Americans and writers than about Paris or Madrid. Paris France and Pagan Spain are intellectual portraits-of-the-artist for these writers who simultaneously distrust and respond to the autobiographical form. But more than solipsistic journeys into the Self, Paris France and Pagan Spain map the development of the modernist sensibility in its literary and social manifestations. In lieu of Alice in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas or the autobiographical Richard in Black Boy, the narrators of these texts are closer in time and space to the actual authors precisely because the supposed subject is not the author. Indeed Paris France reads like a friendly tête-à-tête on the advantages of French life, while Wright takes us along on interviews, shares his frustrations, and mulls over strange encounters. It is a clever and effective narrative strategy that deflects attention from the authors as autobiographical subjects and focuses instead on their intellectual concerns, which are projected Stein'* laritfraiireaiiJWriglit'f Pagan ípaia 29 onto the screens of Paris and Spain. Part of their project is to show how writers are born and made. In these narratives, Stein and Wright assume we know what they have made; here they attempt to respond to the hows and whys of their making. These accounts provide not simply greater insight into their canonical work; they explore how this work grew out of a need for new and radical forms characteristic ofmodernism. On the first page of Pagan Spain: A Report of a Journey into...