American Writers in Istanbul (review)

In American Writers in Istanbul, Kim Fortuny gathers eight case studies of American writers who lived or visited Istanbul at one point in their lives. The authors, largely canonical, include Melville, Twain, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Bowles, Algren, Baldwin and Settle. Her aim is twofold: to explore the potrayal of Istanbul by these writers, but also to consider a far more provocative idea that, "Istanbul—and everything the place name conjures up for an Occidental audience—had since at least the middle of the nineteenth century been active, though perhaps ignored, at the aesthetic and cutural center of American letters . . ."(xviii). As a chronicle of disparate portrayals of Istanbul, the book is more successful than in demonstrating any role for the so-called East at the heart of American literature.

Each chapter can be read as a separate entity, and here Fortuny demonstrates her ability as a critical reader of texts placing each author's Istanbul writings within their own oevre as well as the aesthetic history of the period in which they were writing. She brings considerable knowledge and skill to the handling of such disparate writers spanning nearly one hundred and fifty years of American letters. Given that each chapter is nearly stand alone, they will no doubt be useful additions to the knowledge that we have of these writers.

In the chapters on Melville and Hemingway, Fortuny is at her best. Working with Melville's diary of his stay in Istanbul, she deftly displays the way in which his observations reveal his continued interest in nature which extends to the architecture of Ottoman Istanbul. Perhaps most fascinating is that the chapter is dotted with his diary entries allowing the reader as well to engage in the interpretative process. Similarly, the chapter "Dispatches from the Greco-Turkish War" focusing on Heminway's war correspondence from Turkey is filled with sometimes extended copy of his newspaper dispatches which she then explicates to demonstrate the ways that Hemingway used fictional techniques to enliven his reporting.

While in her title Fortuny limits the scope of the work to Istanbul, I question the narrowness of the title given that some of the authors spent little time in Istanbul and the majority of their writings focus on various parts of Turkey rather than exclusively on Istanbul. Nelson Algren, accompanied by Simone de Beauvoir, abandoned the city after just three days while Melville and Twain remain only a week. Time actually spent in Istanbul is, in fact, not the issue—rather the amount of work an author dedicated to the city is. For Algren, there is a mere twenty pages, and for Baldwin Fortuny admits that he never made Istanbul his subject despite living in the city on and off for years. This lack of material forces her to focus on other aspects of the authors' work rather than strictly on the portrayal of Istanbul.

Unlike Melville who died not long after returning to the U.S., Hemingway went on to a long and productive career and yet Fortuny does not address the possible ways that his time in Istanbul may or may not have affected his furture writing. In fact, this is an almost forgetten aspect of her original thesis. At almost no time during this work does she sustain a discussion of the transnational aspects of these writers and the implications their travels may have wrought on their subsequent work and American literature as a whole. This may have taken place in a concluding chapter which this volume lacks. A conclusion would have given the author the space to explore the ways that these authors may have drawn the Orient into the heart of American literature, but without it we are left wondering. This is unfortunate given the intriguing nature of the suggestion in this day and age.