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tury, collapsed. Saul Bellow points out (in a very interesting essay,
published in the May 1973
The Chicago Guide)
that from the 1880s
to the 1920s Chicago was really the capital of the Midwest, where
the newspaper reporters and journalists were men like Ambrose Bierce,
Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Ring Lardner. (One may add
that with the founding of
Poetry
which had Harriet Monroe as its
editor and Ezra Pound as its roving European correspondent, Chi–
cago had claims at least equal with those of New York to be the cen–
ter of the modern movement in poetry. ) There were and are also, of
course, great art collections there. But as Saul Bellow points out "Chi–
cago did not remain a capital. It lost out to New York and, in part,
to California. Writers went east and west. The excitement passed. Our
section of the country began to export exiles. These exiles abandoned
the city to the boorish, aggressively militant, dull middle-class."
*
The foreigner can become a New Yorker which means remain–
ing a foreigner - or a kind of foreigner squared - his original nation–
ality retained - and yet a New Yorker. In the rest of the country,
English writers find themselves in the position of either remaining
spectators (Europeans a bit Americanized ) or of becoming completely
American.
English writers like Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, and
Auden who have gone to America, have observed it brilliantly but
nearly always continued to look at it from the outside - even when
they have adopted American nationality - and, for the most part,
to
be
looked at from the outside by Americans. In an interview (pub–
lished in the Spring 1969
Harvard Advocate)
John Berryman stated
that he thought of Auden as a British poet who "came over here and
pretended to be an American for some -years." Berryman recounted
an anecdote of Auden speaking at the National Institute of Art and
Letters and beginning his address,
"We
in England feel .. ." "But
then," Berryman relates, "he suddenly remembered that it was the
American
Institute of Art and Letters !"
Auden returned to the Oxford college where he had been an
undergraduate, where he seemed more New Yorker than Oxfordian .
Isherwood in
A Single Man,
arguably his best novel, lays his scene
in Los Angeles, bu t his hero is a British immigrant, teaching in an
American college. Isherwood sees his Los Angeles characters through
