CHAPTER ONE
Reading as Imitation
No man, excepting in burlesque, should impersonate a womanâs part. Impersonation is not reading. And no woman should attempt to impersonate a man, if by impersonation, you mean actually striving to get at the real tone and manner of a male, because she only makes coarseness of it.
NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF ELOCUTIONISTS (1905)1
Iâm incapable of writing at length about anyone except an American, so itâs not only a question of being out of touch with the native speech but of being out of touch with the native subject matter.
MARY MCCARTHY (1971)2
LITERARY IMPERSONATION
âExpatriate writing, a potpourri of the avant-garde and the decadent, has almost faded away.â3 So proclaimed critic and novelist Mary McCarthy in a 1972 essay titled âA Guide to Exiles, Expatriates, and Internal ĂmigrĂŠs,â tolling the bell for an international literary tradition that had long captivated late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American reading publics. Considered alongside the imminent terror of the Soviet Unionâs ascendancy, the rising body count in Vietnam, and her recent stint as a United States Information Agency (USIA) lecturer in Eastern Europe, McCarthy believed that reading the expatriate novels of the past was akin to smelling a bowl of old âpotpourriââsweet but useless. Readers had developed a distaste for the traditionâs once attractive and now decaying features: its carefully cultivated cosmopolitanism, its elite discourses of aesthetic autonomy, and worst of all, the self-indulgent figure of the expatriate, whom McCarthy described sarcastically as âan artist or person who thinks he is artistic.â The ultimate offense of writing and reading expatriate novels, she posited, was to valorize literary production as the creation of âa work of artâ detached from the historical realities of modernity; a work of art preoccupied with the construction of a deeply solipsistic and apolitical interiority at the very moment when literature and its readers needed to look outward, to strengthen their âatrophying power to communicateâ with others.4
Given her indictment of expatriate writing, it makes sense that McCarthy would name Henry James as the long-dead father of all expatriate fiction. A committed expatriate for more than twenty-five years and a pivotal figure in the shift from nineteenth-century realism to twentieth-century experiments in novelistic interiority, James had âset the themes once and for all.â âEverything that followed,â McCarthy observed, âwas a mere variation, however grotesque,â from the poetry of Gertrude Stein and T. S. Eliot to the novels of H.D., F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, and Henry Miller. Presumably, McCarthy counted herself as part of this genealogy. In 1961, she had relocated to Paris with her fourth husband, James R. West, a cultural attachĂŠ with the United States Foreign Service, and had published her first and only expatriate novel Birds of America (1971) exactly a decade later. âA Guide to Exiles, Expatriates, and Internal ĂmigrĂŠs,â written just one year after Birds of America failed to find an enthusiastic audience among American readers, betrayed her fierce and perplexing irritation with the literary tradition whose life-span she had tried to prolong. Expatriate fiction, McCarthy concluded with her signature snark, evinced âa certain Jackie-and-Ari color-supplement flavor.â Characters went abroad âto lead the beautiful life in one form or anotherâ by âimpersonating figures in a work of artâsomething few people dare to do at home.â
But how precisely do works of art give rise to studied practices of impersonation? And why is âimpersonating figures in a work of artâ something âfew peopleâânot charactersâwould only âdareâ to do away from home? McCarthyâs oddly contemporaneous invocation of the âJackie-and-Ari color-supplement flavorâ of expatriate fiction suggests that Jamesâs influence wasnât limited to the literary characters of the twentieth century but a curiously embodied fact of American public and political life: that his works of art had somehow come to shape the practices, rituals, and lifestyles of the rich and famous over half a century after his death in 1916. Contrary to McCarthyâs proclamation of the fading out of expatriate fiction, Jamesâs legacy was not dressed down in avant-garde or decadent literatureâs fading tropes but dolled up in Jackie Oâs powder-pink Chanel traveling suit and pillbox hat for all the world to see. And although the acerbic quality of McCarthyâs tone may suggest Jackie Oâs ditzy obliviousness to James as her stylistic predecessor, this, too, is misleading. During her time in Washington, DC, Kennedy had pointedly stacked Jamesâs novels in the White House library as part of her attempt to bring high culture to Cold War Americaâone model for how to live the beautiful life amid the ugly glare of Soviet-era geopolitics.5 Yet even before she was rearranging the first familyâs textual furniture, Kennedy was McCarthyâs near contemporary at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, where both women had read Jamesâs novels in the classroom and dorm room and concluded that he was their favorite American writer.6 While these two public figures had pursued wildly incomparable paths after graduationâJackie to Paris, where she wrote her European travelogue One Special Summer (1974), and Mary to the New Republic in New Yorkâas readers and imitators of Jamesâs expatriate fictions, their literary education had shared a common point of departure: the institution of the womenâs college.
Indeed, it was at institutions like Vassar, as well as Vassarâs sister colleges Smith, Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe, and Mount Holyoke, that reading Henry James gave rise to enduring practices of what I call literary impersonation: a strategy of fictional mimesis that turned on a series of unconventional assumptions about the relationship between reading subjects and their textual objects. By âliterary impersonation,â I do not mean the âperformance of impersonationâ within literature: a formulation that many critics have invoked quite loosely to describe a wide range of fictional tropes, from narrative vocalization to mimicry, imposture, personification, forgery, and fraud.7 I mean, rather, the uncanny convergence of literary discourse with real speech acts: utterances that have taken place in richly specified and, to a certain extent, historically recoverable contexts. Literary impersonation asserts the portability between textual properties of the novel and formal properties of speech, gesture, and face-to-face interactionâwhat McCarthy called the âpower of communicationâ in her dismissal of Jamesâs novels. As Benjamin Lee and other sociolinguistics have argued, the interplay between literary discourse (i.e., how people talk about literary representations) and the performativity of speech (i.e., how speech instantiates an action or constructs a subject position) offers a unique nexus from which to examine how literature can shape the formation of social relationships and the individuals who participate in them. Both linguistic performativity and literary discourse, Lee writes, âutilize a shared âfashion of speakingâ about subjectivity that is created by the structural relations among . . . speaking, thinking, and feeling.â8 Literary impersonation reveals a set of readerly logics by which a literary device (like dialogue or narrative interiority) can come to shape lived practices of communication (like speech) across vast expanses of space and time. If reading literature can mediate between literary production and the production of speaking subjects, it does so through a set of unorthodox reading practices that flourished within the institutions of the womenâs college.
Allow me to orient this claim in more historically specific terms, as it offers this bookâs first inroads into a prehistory of international communication from the beginning of the twentieth century to its midcentury efflorescence. This chapter suggests that a certain âfashion of speakingâ about Jamesâs novels and a certain fashion of speaking emerged as twinned components of what womenâs colleges touted as the first systematic âexperiments in international livingâ: the earliest attempts to institute highly regimented and repetitive practices of international communication during the interwar period.9 Thereâs no good reason why any of the tens of millions of students who have participated in these experiments in international living over the last half century, or even the university administrators and educators who have organized them, should know about the literary historical origins of these massively popular sociolinguistic training programs. By the time McCarthy was writing in the 1970s, study abroad programs, as they are commonly referred to today, were already ensnared in a vast and sprawling network of government-issued texts that discussed âthe benefits of study abroadâ for college students. In these pamphlets, brochures, conference proceedings, and conduct guides, the benefits enumerated were seldom literary and overwhelmingly social and political: the spread of âfriendship,â âgoodwill,â âunderstanding,â and underpinning it all, âcommunication.â10 These benefits, however, cut both ways. For administrators at the State Department and USIA, students served as ideal national-institutional subjects for international communication projects, no matter what the projectâs specific purpose was. After all, who more amenable to the imposition of carefully crafted speech and behavioral protocols than full-time learners? Who more willing to embrace with cheerful studiousness their teachersâ instructions to say and do certain things and not others?
This point was made early on by educators John A. Garraty and Walter Adams in A Guide to Study Abroad (1962), a conduct manual that featured a brusque and bellicose introduction by then-vice-president Lyndon B. Johnson. Reprinted every year until 1977 and widely championed by Dr. Paul R. Conroy, USIA chief of professional training, as essential reading for all college students, A Guide to Study Abroad emphasized that âstudents make excellent âambassadors,ââ for they are âintelligent, eager, curious, purposeful, energetic, and (being young) attractive.â11 While it was âhuman for the natives of any country to resent the mere tourist who is idling away his time, often frivolously,â the strictly regimented and demanding activities of students tended âto attract sympathy and respectâ (12). According to the authors, who aspired to âmake the world our campus,â there was no better way for students to attract the nativesâ sympathy and respect than by staging scenes of reading.12 The Guide thus instructed all students to pack a âSix Inch Libraryâ that would include a map of the United States, a âcollege American history textbook,â Richard B. Morrisâs Basic Documents of American History, and D. C. Doyleâs The United States Political System and How It Works. Students who wanted to be âreally well-armed ambassadorsâ were encouraged to pair the hard facts and figures contained in maps, textbooks, and documents with âa collection of your own favorite paperbacks to lend or give to people you meetâ (61). Yet even the construction of oneâs personal literary arsenal had to follow certain guidelines. âTake books that have some literary stature, of course, but not simply those that you know are highly regarded,â the Guide cautioned. âLiterary stature,â a function of cultural prestige, always came second to the studentâs performance of literary discourse: her ability to communicate, through her impassioned advocacy, a deep knowledge of and personal affection for her books of choice. âThere is no better way to gain the respect of foreigners both for yourself and for your country,â the authors crowed, âthan to talk about a good book that you know well and about which you are enthusiasticâ (62).
In the Guideâs mingling of textual objects and genres, we can identify the same processes of readerly preparation that my introduction teased out of international communications initiatives like Radio Free Europe. But a very different view of the relationship between reading literature and the power of communication emerges if we look back at the longer history of these experiments in international living. Although various branches of the federal government worked hard to co-opt students as young and attractive communicative subjectsâthe most titillating chapter in the guide is titled âSexual Communicationââthe history of international literary socialization dates back to the early twentieth-century womenâs college, a far cry from the board rooms and back offices of Washington, DC. In the bucolic college towns of Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania and Northampton, Massachusetts, administrators, teachers, and students first debated the communicative practices of international livingâa debate set off by none other than Henry James, the progenitor of all expatriate fiction. While James was not interested in students as political actors, at least not as explicitly as the State Department or USIA in the 1950s, he was similarly preoccupied with the problems and possibilities of international communication and its relationship to a national literary culture. Indeed, it was during his 1905 American lecture tour that he debuted âThe Question of Our Speech,â a prickly critique of the communicative habits of American women, which he first delivered as a commencement address at Bryn Mawr and which was subsequently reprinted in every major magazine and newspaper in the United States.13 The lecture provoked widespread public outcry across the nation for its unflattering comparison of Americaâs âyoung ladiesââ speechâindistinct from âthe grunting, the squealing, the barking or the roaring of animalsââto their European counterparts (46). The failure of women to exercise proper aesthetic discrimination in their practices of communication, James postulated, would lead to the careening cultural decline of the United States in the twentieth century. The scandal that resulted from his lecture tour was unprecedented but not unproductive. By the early 1920s, the lectureâs reception had given rise to various programs of speech pedagogy for young women, most notably, the first experiments in international living, which originated at Smith College and spread rapidly to other womenâs institutions before attracting the attention of the US government and its communications bureaucracies after World War II.
More rigorously than midcentury government bureaucrats, Jamesâs lecture elucidated an ambitious theory of literatureâs social and pragmatic uses, one opposed to both McCarthyâs pooh-poohing of expatriate fiction and modernist literary studiesâ continued association of James with aesthetic autonomy.14 The lecture, both by virtue of its style and its genre, insists that literary writers and the novels they produced were uniquely positioned to help transform international communication itself into an aesthetic form that could bestow âliterary statureâ onto the speakers themselves. In a memorable scene in âThe Question of Our Speech,â James portrayed the speech of American women as âour transported maiden, our unrescued Andromeda,â abandoned to her own devices in âthe international concert of cultureââa âpoor dear distracted organâ waiting to be saved from aesthetic ruin and cultural condemnation by one who had mastered the distinctions between âform and the absence of formâ (52). While it would be improper to read Jamesâs melodrama without a sense of humor, his audiences were ready to take him at his word as the aesthetic savior of American speech and communication, or the âcosmopolitan patriot,â in the words of one critic, whose finely honed mastery of literary form could discipline the speech of his female readers.15 Like the attractive and industrious students addressed in the Guide, the young ladies housed within the womenâs college were to emerge in the national public sphere as âexcellent âambassadorsââ for Jamesâs literary aesthetics and, thus, excellent representatives to communicate the nationâs linguistic and cultural singularity in the international public sphere. Decades before government-sponsored Kulturkampf would propel thousands of students across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, equipped with guides to help them âcommunicate fluentlyâ with international audiences, Jamesâs fictions had already laid the blueprint for how international communication ought to lookâand soundâin the earliest phase of its national development (71).
That the first tentative and testy steps toward overlaying reading practices and international communication should take place in the womenâs college is no coincidence. The historical claim that anchors this chapter to my broader argument about the paraliterary is that the reading practices of the womenâs college and their relationship to the performativity of speech stood in stark contrast to the practices of proper literary reading that flourished outside of its four wallsâparticularly in the elite male institutions of higher education, where the âliteraryâ loomed as a social category that excluded readers based on their class and gender identities. I am not claiming, of course, that the practices of literary impersonation that orbited Jamesâs novels were exclusive to the womenâs college. Nor do I mean to suggest that practices of literary impersonation remained completely unchanged from James to the 1970s, as McCarthy does when she links James to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in âA Guide to Exiles, Expatriates, and Internal ĂmigrĂŠs.â Rather, the womenâs college materialized as the physical space where unacknowledged and even disparaged approaches to reading, communication, and nationalized concepts of gender produced a remarkably consistent set of norms that shaped face-to-face interactions between American subjects and their interlocutors. The persistence of these norms over time served as both a source of inspiration and a point of departure for the readers and writers who fell under the auspices of the womenâs college: not only writers like McCarthy, Kennedy, H.D., and Gertrude Stein, whom I will touch on in the pages to follow, but thousands of lesser known readers, some of whose writings about readingâtheir letters, diary entries, and class notesâhelp us more concretely examine the historical convergence of literature and spoken communication.
While I argue that James and his early twentieth-century readers were eager to imagine literary a...