IMPROVISED EUROPEANS: American Literary Expatriates and the Siege of London.

By Alex Zwerdling. Basic. 425 pp. $35

Europe barely registers on our cultural radar these days, but there was a time when it would have filled the entire screen. Politically and culturally, the United States spent the 19th century in Europe’s shadow. To England especially, America was the boisterous, untutored rebel, the offspring perceived as something of an embarrassment. But by the early 20th century, the upstart had become mighty, a cultural achiever in its own right, and the imperial parent was tottering.

Zwerdling, a professor of English at Berkeley, portrays this grand reversal through the personal encounters with England and the Continent of four great figures in American literary life—Henry Adams, Henry James, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot. The four fall into two roughly contemporaneous pairs, and their collective lives extend from the first half of the 19th century to the second half of the 20th. The concatenation is striking: Adams and James were friends; late in his life, James knew Pound; Pound was a friend and creative adviser to the young Eliot.

Derived from a letter of Adams to James, the term "improvised Europeans" is used to characterize a particular type of mid-19thcentury American, "molded by Boston, Harvard, and Unitarianism," and "brought up in irritable dislike of America." Zwerdling employs the term in a more expansive sense for his literary expatriates, who felt compelled to come to terms with themselves, their talents, and their ambitions by moving to Europe. Adams was mature when he lived for a time in Paris and London, but the others were young when they went abroad and had their imaginations fired by the Old World.

We forget how young. We remember Pound as the remote and deranged old man who had favored the Fascists, not as a product of Idaho and Hamilton College and the University of Pennsylvania. James and Eliot linger in our minds as they were in their seniority, grave, oracular, marmoreal. But all three were still in their twenties when their work began to win critical attention. Eliot published "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" at 27 and "The Waste Land" at 34, after it had been revised and shaped by the barely older Pound. In his mid-thirties James wrote The American, The Europeans, and Daisy Miller.

They all aspired to separation from their American origins and association with the superior European culture. They wanted to be placeless cosmopolites who could move with facility among the literatures and traditions of the world, their work free of mere national affiliation. "The birth of Anglo-American modernism as a self-conscious movement," writes Zwerdling, "owes a great deal to the overlap (and the shared assumptions) of these displaced Americans."

But they achieved their cosmopolitanism at a price. The youthful genius released by immersion in the foreign yielded eventually to regret. The recovery of their origins and of what they had forgone became for them "a necessary act of self-possession." What Zwerdling says of James hints at the common loss: "As he reflects on his own life and those of artists who have made similar choices, he becomes aware that the dream of his youth—to write about, and for, a cosmopolitan world in which the issue of his national identity is unproblematic—has not been realized. He has had to settle for less, much less."

Zwerdling mixes social and cultural history, literary criticism, and biography in expert measure to construct an absorbing narrative of these divided lives. He draws on the major published works as well as on letters and journals and unpublished materials, and he is always agile in controlling the disparate sources. When he turns to the human consequences of his characters’ decisions to stand apart, the book even manages an effect rarely associated with academic criticism these days: it becomes moving.

—James M. Morris