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From Open House, A Book of Essays, by J.B. Priestley (1927)
"It is not the going abroad, for a glance or two at an alien life, but the living abroad that works the mischief. The real exile, with a hunger in his heart, may write more beautifully than ever he did at home, seeing the life that he has lost as an old man sometimes sees his youth, something far away and glamorous yet wonderfully clear. Literature can be well served even by nostalgia, for passionate desire and dream are there…. The voluntary exile, unless he should be one of those very exceptional persons who find their own souls only in a foreign land, is in an absurd position. He is merely a tourist who is lingering on".
I have just received a copy of Open House. Priestley's essay, A Voluntary Exile, is brilliant, but provocative!
How many writers fit into the category of 'voluntary exiles'?
Do you share Priestley's misgivings about voluntary exiles?
"I mistrust this practice, now so general among literary people, of voluntary exile....Some of these exiles...we can very well spare, reserving our sympathy for the Parisian quarter or Italian village horribly destined to receive them...Is there any one more boring and futile than your cosmopolitan aesthete?"
How many writers fit into the category of 'voluntary exiles'?
Do you share Priestley's misgivings about voluntary exiles?
"I mistrust this practice, now so general among literary people, of voluntary exile....Some of these exiles...we can very well spare, reserving our sympathy for the Parisian quarter or Italian village horribly destined to receive them...Is there any one more boring and futile than your cosmopolitan aesthete?"
Priestley's essay seems to anticipate the 1950's views of stay-at-home poets like Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin and their suspicions about "abroad" and about British writers choosing to live abroad (following the "Personal Landscape" writers who were based in Egypt during the war years):
"Nobody wants any more poems on the grander themes for a few years, but at the same time nobody wants any more poems about philosophers or paintings or novelists or art galleries or mythology or foreign cities or other poems. At least I hope nobody wants them" (Kingsley Amis, preface to his contribution to Poets of the 1950s).
More on Kingsley Amis and 'abroad'.
Both W. H. Auden and Bernard Spencer died in Vienna. Robert Graves moved to Deià, Mallorca. in 1929. D.H.Lawrence and James Joyce settled in sunnier climes, to name a few other voluntary exiles.The list is long.
"Throughout his life, England was Larkin’s emotional territory to an eccentric degree. The poet distrusted travel abroad and professed ignorance of foreign literature, including most modern American poetry"- poetryfoundation.org/poets/philip-larkin
"Throughout his adult life Larkin had what can reasonably be described as an irrational, deep-set fear of foreign places. Andrew Motion, in his biography Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life, documents Larkin’s dread at having to visit Germany to collect the Shakespeare Prize. It was holidays in Germany as a child of the ’thirties that had, according to the poet, ‘sowed the seed of my hatred of abroad’, a seed that germinated abundantly in Larkin’s adulthood. Whether this ‘hatred of abroad’ was more accurately a hatred of going abroad, or near scatter-gun xenophobia, is a matter of debate; certainly, however, one country received the brunt of Larkin’s opprobrium: the United States of America" -
"Nobody wants any more poems on the grander themes for a few years, but at the same time nobody wants any more poems about philosophers or paintings or novelists or art galleries or mythology or foreign cities or other poems. At least I hope nobody wants them" (Kingsley Amis, preface to his contribution to Poets of the 1950s).
More on Kingsley Amis and 'abroad'.
Both W. H. Auden and Bernard Spencer died in Vienna. Robert Graves moved to Deià, Mallorca. in 1929. D.H.Lawrence and James Joyce settled in sunnier climes, to name a few other voluntary exiles.The list is long.
"Throughout his life, England was Larkin’s emotional territory to an eccentric degree. The poet distrusted travel abroad and professed ignorance of foreign literature, including most modern American poetry"- poetryfoundation.org/poets/philip-larkin
"Throughout his adult life Larkin had what can reasonably be described as an irrational, deep-set fear of foreign places. Andrew Motion, in his biography Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life, documents Larkin’s dread at having to visit Germany to collect the Shakespeare Prize. It was holidays in Germany as a child of the ’thirties that had, according to the poet, ‘sowed the seed of my hatred of abroad’, a seed that germinated abundantly in Larkin’s adulthood. Whether this ‘hatred of abroad’ was more accurately a hatred of going abroad, or near scatter-gun xenophobia, is a matter of debate; certainly, however, one country received the brunt of Larkin’s opprobrium: the United States of America" -
Even Dylan Thomas expressed similar views, in a letter (c. December, 1938) to Lawrence Durrell, who'd invited him to visit Corfu in 1939:
"I think England is the very place for a fluent and fiery writer. The highest hymns of the sun are written in the dark. I like the grey country. A bucket of Greek sun would drown in one colour the crowds of colours I like trying to mix for myself out a grey flat insular mud. If I went to the sun I’d just sit in the sun; that would be very pleasant but I’m not doing it..."
From The Life of Dylan Thomas, Constantine Fitzgibbon, J. M. Dent and Sons, London, 1965
Full letter here
https://poetrydispatch.wordpress.com/2010/05/17/henry-miller-lawrence-durrell-dylan-thomas-how-way-leads-to-way/
"Durrell seems to stand for a good many things which the Movement poets (and critics since) have been determined to disapprove. An inveterate denizen of 'abroad', and especially of the Mediterranean littoral, raffish, touched by surrealism, but unable to take it very seriously, technically rather loose and careless: it adds up to a formidable indictment. Durrell proceeded to add insult to injury by becoming a best-selling novelist" - Edward Lucie-Smith, British Poetry Since 1945 (quoted by Jonathan Bolton, Personal Landscapes, 1997).
Bolton discusses Lucie-Smith's criticism:
"The charge of 'abroadness', of not being one of us, is decidedly parochial...Needless to say, things do happen outside of Britain that cannot be witnessed from the window of a third-floor bedsit in the Provinces".
Title page from my copy of Personal Landscape, An Anthology of Exile, 1945:
Of related interest, Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3176/3176-h/3176-h.htm
Letter from Harriet Byron to Lucy Selby:
"Travelling! Young men travelling! I cannot, my dear, but think it a very nonsensical thing!...
To see a parcel of giddy boys under the direction of tutors or governors hunting after -What? - Nothing: or at best but ruins of ruins," from Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison.
Quoted by M. G. Lloyd Thomas, in Travellers' Verse, 1946 (a book I bought secondhand in 1965)
"I think England is the very place for a fluent and fiery writer. The highest hymns of the sun are written in the dark. I like the grey country. A bucket of Greek sun would drown in one colour the crowds of colours I like trying to mix for myself out a grey flat insular mud. If I went to the sun I’d just sit in the sun; that would be very pleasant but I’m not doing it..."
From The Life of Dylan Thomas, Constantine Fitzgibbon, J. M. Dent and Sons, London, 1965
Full letter here
https://poetrydispatch.wordpress.com/2010/05/17/henry-miller-lawrence-durrell-dylan-thomas-how-way-leads-to-way/
"Durrell seems to stand for a good many things which the Movement poets (and critics since) have been determined to disapprove. An inveterate denizen of 'abroad', and especially of the Mediterranean littoral, raffish, touched by surrealism, but unable to take it very seriously, technically rather loose and careless: it adds up to a formidable indictment. Durrell proceeded to add insult to injury by becoming a best-selling novelist" - Edward Lucie-Smith, British Poetry Since 1945 (quoted by Jonathan Bolton, Personal Landscapes, 1997).
Bolton discusses Lucie-Smith's criticism:
"The charge of 'abroadness', of not being one of us, is decidedly parochial...Needless to say, things do happen outside of Britain that cannot be witnessed from the window of a third-floor bedsit in the Provinces".
Title page from my copy of Personal Landscape, An Anthology of Exile, 1945:
Of related interest, Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3176/3176-h/3176-h.htm
Letter from Harriet Byron to Lucy Selby:
"Travelling! Young men travelling! I cannot, my dear, but think it a very nonsensical thing!...
To see a parcel of giddy boys under the direction of tutors or governors hunting after -What? - Nothing: or at best but ruins of ruins," from Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison.
Quoted by M. G. Lloyd Thomas, in Travellers' Verse, 1946 (a book I bought secondhand in 1965)
Robert Crampton in The Times, 21 January, 2020 (on Prince Harry leaving for Canada):
"I always sympathise with anyone who has to live away from this country, for family or work reasons.
(As for those who leave voluntarily, because they just prefer somewhere else, I can never entirely forgive what I regard as treachery, albeit in a mild form.)
...Leaving these shores will be a huge emotional wrench. Or it will become so after a year or two. Exiles are rarely happy after a while".
Discuss.
"I always sympathise with anyone who has to live away from this country, for family or work reasons.
(As for those who leave voluntarily, because they just prefer somewhere else, I can never entirely forgive what I regard as treachery, albeit in a mild form.)
...Leaving these shores will be a huge emotional wrench. Or it will become so after a year or two. Exiles are rarely happy after a while".
Discuss.
.
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