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PIZER, DONALD. American Expatriate Writing and the Paris Moment: Modernism and Place (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996). xv+149 pp. $30.00.
There are segments in Donald Pizer's American Expatriate Writing and the Paris Moment that remind us of the reasons American modernist writing still fascinates. From the fifteen-year-old high school sophomore who has only heard of Gertrude Stein to the jaded college senior whose encounters with Ernest Hemingway have shaped an aesthetic of art and life that may have already done permanent damage, students revel in the romance of expatriate Paris. In their romanticization, students ape their parents and their grandparents: it is probably one of the rare congruences of taste in the twentieth century.
Bringing Paris back from the corners of our educated literary imaginations is one of the aims of Pizer's book. Comfortably haunted by those fabled environs, we appreciate our rewakening: as Pizer calls up images, we remember the warm chestnuts from Hemingway's A Moveable Feast; we imagine the author's quick glances as he looks up from his writing in the chilly cafe, staring at the distant beautiful girl, to whom he does not speak. Similarly, from Gertrude Stein's double autobiography/biography The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, we remember both scenes of Picasso's surety...