Atlantic Crossing: Placing William Carlos Williams's A Voyage to Pagany

Abstract

Ezra Pound said how in William Carlos Williams's novel A Voyage to Pagany (1928), based on Williams's trip to Paris, Rome and Vienna of 1924, he adopted the position a European observer would take upon the United States. Thus Pound preempted the later standard view of Williams as committed to an exclusively American national culture and ‘local’ modernism. This essay argues how Voyage to Pagany and a family of texts on Williams's European sojourn show him as neither European expatriate nor American ‘primitive’. Rather, Voyage to Pagany, Williams's Autobiography, his travel notes, Philippe Soupault's novel Last Nights of Paris, which Williams co-translated, and chapters of In the American Grain, composed in Europe, present a tension between Williams's ardent claim for the authenticity of local conditions, in both Europe and the USA, and a writerly text which renders this experience and its associated aesthetic in terms of difference and cultural diversity.