The romantic archetype of the poor, isolated writer living abroad was perhaps best immortalized by Ernest Hemingway in "A Moveable Feast," his memoir of life in Paris as a young writer in the 1920s. Yet little remains of the kind of life he described, while electronic communications, cheap travel and modern economics have virtually wiped out much of the expatriate writer ethos.
Paradoxically, those same developments have made life more practical for the many writers who still seek distant shores to escape the conventions and restrictions of their home countries. Nevertheless, it’s not quite what it used to be, as a few expatriate writers attest.
Just this week, Norman Spinrad, an American science fiction writer who has lived in Paris for 15 years, suddenly had to repatriate to New York after his landlord decided to sell his Latin Quarter apartment. ’Tm being squeezed out of France," said Spinrad. "Because I’m a writer I don’t have a regular job. So in order to get an apartment they demand a year’s deposit to be tied up 20 grand or so and I am not rich enough to be able to lose 20 grand and then be able to continue to pay the rent. "Even if you’ve got the money, they’d rather rent it to somebody with a salary," added Spinrad, 63. "The paradox is that the French encourage creative artists on every other level, and I’ve been treated very well." Spinrad first came to France to write a novel set in Paris, but ended up staying because he liked the lifestyle. He said he intends to return if he can.
Jerome Charyn, another American writer from New York who lives in Paris, says he loves the "softness" of European culture. "I feel there’s a kind of brutality in America," he said. "It’s part of its virtues because as a creator you probably need that brutality. But as someone who’s just sort of bouncing around day-to-day, you don’t need it." Like many of today’s nomadic writers, Charyn maintains a home in his native country to fuel his fiction. "I feel like Jekyll and Hyde, I’m constantly split," he says. He teaches film at the American University of Paris and said that having a regular job helps the writer abroad in more ways than fighting bureaucracy. "It sort of puts you into the system, makes it easier for you to exist within the culture," he said. "You’re no longer that isolated because you’re seeing students, you’re seeing other faculty members, you have a very different kind of context."
Writers abroad say they do not feel cut off from what is happening in the United States. "I feel I know more about what’s going on in the States being here than being there," Spinrad said, "because the news there is just pitiful and pressured by the government, if not controlled." Cable television in France, he said, gives him both American news programs and international stations. Indeed, Herbert Lottman, a publishing business expert, long-time Paris resident and the author of books about Man Ray and Albert Camus, said that technology has made it almost impossible for writers to isolate themselves. "The world has changed and the medium has changed so there is no longer an expatriate hidden in a hole in a garret in Paris," he said. "Everything he thinks and says is e-mailed immediately to everybody he knows in the United States."
If Paris is inadvertently discouraging impoverished writers, Ireland encourages them by exempting writers from income taxes. Anne McCaffrey, a fantasy and science fiction writer, has lived in Ireland for more than 30 years, although she said she moved there partly to get away from an increasingly violent America when her children were young. She said that Ireland was also conducive to writers because "the Irish leave you to get on with your own business".
Today’s expatriate writers are different from their predecessors in the following aspects EXCEPT