Last week, quietly, death came to a man and an era in American life.
The man was Harold Edmund Stearns, critic and essayist. The era was that in which Americans believed that their own civilization could not be lived in and those who had the courage of their convictions became expatriates.
In the 1920s, when U.S. prosperity was at its crest, the lives of the young Americans who had transplanted themselves to Paris had three fixed points—the Dome, the Select, the Rotonde. To these world-famed cafés, at some time or other, came all American exiles: Ernest Hemingway, Elliot Paul, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Glenway Wescott, John Dos Passos, Robert Coates.
But perhaps the most expatriated of the young expatriates was Harold Stearns, who was known to his intimates as a "picturesque ruin." Behind Harold Stearns, in America, lay the broken promise of a brilliant career—essays in The New Republic, editorship of The Dial, prime mover of the famous iconoclastic symposium Civilization in the United States. To the ruin of his career, Expatriate Stearns seemed anxious to add the ruin of himself. The news of his death caused friends to remember the days when, as he confessed in his autobiographical The Street I Know, he made a career of drink and an occupation out of borrowing money. Remembering the stir caused by his symposium, viper-tongued critics would say: "There goes American civilization—in the gutter."
But Harold Stearns, who brought the U.S. expatriate movement to its most grotesque distortion, had a deeper resourcefulness than his critics and friends suspected. Under the name of Peter Pickem he became a racing expert for the European edition of the Chicago Tribune. In 1932, he came back home. Said he:
"I came back because I was sick and the joy had gone out of things. . . . Irresponsibility is one of the chief joys of being abroad. . . . This is all very well when you know your country is prosperous. But when your country, or your family, is in trouble, you want to go back. . . . For better or worse I am American, even if I am not particularly proud of it."
Trying to pick up the broken threads of his career, Expatriate Stearns wove himself another. He began to re-examine the country he had forsaken. His America: A Reappraisal, which critics found more penitent than profound, was followed by a new symposium America Now, more thoughtful and more hopeful than the indictment of U.S. civilization Stearns had edited in his youth. As a symbol of the "exile" period in American literature, Stearns had only literary interest. But the pattern of denial and affirmation that he wove into his life—the rejection of American values and then a sober re-examination of them—was part of the social pattern of his time.