Spicer's poetics, as we saw in the previous chapter, demonstrate an entirely Poundian emphasis on the centrality of translation for poetic production, along with positing a dialectics of locale and its derealization which is in many ways reminiscent of Stein. Unlike his two expatriate forerunners, however, he offers no extended meditation on Americanness or American identity as such, and gives little sense of a “cosmopolitan” shock before the untethering or relativizing of cultural practice. That said, the resolutely Californian Spicer's profound unhappiness in New York and Boston was certainly lived by him as a form of exile and cultural estrangement, and it is hardly coincidental that relatively soon after his return to the Bay Area he undertook the writing of a novel which foregrounds the high modernist trope of the return, while also remaining entirely Jamesian—not in its problematization of the foreign, but in its questioning of “home” as the promise of perfect fit and adequation, the final end to wandering and alienation. Spicer, as we shall see, rams boisterous, ebullient Beatnik San Francisco, already a media cliché by the time of his novel, against the impalpability of the Jamesian uncanny.

At roughly the same time, Spicer's contemporary, John Ashbery, had set off for Europe and was in most hallowed modernist fashion discovering the extent to which Parisian expatriation could turn into an American scene. Certainly, Ashbery in the 1950s was more worldly and cosmopolitan than Spicer in terms not only of his personal movements and contacts, but also his sense of literary and artistic space.