In America

by Susan Sontag

  “I think,” said Bogdan, “there’s little chance of that.”

  “You aren’t getting any more intelligent,” said his grandmother. “What kind of books are you reading now?”

  “Practical books,” said Bogdan. “Books on livestock farming, on viticulture, on carpentry, on soil management, on—”

  “Pity.”

  “He reads poetry with me,” said Maryna. “We read Shakespeare together.”

  “Don’t defend him. He’s an idiot. You’re not so clever yourself, at least you weren’t when I met you six years ago, and now you’re more intelligent than he is.”

  Bogdan leaned over and kissed his grandmother tenderly on the cheek. A tiny hand gnarled by arthritis reached up and patted the crown of his head.

  “He’s the only one I love,” she said to Maryna.

  “I know. And you’re the only one it distresses him to leave.”

  “Nonsense!”

  “Bonne-maman!” cried Bogdan.

  “Pas de sentiment, je te le défends. Alors, mes chers imbéciles, it’s time for you to go. We won’t meet again.”

  “But I’ll be back!”

  “And I’ll be gone.” Unclenching her right hand, she stared at the palm, then lifted it slowly. “An atheist’s blessings on you, my children.” Maryna bowed her head. “Bis! Bis!” said the old lady merrily. “And some advice, yes? Don’t ever do anything out of despair. And, écoutez-moi bien, don’t invent too many reasons for what you’ve decided to do!”

  * * *

  EVERYONE WONDERS why we are going, Maryna said to herself. Let them wonder. Let them invent. Don’t they always tell lies about me? I can lie, too. I don’t owe anyone an explanation.

  But the others need reasons, or so they tell themselves:

  “Because she’s my wife, and I must take care of her. Because I can show my brother that I’m a practical man, a virile son of the land, not just a lover of theatre and the editor of a patriotic newspaper that was quickly shut down by the authorities. Because I can’t bear always being followed by the police.”

  “Because I am curious, that’s my profession, it’s what a journalist should be, because I want to travel, because I am in love with her, because I am young, because I love this country, because I need to escape this country, because I love to hunt, because Nina says she is pregnant and expects me to marry her, because I’ve read so many books about it, Fenimore Cooper and Mayne Reid and the rest, because I intend to write a great many books, because…”

  “Because she’s my mother and she promised me she would take me to the Centennial Exposition, whatever that is.”

  “Because I, a simple girl, am to be her maid. Because, out of all the other candidates at the orphanage, all prettier and more skilled at cooking and sewing, she chose me.”

  “Because that’s where the future is being born.”

  “Because my husband wants to go.”

  “Because maybe I can’t be just Polish, even there, but I won’t be only a Jew.”

  “Because I want to live in a free country.”

  “Because life there will be better for the children.”

  “Because it’s an adventure.”

  “Because people should live in harmony, as Fourier says, though—it must be very uplifting from all that I’ve heard—I confess that each time I try to read his article on work as the key to human happiness my eyes start to—”

  “Then forget about Fourier! Shakespeare,” Maryna said. “Think of Shakespeare.”

  “But there’s everything in Shakespeare.”

  “Exactly. As in America. America is meant to mean everything.”

  And in an old-style actor’s declamatory voice, a voice that intends to be heard to the last row of the highest balcony:

  “Make haste, make haste. Hordes of people are surging past you. History is roaring by, turning itself into geography: open land as far as the mind can see. Drivers of covered wagons are flogging their horses onward, as if they could catch up with the trains that now link the two coasts—there is a tempest of spitting!”

  And so they went to America.

  Three

  RYSZARD AND JULIAN went first, to scout out a place on the western rim of the continent that would answer to the prospective emigrants’ dreams. In late June they traveled to Liverpool, home port of the famous ships flying the red swallowtail burgee with the five-pointed white star, one of which left for New York every Thursday. The White Star Line’s six steamers dedicated to the North Atlantic crossing were advertised as the most opulent, the fastest, the safest; and the one on which they booked passage, the S.S. Germanic, was also the newest, having been built to replace the Atlantic, which, in 1873, after being chased by lethal gales all across the ocean, emerged into a patch of clear weather and smashed head-on into the granite coast of Nova Scotia, taking down with it five hundred and forty-six lives: the century’s worst transatlantic disaster, twelve times the number lost six months before on the North German Lloyd’s Deutschland, sailing from Bremerhaven.

  “You know,” Ryszard said, “assuming I would survive it, I’d rather like to be in a shipwreck.”

  “I’ll take my adventures on land,” said Julian.

  It had been Julian’s idea to leave from Liverpool rather than Bremerhaven, the usual port for Polish departures to America. He had once spent a year in England and commanded the basic phrases of polite conversation in that important, difficult language so oddly deficient in cases and genders. Ryszard, who had been working hard in the last months to master English, had traveled abroad very little: he knew Vienna, Berlin, and St. Petersburg, the capitals of the masters of Poland. Ryszard, who wanted to experience everything, had never been to England.

  He was glad to be partnered for this voyage into the unknown; he would not have wanted sole responsibility for their mission. But he was irked by the way the relentlessly amiable Julian, older by ten years and the more proficient traveler, simply took charge of their arrangements and experiences: introducing Ryszard to the bounties of an English breakfast, lecturing Ryszard on the miserable condition of the English working class, explaining the transformations wrought by the ever more extensive use of steam power in transport and industry, laying out their money at a broker’s office on Waterloo Road for first-class tickets. Ryszard had pointed out that they could be traveling more economically—the Germanic, unlike other White Star express liners to New York, had no second class—but Julian, as always, had his own ideas. “We’ll be frugal in America,” he said, with a wave of his hand. As if he, Ryszard—but Julian, never—were the provincial Pole. Or one of Julian’s pupils. Or, God forbid, the docile Wanda; he’d heard Julian patronize his wife in the same teacherly tones. That had to change, would change, Ryszard vowed, as they reached dockside to board the glorious vessel with its four tall masts and two stumpy salmon-pink funnels with raked black tops, its shouting sailors and mute, intimidated emigrants being directed with their bundles of bedding and wicker crates and cardboard suitcases down steep iron stairs toward the ship’s cellar: this is when he would change into a man of the world, someone who always knows how to behave. You are whatever you think you are, Ryszard said to himself. Whatever you dare think you are. And to be free to think yourself something you’re not (not yet), something better than what you are—isn’t that the true freedom promised by the country to which he was journeying?

  Son of a clerk and grandson of peasants, Ryszard was keenly aware how much deportment and savoir faire figure in the impression one makes on others, and was not about to relax his standards for himself because he had read (all travelers were in agreement about this) that fine manners counted for little in the New World. He’d watched Julian slip some coins to the porters who hauled their trunks and portmanteaus up the gangway, and to the brawny fellow who brought them midship to their cabin. Tipping, always a vexing question for the inexperienced traveler. And how the devil was Julian so versed in shipboard protocol as to know that after going on board they were imme
diately supposed to settle where they would be sitting for their meals throughout the eight days of the voyage? He trailed after Julian as the older man headed unerringly for the Saloon (“the dining hall,” he said to Ryszard), an immense domed room extending the entire width of the ship, with walls paneled in bird’s-eye maple and pilasters of oak inlaid with rosewood, two marble fireplaces, a platform at the far end with a grand piano, and four long tables framed by rows of upholstered armchairs bolted to the floor. At the entrance a dozen passengers clustered around a podium presided over by a bearded man in an impressive black uniform with two gold stripes separated by a white band on the sleeves. “The captain?” whispered Ryszard imprudently. “Chief steward,” said Julian.

  As soon as Julian had negotiated their places—they were to be at the second table—and gone off to their cabin to unpack, Ryszard arranged for a seat at table number three. Then he joined Julian, who reminded him once again that outside Poland a man does not automatically, upon being introduced to a woman, kiss her hand (“I’m afraid that’s considered rather old-fashioned, especially where we are going”), and immediately after, as if wishing to cancel this hint that he was already nostalgic for the Old World by demonstrating his utter harmony with the new, drew Ryszard’s attention to a cleverly designed folding washstand and pointed out the other amenities, such as the gas lamp and the electric bell to call a steward, to be found only on the White Star ships. “Modern improvements often start as luxuries,” Julian explained. “Let’s hope that before long such devices will be available to better the lot of everyone.”

  “Yes,” said Ryszard, who wondered how he was going to make Julian accept what he’d just done.

  “We should open this trunk.”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “You’re a teacher, a man of science, you appreciate inventions, but I’m a writer.”

  “And?”

  “I’m fond of games.”

  “Are you?”

  Ryszard went on silently assisting in the unpacking.

  “What kind of games?”

  “What I had in mind,” said Ryszard, feeling his face flush, “if you could consider going along with it, was that, it’s just a little game, that we’d pretend we’re not traveling together.”

  “Pretend what?”

  “Well, we could know each other from Warsaw. No, it’s better to have become acquainted just before boarding the ship.” He carefully lifted Julian’s shirts out of the trunk. “I’ll be Mr. Kierul to you and you’ll be Professor Solski to me, and we’ll tip our hats to each other when we meet on the deck.”

  “While we’re sharing the same cabin?”

  “Who is to know that? Except for a few hours of sleep, I for one intend always to be on deck or exploring the ship.”

  “And eating side by side?”

  “Actually, we’re no longer at the same table. I need to practice my English. If you’re there, I’m sure to be lazy and just talk Polish to you.”

  “Be serious, Ryszard.”

  “I am serious. I’ll be gathering material for my articles about my impressions of America—”

  “We’re not in America yet!”

  “This ship is full of Americans! I have to talk to them.”

  “You’re not fooling me,” said Julian. “I know the real reason.”

  “What?”

  “To have a clear field with the available girls. Or do you think this old married man is going to preach to you about lechery? Go ahead!”

  Ryszard grinned. (As if another man could cramp his zeal for seduction!) The real reason was that he wanted to be alone with his own thoughts, without the obligation of dialogue. But he was content to let Julian settle on this explanation. As it turned out, he need not have schemed how to lighten Julian’s overbearing presence on the voyage. Julian was at the first night’s dinner, gleefully holding forth (Ryszard observed from the table to which he had reassigned himself) on God knows what tedious topics to a middle-aged Englishwoman; he ate a copious breakfast the next morning; but he failed to appear for lunch. Ryszard went to see what was wrong and found him in his nightshirt retching helplessly into the vomit-filled washstand, and helped him back onto his bed. From then on, though the sea stayed calm for most of the crossing, Julian was almost continuously seasick, and rarely emerged from their cabin.

  Ryszard was never seasick, not even during the one spell of bad weather, and that seemed to him an omen of future unlimited powers. This journey will make a writer of me, he said to himself, the writer I have dreamed of becoming. If ambition is the surest goad to writing better, writing more, then ambition must be cultivated: by keeping in sight, always, the romance of one’s own life. To travel to America had not figured in his dreams of a romantic life before Maryna broached the idea last year, and Ryszard had decided it would be there—on some prairie or desert, perhaps rescuing her from an Indian raid, or finding a spring and bringing her water in his hands, or with those same bare hands trapping a rattlesnake to roast over a campfire when they were stranded, parched, famished—that he would finally win her away from the genteel Bogdan. Now, on the ship, dreams about his enhanced prospects as a suitor were joined by the conviction of his enhanced energies as a writer. The articles he would send back to Warsaw as the newly appointed American correspondent for the Gazeta Polska could make an important book. Mentally consigning to oblivion those two mawkish novels he’d had the temerity to publish while still at university, he exulted: My first book!

  He had never felt so much a writer, so delightfully alone. Julian was mortified by being seasick: he certainly didn’t want his cabin mate to stay at his side and tend to him. Ryszard was usually sharply awake by five o’clock, but lingered in his bed a little longer—he found the rocking of the ship excited him. (The first morning he masturbated to the mental image of a fat brown walrus slowly turning from side to side. Strange, he said to himself; I must think of Nina tomorrow.) Then he rose, washed, and shaved; Julian groaned softly, opened his unseeing eyes, and turned his head to the wall. There was no one in the corridor—how indolent these rich people are!—and for the hour or so until breakfast he had the luxurious Smoke-Room, with its couches and chairs sheathed in scarlet leather, all to himself to con his maps and atlases and English dictionaries and grammars. Then, over the tasteless porridge and the bizarre kippers, he could listen and respond to English untainted by a single Polish word. He was at the far end of his table and by chance the passengers nearby were all native English speakers—plain-faced, smartly dressed Americans, male and female, and a Canadian bishop, who’d been in Rome to receive the Pope’s blessing, and his young secretary. Breakfast done, whatever the weather he went outside for a tour of the upper part of the ship—his walking stick from Zakopane with the carved bone knob, a bear’s head, might seem an affectation on the pitching deck—then settled into a reclining chair and opened his notebook. The time until noon was devoted to jotting down descriptions of whatever he saw: sailors swabbing the deck and polishing brass fixtures, passengers dozing and chatting and playing quoits, the shapes of clouds and the patterns of gulls following the ship, the exact color and striations of the magnificently monotonous sea.

  Before lunch he went to sit with Julian, to encourage him to eat the broth and rice that had been brought to their cabin, and returned after lunch for a longer visit to report on his shipboard encounters and observations and listen to Julian’s lectures about America: though nausea prevented him from even opening the copy of Democracy in America he’d brought to read on the voyage, Julian was full of ideas about what Tocqueville must have said in his celebrated book. Then Ryszard hurried to the somber room with its uniform editions of Sir Walter Scott, Macaulay, Maria Edgeworth, Thackeray, Addison, Charles Lamb, and such, locked up behind high glass-fronted bookcases, names of famous authors carved in scrolls on the oak wainscoting, and quotations with a maritime theme inscribed on stained-glass windows: there, in the Library, he wrote his letters—to his mother
and aunts, to friends, to various abandoned women to each of whom he had promised to return, and of course to Maryna and Bogdan (how he wished he could write to Maryna only). Some two hours later he released himself and went back to the Smoke-Room, ordered a whiskey (a new drink!), lit his pipe, and in that boisterous all-male preserve offered himself the pleasure of a chaste daydream about Maryna. Then he reclaimed his deck chair to continue reading Julian’s copy of Tocqueville or honing his skills of description in his notebook; or he prowled the deck where, ever bent on honing his skills of seduction, and as if to test Tocqueville’s statement that the United States was morally stricter than Europe and American women more chaste than English ones, he flirted gamely with a pretty, self-assured young American from Philadelphia, whom he was trying to persuade to call him by his first name.

  “I certainly don’t know you well enough to call you by your Christian name,” she said. “Why, we’ve only known each other for three days, and one of them I didn’t even come on deck because I was, I was … indisposed.”

  “It is like your Richard,” he persisted, fondling her in his mind, “although we spell it differently.”

  “What if my mama overheard me calling a gentleman I barely knew by his Christian name?”

  “Pronounced the same,” he said. “Rishard. Is that so difficult?” How long, he wondered, would it take to bed her on land?

  “But you don’t say it the way we do!”

  “I will”—he laughed—“as soon as I am in New York.”

  “Are you sure?” she replied pertly. “I’m not so sure, Mr.… oh, I can’t pronounce it! They have very funny names in your country.”

  “Then teach me how to pronounce it like an American.”

  “Your family name?”

  “No, you impossible creature. Rishard!”

  And impossible—if Ryszard had any thoughts of further intimacy—she was.

  * * *

  A WRITER is never, need never be, bored—fortunate aptitude! The ship, Ryszard learned from notices posted about the promenade deck and at the entrance to the Saloon, proposed a great deal of daily entertainment: lectures, religious services, games, musicales. But nothing was so entertaining as drawing out his fellow passengers in conversation—like most writers, he was a sly, ingratiatingly receptive listener—and there wasn’t much point in trying to talk about himself.