In America

by Susan Sontag

  “Bravo,” said Julian.

  “So will you get dressed now?”

  Julian shook his head. “Let me live vicariously. I shall look forward to reading a story about each of these ladies in your next book. Don’t disappoint me. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m afraid I am about to be sick.”

  * * *

  HOW IRRITATING that Julian would not accept his offer of rescue from naïve self-pity and unhealthy inactivity. How odd for him to have extended it, after being so bent on disburdening himself of Julian’s company during the voyage; but a change of inner weather can no more be ignored than the coming of an ocean squall.

  Leaving the cabin, after dutifully cleaning up after Julian, he regained the sun and wind and his own perch of scornful acuity. Like most writers who are intelligent, Ryszard had long since accustomed himself to being actually two people. One was a warmhearted, anxious man, rather boyish for his twenty-five years, while the other one … in the other one, detached, reckless, manipulative, flourished the temperament of someone much older. The first self was forever being surprised by the evidence of his own intelligence; it never ceased to astonish him, thrill him, when words, eloquence, ideas, observations just came, like birds flying out of his mouth. The second was condemned to finding nobody clever enough—and everything he saw a challenge to his skills as an observer and describer, because so blindly, thickly steeped in itself (“the world” is not a writer).

  The first self was the insecure youthful Pole who aspired to be a man of the world. The second had always, in the recesses of his furtive heart, considered himself to be someone unlike anyone else. One of those extremely intelligent people who become writers because they cannot imagine a better use of their watchfulness, their sense of being different from others, Ryszard knew that his intelligence could also be a handicap: how good a novelist could he ever become if he found everybody he met either preposterous or pathetic? One must believe in people to be a great writer, which means one must continually adjust one’s expectations of them. Ryszard could never be so contemptuous of a woman for being less intelligent than he, since stupidity was a quality Ryszard found to be in ample supply among everyone he knew, including Maryna (whose intelligence he found … endearing). And, despite what he had said to Julian, Ryszard would have been affronted if everyone back in Poland did not think him in love with her; and to these easily mocked yearnings of a younger man for a famous actress, the man who was always seeing through people, the writer, gave his fervent assent. He thought it becoming, even improving, to be humbled by love.

  Love, a voluptuous sacrifice of judgment. Love, the shape-shifter—changing as much in the absence as in the presence of the beloved. The variety of his feelings for Maryna enchanted him. One day it was lust, pure lust. He could conjure up only the smooth white nape of her neck, the curve of her breasts, the pink heaviness of her tongue. The next day it was fascination. She is the most interesting subject I’ve ever come across. Another day: it’s only (only!) her beauty. If she didn’t look exactly like that, that face, those gestures, if she didn’t have that voice, if she weren’t so tall, if she didn’t wear those soft, silkily expressive clothes, she could never have burned a hole in my heart. And sometimes, often: no, it’s admiration. She has a great talent, and a great soul; she is sincere, which I am not.

  Maryna, he knew, would approve of his sympathy for the steerage passengers, and when, two days later, he went down once more to steerage—whether because Maryna would want him to or simply because he had to re-experience, but more coldly, that dismay, at that moment Ryszard was delightfully unable to say—he also came away with more than enough material for his article about the trip from conversations he succeeded in conducting with some dozen stuporous or bewildered emigrants. (The old man who recited from the Book of Revelation, explaining how it had been ordained by God that before the end of days everyone in the world would come to “Hamerica”—Ryszard would save him for a short story.) It took two days before the smell of putrefying food and shit-clogged toilets was out of his nostrils.

  It was still in his nostrils when the captain of the Germanic took Ryszard aside to remonstrate with him about his forays, saying that while he could not of course forbid “communication” between Saloon and steerage passengers, he had instructions from the company to discourage it strongly. “For reasons of health,” he said. He was a large man, a whale of a man, on whom this mincing language seemed ill-suited, Ryszard was thinking—for he assumed that the captain was referring to the wretched sexual commerce offered below. But no, it turned out to be a more immediate inconvenience: should the Health Officers in New York who would be examining the steerage passengers for signs of contagious or infectious disease find out there had been any visits from Saloon passengers during the voyage, those passengers might also be made subject to quarantine.

  “I thank you for your concern,” said Ryszard.

  They were in the Smoke-Room, to which all the men were expected to adjourn once dinner was over (wives and daughters had the Ladies’ Boudoir for their own off-duty chatter), and where Ryszard had excused himself from the obligation of making polite conversation and sat a little apart with his pipe, watching, listening. The men, flushed with drink, mostly talked of stocks and percentages (he understood little of what they were saying) or related stories of their sexual exploits (he wondered which of them had been with Nora) while Ryszard—Ryszard was cultivating elementary forbearance and good-humored indifference. What a great distance I have come on this ship, he thought. He felt not only many miles but many years from the callow young man who had come aboard at Liverpool. How fast the intelligence travels. Intelligence travels faster than anything in the world.

  * * *

  TOWARD THE END of the voyage the weather turned rough (one day of real gales) and, as if needing only this challenge, Julian ruled himself recovered from seasickness and able to resume the routines of shipboard life. “I feel quite refreshed,” he announced to Ryszard. “As if I’d taken a cure.”

  They were standing together at the railing above a now calmer sea and Julian was alerting Ryszard to some differences between British and American English (“A booking office is a ticket office, luggage is baggage, a station is also a depot…”) when the girl from Philadelphia came onto the deck.

  “Oh, there you are! I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”

  “Aha,” said Julian.

  She was upon them now.

  “Good morning, Miss,” Julian said. “It’s a beautiful day, is it not? What a pity, is it not, that this delightful voyage is about to end.”

  “Want her?” said Ryszard in Polish. “She’s yours.”

  “What are you saying?” said the girl. “My mama says it’s not polite to say something other people don’t understand.”

  “I am telling Professor Solski that you have found me so charming that you are very eager to meet as many Polish gentlemen as you can.”

  “Mr. Krool, how can you say such a thing! Why, that’s a lie!”

  “Excuse me,” said Julian, “excuse me, Miss,” and fled.

  “How naughty you are,” cried the girl. “Now your friend has left. If you did want me to meet him, that wasn’t the way to go about it. Why, I believe he was even more embarrassed than I was.” She paused, and then wagged a finger at Ryszard. “Oh, you are very, very naughty. Were you trying to embarrass your friend?”

  “Yes. To be alone with you.”

  “Well, we can only be alone for a minute. I have to go right back to the cabin to help Mama decide what to wear for the farewell banquet tonight. But I brought you this.” She was holding out a small red plush album with gilt edges.

  “A present?” said Ryszard. “You have a present for me, you adorable girl?”

  “Oh no, it’s mine!” she exclaimed. “It’s my most precious possession, except for—” She stopped, abashed. The list of her precious possessions was rather long.

  “Still, you want to show me your most precious possess
ion. And that proves you do like me. What is it?”

  “My autograph book!” she called out triumphantly. “And my showing it to you doesn’t prove anything at all. I show it to everyone I know and everyone I meet, even if I like them only a little.”

  “Oh,” said Ryszard in mock dismay.

  “You have to look inside. It has verses people have written to me. Every young lady owns one.”

  Ryszard leafed through the pages of robin’s-egg blue, salmon, grey, pink, buff, and turquoise. “‘Be good, dear child, and let who will be clever.’ Who wrote that?”

  “My father.”

  “Do you agree?”

  “Mr. Karool, you do ask the silliest questions!”

  “Richard. And this?”

  “Which?”

  How he enjoyed reciting, in his ridiculous Polish accent, “In the tempest of life / When you need an umbrella / May it be upheld / By a handsome young feller.” If Maryna could see him now! “Who is the author?”

  “My best friend, Abigail. We were at Miss Ogilvy’s Academy together, she was just a year ahead of me, but now she’s married.”

  “Which means you envy her?”

  “Maybe I do and maybe I don’t. That’s a very intimate question!”

  “Not so intimate as I can be.”

  “Mr. Kreel, you just have to stop that. And write something in my book, didn’t you say you were a writer? If you write something in it, then I’ll never forget you.”

  “I must write something for you to remember me? You would not remember me always if I follow you to Philadelphia?”

  “You’re coming to Philadelphia?”

  “To see the Centennial Exposition, of course. You said that I must see it.”

  “But I—”

  “And you shall be my guide.” He pulled her toward him: why not, they were landing in New York tomorrow. “I press you to my heart. Don’t say that we must part. Or I shall find a—” And she, too, fled. Farewell, Philadelphia Miss.

  * * *

  NARROWING WATER, islands, tugboat, then the island, Manhattan, sultry wind, and the gulls, cormorants, falcons wheeling and circling overhead as the Germanic started upriver, eventually shuddering and bumping into White Star’s pier at Twenty-third Street. On their right, the relentless contra naturam of a modern city, a city devoted to the recasting of all relations into those of buyer and seller. A successful city, a city to which people wanted to emigrate. At any cost, whatever the indignities.

  The steerage passengers were still being herded off the Germanic onto the barge that would transport them back down the river to Castle Clinton, the former fort at the bottom of Manhattan where they would be interrogated and examined, when the customs officials who had come aboard to interview the first-class passengers and check their baggage had finished with them and welcomed them to America. Ryszard and Julian descended into the steaming street and hired a hackney carriage to take them to their hotel.

  Its size astonished even Julian. By telegraph from Liverpool he had booked a double room at the Central Hotel—for the name. “It looks like a bank,” said Ryszard.

  Is this normal weather, he inquired of the clerk after they had registered (in a free country, as Julian pointed out, one need not show any identity document) and after asking him where to purchase stamps to mail his stack of letters (“Just give him the letters,” whispered Julian. “He does it and puts the postage on our bill”).

  “You mean the hot wave?” said the clerk. “Oh, it’s not so hot as it can be. Not in July. No, sir. This is nothing. You should come back next month!”

  Following the two black porters who sprang forward to take charge of their trunk and bags, they crossed the huge lobby, with its several aroma zones of polished brass and oiled wood and chewing tobacco, looked into the cavernous dining room where four times a day the guests descended for their meals (Ryszard noting that the heat apparently authorized men to dine without their jackets, Julian explaining that, as on the ship, in American hotels there is no separate charge for meals, their cost being included in the price of the room), reached their immense room with its handsome but, their skin told them, useless ceiling fan, and decided to go out immediately for a walk. And it was when they stepped back on the street that Ryszard, who had been busy observing, judging, concluding from the moment they had landed two hours ago, had his epiphany. Perhaps it was seeing the sign as they emerged from the hotel. Broadway. They were on Broadway! His agile mind slowed and all he could think was: I’m here, I’m actually here.

  On the ship, that cruel microcosm, Ryszard was nowhere; therefore he could feel he was everywhere, the king of consciousness. You pace your world, as it moves across a surface of unmarked sameness, from one end to the other. It’s small, the world. You could put it in your pocket. That is the beauty of traveling on a ship.

  But now he was somewhere. He had not felt dumbfounded when the destination had been St. Petersburg or Vienna (though his head had long been stocked with pictures of those, to him, mythical cities), had not felt stunned the first time by the sheer this-ness of where he was, and that it looked as pictured. It was New York that produced this spell, or maybe it was America, Hamerica, made too mythical by a suffusion of dreams, of expectations, of fears that no reality could support—for everyone in Europe has views about this country, is fascinated by America, imagines it to be idyllic or barbaric and, however conceived, always a kind of solution. And all the while, deep down you are not entirely convinced it really exists. But it does!

  To be so struck that something really exists means that it seems quite unreal. The real is what you don’t marvel over, feel abashed by: it’s just the dry land surrounding your little puddle of consciousness. Make it real, make it real!

  That evening they returned on foot almost to the bottom of the island. As night fell the streets were still aswarm, shoppers and office workers giving way to the entertainment crowd, which included a multitude of streetwalkers. Lingering in Union Square, watching the well-dressed go into the theatres; peering into a bar on Bleecker Street at half-naked women on the laps of shirtsleeved men canted back in their chairs (“This is what, oddly enough, Americans call a saloon. Also a dive,” said Julian); passing streets where suffocating tenement dwellers had dragged pallets and planks out on fire escapes and sidewalks to sleep … Ryszard remaining silent; Julian commenting that a slum in New York had a different meaning from a slum in Liverpool because here people had hope (“Ships aren’t leaving New York weekly packed with poor people emigrating to Liverpool,” he said). But Ryszard didn’t mind, hardly heard Julian’s platitudes. He was listening to the voice in his own strangely empty head. I’m here. Where did I think I was going? I’m here.

  It exists … but then, do you?

  * * *

  OF COURSE you have your things you do. Your ways of behaving. If you are a man, anywhere you go, you can always hunt for sex. If, man or woman, you are someone given to more exotic entertainment, such as art, you can spend time checking out the local facilities, if only to deplore their insufficiency. If you are a journalist, or a writer of fiction playing at being a journalist, you will want to get your fill of the local misery. The unrelenting servility of the Negro waiters in the hotel restaurant, exclaiming “Yes sir! Yes sir!!” to every request, confirmed his impression that the politest people to be encountered in New York were those from Africa, who had been brought here in chains, while the people felt to be a menace were Europeans who had most recently chosen to come here. Wherever he was warned not to venture he went: the valley of hovels and shanties that started a few streets west of the Central Park, dark and fearful backstreets such as Bayard and Sullivan and West Houston, even the infamous Rag Pickers Row and Bottle Alley, where the most impoverished, most miserable, and therefore most dangerous lived. The risk of having his wallet lifted was the least of the dangers he was told he would be incurring. You would think he had landed on an island of cannibals.

  Ryszard had the writer’s perpetually available
blankness of mind. Julian had the comfort of his interests—science, inventions, progress. What he saw when he traveled illustrated or added to what he already knew. It was Julian, alone, who went off to the Centennial Exposition two days after they arrived. The latest prodigies of American inventiveness were on display—the telephone! the typewriter! the mimeograph machine!—and he returned after a day in Philadelphia enchanted with what he had seen. Ryszard, although his paper wanted a firsthand account of this national jubilee and world’s fair, had begged off: he could not bear another round of Julian explaining the modern and the sensible to him. It was New York, its rawness, its irreverence, that attracted Ryszard. Indeed, he suspected he might have felt even more at home in the city of thirty years ago that Dickens had excoriated, when pigs were still to be seen on the cobblestone streets. Of the three articles he sent back to the Gazeta Polska before they moved on—“The Life of a Great Transatlantic Steamship,” “New York: A First View,” and “American Manners”—the second and third were full of lively description and judicious admiration for the city’s energies.