In America

by Susan Sontag

  March 23. Copper-colored skin. Cheekbones. Impure thoughts.

  March 24. M. doesn’t see how much I have to struggle against my natural inertia. Her penchant for exertion has been a good influence on me. What makes me strong is being strong for her.

  March 25. We have been captured for all eternity near the house on a sheet of wet glass by an itinerant photographer, who was female, elderly, and quite droll. M. liked her. A diverting occasion for our community, I thought, but for M. it seemed to bring out a kind of foreboding. Or regret—as if we were taking the first step toward accepting the eventual failure of our colony, by making sure that we would have in our possession an image of what we are now.

  March 26. I’ve always had a horror of making myself conspicuous or seeming different from other people. Beset by qualms, I didn’t do anything outrageous. I was merely obstinate, absent-minded. Only in a theatre did I feel free to pay attention to everything that went on about me. While watching a play, in the company of actors, I found in myself nearly occult states of awareness. I thought I would never marry. I loved but I never wanted to seduce. Then everything became possible with M. She entranced me. She needed me. The sluggish coals of my emotions burst into flame. Can love be founded on adoration, I asked myself. Yes, replied my heart.

  March 27. It is so habitual for me to support M. in anything she has wanted to do. For a long time I thought her wanting to come to America a whim. Worse: I feared it was an act of desperation, not thought out at all. So it was my task to make it mean something—or something else. I’ve heard her parroting my ideas to Henryk, about how the noble doctrines of Fourier could be adapted to our venture, almost sentence by sentence. I suppose it didn’t matter that I was listening. That an actress is not the author of the play doesn’t make the lines any less hers. Gophers have made havoc of the artichoke patch.

  March 28. M. still treats P. like a baby. Actresses make willful mothers, smothering and neglectful. Now he’s asked for piano lessons. It would be wiser to encourage his interest in engineering. The boy is already too high-strung. Unless he’s a future piano virtuoso, which I have no reason to think likely, a passion for music can only strengthen his morbid, effeminate tendencies. Perhaps M. will be less than enthusiastic about these lessons once she realizes that the piano teacher, the pretty daughter of the town clerk, Herr Reiser, is already an object of Ryszard’s lighthearted lust.

  March 29. They are alike in many ways, M. and Ryszard. I understand, I suppose I envy, the actress, who has permission to flaunt herself in the guise of another. I feel more censorious toward the writer, who believes he has a mandate to say what he himself thinks to the world. But I can’t help admiring his self-confidence and his blithe, almost American pursuit of his own happiness.

  March 30. The defect of keeping a diary is that I note mostly what ruffles my temper. Tonight I could pen a whole sermon on the ugliness of a loveless marriage. Wanda has taken to wearing her hair pulled back and in frizzed bangs—le dernier cri, apparently, among the ladies of the village—and Julian is merciless.

  March 31. I try not to be irritable. M. can’t imagine I harbor any criticisms of her. She thinks of me as an admiring mirror. Perhaps that’s her idea, the actress’s idea, of a good marriage. But I know my jumble of feelings is what makes me right for her. Only I register her bad behavior as bad, only I see her vulnerability, her dismay, only I know that she doesn’t want, really, to be possessed by anyone.

  April 1. A day in the fields has left me feeling optimistic. Most of the grafts we did last month have taken, the vines have flowered, the grapes have appeared, and the leaves to protect them. The sandy land is fruitful, and we are working more expertly than ever. Ramon, age 17. My senses are sharper here. I cannot control what I feel. I cannot control its reverberations in my flesh and my heart. But I can control what I do. I will not betray M.

  April 2. Jacinto, age 25. Curly hair. Scar on his right forearm. White teeth. Calloused hand inside his partly open shirt. The curve of his breast. Standing there.

  April 3. This afternoon I rode with Ryszard out to an Indian settlement in the Santa Ana foothills. Packs of scrawny children came running out of the wigwams and a few grey adobe huts thatched with tule reeds—an impression of mournful poverty. An elder ordered some women to serve us bowls of acorn porridge and their jet-black bread made from acorn flour. The dessert was tuna, the red fruit of the prickly pear, and the drink was manzanita cider. On the way back, Ryszard and I argued about whether the insensibility of Indians to pain is proof of their inferiority. I said the more one feels, the higher one is racially, culturally. He accused me of the most benighted prejudice. I’m sure he said to himself, a Dembowski would think that. Despite everything, I like Ryszard. He is intelligent. He has a healthy nature. How fortunate for me that he can’t offer M. the fidelity she requires, or even notice that she minds his trifling with P.’s schoolteacher and Fraülein Reiser.

  April 4. Flashes of hope, like flashes of desire. Beginning again. How much must one give up for the privilege of “beginning again”? For more than fifty years Europeans have been saying, If it doesn’t work, we can always go to America. Socially mismatched lovers escaping a family ban on their union, artists unable to win the audience they know their work deserves, revolutionaries crushed by the hopelessness of revolutionary endeavor—to America! America is supposed to repair the European scale of injury or simply make one forget what one wanted, to substitute other desires.

  April 5. Staszek, Józek. The shepherd boy who gave me the feather. Mrs. Bachleda’s grandson. I never anticipated California would be a new theatre of temptations. Indeed, I thought I was leaving these furtive pinings behind in our unhappy country. Instead, it’s as if my weakness had flown ahead of me. While we were exploring New York, descending the Atlantic coast, crossing the isthmus, rising up the California coast, dallying in San Francisco, and then entraining for here, these reincarnated phantoms of endangering desire were already waiting for me. And with them a quiet, firm voice that says, as it never did in Poland, why not? You are abroad, no one knows who you really are. This is America, where nothing is permanent. Nothing supposed to have fixed, unalterable consequences. Everything supposed to move, change, be torn down, mix.

  April 6. Transfixed this morning by an idyllic scene of comradeship straight out of Whitman’s Calamus poems. Joaquin, age 19. Loose cotton shirt, trousers made of the skin of fallow deer. Seated on a tree stump playing a kind of small harp with one string which they call a chiote. Sinewy wrists, broad hands. Beside him on the ground, legs akimbo, carelessly leaning his head against Joaquin’s thigh, another boy, no more than 15, was singing. His name, I think, is Doroteo. Level marked brows over large eyelids. His fat busy lips. When I asked him to translate the song, he blushed.

  In the shade of the magnolia I dreamt of you.

  When I awoke and found you gone,

  I cried myself to sleep again.

  Then I blushed. I wanted to stroke his leg from the knee to the groin.

  April 7. It is eighteen months since M. first proposed coming to America. Spring rains are over, we are told. It will be dry until November. Moments of hard doubt when I think of the money (mostly mine but also Aleksander’s, his aunt’s legacy) slipping through my fingers. I am the only one who thinks about money, and I am the one least prepared, by nurture and temperament, to think about it. The others must be worrying too, but don’t dare express their concern, as if they would be impugning my competence. Still, there is reason to be optimistic. I had not fully understood the scope of the depression in the wine industry, which reached its nadir the year before last. Grapes sold for $8 a ton and were sometimes fed to hogs. But prices are rising, they should soon return to what they were before 1873, around $25 a ton. Come this autumn or the next, we could make several thousand dollars.

  April 8. Dream about Francisco. His hand on the iron pommel of his saddle. It is natural to be attracted by beauty. M. was so beautiful.

  April 9. In the vill
age this morning to have a horse reshod and buy grain for the livestock, I was struck once again by how plain, how meanly utilitarian, the buildings are. One can easily imagine any or all of them being torn down. Conversation about irrigation with that idiot Kohler.

  April 10. Humbling experience to be without a past. Nobody knows, or would care if they did know, who my grandfather was. General who? Perhaps they’ve heard of Pulaski, but that’s because he came to America, or Chopin, but that’s because he lived in France. In Poland, I congratulated myself that my sense of my own dignity didn’t come from my name or rank. I was too different from my family—I had better ideals, other weaknesses. But I was proud of being Polish. And that pride, like Polishness itself, is not only irrelevant here, it is a handicap, for it makes us old-fashioned.

  When we first arrived, most of us were disappointed to have only foreigners, instead of real Americans, for neighbors. The more I know the villagers, however, I see that although they still speak German they really are Americans. What is European, indolent, old-fashioned, has no place here. And it seems easier for someone from Europe to become an American than I would have thought. But it will never be easy for Mexicans. Poor Mexicans will always be lowly foreigners to these newly minted Americans, while the few wealthy Mexicans remind me of our gentry back home—they are valiant, haughty, extravagant, hospitable, ceremonious, lazy—and destined to be pushed aside by the Americans with their unrelenting practicality and passion for work. The old California’s doom is sealed.

  April 11. Billy’s the name, says the carrot-haired boy at the rodeo. What’s yours? White teeth, a scar on his forehead. Bob-Dan, I say. Nice to meet you, Bob. Whinny and plunge of the horses. Imprecations of the Mexican cowboys digging their wooden stirrups into the bleeding sides of their broncos. Bellowing of cattle, thrown, pinioned, branded. No, not Bob, I say, Bob and then Dan. He calls me Bobby.

  April 12. I think I have never felt so healthy, so pleased with myself, so agreeably simplified, as this morning, with the temperature at 85°F by ten o’clock, pitching forkfuls of hay down from the loft for the horses. Read Pasteur’s Etudes sur le vin in the afternoon.

  April 13. I decided to have a candid conversation with Dreyfus, the only Jew in Anaheim as far as I can tell and, not surprisingly, the cleverest fellow in the village. He says the only way to make a go of our enterprise is to start our own wine company. We must expand or perish.

  April 14. Forbidden desire, straining to be liberated by foreignness. The curse on desire. But there is no puzzle about how I can be so strongly drawn to these boys and wholly in love with M. Loving her is the one steadiness I have.

  April 15. One answer would be to plant other varieties of grape. From one grape, brought here by the Spanish fathers who founded the Missions, so many kinds of wine are made. The liqueurs, the brandy and angelica and sparkling angelica, and the port and sherry and other sweet wines, uneven though they be, are acceptable—the criolla grape swells with sugar under all this sun. But the dry wines, the riesling, the claret, being too low in acid, are flat and dull. Yet everyone drinks them. And not only in California. The companies here sell more and more on the East Coast, and even export to Europe. It is entirely possible that wine will become American, with an American standard of excellence, just as happiness is destined to become American, with an American standard of what it is to be happy.

  April 16. Are we fools for coming here? The possibility is not to be excluded. Am I a fool? Complaisant husband, looking the other way while another man courts his wife? But she will not leave me for him. Ryszard is not the man for her. I am not a fool.

  April 17. I was born thirty-five years ago, which makes it my birthday à l’américaine. Our custom of celebrating birthdays on the day of the saint after whom one is named is unthinkable here, and not just because this is not a Catholic country, with a religious calendar enshrining the most ancient histories and traditions. What is paramount in America is the personal calendar, the personal journey. My birthday, my life, my happiness.

  April 18. Two Indian boys playing leapfrog. One with black hair like a horse’s mane and filed teeth. 97°. And it isn’t summer yet. I should get a book on pig breeding. And one on beekeeping and how to make mead. Talking to people in the village, I gather that these are the businesses that require the least amount of work and bring the best profit: pigs and bees. Mead is very popular here, but they don’t make it properly. Julian and I made some, and it seemed very good. However, it would not hurt to have proper recipes.

  April 19. I came too late into her life to entertain the fantasy of molding her. I had no aspirations to change her. I loved her exactly as she was. I was an ideal second husband. The husband of a great actress—that was a role I knew how to play. I wanted her to take me for granted, and now I find that I take her for granted, too. But I have never penetrated the innermost recesses of her heart. Odd how confident I am that M. will never leave me.

  April 20. Juan María, Doroteo, Jesús.

  April 21. Ryszard has proposed to take us, just M. and me, on a two-day trip into the San Bernardinos. I told M. I can’t leave the work I’m doing with Aleksander on the stable, but she should go. To be sure, Ryszard may have counted on my refusing.

  April 22. M. off before dawn with Ryszard, old Salvador in attendance. Ryszard was armed with his 14-shot Henry rifle, revolver, and bowie knife. Salvador carrying enough weapons for two bandits. M. took a gun, too. At supper everyone seemed subdued, having no one to perform for. Maybe they’re all worrying that she will leave them. The most distraught was Aniela. How can Madame sleep outdoors, she kept saying. P. asked if his mother’s absence meant he could stay up later and practice at the piano. The house felt empty and I went for a long walk around midnight. Away from our settlement, in the immensity and candor of nature, under the boundlessness of the night sky, I was suddenly gripped by a vision of the enormous falseness of human relations. My love for M. appeared to me as a great lie. Equally a lie are her feelings for me, for her son, and for the members of our colony. Our half-primitive, half-bucolic life is a lie, our longing for Poland is a lie, marriage is a lie, the whole way that society is constituted is nothing but lies. But I don’t see what I can do with this knowledge. Break with society and become a revolutionary? I am too skeptical. Leave M. and follow my shameful desires? I cannot imagine a life without her. Returning to the house, sitting down to write this, I think once again: the house is empty.

  April 23. They returned this evening. M. exuberant, full of stories of what she had seen. She had a nasty injury, the culprit being not some wild beast but a cup of boiling hot tea; the entire palm of her right hand is one suppurating blister. I don’t think she discovered she was in love with Ryszard. But how would I ever know if something transpired between them? I have an actress for a wife.

  * * *

  TRAVELING EASTWARD in the direction of the mountains, their horses crossed the wide sandy bed of Anaheim’s seasonal river. After all his entreaties, Ryszard was astonished that Maryna had agreed to the excursion. Now he would surprise her, by showing that he did not assume she had conceded anything further by giving him this. Patience was the cardinal virtue of the hunter: he would not press his suit. Nor would he point out what they were seeing. From the vantage point of silence, that would present itself as an intrusion, as if he thought she could not see for herself the herd of Angora goats, the cock pheasants perched on the cactus, the antelope on the hill, the flock of rose-colored turtledoves hovering above. He felt ashamed of his ready spray of words. Words were easy—they flew out of him and filled everything with light. There was no need to talk.

  Toward noon they stopped on a high ridge of the San Bernardinos. Salvador pointed to a large black oak on the edge of the glen and shouted something to Ryszard in Spanish.

  Ryszard shook his head. “No quiero oirlo.”

  Salvador crossed himself, dismounted, tied up the horses, and began gathering brushwood for a fire.

  “What did he say?” said Maryna.


  “That a cattle thief was caught up here last summer.”

  “Right here?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what happened to him?”

  Salvador had kindled the fire, and was setting out his tinware—saucepan, kettle, dishes, cups—for a light meal.

  “He was lynched.”

  “From that tree.”

  “I’m afraid so. Yes.”

  Maryna groaned and moved toward the fire. Ryszard followed her, took a blanket from his saddlebag, and spread it out on the ground for them to sit.

  “I won’t ask if you’re tired.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Do you wish you hadn’t come?”

  “Ryszard, Ryszard, stop fretting about whether I’m glad to be here. And with you. I am.”

  “Now I know you love me. You said my name twice.”

  “Yes, as you do.” She laughed. “‘Maryna, Maryna!’”

  He thought his heart was going to burst with happiness.

  “Are you happy, Maryna?” he said gently.

  “Ah, happiness,” she said. “I think I have a vast capacity for happiness.”

  It was not the moment to explain to Ryszard her new arrangement with herself regarding happiness and satisfaction. Happiness depended on not being trapped in your individual existence, a container with your name on it. You have to forget yourself, your container. You have to attach yourself to what takes you outside yourself, what stretches the world. The joys of the eye, for instance—she remembered her mad delight the first time she set foot in a museum: it was with Heinrich, Heinrich had taken her to Vienna, she was nineteen and sorely in need of initiation. She was a girl. One of the strengths that comes with being a woman, and older, was that she had less need to share those bright moments of exit from the self. But she had not forgotten, though Ryszard seemed to think she had, the joys of hand and mouth and skin.