In America

by Susan Sontag

  Maryna had anticipated that the English were not to be conquered as swiftly as the Americans. She had not supposed that they weren’t to be conquered at all, except conditionally. Her wager to herself was that if no more than half the reviews in the London newspapers mentioned her “enchanting” or “charming” accent, she would succeed in transferring her career, triumph and all, to England. All the reviews were flattering. Every critic mentioned the accent.

  She was praised, but not embraced. Unlike Americans, the English didn’t know what to do with questing foreigners. (Allowing them to become English was not an option.) And she, Marina Zalenska, was doubly a foreigner: a Pole from America.

  At the end of May, when her run at the Court Theatre (Heartsease, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It) had finished, she went with Bogdan and Miss Collingridge to see, possibly admire, the celebrated romantic pair of Ellen Terry and Henry Irving, at Irving’s theatre, the Lyceum. Ready to incline her head to these new gods of the English stage, Maryna was almost disappointed, so she told Bogdan, to discover that she was as good as the Terry she studied closely that evening in the title role of Bulwer-Lytton’s fusty, ever popular The Lady of Lyons; and as for the great Henry Irving, in the role of the lowborn hero, he seemed to her, with his dragging walk and weak guttural voice, altogether inferior in grace and distinction of speech to Edwin Booth.

  At least Maryna had the satisfaction of knowing that, were she not barred from a career in England because she had committed herself body and soul to performing in English, she could have stood her own against Terry. But she couldn’t compete with Sarah Bernhardt, who was about to arrive and would play at the Gaiety in French.

  The day that Bernhardt and the Comédie-Française opened to worshipful acclaim in her Phèdre, Maryna went out on summer tour of the English provinces. There she offered her Rosalind and her Juliet, and also her Ophelia and Viola, which Brownlow was eager to present in another London season in the fall; but Maryna had no desire to stay on, campaigning for a more clinging approval. Perhaps, Maryna wondered gloomily, she had used up the allotted number of impossible feats her will could make possible. Even if that were so, there still remained the nearly impossible. The merely very difficult.

  It had taken this sojourn in England to understand how much easier it was (hadn’t it been easy?) to prevail in America: a whole country of people who believe in the will.

  At a dinner party given in her honor by Lady Wolsington, Maryna had been seated next to the formidable American novelist and theatre critic Henry James, recently settled in London, and Mr. James had wondered if she might care to join him the following Tuesday for tea at the Café Royal, where he told her with circuitous bluntness that he hoped she’d not find him in the least predatory if … he hesitated, stroking his beautifully trimmed silky beard; he had already hesitated several times since they sat down at the marble-top table. “If what, dear Mr. James?” “If I confess to being what I can only describe as very interested, if not actually fascinated, both as a novelist and, I shall take the liberty of confiding in you one of my fonder hopes, a future playwright, fascinated, I say, in the actress as a contemporary type. I speak not of the actress as someone capable of an uncommon expressiveness, that expressiveness being to some extent conjoined with a flair for taking risks, necessary as such assets, expressiveness, audacity, are to her art, but the actress, the contemporary actress, as the most brilliant embodiment of feminine success.” Mr. James spoke with decided emphases, sometimes at the beginning, usually at the close of his often meandering sentences.

  “It doesn’t feel as if I have been altogether a success in London,” said Maryna. “At least not as much as I’d hoped, though I am most grateful for your friendly article.”

  “Ah, you must give the English a chance, dear Madame Zalenska. I’m afraid you may have been spoiled by our Yankee forthrightness. For all the want of spread in these compact isles there is much more surface here, one thing is said while another is meant, they are cautious, they can be suspicious, they are not keen on making a great effort, they would rather be thought a bit slow than too clever, they, how can I put it, withhold. But I predict they will come round.”

  He meant to be kind, no doubt. “England is not as vague and cushiony as America,” he declared. He was a little vague and cushiony, in the nicest way—this fattish, wordy, manifestly brilliant man. It was futile, he pronounced encouragingly, to dwell on the differences between England and America, which he invited Maryna to look upon as “one big Anglo-Saxon total—” Had Mr. James recently revisited his birthplace, New York City? Had he ever set foot in California? Surely not. “—one big Anglo-Saxon total, destined to such an amount of melting together that an insistence on their difference is idle and pedantic,” James was saying, “and that melting together will come the faster,” he went on, “the more one takes it for granted and treats the life of the two countries as continuous or more or less convertible.”

  Convertible perhaps for an American, Maryna thought. Or this kind of American. For Mr. James—in accent, in hesitations, in stiffness, in ominous opaque courtesy—seemed quite English to her. Perhaps for a writer …

  “Two chapters of the same book,” James intoned, as if reading her mind.

  “Or two acts of the same play.”

  “Just so,” James said.

  But no, not for actors. She could become an American, but never an English, actor.

  She recognized the old American tune, which conflates willing strenuously and taking for granted. Henry James was very American after all. He’d contrived to have at his disposal a vast allotment of willing.

  An English actor could always come to America: many had done so. Edwin Booth’s father, Junius Brutus Booth, who as a young actor had played with and rivaled Edmund Kean on the London stage, deserted his wife and child for a flower seller on Bow Street and ran off with her to America, there to found a new family of ten children and make one of the great American acting careers. Unthinkable for an American actor to flee to England and have an equally illustrious career. Americans acclaimed by the London critics, as Charlotte Cushman had been a generation earlier with her Portia, Beatrice, Lady Macbeth, and her Romeo (played opposite her sister’s Juliet), were not supposed to stay.

  Maryna and Bogdan returned to America after a quick trip to Kraków in late August. A failure is a failure only if acknowledged. The English public had been most welcoming, the shoving, sweating, shouting crowd of journalists waiting for her at the White Star pier were told. Yes, she nodded, she had been tempted to remain in London. (“No, no! Please, gentlemen! I have not, I repeat, not said that I am abandoning the American stage.”) But she was wholly pleased—this part was true—to be back in America.

  America: not just another country. While the unjust course of European history had ordained that a Pole could not be a citizen of Poland (but only of Russia or Austria or Prussia), the just course of world history had created America. Maryna would always be a Pole—no way to change that, nor would she want to. But she could, if she so chose, be an American too.

  She immediately set to planning the next New York season and another national tour. Unable to forgive Warnock for, once again, being right, Maryna, in consultation with Bogdan, had engaged a zealous new personal manager with a “delicious” name, Ariel N. Peabody.

  “Even more delicious than we thought,” Maryna reported to Bogdan. “Recalling how pleased Mr. Warnock was with his middle name, I thought Mr. Peabody might like to be asked his. ‘The N, you mean?’ he cried.” Maryna tilted her head as Peabody did; her mimicry of his voice was uncanny. “‘Ah, this may amuse you, Madame Marina. It stands for’—pause—‘the name is’—flourish, bow—‘Nothing.’”

  “America never disappoints,” observed Bogdan.

  “Nomen, omen. Maybe he’ll prove to be nothing like Mr. Warnock. No more humbug, I like this word, lost diamonds, lapdogs, alligators, tall tales—nothing of that.”

  “I shouldn’t count on it,” said Bogdan. �
�But a Marina Zalenska doesn’t need A. Nothing Peabody to tell her what to do.”

  * * *

  “HER SUCCESS has grown like an avalanche,” announced the Norfolk Public Ledger. She continued to add Shakespeares: starting in 1880, Measure for Measure, and the following year The Merchant of Venice and, at last, “the Scottish play.” As for being a star, American style: by the end of the third national tour Maryna thought she had got that role down pat.

  It is to go about in your own sumptuously appointed apartment on wheels, a private railway car with etched-glass Gothic windows and velvet draperies and potted palms and a small library and a piano and a boudoir large enough for a mahogany dresser and four-poster bed, the other actors and your staff following in a second, private Pullman car; to have a pug named Indiana; to have a large watercolor painting of your pet pug adorning a panel of the parlor of your private car; to need the largest, most luxurious suite whenever you stop at hotels, the best hotels, and the most delicate food; to scribble notes on the finest linen paper with an embossed crest, the usual words of thanks to those who have attempted to entertain you or otherwise please you, kindly words to the bedazzled young women brave enough to request an interview (“You can’t imagine how many girls write me every day to ask my advice on how to begin this profession, but how can I encourage them, so long as in America there are hardly any permanent theatres?”). It is to hobnob with other living legends: Longfellow is your special friend and Tennyson has received you in London and Oscar Wilde has greeted you with an armful of white lilies and announced he will write a play for you. It is to be unconventional, though hardly as unconventional as Oscar Wilde: your particular defiance of convention—you are a lady and you smoke—is the kind of thing people expected to learn about you. It is to be careless about possessions, to be unable to throw anything away, to be continually acquiring: you disembarked with sixty-five pieces of luggage when you came from the following summer’s trip to Paris (“and a brief visit to her native Poland”), the New York papers recounted. It is to have many residences: “Soon she and her husband, Count Dembowski, will be going for a month to their ranch in southern California. The main house, recently completed, was designed by a friend of Madame Zalenska, the eminent architect and theatre-lover, Stanford White.”

  In Poland, you were allowed some practice of the arts of self-indulgence, but you were expected to be sincere and also to have high ideals—people respected you for that. In America, you were expected to exhibit the confusions of inner vehemence, to express opinions no one need take seriously, and have eccentric foibles and extravagant needs, which exhibited the force of your will, your appetitiveness, the spread of your self-regard—all excellent things.

  Out for a drive (Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago) in your private brougham, you stop on impulse in front of a bookstore and come out with a dozen poets bound in choicest vellum, morocco, and tree-calf. Her tastes are all of the exclusive kind, the journalists reported. She spends money royally right and left, they said, with a princess-like freedom. At the same time, you were expected to be shrewd about money and a pitiless negotiator, but charitable too (you are pursued by heartrending letters from indigent Polish immigrants), and beyond reproach, that is, respectable, and a would-be homebody, and a devoted parent. A woman must always declare that her family matters more to her than her career.

  Of course her real family was her company, whose ever-changing roster continued to advance in skill, thanks to Maryna’s ferocious, supple mentoring.

  “The curtain rises, you must seize the audience.” Here she might seize the actor’s wrist. “Fix the audience with a look, then ravish its soul with the voice. Making full use of your diaphragm, yes?” Here she would bellow. “Don’t squeak or rant!”

  She went over the tricks and pitfalls of the stage embrace. Dying, she explained, should be neither swift nor too drawn out. She gave instruction in techniques of coughing, fainting, and praying. To an actor who had the habit of agonizing in the wings with stage fright long before his entrance, she prescribed “a last-minute departure from the dressing room.”

  “Don’t be afraid to turn upstage,” she admonished. “The face may say too much, but the audience can read just what it needs, no more, from your back.”

  And: “Don’t move your head when you talk. It makes the neck much less powerful.”

  And: “Don’t let the voice go down. The voice should go out, but to another actor. Your voice is too much at the public.”

  At regular intervals packets of raw ginger arrived from San Francisco’s Chinatown so Maryna could press on all members of her company the merits of frequent infusions of ginger tea: drinking it boiling hot, then eating the finely sliced raw ginger at the bottom of the cup, will solve almost all last-minute voice problems, she said. She pointed out that while fear and anxiety make men more thermic—“Thermic!” exclaimed Miss Collingridge appreciatively—so they need to be vigilant about perspiration stains that blossom on the upper part of their costumes, the same emotions make women feel chilled, so the women must be sure to bundle up before the performance and during intermissions.

  “But, Madame,” said Warren Bancroft (her Romeo and Benedick and Orlando and her Armand Duval and Maurice during the company’s second season), “I always go cold as ice when I have stage fright.”

  “Nonsense,” she said.

  “Acting should never be easy,” she said, spitting out easy. “That means you have forgotten yourself. You have forgotten where you are. You must never, never, never forget you are on a stage. Therefore you will always be afraid. You are afraid, but you are a conqueror. When you are on stage, whatever your role, you are a conqueror. You should feel very tall when you stand on a stage. Everything in you should straighten and contract around the fear. Even in grief, which is concave, you are still a line. And that line goes straight out to the last row of the highest balcony. Hold the line! Become a source of light. You are a candle. Keep your back straight, don’t let your neck settle into your shoulders. Feel the flame rise from the top of your head.”

  Of Abner Dixey, dismissed after the first season (he had played Jaques in As You Like It and Malvolio in Twelfth Night and, even more woodenly, Captain Levison, the scheming rake in East Lynne), she said, succinctly, “He didn’t transform anything. An actor transforms.”

  “Most rules for behaving properly on a stage,” she told them, “also apply to real life.” (“Except,” she said, smiling blithely, cryptically, “when they don’t.”) One such rule is: Never acknowledge a mishap. Once, in a Measure for Measure at the Taylor Opera House in Trenton, the actor playing Claudio, the brother, who has been condemned to death, in flinging himself at Isabella’s feet to implore her to grant Angelo’s base request (the price of sparing his life) knocked the prison bench over; sustaining the same frenzy of utterance that Claudio’s wretchedness demanded, he deftly righted the bench. When the curtain fell on the last of numerous recalls that Maryna had generously shared with the young actor, a new recruit to the company, she said very softly to him: “Never try to repair an accident during a performance. It only prompts the audience to notice it.”

  To be sure, some accidents are harder to ignore, as when, in a Macbeth at McVicker’s Theatre in Chicago (“Naturally, it was the Scottish play!”), having stupidly essayed her sleepwalking entrance with her eyes shut, Maryna stumbled and ruptured a tendon in her ankle. She continued the scene to the end without murmur, grimace, or alteration of her gait.

  Your corrections are biting, maternal, just. Your example is luminous.

  The members of your company repay you with adulation and fear and perfect, anxious devotion.

  You show off, you amaze them. You are at the zenith. Your powers, so you feel now, are unlimited.

  They were drawing full houses and enchanted audiences in Colorado. And after the final performance of a week at Denver’s Tabor Grand Opera House—Juliet (as Romeo and Juliet was called in the company’s schedule), Adrienne, Camille, Winter’s Tale—Peabody o
rganized a late supper with free liquor for the company in the empty saloon of their hotel. By the time Maryna joined them, most of the men, and not only the men, were jovially drunk, and flirty Laura Fitch, who played the wicked Queen of England in Cymbeline and Audrey in As You Like It and Paulina in The Winter’s Tale, was finishing her tabletop recitation of

  When scarcely old enough to know

  The meaning of a tale of woe,

  ’Twas then by mother we were told,

  That father in his grave was cold.

  For long we watched beside her bed,

  Then sobb’d to see her lie there dead;

  And now we wander hand in hand,

  Two orphan girls from Switzerland!

  “Ahem,” said James Bridger, the new Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet and Touchstone in As You Like It and the faithful Gaston in Camille, who was in love with Laura. “Now where’s my stage?” Leaping with Mercutio-like agility to the counter of the bar and slapping his hand to his chest, he bawled