In America

by Susan Sontag

  * * *

  “PERHAPS IT IS a curse to come from anywhere. The world, you see,” she said, “is very large. I mean,” she said, “the world comes in many parts. The world, like our poor Poland, can always be divided. And subdivided. You find yourself occupying a smaller and smaller space. Though you’re at home in that space—”

  “On that stage,” said the friend helpfully.

  “If you will,” she said coolly. “That stage.” Then she frowned. “Surely you’re not reminding me that all the world’s a stage?”

  * * *

  “BUT HOW CAN you leave your place, which is here?”

  “My place, my place,” she cried. “I have none!”

  “And you can’t abandon your—”

  “Friends?” she hooted.

  “Actually, Irena and I were thinking of your public.”

  “Who says I am abandoning my public? Will they forget me if I choose to absent myself? No. Will they welcome me back should I choose to return? Yes. As for my friends…”

  “Yes?”

  “You can be sure I have no intention of abandoning my friends.”

  * * *

  “MY FRIENDS,” she repeated, “are much more dangerous than my enemies. I’m thinking of their approval. Their expectations. They want me to be as I am, and I cannot disabuse them entirely. They might cease to love me.

  “I’ve explained it to them. But I could have announced it to them, like a whim. Recently, I thought I was ready to do it. At dinner in a hotel, the party after a first-night performance. I was going to raise my glass. I am leaving. Soon. Forever. Someone would have exclaimed, Oh Madame, how can you? And I’d have replied, I can, I can. But I didn’t have the courage. Instead, I offered a toast to our poor dismembered country.”

  * * *

  LOVE OF COUNTRY, of friends, of family, of the stage … oh, and love of God: love, the word, came easily to Maryna’s lips—however little she expected from romantic love, the stuff of plays.

  She had been a stern, dutiful child. She thought God was always watching her and recording in a large brown ledger (as she imagined it) her every thought and action. She kept her back straight and always met people’s gaze. She was sure God approved of that. She understood, early on, that it was futile to complain, and best not to confide in anyone. God knew how weak she was, but forgave her because she tried so hard. In return, she determined not to ask God for anything she might not deserve, either by her own talents or by the strength of her wishing. She did not want to strain His generosity.

  Granted, she could not tell the truth. But there was so much energy in her for saying something, and making others listen. A woman could not say much. A diva could say too much. As a diva, with a diva’s permissions, she could have tantrums, she could ask for the impossible, she could lie.

  It would have been appropriate if she had arisen from nowhere to become a star. It was equally appropriate that she should be the scion of a charming, vastly talented clan. The family story that she constructed, her happy though penurious childhood, artfully blended elements of the two.

  She was the youngest of her mother’s ten children—there had been six by a first marriage, then four more after marriage to a secondary-school Latin teacher—and, as Maryna used to say, with two of her half brothers already on the stage by the time she was four and learning to read, how could she not have wanted to follow them? In fact, Maryna had not at first dreamed of the actor’s life. She wanted to be a soldier; and when it occurred to her that, being a girl, she would never be allowed to bear arms, she wanted to be a poet whose patriotic odes men would recite as they marched to demand their country’s freedom. But her father, though he did not discourage her appetite for reading, seemed to think it more becoming for a girl to be musical than bookish. He, after preparing the next day’s lessons, retreated from the evening’s family noise by playing the flute.

  From all this, what she distilled for her friends was that her father had taught her to play the flute.

  Banished from telling: the frightening disharmony of her parents, her mother’s tirades, her father asleep over his Caesar or Virgil, the taunts of the neighbors’ children when she was six that the Latin teacher was not her father but someone who had rented a room in the flat (they’d always needed to take in boarders): someone like the older man, half-German, half-Polish, who moved into the flat with the title of boarder when she was eleven, two years after her father died, and who did not begin to visit her bed (extracting a promise from her not to tell her mother) until she was fourteen—she should count herself fortunate to have remained unmolested until such a late age, was her mother’s comment.

  * * *

  “I COME FROM a family of many brothers and sisters, all as children in love with the theatre, though just four of us—Stefan, Adam, Józefina, myself—went on the stage. Of course only one among us had real genius, and it was not I. No”—she raised her hand—“don’t contradict me.”

  Maryna liked declaring that Stefan’s was the more natural talent, that she had achieved everything by hard work and application: she’d never ceased to feel guilty about the speed with which her career had eclipsed his.

  “And we were poor. Even poorer after our father died, when I was nine. After he died my mother worked in a pastry shop on the same street as the flat in which we all had been born, which was lost in the Great Kraków Fire.” She paused. “When I was young I thought I could not live without comfort and luxury.” A spindly waiter was pouring the champagne. “Then I thought I couldn’t live without my friends.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I think I can do without everything.”

  “Which is the same as wanting everything,” replied her clever friend.

  * * *

  SHE WAS SEVEN when she first entered a theatre. The play was Don Carlos. It seemed to be about love, and then it was about being heartbroken, but then it was about something much better, when at the end the unhappy Carlos went off to fight for the liberty of enslaved Holland. (That he will never go to Holland—that in the final moment of the play the King, Carlos’s father, orders his son’s arrest and execution—was too horrifying to take in.) She was completely swept up by Schiller’s message of liberty, so much so that, eventually, it dislodged from her mind the reason that, young as she was, she had been taken to the theatre. It was to see her half brother Stefan, performing in Kraków for the first time, in one of the principal roles. For, as the play went on, she had realized with a mounting sense of humiliation that she did not recognize him. She’d looked at all the men who came and went on the stage, and hadn’t seen her handsome brother among them. One was too fat, another too old (Stefan was nineteen), another too tall. The only one who wasn’t too fat or too old or too tall, a man with a silver wig and red paint on his face, playing the part of the faithful Posa, didn’t look at all like him. But she couldn’t ask her parents who Stefan was. She would be judged hopelessly stupid and never be taken to the theatre again.

  After the performance, when she accompanied her mother backstage and Stefan emerged, beaming, his bony face with its strong jaw and high forehead cleansed of makeup, she could hardly ask him which part he had played (could he have been Posa?) and just told him that he was wonderful, wonderful.

  Then it occurred to her—it seemed a very ingenious, grown-up calculation—that there was one way to ensure that she would be allowed again into a theatre. That was to become an actor herself. Who could bar an actor from the theatre? Indeed, so welcome were actors that apparently they didn’t have to use the regular entrance (though she supposed they were still required to buy tickets) but went in by a back door.

  “That night”—she was telling the story, laughing at herself, to a friend—“I swore a vow standing with my mouth pressed to the icy pane of the little window of the room I shared with five of my sisters and brothers … no, not in the flat where I was born but the new one (it was a year after the Fire) … that I would live only for the theatre. Of course I did
n’t know if I could be an actress. And for a long time Stefan, and even Adam, did all they could to discourage me with fearful pictures of the actor’s life: the hard work and the tedium, the bad wages, the dishonest theatre managers, the ungrateful ignorant audiences, the malicious reviewers. Not to mention the unheated filthy hotel rooms and their creaking floorboards, the greasy food and the cold tea, the interminable journeys over unreliable roads in badly sprung carriages, but”—she broke off, to explain—“that was what I liked.”

  “The discomforts?”

  “Yes, the traveling! Being a vagrant. You go somewhere, you please people, and then you never have to see them again.”

  “But it must be more comfortable now, since you can travel by train.”

  “You’re not listening to me. You don’t see,” she cried. “It felt right not having a home!”

  * * *

  “I CAN STILL SEE that fire”—she was telling this to Ryszard—“and smell it. I’ll always be terrified of fire. I was ten. From across the square, sheltering at first with so many others in the door of the Dominican church, we watched our windows melt, the windows from which my brothers used to take aim with their wooden guns at Austrian soldiers—how that had frightened our mother. She said we were lucky to escape with our lives, which was all we escaped with, for everything burned, even the church, and the flat we moved to after the fire was even smaller. Still, small as it was, my mother took in another boarder—we’d always had boarders in the flat on Grodzka Street—and that was Mr. Załężowski, Heinrich Załężowski, who was very kind and gave me German lessons. Of course, Latin had come easily to me; our father had drilled us in Latin; but I didn’t know that I had a talent for learning languages. Though he was a foreigner, from Königsberg, his real name was Siebelmeyer, Mr. Załężowski had become one of us and taken a Polish surname. Mr. Załężowski was a patriot. At seventeen, he’d fought in the Uprising of 1830. My brothers worshipped him. And my mother seemed very fond of him as well, and for a while my brothers and I thought my bearded, gruff German tutor would soon become the stepfather of us all. But it turned out that he had become quite fond of me, young as I was, and though the gulf of twenty-seven years lay between us, I didn’t find it in my heart to refuse the affections of so fine a man, who could teach me so much. It was he who believed in my future in the theatre when Stefan was still discouraging me, and after I’d had a catastrophic audition with a celebrated actress in Warsaw (no, I won’t tell you who it was) who told me I had no talent at all, none. None! And he offered to launch me on the stage. For some years earlier, while hiding from the police, Mr. Załężowski had managed a traveling theatre company, and he proposed that we go to Bochnia for a time and revive that troupe with some actors he knew there who were seeking work. Thereby he would have an instrument to undertake the direction of my career.

  “And so, when I was sixteen, with my mother’s tearful blessing, for I wouldn’t have done it without that, Mr. Załężowski and I were married and left Kraków for that town where he still had his connections, and there I made my debut at seventeen, in A Window on the First Floor by Korzeniowski, in the part of the wife who, as you’ll remember, on the point of being unfaithful to her husband is saved by the cry of her sick baby. Audiences were not sophisticated then. They loved healthy sentiments and a moral. But Mr. Załężowski wanted me to do great plays, German plays and Shakespeare, and within a few months I had learned the roles of Gretchen and Juliet and Desdemona and—

  “Why am I telling you all this?” she said fretfully. “I’m making it sound easy!”

  * * *

  “OF COURSE it wasn’t easy,” said the friend soothingly.

  “But it was!” she exclaimed. “For I, who was all ambition, was myself as unsophisticated as the audiences of those days. I remember the effect on me of a little book called The Hygiene of the Soul, in which the author, someone named Feuchtersleben, tries to prove that everything we wish can be obtained if we wish it strongly enough. Obedient to the spirit of this utopian, I rose from my bed—it was late at night—and, stamping the floor, I shouted, ‘Well then, I must and I will!’ This woke up the nurse, and my baby began to cry, so I crept back to bed, dreaming of future laurels.”

  “You were very young then.”

  “I was already twenty. No, not so young. And my daughter, my baby—you know what happened. Diphtheria. While I was away on tour.”

  “Yes.”

  “I couldn’t go to her. Mr. Załężowski, my husband, pointed out that the plays could not be performed without me and we would never be engaged again at the theatre should we fail to fulfill our contract.”

  “It must have been dreadful for you.”

  “It still is. I mourn her every day of my life. I love Piotr, but I hadn’t pictured myself with a son. I always imagined a daughter.”

  “But the laurels—you were right about the laurels.”

  “Yes, I admit that from the beginning I never played anything but principal roles. But it doesn’t help. It’s astonishing how one becomes accustomed to applause.”

  * * *

  AS STEFAN and others had discouraged her, Maryna felt it her duty to discourage young aspirants to the stage who sought her support. “You can’t imagine the slights you’ll have to endure,” she had warned Krystyna. “Even if you become successful”—she shook her head—“and then, one day, because you are successful.”

  But even though Maryna did not mean to encourage, she did, simply because she liked to instruct, and to tell stories about her life.

  “Mr. Załężowski, Heinrich Załężowski, used to say, ‘It won’t help you to grind away day and night at your roles. It will ruin your health and give you too many ideas. Believe me, actors don’t need to think!’” She laughed. “Of course I thought this was preposterous. I like ideas.”

  “Yes,” interjected one of her protégés, “ideas are—”

  “But I knew there was no point in arguing with him. So I replied humbly, I was still very young and he was much older, and my husband: ‘Then what should I do?’ ‘Diligence, day-to-day diligence!’ he shouted (why do theatre people shout so much?). As if I’d not been diligent!”

  She pressed her fingers to her temples. Another headache in the wings.

  “And diligence isn’t enough. I can study a part for a long time and still not be ready to play the role. I learn the lines, say them walking up and down, imagining how I’ll turn my head and move my hands, feeling everything my character feels. But that isn’t enough. I have to see it. See myself as her. And sometimes, who knows why, I can’t. The picture isn’t sharp or it won’t stay in my mind. Because it’s the future—which nobody can know.”

  This was the moment when the young actor listening to Maryna became a little apprehensive.

  “Yes, that’s what preparing a role is, it’s like looking into the future. Or expecting to know how a journey will turn out.”

  * * *

  MUSING, she said: “I am not brave, you see. I know myself very well. And I am not quick, either. I should describe myself as … slow.”

  “But—”

  “Not quick. Not clever. Just a little above mediocre. Really. But I’ve always understood”—she smiled implacably—“that I can triumph by sheer stubbornness, by applying myself harder than anyone else.”

  * * *

  “PERHAPS you should rest.”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t want to rest. I want to work.”

  “Who works harder than you?”

  “I want peace.”

  “Peace?”

  “I want to breathe pure air. I want to wash my clothes in a sparkling stream.”

  “You? You wash your own clothes? When? When would you have the time? And where?”

  “Oh, it’s not the clothes!” she cried. “Does no one understand me?”

  * * *

  “PARIS,” someone suggested. “Despite the presence there of so many of our melancholy, noble-spirited compatriots, Paris is full of gaiety
and opportunity. And you would never be an exile comme les autres. You would like—”

  “No, not Paris.”

  * * *

  “IT’S TRUE I’m not satisfied. Most of all,” she added, “with myself.”

  “You mustn’t—”

  “It’s good to be happy, but it’s vulgar to want to be happy. And if you are happy, it’s vulgar to know it. It makes you complacent. What’s important is self-respect, which will be yours only as long as you stay true to your ideals. It’s so easy to compromise, once you’ve known a modicum of success.”

  * * *

  “OF COURSE I am not fanatical,” she said, “but perhaps I am too fastidious. For instance, I can’t help thinking a person who sneezes in an absurd way is also lacking in self-respect. Why else consent to something so unattractive? It ought to be a matter of concentration and resolve to sneeze gracefully, candidly. Like a handshake. I remember a conversation with someone I’ve known for years, a subtle man, a doctor, whose friendship I cherish, when, in the middle of a sentence, we were talking about Fourier’s theory of the twelve radical passions, he seemed suddenly overwhelmed with emotion. He made a sharp shrieking sound and then said ‘Kissh’—said it twice and closed his eyes. What did he say, I wondered, staring at his mottled face. I understood when I saw him groping for his handkerchief. But it was difficult to continue with Ideal Harmony and the Calculus of Attraction after that!”

  * * *

  “I THINK,” she started off grandly.

  And then she stopped.

  What nonsense it all is!