by Susan Sontag
Of course, it is possible it was an accident: that he’d longed for the peace of the deck after the tedious dinner, that at the railing, being American and young, hardly more than a boy, he had insouciantly removed his shoes to stretch his toes and feel the clammy planks under his stocking feet (Piotr might have done that; I might have done that when no one was watching!) and then glimpsing something large, silvery, a whale he thought with excitement, leaned over, and when the sea heaved and the ship rocked—
But it wasn’t like that, was it? Still, maybe he didn’t plan to do it. Perhaps he just went outside for a turn under the night sky, quite tranquil, with nothing much on his mind except the usual, bearable forebodings and regrets. And then, like me, he was mesmerized by the lure of the sea. Suddenly it seemed so easy to fall. But what could have made him want to give up the security of feet planted on the deck and chest pressed against the guardrail and cheeks and brow receiving the moist caressing breeze for a flailing, heart-stopping plunge toward the blow of icy water; to surrender the air of a deep openmouthed inhaling for a wall of water pushing into his face, flooding his throat, swaddling his hips and legs, dragging him away from the ship? What failure of imagination made him cast himself overboard? Or what callow despair? But we are always being borne inexorably toward something. Who, what, was waiting for him when the ship docked in New York? A family business he didn’t want to enter? A fiancée he no longer wished to marry? A mother to whose doting attentions he would again be enslaved? How I wish I could have explained to him that he didn’t have to be what he thought himself sentenced to be. For isn’t that why one thinks of ending one’s life?
Quite a few of us remained on deck for a while, still hoping to spy something in the water—as if returning below meant acquiescing in his death. At breakfast next morning people talked of little else. It was agreed that he dressed badly, it was observed that he had been acting oddly, it was concluded that he must have been out of his mind. Bogdan seemed much affected. Piotr, who had been listening somberly, asked me in a whisper, “Why did he take off his shoes?” When I didn’t answer—suicide is not something one wants a child to be able to picture clearly—he declared that the American took off his shoes because he was going for a swim. And if he wanted to swim in the ocean he must have been a very good swimmer, so it was possible, wasn’t it, that he was still swimming. Then another ship could pick him up. I told him it was possible. That afternoon the captain held a memorial service in the Saloon. I was asked to recite something and, thinking it should be a German poem since we were on a German ship, plunged somewhat distractedly into
Vorüber die stöhnende Klage
Elysiums Freudengelage
Ersäufen jedwedes Ach—
Elysiums Leben
Ewige Wonne, ewiges Schweben,
Durch lachende Fluren ein flötender Bach
and so on, you remember, Schiller’s “Elysium.” But at Hier mangelt der Name dem trauernden Leide, Here grieving sorrow has no name, I could no longer hold back my tears. On my request the country girl I’ve taken with us to help with household chores sang a hymn to the Madonna; she, Aniela, sings beautifully. How it saddens me to remember him, this young man I never knew—
I shall stop now.
10 August
I can continue. Have I alarmed you, dear friend? Don’t worry for me. I am quite solid. You know I have these wild fantasies. It is my nature to imagine, vividly imagine, what others feel.
What else shall I tell you about our voyage on the Donau? That I ate heartily, that I took deep breaths of sea air, that I waited for the voyage to end. Unlike more than one member of our party, I harbor no romance about travel. To combat idle or morbid thoughts, I worked through another manual of English grammar and I read. Losing oneself in a book is a great consolation. Bogdan had his books on farming, but he was enjoying the journey too much to feel like immersing himself in preparations for the tasks awaiting us when it came to an end. Indeed, he said to me one evening that he almost wished we would never arrive, that the ship would sail on forever. Piotr, who seemed equally enchanted, scarcely opened his precious illustrated volume of Fenimore Cooper, familiar tales of noble Indians retreating before the onslaught of civilization having yielded to the exotic reality of the steamship advancing across the ocean under the stars. He put questions to everyone about the workings of the ship’s engine and the names of the constellations. The chief engineer, whose pet he became, took the boy down into the stokehold. Bogdan, adorably paternal, spent hours with Piotr poring over an atlas of astronomy borrowed from the captain’s private library. And I had the volume you gave me as a farewell present, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, and was pleased to find my English up to the challenge of reading it. Of course, as you had to know, Mr. Darwin’s account of how similarly to us animals express fear, hate, joy, shame, pride, and the rest was bound to interest me. And I see why he would be drawn to this subject, for if we are so like animals, that is further evidence for his notion that we descend from them. Well, maybe we do! Had I read the book on land, I would have been made queasy by this thought, but reading it at sea, where human beings seem insignificant, seem nothing, made me receptive to Mr. Darwin’s blasphemies. Henryk, I did not resist your book!
Yes, I accept that animals do resemble human beings, resemble us to a fault. They are like old-fashioned actors, with all too predictable ways of expressing what they feel. Mr. Darwin’s book is, in fact, a manual of overacting. Woe to the actors who consulted this book; they would find all their bad habits confirmed. A good actor will be chary of the obvious facial sign, the large gesture—natural as these may be. What is most moving to an audience is a certain holding back, a kind of dignity in distress. This has nothing in common, I hasten to add, with the notorious reluctance of the English to show their feelings at all. For even Mr. Darwin, bent on proving that the language of emotions is universal, must admit that his compatriots shrug their shoulders far less frequently and energetically than the French or the Italians and that the men rarely cry, whereas in Poland, indeed in most parts of the Continent, men shed tears quite readily and freely.
And, I think, there is one irreducible difference between human beings and animals. Mr. Darwin’s idea that each emotion has a natural way of being expressed assumes that each emotion is distinct. That may be true for my cousin the monkey and mon semblable the dog. But aren’t we humans apt to feel—moments of emergency excepted—at least two emotions at once? You, dear friend, are you not feeling contradictory emotions about my departure? Are you biting your lip, raising your eyebrows, contracting the grief muscles around your eyes? No, probably there’s nothing to be observed on your face. Am I saying then that you are a good actor, Henryk? Perhaps I am. Nothing to be observed in your body, other than a slower gait—except when you drink. And, forgive me for hectoring you, but are you drinking as much as you usually do? More?
Ah, but you will say, what I feel about dear Maryna and her abandonment of me is not an emotion. It is a passion! Exactly. Exactly, dear friend. And Mr. Darwin is describing not passions but only reactions. By emotions all this Englishman seems to mean is what we feel when we are caught unawares, surprised. Someone I don’t at first recognize but do have reason to fear is lurking in a crowded place where I expect to meet no one, like, yes, a hotel lobby in a foreign city. Or someone I know to be furious with me—I never told you about this incident—bursts into some place where I feel utterly safe when I am alone, like my dressing room. I am startled and, of course, frightened. My lips part, my pupils dilate, my eyebrows rise, my heart beats violently, my face pales, the hairs on my skin stand erect and the superficial muscles shiver, my mouth goes dry and my voice turns husky or indistinct—all this reacting quite out of my control. When the stimulus is withdrawn, I return to calm. But what about those long-held painful feelings that seem to have been mastered, and then, without any warning, flood the soul? Where is unrequited amorous longing? What about jealousy? What about regret?—oh, yes, reg
ret! And anxiety, anxiety about everything and nothing? Mr. Darwin’s repertoire seems very British!
Speaking of the British mentality, I must tell you about the other book in English I brought to read on the ship—a novel, not at all recent, called Villette. It is the portrait of a young woman of high principle and small expectations. You know how I always sympathize with such a character. I like heroic women and I wait for a dramatist who will depict the heroism of women in modern life, women who are not beautiful, who are not wellborn, but who struggle to be independent. I was even imagining how one might adapt the novel for the stage; it would be a challenging role—a relief from actresses and queens!—which I might like to have played. That was not why I was given the book, a parting gift from a colleague at the Imperial who had spent her childhood in England. She thought I would be interested in a scene where the heroine sees Rachel performing in London. I was making my way tenaciously through the book (Miss Brontë has a bigger vocabulary than Mr. Darwin!), quite entranced by the character of Lucy Snowe, a plain, self-aware girl full of hidden passion, until I finally reached the chapter where she is taken to the theatre. Imagine my dismay when I discovered that the heroine, with whom I had been feeling such sympathy, does not like Rachel at all. Although she is beguiled, enthralled, by Rachel’s power—who was not?—she is also repelled by the passionate woman she sees on the stage. She actually disapproves of her! She judges the expressiveness of the stage empress to be excessive, unwomanly, rebellious—satanic!
Don’t you find it odd that watching a great actress could have aroused such animosity, such fear? In Poland, as in France, an actress might be taxed with being too free with her sexual favors, but not with being too fervent. Perhaps the theatre means something in Poland that it cannot mean elsewhere, even in the land of the divine Shakespeare. Why could Lucy Snowe not simply have enjoyed herself? Why did she not wish to be transported? Why did she feel threatened by the passion of Rachel? And yet the novel Miss Brontë has written is very passionate. Perhaps the author was quarreling with herself. She feared that her own passions would overturn her life. She did not wish to change, or be changed.
But you see, I am imagining my own task—and the resistance to it, from outside and from within—everywhere I turn. It is harder for a woman to want a life different from the one decreed for her. You men have it much easier. You are commended for recklessness, for boldness, for striking out, for being adventurous. A woman has so many inner voices telling her to behave prudently, amiably, timorously. And there is much to be afraid of, I know that. Don’t assume, dear friend, that I have lost all sense of reality. Each time I am brave, I am acting. But that is all that’s needed to be brave, don’t you agree? The appearance of bravery. The performance of it. Since I know I am not brave, not brave at all, this spurs me on to act as if I were.
No one in our country would charge an actress who flaunts her feelings on the stage with being a demon, yes, a demon, and with glorifying the figure of a rebel—this is a moralism with which I am unfamiliar. In Poland we cherish the idea of rebellion, of the insurgent spirit, do we not? I cherish the rebelliousness in myself, being all too aware of how much I am drawn to yielding, to following slavishly the expectations of others. How I fight that large part of me that is a conquered spirit, eager to obey—larger, surely, because I am a woman, reared to be servile. This is part of what drew me to the stage. My roles schooled me in confidence and in defiance. Acting was a program for overcoming the slave in myself.
Imagine then what it means for me to give up the stage, where I have permission to act imperiously. Don’t think it is not a sacrifice. I have been married to the stage for nearly twenty years. Perhaps one day in California—even now, already in America, it thrills me to write CALIFORNIA—by the brook behind our little hut, for the amusement of our colony and some Indian maidens, I shall perform a scene from one of my favorite plays. Yes, I confess, I have taken some of my costumes—Juliet, Rosalind, Portia, Adrienne—with me. No doubt it will feel quite ridiculous to put one of them on after a day of vigorous toil in our fields under the blue skies or in the hills on horseback with a gun over my shoulder. How artificial will all this appear to me then! Still, if ever I am tempted to return to the theatre, may I remember what I have learned about the Anglo-Saxon suspicion of great actresses. Thank goodness I have not come to America to go on the stage!
12 August
But she has not told me anything about America, you must be thinking. Well, I can tell you something about New York, which everyone insists to us is now so overrun by immigrants as to be but an extension of Europe—not America at all! As you saw at the beginning of this already too long letter, we are not staying on the island of Manhattan. Since Bogdan thought accommodations there for all of us in a decent hotel a waste of our capital, we sought the advice of the captain, who recommended an inn, comfortable and not expensive, close by where the Norddeutsche Lloyd line has its piers on the other side of the Hudson River. Here, in this waterfront town whose charming Indian name means tobacco pipe, and in full sight of Manhattan, we are actually in another of the thirty-eight states!
Each morning the more intrepid among us board the ferry and spend the day exploring the city—I say the more intrepid, for those who cross the river are now a smaller group. Manhattan has proved intimidating to most of our gentle companions; and they think only of moving on, and of our waiting pastorale. Wanda is altogether lost without Julian. Aleksander, though indefatigable, is handicapped by his lack of English. Danuta and Cyprian must attend to the needs of their two little girls. Only Jakub, who goes about everywhere with his sketchbook, has made himself almost at home here. I fear he will be quite sorry to leave so soon, but I have promised him that California will prove just as rich a subject for the artist. I shall be a little sorry, too. An actor is generally an eager spectator, and no spectacle could be more enthralling than what we see enacted, in every known language, on this rude stage. Every race and nation and tribe in the world is represented, at least among the poorer classes—and most people appear to be very poor once one ventures beyond the grand streets. I’m not surprised to find the city so ugly. But I had not expected to see so many paupers and vagrants. We are told that the poor are more numerous than a few years ago, not only because there are more and more immigrants, most of whom arrive with nothing, but because—Bogdan had received some dire warnings from his brother about this—the economy has yet to recover from the great crisis (“panic” it’s called here) of three years ago. Employments, especially menial ones, are scarce and wages continue to fall. But obviously this doesn’t deter anyone from coming here, expecting better days!
Last night Bogdan and I claimed an evening for ourselves, and dined at Delmonico’s, a restaurant reputed to be the best in the city. I can report that the nabobs here are as richly fed and sedate in their movements as those in Vienna and Paris. Outside, all is restlessness and noise. Wagons, carriages, omnibuses, horse-cars, streetcars, jostling pedestrians make each corner crossing an adventure; every building is covered with signs and there are men hired to be walking kiosks, festooned front and back, even on their heads, with advertisements, while others shove leaflets into the hands of every passerby or toss them by the fistful into the streetcars; bootblacks plead for clients from their little stands, peddlers shout from their carts, and bands of musicians, mostly German, blare their horns and tubas at you. I was surprised to see so many Germans, more numerous even than the Irish and Italians, with each nation having its own quarter. Henryk, there is so much misery and poverty here. And crime: we are constantly being warned not to venture where the poor live, for the danger of being attacked and robbed by bands of roughs is very great. Jakub is the most daring among us in exploring these teeming parts of the city; he has already filled five albums with sketches. Yesterday he spent the afternoon in the neighborhood of Jews, poor Jews of course, who look much as they do in Kraków, the dark-bearded men in skullcaps still wearing their long black coats in this atrocious heat.<
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Which brings me to my only complaint. I have never known such heat. All of us are suffering. Piotr has a rash. Danuta’s younger girl cries all the time. Feeling hot means that I feel overdressed—I suppose I am overdressed—though less than the women here, who still wear hoops and, as Danuta, Wanda, Barbara, and I have noticed, stare enviously (so I imagine) at our slim skirts. Of course, we walk a great deal after we disembark from the ferry. Yesterday, while we were strolling on Broadway, the principal street here, a large woman girded by an enormous hoop under her heavy black skirt crumpled to the sidewalk before our eyes. I thought she was seriously ill but, no, a fellow stroller said this happens often in August, and a cabman unfastened his horse’s pail of water and unceremoniously sprinkled some on her face, whereupon she was helped to her feet and without any embarrassment went on her way. I know it is imprudent to remain so much in the sun, but we have no hotel to retreat to. If Piotr had his way, we would be taking refuge once an hour in an ice-cream parlor. Ice cream here, made by Italians, is delicious. He’s also fond of an Indian delicacy sold on the street, dry airy lumps made by exploding kernels of white corn, and the small brown pea-nuts sheathed in a pale soft pod, but these I find quite indigestible. People here drink even more water than wine with their meals, and in winter as well as summer the water is drunk very cold: the glass is filled with small cube-shaped pieces of ice—I’m sure you will think this quite unhealthy. Today, in vain search of coolness some of us visited the vast park just completed north of the city; it is called the Central Park, though there is nothing central about it. Nor much that is parklike either, if truth be told—do not imagine anything like a newer park in Kraków, much less our stately, leafy Planty—for most of the trees are too young yet to give any shade.
The Polish community is small, many more of our compatriots having settled in the west, in Chicago. Bogdan has visited some of the leaders, who told him of their desire to organize a reception in my honor. I feel that I must decline, much as I regret disappointing them. They want to welcome the person I have ceased to be. But the actress who was cannot stifle her curiosity about the theatre, and August, besides being the hottest month, is also the beginning of the season. Indeed, as Heinrich rudely warned me, theatre here does seem to mean something other than what it means chez nous and in Vienna and Paris. The public expects to be entertained, not elevated, and is most entertained by the grandiose and the bizarre. We had thought of seeing Offenbach’s La Grande-Duchesse, playing on one of the largest stages here, until we learned that it was being performed by the Mexican Juvenile Opera Company and that the prima donna, Señorita Niña Carmen y Morón, was eight years old. Can you imagine hearing the Duchess’s “Dites-lui qu’on l’a remarqué”—is there a more ravishing love song?—in the shrill squeaking voice of a small girl! Something for Piotr perhaps, though I suppose he would have enjoyed even more the program at another theatre, which included George France and his dogs, Don Caesar and Bruno, the Hansell Troupe of Alpine Warblers, Jenny Turnour the Trapeze Queen, and a Herr Cline, who dances a pas de deux on the high wire with his grandmother. No Shakespeare in any of the theatres, alas, even though I have been assured that no dramatic author is performed as often in America as Shakespeare. Apart from farces and melodramas that seem not worth risking, even out of curiosity, there is only a light comedy, English of course, called Our American Cousin, which has enjoyed an unstoppable popularity throughout the country for the last eleven years because it was while watching this play from a box with his wife and members of his government that President Lincoln was murdered—by a deranged actor, as you’ll recall. Proper plays are almost all English or French but, while Wagner is adored by the New York public, there is no interest in the great German dramatists. Should you want to see some Schiller, you must go to one of the German-language theatres, where you will see him performed by a second-rate touring company from Munich or Berlin. And, since it’s unthinkable to present a play by Krasiński or Slowacki or Fredro in English and there are not enough Poles in New York to support a Polish-language theatre, our own sublime dramatists remain quite unknown here.