In America

by Susan Sontag

  May 27. Argument with Danuta and Cyprian. The little girl at Edenica has been taken by the village authorities, and formal charges of endangering the life of a child brought against Lorenz. He is to appear in the village court next Monday. Danuta and Cyprian assure us that he will be exonerated. M. particularly loving this evening. Sleeping now.

  May 28. I rode to the mountains this morning and came back at dusk. About fifty miles. I didn’t feel tired at all.

  May 29. Meeting to decide what to do. Danuta and Cyprian want to continue. Jakub says he is willing to go on, and, whatever happens, he wants to stay in America. Barbara is very distressed by a letter from her mother—her father is ill and not expected to live long—but she and Aleksander are not considering making a trip back home, since they probably could not reach Warsaw in time. Aleksander has already assured me that the dismay he has expressed about our prospects does not mean that he regrets joining our venture, and I want to believe him. It is agreed we will continue until October and the vintage, and see if we can sell the grapes at a good price. M. says she could raise some money to keep us together until the farm becomes profitable by going back on the stage for a while.

  May 30. 97° at noon. I should not like to think I am pushing M. back on the stage, to have an excuse for giving up our life here, which we will call an adventure, an interlude. And then I think: But she does want to go.

  May 31. I suppose it’s worth noting that the charges against Lorenz have been dropped. Apparently the community pledged a substantial sum to the building fund for the new school. Saw Doroteo admiring a straw hat in the window of a store in the village. He showed me that he had 15 cents—the hat cost “two bits,” he said, California(?) slang for 25 cents—and asked me to buy it for him. Feelings of shame.

  June 1. We saw Julian and Wanda off at the depot this morning. They board the transcontinental express in San Francisco tomorrow. Their ship leaves New York for Bremerhaven in ten days.

  June 2. I am plagued with useless questions. What moves us to take one direction in life and not another? How did it become inevitable that we would travel to California and not another place? Found Doroteo in the kitchen, trying to make himself understood by Aniela. Asking if we need an extra field hand. Wearing the hat.

  June 3. A day of idleness and conversations about our future. Barbara received another letter from her mother: her father has died.

  June 4. Barbara and Aleksander took me aside after supper. They have decided to return to Poland sometime this summer.

  June 5. Danuta and Cyprian have announced their intention to remain in California: they will be moving to Edenica. M. remonstrated with them, to no avail. There’s no arguing with fanaticism. Clearly, this folly has been in the making for a long time. And Lorenz’s preposterous community has a better chance of surviving than ours had. Maybe we weren’t radical or eccentric enough. Ay, Doroteo.

  June 6. In retrospect, it is easy to say that we were bound to fail, were naïve, should have known: European intellectuals who thought they could be pioneers, and so forth. We are hardly the first and surely not the last to believe in the possibility of a better life, perhaps on foreign territory, where, one has been told, a fresh start is being made. Those incapable of any idealism will heap scorn upon us. But there is nothing shameful in wagering on our better nature. It would be a poorer world if no one ever felt like us again.

  June 7. Jakub left today for New York. In farewell he presented M. and me with three paintings that he thinks the best of the work he has done here. A small portrait of two sad heads, a young woman and a bearded man: Jessica and Shylock. Full-length portrait of M. seated, reading. A scene in Los Nietos: a Mexican woman with a tumult of small children at her knees hanging long strips of jerked beef on a sort of clothesline running between a pair of eucalyptus trees. The paintings are splendid. M. is despondent over Jakub’s departure.

  June 9. M. is engaged with Aniela in a ferocious bout of housecleaning. She says she feels very calm. I must talk to August and Beate Fischer.

  June 12. M. and Ryszard and I rode out this afternoon to Anaheim Landing to eat freshly caught flounder at the tavern there and watch the sun set over the ocean. Purged of wanting something from this beautiful setting, we felt almost as we did when we first arrived, full of euphoric appreciations. On the eve of departure, we behaved like newcomers. Or future tourists. So final and vast and indifferent did the Pacific appear, it felt as if one could not go farther than here, that one could only go back, retracing one’s steps. But of course that is an illusion.

  June 13. It wasn’t a new life M. wanted, it was a new self. Our community has been an instrument for that, and now she is bent on returning to the stage. She will not consider going back to Poland, she says, until she has shown what she can do before the American public, and dares me to cite all the obstacles that lie between her and stardom in America.

  June 15. M. getting ready to go to San Francisco. As soon as she is settled, P. and Aniela will join her.

  June 16. The Fischers, well aware of all the improvements we’ve made on the property, including two new dwellings, say they are willing to buy back the farm for $2,000 less than I paid them for it in December. I shall stay to look around for other offers.

  June 17. Had any of us really taken in the volatility of the economy here? Or how much work there was to running a farm? Maybe we should have gone to the South Seas.

  Seven

  IT FELT LIKE an escapade; like leaving home; like telling lies—and she would tell many lies. She was beginning again; she was rejoining her destiny, which conferred on her the rich sensation that she had never gone astray.

  Maryna arrived in the city in late June. Her skin had forgotten San Francisco’s brisk maritime climate, she had let slip from her mind the noble bay and ocean views, fog permitting, from the top of the steep streets in the heart of the insouciantly planned city, but she recalled every detail of the wide, pillared entrance to the building below Nob Hill on which all her desires were trained.

  Bogdan had arranged for Maryna to stay with old Captain Znaniecki and his wife. A respectable woman temporarily severed from her family would hardly want to live on her own. The Znanieckis had been chosen because they were kindly and protective, and because the Captain had married an American, so Maryna would not be speaking Polish all the time. Further, Znaniecki, a senior surveyor and title searcher with the Land Office, apparently knew everybody—from members of the Bohemian Club to the governor of the state—and it would take concerted lobbying to secure an audition with the formidable Angus Barton, the California Theatre’s manager in charge of the stage. The morning after her arrival, Maryna had walked over to Bush Street and slipped into the theatre. Like a gladiator whom bravado and fear have lured to the last row of the empty stadium the day before the game, high above the arena’s neatly raked, un-bloodied sand, Maryna entered one of the boxes for a view of the red velvet curtain and the width of the peacefully darkened stage. But the stage was not dark: a rehearsal was under way. A tall, stooped man dressed in black had bounded from his seat in the tenth row and was rushing down the aisle: she wondered if he could be Barton. “Don’t tell me you’ll be ‘all right’ this evening,” he shouted at one of the actors. “If there’s anything I hate, it’s that. If you’re ever going to be ‘all right,’ you can be ‘all right’ now.” Yes, that must be Barton.

  The problem, as she confided in a letter to Henryk, was that she was rarely alone. Word of her arrival had spread (but how could she go anywhere in the world there were Poles and remain incognito?) and everyone in San Francisco’s Polish community wanted to be invited to meet her. It was difficult to stoke the banked fires of ambition and the fear of failure while being lapped by the effusive adoration of her uprooted compatriots. And then in the evening only Polish was spoken, though Captain Znaniecki, a refugee from the wave of slaughter and arson incited by Metternich (and, horrifyingly, carried out by Polish peasants) which had decimated the liberal, insurrection-minded gentry
and intelligentsia of the Austrian part of Poland thirty years earlier, was as engrossed by the politics of his adopted country as by the catastrophes that punctually befell his homeland. He called himself a Socialist—while telling Maryna he suspected that Socialism had little future here in America, where the admiration of the poor for the rich seemed even more unassailable than the fealty enjoyed by monarchs and priests in Europe—and took it on himself to elucidate for her the difference between the two American parties, but in the end Maryna understood little more than that the Republicans wanted a strong central government and the Democrats a loose, federal union of the states. She supposed these party matters must have been easier to grasp in antebellum times, before the slavery issue was settled, when no right-thinking person could have failed to be a Republican; it was unclear to her what Americans were quarreling about now. One evening Znaniecki invited her to hear “the Great Agnostic,” Robert Ingersoll, who was drawing huge crowds in San Francisco with his atheistic sermons. Maryna was impressed by the responsiveness of the audience.

  She had interrupted the accumulations of approval that embolden a performer, with what consequences to her art Maryna had now to determine. I adore recklessness, she wrote to Henryk, and wondered if she was telling the truth.

  She left the Znanieckis, secluding herself from her fawning compatriots in furnished rooms half a neighborhood away. By pawning all her jewels, none of them worth much in dollars, she would have enough to live on, very frugally, for two months. She required solitude to reconstruct the instincts, the technique, the dissatisfactions, and the taste for effrontery which had made her the actress she was. The art of walking, the effortlessly upright carriage and certainty of step, needed no refurbishing. The art of thinking only of herself, essential to true creation—that she could only recover alone.

  Now there were only herself and this city, herself and her ambition, herself and the English language, this cruel master she would subdue and bend to her will.

  “Will,” said Miss Collingridge. “Not weel.”

  She had found Miss Collingridge by crossing the sloping wooden floor of her parlor and looking out the bow window, a volume of Shakespeare pressed to her bosom. Gazing dreamily into the street while reciting to herself from Antony and Cleopatra, she became aware that a short plump woman with corn-colored hair topped by a large straw hat was staring up at her. Involuntarily, Maryna smiled. The woman clapped her hand to her mouth, then took it away slowly; smiled; hesitated a moment; flung herself into a cartwheel (her cape went swirling); and walked on.

  They met again a few days later, when Maryna had let herself out in the afternoon for a stroll in the Chinese quarter—the apartment was a few blocks from Dupont Street—after eight hours of studying and declaiming. She had turned into a lantern-hung alley, drawn by the sinuous racket of music and voices shrilling over the gilded balconies of teahouses; through the open doors of the shops adorned with pennant flags beckoned a bright disorder of carved ivories, red lacquer trays, agate perfume bottles, teakwood tables inlaid with mother-of-pearl, sandalwood boxes, umbrellas of waxed paper, and paintings of mountain peaks. Sauntering beside her among the faster-gaited coolies in blue cotton tunics were several gentlemen in lavender brocade coats and puffed silk trousers, their long queues braided with strands of cherry-red silk, and coming very slowly behind her—Maryna stepped aside to admire them—two women with beautiful sleek heads and jade bracelets falling over their hands, each leaning on an attendant maid; her gaze dropped casually below the hem of their sumptuous robes to the three-inch-long stumps shod in gold-embroidered silk, and before she could remind herself that she’d once read about the custom in prosperous Chinese families of breaking the bones of their small daughters’ feet and keeping the toes tied back against the heels until the girls were fully grown, her stomach heaved and her mouth filled with acrid phlegm. The shock had gone straight to her innards.

  “Are you ill? Shall I run for a doctor?” Someone was at her side as she held back a faint. It was the young woman whose eyes she had met from her window the other day.

  “Oh, it’s you again,” said Maryna wanly. Struggling to contain another surge of nausea, she smiled to see the galvanizing effect this greeting had on her rescuer, who darted into a shop and emerged with a fan of white feathers, which she waved energetically at Maryna’s face.

  “I’m not ill,” said Maryna. “It’s that I just saw two Chinese ladies who— two women with—”

  “Oh, the little-foot women. It gave my stomach a turn too, the first one I saw.”

  “How kind of you to— very kind,” said Maryna. “I’m quite recovered now.”

  By the time the young woman had walked her home, each had learned all she needed to know about the other to feel they were destined to be friends. Why should I have been looking out the window at that exact moment, she wrote Henryk. And why should I have smiled at her? There is something a little romantic about it. And I had not yet heard her silky contralto or her admirable enunciation! Well, there it is, dear friend. The first coup de foudre I have experienced after a whole year in America is for a bossy, hoydenish girl who wears silly hats and shapeless serge capes and tells me that she keeps, for a household pet, a full-grown young pig. But you already know how I can be seduced by a mellifluous voice.

  Maryna’s new friend had commended her mastery of English vocabulary and grammar, and ventured to say that this was a disinterested, professional judgment. Miss Collingridge—Mildred, she said shyly, Mildred Collingridge—was a speech teacher. She gave elocution lessons to the rich wives in the new mansions on Nob Hill.

  Maryna had told her that she had given herself two months, no more, to prepare for the audition. She would show this Mr. Barton what she could do.

  “Mister,” said Miss Collingridge. “Not meester.”

  Diving into Maryna’s employ for the pittance gratefully offered (Maryna could not afford a penny more), she came each morning at eight o’clock to Maryna’s lodgings to work with her on the roles she was relearning in English. Seated side by side at a gate-leg table near the parlor window, they went at the lines a word at a time, and, when vowels had been hammered and consonants chiseled and an entire passage polished to the satisfaction of both, Maryna marked her play script for pauses, stresses, breathing marks, aids to pronunciation. Then she would rise and pace and declaim, with Miss Collingridge remaining at the table and reading (in the flattest of tones, as Maryna had instructed her) the other roles. It was never her tutor who ended their long days together: Maryna had found a partner in work as tireless as herself. But sometimes, at Maryna’s insistence, they would break for a stroll. Maryna had not realized, while she was letting herself be pacified by rural austerities, how much she had missed the pulse and perfume of city life.

  “City,” said Miss Collingridge. “Not ci-ty.”

  Captain Znaniecki came often in the early evening to bring covered platters of the good Polish dishes he had taught his wife to cook and to see how Maryna was getting along, and when she told him about Miss Collingridge, he said: “Dear Madame Maryna, you don’t need any professor. Pronounce the words just as they are written, as you would pronounce them in Polish—that’s more than good enough, and you’ll only spoil the shape of your mouth or harden your voice trying to make impossible or harsh sounds. And above all, don’t try to pronounce the t-h as they do, for you’ll never manage it. Plain t or d are far more pleasant to the ear than their lisping th—and besides, I assure you, Americans are charmed by foreign accents. The worse they think your accent, the better they’ll like you.”

  He had said she could never learn to pronounce English correctly. What if he was right? She would become a sort of freak, to be applauded because she was ridiculous rather than wonderful. How then could she ever represent something ideal as an artist? But she would not do what he advised.

  Over and over she practiced the infernal th—impossible to place her tongue so as to form the sound without first halting the flow of a phrase. Perha
ps one needs a pair of American dentures, she joked with Miss Collingridge. She had seen a large sign at the corner of Sutter and Stockton: DR. BLAKE’S INDESTRUCTIBLE TEETH.

  “Teeth,” said Miss Collingridge. “Not teece.”

  Each word was like a small, oddly shaped parcel in her mouth. Theatre, thespian, therefore, throughout, thorough, Thursday, think, thought, thorny, threadbare, thicket, throb, throng, throw, thrash, thrive … That, that, that. This, this, this. There, there, there.

  Besides Miss Collingridge the only person Maryna had seen gladly in the first weeks in San Francisco was Ryszard. But in the end she had to send him away.

  Ryszard had left Anaheim before she went north. He had been waiting for her when she arrived. On the Fourth of July, they listened to vehement oratory and music and watched the parading and the fireworks and the firemen rushing by in their red wagons to put out the many fires. Another day they hired a four-wheeled stanhope for an afternoon’s drive along the ocean shore. She felt drawn to him. They held hands. Their hands were damp. She felt happy, and surely that was part of being in love. She was no longer the head of a clan, temporarily neither a wife nor even a mother—not responsible for others; free to act solely for herself. (Had she ever done that?) But having for a time forgone both husband and child, did she want to assume the obligations of a lover?

  All she wanted was to think about the roles she was preparing.

  Ryszard suggested they go to the theatre. “Not yet,” she said. “I don’t want to be influenced by anything I see here and think, Oh, this is what an American actor does, or what an American audience applauds. To find what is deepest in my own talent I have to look for everything within myself.”

  Ryszard was enchanted to see her molting back into the imperious artist. “It has never occurred to me,” he said humbly, admiringly, “to suppose I should do without the inspiration to be found in the books of other writers.”