Finding a Form

by William H. Gass

  I can be forced from my homeland by a usurper, or by a conquering army, but so long as I cannot feel I have been excluded by the country itself, I am not really an exile. Exile involves rejection by a loved one, as if the face in your mirror grimaced when it looked out and saw you looking in. Exile is a narcissistic wound.

  Our species cannot regenerate a limb. Only in rare cases, and immediately, can any severed member be reattached, sewn back like the finger of a glove. Perhaps one can pretend to be a tourist for thirty years, as Gertrude Stein did, and never be an exile, just a Yank on an extended trip abroad. Perhaps one can write in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris while becoming more Irish than ever, a Dubliner of dreams. Perhaps.

  A friend has told me how it felt to flee East Germany as a child of ten, and to leave behind the real companions of her heart. She had a number of dolls, which she cared for in a most motherly way, and she reported to them everything that happened to her, and shared with them what she read, and explained to them how she felt and what she thought. Above all, she invented stories for each one, since each was an individual and had personal preferences. It was natural that the stories would begin to intertwine, creating a single enriched narrative, one part of which she would then relate to the doll most deserving of it, while another part she would tell to the doll desiring that. So she had a special listener for each part of her life, a listener who listened with the same sort of attentive ear, and sympathized, and supported, and forgave, perhaps more perfectly than her own heart could, whatever needed forgiveness, hugs, reassurance, tears. She was told that when she left she could take only one doll. The family’s exit would be illegal, and they would travel light. But to choose? And to leave one thread intact and snap the others as if you were your own malignant fate? She never played with dolls again, and never invented another story. She says that for a time she closed down her soul like a shopfront’s steel shade.

  She could return now to “her native haunts,” of course. But her doll days are over. When you are exiled from a space, you are also exiled from a time—in my friend’s case, a childhood. The hurt heart heals, but the healed heart still hurts.

  What exactly is the crime for which exile seems such an appropriate punishment? There are scoundrels aplenty in our midst: murderers, muggers, robbers, rapists, vandals, addicts, pushers, extortionists, kidnappers, car thieves, counterfeiters, safe crackers, seducers, embezzlers, arsonists, pickpockets, pomographers, purse snatchers, con men, molesters, skimmers, usurers (so many scoundrels we may really be in their midst); those who make obscene phone calls, beat babies, steal from the poor box, drink or gamble away somebody else’s savings, adulterate and poison, forge and deceive, censor and otherwise practice intimidation, or are guilty of cheating, harassment, libel, misrepresentation, plagiarism, peeping, high crimes and misdemeanors, including terrorism and treason; and all of these, and all those I haven’t listed who nevertheless belong there, like those whose dogs foul the walkways, who litter our alleys and deface our walls, who chop down old trees and tear down old buildings, who poison the air and offend the eye and din their dins in our ears—they are simply put in the pokey and kept securely penned for varying periods of unpleasant time; but none of them, including those who threaten the welfare of the State by running from the enemy, selling secrets, disobeying their superiors, or abusing their high office, are sent into exile.

  Rulers frequently suffer this demeaning fate, often as a simple consequence of usurpation; but we must remember that in any game of king-of-the-hill, it is the hill which must send you spinning if you are to taste true exile, not a knock on the head by some kid who wants your job. And if a kid anyway, then only by your own son (the classic configuration, although nowadays a daughter will also do), who has to have the people behind him, as well as an army and a couple of international cartels. Then it will be the hill, indeed, that gives you the heave and the humiliation. At other times, the rulers we lose are simply scoundrels who would have a place or two reserved for them on my list of the common kind if they didn’t happen to be playing Big Daddy behind some polished desk and, like Ferdinand Marcos, probably ought to be jailed for bad taste, murder, and theft but for many reasons, most of them morally obnoxious, escape this result through exile.

  Who else? People of the wrong race sometimes. Yes. However, the ghetto is not a place of exile, or even a sealed-off area of infection. It is a convenient circle of moral and religious confinement, which has the further advantage for the State of being economically useful. As in the slums in which black people are put, the occupants of the ghetto are encouraged to go out to do the Turk’s work, the Mexican’s, the Yugoslav’s labor, to dig holes and touch caps, to fare forth upon a bus to ma’am the ma’ams and wipe cracks.

  Who else? Artists. And among artists, it is only occasionally painters, sculptors, architects, who may have their shows closed, their buildings reviled, their casts smashed. They are rarely banished for the reason of their work. Nor are musicians—who may have performances disrupted, who may find that the concert halls are closed to them, who will receive excoriating reviews and then an ornately orchestrated silence—ordinarily ushered out of the country on account of a run of seditious notes.

  The case of Socrates continues to be instructive. It was Socrates who felt, and taught, that the soul was the only true mover of the body, and that therefore it behooved us to learn its makeup, and something of the way it went about its business. Like plants, we had appetites, and these impelled us; in league with the animals, we had feelings and perceptions as well, and these sent us in search of satisfactions; but, in addition, and unlike any other creature, we could direct ourselves by means of reason to responsible ends. Speech was the principal organ of influence. Through speech we made our thoughts known to others, and through speech each aspect of ourselves endeavored to persuade our differing desires, by reasoning, flattery, or shouts, to fall silent. More often than not, the exiled are novelists and poets, journalists and playwrights, or any others, whatever their occupation, who speak out or up. Put generally, though I think centrally, what is exiled is nearly always someone’s word.

  And when a musician is sent away in disgrace, it is what his music is said to say that is the cause; and when the painter is put out like a wildfire, mostly it is because of what his paintings are supposed to mean; it is the words which can be pulled from them, the ideas they then can be alleged to support, for which they are excluded. Socrates did not corrupt the youth by laying his lustful hands on them; he did not corrupt them by omitting to pay ritual homage to the gods; he corrupted them by teaching them intelligent talk; he taught them to quiz the wizards of the marketplace and the heavies of the politburo and the swifties of the courts, and to confront them in their places of power, where their walk would be most swaggery and their talk most confident; and there, in that advantageous atmosphere, were their words to be examined, weighed in a just debate with other words.

  The pimps and prostitutes, cardsharps, bid riggers, and legal liars on my list: why should we suffer the expense of their long stays in our iron-bar hotels, and the pay of the guards who must guard them, and the cost of the high walls which hedge them in? why should death row be crowded with criminals who have grown old on appeals and three square meals a day? why not wrap up our undesirables and ship them to Cuba? goons and contract killers and burglars by the boatload.

  Couldn’t we pay some country to be our penal colony? As with radioactive waste, nobody wants wife beaters, bad-check artists, and confidence men. And so I wonder: why are writers always able to find a welcome under another flag when other kinds of bad guys are turned away at the border? Well, why are miserable and misunderstood wives so valued by the husbands of their neighbors? Over and over again, one nation’s persecuted artists have become another’s national treasure. The word which sounded foul in one ear may ring sweetly in someone else’s. It was brave of Solzhenitsyn to tell the truth we wanted to hear about the U.S.S.R., and we were glad to give him a mountaintop from which
to broadcast, so long as he set off his charges in the right direction.

  Rarely is an exile lucky enough to be kicked out of New Jersey only to fall on his feet in Devon. Normally he is taken from his family and friends, deprived of his livelihood, his habits, his haunts; his ordinary avenues of expression are closed, his countryside is altered utterly, snow begins to fall in a world which had heretofore worn a Hawaiian shirt, the birds no longer sing the right songs, the flowers sport the wrong colors, nor are the car horns happy; the winds blow from unexpected corners, the cities smell of fish or beer or paper, clothing is uncomfortably odd, and the words which once came to your tongue like your own soul freely, unashamed, naked to a wife or husband, now have to hide in your head, for there is no one to speak to, no one to read what you’ve written, no one to know about and protest your case, or understand the displays of virtue which were called your crime.

  You are no longer you when even your present daily life is as remote as a memory. You are no longer you if—especially—you were defined by your way of life, the things you loved, the ideals you esteemed, your language.

  Contrary to this sour situation, celebrity exiles have often reported improved conditions: they got better jobs, were lionized, greatly overrated, given opportunities to express themselves—in dance, in painting, in design—in directions they could scarcely have foreseen. They were put on TV, asked their opinion, smiled at by strangers in the street, by the CIA debriefed. And there was tea on the terrace following the replay of their defection. Universities paid them to speak and offered them even more to teach. They had assumed, in effect, the mantle of a new profession: Herr Doktor Dissident, Professor of Exilese. And ease it is for some, and easy for some to shift tongues, to pick up this word and that and grammarize themselves, to adapt to a new, far richer life than they, earlier, could have dreamed.

  They might have remarried, adopted a team (the Washington Redskins, most likely), discoed around a lot, acquired a taste for scotch, begun to forget the wretched whom they once resembled and who lay in prison still or slid still in fear down gray streets or slept lightly as the cat sleeps when in the pound. It became equally easy to discount or forget their fellow exiles who hadn’t landed in swimming pools with surrounding lawns, but who found themselves taken down every peg possible, driving a taxi through streets they couldn’t recognize or pronounce, selling bruised fruit, cleaning houses when before they had owned one—patronized or ignored, handed a visored cap or a broom, and cast adrift where there was neither water nor a boat.

  To enjoy such success, cold wars need to be kept on the flame. To enjoy such success, other exiles are unwanted competition: for limelight, available sympathies, access to the goodies of the new good life. Back in the old country, they had often cultivated a fine hatred for one another, so why should they change this comforting relation just because both were in a new place? Besides, only they, of this country or that, region or that, race or that, language or that, were true victims of this or that kind of cruel repression, grim persecution, special pain and particular rage; only they, that is, were exiles really, exiles in extremis, with an island in their name, exiles in essence. Others were carbons, copies, no-accounts, unable to muster up the misery, the enmity, the enemies, that might give them an honest exile’s status and an entry into the aristocracy of the properly deposed.

  In order to exaggerate their plight, exiles customarily inflate their former reputation. Where are those honors they once enjoyed? where are their precious perks? they must drive their own car, shop for themselves, suffer fools who pretend to know their language, their literature, their history. For the sake of complaint, forgotten are the chains, the long lines, the mistrust, the fear, the cramped flat, the fat spouse. Remembered are their small sales, loss of all influence, the successes of undeserving others, the still fat spouse, lost land, food smells, songs.

  Who are those who make this transition most easily? those for whom exile almost turns out not to be? The lucky ones scarcely cared about their native soil, were into making it by hook if not by crook, were cosmopolitan in their dress and tones and taste and bones, and had early on freed themselves from clan and family, from countryside and climate—perhaps as children they had spent time abroad, become fluent in the right language—perhaps they lived in an apartment complex on a city block amid a lot of similarly anonymous buildings, saw only the sky through a sooty window, and wrote on mimeograph paper. Coca-Cola and corn dogs comfort them now; their microwave knows how much better off they are—with clean sheets and a car, some good dope and their own towel. The region they had always cared about remained a region of the mind, and the mind was mainly a midden made of texts, of pages of reportage and consignment, and drama, of course, sentiment, sob stuff, high-minded alignments of rhymes recited in a Racinean hurry before being shot or having a head cut off; and they understood geography as a text, history as a text, texts as texts, and were able then to transfer themselves as on library loan from one book depository to another, suffering only the ordinary wear and tear of careless usage.

  Most musicians, many dancers, quite a few architects, importers too, were already practicing arts as international as pizza. But among writers, those who did well in their adoptive country were those who learned the new language quickly (if they hadn’t learned it in school); who stepped smartly into the idioms and lingo of the times; and who wrote in their new home as they had written in the old one: rapidly, breezily, glibly, satirically. For them, the forced switch from one language to another put both the new one and the old one in a revelatory light. They saw their mother tongue no longer as a daughter might see her mother, but as mother’s seducer might, or the baker whom she owed for last week’s rolls. And they saw their adopted tongue as an entirely new, wholly free, wonderfully energized way of thinking, because nothing of their rejected history clung to it, the lint of a past life didn’t remain; it was as clean of guilt and memory and old emotion as algebra is (one reason why algebra has always been a haven for the haunted).

  There was guilt enough. The old days had gathered it like cloud. That was one more factor in favor of another language, another country; because every difference was desirable, and every distance; because no matter what wrong your Motherland had done you, or how clearly mistaken in you it had been, or how unjustly you had been treated, how severely you had suffered, how long you had been made to play Job; you were nevertheless still haunted by your Father Figures, your idols of the Family; you were bitten by your conscience regardless; you called yourself an ungrateful whelp, disgraceful offspring, rotten kid—all the regular stuff—while knowing that your voice, at such times, was only the flavored echo of your enemies, that it was your own arm they were using to bring the gavel down, and your mouth which dolefully pronounced their sentence. That was another unfairness. Perhaps the final one.

  Well, it is certainly sensible, under such circumstances, to make yourself over in the image of another culture, if you can, because you are going to want to call cabs and order croissants, and you may want to blow the whistle on the bastards who drove you from your homeland—a vigorous article in the local language might do that—or cash in on your new celebrity. It may be, however, as I’ve suggested, that you used your first language as superficially as you will use every other, just to request cold toast and tea, or to kiss off an unwanted lover, get a good lie going; and it may also be that you know no other way to use any language but badly, as if it were a laundry basket you could carelessly empty or a paper cup you could crush and throw away after use.

  The scientist, for example, is presumed to be working at a level of concept which escapes the parochial, so that, although the summaries of his experiments are in German or French, his actual researches are not in French and German but in techniques of investigation, perception records, and logarithms.

  Suppose our words spilled from our mouths as palpably as spit; suppose some were encased in soft pink clouds like cotton candy or encircled like comic-strip balloons, or came out
in Gothic; suppose they filled up small rooms, and we waded through them to reach the phone or the door, and little language ladies spent the night collecting them in nets, hosing them into vats, and at earliest dawn trucks laden with the logoi slunk through the streets to great dictionary-shaped dumps. I suppose it only to indicate how well rid of our words we are. No sooner spoken than absorbed by the wide, though increasingly worried, sea of air around us. As for the similarly useless written word … well, we may die of our records; bad writing is more contagious than a cold; and if it isn’t pieces of plastic and those wormy twist-ties that get us, it will be vast memo slides, a plague of computer print-outs, best-seller buildups, or stock-certificate subsidence.

  But if your language is intended to be the medium of an art; if you, its user, are an artist and not a reporter, a persuader, a raconteur; if you aren’t writing principally to get praise or pay, but wish to avoid the busy avenues of entertainment, to traffic in the tragic maybe, dig down to the deeply serious; then (although there are a few exceptional and contrary cases) you will understand right away how blessed you are by the language you were born with, the language you began to master in the moment you also started to learn about life, to read the lines on faces, the light in the window which meant milk, the door which deprived you of mother, the half-songs sung by that someone who loaned you the breast you suckled—the breast you claimed as more than kin.

  Only if you spring fully grown from the brow of Zeus can you escape being born, and learning a language before you get big, and losing that language along with growing old. It is like living under a certain sort of sun, except that the word begins as merely the wind and weather of the spirit, because what occurs in the outside world initially as a kind of din is slowly made sense of and assimilated. Gradually, too, is a style formed, like the hardening of your bones and physiognomy, by degrees, the way your character comes into being—assertive and tough, mild and weak. That you will learn a language, then, is likely; that you will learn it well is unlikely; that you will live well is unlikely; that you will have a shape is certain; that your soul—that old ghost—will be the source of your speech and the words you write is a Socratic conjecture I support; the word is all the soul is, ever was, or wants to be.