Americans Go Home

Few Americans In Europe, I would guess, are much dismayed these days by the pickets who, on one political occasion or another, parade before our embassies carrying signs that read:Americans Go Home! Such pickets, we tell ourselves in our new sophistication, are merely hardened Leftists or Rightists ready to exploit any occasion, the execution of Caryl Chessman or the building of a new rocket base, for their own obvious ends. And yet deep within us, I suspect, lurks an uneasy sense that such pickets speak also for us; a half awareness that, in the dark innards of the most enthusiastic American abroad, shadow figures march with placards carrying similar slogans. But this is a secret we have always found easier to confess in literature than in life.

Perhaps this is why an American friend, more or less permanently transplanted to Greece, brought to me with special indignation a recent article by Karl Shapiro, an angry valedictory to the world in which we were reading his words. "We retired from Europe in humorless disgust," Shapiro had written, "trading Provence and Tuscany for Lincoln, Nebraska. I suspect every American living abroad would do the same, given the opportunity and a little imagination ... American writers have been trying to explode the myth of Europe-our-Europe since the year one, and have not yet succeeded." And surely this is why I echoed my friend's indignation, pretending to us both that though we admired Shapiro as a poet and a man, his case could be dismissed out of hand: humorless, certainly, but grotesquely overstated and full of not-quite facts as well.

Either, I found myself thinking in his defense, he has deliberately overstated his position so that no one will believe what he has written just to earn the passage money home; or the whole thing is a symptom of incipient hepatitis, that endemic disease of the liver which attacks Americans abroad with particular virulence, filling them with a pointless rage not always possible to tell from the true prophetic fury. And I almost wrote to Mr. Shapiro in Lincoln, Nebraska, to ask whether his eyeballs and elbows were beginning to turn yellow.

But, after all, I told myself on second thought, hepatitis is a semipsychic affliction; and the fact that American livers do so spectacularly fail in Europe, that habitual anger plus an uncustomary diet sends the bile churning in our blood, is an argument for Mr. Shapiro's position rather than against it. On the other hand, my private argument continued, many Americans are living abroad (including me), and surely they are not all simply lacking in imagination and opportunity. As a matter of fact, as the "opportunity" for me to go home again has come closer and closer, my "imagination" has reduced me to a state of near panic. Even now, I am not quite ready to leave Greece, and find it hard to believe that I ever shall be. Moreover, I can hear outside my window the noises of the more and more fellow Americans who each year go abroad: some to look briefly, some to stay awhile, a few to remain indefinitely.

What is the matter with such Americans? Are they merely, as Mr.Shapiro would have us believe, victims of the tourist offices of Italy and France and Greece, dupes of their own travel agents? Or is it an unfortunate combination of prosperity and boredom which keeps them feastward? If not, what in the world makes them willing to take the world of commercial brochures over that of their greatest writers and their deep inner selves? For, after all, if Mr. Shapiro is not telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth, he is telling something more like the truth than the leaflets of travel agencies. Many of our greatest writers have tried to explode a vulgar myth of Europe, warning us of its corruption, its commercialization, its political tyranny, its indigestible fare, its sheer ugliness.

The collaborators in this endless debunking campaign have included not only Mark Twain, who claimed nearly to have starved on European food, and managed to eat well forever after by (continued on page 104)Americans Go Home(continued from page 87) saying so; but also Nathaniel Hawthorne and James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville and even Henry James, who finally became an English citizen all the same. And they should have known, those writers who "since the year one" have been trying to explode the myth of Europe; because "since the year one" they have all helplessly been drawn to Europe; too. Not only have some lived most of their adult lives as declared expatriates, like Pound and Eliot and James; but others, who would have hooted in derision at the title, have spent long periods abroad. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, wrote most of his Autobiography in England and France; and, indeed, that first of American books which we can still read with delight appeared in French before there was any edition at all in Franklin's native tongue.

From Washington Irving (who spent 17 years in Europe), through Hawthorne (who did seven at one stretch), to Melville (whose first voyage took him in that direction, and who at his life's critical moments always headed across the Atlantic), to the whole generation of the 1920s –on through Henry Miller to the present moment, American authors have sought in Europe a refuge from our weather and their friends, as well as a place for indolence and work. Only last year, James Baldwin, who has lived for many years in Paris, finished a novel in Istanbul; while William Burroughs, the black saint of the American very young, refuses still to return to his homeland; and Allen Ginsberg, who has made of Burroughs' exile a standing charge against America, recently walked in the mountains above Delphi in search of whatever it is that, for more than a century and a half, our writers have sought in the Old World and not found –found, perhaps, by not finding.

Not only certain great European cities such as London and Paris and Rome have provided our writers with a literary climate more favorable than their own; but the single small hill of Bellosguardo in Florence lists on a memorial tablet the names of more American novelists of first rank who worked there on major books than any single spot in America could boast. It is, indeed, astonishing how many especially American fictions were conceived or actually executed abroad, from Rip Van Winkle through The Leather-Stocking Tales, The Marble Faun of Hawthorne and Twain's Pudd'n head Wilson to Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night and The Sun Also Rises of Hemingway.

Some of these books are, of course, precisely studies of the American abroad; and since Henry James brought the theme to full consciousness, it has been an almost standard subject of our literature. I have before me as I write a list of this year's "Outstanding Books for Summer Reading," chiefly by Americans, and my eye following the plot summaries sees at a glance "on a Greek island," "self-discovery on the French Riviera," "a busy Left Bank street in Paris," "a voyage from Mexico to pre-Nazi Germany." Moreover, resting beside one elbow is the manuscript I have just finished, a novel dealing with Americans in Rome. Remembering such books as these, however, we remember also – with a twist which brings us back to Shapiro's side –that most of them, including my own, end with their protagonists going home.

Such novels of exile and return reflect the deepest truth, the mythical truth of the experience of Americans abroad, a truth of art which life does not always succeed in imitating, though it is one to which it aspires. T. S. Eliot, I suppose, will never go back to St. Louis to live out his declining years; while Pound, released from captivity in the States, seems set on dying in Rapallo. And if Rapallo looks, as Mr. Shapiro claims, just like Santa Barbara, California, that is just one of those irrelevant jokes that history plays on us all. Nonetheless, Hemingway, after long wandering, did come home to the American West to die; and Henry Miller, who threatened for a while to freeze into the image of the last exile in Paris, has managed to thaw out in California. As for the generation of the Twenties, its backward trek has been memorialized in that bible of repatriation, Malcolm Cowley's Exile's Return.

In literature, the pattern of exile and return works with more consistency; indeed, in some cases going home seems to be lived out vicariously in books to spare the writer the indignity of living it out in fact. In the key novels of Henry James, for instance, from The American to The Ambassadors, the protagonists go back to the place from which they started, whether it be San Francisco or Boston. And though in The Ambassadors the departing Lambert Strether tells his young friend Chad to stay in France while he is leaving – we cannot help suspecting that Chad will, for ignoble reasons, take the path back to America already followed, for quite noble ones, by his senior. Whether in self-sacrifice or cowardice, the displaced American returns. At least in literature.

The Dick Diver of Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night is living in Geneva, N.Y., as his book closes; while Kenyon and Hilda of Hawthorne's The Marble Faun are headed for marriage and America at their story's end; and Twain's Connecticut Yankee, who has traveled in time as well as space, returns to Connecticut to mark the close of his strange fable. Even Eliot, Anglo-Catholic and Royalist, returns home in his imagination, making a pilgrimage in the Four Quartets not only to New England, but even, less foreseeably, to Huck Finn's Mississippi, beside which he was born.

In the deepest American imagination, Europe represents a retreating horizon, opposite to but quite as elusive as the retreating horizon of the West. And like the West, it is thought of as a place in which we find it difficult to remain, like the place of a dream from which we wake in pleasure or fear. Or alternatively, we wake in pleasure or fear.Or alternatively, we view it as the object of a romantic flirtation from which we return to the realities of marriage or loneliness. Most typically, we represent Europe to ourselves as a woman we cannot hold: a saint to be worshiped from afar or a whore to be longed for and left –from Henry Adams' Virgin, through Twain's falsely accused St. Joan, to the "clouded" Mme. de Vionnet of James, and Pound's symbolic "old bitch gone in the teeth..." Only homosexuals and the women who these days let homosexuals prefabricate their fantasies imagine Europe as the bronze-and-black Mediterranean boy appropriate to a Roman spring.

Longfellow, for many years the chosen intermediary between the American middle classes and Europe, found once in a Roman stornello what struck him as the perfect expression of the feeling with which the American artist goes home. "Se il Papa me donasse Campidoglio," the song runs, "E mi dicesse, 'lascia andar sta figlia'/Quella che amavo prima, quella voglio"; which means in English, "If the Pope would offer me the Capitoline Hill, and say to me, 'let your girl go,' the one whom I loved first, her would I choose." And after "the one whom I loved first," Longfellow wrote, transcribing the lines in his notebook, "(America)." America! The image is customary enough: the presentation of the longing for Europe as an unworthy impulse to adultery, and of the return as a righteous reassertion of loyalty. And with it as a clue, we can begin to resolve the contradiction between the fact that our writers have constantly warned us off Europe and constantly sought it out.

The American, let us say, goes to Europe to see if he can triumph over temptation; and he learns that even if he cannot always leave what allures him, atleast he can write accounts of leaving it. Discovering in Europe that his own country is myth as well as fact, and Europe fact as well as myth, he comes to see that one myth is as good as another and that he might as well stick to the one to which he was born. Meanwhile, he learns that in fact, in terms of plumbing and class relations and politics (continued on page 151)Americans Go Home(continued from page 104) America is clearly preferable; for even the superior comforts of Europe –cheap services and greater leisure, for example – are for him guilt-ridden advantages. In Paris, obviously different from the dream of Paris, the American discovers he can bear Kansas City, which he began knowing was different from all dreams of it; and this is worth his fare plus whatever heartache he pays as surtax.

Yet the American is typically not sure that the choice he has made in leaving is what in his deepest of deep hearts he desired. On the streets of Athens his inner pickets chanted, "Go home!"; as he boards ship or plane they cry, "You fool!" Which is to say, he has fallen in love. In the erotic dream he has committed his waking self. And he is dogged thereafter by the sense that if he had not got out in time he might have been captured forever; might have been held by precisely what, in his right mind, his Stateside mind, he believes to be worst in Europe: its venality, its indolence, its institutionalized cynicism, its idle sensuality, its class distinctions, its shoddiness and dirt, its oppressive concern with the past. There is no reason, of course, that he should love only what is worthy of him; but as an American he is possessed by the mad notion that he must.

In any case, in our most serious books, representative Americans do not give up Europe gladly. Fitzgerald's Dick Diver blesses the Riviera beach from which he turns; and James' Lambert Strether departs from France as close to tears as his dry eye can come. But the regret itself is ambivalently regarded, Diver's blessing felt as blasphemous, Strether's regret as a betrayal of all New England has taught him to honor. When the tone of rejection is not nostalgic, it is likely to be – as in the case of Mark Twain or Karl Shapiro – shrill and unconvincing: the tone of one who has awakened from a dream left only reluctantly but remembered with shame.

Another way of saying all this is that to feel himself truly an American, the American artist must have the illusion of having personally rejected Europe. Now that revolutions against Europe (rejection by force of arms) belong to a remote past; and emigration (rejection by flight) has slowed to a trickle, most Americans must content themselves with the experience of visiting the old country as strangers, members of a new "we" able to say "they" of the inhabitants of lands which their fathers or grandfathers left behind. This means that our chief act of protest against Europe is tourism itself; and, indeed, this fact is more evident to the Europeans who profit, and suffer, by such tourism than to us as tourists.

In any event, European travel has become an essential aspect of our culture, an essential part of what makes Americans American. It is as much an expression of our quest for identity as baseball, rodeos, quiz shows on television or the Western movie. Ever since 1850, and with especially vigorous surges after the end of each of our great wars: in 1864, 1919, and 1945, the trip to Europe has tended to become more and more a part of mass culture. What began as the perquisite of a favored few has become first the right and then the duty of the many, since it is characteristic of America that things fought for as rights come to be felt as obligations. "What, you haven't been to Europe?" says the lady who has, to her next-door neighbor. "You've just got to!" And the command is transmitted via that neighbor's husband to their travel agent.

As a part of our total culture, the pilgrimage to Europe is necessarily ambiguous in significance, its meaning different for each of the subgroups within that culture. We have all of us, I think, somewhere in the back of our minds the image of a typical American abroad – for which Mark Twain is surely responsible in part: the image of a middleaged, middle-class, moderately naive and uneducated white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant female with vague cultural aspirations and an even vaguer sense of returning to a place from which (give or take a few hundred kilometers) her own ancestors came. But what of the American Negro, whose ancestors bypassed Europe completely in the holds of America-bound slave ships; and who stand therefore, as James Baldwin has movingly described, bewildered before cathedrals utterly unrelated to their own prehistory? And what of the American Jew to whom those same cathedrals represent not something alien, but a familiar horror: a threat before which his fathers quaked and spat, and which he cannot pass without a dim visceral response?

"I am not religious," Karl Shapiro writes, "but I cannot enter a European church without remembering that on Easter Sunday for a thousand years the sermon was a signal for the massacre of the local Jewry." Yet there is a sense in which the American grade schools have made Anglo-Saxon Protestants of us all, perhaps even middle-aged females as well; teaching us to identify ourselves, Africans or Semites though we may be in our origins, with Dick and Jane, those textbook figures whose ancestors obviously made it out of England on the first boat. Certainly Negroes and Jews in Europe tend to blend indistinguishably, whatever their inner qualms, with the three chief classes into which Americans abroad visibly divide: lowbrow, middlebrow and highbrow; though marginal types such as Negro and Jew are more likely to be found in the last group, the Anglo-Saxon members of which have been swinging back and forth for some 30 or more years between a cult of the black man and a programmatic philo-Semitism.

Lowbrow, middlebrow and highbrow – these are surely the closest things to genuine castes in our society; though they are distinguished from one another not by racial origin nor even money and status, but by taste Despite the fact that this threefold classification is widely used, however, it is hard to define satisfactorily. But a glance at the attitudes of each group toward the American publication of an uncensored Lady Chatterley's Lover will perhaps make their differences sufficiently clear.

To the lowbrow, the lifting of the censorship is of little importance. If he reads Lady Chatterley at all, he reads it as a dirty book still, i.e., conceals it from his wife, mother and especially his young daughter; and he is likely to be a little disappointed at its not being such hot stuff after all. The middlebrow, on the other hand, self-righteously hails its publication as a triumph of enlightenment, and reads it as an obligation, urging it on his young daughter. His wife and mother are already reading it, have, perhaps, read it long since. The highbrow regards the whole thing as yesterday's fight; and if he rereads Lady Chatterley (naturally he owns the bootleg Swedish edition), finds it rather unsatisfactory. He prefers, he will tell you, Lawrence's first version to either the cut or the unexpurgated later ones; and he will inform you that we ought to be concentrating on living issues rather than dead ones.

What, then, of our three cultural castes and the trip to Europe? The lowbrow by definition tends to stay home, to see America not only first – as his kind of billboard occasionally urges him – but last, too. He is the least secure of all Americans, most easily brainwashed, for instance, if he falls into Communist hands; for he has the smallest and least portable cultural stake. What he does possess cannot be carried with him like memories or even books, but is anchored to a particular ball park or TV channel. Culturally as well as politically, he is a natural isolationist. Not sure of himself, he thinks that at least he knows "them" all right; and he is sure that all "they" want is our dollars and our women.

There are, however, two occasions when the lowbrow goes abroad: when his sentimentality triumphs over his isolationism, and when he is drafted. Overseas wars are his kind of tourism; and he reacts in two ways to the great world into which he is hurled, gun in hand. He has a hell of a good time, an extended binge or night on the town; and he hates, in retrospect, every minute of it. The Europe available to him is, by and large, the Europe of bars and brothels. And when he is tossed into any other, he desecrates it in self-defense: shoots the head off the bust of Augustus in a Roman villa (claiming he thought it was Mussolini); writes Kilroy was Here on castle walls; returns singing "Bless them all" and reporting that France literally stinks as does Venice, that Germany is clean at least, but you know those Krauts, etc., etc. When war has become permanent or institutionalized in the shape of occupation forces, he retreats to an imaginary America to nurse his grievances and keep himself true blue. He lives, that is to say, in PXville with peanut butter, cornflakes, Coca-Cola, and all the other disgruntled lowbrows with whom he rehearses their common complaints: poor plumbing, inferior goods, bouts of diarrhea, cheating storekeepers, infected prostitutes and the rest.

Sometimes, however, the lowbrow makes a peacetime journey to Europe. Each year, for example, whole boatloads of returners seek out the places of their origin, to mingle condescension with benefaction, to be baffled by the ingratitude of those they have come to help and look down on, and to be annoyed by the poverty and backwardness – which, all the same, they relish. For only against the former can their prosperity and only against the latter the progressiveness of their new home towns be properly appreciated. Meanwhile, they search everywhere for a remembered fellowship, which, of course, no longer exists; and, feeling somehow cheated, they return with a handful of souvenirs, some photographs of surviving relatives.

Sometimes, too, the wives and daughters of those who wrote Kilroy was Here demand a trip to see just where Kilroy was – and join organized tours, in mingled expectation or fear, for that end. Such rudimentary tourists, like the lady fellow traveler of my own first journey to Europe whom I shall never forget, no sooner set foot on foreign soil than they begin to sing aggressively, "God Bless America!" And they stare suspiciously around them at those who do not join in, sure that they are already infected beyond all hope of cure.

When the lowbrow, however, joins a tour, for no matter what pious purpose, he is already on the way to becoming a middlebrow. No longer is he the pure exponent of hate and distrust harrowing the hell of Europe, but also a votary of culture making a pilgrimage to the places in which it was born, and where it is now shown to hordes of the ignorant by men almost as ignorant as they, who earn their living as pimps of the past.

In the middlebrow couple, the American ambivalence toward Europe is expressed in almost perfect balance: the positive and negative poles of that ambivalence neatly portioned out to wife and husband – the wife who is entirely thrilled (or claims to be), the husband who is utterly bored (or chooses to say so). But surely the current sometimes alternates in each.

Such Maggies and Jiggses, at any rate, are the comic mainstays of the tourist trade: the gallery-crawlers, the abject starers, the picture-takers, the throwers of coins into fountains. In each country, they know what they must see, for it has two stars or three in the guidebook; but they do not always know what they are seeing. "If this is Thursday, we're in Venice," the old joke goes. And surely there is a pathos in it beyond even that of most old jokes: a pathos proper to those who at last, frozen in their deepest marrow by the dread chill of half-abandoned churches, wearied to the bone by the inhuman endlessness of the Louvre and the Uffizi, baffled by the hostile stares of those at whom they stare so warmly – go home in unconfessed frustration, each item on their agenda duly checked off.

At home they have two revenges: one on Europe, the other on their friends who stayed behind. They can buy Europe, take it home with them and pass it out gift wrapped. The hysterical acquisitiveness of the American shopper abroad must surely be thought of as a kind of violence, a symbolic mayhem or rape. And once home, the baffled middlebrow can urge his stay-at-home friends to go to Europe, too, not to miss it while there is still anything not to miss. In quite the same way, he tells them to see the uplifting play through which he has already suffered, or to read the dull, pretentious book that bored him. Or, in special malice, he can show them slides – momma before the Colosseum, papa in the blue Aegean – while in the half-darkness and the haze of smoke they writhe. Yet he scarcely knows he lies, and would be horrified to learn he acts more from hostility than love.

The pretense about loving Europe which Shapiro attacks does in fact exist in a large part of middle-class America. But precisely that group calls for and pays well certain privileged clowns who act out for them the hatred of Europe which they cannot otherwise confess. The first and greatest of such clowns was, of course, Mark Twain, and the first and greatest of all middlebrow travel books, his Innocents Abroad.

Certain middlebrow tourists, however, who grow weary of the standard fare of organized tours, begin the search for "unexploited places," "authentic locales," "characteristic taverns"; and they are on the way to the next and final level. Most of them will become only aspiring or ersatz highbrows, but some of them will really make it – or, at least, prepare the way for sons who will make it. For just as the wife of the lowbrow tends to become the middlebrow, the son of them both seems destined for highbrowdom. Culturally speaking, the mythical American family consists of father, son and holy mother: low-, high- and middle-brow in a single split-level house.

If the lowbrow expresses the negative pole of our ambivalence toward Europe, and the middlebrow both poles in balance, the highbrow embodies the positive pole alone. In him, tourism is transformed into exile; for at his extreme, he is the expatriate or the fullblown renegade: wearing the costume of his adopted country, speaking its language, eating its humblest fare, hiding in its dingiest corners, and crossing its streets to avoid his compatriots. It is as if he were punishing himself for having been born an American, or trying to convince himself that he is not. Yet it would be unfair to think of self-punishment and self-deceit as the chief motives of the traditional expatriate.

Three main forces have impelled him to seek a new home. The first is simply the very American desire to escape America and other Americans, when the one has come to seem a travesty of its own dream, and the others caricatures created by those who hate them most. The second is an equally American tendency to confuse some particular place with an imagined utopia; and the third the identical hunger for an absolute freedom which brought the first Americans across the Atlantic and sent later generations trekking West after what, after all, can only be sought but never found. All three impulses obviously are self-defeating as well as authentically American and more than a little native: evidence that even such transplanted Americans as James and Eliot and Pound have been innocents abroad.

No more than the trapper or the cowboy, can the American artist escape his countrymen. As the national part springs up in the footsteps of the former, the Hilton Hotel rises on the heels of the other. There is no use in the highbrow seeking a Europe the tours have not yet reached. His fellow countrymen will scent him out; and the middlebrow hounds run fast and true. Let him leave Athens for Mykonos, Mykonos for Skyros; sooner or later the hordes will follow. Let him leave Naples for Capri, Capri for Ischia; busloads of uncomfortable worshipers at the shrines of culture will track him down. Americans cannot leave their artists alone; but having presumably driven them into exile, insist on following them there.

Similarly, they incline in the long run to ape the opinions of the avant-garde which in the short run they have despised. Let the wary highbrow try to assert his independence by despising the Parthenon in favor of the Erechtheum in Athens; preferring the San Clemente to St. Peter's in Rome, or the Sant' Ambrogio to the Cathedral in Milan – the next generation of middlebrows will be taught his preferences by Time magazine, and the generation after by its guidebooks. And in the meanwhile, the Europe which the highbrow prefers to the America he remembers is remarking itself as fast as it can in the image of that America. Comics, picture magazines, electric refrigerators, bad American movies and television await him everywhere. For it is true, as Shapiro nastily reminds us, that the Riviera becomes Miami Beach, true that most Europeans want it Miami Beach. To transatlantic middlebrows and lowbrows this is the next best thing to emigration, which has been denied them.

How, then, can the intellectual-artist-highbrow continue to believe Paris or Rome or Athens the earthly embodiment of the invisible republic of letters, the long-lost spiritual homeland to which he owes an allegiance beyond the patriotism demanded of him by an America which nurtured his body but starved his spirit? The portable radio held by the European beside him plays Frank Sinatra or Elvis Presley; the girl who, bending to tie her sandal, looks like a Nike, chews gum and dances the twist. Europe is no utopia made of stone and wood, only a shabby world moving toward mass industry and mass culture – only a score of pseudo Americas whose various pasts blend into a dismaying future.

There are various possibilities open to the highbrow who aspires to exile all the same. The first is to deceive himself more or less deliberately, even as his middlebrow parents at home deceive themselves, though about another country: to make his slogan, "My noncountry right or wrong!" Precisely such a pair of self-deceivers traveled with me on the ship to Greece, refusing to be vaccinated; for, they insisted, there was no smallpox in Greece, only in America, to which they were determined never to return!

A second possibility is to move beyond Europe to ever more remote and alien lands. Even now one sees in Athens and Istanbul the highbrow hordes, bearded and sandaled like traditional pilgrims, and bearing the holy books of William Burroughs to countries whose chief industries have always been mysticism and the "alteration of consciousness." They have reached the borders of Europe in their quest, and beyond the marches of Greece and Turkey the way lies open to the Orient, to India and on to Japan. It is Japan, of course, which has already become the favorite meta-European haven of the highbrow. But Japan is, alas, precisely the most American country in the Far East. Since 1860 it has been available to our ships and our imaginations; and we are linked to it by Lafcadio Hearn, Madame Butterfly and hundreds of haiku produced at the turn of the century by genteel New England ladies. Even the atom bomb beat the first large wave of expatriates to Japan; and, indeed, both they and the bomb beat the first large wave of expatriates to Japan; and, indeed, both they and the bomb represent aspects of a continuing chain reaction: extensions of the Americanization more mildly begun by Deanna Durbin and Gary Cooper movies. How is it possible ever to forget the images of the new Hiroshima out of Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour, its portrayal of the atrocity after the final atrocity – as Coney Island rises on the ruins we have made, a parody of America out of the cold cinders?

A third possibility seems to me more genuinely new, though viable only for a minority of Americans: those – chiefly Jews it turns out – who have not only been born in large American cities but also are descended from those who have never lived anywhere else on that continent. For them there is another kind of exile, interior exile or in-patriation. Indeed, Jewish American writers, no matter how highbrow, have not by and large had a taste for expatriation or the portrayal of expatriate heroes. Experts in exile, such writers have seen more clearly than others that the choice offered us is not between belonging and exile, but between one form of exile and another. And in ever larger numbers they have chosen to exile themselves into America, moving from New York or Chicago, Boston or Baltimore to small towns in New Mexico and Oregon, Nebraska and Montana.

After all, if it is a difference from what one is born to that is desirable, there is a greater difference between New York and Athens, Georgia, than between New York and Athens, Greece, or between Chicago and Moscow, Idaho, than between Chicago and Moscow, Russia. The first fictional treatment of this new migration, a comedy involving an urban Jew in a small university community in the West, has appeared in the form of a novel by Bernard Malamud's called A New Life. But though Malamud's book begins with exile, it ends with return; for like the expatriates of the past, the in-patriate of the present also ends by going home, returning East as inevitably as his forebears returned West.

And yet the impulse to exile is not entirely fruitless; for the American highbrow finds in the places he cannot stay a sort of freedom, plus, most usually, magnificent scenery; a bohemia with a view. Away from home, he is able to shed one set of responsibilities without assuming another, becoming—in his moral limbo—a functionless man, a privileged drifter, a stateless person. But outside the state, Aristotle long ago assured us, we are beasts or gods, not men. And if the stateless American on his best nights fells himself divine, there is always the morning after when he confronts his beastliness in the glass. Yet he has, all the same, not only certain obvious smaller freedom to drink more than someone else thinks good for him, the freedom to use certain narcotics less dangerous to health than tobacco, the freedom to indulge unusual culinary or sexual tastes; he as the final freedom, the freedom from home.

To be sure, the purity of his freedom is compromised a little by the fact that, no matter how hard he tries to resist, sooner or later the Guggenheim or Ford or Rockefeller or Bollingen Foundation will insist on subsidizing his expatriation. But this is a customary irony in a time when the standard joke goes: "I'm running away from home tonight, if my father lets me have the car." Far more disturbing is the exile's eventual sense that he is condemned to what he thought he chose; that he cannot, unless he becomes a citizen of the place to which he has fled, assume certain responsibilities he once believed he was glad to leave for all time. But what, after all, is the point of fleeing America to become a church warden in England?

Yet it is a worse indignity to endure freedom by virtue of a half-despised passport, among those who, without that passport, are not free at all; a greater torment to read each day in a tongue not one's own accounts of elections in which one has not voted, and which cannot, therefore, ever really matter. For this indignity and this torment, not the charm of exotic landscapes nor the color of unfamiliar skies, not the beauty of foreign rivers nor the uncustomary pace and pattern of life abroad, not even the release to productive work can make amends.

Slowly a burden of hatred grows in the exile: hatred for the lies, the officiousness, the lassitude, the petty malevolence, the very charm of those among whom he is condemned to be free. Especially the charm enrages him, the charm eternally sold and always for sale; and tasting his bile, he looks in the mirror to see if his eyeballs are turning yellow. But one morning he wakes to feel the pang in his liver abated, the knot in his bowels relaxed; for he knows finally that he is really free, free even to be unfree if he chooses, free to go home.