‘—and because of that, because of your recent history, knowing where you came from and whatnot, and having seen you give that lecture last spring when you were here for the interviews and all, and you sounded really, really British then, probably because you’d just come from Oxford and hadn’t been around Americans very long, you know what I mean? Well, we just assumed, I mean I’m not the only one, other people must have mistaken you for British?’
‘Some, yes, but only strangers.’
What I meant to imply was that Rachel’s confusion could so easily have been dispelled if she had spent five minutes on my Faculty web page, where a brief academic biography makes my trajectory unambiguously clear. This, however, is something I have noticed in Rachel’s generation, and even more so in younger students: despite having all the world’s information available to them, they seem even more likely than earlier generations to leap to assumptions, or to wait for someone to explain to them what they have failed to understand or investigate for themselves, and in so failing have gone on living in a state of uncertainty or false belief. It surprised me at the time, but even in Oxford there were occasions when it became apparent in the course of a tutorial or supervision that a student had woefully misinterpreted some aspect of the work because he or she had not known the meaning of certain words, and despite having the Oxford English Dictionary freely accessible online, had failed to look up unfamiliar vocabulary, instead reading in so superficial a way that he or she had reached wildly erroneous conclusions about the text in question. I had hoped that in returning to America I would not find this same intellectual laziness, such absence of curiosity. I was, it has to be said, disappointed by Rachel’s failure to figure out that I was as American, probably much more and much longer American, as she. Frankly, I was more than a little pissed off and I thought of what the man had asked me in Caffè Paradiso on Saturday, whether the student who had failed to arrive was female and if she was attractive. No, I said to myself sitting before Rachel that Monday afternoon, she was well dressed and neatly groomed, but she was not attractive. Genetics had dealt her a rather poor hand. I am ashamed to admit her homeliness (a confusing word, meaning something entirely different in British English, almost the opposite of what it means in America) heightened the bitterness I felt as the hour drew to a close and she, this homely but very bright, very promising girl, felt compelled to tell me why I did not sound American to her untrained and largely untraveled ear.
As I showed her to the door, I turned and said, before thinking about the words or what their effect might be, ‘You know, Rachel, one of the great things about America, one of the reasons I wanted to come home to my country, is that anyone can speak any language in any possible accent and still be accorded the status of American.’
Rachel blushed and muttered something almost unintelligible, a kind of half apology that did not go far enough by half, as some British acquaintances of mine might have said.
‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I didn’t quite hear that,’ which was true, although I could not help noticing she looked crushed, and in that moment I felt sick with myself. I was behaving badly in a way I had not in a very long time.
‘I’m sorry, Professor O’Keefe,’ she mumbled, ‘I find, I don’t know, I just — interacting with people is really difficult sometimes, because, I guess, I don’t find other people very transparent.’
‘You should move to Germany. Germans are very transparent. If they hate you, they’ll tell you.’
And with that she rustled off into the cold November night. I had not meant to speak with such vehemence, but as I did, little though Rachel knew it, I was thinking of an encounter I had at a High Table dinner at Exeter College a few years before, when the matter of my nationality arose for the umpteenth time. I had by then acquired dual citizenship, having done so for the pragmatic reasons that it made travel back and forth between Britain and America much easier, and so when a Fellow of the College, a woman my age born and bred in London, asked me where I was from, I said, ‘I’m American, but now I’m also British, I’m a dual citizen,’ and she shook her head and corrected me, saying, ‘No, no, no. You’re American.’ When I protested, insisting, ‘It’s more complicated than that, I’ve lived in Britain for a decade and have acculturated to a certain extent, and don’t have any plans to return to America,’ she again shook her head, scolding me, ‘No, you are American, first and last, and even if you spent the rest of your life here you would never be British.’ I was so irritated by the woman, a Professor of English whose own family were themselves Austrian immigrants to Britain in the 1930s, that I did not speak to her for the remainder of the meal, or for the drinks afterward in the Senior Common Room, and ignored her whenever we passed each other on the street in the months and years that followed. I could not imagine a similar conversation happening in America. I could not imagine a born and bred American saying to an immigrant who had been in the country legally for a decade or more, someone who had acquired American citizenship, that they were not and would never be American; such a stance would be antithetical to the foundational concepts of American national identity.
The encounter with Rachel unsettled me, mostly because since returning to New York from Oxford there had been a number of such exchanges with strangers who assumed on first introductions that I was British, and on a few occasions some of the less astute strangers persisted, even after I had explained the situation and my personal history, convinced that I myself was somehow confused about my own nationality, that I was in fact not American, or that my parents must be British. Sometimes these exchanges would turn into confrontations; I would begin to lose my temper at a party or other social event, alcohol perhaps muddying the argument while also prolonging it, until I was finally forced to say something to the effect of, ‘Listen, I was born in the state of New York to parents who were born in the state of New York to grandparents who were born somewhere between Maine and Pennsylvania. I grew up in New York, I was a child in this state, I was a student here, I lived in America until I was in my late thirties, and then by the whims of a career in academia I happened to take a job in Britain and move there for a period of more than a decade. Some Americans are capable of living abroad and never losing their native accent. I am not one of them. Call me a chameleon or poseur or snob or whatever else you like, but I tried, perhaps unconsciously, perhaps intentionally at some points, to blend into British life because it became exhausting to be asked twice or three times what I meant when I said a word or phrase or whole sentence that was misunderstood as a direct result of my thoroughly American accent or vocabulary or some concatenation of the two, and so I made micro adjustments the better to be understood by the people who were, in a very real sense, my hosts. In making such adjustments I made myself sound foreign to you and people like you but I am no less American than I was when I moved to Britain all those years ago.’ And then, because I might have made the mistake of mentioning the year in which I moved to Oxford, a shadow would fall between me and the person who had misinterpreted my nationality to the point of offending me, and he or she would say something to the effect of, ‘Oh, did you leave before or after the attacks?’ and then I would have to say that the move occurred in the weeks following the attacks on New York and Washington, although this was merely a matter of coincidence. In a few cases one of these tin-eared interlocutors would look at me sharply and grumble, ‘If it had been me, I wouldn’t have deserted my country in that hour for the sake of a job,’ and, having made such a statement, the person would take their drink or canapé and flounce away, as if there could be no retort from me that would change their mind. It was dispiriting, and this succession of encounters, including the encounter with the English don at Exeter College that Rachel’s confusion recalled, all bled into my exchange with her that dark Monday afternoon. Conversations, perhaps especially ones involving some element of miscommunication or misapprehension that leads to a sense of conflict unfolding unexpectedly in the course of the exchange, are necessarily informed by the whole panoply of other remembered conversations about the same or similar subjects, conversations that devolved into a state of tension or open conflict. Sometimes that process of recall is triggered by nothing more than the physical stance of the person to whom one is talking, the way she cocks her head or uses a finger to draw her hair behind her shoulder, or by a word, a phrase, a tone of voice that suggests a prior exchange with a different person in a distant location. Then the catalog of past conversations begins to poison the present, so that, in this particular case, I was responding not only to Rachel’s confusion and stubbornness, but to the confusion and stubbornness, the rudeness and exclusiveness, of the Professor of English I had encountered at Exeter, and the Americans who have wanted to place me in the narrowest possible national category, who have seemed to think that they know my identity better than I do myself.