XV
Among flags we preferred the Union Jack; among cigarette brands, Camel; Beefeater among liquors. Clearly our choice was dictated by sense of form, not substance. We can be forgiven, though, because our familiarity with the contents was marginal, because what circumstances and luck were offering didn't constitute choice. Besides, we weren't so much a mark vis-a-vis the Union Jack and, moreover, vis-avis Camels. As for Beefeater gin bottles, a friend of mine observed upon receiving one from a visiting foreigner that perhaps in the same way we get kicks from their elaborate labels, they get their kicks from the total vacancy on ours.
I nodded in agreement. He then slid his hand under a pile of magazines and fished out what I seem to remember as a Life magazine cover. It depicted the upper deck of an aircraft carrier, somewhere on the ocean. Sailors in their white tops stood on the deck looking upward—presumably at a plane or chopper from which they had been photographed. They stood in formation. From the air, the formation read: E = mc2- "Nice, isn't it?" said my friend. "Uh-huh," I said. "Where was it taken?" "Somewhere in the Pacific," he said. "\Vho cares?"
xvi
Let's turn the light off, then, or let's shut our eyes tight. What do we see? A U.S. aircraft carrier in the middle of the Pacific. And it's me there on the deck, waving. Or by the zCV's wheel, driving. Or in the "green and yellow basket" rhyme of Ella's singing, etc., etc. For a man is what he loves. That's why he loves it: because he is a part of it. And not a man only. Things are that way, too. I remember the roar produced by the then newly opened, imported from Lord- knows-where, American-made laundromat in Leningrad when I threw my first blue jeans into a machine. There was joy of recognition in that roar; the entire queue heard it. So with eyes shut let's admit it: we recognized something in the \Vest, in the civilization, as our own; perhaps even more so there than at home. What's more, it turned out that we were prepared to pay for that sentiment, and quite dearly —with the rest of our lives. Which is a lot, of course. But anything less than that would be plain whoring. Not to mention that, in those days, the rest of our lives was all we had.
1986
The Condition We Call Exile, or Acorns Aweigh
As we gather here, in this attractive and well-lit room, on this cold December evening, to discuss the plight of the writer in exile, let us pause for a minute and think of some of those who, quite naturally, didn't make it to this room. Let us imagine, for instance, Turkish Gastarbeiters prowling the streets of West Germany, uncomprehending or envious of the surrounding reality. Or let us imagine Vietnamese boat people bobbing on high seas or already settled somewhere in the Australian outback. Let us imagine Mexican wetbacks crawling the ravines of Southern California, past the border patrols into the territory of the United States. Or let us imagine shiploads of Pakistanis disembarking somewhere in Kuwait or Saudi Arabia, hungry for menial jobs the oil-rich locals won't do. Let us imagine multitudes of Ethiopians trekking some desert on foot into Somalia (or is it the other way around?), escaping the famine. Well, we may stop here, because that minute of imagining has already passed, although a lot could be added to this list. Nobody has ever counted these people and nobody, including the UN relief organizations, ever wilclass="underline" coming in millions, they elude com-
Written for the Wheatland Conference, held in Vienna in November ig87.
putation and constitute what is called—for want of a better term or a higher degree of compassion—migration.
Whatever the proper name for this phenomenon is, whatever the motives, origins, and destinations ofthese people are, whatever their impact on the societies which they abandon and to which they come, one thing is absolutely clear: they make it very difficult to talk with a straight face about the plight of the writer in exile.
Yet talk we must; and not only because literature, like poverty, is known for taking care of its own kind, but mainly because of the ancient and perhaps as yet unfounded belief that, were the masters of this world better read, the mismanagement and grief that make millions hit the road could he somewhat reduced. Since there is not much on which to rest our hopes for a better world, and since everything else seems to fail one way or another, we must somehow maintain that literature is the only form of moral insurance that a society has; that it is the permanent antidote to the dog-eat- dog principle; that it provides the best argument against any sort oflmlldozer-type mass solution—if only because human diversity is literature's lock and stock, as well as its raison d'etre. We must talk because we must insist that literature is the greatest—surely greater than any creed—teacher of human subtlety, and that by interfering with literature's natural existence and with people's ability to learn literature's lessons, a society reduces its own potential, slows down the pace of its evolution, ultimately, perhaps, puts its own fabric in peril. If this means that we must talk to ourselves, so much the better: not for ourselves but perhaps for literature.
Whether he likes it or not, Gastarbeiters and refugees of any stripe effectively pluck the orchid out of an exiled writer's lapel. Displacement and misplacement are this century's commonplace. And what our exiled writer has in common with a Gastarbeiter or a political refugee is that in either
24 I J О SEPH B R О D SKY
case a man is running away from the worse toward the better. The truth of the matter is that from a tyranny one can be exiled only to a democracy. For good old exile ain't what it used to be. It isn't leaving civilized Rome for savage Sarmatia anymore, nor is it sending a man from, say, Bulgaria to China. No, as a rule what takes place is a transition from a political and economic backwater to an industrially advanced society with the latest word on individual liberty on its lips. And it must be added that perhaps taking this route is for an exiled writer, in many ways, like going home—because he gets closer to the seat of the ideals which inspired him all along.
If one were to assign the life of an exiled writer a genre, it would have to be tragicomedy. Because of his previous incarnation, he is capable of appreciating the social and material advantages of democracy far more intensely than its natives do. Yet for precisely the same reason (whose main by-product is the linguistic barrier), he finds himself totally unable to play any meaningful role in his new society. The democracy into which he has arrived provides him with physical safety but renders him socially insignificant. And the lack of significance is what no writer, exile or not, can take.
For it is the quest for significance that very often constitutes most of his career. To say the least, it is very often a literary career's consequence. In the case of the exiled writer, it is almost invariably the cause of his exile. And one is terribly tempted to add here that the existence of this desire in a writer is a conditioned response on his part to the vertical structure of his original society. (For a writer living in a free society, the presence of this desire bespeaks the atavistic memory every democracy has of its unconstitutional past.)