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James
Wood I
had a piano teacher
who used to talk about the most familiar musical cadence – in which a
piece
returns, after wandering and variation, to its original key, the tonic
– as
‘going home’. It seemed so easy when music did it: who wouldn’t want to
swat
away those black accidentals and come back to sunny C major? These
satisfying
resolutions are sometimes called ‘perfect cadences’; there is a lovely
subspecies called the ‘English cadence’, used often by composers like
Tallis
and Byrd, in which, just before the expected resolution, a dissonance
sharpens
its blade and seems about to wreck things – and is then persuaded home,
as it
should be. I
wish I could hear that
English cadence again, the way I first properly heard it in Durham
Cathedral. I
was 11 years old. During the lesson, we choristers had been exchanging
notes,
probably sniggering at one of the more pompous priests – the one who,
as he
processed towards his stall, held his clasped hands pointing outwards
from his
breast, like a pious fish – and then we were up on our feet, and were
singing
‘O Nata Lux’ by Thomas Tallis1.
I knew
the piece but hadn’t really listened to it. Now I was struck –
assaulted,
thrown – by its utter beauty: the soft equanimity of its articulation,
like the
voice of justice; the sweet dissonance, welcome as pain. That
dissonance, with
its distinctive Tudor sound, is partly produced by a movement known as
‘false
relation’, in which the note you expect to hear in the harmony of a
chord is
shadowed by its nearest relation – the same note but a semitone off. As
the
Tallis was ending, I saw a middle-aged woman with a canvas shoulder-bag
enter
the shadowy hinterland at the back of the huge building. Standing so
far away,
a singular figure, she might have been a tentative tourist. But I knew
the full
bag, that coat I always wanted to be a bit more impressive than it was,
the
anxious rectitude of my mother’s posture. She came every Tuesday
afternoon,
because the girls’ school she taught at got out early then. My parents
lived
only a mile or so from the cathedral, but I had to board; Tuesday
afternoons,
before I went back to school, gave me the chance to exchange a few
words, and
grab whatever she brought in that bag – comics and sweets; and more
reliably,
socks. In
my memory this is
exactly what happened: the radiance of the music, the revelation of its
beauty,
the final cadences of the Tallis, and my happy glimpsing of my mother.
But it happened
37 years ago, and the scene has a convenient, dream-like composition.
Perhaps I
have really dreamed it. As I get older I dream more frequently of that
magnificent cathedral – the long grey cool interior hanging somehow
like memory
itself. These are intense experiences, from which I awake hearing every
single
note of a piece of remembered music; happy dreams, never troubled. I
like
returning to that place in my sleep, even look forward to it. But
real life is a
different matter. The few occasions I have returned to Durham have been
strangely disappointing. My parents no longer live there; I no longer
live in
the country. The city has become a dream. Herodotus says that the
Scythians
were hard to defeat because they had no cities or settled forts: ‘they
carry
their houses with them and shoot with bows from horseback … their
dwellings are
on their wagons. How then can they fail to be invincible and
inaccessible for
others?’ To have a home is to become vulnerable. Not just to the
attacks of
others, but to our own adventures in alienation. I left my home twice –
the
first time, just after university, when I went to London, in the
familiar march
of the provincial for the metropolis. I borrowed a thousand pounds from
the
NatWest bank in Durham (an account I still have), rented a van one-way,
put
everything I owned into it, and drove south; I remember thinking, as I
waved at
my parents and my sister, that the gesture was both authentic and oddly
artificial, the authorised novelistic journey. In this way, many of us
are
homeless: the exodus of expansion. The second departure occurred in
1995, when
at the age of thirty I left Britain for the United States. I was
married to an
American – to put it more precisely, I was married to an American
citizen whose
French father and Canadian mother, themselves immigrants, lived in the
States.
We had no children, and America would surely be new and exciting. We
might even
stay there for a few years – five at the most? I
have now lived 18
years in the United States. It’s a bit feeble to say I didn’t expect to
stay that
long; and ungrateful, or even meaningless or dishonest, to say I didn’t
want
to. I must have wanted to; there has been plenty of gain. But I had so
little
concept of what might be lost. ‘Losing a country’, or ‘losing a home’,
if I
gave the matter much thought when I was young, was an acute
world-historical
event, forcibly meted out on the victim, lamented and canonised in
literature
and theory as ‘exile’ or ‘displacement’, and defined with appropriate
terminality by Edward Said in his essay, ‘Reflections on Exile’: Exile
is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to
experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and
a native
place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can
never be
surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain
heroic,
romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these
are no
more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of
estrangement. The
achievements of exile are permanently undermined by the loss of
something left
behind for ever. Said’s
emphasis on the
self’s ‘true home’ has a slightly theological, or perhaps Platonic,
sound. When
there is such universal homelessness, of both the forced and the
unforced kind,
the idea of a ‘true home’ surely suffers an amount of unsympathetic
modification. Perhaps Said’s implication is that unwanted homelessness
only
bears down on those who have a true home and thus always reinforces the
purity
of the origin, while voluntary homelessness – the softer emigration I
am trying
to define – means that home can’t have been very ‘true’ after all. I
doubt he
intended that, but nonetheless, the desert of exile seems to need the
oasis of
primal belonging, the two held in a biblical clasp. In
that essay, Said distinguishes
between exile, refugee, expatriate and émigré. Exile, as he understands
it, is
tragic homelessness, connected to the ancient sentence of banishment;
he
approves of Adorno’s subtitle to Minima Moralia: Reflections
from a
Mutilated Life. It’s hard to see how the milder, unforced journey I
am
describing could belong to this grander vision of suffering. ‘Not going
home’
is not exactly the same as ‘homelessness’. That nice old boarding
school
standby, ‘homesickness’, might fit better, particularly if allowed a
certain
doubleness. I am sometimes homesick, where homesickness is a kind of
longing
for Britain and an irritation with Britain: sickness for and
sickness of.
I bump into plenty of people in America who tell me that they miss
their native
countries – Britain, Germany, Russia, Holland, South Africa – and who
in the
next breath say they cannot imagine returning. It is possible, I
suppose, to
miss home terribly, not know what home really is anymore, and refuse to
go
home, all at once. Such a tangle of feelings might then be a definition
of
luxurious freedom, as far removed from Said’s tragic homelessness as
can be
imagined. Logically,
a refusal to
go home should validate, negatively, the very idea of home, rather in
the way
that Said’s idea of exile validates the idea of an original ‘true
home’. But
perhaps the refusal to go home is consequent on the loss, or lack, of
home: as
if those fortunate expatriates were really saying to me: ‘I couldn’t go
back
home because I wouldn’t know how to anymore.’ And there is ‘Home’ and
‘a home’.
Authors used to be described on book dust-jackets as ‘making a home’:
‘Mr
Blackmur makes his home in Princeton, New Jersey.’ I have made a home
in the
United States, but it is not quite Home. For instance, I have no desire
to become
an American citizen. Recently, when I arrived at Boston, the
immigration
officer commented on the length of time I’ve held a Green Card. ‘A
Green Card
is usually considered a path to citizenship,’ he said, a sentiment both
irritatingly reproving and movingly patriotic. I mumbled something
about how he
was perfectly correct, and left it at that. But consider the
fundamental
openness and generosity of the gesture (along with the undeniable
coercion):
it’s hard to imagine his British counterpart so freely offering
citizenship –
as if it were, indeed, uncomplicatedly on offer, a service or
commodity. He was
generously saying, ‘Would you like to be an American citizen?’ along
with the
less generous: ‘Why don’t you want to be an American citizen?’ Can we
imagine
either sentiment being expressed at Heathrow airport? The poet and
novelist
Patrick McGuinness, in his forthcoming book Other People’s Countries
(itself a rich analysis of home and homelessness; McGuinness is
half-Irish and
half-Belgian) quotes Simenon, who was asked why he didn’t change his
nationality, ‘the way successful francophone Belgians often did’.
Simenon
replied: ‘There was no reason for me to be born Belgian, so there’s no
reason
for me to stop being Belgian.’ I wanted to say something similar, less
wittily,
to the immigration officer: precisely because I don’t need to become an
American citizen, to take citizenship would seem flippant; leave its
benefits
for those who need a new land. So
whatever this state I
am talking about is, this ‘not going home’, it is not tragic; there’s
probably
something a bit ridiculous in these privileged laments – oh, sing ’dem
Harvard
blues, white boy! But I am trying to describe some kind of
loss, some
kind of falling away. (The gain is obvious enough and thus less
interesting to
analyse.) I asked Christopher Hitchens, long before he was terminally
ill,
where he would go if he had only a few weeks to live. Would he stay in
America?
‘No, I’d go to Dartmoor, without a doubt,’ he told me. It was the
landscape of
his childhood. Dartmoor, not the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
It’s not
uncommon for expatriates, émigrés, refugees and travellers to want to
die ‘at
home’. The desire to return, after so long away, is gladly irrational,
and is
perhaps premised on the loss of the original home (as the refusal to go
home
may also be premised on the loss of home). Home swells as a sentiment
because
it has disappeared as an achievable reality. Marusya Tatarovich, the
heroine of
the novel A Foreign Woman, by the Russian émigré writer Sergei
Dovlatov,
comes to the conclusion that she has made a mistake in leaving Russia
for New
York City, and decides to return. Dovlatov, who left the Soviet Union
for
America in 1979, and who appears as himself in the novel, tries to talk
her out
of it. You’ve just forgotten what life is like there, he says: ‘The
rudeness,
the lies.’ She replies: ‘If people are rude in Moscow, at least it’s in
Russian.’ But she stays in America. I once saw, in Germany, a small
exhibition
of Samuel Beckett’s correspondence with his German publisher. Many
brief
note-cards were arranged chronologically, the last written only a few
months
before his death. Beckett wrote to his publisher not in German but in
French, a
language in which he was deeply at home; but in the final year of his
life, he
switched to English. ‘Going home,’ I thought. * After
so many years,
life in America, or in my small part of America, has become my life.
And life
is made up of particulars: friends, conversation, dailiness of all
sorts. I
love, for instance, that certain New England states alert drivers that
they are
entering a built-up area with the sign: ‘Thickly Settled’. I love the
Hudson
River, its steady brown flow; generally, I like the way most American
rivers
make their European rivals look like wan streams. There is the crimson
livery
of the Boar’s Head trucks2.
Or the
way the mailman, delivering the post in the dark winter afternoon,
wears a
little miner’s lamp on his head, and peers down at his paper bundle.
Large American
radiators in old apartment buildings, with their hissing and ghostly
clanking.
A certain general store in New Hampshire that sells winter boots, hand
cream,
excellent bacon and firearms. I cherish the phrase, ‘Take it easy,’ and
the
scandalous idea that people would actually say this to each other! I am
even
fond, now, of things that reliably irritate Europeans, especially the
British:
American sports, say; or the fact that the word fortnight does
not
exist; that fudge is just chocolate; and that seemingly no one
can
properly pronounce the words croissant, milieu or bourgeois. But
there is always the
reality of a certain outsider-dom. Take the beautiful American train
horn, the
crushed klaxon peal you can hear almost anywhere in the States: at the
end of
my street at night-time, across a New Hampshire valley, in some small
Midwestern town – a crumple of notes, blown out on an easy, loitering
wail3.
It
sounds less like a horn than a sudden prairie wind or an animal’s cry.
That big
easy loiter is, for me, the sound of America, whatever America is. But
it must
also be ‘the sound of America’ for thousands, perhaps millions of
non-Americans. It’s a shared possession, not a personal one. I’m
outside it; I
appreciate it, as something slightly distant. It is unhistorical for
me: it
doesn’t have my past in it, drags no old associations. (We lived about
half a
mile from Durham station, and from my bedroom, at night I could hear
the
arhythmic thunder of the big yellow-nosed Deltic diesels, as they
pulled their
shabby carriages onto the Victorian viaduct that curves out of town,
bound for
London or Edinburgh, and sometimes blew their parsimonious horns – the
British
Rail minor third.) Or
suppose I am looking
down our Boston street, in dead summer. I see a familiar life: the
clapboard
houses, the porches, the heat-mirage hanging over the patched road
(snakes of
asphalt like black chewing gum), the grey cement sidewalks (signed in
one
place, when the cement was new, by three young siblings), the heavy
maple
trees, the unkempt willow down at the end, an old white Cadillac with
the
bumper sticker ‘Ted Kennedy has killed more people than my gun,’ and I
feel …
nothing: some recognition, but no comprehension, no real connection, no
past,
despite all the years I have lived there – just a tugging distance from
it all.
A panic suddenly overtakes me, and I wonder: how did I get here? And
then the
moment passes, and ordinary life closes itself around what had seemed,
for a
moment, a desperate lack. Edward
Said says that it is no surprise that
exiles are often novelists, chess players, intellectuals. ‘The exile’s
new
world, logically enough, is unnatural, and its unreality resembles
fiction.’ He
reminds us that Georg Lukács considered the novel the great form of
what Lukács
called ‘transcendental homelessness’. I am not an exile, but it is
sometimes
hard to shake the ‘unreality’ Said speaks of. I watch my children grow
up as
Americans in the same way that I might read about, or create, fictional
characters. They are not fictional, of course, but their Americanism
can
sometimes seem unreal to me. ‘I have an American seventh-grader,’ I say
to
myself with amazement, as I watch my 12-year-old daughter perform at
one of
those dastardly school events always held in gymnasiums. Doubtless,
amazement
attends all the stages of a child’s growth – all is unexpected. But
there is
also that strange distance, the light veil of alienation thrown over
everything. And
then there is the
same light veil thrown over everything when I go back to Britain. When
I was
first living in the States, I was eager to keep up with life ‘back at
home’ –
who was in the cabinet, the new music, what people were saying in the
newspapers, how the schools were doing, the price of petrol, the shape
of
friends’ lives. It became harder to do so, because the meaning of these
things
grew less and less personal. For me, English reality has disappeared
into
memory, has ‘changed itself to past’, as Larkin has it. I know very
little
about modern daily life in London, or Edinburgh, or Durham. There’s a
quality
of masquerade when I return, as if I were putting on my wedding suit,
to see if
it still fits. In
America, I crave the
English reality that has disappeared; childhood seems breathingly
close. But
the sense of masquerade persists: I gorge on nostalgia, on fondnesses
that
might have embarrassed me when I lived in Britain. Geoff Dyer writes
funnily,
in Out of Sheer Rage, about the obsession with reading the TV
listings
in English papers he developed when he was living in Italy, even though
he had
never watched TV when he lived in England, and didn’t like it. To hear
a
Geordie voice on an American news programme leaves me flushed with
longing: the
dance of that dialect, with its seasick Scandinavian pitch. And all
those
fabulous words: segs (the metal plates you’d bang onto your
shoe-heels,
to make sparks on the ground and act like a hard-nut); kets
(‘sweets’); neb
(‘nose’); nowt (‘nothing’); stotty-cake (a kind of
flat, doughy
bread) claggy (‘sticky’). The way Northerners say eee,
as an
exclamation: ‘Eee, it’s red-hot today!’ (Any temperature over about 72
degrees.) Recently, I heard the old song ‘When the Boat Comes In’ on
National
Public Radio, and I almost wept4. Now
come here little
Jacky But
I really disliked
that song when I was a boy. I never had a very Northern accent. My
father was
born in London. It was important to my Scottish petty-bourgeois mother
that I
didn’t sound like a Geordie. Friends used to say, with a bit of menace
in their
voices: ‘You don’t talk like a Durham lad. Where are you from?’
Sometimes it
was necessary to mimic the accent, to fit in, or avoid getting beaten
up. I
could never say, as the man in the song ‘Home Newcastle’ foolishly
does: ‘And
I’m proud to be a Geordie/And to live in Geordie-land.’ My
town was the
university and the cathedral: it seemed that almost everyone who lived
on our
street was an academic (like my father), or a clergyman; and they
didn’t sound
like Geordies. How vivid all those neighbours are, in my mind! And how
strange
they were. I think now that in the 1970s I caught the fading comet-end
of
allowable eccentricity. There was Mrs Jolley, though she was in fact
anything
but, who walked with three canes, one for the left leg and two (bound
together
with string) for the right. There was the dry, bony Reader in Classical
Epigraphy, Dr Fowler, who was fond of repeating, as a kind of motto:
‘Tell it
not in Gath!’ Next door to us, separated only by a wall, lived a
profoundly
learned scholar, the university librarian. He knew many languages, and
pages of
Dickens by heart, and sometimes we would hear him pacing up and down,
reciting
and laughing. A sweet, innocent, Dickensian character himself: one day,
he was
on the bus with my father, going to the university, and embarrassed him
by
loudly opining: ‘You could say that the girls who serve in Woolworth’s
are the intellectual
scum of the earth.’ This academic-religious world had obscure
prohibitions
and rules. There was a historian who for some reason forbade his two
slightly
green-hued, fearsomely clever daughters from watching The Forsyte
Saga
on television; and a thrifty professor of divinity whose household had
no
television and who, according to my mother, always had sausages, never
turkey,
on Christmas Day – that family’s fantastical drabness sealed in my
childish mind
by the information that he and his wife and three children exchanged
only
cotton handkerchiefs as presents. Our headmaster at the Durham
Chorister
School, also a clergyman, told us that we should start our essays ‘with
a bang:
Bacon began his essay on Gardens, “God Almighty first planted a
Garden”: try to
emulate Bacon.’ He had an elaborate system of mnemonics to help us with
difficult Latin words. Whenever the word unde appeared in a
text, he
would suck on his pipe and intone, in Oxonian basso: ‘Marks and
Spencer, Marks
and Spencer!’ This was supposed to trigger, ‘Where do you get your
undies?’
‘From Marks and Spencer.’ And then lead us to the meaning of the word,
which
is: ‘where’. As you can see, I haven’t forgotten it. * A
recent editorial in
the Brooklyn-based literary journal n+1 inveighed against
so-called
‘World Literature’. In their opinion, postcolonial writing has lost its
political bite and now fills its toothless face at the trough of global
capitalism. Midnight’s Children gave way, as it were, to the
inoffensive
Rushdie of The Ground beneath Her Feet. The essay argued that
World
Literature should really be called Global Literature. It has its
royalty, like
Coetzee and Ondaatje, Mohsin Hamid and Kiran Desai; its prizes (the
Nobel, the
International Man Booker), its festivals (Jaipur, Hay), and its
intellectual
support system (the universities). The success of World Literature, the
editors
said, is a by-product of successful capitalism, and of a globalised
aesthetic
that prizes writers who, like Orhan Pamuk, Ma Jian and Haruki Murakami,
are
thought to have transcended local issues and acquired a ‘universal
relevance’. It’s
hard not to share
the derision, once the victim has been so tendentiously trussed. Who
could possibly
approve of this complacent, festival-haunting, unit-shifting,
prize-winning
monster? Who wouldn’t choose a ‘thorny internationalism’ over the
‘smoothly
global’, untranslatable felicities over windy width – and Elena
Ferrante over
Kamila Shamsie? In the end, a case was being made for well-written,
vital,
challenging literature, full of sharp local particularities, wherever
it turns
up in the world; and so there was inevitably something a bit random
about the
writers chosen for the preferred canon of Thorny Internationalists:
Elena
Ferrante, Kirill Medvedev, Samanth Subramanian, Juan Villoro. Perhaps,
though,
postcolonial literature hasn’t only morphed into a bloated World Lit.
One of
its new branches may be a significant contemporary literature that
moves
between, and powerfully treats, questions of homelessness,
displacement,
emigration, voluntary or economic migration, and even flaneurial
tourism; a
literature that blurs the demarcations offered in ‘Reflections on
Exile’,
because emigration itself has become more complex, amorphous and
widespread. N+1
inaudibly conceded as much when it praised Open City, by Teju
Cole, a
Nigerian writer based in New York City, whose first novel is narrated
by a
young half-Nigerian, half-German psychiatry intern, and which mixes
elements of
familiar postcoloniality with W.G. Sebald’s flaneurial émigré
sensibility. But
to Open City
could be added Sebald’s work; McGuinness’s Other People’s Countries;
the
half-Nigerian, half-Ghanaian novelist Taiye Selasi; Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland,
which makes acute distinctions between the privileged economic
migration of the
Dutch banker who narrates the novel, and the much less privileged
immigration
of the Trinidadian trickster who is the book’s tragic hero; the work of
the
Bosnian-American writer, Aleksandar Hemon; Marilynne Robinson’s Home;
some of the writing of Geoff Dyer; the stories of Nam Le, a
Vietnamese-born
Australian; the fiction and essays of the Indian novelist Amit
Chaudhuri. The
‘great movement of
peoples that was to take place in the second half of the 20th century’,
that
V.S. Naipaul spoke of in The Enigma of Arrival was, as Naipaul
put it,
‘a movement between all the continents’. It could no longer be confined
to a
single paradigm (post-colonialism, internationalism, globalism, world
literature). The jet engine has probably had a greater impact than the
internet. It brings a Nigerian to New York, a Bosnian to Chicago, a
Mexican to
Berlin, an Australian to London, a German to Manchester. It brought one
of n+1’s
founding editors, Keith Gessen, as a little boy, from Russia to America
in
1981, and now takes him back and forth between those countries (a
liberty
unknown to émigrés like Nabokov or Sergei Dovlatov). Recall
Lukács’s phrase
‘transcendental homelessness’. What I have been describing, both in my
own life
and in the lives of others, is more like secular homelessness. It
cannot claim
the theological prestige of the transcendent. Perhaps it is not even
homelessness; homelooseness (with an admixture of loss) might
be the
necessary (hideous) neologism: in which the ties that might bind one to
Home
have been loosened, perhaps happily, perhaps unhappily, perhaps
permanently,
perhaps only temporarily. Clearly, this secular homelessness overlaps,
at
times, with the more established categories of emigration, exile and
postcolonial movement. Just as clearly, it diverges from them at times.
Sebald,
a German writer who lived most of his adult life in England (and who
was thus
perhaps an emigrant, certainly an immigrant, but not exactly an émigré,
nor an
exile), had an exquisite sense of the varieties of not-belonging. He
came to
Manchester, from Germany, in the mid-1960s, as a graduate student. He
returned,
briefly, to Switzerland, and then came back to England in 1970, to take
a lectureship
at the University of East Anglia. The pattern of his own emigration is
one of
secular homelessness or homelooseness. He had the economic freedom to
return to
West Germany; and once he was well known, in the mid-1990s, he could
have
worked almost anywhere he wanted to. Sebald
was interested,
however, not in his own wandering, but in an emigration and
displacement closer
to tragic or transcendental homelessness. In The Emigrants, he
wrote
about four such wanderers: Dr Henry Selwyn, a Lithuanian Jew who
arrived in
Britain at the beginning of the 20th century, and who lived a life of
stealthy
masquerade as an English doctor, before committing suicide late in
life; Paul
Bereyter, a German who because of his part-Jewish ancestry was
prohibited from
teaching during the Third Reich, never recovered from this setback, and
later
committed suicide; Sebald’s great-uncle, Adelwarth, who arrived in
America in
the 1920s, worked as a servant for a wealthy family on Long Island, but
ended
up in a mental asylum in Ithaca, New York; and Max Ferber, a fictional
character based on the painter Frank Auerbach, who left his parents
behind in
Germany in 1939, when he escaped for England. When
The Emigrants
appeared in Michael Hulse’s English translation, in 1996, it was often
described
as a book about four victims of the Holocaust, which it was not – only
two of
the emigrants are direct victims. Because the book is deeply invested
in
questions of fictionality, decipherment and archival witness – and
because of
the book’s teasing photographs – it was also often assumed that these
were
fictional or fictionalised sketches. Almost the opposite is true. They
are more
like documentary life-studies; Sebald told me in an interview that
about 90 per
cent of the photographs were ‘what you would describe as authentic,
i.e., they
really did come out of the photo albums of the people described in
those texts
and are a direct testimony to the fact that these people did exist in
that
particular shape and form.’ Sebald did indeed meet Dr Selwyn in 1970;
Paul
Bereyter was Sebald’s primary school teacher; his great-uncle Adelwarth
immigrated to America in the 1920s; and Max Ferber’s life was closely
modelled
on Frank Auerbach’s. None
of this suggests
that Sebald doesn’t enrich the documentary evidence in all kinds of
subtle,
slippery, fictive ways. And one of the subtleties involves his
relationship, as
a kind of emigrant, with his subjects. Henry Selwyn and Max Ferber
were,
essentially, political refugees, from different waves of 20th-century
Jewish
flight; Adelwarth was an economic immigrant; and Paul Bereyter became
an inner
emigrant, a postwar German survivor who, in the end, didn’t survive.
And Sebald
himself? His own emigration would seem to play out in a minor key, by
comparison. Officially, he could return to his homeland whenever he
wanted. But
perhaps he had decided, for political reasons, that he could never go
home
again, could never return to a country whose unfinished postwar
business had so
disgusted him in the 1960s. Sebald
is a ghostly
presence in The Emigrants. We are offered only glimpses of the
German
academic in England. Yet in another way, the author is strongly
present, felt
as a steady insistence in regulated hysteria. Who is this apparently
well-established professor, so obsessed with the lives of his subjects
that he
crosses Europe or the Atlantic to interview their relatives, ransack
their
archives, frown over their photograph albums, and follow their
journeys? There
is a beautiful moment in the first story, about Dr Henry Selwyn, when
the text
glances at Sebald’s own, lesser homelessness, and then glances away, as
if
politely conceding its smaller claim on tragedy: On
one of these visits,
Clara being away in town, Dr Selwyn and I had a long talk prompted by
his
asking whether I was ever homesick. I could not think of any adequate
reply,
but Dr Selwyn, after a pause for thought, confessed (no other word will
do)
that in recent years he had been beset by homesickness more and more. Sebald
then describes Dr
Selwyn’s homesickness for the village in Lithuania he had to leave at
the age
of seven. We hear about the horse ride to the station, the train
journey to
Riga, the ship from Riga, and the arrival in a broad river estuary: All
the emigrants had
gathered on deck and were waiting for the Statue of Liberty to appear
out of
the drifting mist, since everyone of them had booked a passage to
Americum, as
we called it. When we disembarked we were still in no doubt whatsoever
that
beneath our feet was the soil of the New World, of the Promised City of
New
York. But in fact, as we learned some time later to our dismay (the
ship having
long since cast off again), we had gone ashore in London. I
find moving the way in
which Sebald’s homesickness becomes Selwyn’s, is swallowed by the
acuter claims
of the larger narrative. We can only guess at the smothered anguish in
Sebald’s
primly painful aside: ‘I could not think of any adequate reply.’ There
is also
something touchingly estranged, unhoused even, about Sebald’s language
– this
peculiar, reticent, antiquarian prose, in an English created by Michael
Hulse
and then strenuously worked over by the bilingual author. * Sebald
seems to know the
difference between homesickness and homelessness. If there is anguish,
there is
also discretion: how could my loss adequately compare with yours? Where
exile
is often marked by the absolutism of the separation, secular
homelessness is
marked by a certain provisionality, a structure of departure and return
that
may not end. This is a powerful motif in the work of Aleksandar Hemon,
a
Bosnian-American writer who came to the States from Sarajevo, in 1992,
only to
discover that the siege of his hometown prohibited his return. Hemon
stayed in
America, learned how to write a brilliant, Nabokovian English (a feat
in some
sense greater than Nabokov’s because achieved at a steroidal pace), and
published his first book, The Question of Bruno, in 2000
(dedicated to
his wife, and to Sarajevo). Once the Bosnian war was over, Hemon could,
presumably, have returned to his native city. What had not been a
choice became
one; he decided to make himself into an American writer. Hemon’s
work stages both
his departure and return. In the novella Blind Jozef Pronek &
Dead Souls,
Pronek arrives in America on a student exchange programme. Like Hemon,
Pronek
is from Sarajevo, is trapped by the war, and stays in America. He finds
the
United States a bewildering, alienating place, full of vulgarity and
ignorance.
When, near the end of the story, he returns to Sarajevo, the reader
expects him
to stay. Though the city is terribly damaged, and familiar landmarks
have
disappeared, he seems to have come back to his ‘true home’ – where
‘every place
had a name, and everybody and everything in that place had a name, and
you
could never be nowhere, because there was something everywhere.’
Sarajevo, it
seems, is where names and things, words and referents, are primally
united. He
goes through his parents’ apartment, touching everything: the
clean, striped
tablecloth; the radio, with seven ivory-coloured buttons and a Donald
Duck
sticker; the grinning African masks; the carpets with intricate, yet
familiar,
geometric patterns, full of gashes, from under which the parquet was
gone,
burned in the rusty iron stove in the corner; the demitasse, the coffee
grinder, the spoons; Father’s suits, damp, with shrapnel slashes … But
Jozef doesn’t stay,
and as the novella closes, we see him in Vienna airport, about to board
a
flight to America: He
did not want to fly to
Chicago. He imagined walking from Vienna to the Atlantic Ocean, and
then
hopping on a slow transatlantic steamer. It would take a month to get
across
the ocean, and he would be on the sea, land and borders nowhere to be
found.
Then he would see the Statue of Liberty and walk slowly to Chicago,
stopping
wherever he wished, talking to people, telling them stories about
far-off
lands, where people ate honey and pickles, where no one put ice in the
water,
where pigeons nested in pantries. It’s
as if jet flight is
existentially shallow; a slower journey would enact the gravity and
enormity of
the transformation. Pronek returns to America, but must take his home
with him,
and must try to tell incomprehensible stories – pigeons in the attics,
honey
and pickles – of that home to a people who readily confuse Bosnia with
Slovakia, and write off the war as ‘thousands of years of hatred’. And
at the
same time, he is making a new home in America. Or not quite: for he
will stay
in America, but will, it seems, never rid himself of the idea that
putting ice
in the water is a superfluity. And like Sebald, though in a different
register,
Hemon writes a prose that doesn’t sound smoothly native – a
fractionally
homeless prose. Like his master, Nabokov, he has the immigrant’s love
of puns,
of finding buried meanings in words that have become flattened in
English, like vacuous and petrified. One character has
‘a
sagely beard’,
another ‘fenestral glasses’. Tea is described as ‘limpid’. Exile
is acute, massive,
transformative, but secular homelessness, because it moves along its
axis of
departure and return, can be banal, welcome, necessary, continuous.
There is
the movement of the provincial to the metropolis, or the journey out of
one
social class into another. This was my mother’s journey from Scotland
to
England, my father’s journey from the working classes into the middle
classes,
my short drive from Durham to London. It is Ursula Brangwen’s struggle
for
departure, in The Rainbow, when she quarrels with her parents
about
leaving her home in the Midlands and becoming a teacher in Kingston
upon Thames
– what her father calls ‘dancing off to th’other side of London’. Most
of us have to leave
home, at least once; there is the need to leave, the difficulty of
returning,
and then, in later life as one’s parents begin to falter, the need to
return
again. Secular homelessness, not the singular extremity of the exile or
the
chosenness of biblical diaspora, might be the inevitable ordinary
state.
Secular homelessness is not just what will always occur in Eden, but
what
should occur, again and again. There is a beautiful section at the end
of
Ismail Kadare’s great novel Chronicle in Stone entitled ‘Draft
of a
Memorial Plaque’. Kadare was born, in 1936, in the city of Gjirokastër,
in
southern Albania, but has spent much of his writing life in Paris. Chronicle
in Stone is a joyful, comic tribute to the ancient native city he
left
behind. At the end of the book, Kadare directly addresses his hometown:
‘Often,
striding along wide lighted boulevards in foreign cities, I somehow
stumble in
places where no one ever trips. Passersby turn in surprise, but I
always know
it’s you. You emerge from the asphalt all of a sudden and then sink
back down
straight away.’ It is Kadare’s nicely humdrum version of the moment in
Proust
when Marcel stumbles on the uneven stones in the Guermantes’ courtyard,
and
memory opens itself up. If
it didn’t trip you
up, you wouldn’t remember anything. For the émigré writer, returning to
live in
Gjirokastër is doubtless unimaginable, in rather the way that living in
Paris
must have seemed unimaginable when Kadare was a young man in Albania.
But a
life without stumbling is also unimaginable: perhaps to be in between
two
places, to be at home in neither, is the inevitable fallen state,
almost as
natural as being at home in one place. * Almost.
But not quite.
When I left this country 18 years ago, I didn’t know how strangely
departure
would obliterate return: how could I have done? It’s one of time’s
lessons, and
can only be learned temporally. What is peculiar, even a little bitter,
about
living for so many years away from the country of my birth, is the slow
revelation that I made a large choice a long time ago that did not
resemble a
large choice at the time; that it has taken years for me to see this;
and that
this process of retrospective comprehension in fact constitutes a life
– is
indeed how life is lived. Freud has a wonderful word, ‘afterwardness’,
which I
need to borrow, even at the cost of kidnapping it from its very
different
context. To think about home and the departure from home, about not
going home
and no longer feeling able to go home, is to be filled with a
remarkable sense
of ‘afterwardness’: it is too late to do anything about it now, and too
late to
know what should have been done. And that may be all right. My
Scottish grandmother
used to play a game, in which she entered the room with her hands
behind her
back. You had to guess which hand held a sweet, as she intoned: ‘Which
hand do you
tak, the richt or the wrang?’ When we were children, the decision
seemed
momentous: you had at all costs to avoid the disappointment of
the empty
‘wrang hand’. Which
did I choose? Letters My
experience of growing
up in Durham was very similar to James Wood’s: the same era, in the
house next
door to his prep school (LRB, 20 February).
The pompous priest with the fish hands is undoubtedly my dad, also
affectionately known – owing to his ability to glide – as the ‘caster
canon’. I
grew up in a similar
linguistic melting pot, and was well versed in the mimicry-to-fit-in
that Wood
describes. At least my hybrid accent had flat vowels: nothing was more
likely
to get you beaten up in Durham than rhyming ‘grass’ with ‘arse’. But I
found it
got worse when I left home. I remember hamming it up even more, when I
grew fed
up of the constant ‘Really? You don’t sound like you come from
Durham.’
I wonder if being a ‘posh northerner’ gives rise to a particular breed
of
homelooseness – my parents still get called incomers, more than forty
years on. David
Perry
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