Opinions

by Claude C. Washburn

ON LIVING ABROAD

This is not an essay in defence of living abroad nor yet a plea to others to choose such a life. Rather, it is in the nature of a dispassionate explanation intended respectfully for those who wonder why a good many Americans who are neither loafers nor sentimentalists endeavouring to escape backward into what they fancy to have been the Utopian life of the twelfth century (or was it the thirteenth?) do prefer living abroad to living at home.

The first and very natural objection of such readers would probably be: ‘You are cut off from the life to which you belong.’ But is this really true? It would be true of, say, an Italian coming to America. He is indeed cut off, and unless he has a very strong personality his character suffers for it. A certain looseness comes. But it is not equally true of an American who emigrates to Italy. The Italian has strong bonds, roots that go down and down and link him to an incalculable past. (Which is both valuable and harmful). The American lives like some drifting rootless water-plant. Family for him is something to get away from; at least it does not postulate the obligations it does abroad. And he has seldom ties of place. So few Americans live at maturity in the house or even in the town where they were born that those who do are made the subject of quaint, rather emasculated, dialect stories in our more expensive monthly magazines. There is an appearance of national life because so many thousands are doing the same thing at the same time—reading the same advertisements, wearing the same kind of clothes, going to the same movies; but they are not consciously performing the same duties. In existence we are a gregarious nation, but existence is nothing; in real life we are intensely lonely, isolated individuals—as much so as if we lived in Europe. Perhaps this would be as it should be, a foundation for individual achievement, if we would recognize it and rejoice in it. But no nation in the world is so wistfully desirous of a unity that, despite appearances, it has not got. All sorts of judgments, mostly idiotic, have been passed on Americans by Europeans, but there is at least one which is profoundly true: that Americans want pathetically to be liked. This is at once a sign of weakness in us and a proof of frustration; it reveals the fact that we have not the unity we crave. We huddle together for comfort, but, because we are doing childish insignificant things, we get no closer for that. It is true that individuals can never get very close to one another. Still, two men even at opposite ends of the earth may exchange a few lines of writing that can profoundly influence the life of each. But two men side by side, brushing their teeth ...?

So, leaving all this, one is not really leaving a life-in-common. If I go to see a baseball game, what is it to me that ten thousand others are also there watching it? The real question is: of how much value to me and to each of the ten thousand is the baseball game? Also, leaving all this, one is thrown frankly upon himself. Living among people who speak a different language and have different customs, he can no longer be supported by that illusory sense of companionship. If he has any strength of character he presently finds this an immense relief and becomes aware that at home his time was recklessly wasted on a thousand things that meant nothing to him—that did not touch his mind or his heart. To take the most trivial example, the telephone system in Italy or France is so bad that there he will almost never use a telephone; which at once frees him from something very like tyranny.

This sense of freedom is not the least of the advantages of living abroad. In large part, no doubt, it comes from one’s not really belonging to the life about one, since however well one gets to know a foreign country it always remains foreign, and though one acquire fluency in the language it must always, unless learned in childhood, be spoken more consciously—and conscientiously—than one’s own. But this is not the whole story. One is, too, aware of a greater freedom surrounding him in European—at least in Latin European—countries than in his own America. There is stronger individualism, less herd spirit, greater divergence of opinion. Individuals appear less like one another, and eccentricities that would almost ostracize men from their disapproving fellows in America are in France and Italy accepted with a smile. The sensitive American, especially if he is one of the many who have suffered bitterly at school and college and dully afterward from the intolerable oppression of herd standards, breathes in this relative freedom deeply with a sense of sudden release. It is true that after a while, if he is observant, he perceives that the liberty is not, as perhaps he first thought it, something deep affecting the fundamentals of life, but, rather, a freedom from unnecessary rules for existence. He may even come to explain it as the result of a number of very superficial things—the comparative absence of standardizing advertisements, for example, the lack of universally read magazines, the smaller size of newspapers, the greater localism of feeling—though whether such things are cause or result remains a question to him. At any rate, even when estimated at only its proper importance, the sense of freedom still remains as something gracious.

Curiously enough, as our expatriate learns to understand better this delightful surface freedom, he begins to discern beneath it, in things that have to do not with existence but with life, some very rigid laws—more rigid than any beneath the surface in his own country—recognized unshirked duties. The greatest of these is the accepted burden of the family. In America children early shake themselves free from their parents. More often than not, a grown man’s life is completely cut off from that of his father and mother, especially after his marriage; he frequently lives in another city than that where they live; the whole adventure of bearing and rearing him becomes to them as well as to him almost as though it had not been; not uncommonly he evades the responsibility of giving them a home when they are in need of one in their old age. As for uncles, aunts, and cousins, the average American avoids them with distaste. In Italy and France you get the opposite extreme. Except in the detached, irresponsible and less national aristocracy, family ties are tremendously strong. A family is always closely bound together, even in its obscure ramifications of cousinship. However much its individual members may dislike one another they accept unquestioningly the family duties. Grave financial sacrifices are assumed as a matter of course. In many years of living in Italy I have never yet had servants who did not send the greater part of their wages to their parents, or known a single individual of the bourgeoisie or the provincial aristocracy who would not as a matter of course give up something he really wanted to do with a friend for the sake of something he ought to do for a relation. As for the peasants, no matter how poor, they will support ailing brothers or cousins, and even the wives and children of these, in perpetuity; for among the peasants, who are the most truly Italian of all Italians, the family is law—the only law.

This undoubtedly has its defects. The better an American comes to know Italy or France (where the influence of the family is almost equally strong) the more he feels the often disastrous tyranny of this universal obligation. Yet it is more admirable than harmful; for in a world only too full of greed and selfishness it supplies a bed-rock of self-sacrifice, an anchor in something solid and permanent for the individual, and it creates a strong national life, which we Americans, for all our standardization of existence, are without. You have, in short, in Italy and France, the exact opposite to life in America. In the latter country there is unanimity, all but identity, of behaviour in superficial things, with, beneath, no convictions, no obligations, a chaotic emptiness; in the former countries below a surface freedom approximating licence there is a life founded on stern unquestioned laws.

One of the dangers (and they are many) for Americans who live abroad is that, not sharing the real life of the country, they get all the surface freedom without any of the underlying obligations. Trivial as the American’s obligations at home were—obligations to speak, dress, and behave like his fellows—they at least bound him to something, even if it was a silly something; and it is safer to be bound by some duties, though they are only to do a ‘daily dozen’ or to support Americanization, than to be bound by none at all. For those Americans who do not look beneath the surface, or, looking, do not care, or whose character is weakened rather than strengthened by sudden freedom, the Latin countries of Europe are a dangerous place of residence. I have seen many such. They become very petty, very selfish, and so lazy that they do not even take the trouble to learn decently the language of the country in which they live, but play, instead, with other expatriates like themselves. Since at home their standards were imposed from the outside, instead of evolved from within, and are now at one stroke abolished, they grow limp and flaccid in character and pick up any tawdry vice that appeals to their standardless weakness. Frequently the men go in for homo-sexuality, since somehow this seems to harmonize with living futilely and prettily with nothing to do but to look after the rose gardens about their villas. They are quite mad—in a mild suave way. Their only care in life is that they are occasionally blackmailed. Also they are gently fuddled most of the time. But their rose gardens are very pretty.

However, this is by the way. What denationalized Americans of this sort do is of no conceivable importance to any one, and the fact that they might have failed to do it had they remained at home is of little greater moment. They drift above life like soap-bubbles on a gentle breeze, and when they burst no one even cares. The real question is: what can be done by an American of a little more character with the freedom that such as these misuse?

A great deal, I think. For a writer or a painter it is invaluable. It gives him a blessed feeling of space around himself that becomes more precious to him than all the soft comforts of America, that becomes indeed the one superlative comfort. At last he has elbow-room—and peace to think down to the bottom of his thoughts. Let him but guard his gift of freedom jealously and he can have evening after evening of solitude. In America he must have fought rudely to obtain even half-hours of solitude, since nobody could understand that he wanted it. He builds up about him now a peace that is not empty but the richest of all mediums. Any flight, any surrender, any subterfuge, was justifiable to obtain it—provided he does something with it; and if he does not, the punishment will be swift and he alone the sufferer, for the full sense of space will become an aching emptiness and his precious leisure a burden.