Occasional Prose (9 page)

Though the term easily lends itself to metaphorical inflation—“I am in exile here, in this unsympathetic environment into which fate has cast me,” as Mme Bovary might have sighed to the notary’s clerk—it has not lost its primary, political sense. The exile waits for a change of government or the tyrant’s death, which will allow him to come home. If he stops waiting and adapts to the new circumstances, then he is not an exile any more. This condition of waiting means that the exile’s whole being is concentrated on the land he left behind, in memories and hopes. The more passive type, summed up in the banished poet, lives on memories, while the active type, summed up in the revolutionist, lives on hopes and schemes. There is something of both in every exile, an oscillation between melancholy and euphoria.

More than anybody (except lovers), exiles are dependent on mail. A Greek writer friend in Paris was the only person I knew to suffer real pain during the events of May 1968, when the mail was cut off. In the absence of news from Greece, i.e., political news, he was wasting away, somebody deprived of sustenance. They are also great readers of newspapers and collectors of clippings. The fact that the press of their country is censored (a corollary, evidently, of their exile) makes them more hungry for scraps of rumor and information which they can piece together.

Classically, exile was a punishment decreed from above, like the original sentence of banishment on Adam and Eve, which initiated human history. Today deportation of native-born citizens is illegal, so far as I know, in most Western countries, where the opposite punishment—refusal of a passport—is meted out to political undesirables, and assignment to forced residence, which is really a form of imprisonment, is practiced most notably by the colonels’ regime in Greece and by the Soviet Union, as in the case of Solzhenitsyn. Today a man may be an exile from his homeland even though he left voluntarily—the Jews who managed to get out of Nazi Germany, defectors from the East, Cuban runaways, American draft-resisters and deserters.

A person who cannot return home without facing death or jail for acts committed against the government is an exile. Eldridge Cleaver in Algiers. Or for acts he may commit if he remains true to himself, a whole being. Or for no acts at all, if he belongs to a proscribed category owing to his race, class, or religion. But in recent times, it is worth noticing, a new word, “refugee,” describes a person fleeing from persecution because of his category. Taken from
refugie
, it was first used in England in 1685 of the Huguenots seeking asylum after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

The exile is a singular, whereas refugees tend to be thought of in the mass. Armenian refugees, Jewish refugees, refugees from Franco Spain. But a political leader or artistic figure is an exile: Thomas Mann yesterday, today Theodorakis. Exile is the noble and dignified term, while a refugee is more hapless. At one point in your flight you may be a refugee and later, covered with honors, turn into an exile. If a group of Greek writers draws up a manifesto, they are writers-in-exile, but if we are trying to raise money to help them, they are refugees. The Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Lao peasants fleeing from the war zones are, of course, refugees; former Vietnamese politicians living in Paris are exiles.

What is implied in these nuances of social standing is the respect we pay to choice. The exile appears to have made a decision, while the refugee is the very image of helplessness, choicelessness, incomprehension, driven from his home by forces outside his understanding and control. We speak of flood refugees, earthquake refugees, persecuted by nature on account of the place they live in, war refugees harried by men for no other reason than that. Since refugees are seen as a mass the immediate thought is to process and resettle them. After first aid and minimal feeding. But no bureaucrat or social worker would dream of resettling exiles. The whole point about them is their refusal to put down new roots.

They are more like birds than plants, perching wherever they are, ready for homeward flight. Even when they have funds to buy a little house, take a long lease on a flat, they prefer transient accommodations—bed-sitters or hotel rooms, like Nabokov at the Hotel Montreux-Palace in Montreux. If an exile buys a house or takes a long lease on a flat, it’s a sign that he’s no longer a true exile.

An expatriate is almost the reverse. His main aim is never to go back to his native land or, failing that, to stay away as long as possible. His departure was wholly voluntary. An exile can be of any nationality, but an expatriate is generally English or American. The type was not seen in any numbers until the Romantic period. His predecessor was the eighteenth-century traveler, someone like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, but the true expatriate is not a gadabout. Nor a wanderer like the exile. He tends to take up residence in some fixed spot (which he may change definitively, as Henry James did when he moved from France to England) and to buy property or lease it. In fact, the acquisition of desirable property, also in the form of furniture, paintings, statues, bibelots, seems to be one of the motives for expatriation. This is clear enough in James’s novels.

The expatriate is a hedonist. He is usually an artist or a person who thinks he is artistic. He has no politics or, if he has any, like the Brownings he has acquired them from the country he has adopted. The average expatriate thinks about his own country rarely and with great unwillingness. He feels he has escaped from it. The expatriate is a by-product of industrialism. The Industrial Revolution sent him abroad, in headlong flight from ugliness. At the same time, of course, he owes his presence abroad to the prosperity induced by the factories and manufactures he is fleeing from. This too is clearly, though somewhat coyly, stated by James.

The expatriate’s need is to locate as far as possible from the source of his capital and to be free of the disapprobation of the administrators of the same. He is somewhat less compromised if he is “only” receiving checks, like Scott Fitzgerald, from the
Saturday Evening Post
or royalties from Scribner’s, like Hemingway. Least compromising of all is to find work in the adopted country, like the poet Allen Tate acting as a janitor in a Paris basement, but the expatriate is seldom willing to work at a job, since the nine-to-five routine is part of the spiritual oppression he is escaping from. Dependence on money from a despised source tends to demoralize any but very young people. This demoralization is felt all through expatriate literature.

The exile too is dependent on money remitted from the homeland and other doubtful sources. The draft-resister’s parents send checks; relations of the East European defector smuggle out icons and bits of jewelry which he can offer for sale. Without papers, the political refugee may have trouble finding work; if he is an author, he has exiled himself from his audience: at home his books are banned. But since he is not a hedonist money is not very important to him. As soon as he gets any, he is likely to share it with others or start a magazine.

Magazines are very important to exiles, and for literary expatriates they are morale-builders. To start a magazine—e.g.,
transition
,
Blues
,
Broom
—is to start a sort of literary government-in-exile; up to then, you were just expatriates sitting in cafés. For the genuine exile, a magazine in the native language, like Herzen’s
The Bell
or today’s Polish
Kultura
, is almost as vital as mail. It is not only a forum for discussion but also a transmission belt to the home underground. Texts and news of secret trials, assassination attempts, purges, executions are smuggled out of the mother country, and copies of the magazine are then smuggled back in, to circulate in clandestinity.

The expatriate writers of the twenties and early thirties, mainly located in Paris, mainly rather poor or at any rate struggling, were also mainly American. Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Miller, Djuna Barnes, and so on. And of course Gertrude Stein and Edith Wharton, who were not poor. T. S. Eliot, Pound, and Conrad Aiken were living in England. The Irishmen Joyce and Beckett were living in Paris, Joyce having moved on from Trieste and Zurich. Norman Douglas and Percy Lubbock were in Italy. D. H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield had died in some awful combination of exile and expatriation, since their health forbade England to them. She was already an expatriate from New Zealand to England.

But when the dollar dropped in value during the thirties, after the crash, the Americans, by and large, went swiftly home, proving that even those who like Malcolm Cowley (author of a book called
Exile’s Return
) had imagined themselves to be exiles were only expatriates. The few who stayed were driven back to the United States as refugees after the fall of France in 1940. Those few were the ones who returned when the war ended: the others had “refound their roots.”

Today the expatriate writer is mainly a memory. In Paris, so far as I know, there are only Graham Greene, Beckett (unless he counts as French), James Jones, Nancy Mitford, Lesley Blanch, Italo Calvino, though there is a rumor that Lawrence Durrell is around. S. J. Perelman in England. A few live in Tangiers, a few still in Athens; in Rome, Gore Vidal and Muriel Spark. James Baldwin, in the south of France and before that in Turkey, is more of an exile than an expatriate. That is true of Burroughs too.

Expatriate writing, a potpourri of the avant-garde and the decadent, has almost faded away. In fiction, Henry James had set the themes once and for all. Everything that followed can be seen as a variation, however grotesque.
South Wind
,
The Sun Also Rises
,
Nightwood
,
The Alexandria Quartet
,
The Merry Month of May
, even
Tropic of Cancer
. From James on too, there is a certain Jackie-and-Ari color-supplement flavor to most of this fiction. The characters, from Isabel Archer to Henry Miller’s hero, have come abroad to lead the beautiful life in one form or another. They are impersonating figures in a work of art—something few people dare to do at home.

The great exception is Joyce. But he considered himself an exile, not an expatriate. He proclaimed it in the title of his single play,
Exiles
, and in Stephen Dedalus’s famous vow of silence, exile, and cunning. Of course, this was rhetoric: it was only in his own mind that Joyce was driven into exile by the tyranny at home. He could have come back without risk whenever he wanted and did several times. Yet he willed his rhetoric so fiercely that it commands belief, particularly since the difficulties of publication pitted him against the forces of order in the shape of censors wherever his native language was spoken. He was able to go home freely, but his books could not. In this, he differed from expatriates like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, who never had any problems with censors or customs.

Moreover, Joyce was no hedonist, though fond of white wine and song. He had come abroad with a purpose: “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” He was engaging himself in a conspiracy against the ruling forces of Ireland, and the infernal machine was to be his literary work. It was a plot, to be executed with the typical methods of the revolutionary: silence (i.e., secrecy) and cunning.

As an exile and a conspirator, he had no moral shrinking from accepting money from his hard-up brother, from his rich patron, Miss Weaver, from any available source. It was as impersonal as raising money to buy a mimeograph machine or material for making bombs. Unlike other exiles, he was a real loner, a conspiracy of one, yet he had great organizational talent and was always able to recruit a staff of collaborators: Herbert Gorman, Stuart Gilbert, the Jolases, Sylvia Beach, Samuel Beckett, Frank Budgen, Robert McAlmon, Padraic Colum, not to mention typists, copiers, miscellaneous helpers. In London his chief agent, Pound, was active. In Paris there was a small cell of Frenchmen, headed by Valéry Larbaud. The expatriates who helped him fabricate the big bomb, first known as
Work in Progress
, became, as it were, honorary exiles, and the organization did not dissolve with his death.

He had the exile’s characteristic restlessness: the Joyces were constantly moving. Yet he regarded his exile as permanent and definitive and was rather upset when the Irish finally got their freedom, which he feared might suggest that he no longer had any reason to stay away. He was making a
literary
revolution, whose strategy required his physical absence to foster mental concentration. True to form, he was nourishing himself on memories. Nothing could be farther from the expatriate “international novel” than his careful reconstruction of Bloomsday—June 16, 1904—with its remembered Dublin containing real streets and real people, like the scale model of some famous battle with all the generals, foot soldiers, and artillery pieces in place.
Finnegan’s Wake
is still set in Dublin with a cast of native characters, seemingly pre-World War I, who have become eternal.

Ada
, you might say, is Nabokov’s
Finnegan’s Wake
, polylingual, full of puns and linguistic jokes, placed in an imaginary future-past, where America and Russia have merged and annexed bits of France and Switzerland into their author’s sovereign territory. The characters, like the Earwicker nuclear family, are closely related and prone to split and fuse; though not primordial or eternal, they attain patriarchal ages without taking leave of adolescence, as though playing naughty tricks on time. If the self-banished Joyce was making a one-man literary revolution, Nabokov, a genuine displaced person, has been trying throughout his career to make a one-man literary restoration, using his prodigious memory to undo the present. “Speak, Memory,” he commands royally, in a title, and the masque begins.

Though he has the reputation of a modernist, his language is antique Mandarin, like his life style, and he is probably the greatest enemy of modernism extant. He is against psychoanalysis, every kind of “new” politics, atom bombs, avant-garde art. He is not just any White Guard exile but a dethroned monarch, like Charles the Beloved, in
Pale Fire
, traveling under the incognito of Kinbote-Botkin, a poor mad refugee. Nabokov’s relations with English are often highly autocratic: witness his controversy with Edmund Wilson over his Pushkin translation—an international incident. He has written a long poem—and some shorter ones—to the Russian language, which he treats as a national treasure the usurper Bolsheviks appropriated from him, to turn over to the rabble.