How did Georges Steiner do it?

Listening to an interview with Georges Steiner on Radio France last night, I was struck by two thoughts:

First, how immensely my French has improved by virtue of just one short visit to Morocco. All the listening and reading and watching of TV5 over a period of two years, though it has laid that slow laborious foundation of the success that followed, was like carving rock with bare hands. Compared to it that one month last summer was… a picnic. I didn’t even realize I was working. Yet, it opened my ears to the language the way priests open the eyes of divine statues. How delightfully surprising: I had thought that at my age I had no real hope to learn yet another language well. I now feel encouraged to redouble my efforts at French; and resume my Persian.

And, secondly, I wondered at how Georges Steiner did it. He must have found himself in the US at about the same age as I. Yet, unlike me, he’d found no problem, it would seem, adjusting, fitting in, and settling down. He’d even managed to acquire an odd accent in his own native French. How very remarkable.

Perhaps meeting Niels Bohr and Oppenheimer and all the other luminaries he mentions in the first interview, and meeting them so early in life, right at the outset of his American experience, made all the difference. Perhaps they (a German, a Dane) came to exemplify the US to his mind; and not the sort of definitely second-rate people it became my fate to encounter in my first encounter with the US.

Or perhaps the times were different. It was his lot to arrive in the US at the outset of World War Two. Perhaps there was an upwelling of patriotism; an intoxicating enthusiasm for those principles so much at the forefront of the propaganda war and so much worth defending – democracy, personal liberty, self-determination, life; a catchy kind of enthusiasm which was perhaps already lacking in the Unites States I first saw in 1979?

I had been brought up in Eastern Europe amidst a general longing for those very things; as I reached puberty – the time when one becomes first truly conscious of himself – there was taking place all around me a flowering of these longings; shortly after I left they would break out in the Solidarity strikes. While I was still there, one could feel a groundswell rising; something was going to happen: there were samizdats; people talked; kids at school engaged in small time political demonstration; there were strikes in 1976; then K.O.R. and the Radom trials; then, for added drama, Pyjas, a young student activist barely older than me, was murdered by the U.B. Everyone whispered about it.

Impressed by all this, I'd come to imagine myself living, and possibly even dying, for the cause. By the time I was sixteen I had made up my mind to enter politics at the business end, as a dissident. I had found a circle of like-minded friends; was introduced to older, mature, serious activists. Everything seemed to be coming into place. I had a dream and it seemed about to be fulfilled.

Now, for a sixteen-year-old, purpose can be an important matter; it can mean as much as meaning; and for young, naive people, the difference between having a purpose and not having one can be one between everything and nothing.

My parents’ decision to emigrate therefore came as a shock: it deprived me of all that rather rudely. I remember myself fresh out of the country, going out for long walks in Sweden -- our first stop on our flight from Eastern Europe -- trying to figure out what to do next, how to think of my life, what purpose to give it. Rather romantically, I imagined myself (to quote the rather bad poetry I wrote at the time) a beam of light from an extinguished star still traveling in space. Pathetic words can unjustly ridicule the pathos of the situation they try to describe.

Compared to what I was used to, the American youth I would soon meet were a terrible surprise: they did not have a purpose as I understood it; they did not seem to hang desperately onto any transcendent principles. This made them seem devoid of passion: their principal concerns seemed to be cars and girls. Somehow it all seemed terribly shallow, empty, and ignoble to me.

That they didn’t seem to match my wits did not help, either. And perhaps they did not: I’d gone from the most sophisticated city of my country to one of the less sophisticated cities in the United States; while there, I was probably punching under my weight. But then because my interlocutors were Americans they could not possibly have been expected to do well in European discussions, either. Of course Americans don’t know Turgenev; or Prince Igor; why should they? (Do Europeans know honky-tonk? Indeed, it gives Americans great credit to know Sheherezade). I was expecting my American interlocutors to live up to a standard of conversation which in the US of A was entirely meaningless.

(Then again, unlike Europeans, Americans are not intellectual poseurs: by and large they don’t care to fake knowing things. To say “I didn’t know that” in America passes for simple honesty; in Europe it's a measure of stupidity. Most Europeans are not half as well read as they appear: they are merely great masters of creating such an impression. Most European conversations aren’t therefore as intelligent as they may appear; but semblances of intelligent conversations).

I didn’t know any of that then. I only knew that I was unable to have a conversation with anyone. And I longed to be among people with whom I could talk.

Things did not get any more idealistic as time went on; nor did the conversations appear to improve in college. Soon it became clear to me that they would never improve and that I would have to leave. Unable to go back east, the way I had come, I went west – and kept following the sun until I found myself in the East again – the Far East. And here I have stayed. For some reason, some reason I do not quite understand, I had found the Far East more familiar, more welcoming. It seemed to fit me better.

Perhaps it did because there are certain important ways in which all traditional societies -- whether in Europe or in Asia -- are alike (especially when they are contrasted with the ultra-new United States): family structure, the way people think of personal identity, of friendships, of love, of sex, money, and careers; of the things they want for themselves; even the way they want them (insufficiently ruthlessly for the most part).

Or perhaps the Far East suited me better because I had come here not expecting it to; perhaps I had come expecting myself to do the hard work of fitting in – and as a result, did the work, too. I do not think I’d gone to the United States in quite the same frame of mind. There I had not expected to have to work to fit in. Raised in the typically Eastern European mindset of us (Westerners) against them (Russians), I had imagined that America would be just like home, only better; while it was in fact nothing like home at all. (In this I was like most Europeans: they think the US is just like Europe; a particularly glaring feat of ignorance). So perhaps all my energy went into the discovery that they are not like us rather than into the work of adaptation.

*


Although the years I have spent in Asia have rewarded me with great riches – I have discovered a great treasure: arts and philosophies and histories and literatures whose existence most westerners do not even suspect; ways of life, of eating, and of love-making without which my life would no doubt be a mere shadow of its current self; yet, there is a part of me which envies Georges Steiner for his ease of adjusting to the United States.

Perhaps there is something very Old-World about that feeling: I had been forced to go on a kind of Odyssey; the Odyssey turned out to be the best thing that had ever happened in my life; yet – a very European thing – I resent the pains and dangers I had been forced to undergo. A nice soft easy landing in the new country, followed perhaps by a pleasant academic career, would have been so much easier, if I had only been able to fit in.

And again, I ask myself, how did Georges Steiner do it?