Victor Határ
The Secret Knowledge of Emigrés
Cælum, non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt.
Horatius: Epistolae
What am I doing here, for God's sake, sitting in my Victorian library,
facing a sixteen-foot Victorian bookcase full of English volumes up to
the ceiling, feeling cosy and warm, writing in an adopted language in which
I feel somewhat insecure, just like seamen on dry land? Why am I not back
in the Old Country of the language and literature I belong to, instead
of disconcerting myself with all these questions, after having spent two-thirds
of my adult life in the British Isles?
Cornered by my own cross-examination and feeling guilty, I am trying
to cast my mind back to the days when I ran away. Did I want to? Never.
I felt at home, so much so that the question of going to live anywhere
else had never arisen: and if "language is the house of Being",
I have been housed in, even ensconsed in, my native language and literature.
I still remember the terror I felt when I was forced to flee: twice imprisoned
previously, I had to escape from being jailed a third time. At 42, which
is not exactly young, not even youngish, where am I going to live, to earn
my bread and how? How many times am I going to be hated, execrated, challenged,
called bloody foreigner or sale métèque?
All of these, of course, by now are academic questions. I found a comfortable
habitat, friends, peace of mind, managed to publish my books: all past
history. Yet there is one thing I still do not find easy and that is to
explain to Westerners what being or having been an emigré means
to Easterners. By Easterners, this time I mean all those people living
or having lived behind that, now defunct, Iron Curtain.
That I was "born in exile", the way I have put it in my autobiography,
much to the bewilderment of my readers, because the turn of my mind was
so pronouncedly "Western" and that settling down in England for
a philosopher felt like "coming home"--that's beside the point.
In a way, my case was an exception and not the rule. In those East ern
Parts, well before the inception of the Soviet Union, the rule was that
if anyone fancied living any where else, dreamt about it, or had the cheek
to go away--the dice was heavily loaded against him or her. If he made
good and became famous on whatever account, his "glory" was reclaimed
by the Motherland and credited de rigueur to her assets: but the large
majority of those in exile were branded exiles and looked askance at. That
vagabondage won't do--said the Elders of the tribe: suspected of treachery,
eyed with a mix of jealousy and hatred, his or her final lot was, many
a time, shame and/or oblivion.
Even while I am writing these lines, I am shaking in my shoes as to
what some censorious Catos of my tribe will say. For it is not easy to
explain to a Westerner that the Easterner's outlook is drastically different.
They do not say aloud once a Catholic always a Catholic--but they do think
all the time, once an emigré always an emigré. And, in a
droll sort of way they would never ever guess, they have a point. In the
West--be it the self-contained Anglo-Saxon, Francophone, Spanish or Portuguese
cultural expanses--there are and always have been expatriates: writers
and artists called "tax-exiles" trying to escape the claws of
the Inland Revenue and its exorbitant income tax claims. No reader in his
right mind would hold it against them that the book they've just bought
was written in Deya or Monaco, in Trieste or in Rome. By and large, readers
never knew if one of their favourite authors, Lawrence Durrell or Graham
Greene, James Joyce or Anthony Burgess were living abroad, in Cyprus, in
Paris, on the French Riviera, etc. They couldn't care less. These authors,
were they ever branded emigrés?
I recall John Osborne who, once, in a Paris interview, heaped a plethora
of abuses on his fellow-countrymen calling them prigs, bastards, phoneys,
pharisees, frauds, etc. Had he been from Eastern Europe and would he have
done the same to the nation he came from, a hidden fatwa would have befallen
him; when home again, he might have been lynched or summarily shot. He
would never anywhere be safe from the ethnic cleansing of chauvinistic
intellectual fundamentalists. As to Osborne, he stepped ashore, came home
and put on his slippers. He has not been stripped of his citizenship, nobody
asked him awkward questions. He wasn't boycotted, nor was he libelled.
He wasn't branded a traitor and, just because he lived a while in Paris,
was never blotched as an
emigré. He had his say, that's all.
If there was such an electronic gauge to measure this quaint metamorphosis,
my reading would still be ambivalent: after forty years in the West, I
have become 90 per cent westernized yet, at the core I am still as died-in-the-wool
Hungarian as any ancestry-boasting aristocrat or chip-off-the-old-block
peasant. But between the one who stayed put and the one who ran away, there
is a world of difference. And that's the crux of the matter. Let me spell
it out.
Someone who, by mishap or by stupidity, falls headlong into prison,
qualifies for a dunce's cap. An ass is an ass is an ass. But once he went
through his hell and became acquainted with the inside of dozens of the
jails of the Land, he or she will cherish his misfortune which, in retrospect
will prove an experience as unmatchable as it is unique: for an author
a goldmine for which there are no substitutes in textbooks or references.
It's the same with emigration. Once you went through its hell, you come
out of it a different man. The difference is a secret knowledge, an Arcanum
which, in your homeland, is impossible to get at. The keys to this double
lock are nowhere to be found, no indication, no arrows to point at, no
access to it.
Myriads of people live in their homelands deeming themselves absolutely
safe, feeling at home. Their at home feeling is their carapace.
Everyone feels safe in this armour to which a matchless warmth is given,
the warmth of the hearth. For la Patrie, the fatherland, any fatherland
spreading itself around one on the map, by its borders and within its boundaries
gives the impression of a giant cocoon. In this cocoon a citizen who stays
put from the cradle to the grave, feels doubly safe, and at home on the
planet.
Once you run away you lose your carapace, that vast cocoon which was
your country melts away. It may be true to say that everything around you
becomes risky, dicey, chancy--yet it's more than that. The discovery of
your utter defencelessness reveals the extreme vulnerability of us all,
a thought which has philosophical vistas never to be lost from sight. A
discovery which is as shattering as it is manifold in its inferences.
All "Lands", "Homelands", "Motherlands,"
"Fatherlands," are illusions on the Mercator World Map. All "vast
cocoons" are delusory. That we are welcome to this Earth and, in fact,
that it was created for our convenience, is a figment of our imagination.
Our species is an upstart and a belated newcomer, just partially successful
in its "conquest of the Land"; in a state of non-belligerent
unease, we are tolerated by the rest of the biosphere and the planet, but
only just. Our compatriots, left behind in their imaginary cocoon, though
never budging an inch, are, in fact virtual runaways just the same as we
all are, without having an inkling of it, six billions of runaways, itinerants
and emigrés on Earth.
The title of the poem was "The Emigré". In the life
of an emigré there are ups and downs: and this was written when
I was down, a few days before being admitted to hospital, after a nervous
breakdown. For it might come even to that when one realizes how inhospitable
this planet can be, the notion of homelands where we could be at home a
mirage and that in the last analysis we all are, with no exception, run-aways
and roam-arounds on a clump of earth we fancy was botched up for us but,
in fact, could easily well do without our bustling termitary.
This is a tenet with which my interpenetration is complete, it became
one of the sheet-anchors of my philosophy. Some of my readers shook their
heads in disbelief. Can one live with such a disheartening discovery at
the back of one's mind all the time? Your inmost being permeated with that
sentience that from now on you have been expelled from your Paradise and
there is no going back to that safe cocoon, not even for the happy escapade
of a conducted tour...?
I can answer all these questions in all serenity, easily, composed
and undismayed. Si parva licet componere magnis, just as Socrates gave
to this his stand-ard answer, I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen
of the world. Thus, we are in good company, and although for some backwoodsmen
in the East cosmopolitan is still a dirty word, I let it pass unruffled
and unflappable as ever. It's true that there is no going back for us,
yet not because we are lacking in will or longing to be back, but because
by now we know that that cocoon was an illusion. And this is not where
our secret knowledge ends. For invisible as it be for those safely at home
in their giant cocoon, and depressing and overcast as it may seem to them,
we still have, on our sky, a hope on a colossal scale, bigger than they
even thought possible. Granted that no silver lining comes without a cloud,
that secret hope we entertain is that, by and by, the confraternity of
emigrés will grow out of all proportions and will become "la
Condition Humaine".
Apart from the centuries of the Völkerwanderungen, the Doomsday
mass hysteria on the Continent and the crusades, the general pattern was
that all and sundry spent his or her life where he or she was born; villages,
townships stayed put. Local pilgrimages--yes; world-wide tourism--no. Highways--yes
(very few, sort of; infrastructure--no.) No trace of it in the vocabulary.
To roam about rootlessly was absurd and as suspicious as to be a pedestrian
"prowler" and not on wheels in the States. In Antiquity, the
flight of Simon Magus over Rome was magic, the flight of angels--a miracle.
With the world net of air routes and with the tourism explosion all this
has changed out of recognition. There seems to be a Gypsy instinct abroad,
awakening and with drifters, "travellers" banding together, families
who embrace the new lifestyle and prefer the change of setting and scenery.
Newcomers on our doorstep are no longer suspect or, in principle unwelcome.
Swaying and inveigling as a mirage in the heathaze and remote it may
be, but there may come to be a future when nearly all the world will be
on the move, people who do not budge, a minority and emigrés the
majority. To the extent the world economy, under the sway of multinationals,
becomes increasingly globalized, to the same extent the significance of
national frontiers seems to be decreasing. If not mine, a generation of
Methuselahs born today might live to see the receding of all gut reactions
of the past, the furore of chauvinists and fundamentalists ebbing away
and ethnic cleansing just a mention in the annals, like the memory of Genghis
Khan's pyramids of skulls; and then, one day the miracle might happen:
people in Central and Eastern Europe will come to accept the notion of
expatriate authors as long as they stick to the outlandish lingo they call
their mother tongue.
All these things will come to pass--one day when it will dawn on us
that we all are runaways on this planet Earth. A midgety little perch allotted
to us in the Cosmos which, however inhospitable it may be out there, it
behoves us to make our foothold more hospitable.
Victor Határ
is a poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, critic, and broadcaster living
in England since 1956.
