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I

ON MEETING AMERICANS ABROAD

And Discovering One's Own Country There

IRWIN EDMAN

T HAS become a commonplace that one of the best spots in which to study America in our time is Europe. That is not simply because of the obvious fact that American method and the American tempo are becoming omnipresent in the food, the dancing, and the business of European life. It is because of the still more obvious, almost irritating fact that one cannot any longer spend any length of time abroad without meeting one's fellowcountrymen. It is no longer simply in summer or in Paris that you encounter them. You may find yourself in the heart of Touraine in February or at Nice in August, in the high obscure hill city of Gubbio or in some village tucked away in the wildest of North Wales; the familiar tone, profile, and gesture of a fellowAmerican are more than likely to appear. If you did nothing else for a year in Europe but study the Americans you met, you would have accomplished a year's important work in sociology.

In a year abroad spent on various parts of the Continent one is sure to meet every variety of American, from the notorious loud-mouthed and quick-paced tourist to the expatriate dawdling out the decline of his life on the disdainful height of an olive

clad villa above the Arno. America abroad constitutes a country whose population is always more or less transient. Its philosophy, as various as the purse of its inhabitants, is controlled always in some measure by the fact that those inhabitants are away from home. If you are fatuously determined while in Europe to be a European, seeing Americans will be a constant source of irritation. It is hard, just when you feel that you have become pro tem. a Frenchman or a Tuscan, to find yourself jolted back to Dayton or Detroit. But if you are frankly more or less preoccupied even when abroad with your own land, America in Europe becomes another continent to explore.

In a certain sense you discover your fellow-countrymen for the first time when you meet them away from their usual haunts. Whether they have come for a month to see the whole Continent or have lived for a decade in one corner of it, what they have that is characteristically American stands out in almost brazen relief. You come to be aware, as never before, of the American voice when you hear it suddenly in the shrill staccato chatter of an Italian market-place. It may come as a jarring unmusical shock, this famil

iar drawling monotone, after the musical cadences of French or English speech. It may come as a fine homely suggestion of a hundred mingled memories of home. You may overhear a slang epithet that you have not heard in months, and it will recall forcibly the intense nervous definiteness of a civilization you thought for the time to have completely deserted. You may notice the tilt of a hat or the movement of a hand that in some unaccountable way spells America, or a touch of bright brassy humor that could be none other than transatlantic in its source.

Time and again you come upon America in a phrase, a joke, an intonation, or a gesture, and you are led to ruminate a little on your compatriots. What are they doing here, these energetic countrymen of ours who pass from Paris to Madrid, from Amsterdam to Berlin, as they might from Albany to Rochester. Why have they come? What are they getting out of it? What makes them so immediately and irretrievably different from these natives, among whom they move so quickly and so hermetically, and from all other travelers in these foreign lands.

Perhaps it is the new cheap rates to Europe or that Europe has ceased to be merely a place to visit museums or to buy hats. But there are whole new classes of Americans you meet abroad who cannot be dismissed as conventional quick trotting tourists or vulgar itinerant millionaires. Heaven and the irritated Continental know that there are still sufficient of these; more, doubtless, than ever. You know where to

find and how to avoid them, these hurried idlers who make a loud summer resort of Paris and a loud winter resort of Nice. There is almost nothing in the way of atmosphere they could not find as well or as badly in Atlantic City or in the boom cities of Florida; wines, French dishes, and French shops are about the only differences that distinguish their lives abroad from the lives they would find at equivalent places at home. Almost they need not be studied at all in this connection, for in a profound sense they are not in Europe.

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But Europe is filled these days with a younger America that is here for good and serious reasons and has an almost pathetic earnestness in getting something out of it. You meet young men and women in all parts of Europe staying for longer or shorter periods, and for more or less special purposes. less special purposes. An increasing number of fellowships for travel and study abroad pour each year upon the Continent a whole stream of youngsters in their twenties for a wanderjahr. It is not the conventional grand tour. For these travel stipends are, even with the present rate of exchange, not too large. Many of these post-collegians live and travel in Europe even more frugally than they would live and travel at home. They are to be found in the most modest of pensions or wandering in the most out-of-theway towns and museums.

In Italy they are discoverable spending a month in Florence, trying to swallow en même temps the whole of Renaissance art, the whole of the Italian language, and all of Fascism.

In Paris you will have to look for them far from the mundane crowd, in some pension, or in some family far from the Rue de Rivoli, deeper by a good deal in Racine than in Montmartre. Nearly all of them have the haunting presentiment that they may never be in Europe again, and they are counting their minutes as well as their pennies. There is astonishing intensity and efficiency in their attempts to get all there is and all at once. They never miss doing or seeing the native and revealing things of the places at which they happen to be. They will be sure to hear the classics at the Comédie Française, and be present in Siena for the summer festa. In Southern France they will not miss the local wine or the local entremets. All over the Continent they will avoid English when they can, and in England they will try to speak it particularly well. There is none keener than they for detecting the unique qualities and characters of places visited, or reading themselves into sympathy with the objects of their pilgrimage. In their memories and in their collected mementos they are storing up Europe for life.

The young student-wanderers have, of course, the weaknesses of all tourists. They like, for one thing, to feel that they have been where few others have ever gone. It is nice to come home having Ragusa and Helsingfors as well as Paris and London under your cap. They will occasionally be contemptuous of their own country in the enthusiasm of visiting another, or be impatient of a foreign land in the homesick memory of their own. For like other travelers they do grow home

sick. Many a student plowing through Dante in a room in a pension in Rome, or through Lamartine in a room in a pension in Paris, lives spiritually half the time in his letters to and from home. With all the help afforded by the university unions and the international committees, the student abroad, or the student-traveler abroad, very seldom penetrates into the intimate domestic life of the country in which he happens to be. One out of twenty comes home having acquired a European friend. Few of them in a year come to know familiarly a European family. Very few of them certainly feel themselves Europeanized at the end of a year, and almost none wishes to become expatriate. Long before the end of the year their eyes and imaginations are turned with childlike eagerness toward home.

Where they do get to know or get to be known by Europeans, they are among our best ambassadors. They do much to disabuse the European of the notion that every American is a millionaire. They help to clear them of the belief that most of us are vulgarians. To meet them abroad is to have a sudden pride and a kindled hope in the possibilities of American youth. It is to have a sudden sense also of the distinctive character of that youth, and of its special limitations and indubitable special virtues. They are a well set-up lot, these American studenttravelers, for one thing, and display a certain fresh antiseptic energy that marks them out when they appear among a group of Continental students. The American student of, say, twenty-three seems ridicu

lously naïve compared with some of the eighteen-year-old students among whom he studies when he settles down for a while at a Continental university. He still has to find out the elements of subjects and ideas whose complexities they have long ago taken for granted. His Continental acquaintances are often amused by both his intellectual and moral innocence. The English student's conversation will be sprinkled with casual references to the classic of his own and of ancient tongues; the German student will mingle politics with metaphysics; the Italian student will move easily in the history of fine art and in the ways of the world. All this will bewilder and discourage the American fresh from his B.A. For the wandering bachelor of arts is innocent morally as well as intellectually. A meeting with young Americans abroad sometimes prompts you to consider what babes may win degrees, and degrees with honor, from an American university.

But most of them, at least in the experience of the writer, do not try to hide or belittle their naïveté. Some of them, away for the first time from the restraints of their usual environment, are in terrific haste to remedy their state of innocence. They ape a culture they do not yet possess and a deviltry they do not care for. But you are struck peculiarly by their balance, their eagerness, and their good sense. They live in Europe usually as discriminating Americans, not as the esthete's imitation European. They get Europe without succumbing to it. Their six months or a year abroad does not disenchant them with

America. It gives them a perspective on it; it helps them to live more fully as citizens of their own. country, and as citizens of the world in whose fortunes that country is involved.

It is hard to speak as highly of the summer migration of undergraduates. For them the new cheap ocean rates have made possible a quick lurid holiday in Europe. Many an innkeeper on the Continent has mixed memories of American collegian visitors. You wonder whether the average American collegian on his return has clear memories of anything. But for even the most scatter-brained of them Europe must be at least a visual experience. For those with any degree of intelligence or feeling, even a hurried trip through the Continent or England must make literature and history much less a matter of hearsay when they return in the autumn. The sound of French or the look of Oxford must be for many of them an elementary lesson in cosmopolitanism.

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There are other Americans you meet in Europe whose presence you cannot so clearly account for. In many cases you are certain that Europe is for them in the nature of some sort of flight from boredom, from perplexity, from disappointment. If you meet such cases in a lonely place, a little off the beaten track, where America seems very far away, you may, over a bottle of wine, learn why they are there.

The writer has met in the course of less than a year at least a dozen men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five who have discovered at the end of several years in some

business or profession that they did not like it. They have come to spend their accumulated savings and an uncertain length of time to try to think out what they should do next. They drift through Europe from one place to another, not much caring where, until their minds are made up or their purses exhausted. For them the charm of the Continent consists chiefly in the fact that it is three thousand miles from home, and that they are for a time where they are known by nobody and where they owe explanations to no relatives. Or you run into men who persist in believing that they can come to Europe and leave their crucifixion of spirit at home.

There are older people, elderly married couples, released by a small funded income, to wander aimlessly and not very happily from one famous place to another. They do not know when or if they are ever coming home, or why they are staying, or quite why they came. They are pathetic castaways living aimlessly in no world at all. There are sad-eyed men and women of varying ages who have come to forget something or other, and in the loneliness of distance they will tell you, perhaps, what they have come to forget or how lonely they are.

Even people you think to have known fairly well at home will in the stimulation and liberation of being in a foreign country suddenly reveal themselves as they would not dream of doing or dare to do in twenty years' conversation at home. There are professors who will betray their disillusion with scholarship or education, or who will lapse into sentiment or sentimentalism that they would

never permit themselves amid the respectable frigidities of a campus. There are business men who have a surprising childishness and humility here amid the inconveniences of a foreign language and far from their telephones and secretaries. All their brusque efficiency is gone, and in Sicily or at Cap d'Antibes they may suddenly confess a doubt about the distant busy preoccupations of their lives.

Some of the driftwoods seem bound to stay forever, if they have any income and if they consider the rate of exchange. It is certainly the low rate of exchange in the Latin countries that is responsible for the large semi-permanent literary colony you meet nowadays abroad. Nor is this literary colony simply a longtalking non-working Bohemia. Paris and all of Italy are filled with industrious literary men who find it convenient to live where American checks will pay for taxis instead of subway tickets, and where the receipts of one fairly successful book will permit life in semi-luxury for a year. These also can hardly be described as really living abroad. For what is alive in them, their spirit, is at home. Their intellectual food consists largely of American books, periodicals, and press-clippings. Their social life consists largely in conversation with kindred Americans settled like themselves for reasons of convenience in Europe.

But it is not the low exchange that explains the presence of the large body of expatriates you meet all over Europe, especially in Paris and Italy. These permanent exiles are a sadly interesting lot. They are interesting if for no other reason than that they

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