The Displaced Nation

A home for international creatives

Tag Archives: Displaced Hall of Fame

The John Steinbeck Encyclopedia of Road Trips

5 Comments Posted by on September 12, 2011

When we announced this month’s theme — road trips — some of you may have wondered if we’d gone around the bend. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — really? That’s a book for roadgeeks or — if you get into its philosophical meanderings — Roads Scholars, not for Displaced Nation types, most of whom equate travel with boarding an international flight.

Besides, road trips are for the young and restless — something you do when you’ve just graduated college.

But before you put the brakes on the road-trip idea again, let me convince you to take one more test drive. Only this time, instead of riding pillion on Robert Persig’s motorcycle, you’ll be seated in John Steinbeck’s camper station wagon next to his pet dog, Charley, on a 10,000-mile journey across America — from Long Island to Maine to Chicago to Seattle to California to Texas to New Orleans and back to New York City.

As the Nobel prize-winning writer puts his engine in gear, may I invite you to peruse our specially compiled John Steinbeck Encyclopedia of Road Trips.

A is for Autumn

John Steinbeck made a road trip across America in the autumn season and in the autumn of his life. He set out from his home in Sag Harbor, Long Island, shortly after Labor Day in 1960. He was 58 years old and not in the best of health. As Edward Weeks wrote of Steinbeck’s expedition in The Atlantic:

He set out with some misgiving, not sure his health would stand up to the 10,000-mile journey he envisioned; as he traveled, the years sloughed off him…

B is for Bestseller

Steinbeck wrote a book about his journey, Travels with Charley. It reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list for non-fiction on October 21, 1962. To this day, the book retains a special place in the American imagination, despite attempts to challenge its categorization as “non-fiction” (see F).

C is for Charley

Meet Charley, Steinbeck’s middle-aged French poodle, one of the most civilized and attractive dogs in literature. He’s the genuine article, a real French poodle, having been born on the outskirts of Paris, where he also received his training. As his proud owner once said:

…while he knows a little Poodle-English, he responds quickly only to commands in French. Otherwise he has to translate, and that slows him down.

D is for Dog

For Steinbeck, a dog is an ideal companion on the open road as well as being an effective ice breaker:

A dog is a bond between strangers. Many conversations en route began with “What degree of dog is that?”

E is for Environment

Steinbeck was extremely attuned to the intimate connection between people’s lives and the rhythms of nature — weather, geography, the cycles of the seasons. But while nature animates his picaresque tale of his travels with his dog, one of his key observations was the the high price Americans would eventually pay for lives filled with ease and convenience. He felt they were trashing their environment for the sake of material prosperity. (A tad prescient, might we say?)

F is for Fictions

Journalist Bill Steigerwald set out to retrace Steinbeck’s steps on the 50th anniversary of his road trip. He concluded that not only had the Nobel laureate invented characters, he’d also embellished the hardships of his cross-country journey with Charley. In other words, this brilliant author’s much-loved book is loaded with creative fictions. (Wait, I thought all travel writers used some creative license — is there anything wrong with a novelist-turned-travel-writer using some?)

G is for Giant Redwoods

After sorting out his flat tire in Oregon (see O), Steinbeck visited the giant redwoods and ancient Sequoias and found them as awe inspiring as ever:

The vainest, most slap-happy and irreverent of men, in the presence of redwoods, goes under a spell of wonder and respect.

Steinbeck was further impressed when his dog, Charley, refused to urinate on the trees…

H is for Hurricane

The best-laid schemes of mice and men go oft awry, and Steinbeck had to delay the start of his trip slightly due to Hurricane Donna, which made a direct hit on Long Island. (Still, it could have been worse. It could have been Hurricane Irene!)

I is for International

While he never became an expat, Steinbeck moved to New York City and took quite a few international trips, mostly to Europe. He hoped that his road trip would enable him to reconnect with both the people and the landscape of his native land. He also wanted to see his birthplace — Salinas, California — one last time.

J is for Jamming

Steinbeck’s journey concluded with jamming Rocinante (see R) across a busy New York City street, during a failed attempt at making a U-turn. He reports having said to the traffic policeman:

Officer, I’ve driven this thing all over the country — mountains, plains, deserts. And now I’m back in my own town, where I live — and I’m lost.

K is for Knight-errant

A mainstay of medieval romance literature, the knight-errant wanders the land in search of adventures to prove himself a worthy warrior. Don Quixote is a famous example (see Q). Likewise, Steinbeck hoped to recapture his youth, the spirit of a knight-errant, through his travels. (Makes sense if you’re middle aged and your health is rapidly deteriorating — see P.)

L is for Language (of Road Signs)

Steinbeck closely observes the language of road signs during his trip across country. In New York State, he notes that the road signs are commands: “Stop! No turning!” But in Ohio, the language is gentler, with friendly advice rather than curt demands.

M is for Maine

Steinbeck reports that he learned not to ask for directions in Maine because locals don’t like tourists and tend to give them the wrong directions — another example of regional differences (see L).

N is for North Dakota

Upon arriving at Fargo, North Dakota, Steinbeck declares that the mentality of the American nation has grown “bland.” He fell head over heels in love with Montana, however. NOTE: Steinbeck’s account of meeting an itinerant Shakespearean actor outside the town of Alice, North Dakota, is disputed by the journalist Bill Steigerwald (see F).

O is for Oregon

Having his first flat tire on a remote back road in Oregon inspired Steinbeck to write a send-up of similarly desperate scenes in his most famous novel, The Grapes of Wrath:

It was obvious that the other tire might go at any minute, and it was Sunday and it was raining and it was Oregon.

P is for Poignancy

When Steinbeck set out on his road trip, he knew he could have died at any point along the way because of his heart condition. This knowledge suffuses Travels with Charley with a certain poignancy, and perhaps explains why it’s such a beloved book.

Q is for Quixote

As one might expect of a man who won a Nobel Prize in Literature, Steinbeck had a literary hero in mind when he set out on his road trip: Don Quixote. Like the ingenious gentleman of La Mancha, it seems that Steinbeck fancied himself a knight-errant in search of adventure (see K). He even named his camper truck for Quixote‘s steed (see R).

R is for Rocinante

As the narrator of Don Quixote explains, its hero feels obliged to find the right name for his horse:

Four days were spent in thinking what name to give it, because (as he said to himself) it was not right that a horse belonging to a knight so famous, and one with such merits of his own, should be without some distinctive name…

At last, Don Quixote calls the skinny steed Rocinante. In a nod to this fictional knight-errant (see K), Steinbeck christened the vehicle for his journey — a green GMC truck, which he’d had custom-fitted with a camper — Rocinante. He even painted the name across the side of the truck in 16th-century Spanish script.

S is for Salinas

Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California. He wrote his first stories about the Salinas Valley and was determined to see his hometown one last time before he died. Visiting a bar from his youth, he lamented the loss of several regulars as well as quite a few of his childhood chums, wondering if perhaps Thomas Wolfe was right (see Y).

T is for Texas

Steinbeck remarked of Texas that it was the kind of state that “people either passionately love or passionately hate.” He went on:

Texas is a state of mind. Texas is an obsession. Above all, Texas is a nation in every sense of the word. … A Texan outside of Texas is a foreigner.

Texas was also where Charley (see C) became ill for a few days and stayed in a veterinary hospital. NOTE: From Texas onwards, Steinbeck’s travel writing gives way to social commentary, culminating in the account of a school integration crisis he witnesses firsthand in New Orleans.

U is for U.S. Route 66

In mid-November of 1960, Steinbeck crossed the Mojave Desert and picked up the historical U.S. Route 66 at Barstow, California. He and Charley then drove 1,300 miles to arrive in time for a Texas-style Thanksgiving on a cattle ranch near Amarillo. U.S. Route 66, known colloquially as the “Main Street of America” or the “Mother Road” was a major path for those who migrated west. In Steinbeck’s classic novel The Grapes of Wrath, the poor family of sharecroppers, the Joads, make their way west from Oklahoma to California on U.S. Route 66.

V is for Viking Press

Travels with Charley was published by the Viking Press in mid-summer of 1962, several months before Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

W is for Wanderlust

Steinbeck begins Travels with Charley by describing his wanderlust, saying he’s had a life-long impulse to travel and explore the world.

X is for Xena the Warrior Princess

This entry has nothing to do with John Steinbeck, but I have included it in case there are any women travelers who are having trouble identifying with the adventures of a rugged, broad-shouldered, six-foot-tall writer, and his desire to be seen as a knight-errant (see K). Xena the Warrior Princess reminds me of the title of Debbie Anderson’s best-selling guide for women who travel the open road: Simple Rules for…The Road-Warrior Princess.

Y is for “You can’t go home again”

When Steinbeck reached his birthplace of Salinas, he discovered the truth of Thomas Wolfe’s words “You can’t go home again.” Saying good-bye to his hometown for the last time was a bittersweet experience:

I printed once more on my eyes, south, west, and north, and then we hurried away from the permanent and changeless past where my mother is always shooting a wildcat and my father is always burning his name with his love.

Z is for Zzzzz (under the stars)

Steinbeck reports that camping out with Charley in the American outback — where they enjoyed lots of zzzzz under the stars — was one of the highlights of their trip (though the veracity of that experience is now disputed — see F). But, despite the magnificent setting, both he and Charley often suffered moments of crushing loneliness. Ultimately, man and dog concurred that however much they relished their adventure, home is where the heart is.

So…are you inspired? Can you now see yourself motoring across country in the autumn and/or autumn of your life? And how about attempting a best-selling travelogue? (Or am I still driving you bonkers?!)

STAY TUNED for tomorrow’s post, a Displaced Q about none else than road trips(!).

If you enjoyed this post, we invite you to register for The Displaced Dispatch, a round up of weekly posts from The Displaced Nation. Includes seasonal recipes and book giveaways. Register for The Displaced Dispatch by clicking here!

Related posts:

Image: MorgueFile

, , , ,

6 celebrated women travel writers with the power to enchant you

3 Comments Posted by on August 24, 2011

Any wannabe expat/travel writer would do well to consult with Kristin Bair O’Keeffe, herself a novelist and former expat, before beginning their Great Works. Kristin offers a wealth of writing tips on Writerhead, a blog that she launched on April 1 of this year (which, coincidentally, was the same day we launched The Displaced Nation).

Of the helpful hints Kristin has offered thus far, I have many favorites, but if I had to pick one, it would be her post entitled “Write Wee.” In her breathlessly inimitable style, Kristin assures us that producing a multi-volume series on one’s overseas adventures is not the way to go:

Instead find a nugget. A moment. A single object. One exchange. One epiphany. One cultural revelation.

Find one story and tell it.

Just it.

The only thing I would add is that in general, women are better at extracting such nuggets than men.

Actually, what got me started in thinking about the difference in travel writing styles of the sexes was a post I wrote a couple of weeks ago on Edwardian novelist Elizabeth von Arnim, who penned the much-loved work, The Enchanted April, about four women who escape to a medieval castle in Italy for a much-needed break from their routines.

For me, von Arnim typifies one of characteristics that makes women’s travel writing so special (no doubt there are many more!). As she wandered far and wide across Europe and America, she paid extremely careful attention to the details of her surroundings.

A forerunner of what today we’d call a nature freak, she could get lost in telling the story of watching a “nightingale on a hornbeam, in loud raptures at the coming of the sun…” — I quote from her largely autobiographical novel The Solitary Summer, about a woman, also called Elizabeth, who is anything but solitary. She has a husband, to whom she refers as the Man of Wrath, small child and household to care for.

Perhaps such descriptive powers are born of necessity. Women have little choice but to make the most of spinning tales out of the moments they snatch from lives that are otherwise spent ministering to the needs of others — even when they’re technically on vacation.

Having combed through the pages of The Virago Book of Women Travellers (ed. Mary Morris with Larry O’Connor), I think I may be on to something. I discovered any number of women travel writers with the power to enchant their readers by capturing in their works the moments, exchanges, and personal ephiphanies their wanderings have yielded.

Here are six whose “nuggets” continue to gleam for us modern-day nomads:

Frances Trollope (1780-1863)

Who was she? Mother of Anthony and like her son, a prolific writer of novels (34 in total!).
Key work: Domestic Manners of the Americans, a travel book that made her name, about the four years she spent pursuing opportunities in the United States after her family suffered financial setbacks.

from DOMESTIC MANNERS OF THE AMERICANS
At length my wish of obtaining a house in the country was gratified….But even this was not enough to satisfy us when we first escaped from the city, and we determined upon having a day’s enjoyment of the wildest forest scenery we could find. So we packed up books, albums, pencils, and sandwiches, and, despite a burning sun, dragged up a hill so steep that we sometimes fancied we could rest ourselves against it by only leaning forward a little. In panting and in groaning we reached the top, hoping to be refreshed by the purest breath of heaven; but to have tasted the breath of heaven we must have climbed yet farther, even to the tops of the trees themselves, for we soon found that the air beneath them stirred not, nor ever had stirred, as it seemed to us, since first it settled there, so heavily did it weigh upon our lungs.

Still we were determined to enjoy ourselves, and forward we went, crunching knee deep through aboriginal leaves, hoping to reach some spot less perfectly air-tight than our landing place. Wearied with the fruitless search, we decided on reposing awhile on the trunk of a fallen tree; being all comfortably exhausted, the idea of sitting down on this tempting log was conceived and executed simultaneously by the whole party, and the whole party sunk together through its treacherous surface into a mass of rotten rubbish that had formed part of the pith and marrow of the eternal forest a hundred years before.

We were by no means the only sufferers from the accident; frogs, lizards, locusts, katydids, beetles, and hornets, had the whole of their various tenements disturbed, and testified their displeasure very naturally by annoying us as much as possible in return; we were bit, we were stung, we were scratched; and when, at last, we succeeded in raining ourselves from the venerable ruin, we presented as woeful a spectacle as can well be imagined. We shook our (not ambrosial) garments, and panting with heat, stings, and vexation, moved a few paces from the scene of our misfortune, and again sat down; but this time it was upon the solid earth.

We had no sooner begun to “chew the cud” of the bitter fancy that had beguiled us to these mountain solitudes than a new annoyance assailed us. A cloud of mosquitoes gathered round, and while each sharp proboscis sucked our blood, they teased us with their humming chorus, till we lost all patience, and started again on our feet, pretty firmly resolved never to try the al fresco joys of an American forest again.

Flora Tristan (1803-1844)

Who was she? French reformer who campaigned for workers’ and women’s rights; grandmother to artist Paul Gauguin.
Key work: Peregrinations of a Pariah, about a trip she made alone to Peru to stake her claim to her family’s fortune.

from PEREGRINATIONS OF A PARIAH
Mr. Smith took me to the house of his correspondents, and here once more I found all of the luxury and comfort characteristic of the English. The servants were English, and like their masters they were dressed just as they would have been in England. The house had a verandah, as do all the houses in Lima, and this is very convenient in hot countries, as it gives shelter from the sun and enables one to walk all round the house to take the air. This particular verandah was embellished with pretty English blinds. I stayed there for some time and could survey in comfort the only long wide street which constitutes the whole of Callao. It was a Sunday, and sailors in holiday attire were strolling about; I saw groups of Englishmen, Americans, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Germans — in short, a mixture from nearly every nation — and I heard snatches from every tongue. As I listened to these sailors, I began to understand the charm they find in their adventurous life… When I tired of looking at the street I cast a glance into the large drawing-room whose windows overlooked the verandah, where five or six immaculately dressed Englishmen, their handsome faces calm and impassive, were drinking grog and smoking excellent Havana cigars as they swung gently to and fro from hammocks from Guayaquil suspended from the ceiling.

Mary Anne Barker (1831 – 1911)

Who was she? Jamaica-born, England-educated author and journalist who with her second husband tried to run a sheep station in New Zealand (they later traveled to Mauritius, Western Australia, Barbados and Trinidad for his colonial appointments).
Key works: Station Life in New Zealand (1870); First Lessons in the Principles of Cooking (1874); A Year’s Housekeeping in South Africa (1880).

from STATION LIFE IN NEW ZEALAND
All this beauty would have been almost too oppressive, it was on such a large scale and the solitude was so intense, if it had not been for the pretty little touch of life and movement afforded by the hut belonging to the station we were bound for. It was only a rough building, made of slabs of wood with cob between; but there was a bit of fence and the corner of a garden and an English grass paddock, which looked about as big as a pocket-handkerchief from where we stood. A horse or two and a couple of cows were tethered near, and we could hear the bark of a dog. A more complete hermitage could not have been desired by Diogenes himself, and for the first time we felt ashamed of invading the recluse in such a formidable body, but ungrudging, open-handed hospitality is so universal in New Zealand that we took courage and began our descent. … We put the least scratched and most respectable-looking member of the party in the van, and followed him, amid much barking of dogs, to the low porch; and after hearing a cheery “Come in,” answering our modest tap at the door, we trooped in one after the other till the little room was quite full. I never saw such astonishment on any human face as on that of the poor master of the house, who could not stir from his chair by the fire, on account of a bad wound in his leg from an axe. There he sat quite helpless, a moment ago so solitary, and now finding himself the centre of a large, odd-looking crowd of strangers. He was a middle-aged Scotchman, probably of not a very elevated position in life, and had passed many years in this lonely spot, and yet he showed himself quite equal to the occasion.

After that first uncontrollable look of amazement he did the honours of his poor hut with the utmost courtesy… His only apology was for being unable to rise form his arm-chair (made out of half a barrel and an old flour-sack by the way); he made us perfectly welcome, took it for granted we were hungry — hunger is a very mild world to express my appetite, for one… I never felt more awkward in my life than when I stooped to enter that low doorway, and yet in a minute I was quite at my ease again; but of the whole party I was naturally the one who puzzled him the most. In the first place, I strongly suspect that he had doubts as to my being anything but a boy in a rather long kilt; and when this point was explained, he could not understand what a “female,” as he also called me, was doing on a rough hunting expedition. He particularly inquired more than once if I had come of my own free will, and could not understand what pleasure I found in walking so far.

Vivienne de Watteville (1900 – 1957)

Who was she? British writer and adventurer who accompanied her father on a safari in Kenya. After he was killed by a lion, she finished the trip on her own.
Key works: Out in the Blue (1927); Speak to the Earth: Wanderings and Reflections among Elephants and Mountains (1937).

from SPEAK TO THE EARTH
Finally, it was the boys themselves who pointed to the summit and said it was not very far.

Enviously, I admired the way they could climb. As for me, … I was badly spent; my knees trembled as I panted up through the reeling boulders. …

At last I climbed above the forest zone, passing beneath the last outposts — stunted trees ragged with beard-moss in whose chequered shade lay a carpet of tiny peas … whose blossoms were a lovely transparent blue. Above them flitted miniature butterflies, as though the petals themselves had taken wing. …

The top, when I at last reached it, was, after all, not really the top, and beyond a dipping saddle another granite head still frowned down upon me.

But meanwhile, below me the south side disclosed a grassing depression girt about by the two summits and bare granite screes; and amid that desolation the grass stretched so green and rural that you had looked there for shepherds with their flocks. Instead of which, on the far side of a quaking bog, I saw — grey among the grey slabs — two rhino.

… I drew to within forty yards of the rhino, yet they still looked like a couple of grey boulders as they browsed off an isolated patch of sere grass. …

The wind had risen to a tearing gale, and nosing straight into it I approached the rhino somewhat downhill. There was no chance of this steady blow jumping around to betray me, and it was strong enough to carry away any sound of my footsteps. Precaution was therefore unnecessary, and I walked boldly up to them. Just how close I was, it is hard to say; but I felt that I could have flipped a pebble at them, and I noted subconsciously that the eye of the one nearest me was not dark brown as I had imagined it, but the colour of sherry.

… he now came deliberately towards me nose to the ground, and horn foremost, full of suspicion. … In the finder [of my small cinema camera] I saw his tail go up, and knew that he was on the point of charging. Though it was the impression of a fraction of a second, it was unforgettable. …

… I read the danger signal, yet in a kind of trance of excitement I still held the camera against my forehead. Then Mohamed fired a shot over the rhino’s head to scare him, and I turned and fled for my very life.

M. F. K. Fisher (1908 – 1992)

Who was she? A preeminent American food writer, whose books are an amalgam of food literature, travel and memoir.
Key works: How to Cook a Wolf (1942); Map of Another Town: A Memoir of Provence (1964); Dubious Honors (1988); Long Ago in France: The Years in Dijon (1991).

from LONG AGO IN FRANCE
Monsieur Venot was a town character and was supposed to be the stingiest and most disagreeable man in Dijon, if not in the whole of France. But I did not know this, and I assumed that it was all right to treat him as if he were a polite and even generous person. I never bought much from him but textbooks, because I had no extra money, but I often spent hours in his cluttered shop, looking at books and asking him things, and sniffing the fine papers there, and even sitting copying things from books he would suggest I use at his worktable, with his compliments and his ink and often his paper. In other words, he was polite and generous to me, and I liked him. …

In Monsieur Venot’s shop I learned to like French books better than any others. They bent to the hand and had to be cut, page by page. I liked that; having to work to earn the reward, cutting impatiently through the cheap paper of a “train novel,” the kind bought in railroad stations to be thrown away and then as often kept for many years, precious for one reason or another. I liked the way the paper crumbled a little into my lap or my blanket or my plate, along the edges of each page.

Mary Lee Settle (1918 – 2005)

Who was she? American writer, novelist and expat, one of the founders of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
Key works: “Beulah Quintet” novel series (1956-1982), about the history of her native West Virginia (and hence of America); Turkish Reflections: A Biography of Place (1991).

from TURKISH REFLECTIONS
I hadn’t heard anything move, yet he stood there in front of me, smiling, quite silent, a large strong Turkish man, holding in his hand a small bunch of sweet wild thyme. He held it toward me, saying nothing, still smiling. There was something so gentle about him that I could not be afraid. I took the wild thyme, and I thanked him, in Turkish. He smiled again and touched his mouth and his ear. He was deaf and dumb. I still have the wild thyme, pressed and dried, kept like a Victorian lady’s souvenir of the Holy Land.

Dumb was the wrong word for him. There was no need for speech. He was an actor, an eloquent mime. I pointed to the atrium below and held my hands apart to show I didn’t know how to get down into it. He took my arm, and carefully, slowly, led me down a steep pile of rubble.

He mimed the opening of a nonexistent door and ushered me through it. He showed me roofless room after roofless room after roofless room as if he had discovered them. …

I think he had scared people before, and he was happy that there was someone who would let him show his house, for it was his house. Maybe he didn’t sleep there. I don’t know. I only know that he treated me as a guest in a ruin ten feet below the levee of the ground, and that he took me from room to room where once there had been marble walls and now there was only stone, where he was host and owner for a little while.

He showed me a small pool, held out his hand the height of a small child, and then swam across the air. All the time he smiled. He took me to a larger pool and swam again. Then he grabbed my arm and led me through a dark corridor toward what I thought was at first a cave. It was not. He sat down in an niche in the corridor, and strained until his face was pink, to show me it was the toilet. Then he took me into the kitchen where there were two ovens. …

For the first one he rolled dough for bread, kneaded it in air, slapped it, and put it in the oven. Then he took it out, broke it, and shared it with me. I ate the air with him. …

When I gave my friend, my arkadaş, some money, he kissed my hand and held it to his forehead, and then, pleased with the sun and me, and the fact that someone had not run away from him who lived like Caliban in a ruin, he put his arms around me and kissed me on both cheeks. Then I went down the hill to Ephesus. When I looked back to wave he had disappeared.

STAY TUNED for tomorrow’s post, a tell-all from Kate Allison on what inspired her to create her fictional expat heroine, Libby.

If you enjoyed this post, we invite you to subscribe to The Displaced Dispatch, a weekly round up of posts from The Displaced Nation, plus some extras such as seasonal recipes and occasional book giveaways. Sign up for The Displaced Dispatch by clicking here!

Related posts:

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

CLASSIC DISPLACED WRITING: Joy in the place — Elizabeth von Arnim

5 Comments Posted by on August 2, 2011

The novelist Elizabeth von Arnim (1866-1941) wrote many enchanting books, all of which were autobiographical to some extent, linked to persons or places she knew.

But does that necessarily mean that Elizabeth — born Mary Annette, nicknamed May, she called herself “Elizabeth” upon becoming a professional writer — led an enchanted life?

Yes and no. By all accounts, she was an enchanting person herself, constantly delighting other people with her sharp wit.

She also kept enchanting company: E.M. Forster was tutor to her children, Katherine Mansfield was her adopted cousin, and H.G. Wells was one of her lovers.

Displaced almost from birth (she was born in Kirribilli Point, Australia, and then moved to England at the age of three), she made a life-long habit of flitting from one enchanting locale to the next.

Having spent her formative years in London, she moved to Pomerania in Prussia (Germany) for her first marriage, where she raised five children.

Upon the death of her husband in 1910, she made her home in the Valais, Switzerland, living in a glamorous house, Chalet Soleil, which she’d built from her riches as an author.

With the failure of her second marriage, Elizabeth zigzagged between homes in the United States and Europe.

She died in Charleston, South Carolina.

A full measure of sorrows

But a peripatetic life isn’t always a charmed one, as many of us expats and former expats can attest. As her life progressed, Elizabeth experienced a full measure of sorrows.

Her first marriage — to a domineering Prussian count — wasn’t particularly happy. She nicknamed him the Man of Wrath, and they separated several years before his death.

Her second marriage, to Frank Russell, elder brother of Bertrand, was even more miserable (he proved to be a despotic egoist).

Her only true love she met when she was 54 — and he was nearly 30 years younger. (They never married.)

She also suffered the grievous deaths of a daughter and a brother.

By the time she died, Elizabeth was estranged from most of her children, crippled with arthritis, and almost forgotten by her adoring public.

Her only devoted companion was her dog, Billy.

Escape artist par excellence

But despite these tribulations, Elizabeth remained throughout her life, in the words of gardening writer Deborah Kellaway,

a steadfast hedonist, firmly suppressing sorrows. … Her journals and letters repeatedly record moments of happiness, usually associated with sunny days.

As Elizabeth once wrote in a letter to one of her daughters,

“What I really am by nature is an escapist.”

Thus what we can learn from Elizabeth’s life — and from her many autobiographical books — is the art of escaping into happier worlds.

As Kellaway explains:

[The heroines of her novels] escape from richness into the simple life, or from conventional home life into foreign travel; they escape from houses into caravans.

The most famous example, of course, is Elizabeth’s 1922 novel, The Enchanted April — from which we’ve taken our theme of enchantment on the blog this month.

As everyone knows who has read that book — or, more likely, seen the 1992 film or the 2003 Broadway play — four women who share only their unhappiness and a love of wisteria flee 1920s London and converge in Portofino, Italy, on a magical medieval villa overlooking the Mediterranean.

Simple pleasures are the best?

But while Italian castles can certainly be a tonic — if offered one, I’d be off like a shot — what most people don’t know is that Elizabeth was equally fond of much simpler escapes. In the first two books that made her reputation as a writer, the heroine escapes her marital, motherly and household duties by venturing into a German garden, set in a wide landscape.

Here is the most lyrical passage from the second of these, The Solitary Summer (1899):

Yesterday morning I got up at three o’clock and stole through the echoing passages and strange dark rooms, undid with trembling hands the bolts of the door to the verandah, and passed out into a wonderful, unknown world. I stood for a few minutes motionless on the steps, almost frightened by the awful purity of nature when all the sin and ugliness is shut up and asleep, and there is nothing but the beauty left. It was quite light, yet a bright moon hung in the cloudless, grey-blue sky; the flowers were all awake, saturating the air with scent; and a nightingale sat on a hornbeam quite close to me, in loud raptures at the coming of the sun. …

It was wonderfully quiet, and the nightingale on the hornbeam had everything to itself as I sat motionless watching that glow in the east burning redder; wonderfully quiet, and so wonderfully beautiful because one associates daylight with people, and voices and bustle, and hurrying to and fro, and the dreariness of working to feed our bodies, and feeding our bodies that we may be able to work to feed them again; but here was the world wide awake and yet only for me, all the fresh pure air only for me, all the fragrance breathed only by me, not a living soul hearing the nightingale but me, the sun in a few moments coming up to warm only me…

A lovely garden at just the right time of day — as I know from my own experience of enduring many city summers*, that’s all it sometimes takes to escape into happiness.

*On that note, I’d like to recommend a walk on the High Line in early morning or late afternoon, to anyone living in or traveling to New York City this month…

QUESTION: What does it take for you to escape the dog days of summer into happiness: a trip to Italy, a walk in the garden — or something else?

STAY TUNED for tomorrow’s post, on our new weekly newsletter, The Displaced Dispatch.

If you enjoyed this post, we invite you to subscribe for email delivery of The Displaced Nation. That way, you won’t miss a single issue. SPECIAL OFFER: New subscribers receive a FREE copy of “A Royally Displaced Tea.”

Related posts:

, , , , , , , , , ,

CONTEMPORARY DISPLACED WRITING: David Foster Wallace – A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

4 Comments Posted by on July 29, 2011

A few weeks ago I found myself in Claremont, California. I hadn’t intentionally planned to stop there, it was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I’d been at a wedding in Southern California the day before, and as I made the long drive back home the next day my stomach began to rumble, and there were signs on the highway for Claremont. That name rang a bell with me, but I couldn’t quite recall why. Possibly, being not the world’s greatest driver, I was too busy concentrating on the road, and the suicidal, kamikaze driving of the locals, to really stop and think on why the name Claremont was so familiar to me. My wife told me that it was probably because I’d heard of Ponoma College, a liberal arts university, which is based in downtown Claremont. That certainly sounds familiar. Yep, it must be that, I thought. And being a college town, it seemed like the perfect place to stop for lunch on a Sunday afternoon.

It was only as after lunch as I was getting back into my car – already dreading the thought of getting back onto the highway, staying on it for another 6 hours, and sharing it with mad men – that I realised why the name Claremont and Ponoma College had seemed so familiar. It wasn’t through a synapse suddenly working, finally passing a neuron to that part of my brain that stores all my thoughts on Claremont. No, it was my wife googling Ponoma College on her iPhone. Reading its Wikipedia entry, she said, “Oh, David Foster Wallace was a professor here. You must have known that, surely?”

David Foster Wallace had taught at Ponoma College, and it was in Claremont that he had sadly taken his life in 2008. You probably already know about him, so I won’t waste time repeating things here that you already know. What I will note is what an important writer he has been for me. Foster Wallace was not, as far as I know (or as far as I can remember, and as we have established, it’s not clear if we can really trust my synapses) an expat, which is what this blog focuses on. His writing does, at least to me, convey better than any other writer of his generation a sense of displacement with himself and with his America.

Moving to the U.S. in 2007, Foster Wallace’s essays were something I eagerly reconsumed. I’d read them early, but that was from the position of being a young Englishman in his early 20s who had never been to the U.S. Somehow, it didn’t count as much. Now with an I-551 visa stamped in my passport, Foster Wallace’s essays, along with de Tocqueville were the first books off my shelf as an American resident. Like de Tocqueville, Foster Wallace, though American, gave me an outsider’s perspective on my new homeland.

So this week’s displaced writing is David Foster Wallace’s essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” It was first published in Harpers and has since been republished in book form along with other Foster Wallace essays. It’s the Harpers version that I’m going to link to as it’s still available for free on the web. The essay details an assignment Foster Wallace had, trapped and displaced, on a Carribean cruiseliner and which is the supposedly fun thing he’ll never do again.

Click below to read.

“I have seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled what suntan lotion smells like spread over 21000 pounds of hot flesh. I have been addressed as “Mon” in three different nations. I have watched 500 upscale Americans dance the Electric Slide. I have seen sunsets that looked computer-enhanced and a tropical moon that looked more like a sort of obscenely large and dangling lemon than like the good old stony U.S. moon I’m used to. I have (very briefly) joined a Conga Line.”

STAY TUNED for Monday’s post, when we explore next month’s theme: “An Enchanted August.”

If you enjoyed this post, we invite you to subscribe for email delivery of The Displaced Nation. That way, you won’t miss a single issue. SPECIAL OFFER: New subscribers receive a FREE copy of “A Royally Displaced Tea.”

Related posts:

, , , , ,

THE DISPLACED READS: 7 books with a twist of Alice

1 Comment Posted by on July 8, 2011

As it’s that time of year when (depending on your hemisphere) poolside or fireside books are a must, and since we’re not quite ready to let go of the Alice theme, we at TDN have come up with our own version of a summer (or winter) reading list.

In our usual perverse manner, we haven’t chosen books on the current New York Times bestsellers list, but, quite simply, books with the name “Alice” in the title.

We haven’t read them yet, either, so this list is as much a journey of discovery for us as it is for you.

Let us know what you think!

1. Alice in Verse: The Lost Rhymes of Wonderland by J. T. Holden and Andrew Johnson

Average Amazon rating: 5 stars

Have you ever wondered…
Who really stole the Queen’s tarts? Whatever did become of the Walrus & the Carpenter after their nefarious jot down the briny beach with the little Oysters? Is there truly any sense to be found in nonsense at all? (Amazon product description)

“The rumored ‘lost rhymes’ of Lewis Carroll are the inspiration behind Alice in Verse: The Lost Rhymes of Wonderland, a compilation of masterful poetry. While adding new and interesting elements, Holden has managed to keep the timeless appeal of the original works, allowing true fans to insatiably dig in. From the absurdity of the verse to the well-composed rhyme to the shrewd black-and-white illustrations, this book is certainly a literature lover’s delight.” The Children’s Book Review)

2. The Logic of Alice: Clear Thinking in Wonderland by Bernard M Patten

Average Amazon rating: 4 stars

“Alice in Wonderland may well be the most interpreted book in history, but there are always new depths to be plumbed. Bernard Patten dazzles us with his analysis of key episodes in the book. Like Lewis Carroll, Patten obviously loves logic and uses wit and humor to draw serious lessons about the principles of clear and logical thinking.” —Clare Imholtz, Secretary, Lewis Carroll Society of North America

“As Patten makes clear, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, far from being just an entertaining children’s book, is more complex and deeply reflective of Dodgson’s character than it may seem. By making an effort to understand its deeper layers, both children and adults may profit from this masterful tale by learning to think better and, along the way, having fun.” (Amazon product description)

3. Alice in Wonderland and Philosophy: Curiouser and Curiouser by William Irwin

Average Amazon rating: 4 stars

From the back cover:

  • Should the Cheshire Cat’s grin make us reconsider the nature of reality?
  • Can Humpty Dumpty make words mean whatever he says they mean?
  • Can drugs take us down the rabbit-hole?
  • Is Alice a feminist icon?

This book probes the deeper underlying meaning in the Alice books and reveals a world rich with philosophical life lessons. Tapping into some of the greatest philosophical minds that ever lived—Aristotle, Hume, Hobbes, and Nietzsche—Alice in Wonderland and Philosophy explores life’s ultimate questions through the eyes of perhaps the most endearing heroine in all of literature.

4. Alice I Have Been: A Novel  by Melanie Benjamin

Average Amazon rating: 4 stars

“Benjamin draws on one of the most enduring relationships in children’s literature in her excellent debut, spinning out the heartbreaking story of Alice from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland…Focusing on three eras in Alice’s life, Benjamin offers a finely wrought portrait of Alice that seamlessly blends fact with fiction. This is book club gold.” (Publisher’s Weekly)

5. Alice Bliss: A Novel by Laura Harrington

Average Amazon rating: 5 stars

“When Alice Bliss learns that her father, Matt, is being deployed to Iraq, she’s heartbroken. Alice idolizes her father, loves working beside him in their garden, accompanying him on the occasional roofing job, playing baseball. When he ships out, Alice is faced with finding a way to fill the emptiness he has left behind.” (Amazon product description)

6. What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty

Average Amazon rating: 4.5 stars

“What would happen if you were visited by your younger self, and got a chance for a do-over?
Alice Love is twenty-nine years old, madly in love with her husband, and pregnant with their first child. So imagine her surprise when, after a fall, she comes to on the floor of a gym (a gym! she HATES the gym!) and discovers that she’s actually thirty-nine, has three children, and is in the midst of an acrimonious divorce.
A knock on the head has misplaced ten years of her life, and Alice isn’t sure she likes who she’s become. It turns out, though, that forgetting might be the most memorable thing that has ever happened to Alice.” (Amazon product description)

7. About Alice by Calvin Trillin

Average Amazon rating: 4 stars

Trillin, a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1963, regularly wrote about his family members, particularly his wife Alice, who lost her battle with lung cancer on September 11, 2001. This book, an homage to Alice, was published five years after her death.

“This succinct account of Alice’s upbringing, their meeting, their romance, their family, and her career beyond that of Trillin’s helpmeet, offers glimpses into a multifaceted character.” (Booklist)

“In his writing, she was sometimes his subject and always his muse. The dedication of the first book he published after her death read, ‘I wrote this for Alice. Actually, I wrote everything for Alice.’
In that spirit, Calvin Trillin has, with About Alice, created a gift to the wife he adored and to his readers.” (Amazon product review)

.

STAY TUNED for Monday’s account of the two displaced royals, William and Kate.

If you enjoyed this post, we invite you to subscribe for email delivery of The Displaced Nation. That way, you won’t miss a single issue. SPECIAL OFFER: New subscribers receive a FREE copy of “A Royally Displaced Tea.”

Pot Luck , , ,

Another Friday, another royal wedding of international fame

4 Comments Posted by on July 1, 2011

Who’s the happy Royal couple today?

Ah yes. Kate Moss and Jamie Hince, in a three-day bling-fest entailing two top chefs, six marquees, and performances by Snoop Dogg and Kanye West. I bet the residents of  Little Faringdon are loving that one. There probably haven’t been as many twitching net curtains since Kate entertained a pipedream of opening a London pub in the middle of the peaceful English Cotswolds.

But I’m joking, of course. While Kate Moss’s wedding is taking place today, the real Royal wedding is that of Prince Albert of Monaco and his 20-years-junior, South African fiancée Charlene Wittstock, in a two-day bling-fest entailing super-chef Alain Ducasse, a Royal courtyard, and performances by Jean-Michel Jarre and The Eagles.

Money no object – money the object

With an estimated price tag of $65 million, Prince Albert’s wedding makes William and Catherine’s April nuptials look like five minutes in a Las Vegas chapel. Sadly, this extravagance seems to be the main point of the exercise: an attempt to revive both Monaco’s struggling economy and its reputation of classy glamour, the latter which, to a large extent, died with Princess Grace in 1982.

With Monaco awash in heads of state, fashion designers, and A-list celebrities, who could fail to notice the wealth and pizzazz of this little principality?

Prince Albert himself said:

“Even if it’s not the main purpose [of the wedding], it will be a chance to shine a light on the principality and to contribute to ending stubborn clichés [about Monaco].”

A runaway bride?

Recent rumors, however, seem to be shining lights in other, unwanted directions.

Already the father of two illegitimate children, the Prince must have been perturbed when a new whisper surfaced that a third offspring was toddling out of the woodwork.

Further rumors that, in response to this revelation, Ms. Wittstock tried to back out of the wedding and fly back to South Africa, and claims by Monaco police that her passport was confiscated to stop her doing so, have surely cast a shadow on the proceedings.

Prince Albert (and his lawyers) have vigorously denied the claims – but then, as Mandy Rice-Davies once said, “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?”

You can’t have a Royal wedding where the bride is perceived as being frog-marched down the aisle.

Lambs to the altar

Actually, you can. It used to happen all the time, and not too long ago either, but we like to think we’ve moved on.

We haven’t. Not really. Royal dynasties need heirs. Prince Rainier needed heirs because if there were none, Monaco would revert to France under a 1918 treaty. Grace Kelly duly produced heirs.

Not surprisingly, parallels have been drawn between Grace Kelly and Charlene Wittstock: both tall and blonde, both ‘commoners’, one an American film star, the other a South African Olympic swimmer who bears more than a passing resemblance to Grace Kelly.

Thirty years ago, similar parallels were drawn between Princess Grace and Lady Diana Spencer, before she became Diana, Princess of Wales. Another tall blonde, capable of producing heirs for a royal family; another dazzling wedding to shine a light upon a country in recession.

One can only hope that, despite this week’s rumors, Her Serene Highness, Princess Charlene of Monaco will have a better fate than the other two. If the marriage is less than perfect, let’s hope it hasn’t all been in vain and that the flagging economy in Monaco recovers as a result.

Plan B

If not, perhaps they could approach Kate Moss and offer her a venue in Monte Carlo to open the London pub she was thinking about. That would soon revive the economy.

Whether it would do the same for Monaco’s classy glamour, however, would remain to be seen.

Related posts:

Jerry Seinfeld – the Royal Wedding’s answer to Ricky Gervais

A displaced American writer, awash in a sea of Royal Wedding apathy

A toast to two displaced writers with passionate views of royal passion

Pot Luck , , ,

CLASSIC DISPLACED WRITING: Ian Fleming

7 Comments Posted by on June 24, 2011

As The Displaced Nation has been serializing Sebastian Doggart’s article (part 1 and part 2) about visiting Ian Feming’s Goldeneye estate in Jamaica, it seemed like a good time to take a brief look at Fleming’s writing with a Classic Displaced Writing Post.

Sebastian’s posts have been concerned with Fleming and his love of Jamaica, and while Jamaica and the Caribbean is used numerous times as a backdrop in the Bond novels, through the course of the novels Bond visits dozens of  different countries that Fleming has to conjure up for the reader.

What is clear on reading Fleming is just how important food and drink is to Fleming in order to allow him to describes new and exotic (at least for the vast majority of readers in austerity Britain of that time) locations. I don’t think it’s unfair of me to say that Fleming fetishes food and drink. At times, reading a Bond novel is like reading food porn. While the Bond films now do an expert and cynical job of name dropping as many brands as they can in 2 hours, the Bond novels don’t shy away with the name dropping of food or of alcoholic brand names. The Bond of the novels isn’t solely a Martini drinker. He’s aways one to try anything local that’s on offer. In Jamaica he’ll drink a glass of Red Stripe, in the US he’ll have a Millers Highlife beer. Throughout the novels Fleming uses food and drink to convey an alien culture, demonstrate social status, show Bond’s mood and his sophistication and ease with the world.

For ten minutes Bond stood and gazed out across the sparkling water barrier between Europe and Asia, then he turned back into the room, now bright with sunshine, and telephoned for his breakfast. His English was not understood, but his French at last got through. He turned on a cold bath and shaved patiently with cold water and hoped that the exotic breakfast he had ordered would not be a fiasco.

He was not disappointed. The yoghourt, in a blue china bowl, was a deep yellow and with the consistency of thick cream. The green figs, ready peeled, were bursting with ripeness, and the Turkish coffee was jet black and with the burned taste that showed it had been freshly ground. Bond ate the delicious meal on a table drawn up beside the open-window.

From Russia with Love (1957)

Video of some more examples –

STAY TUNED for Monday’s post, when guest blogger Sezin Koehler riffs off Alice in Wonderland to capture the curious, unreal aspects of her life in Prague.

If you enjoyed this post, we invite you to subscribe for email delivery of The Displaced Nation. That way, you won’t miss a single issue. SPECIAL OFFER: New subscribers receive a FREE copy of “A Royally Displaced Tea.”

Related posts:

, , , , , , , ,

CLASSIC DISPLACED WRITING: Lewis Carroll

9 Comments Posted by on June 3, 2011

Continuing with the Alice theme that has infected the site, here’s the latest edition of Classic Displaced Writing. Also, we’re experimenting and instead of the normal, written article, I’ve done this version as a video. Be sure to tell us what you think of the new format.


QUESTION: Have you ever thought to yourself, during your various experiments with international travel and living, “I must have been mad”?

Note: The film clips are from Alice in Wonderland, a 1903 silent film by Cecil M. Hepworth, starring May Clark in the title role of Alice.

STAY TUNED for Monday’s guest post by Carole Hallett Mobbs on “Alice in Japan.”

If you enjoyed this post, we invite you to subscribe for email delivery of The Displaced Nation. That way, you won’t miss a single issue. SPECIAL OFFER: New subscribers receive a FREE copy of “A Royally Displaced Tea.”

Related posts:

Pot Luck , , ,

CLASSIC EXPAT WRITING: Nabokov — Pnin

Leave a comment Posted by on May 18, 2011

Few characters in literature deal with discombobulation to quite the extent as Vladimir Nabokov’s Timofey Pnin. Pnin, a Russian-born professor at the “somewhat provincial institution” of Waindell College, is a somewhat absent-minded and culturally confused man. Nabokov begins the novel with Pnin catching the wrong train, thus missing an important lecture he was due to give.

Despite such a farcical beginning, Pnin is not a campus farce. Yes, it is deeply comic, but it is also a novel that plays on Nabokov’s own experiences as a Russian émigré marooned in American academia. There is a phrase I like a lot — I like it so much I named my own blog after it. It is the term “culturally discombobulated.” I think this is something that Pnin struggled under the weight of. For all his intelligence, Pnin struggles with English — “If his Russian was music, his English was murder,” writes Nabokov — and who constantly seems out of step with the society he is living in.

The extract I want to highlight this week comes from early in the novel. Pnin has boarded a train for his lecture, but oblivious to him he has boarded the wrong train — a fact he won’t discover for a number of hours. As Pnin sits in the  train, the novel’s narrator allows us a closer look at Pnin’s history and some of his shortcomings.

Pnin, despite his many shortcomings, had about him a disarming old-fashioned charm, which Dr. Hagen, his staunch protector, insisted before morose trustees was a delicate imported article worth paying in domestic cash. Whereas the degree in sociology and political economy that Pnin had obtained with some point at the University of Prague around 1925 had become by mid-century a doctorate in desuetude, he was not altogether miscast as a teacher of Russian. He was beloved not for any essential ability but for those unforgettable digressions of his, when he would remove his glasses to beam at the past while massaging the lenses of the present. Nostalgic excursions in broken English. Autobiographical tidbits. How Pnin came to the Soedinyonnie Shtati (the United States). “Examination on ship before landing. Very well! ‘Nothing to declare?’ ‘Nothing.’ Very well! Then political questions. He asks: ‘Are you anarchist?’ I answer” — time out on the part of the narrator for a spell of cozy mute mirth — “‘First what do you understand under “anarchism”? Anarchism practical, metaphysical, theoretical, mystical, abstractical, individual, social? When I was young,’ I say, ‘all this had for me signification.’ So we had a very interesting discussion, in consequence of which I passed two whole weeks on Ellis Island” — abdomen beginning to heave; heaving; narrator convulsed …

… And he still did not know that he was on the wrong train.

A special danger in Pnin’s case was the English language. Except for such not very helpful odds and ends as “the rest is silence,” “nevermore,” “weekend,” “who’s who,” and a few ordinary words like “eat,” “street,” “fountain pen,” “gangster,” “Charleston,” “marginal utility,” he had no English at all at the time he left France for the States. Stubbornly he sat down to the task of learning the language of Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Poe, Edison, and thirty-one Presidents. In 1941, at the end of one year of study, he was proficient enough to use glibly terms like “wishful thinking” and “okey-dokey.” By 1942 he was able to interrupt his narration with the phrase, “To make a long story short.” By the time Truman entered his second term, Pnin could handle practically any topic, but otherwise progress seemed to have stopped despite his efforts, and by 1950 his English was still full of flaws.

If you enjoyed this post, we invite you to subscribe for email delivery of The Displaced Nation. That way, you won’t miss a single issue. SPECIAL OFFER: New subscribers receive a FREE copy of “A Royally Displaced Tea.”

Related posts:

, , , , ,

Mia Wasikowska — a Third Culture Kid who is no Cinderella

Leave a comment Posted by on May 11, 2011

Neatly coinciding with The Displaced Nation’s recent themes of the Royal Wedding and Gothic Tales, Maureen Dowd in her New York Times article “Who Married Up: The Women or the Men?” compares Cinderella with Kate Middleton and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.

While the comparison with Kate Middleton is oft-cited, Bronte’s tale is less obvious: the story of a society misfit Plain Jane who suffers a series of gothic melodramas before finally claiming her maimed prince – but on her own terms. It’s possible that at some point during her ten-year waiting game in which Prince William apparently called all the shots, Kate Middleton may have sympathized with Jane Eyre’s wistful statement in the latest adaptation of Bronte’s novel:

“I wish a woman could have action in her life, like a man.”

A shooting star who needs no wishes

Mia Wasikowska, who stars in the title role of Cary Fukunaga’s “Jane Eyre,” needs no such wishful thinking. The 21-year-old Australian had her first US TV role at 17, was named the following year as one of  Variety magazine’s Top Ten Actors To Watch, and won the 2010 Hollywood Film Festival Award for Best Breakthrough Actress. Until “Jane Eyre” came along, she was best known for her portrayal of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland.

While it is hard to imagine two female characters more different than Jane Eyre and Alice,  they do share some similarities:  Jane’s feeling of exile, of being shunned by society, is echoed in Burton’s Alice. In an interview with Australian Harper’s Bazaar, Wasikowska spoke of her interpretation of the role:

“Alice has a certain discomfort within herself, within society and among her peers. I feel similarly, or have definitely felt similarly, about all of those things, so I could really understand her not quite fitting in.”

Although Ms. Wasikowska  does not elaborate about her own feelings of displacement — and certainly most young women feel insecure at some time or other —  one can’t help wondering if she is referring to travel experiences in her childhood and teens.

A TCK in Tinseltown

The daughter of an Australian father and Polish-born mother, Wasikowska is a TCK (Third Culture Kid.) She was born and raised in Canberra, Australia, and when she was eight years old the family moved to Szczecin, Poland, for a year, during which time they also traveled in France, Germany and  Russia.  At 17, she was cast in the role of Sophie in HBO’s “In Treatment,” which necessitated a move to Los Angeles.

One could argue that anyone, of any nationality, who is flung into the Hollywood carnival at such a tender age could qualify for the label of TCK.

Ignore the naysayers

The US Department of State defines Third Culture Kids as:

“those who have spent some of their growing up years in a foreign country and experience a sense of not belonging to their passport country when they return to it…they are often considered an oddity [and] what third culture kids want most is to be accepted as the individuals they are.”

A most depressing definition, highlighting the bad and ignoring all the good. It says nothing of the inevitable expansion of horizons that enable a TCK to empathize with other ways of life, to walk in another’s shoes – and if you’re an actor, the ability to walk in another’s shoes is crucial.

It would be nice to think that, despite governmental gloom, TCK experiences played a part in Wasikowska’s professional development and rocketing career.

Home is where reality is

Canberra is still Wasikowska’s home, however, and she lives there with her family between film projects. When asked by PopEater if she was treated like a celebrity at home, she answered:

“I still take the rubbish out and empty the dishwasher. It’s good going back for that reason.”

Well, that’s OK. After all, Kate Middleton said she intended to cook dinner for Prince William when they married.

And I expect even Cinderella swept a few floors in her new castle.

Img: Tomdog/Wikimedia Commons

If you enjoyed this post, we invite you to subscribe for email delivery of The Displaced Nation. That way, you won’t miss a single issue.

Pot Luck , , , , , , , , , , ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →