“The one thing of value in the world is the active soul.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Fixed even today in my mind, they seem to have always been there. Remote, appearing to reside outside of time, they looked down on me from the wall in the hallway between my bedroom and the kitchen. To the casual observer they were photographs, but to me, a boy growing up in a parochial American town in the early 1950s, they were living, breathing entities ever ready to pass judgment not only on my behavior but my very existence, beings emblematic of cultures so removed from my own that I had no tangible point of reference for them.
A mustached Kurd, his knit brow and tight, firm mouth heavy with suspicion. A veiled Tuareg of the Sahara, eyes ablaze above the blue cloth that suggested a sinister presence behind it. A Chinese monk turning a prayer wheel by a stony path in Inner Mongolia. The Panchen Lama of Tibet, second only to the Dalai Lama in the religious hierarchy, gazing with penetrating insight from his throne. Silent, yet eloquent beyond my parents themselves or anyone part of their world, they spoke to me in a way matched only by the characters in the literature and mythology I was then reading. In a home environment I felt lacked warmth, spontaneity or meaningful live communication, they helped fill the breach. They became my intimate companions.
They also were among the earliest contributors to a certain cultural ambivalence that’s always reflected my outlook, a condition that’s only grown as mass American culture accelerates the breakdown of historically distinct, traditional societies around the globe. I’ve felt at home in countries as diverse as Greece, Germany, Mexico and England. Tellingly, when I hungered for America one day in 1990 while walking down an English rural road, it wasn’t American society that I wanted but the immense spaces of Wyoming. A windswept high plateau with distant mountains. Emptiness. Lots of room.
In a sense I could hardly avoid this ambivalence, since my father was a European with decidedly Continental attitudes. Furthermore, his background belonged to another realm altogether, one of those extraordinary romantic crescendos compared to which less compelling periods and daily lives seem, by default, unbearably pedestrian. Before he married, my father lived a life that is no longer possible, simply because the world he knew has vanished into history. In some ways that is good, in others, regrettable. People like him have long since gone out of fashion. Growing up under his authority, I couldn’t have cared less. I would have gladly done away with the present if only I could have claimed his past. Virtually everything attractive about him seemed to belong to it. It was difficult to reconcile with his current existence as a mundane, irredeemably middle class traveling salesman. There was about him both a larger than life magnificence and a disturbing banality that by turns confounded and infuriated me. I wanted to connect with him, but personality and cultural differences made this next to impossible until I became an adult. Old enough to be my grandfather, from another country and often gone for a week or two at a time with his work, he was a remote rather than an intimate figure. Respect and admiration I had. Love was for a long time much too costly.
Though he arrived in the United States when he was still only twenty-eight, my father never was an American in the sense the fathers of my childhood friends were. To the day he died he remained a patrician Viennese with manners and attitudes to match. A fervent believer in democracy in the political sphere, he was the unquestioned Germanic autocrat at home. The Viennese dictum that children were to be seen and not heard was so ingrained in him as to not even merit conscious thought. His word was fiat, his favorite expression, used whenever some suggested activity met his disapproval, succinct and final.
“It isn’t being done!” he would assert.
More often than not it was being done, but that was entirely beside the point. Like Judge Roy Bean, he was the law west of the Pecos, a psychic jurisdiction under which I fell without a sliver of recourse.
The faces on the wall implied an incomparable reality. Yet this was not the reality he was now living, and I constantly found myself moving in and out of two different worlds. In 1928 he had become an “American,” whatever that was supposed to mean beyond the merely legal definition. The man I grew up regarding with varying degrees of fear, admiration and at times even hatred was the very embodiment of the white, highly conservative middle class. Plump and balding, he dressed impeccably, walked with a marked limp and sounded like the second coming of Viennese actor Erich von Stroheim. He and my mother fit solidly into the type of life sanctioned in the 1950s by such smug organs of majority taste as Time, Newsweek, The Saturday Evening Post and Reader’s Digest. Out on the road selling training in electronics, he would return, offer a perfunctory greeting to my brother and me as he removed his coat and hat and then sit down with my mother to discuss business, a habit that drove me at an early age to resolve never to become a businessman. That he was providing for his family failed to dilute my resentment over his absences, formal aloofness and emphasis on appearances over genuine substance.
But I held a deeper grudge. While he was away I’d spend hours in his study trying to find him—or rather, the person he had been. In this inner sanctum I’d sit and gaze at a photograph of a jaguar momentarily at rest in the crook of a tree somewhere in the Amazon jungle. Over in the corner stood the beautiful, mahogany-colored snakewood bow from Brazil with which he used to hunt the big cats, an awesome weapon with a pull of between eighty and ninety pounds. Due to its extreme hardness, it took one-and-a-half years to fashion a bow from snakewood. The deadly arrows, tipped by razor sharp triangular steel heads, hung in their quiver. Photos of Tibetan women lined the walls.
But the closet held the true key to the vault. There I discovered the enormous scrapbook and stack of photo albums that illuminated the life he had once led, the adventurous one, the one I craved. What amazing sights I found within them! Lavrenti Beria, head of the NKVD, the dreaded secret police under Stalin, with some officials at the Moscow train station. Mexican revolutionaries with crossed bandoliers. A freshly severed Indian head in the Amazon prior to shrinking by the infamous Shuar. Tartars, Uzbeks, Mongols.
And yet, fascinating as these were, they represented just the tip of the iceberg. As I read the yellowed newspaper clippings I began to stitch together a scarcely credible mosaic of activity and accomplishment. Isolated snippets of information leaped out at me: “…an internationally known economist, writer and lecturer educated at the University of Vienna and the Sorbonne…”; “…ex-diplomat, noted big game fisherman, explorer, big game hunter and linguist…”; “…world’s foremost authority on the history and customs of Mongolia…” What? This reserved and courteous man who liked to play bridge and watch I Love Lucy and The Ed Sullivan Show when he wasn’t working? I had to know more about who he had been in order to discover some clue that would explain not only who he was now but also who I was in the process of becoming. I had his example and background on the one hand, and the reality of growing up in a distinctly American culture on the other. Ironically, as I would learn much later, ambivalence toward one’s own culture is also a Viennese characteristic. To what aspects of American culture did I—and did I not—owe my allegiance? Was patriotism all about standing for the national anthem at a baseball game, or was it something other, different, more individual and personal? Was the anthem at a ballgame even relevant? How far did personal choice extend in such matters? What defines being “an American”? Straddling both America and Old Europe, I sometimes felt stretched to the limit.
