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Chris Bertram
I’ve owned this mug for twenty-five years now. Bought in the gift shop of the Metropolitan Opera in New York on my first ever trip to America, which I doubt I shall ever visit again. The mug, in art nouveau style, celebrates Pucchini’s La Bohème, which we might have seen there. I forget what we saw from the cheap seats, high up. The colours are badly faded after a quarter-century of machine washing, which suggests that its manufacture was cheap, though it has served me well through different places. Sometimes it disappeared for weeks on end into other people’s offices and I had to mark “property of Chris Bertram” in indelible marker on the base. But all sign of that writing has now gone.
Clinton was President then, and the Twin Towers still standing. We went to the top. Terrible things had already happened in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, but we didn’t think they might happen to us too, as now we do.
I was surprised by America, how cheerful people were and large the food portions. It all seemed to work and the buildings went upwards forever. We stood in the street and looked up, up, up. That journey made me see America as human and not just an abstraction of ideas and power. When 9/11 happened I got angry at my British friends who said they got what they deserved. Those were actual people in a place that really existed.
My youngest child got sick there on that trip. Appendicitis. Luckily we had insurance, which paid. We resisted their demand that one parent should fly back with the other child, not knowing if the operation had succeeded, or not. Lenox Hill Hospital was nice once you got past the ER with people shouting about gunshot wounds and others behind transparent screens demanding that you show that insurance. The nurses, mostly black, were friendly and made conversation with us about the NHS.
The mug is not all that remains. I have some amber cuff-links from the New York Public Library gift shop, a tie bought at Macy’s, photos (one with a banner behind us “CAPITALISM MADE FRESH DAILY”),the drawings our children made of the skyline and a cartoon book about the appendicitis. But the mug I see daily.
I’ve been back many times, visited many US cities: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Providence, Boston, Chicago, Madison, Tucson. But nothing quite matches that first glimpse of Manhattan out of a plane window, the immediate raucousness of the airport, the taxi ride from JFK, the first multi-decker sandwich with pastrami, the cacophony of different voices, colours, accents, possibilities. So much gone, and I will not return. But I still drink my morning coffee from that mug.
(Inspired by Jenny Erpenbeck’s “The Pressure Cooker” in her Not a Novel.)
A few weeks ago the historian Perry Anderson published an essay “Regime Change in the West?” in the London Review of Books. Like many of Anderson’s essays this is a wide-ranging splurge full of bon mots and *apercus” delivered from some quasi-Olympian height. My attention was caught, though, by the following couple of sentences which both expressed a widely-held belief, even a cliché, but one which I knew to be false despite the lazy “of course” which Anderson interjects:
Historically too, of course, the US is an immigrant society, as no European country has ever been [emphasis added]. That means there is a tradition of selective welcome and solidarity for newcomers that doesn’t exist at anything like the same emotional pitch in Europe.
The reason I knew this to be false is that, unlike Anderson, I had taken the trouble in my own (non-historical) work on immigration to read the work of France’s foremost historian of the phenomenon, Gérard Noiriel in his now-classic work, Le creuset francais: histoire de l’immigration (XIXe-XXe siècle) (Seuil, 1988). In his opening chapter “The dismissal of memory”, Noiriel addresses both the facts and the myth, pointing out that while in the US immigration is understood as an “internal” part of the constitutive history of the nation, in France it has been treated as something episodic and external. But when you look at the facts, immigration has played as much of a role, and perhaps more, in French society as American.