This weekend I finished Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Letters from America, a readable, informative account, occasionally and aberrantly opinionated, of his two years here, mostly in California. About what one would expect of literary journalism: lively description, attention to the American exotic, and edgy overgeneralization. Arriving in 1876, our hundredth anniversary, he passed unfavorably impressed through New York City (dirt, money-grubbing), ignored the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, as well as Washington. D.C.; entrained to the Midwest, he deeply appreciated Niagara Falls—though scorning the tacky souvenir vendors (nothing changes)—arrived in time to lavish praise on Detroit and Chicago for their order and vitality (alas, how things change), then boarded the transcontinental railroad in Omaha for San Francisco, just a few months before George Armstrong Custer made his own much less successful prairie sojourn due north. (This week I also happened to watch again the quite wonderful Little Big Man. The film Custer’s moustache, I note, turns up and out, like the imperial Swedes of Hoffman’s Potop, though its wings spread more widely. I’m beginning to theorize moustaches of power and moustaches of freedom. The former rise and extend, no doubt, well-intendedly in beneficent embrace; the latter drop downward and signal a wing-beat of flight. But I digress.)
Sienkiewicz, a well-bred Pole, found that “American women are unattractive,” the upper-class ones anyway, over-dressed and undercultured; of blacks, he wrote, “All of them look ugly and slovenly”; the Chinese “are a people lacking all elements of idealism,” and one shouldn’t turn one’s back on a frontier Mexican. (27, 11, 14, 177) He dismisses our 19th –century foodways in a huff, “American cuisine is the worst on earth.” (4) But we must remember that he wrote before the invention of the chili dog and iced tea. He was not without generosity, compliment, or insight, and while rapturous of the American Wild, he couldn’t quite recommend the society and civilization with his whole heart. He could, however, recommend to Europe and to Poles the American example of simplicity and directness, political and social equality, and industry and energy. Traits to emulate—though not necessarily grounds to emigrate. “[P]easant emigration,” he warned, “is perilous both to the mother country and the peasant himself,” (280) and later wrote a rather harrowing melodrama in After Bread to counter the steamship company hype about the Promised Land. Peasants, and even the poorer gentry, couldn’t make it to the cheap western lands; the process killed father and daughter in this case, but only after driving them insane first. Better, for most, to stay home.
Some Poles did survive and thrive, and Sienkiewicz duly credited their achievement and cherished their sentimental attachment to Poland. “But what of the second, third, and fourth generations?” he worried. “Sooner or later they will forget. They will change everything, even their names, which English teeth find too difficult to chew….just as Poland disappeared, so will this same, sad fate inevitably befall her children who, today, are scattered throughout the world.” (291) Or maybe not. Poland has reappeared, and I called a realtor this week.
