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The Cosmopolitan Mind of Louis Adamic
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On the occasion Of the One Hundredth Anniversary of his Birth @ by Ales Debeljak I knew Louis Adamic
and his literary work from school only vaguely until the very key period of
my life when I myself experienced However,I only began to wonder seriously about Adamic's ethical vision when as a postgraduate student
and an enthusiastic poet,I started to enter the
seductively painstaking word of American English,the
adopted media,to which,along
with the special social imperative for an untroubled life in America,some prestige is also granted by the universal
fact that it has the status of lingua franca.I myself arrived in America when
I was over twenty-five,with already formed poetics
and with the formative period of growing up in Slovenia behind me.That means that I actually came to the "land of a
thousand opportunities" too late to successfully change my artistic
language. Adamic,on
the other hand,was carried across the sea by the
waves of political repression, undoubtedly gifted with the necessary measure
of personal courage,at the tender age of fifteen
after being expelled from a Ljubljana secondary school because of hid
progressive ideas.Consider:a fifteen-year-old boy
aboard an ocean liner carrying masses of emigrants to the New World.Is that not the archetype of the twentieth century,the century of refugees and normads,exiles
and adventures? How many of them were lost and disappeared namelessly in the
whirlpool of brutal competition under the Statue of Liberty? Countless numbers.Louis Adamic,however,did
to get lost.On the contrary,with
his life and creative talent,he showed how it is
possible to turn the thrilling freedom of "starting over" to his advantage.And Adamic definitely
had to start over,because he could not speak
English on his arrival in America.The melody,rhythm,and dictionary of American English
therefore became the air that he breathed:the
adopted language became Adamic's "second
nature," because he wrote all his literary works,critiques,and
documentaries in it.His writing opus,as
we know,is immense and formally diverse,although
not always balanced in quality because there is a considerable stylistic
difference between,for example,his
complex social criticism novel Dynamite(1931) and the
"politically interested" book Dinner at the White House(1946). However,one must be careful here.After thoughtful consideration,we see that it is not possible to easily
reject the assumption that in Adamic's position,one could hardly avoid the often thankless genre
of political journalism.How could Adamic,a convinced advocate of socialist ideas,democratic order,and
national recognition,possibly resist the tempting
opportunity to acquaint Roosevelt with the partisan battle in Yugoslavia
which he ardently supported? This approach of his is fascinating because,in spite of his feverish
writing and perhaps precisely on account of it,Adamic
was in the position of having access to the president of the strongest world
power! Authors,American as
well as emigrant,were numerous in This dimension of Adamic's
exemplarily colorful biography and emigrant experience,which
still has central meaning for the (self-)understanding of America,in
itself eloquently reveals his reputation and high position in a creative career.And it directs us to another important fact just
as infallibly:that Adamic
never renounced his "first nature," the culture of the Old World
and the homeland from which he crossed the sea to follow the myth of the
Promised Land on a --though hardly reflected--historical,economic,and
metaphysical level.Adamic soon sensed the painful
contradiction and difference between the ideal and the reality in all its
direct brutality. Thus he wrote about his two homelands:with the swift strokes of realist portrayal
where the palpable living fabric bursting with ambition to come to light has
the final say.This is where I as a reader first
encountered him,in a dynamic condition and in persuasive,though somewhat time-marked social criticism
in the tradition of the popular literature written by Upton Sinclair and Theodore
Dreiser.It was only later that I came across his
essays in which the critical note is preserved but augmented with the
unmistakable acceleration of intellectual debate about Yugoslavia.In
those somewhat less than five years during which Yugoslavia disintegrated
that I spent on a campus on the east coast of the "land of plenty"
as a postgraduate and gradually as a publishing poet in America,I
inevitably pondered on my own individual and creative identity because of the
experimental weight of the "newcomer" in a new cultural fabric was
particularly inspired by the fact that Adamic was
not a professor or a scientist--we Slovenes already had such people in
America even before Adamic's appearance. Why was it important at all
that I saw Adamic first and foremost as a writer?
Simply because on the international scale,Slovene
poets and novelists indeed have no such prestigious references and names.Adamic's work,however,definitely
represents such a reference,even though the pages
of his numerous books are today yellow with time.In spite of his postwar moral and social engagement,Adamic was,after all,a writer who managed in his stories to reflect the
painful tensions of history in the inevitably deformed mirror of literature.For the very reason that,in
accordance with personal vision,the
view of a literary work of art is inevitably deformed,it
opens access to such a stylized form of experience that reaches beyond the
valued indifference of political economy and beyond malleable statesmanlike rhetoric.It is only the artistic recuperation of reality
as the utmost crystallization of the cultural experience that anticipates the
sober mercy of that special light which "...life
is most enriched by that story which is just to the complexity and multiple
meaning of history,which opens the widest area to
manfs creativity, which with elegance of form achieves a kind of
transcendence and appeals to the better dimension of our essence,"as
American cultural critic Neil Postman puts it.Adamic's
work undoubtedly knows this kind of narrative.Directly
but eloquently,it is evident in the spark which
flew across the Atlantic into the Slovene atmosphere of politically and
culturally charged debate on the national question in the 1930's.In the
summer of 1932,Louis Adamic and his wife Stella
Sanders-Adamic traveled across Slovenia and,of course,across Yugoslavia.With a grant from the prestigious Guggenheim Foundation,after nineteen years of emigrant life in
America where he grew from a fifteen-year-old Grosuplje
boy into a respected American writer,Adamic
returned to his "old place" to write a book of essays on his former
homeland and its literature and politics entitled The Native's Return.Published
two years after the visit.the book was immediately
banned in the kingdom of Yugoslavia. @ Adamic met only fleetingly Josip Vidmar,whose polemically
radical 1932 booklet Kulturni problem slovenstva ("The Cultural Problem of Slovene
Identity") again stimulated the "eternal" debate on the
national question,but Vidmar
too had the impression that their interests did not really match.However,Vidmar and his colleagues at the magazine Ljublianski Zvon
as well as other members of the literary elite of the time socially
befriended the successful Slovene-American writer: Ludvik
Mrzel,Jus and Ferdo Kozak,Fran Albreht,Mile Klopecic,and Oton Zupancic.Socializing with Adamic
in Ljubjana and around Slovenia (including a visit
to Adamic's birthplace in Spodnje
Blato),Zupancic seemed to
be extremely touched.In his essays,Zupancic,who
then enjoyed the reputation of a poet with extraordinary public influence and
spiritual authority, criticized with great affection the dangers of
deeply-rooted Slovene provincialism.Adamic's
personal example played a great role in forming Zupancic's
position,which today it appears is again becoming
relevant since chauvinism as the policy of the Nation,that
is,the policy of the nation as an exclusive
metaphysical idea in whose name all measures are justified,is
again raising its Medusa's head all over the world,especially
in the Balkans and in Central Europe.Adamic's
creative and existentialist tension of life between two worlds which stands
against ethnic fundamentalism is becoming relevant as well.In
this kind of tension,an inspiring cosmopolitan
approach is born that is marked by respect for different traditions without
at the same time forgetting its own genius loci.In a period of migration and
multilingual environments,forces of transnational capital,and the universal circulation of ideas;in a period of plural identities in which national
identification is no longer generally self-evident--less because of political
reasons than in the period between the two World Wars and more because of the
gigantic economic and cultural processes of modern globalization;in
this period which is our current fin-de-millenium,Adamic's vision increasingly
embodies an important source from which it is possible to draw stimulation
for considering "how to be human"--not a Slovene or an American but
a human being.It is possible than this is a
hopelessly humanistic and antiquated approach,as
those provincials of the mind would probably say who care little about the
tension between the individual and universal dimensions of existence and even
less about the conflict between the national and global momentum of the
individual's biography. For me,however,Adamic's approach presents a welcome
opportunity to look for the answers to one of the key dilemmas of modern
times by looking back over my shoulder to past literary reflections of this dilemma.Ultimately,I cannot act in any other way since I
remain bound to Slovene as a poet in spite of the English in the island of
the family home where,after all, I speak the
language in which Adamic lived a full writer's life
with my two children and my American wife. Indeed,the first edition of Ivan Cankar's
Hlapec Jernej
in English that I showed to my wife to begin introducing her to the
achievements of the literary tradition in which I create came from Adamic's generous translator's pen in distant 1926. Adamic's mysteriously unexplained death on his
farm in Milford with its undeniable elements of political murder,his
extensive social activity after the war,and his
evident moral engagement cannot but add a strangely attractive light to his "life
and work." No Slovene literary artist of this century can pass him
without a feeling of impoverishment.Adamic is
firmly anchored in our literary heritage,despite
his use of English.He is one of a kind. @ *This article was appeared on
the quarterly magazine |
*Dear Prof Ales Debeljak
Thank you for your mail! –shozo@2005
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