I belong to the last generation of Americans obsessed with Europe and intimidated by it. When I was a small boy in Ohio in the s, America was simultaneously isolationist and truly isolated. There were no foreign films. There were almost no foreigners. No one drank wine or used garlic or even ate in courses. We were served just one heaping plate of overcooked meat and fried potatoes and boiled beans, then chocolate pudding. Those who drank stuck to whisky and water. Travel to Europe was expensive and few people could afford it.
We listened to the Texaco radio broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera every Saturday afternoon. During the intermissions Europeans with heavy accents and Hungarian or Russian names were asked in a quiz to list all the scenes in opera in which A the tenor falls in love with his aunt, B the heroine is buried alive and C a witch switches two babies at birth.
The jokey knowingness of the foreign participants, the unusual deliberation and circumflexion and secret mirth in their voices, seemed exotic and superior to us. We longed to visit Europe, even live abroad for a whole year. Europe was where we would raise our general level of culture. Europe was where we might at last have experiences, even sexual ones.
The idea that we might be excluded from a club or a party because of our low birth seemed maddening and exciting to us. In the s, Americans took extraordinary pride in the Marshall Plan. We expected Europeans to be grateful ever after. My first trip to Europe, for some reason, was to the Costa Brava in the mids when I was in my twenties.
I guess I thought that sounded affordable and not as scary as Paris or London. My first lover, Stanley Redfern, and I flew to Paris, where our luggage was lost, and then we sprinted on to a waiting plane for Malaga.
