Swimming in the Pond

I have been meaning to write this entry for a while, but I think I just wasn’t sure where to start, because the idea is so blurry and abstract. But yesterday I started reading Letter from America, a book of broadcasts made by Alistair Cooke, who was the BBC’s American correspondent from 1949 until his death in 2004. He was a Salford boy made good (like half of one of my favorite bands), who after spending time at Yale and Harvard, moved to the States and became a citizen in 1941. He spent most of his life interpreting America for a British audience, writing about so many different aspects of politics, society, and culture, beyond just that of the movers and shakers in Washington.

When I read his scripts, I both marvel at the quality of his writing and his deftness and delicacy in capturing a country that had both obvious things in common with Britain, and yet some drastic differences as well. But it also makes me wonder about his identity, and about my own by extension. He’s an Englishman, but an American citizen, writing about his adopted country for his native one. It’s a really unique position to be in, to both invest oneself in a place like that, and yet to also step back and observe it in that way. Maybe, in a way, it helped him maintain his sense of Britishness, to look at America through that particular lens.

I find that when I am here in Britain, I am at my most American. I know that the cadence of my speech is more song-like, and that I have a decent handle on Edinburgh slang. But when I refer to a group of friends as “y’all”, there’s no mistaking where I’m from. When I’m here, I vocally stand up for baseball as a superior sport to cricket (which for all my Britophilia I consider the most boring sport ever created). I defend the merits of jazz to my friends who consider it boring and pretentious. When I quote the Bible I am sometimes met with unblinking incomprehension, and when I talk casually about how I shot rifles at summer camp when I was twelve, the expressions of horror on my friends’ faces are camera-worthy. None of these things are in my thoughts when I’m in the States, but I’m strangely proud of them when I’m in Scotland.

There are definitely things about me that are more British than American. Introverts, intellectuals, and eccentrics are an accepted part of British culture, and I slot pretty comfortably into all of those categories. My sense of humor is drier than a Saharan summer, something that puts me pretty firmly on this side of the Atlantic. I love books, ideas, rock music, and single-malt Scotch. So where do I belong? If you had asked me that question a year ago today, I would have said I had an American passport but a British heart. But I’m just not sure anymore.

For now, I’ll just keep swimming laps in the Atlantic.

(There’s a strange symmetry here, that as I wrote this I listened to Schubert’s “Ave Maria” being sung by Marian Anderson. The most American of voices singing a European song.)

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