My First European

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 1940s, 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. For us ‘Europe’ was the symphony (all our conductors were foreign-born) and opera. 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. We deplored but were privately intrigued by ‘European snobbishness’, since in Texas and the Midwest where Fd grown up the word class was never mentioned and if pressed we’d all have declared ourselves middle class. 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 1950s, Americans took extraordinary pride in the Marshall Plan. We were convinced we’d not only saved England and France, we also believed we’d single-handedly rebuilt the entire continent. We expected Europeans to be grateful ever after. Most Americans didn’t realize how quickly and triumphantly Europe had emerged out of the war. As late as the 1970s, ignorant friends and relatives of mine would say, ‘I feel sorry for those folks, still living in bombed-out ruins.’ Like some ninety per cent of Americans they didn’t have passports.

My first trip to Europe, for some reason, was to the Costa Brava in the mid-1960s 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. We hadn’t made hotel reservations and in January the town was packed. A nice man who worked behind the desk at one of the hotels that turned us away offered us his mother’s guest-room. It smelled of backed-up sewage and was next door to an outdoor movie theatre where people sat on folding wooden chairs half the night and listened to booming voices; from our window we could look down on the entranced, upraised faces strafed and submerged by alternating lights and shadows. Our luggage took a week to arrive. I made Stanley go with me to a bullfight even though we had to sit in the sun wearing our wool winter-suits. We were too poor to buy new clothes or to afford tickets in the shade.

We visited the Alhambra on a guided tour conducted in English. Two young gay Swiss guys came up to us (they’d taken our tour to improve their English) and told us that they just wanted us to know that they approved of our war in Vietnam. We were appalled and realized for the first time that we were being taken as Americans, as representatives of our national policy, and not just as Stan and Ed.

The luggage arrived on Stan’s next-to-last day. We celebrated by taking a bus over to Torremolinos and going to a gay bar full of effeminate Germans in bits of jewellery and finery they could remove and hide when they walked home through the dark streets. I stayed on another week with Brookie, a pretty girl from my office, who insisted on wearing miniskirts everywhere in Malaga in Franco’s Spain. We had big wolf-packs of young men howling behind us wherever we went.

At night the restaurants were thronged. Twenty-two members of the same family would sit around adjoined tables in a cafe and eat ice cream. ‘Europe’ (at least the bit of it we’d seen) appeared eternal, poor but well-dressed, fiercely macho, Catholic and so little subject to change that all four generations of a family could laugh heartily at the same jokes.