Displaced people
Sir: May I correct Ferdinand Mount (Books, 8 December) on the subject of alienation and displaced people? 'Happier to think of everyone around them as being displaced too, if only in a spiritual sense'? On the contrary, it is the rooted quality of the host nation, its settled, sane, unques- tioning air of belonging to the place where they live, as of right, which gives displaced People that feeling of reassurance which they need more than anything, as well as the hope that they, too, might find a home. I came here as a displaced person in 1956, aged 18; and if I had sensed that People here felt as displaced spiritually as I felt both spiritually and physically, I would have been terrified.
I think it is a mistake to link the idea of alienation to the idea of being displaced. Most émigrés are painfully homesick, or savagely nationalistic, or both: this is not so much a matter of alienation as of a frustrated and dammed up sense of belong- ing. And it is not incompatible with want- ing to enjoy all the civic and spiritual privileges of one's new country: as long as a displaced person feels displaced, he wants consciously to belong somewhere. Once this consciousness is gone, one is no longer displaced.
As for alienation, it has never been a question of inventing it, but of diagnosing it. Among those who have done so, are Schopenhauer, Wordsworth, Dostoyevsky and Sartre, and I cannot think of anyone more completely belonging to their nations and societies, both materially and spiritual- ly, than those four men.
John Peter
200 Gray's Inn Road, London WCI
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