Reading Das Kapital in the sauna

Dr Sam Elworthy was awarded a Fulbright New Zealand Graduate Award in 1991 to complete a PhD in History at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He ended up staying in the US for fifteen years, becoming Editor-In-Chief of Princeton University Press. Sam returned to New Zealand last year to take up the position of Director of Auckland University Press, where he will put his publishing expertise to good use. Sam reflects on his extended stay in the US and the changes in New Zealand during his absence.

Sam Elworthy

In early 1991, I was hanging around our flat in Newtown, Wellington, when a call came down the line from the Rutgers University historian Jackson Lears. Jackson has a deep, resonant voice, full of the rolling rrrs and long vowels of a Virginia native and I’d never heard anything quite like it. It seemed extraordinary that anyone would reach out across time zones and accents all the way to the bottom of the Pacific to haul in a graduate student. New Zealanders are not big on flattery and the country does not have enormous resources. Getting phone calls from America, prospectuses full of faux-gothic architecture, and five years of funding felt to me like winning a lottery that I didn’t even know I had entered.

I was twenty five years old then and I knew what I liked: favourite authors - frequently discussed and seldom read - from Marx to Michael King, bands like the Velvet Underground and the Verlaines, the politics of organic self-sufficiency and anti-Americanism. I had been out of the country only once, to Sydney for a few weeks, but I was pretty sure that nothing in the wider world could surprise me.
Arriving in New Brunswick, New Jersey, to start a history PhD was a surprise. New Brunswick in August was a 40 degree sauna. A panhandler escorted me from the train station, crack dealers warned me off the street, and burnt out buildings were reminders of a riot earlier that summer. I mixed with Germans (marrying one), South Africans, and Canadians. I read The Interpretation of Dreams and Das Kapital until two in the morning, argued through three hour graduate classes about the origins of the American Revolution, went to New York to see Cedar Walton play jazz and Atom Egoyan talk about his movies. We lived in Manhattan and Pasadena and Brooklyn.

The whole experience was exhilarating and disturbing. Graduate students by nature tend to be arrogant, itinerant, and insecure. And as immigrants on temporary visas in a big, anonymous society we were probably more itinerant and insecure (and perhaps more arrogant) than most. We spent a great deal of time moaning about the deficiencies of America compared with the glories of Canadian health care, or German cars, or New Zealand beaches. And we didn’t quite understand the ways of the natives. Why didn’t Americans invite us to dinner parties? What was the deal with dating? Why did even Democrats pay pious homage to God and the flag?

Time passed. We had three boys born in America. I finished my PhD and started working as a publisher at Princeton University Press. We moved to a beautiful little town on the banks of the Delaware River and spent summers twelve hours by car north along the rocky shores of Penobscot Bay, Maine. In part, I was probably recreating what I loved about where I grew up in New Zealand - rivers and beaches, places to escape for walking and camping, knowable, walkable communities. But I also began to appreciate what the United States offered. As a scholarly publisher, I got to enjoy America’s cultivation of the life of the mind in its largest dimensions - traveling from Stanford to Edinburgh to Aaarhus to track down the brightest academics and publish their ideas. In Lambertville, where we lived, I saw the country’s radical acceptance of diversity. Mexican day labourers and Italian engineers, lesbian mothers and observant Jews, surrealist painters and conservative politicians lived together and got to see the world from the other’s point of view. And I fell for the great novels of flawed manhood by Richard Ford and Russell Banks, for the optimistic idealism of Bill Clinton, and for the generosity of American friends.

Fulbright was part of this story. Winning a Fulbright in 1991 was a vote of confidence and an airfare, both of which helped persuade me to try out graduate school in America. But Fulbright was also part of a larger tradition in my head. In Roberto Rabel’s superb honours class on American foreign policy at the University of Otago, we’d learned something about J. William Fulbright and his dissent during Vietnam. We’d also studied Woodrow Wilson’s flawed idealism, Teddy Roosevelt’s rough riders, and Kennedy’s brinkmanship. We’d read Walter la Feber, a Marxist historian from Cornell, and the brilliant analysis of strategy by Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis. Fulbright’s example and Rob Rabel’s class had begun to show me an America that, in politics and scholarship, was not a monolithic evil empire. Living in America for 15 years reinforced that lesson.

I came back to New Zealand a year ago to direct Auckland University Press. It’s a different country than the one I left. Living in Auckland, my boys can learn kapa haka in the morning and sit among Japanese students eating yakitori in the evening. That new diversity, combined with the ease of connections to the rest of the world by aeroplane or internet, has helped dampen what can be a narrow cultural nationalism. I like the fact that New Zealand writers, painters, and film makers are now comfortable producing great works that don’t necessarily appeal to our particular landscape or traditions at all. I like that most of us are willing to appreciate key strands in American life, even if we may not love its political leaders. And I enjoy my work at the Press, developing books of poetry and art, history and science, that can both speak to New Zealanders and to the wider world.