"It is a mistake to expect good work from expatriates for it is not what they do that matters but what they are not doing"
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Connolly’s line is a cool slap at the romantic myth of the expatriate: the idea that leaving home automatically sharpens your art, your conscience, your originality. He flips the expectation. The expatriate isn’t valuable for some heroic output produced abroad; the real drama is negative space: what they’ve opted out of. Not the work, but the refusal.
The intent is needling and diagnostic. Connolly is pointing at a familiar literary posture of the early-to-mid 20th century, when writers decamped to Paris or the Riviera and sold exile as a kind of moral hygiene. His subtext is that expatriation can be less a brave exposure to the world than an elegant avoidance of it: dodging parochial pressures, politics, family, class obligations, even the humiliation of being judged by people who know you too well. The expatriate’s main “achievement” may be self-curation, not creation.
The sentence works because it’s built like a moral accounting trick. We’re primed to tally accomplishments; Connolly tallies absences. “Not what they do” carries a faint sneer at productivity talk, while “what they are not doing” implies a guilty ledger: not participating, not risking, not committing, not being answerable. Coming from a British journalist who spent his career amid London’s literary circuits, it’s also a warning shot at cosmopolitan glamour. Exile can widen the lens, sure, but Connolly is interested in the cheaper benefit: distance as insulation. The bite is that the expatriate’s biggest act might be opting out of the very conditions that make “good work” necessary.
The intent is needling and diagnostic. Connolly is pointing at a familiar literary posture of the early-to-mid 20th century, when writers decamped to Paris or the Riviera and sold exile as a kind of moral hygiene. His subtext is that expatriation can be less a brave exposure to the world than an elegant avoidance of it: dodging parochial pressures, politics, family, class obligations, even the humiliation of being judged by people who know you too well. The expatriate’s main “achievement” may be self-curation, not creation.
The sentence works because it’s built like a moral accounting trick. We’re primed to tally accomplishments; Connolly tallies absences. “Not what they do” carries a faint sneer at productivity talk, while “what they are not doing” implies a guilty ledger: not participating, not risking, not committing, not being answerable. Coming from a British journalist who spent his career amid London’s literary circuits, it’s also a warning shot at cosmopolitan glamour. Exile can widen the lens, sure, but Connolly is interested in the cheaper benefit: distance as insulation. The bite is that the expatriate’s biggest act might be opting out of the very conditions that make “good work” necessary.
Quote Details
| Topic | Management |
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