The Many Ways a Sense of Place Defines and Confines
After the recent political season, the search is on for metaphors to explain the election results. Since I’m not a data guy, I will leave that matter to the experts. I will focus on some side information I picked up while trying to avoid real news: a chunk of Trump voters had never “left” their home towns or traveled to any extent. Naturally, given the bubble I inhabit, I thought about the very opposite of this inference: what if you really can’t go home again? Thank goodness writer Thomas Wolfe is close at hand and I am flipping through his famous, archetypal novel titled “You Can’t Go Home Again,” which has been seriously damaged by a half-century of high school literature classes. But that sure beats politics by a long shot.
The critical wags on this fifty-year journey have told us that the quote means, once you leave Backwater or Flyover, America, for the big shining city, you cannot return to Hicksville. Of course, this quote has psychological, mythic and personal implications. Some goddess floats in and out of the discussion. I am feeling better already. Once you are inside a tidy archetype, anything can happen.
Having once been an English teacher in high school and college, I should back away a little from my heavy handed criticism of that special breed of teachers whose only fault is trying too hard to tie everything up in a metaphorical bow. It comes with the territory. And the terrain these dear folks can travel is often very limited. After serving in Tonkin Gulf with the Navy during the Vietnam War, I brought back sea stories aplenty about my time at the helm only to realize that most of my students located Vietnam on the map right next to the Cape of Good Hope, with the Panama Canal a close second. I did give a student extra credit for actually knowing that the canal was really an “Isthmus.” You never know. I can still hear my mother in the mist claiming that she was at sea and all sixes and sevens; her life a bingo call.
For decades I’ve been going back to my childhood home in north London, situated strategically between the Arsenal and Tottenham soccer stadiums. I lived near the former and went to school near the latter. This sports conflict resulted in an agonizing Hobson’s choice that in the current non-scientific lexicon is best presented as an existential itch preserved in the language of The Clash: “Darling you got to let me know, Should I stay or should I go.”
My father said “Go” so my mother, two brothers and I packed up and sneaked out of our London flat in the middle of the night, leaving friends, school, boy scouts, church and playthings behind. I think that the rent was due. We were teenagers and felt betrayed by our parents, but we couldn’t curse because we were Catholic and within range of a whole bunch of fathers. When we arrived at a grubby hamlet outside of Pittsburgh, PA, now surely celebrating its Rust Belt fame, a modest chorus line of neighbors gathered to welcome the short-trousered Limey brothers to town. Years later, I realized that we all must have had a vitamin C deficiency. We obviously had spent too much time at sea and on an Italian liner to boot.
I have returned to England dozens of times since that fatal day for funerals, family gatherings, bike trips and business. On most occasions I met old London friends and on each occasion they seemed to be a little heavier, more conservative and with less interest in the EU. The anti-immigrant rant grew more stringent. Among my friends were tradesmen, teachers and civil servants. Though most of these sessions were fueled with beer, we didn’t get deeply into politics. They knew that I was in media and traveled a lot. There was a group consensus by the mid 1990’s that I was lucky to have escaped the UK.
We learn from the Wolfe novel about the irrational nature of nostalgia, the trip backwards into the womb. Every time I met my British friends a few scales fell from my eyes. I recall visiting the Queens pub in the Crouch End section of north London and meeting a man who said he knew my father twenty-five years earlier. He seemed to have the biographic details right, so I didn’t doubt him. I did fantasize about the man sitting nightly by the door in that pub waiting for the bartender to call out or sing in his rich baritone, “Time Gentleman, Time.”
One of my childhood friends went to Oxford, learned languages, including Italian, and moved to Italy to marry an Italian woman. I told the story of my friend’s productive, loving and cultured life at my son’s wedding. I recounted that my friend was always the smartest guy in the class and a lifetime example for me. He was my hero as I told him on many occasions and one of the reasons I went to college and graduate school. I mentioned at the wedding the transformative power of leaving home and embracing the beauty in another person and culture, as my son was doing with his bride-to-be.
I am a fan and student of Southern literature. I was drawn to Southern authors because of their profound dedication to a sense of place and wicked humor. Eudora Welty, Mississippi born author, wrote solemnly about how place in fiction defines and confines. A writer of fiction has to think about texture, the lay of the land and what meaning is given off by the hard earth. For Welty and other Southern writers, the land, a place and a community, were “ensouled” with history, memory and a kind of consciousness. I suspect that, if we listen closely, we will find these sounds and motifs in life as well as in art.
I spoke at my older brother’s funeral Mass in Green Bay, Wisconsin, a couple of years ago. Soon after we arrived in America our father died and three brothers scooted off to the military. We all lacked a sense of place. I said at my brother’s service that the best thing he ever did was marry his British wife and move to Green Bay. I thanked the community for taking him in, for helping to give his life meaning and purpose. He might have gained some other advantages by moving elsewhere in the states, but I cannot imagine a better place for building character and raising beautiful children. And having the Green Bay Packers nearby didn’t hurt. I was reminded again of how much place matters, how holy and precious it is.
I just saw on Twitter a map of the much misunderstood Rust Belt. I noticed on the map of Western Pennsylvania the location of my college and of the family that took me in at my hour of need. There I stayed among mill workers, laborers, and hunters, and with them watched the town and local industry decline. As a thank-you, I wrote a long poem about the family, the town and the ethic of the place. It was a Christmas gift in lumbering free verse.
