On the promise and perils of returning home after many years away.
The romance of traveling abroad, and finding ourselves anew (or perhaps
finding new selves) there, forms a common trope in our national narratives.
That’s particularly true, I’d say, of our images of artists and authors, as
exemplified by the Roaring ‘20s
expatriates whose European journeys continue to fascinate us (see Woody
Allen’s engagement with them in the
recent Midnight in Paris). We
tend to engae much less frequently, however, with the other side of that coin:
with what it means when such travelers return to their American homes. Literary
and cultural critic Malcolm
Cowley’s Exile’s Return: A Literary
Odyssey of the 1920s (1934) offers a particularly rich and complex
examination of what that experience of return meant for those 20s expatriates,
and more exactly of both the hopes and the fears that those Americans felt as
they made their way back to their home.
Even more telling, and at the same time substantially stranger and more
surprising, are James Fenimore Cooper’s contemporaneous, interconnected, yet dueling
fictional representations of the same experience. In 1826, at the height of his
first literary successes, Cooper took a job as a US consul and moved his family
to France, where he remained, traveling through Europe and continuing to
write, for the next seven years. When he and they returned to America, and to
his childhood and lifelong home of Cooperstown, in 1833, he found the place
after those years away at once familiar and yet changed, nostalgically
comforting and yet threateningly foreign. Some of those shifts were in the community
(Jacksonian
Democracy was in full force, and the nation was indeed changing), while
some were in Cooper himself (in his more mature and elite status, in his
European-influence d perspective, and more). And as he did throughout his
prolific career, Cooper responded to his experiences and the world around him by
writing novels, in this case two that he published in the same year: Homeward Bound;
or, The Chase: A Tale of the Sea (1838) and Home
as Found (1838).
The latter novel was subtitled “Sequel to Homeward Bound,” and indeed the two works feature many of the same
central characters. Yet on the other hand they feel hugely and interestingly
distinct. Partly those are differences in genre and setting: the former is a
seafaring adventure that takes its characters to multiple exotic destinations;
the latter a comedy of manners set entirely in homes and social settings within
New York York and Templeton (Cooper’s fictionalized Cooperstown). But the
differences in tone go beyond those elements, and reflect some of the
disappointment suggested by the phrase as
Found, the gap between the idea of home (toward which the characters
ostensibly move throughout Homeward Bound,
although in reality they adventure around the world) and the reality of what is
encountered when it is reached. That gap is perhaps inevitable for anyone
returning home, especially after years away; but it’s also complex and
troubling, given the importance that our homes hold in our identities and
psyches throughout our lives. In any case, such experiences are likely
universal, and Cooper’s novels, like Cowley’s book, can help us understand and
engage with them in our own lives.
Next home connections tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Responses to these ideas? Other
images and ideas of home in America you’d highlight?
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