[Summertime is
perfect for travel, whether around
these United States or abroad. So this week
I’ll AmericanStudy travel writing across our history, leading up to a special
Guest Post from one of my favorite travelers and travel writing fans!]
On the promise and perils of returning home after many years away.
As many of this week’s posts have illustrated, the romance of traveling
abroad, and finding ourselves anew (or perhaps finding new selves) there, forms
a common trope in our national narratives across many different time periods
and communities. 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 recent engagement with
them in the film Midnight
in Paris). We tend to engage 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.
Guest Post this
weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other travel writing you’d highlight?
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