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The other night, re-reading (so often these days, it's re-reading!) a book of short stories by Eudora Welty in the preface to the collection I came upon a remark about the "importance of place." This led to a meditation.
What the editor meant, I think, was not only that Welty exemplified the "regional writer," whose own home state of Mississippi was her "beat."
She reveled in the rich detailing of place at every level: The provincial city whose economic extremes are bridged by the creepily duplicitous Mr. Marblehall. The river where a husband and his neighbors dredge for the body of his presumably drowned wife. A deep-worn dirt path trod countless times by an old woman to refill the prescription that keeps her grandchild alive. A cluttered cubicle in a beauty parlor.
Welty fully inhabits each place. She shows us around. Each place is inherent to the characters, the characters to the place; they are all of a piece that is the story.
Place is essential to stories in infinite possible ways. There is, of course, a divide between actual places and fictional places. Fictional stories can incorporate real places or invent fictional ones. Events take place in places, or on travels between. Place can be as wide as outer space, or small as a dollhouse invaded by mice.
Even the space inside someone's head.
Place can amount to a one-word label, a stage set, an atmosphere, an aspiration, a puzzle box, an obstacle course, an active force, a mirror maze, a character in itself.
Stories can go questing cross-country like Don Quixote, or stagnate like Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. Place can bring characters into contact or part them forever.
But no place, no story.
And there's no place like home.
For most of us, home is the very first place. If we're fortunate, the place where we felt safest. Home base. Where fresh impressions first soaked into our young selves, creating nearly eidetic memories that in time may morph into nostalgia.
For others, unfortunately, home was never so simply benevolent or beloved.
A couple of apologies here, or three. One: for not being very widely read. I'm officially antique; my go-to canon is sadly weighted to the trad, dead, and even perhaps objectionable. Two: for this being a little rough around the edges. Apart from procrastination, I ran into novel (pun unintended) formatting problems this afternoon. Three: for poetry. The subject somehow whistled it up.
So, anyway: a scattered smattering of home tropes. In no particular order, filled out with purely personal associations--just a jumping-off point for conversation.
Do you have your own favorite homes in literature? Favorite tropes? Other thoughts?
Just want to talk about something else entirely? Open house!
Nonfiction.
The above isn't the same book that was read to me in my suburban bedroom, age 4. That was IIRC a Little Golden Book, but it looked similar. Swiss chalets, pueblos, tents, igloos, city apartments, more, even rock-cut caves, the engaging illustrations expanded the world.
For adults, in this class are interesting books such as the popular Field Guide to American Architecture by Virginia Savage McAlester and Lee McAlester, 1984. And many more about stately homes, castles, and notable historic houses.
Hometown.
Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood: A Play For Voices, 1954
It is spring, moonless night in a small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestones silent and hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. All the people of the lulled and dumbfounded town are sleeping now. Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmakers, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cocklewoman and the tidy wives. Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams....
Thornton Wilder's play, Our Town, comes to mind. Thomas Wolfe's semi-fictionalized Altamont, N.C., in the grim yet lyrical Look Homeward, Angel. Sinclair Lewis's composite midwestern town of Gopher Prairie in Main Street, and city of Zenith in Babbitt, each almost complete as a sociology text, so solid you could almost move in, and containing their own critique. Willa Cather's Black Hawk, Nebraska, in My Antonia.
Trying to get back home.
Quintessentially, L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz and the classic 1939 film with Judy Garland. Dorothy and Toto are ripped away from home by a natural disaster and all of the adventures are incident to her determined efforts to return there.
Though Thomas Wolfe warned You Can't Go Home Again, sometimes, at least in childhood, you can.
Similarly a book from my paternal grandmother's childhood, Master Skylark, by John Bennett (1896), about a talented youngster in Elizabethan England who is kidnapped by a troupe of traveling actors and forced to sing for his supper, never accepting the situation or giving up on his efforts to return home.
More in a moralizing vein are stories where the young protag leaves home, regrets it, and struggles to return. Toby Tyler, Or Ten Weeks With a Circus, by James Otis [Kaler] (1881) was read to us by installments in third grade, daily after lunch. Toby runs away from an unpleasant foster home and, in what seems like a glamorous adventure, lands a job with a traveling circus; not so much. Gripping, to eight-year-olds. And of course there's Pinocchio!
There and back again.
Literal subtitle of The Hobbit, IMO perhaps the most perfect children's story ever written.
The difference from the previous trope is that the round trip is planned, or at least hoped for. The Lord of the Rings, while more complex and bitter-sweet, follows the same basic trajectory. Who could forget the beautifully realized Hobbiton, and Bag End itself, barely rescued from the greed of Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, and then the totalitarian takeover by a devolved Saruman?
Quite a few travel memoirs fit here too.
Dystopian home.
Winston Smith's dreadful apartment in George Orwell's 1984, where the telescreen is always on, and watching you so you have to be careful about your facial expression.
Thrushcross Grange in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, home to surely the UK's single most dysfunctional family; and that's saying a lot.
The unfriendly home of the Gates family on which the orphan Jane Eyre is wished, no home to her. Thornfield Hall where she is hired as a governess seems reasonably satisfactory as a home pro tem at least, but turns out to be goblin fruit.
For a comic version, the eponymous Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons.
Mobile home.
Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (originally in French, 1869-70).
Captain Nemo was disgusted with humankind and created a submarine that the aid of a small crew, was almost entirely self-sufficient. It was mistaken for some kind of narwhal and became the subject of a scientific expedition, which was captured by Nemo.
At home in nature.
Thoreau's Walden, of course.
A favorite of mine is Henry Beston's The Outermost House. Beston spent a year in effectively, a "tiny house" on the beach at Cape Cod.
Edward Abbey, a season as a park ranger in Desert Solitaire.
None of them were actually alone, of course, but the natural world was their most frequent and closest companion.
Nature at home in the home.
A unique and fascinating read IMO is a 1959 volume called The Living House by George Ordish, a chronicle of wildlife that successively inhabited over literal centuries a cottage called Barton's End, first constructed in the year 1555 in the English village of Ashwell in Kent. He starts with wood borers, moving on other insects, spiders, birds and mammals, following along with the weathering of the house, social and technological developments, renovations, ecological shifts and the personal histories of it human inhabitants. Altogether maybe the most interesting interweaving of social and material culture with nature that I know of.
What is home?
"Death of the Hired Man" by Robert Frost. Certain lines are usually quoted. I won't, because to do that is to falsify, to strip down a complex work of art into a homily.
Please go there, if you are minded.
Building a home.
House, by Tracy Kidder (1985) was a fascinating account of building a home from scratch, with all its considerations, hitches, satisfactions, and bookkeeping. If it seemed a little slow and plodding at times, that accorded with the experience. I'd read it again before undertaking anything of the kind.
Famously, The Little House In the Big Woods (1932) and its sequels about a pioneer family by Laura Ingalls Wilder, much adapted for video. One of many classics that have become controversial a over conces about its treatment of minorities, they were were written as fictionalized autobiography and then edited by the author's daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, an ideological libertarian.
Magical home.
So many! My favorite might be the one in Hayao Miazaki's lovely animated feature, My Neighbor Totoro.
Leaving home.
Every youth in a fairy tale who ever "set out to seek his fortune." Every princess who has to escape from an abusive father (e.g., "Allerleirauh," or "all sorts of fur," one of the Grimms').
One of my favorite comic masterpieces, the story, "Why I live at the P.O.," by Eudora Welty. The narrator, postmistress in the tiny town of China Grove, Mississippi, lives at home with her eccentric, squabbling family, supposedly the "main people" of China Grove, each and every one of them cultivating a grievance. One July 4, hers reaches a head.
So I just decided I'd go straight down to the P.O. Plenty of room at the back, I says to myself.…
And that's the last time I've laid eyes on my family, or my family laid eyes on me for five solid days and nights.…
But oh, I like it here. It's ideal, as I've been saying. You see, I've got everything cater-cornered, the way I like it. Hear the radio? All the war news. Radio, sewing machine, book ends, ironing board, and that great big piano lamp--peace, that's what I like. Butter bean vines planted all along the front, where the strings are.
Of course there's not much mail....
Old home week.
A great example closes Alice Walker's classic, The Color Purple.
Celie, to her surprise, has inherited a house from "Pa," who wasn't her father and was a monstrous abuser at the start. But many turnings, changes, difficulties and heartbreaks and dangers have altered relationships, some beyond recognition.
One July 4, the Celie's extended family including family-of-choice assemble on the porch of Celie's house. Some new acquaintances are made. The elders talk, catch up. Celie:
I feel a little peculiar around the children. For one thing, they grown. And I see they think me and Nettie and Shug and Albert and Samuel and Harpo and Sofia and Odessa real old and don't know much what going on. But I don't think us feel old at all. And us so happy. Matter of fact, I think this the youngest us ever felt.
And finally, because it's me: ;-)
Where the heart is.
Sonnet 109
William Shakespeare
O! never say that I was false of heart,
Though absence seemed my flame to qualify.
As easy might I from myself depart
As from my soul, which in thy breast doth lie:
That is my home of love; if I have ranged,
Like him that travels, I return again,
Just to the time, not with the time exchanged,
So that myself bring water for my stain.
Never believe, though in my nature reigned
All frailties that besiege all kinds of blood,
That it could so preposterously be stained,
To leave for nothing all thy sum of good;
For nothing this wide universe I call,
Save thou, my rose; in it thou art my all.
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