The emotional tug of 'home' is powerful

By Carl Heintze

Home, so the saying goes, is where the heart is. Well, maybe. I was thinking about this the other day while ruminating over the lives of some of our Nobel Prize winners for literature--writers such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and John Steinbeck. And some, like Thomas Wolfe, who weren't prizewinners, but who wrote much about where they came from.

And it occurred to me that most American writers, and maybe all of us, have lifetime, yet tenuous, relationships with home, the place where we grew up.

Of course, some people grow up in not one, but many different places.

Army, Navy, Marine or Air Force "brats" for example, often grow up in a multitude of places as their families move from station to station and base to base.

And sometimes circumstances push us to places far removed from where we are born.

But most of us are born in a place and spend most or all of our growing years there. It sticks with us; it lasts a lifetime.

I've always felt that way about my growing up. It was in Northern California, a place I've always thought of as somewhere close to heaven.

I don't know where you grew up, but I can deduce something of the early years of the authors I have mentioned because they left a record. They began writing about what they knew. In some cases it was about all they wrote about.

Faulkner, for one, never really left where he grew up: a small town in Mississippi. True, he shuttled back and forth to Hollywood to make money writing for the movies, but almost all he wrote was about where he was born. He went back and forward in its history, mythologizing it, and making it into literature.

Hemingway grew up in Michigan, in rural Michigan, at that, and he made some of it the background for his early stories. But in time he grew to hate it for a variety of reasons and found writing inspiration in homes in Florida and Cuba.

In fact, most of what Hemingway wrote about was neither his home or his homeland. Instead it was expatriate. He was mostly an exile from his home and his country.

Something of the same thing applies to John Steinbeck. Steinbeck grew up in and around Salinas, and it and the Monterey Peninsula are the background for most of his work. But he left his home valley when he was young. Part of his adult life was spent in and around Los Gatos. Part of it was spent roaming.

One has the feeling that Steinbeck wanted to go home again, back to a Salinas and a Salinas Valley that no longer existed, but he couldn't.

Mostly this was because the place that he memorialized in his works wouldn't for a long time accept his books. So after he was famous, Steinbeck fled eastward and spent his last years in New England. One gathers he wasn't very happy there and that his writing suffered, perhaps because he had been exiled from home.

I've often wondered what Steinbeck would think about what Salinas and the Monterey Peninsula have done with his memory. His home has been preserved and turned into a museum, The National Steinbeck Center is thriving in downtown Salinas and his name is all over Monterey.

Steinbeck would have liked none of this.

Thomas Wolfe has suffered a similar fate. He's not as famous, in part because he lived a short and intense life, in part because he is now mostly forgotten, but his growing up and subsequent life are similar.

Raised in North Carolina, he moved somewhat unwillingly northward to New York and spent most of the rest of his short life there. His work, really one long chronicle divided into about four novels, is about this process.

He tried unsuccessfully to go back to where he came from. He also thrashed about New York without ever really appearing to understand it, just as he thrashed about life in general.

But he always seems to have had this feeling about where he grew up, that it was enchanted, but irretrievable.

So what can we deduce from this?

Well, I suppose first of all that where we grow up has a powerful influence on us. That's not exactly an earthshaking discovery. Our growing years are our most impressionable. We learn as we grow and we learn from where we grow and with whom we grow up. We're molded by our beginnings.

And thinking of home and growing up often is an exercise in nostalgia. That's partly because nothing in this country ever stays the same very long.

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Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Willow Glen Resident. A collection of his essays may be found at http://www.doitright.com/Carl/essays. He can be reached by email at feodorh@juno.com.

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