FROM THE WINDOWS of my rooms in Brooklyn, there is a view of the Manhattan sky-line. The sky-scrapers, pastel mauve and yellow in colour, rise up sharp as stalagmites against the sky. My windows overlook the harbour, the grey East River, and the Brooklyn Bridge. In the night, there are the lonesome calls of the boats on the river and at sea. This water-front neighbourhood is the place where Thomas Wolfe used to live, and Hart Crane. Often when I am loafing by the window, looking out at the lights and the bright traffic crossing the Bridge, I think of them. And I am homesick in a way that they were often homesick.
It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the roller-coaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or the country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.
All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers. Poe turned inward to discover an eerie and glowing world of his own. Whitman, that noblest of vagabonds, saw life as a broad open road. Henry James abandoned his own adolescent country for England and the airy decadence of nineteenth-century drawing-rooms. Melville sent out his Captain Ahab to self-destruction in the mad sailing for the great white whale. And Wolfe and Crane—they wandered for a lifetime, and I am not sure they knew themselves just what it was they sought.
But these writers, our spokesmen, are dead. And although the harbour and the Bridge instinctively make me think of them, I have these days remembered also a friend of mine from whom I got a card a couple of weeks ago.
My friend is named Lester, and he lives down in North Carolina. Lester is about twenty years old with a gangling body and a pleasant, sunburned face. He has some responsibility, as he is the eldest child in the family and his father is dead. He and his mother have a little store and filling-station on Highway U.S. I. This road runs from New York down through to Miami. It cuts through the long coastal plain that lies between the Appalachian Hills and the Atlantic. There are thousands of stands and filling-stations on this highway.
Lester takes care of the gas-pump and waits behind the counter of the store. This filling-station is out in the country a few miles from the town where I used to live, so sometimes when I was out walking in the woods I would stop in and warm myself by the stove and drink a glass of beer. Coming out of the pine woods and crossing the grey winter fields, it was good to see the lights ahead.
In the afternoon, the store would be cosy and quiet, with the air smelling of sawdust and smoke, and with the sleepy ticking of a clock the only sound in the room. Sometimes Lester would be out hunting and would come in as I was drinking my beer. He would come in from the frosty twilight with his wet-nosed hound, and maybe in his sack there would be a couple of quail for his mother to fry at suppertime. Other days, if the weather were warm, I would watch Lester just sitting on a crate by the gas-pump, a peaceful halo of flies around his head, waiting for some tourist to pass along the road and stop for service.
Lester was a great traveller. He had hitch-hiked a good deal and seen much of the country. But mostly he had travelled in his mind. On the shelf behind the counter of the store there were stacks of old National Geographies and a collection of atlases. When I knew Lester first it was long before the war had started, and the maps were different then. "Paris, France," Lester would say to me. "That's where I mean to go someday. And Russia and India and down in the jungles of Africa—"
It was a passion with Lester—this hunger to know the world. As he talked of the cities of Europe, his grey eyes widened, and there was about them a quality of quiet craziness. Sometimes as we were sitting there, a car would pull up to the gas-pump, and the manner in which Lester treated the customer would depend on several things. If the driver were known to him, someone from those parts, Lester did not put himself to much trouble. But if the licence plate were from some distant place, such as New York or California, he polished the windshield lovingly, and his voice became gentle and slurred.
He had a deft way of extracting information as to the places the tourist had seen in his lifetime. Once a man stopped who had lived in Paris, and Lester made friends with him and got him drunk on white-lightning so that the customer had to stay overnight in the town.
Lester did not often talk about the places he had actually seen, but he knew much of America. A couple of years before he had gone into the C.C.C. and had been sent out to the forests of Oregon. He had passed over the prairies of the Middle West and seen the tawny wheat-fields under the summer sun. He had crossed the Rockies and looked out on the magnificence of the Pacific Ocean.
Then later, after a year in the Oregon camp, he had stayed for a while with an uncle in San Diego. On his way home again, he had hitch-hiked and taken a zigzagged course—through Arizona, Texas, the delta of the Mississippi. He had seen south Georgia in peach time and discovered the lazy grandeur of Charleston. He had come back to North Carolina in time for the tobacco harvest, after having been away from home two years.
But about this odyssey Lester did not talk much. His longing was never for home, or for the places he had seen and known and made a part of himself. He hungered always for the alien, the country far away and unattainable. And in the meantime he was wretched in his own countryside, and waited by the gas-pump thinking always of distant things.
When the war started, Lester did not concern himself as much with the happenings in Europe as I had expected. He was convinced that the war could not last longer than a few months because Hitler would run out of gasoline. Then in the late spring I went away and did not hear from him until his card reached me this autumn. He mentioned the tobacco crop and told me his hound had got mange. At the end he wrote: "Look at what happened to the places I meant to go. There is certainly one thing about this war. It leaves you no place to be homesick for."
A lonely little store and gas-pump down on Highway U.S. I seems far away from the harbour of Manhattan. And Lester, a foot-loose adolescent, does not appear to have very much in common with our poets of the time before the war—with Wolfe and Hart Crane. But their longing, their restlessness, their turning to the unknown is the same.
There are thousands of Lesters, but poets come rarely and are the spiritual syntheses of their time and place. And the world of these poets, and of all of us who lived before this debacle, has been ruthlessly amputated from the world of today. Frontiers, both of the earth and of the spirit, were open to them and have since been closed to us. America is now isolated in a way that we never before could have foreseen.
The Manhattan harbour is quiet this year. Wolfe and Hart Crane no longer wander in these water-front streets—Wolfe maddened by unfocused longing. Hart Crane sick for a nameless place and broken and inflamed by drink. The harbour, yes, is quieter now, and the great ships from abroad do not come to port so often any more. Most of the boats I see from my windows are the small sort that did not go out far from shore. In the late autumn afternoons, a soft fog veils the sky-line of Manhattan. There is a sadness about this scene. And no wonder—a sky-line facing outward toward the Atlantic and the grim convulsions of the world beyond. Not only sad, but somehow hopeless.
So we must turn inward. This singular emotion, the nostalgia that has been so much a part of our national character, must be converted to good use. What our seekers have sought for we must find. And this is a great, a creative task. America is youthful, but it can not always be young. Like an adolescent who must part with his broken family, America feels now the shock of transition. But a new and serene maturity will come if it is worked for. We must make a new declaration of independence, a spiritual rather than a political one this time. No place to be homesick for. We must now be homesick for our own familiar land, this land that is worthy of our nostalgia.
[Vogue, December 1, 1940]