On Nostalgia, Hometown Enthusiasm, Brideshead Revisited
The word nostalgia comes from the Greek nostos, to return home. For the ancient Greeks, Nostos was a whole thematic branch of literature: the hero’s homecoming. The Odyssey is peak nostos. So is The Wizard of Oz. Castaway. Hercules, whose story includes 100% more infanticide than the Disney zero-to-hero narrative will have you believe, experienced a spiritual nostos when he completed the Twelve Labors and became himself again following some Olympus-inflected misdeeds.1 The list goes on; we love a hero returning home.2
Earlier this month I visited my own hometown, San Francisco, for the first time in nearly two years. I think this might have been the longest I’ve ever been away from the city, and the first time back since my parents sold their house and moved away. I have such a strong, gut-level attachment to those 49 square miles, to their foghorns and hills, the smell of damp eucalyptus and the way the slanted silhouettes of the Monterey Cypress trees loom black against the grey. I walked around my favorite neighborhoods with my husband, pointing out landmarks entirely uninteresting to anyone who didn’t grow up exactly as I did. If you ask me for a list of things to do in San Francisco it will be filled with the excellent hardware store on Cole Street and the grocery co-op in the Outer Richmond and the nook in the cliffs above the Great Highway where, if you’re willing to jump a fence, you can drink forties of OE and watch the waves crash. Paxton Gate in the Mission, Green Apple Books on Clement. (You probably actually would like those ones.) Whenever I’m home, and I do still call it that, all I seem to do is take the same walks: looping paths through the avenues of the Outer Richmond and Sunset, the Lands End trail, Ocean Beach. I miss the feeling of being there so much and so often that even when I’m back I have a sense of longing, a memory of and a projection toward the times when I have been and will be away. For the last year, as I’ve been putting my first book to bed3, I’ve been chipping away at a new project. It is set, no surprise given the placement of this sentence, in the city. It’s been fun and challenging, attempting to capture the specific San Francisco of my youth, and also why the more universal pull toward home persists, and also that feeling of wanting to return to something that no longer exists. The other part of nostalgia comes from the Greek root algos, which means pain.
I am a relatively recent resident of a state with some very hardcore hometown enthusiasm. My glib short answer for why my husband and I moved to Maine is that the land feels, to me, like the San Francisco of the East Coast—or rather like my San Francisco, the foggy beach, the coastal bluffs. I’ll tell you who do not like this answer: Mainers. For a place that has self-described as “Vacationland” since 1936, its people have been, historically, pretty notoriously opposed to outsiders. In cities like San Francisco and New York, where home turf pride is strong and there’s a revolving door of newcomers eager to claim the place as their own, there are arguments about what one must get through to do so. When can you say you’re from San Francisco? When are you a New Yorker? Ten years, I’ve heard pretty often. In Maine, the answer is never. In Maine, unless you were born in the state, or your parents were, it doesn’t matter if you’ve braved a dozen winters, or if you’ve been summering at your family’s camp since you were a baby: you will—I will—always be “from away.”
I get it, the protectiveness. By July, just clearing a full year of residency, I already felt a certain way about the “summer people” snaking out of the local bakery in a block-long line and flooding the beach with their French Bulldogs (never mind that I, too, love to travel, that French Bulldogs are adorable). It’s a beautiful, relatively remote state which, for a significant portion of its modern history, relied heavily on now dwindling or defunct industry, and in some places is being rapidly altered by an influx of new people, like me. Likewise, I spent a certain portion of my short trip back to San Francisco pointing out all the ways it has changed and bemoaning the behavior of the “new” people who had changed it. It seems that everyone believes they grew up in the final golden age of their place of birth. Still, in 2022, in this country founded on the theft of land and human beings, it’s hard not to see the cracks4 in this theory of who gets to belong.
I’ve been rereading Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, a book that somehow always feels fitting for the blustery transition from summer to fall, and another nostos tale of sorts. Amid WWII, thirty-nine-year-old Charles Ryder and his battalion come upon an estate: “I had been there before,” Ryder recounts, “I knew all about it.” And so unfurls The Sacred and Profane Memories of Charles Ryder (Brideshead’s delicious subtitle), a halcyon coming-of-age amid the pleasures of Oxford and the English aristocracy, which gives way to sadness and decay. The novel was originally published in 1945 and reissued, with Waugh’s additions and trims, in 1959, and though I’ve read and reread the book over the last decade and change, I think this was the first time I’ve fully taken in Waugh’s weird little mea culpa introduction to the reissue, in which he describes writing Brideshead while on leave from army service following a parachute accident: “It was the bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster—the period of soya beans and Basic English—and in consequence the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendors of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language, which now with a full stomach I find distasteful.”5
The magic and horror that is writing something down: the extricating of thoughts from the passage of time, a pinning for posterity. It’s like that old Dazed and Confused truism: The writer keeps getting older, the writing stays the same age. It wasn’t just Brideshead that soured for Waugh, in retrospect. He spent much of a 1949 interview attempting to convince the poet Harvey Breit that Breit was wrong to have enjoyed a book Waugh had written a mere three years prior. When I recently interviewed the author and critic Darryl Pinckney for V.F., he said, “the struggle for self-acceptance, if you’re a writer, is never over, I think. I mean, you know that.” Writer. Person, maybe. Change, man. It’s tough. In ourselves, in others, in the places we’ve known and loved.
I guess that’s it, and I guess this is all to say that I’ll try to stop calling Maine the San Francisco of the East Coast. It doesn’t make sense unless you’re from there, anyway.
Breathe…
…in…and out. I have a self-soothing mantra that I repeat—sometimes internally, sometimes out loud—when I’m feeling particularly stressed or overwhelmed: everything’s going to be okay. I repeat it on a loop as I walk, a four-step patter (éverything’s góing to-bé okáy). My therapist recently suggested I shift this into the present tense; not that everything is going to be okay, but that everything is. (Because chances are that if you have the mental capacity and wherewithal to invoke a mantra, the statement is at least a relative personal truth.) It’s been a helpful realignment. (“The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be,” Virginia Woolf thought—and wrote down—in 1915.)
Share…
…your sleep aids. I should rename this newsletter Sleepless in South Portland, because it is typically written between the hours of 2 and 5AM. Are you a melatonin person? A meditate-before-bedder? Tellll meeee.
An answer to a Quora question that asks “Why did Hercules kill his friends and family?” reads: “The ancient Greek mythical hero Herakles (Roman Hercules) did not kill his ‘friends’; he only killed his wife and children.” Only!
I like this Daniel Mendelsohn essay on the “ideologically awkward” Avatar, which doesn’t conform to the hero-returns narrative.
Ie. readying it for public consumption; you can preorder The Mythmakers here, a nice present for Future You, as the subway ads say.
From the link: Portland artist and educator Daniel Minter says that perception of Maine’s “whiteness” can also act to erase certain Maine cultures that have been here for centuries…“There are people of color here,” Minter says. “There have always been, there were, I mean, you know the Wabanaki were here forever. And how often do you hear of them being called ‘Mainers,’ you know?”
Of course, it’s the first half of the book—where most of the gluttony, the splendors, the ornamental language resides—that people tend to remember and love; I know more than one person who, in rereading the book or rewatching the adaptation (1981 miniseries, we don’t speak of the 2008 film) simply stops before things start going downhill. When Donna Tartt and company were gallivanting around Bennington cosplaying Waugh characters, they were dressed as Oxonians, not Canadian businessmen or monastery underporters—or young Hooper, for that matter.