Writing Exile and Reading Homeward

Branson, Missouri. I guess I always thought there would be a homecoming.

Fifteen years ago, I moved from my home state of Nebraska to Missouri to go to graduate school. Fifteen years later, in Missouri I remain. I probably should not be as surprised by this development as I am. I came to Missouri to complete a master’s and then a PhD, and I was never so naive as to think that an academic career was a ticket back to my sparsely populated home state. Still, in some part of me I always believed that I would find my way back home. I thought my love of that little-loved state and my dedication to its benefit might be enough to help me find a vocation and a foothold back there. Years living away didn’t blunt my homesickness; if anything, my life in exile made my identity as a Nebraskan ever more central to the story I told about myself.

Yet for a variety of the usual tedious reasons, a homecoming has remained elusive. And increasingly it seems likely to remain so. My children have grown up in Missouri and our family has settled into this place. We have friends and a life here and are bound to this place by no shortage of ties. I think Missouri is where we will remain. I think fifteen years is likely to become more, and more.

I have long felt a sense of calling to love and care for my overlooked home state. But I’m bound to admit that providence and my own choices have ordered my steps toward another calling, not of the homecomer but of the exile. I wear my displacement on my sleeve: I have a Nebraska sticker on my truck and poster in my office. My students know that I am a man in exile, and they talk with me about their own anxieties and griefs about going home, leaving home, or feeling without a home place. It seems that I have a vocation to bear this grief and to try to make some good out of it. Henri Nouwen talks about the concept of the “wounded healer,” and I’m tempted to invoke that image here; yet I’m bound to admit that talk of homesickness doesn’t so much heal as aggravate the wound.

My calling seems ordered toward that cry of longing expressed by Samwise Gamgee toward the end of The Lord of the Rings:

“I wish I could go all the way with you to Rivendell, Mr. Frodo, and see Mr. Bilbo,” said Sam. “And yet the only place I really want to be in is here. I am that torn in two.”

“Poor Sam! It will feel like that, I am afraid,” said Frodo. “But you will be healed. You were meant to be solid and whole, and you will be.”

I want to believe that I can be one and whole again, as Frodo promises Sam. I don’t know how it can happen short of the eschaton. It seems my fate to walk together with those who share this grief, for whom a homecoming remains an elusive thing.

As a man, I can live in this grief. I know that I had no right to expect a homecoming, no reason to feel myself entitled to it. I know that exile is the human condition, that our modern world is shot through with alienation, that all our stories will be tinged by tragedy, that we are all wounded members. I know that I can live with this severe mercy and this magnanimous despair, and I know that I am blessed.

As a writer, though, this exile presents more of a problem. Even as I make my home in Missouri, I want to be, and I feel I am, a Nebraskan writer. But how can I sing the songs of Nebraska in the Ozarks?

The writers who mean the most to me are a disparate group, but most share the characteristic of being placed people. Wendell Berry, J.R.R. Tolkien, Sarah Orne Jewett, William Least Heat-Moon, John McPhee, Marilynne Robinson, Leif Enger, R.S. Thomas, Ernest J. Gaines—all writers of a long tenure in one place and a strong identification with a home territory. I share that disposition toward writing that emerges from and cares for a place.

In his essay “Writer and Region,” Berry articulates a need for this sort of writing in American letters. American writers are always “lighting out for the territory” after Huck Finn, always exploring the experience of displacement and indeed inviting it. Berry calls instead for a literature of belonging, examining what it means to stay in place. I want to contribute to such a literature, but it’s not simple to understand how to do so when I myself am a displaced person. I’m mindful that the very writer Berry takes on as emblematic of the displacement of American letters, Mark Twain, came from Missouri.

One strategy to resist becoming part of the literature of displacement would be to embrace the place where I live and strive to become an Ozarks writer. I may pursue such a course someday, but I can’t feel it open to me right now. Writers are made by their childhoods much more than their mature experiences. All my imaginative life has its root and indeed its fulfillment in the little prairie towns of southwest Nebraska, in the cornfields and the brushy creeks. I struggle to imagine how I would write about the Ozarks when its hills and oak-hickory woods still feel so alien to me, still do so little to prompt my imagination or light my heart. Is that a failing in me, an unwillingness to imagine my place, a refusal to love? Maybe. But it feels inescapable. My writerly self turns always toward Nebraska.

So while a homecoming in fact has escaped me, I find myself seeking a homecoming of the imagination. I need a way to go home as a writer. And yet certain difficulties present themselves. First, I am a writer of nonfiction. Novelists and poets can go home again through the exercise of memory, fantasy, and nostalgia. An essayist, especially one hobbled as I am with a weak memory and no habit of journaling, needs something more concrete. Second, and related to the first objection, successful writing about place and nature depends upon close attention to detail. Love of place is found in the degree to which the writer looks closely at it, becomes intimately familiar with it. A true literature of place, by my conviction as influenced by Berry, can scarcely be written in the absence of its subject. To write about a place without the close intimacy of living in it is a presumption at best, and at worst might be an active betrayal of the love and attention the place deserves.

Where does this leave me then? Loving my home country and yet finding myself in exile from it, bound by my convictions to write out of close attention and yet prevented from dedicating that attention to the subject I most long to explore. I would seem to find myself a writer without a subject. And indeed I think that for many years my writing has slowed and even come to a halt because of this basic impasse.

Maybe I can only be a writer of exile. So far, as this essay would seem to demonstrate, that is what I am. Yet I am not only a writer; I am also a reader. If I cannot be a writer of homecoming, could I perhaps effect a homecoming through what I read? And would a program of homecoming reading perhaps help me find a path into the writing I most seek to do?

See, the placed writers who have most influenced me come from a variety of places—from Kentucky and Kansas, England and Wales, Louisiana and New Jersey—but they don’t come from Nebraska. In my early life, as I have written elsewhere, I was an Anglophile and largely shaped by writers from the British isles. I was captivated by the sense of history and literary tradition I found there, as well as by their fantastic worlds and invocations of high-church religion. Later, as I discovered regional literature and localism, I read more American books, yet even there my magpie reading habits didn’t lead me into the path of many writers from my home state.

Nebraska in fact has as distinguished a literary tradition as you could hope for from a scantily populated, Midwestern state. We boast one writer who’s attained absolutely canonical status in Willa Cather; a Pulitzer winner and U.S. Poet Laureate in Ted Kooser, who comes from my home county; and a host of other notable novelists, poets, and essayists. However, that literary tradition has never really felt like my own for a variety of reasons. I read Cather and Kooser, and some others, but I was not shaped by them.

Perhaps, though, I still can be. Maybe my homecoming of the imagination can arrive through my life as a reader. An imaginative immersion in the literature of my home state wasn’t part of my education so far, but it could be still. Accordingly, I have plans to read deeply in literary work that has emerged from my home state, and to write about what I find.

As a first foray in this reader’s homecoming, though, two books presented themselves first to my imagination, books I had already read and which meant much to me. As I reflected upon the literature of homecoming and exile, I realized that Berry’s Jayber Crow and Cather’s My Ántonia share a common orientation around love of place, disappointment, exile, and return. I wondered if reading these two majestic novels of place—one unquestionably not a book of exile, the other tied to my home state—would illuminate my own disappointment and homesickness. Could Berry and Cather together help me become something more than a writer of exile?

I read the two books together over my winter break, devastated as always by the purity and simplicity of Berry’s and Cather’s prose styles. Though Berry and Cather inhabit different geographical regions and different strains of American literature, both draw from a common source in Sarah Orne Jewett’s regionalism. Berry invokes Jewett in “Writer and Region” as one of the only American writers to describe a settled community, while Cather was famously encouraged by Jewett to write about her Nebraska home. Accordingly, both Berry and Cather can be described as regionalist writers seeking to create a distinctly American and localist literary form. Additionally, both writers strive for a clean style that does not owe much to either Victorian classicism or Modernist intertextuality.

Jayber Crow and My Ántonia both center around a male narrator who comes from a rural place. Both narrators leave their home places, although Jayber’s absence is shorter than that of Jim Burden, the narrator of My Ántonia. However, by the end of the books both characters have returned, if only temporarily in Jim’s case. Both characters at times feel ambition that their rural homeplaces constrain, though Jayber seems to check this impulse, becoming the town barber, while Jim follows it to another way of life altogether as a city lawyer on the East coast. And both men spend much of their lives in love with a woman whom they will never marry. Accordingly, the books speak immediately to me of home and exile, ambition and disappointment, love and loss.

As a young Nebraskan, I had a complicated relationship with Cather’s Nebraska books, feeling both pride that such highly regarded works had been written about my homeplace and distaste at what I perceived as their bleak vision, which I experienced as a dismissal of my state. Returning to My Ántonia as an older man, however, I found the book’s air of nostalgia almost overwhelming. Cather invokes her Nebraskan childhood in a sequence of vignettes set in a thinly veiled portrait of her hometown—Red Cloud, Nebraska becomes the fictional Black Hawk. The young Jim Burden socializes with immigrants from Russia and Bohemia and is transformed by an encounter with the prairie:

The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers. Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me. Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots. I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkin, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy.

The book most fully articulates its nostalgic relationship to Nebraska, though, in the character of Ántonia, the Bohemian girl whom Jim loves and loses. As Jim departs Nebraska for an education and a high-powered career in New York, Ántonia stays in west-central Nebraska, working brutally hard in the fields and raising, in time, eleven children. Jim does not return to the state for twenty years, by which time the hardships of pioneer life have taken their toll on Ántonia. She has lost many of her teeth, and Jim describes her as “a stalwart, brown woman, flat-chested, her curly brown hair a little grizzled” though still present “in the full vigour of her personality.” Like the Nebraska landscape of Cather’s day, transformed from ancient prairie to a rough farming landscape, Ántonia had changed from the primal joy of youth to a battered, work-worn middle age. Jim’s pleasure in the place and in the woman is not diminished, though he relates to them only as a guest and a friend, never as a resident or a lover. However, his affection is that of nostalgia and homesickness—the love of the exile. Here are the final words of the novel:

I had the sense of coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man’s experience is. For Ántonia and for me, this had been the road of Destiny; had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can ever be. Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.

Jim, of course, is not the only one who tastes exile. Ántonia, the Bohemian immigrant, must also confront the loss of her home place in her relocation to Nebraska, as do most of the other characters in the novel. For Cather, exile seems to be the human condition, and unstinted nostalgia the only possible response. However, nostalgia is not just sentiment. It is what love looks like when shot through with loss.

Turning to Jayber Crow, I expected different reflections. After all, Cather’s emphasis on exile and nostalgia was colored by her own departure from Nebraska, to spend her adult life, like Jim Burden, in New York City. Berry, who returned home, might not have much comfort to offer me in my self-imposed exile. Yet I found that Berry’s Kentucky, like Cather’s Nebraska, is passing away. Jayber Crow lives to see his hometown of Port William begin the rural decline of twentieth-century America, losing its downtown businesses, losing its school and its young people, the community faltering. The woman he loves, Mattie Chatham, may keep her teeth, but she loses much else: her children, the love of her husband, the beautiful farm her parents had willed her, and her life. Jayber’s reflections are unsparing but hopeful:

It is not a terrible thing to love the world, knowing that the world is always passing and irrecoverable, to be known only in loss. To love anything good, at any cost, is a bargain. It is a terrible thing to love the world, knowing that you are a human and therefore joined by kind to all that hates the world and hurries its passing.

Jayber’s love of Port William and of Mattie is not, finally, a waste. As Jayber says elsewhere, from these experiences of loss he also made one great gain: “I got to have love in my heart.”

One passage in particular from Jayber Crow helped me newly grasp this relationship between love and loss, helped me understand how one can love the loss itself. The first part of the novel underlines Jayber’s integral relationship to loss as he is doubly orphaned—his young parents die while he is still a young child, and then the elderly couple who take him in and love him also die, casting him upon the charity of an orphanage. When, as an adult, Jayber returns to Port William he goes to visit the home where he once lived with his poor, young parents. It has long since fallen down, leaving just a chimney standing in a field of saplings and weeds. Yet Jayber’s reaction is not rage at the loss of something good or even an unqualified grief. Instead he comments: “I love the house that belonged to the chimney, holding it bright in memory, and I love the saplings and the weeds.” Even in the loss of a good home, there is beauty to be found. The home where Jayber lived with his young parents was good, was a true home, and Jayber can love it still in memory. And he can love too the new thing that springs up in its place. These are the words of a man who’s not torn in two, who takes loss into himself as something to be accepted if not cherished.

This sentence from Jayber Crow has become a sort of mantra for me as I navigate my own relationship to home and exile. Like Jim Burden and Cather herself, I love the Nebraska of my youth, “holding it bright in memory.” And I am striving to love too the “saplings and the weeds” of my changed relationship to the place, my exile’s affection. If I am going to evade becoming a writer of exile, I suspect Jayber’s sentence about his lost home needs to dwell at the center of my writing and my being.

My upbringing in Nebraska fills the role of the house that belonged to the chimney, a precious thing, rich in memory, now lost. Though I can and do go home again, Nebraska as a daily presence is lost to me. To hold that lost place “bright in memory,” though, means to adopt a posture of gratitude rather than rage. Like Jim Burden, it is to be thankful for “the precious, the incommunicable past.” Dwelling in my home state may be a thing of the past, and yet that past can still be a gift to me, helping me come “home to myself.” And such a posture of gratitude means too that I can be grateful for the saplings and the weeds—for my present life in Missouri, that has sprung up in the place of the home I cherish in memory. I am no longer a child, and so I can’t proclaim myself “entirely happy” like the young Jim Burden. But I can be grateful that I get to have love in my heart, even love known only in loss. I pay the price for my love of two places in homesickness and longing, and yet I’m bound to admit as well that I’m a recipient of a great bargain.

Here, then, is my homecoming of the imagination: to hold the past bright in memory, and to love also the saplings and the weeds of my exile. I live in hope that such a homecoming can make me a writer whose work springs not just out of the wound of exile, but from the precious memory and the living reality of home.

Image Via: Rawpixel