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| This is the house where I grew up; sketch from a 1920s architectural journal |
During the 1970s, A Separate Peace by John Knowles became
a mainstay of the U.S. high school English curriculum. It is a tale of male
adolescence, namely the complicated relationship between two boys who attend a
New England college preparatory school. All of the action occurs on campus between
the summers of 1942 and 1943.
A
Separate Peace is sad and introspective.
The death of one of the boys creates moral uncertainty against
the backdrop of World War II. That probably explains the book’s continuing
presence in the syllabus, although whether it merits that place is
debatable.
Regardless, its first sentence
always had, for me, a singular resonance.
I
went back to the Devon School not long ago, and found it looking oddly newer
than when I was a student there fifteen years before.
With this opening John
Knowles performs the work of any good writer, which is to say he puts his arm
around the reader and invites her in.
Of course the book isn’t
about the school looking newer than the grown man recalled. It’s about the
experience of revisiting the past.
It reminds me of the late
1980s, returning to the area where I grew up, now with a husband and children.
The boys were a toddler and a
baby. They would spend their childhood, and a bit more, in a place infinitely recognizable
to me. They went to nursery school at the Mt. Vernon Y and children’s hour at
the Mt. Vernon Public Library. Their favorite cookies came from a Mt. Vernon
bakeshop. They ate their first pizza in Mt. Vernon.
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| Mt. Vernon Public Library, 1920s |
Many times I showed them the
house where I grew up and the houses where my friends had lived and the streets
along which we walked everywhere.
They came to watch out for
the gazebo in Hartley Park, which looks like an illustration in a children’s
book, and the turret of the Victorian house where E.B. White kept a mouse when
he was growing up in Mt. Vernon. They saw the sights!
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| Childhood home of author E. B. White, Mt. Vernon, N.Y. |
When the children were young,
every tale I told would elicit enthusiasm. One of their favorites involved driving
home from a friend’s house during the 1977 blackout.
When the lights went out, my friend and I were sitting
on a flat part of the roof of his house, having crawled out a window into the
hot night. It’s actually more of a shock to be outside than inside at the
moment when the lights go out. We made our way back into the house and down the
stairs and I got in the car to drive home.
I followed the familiar
streets, now pitch-black like country roads. Within ten minutes, I pulled up in
front of our house where my father stood on the front lawn, waiting.
It’s a simple story that the
boys found exciting and comforting at the same time. They were transported to a
place where their mother was young and faced something slightly daunting that
worked out happily in the end.
Nearly 40 years later, I
remember a feeling of absolute calm riding through the dark streets.
Sometimes, not always, that’s
what you get for going back.
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| Gazebo in Hartley Park, Mt. Vernon, N.Y. |
https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/09/going-back-to-mount-vernon-ny.html
