Coincidentally, my three most recent reads (Lady, by Thomas Tryon; The Children of Dynmouth, by William Trevor; and The Mountain Lion, by Jean Stafford) have all featured youthful protagonists, described by three authors who, each in a unique way, attempt to recapture something of the simplicity of that time of life. In the course of this reading, I’ve naturally found myself hearkening back to my own youth and, in the process, trying to understand the feeling of nostalgia that inevitably accompanies such an exercise.
The trope of longing is prominent in Lady, a bildungsroman that traces Woody’s development from boy to man, with the eponymous Lady as his guide and touchstone all along the path to adulthood. As Woody enters adulthood, we feely keenly his internal stress at forging new life, with a wife and children, as he also quietly mourns the loss of what is past, and of those who inhabited that lost world. Lady is not only a real character, Woody’s ‘boom companion,’ but, in the symbolic capacity indicated by her capitalized and anonymous appellation, a figure for the knowledge that complicates our relationship with the world as we grow to maturity, inevitably causing us to view our earlier years as somehow more pristine and desirable.
Knowledge may sully the apparent perfection of our earliest ideals, in the same way that Woody’s growing awareness of Lady’s past troubles him. But, Tryon seems to be saying, greater knowledge should not lead to cynicism about the past; nostalgia is a legitimate sensation rather than a sign of vapid sentimentality, a window into a privileged condition that cannot be contaminated by subsequent events, but to which we cannot return.
Wisely aware of this Keatsian dilemma, Lady gives Woody a book, A Shropshire Lad, and points him to the fortieth poem in Housman’s volume. The older, nostalgic Woody, the writer, can finally appreciate the land, the past, as things of ‘lost content’ rather than ‘discontent.’
‘Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.’Together we looked down along the valley, our eyes tracing the ‘happy highways’ where each of us, of different
generations, had grown up, the valley which was the land, not of my lost content, for I was too young to know that
then, but what seemed like the land of my discontent, and I was more eager than ever to leave it ….[Lady, Dell paperback edition, p. 271]
William Trevor’s odd, slight novel, The Children of Dynmouth, provides an antidote for nostalgia. The bizarre antics of Timothy Gedge remind the reader of the awkwardness of adolescence; Gedge, adrift in a lonely life not of his own design, is yet too young for the adulthood with which he tries to connect but, sensing a future of seemingly inevitable bleakness, mocks himself and the grownups around him by constantly creating some parodic version of an adult self.
And, in The Mountain Lion, we encounter Ralph and Molly, two children who follow divergent paths into young adulthood: Ralph, by moving to live with his uncle in Colorado, escapes the stultifying life in Covina, CA, a “fat” life of disingenuous superficiality, to live with his Uncle Claude and sample a freer, wilder existence. In the process he gains skills that reinforce his sense of himself as a man. For Molly, the move to Colorado, while preferable to remaining in Covina, brings with it fears and neuroses that threaten her sanity. Perhaps foremost among Molly’s anxieties is a developing fear of sexuality, brought to the fore by a random remark from Ralph, which clouds and complicates their relationship. Not since Quention Compson’s relationship with his sister Caddie in The Sound and the Fury has there been a brother-sister dynamic in literature so fraught with guilt, fear, and complex emotions.
Ultimately, it seems as though Molly and Ralph leapfrog into adulthood. For Molly in particular, the post-Edenic vision comes quickly and harshly. There is no place for nostalgia in Stafford’s world.