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A visit to an ordinary, distant, pleasant place called the past

Sunday, April 20, 2003

By Roger K. Miller

Novelist L.P. Hartley wrote, "The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there." Samuel Hynes most likely would agree, for in his fetching memoir, he is writing about "a time as remote and different from the present as some foreign country."

	"The Growing Seasons An American Boyhood Before the War" By Samuel Hynes. Viking ($24.95)

Hynes is an emeritus professor of literature at Princeton University and a respected author of literary criticism, although he probably is better known for less academic writings, among them "The Soldier's Tale," a book of soldiers' narratives.

In this volume, his well-turned thoughts turn to his boyhood and adolescence in Minneapolis in the 1930s and early 1940s. Hynes came to Minneapolis when he was 10 after traveling around the country with his brother and father, who was in search of work. His mother had died when he was 5.

His father remarried in 1934, and the family -- now including his stepmother, Nellie, and her son and two daughters -- settled into a Sears and Roebuck kit-built house (the Langston model, $2,964 total).

In Minneapolis they stayed, with one move to a duplex, until World War II scattered the family.

Hynes clearly loves his hardworking father and his peculiarities. About his stepmother his attitude is more distant. "I liked her," he writes. "I liked the way she faced troubles and laughed at them, I liked her rough kindness and her tolerance." But he couldn't call her Mother.

Why the two ever married is a puzzle to the author, the father with his fiercely held, though rarely observed, Presbyterianism, and his wife with her devout Irish Catholicism, a nationality and a faith that his father scorned.

Yet they bumped along, mostly content, until the end of their days.

Perhaps what bound them was that, despite living in the city, they remained frugal people of the country, where they grew up. Hynes is writing of the Depression years of straitened circumstances; yet, he says, "when I call up memories of those days, the life I recover doesn't seem hard or narrow, but generous and free and full of opportunities."

And, although Hynes does not say so, perhaps that tough-it-out attitude, quite typical of his generation, is how they "did things differently" in their "foreign country," and why it can seem foreign to us -- and so appealing. You can almost hear scenes and events clicking into the author's mind as he remembers them -- big things like the bloody Teamsters strike of 1934 and the howling, deadly Armistice Day blizzard in Minnesota of 1940. And, far more, the small, quotidian things that fill all lives.

The summer of his father's marriage Hynes and his brother spent on a farm in Litchfield, helping with the haying, milking and threshing, killing gophers, swimming in the creek and watching agog as a stallion serviced a mare.

But the spur to the most deeply felt memories, the core of this American boyhood, is high school, when it seems as if your friends will be your friends forever, passions can be the very fuel of existence, and "love is slow dancing; slow dancing is love."

His existence is not totally unlike Andy Hardy's or Henry Aldrich's -- that is, if Andy or Henry had ever done things like steal for the thrill of it or explore "the scary mysteries of below-the-waist" with a girl in the back seat of a friend's car.

There is about some of this a quality of "And there's another thing that we did in those days . . .," but nowhere is it annoying, and Hynes has a great gift for making an ordinary life seem worth the telling. It is extremely pleasant to spend time in someone else's past, when it is called up as honestly and meaningfully as this.

Of course, there is life after high school, and too often it involves death and dying. He enrolls in the "U" -- the University of Minnesota -- but cannot stand to watch his friends go off to war one by one.

"I'd go because not to go was impossible." Hynes enlists to train as a Marine Corps pilot, which he has written about in "Flights of Passage," and ends his book and this stage of his life with a sad, tender goodbye to his father and to the woman who had come finally to be his mother and whom, he realizes, he had in some measure come to love.

Roger K. Miller, a newspaperman for many years, is a freelance writer living in Wisconsin.