"We have everywhere an absence of memory. Architects sometimes talk of building with context and continuity in mind, religious leaders call it tradition, social workers say it's a sense of community, but it is memory we have banished from our cities. We have speed and power, but no place. Travel, but no destination. Convenience, but no ease."
—from In the Memory House.
"Visitors to New England usually arrive with a lot of baggage," says Howard Mansfield. "They are weighted down by a lifetime of Norman Rockwell, and Currier and Ives. They want nostalgia and quaintness. In the Memory House is an attempt to see New England plain. I was looking for the contours of historical memory itself.
"Memory is a defining characteristic of New England-this great desire to mark the landscape with historical monuments, to crowd little museums full of small acts of homage, and to tell certain stories."
Each essay in the book is about a moment of commemoration-or the failure to commemorate. At such moments, our aspirations are on full view. When we seek to honor something, we are staking a claim: This is us. In history, unlike heredity, we choose our ancestors.
Mansfield visited many small museums and local historical societies which he calls "memory houses." He examined the changes in Town Meeting and the changes in our local landscape: the loss of the elms, and the bulldozing of an entire neighborhood, Boston's West End. He explored the histories of Franklin Pierce, Thoreau, Johnny Appleseed and Jack Kerouac.
"We have journeyed a long way, once ever so optimistically, and find ourselves far removed from the one-room schoolhouse and the swimming hole, from the horse car and elm-lined Main Street," says Mansfield. "We try nostalgia, elegy, jeremiad. All our efforts at recollection, and somewhere the past itself, are in the memory house."
REVIEWS AND COMMENT:
"Mr. Mansfield gets beneath the patina of the tangible and intangible relics of our
history to locate the emotional core of our past…Through the intensity of his language,
his pace and wit, the predisposed reader can take the leap into collective memory and
even catch, with Mr. Mansfield, that damp, sweet scent of the past….[a] wise and beautiful book."
—The New York Times Book Review.
"Informed by a humane spirit that prizes imagination while respecting fact…a clearheaded, warmhearted book."
—Smithsonian.
"Provocative and elegant."
—Boston Book Review.
"This book is about all of us. Part ethnography, part description, part evocation, part illusion. It's an x-ray that has found the soul."
—Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of The Harmless People.
"Now and then an idea suddenly bursts into flame, as if by spontaneous combustion. One instance is the recent explosion of books about the idea of place...the best of them, the deepest, the widest-ranging, the most provocative is Howard Mansfield's In the Memory House."
—Hungry Mind Review.
"Anyone interested in small town America should read In the Memory House. Howard Mansfield asks profound questions about how and why we make the histories we cherish, and the ones we fear, and he has found stirring examples of the heroic presences who live
among us disguised as our friends and neighbors. This is an unsentimental, consistently interesting book."
—Rosellen Brown, author of Tender Mercies and Before and After.
"That our country has for some years now been losing its democratic soul, its independence, and perhaps its mind has been noticed by various thinkers. None, however, has written about this loss as attentively, wisely and engagingly as Howard Mansfield."
—Guy Davenport, author of The Geography of the Imagination.
From In the Memory House:
A Lost Spring
There was a man I loved to visit. He lived in the house he grew up in-a wonderful, warm, cluttered house that seemed larger inside than out. There were long hallways and rooms, and a barn lined with the things he had collected-antlers and bones, small animal skulls, wood of all sorts. He would carve animals on these or paint scenes of how it used to be. He carved my wife's wedding ring.
I could have listened to him tell me stories for hours. He knew how many turtle eggs it took to make enough mayonnaise to last the summer. In his stories he could remake the land, clear away the woods and bring back the farms he knew in his youth, the trains, the factories making clothespins.
His house is two hundred years old, shaded by a maple tree probably as old-the tree is what you look at first. The house seems to be keeping the tree company. He told me once that it used to get so cold upstairs in his sisters' bedrooms that the nail heads in the wall would frost over. And in summer it would be so hot up there. But they would run down to the swimming hole and come back and slip under the sheets-real cool. The swimming hole was a marvelous place. It was fed by a spring.
Some years back, the state widened the road and built a new bridge. They had to drop a cement slab on that spring. Plugged it right up, he told me. It took quite a load of cement and a bit of engineering, but they stopped the spring and the bridge goes through straight. You wouldn't even notice it.
When I pass his house and that great maple tree, I picture the spring, and the children swimming there in summer twilight.
And when I am away from this corner of New Hampshire, down among the landscape of haste-parking lot and highway, mall and condo—I look into the faces of my countrymen and I think of the plugged spring.