The
title has a certain euphonic symmetry, and the cover, featuring a photo
of four young baseball players and a map of New York state on a field
of corn, suggests that this book is about how these unfledged
boys, brothers, get their wings and fly from their provincial
upstate origins. At least one of them, the littlest one, does, and this
book is actually about his early life both in and outside New York
before he became an English professor, the position from which Art
Seamans retired as he finished this memoir.
Although he has published other things in the course of his career,
including a widely used composition text, this is the second book of
memoirs from Seamans in as many years. The first, The Dead One
Touched Me From the Past (Peninsula Press, 2003), is a series of
literary travel essays based on trips to England and the Continent
taken with both students and other companions over a period of
decades. It has qualities reminiscent of Goethe’s Italienische Reise,
especially insofar as the author frequently winds up educating local
people about the literary landmarks in their own hometowns.
In Upstarts in Upstate, Seamans takes us on a tour of the places where he himself grew
up. Whenever a writer looks homeward, an inevitable comparison
is Thomas Wolfe, whose posthumous You Can’t Go Home Again is more
famous for its title than its contents. Or perhaps Proust will
come to mind, the writer searching for lost time from the confines of a
cork-lined study. But neither of these comparisons is helpful
except for contrast to Ustarts in Upstate. For one
thing, Art Seamans doesn’t really have a hometown to return to, and for
another, his recollections are more of a lost era than of Proust-like sensations that bring back memory in vivid detail.
Seamans grew up in the 1930s and 1940s in the shadow of the
Adirondack Mountains and overlooking the Erie Canal. He apparently felt somewhat removed from an
ordinary American boyhood because of his family's religion. His father was
a pastor in the Church of the Nazarene until his death by drowning when
Art was two years old. For a time, Mrs. Seamans took over the
pastoral duties, but she was soon replaced by a new minister, so the
family moved from town to town as Art’s mother remarried and his
step-father, a butcher shop owner, failed several times in head-to-head
competition with the new supermarket chains that began appearing everywhere in the United States at that time.
In this environment of near poverty and rootlessness, the main anchor
for the Seamans family was their church. Much of the extended
family also belonged to this Church of the Nazarene, a holiness,
evangelical offshoot of Methodism whose 1.4 million members are
scattered in isolated pockets around the world. To give an idea
of the comparative size of the Church of the Nazarene, in 2000, there were
roughly 1.7 Muslims and almost 70 Roman Catholics for every Nazarene in
the United States
(http://ext.nazarene.org/rcms/groupnumbersandchange.html). To put
it another way, only one of every 326 people in the US is a Nazarene.
As youngsters, Art and his older brothers, the putative upstarts of
the title, were
quite fond of pranks, and one of the endearing qualities of this book
is the playful recollection of a childhood where boys had license to
roam, take risks, and make their elders scold and laugh at the same
time. In the days before television, video games, cell phones,
and
instant messaging, they kept busy building clubhouses and rafts and
taking unauthorized excursions on the region's small but dangerous
rivers.
While perhaps not mainstream, this rural background is more
representative in the US than young Art at first thinks. Once he
begins reading American literature, Seamans finds kinship with
Huckleberry Finn and learns that the “hayseed quality [is] part of the
American
tradition” (145). Indeed, American literature is rife with
these experiences of discovering representative qualities in one’s own
parochialism; it’s the experience of every ethnic writer in our
literary history. The difference in this book is that while Art Seamans is in the ethnic majority, his inner
reality is one of difference–apartness–that comes more from his religious
heritage than from his rural environs. It’s from this provincial yet representative
background that Seamans sets out to tackle the world by going to
college, serving in the military, and beginning his teaching
career.
While recounting his interesting journey, he makes a number of
surprising observations. The
most notable of these is his assertion that attending a Nazarene
college (Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy, MA) helped in his
liberation from the narrow parochialism of his church background. The
Church of the Nazarene has from its earliest origins supported an
archipelago of colleges to teach its young people liberal arts and
sciences in an environment of faith. It is doubtful that the
purpose of establishing these colleges and universities was to help
Nazarene youths escape the strictures of the church, but Seamans makes
a convincing case for just this result for himself, though the
liberation he's describing is from narrow, inherited thought and not
from the church itself. His professors, some of whom he names,
encouraged him to question the assumptions and preconceptions he
brought to college.
Another surprising assertion is Seamans's claim that "basic training
made [him] into a man" (171). Ordinarily, this assertion is the
oldest cliche and usually means that military service makes a person
tougher, but what Seamans means is that it shows him he can survive in
a world where people are not like him but have different beliefs and
cultural traditions. He discovers that he can thrive in this
plural world on his own, without the props he's had from childhood
right through college.
While Upstarts in Upstate
will be of special interest to people who
grew up in the Church of the Nazarene or other small, evangelical
sects, as well as those who have ever lived in Lowville, Boonville,
Carthage, Mowhawk, or Ilion, it’s also a worthy addition to American
letters, a tradition in which writer after writer copes with the
fact that because of the nation's multifaith heritage, many people
growing up here endure the isolating experience of living in
two worlds: that open world in which one goes to school and work, and
the spiritual world of church and faith, a facet of American life often driven underground. In Upstarts,
this underground life is exhumed, subjected to analysis, and shown to
provide a solid foundation for both strength and tolerance.
