Eddie Watkins's Reviews > The Wanderer

When I was about 10 I spent what felt like an entire summer playing in a marsh with a friend. The marsh was a gradual discovery. Each day, as our courage increased, we penetrated deeper into it, crawling and hopping from tree mound to tree mound, until we had mapped out quite a large area in our imaginations. And of course we were the only two who knew about it. This area of the marsh became our sprawling fort, with significant crossings and islands given names from my primary reading matter of the time, The Book of Lists. So the longest "bridge” (a downed tree) was dubbed Verrazano Narrows, and the crossing that required the longest leap was called Bob Beamon Way. There was also Edison’s Isle, where we found a light bulb; and The Sewer, where we pissed. Every day I dreamed about this place, and every day that I could I returned to it. It was a wonderful time in a secret world.

By the next summer my friend had moved, but that didn’t deter me; I returned to it alone. But just one year had wrought irreversible changes – plants were so overgrown I couldn’t even find my way in, let alone make it back to Edison’s Isle. I was devastated, but being 11 or so I quickly recovered and moved on to other adventures, though in many ways the adventures in that secret marsh were never replicated, never surpassed, so it became a place in my imagination, a fertile place representing the unselfconscious mysteries and adventures of youth.

Many years later I spoke to this friend, now far along in a life fairly antithetical to my own, and I mentioned the marsh, hoping to recapture some of its magic by tapping into his memories, but he had little or no recollection of the place. I was newly devastated, as I had wanted for years to ask him about it, and I felt a hard lump of sadness drop to the bottom of my being, but in some ways this sadness fortified even further the magical significance of the marsh in my imagination.

This book, too, is about a “secret domain” discovered by chance and never found again, and the spell the experience casts on the children involved. But its secret domain was also populated by a beautiful girl (the children being not 10 or 11 but 15 or 16), and so there’s the added tragic element of lost love permeating Le Grand Meaulnes’ life, infecting it with an ideal that can never be realized, making of him a wanderer on this earth.

But what is it about this book that is so affecting, so haunting and magical? The subject matter, sure, is one reason: the end of youth as precipitated by life-long obsession with unattainable beauty and mystery encountered in one’s youth, bringing on the realization that one peaked early, that those early wonders will never be experienced again. This is always a powerful theme, and in one way or another is the emotional substratum of much literature. But why does this book in particular pack such a wallop? I have now read it twice, the first time being many years ago, but I still don’t know exactly. One possibility that struck me this time is the odd hybrid nature of the sensibility expressed in its pages. There’s an enchanted wistfulness, a Romantic sensitivity to very delicate natural mysteries and adolescent relations, but coupled with this is an almost blunt and matter-of-fact rusticity that is somewhat detached. In other words the sensibility is that of a sensitive rustic intellectual; a character type I always find intriguing. And then there’s the writing itself which had every opportunity to launch into floweriness and mystical indulgence, yet didn’t, instead it steered a steady course of basic description, which enhanced even more the aching unresolved mystery of the subject matter.

I love this book and its impact on me was no less than the first time around, and upon finishing it I’m having some difficulty moving on to another novel.