Galesburg Nostalgia

ALWAYS THE YOUNG STRANGERS (445 pp.)--Carl Sandburg--Harcourt, Brace ($5).

At 19, Carl Sandburg gave up the idea of committing suicide and decided to become a hobo instead. Young fellows can feel pretty morbid at that age, but the juices of life are running pretty powerfully too. So one day in the summer of 1897, in his home town of Galesburg, Ill., he accepted his mother's kiss and his father's scowl and hit the road.

In Always the Young Strangers, his autobiography, Sandburg, now 75, remembers his departure thus: "I walked out of the house with my hands free, no bag or bundle, wearing a black sateen shirt, coat, vest, and pants, a slouch hat, good shoes and socks, no underwear, in my pockets a small bar of soap, a razor, a comb, a pocket mirror, two handkerchiefs, a piece of string, needles and thread, a Waterbury watch, a knife, a pipe and a sack of tobacco, three dollars and twenty-five cents in cash."

Those simple possessions were the outward badge of failure. His schooling had ended in the eighth grade, and a long succession of boring jobs without a future had made him uneasy. Awkward and bashful, he didn't even have a steady girl to cheer him. He loved his Swedish-immigrant parents, but he wanted something more exciting than his father's life as a railroad laborer, ten hours a day, six days and six dollars a week. Eventually he was to find a life very much to his liking, but at the end of this long book he is back home in Galesburg, his hoboing and the Spanish-American War behind him, and he is still adrift.

Always the Young Strangers is old Poet Sandburg exercising mellow and total recall. He seems to remember every playmate, neighbor and town character of the first 20 years of his life. And he tells about them with an artless lack of point and discrimination that flirts perilously with final boredom. A historian 100 years from now may easily conclude: this is how a Midwestern U.S. town must have looked in the 1880s. But the impression would be only tintype deep, for Author Sandburg has seemingly cared little about looking past the frock coats and working clothes for attitudes and feelings. Moving about from home to school to barbershop, he has recalled a pace of life that the U.S. will surely never know again, and the nostalgia he evokes is sometimes as moving as a Sandburg folk song. What is lacking is the elusive human dimension that James Thurber caught (for Columbus, Ohio) in The Thurber Album.

Always the Young Strangers is always in the American grain; it is almost always short on American imagination.

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