A
Soldier's Son: An American Boyhood During World War II
By John Hodgkins
Reviewed
by
Kenny Brechner
For a small rural town, Temple Maine is the setting of an unusual, but not a surprising number of well regarded literary memoirs. George Dennison’s Temple, Bill Roorbach’s Temple Stream, Bob Kimber’s Living Wild and Domestic, come easily to mind. The abundance of Temple memoirs should be received with the same pleasurable, but unsurprised welcome given to corn stalks found breaking the soil where corn kernels were planted some weeks earlier. The unusual number of writers who have settled in Temple, Maine must be accounted for.
The late 1960's saw a large number of urbanites moving into rural New England, most notably stemming from the Nearing inspired Back to the Land movement, and Temple was the recipient of a fair number of new residents. Temple also saw a smaller, more unique influx of writers from away, as it were. The first Temple writer, Theodore Enslin, following eleven years of sporadic residence, settled permanently in 1961. He was followed by his acquaintances, Mitch Goodman and Denise Levertov. George and Mabel Dennison arrived in the late 1960's, Bob and Rita Kimber in 1971. Later, as the University of Maine at Farmington’s English and Creative Writing program became established, another species of writer became likely to appear in the Temple area.
The latest account of Temple, John Hodgkin’s new book, A Soldier’s Son: An American Boyhood During World War II, just released from Down East books, differs from its predecessors in a few important regards.
It is no surprise that previous memoirs have covered the period from the late 1960's to the present day. We should note that A Soldier’s Son: An American Boyhood During World War II, is not only physically set in an earlier Temple, but that it is written and presented in an older style. It’s author, John Hodgkins, was born in Temple in 1935, and was a civil engineer by trade, now retired. His writing and his research reflect old time academic standards of structure, cohesion, and veracity. This approach is ideally suited to capture the dual worlds of Temple during the Second World War and his Father’s life at the front.
Hodgkin’s account opens with the information that "One day during the summer my father died, he set two cardboard boxes and a locked strongbox down on my kitchen floor. These are yours, he said, and handed me a key." The boxes contained World War II memorabilia of various sorts, including letters, diaries, and all manners of written and photographic incidentals.
The author, intent on telling his father’s war story, along with his own wartime childhood, combined the contents of these boxes with period research and much talk with surviving relatives. When he declares that "A Soldier’s Son is the truth as I know it...what I recall, what I saw, what I heard what I felt in my heart, and what I learned.", he speaks with conviction.
A Soldier’s Son is valuable
on many counts, for its integrity, and for the vivid charm and compelling
humanity of the people whose lives it so successfully preserves. We should
consider too, that it is uniquely important to the tradition of Temple Memoirs
in that it captures a Temple which predates the arrival of literary settlers. In
this sense, A Soldier’s Son establishes the setting which later writers
entered and ultimately transformed through the telling, and the living, of their
own lives.
