The Endgame

Newsletter #62 - Hometown

Toronto, April 14, 2024

Hometown

Hometown. The idea is beautiful. Your hometown belongs to you. You belong to it. It’s where you grew up. It made you what you are. It’s a place you know better than any other. It may be grand and exciting—New York City. Or middle of the road—Kansas City, Missouri. Or tiny and obscure—Liverpool, Nova Scotia. It could be beautiful—Burford, Oxfordshire. Or ugly—Bakersfield, California. Never mind, it’s your hometown. Nothing can take its place. You wrap the place in sentimentality, you see it through gauze. Perhaps you’ll return one day. You’ll take the grandkids. The newspaper will mention the place in your obituary.

But maybe your hometown wasn’t like that. Maybe your hometown was hell. Maybe it offered nothing. Maybe it was nasty and bereft. And in it you felt lonely and misunderstood. You have nothing but bad memories. You fled at the first opportunity. You hate the place and will never return, even for a day. Your whole life has been spent implicitly pushing back against the place you came from. But with horror you realize that the hometown you disavow has helped define you.

Or perhaps you never think about your hometown. It’s as if you were never there. It means nothing to you. It’s just a forgotten piece of autobiography. There’s something missing. A page has been torn out of your book. The tale of your life is incomplete.

Winnipeg is my home town. I got to thinking about it again when I read Orde Morton’s agreeable and eccentric memoir Winnipeg Made Me: Growing Up After World War II. The Mortons were Winnipeg aristocracy (Orde’s father was the esteemed historian W. L. Morton). The Slaytons were not. But, Orde and I, our Winnipeg lives overlapped, although we never met there (Orde is a bit older than me). Our families lived in the same peaceful neighbourhood. We both went to River Heights Junior High School and Kelvin High. We both studied at the University of Manitoba, and we were both Manitoba Rhodes Scholars.

Orde Morton’s book stresses the isolation and remoteness of Winnipeg. Here’s a question: How far is Winnipeg from Montreal? Richard Hannay asks Mr. Memory if he knows in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 movie thriller The 39 Steps. Hannay is testing Mr. Memory’s knowledge of obscure facts and places.

Winnipeg may be remote and obscure, but oddly it is frequently mentioned in movies, TV shows, and books (and is often a movie filming location, although that’s probably mostly about tax credits). For example, in Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America Shepsie Tirchwell, fearing the increase in antisemitism in Newark, New Jersey, flees the United States for Winnipeg (“My brother says Winnipeg's nice. He's an idiot, but that's what he says.”) Hometown boy Guy Madden made an extraordinary feature film called My Winnipeg (2007) that melds "personal history, civic tragedy, and mystical hypothesizing" and met with critical acclaim.

I wasn’t born in Winnipeg. I didn’t arrive until I was ten (my family emigrated from England). I only lived there for eleven years, about a quarter as long as I’ve lived in Toronto. Since I left, almost sixty years ago, I’ve only been back a handful of times, and not recently. But, if you ask me, I’ll tell you that Winnipeg is my hometown. There is no other place that has more visceral attraction for me. “That’s because you haven’t been there for years and aren’t being sensible,” says my wife, who was born in Winnipeg and doesn’t share my enthusiasm for the city.

I can’t say exactly why I feel the way I do. Maybe it’s a mix of Madden-style personal history and mystical hypothesizing. I don’t know, but I do know that I miss that place.

P.S. Here’s something frightening

Fiddling around the other day, with time on my hands, feeling curious, I asked the chatbot Perplexity to write a paragraph “in the style of Philip Slayton.” Here is its instant response:

"As I strolled through the bustling city streets, the cacophony of voices and the relentless hum of traffic seemed to fade into the background. My gaze was drawn instead to the small, fleeting moments that so often go unnoticed - the elderly woman pausing to admire a blooming flower, the young student absorbed in the pages of a well-worn book, the harried commuter pausing to hold the door for a stranger. These quiet vignettes, so easily overlooked in the rush of daily life, are the true heartbeat of the urban landscape. It is in these subtle interactions, these fleeting connections, that we find the essence of the human experience."

You too can be replaced by a machine.