UpDate - Vol. 15, No. 24, Page 3
March 14, 1996
Family memories; Professor's 'Americanization' subject of latest book

     When Carl Dawson, professor of English, completed a book on turn-
of-the-century, British autobiographers, Prophets of Past Time, his
creative wheels continued to spin.
     The result was his own memoir, November 1948, which has recently
been incorporated into a longer autobiographical work, Living
Backwards, both published by the University Press of Virginia.
     Living Backwards is an account of his family's odyssey by ship
and transcontinental train when Dawson was 10 years old from
declining, industrial Yorkshire to Los Angeles, then a golden city in
its heyday.
     It was a world of contrasts. Dawson recalls more than 40 years
later his first impression of his new home, "After the darkness and
rain of a Yorkshire autumn, Los Angeles enticed me that first morning
like a new dream, bright and intoxicating."
     Although Dawson adjusted to his new surroundings and became
"Americanized," Los Angeles was not the land of promise his parents
had envisioned. His mother always felt she was in exile, and his
father's promised partnership in his brother's cleaning firm meant
long hours of drudgery.
     Dawson himself desired to return to England to go to the Salt
grammar school in Yorkshire. His mother and sister both had attended
the school and had wonderful memories of their years there.
     At the age of 14, through sheer persistence, Dawson said, he wore
his parents down and undertook the return journey alone, traveling by
Greyhound bus across the country, flying across the Atlantic and
making his way by train and buses to Yorkshire, where he was to live
with his aunt, uncle and cousin.
     It was culture shock all over again. Gray, grimy Salt School was
the antithesis of the modern, bright, clean, well-equipped schools he
attended in Los Angeles. Instead of casual American clothes, Dawson
wore the prescribed school uniform. His world was split into school
life and home life with relatives who did not understand his
aspirations.
     Nevertheless, his experiences in Yorkshire and his year at Salt
School with its devoted teachers were pivotal in his education and in
growing up, Dawson said. But, he missed his family, and, at the end of
the year, he asked to return to California and then deeply regretted
having to leave England.
     Dawson compresses his teenage years upon his return to California
into a few pages in his book, but pays homage to his first car, a
symbol of his coming of age.
     He writes "A car meant freedom. Nothing less. And from time of
paying out the $250, I considered myself an independent person."
     What happened next?
     Dawson has no plans to write a sequel, but continuing his life
story where the book ends, he said by a fortuitous set of events, he
attended Occidental College instead of UCLA.
     "I visited the school, which was a mile from my home, a week
before the semester began. The dean offered me a scholarship and later
bought me my Phi Beta Kappa key. Another professor encouraged me to go
to Columbia to graduate school-I was fortunate to be in a place that
gave me such support and encouragement," he said.
     Woven into his own story are references to events going on in the
world and the culture surrounding him. He also inserts historical
sketches of the village of Saltaire and its founder Titus Salt, who
owned and operated one of the largest woolen mills in England and
built a model town for his workers.
     Interspersed among his boyhood memories, Dawson also writes about
his parents and what happened to them-his mother's final illness and
death from cancer and his father's Alzheimer's disease.
     He writes of them, "At times I think I have accepted a calling
from both my parents who loved any kind of learning and longed
throughout their lives for careers they had been denied. Both hoped to
teach, and mother wanted desperately to write."
     A review in Kirkus calls Dawson "a talented memoirist with an eye
for character and speech." A Chicago Tribune reviewer wrote, "There is
a sort of poetry to memory that Dawson...mirrors in this memoir of his
childhood."
     Dawson, whose field is 19th-century British literature, also has
written His Fine Wit: A Study of Thomas Love Peacock, Matthew Arnold:
The Critical Heritage and Victorian Noon, English Literature in 1850.
Most recently he has written Lafcadio Hearn and the Vision of Japan, a
biography of a nomadic journalist, known for his lurid prose, who
lived in and wrote about Japan at the turn of the century.
     Dawson currently is writing The Two Worlds of Percival Lowell,
about the noted astronomer, who later built his own observatory in
Arizona, and his encounters in the Orient in the late 1800s.
                                                   -Sue Swyers Moncure