Final Fridays (21 page)

As for Topic 1: “I've lost my place!” is a lament almost as common among writers as among readers who neglect to use bookmarks. Among the former, the consequences of place-loss by voluntary or involuntary
exile
, for example, have historically been downright splendid for literature, however painful for particular writers as people. From Ovid through Dante to Joyce and Nabokov, and including the expatriate “Lost Generation” of Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, et al., the Literature of Exile is so rich a tradition that it might arguably be well for Place-Lit if
all
writers were obliged to spend a figurative Junior Year Abroad in the course of their apprenticeship, the way Professor Larry Chisholm at Yale used to require his doctoral candidates in American Studies to spend a year or two in Biafra or Zimbabwe, say, for the purpose of acquiring an anthropological detachment from their subject-matter. In my own case, it was when I left my native Chesapeake tidewaterland after graduate school to go teach in central Pennsylvania that the place I'd put behind me became the locale, if not quite the subject, of my first several novels. But of course writers are so different from one another that no generalizations about the benefits of exile will do. Getting out of Ireland worked as well for Frank McCourt (of
Angela's Ashes
fame) as it did for James Joyce; but whether that “Trieste/Zurich/Paris” at the end of Joyce's very Irish
Ulysses
would have been good for Eudora Welty or Flannery O'Connor, for example, is another story.

And as to our real subject—the literary consequences of a place's loss of its distinctive character to the “homogenization of American life”—I call it a non-problem for at least four reasons, while always acknowledging that
anything
might turn out to be a problem for some particular writer:

—First (a point I'll expand upon in my later remarks on “The Place of Place in Fiction”), although many good writers revel and even more or less specialize in the realistic rendition of some particular locale, such rendition is
not
prerequisite to first-rate fiction. Ernest Hemingway declared that “every writer owes it to the place of his birth either to immortalize it or to destroy it”; I would add that he/ she may opt simply to ignore it, and to set her/his fiction in other real places, or in imagined or imaginary places, or nowhere in particular. I'm not
recommending
this, mind; only remarking it.

—Second, the loss of a place's once-distinctive character, whether to cultural homogenization or simply to the passage of time, is what leads to the Literature of Nostalgia: a genre as rich as, and often overlapping, the Literature of Expatriation. Thus Faulkner, for example, whose Mississippi remained central to his imagination even after he himself shifted to exotic Virginia in his latter years, enjoyed contrasting the Old Yoknapatawpha with the New, where automobiles now zip down the streets “with a sound like tearing silk.” All grist for his mill.

—Third, the Homogenization of American Life and consequent attrition of place-identity can itself be a viable literary subject—as can anything, I daresay, in the hands of an appropriately inspired writer.

—And fourth, “homogenization” is always a matter of degree, and can cast what distinctiveness remains into higher relief than formerly. The film-director Jean Renoir observed that “the marvelous thing about [Hollywood] Westerns is that they are all the same movie. That gives a director unlimited freedom.”
¹
“Unlimited” is doubtless an exaggeration, but it's a truism about any genre-art that its practitioners and fans become connoisseurs of small differences within the generic parameters. Against a background of the
perceived homogenization of American life, the same might apply to non-generic art as well—as witness the title of Larry McMurtry's recent essay-collection,
Walter Benjamin at the Tasti-Freeze
. A once-“wild” West that now has the usual constellation of strip developments and franchise businesses is admittedly less different from other places than it used to be; I submit, however, that a Tasti-Freeze in Archer, Texas, with a Larry McMurtry in it reading the late French literary critic and theoretician Walter Benjamin, remains a distinctive place indeed and (Q.E.D. by the book afore-cited) may be a fit subject for fiction, nonfiction, drama, or verse.

 

MIND YOU, I'M not arguing in
favor
of homogenization. But even biological clones are identical only genetically—and our DNA, as we all know, is by no means our whole story.

J
OHN O'HARA ONCE remarked that when he was between plots, all he had to do was take his imagination for a stroll down the streets of his native Pottstown, PA, remembering the families who lived in each house along the way, and soon enough he'd have the makings of his next story. One can scarcely imagine Flannery O'Connor's muse in Ontario instead of Georgia, or William Faulkner's singing sweetly of Down-East Maine. Fiction, whether narrative or dramatic, requires characters, action, theme, and setting, and for a great many writers of it—especially from the 18th century onward, with the ascendancy of the novel and the tradition of literary realism—
setting
becomes not only inseparable from those other components, but a virtual player itself, in numerous instances even a kind of authorial trademark: Thomas Hardy's Wessex, Anne Tyler's Baltimore.

This is so clearly the case that it's worth remembering that the richly “textured” rendition of geographical locale is
not
prerequisite to great literary art. It was enough for Homer to invoke Odysseus's Wine-Dark Sea and Rock-Bound Ithaca without going much beyond those formulaic epithets; we may get some pungent flavors of 14th-century Florence from Dante's
Divine Comedy
or of 16th-century France from Rabelais'
Gargantua and Pantagruel
, but it's not from any Henry Jamesian “composition of place.” And in modern times,
writers like Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Donald Barthelme achieved first-rate literary art that in many instances is all but placeless. Indeed, one does well to bear in mind Borges's memorable objection
²
that to be an “Argentine writer” one need not lay on the tangos and gauchos and pampas and such, any more than the author of the Koran felt obliged to load that sacred text with camels (Borges cites Edward Gibbon's observation that there is no mention of camels in the holy book of Islam, and then speculates that had its author been an Arab nationalist, there would be caravans of camels on every page).

One might go even further and perpend some writerly cautions about the risks of
too much
dependence upon Place, especially upon any one particular place. Larry McMurtry, at an earlier stage of his career than the present, good-humoredly complained that critics had so often called him a “good minor regional novelist” that he'd had (or was going to have, I forget which) a T-shirt made for himself with that damningly qualified praise: a T-shirt that he has most certainly outgrown, if it ever fit him in the first place. And Joyce Carol Oates, speaking in my seminar room at Johns Hopkins to a group of apprentices from all over the map, warned that it can be perhaps all too easy to become the Sweet Singer of Saskatchewan, say, with an audience that may not extend beyond that doubtless songworthy place. The difference between a “good minor regional writer” and a Faulkner or a Joyce (Joyce Oates or Wordsworth or a Frost, for this distinction applies to poets as well as to fictionists) would seem to be the evocation of Place as an end in itself versus its evocation as locus and focus of the writer's other and larger concerns. It no doubt has to do also with the strength, width, and depth of the writer's powers other than “the composition of place.”

It's worth noting too that writers very good indeed at the evocation of Place may not be associated with one particular locale: Of the likes of Hemingway, Steinbeck, Nabokov, Penelope Fitzgerald, Annie Proulx, and Robert Stone, one is tempted to say that they choose, from book to book, the locale that suits the project's theme and action. More likely, I'd bet, the connection is coaxial, the place suggesting the theme as much as vice-versa—as is the case dramatically, so to speak, with Shakespeare's “Italy of the heart” and Denmark of the soul in such plays as
Romeo and Juliet
and
Hamlet
: masterworks of whose settings the author had no firsthand experience at all.

 

THAT SAID, IT remains the case that Place assumes uppercasehood, for better or worse, more with writers like Eudora Welty, García Márquez, Flannery O'Connor, and Robert Frost, whose virtually entire
oeuvre
is inspired by or at least grows out of one general locale, than it does with writers who shift locations from project to project, or with writers like Jane Austen or Honoré de Balzac or Henry James or Marcel Proust, whose evocation of place is more social than geographical. Take Africa away from Hemingway or Italy from Henry James and you've still got a lot of Hemingway and James; take Mississippi away from Faulkner and you've got a Displaced Person.

A good many writers, of course, are somewhere between these polar examples: Their muse may return more or less frequently to some home base (Twain's Mississippi River, John Updike's small-town Pennsylvania), but also enjoy notable excursions from it (Twain's
Connecticut Yankee
and
Innocents Abroad
, Updike's Bech-books, his Brazil and medieval Denmark). It's in this category that I locate myself: Tidewater Maryland, especially the Eastern Shore thereof, has been my muse's boggy home turf for five decades, from
my first published fiction to my latest. But if it is a place
to
which she much enjoys returning, that is at least in part because it is a place
from
which she has enjoyed considerable excursions: My first three books are set there, although Place is all but irrelevant to the second of those (
The End of the Road)
. The next three are set mainly in Allegorica or Mythsville; most but not all of the ones after that return to Tidewaterland.

Why? Not because it's the only place that I know rather well: I housekept for a dozen years in central Pennsylvania, half a dozen in upstate New York, and two dozen in urban Baltimore, with shorter residences in Andalusia, Boston, and Los Angeles; my wife and I have traveled fairly extensively (by my lights, anyhow, though less extensively than my Mrs. wishes), and in recent years we've wintered on the Gulf Coast of Florida. In any case, one needn't necessarily know a place widely or deeply in order to be literarily inspired by it; one need only apprehend some aspect of it sharply and then render that aspect into artful language. How profoundly did Vladimir Nabokov know the American west, into which he made only the occasional lepidop-teral foray? And yet his impressions of it in
Lolita
, however limited, are memorable indeed. On the coin's other side, we note that massive knowledge of a place is no guarantee of its immortal rendition: Nobody did his homework more thoroughly than James Michener as his muse shuttled him from the South Pacific to Hawaii, Korea, Spain, Poland, the Chesapeake, Texas, and even Outer Space—but one may respectfully question the long-term staying power of those knowledgeable and enormously popular place-novels of his.

Myself, I take my inspiration where I find it, and that Where more often than not turns out to be the only geographical place to which I feel genuine, like-it-or-not Connection. That like-it-or-not,
warts-and-all qualification can be important, as with pain-in-the-ass members of one's family: It can safeguard one's commitment from contamination by sentimentality. At its most extreme, one notes that it was Thomas Bernhard's visceral
disgust
with aspects of his native Austria that largely fueled his novelistic imagination. My attachment to the region of my birth, upbringing, and re-residency—after a considerable and useful absence from it—is not an uncritical bond, but it's a warm and strong one. To its choice as the setting for a novel or short story, however, I try to apply the same qualification-test that one ought to apply to one's choice of characters, action, and every other component of the work: What's its relevance to the fiction's
sense
, the project's theme? What's it
for
?

The answers to such questions may not always be clear or pure to the author/asker; even hyper-self-conscious Postmodernists work by hunch and feel and habits of craft that have become second nature to them. But the questions ought always to be asked.

Commencement address delivered in 2002 to the graduating seniors of St. John's College, Santa Fe (an institution noted for its Great Books curriculum), and subsequently published in the Albuquerque, NM,
Tribune
:

 

 

A COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS MUST always commence with a joke, even if the somber-sounding title of that address is “The Tragic View of Liberal Education.” As I happen not to have any appropriate jokes of my own, I'm going to borrow one from Bill Cosby, who gave the commencement address at Goucher College in Baltimore this time last year. It is a joke that, as Cosby warned his audience, contains one naughty word—and then he added, “At least it
used
to be a naughty word.”

It seems that a distinguished physicist and a distinguished philosopher happened to die at the same time, and approaching Heaven's gate they were informed by the Gatekeeper that because of temporary overcrowding, God was admitting only those deserving souls who could ask Him a question that even He couldn't answer; all others would have to wait in Limbo indefinitely. The physicist reflected for a moment and then posed the most intricate, difficult problem in quantum mechanical theory—which God solved on the spot. The
philosopher then put the most elusive question in metaphysical/ontological /epistemological theory—to which God unhesitatingly gave an irrefutable answer. As the two great thinkers shook their heads in awe, an elderly couple humbly approached and whispered in the deity's ear; He scratched His head, then shook it and promptly ushered them into Heaven.