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 welclass="underline" 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.
Liberal Education: The Tragic View
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.