Dislocations

Stephen Fender

• Landscape and Written Expression in Revolutionary America: The world turned upside down by Robert Lawson-Peebles
  Cambridge, 384 pp, £35.00, March 1988, ISBN 0 521 34647 9
• Mark Twain’s Letters. Vol. I: 1853-1866 edited by Edgar Marquess Branch, Michael Frank and Kenneth Sanderson
  University of California Press, 616 pp, $35.00, May 1988, ISBN 0 520 03668 9
• A Writer’s America: Landscape in Literature by Alfred Kazin
  Thames and Hudson, 240 pp, £15.95, September 1988, ISBN 0 500 01424 8

What constitutes an American writer’s landscape? In Great Britain it’s common to refer to ‘Brontë country’ or ‘Hardy country’. The Lake District belongs to Wordsworth more than to any landowner. But ‘Hemingway country’? He lived in at least thirty parts of the United States, not to mention Cuba, Paris and the Riviera. Stephen Crane’s birthplace is now a children’s playground in New Jersey, William Faulkner’s a Presbyterian parsonage. The Oxford Illustrated Literary Guide to the United States, from which these titbits come, provides further unwitting refutations of its own project, which is to fix American writers in their proper locales: ‘It was while walking home with a student one evening that [Wallace] Stevens ... spoke of his recent poem, “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction”. “I said that I thought we’d reached a point at which we could no longer really believe in anything unless we recognised it was a fiction.” Exactly. The ‘place’ was Hartford, Connecticut, but it could have been anywhere.