Intimate Stranger

TERRITORIALITY

In the bright morning a daymoon just the barest knuckle of a reminder of subterranean dimensions. Red birds flit and flutter in the bare branches of a big tree. This is Connecticut. We are staying in the house of an old writer. There are many rooms smelling of ancient dogs and manuscripts, narrow passages, creaking wooden floors, framed New England faces against the walls. For breakfast we have ‘hambiscuits’ — salty and sweet Virginia meat cured by the master in his bathtub, then glazed.

It is the season of silent waiting before the first snow that will bring memories of visitors and family. The forests rolling over the hills are armies of threadbare veterans retreating from the summer wars. One senses the throb of muffled drums. I go walking with the master: we see deer tracks in the soft dirt, a neighboring farmer leading two big white horses with steaming flanks down the road to the fast river that spilled over its banks many years ago when my host first moved here. There are several other writers living in the vicinity, he tells me.

What is Writer’s Land? It is a territory of the imagination, more familiar than any existing place, that area of the heart that the writer speaks from. Sometimes it will be consciously delineated and populated, as with William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha or Shelby Foote’s Jordan County or Gabriel Marquéz’s Columbia of the mind where retired colonels and killers live. Very often it is the shadowed land of one’s youth that cannot be found on any map. It may be left undefined so that only recurring situations will constitute an environment, giving one the feeling of having been there before. It could be political surroundings — somewhere you escape to because it provides a sanctuary where the problems of the day can be dealt with metaphorically (with Zamyatin and Kapek in their respective socialist paradises these ‘worlds’ were futuristic), or the place you run away from because, paradoxically, the issues are starker and the implications more momentous there (with Kafka it was that of the suspended nightmare).

Arthur Miller’s world is mostly urban and imbued with the political consciousness of the working classes. Allen Ginsberg probably lived at the chanting intersection of Jewish liturgy and Buddhist ritual where the prayer flags flap, but it was more likely the land of desire than that of quietude. It may be a land of traveling, as it was with Arthur Rimbaud, who pushed to the frontiers of himself and was destroyed by what he found there.

It can be a land of time, often tucked into a specific period, and then the borders will be drawn by the story of unfolding. With older writers — William Styron, Norman Mailer, Edgar Doctorow, Philip Levine — you notice how they revisit it phrase by phrase: a familiar landscape smoothed by their attention to the quirks of consciousness and burnished by their lives. The land they walk over is as loyal and hand-tooled as an old dog or a family retainer. They come across deer tracks, pass neighbors leading white horses to sound-spitting rivers. There are still impenetrable copses though, and the unexpected dragons of depression and madness.

South Africa used to be considered ideal writer’s territory, a country of heroes and villains, of loyalty and betrayal, of climatic extremes and severed heads; but it was always too easily and seductively so: the challenges of violence and confrontation, of distinction and acceptance, were exacerbated as forms of escape into the never-never land of portent and moral prancing. Under those circumstances it is difficult for the writer not to become an angel. And the angel has no sex.

Writer’s Land is the invisible ‘book’ behind the words (these here now, also) — larger than the volume but confined between its covers. It may not be attractive, it may be that place which is covered with the anonymity of burial sites, and the extent of your success in making it live will depend on your capacity to familiarize the reader with its contours and its natives, thus on the sounds of your sentences and the way meaning glances like light off your words; but if you identify and inhabit it you will have a voice, and at least be a citizen of somewhere.