Rock Island, IL. A reader sufficiently alert to what happens when he reads may sometimes catch a whiff of an incoherent or fragmented self rising up from his glands and escaping at his collar, usually about the time he finds himself defending Norman Mailer and Hannah Foster, or J.V. Cunningham and Charles Bukowski. A mild irritation, like an ambient buzz from a bad light, can and probably should attend conflicting literary tastes. We have Twain’s jabs at Cooper, and Hemingway’s at Faulkner, to remind us that judgment has its place and that literary ecumenism can sometimes verge on the promiscuous, as when men agree on much because they believe in little, as I think Malcolm Muggeridge once put it.

Nor is irony a sufficient defense against this irritation, or won’t be for long, anyway, if irony becomes less affordable in the coming years, as I suspect it will, when the magic wand wielded by that mythical magic hand shatters against the hard impervious surfaces of diminished natural capital, ravaged landscapes, and resource wars such as those we are engaged in now under the usual prevaricating banners.

Irony, at any rate, isn’t doing me much good these days. The whiff of incoherence begins to overwhelm the more honestly I own up to my conflicting tastes. Case in point: I have read all the novels and stories of Richard Ford and Wendell Berry both, and liked them all a great deal, have learned from them and felt myself richer for having read them, and am now beginning to worry that the fragmentation of my appreciative faculties is complete. Forget the center. The self cannot hold.

That both Ford and Berry often rely on recursive looping narratives, or that both feel the fault lines of loss trembling beneath them, does nothing to diminish the unassailable fact that, in the end, about all they have in common is the English language. To get right down to brass tacks: Berry is a placed writer at the heart of whose novels is place in all its particularity—this stand of old-growth oak, that creek bed, this barber shop. “You’ve got to know where you are,” he says again and again. “You’ve got to consult the genius of the place.” Ford, by contrast, is in many ways a placeless writer at the heart of whose novels is placelessness in all its generality—the Holiday Inn, the interstate, the office. “Place,” says the peripatetic Frank Bascomb in Independence Day, “means nothing.” (In “Self-Reliance” Emerson had said, “We owe to our first journeys the discovery that place is nothing.”) In Berry’s fiction the self coheres because it knows where it is. The what is a subsequent concern. In Ford’s fiction the self coheres because it knows where it is going. The where (or whence) is incidental.

Moreover, whatever peregrinations Berry’s characters are capable (or rather guilty) of, there abides in all he writes the tug of home, the centrality of place, implacable, decisive, threatened. Whatever momentary stasis Ford’s characters are capable of, there obtains in all he writes the tug of the road or the skies, always promising freedom from the constraints of place and, apparently, from the limits of nature (though certainly not from the consequences of offense). If both understand the journey as transformative, they appear to have differing notions of transformation. Berry works out of the Bible and Homer; he appeals to a tradition in which departure from home is only half the story. It is followed—and completed—by return. Ford certainly has the likes of Faulkner at his back, but he also has the expatriates Hemingway and Fitzgerald there as well; he appeals to a tradition in which departure is pretty much the whole story. It is followed—and completed—by death, as when James Gatz goes East but comes to grief there in his swimming pool, a displaced, refashioned, and now lifeless Jay Gatsby.

But as important as the second half of the story is—and as useful as it may be to train our lens now on one half of the story, now on the other—it is also important to remember that although the prodigals and the warriors depart and return, they return, both of them, to a place. The fact of return matters—certainly to the rejoicing father and the bitter elder brother, certainly to Penelope and Telemachus—but at length the Prodigal Son and Odysseus will find themselves somewhere. Ithaca no less than the father’s house will make demands. “Staying put,” as Scott Russell Sanders says in a book by that title, has its own ethical imperatives. You may answer to them in full consciousness and conscience—“I wish to consider the virtue and discipline of staying put,” Sanders says—or you may complain about them bitterly, as when in Tennyson’s account of the Odyssey Ulysses, now “an idle king,” lights out again, leaving to an “aged wife” and a duty-bound son the virtues and disciplines he himself is too restless and too important to perform.

Such willful abnegation finds little or no recompense in the novels of another Richard, Richard Russo, on whom the virtues and disciplines of place seem to have considerable purchase. Miles Roby, to take but one example, answers admirably to the demands of place in Empire Falls, a novel like much of Russo’s fiction firmly situated in an infirmly situated place—a place, that is, struggling to survive what Berry calls predation from without and disaffection from within. Having returned from college long ago for filial reasons, no degree in hand, Miles struggles as the tenant operator of a small diner to raise a daughter, protect a delinquent father from self-destruction, keep old promises, maintain old friendships not easy to maintain, and to get along with his ex-wife’s unlikable ostentatious new husband—to answer, that is, to the demands of place, enduring, as such people inevitably do, the officially sanctioned contempt for “provincial” life. I don’t think it is quite right to say that Russo always begins with place in mind—he once told the New York Times that what gets chalked up to place often has more to do with class than anything else—but his work betrays a deep concern for small places, everywhere threatened now by an absentee economy, and a deep respect for the people devoted both to the places themselves and to those who live in them. Russo is no ideologue on these matters—The Bridge of Sighs achieves a degree of neutrality toward both the stickers and the boomers, to use Wallace Stegner’s terms—but he never surrenders the virtues and disciplines of staying put to the likes of a Frank Bascomb, whose home, it seems, is a Lincoln or some other version of the high rat-colored car that gave Hazel Motes in Wise Blood a false sense of mobility and an illusory sense of belonging. Miles Roby knows where he is and has as clear a sense as anyone of how to behave there. You won’t hear him saying “place means nothing.”

I mentioned Wise Blood just now because I think that Flannery O’Connor is another, if unlikely, case in point. At first an unreflecting convert to the notion that the novelist must leave home for larger literary hubs, she learned from lupus, that stern preceptor that first sent her home and at last took her life, the virtues of place and the disciplines of home. “I stayed away from the time I was 20 until I was 25,” she told Cecil Dawkins in a letter from July of 1957, “with the notion that the life of my writing depended on my staying away. I would certainly have persisted in that delusion had I not got very ill and had to come home. The best of my writing has been done here.” Her recent biographer, Brad Gooch, notes that “She drew marginal lines in her copy [of The Divine Milieu] next to Teilhard’s concept of the Incarnation as ‘a single event . . . developing in the world’; a cosmic presence in local material lay behind her own arguing for regional writing.”

“Regional” or “southern” are the epithets often used to designate O’Connor’s fiction, and they are serviceable enough, but the fact is that O’Connor—who said somewhere is better than anywhere—was more placed than any of her peers and all of her descendents—a list that must certainly include the likes of Robert Penn Warren, Andrew Lytle, and Allen Tate. It was never her stated purpose to defend place, but in the characters she drew there is an implicit defense of the local, for only local places could produce such recognizable characters as the famous grandmother, and only recognizable characters can become the unsuspecting victims of a scorching grace. Stock characters turned out on the same placeless lathe have no need of it, for they are not real. It can hardly be a matter of bewilderment to anyone who has read O’Connor’s work, especially the letters and the lectures, that this woman of formidable intellectual abilities was fiercely loyal to the Church Universal and stubbornly committed to attending daily mass at the local parish, where gossip was sure to be high and intelligence low. O’Connor knew that although we participate in universals we don’t inhabit them. Only such half-men as Rayber in The Violent Bear it Away live in a universe, and moral failure tends to follow from their ghostly attempts to make a home in their heads. You can fly the friendly skies, but only temporarily. The young prophet in The Violent Bear it Away wouldn’t give a nickel for an airplane ride: the view from far above falsifies the truth below.

There’s an indictment in that sentiment that a novelist of, say, Walker Percy’s sensibilities might feel the sting of. He knew, I think, the glandular irritation of which I spoke above. Percy, his full sense of place notwithstanding, notwithstanding all the ways in which he carefully situated such heroes as Binx (who cannot stand the mere thought of going to Chicago, the city with no genie-soul), nevertheless frequently sets them free to dally with anonymity. He allows Binx to exalt with his secretaries, with Linda or Sharon or whomever, as they go spinning at mechanical speed along the interstate toward the gulf. He allows Tom More to head out anywhere, to happen upon some nameless and anonymous intersection of the interstates, some “abscissa and ordinate,” which can never be anything but a somewhere, and then once there to touch, in some tiny church, the thread in the labyrinth. But such was Percy’s sense of place. He seemed almost to enjoy being at home in his homelessness, at once lost in the cosmos and yet found in Covington, the pilgrim and the wayfarer and the situated movie-going denizen of Elysian Fields.

Could Percy appreciate The Sportswriter (which surely descends from him) as well as A Place on Earth without, in doing so, catching that whiff of incoherence? I think so. But that is because in Percy’s moment irony was more affordable than it’s going to be.

Berry once said to me that he thought he remembered reading Love in the Ruins and not liking it. This remark was painful to hear, because I love that book, but I can believe it. When you write as a farmer and farm as a writer, as Berry has, you tend to have limits in mind, the limits of place and weather as much as the limits of form, all of which come within the natural limits of which I made brief mention at the top. Such limits may seem to bear to varying degrees on the likes of Russo, O’Connor, and Percy, but my own sense is that Berry has outplaced them all. In reducing the scope of his imagined world, the Port William membership, and in taking great care to know its hen flocks and sycamores, he has managed at the same time to enlarge his concerns beyond those of our most placed writers. His standard is the life and health of the world. For the Catholics mentioned in these brief sauntering remarks, and they comprise an easy majority, this should mean something—if indeed grace comes by means of nature, not in contempt of it.

Twain’s Hannibal, Faulkner’s Oxford, Jewett’s South Berwick—all delightful, all useful. Winslow Homer’s Prouts Neck or Andrew Wyeth’s Kuerner farm would be no less instructive than these, and the only reason Grant Wood is no Andy Warhol is that to the Sophisticated Critics living in Important Places Cedar Rapids is no Gotham City. So accomplished a stylist as Aldo Leopold, sitting still up there in his shack outside of Madison, Wisconsin, knew something about staying put, the virtues and disciplines of which are, as Sanders suggested and I implied at the outset, poised to replace the orthodoxies of an economic brutality about which, sooner or later, natural limits will have something to say. And when that happens, when the scale of American life becomes smaller and more local, as I suspect it will, “place” in American letters will probably mean something far more specific than the terms “regional” or “southern” were ever capable of implying. “Place,” I’m betting, will no longer mean nothing, and the Frank Bascombs of the world, seeing the cruise control fail, will have to amend their opinions. At such a time T.S. Eliot, displaced American though he was, will be vindicated for having noted that the tradition always undergoes a shift, if ever so slightly, for having been catalyzed by the individual talent. We may be heading toward a world in which how we understand the old stories of departure and return will depend on how we understand the likes of those few American writers I have briefly spoken of here—and on whether we are capable of being irritated by the odor rising up from inside our shirts now soiled by honest labor.

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Tagged as: Andrew Wyeth, community, Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Grant Wood, Hemingway, home, homer, Lord Tennyson, Odysseus, place, Richard Ford, Richard Russo, Scott Russell Sanders, Wendell Berry, Winslow Homer