Writing Places

In 1773, barely thirty years after the battle of Culloden that brought about the total defeat of the ’45 uprising and the annihilation of the Stuart cause, Samuel Johnson paid a visit to the western parts of Scotland in company with his admirer and future biographer, James Boswell. Amongst other aims, they were determined to visit the Isle of Skye and Sir Alexander MacDonald, whom Johnson had met in London and admired. After a bad night at a filthy inn at Glenelg on the mainland, they took an open boat and were duly rowed to Armadale, a mile away, where the MacDonalds of Sleat lived in hereditary splendor. In his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides—not published till 1786—Boswell recorded their boat’s arrival, Lady MacDonald jumping up and down right to the water’s edge, in a welcome that the visitors found idiotic and deeply embarrassing—though as an heiress from Yorkshire she may have been demonstrating newly learned prowess at Highland dancing. The incident does not appear in Boswell’s published account—only in an early draft found more than two centuries later in a bundle of papers at Malahide, in Ireland. Of course one prefers the more bizarre version: you can’t make these things up, and this version may tell more than Sir Alexander may have wished about his wife. Boswell had to make other retractions, after all, for fear of libel.

In the case of Reading Life, under present review, Michael Pearson begins his book by making a valiant attempt to introduce himself as a bluff, humorous, compassionate professor who is guiding a party of giddy American students in Spain on a pilgrimage from Villafranca del Bierzo just south of the French border to Santiago de Compostela, westward in far-off Galicia. From the start, the students get lost, get drunk, and even demand taxis to help them along the pilgrims’ road. So childish are they that I longed for brutal reality to strike and Pearson to sum up and shut up. To quote from one of the puffs at the front of the book: this is, after all, “a primary experience in robust life” (alas, though, unrevealing and soon not at all funny).

Expurgation is to be expected in books about place, as the experiences of places naturally differ with each person. You edit your experiences, and readers have to find common ground with their writers. What the readers know otherwise, they have to discard. When it came to light, for example, that Thoreau, the father of such books, managed to burn down some 300 acres of precious woodland at Walden, such news didn’t join what Pearson calls “the common contemplation of Thoreau’s life’s meaning”—it would jar too much. Pearson is on more solid ground when he interviews writers rather than the places they write about: John McPhee, for example, on New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, or E. B. White on Maine. McPhee told Pearson “that he spent about eight months exploring the area [the Pine Barrens] travelling the forty miles from Princeton . . . spending days or weekends over that period. When he had collected his material, had gathered all his notes, he sat down at home and asked himself in a mild kind of panic, ‘What the devil do I do with all this stuff? The canvas was so miscellaneous. I was absolutely blocked. So I lay on a picnic table in the back yard and stared at the leaves. I lay there for about two weeks. Then it dawned on me: make Fred Brown the organizing principle.’” Fred Brown was, as you might guess, his guide and informant: “the central character, a sinewy, tough old bird . . . idiosyncratic and representative of the Pine Barrens.”

When I read those words, I wondered what organizing principle Michael Pearson had used as I followed him from northern Spain to John McPhee and the Pine Barrens, E. B. White...