by By Melanie L. Simo
University of Virginia Press, 2005
“With all the Web sites and links, with the near infinity of information available, who has time to – who wants to – read?” Melanie Simo poses this guilt-inducing question at the conclusion of Literature of Place. “Not simply ingest information,” she continues, “but read with undivided attention and penetration – who will do that?” This is perhaps the most insistent passage in an otherwise subdued book. Simo responds to her own challenge in this thoughtful, subtle exploration of an eclectic variety of writing about American landscapes in the years between 1890 and 1970. Her singular brand of literary archaeology unearths the essence of scores of “unaverage little books” by authors both renowned and forgotten, who depict many distinctive American places richly “layered
with human experience.”
Simo, the author of several books about landscape architecture and landscape history, hopes that her own deliberate excursions through “slow time” – the calm, temporal quality she discerns in the works of many place-oriented writers – will be useful to, among others, contemporary architects, planners, and landscape architects. “Legible, tangible connections between past, present, and future,” Simo observes, are also revealed not just by studying landscapes, buildings, and structures, but “through stories.”
In search of such stories, she has investigated a literary domain spanned by the “age of the typewriter,” as she designates it, which was “bracketed by an awareness of frontiers.” Historian Frederick Jackson Turner, in 1893, had famously announced the recent abrupt closure of America’s western frontier. In April 1970, less than a year after Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, the first Earth Day represented an acknowledgment of the limits of the terrestrial sphere.
Simo organizes her expansive and imaginative reading journey symmetrically. The first half of her book selectively examines the literature of five American regions: New England, southern Appalachia, the Pacific coast, the desert West, and the agricultural heartland. The second half explores five “domains” or themes: places small, abandoned,
reinhabited, lost, and explored. Many of the authors Simo considers will be familiar to diligent readers and students of American literature. Wallace Stegner, William O. Douglas, John Steinbeck, Willa Cather, Jane Jacobs, Sarah Orne Jewett, Henry James, Robert Frost, Edward Abbey, E. B. White, and Aldo Leopold appear in her gallery of place-centered authors. Many of these writers offer a truly cosmopolitan perspective, experiencing and writing about places that span the wilderness-rural-suburban-urban continuum. Indeed, Literature of Place is not a book about “nature writing”: Simo is interested in authors who evoke landscapes to which people belong, by virtue of work and play.
Her warmest sympathies and sharpest perceptions, however, are stimulated by writers of more modest reputation. Frank Bolles was an amateur naturalist who, during the 1890s, sensitively depicted the wilder niches of Boston’s far suburbs and the Sandwich Range of New Hampshire’s White Mountains. Drama critic Walter Prichard Eaton, retreating to the country, investigated the cellar holes and upland pastures of the Berkshires. Maginel Wright Barney, sister of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, recalled pioneer life in a rural Wisconsin valley. The literary couple Henry Beston and Elizabeth Coatsworth applied their differing perspectives and literary talents to the same terrain along the coast of Maine. Wilderness advocate Harvey Broome, a man of “gentle, sensitive spirit,” rhapsodized in his published journals about the Great Smoky Mountains of his native east Tennessee.
While Simo’s own literary style has an appealingly old-fashioned economy and grace, there is nothing archaic or unsophisticated about either her perspective or her conclusions. “It is memory and history that concern us here,” she cautions, “not nostalgia as commonly understood and dismissed.” Her panoramic literary tour in the company of these sharp-eyed chroniclers of American landscape leads to an essential, hard-edged question about the future of that terrain and the human role in shaping it. The early years of the twenty-first century offer unsettling prospects of novel virtual landscapes, in which direct human contact with the surrounding environment is mediated by technology. Such a world seems distant from the slow-paced, deep-rooted, closely focused literature of genuine physical locales explored by Simo. The challenge for the future, she concludes, will be “how to balance the freedoms of mobility with a sense of responsibility for place.”