Shannon McKenna Schmidt - Novel Destinations: A Travel Guide to Literary Landmarks from Jane Austen’s Bath to Ernest Hemingway’s Key West, 2nd Edition

y first week in college, I fell in with a group of freshmen already down to business. They were searching for the bridge Quentin Compson jumped off of in The Sound and the Fury. We looked the whole day, Cambridge being all bridges. One unapproachable member of the group recited whole passages as we walked. Finally, our reward: a brick-size plaque marking the bridge with a Sound and the Fury quote. Much later, I heard that Faulkner had never actually been to Cambridge, Massachusetts, before writing that scene. The geography in the book had been approximated, fogged over; the plaque was a bridge of a different kind, a bridge between fiction and a real destination.

What I wouldnt pay for my poker buddy Kevins literary stint to boast about. Davy Byrnes pub in Dublin, Ireland, is where the everyman hero of modern fiction, Leopold Bloom, has lunch (a Gorgonzola sandwich) in Joyces Ulysses. Kevin was Davy Byrnes bartenderfor a day. The manager was tipped off to the fact that Kevin may have embellished his bartending credentials when Kevin couldnt change a keg. No problem: Kevin had lived in Ulysses for a day, and served a few beers in it.

Joyce bragged that if Dublin were ever destroyed, it could be rebuilt by reading Ulysses. Some of our favorite texts do not fold out into a map. Looking for the spot where the Pequod sinks in a whale and Ahab swirl? Where exactly did Didi and Gogo hang around for Godot? Luckily, universes can fit on a head of a pin, and the pins are worth honoring, too. Beckett might have thought of the idea for Waiting for Godot on this bar stool. Poe pictured the raven landing in this room. And out of the top-floor window of Herman Melvilles Arrowhead, his home in western Massachusetts, doesnt that view make the top of Mount Greylock look very much like awhale?

Sometimes a book invites a journey, sometimes we invite ourselves. We can cross through rugged mental landscapes. A physical place can map out a mental one; the mental one can prompt a new physical one. If the Dante house in Florence cannot conclusively be declared the home of Dante Alighieri, that hardly lessens its impact on visitors.

No one is worse with directions than I am. I spent four years of college lost. (Does the Charles River need to curve so much?) When I returned to the area, I was writing a novel and armed with a Boston map circa 1865. I was using it for researching a book and a past, but it made me feel at home in the present for the first time. I grew up in Florida and liked to say I had become a native of Boston, at least of 19th-century Boston. With obsolete maps, I have entered the lives of Longfellow, of Emerson, of Poe, of Thoreau, of Dante, of Kafka, whether the buildings remain or long ago vanished. Writers infuse their work with a sense of place because a sense of place is what often orients our ideas.

Searching for Faulkners bridge was the kind of thing I had probably imagined I would do at college. Looking back, maybe it had something to do with my becoming an English major and, eventually, a writer. I dont remember actually caring much that afternoon whether or not we would ever find that bridge. I had found my first camaraderie in a new place.

MATTHEW PEARL

Author of The Dante Club, The Poe Shadow, The Last Dickens, and The Last Bookaneer

www.matthewpearl.com