Issue Two

All of the great cities and the popular places to live and work are represented by great works of art that have lodged the romance of the place in the minds of its denizens and worshippers. Think of Paris, think of New York, think of San Francisco, think of London and Venice and Florence and Berlin and Key West and then think of how novelists and painters and poets and sculptors and musicians have lovingly and also critically etched these places in our minds. I wanted to go to these places initially because I read books set in these cities, and I yearned to see the Paris of Proust and the San Francisco of the beat poets and the Venice that Waugh describes in Brideshead Revisited. Salinger, Kazin, Updike, Cheever, Ellison, and William Maxwell have all contributed to the way I see and understand and love New York City There are so many more examples,many of them obvious to any reader, that I think the point can be made with only a few references.

The settings that have lodged in my mind from literature and art are not just grand cities. Howard Frank Mosher’s novels about rural Vermont, critical as they are about the locals, have made me want to go to the Northwest Kingdom. Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes romanticized Watertown, New York in my mind. Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac put Big Sur on my imaginative map. Thomas McGuane has made me yearn for Montana. Indeed, I was crushed once when I learned that I was the runner-up for a lowly instructorship at Montana State College on the Canadian border not because I wanted the job so badly, but because of McGuane’s writing.

Anne Proulx’s recent collection of short stories, Close Range inspired me to want to go to Wyoming even before friends of mine moved there. Proulx also made me see the beauty in dying industrial New England towns. Larry McMurtry gave me Houston, Philip Roth showed me Newark, New Jersey, Faulkner painted Mississippi indelibly in my mind, Ken Kesey immersed me in the Oregon Coast, Walker Percy made me long for New Orleans, Frost made me love all of Vermont, and, Emerson and Thoreau gave me Concord and Walden. Indeed, Thoreau introduced me to Maine and Cape Cod long before I got a chance to actually visit these places.

Anne Fadiman calls this literary lens through which we can gain a sense of place "You-Are-There Reading." I realize now that after so many years of reading, my aesthetic map of the United States and of the world is constructed from the novels, biographies, histories, poetry and memoirs I have read. I would gladly take a job in any of these places–yes rural Vermont and yes–Watertown, New York. Western New York also holds a permanent place in my literary map and in my imagination. Indeed, I would forcefully submit that the books that have triggered my affection for Buffalo and its environs be made known to the business and non-profit communities and be required reading for any who seek to attract people here and to the people being sought.

The literary imagination is different from mere image or attitude. It must be distinguished from the sometimes clever marketing and advertising campaigns that seek to attract visitors and businesses to our region. To lodge inside one’s imagination is more permanent and profound. The imagination refers to the meaning-making capacity of human cognition. It is the luminescent region of the mind and the soul that drinks in experience and creates resonant habitats within which our authentic selves can dwell. The landscape of the imagination is neither purely make-believe nor rigidly factual. It is through the mesh of the imagination where we actually live every minute of our lives. I believe that it is the task of the business and arts communities of Western New York to unite and to locate and create such a landscape and such a mesh for people who live in the area and to lure, like the songs of the Sirens, others to settle here.

As the British philosopher Owen Barfield, in the tradition of Blake and Coleridge, said: "Only by the imagination can the world be known. And what is needed, is not only that larger and larger telescopes and more and more sensitive calipers should be constructed, but that the human mind should become increasingly aware of its own creative activity." The arts aid us in discovering this authentic space. Good literature about a place helps us to experience the place on a more profound level that feels like this state of final participation. If Barfield is correct, when we imagine the world, we create it. Change the imagination and change the world. Hence, change the way we imagine Buffalo and Western New York and we change the city. We will need more than advertising slogans and posters and video productions to core out the way we perceive our region. We will need good art to push the evolution of our consciousness.

During my first days in Buffalo, the imaginative spirit seized me and began to prepare my consciousness to experience the region as radiant and resonant with meaning. I discovered on my first day in Buffalo that one of the finest independent bookstores in the country, Talking Leaves, was right down the street from my house. Emerson once said: "Be a little careful of your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is, what will it do with you? You will come here & get books that will open your eyes, and your ears, and your curiosity, & turn you inside out or outside in." When I walked into that store for the first time, I was not looking for any particular book, but just checking out the neighborhood. And as I walked down the aisles, a book chose me. I had never heard of it. I barely recognized the name of the author, and I had never read any of his works. The cheesey, paperback cover design actually turned me off. The book was thick and given the state of my life at that moment, I knew that I would never have time to finish it. And yet, the book insisted on choosing me. I heeded its call and pulled it of the shelf and began reading The Sunlight Dialogues by John Gardner.

The first sentence of the first chapter revealed the setting as Batavia. I knew that I needed a new imaginative lens within which to live in my new home.

The book is not a travelogue for Western New York. It is dark and philosophical, and it paints a painful and murky picture of the cities of Batavia and Buffalo. And yet it presents a rich and complex sense of place, history and consciousness. Its people are both representative and uniquely individual. The novel got under my skin. It is what I think about when I drive the thruway and go past the Batavia exit, for the action of the novel begins with these words: "He’d been arrested on August 23rd for painting the word love in large white, official-looking letters across two lanes of Oak Street, just short of the New York Thruway." Whenever I am in Batavia, I look for those white letters. Of course, I know that they will not be there, and I will never physically see them. And yet my experience of Batavia will always be colored by that image.

In fact, I am not the only person who has fallen for Batavia because of this novel. At the Second Annual John Gardner Conference at Genesee Community College you could have taken a Sunlight Dialogues tour of Batavia and bid at the silent auction on meals at the restaurants mentioned in the novel. Clearly, the city has taken on a deeper resonance for other readers. Gardner is not a cheerleader for this region. But his concern and affection for his home is evident. He was born in Batavia, on July 21, 1933, the son of a dairy farmer and lay Presbyterian preacher father and English teacher mother. At the age of 11, he accidentally killed his brother with a cultipicker. This tragedy would later serve as a theme in his literary work. He went to school in Rochester and Batavia, graduating from Batavia High School and going on to DePauw University. After transferring and graduating from Washington University, he enrolled in the prestigious writing program at the University of Iowa. He became an acclaimed novelist. Besides The Sunlight Dialogues, he published numerous novels including The Resurrection and Grendel, the reworking of the Beouwoulf story for which he is perhaps most famous. His novel October Light was a bestseller in 1976. His theories of writing, the controversial On Moral Fiction and The Art of Fiction, became almost canonical for budding writers. He died on September 14, 1982 in a motorcycle accident near Susquehanna, Pennsylvania.

One of the themes in The Sunlight Dialogues, echoed in another of his novels that take place in Western New York, The Resurrection, which also evokes the evolution of life in Batavia, is the decline of civilization.

He said once: "If you are going to talk about the decline of Western civilization, you take an old place that’s sort of worn out and run-down. Batavia, New York is this old run-down town that’s been urban-renewalized just about out of existence. The factories have stopped and all the people are poor and sometimes crabby. The elm trees are all dead." ("Paris Review," 54)

Still, Gardner paints loving descriptions of the town and the characters’ search for some meaning through all of the change. The main character of The Sunlight Dialogues, Taggert Hodge, is a mysterious scion of the town, who returns after 16 years absence to challenge the traditions of his home. His character refracts images of religious revivalism of the kind that raged through Western New York in the early 1800s and spawned religions like Mormonism. The theme of Western New York as a paradise lost and hoped-for paradise regained is intellectually sounded in the philosophical dialogues that punctuate the book between the chief-of-police, who accepts the natural process of change, and the Sunlight Man, who decries it. The theme of paradise lost is also represented in the lyrical descriptions of the countryside and farm life between Batavia and Buffalo.

"They’d bought a house in the country, fifteen miles from the office. It was a place two hundred and fifty years old, made of fieldstone, with beautiful chimneys at each end and a view of, you would have said, Paradise. It had a windmill and barns and a creek running through, and there were sugar maples on the wide sloping lawn. The barns, made of native oak, were in good repair. They could live there all their lives, if they wanted."

And read to this word-painting "September and October are the saddening of the year in Western New York. In the morning the air snaps and there’s a smell of winter; at noon it warms to a kind of false hope–gray corn on the fields, gray expanses of frost-bitten grass. Wasps, stir in the eaves preparing for their sleep until spring. The shaggy, toothless old people who come out from the County Farm every spring to work as hired men or to beg put on their sweaters and overcoats and put their belongings in grocery bags with string handles and begin their trudge along the high-crowned gray dirt roads, going in. The evening slides in cold, and birds fly south. The Indians leave too, old men and boys who come out for the summer to do handiwork or man the gypsum quarries, tanneries, trucking lines, construction jobs; they shrink back into the Reservation."

In this quotation we get a sense of our world here, its economic difficulties, its bittersweet beauty, its forgotten people, and its indelible rhythms. Neither positive or negative, the description lodges under the skin and make one feel a sense of place. Even as simple a turn as the following, conjures a comforting image of downtown Buffalo.

"There was a parking space waiting. There always was on a Sunday evening. He pulled his station wagon into it, got out and locked the doors. He bought a Buffalo Evening News with the air of a patron of the arts and he unfolded it with the detached curiosity of a stockbroker as he let himself into the M&T Bank lobby. He signed in, gave his usual polite greeting to the attendant-and-elevator boy, and rode to the fourteenth floor."

The novel is a complicated story that threads together Western New York history, American history, ancient religions, and a Faulknerian plot of the fate of place and family. After reading this book, Buffalo and Western New York permanently entered into my imagination, enabled me to re-see the area, romanticized it for me in a way, and helped me to feel that this was a pretty cool part of the world to be in.

Great literature does that for a place. We might revisit Verlyn Klinkenborg’s novel The Last Fine Time about a Buffalo bar and the family that owns it. Whitney Cross’s The Burned-Over District is a near cult classic for those fans of fundamentalist revivals. Who wouldn’t want to live in a place where "the wood hills and the valleys of Western New York were swept by the fires of the spirit."? The contemporary novels of Frederick Busch, Megan Staffel and Jane Urquhart might capture some imaginations. And Edmund Wilson’s Upstate is simply marvelous.

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, a book not about Buffalo, describes the reasons why epidemics, fads and fashions seem to exponentially grow after a certain point. The rate of growth bears no proportional resemblance to the rate of growth before the tipping point. The same conditions of exponential growth hold true for syphilis epidemics as well as fashion epidemics, like the resurrection of hush puppies among the urban well-heeled. You need well charismatic, well-connected people who have got themselves a hold on an idea, a shoe, a vision, or a germ.