Gardner's Use of Place in the New York State Novels

by Deborah Schwabach

    In On Becoming a Novelist John Gardner wrote, "Setting exists so that the character has someplace to stand, something that can help define him, something he can pick up and throw, if necessary,"(26) The settings of most classical "places" in American Literature -- places like Winesburg, Ohio, or Gopher Prairie, Minnesota or that county I can't pronounce in Mississippi, or even Peyton Place -- are imaginary, composite communities of likelihood. They are, possibly, attempts on the part of the writer to portray reality without having to move out. This has been especially true of literature set in small towns. Gardner, in contrast, seized on the most minute details of the places he wrote about.

    Why is this important? The layout of a fictional community can parallel that of a real one easily enough, and any author can summon up a sunset on demand. Can it really matter whether so lightly traveled a road as Mickelsson 's switches back above his farm or runs right straight up over the hill? It can matter a lot. The switchback steepens the hill in the reader's mind and increases the isolation of Mickelsson's neighbors, the Spragues. In addition, the steepness of the hill affects the gravity feed of Mickelsson's poisoned spring so that it seems to flow under the house faster, raising a more immediate threat. "The main value of careful recording of literal detail." Gardner wrote in On Moral Fiction, "is truth of place ... gives increased weight, increased authority, a certain metaphysical conviction to the probing of larger questions, the struggle of order and disorder, of form and substance." (141)

    Logan Pearsall Smith defined a sense of place as "the moral atmosphere of places, the tones, that is, of collective feeling, the moral climates which are produced by, and surround, different groups of people and fill, as with a body of dense and saturated air, the places where they live." (RR 369) The definition suggests a rigid link between character and place: Real places inevitably, and exclusively, affect character -- partly because real people inhabit real places, but also because fictional people in real places can develop their full potential; they can be better than real people. Gardner's characters consistently outthink, outspeak and outperform anything that the reader might have supposed. The farmers lecture like philosophers; even the children are wise.

    In some ways John Gardner's sense of place in the New York State novels typifies the provincialism of upstate New York, "In no other region, I believe," Carl Carmer wrote in My Kind of Country, "is there a more comprehensive rapport between inhabitant and environment." Carmer goes on to describe "the mystic influences which never cease to hover in the otherwise salubrious air," and attributes to the upstater "a small voice deep within himself ... the voice of his own landscape .... The happiest entry into New York State, my grandfather used to say, is to be born there." It is, of course, an area steeped in history, important battles in the French and Indian Wars, the Revolution and the War of 1812 were fought here. Nineteen forties schoolchildren were fed the following "facts" along with the history lessons: New York had the best schools, the best roads, the best apples, the most people (and, by implication the best people; after all, didn't they attend the best schools and, upon graduation, go right out and build the best roads?) New York had the biggest city in the world, the tallest building, the most powerful waterfall, the longest island, It was the only state to touch on two Great Lakes and the ocean. The list of superlatives was unending.

    It was, of course, all true and, at the same time, not true at all, But in the forties and well into the fifties the schoolchildren of New York were imbued with a sense of pride -- pride of place. Nothing in our surroundings suggested that this pride was misplaced; the spotless dairy farms that dotted the landscape, the beautiful scenery, the smoke that billowed from the factory stacks -- all promised an endless prosperity. Within a couple of decades this pride, which may have been an obsession, confonted some harsh realities: The dairies began to close down; the silos collapsed; the smokestacks developed into cold hosts for summer nests of chimney swifts. Towns whose names had seemed synonymous with industrial development -- Troy, Utica, Schenectady, Buffalo --turned into wastelands of unemployment. And at the same time, these places turned into actual wastelands as misguided city fathers, confusing change with progress, eviscerated the cities, replacing beloved buildings with empty lots, Eventually the roads developed pot holes and everybody realized that Johnny could fail to read as readily in New York State schools as anywhere else, Outside of the small industrial cities, the scenery remained. And the apples. But there were other picturesque sites in America and New York became what it had probably always been: just another place.

    Gardner displays some of this provincialism in The Sunlight Dialogues. He writes of "the richest farm country in New York State," as well as "the best dairies in the world," and "the hard-kernel wheat that grew nowhere else in America."(173) "I learned to love the land at least partly because my parents did ...working it .watching things grow," Gardner said in a Paris Review interview. Of course the farm child inherits, almost from birth, an extensive world that can be explored on foot. Surrounded as he is by the permanence of natural objects --rocks, fields, streams -- he may grow up expecting a similar constancy in the rest of the world. The farm child, in other words, has roots; he may yank himself free, yet ret urn to lament the changes that have taken place in his absence, the way Gardner regretted the changes in Batavia. As the reader becomes immersed in the New York State novels, she becomes increasingly aware of John Gardner's developing sense of place and begins to distinguish one place and its effects on character from another. For example, the fictionalized place, Nickel Mountain, is a stage setting against which the characters act out their roles. Though it purports to be in the Catskills, its actual location is completely obscured by the information offered in the book. Henry Soames' Stop-Off Diner is placed on Route 98, the north-south route through Batavia, some 150 miles from the nearest Catskill. Among a list of fictitious locations (Slater, New Carthage) the reader finds Putnam Settlement. Late in the novel the reader shares a look out over the New York Central tracks. Basically the geography, despite loose associations with reality, is disturbing and often represents the kind of interruption of the "continuous dream" that Gardner would criticize in The Art of Fiction as a violation of the writer's contract with the reader.

    But where the geography of Nickel Mountain is skewed, the Stop-Off Diner seems very real, a place where any of us might have waited for a second cup of coffee, while listening to the endless banter of the regulars. In the eyes of Willard Freund it is "a seedy, run-down dingle." The diner gives Henry Soames a place to stand and, fat as he is, he seldom leaves it. Outside the sound of the trucks gearing down to make the hill, and the occasional farm noises which remind Henry of his grandparents' farm help to establish a ground on whic the diner can stand. When Callie first came to work for Henry, he felt constrained to find things for her to do. Together they started to fix up the place. The changes made Henry uneasy "like a man away from home." (26) Actually, the changes in the diner reflect the changes in Henry until finally, when Call ie, Henry and little Jimmy become a family, the diner turns into a family restaurant called the Maples with boxes of flowers out front.

    On the whole Henry is satisfied with the changes. He had given the matter some thought before when considering how ill-suited George's fifteen or sixteen room house was to George, and had worried that if somebody didn't interfere, George would become like his house, ramshackle and dark. "A man did things to the world," Henry Soames thought, "but also the world did things to him."

    When the religious fanatic Simon Bale has moved in, then leaves to distribute his pamphlets, Henry worries that people will think, "He comes from Henry's place ... to our poor ordinary domain." (192).

    The only authentic place in the book is the Utica Railroad Station. In a scene that was almost certainly written near the end of the novel 's twenty year gestation period Willard Freund detrains at Utica where he sees a bearded man with a scarred face asking, "Which car forBatavia?" Willard is headed for the conclusion of Nickel Mountain; the other, surely the Sunlight Man, is headed for the beginning of The Sunlight Dialogues.

    Shortly before this chance encounter Gardner had indicated some development in his sense of the importance of place. Henry Soames had been pondering the story of two oct ogenarian brothers who had relocated to Florida from the Nickel Mountain vicinity. They had just moved into their new home when one brother killed the other with an axe, "It never would have happened." Jim Millet had said, "if they'd stayed where they belong." This sense of belonging to a place, that a character cannot be the same person if he lives in Florida that he is if he stays at home, becomes an integral part of the later novels. By the time Gardner wrote the brief scene between Willard and the Sunlight Man, he had discovered the potential that real places could have. Both The Resurrection and The Sunlight Dialogues were written in the years between the commencement and the conclusion of Nickel Mountain. Both books take place in Batavia, It seems likely that Gardner's discoveries about the use of place which are revealed on the Utica railroad platform were made while he was writing about Batavia, a real place that had changed.

    In The Resurrection James Chandler goes home to die, returning to Batavia after a sixteen year absence. Stepping off the train which has brought him, his wife and their three daughters from California, Chandler is immedi ately conscious of having made a mistake. This is not the Batavia he remembered; this is a different place. On an intellectual level, Chandler can approve of the changes, He observes that the anti-Italian sentiment that was an integral part of his childhood has vanished, along with the elm trees. Some of the old mansions have been torn down, while others have grown shabby. Brick streets have been widened. It's a small price to pay for social improvement if that's what the new acceptance of Italians signifies. But on an emotional level, Chandler finds the changes unacceptable: "It was good, but it was not all right." because, "there was not a trace left of the old country town, nothing." (36)

    Chandler the philosopher can interpret the changes as beneficial, but Chandler the man who has come home to die needs a place untouched by time. He finds it in the Staley sisters' home, a place where he had spent many terrifying hours as a child taking piano lessons. In the Staley house nothing has changed; even the sunlight filtering through the yellowed lace curtains has remained the same. Though in time Chandler seems to adjust to the changes in Batavia, thanks to the smells in his mother's house and the sound of her voice, the Staley house is the home in which he inevitably dies.

    To the Staley niece, Viola, the Chandler house with all its children and problems represents illusion; the Staley house which she labels "dark," "heavy," and 'dead," "timeless." and "immutable," she identifies as "reality."

    There is a second different place in The Resurrection. It is James Chandler 's grandfather's farm. The farm, which had been sold long ago and which James is far too ill to visit, was the site of much of his boyhood happiness. Its past existence parallels Emma Staley 's painting of the old mill which still hangs in the Staley parlor: Both represent places that the child James had regarded as exclusive, places that only the Staleys and people like them knew how to enter.

    In the Paris Review interview, Gardner had this to say about his hometown: "If you're 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 .... " (54) In The Sunlight Dialogues the changes are used to reflect the fall of civilization; yet to Fred Clumly, who has remained in Batavia and watched the changes, they seem natural. Clumly drives through a neighborhood and remembers when the houses were new, the trees in front of them were seedlings. He recalls a later time when the trees were six feet tall and the owners decorated them with Christmas lights. In the now of the novel the trees tower over the houses: It is merely a function of time.

    Esther Clumly arrived in Batavia as a partially-sighted child from the Catskill town of Liberty. "I did not like Batavia," she remembers, "the funny way the people talked, the bright red brick streets that a half-blind child could barely cross without falling...." (282) Esther recalls that all of the children attending the School for the Blind had been homesick, had prayed, as she had, that their parents would come take them home. But Esther stayed in Batavia and, like Fred, "watched" the changes. To her the changes are somewhat superficial, The patterns of the street grid have remained the same, and she leads the reader on long walks through town, finding her way without difficulty.

    To Taggert Hodge, the Sunlight man, returning to Batavia after a sixteen year absence (like James Chandler) the changes are startling. For both men the past was rekindled by a voice rather than by the sight of the town. Both have come home to die, though possibly Taggert Hodge is less aware of that. He regards himself as an agent of destruction, acting on behalf of the Babylon of his grandfather's world. Hodge himself has changed beyond recognition, His face is scarred; he wears a beard. ("You ever see a beard like that around Batavia?" Fred Clumly asks. The response is one of typical Gardner humor: "Only old man Hoyt's ... and Walyzinski ... and that Russian guy, Brotski." (8)

    Born to be a saint, the Sunlight man wreaks so much havoc that Clumly begins to wonder if it's something in the land itself, Were the same forces that had nurtured the prophets of an earlier day -- Jemima Wilkerson, Bernarr MacFadden, the Mormons, the Shakers, the Millerites -- were these forces still at work? "Was he another of them, this Sunlight man -- called, driven -- spooked, more like -- a man compelled to speak out, having nothing to say? It was possible. A terrible thought, that after God 's withdrawal into silence the ancient mechanisms which made prophets arise should continue working, like machines left on in an abandoned factory .... "(370) The changes appear to be surface changes; the nature of the land is perceived as a constant, although agriculturally it has grayed, quit. Idealized Place, the Farm Remembered:

    All of Gardner's protagonists in the New York State novels have some association with dairyfarming. Henry Soames has only a few isolated memories, but many of the characters in Nickel Mountain (subtitled: A Pastoral Novel) are farmers. Farming is looked at realistically: George Loomis" arm is devoured by the corn binder (much like Grendel's; ) the old man in the final chapeter explains that he and his wife had had to leave the area because the land was 'played out," During the drought the farmers gather at the Stop-Off to wait for rain. The air is filled with tension and the oldest of them all says:

It never changes. They bring in all them new machines, put all them chemicals into the ground, but they still got to wait on the land. Progress, they say. But th 'earth don't know about progress. No rain. that means no corn and no hay... banks don't care about hay. No chance any more of winning. They just try and survive. (237)

   When Callie suggests that you have to have faith, he contradicts her: "No, you have to have the nerve to ride it out."

    This is an accurate portrayal of mid-to late 20th century farming in New York State: farmers lost in debt, consumed completely by foreclosure, or piecemeal by their own machinery. The modern farm was not a suitable setting for moral fiction and Gardner did well to substitute the farm of memory for the farm of reality. The farm he remembered, and the people who lived and worked on it, seemed to affirm life with every action, and so the farm remains the source of much that is good in his characters. The Stop-Off diner serves a dual purpose: it is a haven for all-night truckers who know that it's important to be in a place where people know you, but it is also a big farm kitchen where local farmers sit around and, like Congressman Hodge's children, "contend busily, passionately for truth and mashed potatoes." (240)

    The Congressman's farm was Stony Hill. Among his four sons -- Art, Ben, Will and Taggert (the Sunlight man) --only Ben has become a full-time farmer. Unlike the Congressman's "garden of idealism," Ben's farm is impoverished, patched together. Old now, Ben and his wife Vanessa bumble about the farmhouse like two of their own cows and, like the cows, they have become ruminants -Vanessa even regurgitates her words in an effort to pronounce them properly -- both of them chewing ponderously on problem after problem until they arrive at some form of truth. "Blind to the accelerating demolition around him," Ben is an itinerant preacher whose sermons move congregations to laughter so that it seems that the aisles have sprouted daisies and bluegrass, or to tears through which they see rainbows, In the eyes of the Indian delinquent Nick Slater, Ben Hodge is "a place to be." (103)

    There is another picture of Ben Hodge: He is King of the Beggarmen astride his wired-together tractor at 11 PM, singing as loud as he can. He can be heard a mile away, Nick remembers, plowing up a field 'as big as the world," It is a charmed image. Somehow by chaining themselves to endless responsibilities -- the farm, the family, and a long line of strays, teenaged boys whom nobody else wants, Ben and Vanessa have freed themselves to lead lives of unfettered goodness. Their farm remains a nurturing environment, a place for moral growth. It is not a garden of idealism; it's too poor for that. Instead it's a weedpatch of idealism. Ben 's farm, ramshackle but intact, is a working farm. Like his marriage, and because of his marriage, the farm stumbles through time and retains its idealism. Ben's brother Will, who inherited Stony Hill, has a different experience. When Will and his wife Millie were divorced, Stony Hill was sold. However, both of their sons, Will, Jr. and Luke, have lived on farms. Will, Jr. can no longer remember why he ever wanted barns or how he ever thought the 250 year-old farmhouse could be a home. And once he has uprooted himself and moved to Buffalo, he feels he has "finally broken free of the myth... broken out of Eden, released his childish clutch on the impossible. (333) Luke's farm is as chaotic as his paralyzing, angry headaches. To Millie, Luke's farm is "unreal -- a scene from some greenish dimly-remembered childhood dream.... the wind-wrecked remains of a farm .... A place for doleful creatures .... "(183) and finally la place for dying... for sick old women." (199)

    Peter Mickelsson's father was a farmer in Wisconsin. Mickelsson 's reminiscences begin with the memory of stepping barefoot into cowpies, the sensation of warm manure squeezing up between his toes. They continue through specific instances: his father and uncle stabbing supine cows to relieve the gas pressure from too much new clover; the cows awakening the household in the middle of the night because a calf had slipped below the grating on the barn floor; his father's constant puttering about the house which he now interprets as a gift of love to his mother. Mickelsson recognizes that the farmers, "those majestic grown-ups of his childhood,' (592) were happy doing what they were doing. It amazes him that he ever believed in "the honor and nobility of the profession of philosophy compared to his father's profession." (391)

    That farms were once good places wherein good people could be found, Gardner never failed to assert. That they had somehow changed, he recognized in writing Nickel Mountain. Subsequently, the farm became linked with happy memories and meaningful child -to-adult relationships which the child who survived in the man could eternally admire. The farmers of his own childhood had been good people and the first three novels give some measure of the distance he felt between himself and them. It wasn't until the writing of Mickelsson's Ghosts that he seemed to discover the good people of his own generation. He found them in a real place, Susquehanna, Pennsylvania.

    The village of Susquehanna blankets a couple of hillsides in the Endless Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania. Traveling down from Binghamton as Gardner did, one approached the village by crossing the Susquehanna River on an iron erector set bridge, and squeezing through a tunnel beneath the old Erie Railroad. A mile east of town, the same railroad crosses the Starucca Viaduct, an immense structure of stone arches built in 1847 that spans an entire valley; a mile west of town is the site at which Mormon founders Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery were "visited" by John the Baptist in 1829. In town the old combination hotel/railroad depot stretches out along the little used tracks. A sign reads: population 1994,

    At the top of one hill a silvery spire points the way to heaven. Below, the houses are a jumble, wedged in every whichway against the hillside, defying the probability that they will tumble into the nearest stream. But they stay put, supported in a visual sense by the fine facades of the commercial buildings on Main Street.

    At the time of the Erie Railroad strike in 1922 the Susquehanna yards employed 2,000 people, more than live in the town today. When townspeople supported the strikers, even joining the fights against management and scabs, the railroad reacted by closing the yards permanently, As a result, Susquehanna remains locked into 1922. Only a few new commercial buildings and even fewer houses have been built since. In the words of Peter M ickelsson, this was "a part of the world time had forgotten or rather -- despite the decay -- had spared. "(21) It was a perfect backwater in which Gardner could project the virtues of his pre-World War II childhood. As Mickelsson notes, "The seeming timelessness was a part of it, all right .... Dropped out of nowhere into this still shade, one couldn't have known it wasn gt 1940." (25)

    In fact, in the1890's Susquehanna may have been more like the Batavia of Gardner's childhood than Batavia itself. The brick streets, the sense of community inherent in the small owner-operated businesses which are accurately named in the novel, the existence of surrounding farms -- all appear to have sparked in Gardner some impulse of recognition, Both towns had their rivers and the same railroad ran through each. And those ancient mechanisms that produced prophets had workedd under the soil of each. Joseph Smith's visitations, B,F.Skinner's behaviorist ideas, the nightmares of Rod Serling -- in 1980 three perfect circles of destruction (grass, trees, wildlife) one hundred yards across appeared along Route 17 between Binghamton and Susquehanna. When a Binghamton reporter asked federal investigators if the circles might have been made by UFO' S, he was told that that was the likeliest explanation.

"Strangest place I ever lived," Peter Mickelsson says.

"Still wild, that's the thing of it." dowser John Pearson replies. (458) At the end of a catalog of local fauna which includes rattlesnakes, Pearson adds the word, "Hobgoblins."

    All in all, both Gardner and Mickelsson accepted Susquehanna as it was, a community that had never emerged from a depression that began in 1922. At the beginning of the book Peter Mickelsson, a philosophy professor at the nadir of his career and of his personal life, bludgeons a dog to death. It is a morally reprehensible act from which the reader holds out little hope of redemption. Mickelsson identifies the bleakness of his apartment in Binghamton as the source of his moral decay. He is driven to find a better place, the farm in Susquehanna.

    The farmhouse he selects is in poor repair (a reflection of himself) and Mickelsson sets about fixing it up -- not renovating it, but restoring it. Early in the restoration process, he rips off a piece of wallpaper and discovers that it is comprised of nine separate layers. The house itself has been subject to multiple add-ons; both his philosophers and the people of Susquehanna have similarly complex textures, In the renovation process Mickelsson has to make contact with the outside world. By fixing his house, he hopes to heal himself. Both are threatened: Internally, Mickelsson is threatened by his own failure to sustain human relationships; the house is threatened by the poisonous spring that flows through the basement, Externally, the spring has been poisoned by illegal dumping; Mickelsson's life is threatened by the gun in Professor Lawler 's hand.

    Ironically, it is Lawler's attack that heals Mickelsson. At gunpoint Mickelsson makes his own lifeaffirming discovery -- he would rather destroy the house he has worked so hard on, than die. He sends a telepathic message to the human community and the human community responds through the medium of a mute child. Involved in his rescue are several well-intentioned neighbors. Although he cannot understand why they help him, he accepts his deliverance and flees to the arms of Jessie Stark. Home, he discovers, exists as much in a relationship as in a place. M ickelsson is not completely cured, but he is better and, as the village cop Tinklepaugh says, "Poisoned springs can be sealed off." (596)

    Throughout the novel, Mickelsson 's mind reverts to another good place, the farm he was raised on. He equates the house he is working on to the one he grew up in, a house which nobody but his mother wants, although she no longer lives there but instead is confined to one room in the house of some cousins. Ideally, home should be permanent, as permanent as the viaduct that spans the valley. But, "I read in the paper that there are termites that eat cement," one of his colleagues comments. (119) By the end of the book Mickelsson is clearly satisfied that he has found a good place -- not just in Susqu ehanna, but with Jessie Stark. He learned it not only through his association with a real place and the good people he found there, but from his confrontation with and victory over a bad place.

    Bad places have deleterious effects on Gardner's characters. When James Chandler returns to a Batavia of dead trees and torn-up streets, the reader understands that there is to be no remission from the cancer that will shortly kill him, In Nickel Mountain Henry Soames worries about what George Loomis' house will do to George. The reader follows George through his grim tragedies but the connection, once established artistically, is not maintained. The use of bad places as a destructive force on character is more highly developed in both The Sunlight Dialogues and Mickelsson's Ghosts.   

    Luke's cellar where he, his mother Millie and Nick Slater are imprisoned by the Sunlight man, bound to upright beams and gagged, is dark and wet, so wet that rats swim about in it. The cellar is a source of hate, like Grendel's cave: Millie and Luke hate each other; they both hate the Sunlight man: Nick Slater seems to hate everybody.

    Peter Mickelsson imagines that his cellar is hip-deep in rattlesnakes. He hears crashes and clunks as things move around down there. His cellar walls drip water; patches of gray fuzz grow on the beams. "He had fled from the world 's complexity (Binghamton) to what he'd hoped might be Eden, and he'd found the place polluted, decaying -- filled with low, slimy secrets." (174) But whereas Millie's experience in the cellar makes her old and ugly, Mickelsson's experience represents a discovery and a challenge.

    Closely allied to bad places is no place. In its mildest form no place is represented by the twenty different suburbs that Will and Louise Hodge's friends live in. These suburbs are "all identical, but have nothing in common, nothing human." When the friends get together they can talk only in "wearisome abstractions," "what neighbors in general are like," and "the abstract idea of a shopping center." No place is disorienting, where one finds oneself when one is lost. It is a symbol of the confusion Mickelsson feels about beliefs he once held: "It was as if he'd stepped out of a room which, for the time he'd been inside it, he'd known to exist, and could not now find his way back to it --couldn't find it on any map, couldn't even find its theoretical justification, its chemical and mathematical possibility in so-called reality." (272)

    When James Chandler was three he wandered away from home and, "when he looked back, if it was back, the house was gone and it was as if the world, succinct with intelligence, had turned bestial and insane." Hours later, riding home on the tractor in his father 's arms, "the world was in order again. Even though he didn't yet no where he was, the center had re-established itself." (134) James Chandler's father, like Jessie Stark and Ben Hodge, was a place to be.

    By and large, Gardner avoids no place as intently as any of his characters would. It is the antithesis of place: somewhere to stand. It is an accident and, like Grendel's accident, it's allied to death. "So may you all," Grendel whispers. But not Gardner. Gardner 's message is that, in the long run, life is worth living. No place has no people in it and, therefore, no hope.

    There are places that we know the way Gardner knew Batavia and Susquehanna, that give us some idea of who we are: we define ourselves in terms of those around us, Then there is home, where we don't have to define ourselves: it is done for us by the other people who live there. Home is inextricably linked with people. As hard as Peter Mickelsson works on his house, he cannot avoid the empty awareness that he is doing it only for himself. He toys with the idea of bringing his mother to live with him, knowing that so small a thing as the sunlight streaming through the window and striking the pages of her book will enhance the house.

    Places affect character. Bad places affect character adversely. From the moment they enter the cellar with its cobwebs and rats, its caved-in furnace and its shelves full of rotten preserves, Luke, Millie, the Sunlight Man and Nick are doomed.

    The character caught in no place is lost, undefined, in need of rescue, In tearing apart his house under the eye of the pistol in Professor Lawler's hand, Peter Mickelsson is in danger of destroying his place to stand. In a different place, characters reveal the changes in themselves. When James Chandler returns to Batavia, people on the street assume he is a stranger. Taggert Hodge comes back so altered that his own brothers fail to recognize him. Born to be a saint, Hodge kills. When the enigmatic Walter Benson who recites children's poems and New York State place names, leaves his home in Buffalo which be considers Inviolate, he becomes Walter Boyle, housebreaker.

    T he ideal farm, the farm that exists in memory, is the habitat of "those majestic grown-ups," ideal-people incapable of pettiness or error, the source of all the residual good in character. But in the real place, Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, the people are real. They comprise the. human community without which survival. is hopeless. Mickelsson's student Brenda can say, "Your class was like church or something." and be understood. (575 )She does not mean to describe the room; she means M ickelsson is godlike. Similarly, the rustic John Pearson can comment on the Mormon Tabernacle that rises cold and forbidding beside the Washington Beltway, "I don't think I'd care to do business with a God wants a church l ike that." (230-1) The class to Brenda was a spiritual home; the church to Pearson, a spiritless one.

updated on 21 May 1998

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