Novel Destinations

Do you have to have read the books to appreciate the places?

JR: Definitely not!  The beauty of these places is that they can enlighten and inspire someone completely unfamiliar with a particular author’s work, while at the same time, someone who’s already a fan will gain new and deeper insights. In fact, you don’t even have to be a reader to appreciate many literary locales, because so often they provide broader historical insight into a society or the opportunity to soak up magnificent landscapes. My husband and I drove the Cervantes route in La Mancha a few years ago, and although neither of us knew a thing about Don Quixote, it was a great way to take in the vast plains of central Spain. We visited an old stone cave where Cervantes was imprisoned, saw a recreation of his birthplace home, and stood in awe at the foot of the huge windmills that Quixote valiantly battled after mistaking them for giants.    

SMS: Also, many places have beautiful grounds, gardens, and hiking trails to explore, such as Jack London’s California ranch, Flannery O’Connor’s Georgia farm, and Rudyard Kipling’s English estate. Other sites are architecturally interesting, like the Victorian mansion in Hartford, Connecticut that Mark Twain had built. It’s a cross between Gothic and whimsical. On the exterior are gables and a colorful palette of painted brick, and the elegant interior has rooms designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany.

Have you ever visited a place, not knowing anything about the author or book, and been inspired to read the book?

SMS: This actually happens quite a bit, and our nightstand reading tables have become precariously full as a result!

JR: While visiting the James Joyce Tower outside of Dublin, where Joyce briefly stayed with a friend, I learned of an intriguing incident that inspired me to attempt to read Ulysses. Tensions between Joyce and his friend were running high and when gunshots rang out over his bed in the middle of the night, Joyce understandably fled in haste! Later, he wove the tower and the incident into the opening scene of Ulysses, and though I excitedly bought a copy of the book in the gift shop and tore into it, I have to admit that I struggled getting beyond the first few pages. 

SMS: I was inspired to read Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo after visiting the locale named for it. Located on the outskirts of Paris, the Château de Monte-Cristo is a small castle and grounds (including man-made grottos and a waterfall) that Dumas called his “paradise on Earth.” Each room in the château presents a different facet of his life, from his exotic travels to his affinity for gourmet cooking. Also on the property is a stone tower Dumas had built for his office, which he named Château d’If after the prison in The Count of Monte Cristo. The whole place is so interesting and imaginative it made me to want read its namesake novel.

How much really do you get of the author’s spirit from visiting their houses—I’m thinking of how many famous authors are known for being alcoholics or depressives or really messy, and then you see this nice, neat place out of Better Homes and Gardens.

JR: Admittedly, not all writers were saints and many—if not most—experienced hard times (like Mark Twain, who never returned to his lavish Hartford mansion after his daughter Susy died there), but these are stories you learn about when you visit their inner sanctums. You quickly realize how human these writers were—despite their greatness—and that’s what gives you a window into their spirits, even if, in some cases, the dirty clothes once strewn about or broken liquor bottles littering the floor have been tidied up.

And actually, many houses do a pretty accurate job of reflecting a writer’s personal history. For instance, the tiny Edgar Allan Poe cottage in the Bronx, where he lived during his last years, really gives you a sense of the bleakness and hardship of his life, even after his work had achieved great acclaim. The Walt Whitman House in Camden, N.J., is another example. The poet was infamous for his clutter and disorganization, and the bedroom of the New Jersey home where he died is haphazardly strewn with paper, just as friends recalled it was during his time there.

What have you found to be the most popular literary landmark?

SMS: A very popular literary landmark is the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum in Key West, although we’re not sure if the allure is the author’s larger-than-life legacy or the many cats that live on the premises. Legend has it that Hemingway was given a six-toed cat by a ship’s captain, and the ones that roam the property today—including the fiery-orange Archibald, who lays claim to Papa’s bed—are said to be its descendants. Hannibal, Missouri, the birthplace of witty raconteur Mark Twain, attracts a lot of families, who come to tour his boyhood home, explore the cave featured in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and cruise the Mississippi like Twain, a former riverboat pilot, once did.

JR: Across the pond, the Jane Austen Centre in Bath, England, is always packed with visitors from all over the world, including, surprisingly, a fair share of men! Ironically, the far more poignant location associated with the author—the home in the Hampshire countryside where she wrote many of her final works—is much less visited but worth the extra effort to seek out. There, you can see her tiny, three-legged writing table and the famous “creaking door” that alerted her to incoming callers so that she could hide her work.

Literature has actually saved monuments! I was surprised to learn in your book that the cathedral of Notre Dame had fallen into disrepair during the 18th and 19th centuries and it was the publication of The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1831 and the resulting crowds in search of “Victor Hugo’s cathedral” that inspired the city to restore the monument to its medieval glory. Do you know of any contemporary examples of that?

SMS: One of the most striking examples of the power of modern readers to save a literary landmark is The Mount, Edith Wharton’s estate in the Berkshires, which faced foreclosure earlier this year. They recently succeeded in raising nearly a million dollars from bibliophiles inspired to preserve not only a chapter of literary history, but also to save one of the handful of National Historic Landmarks devoted to women. Although more funds are needed, the outpouring of support was enough to allow the house to open for the 2008 season. It would be a shame to lose this literary landmark, where Wharton—who had a flair for architecture and landscape design as well as writing—designed the house and gardens. It goes to show that books, even ones published a century ago, can continue to be powerful forces in shaping and preserving our cultural heritage.

Photo: Above, A statue of the Bronte Sisters at their homestead, by Laura George; Below, The Hemingway Home in Key West, by nerboo via Flickr

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