Literary Places

by Sarah Baxter

  Some readers have become so obsessed with the myth of the missing girls that, for many, it’s become reality. Lindsay herself was ambiguous. In a brief prologue she states: ‘Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction my readers must decide for themselves’. Either way, the monstrous Rock is just as the author describes. Located northwest of Melbourne, a little north of Mount Macedon, it rises 105 metres (345 feet) from the Hesket Plains, as extraordinary now as when Miranda, Irma and the rest of the Appleyard girls laid eyes on it over a century ago.

  The schoolgirls, surely sweltering in their prim lace collars, corsets and petticoats, travel to Hanging Rock in a covered drag. You’ll no longer kick up fine red dust as you drive the Melbourne–Bendigo road but you could pause, as they did, for refreshment in the village of Woodend – the 1896-built hotel is still a serving brewhouse. And, as you drive, you’ll still look out at the lines of stringy bark trees, cloud-tufted Mount Macedon and, eventually, the terrible bulk of Hanging Rock itself, which sits within Hanging Rock Recreation Reserve.

  Like drag-driver Mr Hussey, you could go to the horse races here – the first official meeting was held at the Hanging Rock track in 1886, and continues twice a year, on New Year’s Day and Australia Day. The Reserve also encompasses a visitor centre and, of course, picnic grounds where, like the girls, you can spend an afternoon in exquisite languor, dozing and dreaming, breathing in the wattle and eucalypt, basking with the lizards. There are hiking trails too, leading under the boulders, along precipices and up and around the Rock’s summit, which you can follow. If you dare.

  NEW YORK

  Which?

  The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951)

  What?

  Big, brash backdrop for the classic American tale of disaffected youth

  THIS CITY – the most iconic of cities – is a mass of humanity. A seething megapolis of taxi cabs, dive bars, movie stars, uptowners, out-of-towners, priests, pimps, players and phonies. Everyone squeezed in; everything possible. But it can also be the loneliest place in the world, an anonymising anthill of concrete and steel. New York: where you can choose to ride the carousel or step off the kerb into oblivion. Just the place, then, for a troubled teen on the cusp of adulthood to get drunk, laid, lost or saved …

  Holden Caulfield, angsty antihero of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, spoke to a generation. The book contains little action: posh kid gets expelled and spends a few days bumming around New York. But this 16-year-old wise-ass became the poster boy for disaffected youth, beloved for his delicious rebelliousness, his rage against the machine.

  And what better setting for this coming-of-age tale than mid-century Manhattan? In 1950, New York was also finding its place, emerging as the biggest and most important city on the planet. It had Wall Street and Broadway, the tallest skyscrapers and the new United Nations. Yet post-war confusion was palpable; hope tinged with fear. The Catcher in the Rye is a kind of unorthodox guidebook to the city at a certain moment.

  Holden isn’t just in New York, he is of it. He was raised on the Upper East Side and, when he’s kicked out of his fancy Pennsylvania boarding school, he runs not for the hills but for home. Despite his tender years, he moves effortlessly through the urban clutter of seedy hotels and heaving avenues; he knows where to score a drink. New York overwhelms and repulses him too but, love or hate it, the city is intrinsic to who he is.

  It’s late one night, just before Christmas, when Holden arrives by train. Today’s Penn Station is a rather perfunctory terminus, not a patch on the ornate beaux arts edifice that was pulled down in the 1960s. But still, exiting the station is to be spewed into mid-town Manhattan, straight into the melee. Stop for a moment in the sea of souls and immediately you get it: the sensation of feeling utterly alienated while surrounded by thousands of people.

  Over the next couple of days, Holden moves around the city, a journey of experience and innocence. He checks in to the Edmont Hotel, with its prostitutes and perverts, and he takes a ‘vomity’ cab to Ernie’s Jazz Bar, which is full ‘phonies’. Neither establishment ever existed, though there are still basement jazz clubs in Greenwich Village where you can drink Scotch and soda in a dark corner into the small hours.

  Holden hits plenty of real-life Manhattan haunts, too. He stows his Gladstone at Grand Central, still a striking terminus – though the left-luggage service has since been discontinued for security reasons. He jostles with the masses on ‘mobbed and messy’ Broadway; he takes his date ice skating at the Rockefeller Center rink (still open every winter); he watches a show at Radio City Music Hall, a vast venue narrowly saved from closure in the 1970s and now an official City Landmark. The book is set in December and, then as now, Fifth Avenue is a-sparkle with Christmas lights – which might incite festive cheer or an anti-consumerist rant, depending on your perspective.

  Central Park is the book’s principal location, and you can follow Holden’s trail through this great green lung, first opened to provide escape for urbanites in 1858. The vintage carousel, like the one on which Holden watches his sister, is still spinning. Sea lions still swim at the zoo. The parkside Natural History and Met museums that Holden recalls so fondly remain relatively unchanged.

  However, Holden’s main preoccupation is with the ducks on the lagoon near Central Park South: when it freezes over, where do they go? The answer is nowhere. Wander around, wrapped against the chill, and you might see them, huddled in different parts of the park, adapting to survive. Just as Holden must adapt. Just as this great, glorious, notorious, intoxicating, indefatigable city has had to, too.

  MONTEREY

  Which?

  Cannery Row by John Steinbeck (1945)

  What?

  Ocean-side California street where life at its most colourful ebbs and flows

  IN THE early, pearly morning, The Row begins to wake. Gulls start their vigils on corrugated-iron rooftops, waiting for trash to become lunch; sea lions bark like hunting dogs over the heave of the ocean. People stir, feet flip-flapping along the tidy sidewalk. A new cast of human characters thrives here now: trinket-shop keepers, aquarium cleaners, tourist dealers. The whole street spruced up for a huge new shoal: visitors in their millions. But back in the day, when the factories were grinding, empty lots lay under mallow weeds and the air reeked of rotten fish, it was a different troupe – vagrants, prostitutes, artists, idlers – who frequented this industrious neighbourhood by the sea. Like a human rock pool, Cannery Row was flow and vitality, colour and oddity, a discrete ecosystem of humanity striving to stay afloat …

  Cannery Row, a waterfront avenue in Monterey, California, is one of the most famous streets in America. John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, a little northeast of Monterey, in 1902, and set many of his works in this area of central California where the Coast Ranges and rich agricultural valleys – the ‘salad bowl of the States’ – meet the Pacific Ocean.

  By 1930, Steinbeck had moved to Pacific Grove, close to Ocean View Avenue, aka Cannery Row. It was a street lined with noisy, stinking sardine canneries that processed the spoils of the nutrient-rich water offshore – for a time, one of the most productive fishing grounds in the world. The stock seemed inexhaustible, and huge purse-seiners with nets a quarter-mile long ravaged the ocean. This kept workers working during the Great Depression and fed needy mouths during the Second World War. But by the mid-1950s, the sardine supply ran dry. The industry collapsed; the last cannery closed in 1973.

  Published in 1945, but set in an indeterminate period before that, Steinbeck’s eponymous novel remembers The Row with fond sentiment. There are no Nazis in these pages. Indeed, Steinbeck himself called Cannery Row a ‘kind of nostalgic thing’, penned for a group of soldiers who asked him to ‘write something funny that isn’t about the war’.

  The resulting book is like a series of vivid portraits, showing life on The Row in all its odoriferous, eccentric, enterprising glory. The plot, such as it is, follows the exploits of Mack and the boys, a band of resourceful b
ums who doss in an empty fishmeal shack. Mack decides they should do something nice for Doc, the intellectual proprietor of a biological supplies lab, whom everybody loves – and who Steinbeck based on his close friend, marine biologist and philosopher Ed Ricketts.

  The resulting party ends in disaster – but that’s not really the point. The novel is less about action than atmosphere. And it oozes affection for this ramshackle street and those living upon it. These folks may be a motley crew of down-and-outs and chancers, but they are mostly heart-of-gold.

  Today’s Cannery Row – as Ocean View Avenue was officially renamed in 1958 – bears little resemblance to Steinbeck’s. For him, the street was ‘a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream’. The light is still right – the golden California sun still flickers off the water and down the wharf, bathing the honking sea lions and the wooden piers. But it’s all a lot tidier now. The stench has gone, and the defunct factories have been given new leases of life as fish restaurants, gift shops, candy stores and antiques boutiques.

  In Steinbeck Plaza, halfway along The Row, a statue depicts some of the area’s characters, including Steinbeck, Ed Ricketts and local brothel madam Flora Woods, who gave food to the poor during the Depression and provided inspiration for the novel’s Dora Flood. Just off The Row near here are three Cannery Row Workers’ Cabins, now little museums that give a glimpse of living conditions during the district’s sardine fishing heyday.

  Further along the street sit real-life buildings that Steinbeck weaved in. There’s Wing Chong Market, which became Lee Chong’s Heavenly Flower Grocery where you could buy everything from silk kimonos to Old Tennis Shoes whiskey. There’s also Austino’s Patisserie, once the site of a bordello on which Steinbeck based his La Ida Café.

  At No. 800 is Ed Ricketts’ clapboard Pacific Biological Laboratories – inspiration for ‘Doc’s Lab’. Like Doc, Ricketts preserved marine specimens here, which were bought by institutions across the country. A public walkway leads to the rear where you can still see the concrete tanks where Ricketts kept his samples; the ocean beyond is now the Edward F. Ricketts State Marine Conservation Area. Ricketts was an intellectual with diverse interests and his lab became a gathering place for artists, musicians and writers. These days the building is mostly closed, though free public tours run once a month.

  Even if Doc’s isn’t open, you can see plenty of marine specimens on the site of the former Hovden Cannery. Since 1984, this has been home to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, a groundbreaking, not-for-profit facility dedicated to marine conservation and education, with a focus on the wildlife of Monterey Bay. The aquarium is home to some 550-plus species, from sea turtles to huge shoals of glittering sardines. Millions of paying visitors come each year. So while times may have changed, it’s still fish that bring the dollars to Cannery Row.

  MISSISSIPPI RIVER

  Which?

  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884)

  What?

  Mighty waterway through the heart of America, brimming with adventure and social significance

  SOMETIMES THIS river seems wide as an ocean. A great blue-grey expanse, slipping ever southwards from glacial lakes and tallgrass prairie to the sultry subtropics. It makes a massive, meandering journey, but is a place for simple pleasures; where you can float away from your troubles. It’s a place for lazing back, trailing a toe in the flow, and listening to the somnolent trickle. For eating mushmelon and corn dodgers, talking aimless flapdoodle. For gliding to the hum of mosquitoes. For gazing at a sky a-flicker with stars. The ancient river: an invitation to drift, an opportunity to escape …

  Ol’ Man River, Big Muddy, Father of Waters. The Mississippi, a leviathan of many names, flows through the heart of America. It once served as the country’s western border, and has long been key for trade and transportation. During the American Civil War (1861–1865), the river’s capture by Union forces signalled a turn towards victory. In short, the Mississippi looms large in America’s history, culture and consciousness. And it’s central to Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

  Samuel Langhorne Clemens – pen name Mark Twain – was born in Florida, Missouri, in 1835 but moved to nearby Hannibal, on the Mississippi’s west bank, in 1839. He was raised in antebellum America, a time of growth and expansion, thriving plantations and goods-laden steamboats; as a young man, Twain even worked as a riverboat pilot, gaining intimacy with the Mississippi’s many twists, turns and eddies.

  This was also a time of slavery. Unlike Illinois, across the river, Missouri, was not a free state; by the mid-19th century, a quarter of Hannibal County’s population were slaves. While Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published two decades after the 1865 Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, the novel is set in the 1840s. And Twain’s novel – at first glance, a simple boys’ own adventure – is a blistering examination of American attitudes to race at the time.

  The novel follows the exploits of teenage vagabond Huck Finn and Jim, a black adult slave. Both live in the Missouri town of St Petersburg and both want to escape incarceration. Huck is running from his abusive, alcoholic Pap and the constraints of ‘sivilized’ society – the hand-washin’, meal times and starchy britches that have been inflicted on him. Jim is fleeing slavery. So the pair strike out together, intending to raft to the free state of Illinois. Their drifting comes at a cost – they lose their raft, witness a massacre, encounter burglars and murderers. But despite all this, the wandering river provides the ultimate prize: freedom. Unlike life ashore, it’s not ‘cramped up and smothery’. Once they’re sliding down the Mississippi, it’s as if they exist beyond society’s normal rules. On the water, a white boy and a black man can float together, talking as equals.

  Academics argue over Twain’s stance on race. Some see the novel as a scathing attack on prejudice; others condemn its repeated use of the word ‘nigger’ and feel it stereotypes black people. But it remains one of the most important works of American literature, as well as a rich evocation of the mid-19th-century Midwest.

  To get a taste of Twain’s Americana, head to his one-time hometown of Hannibal, on which fictional St Petersburg is heavily based. The heart of the riverside town remains largely intact, its gridded historic centre lined with old-fashioned drugstores and taverns, as well as the old Clemens’ house, now the Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum. You can also soak up the scenery that inspired Huck’s adventures – the sandbanks, the old mansions, the lazy river views – and board a replica paddle steamer for a journey on the Mississippi.

  A few miles south of Hannibal is Jackson’s Island, where Huck and Jim meet up and forge one of the most monumental friendships in American literature – a mixed-race mate-ship in an era when this was rare indeed. The narrow, wooded island is still uninhabited, aside from the muskrats, turtles and beavers. And it’s still an ideal spot to play, hide, lark, tumble and watch the timeless river glide by.

  MONROEVILLE

  Which?

  To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)

  What?

  Deep South US town that inspired a simple tale of racial heroism

  NO ONE’S in a hurry in this tired old town. Maybe it’s the heat – the Alabama summer is stultifying, sticky as molasses. It would be swell to swing on a porch all afternoon with an icy Coca-Cola. But this bench under the main square’s live oaks and magnolias will do just fine. Folk pass by, strolling between the Christian bookshop, the thrift store and the fine old County Courthouse, its white dome dazzling under the sun. No case has been tried here for decades; indeed, its most famous case wasn’t tried here at all. But it remains a potent symbol of justice all the same …

  Harper Lee’s classic, To Kill a Mockingbird, delivered the right message in the right tone at the right moment. A simple tale of prejudice, unjustness and morality, it was published in 1960, just as the American South faced its biggest social shift since the Civil War. The equality movement was gaining momentum; deeply
entrenched attitudes to race and class were being challenged. Alabama saw some of the highest-profile acts. It was in Montgomery in 1955 that Rosa Parks refused to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger. In 1956, anti-integration riots erupted when Autherine Lucy and Polly Myers became the first African-American students to be admitted to the state’s university.

  Though set in 1930s Alabama, during the Great Depression, To Kill a Mockingbird matched the mood of the sixties, and gave voice to the fears and frustrations of this transitional period. It showed the country it needed a conscience and offered an unimpeachable hero: Atticus Finch – single parent, lawyer, ‘the bravest man who ever lived’. Atticus, the father of child narrator Scout, defends Tom Robinson, an innocent black man, against charges of raping a white woman. Atticus knows he is destined to fail, but he proceeds with the case nonetheless.

  The Finch family live in Maycomb, technically a fictional place but so modelled on the author’s home of Monroeville that the two inevitably merge – the footsteps of Harper Lee and Atticus Finch lead the same way. Maycomb is an isolated, insular, hard-scrabble town, steeped in Southern values. Monroeville is similarly out on a limb, similarly Southern-hospitable, similarly facing testing times. Its former clay streets – ‘red slop’ in the rain – have been paved but the population is low and falling (currently 6,000 or so) and there’s a slight air of decrepitude around the old square, where many businesses have closed. However, its cultural impact has not faded.