Last week, I went to Troy. (I also made a brief stop at Sodom, but probably the less said about that the better.) I mention this because one of the segments of the seminar I’m teaching in England this year is about the relationship of literature to landscape. But what can a place, however historic, really tell us about the acts of imagination that create literature?
Don’t get me wrong: I can think of a few cases in which looking at the landscape can help you understand what inspired a writer. Seeing the Lake District brought Wordsworth to life for me, and I’m looking forward to showing it to my students. But can we find anything except kitsch in a place as strewn with literary associations as Troy? It’s not clear if what archaeologists have spent the last century digging up on a hill along the shores of the Bosphorus is Homer’s legendary city: the ruins roughly match the story of a walled city destroyed by war at some point in the 12th or 13th Century BCE. And yet, even if that history were true, what could gazing upon those ruins add to the pleasures of reading The Iliad?
I always get this question when I visit literary sites. What do we really expect to find at Walden or Stratford-upon-Avon or the Bronte Parsonage except other tourists gazing at a few cherished relics or reconstructions which do nothing to explain the miracle that took place there? At Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s house in Oxford, Mississippi, you can see some words scribbled on a wall. At Keats House, voted Britain’s top poetry landmark following a nationwide survey by the Poetry Society in 2005, you can see some manuscripts, the engagement ring that Keats gave Fanny Brawne, a plum tree in the garden on the spot where the poet sat in a swoon writing “Ode to a Nightingale,” and the bedroom where he first coughed up blood. That place, at least, has inspired new acts of imagination: Thomas Hardy wrote a poem after his visit, Andrew Motion spent six months living there while working on his biography of Keats, and Vita Sackville-West described the house in her novel All Passion Spent as “that little white box of strain and tragedy marooned among the dark green laurels.” Still, what sets one house in Hampstead or Bloomsbury apart from all the others on its block? Emotions were felt, ideas were had, words were scribbled. It’s not like visiting a battlefield, where we can stand on the ramparts and visualize the horror. Even at Troy, the most famous battlefield in the ancient world, all we have are acts of imagination.
Homer, if he ever existed, never saw Troy: while local legends claim that the poet was born in Smyrna, just down the coast from Troy, time and blindness, if not the Greeks, would have made that impossible. The city was abandoned during the period in which a poet named Homer might have lived, so the Troy of Homer’s poems was a verbal construction ??? made up of history, legend, and song ??? before he ever began to tell its story. And if there was a war that destroyed this city, it probably had nothing to do with a great beauty stolen from Greece, but geography, power, and control of shipping lanes.
And yet, I had to go there. Most people who visit the site arrive on a tour bus from Istanbul. You can hitch a ride with the crowds of Australian tourists headed for Gallipoli, then break away to cross to the eastern shore of the Hellespont, just a few kilometers south of the ruins of Abydos and Sestos, where Leander and Byron took their romantic swims. For me, degenerate modern wretch, there was a ferry, full of people doing their weekly shopping and teenagers checking their text messages. When you get to the site, you find an archaeological dig with carefully laid-out tourist paths and busloads of Japanese tourists who seem vaguely disappointed not to catch a glimpse of Brad Pitt. The horse was knocked together by a local carpenter in six weeks one summer. (They’ve got the one built for the movie in the harbor of ??anakkale, the nearest town.) Still, there’s a lot of myth for the money at a place like Troy, even if the most you can make of it is a blog post.
But here’s an evocative little fact: Troy, at the height of its wealth and power, was smaller than the Kenyon College campus. (If you’ve never seen Kenyon, we’re talking small, and that’s just the campus, not the tiny village that surrounds it.) I like that idea, partly because it fits my sense that all myths are local. Every college, if you ask the students, has its Helen of Troy, its ball-field Hectors, its arbitrary gods. We compose ourselves in landscapes, and the stories we tell there are what bring the place to life, leaving it to feel strangely hollow to those ??? including our older selves — who wander through in later years. At Kenyon, we also live among the ruins, haunted by the ghosts of poets in their youth — John Crowe Ransom, Robert Lowell, James Wright, Randall Jarrell, Peter Taylor, E.L. Doctorow, Anthony Hecht, William Gass, Delmore Schwartz ??? who passed through this small place. But to those of us who have lived there, all that means is that we know where they bought their liquor and what they saw from their windows in the depths of winter, not what fired their minds.
Landscape, it turns out, is a Trojan horse, in which the imagination crouches with sword drawn. And literature is what history can’t contain, sweeping away cities and burning their topless towers. All that’s left to see are the ruins.