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Novel Destinations
Shannon McKenna Schmidt and Joni Rendon
By
Published: Jan 01, 2008
Category:
Travel
Novel Destinations: Literary Landmarks From Jane Austen’s Bath to Ernest Hemingway’s Key West
Shannon McKenna Schmidt & Joni Rendon
For real book fanatics, great novels are only the beginning. Closing the pages of a beloved Jane Austen or Charles Dickens or James Patterson for the umpteenth time is a cue to pack suitcases and head out to visit the sacred places where Austen, Dickens or Patterson — well, maybe not Patterson — created their masterpieces.
Publishers know this, and so there are endless “world of” books: great for the obsessive, way too much information for the merely interested. All I want — and unless you revere Jane and worship at the shrine of Charlotte, may I speak for you here? — is a book that ventures wisely but briefly into the lives and haunts of a gaggle of writers.
At last: Novel Destinations: Literary Landmarks From Jane Austen’s Bath to Ernest Hemingway’s Key West does just that.
Shannon McKenna Schmidt and Joni Rendon are my kind of bibliophiles — they know a lot but only tell you the coolest stuff. And their hearts are pure. They’re not stalkers. They just seek “a deeper perspective on the books we cherish.”
They start, therefore, Where They Wrote. With Shakespeare, of course, but they move on briskly to Eugene O’Neill. (Did you know his boyhood home is a nearly exactly model for the set in “Long Day’s Journey into Night”?) And Charlotte Bronte. (Don’t miss the “eerie blank space” on the portrait of the three sisters at the Bronte house.) And John Milton. (I, for one, had no idea the blind poet wrote “Paradise Lost” in his head, then dictated it to his secretary.) Robert Frost is buried in Bennington, Vermont? I lived there and never knew. And how about Edgar Allan Poe’s house in Baltimore — in addition to his writing desk, fragments of his coffin are displayed. How cool.
Another section focuses on American writers at home and abroad. The writers are the usuals: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Wharton, James, Twain. But Schmidt and Rendon don’t do the usual tour. Did you know, for example, about the Scott and Zelda museum in Montgomery, Alabama? I’d make a detour to see Zelda’s ”feather-adorned hair band” and cigarette holder, to say nothing of her manuscript pages edited by Scott.
Literary Festivals? I was going to pass. Then I read about the walking tour of Oscar Wilde’s London, led by a guide in Wildean duds. (Wilde smoked 80 cigarettes a day. Again, news to me.) Literary Places to Drink and Dine? Again, I thought, no interest. Then I read about Truman Capote chancing upon Sartre and de Beauvoir writing in the secluded basement bar of the Hotel Pont-Royal in Paris.
Almost half of the book is devoted to ten writers. I’m competent to judge the sections on only a few, but I was riveted by all the new information coming my way about Dickens, Kafka, Hemingway, Harper Lee. The authors serve up mini-biographies, short literary assessments, guides to houses, museums and restaurants — and, in Kafka’s case, a note about tours to the concentration camp where his favorite sister died. And Hemingway — he had the first swimming pool in Key West. Fascinating how a penny came to be embedded in nearby cement. And….
Oddly, I don’t feel the need to travel after reading “Novel Destinations”. Nor do I feel tired, as if I’ve made these expeditions. What I feel like — what you too may feel like — is reading. And later, if I get obsessed and feel like packing my bags, I know the book I’ll return to.
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