Setting & Atmosphere

163}DUELING LANDSCAPES:
SOME FIELD NOTES ON SETTING

I’m writing this at a café in the Piazza del Pantheon, Rome, on a dreary winter’s day. Clouds hang low over Marcus Agrippa’s temple to the Gods, that ancient concrete and granite eyeball open to the skies.

No wine without the glass, they say. And no story without a setting.

I’ve planted myself here with the resoluteness of a weed: You can do that in Roman cafés. I’ve come here to write. I may write about the rotting, ruined hat factories in the Connecticut town where I grew up, or about the courtyards of Piacenza, where my mother once lived. Whatever I write, it will be informed by the slightly wobbly table with its blue and yellow linens, by the lingering sweetness of the coffee, by the Pantheon’s blackened columns, and by the fountain whose waters, on this grim, damp day, feel redundant. I write with the sense that I’ve been here and will be here forever, as fixed to this spot on the earth as the columns of the Pantheon.

I grew up in two countries: the Europe inside my parents’ home, and the America outside. Inside were books in foreign languages crammed onto shelves, along with my father’s sloppy but solid paintings of fountains and statues. Outside were baseball diamonds, white picket fences, and woods. Inside was the must of the Old World, outside were five-and-dime stores and the ruins of hat factories. (The phrase itself is quaint: Men once bought hats, and wore them.)

I was eight when we crossed the Atlantic by ocean liner and finally got to see that other world. Though too young to appreciate very much beyond gelato nocciola, still, I did stand transfixed before the courtyards of Piacenza, gazing through the locked iron gates at weeping willow trees and marble Venus statues. In Italy, every surface was cracked and pitted or burnished smooth. Voices bounced off the broken walls like organ notes in a cathedral. Even the pigeons sounded different, cooing in Italian, saying, “Ma basta, ma basta” (translation: Cut it out!). Birds, trees, flowers, bricks, pigeons—all seemed happier here. And I loved that everything was ancient and dusty.

Back home, environment exerted its own influences. The house I grew up in sat on a Connecticut hill with its back to the woods. I spent lots of time in those woods—dark and Dantesque, but also my best friend, always willing to play with me. I’d hike up to the bald patch of rocks we called Eagle’s Nest. From there you could see the whole town, a valley packed with abandoned hat factories, their smokestacks pointing like brick fingers into the sky. I’d take a deep breath and run fast as I could down the hill, leaping over rocks and fallen trees (it’s a miracle I didn’t break my neck). Those woods were my real home, as was the Italy that lived in our house.

Setting. I think of Saul Bellow’s New York and Chicago, of the skyscrapers he once described as “monuments to (men’s) mysteries,” of his transit buses spewing poisonous bouquets of vapors. No writer has done more justice to America’s cities than Bellow, faithfully translating their magnificence and meanness, their generosity and cruelty. Here is a Chicago morning from Dangling Man, his second novel:

In the upper light there were small fair heads of cloud turning. The streets, in contrast, looked burnt-out; the chimneys pointed heavenward in openmouthed exhaustion. The turf, intersected by sidewalk, was bedraggled with the whole winter’s deposit of deadwood, match cards, cigarettes, dogmire, rubble.

The grass behind the palings and wrought iron frills was still yellow, although in many places the sun had already succeeded in shaking it into a livelier green. And the houses, their doors and windows open, drawing in the freshness, were like old drunkards or consumptives taking a cure.

In Bellow’s hands, the opened windows of a tenement yawn in great gulps of tainted air. A clump of weeds rising from a rubbled lot invites as much pity as any foundling in Dickens. In most great descriptions, the pathetic fallacy is at least courted—or even engaged outright.

A sign flashing Blatz in a bar window draws sympathy from Nelson Algren. For Algren even shadows and air have feelings:

There through the starless night or the thunderous noon, sunlight or rain or windless cold, she would sit till the tenement’s long shadows moved all the way down from the fourth floor rear, slid silently under her door and drifted across her lap, to tremble one moment at still finding her there and then lie comforted and still. While all the air hung wearily.

Sometimes interior and exterior landscapes are so inextricably linked it’s hard to say which is more real. Is the Mexico in Lowry’s Under the Volcano the setting of the drunken consul’s deliriums, or their result? In Joyce’s Ulysses, the characters seem to live in cities of thought, with the map of Dublin identical to that of Leopold Bloom’s brain. The plot of that novel couldn’t be simpler: Two men, crossing a city in opposite directions, meet along the way. Yet the inventory of sensual phenomena borne by their dual streams of consciousness couldn’t be more exhaustive. Joyce didn’t plot his masterpiece so much as he connived it as a way of recovering the Dublin he’d abandoned as a young man, and which he spent much of the rest of his life reconstructing—pub by paving stone—out of words. With the possible exception of Faulkner and his Yoknapatawpha County, no author ever made a setting more completely his own.

Compare Joyce to Dostoyevsky, whose novels are so wanting for atmosphere one searches in vain for a piece of furniture to sit on while his characters beat each other’s Slavic brows. With Dostoyevsky talk isn’t cheap, but it is in infinite supply, and readers in search of a breeze or a sofa may as well search for oxygen on Mars.

The same atmospheric stinginess serves to enhance the effect of setting in Hemingway’s stories and novels. The less lush his descriptions, the greater their impact. How does Papa do it? If he washes a trout in a clear, rushing stream, you feel the water so cold against your fingertips they grow numb. When, at the Select (his favorite Parisian café), he drinks down oysters with cold wine, you feel that cold against the back of your throat:

As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and make plans.

In this passage from A Moveable Feast, atmosphere is so well evoked it gives you an ice cream headache. Yet there’s nothing purple here; the feelings are evoked by things themselves, not by the author’s wish to sanctify or glorify them.

Then there are minimalists like Camus, for whom all of Paris “with its black pigeons and sooty courtyards” is dispatched with a single phrase. From then on in The Stranger, except for that blinding burst of sunlight on the Algerian shore, setting will take a back seat to thought. But note how the glare of sunlight in that fateful scene contrasts with the blackness of the city, as if civilization were an inkblot on a sunny landscape.

Great stories are joined to their settings: the fogged-in London of Bleak House, Kinnan Rawlings’s creeks and bayous, the Marabar Caves in A Passage to India, the coffin-shaped gondolas in Death in Venice, the bureaucratic metropolis of Kafka’s unfinished The Trial (where men’s souls are jammed like punch cards through a monumental computer). The desolate moors of Yorkshire give rise to the characters in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Her bad-tempered, vengeful antagonist is named “Heath-cliff,” evoking the windy bluff on which perches the dark, foreboding house he grew up in. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the doctor’s country home near Geneva is also isolated, hemmed in by snowcapped mountains, brooding over a still, dark lake, cut off from society. These are landscapes perfectly suited to characters struggling by sheer willpower against forces and fates over which they have no control.

With civilization wedging itself into every nook and cranny on the globe, such “raw,” “brooding” landscapes have grown increasingly rare. From the taming effects of human intervention even the oceans and heavens aren’t safe. Now that we’ve torn the lids off of inner and outer space, what sort of settings would Jules Verne choose for his speculative fictions?

Settings are an endangered species: forests burn; glaciers melt. Aside from its tattoo and pizza parlors, small town America is gone, replaced by one big mall (the setting of Nicholson Baker’s The Fermata, where several hundred pages are devoted to a voyage up an escalator). The last few decades have served up a slew of minimalist fictions exploring nihilism and ennui, fiction in which settings are distilled down to and codified by brand names of clothing and burger franchises. It’s not the writing that’s turned generic, but the world: McSetting. In such sandy soil can stories survive, let alone thrive?

The streets of my hometown were equal parts dangerous and drowsy, heavy with boredom, suspicions and conformity. My brother and I pedaled our bikes endlessly, ducking into the Town Hall to slurp from the freezing water fountain. Or we sat atop May Hill, the limestone cliff overlooking a one-time hat factory converted into a bicycle seat company, breaking off chunks of cheesy stone and hurling them onto the corrugated tin roof of the reject shed. God, were we bored! We longed for an apocalypse, for the fuel oil tanks by the railroad to explode and suck the town into a fireball. Sometimes we’d set imaginary plastic explosives along the railroad tracks and do the job ourselves—like Burt Lancaster in The Train. My hometown’s landscape of violence-inducing boredom stood in sharp contrast to the promise of heaven held out by those dreamy Italian courtyards: the dual landscapes of a divided human nature—destructive and contemplative, deadly and dreamy.

In her essay, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” Flannery O’Connor writes, “The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find the location.” Where and when would my dueling landscapes find their one home?

Whether we’re writers or not, each of us, in her own way, is searching for that ultimate setting—not just for our stories, but for ourselves, for our souls, for a place to hang our emotional hats. Maybe that crossroads doesn’t exist, at least not in physical time and space. Maybe it can’t be pinned down by longitude and latitude. Maybe it only exists on paper.

It may be, too, that as fiction writers the only place we can ever safely call home is the one where dreams and ideas meet, where thoughts turn into words, sentences, and scenes, where moods, inspirations, and feelings are nailed down, as fixed on the page as the stars in the night sky: a sheet of paper.

The ultimate setting for all of our stories.

164}RAGING & BLOWING:
WHIPPING UP A STORM

Weather can add atmosphere and even psychology to our stories. Temperature is pain or pleasure; humidity is mood; barometric pressure is destiny (in terms of weather, but also in terms of human nature).

There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gor-gonio Passes, blowing up sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night. I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.

In Joan Didion’s essay, “Los Angeles Notebook,” the Santa Ana winds function as both setting and character, heralding but also instigating the narrator’s deep depression. Similarly the fog that sets the stage in Dickens’s Bleak House hangs metaphorically over the rest of his nine-hundred-page novel. The forest fire that provides the climax for Roxanna Robinson’s novel Sweetwater grows organically—not just out of the drought-afflicted Adirondack landscape, but out of the smoldering relationships between characters. And of course there’s the great storm on the heath in Act Three of King Lear, which rages as much within the baffled and buffeted monarch as without.

Another storm scene ends a student’s novel-in-outline: A lot will depend on how it is set up. Is the hurricane an inevitable occurrence, or just an authorial convenience? Is it properly foreshadowed? Does it function metaphorically or symbolically, or is it merely there to make something happen in a story that otherwise would have been static? Is it part of the plot, or a substitute for the lack of one? If the plot hinges entirely on the hurricane, then the action has been taken out of the characters’ hands and turned over to Mother Nature. The result would be a deus ex machina (“god in his machine”), an ending that doesn’t function organically.

On the other hand, as in Didion’s essay, the weather may play a central role in the drama—but that intention should be clear, or at least hinted at, from the start. A storm scene in a novel or story shouldn’t be a random climactic act, but one ordained by and intrinsic to the story, that complicates or resolves a drama that is already stormy.

165}NOT IN MY BACKYARD:
RESEARCH SETTINGS

When writing about a real place, it pays to research your setting. One can’t arrive at Rockefeller Plaza via Madison Avenue, though a character in a story does just that. And I can’t remember the last time I saw a “No Loitering” sign anywhere in Manhattan, let alone in Times Square, where the same character finds one. Furthermore one usually can’t access restrooms in office buildings without a key or a visitor’s pass; but this same lucky fellow does so. Quibbles, I know, but New York City is too well known to get details like that wrong.

We owe it not only to our readers but to ourselves to believe every word that we write. And though we’re writing fiction, when that fiction is set in a real place—especially a famous real place— we should try to be as accurate and authentic as possible.

Readers want to believe. Why make it any harder for them than necessary?