When I was 16 years old and obsessed with the Glass family stories of J. D. Salinger, I convinced three of my friends to set out for Cornish, New Hampshire, in hopes of meeting the reclusive author. I’d recently read an unauthorized biography of Salinger that had provided some clues concerning how to find his home, but at some point during the journey, it occurred to me that I didn’t have much of a plan for what would happen if I actually found Salinger.
What could I possibly say to the man? Would I be run off his property? It never occurred to me, then, to be concerned for his privacy. When we finally found what we believed was Salinger’s mailbox, I called off the search, losing all nerve. In the end, I was content to visit the local grocery store, which was likely patronized by J. D. Salinger. This was enough for me: to be in the place where my hero shopped, where he bought his milk and cereal.
That was my first literary pilgrimage, but it was far from the last. Over the last two decades, I’ve completed several more, although never to the home of an actual living author. I’m content to remain on the periphery.
My travels began in earnest in 1999, the year I married a fellow English major and literary tourist/pilgrim. Our first trip was to visit the grave of Edgar Allan Poe in Baltimore. Since then, we’ve been to 45 states together, as well as three foreign countries. While each trip wasn’t solely for the purpose of literary tourism, there was always some literary site nearby—“nearby” being liberally defined—that called to us. What self-respecting English major could refuse a mere 246-mile detour off I-80 to visit Ketchum, Idaho? It’s not every day you are only four hours from the spot where Ernest Hemingway lies buried. Besides, as an added bonus, we got to see where Ezra Pound was born, in Hailey, Idaho.
That neither of us is a particular fan of Pound’s poetry is beside the matter: These shrines might pale in comparison to the shrines of the saints in medieval cathedrals, but in our modern world, where football stadiums and shopping malls might be the only proper destinations for a pilgrim, I’m much happier spending my time among literary ghosts.
Through the years, we’ve visited John Steinbeck’s Salinas Valley, Walker Percy’s New Orleans and Greenville, Mississippi, William Faulkner’s Oxford, T. S. Eliot’s St. Louis, and the final resting place of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald in Rockville, Maryland. We’ve been to Hemingway’s Michigan and Key West, Eudora Welty’s home in Jackson, Willa Cather’s Red Cloud, Nebraska, and J. F. Powers’s Collegeville, Minnesota.
We visited the Concord of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and the Alcotts—the highlight of which was stopping at The Old Manse, once home to both Emerson and Hawthorne. (In the window of the north study, visitors can still see where Nathaniel Hawthorne carved into the glass with a diamond this phrase: “Man’s accidents are God’s purposes.”)
We also visited Herman Melville’s Arrowhead in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where, looking out on Mount Greylock, Melville saw his great white whale in the snow-covered mountain.
Our most profound experience came on a recent visit to Flannery O’Connor’s Andalusia, her home from 1951 until her death in 1964. This was actually our second visit to Milledgeville, Georgia, as we spent a day of our honeymoon detouring to the town in hopes of finding O’Connor’s grave. While neither Milledgeville nor a cemetery is the quintessential romantic destination, we were only a few hours away; how could we resist the temptation? At the time of our first visit, Andalusia was inhabited and not open to the public, and while making preparations for the trip, I recalled reading stories of pilgrims being chased off the property by a shotgun-toting cousin. I didn’t know if there was any truth to these stories, but I concluded that it might be best simply to stop and pay our respects at Memory Hill Cemetery, or maybe just stick our heads into Sacred Heart Catholic Church.
Fortunately, Flannery O’Connor’s Andalusia was opened to the public in 2003, and it has since become a genuine landmark. It was in this house that O’Connor spent her remaining years after receiving a diagnosis of lupus, the disease that had killed her father. It was here that she completed her two novels— Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear it Away (1960)—and her collections of short stories, A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything that Rises Must Converge, published posthumously in 1965.
Most of the letters collected in The Habit of Being (1979) were also written in this house, and, standing on the porch, I found it hard not to think about the countless luminaries (and pilgrims) who visited O’Connor over the years. Andalusia, indeed, was frequented by some of the most important literary figures of the 20th century. I was struck by the same thought while visiting Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford, where the list of pilgrims can be found in a guestbook: Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, Alfred Lord Tennyson, John Keats, Lord Byron, Thomas Hardy.
I signed the guestbook in both places.
Andalusia is part of a 544-acre farm and includes most of the original structures extant in O’Connor’s lifetime. There is even a peafowl aviary on the land, although none of the original flock survived long after O’Connor’s death. Since O’Connor’s lupus made it difficult for her to climb stairs, her bedroom is on the main floor, with windows looking out on the surrounding acreage. O’Connor’s room is immediately to the left upon entering the front door, making it the first thing one sees in the house. Here are O’Connor’s crutches and typewriter. In the kitchen, you see a table set for two—O’Connor and her mother Regina—and the refrigerator purchased by Flannery after the sale of the television rights for “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.” Behind the house is the barn, which calls immediately to mind Hulga Hopewell and the traveling Bible salesmen/atheist Manley Pointer from “Good Country People.”
For me, it was overwhelming. Almost everything appeared as though Flannery O’Connor were still alive, as if the world about which she wrote still existed.
Yet news of these pilgrimages often elicits puzzled expressions from others, even pity for our children. I would be the first to admit that there is nothing conventional about our vacation practices, and while we might relish the uniqueness of our travels, we have reflected about them as well. Inhabiting places where authors lived and worked, viewing the landscapes of novels and stories that we have treasured over a lifetime, connects the imagination with concrete experience. There is certainly a sense that we are paying homage to our literary heroes; we are also trying to instill in our children a proper reverence and love for literature, hoping that they will come to share in something that has drawn us together.
Being in these places opens up a new, almost tangible, connection with their corresponding works of literature. Perhaps it is akin to what Binx Bolling in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer calls “certification.” Rather than seeing everyday reality transformed on a movie screen into places heretofore only encountered in the imagination, such places become real in a way that’s hard to articulate but difficult not to feel.
Maybe part of the allure is hope. Maybe seeing the places that inspired great art offers some sort of clue, some way of looking at the world, that will translate into a vision we make our own someday.
Mark Maier is assistant to the provost, and lecturer in English, at Hillsdale College.