The Toast’s previous literary pilgrimages can be found here.

Not too long ago, I found myself on a dusty bus rumbling through French Catalonia, trailing a dead man called Patrick O’Brian. I would find him in a tiny fishing village called Collioure.

“It would have been easy to miss Collioure altogether,” he once wrote, “but I did not.”

O’Brian might have liked it if everyone else missed Collioure altogether, myself included. He was a notorious misanthrope. He produced historical novels — some of the best ever to be written, according to many — and was also a translator, biographer, vintner, and husband of a divorced Russian countess. In his old age, O’Brian looked exactly like a hawk. Not approximately; exactly. The cover of his complete short works features a marvelous picture of him grinning, a hawk perched on his gloved fist. They could exchange places and one might not notice.

His books are sea-tales, rollicking broadside ballads of the Napoleonic era. The era of Nelson! Of Trafalgar! Of wooden ships and iron men, with hearts of oak pulsing with Stockholm tar! Every thumb a marlinspike! The novels feature a courageous British sea captain and his best friend, a brooding surgeon/naturalist/spy/anarchist. There are duels and puns and moral quandaries, as well as drunken sloth. They are the ineluctable best of their genre, the sadly crowded genre of nautical super-series. There are twenty of them in all. I freely admit to an incomplete knowledge of the O’Brian oeuvre; the closer I get to finishing the series, the slower I go. I am close — alarmingly close. But just as I was unable to finish Thomas Merton’s Asian Journal (it ends because he dies. Just up and dies on you), I don’t want to run out of Patrick O’Brian. One day I’ll finish The Final Unfinished Voyage of Captain Jack Aubrey, an incomplete manuscript, cryptically published as “21” after the lonely Dublin death of its author. But not yet.

Oh, how I loved Edith Wharton. We were like two peas in a pod. True, she grew up stifled by the conventions of Old New York at the turn of the century, and I grew up on an Adirondack commune during the Age of Aquarius. But we both felt such claustrophobia, her in the drawing room, me with the hippies and the trees.

The Toast’s previous literary pilgrimages can be found here.

Growing up in the heart of New York City, I hardly believed places like Nebraska and Kansas were real; they sounded as foreign to me as Madagascar and Timbuktu. I took my first cross-country drive at age 19 and was immediately and irreversibly enchanted by the cows and cornfields, enormous sky and straight, hypnotic highways of America’s heartland. 

So naturally I signed up for the “Literature of the Midwest” class in college, where I first read O Pioneers! by Willa Cather, whose most famous works—O Pioneers!, My Antonia, and The Song of the Lark—are some of literature’s most evocative portraits of life on the prairie. (For grownups, that is. Little House on the Prairie these ain’t.)

Cather’s father moved the family moved to Red Cloud, Nebraska in 1884, when Willa was 10 years old. The town was only a few years older than she, “a few seasons from raw prairie” she wrote. She didn’t take to the prairie right away, thought it, “naked as the back of your hand.” But long after she left Red Cloud to attend college, returning only for visits after that, she realized, “That shaggy country has gripped me with a passion I have never been able to shake.”

Yeah, me too. I’ve made the pilgrimage to Red Cloud twice and probably will again. From my home in Dallas, I drive six hours to Wichita, Kansas where I spend the night, then another three-and-a-half hours north through a landscape like an alpha wave: gently rolling prairie and farmland punctuated by picture-book barns and farmhouses. (You could also fly into Omaha and drive three hours from there.) Red Cloud is very much a pilgrimage; it is not on the way to anything and there’s nothing nearby but prairie and cornfields, so if you are going to go there, you go there. 

The Toast’s last literary pilgrimage was to Haworth, home of Wuthering Heights.

There’s a line in one of my favorite fantasy novels, Pamela Dean’s The Whim of the Dragon, which I think about all the time. Ted, one of the main characters, is contemplating the Secret Country, the fantasy land that he and his sister and cousins have found themselves in – which they may or may not have made up – and he realizes something. “The Secret Country was smoothed to the contours of his mind (or they to it.)”

“Smoothed to the contours of his mind.” That’s how I feel about my favorite books, the ones I go back to over and over again. They dig in to my brain and carve out their own space, one I can visit whenever I reread them, or even when I just think about them. But that space isn’t visual. When I revisit the world of The Secret Country trilogy, I don’t walk along its paths or through the halls of its castle. I’m not a visual reader; rarely do I see a movie playing when I read something. It’s the words themselves, the shape and rhythm of them, which imprint on me. It takes a special writer to put pictures in my head.

Susan Cooper is one of them.