A Place in the World Read online

  Copyright © 2022 by Frances Mayes

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Crown and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Mayes, Frances, author.

  Title: A place in the world / Frances Mayes.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Crown, [2022]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2022016137 (print) | LCCN 2022016138 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593443330 (hardcover; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780593443347 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Mayes, Frances—Travel. | Mayes, Frances—Homes and haunts. | Women authors, American—20th century—Biography. | LCGFT: Travel writing. | Essays.

  Classification: LCC PS3563.A956 P57 2022 (print) | LCC PS3563.A956 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54

  [B]—dc23/eng/20220406

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2022016137

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2022016138

  Ebook ISBN 9780593443347

  crownpublishing.com

  Book design by Barbara M. Bachman, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Christopher Brand

  Cover art: copyright © Estate of Nell Blaine, courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York

  ep_prh_6.0_140819454_c0_r1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Preface: I Could Live Here

  Introduction: Imprint

  Part I: A House Down South

  Lighting Seven Fireplaces

  Who Lives Here?

  Green World

  Camellia

  Magnolia

  Gardenia

  Sun Standing Still

  Secret Spaces

  My Southern Accent

  The Ghost Who Cooks

  Part II: Yearning for the Sun

  Toward the Apennines, Toward the Lake

  Dinner / Cena

  Time Difference

  Risking Happiness

  Pure Gold Clasps

  Cucina Povera / The Poor Kitchen

  Household Shrine

  Exile 2020

  Part III: Southern Exposure

  The House on South Lee Street

  The Monumental Cakes of Frankye Davis Mayes

  Frankye’s Cookbooks

  And Again to the Golden Isles

  Part IV: Momentary Homes

  Why Not Stay

  Blue Apron

  Fragments

  A Place to Hide

  Water Maze

  Part V: Friends at Home

  Home Thoughts: A Litany

  The Taste of Memory

  Part VI: Rhymes with Home

  Changing the Changes

  Memento Vivere (Remember to Live)

  Part VII: Why Stay?

  Annals of Stone

  “I Left a Basket of Figs by Your Gate”

  Envoi: Architect

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on Sources

  Also by Frances Mayes

  About the Author

  A Reader’s Guide

  …how difficult it is to remain just one person, for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, and invisible guests come in and out at will.

  —Czesław Miłosz, “Ars Poetica”

  Perhaps home is not a place but an irrevocable condition.

  —James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

  The house is the same size as the world, or rather it is the world.

  —Jorge Luis Borges, “The House of Asterion”

  The sprawling white farmhouse looms in my headlights. I always seem to arrive home from my travels at night. Stepping out of the car, I’m hit by the fecund smell of the Eno River, which cuts through our meadow, wet grass (needs mowing), the greeny scent rising from a thousand trees, and the sound of screeching tree frogs. If it’s early summer, any breeze wafts the divine sweetness of magnolia and tea olive. In winter, winking string lights along the porch cast light onto the bumpy stone path that ruins the wheels of my roll-on. In deep summer, bright sparks of fireflies, in autumn the crunch of fallen walnuts, and a clutch of purple asters around the back door. Kiss the ground. Pull the door to you or the key won’t turn. Then it does. Anyone home?

  Home: where and why this house? Is home fixed forever or a moveable concept? How do four walls, utilitarian and convenient, or soulful and evocative, connect with your metabolism and turn into that charged feeling of I’m home? Or is home a quest never to be fulfilled? Down the road not taken—was there a blue door for you to open? Some writer said, “My home is my subjects.” What a floating idea of home. Mine feels more visceral. Most alluring, the places where you feel an immediate, illogical bonding. You wish you lived there but you never will. Capri, San Miguel, Provence—you imagine yourself extant in another version that may for years run parallel to the road taken. What’s the truth—that hotel that caused me to refer to it as home after three days, or the house where I grew up? The first eighteen years: the spool bed, the mirror above the pink-skirted dressing table, ceiling fan pulling in a humid breeze over the buffer of hydrangeas around the house. Others? A boxy apartment at Stanford, where through thin walls I heard my neighbor cry out that Kennedy was shot. The New England saltbox in Bedford, prim black and white, where snow came up to the windowsills and lilacs surrounded three sides of the house. On Hamilton Avenue in Palo Alto, the L-shaped house, the inside of the L all glass. Orange, lemon, loquat trees. My Selectric typewriter on a picnic table by the pool, poems blowing into the water. My San Francisco Victorian flat where I became single after years of marriage? That first night, surrounded by packing boxes, the foghorns sounded like strange, mournful calls from far under the ocean.

  I’ve always loved suitcases. The luggage rack stays up in my bedroom. That damp stone house above Florence, where bats flew around the fireplace. The gullet in Turkey where ten of us slept on cushions under stars, while the rigging clinked time with the swells. Home for a month, a whitewashed cottage in Crete, with bougainvillea blossoms wafting down the hallway. The rented house in Sicily can pull me back. I’m in the kitchen deciding what to cook and where I’ll find a private spot to write about how we live there. Long after the key is returned, I’ll revisit what Virginia Woolf called “moments of being.” Is where you are who you are? Maybe home is as small as a suitcase.

  I’m not looking for answers, but for more and more questions about what home means, how it hooks the past and pushes into the future. Often, it’s mysterious. When my daughter was young, we lived in Somers, New York. In 1768, a man named Joseph Sunderland hid his account books—elaborately penned in black ink—along with seven thick sheepskin condoms in the rafters. Over two hundred years they waited for me—why me?—to reach behind a beam and bring them back. A millwright and maker of coffins. Enamored of a maid who lived in the attic room? We skated at night on Dean’s Pond. Maybe he did, too. The old places we love will bring up the question that haunted medieval poetry: Ubi sunt…Where are…Short for ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt, where are those who went before us. Who left
a coin between the floorboards, a date scratched on the chimney, the growth chart on the door? At Chatwood, my home in North Carolina, the name Buck was painted inside the barn door, and when I entered, I always sensed a black horse. These homes are vast and dazzling to the imagination.

  This memoir is a floor plan of a lifetime of house and home obsession.

  Maybe each chapter is a room in the big house.

  As a child in Fitzgerald, Georgia, way back in the middle of the last century (that sounds archaic), I was struck with the wildness of the land. I felt the elemental potency beneath my black patent Mary Janes (polished with Vaseline). Quicksand could take the dog. A tornado might rip every trailer and shack into the sky. Collapsing limestone layers could swallow a house whole—only a crooked chimney visible in the sudden chasm. Or the river floods, jumps its banks, sending a shack drifting, forlorn family riding the roof. The air rising above asphalt roads shimmied in the heat, oncoming cars quivering like mirages. Sheet lightning flashes like shook foil. There was, too, the acidic sweetness of roadside plums in the country, the dense scent of cotton fields after rain, lurid sunsets, water moccasins the size of my leg, icy springs bubbling out of the ground, and ten thousand other ways that I felt the innate energy of the place slapping me into a visceral identification with our plot of earth. Clear as the outlines of a saucer magnolia: the southern instinct for place.

  Then came the home-bred writers, spoon-feeding me: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings—I’ll never get beyond The Yearling—and her beloved homestead, a cracker farmhouse deep in the orange groves of north Florida. At twelve, propped in bed, turning the pages of Gone with the Wind, what I was enchanted by was not the plot, the Civil War, or Scarlett and Rhett. I was hit by Tara, the iconic house. I absorbed the message: Home means more than anything. Later, I found Flannery O’Connor nailing her place to the ground, Thomas Wolfe in a boardinghouse in Asheville, elegiac and lyrical, Edgar Allan Poe, all dire and sad, Carson McCullers, who had the guts to begin a book “In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together.” Zora Neale Hurston, digging back into witchcraft, spells, folklore, with her philosophy of being too busy sharpening her oyster knife to bother with what others thought she should be bothered with. Frank Yerby! The librarian disapproved of my voracious reading of his steamy novels that featured keys being passed to forbidden lovers and thrilling affairs. I read and reread Eudora Welty, that going-to-ground writer, living at home with her mother, her homespun magic and gigantic talent.

  Then my soul mate: James Agee. His sense of beauty in every crevice, his tragic love of place, and his gift for taking you there. And over us all, looming at five feet four inches, cross yourself as you say his name: William Faulkner, epic father, lonesome homebody.

  I already had the place inside, but when the writers came to me in high school and college, they named the nameless and thereby pinned me to their pages. Home. A place in the sun. Home, briar-caught, Christ-haunted, peopled by the living and the dead. Homebody me. The house: one’s body living in another form. Homegrown. The idea burrowed into the canaliculi of my brain. Home place. To this day I can touch every inch of the house where I grew up—where the doodlebugs burrowed under the hydrangeas, my mother’s yellow mixing bowls, unraveling ropes that raised the windows, climbing peavine on the front porch, the little iron door on the outside of the chimney where ashes fell out, my twin white spool beds with pink linen bedspreads scalloped along the edge, boxes of bullets and hunting rifles stored in the back of my closet. Such memories rise into a different consciousness of that time and might seem suspect viewed with a long lens, especially from those with set ideas of the South. No one is more aware of the ramifications of racial dynamics in the past than thoughtful southerners, of all races.To those who question any positive memory, I can only quote Federico García Lorca: “Beneath all the statistics / there is a drop of duck’s blood.”

  Wherever I live, the house feels alive. Even in graduate school and newly married, a sudden startled homemaker, I began buying bargain antiques at auction, envisioning a romantic atelier in the university-provided apartment. I was imprinted with my mother’s quest for the ideal house, with not a remote chance of living in one.

  Then, grown and married, a saltbox in Massachusetts, a 1743 village house in New York, the low, L-shaped Palo Alto house with loquat and orange trees pressing close to so much glass. East coast, west coast—first for schools, then for work, for life. Moving went against my instinct for the taproot place one passes on to the next generation, but we moved. I resisted. Accommodated. And moved. For my husband’s work. Through peregrine years of raising my daughter, living in a marriage—all exciting, tumultuous years—I wrote poetry. And I painted and wallpapered and stripped and refinished. I cooked. This came from the love of it and living on graduate student scholarships, but also I still was answering some call from the Deep South sense of place that I inherited naturally.

  Once settled, I loved New York, Boston, San Francisco, every place I lived, but what widened the aperture was where I traveled. London, Paris, Rome, Venice. I fell hard for Central America and Mexico. Unhooked from the South, in each country I now had fantasies that I could upend my life and live there forever. I wrote six books of poetry and a field guide, The Discovery of Poetry.

  One July (fast-forwarding), after my marriage to my brilliant college boyfriend ended, I rented a house in Tuscany with friends. Rural life in those ancient hills simply knocked me in the head. After several more summers in sun-drenched villages, I forked over all my savings and bought a long-abandoned country villa. The life I forged caused a personal tectonic shift. The place had formed the inhabitants as surely as in creation tales where humans were patted into shape from mud. I was riveted by Italian time—long sine waves of artists, farms, history, piazzas, vineyards, cuisine—but, really, what I loved was the lively intersection of place with people. A vivid homecoming.

  In Italy, learning a new language, soaking in piazza life, restoring a house, meeting people from all over the world, my poetry refused to break into lines; stanzas reverted to the actual meaning of the word: stanza = room. I bought a bigger notebook. My concept of time expanded and cubed. My fatalism subdued. I moved toward memoir as I felt myself begin to be changed by the place. The happiness that suffuses my Tuscan days drove my pen. I wanted, with my net, to catch elusive and fragile happiness in images. I was at home in Tuscany. Home free. As I thought more about the why of that, I embarked on a travel narrative originally called At Home in the World. When I found out another book already had that title, I changed it to A Year in the World. I explored what it would be like to live in other countries, some new to me and others that had attracted me on previous visits: France, England, Wales, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Morocco, Turkey. Traveling became not just travel but a choice of living a new way. I learned to see a place from the inside out rather than as a visitor passing through. Renting houses, apartments, even a boat, turned into a way of asking: What is home here? Who are these people and how has here caused them to be who they are? Home truths. I found out I could be at ease in the Arab quarter of Lisbon, in a former schoolhouse in the Cotswolds, in a whitewashed cottage in Crete with bougainvillea blossoms blowing down the hall from the open door.

  Although my taproot led me to think of home as a fixed place, home became a portable emotion. Possibly this is genetic? Built into the DNA like a bird’s instinct for migration. Or not. Carson McCullers writes:

  It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the rollercoaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the hometown or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.

  The poet Pablo Neruda claimed there are only eleven subjects to write about. He doesn’t say what they are, but one of them
, and the most difficult, must be happiness. Another must be home. Both subjects are hard to sustain; often they’re entwined quests. Happiness: How to write a book that has no tense plot, an unforeseeable resolution, and not even an I survived motif? Well, I thought as I began writing about Italy, let’s just go a little against the grain. I quit worrying about conflict/resolution and character development requirements. I’ll try, I told myself, simply to re-create this place in tactile, evocative words. The writing felt spontaneous. When you’re falling in love, everything is lit from within. When you’re falling in love, you’re greedy and generous, lavishing your insatiable desires over all you encounter.

  At the end of writing Every Day in Tuscany, my third memoir, I decided to leave my home in San Francisco and return to my origins—the South. (My family always claims that I took the first thing smoking on the runway out of there, forgetting that there was no runway then. I’d had the instinct that, as a woman, I would forever be stalled by someone sidling up saying, “Buy the little lady a drink?” Or by well-meaning good ol’ boys wanting an ornament by their side at the club.) My husband, Ed, was up for the move. He went to graduate school in Virginia and felt a strong connection to the gentle southern seasons. And the better proximity to Italy.

  Back in North Carolina, we didn’t locate the right place right away. First, we lived in a columned house with a pretty view of a golf course. With some irony we called it Magnolia Hall. Out walking with a friend one morning, she showed me her friends’ farm on the Eno River. She said she thought they were selling. Jokingly I said, “I’ll buy it.” A few months later she called. “They’re moving to California.” Ed and I walked around the grounds and fell under a spell. We bought the historic farm with extensive gardens in Hillsborough. I thought, now that I was getting older, I would have a world there, one I wouldn’t have to leave if fate had hard surprises in store for me. (Home to roost.) The agent kept calling it our “forever home,” making me feel like a rescue dog. Then, all at once, this farmhouse suddenly takes my love, my time, my hard work. I realized that I would passionately belong to it (instead of it belonging to me).