Interview

A Conversation with Tracy Kidder

Thomas Cole View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow)

In the following interview, Marianne Doezema discusses the image of Mt. Holyoke (the mountain) as it appears in the book Home Town, with Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Tracy Kidder.

MD: Why did you begin Home Town with some musings about the summit of Mt. Holyoke?

TK: I wanted some way to invite readers in, to set the stage for the book—and I tried many different things.

Maybe I should go back to the way this project came about, in 1994. At the time I began writing the book about Northampton, I had recently been in Haiti to do a story for the New Yorker. I don't think I would previously have been able to imagine a place as dreadful as Haiti, and when I came back I couldn't help but think about the advantages we have in this place. In contrast to Haiti, where almost nothing functions, where there is virtually no viable infrastructure, returning to Northampton, I thought: here's a town that seems to be working pretty well, and I wonder why.

Critical too was meeting the cop, Tommy O'Connor, who promised to show me a different town than the one I'd ever seen. He was right. The underside of a town as nice as Northampton can still be pretty gritty. He introduced me to it.

So that opening scene of Home Town contains a certain amount of irony. The view from the summit of Mt. Holyoke has been one of the most famous landscapes in America. And yet, all these things are going on underneath. And in the course of my research I discovered that this was true when Thomas Cole painted his famous landscape. What was the year?

MD: Cole painted The Oxbow in 1836.

TK: So, his exquisitely beautiful painting was done not very long after the horrible hanging of two young Irishmen in Northampton, which provided an occasion for a great holiday in the town. What I was trying to suggest in the foreword was the intrigue that is always hidden in a scene, what a scene doesn't fully show.

But I have many thoughts about the view from Mt. Holyoke. It hasn't really changed very much, for one thing. Of course, Interstate 91 is there now and the marina, but still the main elements remain.

MD: That some things never change might be seen as a recurring theme in Home Town.

TK: In fact, continuity is one of the things I like about New England. I grew up on Long Island in the 1950s, and the place where I was raised has essentially vanished. It was bulldozed. For me it's reassuring that my "replacement" home has changed less. In fact, we know that over the last 150 years quite dramatic changes have occurred—almost every tree was cut at one time, for example—but the landscape has returned in many respects to the way it was in the early 19th century.

MD: In terms of Mt. Holyoke itself and the historic hotel where so many tourists stayed, we owe a debt to groups of citizens who have recognized the value of the site of a national cultural icon and fought to preserve it over the years.

TK: I do believe that enduring geological features are important, though I don't think I can be clear about exactly why. In a very basic way, a prominent landmark such as Mt. Holyoke tells you where you are. I also feel that old buildings in a town are important, too, for a variety of reasons, but landscape features like Mt. Holyoke even more so. They let you know that you're not the first person in a place.

MD: Laura Baumeister, a Smith College student featured in your book, was wistful at one point about "an old, settled kind of beauty."

TK: Yes, Laura was initially quite scornful of considering the Mt. Holyoke Range a real mountain range, having come from the West. But the mountains here came to be meaningful to her, as well as the old buildings. They served as reminders that these things were here before you and will be here after you're gone. The geographic features, especially, give you a sense of your own place in the world and in time.

MD: In an early scene in Home Town you describe Tommy out on patrol, seeing the Mt. Holyoke Range above the Victorian rooftops of Main Street. Would you read from that paragraph?

TK: "They aren't really mountains, just a line of steep green hills. But in Tommy's windshield, they always looked more distant and much taller than they are. They looked grand and not quite real. They looked like Northampton's painted backdrop, and they gave him both a faraway and a comforting feeling. They made Northampton seem like places that he's never seen, and yet defined the cozy scale of a place he knew by heart—miniature mountains for the miniature city that lay before him down Main Street."

MD: For Thomas Cole the mountain wasn't a backdrop, of course, but a destination. People today might not realize that the summit of Mt. Holyoke was one of the most popular tourist sites in the country, second only to Niagara Falls. And a large part of Cole's achievement in his now-famous painting was to embrace in one picture both aspects of the view from the summit that was consistently described in the travel literature of the time: wilderness and cultivation.

TK: The combination of domesticity and wildness—that's a deep expression. We shouldn't forget how terrifying untamed landscape was to early settlers. From their perspective, mankind was put here in the "New World" to conquer the wilderness. And painting the landscape was, in a sense, another means of exerting control, of imposing order on the disorderly. So Thomas Cole is possessing that landscape, claiming ownership of it, in a way. Then the question becomes—for any artist and for any writer, too, for that matter—just how accurate or interesting is your vision of that order.

Martha Armstrong Oxbow from the Summit House

MD: The curators of this exhibition have had the opportunity to discuss that very question with some of the contemporary artists who have returned to the site, often with the specific intention of creating a rejoinder to Cole's influential prototype, paying homepage to and challenging the work that has been described as the most important American landscape.

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