10 The New York Review
her, even just in thought, from the sex-
fearing straight and narrow, Daly in-
troduces a cautionary subplot involving
Lorraine, Angie’s sister, who isn’t beau-
tiful and natural the way Angie is—she
is always putting her hair in curlers and
covering her face with cold cream—
and who, in her desperation to keep
him interested in her, succumbs to the
demands for sex of a “fast,” unpleas-
ant, older (in his twenties) guy named
Martin. We never learn whether the ill-
favored Lorraine went all the way with
Martin, or just allowed him the liber-
ties then known as “petting” or “heavy
petting.” “Things are different now
from the way they used to be,” Lor-
raine defiantly says to Angie during theconfessional scene in which we learn of
her transgressions. “Now everybody
does it and nobody thinks... you know
what I mean.. .” But later she piteously
admits, “This isn’t how I meant to grow
up. I’ve heard of other girls... but that
isn’t how I meant to be.”
Daly’s tale of careful love is still in
print. Among the responses to thebook on Amazon, my favorite is from
a reader in her twenties who just
bought a copy for an eleven-year-old
and isn’t sure how the gift will be re-
ceived. “For an 11 year old girl that
daydreams about kissing boys, she’d
probably like it. For an 11-year-old
girl that’s already had sex, the book
may seem ‘lame.’” QTraces of J. B. Jackson:
The Man Who Taught Us
to See Everyday America
by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz.
University of Virginia Press,
311 pp., $39.
The pioneering American cultural
geographer John Brinckerhoff Jack-
son (1909–1996) learned to analyze
landscapes not at Harvard, where he
lectured, or in New Mexico, where
he lived and ranched, but in the war-
shattered countryside of Germany’s
Hürtgen Forest during the Allied push
eastward after the D-Day landings in
- German resistance had halted
the American advance in the forest,
and Jackson, attached to the Ninth In-
fantry Division as a combat intelligence
officer, spent a cold and uncomfortable
winter there. With time on his hands,
he set about creating a most unusual
library. During the day he moved be-
tween ruined buildings, searching the
wreckage for regional guidebooks, pic-
ture postcards, tourist maps, and works
of French geography and history—
anything, really, that offered details
of the terrain ahead. In the evenings,
he studied aerial photographs of the
area, questioned Wehrmacht prisoners,
and scrutinized their diaries and Sold-
bücher (logbooks).
From this fragmentary archive—
a bomb-struck Baedeker—Jackson
pieced together a vision of the land-
scape beyond the front line. He gained
not only a bird’s-eye view of the coun-
tryside, but also ground-level, fine-
grained details of settlement and
geology. He scrutinized soil textures
and types of dwelling (wanting to know
which farms had barns large enough to
accommodate enemy vehicles). He as-
sessed the differing sizes of roadside
orchards (to determine which might
conceal German artillery or troops).
He gathered this evidence primarily
to inform military decision-making,
but he also read it historically as testi-
mony to the long-term human culture
of this landscape before its drastic re-
arrangement by war. Even when fight-
ing through small industrial towns,
he noted the small vegetable gardens
that backed onto the “long rows of
workers’ houses,” or the half-timbered
farmhouses that were “wedged in at an
angle among the modern buildings.”
“Combat existence” also developed
in him, he later recalled, a hunter’s
“acute receptivity to the messages sent
out by the environment.” He learned
to distinguish between “kinds of gun-
fire,” the sounds of vehicle engines and
footsteps, even the stink of the en-
emy—“for each army had a character-
istic body odor.”
Jackson was thirty at the outbreak
of World War II. Born in France to
American parents, he grew up first in
New York, then at boarding schools in
Switzerland, France, and Massachu-
setts. He scarcely knew his father, who
abandoned the family at the outset of
World War I, when Jackson was five.
His mother was loving, controlling,
independently wealthy, and very ambi-
tious for her son. Through a combina-
tion of her string-pulling and Jackson’s
persistence, he was admitted to Har-
vard in 1929, where his undergraduate
tutor found him to be a “rather half-
baked intellectual.”
He fancied himself, incorrectly to my
eye, to be a decent artist en plein air with
pencil and crayon. He toured Europe in
the early 1930s, and witnessed the rise
of Nazism in Munich and Nuremberg.
His published work from these years—
essays, reviews, and short stories—re-
veals a young man both fascinated and
appalled by fascism and suspicious of
liberalism; he was, in the words of his
biographer Helen Lefko witz Horowitz,
“a cultural conservative of the deepestdye,” given to the “biases” of his “privi-
leged background.” A travel journal
Jackson kept from a trip to Cuba in
1938 is marred by casual racism; he
uses the n-word unhesitatingly and
writes of the “brutal” faces of mixed-
race Cubans. Horowitz is unsparing of
Jackson’s failings in these respects, but
the story she tells in her excellent biog-
raphy is of a man striving to outgrow
his youthful prejudices. “One needs
to remember this passage,” she writes
of the Cuba diary entry. “It is a way of
marking where Jackson began in early
manhood, not where he ended up.”
In the late 1930s Jackson worked for
two years as a cowboy on a large ranch
in Cimarron, New Mexico, near the
Colorado border, then leased his own
ranch east of Albuquerque. He wrote
a novel with a terrible title—Saints in
Summertime—that received respectful
reviews when it was published in 1938,
sold about a thousand copies, and then
sank. The publishers rejected his sec-
ond book.
His career as a novelist over, Jack-
son enlisted in 1940 and served for the
full term of America’s engagement. He
trained in the Blue Ridge Mountains,
was commissioned as an intelligenceofficer due to his skills as a linguist
(fluent French and decent German,
acquired during his European school
years), and saw his first action in the
North African desert in 1943. The aus-
tere landscape of the region scarcely in-
terested Jackson; he found it to be “dry
and relatively empty.”
In 1944 he landed two days after
D-Day, and moved first into Norman-
dy’s bocage—a farmed patchwork of
hedgerows, woods, and fields that, he
observed drily, “we were in the midst
of... and having trouble getting out
of”—then to the Ardennes and the
Hürtgen Forest. Here were landscapes
that spoke of the habits and hardships
of sustained human life in a place. In
his essay “Landscape as Seen by the
Military,” written long after the war,
Jackson characterized these months of
“landscape reconnaissance” as an in-
tellectual turning point. Horowitz con-
curs that his intelligence work “gave
him a new understanding of the land-
scape.” She also identifies “the crucible
of war” as the period when Jackson’s
character was reforged: he emerged,
she writes, “a substantially different
human being... more open to the world
and less judgmental.”The Crapola Sublime
Robert Macfarlane
A photograph by Stephen Shore from Transparencies: Small Camera Works 1971–1979, a collection of his images
of the North American landscape just published by Mack©StephenShore/^303Gallery,^ NewYork