April 9, 2020 11
In the war’s closing months, inspired
by the popular French works of geogra-
phy he had read in the Hürtgen Forest,
Jackson decided to found “a magazine
of geography” back in America. A bad
riding accident sustained while ranch-
ing delayed his plans, but in 1951 he
published the first edition of Land-
scape, a magazine he edited, contrib-
uted to, and published for seventeen
years. Landscape was the wellspring
of Jackson’s transformative work as a
geographer of the American vernacu-
lar—a thinker who, as Horowitz puts
it, “enabled Americans to see everyday
America through its places and spaces
as they evolved over time.”
Our word “landscape” arrived into
English in the late sixteenth century
from the Dutch “landschap,” or ig i nal ly
meaning a “unit or tract of land,” but
at the moment of anglicization more
strongly associated with the emerging
school of Dutch landscape painters
that included Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
This sense of landscape as painterly
and passive has remained surprisingly
persistent, despite frequent attempts
to unsettle the association. I have long
preferred to think of “landscape” as a
compound noun with a verb concealed
i n s i d e i t —a r e m i n d e r t h a t l a n d “ s c a p e s ”
human existence as a dynamic, partici-
patory presence, rather than a static
backdrop to our actions. Anna “Nan”
Shepherd—the Scottish writer who
completed The Living Mountain, her
slender masterpiece about the Cairn-
gorm massif of Scotland, while Jackson
was halted in the Hürtgen—was also
drawn to a vibrant sense of landscape.
In a beautiful passage, she describes
looking upside-down and back through
her legs at the mountains, defamiliariz-
ing the terrain she loved. “As I watch, it
arches its back, and each layer of land-
scape bristles,” she wrote. “Nothing
has reference to me, the looker. This is
how the earth must see itself.”
Jackson believed that “a new defini-
tion” of landscape was needed; this was
why he founded his magazine. But he
had little time for Shepherd’s “bristle,”
and cared not how the earth might “see
itself.” Jackson’s was a wholly human
geography. He liked gas stations, front
lawns, and street corners—landscape
artifacts that exist only with reference
to the looker. He preferred woodlots to
primeval forests, “crowded ball parks”
to a Thoreauvian cabin in the woods.
To Jackson, writes Horowitz, land-
scape “encompassed the full imprint of
human societies on the land.” It was, in
his memorable phrase, “a complex and
moving work of art, the transcript of a
significant collective experience.”
Both definitions, of course, raise
questions about who is included in, and
who excluded from, that supposedly
“collective experience,” that “full im-
print.” Jackson’s curiosity was for the
most part admirably inclusive, ranging
across Hispanic and Native Ameri-
can as well as Anglo-American tradi-
tions: his essay “Pueblo Dwellings and
Our Own,” for instance, compares the
“vernacular dwelling... for working
people” prevalent in prehistoric Pueblo
village architecture with early medie-
val European home-building. Such a
broad vision makes the persistence of
some of his prejudices—especially his
casual anti-Semitism, carefully tracked
by Horowitz—all the harder to fathom.
Jackson was an unorthodox ob-
server, whose ways of seeing ran
against the grain of midcentury Ameri-
can landscape conventions, with their
attachments to the picturesque and the
sublime. His unpublished travel jour-
nals from the 1930s to the 1950s—now
archived at the University of New Mex-
ico, where Horowitz consulted them—
record what caught his eye while on the
move. In Central Europe, he cataloged
the different “mascots for cars,” and
the various jackets and caps “inspired
by autoculture.” Driving to Mexico in
1957, he noted the “bells on porches to
call in field workers,” and the varying
“colors of the soil.”
On arrival in a new town or city,
he would often acquire a local phone
book and calculate the ratios of “Drs,
Beauticians, restaurants, churches,”
or close-read street maps for informa-tion on zoning, parking, industries, and
commuting routes—the skills learned
in the Hürtgen Forest, repurposed for
Santa Fe or Silver City. He was nerd-
ily fascinated by that degraded phylum
of Americana that the artist Philip
Guston once referred to as “crapola”:
junkshops, edge lands, strip malls,
and trailer parks. When Jackson was
publishing the early issues of Land-
scape, Edward Hopper was painting
his late studies of transit loneliness,
Morning Sun and Hotel by a Railroad,
and Nabokov was writing Humbert
Humbert’s road trip to hell in Lo-
lita (1955), when Humbert and poor
Lo motor through motel America,
“ putting the geography of the United
States into motion” as they careen be-
tween “the stucco court,” “the adobe
unit,” and the “log cabin.”There is a tenderness to Jackson’s en-
gagement with “crapola.” By studying
what he called “the commonplace as-
pects of the contemporary landscape,”
he sought to invest mundane places of
work and dwelling with a value at least
comparable to venerated landscape
sites such as Yellowstone or Yosemite.
He wished—to borrow a phrase from
his own appreciation of the Puritan
writer Timothy Dwight—to endow
“everyone who lived and worked in
[landscapes] with a kind of visibility.”
At its best, Jackson’s project might be
described as a democratic devotion to
everyday dignity. He was a localist, not
a nationalist, most interested in cities
and towns, not nation-states, as the op-
timal units of community-making. He
wanted, as he said in his 1995 PEN ad-
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