Daniel Martin (Vintage Fowles) by John Fowles

Author:John Fowles [Fowles, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780099478348
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

Tsankawi

WHEN I WENT to New Mexico, just after Miriam and Marjory walked out on me, I had plenty of free time. My director was busy with the Western he was shooting, and our script discussions had to be in the evening. The unit was based on Santa Fe – for once they were giving the butte landscapes a miss and shooting mainly in those last southern outriders of the Rockies that stretch down over the desert into the state. It was my first visit, and like many people before me – most famously D. H. Lawrence, of course – I fell for the area almost on sight.

Along with San Francisco and New Orleans, Santa Fe is one of the most humane of all American cities; by some miracle it has so far managed to ban the skyscraper, and the literal low profile there extends to other things. I think it was Lewis Mumford who pointed out that most American downtown architecture is an attempt to create distance between people – to crush ordinary humanity and all its proper scales out of sight. Perhaps because it has opted out of the high-rise rat race, and has attracted a huge art-and-crafts colony. Santa Fe is noticeably relaxed; provincial, perhaps, but proud of it. The Spanish Colonial adobe buildings with their pretty patios, the sweet-pungent incense of the piñon logs that pervades every New Mexican dusk, the marvellous light and air of the high desert, the cottonwoods, the old colonnaded shops round the sleepy central plaza, the cathedral bells chiming through the night . . . it’s not at all the America of the European myth, and I liked it very much the first time, and have not changed my mind since.

But Santa Fe could have been a far less attractive town than it is without seriously damaging my regard for the surrounding landscapes. There are more spectacular ones in the United States, but none has quite the pure balance, the classical perfection and nobility, almost the Greekness, of the ranges that border the Rio Grande between Santa Fe and Taos fifty miles to the north. Some skylines will not be forgotten; one from my childhood, of the southern edge of Dartmoor, is like that. It has always haunted my dreams; and the secret template of its contours still inhabits outwardly quite different vistas. The Rio Grande valley here is also one of the great Pueblo Indian centres; and though I wasn’t much taken by their modern villages down in the valley reservations, I fell in love with the abandoned ‘medieval’ mesa sites on the outliers of the Jemez Mountains that face Santa Fe across the rift.

Their atmosphere is paradoxically very European – to be precise, Etruscan and Minoan . . . that is, they are haunted by loss and mystery, by a sense of some magical relationship, glimpsed both in the art and what little is known of their inhabitants’ way of life, between man and nature. This must have been what so attracted Lawrence.

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