Literary Cities
A writer can mark a city more durably than an architect: the pub where the manuscript was drafted, the route a fictional character walked on one June day, the house kept exactly as the desk was left. These are places where reading before arrival changes what you see.
A city gets into literature two ways, and they produce entirely different places.
The first is by being written from. Joyce left Dublin in 1904 and spent the rest of his life reconstructing it from Trieste, Zurich and Paris, claiming the city could be rebuilt from Ulysses if it were destroyed; Pessoa barely left Lisbon and produced seventy-two invented authors inside it. In both cases the city is the subject, and the reader who arrives is checking a description against a place.
The second is by being written in. Bath and Weimar and Oxford are not much described by the writers who lived there; they are the conditions that made the writing possible — an income, a season, a library, a circle of people who would argue with you. Goethe ran a duchy's administration for fifty-seven years and drew Schiller and Herder after him, which is a fact about a town's function rather than its scenery.
A third category sits awkwardly between the two, and it is the most interesting: cities that produced a writer and then had to live with what he wrote. Trieste barely appears in Ulysses although most of it was written there. Stratford has managed a reputation for four centuries on the strength of a man who left. Alexandria's poet was a clerk in the irrigation department, and the city he wrote about was already vanishing as he described it.
The addresses below are marked by all three arrangements, and it is worth knowing which one you are visiting.