In an Undisclosed Location

Mark Dorset

When B. W. Beath delivered the images, he suggested calling the book Lotus Land. As soon as Kraft looked through the images, he sketched in his mind a straightforward plan for presenting them. It was based on the idea of a couple of visitors — the unidentified man and woman from Just Now, at Present — approaching the place, wandering through it, and then leaving it, moving on.

A Beautiful Gem in a Beautiful Setting An aviator might see this view of the undisclosed location. (Google Earth™ Mapping Service)

To some degree, that plan was suggested by the images themselves, but it also grew from a vicarious experience that Eric and Madeline had shared for several years, individually and privately. They didn’t realize that they had shared this experience until one evening in 1997 or 1998, when Kraft had finished Leaving Small’s Hotel and was at work on Inflating a Dog.

At the time, The New York Times ran a regular feature in its real estate section under the series title “If You’re Thinking of Living In.” That title was followed by the name of a community in New York City or its environs, so that the title of an individual article might become, say, “If You’re Thinking of Living In / Hell’s Kitchen” or “If You’re Thinking of Living In / Sleepy Hollow.”

For Eric and Madeline, the series might better have been called “Close Your Eyes and Imagine Yourself Living In,” because that was the invitation that each of them accepted with every installment of the series, every time, for every place that was presented, however peripheral it might previously have been on the map of places they might have imagined living. For a while, in the theater of the mind, they lived there. They would, in imagination, walk its streets, shop its shops, have lunch or dinner in its restaurants, ride the train or take the subway from wherever it was to wherever they might want to go. They would, usually, decide that living in that place might be nice . . . for a while.

Though each of them visited the places in the articles nearly every week, neither of them spoke to the other about it. Why? As they do now, they ended each day with a cocktail hour, a time when they drank a couple of martinis and talked. There was hardly anything that didn’t get said during those cocktail hours . . . but their imagining living in other places remained off the table. Why? I don’t know.

A Fertile Place In the undisclosed location, even the lettuce is beautiful.

Let’s visit the American Hotel in Sag Harbor, New York, on the evening when Eric and Madeline finally did acknowledge their mutual attraction to “If You’re Thinking of Living In.” They have been living in East Hampton for nine years — long enough. They both know it, both feel it. While they are chatting, the name of a neighborhood in Manhattan where they might move comes up.

Eric: Apartments tend to be small and expensive there.
Mad: Right, and it’s served by only a single subway line.
(There is a pause. Each of them is thinking the same thing, but neither voices it. Finally, Eric breaks the silence.)
Eric: You read the profile in “If You’re Thinking of Living In,” didn’t you?
Mad: I did.
(Another brief silence.)
Mad: Do you read that, too?
Eric: Yes.
Mad: Every week?
Eric: Every week.
Mad: I do, too. Every week.
Eric: And do you imagine —
Mad: Living there? Walking the streets? Shopping in the shops? Having drinks and dinner? Yes.
Eric: Am I with you?
Mad: Of course you are, my darling. Did you need to ask?
Eric: No. I just wanted to hear you say it.
(Another pause.)
Mad: And when you — am I — ?
Eric: Of course you are, my darling. Did you —
Mad: No. I just wanted to —
(Each of them swallows hard and brushes a tear away. After they have composed themselves, they order another round and begin making plans to move.)

Renowned Beans The beans grown in the undisclosed location are highly prized. Here they are one of the ingredients in a sauce for clams.

So, with “If You’re Thinking of Living In” in mind, Kraft at first thought that he would arrange the images in a sequence that would invite the reader to make the kind of visit that he and Madeline had made to so many communities, beginning with sweeping views of the area, then moving to views of the village, and finally focusing on the details. However, the images began to have an effect on Kraft that neither he nor BW, nor Madeline would ever have expected: they inspired fear. He brought the matter up with the photographer.

Kraft: You’ve shown me a beautiful place.
BW: A beautiful gem in a beautiful setting.
Kraft: Exactly. But —
BW: But?
Kraft: It is such an alluring place that I was immediately afraid for it.
BW: Afraid for it?
Kraft: Yes. I was afraid that if I published these pictures just as you gave them to me, this place would be overrun, ruined.
BW: Ah, yes. I see what you mean.
Kraft: So I’ve added some images from other places, to throw people off.
(He arranges a selection of images on a table in the workroom. BW, with his eyes narrowed, scans them.)
BW: It won’t work. You’re being naive.
Kraft: I resent that.
BW: Oh, really? You resent that? You, who have given me so much to resent? You, who have been so very, very generous in handing out reasons for resentment?
Kraft: BW, I have put a lot of work into publishing your work, into preparing it for publication, into —
BW: Into playing fast and loose with my work, you mean. You’ve manipulated and distorted my poor defenseless images, and you’ve put words into my mouth, and now you resent my calling you naive? Well, I resent your abusing my images and overwhelming them with your words.
Kraft: My words —
BW: Your words, words, words.
Kraft: Enough. Please.
BW (petulantly): All right.
Kraft: Will you at least listen to what I propose?
BW: Yes, I will listen to what you propose.
Kraft: I propose to turn the book into a cautionary satire. Following the images that you gave me — and the added images of other places, the red herrings — I’ll add images showing what could happen to the place if it became widely known. I’ll show it defaced by “luxury” condominiums, hotels, restaurants, and legions of cars.
BW: Stop there.
Kraft: Why?
BW: I really don’t understand this impulse of yours — I might say this need of yours — to alter the images, to find so many ways to turn them into something other than what they are. The images stand on their own. They are enough.
Kraft: But to me they imply something —
BW: Why can’t you keep that to yourself?
Kraft (sweeping the images into a stack): I’ve had enough of this. Let’s adjourn.
BW: Gladly.

Left to himself, Kraft did add some images from other places, “to throw people off.” The undisclosed location is, therefore, a nowhere made of images of Santa Pau, in Garrotxa, Catalunya, Spain, altered, or adulterated, by the addition of bits of Zaragoza, Cardona, and Barcelona; Deer Isle, Maine; Marco Island, Florida; Newburyport, Massachusetts; and New Rochelle, New York.

However much BW might have objected to the addition of “words, words, words,” by the time Kraft began work on In an Undisclosed Location, including a text with the images had already become inevitable, a “foregone conclusion,” because during the writing of the text for Just Now, at Present, he had begun to perceive the full arc of the narrative that would stretch across what he referred to as “BW’s six little books,” or the six parts of the one large book that he hoped they would eventually become.

The arc begins in There I Was, when the unnamed protagonist experiences a sense of being somewhere and nowhere at the same time, of being only where he is told he is.

Then, in Just Now, at Present, that feeling of being at once stuck in place and lost in place leads to — one might say that it inspires — the feeling of being similarly stuck in time, a feeling of progress stalled, of being in stasis, tugged equally toward the past and present, as if he were tied at the middle of the rope in a game of tug-of-war.

In his desire to escape stasis and find a new course — or a way to get back onto an old, correct, course — the unidentified protagonist is tempted, in In an Undisclosed Location, by the charms of a place where life would slow and give him time to think, but his interlocutor (his lover? his counselor?) correctly identifies this as the land of the lotus-eaters, a place where he would probably never finish anything, where a cup of coffee and a misty vista could consume a morning.
Now we venture beyond what Kraft had done in the first three of “BW’s little books” and into the area of —

Kraft (deliberately echoing BW): Stop there.
Dorset: You don’t want me to give the game away?
Kraft: I don’t want you to make one or both of us look foolish.
Dorset: How would I?
Kraft: You’re making predictions, and despite the fact that your predictions match my intentions, just now, at present, at the midpoint in the development of the six parts of “BW’s book,” neither of us can say with certainty whether I will actually do what I currently intend to do.
Dorset (thoughtfully): I see.
Kraft: I suggest that you return to a discussion of the current book.

As the text of the book began to move away from a cautionary satire on the theme of paving paradise and toward a theme that I want to call “seductive setting as enemy of promise,” Kraft began to alter the presentation of the images so that the reader-viewer’s experience of them would parallel the if-you’re-thinking-of-living-in visitor’s progress through the place: arrival, wandering through the village, being tempted to stay, but, finally, moving on.

Of course, the unseen and unnamed protagonist would be moving not through the physical space of the beautiful undisclosed location, but through the idea of living there, progressing through the thought experiment of placing himself there, of “trying on” a life in the place. Without the aid of his unseen and unnamed interlocutor, he might never emerge from the experimental space.

What will the “point” of “BW’s book” be? At the risk of making myself appear foolish, I will make a prediction. As this little book, In an Undisclosed Location, neared publication, I began to recognize that the sequence of six little books would be about the fate of Kraft’s work. What would become of the pieces of the Personal History that had gone out of print? What sort of struggle would Kraft have to go through to reclaim the rights to them and bring those pieces back into print? Should he bother making that effort? Should he allow himself and the work to be tethered to the past in that way? Would he be wasting time trying to break the tether? Should he just accept things as they were, as they had become? Or should he move forward, and concentrate only on moving forward? How could he manage to escape his worries about the fate of the early work—and the integrity of the entire work? If he couldn’t escape those worries, how could he possibly do anything new?

The Babbington Press published In an Undisclosed Location on June 19, 2008, in an edition limited to fewer than one hundred copies.

Note
If “BW’s book” is a message from Kraft to himself, it is also a message to others, to people who — like me — have conceived large projects — in my case a topical autobiography, encyclopedic in its scope—but have never managed to get those projects “off the ground.” Perhaps it is inappropriate for me to introduce my proposed work into this account of the making of In an Undisclosed Location, but I feel compelled to confess that I, like the unnamed protagonist, have deluded myself with the idea that if I could just get away to a tranquil spot I could finally undertake the work that I have always wanted to do. The unnamed protagonist’s wise companion has made me see the danger and even the folly of such romantic rustication, and I am grateful to her for that.