LEGEND - Maphead - page 77

own right, * spent the next decade cutting two hundred thousand words (about the length
of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment ) out of the manuscript and shopping the result
around to New York publishers in seven thick binders, so heavy that she couldn't carry
them all herself.
When Islandia was published in 1942, at the height of World War II, it was a sensation.
Readers had certainly visited fantastic places before, in day trips to Wonderland and Lilli-
put and Dante's Inferno, but spending 1,013 pages among the simple, peaceful people of
Islandia and their carefully constructed world was an entire vacation—especially at a time
when real overseas travel was off the table due to the war. Reviewers clutched for words
to describe this brand-new approach to fiction. Time called it “perhaps the most sustained
and detailed daydream that has ever seen print . . . trompe-l'oeil on a vast scale.” The end-
papers of the first edition were carefully drawn maps of Islandia, no doubt a crucial part of
the illusion.
Todaywecanstillbeabsorbedinmeticulouslyimaginedartificialworlds.In2010,CNN
reported that thousands of viewers of James Cameron's Avatar were reporting feelings of
lossanddepressionafterwatchingthe3-Dfilm, evencontemplatingsuicide attheprospect
that real life would never be as vivid and impossibly beautiful as the movie's computer-
generated moon of Pandora. But Cameron's utopia was the result of hundreds of millions
of dollars and man-hours and state-of-the-art digital technology. I prefer the image of the
respectable law professor scratching away by gaslight after his children are in bed, trying
desperately to record every detail of his little island, the byways and folkways that only he
can see but that he has known since childhood. It's the ultimate outsider art.
ThecreationofgeographiesmusthavebeenintheWrightfamilygenes.Asayoungboy,
Austin Tappan Wright refused to let his younger brother, John, share Islandia with him;
John shrugged and created his own island, Cravay. John Kirtland Wright would grow up to
gain fame as an influential cartographer, director of the American Geographic Society, and
coiner of the term “chloropleth map.” * Their mother, Mary Wright, wrote a series of pop-
ular novels set in a painstakingly detailed but wholly fictional American university town
called Great Dulwich, and the boys learned after their father's death that he too had spent
hours mapping an imaginary world of his own devising.
I'msureweallliketothinkthatwecarrywithinuswholeworldsthatourfellowhumans
never glimpse, but few of these worlds, I'm guessing, come complete with their own plum
liqueurs and nineteenth-century immigration laws. It's easy to write off the Wrights as a
family ofdreamy eccentrics, but many people invent their owncountries anddrawmaps of
rugged coastlines that never were; we call these people “children.” The Wrights were un-
usual only in that they kept summer homes in their childish kingdoms through adulthood.
Some of the most famous pieces of “unreal estate” in literary history were, after all,
inspired by children's maps. Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island , with its famous