The Southern writer Harry Crews once explained why he lived on three acres of uncleared land in the middle of a small university town 100 miles from the place in Georgia where he was born and raised:

I’ve tried to work—that is, to write—in Georgia, but I could not. Even under the best of circumstances, at my mama’s farm, for instance, it was all too much for me. I was too deep in it, too close to it, to make anything out of it. ... [On the other hand], I can’t write if I get too far away. I tried to work on a novel in Tennessee once and after a ruined two months gave it up in despair. I once spent four months near Lake Placid in a beautiful house lent to me by a friend—perfect place to write—and I didn’t do a damn thing but eat my guts and look out the window at the mountains.

As a writer, Crews knew that it had been his task to search for and find the geographic distance that equated with the inner distance necessary for his novels to emerge from the emotional swamp that is the natural dwelling place of all writing. Linked both to the past and the future, this little university town 100 miles from home was now home for Crews because wherever he could work (that is, write) was bound to become home.

Once, in Houston, I brought a dinner table conversation on this very subject—why we live where we live—to an abrupt halt when I said, quite casually, that if everyone I knew died tomorrow I’d be OK because I’d still have New York. The sentence shot out of me, surprising (shocking) me as much as it did everyone else at the table. What, after all, could such a sentiment imply, much less mean? I realized that evening that while I’ve often described in an episodic or story-telling way my many encounters on the streets of the city, I’ve never tried to analyze my joined-at-the-hip relation to New York City. Why it was that, regardless of all other attachments, nowhere—and with no one!—else in the world did I feel as richly connected to myself as I did on the street in the city of my birth? I also realized that evening that while I’ve traveled a good bit of the world, and even lived for months at a time in parts of it, I have never begun a significant piece of writing anywhere except in New York. Completed work abroad yes, but started it no. It occurred to me then that many writers probably have the same relation to their place of abode as did Crews and, for that matter, as do I: Live where you can feel life on your skin and get it down on paper. A problem whose solution involves the mystery of temperament.

In the opening chapter of The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing’s protagonist, the writer Anna Wulf (clearly a stand-in for Lessing herself), and her friend, Molly, sit talking. Molly has reluctantly returned from a vacation abroad, and she asks Anna, with some bitterness, why she’d had to come back to the dreariness of 1950s London, why she could not have remained in Europe. “Because this is the country we know,” Anna replies. “The other countries are places we don’t think in.”

While I’ve traveled a good bit of the world, and even lived in parts of it, I have never begun a significant piece of writing anywhere except in New York.

Anna’s observation—delivered in a section famously called “Free Women”—is that of a writer (Lessing herself) who equates thinking with the hard work necessary to encounter the genuine in her own thought and feeling—and London with the place where the inner freedom necessary to do so is to be found. By inner freedom, Lessing means what D.H. Lawrence meant when he said, “Men are not free when they are doing just what they like. … Men are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes. And there is getting down to the deepest self! It takes some diving.” For Anna Wulf, writing-thinking-London equates with diving in the Lawrentian sense of the word: That, in fact, is what The Golden Notebook itself testifies to. Molly’s sojourn abroad delivered sybaritic pleasure, but under continental blue skies, she was doing anything but thinking, much less diving. To the contrary, she was blissing out: the direct opposite of what Anna calls thinking.