I have recently undergone a sea change, though I still live by the same sea. Not long ago I left my home beach on Cape Cod and moved a thousand miles south to an overdeveloped island off the Carolina coast. It was a hard goodbye, one necessitated by money, work, and health insurance, paralleling a career move my father made, from Massachusetts to North Carolina, at exactly the same age. Though in moments of melodrama I feel I have made myself into an exile, I know it isn't all that bad. But at the very least there is something in the way of surrender to the move. I am a nature writer and it was by writing well about how much I loved my former home that I got the job that led me away. Now I have given up not just a place, but the idea that I will forever commit to one place on earth.

This, as I say, is overly-dramatic, but I can’t seem to shake thoughts of displacement. This morning on the beach I heard a loon cry, and though my field guide tells me that those birds winter as far south as Florida, the eerie yodeling sounded out of place, a melancholy song of the north. I watched the pelicans dive for a while, twisting down into the water, following their divining rod bills, and thought about how exotic they would look plunging into Cape Cod Bay (though the rumor is they have now made it as far north as Long Island). Then I headed back home and made some coffee and got to work on my novel, a book set in the North that I am now writing in the South. I had trouble dredging up the specifics of my old home, despite combing the dozen or so journals on the bookshelf next to my desk, and so, procrastinating, I checked my e-mail. What I found on-line was not so different than what I'd found on the beach: It was clearly going to be one of those days full of coincidence, the kind you're not allowed to have in fiction but that happen often enough in life, when many of your worlds—in this case electronic, avian, and emotional—insist on playing the same theme. There was an e-mail from an old friend, Brad Watson, who had written a beautiful Southern novel while living in the North. The e-mail was an exciting one: He had quit his teaching job and moved to a cabin in Foley near the Gulf in Southern Alabama to be close to his son, Owen. He wrote:

I am now officially a hermit, and man you’re right, it feels good, feels right. The beard’s back after an eight month absence, hair sticking up all around the bald spot like wild grass on the rim of a blighted field. This old house smells like woodsmoke. The other night, Owen said, “The smell of this house reminds me of the smell of a house on Cape Cod,” and he was talking about the old Gessner house. So I suppose right now I’m the southern version of you in those days.

In another parallel, it had been Brad’s first book of Southern short stories that had led him north, when he was offered a five year position as a Briggs-Copeland lecturer at Harvard. Brad liked to play up the Beverly Hillbillies aspect of this move, the country bumpkin strolling into Harvard Yard with a piece of straw between his teeth. Of course he was anything but a rube, and became one of the school’s most popular teachers, though he did make one bumpkin-like decision in choosing to live, not in the urban mix of Cambridge, but down near me in the off-season wilds of Cape Cod. We were introduced by a mutual friend, a Southern writer in fact, and met at a drunken dinner at Brad’s house with our wives where he served coq au vin, a slow-cooked brothy chicken that you could gum off the bone. We drank too much—this would become a repeated theme—and at one point he admitted he had a 26 year old son from his first marriage. I did a little math and figured that meant he’d had his son when he was 16. “You really are a Southerner,” I blurted. When he laughed instead of scolding me for my stereotyping—a scolding that might have actually happened with other oversensitive Southern writers of my acquaintance—I knew it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

At the time we were living a half hour away in East Dennis on the Bay side of Cape Cod—again playing north to his south—but the next year Brad and his family rented a house less than mile away from us, right on the beach. It was a spectacular house where you could lie in bed and stare out at the rocks and the ocean and every now and then see a breaching whale, and where, on the rocky beach below, you could find stranded loggerhead or Kemp’s ridley turtles and the cadavers of coyotes and watch winter shorebirds like dovekies and gannets. The bluff, which you could see out of the western windows of the house, was where I would eventually set my Cape Cod novel, and the wind would be more than a minor character in that novel, since it never stopped whipping across the Bay and hitting the side of the house with enough force to make it hard to open the door in winter. The wind drove Brad’s wife crazy and made her miss the South, but it also leant a drama to the place that verged on melodrama, as if they were living inside the pages of Wuthering Heights.

It’s hard not to romanticize the year we lived down the street from each other, and I need to remind myself that there were problems for all of us—career-related, familial, marital, even chemical—that made the year less than romantic. But I still can’t help but look back somewhat hazily on that time: I had spent my twenties writing in isolation with no literary community at all, and now, suddenly, I was part of a tiny writing community, a Bloomsbury on the beach that included us and our wives. Brad and I would go for runs around the cranberry bog and bat back and forth the various plots of the various books that were obsessing us, and often I would find that he understood the literary allusion I was making or that I understood his, or that we had read the same book, or would soon read that book on the other’s suggestion, and before I knew it we were having, between heavy breaths and plodding steps, a real-live, bona fide literary discussion. One thing I loved about those runs is the way our talk ranged from the high to the low. Low crude jokes, occasional high insight. And plenty of shoptalk too: books, sure, but also ways to get ourselves started, that is to make sure we sat ourselves down and got to the business of typing each day.

There is no Algonquin Round Table without booze, and drinking was also part of the year’s ritual. (I later suggested that Brad’s biography should be called The Sodden Heart.) As it happened there was already a great tradition of cocktail hour on that part of Cape Cod. Not much more than a mile way from where we lived the great New England nature writer John Hay had shared drinks with the displaced Southern poet Conrad Aiken in the 50s, back when Aiken was collecting the second of his Pulitzer Prizes and when his reputation was still considered on par with T. S. Eliot. No living writer—not Bernard DeVoto with his evocation of the perfect martini or the liquor-soaked Hemingway or even Aiken’s protégé Malcolm Lowry—could match Conrad when it came to the daily glorification of booze. “The ritual of cocktail hour represents the communion of all friendly minds separated in time and space,” wrote Aiken. His poetic elevation of alcohol grew so famous that even the napkins used for the Aiken’s pewter drinking goblets later found their way into an Updike novel.

Our nightly boozing wasn’t quite so glamorous. Brad would sip whisky, slouched in his chair and I would swill many beers, and my wife Nina and Brad’s wife would drink wine. If this wasn’t the stuff of literary legend, it worked okay for me. There I was, living on my favorite place on earth, the closest thing I had and would ever have to a Walden, and now I also had a new and dear—and bookish!—friend right down the road, someone who also understood the daily wrestling match with words, and also understood the constant career disappointments—the envy and bitterness and failure, the way the game was so obviously rigged—and who I could drink and laugh about all of it with.

Of course nothing this simple exists for long, if it ever did exist at all outside of stray and random moments. It’s easy enough to make a golden age once the sloppiness of the actual time has passed. By the next year Brad had finally moved up to Cambridge and our friendship had already begun to slip a notch. Brad’s time at Harvard was too complicated to call a triumph, but there were moments of triumph. One was when he imported two of his favorite Southern writers, Barry Hannah and Padget Powell, to speak to a packed house in the Thompson Room below a portrait of Teddy Roosevelt. Hannah, who was very sick at the time, teared up at the podium, saying that he felt “like Quentin Compson come to Harvard,” and that now he knew “this Southern boy has made good.” A year later Brad’s stint in Cambridge ended and he headed back to the South to teach. Since then I have seen him only occasionally and for very short periods of time.

In the meantime Brad had gone a good while between books, not out of any traditional version of writer’s block—that is out of paucity—but rather out of excess, many different plots competing for prominence in his mind. He finally bore down, and finished his novel, The Heaven of Mercury, during his last two years in Cambridge. Of course, strategically speaking, I’ve gone about this essay all wrong, and by so excessively romanticizing my early friendship with Brad you will never believe me when I tell you that the book he produced during those years on the Cape and in Cambridge is one of our greatest contemporary novels. It will sound like hokum, like nonsense, or, even worse, like that lowest and most deceitful of things: a blurb.

But it’s true. Writers tend to be friends with other writers—it just eventually ends up working out that way—but it doesn’t always happen that your favorite books come from your favorite people. I’ve read a lot of friends’ work that I’ve had to politely praise, but Brad’s book was an exception. I had heard him talk about it often enough on those runs around the bog, but even bad writers can sometimes talk beautifully about their work in abstract. But the thing itself, the final book, was, and remains, a delight. The book’s main character, Finus, is a man of deep wistfulness and melancholy, a man who admits his own “inability to see the world except through the crinolated filters of self-conscious need.” But within the book’s pages Brad himself, as if fulfilling Finus’s wish to “not be who he was” flies from character to character, inhabiting each deeply, from Finus himself to Finus’s unrequited love, Birdie Wells, to Birdie’s black maid, Creasie, until we experience a full and varied, and yes, slightly sodden, world. There is an element of caricature—like Finus’s mother a “poor God-ravaged grackle of a woman,” or the horse named Dan: “A long, slow fart flabbered from the proud black lips of Dan’s hole...,” or Mrs. Urquhart’s heart, like a “shriveled potato”—and an element of the grotesque, like the scenes of necrophilia or the final mystery of an actual shriveled heart. But this is a humanized grotesquerie. Critics drew comparisons to the usual Southern suspects, Faulkner and O’Conner and Welty, as well as throwing the name Marquez around, due to the magical scenes at the end. But I was reminded of the early Cormac McCarthy, not the cowboy stuff, but the books Brad had turned me onto, the McCarthy of Child of God and, less so, of Suttree. The difference, to my mind, was that Brad’s stuff was better: It scumbled the surface of language and surprised in a similar fashion, but as well as being a pleasure on a language level, it told a story about very human characters, something McCarthy, for all his achievement and renown, does not do.

Happily, Brad’s accomplishment did not go unrecognized. Heaven was a great critical success, with the exception of one vastly overrated New York paper (that tends not to review good books anyway), and was a finalist for the National Book Award. For my money, it should have won.

I was quite proud to be mentioned on the acknowledgements page, with a phrase that might have easily come from one of our runs. Brad’s nod to me was a simple and practical one: “Thanks to David Gessner for urging me to get on with it.” And so Brad is a role model as I sit here at my Southern desk staring at my newly-purchased Southern Computer in my Southern Town and trying to resuscitate these dead journal details and to create or re-create my days on Cape Cod. I want to write of my fictional Cape Cod in a gritty and particular way and I can think of no better models than the quirky Southern novels I admire, Brad’s not the least among them. Of course there is a tradition of writing about places after you have left them, a tradition every bit as strong as that of writing while in a place. It’s just that I’ve never been of the Hemingway school, the exile school, evoking childhood Michigan from Paris, but of the Thoreauvian one, writing of a place while still in the infatuated midst of it. So some adjustment will be necessary. But here I am, after all, and I won’t be going back any time soon, so I might as well make something of my exile.

The truth is that the more I work, the more I see the advantages of holding a place at arm’s length. For one thing, now that it is in the past tense, I can see the time we were on Cape Cod as a kind of story with a beginning and end, an epoch in our lives, and can make sense of it in a way I never could while in its midst. And mine isn’t really much of an exile: We will be going back North in the summers, after all, and I can imagine a benefit to this pulsing, to going away and coming back, to seeing a place from afar, and so seeing it new. And this annual cycle will include the re-infatuation of seasonal return: my own return right after the bank swallows come back, then the white clouds of beach plum blossoms in later May, the prairie warbler with its xylophone song, the fox kits scampering up the jetty rocks to their den. In fact, thinking about these things leaves me ready to chuck this essay, and get down to my real business, that of imagining Cape Cod. Enough throat clearing. Exile is just another excuse for halting at the imaginative threshold, the sort of excuse we are always using to stop ourselves short. As Samuel Johnson said, any man can write anywhere and any time, as long as he “sets himself doggedly to it.” Or, as Brad might advise me: It’s time to get on with it.