“Living in a place,” Frank Bascombe tells us, “is one thing we all went to college to learn how to do properly.” Like a lot of Frank Bascombe statements, this one sounds a bit smug and invites controversy. But in Haddam, New Jersey, where the art of living is raised to a height that exceeds some of the hedges, and college matriculants abound, such a comment would play pretty well. Settled in 1795 by Wallace Haddam, wool merchant, the town represents paradise of the kind that John Cheever so indelibly etched in his short stories: a moneyed, shady suburb, reachable from the City by train, where folks appreciate a good cocktail. The mood of Haddam is perhaps most beautifully evoked in the opening passage of Independence Day: “In Haddam, summer floats over tree-softened streets like a sweet lotion balm from a careless, languorous god, and the world falls in tune with its own mysterious anthems. Shaded lawns lie still and damp in the early a.m.”
Haddam doesn’t really exist. In a 2006 New York Times interview, Richard Ford revealed that Haddam is a composite of three real New Jersey towns: Princeton, Hopewell and Pennington. The three locations form a leafy triangle in the western part of the state, where American flags are common even after the 4th of July. Of the three, Hopewell is the closest to Ford’s depiction of Haddam, though it seems too small. It possesses an old seminary—a fairly large yellow building next to Seminary Street, though Seminary Street does not boast the cozy but somewhat stodgy retail district of the book. Elsewhere, on another main street in town one finds an institution set far back from the road under formidable trees. It is reminiscent of the De Toqueville Academy that graces the town of Haddam. Pennington is small but historic. Perhaps it contributed the least of its genes to Haddam. As for Princeton, it seems too large to be Haddam, but it has more of a racial mix than Hopewell could ever hope to attain. And this is important because, in Independence Day, Frank Bascombe has invested in some real estate in the black district of Haddam—which is basis for another line of musings. All in all, Ford seems not to have taken too much artistic license in his creation of a town. Haddam’s cemetery is said to hold three of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. In fact, of the cemeteries within the three real towns, Hopewell’s cemeteries hold one and Princeton’s hold two.
