At Home with the Muses

One of the nicest ways to spend a day is at a good bookstore when it’s on sale. For that reason I braved Megamall on a Saturday when Powerbooks went on sale recently. After picking up a couple of books I had been eyeing–now discounted–I spent several delightful hours just browsing, and ended up buying a few more books.

Among them is Writers’ Houses by Francesca Premoli-Droulers (with beautiful photographs by Erica Lennard), first published in the UK in 1995 by Cassell. The large 200-page book, which I found in the architecture section, offers "an intimate and inspirational tour of the homes of 20 of this century’s greatest writers," actually 21 including Marguerite Duras, who wrote the Prologue and opened her home at Neauphle-le-Chateau, "bought with the film royalties from my book Sea of Troubles... I believe this house exists for many things. It consoles me for all my childhood misery. In buying it, I knew right away that I had done something important for myself..."

Such insights are sprinkled liberally in the 20 chapters, each representing one writer, among them Jean Cocteau, William Faulkner, Dylan Thomas, Virginia Woolf, Hermann Hesse and Mark Twain. To see where these great writers wrote, ate, slept, kept their clothes, entertained guests gives deeper insight into and, in a way, better understanding of all those novels and poems read and studied in literature class long ago.

Most of the houses are what one might call "artists’ houses"–rambling, overgrown with vegetation, rooms in sepia lined floor to ceiling with books, interesting furniture and artwork, and a lot of photographs. Some of them are cluttered (like Dylan Thomas’), while others would easily get a Good Housekeeping seal. Several are quite grand, palatial even, with majestic views of the Mediterranean or some hilly countryside, the fruits of literary success.

William Faulker’s house in Oxford, Lafayette County is a typical Southern colonial style house, white with a colonnaded portico over-looking the tree-lined drive. On the mustard-colored walls of his bedroom he wrote the outline for A Fable, a book he conceived as a series of days. The account of Ernest Hemingway’s house in Key West, Florida–"the end of the world, the farthest shore, the outermost point on the Atlantic coast, the foam of a continent dribbling away..."–includes intriguing chismis about his relationship with novelist Martha Gelhorn. Virginia Woolf wrote on pale blue paper with a hard tseel pen dipped in green ink, and she did much writing at a cottage in Sussex called Monk’s Inn that she and her husband Leonard bought at an auction in 1919 for 700 pounds.

The stories go on and on, and the photographs are fabulous, making me think my house so drab and boring! I should learn to arrange flowers like Karen Blixen, and garden like Vita sackville-West, and I must definitely spend more time at bookstores on sale!