A writer's study can tell strange tales of creative agony
PAUL JOHNSON
Loking around my study, after completing a long and difficult book, I am filled with disgust. It is small and overcrowded at best, but during a titanic struggle with a recalcitrant text, it is never tidied and all kinds of objectionable detritus collect. Filled with post-natal depression, I have not yet had the courage to repair and sweeten my nest. I sometimes envy those writers who do not have the luxury of a study of their own, such as Jane Austen, whose masterly novels were composed in one of the common rooms of the house, so that she had hastily to cover up what she was writing when she heard someone approach. But at least she was spared the sight of her own creative squalor.
Some writers solve the problem by detaching themselves from their houses completely. George Bernard Shaw had a hut in his garden at Ayot St Lawrence, which was cabled to the mains so that he could heat it in the winter; it had a telephone too. The merit of the contraption was that it revolved on an axis so that he could push it round to catch the sun any time of day. But it was covered in asbestos, nailed to the wood, small and unutterably dreary. He did not care. He was not interested in comfort or decor. The house itself was — indeed is — an unthinking denial of beauty. Harold Nicolson advised the National Trust that it was 'morally obliged' to accept Shaw's Corner for the nation, and to keep it exactly as Shaw left it 'as an example of the nadir of taste to which a distinguished writer could sink'.
Virginia WooIts writing hut in the garden of Monk's House in Sussex was made out of an old tool-shed, and was twice as big as Shaw's with double doors that opened out on to a delectable garden. She could peer at it through framing trees and shrubs, and push her writing-table into the sunlight on a summer's day. I think I could have worked in this place, though not in Shaw's — too aggressively Fabian and Shavian. The nicest writing hut I have ever seen was created by Antonia Fraser at Eilean Aigas, her idyllic island in the River Beauly in Inverness-shire. It was some way from the house, quite isolated — not a garden shed at all, more a hut in the forest and likely to be visited by small deer, wildcats and pine martens, all creatures that lived on the island or came there from time to time. It was perched on the rim of the wild, dark river that thundered its way over the rocks in times of spate, or flowed stealthily, icy-cold and mountain-fresh, in the tranquil summer months. There she wrote her famous biography of Mary, Queen of Scots and other works, and it is hard to imagine a place where words and thoughts are closer to nature and its wonders.
Other writers go aloft for privacy and quiet, and pitch their creative tents at the top of the house. I remember V.S. Pritchett saying to me — he must have been in his eighties then — 'Every morning I struggle up the stairs, groaning and complaining, to begin another day's stint.' This ascent to the empyrean is almost a conscious self-assumption from the everyday world to the mystic universe of composition. It was the same with Tennyson, in his beautiful house on the Isle of Wight. He had to get aloft, to the view, the silence, the isolation and the majesty of height, there to design his Jovean thunderbolts of words, or cast his rhythmic fairy spells. Also, he could smoke. It was a signal honour, accorded only to males I think, to be invited up there to talk with him in his eyrie.
The classic case of the attic study was Thomas Carlyle's at No. 5 Cheyne Row, still preserved virtually as he left it, as we can see from photographs of him in it taken in the 1850s by Robert Tait. It was specially created for him and was supposed to be sound-proof. Carlyle had a morbid fear, amounting at times to sheer terror, of noise. He complained bitterly all his life of carriages, street cries, bells, train whistles and even footsteps. He protested that the sound-proofing did not work and that he was still tortured by the horrible sounds of London's fierce heart beating. But then he was a grumbler of genius. His letters, printed in 20-odd volumes by Duke University in North Carolina, constitute the largest compendium of grouses, whines, rage, roars and fulminations ever assembled. In Carlyle's grim and far from tranquil sanctum, he composed in seething agony his unreadable masterpiece, Frederick the Great, which took him 13 years of unremitting toil. It isolated him from his longsuffering wife Jane, and may have hastened her death.
Carlyle wrote it sitting at a peculiar patent desk, still to be seen, with an extendable writing-top on struts, and a drawer that opened on the other side; a thoroughly impractical and unattractive contraption in my opinion. But there is no telling what writers will like, or endure. One of Tait's photographs shows Carlyle at work in this den, perched on the end of his hard, horsehair chair, legs entwined, despairing head leaning desperately on his left hand, the pen in the other, a grim-misery picture of the writer at work. Wearing a stiff collar can't have helped much. But whoever heard of these Victorian titans — Dickens, say, or Thackeray — stripping down a bit to ease composition? Both were photographed at their authorial desks, fully, indeed elaborately, dressed.
The ideal writer's house, in my view, was Kipling's, near Burwash in Sussex. This beautiful Caroline manor of stone — called Bateman's after its owner who was presumably a 17th-century Sussex ironrnaster —with its tall chimneys and mullioned windows, is exactly the right kind of place for a distinguished poet to end his days. It has amplitude without being vast, is noble but in no way grand, square, comfortable, timeless and full of ancient power — rather like Kipling himself. His study is exactly as it should be. There is plenty of space, sensible, practical good-quality oak furniture, a huge writing-table with ample knee-room, big wastepaper baskets, globes for dignity and possibly, in Kipling's case, for use, and simple bookcases reaching to the stripped-timber ceiling, crowded with books of reference and standard sets. Kipling could march up and down this room if he wished, or look through the window at the dearly loved Sussex meadows. In this house he was a little monarch, as he deserved to be.
Almost as appropriate, I think, was Freud's study or consulting room in Hampstead, which can also still be seen more or less as he left it. (I include Freud because I regard him as a writer of genius rather than a scientist.) It is much bigger than you would • expect. There is a sinister-shaped symbolic chair, and a carpet on the famous couch. Just as Kipling had on his desk paperweights which once belonged to Warren Hastings, so Freud assembled bits of antiquity, from Persia and Egypt and Greece. These things cast spells, which writers need (I myself have a squashed bullet from the field of Gettysburg, presented by a generous reader). In the old days, of course, a male writer's desk was littered with pipes. A writer without a pipe, from Raleigh and Lamb to Raymond Chandler, seemed incomplete. J.B. Priestley told me that he always spent half an hour every morning fiddling with the pipes on his desk before he could begin work properly. Now it is rare to see an ashtray even. But pills, bottles of pills — there are plenty of those.
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