The writer’s desk

Weimar is home to a lot of history, not least the Weimar republic, Hitler, and Buchenwald – but I went to research happier times, the so-called ‘Goethe-zeit’ when Goethe, having single-handedly dreamt up German romanticism with his novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), and having recovered from a sort of nervous breakdown by taking a sabbatical journey to Italy, returned and invented anti-Napoleonic Weimar classicism. Here the big founding four of German national literature were convened within a blue-stocking, courtly, proto-university. Here Herder, Wieland, Goethe and Schiller sparked off each other, not to mention, in their turn, Nietzsche, Andersen, and Pushkin. It is, in short, a town where a great deal of writing has been done, and it therefore contains a remarkable collection of celebrated writers’ desks.

 But what is a writer’s desk, or rather, what does a desk mean? We might try out the proposition that a writer’s desk makes a series of statements about the act of creative writing, and especially the acts of creative writing carried out by that particular author. It’s worth saying here that there are writers whose desks are almost not desks at all.  I’ve already in this blog mused a little on the proposition that Austen’s desk makes about genteel, amateur, female literary work. Similarly, Charlotte Brontë did not have what we could nowadays call a desk at all, but instead a portable writing-desk (now held at the British Library) which reputedly she carried out to a particular flat stone by a stream on the moors above Haworth, where she drafted Jane Eyre. A stone as a desk – it is appropriate both to her outsider status as a woman author, and to the mythology of the moors that has come to surround the Bronte sisters’ literary output. This desklessness, simultaneously real and ideological, is not confined to women authors but extends to certain male poets as well. Here Burns is of especial interest. As a civil servant (an excise man) he had a number of desks, and such was his celebrity shortly after his death that many of them were preserved and are now scattered between the Burns properties in Alloway and Dumfries, and the Writers’ Museum in Edinburgh, and for all I know to the contrary, in private collections as well. But the idea of the ploughman poet making up songs on the braes o’ Doon did not and does not sit very easily with the middle-class grind of the desk. A few years back, Burns’ desk was redisplayed in the Birthplace slightly tilted up, as though flying away, and all the papers on it were cunningly displayed on invisible wires as though caught by a great gust of wind.  Burns, that particular display said, may have worked at a desk in a particular place, but he wrote in a Caledonian gale of inspiration. The desk may be said to be ideologically embarrassing to the idea of Burns; writing lyric poetry is effusion or dream, not clerical work. Indeed, arguably the most powerful invocation of Burns in the act of writing is not with pen and paper at all, but with a diamond ring on the glass pane of a pub window. This seems truer to our sense of him as a poet who overwrites location.

One of the effects of the advent of the word-processing computer is that the idea of the act of writing has changed utterly. Firstly, the act of writing has become imaginatively less organic. There is an imaginative world of difference between the idea of a living hand curled around a living quill-pen and the idea of fingers tapping a standardised mechanical keyboard, whether typewriter or computer. The transmission of ideas through the body onto paper has become measurably more alienated.  On the other hand, writing for publication – the business of making notes, drafting, redrafting, the making of manuscript ‘fair copies’, copy-editing, and proof-reading – has arguably become more ‘magical’, because more invisible. Wordsworth, for example, composed first in his head, then in scribbled-down sections, and then he got his womenfolk to make fair copies for the press. You can still see the first proofs from the printer for Balzac’s Comédie Humaine laid out on his desk in Paris, covered not just with handwritten corrections but with extensive rewriting before going to second proof stage. If the archival material survives, as in the case of Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’, it is often possible to track poems in detail from initial conception, through subsequent revision. Although the moment of inspiration is invisible, its realization is not. All of this is disappearing from cultural ordinariness. By comparison, the transition from blank page to finished product is almost eerily instantaneous with a computer – a computer turns an author into a reader at the exact moment of writing. Tracking the process of drafting and redrafting has become much more difficult, although the British Library now archives writers’ old computers, with post-it notes still stuck on their shells, and are working on how to archive the changes hidden deep within the machine. This modern scene of writing throws into strong relief a conventional idea of the writer at his desk, which we almost certainly owe to Victorian cults surrounding Walter Scott and Charles Dickens, of which more in a later blog. For now, though, we might say that the dominant cultural trope imagines a professional author as seated at a desk piled with papers and books, working with a pen, by artificial light. That trope is both invoked and challenged by the desks on display in Weimar.

In Goethe’s so-called ‘Garten-house’, where he lived as a young writer and which he kept as a retreat for the rest of his life, there are three desks on view. Somehow a writer should not have three desks – we want one privileged locus of work. Worse, two of them immediately and strongly disrupt our twenty-first century idea of the writer at his desk, for they are designed for standing or near-standing rather than sitting. This was not as unusual as you might think. Goethe’s view was that sitting was bad for the digestion (probably true); perhaps this was what impelled Victor Hugo to build a similar standing desk in his house in Guernsey.  Moreover, Goethe seems to have preferred to write not with a quill (which scratched and interrupted his flow of thought because of the necessity of frequently dipping it into the inkwell) but in pencil. Nor (at any rate in later years, when he was living in the much bigger house up the hill in Weimar) was he alone. Instead, in this dedicated study, he typically dictated to an amanuensis and copyist while walking round and round the table. 

This last practice reinstates the ‘romanticness’ of writing. It separates inspiration from the mere labour of writing – here writing really is just copying down. Schiller’s desk also displays romantic inspiration, but by describing its absence. It displays a facsimile of the last half of his last, unfinished play, laid out on its surface.  Here the manuscript speaks not so much of the labour of writing but of the tragic cessation of writerly imagination. Right next to the desk is Schiller’s bed, adumbrating the pathos of his early death.

The solidity of these desks, houses, and the romantic stories of writing attached to them rather belie what actually happened. Writers write elsewhere as often as they write at home, especially if they can get a free or cheap meal and escape domestic demands (think of J.K.Rowling). Iphigenia auf Tauris and Maria Stuart were actually written at the Duchess Anna Amalia’s summer retreat a few miles away. Goethe seems through much of his life to have written on the run, in notebooks, on travelling writing-desks, even on old theatre tickets stuffed in his pockets. But the writer’s desk remains a privileged locus, evidencing in an uneasy blend the idea of writing as located, magical, timeless inspiration, and writing as a sort of physical slog that takes a good long time.

Last June, I went to Winchester Cathedral to marvel at their flower festival, and, as a scholar of Austen, to photograph the grave, brass plaque, and stained-glass window that between them memorialise her there. Plunging into a particularly excited and dense crowd down a side-aisle, I discovered Austen herself. And here she is.

 In the two hundredth year of the publication of Pride and Prejudice, creating this large and lavish display was reserved by the Winchester Cathedral flower arrangers to themselves. It was located almost on top of Austen’s grave, in the centre of the aisle. Behind her gravestone, there is a late 19C brass plaque, put up by her nephew at the moment when Austen was first becoming a canonical novelist, in large part as a result of his Memoir of Jane Austen published in 1870. And above that, there is a memorial stained glass window, put up even later, in the early twentieth century. The display itself suggested at least two mendacious things: first, that ‘the English country garden’ in the late eighteenth century was full of peonies. Secondly, that Austen was in the habit of working in the garden on furniture that if it had been outside on this particular summer’s day would certainly have been ruined by torrential rain. But the installation had a sort of truth nonetheless – the ‘Englishness’, femininity, and controlled domestic compass of Austen’s fiction is congruent with this fiction of an idealised country garden, and the prevailing popular sense of Austen as a woman writer who composed within and about the confines of the domestic was convincingly staged.  In fact, there is a long tradition in travel-cum-biographical writing of the ‘homes and haunts’ genre, stretching back to the early 1910s, of visiting Chawton Cottage and imagining Austen,  imagining her characters, or imagining Austen looking out onto the garden and imagining her characters.   The traditional English garden is often enough specified as Austen’s ground of inspiration, and as the best and most natural backdrop to her particular evocation of English society.  

Within this frame, a number of other rather conventional things are re-stated about catching genius in the act of creative writing. The inclusion of a dummy Austen insists, for example, on the need to imagine and re-animate the volume of the writer’s body – here, with an unusually and unintentionally macabre literalism, actually rising above Austen’s bones. It insists on the importance of the writer’s hand, foregrounded carefully on the writing-table. It points to the indirection of the reader’s relation with the authorial body, which is only inferred or created by readers from the writing, by positioning the dummy in such a way that the writer’s back is turned away from the viewer, and the face is completely hidden. It details not only the embodiedness of the author but the materiality of the business of writing, assembling here its tools, the chair, desk, inkstand, quill-pen, and paper.  Finally, it emphasises the moment at which writing comes into being, when the paper is almost blank, when the first famous sentence is written, but discarded by its originator, when the second attempt is about to be made. It is interested in the moment when a quotation is originated, before it knows and is known to be a quotation.

Of course, nothing in this tableau of the writer at her desk in the garden is ‘authentic’ — except the considerable amateur affect invested in it. The table, for instance, is not the famous twelve-sided walnut table in Chawton Cottage, on which Austen is said to have written. That said,  it looks quite like it, which suggests that the Cathedral flower arrangers expected that at  least some of the visitors would be familiar with what Austen’s table looks like, as  familiar as they are with the opening of Pride and Prejudice. This is merely a representation of the writer’s desk and a fanciful one at that.  But what it can tell us about ‘real’ writer’s desks is simple but important – it tells us that even the real thing is self-representational, and that what it must strive to represent is the writer at work. This is not as easy as it might sound at first. The writer’s desk (and the writing materials associated with it) are culturally required to describe something immaterial and invisible, and quite possibly entirely fictional – the supposed instant when something happened that has subsequently come, often by slow accretions, to certify the genius of a person and a place, and often the productive confluence of the two.

In microcosm, the problem of making the writer’s desk into the Writer’s Desk is a matter of what John Urry long ago in The Tourist Gaze called ‘site sacralization’. Even if you have the very table, it is only a table until it is provided with markers of signification and valuation, and framed within a narrative of the moment of creation. The production of this ‘aura’ (to borrow Baudrillard’s famous term) is what collectors, curators, and visitors all work at. It is one important way in which ‘genius,’ or rather the cultural fiction and functionality of genius, is produced through representation, performance, and reiteration.

It is therefore instructive to compare the Austen display in Winchester Cathedral with the permanent display in Chawton Cottage – not so much to draw out the differences between the floral fantasy and the real thing, but to get at the marked continuities between them.

This battered, undistinguished and rather rickety piece of Regency furniture is displayed in Chawton Cottage as Jane Austen’s writing-table. It certainly belonged to Chawton, was inherited by Austen’s sister Cassandra and bequeathed by her in 1845 to a manservant; thereafter it found its way back to the cottage when it was being set up as a heritage site in the 1920s.   The table in Winchester Cathedral required gravestone, brass plaque, memorial window, a bonneted dummy, writing materials, and apparently discarded manuscript to stage it as ‘Austen’s table’. By comparison, the contemporary display of this table seems almost ostentatiously understated – a window, a chair, a table, an empty crystal inkstand and a single quill. This is partly possible because the house itself acts as narrative frame.   Nevertheless, this table is, as in the floral display, clearly not just a table. It is ostentatiously not for further use. Protected behind a perspex screen, it is to be seen but not touched. Paradoxically, the very absence of the writer’s body fulfils the same role as the dummy seated on Austen’s grave – it represents the space of the writer’s originating body, while describing its vanishedness. The solitariness and domesticity of the act of writing in the garden staged in the cathedral is re-described here in terms of the quiet sitting-room, which comes with a famous story of the door with the creaking hinge that supposedly gave Austen enough warning to conceal her writing from all but her close intimates. The transparency of perspex produces on the one hand the value of the object through introducing distance and encouraging focussed meditation, and on the other hand, according to Anna Woodhouse, a readerly, fan-style, identity shaped by aspirational desire.[1] Genius-as-a-commodity is therefore produced by a negotiation between reader-tourist and curator around an object seen through a transparent barrier.  Or one might speculate that the perspex functions to denote distance in multiple ways – the distance between use and celebrity value, between organic material and immaterial narrative, between material conditions of production and the miasma of reputation, between pieces of paper and the accolade of ‘genius’, between reader and author, and the ever-enlarging distance in time between reading and composition. Above all, it marks the distance of present-day consumer from long-dead genius. 

All writer’s desks differently inflect this common description of genius. Yet some are more unusual than this would suggest, and this desk is one of them. There aren’t many women authors who have ever been designated geniuses, even in the nineteenth century which was particularly fond of the idea and the category. It’s a specialised and interesting category. One might think here, for example, of Germaine de Stael and George Sand. Fewer still have continued to be regarded as geniuses, but among their number we can (still) include Austen.[2] Austen’s writing-table at Chawton is very unusual among curated writer’s desks in that it bears hardly any marker to single it out.  There is no claim to provenance, and few traces of ‘work’. No paper, no ink, no paper, no sand-sifter, no proofs, no personal belongings, no books, no candle, no brass plaque or inscription, just a single feather. This is a willed blankness.  (There is a history to the display of this table, but I only have space here to describe how it appears nowadays.) Although it is probable that Austen sat at this table which was clearly never designed as a writing-table, her writing-desk was something else altogether – a handsome and expensive mahogany writing-box which opened into a slope and would have sat on the table itself.  Gifted in 1999 by an heir, Joan Austen Leigh, to the British Library, it is now held in the Sir John Ritblat gallery, together with its contents, including Jane Austen’s eye-glasses and her sewing kit or ‘housewife’.[3] That, if anything, is the true paraphernalia of genius. But so far it has had little purchase on the representation of Austen in the act of writing. So what does this contrived blankness at Chawton say about how our culture imagines the nature of Austen’s ‘genius’?

The clue, I think, is the marginal, even opportunistic scene of writing that both the writing desk in the British Library and the table in Chawton Cottage in their own ways dramatise. At the opening of the Millennium exhibition at the British Library, Claire Tomalin, as biographer of Austen, said of the writing-desk that it demonstrated that ‘All you need if you are a writer is a desk, a pencil and of course a great brain.’[4] (Never mind that Austen did not write in pencil.) She had much the same to say about the table at Chawton, emphasising its smallness: ‘This fragile 12-sided piece of walnut on a single tripod must be the smallest table ever used by a writer…. Today, back in its old home, it speaks to every visitor of the modesty of genius.’[5] This sentiment – the sense that any woman could be a genius if Austen could be out of such supposedly modest conditions — can be verified by recourse to the blogosphere, well-populated by Austen enthusiasts. This is Cindy Jones, posting an account of her literary pilgrimage to all places associated with Austen in 2010:

Standing in the simple room where the modest writing-table occupied a spot near the window, I felt my Jane Austen’s presence.  Not the celebrity icon, but the unaffected woman reined in by class, money, and gender.  … Jane Austen was the person I had imagined: physically present at the little table, yet mentally far away, working in a universe of her own creation.  And this is what we both understand:  being stranded on a desert island is not a problem as long as you have paper, pen, and writing-table.   Her writing-table is the most unassuming piece of furniture with the most impressive back-story I’ve ever met.[6]

If Jane Austen could do it, then so can we; and if immediate inspiration eludes us budding geniuses, we can always buy some scented drawer-liners and head over to the tea-shop, where they have invariably stopped serving tea five minutes ago.

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[1] Anna Woodhouse, ‘How glass changes the way we see the world’ Four Thought Radio 4 29 May 2013, downloads.bbc.co.uk… fourthought_20130529-2059a.mp3

[2] Cf. Deirdre Shauna Lynch, ‘Jane Austen’s Genius’

[3] Freydis Jane Welland, ‘The History of Jane Austen’s Writing-Desk’, Persuasions 30.

[4] News, Views & Titbits  republished from http://www.jasa.net.au/newsdc99.htm last accessed 19 June 2013

[5] Claire Tomalin, The Guardian Sat 12^th July 2008 ‘Writer’s Rooms: Jane Austen’

[6] Cindysjones.wordpress.com/2010/08/24/i-met-jane-austens-writing-table last accessed 19 June 2013

Post 9 Dogs of Genius

August 2013 In the dog-days of August all academics should be on the beach rather than in the research library. It is the silly season, and its silliness may suitably tinge even the serious business of thinking about the nature of authorial celebrity and the cultural purposes it has served and continues to serve. In such a frivolous mood, it gives me to think about authors and their dogs, or rather authors whose celebrity has included a sense of their love of dogs.

Now it has to be admitted that many authors are much more strongly associated with cats. Think of Petrarch, of Smart, of Johnson, of Colette. There is much to be said for a cat – it is silent, undemanding, and used at any rate to belong to the kitchen – it was not so much a pet as a tolerated inmate in urban or country household, it came and went as it list, much, one might think, like writerly inspiration.  Dogs, on the other hand, are another matter entirely. Dogs are never just dogs, though cats are usually just moggies, cheap, disposable, spinsterish, sat on the mat, as indoorsish as a writer. For after all, writing for much of the history of literary culture has tended to involve paper and pens and ink, and all of those are easier to manage indoors, even if Wordsworth did manage to think up ‘Michael’ balanced on the ruined wall of a sheepfold in the vale of Grasmere.  Unlike cats, dogs have historically been markers of class status: whether working-dogs like the deer-hound, lapdogs like the Pekinese, or terriers for ratting. Dogs are very much of the outdoors, and specifically bred to different sorts of sporting pursuits – by extension, therefore, they carry class meaning. An author whose persona includes a dog at the edge of the frame is saying something about themselves. Take Lord Byron, for instance. If you go to his ancestral home Newstead Abbey and prowl about the grounds, sooner or later you will come across a large and surprising monument, topped with an urn. On closer inspection, it proves to be a monument to Byron’s beloved dog Bosun, or Boatswain. 

Bosun, as a Newfoundland dog, was special in his own right, and was also a regular companion to Byron.  Byron’s affection for Bosun was real enough but what interests me here is what proclaiming that affection does. It underscored Byron’s credentials as an aristocrat with a country estate on which such a dog could run.  Bosun was also an exotic, not an indigenous breed of hunting-dog, very much of a piece with Byron’s self-presentation of himself as only unwillingly British.

By contrast, Walter Scott’s dogs would seem to have described him more unproblematically as a country baronet. Domiciled in his country retreat Abbotsford, his pack of beloved dogs, ranging from terriers to his famous deerhound, Maida, were a feature of Abbotsford life and were always commented on by visitors.  So famous were they that Maida was included in the portrait sculpture that sits within the Scott monument in Edinburgh.

Scott’s beloved dogs certified Scottish country-life, a life of hunting, shooting and fishing, a life of leisure and land management – a life of which Scott provided an excellent simulacrum for his admiring visitors, but which was funded by a legal practice, and by writing.  Maida epitomised Scott’s fantasy of being the deer-hunting baronet, and for the nation, it provided an externalisation of the supposed ‘healthiness’ of Scott’s fiction – not too intellectual, always good for you, unimpeachably masculine.

And what of women writers? Did they ever have dogs? Flush, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s lapdog spaniel, springs to mind, although he achieved fame not so much in his own time as through Virginia Woolf’s portrayal of him in her cod autobiography. Still, in general, literary genius has been more glamorously identified with wilder animal-daemons than dogs — hares in the case of William Cowper, foxes in the case of Ted Hughes, ravens in the case of Philip Pullman. Only thus can we account for Norman Mailer’s dog-tribulations – it is said that this king of macho-fiction was embroiled in perpetual dog-fights with persons who showed the merest glimmer of a sneer at his beloved dog, a poodle.

Post 8 Travels in the Library

July 2013 These last two weeks, I have been hunkered down in the Upper Reading Room of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, reading. To my right, coat, bag, phone, and a pile of eighteenth century calf-bound books stashed in grey cardboard boxes.  These are the travel-books that have never done much travelling themselves. Instead of falling to pieces in a long-dead traveller’s pocket in some hotel or inn, they are the one copy of that book that a copyright library like the Bodley is entitled to.

In their pages I have been travelling across Europe at break-neck speed. I have left from Dover by packet and hurried to Dieppe, taken carriage or post-horse through Rouen to Paris, paused to sample Paris society before taking the road again for Nice or Marseilles, packed again to travel across the Jura and so arrived in Turin and then onwards; I have travelled to Plymouth, taken ship via Biscay and been landed sick in Lisbon or Leghorn; I have been ferried to Brussels and then been rowed down the Rhone into the heart of Switzerland, paused in Geneva, made a series of excursions around the Alps, hurried over Napoleon’s new road through the Simplon pass and so down to Milan and then through the Veneto to the sleazy delights of Venice. I have travelled by packet, row-boat, cabriolet, calèche, char-a-banc, post-chaise, private carriage, cart, by donkey and on foot.  I have viewed antiquities, art, churches, literature, landscape beauties, geology, local customs, and considered the political and religious state of the nations. I have travelled with poets young and old, bad and good, with a honeymooning wife and a middle-aged Oxford don, with an engagingly silly young gentleman pedestrian and with milord’s six carriage entourage complete with library and menagerie, with intrepid women and invalid men. I have travelled with some of the best company the age could offer – with Byron, Shelley, Mary Shelley, Rousseau, Madame de Staël, William Beckford, Lady Sydney Morgan, Humphrey Davy, Chateaubriand and many others.

The object of this odd and enthralling exercise is to write a conference paper to an unnervingly tight deadline. I am trying to describe how travel and tourism lived out and inscribed a global literary culture across the European map. My interest spans from the late 1780s through to the 1830s, but this paper is about the years immediately following Waterloo, when English travellers flooded into continental Europe and conducted a stock-take on the wreckage of what was left after a world war. I’ve been trying to work out what were the must-see literary locations for the post-Waterloo traveller. What emerges looks something like this:

 Literary Locations: The Top Ten

1. Voltaire’s chateau, Ferney
2. Locations associated with Rousseau’s novel at Clarens and Vevey, on the shores of Lake Geneva
3. Rousseau’s houses at Motiers, and Ile St Pierre in Lake Bienne
4. Gibbon’s summerhouse, Lausanne
5. Petrarch’s house, Vaucluse
6. Petrarch’s house, Arquà
7. Juliet’s tomb,Verona
8. Tasso’s cell, Ferrara
9. Ariosto’s armchair, Ferrara

10.  Virgil’s tomb, near Naples

11.  Loch Katrine, associated with Walter Scott’s poem The Lady of the Lake

But there were, of course, others. One of the more surprising is the so-called ‘tomb of Narcissa’, the poet Edward Young’s daughter in what are now the botanic gardens in Montpellier. Buried there at the dead of night because she was a protestant, the young woman’s grave became a paradigmatic romantic location, as the many plaques there, quoting Young, Valery and Gide on their visits now attest.

As a risky generalization, what gets romantic tourists going is solitary figures expressing extreme and irresolvable emotion in extreme settings. These figures may be historical or fictional; what is essential is that they should have a first person voice, which must place them in the setting and suffuse it with ‘associations’. The tourist then revives these within their memory, and the travel-writer reiterates this process by selective quotation.  The figure that links the most important sites is imprisonment or exile.

So much for the basic academic enquiry I’m working out. Round the edges of it, though, all these travellers come alive – the exasperatingly silly, the depressingly practical, the man of the world, the crashing bore – no doubt all dragged at the heels of the same long-suffering post-horses.  What discomforts, miseries and adventures these privileged travellers endured – the bride who found herself giving birth at Como on her extended honeymoon and a few days later having her new baby baptised in the snows of the Simplon pass because there was an English clergyman passing through; the undergraduate who thought it would be reasonable to walk the St Bernard Pass bare-legged one night in December; the woman whose daughter sickened, died, and was buried in a matter of hours at Rome; the callow lawyer of ‘military height’ who narrowly escaped enlistment into the Prussian army!