The Lives Of Houses – a peak behind the front doors of some of our favourite enigmatic literary figures
The Lives of Houses by Hermione Lee and Kate Kennedy (Princeton University Press)
Most of us enjoy peeking into other people’s homes, and we are all doing more of it than usual at the moment, if only via FaceTime or Zoom. Even in normal times, we have grown used to visiting houses left in the care of the National Trust, and our interest is piqued further when a property belonged formerly to a renowned or notorious family or individual.
But one category of owner or occupant especially draws us in past the front doors and faded curtains. The former homes of writers and other artists intrigue us because we sense we know them already, at least in part, through their books and pictures and sculptures. We feel like distant friends, remote intimates, made so by reading and observation of their works. By visiting the houses they once occupied, we want to be drawn in further, to inhabit their lives a little more, to enjoy their books and pictures in a different and enhanced way.
Therein lies the attraction of Kate Kennedy and Hermione Lee’s newly edited book “Lives of Houses”, a collection of essays touching mainly on writers but also on composers who lived between the 18th and 20th centuries. Most are British, though not all, and most lived in houses in the British Isles.
The book had its origins in an academic conference, but don’t let that put you off. The editors have employed some irritating contents categories (“Dream Houses”, “House-Proud”, “Afterlives”, etc.), but just ignore them as well. The collection is a bit uneven (and occasionally esoteric), as such edited volumes often are, but there are far more gems than duds to be found among the essays included.
The essays are by many hands, some little known beyond specialist audiences, some very well-known indeed, notably Julian Barnes. They touch on settlement, on domestic habits, on displacement and loss, on writerly development and musical evocation. And as well as enjoying what has been offered, this reader was left pining for more – the houses of more writers, of course, but also those of painters and sculptors who do not feature at all.
One writer, W H Auden, makes two appearances (and might have made three if his final, sad, years in Oxford had been covered). His house and life at St Mark’s Place on the Lower East Side of New York is sharply and vividly drawn by Seamus Perry: a life lived daily in the dark behind drawn curtains, in a domestic squalor shared with Chester Kalman, but subject to an invariable work schedule. Perry describes well the seeming disconnect between Auden’s messy lifestyle and his disciplined writing of prose as well as poetry. He catches the fact that, for Auden, the disorder of a fallen world (and Auden remained an Anglican all his life) required to be re-ordered by the writer’s pen.
There are anecdotes galore in Perry’s piece, my favourite being when Auden refused to have his own evening bath-time delayed because of Kalman and friends’ continuing partying, and, having bathed as usual in soapy bubbles (bought for him in a Woolworth’s store), walked naked – except for a covering of bubbles – past Kalman and co. still in the living room adjacent to his bedroom.
An Austrian writer, Sandra Mayer, has a less sparkly but still riveting second essay on Auden’s life in the Austrian village of Kirchstetten, a short journey away from Vienna where he lived each summer from 1958 till his death in 1973.
The wooden chalet-style house was the only dwelling he ever owned. He did not engage closely with the villagers (though he did attend Sunday Mass locally), and they turned a blind eye to some of the guests who came to visit him and Chester Kalman, including Greek boyfriends and rent boys from Vienna. But the locals knew their neighbour was a famous literary figure with a global reputation, and they savoured his presence among them. In what he termed his “Cave of Making”, Auden continued writing poems, most conspicuously and aptly “Thanksgiving for a Habitat”.
Auden’s Austrian refuge survives, partly lived in still and partly made into a discrete museum on the upper floors with a life-sized photo of the poet on the balcony to greet the visitor arrived in the front garden.
A writer of a rather different sort, and better known for his other life as a politician, was Winston Churchill. David Cannadine delves beneath the surface to give a very rounded picture of Churchill’s relationship with Chartwell, his (specially built to his requirements) country house in Kent. Not only does he draw out Churchill’s abiding love for the house, but also the risks it posed for many years to his own finances (a worry regularly articulated by his despairing wife).
Churchill was not till very late in his life, a rich man. His writings were usually designed to make him money and his war memoirs did so in spadefulls. But even so, and only shortly after his signal service as his country’s victorious war leader, he was in danger of having to surrender Chartwell as costs mounted. The house was saved for him, discreetly, by Lord Camrose, the owner of the Daily Telegraph, who put together a small consortium to cover the (substantial: £3 million at today’s prices) costs of purchase and gifting to the National Trust. Churchill was thus relieved of further worry about his beloved home for the decade or so of life still remaining to him.
Two composers are very well served indeed by the essays about their homes and their relationship to them. The first, Benjamin Britten, was born and formed in Suffolk, close by the sea. His music is salty to its core. His engagement with his local community was part of the fabric of his life as well as of his music. He wanted, he said, to be “useful”. He is now indelibly associated with Aldeburgh and with the annual music festival held each summer beside the marshes at Snape.
Apart from a short and much regretted period in the US at the start of the Second World War (for which decision he received much criticism), Britten – with his lifetime partner, Peter Pears – lived in Suffolk near the sea. Lucy Walker, who is a director at the Britten-Pears Foundation at Snape, provides a deeply informed and resonant guide to the ways in which Suffolk shaped Britten’s music (notably his operas which so often have local themes and locations, not least “Peter Grimes” and “Billy Budd”). And she takes us into the houses Britten inhabited in or near Aldeburgh and Snape, focusing finally on the “Red House”, a brick-built Victorian farmhouse which provided him and Pears with a refuge in the local community they helped to shape from 1957 until Britten’s death in 1976.
The second composer, Jean Sibelius, is the subject of Julian Barnes’ essay. Barnes uses Sibelius’ house, located a short distance north of Helsinki, as a means to focus on his long life, the last thirty years of which was musically silent.
The house, “Ainola”, was built by him on land he had purchased for the purpose. His love of nature, especially of swans, was sustained by his life in the countryside. But his mortgage on the house was a constant worry, made especially troublesome because until the 1920s, when it gained independence from Russia, Finland was beyond international copyright protection and Sibelius made nothing more than his original fees from works that became internationally popular in later years.
Curiously, almost as soon as his finances had become more secure, his musical compositions dried up. Thirty years of silence is difficult to comprehend. But Sibelius was not an unhappy man, as Barnes draws out. He lived contentedly with his wife and five daughters and came to bathe in the esteem of his country. Sibelius became and has remained beyond doubt, Finland’s composer. And the wooden house, “Ainola”, sizeable but not capacious, set in the trees and lakes outside Helsinki, was formative in that process of music composition.
There are other gems almost equally rich in different and various ways. Jenny Uglow’s describes Edward Lear’s life in the Villa Emily in San Remo in northern Italy, where he settled after many years of wandering. She uses his poetry and other writings in a cheering evocation of what Lear came to see as a paradisal house and location. But Uglow also depicts the melancholy tones of Lear’s last years when the view of the sea from the Villa Emily was obscured by a new hotel and he had to build a new house so as to see the sea once more.
Robert Douglas-Hamilton, meanwhile, does well to reflect via his poetry on Tennyson’s unsettled sense of home even in his own house. And he picks up well on Tennyson’s readiness in his pomp to allow drawings made of him in study in his house Aldworth, in West Sussex, to appear in press articles but his contrasting unwillingness to admit any pilgrim visitors to the same house.
And an especial mention also of Roy Foster’s excellent piece on Yeats’ tower house in Galway. Foster succeeds in illustrating how the purchase of the medieval tower (again, as with others, rather beyond his means at the time) informed Yeats’ marriage, helped shape his poetry, and provided an evocative historical setting as the Irish civil war sparked unpredictably around him.
Finally, I must not fail to mention one of the oddest essays in the collection, but perhaps the most touching. Alexander Masters (who works with homeless people, and is author of “A Life Discarded” which told of diaries found in a skip in Cambridge) writes of encounters with people taking refuge in a hostel in Eastbourne. In a series of interviews with a number of the hostel residents, he conveys with signal empathy the stories behind those who by accident (or in one case by design) had become “unhoused”.
For those of us currently confined to our houses by the Covid-19 lockdown, it is humbling and thought-provoking to be drawn by Masters’ essay, to reflect on the lives of the currently “unhoused” alongside those of more celebrated figures whose homes coloured and shaped their lives.