Writers’ Homes, Readers’ Castles?

by

Lev Raphael

While driving around the Loire in the late 1980s on vacation exploring the chateaux, I was startled to see a sign for the Balzac Museum home in Saché, where he had written Lost Illusions among other novels. I had first started reading him in college, and was in love with Cousin Bette, which had been turned into a superb Masterpiece Theatre mini-series. How could I pass up this unexpected chance to see the scene of such genius?

So we added Saché to the end of a long day and what a mistake that was. The house dated back to the Middle Ages and had been renovated extensively and was chock-full of gorgeous early nineteenth century furnishings. It was all beautiful—and stifling. We abandoned the crowded tour after less than half an hour, heading precipitously for the nearest exit, even though signs warned us to not use it. I had understood the French well enough and could translate for my partner. But the torrent of details, and the acres or furniture and bric-à-brac made me begin to feel I was in a bell jar and the air was being pumped out. By the time we got to see Balzac’s actual desk (Hosannah!), I had lost my patience. I wasn’t alone: another couple followed us, muttering their dissatisfaction.

It taught me something about writers’ houses. I think I expected to feel some connection with Balzac, or the novels of his I had read and re-read, but all I felt was crushed by the lack of resonance. So he wrote there? So what? What on earth was the point of visiting? I didn’t need my relationship with Balzac to be mediated by a tour guide or by his stuff. His books were what spoke to me.

We drove off into the warm evening relieved, and looking forward to another superb meal at Domaine de la Tortinière, the chateau hotel we were staying in that had a cooking school. At dinner, I recalled the story about Henry James and Edith Wharton prowling around George Sand's house in Nohant. Wharton asked which room Sand had slept in, and James wondered which room she hadn’t slept in. Now that sounded like a fun tour.

The Balzac Museum probably ropes in many tourists like us because it’s so close to Chinon and Azay-le-Rideau. You expect sites like that in Europe, but there are actually dozens of authors’ homes and museums dedicated to authors across the U.S. and they’re visited by hundreds of thousands of people every year, for whatever reason or by whatever serendipity.

Anne Trubek of Oberlin has written about a fascinating assortment of those sites by also writing about herself in a thoughtful, funny, probing travelogue/memoir: A Skeptic's Guide to Writers’ Houses. Searching for what it means to visit a writer’s home, she sets off from the Midwest to explore homes connected to Twain, Walt Whitman, Hemingway, Poe, Louisa May Alcott, Emerson and Thoreau, Hawthorne, Thomas Wolfe, Charles Chestnutt, Laurence Dunbar.

What she finds makes for continually arresting and thought-provoking reading. Each house is different, became a memorial or museum in a different way, and bears a different relationship to the author and the community. Each tells its own story or stories, evoking complex emotions. And Trubek is an unflinching guide, calling out fraud where she sees it, but also unashamedly admitting to being moved where she might expect to scoff. Weaving her own life story into the story of these homes, she turns her book into something as delectable and richly layered as one of those famous Smith Island cakes.

Unlike manuscripts or published works of these authors—some of whom have been forgotten—the homes feel like desert islands in an exotic archipelago. And wherever she comes ashore, Trubek is sympathetic, open-minded, curious, living the ideal Henry James advised for a young author: “Try to be someone on whom nothing is lost.”

I couldn’t wait to chat with her when I finished the book in a day'’s happy reading.

Lev Raphael: You talk a lot in the book about the blurred lines between reality and fantasy at writers’ homes-turned-museums. Do you think you're not alone in noticing these kinds of elisions?

Anne Trubek: Probably not! But then again, most people do not go to these houses looking to find such elisions. When I talked to fellow museum visitors, they were engaged by the history they were learning at the site, their memories of the literary works of the author, and, sometimes, whether or not they might like a couch “like Wharton’s” (or Melville’s, or Wolfe’s, etc.) in their living room.

LR: You visited the homes of several writers nobody seems to read anymore, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charles Chestnutt, even Thomas Wolfe. Are there writers you yourself would like to see get back on the literary map? 

AT: Yes! Well, maybe not Thomas Wolfe. He had his day in the sun and it may be that his works have not stood the test of time. . . . However, I do think as a persona, as a figure of literary history, he should be better remembered. Dunbar does have a reputation today within academia, and somewhat outside of it. It would be nice for his works to be taught more, particularly in the K-12 level, as much of his poetry is accessible. Dunbar also wrote essays that I think would be interesting to readers of all stripes (and ages).

Chesnutt is the one who I want to champion loudly. I WANT TO YELL HIS NAME. His novels, particularly, are very accessible (his style is straightforward, realist), engaging, and fascinating historically. I was introduced to him in graduate school, and his works are taught in colleges and universities. But a trade edition, more writing about him in general audience press, etc. is something I would love to have happen.

LR: Have you read Henry James’s story “The Birthplace,” about a guide making things up at Stratford-on-Avon? Did it cross your mine on your tour? 

AT: Yes! Yes! Sometimes you think something will be featured prominently in your writing and then, for inexplicable reasons, it drops out during revisions.

LR: Your travels around the country took you across time periods in a sense—was there one in which you might be at home?  

AT: Huh. I have a hard time answering that (as a Jew, and a woman, I always find these “favorite period in history” questions difficult!). The period I would most like to vicariously visit would be the time when Wharton, Twain, Chesnutt, Hughes, Dunbar were all writing. That my dissertation focused on late nineteenth/early twentieth century literature is not coincidental, by the way.....

LR: There's now a Vonnegut Museum in Indianapolis. What do you think its chances for success are? 

AT: Oh this is such an unfortunate question to answer. Who wants to say “not great”? Certainly not me. But I do think many such museums that are created by communities, often during times of downturn, in order to revive tourism, bring folks in. Most don't succeed, at least they haven’t in the past. All of the writers’ house museums are struggling financially, even the biggest and best funded ones, such as The Mount and Mark Twain’s house in Hartford. However, one small museum, Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home in Savannah, Georgia, is doing quite well. They hosted the National Book Award finalists announcement this year, and are getting lots of great press and upticks in visitation. However, Savannah is an easier sell than Indianapolis (and I must add here that I live in Cleveland, and think more people should love the city as I do, so I'm not putting down under-appreciated Midwestern towns when I say that).

LR: To turn a writer’s home into a shrine is to make its contents fetish objects. Are there writers you festishize? 

AT: I keep being asked that. But I make a big point in the book by saying that I do not. People don’t believe me. Why is that?

LR: Well, your book is part-memoir, after all, and I don’t expect a memoir to be 100% accurate. 

AT: I do fetishize readers, perhaps. I love to find evidence of readers, and that is, ultimately, what I found on my journey to writers’ houses. Readers.

LR: Did you ever think of Julian Barnes’ novel Flaubert’s Parrot while you were writing your book? The scholar there discovers that various parrots displayed in Flaubert museums as the one on his desk when he wrote “A Simple Heart” are fakes. 

AT: You know, I remember so well reading that novel. I was on a plane, a transcontinental one. It had just come out. I have a visceral memory of loving it so much. So that would have been—wait, let me Google—1990. Huh. That was about a year or so before I came up with the initial glimmer of the idea of this book. I only put the two together recently when smart folks like you asked me about that novel. I haven't reread it. I should. I owe Barnes an unconscious (subconscious?) debt.

LR: Have you visited any writers’ homes while traveling abroad, aside from Dante’s? 

AT: Balzac’s house in Paris. They have his coffee pot.

LR: You suggest the best way to remember a writer is to sponsor a contest or scholarship in the writer’s name. Why do you think there isn’t more of that done? 

AT: I think it has to do with what I was saying about Indianapolis, above. Many of these museums are community efforts, people wanted to draw attention to the presence of a writer in their midst.

Some houses have gone the residency route, and more in recent years—Kerouac and Mailer houses both sponsor these. The Mailer House (it’s actually called a Center now) has contests for high school students, community college students, etc. James Merrill, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Amy Clampitt houses have done this in the past.

It does still mean that lots of funds are going to preserve the houses—the ever-growing-older houses.

It may be the most unselfish act would be to simply offer scholarships, contests and fellowships in a writers’ name. All the money goes to creating literary culture for the future rather than preserving the past. Writers are struggling—that money would go a long way, be incredibly appreciated, and generate new works, ideas, etc. I suppose awards/fellowships that would go towards writers researching the past would also do this work. Hmmm. That last one sounds great. I’d like to apply!

LR: Do you think scholars who do archival research with authors’ manuscripts are different from tourists visiting authors’ homes? 

AT: Yes. They are interested in the genesis, genetics, history and textual history of a writers’ work. They are focused on the literature itself—the words—rather than the environs where the writer wrote—or, in many cases, grew up, were born, or simply ate breakfast in.

LR: You’re a writer, which means you’re also a dreamer. What books are you dreaming of now?

AT: Oh I have so many! Right now I am thinking a lot about the literary canon of the future. Who will create it? The academy doesn’t seem particularly invested in this work right now, but libraries seem to be making some moves—buying living authors’ papers, amping up their special collections in recent literature, etc. I followed the “Franzenfreude” of the fall with great interest, thinking about this idea. People were very engaged—and fighting over—the question of “how fiction becomes literature”—which is another way of saying “who gets to be a great?” There is, I think, a big lag time and gap between what English professors say and have said about this for some time and how the literary culture outside the academy, including taste makers such as boards of the National Book Awards, etc., approach these questions. I have a hunger to get into that gap—that gap between the ivory tower and the reading public—and wrestle with those questions.

On the other hand, I have considered a sequel called “Writers’ Houses in Resort Towns.” I have a list of writers’ houses in splendid locations where it is usually sunny and the food is good. If any publishers out there would like me to write this book, I’ll start making my travel plans immediately.

Books mentioned in this column:
A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Homes by Anne Trubek (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010)

Lev Raphael grew up in New York but got over it and has lived half his life in Michigan where he found his partner of twenty-four years, and a certain small fame. He escaped academia in 1988 to write full-time and has never looked back. The author of nineteen books in many genres, and hundreds of reviews, stories and articles, he’s seen his work discussed in journals, books, conference papers, and assigned in college and university classrooms. Which means he’s become homework. Who knew? Lev’s books have been translated into close to a dozen languages, some of which he can’t identify, and he’s done hundreds of readings and talks across the U.S. and Canada, and in France, England, Scotland, Austria, Germany and Israel. His memoir My Germany was published in April 2009 by the University of Wisconsin Press. You can learn more about Lev and his work on his website. Lev has reviewed for the Washington Post, Boston Review, NPR, the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, Jerusalem Report and the Detroit Free Press where he had a mystery column for almost a decade. He also hosted his own public radio book show where he interviewed Salman Rushdie, Erica Jong, and Julian Barnes among many other authors. Whatever the genre, he's always looked for books with a memorable voice and a compelling story to tell. Contact Lev.