On visiting famous writers’ houses

A version of this article was originally published in the Winter 2020 issue of The Author.

Writer, beware. Ascend to the literary canon, and expect tourists years in the future to come traipsing into your home. They will peruse your chamber pots, ponder your taste in wallpaper, and pore over that natty waistcoat, lovingly displayed in your study, with the bloodstains you incurred in a duel. 

From St Petersburg to Hampshire, the Peloponnese to Paris, big-time literary stardom – not mere Booker-prize glory, but the type of veneration that gets you your own banknote or your name on a metro station – risks turning your home into a fixture on the heritage trail. Tourists, fans and school kids will shuffle through your bedrooms; your scullery will become a gift shop; your favourite jacket repurposed as oven mitts.

What happens to writers’ houses is often a reflection of the values of the wider culture. Some get full-scale veneration, backed by official funding, to bolster a national image or civic pride. Others rely on charitable foundations and the work of dedicated teams of volunteers. Others still are not even graced with a street sign, and require assiduous searching to weasel out.

While tourists, schools and governments each have their own agenda, what is the contemporary writer to make of these domestic shrines to the literary gods? In visiting them, what do we hope to gain? Each time I cross the threshold, I find myself on the lookout for some serendipitous discovery, some insight into the author’s character, perhaps some revelation about how they worked. Alas, the more hallowed the writer, the more stratospheric their reputation, the more elusive such quests become.

Take, for instance, the green-shuttered house in Paris that, for much of the 1840s, was home to Honoré de Balzac. With a splendid view of the Eiffel tower (yet to be built in Balzac’s day), it is a modest, two-storey affair whose walls are replete with pithy quotations interspersed with sculpted busts. But beyond the monogrammed coffee pot, the turquoise-studded walking cane, and the writing desk where he completed The Human Comedy, there is little that seems to connect you to Balzac himself.

A space for research and veneration, it is hard to imagine this house as actually lived in, even despite that coffee pot that stands as a kind of metonym for the author’s caffeine-fuelled labours – he famously rose at midnight and wrote till dawn. The displays in themselves are admirable, but it was a detail they didn’t mention – that Balzac rented these rooms in his housekeeper’s name, the better to avoid his creditors – that generated a flash of empathy across the years.

Like Balzac, Alexander Pushkin – Russia’s most celebrated poet – is also honoured with an official museum in his former home. But here, on the banks on the Moyka in St Petersburg, reverence has (arguably) turned morbid and run to excess. No detail of Pushkin’s death, in an 1837 duel with a French officer, is too small for devoted lingering. The waistcoat he sallied forth in is displayed with the news that its bloodstains have been DNA-matched to those on the sofa, where the dying poet was laid by his friends.

Stern babushkas trail you like a shoplifter intent on pilfering the memorabilia as you shuffle past the roped-off rooms. But apart from a few framed jottings and a gilded inkwell, there is little sense here either of the poet at work. This, instead, is writer as cultural artefact, freeze-framed on the set of a melodrama that lacks only a waxwork model of Pushkin himself.

Unlike the residences of Balzac and Pushkin, Jane Austen’s house at Chawton is one that does allow a sense of the author to emerge. In this Hampshire village, between 1809 and 1817, Austen wrote and revised the six novels whose renown would win her a place, two centuries later, on the £10 banknote. She wrote with a quill at a twelve-sided table barely wide enough to balance a lamp. On display where she worked in the ‘dining parlour’, the walnut table stands on its single tripod, a giant split running across the top. 

There is something moving about the gap between Austen’s achievement and the modest regency table at which she wrote. The effect of this is magnified when one learns that from this position, she could hear the creak of the floorboards in the corridor – signalling that yet another visitor was about to interrupt her work.

It is this, more than the lavender bags and shortbread tins decorated with her wallpaper, that brings the author of Pride and Prejudice most vividly to life. Here, you get a sense of Austen at work as a writer, of the tensions in fitting her fiction around the social demands on her time.

It is usually in the less-feted museums that the strongest connections are felt. A case in point is the townhouse in St Petersburg that was home to Vladimir Nabokov’s family before they fled in 1917. A few of Nabokov’s butterfly collections, a couple of his mother’s paintings, some photographs and a magic lantern are displayed in the wood-panelled rooms. But, on my visit at least, it was an unexpected glimpse through a half-open door that most vividly conjured the spirit of the author himself.

In a timeless black dress and short brown boots, a student was visible in the gap between door and doorjamb, standing on a chair and raising a lamp to examine her restoration work. This was the famous drawing room that Nabokov describes in Speak, Memory, his memoir of his Russian boyhood; and this was the ‘pale green ceiling’ that had been concealed for the past hundred years. Past and present collided in that brief peek at the restoration; I half expected Nabokov himself to come strolling into the room.

Often, it is the more remote houses that offer an authentic flavour of the writer’s life. And it is hard to get a flavour more authentic than at the Charterhouse of Valldemossa, in the mountains of Mallorca, where a museum commemorates George Sand and Chopin’s residence in the winter of 1838. Divorced and a proto-feminist, the trouser-wearing, free-spirited novelist – the most famous in France in her era – would have scandalised the conservative Catholic villagers even without moving into a monastery with her lover and her adolescent children in tow. Sand’s writing retreat was torpedoed on all sides. Chopin’s suspected tuberculosis was exacerbated by the bitter winter; his piano was endlessly delayed by customs; managing the household fell overwhelmingly to Sand. The villagers, meanwhile, were appalled by her absence from church. When three months later Sand and her family departed, the villagers incinerated their furniture, fearing contagion from Chopin’s illness; the newly arrived piano was gifted to their banker and survived. Sand took revenge for the villagers’ hostility in her 1841 memoir, A Winter in Majorca; the village, in turn, has minimised her presence in the museum’s display – where the piano takes pride of place.

In contrast, the ‘Bruce Chatwin annexe’ at the Kardamyli Hotel, on Greece’s Mani peninsula, does not even merit a signpost, though its rooms seem unchanged since 1985 when Chatwin wrote The Songlines there. Staying there is to see Greece through the eyes of the author, whose ashes are scattered in the mountains above. From his balcony, you contemplate the same olive grove he would have gazed at, walk to the same beach he would have swum at, and visit the home of his mentor, Patrick Leigh Fermor, after strolling down the same stretch of path.

Further down the peninsula is the village where, at the end of the First World War, Nikos Kazantzakis shared a house with Alexis Zorba, who was to become the protagonist of Kazantzakis’ 1946 novel, Zorba the Greek. Privately owned, the house is hidden at the end of a lane and rented out to tourists over summer. You have to be dedicated to find it; you know you are there when you spot the mural of Zorba and the narrator dancing on Kalogria beach.

But the writer’s house that eclipses all writers’ houses, which no author can hope to visit without being crippled by envy, is the villa that Patrick Leigh Fermor – war hero and travel writer – built in the 1960s on that same stretch of Peloponnese coast.

Thanks to his wife’s inheritance, the help of friends and the work of local artisans, Leigh Fermor created a home so beautiful that the poet John Betjeman described the living room alone as ‘one of the rooms of the world’. Visiting it, Leigh Fermor’s chronic inability to meet a deadline becomes immediately understandable, given the streams of friends drawn to his literary retreat.

Bequeathed now to the Benaki Museum in Athens, the cool stone arches, light-filled rooms and sunken outdoor seating take the convergence of culture and tourism way beyond the museum-and-tearoom model of other such homes. While for most of the year, the villa is reserved for scholars, in summer it welcomes tourists with a taste for the literary life. At a rate not far from an advance for a full-length novel, exclusive use of the full villa in high season comes – at pre-covid prices – to £3,480 a night.

Visiting the houses of writers can offer serendipitous moments, flashes of understanding, perhaps even a sliver of insight into how others refracted life into art. Such moments, however, come rarely at one’s bidding. Often the result of chance or fortuitous timing, they are usually at their most elusive, the more official the home. These visits, moreover, can be fraught with danger for the writer who lets down their guard. You can be felled by real-estate envy in a home like Paddy Leigh Fermor’s; deflated by comparisons in Nabokov’s childhood apartments; or cowed by the national investment in Pushkin’s name. The alternation of empathy and envy, in settings as arcane as the houses of vanished writers, must surely be a hazard unique to the literary profession. It may be worth recalling, though, that even the greatest writers had their struggles – Balzac with his creditors, Austen with social pressures, George Sand with her neighbours. To be reminded afresh of such difficulties is perhaps reason enough to make the pilgrimage to a writer’s home.

— Caroline Brothers