What Do Women Want? (27 page)

The Elizabethan ambience of
Orlando
’s fictional house owes something to each of these great piles. The silver candlesticks, the flaming logs, the velvet draperies that surround Orlando are Virginia Woolf ’s evocations of the splendor in which it seemed to her Vita Sackville-West lived.

Woolf herself lived in relative penury. She was a literary novelist, after all, and came from a literary but not wealthy family. Sackville-West lived like an heiress to the Elizabethan past. But as a woman, she could not inherit her ancestral home, Knole. And so, banished from its splendor by a feudal vestige, she re-created a legacy for herself in Sissinghurst. In the process she became the inspiration for Virginia Woolf ’s male/female hero/heroine.

But what
is
the connection between the house and inspiration? In one of her poems, “Housewife,” Anne Sexton compares the house to a woman. She describes the housewife “on her knees all day, / faithfully washing herself down.” Her meditation on houses becomes a meditation on mothers: “A woman
is
her mother. / That’s the main thing.”

In Marge Piercy’s novel of the future,
He, She and It,
the protagonist’s house is a mother/robot who welcomes guests, educates the young, and knows everything about the history of the tribe. Either she
is
God or she is programmed by God. She is both educator and moral arbiter, both source of warmth and source of education. She is, in short, a maternal deity of sorts, a female Higher Power.

Sexton and Piercy clearly show that in the unconscious, the house
is
mother. Probably many psychoanalysts could corroborate this. (Poets and psychoanalysts are seldom far apart in their perceptions.) We are particular about our houses because we unconsciously understand their meaning. “Womb with a view,” we joke. Houses give birth to us—or at least to our best selves.

So we are hardly surprised by the coziness we feel in a red room. Warm, passionate, snug—a red room beckons us back. We take for granted an umbilical connection between home and its dweller. We scarcely
know
a person without visiting her home.

We are also fascinated by haunted houses. Do the ghosts dictate stories? Naturally, we assume so.
The Amityville Horror,
with its extraordinary durability as a bestseller and a film (not to mention all the sequels), testifies to this fascination. The original story is of a couple driven out of their home by eerie phenomena (caused supposedly by the murder of a whole family by one brother in the years before their ownership). And nearly everyone has a tale to tell about a haunted house. Perhaps it had to be sold because the ghosts whispered too loudly; perhaps there were strange drafts, noises, and apparitions in the night; perhaps there was a figure of a headless woman standing on the widow’s walk at night.

Most of the writers I know claim to have
lived
in haunted houses at one time or another. Is there a special affinity between writers and haunted houses or do we simply have better ears to
hear
the ghost stories in the walls? Do we
move
to haunted houses because we are drawn by the stories themselves? Is the haunted house another version of mother—who talks to us long after she is dead?

I once claimed to own a haunted house in New York. Friends were fascinated. “How did the ghosts appear?” they would ask.

“Well, I always had a splitting headache in that house. I couldn’t write there, and I was always escaping to the country.”

“Come on,” they’d say, “that’s not
haunted.
”

“But I dreamed the wrong dreams,” I’d say.

Interest would grow.

“You dreamed the
wrong dreams
?”

“They were dreams full of people I didn’t know and situations I couldn’t recognize.”

“Tell us more!” they’d clamor. “Tell us the story!”

Were
ghosts
really responsible? It sounded good, but I didn’t want to think about it too deeply. The house had previously been owned by a psychoanalyst, above whose conjugal bed hung the motto MENTAL HEALTH IS OUR GREATEST WEALTH. I told myself that I was dreaming the dreams of his patients—not all their dreams but only the repressed, uninterpreted ones. Perhaps the people in my dreams were really ghosts. Secretly, I hope so.

Writers tend to be addicted to houses—haunted or not. We work at home, indulging the agoraphobia endemic to our kind. We are immersed in our surroundings to an almost morbid degree. Not only do we see terrifying apparitions that the rest of our families miss, but we sometimes hear loud whispers and feel unearthly chills on our backs. Sometimes there’s organ music or the tinkling of a fountain—even on the twenty-seventh floor. In our books, we mingle dreamed and actual houses; we renovate them with the tools of our imaginations.

Mother, womb, ghost hotel—no wonder it takes an interesting house to make an interesting novel. A house loves and nurtures us. It hates to let us go.

When Vladimir Nabokov taught literature in America, he always emphasized the design of the house in which the action of a book took place. He believed that if you started with a house, put characters in it, and set them in motion, you would wind up with a novel. Whether it was Gregor Samsa’s house in Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” or Dr. Jekyll’s house in Robert Louis Stevenson’s
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
Nabokov knew that only certain characters lived in certain houses and only those houses allowed those particular events to occur.

We instinctively know that Nabokov is right. When we enter Edith Wharton’s The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts, or 18 Villa Seurat in Paris, where Henry Miller completed
Tropic of Cancer
and
Black Spring,
or The House of the Seven Gables, which inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne to compose the novel of the same name, we sense that we are coming upon
more
than a dwelling: We are entering the writer’s source of inspiration.

Many writers visit my house in Connecticut. It sits on a ledge of rock overlooking a steep ravine. Below is the Aspetuck River. Although the area has partially succumbed to the developer’s ax in the many years I’ve been here, my ledge is still remote enough to insulate me from the world.

When visiting writers find themselves able to work here, I am delighted. Fay Weldon was recently my houseguest for a weekend. Quite early Sunday morning, after a cup of tea, she vanished back to the guest room without saying a word. Soon her friend appeared, to brew another cup of tea. He went to her room with it, bringing also a toasted English muffin.

“Shh,” I said to my husband. “Fay must be writing.”

“Shh,” Fay’s friend said to me. “She’s writing.”

I puttered about the kitchen, feeling a delicious sense of anticipation. It was almost as good as writing myself! It was as if the
house
were writing. Everyone felt the frisson of creativity. I wanted to write myself—even though houseguests usually block me. But I stayed on in the kitchen, playing hostess (or muse) for another creator.

At last we all assembled for a late lunch.

“I wrote a story!” Fay said, to no one’s particular surprise. “This is a great place to write!”

We all knew better than to ask “What’s it about?” And we sat down to eat thinking our various thoughts. I knew not to worry about whether or not my house would appear in Fay’s story. If it appeared, it wouldn’t be my house anymore—but
her
house, built of
her
imagination. This house is mine only by title and by the titles of the books I have written here.

“I am glad to be the steward of a house that inspires poetry,” the lawyer Michael Kennedy wrote me when I sent him and his wife, Eleanore, two poems I had written at Kilkare, their beach house on the Atlantic. Kilkare stands like a nineteenth-century schooner facing the sea. The ocean winds cannot tear it from its moorings, though with each hurricane the beach recedes. For me this house and this beach constitute an object lesson about permanence and impermanence. The billionaires may build their beach houses here, but they still can’t control the ocean.

But a house, after all,
exists
to be a steward for our dreams. And the practicalities always matter less. If you sleep well there, you can wake up and write. If someone you love brings you tea, so much the better. And the sound of the sea doesn’t hurt either.

As Edna St. Vincent Millay said:

—WILLA CATHER

 

 

 

Home is the place where
you feel safe, where despite disquieting news that arrives by cable or optical fiber, you can leave the door on the latch and wander outside in your old terry-cloth bath-robe and a pair of muddy clogs to check on whether or not the crocuses are poking through the snow.

As a child, not knowing there is an alternative, you never really appreciate home. As a young adult, home is what you want to leave as soon as possible, brandishing a new driver’s license and a boyfriend.

Only in midlife—our sexy new term for dread old middle age—does home beckon seductively again, inviting you to pleasures running away can never supply. Home is where your books are. Home is where you keep those bell-bottoms from the sixties that may just come back in time for your daughter to wear them. Home is where you know all the quirks of the plumbing, but they comfort rather than irritate you. Home is where you get out of bed at three A.M., wink at the full moon through the bathroom skylight, and go back to sleep perfectly contented, knowing no demons can follow you here. Home is where the trees are all part of your history: the weeping cherry planted for your daughter’s birth, the Scotch pine that once was a Christmas tree, the birch that was hit by lightning and came back the next spring, the oak that seemed to die the winter you were divorced but revived three years later with patience and pruning.

Home is where the same bird’s nest on the front-door lintel receives new robin’s eggs year after year after year. Home is “something you somehow haven’t to deserve,” says Robert Frost in “The Death of the Hired Man.” Amen.

I travel so much that often I wake up with a start, wondering whether I am in Rome or Hong Kong or Auckland, but in my house in the hemlock woods of Connecticut, I always know I am home no matter how jet-lagged.

I bought it twenty-two years ago: my first house with my first real writing money. I carried my daughter into it in my arms when she was three days old. Built on an outcropping of rock over a river, it is made of old Vermont barn beams, fieldstone, and glass. It has never been “decorated.” It contains instead the collections of my life: my grandfather’s paint-splattered easel, my father’s old upright piano, antique quilts bought on drives to Vermont, majolica plates sent home from Faenza, wineglasses I watched being blown in Venice, a motley assortment of family portraits painted by my painting family.

I have a writing room on stilts—a tree house connected to the main house by a raised breezeway. The breezeway is lined with shelves, which contain all my books in foreign editions. My desk wraps around me in a U-shape. It is always piled high, with books for the current project. (Only between novels do I clean my desk.) On a raised platform facing a wall of windows, my desktop is polished oak the width of an old tree. A wall of poetry books is to my left, and all my archives of photographs and manuscripts are in the cabinets. I am never happier than at my desk in Connecticut. This is where I heal and dream.

In the fall, the squirrels play acorn football on the roof of my study. In the spring, birds nest in the eaves and wake up with the first pink light of dawn. I even enjoy having insomnia in the country, so that I can be up before the birds and await their serenade.

From the deck of my tree house, I can see the white-tailed deer tiptoeing up to eat my roses. They wait until the tender buds appear, then chomp them savagely, leaving the bushes bare. I do not shoot. Every year, I vow to put in a deerproof fence, but I never do it. At least the deer leave the mountain laurel and the blackberry brambles to me.

Midsummer will come, and there will be blackberries glistening up and down my steep driveway and throughout my woods. Like the deer among my roses, I will burst their redness upon my tongue, searching for ruby jewels amid the thorns.

I know I am home because Poochini, the bichon frise, has curled up on the stair landing between the first and second floor. I know I am home because Basil, the cat, is racing up the huge ficus tree in the living room, looking for a perch in its swaying top. I know I am home because my desk is heaped with fresh legal pads and stacks of marked-up books. I know I am home because my heart is calm and my pen is moving over the page to its tranquil beat.

Last summer, I put in boxwood hedges to fool the deer. (Deer hate the aroma of boxwood as much as I love it.) I replaced the roses the deer had decimated and prayed for the best. I planted peace roses, pale yellow with blushing edges. Last spring, I had the roof redone. Cedar-shingle chips rained all over the decks for months, imparting their tart aroma on top of the resinous smell of the hemlocks.

I have been planning to build a pool for almost twenty years. But the cycle of a writer’s economic life is such that by the time I have paid the taxes on the last book and the bills that accumulated while I was writing it, there is never enough money left. I live on that seesaw (best known to freelance writers) between flush and broke—so I am glad to have the house even if it lacks a swimming pool.

The pool is no minor matter since the house is built on a ledge, so that blasting will be required to gouge a pool out of the cliff. Every year, it gets more expensive.