Lives of Houses

Lives of Houses

Lives of Houses

Edited by

Kate Kennedy and Hermione Lee

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Princeton and Oxford

Copyright © 2020 by Kate Kennedy and Hermione Lee

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Published by Princeton University Press

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Library of Congress Control Number 2019955826

First paperback printing, 2022

Paperback ISBN 978-0-691-21487-0

Cloth ISBN 978-0-691-19366-3

ISBN (e-book) 978-0-691-20194-8

Version 1.0

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Editorial: Ben Tate and Charlie Allen

Production Editorial: Jill Harris

Text Design: Carmina Alvarez

Production: Jacqueline Poirier

Publicity: Jodi Price and Katie Lewis

Cover art and design by Jason Anscomb / Rawshock Design

This book is dedicated to the philanthropist

HARRY WEINREBE (1914–2000)

whose Dorset Foundation enabled the creation of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College

Contents

List of Illustrationsxi

Prefacexiii

HERMIONE LEE

Houses Lost and Found

1 Moving House3

ALEXANDRA HARRIS

2 Built on Memory18

SUSAN WALKER

3 A House of Air30

HERMIONE LEE

Family Houses

4 My Mother’s House47

MARGARET MACMILLAN

5 At Orchard House52

MAURA DOOLEY

6 Romantic Home55

FELICITY JAMES

Dream Houses

7 At Home with Tennyson71

ROBERT DOUGLAS-FAIRHURST

8 Chartwell: Winston Churchill’s Dream House82

DAVID CANNADINE

Creative Houses

9 The Quangle Wangle’s Hat95

JENNY UGLOW

10 Benjamin Britten in Aldeburgh109

LUCY WALKER

11 77 St. Mark’s Place124

SEAMUS PERRY

12 Samuel Johnson’s Houses133

REBECCA BULLARD

House-Proud

13 The Manor149

SIMON ARMITAGE

14 At Home with the Disraelis151

DAISY HAY

15 H. G. Wells at Uppark160

LAURA MARCUS

Unhoused

16 The Fear of Houses177

ALEXANDER MASTERS

17 When There Is No House to Visit189

ELLEKE BOEHMER

18 A Place One Can Go Mad In 201

KATE KENNEDY

19 Safe Houses213

BERNARD O’DONOGHUE

The Afterlives of Houses

20 When All Is Ruin Once Again 217

ROY FOSTER

21 W. H. Auden in Austria232

SANDRA MAYER

22 John Soane and House Autobiography246

GILLIAN DARLEY

23 Ainola: Music and Silence257

JULIAN BARNES

Acknowledgements264

List of Contributors265

Notes273

Index289

Illustrations

Figure 1.1. A moonlight flitting

Figure 1.2. Cowper’s Summer House

Figure 1.3. Cowper’s sofa

Figure 1.4. The cottage in Helpston that Clare left behind

Figure 2.1. The House of Venus seen from the street

Figure 2.2. Bronze statue of a fisherman from the House of Venus

Figure 2.3. Detail of the mosaic of Hylas’s abduction by the nymphs, House of Venus

Figure 2.4. Rectified aerial view of the room with the mosaic of Diana, showing the position of the pedestal for the portrait of Juba

Figure 3.1. Pavillon Colombe

Figure 3.2. Asheham House

Figure 3.3. Signpost to Bowen’s Court

Figure 3.4. Bowen’s Court

Figure 5.1. Orchard House

Figure 6.1. Dove Cottage, Grasmere, Wordsworth’s home from 1799 to 1808

Figure 7.1. Celebrities of the Day—Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate

Figure 7.2. Home Sweet Home

Figure 7.3. Enoch Arden: The Hour of Trial

Figure 8.1. Churchill bricklaying

Figure 10.1. The Red House as it is today

Figure 10.2. The British Fleet Sighted

Figure 10.3. Britten’s drawing of the location of his new home in Crabbe Street

Figure 10.4. Britten and Pears playing recorders at a meeting of the Aldeburgh Music Club

Figure 10.5. An invoice from O&C Butcher

Figure 10.6. Aldeburgh

Figure 11.1. Auden and the mailman John

Figure 11.2. Auden in his apartment

Figure 12.1. Dr. Johnson’s House

Figure 12.2. In the Shades

Figure 12.3. Dr. Johnson’s House, plaque

Figure 14.1. Portrait of Disraeli

Figure 14.2. The drawing room at Hughenden Manor, Buckinghamshire

Figure 15.1. Uppark exterior

Figure 15.2. Uppark doll’s house

Figure 15.3. Tono-Bungay and the Uppark doll’s house

Figure 17.1. Dambudzo Marechera in Port Meadow

Figure 18.1. Gurney’s pianos in the City of London Mental Hospital, Dartford

Figure 18.2. Ivor Gurney in Dartford Asylum

Figure 19.1. Expulsion from Paradise

Figure 20.1. Thoor Ballylee

Figure 20.2. Thomas Sturge Moore’s cover for Yeats’s The Tower

Figure 21.1. Undated notebook by Stephen Spender

Figure 21.2. The W. H. Auden Memorial, Kirchstetten, Lower Austria

Figure 21.3. Auden’s study in the W. H. Auden Memorial

Figure 21.4. Display by Peter Karlhuber in the W. H. Auden Memorial

Figure 22.1. Perspective of the Dome

Figure 22.2. Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields: The Sarcophagus Room

Preface

HERMIONE LEE

The writing of lives often involves writing about houses. Bringing a house to life through observation, familiarity, memory, or excavation can be a vital part of narrating the life of an individual, a family, or a group: life-writing as housework. A house can embody a person’s childhood, the story of a marriage, an inherited way of life, or a national history. The constructing of a house can be the fulcrum of dreams, ambitions, illusions, and pretensions. How a house is lived in can tell you everything you need to know about people, whether it’s the choice of wallpaper, the mess in the kitchen, the silence or shouting over meals, doors left open or closed, a fire burning in the hearth. The loss of a house can be a turning point that shapes the rest of a life.

Memoirs or autobiographies often start with the memory of a house. One of Virginia Woolf’s first memories was of waking up as a child in the nursery of Talland House in Cornwall, her family’s summer home. From that first memory she reconstructs, through colours and sounds and rhythms and fragments, the life they lived in that house, inseparable from her emotions about it. Henry James, setting out on his minutely recalled, fine-tuned, late-life autobiography, opens the book of his life with his faint, glimmering memory of his grandmother’s house in Albany, and her reading in it, holding her book out at a distance by the light of a single candle. Eudora Welty, telling the story of what made her a writer, begins with her description of her family house, where, at the time of writing, she still lived, eighty years on: In our house on North Congress Street in Jackson, Mississippi, where I was born, the oldest of three children, in 1909, we grew up to the striking of clocks. The life of a house is, also, a story of time.

Some life-stories—and these can be told in poems, plays, and novels, as well as autobiographies and biographies—are fixed inside one overpowering house, a house that can’t be escaped from. Some make their story turn on the moment that a beloved old house has to be left. Some build their life-story on memories, which often include memories of houses, or they imagine the house of troubled inhabitants as a kind of haunted house. Hilary Mantel starts her autobiography, Giving Up the Ghost, on the day she and her husband have decided to sell their second home, a Norfolk cottage where her mother and her late stepfather often came to stay. Looking up, she sees the air move, and she knows it is her stepfather’s ghost coming down the staircase. This does not perturb her. She often thinks in terms of haunted houses. Every house you live in involves other, abandoned choices, roads not taken, ghosts from the past. All your houses are haunted by the person you might have been.

That tremor in the air, which reminds you that solid bricks-and-mortar can also be unstable, and that the lives of houses, like everything we know, must pass, is often built into the narratives of houses. Long after the family had left it, Woolf turned Talland House into fiction in To the Lighthouse, and imagines the moment when the long-deserted house might just tip over into becoming a ruin, as houses easily can:

The house was left, the house was deserted. It was left like a shell on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it.… One feather, and the house, sinking, falling, would have turned and pitched downwards to the depths of darkness.

Robert Frost’s haunting poem Directive takes you on a journey looking for traces of a house that disappeared long ago and has fallen back into a remote, neglected New England landscape. It is now a house that is no more a house. Yet it might be a place where, in your imagination, you could make yourself at home.

House and home notoriously make awkward neighbours. Sometimes the words invite each other in; sometimes they won’t give each other the time of day. Dictionaries and books of proverbs and old sayings tell you different things. We all know that a house is not a home (was it Benjamin Franklin who first coined this useful cliché?), and we are often told so, whether in hokey popular sayings (It takes a heap of living to make a house a home) or lifestyle instructions in the pages of House (not Home) & Garden: Wallpaper emits a warmth, a cheer, that makes a house a home. But definitions, of either word, tend to overlap as well as distinguish, as in the Oxford English Dictionary:

Home: a person’s house … fixed residence of a family or household … a private house or residence considered merely as a building.… The place where one lives or was brought up, with reference to the feelings of belonging, comfort, etc., associated with it.… A refuge, a sanctuary.

House: a building for habitation, typically and historically one that is the ordinary residence of a family … a person’s home.

Sometimes the words are set firmly apart. Wikipedia will tell you with confidence that a house is just a physical structure, while a home is lived in (often by a family) and full of memories. Asked to sum up the distinction, one friend told me: A house is a building; a home is a concept. And there are of course many usages of the word house that have nothing to do with home. That would be house as lineage, as in the House of Atreus or the House of Windsor; house as institution, as in the House of Lords or an Oxford College; publishing house, playhouse, or House of God; house of infamy or shame, like a brothel or a gambling den, and god help you if that is also your home. But other usages run both words together. There are hundreds of magazines and websites for anything from fridges to beds or stoves called House and Home. Being driven out of house and home doesn’t distinguish, though Johnson tried to, in his Dictionary: He harried me out of house and home: that is, he robbed me of my goods and turned me out of doors.

But it’s after that moment of being turned out of doors when the two words may turn on each other most fiercely. Many people don’t have houses to live in, though they may live in households. Many people must live where they can, or are forced to live in places not of their choice, or have had to leave their houses, or have nowhere to live. King Lear’s anguished cry in the storm on the heath must be heard:

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you

From seasons such as these?

Most of the contributors to this book use house and home interchangeably; some prefer household; one, writing about moving house, asks how a new house is to be made a home. But the distinction between house and home is most noticeable in the essays here about homelessness. Having a home and being unhoused are in sharp contrast here.

This collection originally came out of a conference titled The Lives of Houses, held in 2017 at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College, Oxford. The emphasis of the conference was on Western houses (British, Irish, American, European) and that has been mainly retained. The event brought together, as life-writing tends to do, a great many disciplines and professions, and that mixture is reflected in this book. It looks at the lives of houses from the point of view of archaeologists, museum curators, fiction writers, poets, illustrators, biographers, autobiographers, historians, and literary critics. It roams around the lives of houses of writers, politicians, composers, collectors, artists—men and women who have shaped and recorded the history of their houses through their own work—and the unknown and obscure. It goes far back in time and travels to vanished or much-altered houses as well as still visitable houses. It tells the story of house-moves, of houses lost and found, of the traces of houses and of their contents.¹

Lives of Houses is interdisciplinary, pluralist, eclectic, and open-ended. It asks and provokes questions, rather than coming to conclusions, about the relationship between houses and their inhabitants and inheritors. It is arranged with an underlying narrative, beginning with quests for houses (some left, some lost, some buried in time) and ending with their reconstruction or re-finding or becoming public sites. In between it explores the family life that goes on in houses, the dreams and fantasies and hopes that attach to them, the creative life that goes on within them, the way they reflect aspirations, social gradations, and pretensions, and, by contrast, the lives of those who fear, or miss, or reject life lived in a house. Overlapping questions run through all the pieces in the collection. What kind of life choices does the making of a house reveal? What does it feel like to long for a lost house, to have to move house unwillingly, to be unhoused, or to be afraid of living under a roof? What presence do the ghosts of vanished houses play in our lives? What is the cost of keeping up appearances or living in a house beyond one’s means? How does the personality of the inhabitants shape, or become shaped by, the house they live in? The book looks, too, at tourism, house visiting, and the relationship between biography and houses. Why do we love to visit the houses of the famous, and what do we get from those visits? How should houses best be preserved, and what is the relation between a living house and its afterlife as a museum? What are the financial and political demands at work when a house is maintained by organisations such as the National Trust, or by private owners and inheritors? Lives of Houses opens doors onto what went on between the walls of a house, what secrets a house might contain, how it has been remembered and written about, and what remains of it, in the real world, and in the mind’s eye.

Houses Lost and Found

1

Moving House

ALEXANDRA HARRIS

I sit me in my corner chair / That seems to feel itself from home.

—John Clare, The Flitting

The clock ticks on Hardy’s mantelpiece; Woolf’s reading chair is next to the fire; Erasmus Darwin’s geological specimens are laid out under the window at Lichfield. House museums go to great lengths to make things look settled and accustomed. There are curtains at the windows and shades on the lamps, and no reason to question the position of the bedroom chest that fits, just so, in the alcove. When I think of the homes of friends and family, too, they come to mind fully formed; it’s obvious where the coats live and the hallway has never been other than green.

Or at least so it was until I moved house and found myself shaken in previously unsuspected ways by the strangeness of objects pulled out from their habitual moorings, the physical effort and logistical cunning required to collapse rooms into taped cartons and reassemble them in new combinations, and most of all the imaginative effort, the sheer invention, involved in making up the life of a new home. I realised then that feelings about homeliness are liable to assert themselves most acutely when the furniture is upended and the books stacked in crates. I wanted to ask some of those who have thought most intensely about belonging, and belongings, how they responded to these episodes of upheaval when the still point goes spinning.

O what a dislocation of comfort is contained in that word moving, Charles Lamb lamented: not only the lamps but comfort itself turned out from its usual home.¹ William Cowper could get nothing written: The confusion which attends a transmigration of this kind is infinite, and has a terrible effect in deranging the intellects.² As I packed and sorted, phantasmagorias of combined removing seemed to appear: long caravans of borrowed waggons and laden people, tallboys with the drawers out, half-wrapped mirrors, and confused pets. I started to see the lampshades of the past dislodged and waiting vulnerably on top of boxes into which they would not fit. I began to be aware of movers of many kinds and from several centuries, each making their way from one life to another with a different combination of anxiety, exhaustion, loss, and hope.³

The processions I conjured were in reality a common annual or biannual spectacle across Europe and America from the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century. Leases ran from one quarter-day to another and expired in tandem, so that almost every tenant intending to move house that season would do so at the same time. The spring quarter-day was generally the one for moving: Whitsun in Scotland (25 May) and Lady Day in England (25 March or, after the calendar reforms of 1752, Old Lady Day: 6 April). There might be another round of removals at Michaelmas, and Martinmas (11 November) was the traditional date in large parts of continental Europe, but in Britain the spring Flitting Days were firmly established.

The timing suited the agricultural year, with the winter crops gathered and the ground open again for sowing. But it only suited at a stretch: outgoing tenants wrangled over rights to a flitting crop, to be squeezed in before departure, and new arrivals were hard-pressed in April, and certainly in May, to plant in time for summer harvest. Farmers asked themselves each year whether they would sow again in the same ground, or try a change. These decisions were generally made at Candlemas (2 February), the time when deals were done at hiring fairs and land agents knocked at doors to ask tenants whether they intended to sit or flit. By association with holy days, moving acquired forms of transferred liturgical significance. Candlemas, the feast of the Purification, came with questions about how to start afresh, whether to clear out, to whitewash the walls for a newcomer and take on newly washed walls of one’s own. Robert Chambers described in his Book of Days the practice in nineteenth-century Scotland: The two or three days following upon the Purification become distinguished by a feathering of the streets with boards projected from the windows, intimating A House to Let. Then comes on a most lively excitement for individuals proposing to remove.⁴

Moving was part of the shared annual cycle. The Flemish artist Abel Grimmer (compared with Brueghel the Younger in his time but not now much remembered) painted a series of season pictures in 1599 and chose to fill his Spring panel with a combination of garden planting and house-moving. A horse-and-cart in the foreground is so laden with belongings that it needs a push.⁵ The iconography makes clear that the sowing season was also the time of new beginnings in new homes.

The practice of regular, and synchronised, moving became more and more common amongst farming families in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thomas Hardy in Tess of the D’Urbervilles described the annual moment of flux: At length it was the eve of Old Lady-Day, and the agricultural world was in a fever of mobility. Exodus recurred, each family’s cart filled with anticipation of something better: The Egypt of one family was the Land of Promise to the family who saw it from a distance, till by residence there it became in turn their Egypt also; and so they changed and changed.⁶ Flitting Day was still such a fever of mobility in Edwardian rural England that the traffic ground to a halt. Ford Madox Ford observed the tall waggons with tarpaulins to be seen in the lanes of Kent and Sussex each spring. They were liable to become stuck in the elbow-like angles of sunken lanes, with long queues building up behind them.⁷ An inveterate mover himself, Ford sensed excitement in these covered waggons that lumbered, however slowly, towards new prospects. He knew the hard and hopeful work that would await them in the planting season; several times in his life he joined the Lady Day migrations and took on the ancient challenge of rapidly digging his new ground in time for summer crops.

Town and city moving days were another kind of spectacle. In New York, through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, 1 May was notorious for its chaos of furniture in the streets. Businesses stopped trading for the day to allow the great reshuffling of people and their things. The furniture itself, from those times when even prosperous families were more likely to rent than to own property, seems to speak of moving. Rugs could be rolled and trimmed (no one thought of fitted carpet). The tables of choice were gate-legged, or snap-topped, or—like the ubiquitous Pembroke tables—ready to lower their flaps for transit. The most sought-after moving men were carpenters, who would alter cabinetry to fit through doors and repair it again once in place. Often, too, they had furniture ready to hire out by the year: tables to be leased like the house.⁸ Much more so than it is today, moving on was an expectation from the start. And more than today, when moving is the private fate of individual households, there was about it the sense of a common enterprise.

Tables may fold and rugs may roll, but moving has always been a heavy-laden business. Flitting, the Scottish and northern English term (used across Britain in the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth), sounds so quick and weightless. Bats flit in the dark: blink and you miss them. A mercurial hostess might flit about her party; Bathsheba Everdene’s heart flits with excitement. Was a flitting between houses ever so light as its name? In some circumstances it was best to depart unnoticed; moonlight flitting was long synonymous with the rapid departure of those in debt or disgrace. Victorian cartoonists had cruel fun with images of families trying to melt into the night. The children are always lugging things too large for them while dogs and chickens circle at their feet. No degree of light-footedness can silence the clunk and clatter of removal. Though the term flitting has come down to us from the Old Norse fleet and float, so that one thinks fancifully of Viking ships moving fast and soundlessly through water, domestic removals are more likely to evoke sensations of sinking.

Vincenzo Campi’s San Martino (or Trasloco) is one of a series of large paintings showing scenes from rural life in the 1580s.⁹ St. Martin’s Day was Moving Day in Italy (in wine-growing areas, especially, it made sense that removals should follow the grape harvest), and here is a farming family all packed to go. The picture suggests horror if not outright disaster. A high wind is whipping through trees that struggle against a thunderously dark sky. The open door of the house is a black depth from which the whole paraphernalia of a household has spilled into the lurid light of the stormy day. Women sort linens and carry trays while a horse is being loaded in the courtyard, and the immediately striking fact is that we have a close-up view of the horse’s backside. This is the opposite of an idealised composition; its very subject is life discomposed.

Campi was one of the first painters of still life, inventing the new genre as he went, packing his canvases with the whole contents of kitchens and fishmongers’ stalls, painting teeming material worlds with all the greedy urgency that came of his realisation that tangible daily things—these infinitely various fishy, fleshy, rotting, wooden, ceramic, dirty, shiny, ordinary, and utterly compelling things—might now be the subjects of art. His attention was not drawn to the beauty of a single peach or the glint of a well-cleaned copper pan but to unsuitable combinations and upendings. At the birth of still life, then, he painted the turmoil of moving. Trasloco sets up a game in which we try to identify the objects piled onto the horse and stacked on the ground. One by one they become clear—colander, sieve, andirons, basket, rush-stool, wooden ladles—and there’s a touching specificity about each. But as a whole they are hideous. It’s hard to believe that this chaos of sticks and legs and levers might be the ingredients of orderly life.

Campi was interested in the coarse rusticity of his subjects; he was painting for his time and place, sharing with his patrons his laughing disgust at the peasants as well as his rapt attention. But he caught and held ideas that concern movers everywhere. He saw that private possessions come into the outdoor light where they were never meant to be seen. He saw the absurd, comical, ugly conglomerations that are also intimate and eloquent. He saw, most simply and enduringly, that moving involves the making strange of familiar things in ways that are both disturbing and charged with possibility. The contraptions piled onto the horse might have been put there by Duchamp. In fact Duchamp hung a bottle rack from a gallery ceiling in 1914, which was only slightly more alarming. Displaced from its work of drying bottles, it looked a gruesome thing, its prongs designed for some uncertain form of torture. In 1920 Man Ray wrapped up a sewing machine in a blanket and tied it with string. The resulting package, called L’Enigme d’Isidore Ducasse, was both sinister and banal. It sat there quiescent; why then wouldn’t one want to touch it? It was threatening: if you didn’t know the contents the imagination would supply horrible possibilities; if you did, the machine seemed to loom with its glistening needle poised. It was also pitiful: the string confined the sewing machine in its muffling blanket like a victim gagged and bound.

The house-mover is forced to confront the peculiar liveliness and deadness of objects. It belongs to furniture of all kinds, remarked Cowper, however convenient it may be in its place, to be a nuisance out of it.¹⁰ It will trip you up or crowd you out. Some things, released from their usual places and functions, look grotesquely misshapen or unwieldy; others settle obligingly into new corners. Some harbour associations in every scratch; others seem barely to know you. Packing requires the appraisal of each and every item: should it be kept, what can it be grouped with, where will it end up? Taxonomy is the mover’s