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Trubek - A skeptics guide to writers houses

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There are many ways to show our devotion to an author besides reading his or her works. Graves make for popular pilgrimage sites, but far more popular are writers house museums. What is it we hope to accomplish by trekking to the home of a dead author? We may go in search of the point of inspiration, eager to stand on the very spot where our favorite literary characters first came to lifeand find ourselves instead in the house where the author himself was conceived, or where she drew her last breath. Perhaps it is a place through which our writer passed only briefly, or maybe it really was a longtime homenow thoroughly remade as a decorators show-house.

In A Skeptics Guide to Writers Houses Anne Trubek takes a vexed, often funny, and always thoughtful tour of a goodly number of house museums across the nation. In Key West she visits the shamelessly ersatz shrine to a hard-living Ernest Hemingway, while meditating on his lost Cuban farm and the sterile Idaho house in which he committed suicide. In Hannibal, Missouri, she walks the fuzzy line between fact and fiction, as she visits the home of the young Samuel Clemensand the purported haunts of Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher, and Injun Joe. She hits literary pay-dirt in Concord, Massachusetts, the nineteenth-century mecca that gave home to Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreauand yet could not accommodate a surprisingly complex Louisa May Alcott. She takes us along the trail of residences that Edgar Allan Poe left behind in the wake of his many failures and to the burned-out shell of a California house with which Jack London staked his claim on posterity. In Dayton, Ohio, a charismatic guide brings Paul Laurence Dunbar to compelling life for those few visitors willing to listen; in Cleveland, Trubek finds a moving remembrance of Charles Chesnutt in a house that no longer stands.

Why is it that we visit writers houses? Although admittedly skeptical about the stories these buildings tell us about their former inhabitants, Anne Trubek carries us along as she falls at least a little bit in love with each stop on her itinerary and finds in each some truth about literature, history, and contemporary America.

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A Skeptics Guide
to Writers Houses

A Skeptics Guide to Writers Houses Anne Trubek Copyright 2011 University of - photo 1

A Skeptics Guide to Writers Houses Anne Trubek Copyright 2011 University of - photo 2

A Skeptics
Guide
to Writers
Houses

Anne Trubek

Copyright 2011 University of Pennsylvania Press Illustrations by John Hubbard - photo 3

Copyright 2011 University of Pennsylvania Press

Illustrations by John Hubbard

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Trubek, Anne.

A skeptics guide to writers houses / Anne Trubek.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN: 978-0-8122-4292-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Authors, AmericanHomes and haunts. 2. Literary landmarksUnited States. 3. Authors and readersUnited States. 4. American literatureappreciationUnited States.

PS141.T78 2011

810.9B 22

2010021358

Contents

Emily Dickinsons chamber pot Chapter 1 The Irrational Allure of Writers Houses - photo 4

Emily Dickinsons
chamber pot

Chapter 1
The Irrational Allure of Writers Houses

AROUND THE TIME the housing collapse hit New York City, a modest one-bedroom apartment came up for sale on the Lower East Side. How quiet, serene, and wonderful is this 1-bedroom apartment with balcony? the real estate ad asked. So quiet, serene and wonderful that one of the top 5 best novels of 2006... was written here!

The novel was Absurdistan, the writer Gary Shteyngart, a rising literary star, who was born in Leningrad in 1972 and then immigrated to New York at the age of seven. Shteyngarts generation-late Russian immigrant sensibility, brilliant word play, and omnipresence on the New York literary scene has made him downtown hipster cool as well as the subject of esoteric academic conference presentations.

His apartment, in Coop Village, sits in a bleak unadorned building that neighbors other similarly grim structures. Perhaps, not unintentionally, Shteyngarts Loho digs resemble the landscapes of the Soviet-era Russia he conjures in his fiction.

The ridiculous real estate adcome live where Absurdistan was written!and the fittingly utilitarian architecture of the apartment building drew two bloggers from DowntownNY to take a tour. They pretended to be prospective buyers, and furtively shot snaps of Shteyngarts couch and books. They found a photo of a cosmonaut candy bar on one wall, and multiple copies of Shteyngarts novels on his bookshelf.

But no one lay down earnest money. Two months later, in June 2009, the New York Times ran a story on local real estate values. Shteyngarts apartment was featured again, having languished on the market, and the price had been reduced by $25,000. The Times interviewed agents: was this one-bedroom a good buy? Yes, they answered, based upon dollars per square foot, comparable properties, and the presence of a balcony. The owners literary celebrity was not a factor.

So much for the presence of a famous writer adding value to a property. Other realtors have tried similar campaigns to no avail. In 2007, the price of Joseph Hellers former East Hampton home was slashed month after month. It needs a bit of work, and most buyers dont want a project, remarked an agent of why no one wanted the beach home of the author of Catch-22. In St. Louis, a house that T. S. Eliot lived in was excitedly touted as a one-of-a-kind historical find for months before it was taken off the market.

You cannot blame agents for thinking a famous writer as former owner might help sell a place. There is a healthy market for peeks inside the homes of authors dead and alive. The Guardian runs a weekly series called Writers Rooms: Portraits of the Spaces Where Authors Create. (Margaret Drabble has a jigsaw table and works puzzles much of the day.) Oprah at Home magazine recently featured Five Legendary Writers Homes (Eudora Weltys secretary, Edith Whartons view). Coffee-table books are popular holiday gifts: American Writers at Home and Writers Houses, for instance, marry sumptuous photographs with short essays about the authors habitswhat they ate for breakfast, where they hung the family photos. The New York Times often profiles authors with new releases in features that have photos of writers inside their living rooms or studies, to the delight of readers. Twitter links to such stories are often accompanied by the excitement of seeing Margaret Atwoods garden, or Paul Austers wood desk.

One could chalk up this fascination with the private lives of authors to celebrity lusta highbrow version of reading Us Weekly to see the latest pictures of Lindsay Lohans escapades, or a cultured version of reading a profile of a Brooke Astors son in Vanity Fair. There is also a religious strain, a secular form of paying homage. A novelist friend of mine told me that when he went to Stendhals grave, he kissed it.

Tombstones are popular, but houses are the most popular places in which to engage in literary voyeurism, worship or, more crudely, lit porn. Such has been the case since the fourteenth century, when the town of Arezzo preserved Petrarchs birthplacewhere he never lived and about which he cared little. (The current Arezzo house, still open to the public, is a reconstruction. Another Petrarch house, in Arqu, may also be visited, and has been a tourist site since the early nineteenth century.)

Writers house museums have been on the itineraries of the European Grand Tour since the sixteenth century. By the eighteenth century you could visit Shakespeares house in Stratford-upon-Avon and leave with a souvenir. Sir Walter Scott anticipated that tourists would one day visit his house, Abbotsford, when he was no longer alive, and indeed they started doing so once it opened shortly after his death in 1832. Haworth, the home of the Bront sisters, opened around 1928 and continues to draw throngs of tourists on Bront land tours and other excursions. Goethes birthplace in Frankfurt, Germany, has been a destination spot since 1863, and was carefully reconstructed after it was destroyed in World War II.

In the United States, writers houses started to be preserved at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, when historic preservation and tourism, both ways to shore up and create national memory, rose in cultural value. The first writers house to open to the public was probably the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow house in 1901.

Things have only picked up since, both here and abroad. Anne Franks house in the Netherlands may be the most famous and heavily visited writers house devoted to a twentieth-century writer, and it is a chilling homage indeed. Britains official tourism guide, VisitBritain.com, projected that 2009 would be a big year for literary tourism; in August Agatha Christies house in Devon opened as a National Trust property and Alfred Lord Tennysons Farringford house on the Isle of Wight opened as well.

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