Freud's Couch Scott's Buttocks Brontë's Grave Page 2

  It is not by chance, then, that in the nineteenth century we find a new phenomenon: the tour to visit writers’ houses. The birthplace, the grave, the house where the writer lived, or even where the writer was now living—all, for the first time, became sites of pilgrimage. The journey was treated like a visit to a saint’s shrine. So a young man, living “‘mid the din of towns and cities,” in the grime and noise of the industrialized urban sprawl, might carefully plan his train trip to the north to visit Wordsworth’s cottage. He would walk up from the station, noting the places and country sights memorialized by the poetry he knew and loved, and pause by the gate of the home of the master. If he was lucky, the elderly Wordsworth might give him a tour— Wordsworth did this a great deal, and had a good script. If he were too shy or polite to enter, or if Wordsworth was not there, he might pluck a leaf from the garden and jealously keep it to be pressed, and contemplated, when back again at home, in the “lonely rooms” of the town, a relic of his restorative journey back to nature, in search of the poet of nature. (I should probably say that this rather sappy composite picture is based on a set of Victorian letters about precisely such a trip and its preserved leaf. But it wasn’t just sad young men— Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot too both asked for petals from the poet’s garden.) To visit the writer’s house was to be touched by the writer’s charisma, an experience to be treasured.

  The novels and poems of the nineteenth century seemed to encourage this sort of response. The description of domestic interiors is a regular set piece of Victorian fiction. When Margaret, the heroine of Mrs. Gaskell’s North and South, enters the Thornton drawing room, she is given a moment to look around. “It seemed as though no one had been in it since the day when the furniture was bagged up with as much care as if the house was to be overwhelmed with lava, and discovered a thousand years hence. The walls were pink and gold: the patterns on the carpet represented bunches of flowers on a light ground, but it was carefully covered up in the centre by a linen drug- get, glazed and colourless.” Margaret’s eyes continue remorselessly to itemize the tastelessness of the room. The description concludes, “The whole room had a painfully spotted, spangled, speckled look about it, which impressed Margaret so unpleasantly that she was hardly con- scious of the peculiar cleanliness required to keep everything so white and pure in such an atmosphere, or the trouble that must be willingly expended to secure the effect of icy, snowy discomfort.” Cleanliness may be next to godliness, but in this room cleanliness is an icy rejection of life and comfort; the decoration is there to be preserved as decoration, rather than enjoyed as beauty. It is not hard to predict that Margaret’s encounter with Mrs. Thornton is not going to be a success, and that there is something very wrong with the moral and spiritual life of a woman who could design such a space. Domestic space not only reveals the character of those who live in it and design it, but also has a powerful psychological effect on its inhabitants. Dark and gloomy houses make dark and gloomy people, or so the logic of the fiction always runs, and a warm and comforting scene will make people into warm and comfortable personalities.

  This is doubly true of the natural landscape, thanks especially to the influence of the Romantic poets and novelists and their love of the natural world. Wordsworth writes beautifully of his early life amid the hills and lakes of Cumbria, as he recalls

  what I was, when first

  I came among these hills, when like a roe

  I bounded o’er the mountains by the sides

  Of the deep rivers and the lonely streams

  Wherever nature led, more like a man

  Flying from something that he dreads than one

  Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then

  (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days

  And their glad animal movements all gone by)

  To me was all in all.

  The landscape had a profound influence on Wordsworth, it made him who he came to be. So authors were formed by their environment— think of how the Brontës are associated with the moors of Yorkshire— and the depiction of a place in a novel or a poem could change the place forever for its readers. When Richard Blackmoor wrote the bestselling Lorna Doone, with its wonderful and haunting descriptions of Exmoor, Exmoor was redubbed “Lorna Doone Country,” as pilgrims visited it to rediscover the landscape of the novel on the ground. Like military historians tracing where each battalion fought on a battle- field, readers now followed Walter Scott’s heroes through the Scottish Borders, or Dickens’s Oliver Twist through the streets of London. Since the home and the countryside had such a formative influence on the character of a person, to visit the house and the environment of a writer was to catch a glimpse of where the writer and the stories came from, how they came into being. And since those stories and poems had such a formative effect on the reader’s internal life, visiting the writer’s house felt like a journey of self-discovery too.

  So walking to a poet’s cottage or a novelist’s stately home could never be just a day out. In fact—and a book about pilgrimage is a good place to reveal this—there is a small but flourishing academic field known as the history of walking. Walking, say its historians, was invented at the end of the eighteenth century and became a real fad in the nineteenth—a Romantic invention and Victorian hobby. Now, obviously, “walking” here means walking out of choice, as a pastime—“pedestrian travel.” The first use of the term “pedestrian” in this sense is attributed by the Oxford English Dictionary to Wordsworth, significantly enough, who made tramping the hills a mode of spiritual transformation—to “pant slow up the endless Alp of life,” as he put it memorably, if rather painfully. At one time, walking was an unmistakable index of poverty (it may still be in parts of the United States where the automobile is king). Long-distance walking was associated with vagrancy—the tramp, the beggar, the bum. But through the Romantic era and into the Victorian period, as men (and some women) took up walking as a pastime, it came also to be associated with the mobility of the radical mind. The walking trip across Europe, exposing yourself to new cultures, thoughts, people, removed you from the parochial, the conservative, the narrow-minded. (It is an area too of inbuilt gender difference: very few women indeed made the sorts of trips that were so important for, say, Wordsworth or Robert Louis Stevenson.) It is fascinating to see how often the radical, literary, heroic walker has a significant encounter with a vagrant or beggar. Real walkers need to distinguish themselves from economic walkers, even if they learned some lesson from them too.

  Writing about such trips became significant explorations of self- formation and helped make walking fashionable for others, especially hopeful writers. So the young Keats went for his walking tour of the Lakes specifically to get “such an accumulation of stupendous recollolections” in preparation for his vocation as a poet (the misspelling is no doubt part of the enthusiasm of youth for the adventure to come): “I will clamber through the clouds and exist.” Not only were dozens of walking tour books produced, but also essays about the principle and theory of walking. William Hazlitt’s is one of the first and most delightful: “Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours’ march to dinner—and then to thinking!” The trip to the writer’s house also took on the full weight of this new notion of walking: getting there was as important a process as the visit itself. So at the turn of the nineteenth century, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge went on a tour with his friend John Hucks: “Behold us, then, more like two pilgrims performing a journey to the tomb of some wonder-working saint, than men travelling for the pleasure and amusement.” The walk to the house of the writer itself became invested with the significance of a pilgrimage.

  I must admit, my excitement at my editor’s suggestion that I “do something Victorian” could not repress one note of surprise. When I have lectured and taught in America, I have noticed a huge difference between American and British responses to the Victorian. British students, especiall
y for me at Cambridge, do their studying surrounded by Victorian buildings, statues, books. I myself had been taught by teachers brimming with anecdotes of their own teachers, who had actually been Victorians. My grandfathers had grown up “‘mid the din of towns and cities” at the end of the Victorian era, and I had seen the East End streets in London and the docks of Liverpool where they had roamed. On my office walls, I have paintings by the Bloomsbury group, the wild children and snide debunkers of their Victorian parents, and from my window I see every day the path where A. E. Housman walked, writing his poems in his head. For most of the American students I have taught in the United States, this sense of physical and personal continuity just isn’t there with the same intensity. There was no Victorian era in Sacramento. The Civil War, cowboys and the West, the gold rush, were hugely evocative and powerful icons of the nineteenth century. But outside the bustling university departments of nineteenth-century studies, the adjective “Victorian” was less likely to go to the heart of an American cultural identity. For the British, still obsessed with class and working through the end of empire (nostalgically, painfully, apologetically, reflectively . . .), or for those of my generation, for whom the memory of Margaret Thatcher demanding a return to Victorian values is still vivid, a Victorian pilgrimage can still be a journey of self-discovery. So much about us was put in place either by our Victorian ancestors or in direct reaction to them.

  It turns out, however, that the pilgrimage to Victorian writers’ houses has been an American fixation too. In the nineteenth century, English literature—English culture in general—loomed over the development of American writing and thinking. Much of what Americans read in the nineteenth century was written in Britain (often in pirated editions, as there was no international copyright agreement yet). Many British authors, like Charles Dickens and Matthew Arnold and Charles Kingsley, were treated as celebrities when they toured the States, and whole communities turned out to hear dramatic recitals from the novels or lectures on cultural matters. The development of a particular American literary culture still looked nervously and brashly and proudly toward Europe, and Britain in particular. So Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court hilariously plays off the difference between the old country and the new, and Henry James, who lived the last forty years of his life in England, epitomizes both a longing for and an alienation from a culture that could not be found in America—an earlier model for Hemingway in Spain or Gershwin’s American in Paris. The elite of American society traveled widely in Europe, the more so as American wealth and influence grew. This special relationship between the United States and Britain frames American tourism to England. For Americans, a trip to England meant a complex engagement with cultural heritage as well as an encounter with the British Empire at its height. In fact, my journeying was going to follow some celebrated and sophisticated American travelers. Washington Irving visited Sir Walter Scott in 1816 in his house at Abbotsford (and that is my first port of call); Ralph Waldo Emerson visited Wordsworth’s house in the Lake District, our second destination. Mark Twain was one of many writers who went to Stratford-upon-Avon, to see the house of Shakespeare and, more bathetically, as he himself recognized through gritted teeth, to take tea at the house of Marie Corelli, the very much still alive and embarrassingly vulgar novelist. Stratford too will be on our itinerary. And when it comes to Freud’s house, for a host of New Yorkers, that couch is very much part of the interior decoration of the mind.

  The cliché of the rich American tourist oblivious to or baffled by the niceties of British society starts in the nineteenth century, and there are plenty of snide stories, especially from its last decades, about crass groups of badly dressed Yankees buying fake antiques and eating with the wrong fork. In part, this is just English snobbery and self-regard (familiar today too), but the nineteenth century also invented the idea of the tourist as a sort of poor quality traveler. Thomas Cook and the package holiday get going at this time (their first trips were to English stately homes by train), and immediately the counterimage of the Real Traveler emerges. Real travelers, the myth goes, have real experiences in real contact with the communities they visit; tourists merely gawp, follow the beaten track, and snap photos. We are travelers, they are tourists. Americans make jokes about (American) tourists too. Mark Twain’s letters home from his trip to the Holy Land, published first in a newspaper in New York, then as the book Innocents Abroad, set the tone: amused, sly, wry, distanced from the crowd, the writer nonetheless goes to the same places as the companions he mocks. A pilgrimage, even though the word seems to announce its own seriousness, needs the right attitude. It has to be an antitourist trail, even and especially when going to tourist spots.

  Washington Irving, Mark Twain, and Ralph Waldo Emerson were no innocents abroad, and no one was more sensitive to the nuances of cultural interaction than Henry James, an exile whose novels repeatedly dissect the appearance of innocence. Their pilgrimages were not casual excursions. Visiting writers’ houses was for them—and still is for all of us—a moment when we come face to face, not with the cuteness of Olde England, but with a sense of cultural heritage. What do writers and their works mean to us? How do places form us as people? How do we look at the past?

  My reflections were beginning to melt my wife’s scorn. Washington Irving and Mark Twain were clearly better models than the dumb American sidekick. She might, she confessed, be one of my four Jews on a train. (By this stage, the negotiation felt as tense and drawn out as a Victorian marriage proposal.) The plan was to journey as much as possible by Victorian means and following Victorian guidebooks. That meant trains and walking. A bus could replace cart or horse where absolutely necessary, but no cars and no planes. Like so many characters in Victorian stories, we would consult the train timetable, wear stout shoes, and stay in the local inn. The journey was an essential part of the pilgrimage and could not be rushed. There would be five destinations: first, Abbotsford, Sir Walter Scott’s baronial pile in the Scottish borders, the earliest of the houses to enter the public imagination, and the furthest from home; then down to Dove Cottage and Rydal Mount, Wordsworth’s houses in the Lake District; third, across the Pennines to Haworth and the Brontë parsonage; then, more surprisingly, to Shakespeare’ s house in Stratford—of course, Shakespeare isn’t a Victorian writer, but his house was discovered and rebuilt as a national monument in the Victorian era, a testament to the importance of the National Poet for the country. Finally, we would return to London and to Freud’s house in Hampstead. Freud made his consulting room there in 1938, an exact replica of his nineteenth- century study in Vienna. If there is any figure who marks the transition from Victorian society to modernity, it is Freud. The journey would thus go from the heroes of the Romantic movement at the beginning of the century to the great redrafter of family romance at its end.

  Each of these houses fired the imagination of its visitors. Each was taken as a fundamental expression of the writer and the writer’s creative works: to visit them was not just an act of curiosity but to uncover an insight into the writer’s self, a sign of the writer’s self- expression, and to experience an encounter of serious significance for the visitor’s self. Each house was a site of pilgrimage, and each is now swathed in stories about those encounters: and as Chaucer knew, any decent pilgrimage needs its storytelling.

  But as we prepared to set out with our friends, David and Helen (I was particularly relying on David, a doctor with Schopenhauerian tendencies, to provide the depressive notes, as well as the medical backup that all good Jewish trips build in), I found myself still slightly anxious. I had read many books by now on pilgrimage, on writers’ houses, on these writers and their houses, and many, many words by the writers whose houses we would be visiting. But I still felt none of the passionate connection to objects and places that a genuine biographer should feel in his bones. I love books, need books, but I have little interest in authors and their things. I cannot see why I should go and look at John Updike’s typewriter, or S
aul Bellow’s apartment, or Salman Rushdie’s trousers. I’d rather read their books. I have never visited a grave, at least not the grave of anyone famous. I have looked at autographs without breaking down; I have stood where Caesar was assassinated and where Pericles spoke to the Athenian democracy, without the need to orate or shout “Et tu Brute” (which Caesar didn’t say, anyway). I find it hard to credit that Harry Potter is indebted to the particular coffee shop that J. K. Rowling sat in, or that the trademark triviality of Jeffrey Archer’s prose should be laid at the door of Grantchester and its beautiful vicarage. As I came across stories of people weeping uncontrollably at the sight of Freud’s couch, I became more and more baffled by the phenomenon I was about to trace. Was there something wrong with me that I couldn’t feel the emotional pull of a writer’s detritus? For me, books opened a world of the imagination, a world in the mind: why would you want to shut the door on such a greater landscape to fixate on some merely real place or object? Would looking at the Brontë parsonage or Shakespeare’s birthplace really get me closer to the literature I cherished? I felt I had a lot to learn about why so many people, both sophisticated thinkers and bored tour parties on a wet Sunday, want to visit writers’ houses. Like all pilgrims, I was setting out on a search for something, a search I rather feared would be about my own desires and blindness, my own intellectual and emotional investments.

  2

  LION HUNTING IN SCOTLAND

  IT IS HARD NOW to imagine a world without celebrity. Not only are the TV channels and newspapers dominated by grinning and weeping faces desperate for their fifteen minutes of fame, but also, thanks to advertising and the media world, serious authors and musicians and artists are locked into the same economics of culture. Almost every month, without any apparent irony (though with plenty of cynicism, I expect), another journalist regrets that children today want to be famous, but have no idea what they want to be famous for—as if the magazines and newspapers that print such articles were not deeply complicit with what they publicly deplore. We are meant to know who is on the A list of celebs, who is merely B list (the sub-B divisions are mentioned only with a sigh or a sneer), and we also know how such stars of publicity are meant to behave. “The celebrity” is a modern cultural myth: there is a whole set of expectations—from outrageous egos, to demands for special treatment, to divorce and sexual license—that everyone, stars and audiences and commentators, loves to see fulfilled. Celebrity has become one of the stories by which our world is organized, our own normality defined.