Virginia Woolf famously said that, if she is to write fiction, ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own’.
This book explores how male and female writers have over the last two centuries found rooms that inspired them to write, from Tennessee Williams’ garret in New Orleans to the room with a view that E.M. Forster coveted in Florence.
En route I was able discover something of Damon Runyon’s New York, Graham Greene’s Saigon, and George Sand’s Venice.
Not every great writer or every room that has witnessed great literature has made it into these 50 chapters. This was very much a personal quest in pursuit of writers who interested me and I didn’t want to spend too much time in birthplaces that have been turned into well-meaning museums.
For some of the authors in this book, sitting in the right room was all-important. Marcel Proust’s housekeeper claimed that having to relocate from the apartment where he began À la recherche du temps perdu exacerbated his ill-health and hastened his death, leaving that ambitious novel sequence incomplete. Victor Hugo spent a fortune turning his house on Guernsey into a very personal Hugo theme park.
For other writers the room can become a location in their fiction. H.G. Wells set one of his bestselling works, Mr Britling Sees It Through, in his own house in Essex. Olivia Manning used her own Cairo flat in the Levant Trilogy. But others had no need for their subject matter to be in front of them. James Joyce wrote exclusively about Dublin while sitting in his favourite Paris restaurants.
Over the last few years I’ve visited rooms where the author’s presence is almost palpable in the arrangement of every individual object, and others that seem to bear no relationship to the author or the work produced there.
Some writers have preferred to work in a favourite café – J.K. Rowling is only a recent example in a line that stretches back well beyond Sartre. Oscar Wilde liked to write and entertain in expensive hotels but Hemingway and Noël Coward stayed in the best hotels around the world simply because they could. They could write well regardless of their surroundings.
I’ve also followed my writers into pubs, apartments, holiday cottages and homes that are now literary museums.
There are some surprises along the way: young Norman Mailer, staying in his parents’ apartment, trying to have a conversation by the mailboxes with the diffident playwright who lived downstairs and concluding that Arthur Miller could go to hell; Erich Maria Remarque locked in the bathroom by Marlene Dietrich when the Nazis came to visit; a delirious Somerset Maugham overhearing the manageress of his hotel asking the doctor to remove him to hospital as a death would be bad for business.
This book consists of 50 literary pilgrimages – to London, Oxford, Paris, Berlin and St Petersburg, as well as to Italy, America, North Africa and the Far East. I didn’t just want to write about writers beavering away in the family’s spare room so I followed many on their travels – because writers do love to travel. Sometimes they are seeking the ideal place in which to work, sometimes they are escaping from life at home. Often they are travelling because their success makes it possible and they know all they need is a pen and paper – or laptop – to continue writing and so they seize on invitations with alacrity.
There is always something to be learned when you visit the place where a book was written. Sometimes the location features directly in what ends up on the page, but more often than not it’s significantly altered. We expect writers to be good at their craft and we like them to be inspired by their surroundings, but we can’t expect them to be honest as well.
Adrian Mourby, 2017