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On Visiting Writers' Houses, 15 May 2002

Dickens' House, Doughty Street, London

One learns very little about the writer, although one develops a powerful desire to visit Gad's Hill - in fact a resentment that one isn't there already.[Gad's Hill being Dicken's final residence, his ambitious house in the country.]

I was most of all impressed by the quills - how ratty they were. Dickens' desk furniture was clearly upwardly mobile: the final desk in front of the empty chair [seen in Sir Samule Luke Fildes famous illustration, 'The Empty Chair, Gad's Hill, Ninth of June, 1870'] is an acreage compared with the small tilted number upon which his works were mostly written. His ink bottle, heavy in clear crystal, bequeathed to a friend, seemed to come later in life. [Before then, we assume something humbler.]

The most redolent of them all is the clerk's high desk - because it fits with Dicken's subjects, and it was from here that he had to escape in order to become the museumworthy author he did. Boredom comes off it like heat, though one can't date the incised graffiti.

The manuscripts propel themselves forwards, onwards, with elaboration, cancellation, but very little wholesale reconsideration. Tale-telling on paper...

I am impressed by how many dates Dickens played on his 1858 Autumn reading tour. The itinerary looks like that of a top flight stand-up comedian: over fifty gigs in two months. His reading stand is incredibly well designed and sensible; a useful prop, elegant, holds the book in place, glass of water handy, lightsource both for reader and audience. Did he have a roadie, I wonder?

Virginia Woolf's House, Monk's House, Rodwell, The Downs, Sussex

Low, dark, winter-ready house. Which explains why almost all photographs of the Bloomsburyites were taken on the lawn - why we can hardly imagine them sitting in anything other than a deck chair (Strachey stretched out, in particular).

A National Trust lady in every room, making one feel so uncomfortable and unwanted that one can hardly see. The living room, where a photograph of T.S.Eliot was taken. A bookcase full of irrelevant books. Spotting the inauthentic things - a lampshade.

'This is the room where she was ill,' my girlfriend says. She knows a lot more about Woolf than I do.She also knows the Bloomsbury interrelationships in the way she knows the Royal family's various almost-incests. A much brighter room, on the side of the house, with a narrow bed and a whole wall of books - Woolf's foreign editions. Here I can imagine Woolf; laid out long and groaning, trying not to groan.

The garden is lovely. Not too organized, with lots in it that is colourful. Here are bronze busts of Leonard and Virginia, above carved stones which already (in less than fifty years) have become illegible. There is a low tree, beneath which Woolf's ashes were scattered. She would have come this way, heading out towards the fields, when on her way, pockets full of stones already? to commit suicide by wading into the river and not wading out.

The writing shed. A desk and a few non-Woolf articles kept behind a glass wall. As if they were radioactive. A display of photographs, much better. One shows that the desk behind the glass isn't Woolf's.

Again, the outside is more important. Such a 360 degree view of the downs, but much of it obscured by trees. One would like to be in a tree-house, or up the tower of the church next door. From the bowling green, there is a long view of chalky hills - over the river.