In Search of Writers’ Haunts

The British travel writer and novelist Bruce Chatwin held that there are two categories of writers: “the ones who ‘dig in’ and the ones who move.” “There are writers who can only function ‘at home,’ with the right chair, the shelves of dictionaries and encyclopedias, and now perhaps the word processor,” he observed. “And there are those, like myself, who are paralyzed by ‘home,’ for whom home is synonymous with the proverbial writer’s block, and who believe naïvely that all would be well if only they were somewhere else.” I like this notion. It seems to have an air of true insight about it. When I read Chatwin, for instance, I detect the shuffle of his restless feet traversing ancient causeways, just as, when I read Melville, I smell salt air.

One might think that we better know the writers who “dig in” than those who “move.” That is to say, we can picture them at their desks, in their studies, working. ’s cork-lined room and the bed in which he composed his masterpiece affords one an imaginative notion of the writer’s interior world, if not the creative effort itself. Place matters to the imagination. I have frequently, while traveling, attempted to enhance my reading imagination by linking favorite writers to place. Once, for instance, while in London traipsing around’s home. The expected brass plate bolted to the building corner confirmed the find. But the house is not open to the public, and is now converted office space. I was reduced to peering in through a barred street window. There were computers and furniture, a woman in a beige sweater pounding away on a keyboard and the flurry of activity one associates with commerce. I tried to imagine Woolf there but failed—a “dug in” writer who slipped through my fingers. The failure was particularly poignant in light of her famous observation, “A woman is to have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”