This book seems made for me right now. I am a (struggling) writer who spent the last year finding, buying and doing up the house that I hope will become my perfect little writer’s nest. I’ve visited many house museums over the years, spent ten years regularly visiting one (Dr Johnson’s House in Gough Square) and spent four years volunteering there. Houses have been on my mind.
This book started with a conference in 2017 entitled ‘The Lives of Houses’, which produced a number of contributions from all sorts of people. There are big name writers like Simon Armitage and Julian Barnes, fantastic biographers like Jenny Uglow and Hermione Lee, and a general smorgasbord of interesting people pitching in - yet the book is never quite as interesting as it could be.
Many of the chapters were about the house of a particular famous individual, many writers, a few composers, the odd politician but many of these chapters didn’t give much more than a potted biography of their subject through their house. The chapter on Samuel Johnson used Bolt Court to show the domestic chaos he lived in, and contrasted that with the order of the Thrale’s, essentially telling the same story as According to Queeney. There was a little about Hester Thrale Piozzi’s memoirs relating to her domestic sphere and Boswell’s Life relating to his more public-facing Bolt Court lifestyle, but it wasn’t much developed. There wasn’t much about how Johnson never owned any of those houses, and how a house could be a dangerous drain on his mental health, being both solitary and idle.
Similarly, though many of the other chapters included biographies of people I was less aware of, they didn’t do much more than present the biography through a slightly different lens. The chapter in Edward Lear’s houses chiefly felt like a slimmed down part of his biography, the WH Auden chapters revealed to me that his name was Wystan and he lived in a bizarre melange of order and chaos. I found it interesting that both Churchill and Disraeli bought houses that were out of their budget and made them beholden to others - Disraeli was bailed out by party donors, and Churchill’s house was managed by the National Trust while he was still living in it.
The better chapters were the ones that skirted around the topic a little more. There was a chapter about a Roman house in Morocco, which shed interesting light on what it may have been like being at the edge of the Roman world as it was collapsing. One chapter is a recollection of her mother’s house and how it reflected the character of her mother - something many of the more famous-focused pieces didn’t quite do. I really liked Hermione Lee’s ‘House of Air’, about visiting where famous houses used to be, and how they still stand in the works of those writers even if they are not actually standing any more.
The chapter that followed the formula of biography-through-house that I found most successful was the one about Yeats’s damp, flooding tower. This building was a project of romance and whimsy that was never really a successful house, but was a successful symbol to the writer himself. There was an interesting one about the Sir John Soame’s Museum, which I’ve visited many times but didn’t realise what a peculiar institution it is, or its bizarre relationship with other museums in general.
There was a section about the unhoused. About a writer who lived in a tent for a while (and had no permanent home after that), a really good one about a man who lived in mental institutions but yearned for the hills of his old home. The chapter where Stuart Masters interviewed a number of people at a homeless charity was interesting but felt sort of undercooked. I got the sense with a lot of the entries, that this was the work of very good writers who were knocking off some B-grade material quickly, when it had the potential to be something more transcendent. The less said about the poems the better.
So, while the book is pretty good, and in writing this review I have remembered more that I enjoyed about it than I initially thought, it feels more like an interesting enough distraction than it does something vital.
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