Houses Far Afield or Near

Dude Bill

It's an odd thing -- visiting the house where one of the greats among humans was born.  For instance, a house five centuries old shows a little wear: wood floors rubbed down to a shine by millions of shoes, wood railings worn smooth by half a millennium of hands, hearths buffed a millimeter lower into the stone that once faced the famous owner's foot.

In short, little to nothing original remains, even if it all has been well preserved.  Inevitably, old boards and decaying stone have been replaced.  So the stray hair of the poet, the trace of DNA, and the dropped crumb will have disappeared beneath the stray hairs, exfoliated cells, and crumbs from centuries of visitors.  Whether our expectation is articulated or not, we expect (strangely and beyond all probability) to see some trace of the person, some finger print, some remnant of body, soul, intellect, or work overlooked in a corner of some room -- we expect that there will be something untouched, a connection for us that another visitor has not seen.

And everyone wants to own something of the person.

Will's birthplace, John Shakespeare's house

Tuesday involved a nicely meandering train ride to Stratford-upon-Avon, to the house where Shakespeare was born, his father, John's, house.  The birth room remains largely intact, as does, a couple miles away, the cottage of Anne Hathaway, despite an addition.  That cottage is where, it may be assumed, Will first met Anne, willed her to do, which she wantonly wished, and, winging his willie, Anne, 8-years-his-senior, was for some moments wistfully willful and then with his child.  The question was "will 'e marry her?" -- yes, 'e will.

What transpired during their years of marriage has long been debated, not least in relation to stuff in the plays.  But in Will's last will, he left her "the second-best bed."  Was she unfaithful during the years he spent in London, away from Stratford, or (another of perpetual possibilities) did he leave her that bed -- an extravagantly expensive item -- out of great affection, out of an intimate message of deepest love?  Perhaps that was the very bed they first shared and continued to use over the years.

 

Carving and inlay (right side of the headboard)
of what is believed to be the 2nd-best bed.

Touching the talent seems to be the issue for those who visit the houses of the famous.  Is it to touch the hem of the great, the fringe of the robe worn by...and thereby derive some essence of that greatness?  Perhaps.  But I gather they are few who can visit a place like the birth room and regard it with clinical detachment.

So what is it we want, after all?

On the train to Stratford, the man next to me, who appeared to be from Sri Lanka or India, was reading Bill Bryson's book Notes from a Small Island, which is about England.  Bryson is from Des Moines, Iowa, where I also grew up, and some of the places he mentions humorously in his books are places I know well (as do how many others throughout his and my generations?).  Will Bryson's old family home become a place of pilgrimage?  Well, it's not that Bryson would ever be seen on a level with Shakespeare, and Des Moines is no literary capital: anyone with any talent has left this place long before they were known to have had any.  Nevertheless, I wondered if the fellow passenger in the train would like to have heard something of Bryson's home -- both the town and the house he lived in.  I wondered if he wanted something of Bryson as well as of Shakespeare.

I didn't ask.  He was busy with his family, then on his cell making business deals in both Hindi and English. Between looking back to his book, then to his wife, and his attempts to settle their fidgety child, I figured some days are just too busy for any thinking about Bryson, who, by the way, wrote a bio of Shakespeare and who also walked through the house, the birth room, and Anne's cottage at some point.  Perhaps it was he who spied a grey hair on the hearth that the bard had dropped....

Yet Bryson, who has lived in England since his early adulthood, views his hometown without the undue affection that people show to the houses of the famous.  He has instead clearly marked Des Moines as needing remedial work if it would become culturally fit for human existence.  The difference between yogurt and Des Moines?  Yogurt has an active culture....  Iowa or England?  If you want to live in mind and spirit, the choice is obvious.  Yes.  But who can afford it?

Shakespeare probably went through the same questions as these in leaving Stratford for London -- questions Bryson also no doubt contended with in leaving Des Moines for London.  If you want to advance, you have to go where advancement is possible.  It may be expensive, but so is the waste of a truly gifted soul and intellect in a place that fosters only the mediocrity of a big fish in a small pond (a consideration relative to the size of the pond and the fish).

Bryson's recent work includes a book, A Short History of Home, in which, I shouldn't wonder, he probably speaks of his childhood digs.  But it's doubtful that -- except among a very few Des Moinesiacs -- Bryson's childhood home will entertain pilgrimages.

On Wednesday, I took the students to visit Dickens' house on Doughty Street, which has been maintained much as it was in Dickens' day, complete with some of the author's furniture, including the desk at which he wrote his last words.  Suffering a stroke, he left the novel he was working on unfinished.  And even with such an item remaining there, other pieces of furniture were temporarily in France for an anniversary celebration (i.e. his A Tale of Two Cities, which has to do with the French Revolution).  So it is not merely that people want to visit, but want to borrow from, the houses of the great.

Dickens' house, Doughty Street

C. S. Lewis's home outside Oxford, The Kilns, was one I don't recall Lewis cared much for but tolerated, yet was a house that his brother, Warnie -- who lived with his brother -- absolutely loathed.  I believe the events transpiring in the house dictated his feelings towards it.  As a grad student in 1984, I visited the small house; I went back in the early 2000s.  He wasn't there either time....  Of course.  Yet isn't that what we really want?

 The Kilns in Headington, North of Oxford

What I remark is this: the adulation in people's minds regarding great people and their homes.  This adulation, the attempt by a pilgrimage to evoke some part of the great person's spirit, ability, talent or fame, is a seance in reverse: it is the living who visit the place of the departed instead of, by seance, the dead who (supposedly...) visit a place of the living.

Archaeologists can point to plenty of reasons why the houses of the great (or not-so-great) are important to us in what we learn.  In any case, it's a curiosity what we do.  Chaucer gave this reason for people like himself to travel from the Tabard Inn near London to Canterbury:

to Caunterbury they wende,

The hooly blisful martir for to seke

That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke.

That is, in my translation, 

to Canterbury they wend

To seek the holy blissful martyr

That helped them when they were sick

Sheldon Vanauken told me that some of his Catholic compatriots believed that a personal possession retains something of the spiritual residue of the person who used it over time: the favorite pen, the bed, the chair....  And that spiritual residue is present in objects of the pious as well as of the evil, the object itself being an item indifferent to whatever forces act upon it.  So the belief goes.

We want something from the great, from the very houses they lived and died in, whether you believe in spiritual residue or not.   But I think what we seek has already been given us: their works, their thoughts, their entertainments, their recorded experiences.

One Text of the "To be" speech from Hamlet