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I got a spiritual thrill from Strindberg's study. But is the worship of writers' rooms going too far?
In a sluggish property market, estate agents might cheer the news that a wooden hut is going for £500,000. The complication, though, is that the buyers will neither own the shed nor get to live there. The family of Roald Dahl is asking the public to cough up the half million to shift the cabin in which he wrote from a Buckinghamshire garden to the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre down the road.
Given that Dahl remains a heavy seller and hot Hollywood property (Fantastic Mr Fox, James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Twits have all been filmed recently), it might be wondered if his royalties could offset more of the cost to the charitable giver.
And the Dahls are entering a crowded market. The Shepperton semi in which JG Ballard wrote many of his novels is up for sale, and a group of Ballardians have discussed clubbing together to buy it. The home in which JK Rowling lived from nine to 18 has also just swapped hands, reportedly to a keen reader who liked the idea of going from having her books in his house to his books in her house. And a property in Cornwall once associated with Daphne du Maurier is also seeking a reader in residence.
For literary fans, the two main objects of veneration have always been manuscripts and mansions: but the greatest excitement seems to be spreading from the pads they wrote on to the pads they lived in. Any bookworm on a walk experiences a lifting of the spirit at the flash of a blue plaque declaring the former occupancy of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy or Jane Austen. But many itch to get inside the place where inspiration occurred. Rudyard Kipling's house in Sussex and George Bernard Shaw's in Hertfordshire have become impressive tourist locations, the latter featuring a writing shed with a trick missed by Dahl: GBS installed a revolving mechanism to rotate the hut towards the warmth and light.
With Shaw, the house and hut is enough, but the Dahl appeal shows how sophisticated the industry of literary workplaces has become. The huge sum needed to shift the wooden room apparently comes from planning "an interactive exhibit to set the hut in context for visitors". For me, this goes against the spirit of studying writers' studies. My preference is for the desk to be exactly as it was left, because the writer's presence (if there is any) lies in the final scribbled notes, the optimistically uncapped fountain pen.
But, while the Dahl project feels like an absurd reduction of the impulse, most bookish people will have some sympathy for it. Revered writers become something like saints to their admirers, with a resulting desire for shrines.
Because August Strindberg is a writer who matters to me, I felt a little spiritual shiver when standing in Stockholm beside first his desk and then the bed in which he died. Interviewing Philip Roth recently in his Connecticut work-room, it was difficult not to feel a thrill at sitting in the place where his books happened. Except that they probably didn't: a time-and-motion chart produced for many great works of literature would show that they were composed in hotels, borrowed flats or cottages, offices on English faculties or, especially in the case of American authors, endowed houses at writers' retreats run by foundations.
The literary digs movement, though, is alert to the promiscuity of writers' backsides as they shuttle between desks. The "Daphne du Maurier house" in Cornwall is a place she briefly rented. Canny West Country cafe owners might be wise to put it about that Daphne was once seen at one of their tables, scribbling away.
For house worship to count, the connection surely has to have been significant and sustained: a room that once happened to have had JK Rowling underneath it isn't enough. And a home may not always be the right target for pilgrims. Given the centrality of automobiles and shopping malls to the novels of JG Ballard, his old car or even shopping bags might be better relics.
And yet this residential reverence is hard to break. If the homes of John Updike and John le Carré are ever opened as museums, I'll immediately be on the plane to Boston and the train to Penzance. If it turns out, however, that they wrote in garden sheds, I won't be shelling out £500,000 to mothball those for posterity.
Mark Lawson
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