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The Sarah Orne Jewett House
In the past several years, I’ve visited more than half of this country’s writer’s houses and here’s one thing I’ve learned: the writer’s house extends beyond the four walls of their home. A writer carries images into their home and to their writing desk that come from the exterior landscape, from the fields and the forest, and the roads, and from the yard. Writers collect their environment, they pick it up like they are bundling sticks for kindling, like they are stacking wood. Sometimes a writer invests time in manicuring and maintaining the landscape. They do this in their work and in their life, perhaps, in some cases, more carefully and precisely than we recognize.
Hence, when you go to visit Emily Dickinson’s house, you are treated to her gardens (which were reproduced precisely in an exhibit last year at the New York Botanical Garden) and where tour guides discuss her delicate, wonderous Herbarium at length. And when you go to Eudora Welty’s Mississippi home, you get a special tour of her garden. And the same is true for many a writer’s house. Seeing the “outside” of the home can tell you more than you expect. It can give you clues as to how they approached their work, how they constructed narratives and images and scenes.
So, I was not too surprised when I read about a new book by Richard Horan called Seeds: One Man’s Serendipitous Journey to Find the Trees That Inspired Famous American Writers from Faulkner to Kerouac, Welty to Wharton. My immediate response to the title was that the premise seemed a bit of a stretch. And maybe it is, I don’t know, I haven’t tracked down a copy of the book yet, I’ve just read an excerpt. But still, I began thinking about it, and thinking about the homes I’d visited and the properties I’d toured and realized the outside of the homes are telling. They also hold meaning for us. They are important and we know they were important because they oftentimes make their way into the writer’s work.
In Poison, Shadow, and Farewell, the third volume of Javiar Marías’ incredible novel Your Face Tomorrow, which I am slowly working my way through, the narrator digs up a plant from the grounds of Laurence Sterne’s Shandy Hall. He explains, “In the spacious garden I did something that is probably punishable by law: I uprooted a tiny plant, which I concealed and kept moist for the rest of the trip, and later, in London, with barely any care or effort on my part, it grew into a plant of extraordinary lushness and vigor, although I never discovered its name, in English or Spanish (I was thrilled to have carried off and preserved some living thing from the garden of the Shandy family.)”
And in Regina Marler’s contribution for Writers’ Houses about Woolf’s house she explores how she came to acquire a third-generation Monk house geranium.
And in the newest Writers’ Houses guest essay, by my friend the novelist Alexander Chee, we learn how Sarah Orne Jewett’s garden and her exterior landscape works its way into her work and into Chee’s family history. He also gets delightfully defensive about the idea of visiting writers’ houses. For that, I salute him. These houses are like heirloom plants, they can nurture us, but they can also grow wild, untangled, and become lost. It’s up to us to be the seed savers.
