In touring the history of writerly spaces, “The Writer’s Room” elegantly describes the rooms kept by Maya Angelou, Charles Dickens, Joan Didion, John Keats, and other luminaries. It finds that, a lot of the time, the quest for the perfect room is self-defeating: tormented by sounds in his neighborhood (among them a neighbor’s rooster), Thomas Carlyle tried to construct a soundproof chamber, but it turned out to be “the noisiest in the house.” Many people, meanwhile, don’t have room for a writer’s room, or live lives that preclude solitude, or just don’t like to sit still. They work in libraries or cafés; they write on subways, in hospital beds, or in Google Docs. Da Cunha Lewin notes that, although we often picture a writer within a room, there’s also “the writer with another job,” “the writer who is in a queue,” “the writer who is a carer,” “the writer who is in prison.”
There’s a sense, she comes to think, in which the image of an inward-focussed writer concentrating at a desk might be fundamentally misleading. Emily Dickinson, for instance, had a little writing table by her bedroom window, but the dress on display at her house museum also possesses a small, added outside pocket—what the poet Mary Ruefle calls a “workman’s pocket.” (It appears to be well-sized for a pencil and paper.) Dickinson might have spent almost all her time inside the house, but it still seems as though she wanted to write while away from her desk. There is “an undeniably romantic and alluring quality to the desk space,” da Cunha Lewin writes, but bodies, like minds, are always in motion. We might do better to imagine a writer as someone conversing, exercising, socializing, and interacting, instead of merely observing—someone who is out in the world instead of shut away in a room.
In “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” from 1899, the economist Thorstein Veblen explored the purchase of luxurious and unnecessary goods. We buy nice things because we like them, and because they’re better, and because we want other people to admire and envy us, he argued, but we also do it to influence ourselves. Consider hunters: “Even very mild-mannered and matter-of-fact men who go out shooting are apt to carry an excess of arms and accoutrements in order to impress upon their own imagination the seriousness of their undertaking,” Veblen wrote. If you buy a Birkin bag, or an over-specced rifle scope, or an expensive new camera, you may or may not be trying to wow other people, but you’re certainly trying to wow yourself. This is why it can actually be embarrassing when another enthusiast notices your splurge and wants to talk about it. You didn’t necessarily want to be seen by others; you wanted to see yourself.
How do artists come to see themselves as artists? Any piece of art begins in triviality. The first note, brushstroke, or sentence is meaningless; an unfinished first paragraph is humiliating. The circumstances in which many creative efforts arise are rarely propitious. Da Cunha Lewin reports that, with a small child at home, she now writes while “slumped on a chair in the living room.” Everything tells a creative person to give up. And so writers must assert their own seriousness to themselves—perhaps by sitting down at a nicely curated desk, or by strolling into a cool coffee shop dressed in what da Cunha Lewin calls a “uniform of middle-class artistry” (chore coat, round glasses, wide-legged pants).
An elevating writer’s room can strike a blow against triviality. But how powerful is that blow? When I was in college, I struggled to write short stories in my dorm room, while my roommate snored behind me in his bed; I did better once I found, in the basement of the building, a kind of closet that had been accidentally left unlocked, and turned it into my study. The next year, when a few friends and I created a tech startup, I often spent nights writing fiction in the office we rented, surrounded by computer servers. It wasn’t exactly a writer’s room, but it was one for which I was paying, and its very existence signalled my own capability.