Place and the Scene of Literary Practice

Angharad Saunders

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317080671
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

The act of writing is intimately bound up with the flow and eddy of a writer's being-within-the-world; the everyday practices, encounters and networks of social life. Exploring the geographies of literary practice in the period 1840-1910, this book takes as its focus the work, or craft, of authorship, exploring novels not as objects awaiting interpretation, but as spatial processes of making meaning. As such, it is interested in literary creation not only as something that takes place - the situated nature of putting pen to paper - but simultaneously as a process that escapes such placing.

Arguing that writing is a process of longue durée, the book explores the influence of family and friends in the creative process, it draws attention to the role that travel and movement play in writing and it explores the wider commitments of authorial life, not as indicators of intertextuality, but as part of the creative process. In taking this seventy year period as its focus, this book moves beyond the traditional periodisations that have characterised literary studies, such as the Victorian or Edwardian novel, the nineteenth-century or early twentieth-century novel or Romanticism, social realism and modernism. It argues that the literary environment was not one of watershed moments; there were continuities between writers separated by several decades or writing in different centuries. At the same time, it draws attention to a seventy year period in which the value of literary work and culture were being contested and transformed.

Place and the Scene of Literary Practice will be key reading for those working in Human Geography, particularly Cultural and Historical Geography, Literary Studies and Literary History.

Part I

The place of writing

1 Interpretations on an interior^*

‘Place is not mere background atmospherics, but provides for the very possibility of intellectual innovation. Intellectual inquiry is not the view from nowhere, but the view from somewhere.’

(Barnes 2004: 568)

Histories of geography have long been interested in the relationship between the place of the discipline’s happening and the texts that get written within and about these places. The contention among geography’s historians is that the where of geography matters to the what of geography (Barnes 2004; Livingstone 2003; Lorimer and Spedding 2005). It is a body of work that is inspired by Bruno Latour’s (1987) research on science in action. Latour’s premise is that science comes to us as a smooth, coherent, rational entity. It is, to borrow another of Latour’s terms, a black box: a reasoned, given whole that masks its own practice, its own social genealogy. As a result, we are accustomed to think of scientific knowledge as universal, replicable and categorical. If, however, we explore the practices that go into the making of this black box, including the spatialities of these practices, the whole nature of scientific knowledge takes on a different hue. We begin to see it as something made by, and contingent upon, the specificities of its place: institutional norms, the patterns of power, networking and alliance-building, and the exchange and construction of information, reveal science’s making to be chaotic and ragged, and its knowledge to be far from certain or rational.

The purpose of this chapter is to pose a very similar set of questions in relation to the practice of imaginative forms of writing. As argued elsewhere, the doing of science and the doing of imaginative literature have different relationships to place (Saunders 2010). Where the former regards ‘being-in-place’ and ‘seeing-for-one’s-self’ as bound up with the production of truth and veracity, the latter positions the relationship between the real and the imagined as one of authenticity rather than verisimilitude. In consequence, to ponder the place of literary practice is not to ask, as early work in literary geography did (Darby 1948; Gilbert 1960), how closely the real aligns with the imagined, but rather, to consider how the places of literary practice function within the creative process. Thus, while this book argues that writing creatively is more than what goes on in those places where pen is put to paper, this chapter (and Part I as a whole) contends that we must not wholly overlook these places, for where pen is put to paper is rarely an isolated garret or ivory tower; rather it happens within lithe social worlds. Spending time in these places and attending to their materiality – to what winds up in these places, to who gathers within them, and to how they are laid out and designed – discloses something of the way in which place, and the things that happen within place, matter to the happening of imaginative writing.

It is to these questions that this chapter turns, taking as its starting point the material world that was inhabited by the English writer, Arnold Bennett (1867–1931). Bennett had a varied literary career, and while he may not be widely known today, he was one of the most popular and successful writers of his day (Drabble 1975). In 1914 Bennett published The Author’s Craft, a guide on how to write fiction. A central element within this work was the importance that Bennett attached to geography as a prelude to writing. Ostensibly, he meant a cognisance of place as setting, but of particular interest here is the persistent significance that Bennett attached to the organisation of his own place of writing: to the assembly, fashioning and arrangement of his domestic interiors and the way in which these mattered to his literary practice. Before exploring these interiors and what they might have meant to Bennett’s literary making, let us turn to examine the broader relationship between place and literary creation.

Literary interiors

This chapter is not the first to turn its attention to the place of imaginative writing. In The Senses of an Interior, Diana Fuss (2004) probes the relationship between interior spaces, both psychological and architectural, and creative lives. The premise of Fuss’s text is that the where of literary labour is of central importance to the nature of its happening and its meaning. It discusses the work of four writers, Emily Dickinson, Sigmund Freud, Helen Keller and Marcel Proust, whose literary lives span the 1850s to the 1960s. This period is significant, for whether they were engaged in poetry, prose or psychoanalysis these writers were performing their work at a time when the interior, as a space apart from the exterior public world and as a place of mental dwelling, was under construction (Benjamin [1930] 1999; Rice 2007). Such that, prose of the interior was simultaneously prose of interiority; rendering the domestic interior in painstaking detail was one means by which writers sought to explore and reflect on their mental interiors. In consequence, Fuss’s work ‘opens a window onto … author[s] and text[s], reminding us that what we may at first perceive to be the timeless and universal truth of writing cannot be so neatly extricated from the complex particularities of spatial and material origins’ (2004: 2).

Fuss’s interest in the interior is part of a resurgent interest in the world that comes before the text. It is a world that, for much of the twentieth century, remained outside the purview of literary scholars. The influence of the Romantic Movement, with its emphasis on creativity as the work of a lone consciousness – and therefore, elusive, ephemeral, and unknowable – remained strong. Alongside this, New Criticism with its rejection of authorial intentions and, more recently, post-structuralism’s pronouncement of the death of the author directed attention away from the world of the writer and towards the world of the text (Barthes 1977; Wimsatt and Beardsley 1946). Fuss’s work, however, is part of a broader attempt to recover the world of the writer as something more than a footnote to textual meaning. Literary geographers bring a particular dimension to this recovery attempt, for as Hones’ (2014) work demonstrates, they are interested not just in place as a container of things, but in its making and moving. Drawing inspiration from Doreen Massey’s (2005) conceptualisation of space as a product of interrelations, a dimension of coexistence and a process of becoming, Hones uses this concept to argue for the novel as both an outcome and an on-going process of intricate spatial relationships. Thus, what literary geographers bring to studies of the literary interior is a cognisance of the relationality of interior space. It is not enough to know what occurs therein; we also need to know how these spaces are themselves produced and through what kinds of social and spatial relationships. The interior is not just a stage; it is interwoven into the being and the doing of the writer. Writing, as already noted is a process of longue durée; and, as Brace and Johns-Putra observe, ‘being a writer goes on beyond the act of writing and also occupies spaces other than those in which the writing goes on’ (2010: 411). Hence, while this chapter is interested in the place where pen and paper meet it recognises that what happens in the study or writing room is not always easily uncoupled from what happens in the other social spaces a writer inhabits in their day-to-day life. To draw out these ideas it is time to turn to the life and work of Arnold Bennett, and examine his literary interiors through a more explicitly geographical lens.

The writers that guide Fuss’s examination of the interior were living and writing at a time when the nature of the interior was undergoing mental and material transformation. Arnold Bennett’s writing career fell firmly within the middle of the period Fuss considers, beginning with the publication of A Man from the North in 1898. However, unlike the writers Fuss considers, Bennett’s work is rarely noted for its psychological depth or stylistic innovation. Indeed, he is a writer often placed ‘outside modernism’; one who did not experiment with a turn inwards towards interior consciousness and an identity-based political aesthetic (Ardis 2002; Paxton 2000)¹. Nor was Bennett noted for the quirkiness of his interiors in the way that Freud or Proust were. Despite being one of the foremost writers of his day, few photographs exist that document the various homes Bennett inhabited. That said, Bennett’s interiors were subject to another form of critique. In 1924 Virginia Woolf’s now famous essay, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown ([1924] 1959), appeared under the imprint of the Hogarth Press. This essay, the development of a number of earlier pieces, took Bennett to task for the nature of his prose, which was, Woolf argued, comparable to well-built houses in which nobody lived. Woolf carried this domestic analogy further, deriding what she saw as Bennett’s detailism: his tendency to describe character through a detailed inventory of houses and homes, which in its focus on material facts missed life itself.

The quarrel between Bennett and Woolf over aesthetics has been explored extensively elsewhere (Castle 2015; Squillace 1997); yet it is worth reminding ourselves of its lineaments not least for the way it was impelled by different senses (and values) of the interior. Woolf’s main criticism of Bennett focused on the psychological weakness of his prose; he rarely got beneath the skin of his characters. Thus, we know much about the detail of their lives, about what they looked like and where they lived, but when we try to move beyond the solidity of their lives, to enter their homes or their minds, the characters crumble and fade: there is nothing beyond the material world to get hold of. Bennett, in turn, was critical of Woolf’s retrenchment of the lived in favour of what he termed ‘fancy’ and ‘padding’ so that characters never seemed quite present (1929: 5). Where spatial interiority is a cipher for psychological interiority in Woolf’s thinking, for Bennett the spatial interior is a way of narrating the self and disclosing its multifaceted nature.

It is unsurprising, then, that houses are afforded such centrality within Bennett’s fiction; although Woolf’s critique was inspired by Hilda Lessways (1911), it is Clayhanger (1910) that develops through a series of houses both material and imagined. The novel follows Edwin Clayhanger’s interest in the building of his family’s new home, ‘to Edwin it was not a house, it was a work of art, it was an epic poem, it was an emanation of the soul’ (Bennett [1910] 2000: 169) and it was an emanation that altered his very perception of architecture:

[He] had always looked on a house as a front-wall diversified by doors and windows, with rooms behind it. But when Mr. Orgreave produced his first notions of the new house Edwin was surprised to find that he had not even sketched the front. He had said, ‘We shall be able to see what the elevation looks like when we’ve decided the plan a bit.’ And Edwin saw in a flash that the front of the house was merely the expression of the inside of it.

(Bennett [1910] 2000: 170)

Houses, for Bennett, were not a substitution for character; they were part of one’s character and life. Inspired, to some extent, by naturalism, which regarded the material world as an inextricable influence on character and action, Bennett saw where one lived, how one lived and how one arranged one’s material possessions to be expressive of personality, identity and self-development (Lehan 2005). This aesthetic idea was not confined to Bennett’s imagined world; it was, as we shall see, a formative influence on his domestic world.

Assembling the interior: Bennett’s home-making practices

In 1903 Bennett moved from London to Paris, believing the latter city to be a more conducive environment for creativity. Soon after his removal to Paris, Bennett wrote to his friend and fellow novelist, H.G. Wells, observing that ‘I have got a charming little flat here, & furnished it myself’ (8 October 1903, in Bennett 1968: 182). Throughout much of 1904 he records regular trips to ‘my “Empire” shop’, buying on one occasion ‘two occasional tables, a candlestick, and a flower-glass, all strictly Empire. I have now done buying furniture. I only want bibelots and things’ (2 June 1904, in Bennett 1932: 178). Empire furniture took its name from the Napoleonic Empire of 1804–1814. In style it was imposing and opulent, heavy and dark. It was often made from mahogany or ebony and richly patterned with symbols and motifs. Undoubtedly this was an interior rich in signification, but what is also apparent is Bennett’s care for his interior. It was a care that was ostensibly material, for Bennett’s interiors arose not through random happenstance but through painstaking assembly as objects were identified and arranged in-line with an overriding aesthetic. Yet, the very process of assembly discloses a pre-condition of dispersal and disassembly, and in navigating between the two, the cares of Bennett’s material world fold themselves together with those of his mental world. It is at this moment of enfolding as one world intrudes upon and potentially upsets the other, that we catch up with Arnold Bennett and consider the implications this doubling of the interior – as material and mental space – has upon his writing practice.

It is to the Villa des Néfliers, the house Bennett rented in Avon-Fontainebleau soon after his marriage to Marguerite Soulié in 1907, that we turn first. Bennett had begun searching for a new home in the autumn of that year, visiting Avon-Fontainebleau one wet, November day. Despite the weather he took ‘distinct pleasure in examining […] [the] houses’ and quickly ‘fell in love with the one I liked, and at once, in my mind, arranged it as it ought to be’ (26 November 1907, in Bennett 1932: 269). Bennett and Marguerite took up residence at Les Néfliers in April 1908, but it took Bennett several weeks to organise the house to his taste: ‘I haven’t yet arranged my days here. I am doing no reading, no fine writing, no disciplinary thought of any kind. It is true that I still spend about two hours a day in working at the arrangement of the house’ (2 May 1908, in Bennett 1932: 288). Throughout May the interior arrangement of Les Néfliers came to disrupt Bennett’s working routine. On 17 May 1908 Bennett and Marguerite returned home to find the ‘house overrun with ants’. While this invasion caused some disquiet, it was the subsequent arrival of new carpets which, while ‘re-arousing our pride in our toy house’, required Bennett to forego his ‘afternoon sleep in order finally to arrange the second spare room’ (17 May 1908, in Bennett 1932: 290). The full import of such seemingly minor events becomes evident as the month wears on:

To-day I seemed to get a little nearer the state of mind and the mode of life that I have aimed at […]. I have finally got my brain far better under control […] [but I am] haunted by dissatisfaction at the discrepancy between reason and conduct! No reason why conduct should not conform to ideas of reason, except inefficient control of the brain. This I am always preaching, and with a success of popular interest too, I cannot perfectly practise. It is the clumsiness of my living that disgusts me. Half an hour in the morning in complete concentration on the living-through of the day, and I should work wonders! But this all-important concentration is continually interrupted – interruptions which weaken it; sometimes deliberately abandoned for concentration on matters of admittedly interior importance.

(23 May 1908, in Bennett 1932: 291–292)

Les Néfliers is an interior in the making and one whose making unmakes and disarranges Bennett’s mental interior. The process of making the interior is very much one of assembly that involves removal companies, carpet fitters, self-reflection and personal action, not to mention the local wildlife and the temporalities of the building itself.

Exploring Les Néfliers through the lens of assemblage thinking, as a space in composition and therefore in a perpetual state of experimental flux (Anderson et al. 2012), gives insight into the transformative and performative nature of the interior. Assemblage thinking is increasingly used within the social sciences to explore the world as process rather than product, as something in the making rather than as something made. Thus, assemblage approaches reject conceptions of the world as a set of pre-given properties and binary entities (such as inside/outside), and instead, turn their attention to the often messy ways in which people, things and processes gather and assemble in the moment (...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• Introduction: The place and the scene
• Part I The place of writing
• Part II Writingscapes
• Part III En-route writing: Writers at work
• Epilogue: Travelling objects
• Index