D8

Leslie Cockburn

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Speak Up

When we hear our friends and family over the phone, it is pretty obvious how they are feeling.

You can just tell by the timbre of their voices. When you are making all your Christmas calls, and your best friend sounds hesitant and very tired, you just know all is not well with him or her. And that's when, if you are very best friends, you probe, and probably all comes out.

You'd never get that "premonition" that told you something wasn't quite right with an email.

The other thing that is really important when keeping in touch is to be able to visualize each other in your actual surroundings. By that I don't mean just the town or the street, I mean the real house or apartment or office. Somehow, knowing that makes for a more personal connection.

It's the same with writers. The more we know about their "digs" the better able we are to understand their private worlds and how those impact their writings. I admit there is an element of voyeurism in peering at the homes of the rich and famous and literary. But whether you just want to know all you can about your favourite writer, or your interest is spurious, heaven forfend, you can learn a lot about people from the homes they live in.

The library has a lovely, big coffee-table book about the dwellings in which some of the greatest writers of the past hundred years lived, wrote, and suffered for their art.

It's called Writers' Houses, it's produced by Francesca Premoli-Droulers, and you will be endlessly entertained by its contents.

Premoli-Droulers says some of the houses you'll see in this book are important because they provide the context in which the occupants spent the most fertile years of their creative life. Others were chosen, she admits, purely because of the authors' personal interest.

Whatever the reason, here you'll find the family seat of Karen Blixen where she spent a melancholy childhood in a rustic hulk of a manor house in Denmark, and to which she returned after she was forced to sell her beloved African farm and the love of her life, Denys Finch Hatton, perished in a plane crash. The photos of the house, inside and out, are breathtaking and the bio succinct, informative and sympathetic.

The home in which Cocteau lived in Milly-la-Foret from 1947 was still unaltered in 1995 when this book was published. It's fascinating.

Lawrence Durrell, author of the beloved classic My Family and Other Animals, remained enamoured of Cyprus forever, even though it was impossible to settle there. Finally, after yet another of the political upheavals that kept him on the move much of his life, he arrived in the small medieval town of Sommieres in the south of France where he spent his last years. It was he felt very reminiscent of Greece. You might say the Sommieres great house was one of the loves of his life. Again the photographs and write-up are outstanding.

Faulkner's home in Oxford, Miss., was the centre of his universe. When he bought it in 1930 it was 90 years old and had no running water, electricity or a heating system. Faulkner had fallen in love with a house he couldn't afford. He did the renovations himself; it was his all. The photos show it in all its southern charm.

The book includes wonderful photographs of the homes of Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, Vita Sackville-West, Dylan Thomas, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, and Yeats, among others. You can, from the photographs alone, understand why the homes were so inspirational to their owner-writers. If only we could hear their voices, too. This is a book to be savoured, poured over, thought about, and just plain enjoyed. You'll find it at the Fredericton Public Library.

Leslie Cockburn is the young adult and adult services co-ordinator at the Fredericton Public Library, the resource library for the York-Sunbury region. Her column appears on the Book Page every Saturday. She can be reached at leslie.cockburn@gnb.ca.