Cambridge is such that it can sustain not one, but two literary festivals a year. They attract good speakers and good audiences, but it does sometimes feel like being in an echo chamber where there is not a lot of dissent. It’s all very enjoyable, but a little hermetically sealed. (I exclude Patrick Gale from this slight criticism as he can do no wrong, and is the most charming, funny, and engaging author I’ve heard here. Twice. And I’d go again.)
This year I decided to pick a couple of events with authors who might not automatically figure on my reading list. So when we got back from Flanders - having very annoyingly, due to the M11 being closed, missed hearing Jarvis Cocker talk about clearing out his attic (the book is great) - I went to listen to the artist Celia Paul and Dr Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, in conversation.
[A Corner of the Artist's Room in Paris (1907-09) by Gwen John]
Celia Paul has written a book as series of letters to Gwen John (1876-1939) - whose empty room pictures I love - in which she gives a very sparing account of her life as a single-minded artist who had a relationship, and child, with Lucian Freud. The event was in the Fitzwilliam Museum, and although it was all about art, paintings and Gwen John, they sat in front of a blank projector screen. It could not have been more ascetic; no pictures, an author who is very precise and economical with words, unwilling to fill a silence for the sake of it or to please listeners, and an entire audience on tenterhooks and hardly daring to breathe. It was fascinating, and very different to the average lit fest love-in.
I’ve read her two books this week. I adore auto/biographies, novels, and paintings which deal with domesticity, especially if they mirror my own preferences, but Celia Paul’s domestic arrangements as she describes them are the antithesis:
“Throughout the thirty-eight years I have lived here I have kept this space as inhospitable as possible in order to ward off any potential intrusion. There is nowhere comfortable to sit. I don’t have curtains or double-glazing. I don’t have a television, I don’t hang pictures on my walls or keep house plants or vases of flowers. The rooms are empty.”
This made me wonder, could I live with bare floorboards and ready-meals from the local supermarket - even if this were in Bloomsbury in a flat opposite the British Museum - in order to devote myself to my art? Could I exclude my family and even my husband (Celia Paul would not allow hers to have a key to her flat)? I’d have to be so incredibly sure I was good enough and that my art was worth it, and I’d need a core of steel and an obliviousness to comfort. In fact, I’d almost have to feel as if I were a saint, devoted to my calling, and suffering for it on a daily basis. Although she writes that it’s harder for women who are artists, I think this level of conscious domestic privation (not just in the studio) is almost impossible for anyone, which is perhaps one of the reasons why convents and monasteries now find it difficult to get new recruits.
I find it all very unsettling, but then I don’t enjoy austerity. I can’t not close the curtains at night, and I would be permanently, dreadfully depressed by bare floorboards. I’ve lived in miserable flats and houses, and would never actually choose to repeat the experience. When I have a nice hot bath, I am reminded of a bathroom in Sheffield which was so cold that I paid for baths at the students’ union (do they even have public baths any more?). I had a postcard of the Gwen John painting (above) on my wall there, and even though her room is barely furnished, the radiant light, colours and atmosphere suggested a different domesticity to my almost equally bare but dingy student room.
[Pelican Books and Lime Leaves (1996) by Emily Patrick]
So I prefer what might be termed bourgeois comfort, but what the hell. Give me a kitchen table, a bunch of flowers, books, fresh food, definitely curtains, and I’m happy.
[Marmite, Butter and Guinness (2014) by Emily Patrick]
Give me a print with jars of Marmite or tea cups by Emily Patrick. Give me a book which conveys the delight of warm domesticity, and I revel in it.
My enjoyment of literary domesticity reaches all the way back to Enid Blyton’s descriptions - vivid little word pictures for a beginner reader - of the yellow, green and cream interior of the caravan in Mr Galliano’s Circus, and the pots of red geraniums on windowsills and plates of warm gingerbread in many a farmhouse.
I adored the story in which Milly-Molly-Mandy (above) gets a room of her own with green curtains and a yellow pot of nasturtiums, and I was fascinated by the way the bed-bound Katy in What Katy Did transforms her gloomy sickroom into a cheerful, ‘nice and in order’ place which brings people to her and makes them people want to sit with her. “It was a pleasant room now. There was a bright fire in the grate. Everything was neat and orderly, the air was sweet with mignonette, from a little glass of flowers which stood on the table.”
The reading preferences I developed as a child have stayed with me. I can’t banish depictions of appalling living conditions once I’ve read them; books such as Bleak House and Mary Barton and Love on the Dole are often almost unbearable in this regard. (There are rooms in them which, in my mind, are not that far removed from Celia Paul’s.) But positive images of domesticity still evoke an immense sense of pleasure as I read. I actually relish and savour the words, and for me they have some talismanic power; they hold and protect something I know to be fragile and fleeting. But once they are printed, these particular images of domesticity, just like a painting, can last forever. I like knowing they are there, and that I can return to them.
So when, many years ago and long before I met Nicola Beauman of Persephone Books, I came across A Very Great Profession (first published 1983), I was thrilled to find someone who recognised the importance of domesticity (and more) in novels. I remember using her book to compile a long list of books to read which I might otherwise never have found. Then Nicola made it all so much easier by republishing many of them. Since then, Dorothy Whipple, Lettice Cooper, Richmal Crompton, Marghanita Laski, EM Delafield, Dorothy Canfield Fisher et al have complemented novels by the likes of Elizabeth Taylor, Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton. They, like Celia Paul in her way, understand that domesticity is one of the greatest subjects of all in art, literature, and life.
Completely agree! Your ‘Gentle Art of Domesticity’, full of colourful comfort and creativity, sparks joy every time I open it and first pointed me towards Persephone books, for which I am extremely grateful.
No curtains here, but books, baked goods and cats. I'm a fan of Dean Street Press e-books and what they call "Furrowed Middlebrow" stories. Lots of cozy domestic scenes to be found within. I'm a particular fan of early D.E. Stevenson, and Ruth Adam's "A House in the Country" is a must read.
https://www.deanstreetpress.co.uk/pages/books_page/4