A room of one’s own

JUST ACROSS THE DUSTY STREET from my funky old rented adobe in Santa Fe, N.M., was a small, plain-looking bookstore, where each day I would wander in after having a latte on the patio of the coffee shop next door. It was during my first autumn there, and the whole world seemed full of possibility in this new round of life-after-death of a marriage. I couldn’t wait to try it all out.

I set up a laptop on the landlady’s antique dining table and began to write, or tried to, but soon knew it was useless. The words kept coming out in a fidgety, fractious way, all imminently scrappable the minute they hit the screen. I figured out why: This wasn’t my familiar work space -- the room whose loss I most mourned of all the rooms I had left behind. This was not a room of my own. This was a room of someone else’s.

So instead I drank coffee outside in the crisp desert air and sat on the floor between bookshelves reading. One day, I spotted a new arrival by photographer Jill Krementz called “The Writer’s Desk,” with an evocative black-and-white portrait on the cover of Eudora Welty typing at her ordinary schoolteacher’s desk in her old-fashioned home office in Jackson, Miss. Inside were a few dozen more portraits, all of writers working at home, in their own spaces. Oh, how wild was my yearning.

About midway through, I came upon a picture of novelist Walker Percy at work on his bed, saying this about writing: “The only thing I can say is that it takes place -- or the best of it takes place -- in a sort of vacuum. On the worst of mornings. On the least likely of mornings. When you expect nothing to happen. When the page is blank. When the mind is blank. Even in a state of depression and melancholia. And then, only with good luck....”

A rush of sentiment flooded through me. Many years ago, Percy had said as much to me in a letter. We corresponded after an interview I’d done with him at his house in Louisiana, not far from where I’d grown up. I had an undergrad worship of him after having read “The Moviegoer,” his National Book Award winner, and, more than anything, I just wanted to know him. He let that happen, and he became, for a while, if not my mentor, then my great encourager.

During our interview, I told him that I could think up titles, but no plots to accompany them. Well, he said, we should collaborate -- he was lousy at titles. Nothing’s coming to me, I wrote him later from San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where, with shimmering impetuosity, I’d moved for a few months. Something had to, he wrote back. I couldn’t waste all those brilliant titles.

Percy lived in a gracious two-story house on the Bogue Falaya River in Covington, where I spent one afternoon with him on the screened porch drinking iced tea and projecting myself into his writer’s life. I asked him whether he was distracted by the noises around there, like the ducks roaming about in his backyard. No, he didn’t even mind having kids around, he told me.

“The distractions are when you go wrong, when you try to force your creation in the direction it doesn’t want to go. I can get off the track and write 200 pages that are not good. All of a sudden I’ll read it and see how far off I am and then I have to back up six months.”

Well, that must make him feel like ending it all right then and there, I said.

“No, not really. Because you knew all along something was wrong. You have this uneasiness. It’s like amputating a gangrened arm -- you get rid of it and make a fresh start.”

All this was pretty useful for a little know-nothing writer-hopeful. Now if I could just see where he worked, that would give me the most important clue of all about how he created what he created, these books that had affected so many people. What I expected I no longer recall, but probably some kind of big room with a big carved mahogany table on big-planked floors, a ceiling fan or two, plantation shutters and plantation chairs. In other words, a naive Southern-girl version of a Southern gentleman’s writing quarters.

Where he actually worked was at a nondescript desk in a nook of his bedroom. No matter. Dashed fantasy aside, that tiny area pulsated with energy.

“I look at these photographs with a prurient interest,” begins the introduction by John Updike to “The Writer’s Desk,” “the way that I might look at the beds of notorious courtesans. Except that the beds would tell me less than these desks do. Here the intimacy of the literary act is caught in flagrante delicto; at these desks, characters are spawned, plots are spun, imaginative distances are spanned.”

E.B. White worked in a barren boathouse on a rectangular desk no more than 3 feet by 4 feet. Toni Morrison wrote longhand on her sofa. Saul Bellow stood at a drafting table. Tennessee Williams sat in a folding director’s chair at a long folding table. John Cheever sat in a straightback chair at the foot of his bed. Percy lay in his bed. None of them, apparently, needed more. The task, Updike goes on, “as we sit (or stand or lie) is to rise above the setting, with its comforts and distractions....”

I know all this now. I know I need only the smallest of spaces in which to work, with the most ordinary of props and tools. In fact, I’m happiest in the smallest of spaces, in a cocoon-like work setting, curtains drawn and lights low like I’m in Emily Bronte-ville, tied to a confined spot. My home office is such a place. So is my office office. Still, I dream. Come to think of it, now that I’ve resurrected buried memories, I wouldn’t mind trying out that big room with the big mahogany table and plantation shutters that I imagined for Walker Percy. Maybe paint the walls dark green. Put in a palm or two.

I’d go to work in my new home office in a new place in a new way, and the whole world would be full of possibility again.

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Barbara King is editor of the Home section. She can be reached at [email protected].