Painting Writers’ Houses

I had a student several years ago who created a perfect project for my class on houses in American literature and culture. He wrote and produced a film about a literature professor who was terrified to leave his house and a young woman who spent her life painting “portraits” of houses. It was a doomed love story. The professor was meant to dwell indoors reading and underlining pages of text, and she was drawn to contemplating the domestic landscape from outside it. (We spent a good bit of time on Cather's The Professor's House--so perhaps this was a modern retelling of her tale).

I have loved the idea of “portraits” of houses ever since—It seems to me to get at one of the desires we act out when visiting the places where people we admire have lived and worked. We want to see how they are reflected in their places. We want to see the domestic self-portrait that a house or study might provide.

A recent mural commissioned by NYU for their Languages and Literature building combines views of many different writers’ workspaces (Frank O'Hara, Edith Wharton, Washington Irving, Jane Jacobs, Pedro Pietra, and Zora Neale Hurston). The mural by Elena Climent, is a series of trompe-l’oeil widows through the writers’ bookshelves into their workspaces, and was profiled in a New York Times article here.

I haven’t seen the mural in person, though I will certainly make the effort next time we’re in NY. At her blog Climent has posted an image of the entire mural and a detail of Washington Irving’s desk. The article detailed her work and research is brief, but I’m curious about her research process and her experience touring these sights.

(Images here are of Washington Irving's house and study at Sunnyside, from HABS via the Library of Congress )

How Buildings Survive

The home that Langston Hughes grew up in Lawrence, Kansas was torn down long ago. It happens all the time. Old houses are razed to make way for new.

I’m interested in how it is that buildings survive. What we can learn from the ones that do? What can we learn from the ones that are lost? Some are saved in my new home city, Philadelphia,

because of their association with a famous person or because they are considered old enough and “historic” enough to be

important. Others, despite their associations and age, are wiped out.

I started this project, researching historic houses in the U.S., while I was living in Lawrence, Kansas, and love and family have inspired my move far from my Oklahoma roots to Philadelphia. Here it is, frankly, quite a bit easier to explore old buildings. Not necessarily just because this is a city where so many historic buildings have managed to survive, but because in this part of the country there is an expectation that it might matter whether or not they do survive. And should they survive, or should they be resurrected (as in the case of the National Park Service’s President’s House Site), it matters a great deal the kinds of stories that are told with them.

I’m most interested, currently, in the intersections of literature and places, real places and imagined ones. What makes folks visit historic places, and what makes people interested in visiting the homes of authors that they admire? What makes folks spend time walking around the small town, Red Cloud, Nebraska in search of Willa Cather or fly halfway around the world to Prince Edward Island to visit an imagined Green Gables? What makes readers invest in a Paris walking tour in search of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code? And what forces contribute to the fact that I can visit the Edgar Allan Poe House, where Poe wrote “The Black Cat” but I can’t visit the house that Hughes describes in his autobiographical novel, Not without Laughter?

Here I keep track of my visits to historic sites, research, and adventures in Philadelphia.