Monkeys and other items crucial to writing

Memories of three of the study visits I loved the most.

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Before today’s newsletter, something for your diary: the Creative Hour returns this Sunday 27 November at 10am GMT (i.e. London time). We’ll be getting together on Google Meet for a chat followed by 50 minutes of silent writing (and then another little chat). I look forward to seeing familiar faces and new ones too.

I’ll send out the link early on Sunday morning. Please note this is for paying subscribers – if you’d like to join us, please upgrade your subscription for £40 a year or £4 a month.

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I recently received an invitation to have dinner with a previous guest of the In Writing podcast. I’m looking forward to it, not least because they’re hosting me at their home. If you’ve heard the show, you’ll know that I start every episode by asking my interviewee to describe the room where they write. Pre-pandemic, I recorded all the conversations face to face, usually in that room itself, so I could report back firsthand; then Covid came along and scuppered it. The writer I’m seeing for dinner is one of those who I interviewed remotely during lockdown – so I’m very much hoping to break into their study while I’m there and see if it looks the way I pictured it.

People often tell me that those first few moments of each episode are their favourite part of In Writing. I don’t know why exactly; my theory is that the visual description triggers the imagination, and makes the podcast more absorbing. Whatever the reasons, for today’s newsletter, I’m going to tell you about three visits that were particularly memorable for me. If you had your own favourite, or have seen a writer’s study elsewhere that appealed to you, please tell us about it in the comments.

Wendy Cope

It was so exciting to visit the poet Wendy Cope in summer of 2019. It was the first episode of the podcast I ever recorded, and I couldn’t believe she said yes. I emailed her agent and he replied the same day, which is not how these things usually go; most episodes involve weeks of back and forth. He said, ‘Wendy says she can do this as long as it doesn’t involve any photos.’ She hates having her picture taken for interviews, as she told me later. ‘What still pisses me off,’ she said, ‘is that you know, becoming a poet – you don’t think you’re signing up for having to worry about what you look like.’

At that point, I was sending out requests almost as a way of forcing my own hand, because I was extremely nervous about making the podcast. But two weeks after I emailed Wendy’s agent, I was on my way to her home – so that was it. I was committed to making a series. It felt like fate, or very good luck.

Wendy lives in Ely, Cambridgeshire, with her husband, the poet Lachlan Mackinnon. I’d been to Ely once before, only a few months earlier, with an ex-boyfriend who had unceremoniously dumped me soon afterwards. It was nice to go back there on this mission, which was so joyful and empowering for me, and so absolutely not about boyfriends.

What struck me the most about Wendy’s home was that it was really overflowing with books. They lined the hallway as I came in; I believe there were shelves of them in the downstairs loo as well. We moved to her study, at the back of the house, overlooking the garden – and that contained a wall of hundreds of one-poet collections. A separate shelf in the room had poetry anthologies, and there were more of those in the corridor, along with a section of foreign poetry in translation.

There were other interesting things in Wendy’s study, but it was the books that stuck with me. Of course every writer has a lot of them, but in this home of two poets, they felt like twigs and feathers in a nest. At the same time, they suggested the potential for sprawling thought: thousands of gateways into other realms. Here’s what Wendy said about them.

There’s millions more upstairs as well – and in the garage. And we got rid of about 2000 books before we moved, and we’ve got rid of a few more, quite a few more since we moved, but then every Christmas and birthdays, we get more. I mean what I do now is, I read a novel, then I give it away, straight away.

There are lots of poetry books there that I haven’t read and probably am not going to read, as well as a lot that I have read – but you know, I might need to look something up, or Lachlan might need to look something up. You know, quite often he says, Have you got a copy of X’s book? that he needs to look at, and quite often I have, so I think I have to hang onto those for the moment. But I’m thinking of getting rid of more novels. I’ve kept some favourite novels but I don’t know if I’m going to read them again and… I don’t know. I need to get rid of some more.

That was over three years ago. I imagine that Wendy has got rid of more books since then, but acquired a lot more too. And why not?

I’m hugely grateful to her for helping me to get the podcast started. Listen to the episode here.

John Crace

It was in September 2021 that I went to journalist John Crace’s house in south London and carried a cup of tea up to his study in the attic. John and his wife collect ceramics, which were all over the house, and I glimpsed her pottery wheel through an open door as we walked up the stairs.

In the attic were more bowls, plus framed illustrations from some of John’s Guardian columns, including Digested Reads of Stephen Fry’s memoir The Fry Chronicles and Keith Richards’ memoir Life. There was a photo on the wall from his appearance on the BBC quiz show University Challenge – ‘I was terrible. I mean it was really embarrassing. At one stage we were losing and facing abject humiliation.’ There was also a collection of his father’s and grandfather’s medals. Among them was a gallantry medal that his dad received when his boat was sunk in the Second World War.

There were books too, of course – John collects first editions, which he described as his alternative to a pension. I asked about his favourite, and he pulled it from the shelf.

John: This one. This is The Bell Jar. It was obviously Sylvia Plath but it was originally published under a pseudonym of Victoria Lucas.

Hattie: I feel like I should be wearing gloves. That’s beautiful.

John: I love that book.

Hattie: Were you a bit horrified when I put my cup of tea here on the shelf with all your valuable books?

John: I tried to restrain myself Hattie. I try to not be too controlling.

Most touchingly, John had a collection of cuddly toys in his study; technically, they belonged to his son. ‘He used to have a thing about monkeys,’ he said. ‘And he’s now 25 and not really interested in cuddly toys, and I couldn’t bear to throw them out or to give them away, so I’ve got all his old monkey teddies lining up against the window.’

Listen to the episode here.

Anna Hope

There was something magical about visiting novelist Anna Hope at her house in Sussex, and my memories of it are very atmospheric. It was a cold day in December 2019, and when I arrived, she offered me vegan chocolate cake, which I think someone had made for her birthday. Her kitchen looked out onto a very icy garden, and nestled at the bottom of that, down some slippery steps, was a writing shed. Anna persuaded me to borrow practical shoes to get down there, so I didn’t break a leg in my high-heeled boots.

It was cold in the shed; she lent me slippers and plugged in a heater that we put between us. It was a Scandinavian-looking cabin, made of pale wood panels. In my memory at least, it was shaped like a quarter of a cylinder, with three straight walls and a fourth that curved up to become the ceiling. It was very quiet, protected by the garden; beyond that was the Ashdown Forest, famous as the inspiration for Winnie the Pooh’s Hundred Acre Wood.

What struck me on this visit was that if you’re very lucky and can claim your own space, you can almost build ideas outwards from your brain. As Anna put it:

The first novel I wrote was a novel that wasn’t published, but I wrote it in my kitchen in my basement flat in Hackney. Then to be able to go to the shed and have all these Post It notes up, and have the inner workings of my mind there, and not disturbed, was just the most extraordinary thing – to then walk back into that space every morning and it still be there. It’s a luxury. It’s wonderful.

Listen to the episode here.

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Thank you to everyone who commented on last week’s post. Heather shared a link to this clip of Ethan Hawke making the argument that it’s OK to be pretentious, which I really loved.

I think the determination to knock people down when they show an interest in anything intellectual or associated with ‘high’ culture – perhaps a particularly British type of mockery – is really limiting and snobbish. It’s one of the reasons that I’m fond of France, where there are philosophy programmes on mainstream TV and radio, and a taxi driver can start talking about opera or poetry without any raised eyebrows in the back seat.

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If you’re new to this newsletter, please come and introduce yourself here. That’s all for today, but I hope to see lots of you on Sunday. Good luck with your writing until then.