A Brown Study: In the Studio

American Poetry Review, The, Jul/Aug 2004 by Stewart, Susan

Charmant pays de l'imagination, toi que l'etre bienfaisant par excellence a livre aux hommes pour les consoler de la realite. . .

-Xavier de Maistre, Voyage autour de ma chambre

GROWING UP IN NOISY HOUSES WHERE the present was always pressing, I dreamed of having a place of my own where I could read and think and write. The nearby fields of my grandparents' farm and the recently cleared lands of our suburban neighborhood were spaces to wander in search of silence and whatever presence of mind I could gather from it. Thinking is still like this for me-displaced, ambulatory, an internal drum and constant. And writing has its hunting and gathering phases. I have to walk or row in a direction, then return and retreat: collecting on the way to composing, composing on the way to understanding, revising on the way to discerning and revealing, then revising and revising more. A study, I had thought: a high light-filled place protected from weather where moods can be floated with some of weather's freedom. Study to be quiet and to do your own business, wrote Paul to the Thessalonians.

Now I have a reading spot at the top of my own house, an attic with a chair and a door to the roof. There I can listen to the rain hit the tin and watch the end of day from a western window. On important nights like this summer's approach of Mars or last week's lunar eclipse, I can sit on the threshold of the doorway and make out the stars above the city's blur. But my study, the room you partly can see in this picture, faces east and is a place for deliberation. There's a chair for reading and a chair for writing. A long row of dictionaries is in reach, and the horn-handled magnifying glass for the OED, but the Ragazzini Biagi always hides when I need it. The fat Petit Larousse with its dandelion-stamped cover-"Je seme a tout vent," it says, "1947" -is falling apart gradually for reasons of its own.

When I'm ready to write, I must choose the books and images I need and turn away from all the rest: no more arguing and dawdling with them. Drafts and notes and versions pile up on the table and drop to the floor, get carried around in a pocket, find their way around the room, gradually drift through the house. Every long poem, every essay, every book has its own small whirlwind of pages and objects. As the writing finds its order, the space around it moves to chaos-a collapse of the world loaned to form. Between projects, the happy absent-minded clean-up, itself a stage of revision and second thoughts. But brief lyrics rarely start in this room-they come at their own speed in walks or dreams. Who can believe in a writer with a neat study?-it's either a sign of pure inspiration or a sign of nothing happening.

I need a window for clarity and sparks of motion and change. Just outside, an ancient larch leans over the garden wall-today it is nodding with the first snow and I can see a fat robin huddling half way up. Coleridge also saw a bird in a larch treea "throstle" or thrush in a larch appears in a version of what became his Dejection Ode. And those lines about the larch themselves came from his journals: "The Larches in spring push out their separate bundles of Leaves first into green Brushes or Pencils, which soon then are only small tassels." Claustrophobic Coleridge, stuck with writer's block: perhaps only he could imagine the fronds of the larch pushed out from the pressure coursing in the branches-born in a state both freed and frayed, every pencil turned into a tassel.

Beyond the larch are the crossroads of Germantown Avenue and Upsal Street-a major intersection where fire trucks and ambulances lean on their horns and on Mondays the blind hymn-shouting broom-seller lines up his wares against the church wall. He sells Apocalypse and conversion in pamphlet form, and though I once bought one of his deluxe brooms, it came with a curse since I didn't take his literature. He means Literature in the old sense of anything written. When I sweep the sidewalk beneath my study, I find love notes, shopping lists, late slips, and stray homework. "I hate this town" and "Ya-ya, the best B-ball player in G'town" someone has written with a marker on the back of the "Drug-Free School Zone" sign. Across the alley, a billboard suggests "Arrested? Not guilty? Consultations accepted," but a windstorm has blown away the telephone number and address.

In his Voyage autour de ma chambre, de Maistre takes a mental trip around his room for forty-two days and then writes a sequel, his "expedition nocturne." Most nights in my own study you would find a moth or two; in the Autumn evenings bevies of shiny-backed grasshoppers the size of capital letters sometimes land on the page with a thudding snap. One winter night several years ago, a starling came down the chimney, flying out of the cold fireplace and banging in a panic around the room. Eventually I coaxed it out the window on a draft of cold air it must have recognized as its element.

For de Maistre the pictures on the walls of his room were openings into other worlds. If you circled my study, you'd see Ruskin leaning on a crook in his garden and Adam and Eve weeping nakedly as they leave theirs; a turquoise cherubina from Peru and Borromini's blueprint for San Carlino; scenes from Tristram Shandy, and a portrait of Joyce, with Lucia reflected in the left lens of her father's glasses; Raftery's name scrawled on the wall of a Galway schoolroom, and Jean Henri Fabre in old age. Fabre, my chosen ancestor, sits stiffly under his wide-brimmed black hat before a backdrop of over-exposed somethings-maybe rhododendrons, maybe rhododendron wallpaper. Dear William Cowper wears a striped cotton headdress that seems to be holding his poor brains together. To the left, some sketchbooks and an early family bible. Two little boys embracing by the Orvieto fountain. To the right, the Azumith circle in its scratched pine box; a stack of notecards of the Gubbio studiolo.