Author Homes

It’s been a rough few months for the former homes of great authors. In January, Robert Frost’s home was vandalized by partying teenagers. More recently, both the Mark Twain and Edith Wharton museums face severe budget shortfalls and likely closure or sale. Reading Ahead’s Harold Augenbraum wonders what these possible losses could mean:

Perhaps in these cases we are not only talking about the past as a predictor, but as a movement through horizontal space that re-senses our perceptions of the author and his or her literary work. When we visit these homes and imagine Wharton or Twain lolling on the terrace with a cup of tea, we create a literary moment. We write this as a short memoir, and a dialogue with the author.

The new media and our conception of the future will change that movement and our relationship with literary authors. If we don’t visit the author’s home physically, we often do so as an imaginative construct with the help of two-dimensional media. Isn’t that what photography and film initiated? A visit to The Mark Twain House in Second Life, anyone? But what does it mean for our experience if we only visit in cyberspace?

I can’t help but think that terrible management led to these crises. The Wharton Museum, in a noble but ill-advised purchase, acquired Wharton’s 1000+ book library from a private collector for a price well into the seven figures. The Twain House meanwhile embarked on an expansion they clearly could not afford. Perhaps the fundamental problem is this: good book people are often poor business people, and good business people often do not understand books? No matter what the causes, however, it’s a tragedy such resources were squandered. Hopefully it’s not too late to arrange better and more creative stewardship, perhaps under the auspices of an institutional library.

Luckily, there are some bright spots. Edward Gorey’s home has just opened for the season in Yarmouth Port “with a new exhibit of Gorey’s childhood drawings, including cartoons published in The Chicago Daily News when he was 12. The exhibit also showcases his drawings for books he wrote and his illustrations for works by T. S. Eliot, Edward Lear, and others.”

And those Frost vandals? They’ve been sentenced to mandatory class time. On anger management? On underage drinking? Nope. In addition to restitution, they’ve been ordered to study the poetry of Robert Frost.

UPDATE: Maybe not that bright after all. Apparently, guards at Hemingway’s Cuban home are trying to sell books from his library. If offered any book from Hemingway’s library for a couple hundred bucks, would you do it? For Irish writer Adrian McKinty this question wasn’t hypothetical:

He repeated his offer. “Any book in Hemingway’s library for two hundred dollars,” he said in carefully enunciated English.

I nodded to show that I had understood his proposition.

I had spent the last half hour examining the library in Hemingway’s Havana house – the Finca Vigia. There were thousands of books: first editions, engineering texts, old atlases, older dictionaries, galleys mailed to Hemingway for blurbs, review copies, gifts; many of them had been doodled over by Hemingway himself and several were extensively underlined and annotated. A bruised early copy of The Sun Also Rises was probably worth a couple of thousand and at the bar of the Ambos Mundos Hotel a man had told me that somewhere in these stacks was a signed Catcher in the Rye which I knew I could flog on eBay for at least fifty grand.