Eventually, if you are alone in a room, you’ll find your way to writing, I tell myself. Doesn’t Paul Schrader says a whole series of his films are about men in rooms?
Recently, staying at X, I had a suite of rooms to myself. A bedroom with a big iron bed standing up at the end, but with ten feet either side. A hallway with a cold tiled floor. A bathroom. I thought that was it, but the next day, I discovered another series of rooms to the side. A workroom, a utility room, opening like a dream. And all these in the basement, with low windows at ground level.
Sometimes, I would snatch a moment to go down and read. Reading is always different in an expanse of rooms, I concluded. More space out of which the pages open. As though to turn open a page was also to turn into that space, to lose oneself in that real space as I lost myself in fiction. Around me, the space was quiet, still. I read, and the quietness gathered in my reading.
The book seemed to slide into itself, setting language to wander without reference, and the space around me was the correlate of that inner labyrinth. And I thought of the film A Company of Wolves, where the interior of the house opens into another, fictional space. Through what strange topography did this outside within admit through those real rooms and corridors wolves from the dream of the young girl?
One morning, my Hostess showed me what was called the orchard, a few trees in a wide, enclose space with stone walls. And I thought, looking back at the house, this must be the chateau in which Blanchot grew up, and if I looked in the right way, I would find the ‘high room’ where he wrote (and from which a manuscript was confiscated by the troops who put the same day up against the wall to be shot).
Then, off the orchard, another small dwelling, that was being turned into a tiny flat. I thought when I saw the ground floor, it is similar to the room described in The One Who …, and knew upstairs there would be the small room Blanchot himself describes, which looked out towards Corsica from one window and some cape or another from the other.
My own flat, in which I am sitting tonight, I imagine to enclose the hotel room of the narrator of Death Sentence, that he is so reluctant to show to his friends. Their presence contaminates the space, he says. He can’t find the absence he needs after they’ve gone. Is this why he rents hotel rooms elsewhere in the city, simply to leave them absent? And shouldn’t I remember the episode in the hotel room in Y. that I imagined was the double of the one in which the narrator writes in Waiting, Forgetting?
A writer is man who has nothing to do who finds something to do, says Thoreau. With Blanchot, who also wrote in hotel rooms in the evening, after work (in the night, he says, reflecting on his past as a political journalist), I think that nothing invades that something, and what is done is a kind of undoing, a way of making the room more absent.
Sometimes, between tasks, between what would usually occupy me, I find myself wandering from room to room. I always think of the narrator of When the Time Comes who loses himself in a corridor, a hallway. A beautiful, baffling book, which I knew, as I read it, was something I would have wanted to have written. Yes, there it was, opening to me what I had wanted to open in myself. A door into – what?
What was it like, the inside of Beckett’s house at Ussy? What did his desk look like? No, not to the photographer from the newspaper that would try and interest us in the workrooms of this or that writer. I think it is the absence I want to see. To know in me what Beckett knew when writing carried him along.
The beautiful obituary for Blanchot in The Times has him writing his fiction slowly and painstakingly, line by line. For myself, I imagine he wrote his essays each in one magisterial draft. That prose was natural to him; it rolled from him, and was forgotten almost as soon as he set it on paper. Did he write with a typewriter? By hand? The latter, I’ve decided, for his fiction. He wrote in longhand, before typing up the manuscript. And then burned his notebooks, the drafts – everything.
Not for him the strange archiving that saw, as Ballard complains, one of the ‘angry young men’ keep the pencil with which he drafted Lucky Jim. No commemoration. Do not feed the scholarly monster … (Why did Beckett donate his working papers to anyone? Why did he let his drafts be kept? ‘Academic!’ is an insult in Waiting For Godot …) They’ll only come knocking at your door. You”ll only be interviewed, and, like Beckett, be forever opening a bottle of Jameson’s or Bushmill’s for your visitors. But then Beckett had Ussy, where he never received visitors. That’s where absence found him, surrounded him.
I once visited a writer’s house, albeit one whose work I did not know. I saw her rattan armchair, where she entertained a hunter played by Robert Redford in a film. Did I see her desk? I don’t remember. And I think I should also write of the several houses of Duras, and how their space is made to resound in her writings. The house at Neauphle, where films were made and books written. The flat in Paris, with the cupboard where the manuscript of The War was found.
What sort of room would I like to find? What room within the room? Imagine a room outside the house in which it was found. Or a room turned to the outside, with the whole of the world behind you as you type. But the outside inside is more than that. The voiding of a room. A continually emptying, as if no one had lived there, not even you. And especially that: not even you.
And now think of Kafka’s room in the house of his parents, where he lived until it was nearly the end. More of a corridor than a room, seeing the bustle of family members passing by. He couldn’t write until very late at night, dreaming, as he wrote to his fiancee, of another, buried room, without windows, in which he would do nothing but write, all day and all night (but day and night would have no meaning for him). The room in which his fiancee would have to come to bring him food (and what other role could be hers’, he asks. Does she really want that kind of life?, he asks, trying to dissuade her).
Ah, but towards the end, dying, he finds a companion, Dora, who sits on the sofa as he writes. Wonderful companionship, for which he had waited a whole life! But there is no time left. He dies elsewhere, and on one of his conversation slips, which he needed because he had lost power over speech, he wrote, ‘a bird was in the room.’ A bird was there, and now I am in another room, Tarkovsky’s, where he lay dying of cancer in Paris. It was there a bird joined him, flying in through the window. Just as, more than 10 years before, he had a bird visit the room of a dying man in his film, Mirror.
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