Review: Jean McGarry, My Dark Room
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“View from Alexander Pope’s Grotto” (1800–1810) from an illustrated copy of The poetical works of Alexander Pope, Esq., Morgan Library. From My Dark Room (which cites a study dating the sketch to ca. 1760–1770)
What do a formal garden, a writing closet, a creepy grotto, a detachable pocket, and a Gothic folly have in common? Julie Park, author of My Dark Room, a study that embraces “art and architectural history, landscape design, anthropology, media and film studies; and above all, material culture,” would say—and says on almost every page—that these spaces, containers made for thought and imagination, are all analogues of the camera obscura, a simple optical device through which a luminous outside is projected through a hole onto a dark inside. It offers a view not static like a photograph, not clear like a window, not manufactured like a film. A swatch of the outside squeezes its contents through an aperture to a screen, a paper, a wall, visible in part because it is cloaked in darkness. What kinds of contents? Wind in the trees, a flag waving on a pole, things still or in motion, looming behind the viewer's back, coming alive in a dark cubby. The garden, closet, grotto, pocket, and folly, in short, provide space, for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dreamers and their projections, in the form of writing, reverie—routes tunneling from outside to inside the mind, and back again, when one is alone.
Many literary objects are reviewed in Park's study: Andrew Marvell's poem, “Upon Appleton House”; the odd oeuvre of seventeenth-century philosophe Margaret Cavendish; Alexander Pope’s poetry and letters (and grotto—the cave on his estate that he encrusted with glittery bits of shell, minerals, and running water); sensational letters hidden in the detachable pockets of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; as well as the craze in eighteenth-century England for gothic novels, follies, and ruins. And all held up as sub-species of the camera obscura. Does the link work, and, more important, does it enlighten? Luckily for the author, it doesn’t, in the end, much matter. For Park, it serves as a handy “pocket” to store all the cubbies that have intrigued her for many years of study, containers—natural and man-made—that foster productive rumination, sharpen and concentrate their denizens’ view on the real.
Examining this jumble of alcoves gives the reader a chance to walk alongside Andrew Marvell through Lord Appleton's formal garden, tracking not just the poet’s steps (and words), but the moment when he extracts himself (mentally) from his lowly station as household factotum and becomes a poet/observer. And again, a picture of an antique cloth pocket, embroidered and of the shape and size of a hot-water bottle, affords a glimpse at a young servant girl penning (and hiding) SOSes to her mother about her predator boss. Park is a tireless scholar; she clearly loves what she's discovering spirited away in the archives, and her sense of wonder and delight can be contagious.
It got me thinking both of what one looks at (if anything) while writing, and also what one sees while reading. Henry James, I think, did not create many rooms one could enter—with the exception, perhaps, of the cramped space where Princess Maggie Verver Amerigo's golden bowl drops and shatters. In Jane Austen, the gardens are often easy to picture as sites for overheard scandal, or sudden declarations of love. Other little masterpieces of setting: Little Marcel’s malingering great aunt’s stuffy bedroom in Combray, the balconies upon which Mann's TB patients are freezing in The Magic Mountain, the squalid psych ward “6” in Chekhov's story (would you rather link to Pevear/Volokhonsky or Garnet?), the downstairs hallway in “The Dead,” but the prize has to go to Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables, both inside and out. How much landscape and setting does a novel need? Park would say a lot. But overmuch description, as we know, will push the reader to skip.
A course I taught on landscape and setting was designed, in part, to test the word mounds that could make a chair comfortable or a room inviting. For a writer like John Cheever (“The Superintendent”), more was more, but for Peter Taylor’s all-too-real dining rooms, drugstores, and outhouses, less was more. How does a writer create a sense of space—big, small, filled, empty? And lastly, how does all of this stuff drive the story?
And how about writing “closets,” spaces created to stimulate the imagination? My first closet was a pair of pallets set up on the floor, thinly padded. My lifelong closet was any bedroom with the door closed. For ten years, I had a writing cabin, made from a kit, 10 feet by 8, perched on a hill and warmed by an electric fire with an extra-long cord running all the way down to the house. I have a whole room now with a pink chaise and beds for the cats: portable desk, college-lined notebook, fountain pen, and views to the outside, if I think to look up.
Jean McGarry’s most recent book is, Blue Boy, a novel.
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Review: Jean McGarry, My Dark Room
This is so interesting! "what one looks at (if anything) while writing and also what one sees while reading"
I think I look at "nothing" while writing but the inside of my head. Whatever pictures are happening there or I am trying to see or make.
What I see when reading .. someone else is supplying the starter images, a very relaxing feeling. I will often read those parts over again because they give a particular kind of pleasure or interest, and now that I think about it, maybe it is a way to fix the image in my head.
There is a related thing where writers tell you what someone looks like. I always wait impatiently for that kind of information. It is a little bit childish I think, and thus pleasurable.
I like the phrase "word mounds."
It seems that space in books is connected to atmosphere and atmosphere itself can become a kind of space? I am thinking of Knut Hamsun's books, Hunger, but also another one where a guy lives in a cabin in the woods with his dog ... I will have to go back to the book to see how it is described. Now that I think about it quite a few books have left images of rooms or other spaces in my head. Elizabeth Bowen I think is a good one for rooms and houses.
The kitchen in Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle!
My first closet -- was an actual closet, built by my father, who also built the room I shared with my two younger sisters. One day I turned my closet into a smaller room of my own. It made sense since it had two doors that slid closed. I drew a picture of a phone on one wall, to make sure I could be reached - by whom I have no idea! It looked like a push button phone before I think I ever saw one. We still had dial phones then, but I needed a phone that could be one dimensional, so I drew a rectangle with numbered squares inside it. Perhaps closets are places where we become equal to our needs somehow.