Dave's Book Blog: "Rooms of One's Own" by Adrian Mourby

Monday, 7 April 2025

"Rooms of One's Own" by Adrian Mourby

Mourby travels the world, visiting fifty "places that made literary history."

I don't understand the urge behind literary pilgrimage. My mother loved visiting houses where her favourite authors lived and claimed to have bought from a junk shop a chair in which Jane Austen had sat but I never saw anything magical in that relic. Even supposing Jane's bottom had been supported by that seat - so what? I always felt that I could get closer to the author by reading her books.

Mourby admits in his Introduction that while "for some of the authors in this book, sitting in the right room was all-important" and that the locations he visited sometimes made it into the works, "over the last few years I've visited rooms ... that seem to bear no relationship to the author or the work produced there." Which made me wonder why I was bothering to read the book at all.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed it. Mourby has a light, witty style and there are many little facts and anecdotes, sometimes about his experiences (“The bar proudly proclaims ‘Buy One Beer, Get One Beer’ which struck me as the least you can reasonably expect.” Hotel Continental Saigon - Graham Greene), sometimes about the buildings (“Brown’s Hotel ... [has] been open since 1837, when over the period of the year Lord Byron's former butler, James Brown, bought up four London townhouses in Dover Street to create a gentleman's hotel.” Browns Hotel, Rudyard Kipling.) and sometimes about the authors (“A hotel legend runs that in March 1953 Kerouac met his friend Gore Vidal at the Chelsea, both intent on meeting up with the poet Dylan Thomas, newly arrived from Wales. Failing to find Thomas, the two men got very drunk and ended up spending a passionate night together.” Hotel Chelsea, New York - Dylan Thomas)

An easy read ... and one of those books you can dip into for ten minutes at a time.

And there are amusing little facts, such as that round the corner from Proust’s childhood home was a church where the resident organist was Faure or that the Stalinist era redecoration of the Astoria hotel included “bound fasces - a common 1930s symbol - carved around the bedroom doors.” (St Petersburg - Mikhail Bulgakov)

One niggle. The book incorrectly categorises Edgar Wallace “among the American literary greats"; he might have died in Hollywood while working on King Kong but he was born in Greenwich, England and only moved to the USA when he was 56.

Personally, my most important criterion for a room in which to write is peace and quiet and preferably a blank wall to stare at.

Other selected quotes:

“Christ Church, one of the largest of Oxford's colleges ... was built by Cardinal Wolsey, Henry VIII’s chief minister at the time when he was trying to arrange the king's divorce from his first queen, Catherine. Initially known as Cardinal College, it was renamed King Henry VIII’s College after 1529 when Wolsey fell disastrously from favour. Finally in 1546 it was refounded by Henry as Christ Church.” (Christ Church - Lewis Carroll)
“Hauteville House ... is an insight into the mind of Victor Hugo. Walking through it is like coming face to face with the man himself: full of energy and ideas, brilliant, florid and off the scale egocentric.” (Hauteville house, Guernsey - Victor Hugo)
It was in Les Deux Magots cafe in Paris that “Sartre discussed resistance to the German occupation with his mistress Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus, concluding eventually that it was better to write than fight.” (Les Deux Magots, Jean-Paul Sartre)
“Lindy’s was the Broadway deli where - allegedly - the line ‘Waiter, there's a fly in my soup’ received its first witty riposte.” (Buckingham Hotel New York - Damon Runyon).
“On the door was a maitre d’ known as Saint Peter who determined who was allowed to enter.” (Buckingham Hotel New York - Damon Runyon.)
“The Pollard Memorial Library where Jack - playing hooky from school - determined to read every book in stock.” (Lowell, Massachusetts - Jack Kerouac)
“‘I'm only a beer teetotaller,’ Shaw once remarked. ‘Not a champagne teetotaller’.” (Cathay Hotel Shanghai - George Bernard Shaw)
“Nice has nothing to do with creativity.” (Wordsworth)
“Wordsworth is probably the last literary great I’d invite to a dinner party. According to many accounts, he would dominate the conversation and talk entirely about himself. ... At least Byron would have made everyone laugh, albeit while trying to seduce my wife.” (Wordsworth)
“Tess of the d’Urbervilles is almost sadistic in the way that Thomas Hardy makes sure that anything that can go wrong for his heroine does.” (Hardy)
“We expect writers to be good at their craft and we like them to be inspired by their surroundings, but we can't expect to be honest as well.” (Oriental Hotel, Bangkok - Somerset Maugham)