CHAPTER 1

A Room of One’s Own

A room of one’s own: Is there anybody who hasn’t at one time or another wished for such a place, hasn’t turned those soft words over until they’d assumed a habitable shape? What they propose, to anyone who admits them into the space of a daydream, is a place of solitude a few steps off the beaten track of everyday life. Beyond that, though, the form the dream takes seems to vary with the dreamer. Generally the imagined room has a fixed terrestrial address, whether located deep within the family house or out in the woods under its own roof. For some people, though, the same dream can just as easily assume a vehicular form. I’m thinking of the one-person cockpit or cabin, a mobile room in which to journey some distance from the shore of one’s usual cares. Fixed or mobile, a dream of escape is what this probably sounds like. But it’s more like a wish for a slightly different angle on things—for the view from the tower, or tree line, or the bobbing point a couple hundred yards off the coast. It might be a view of the same old life, but from out here it will look different, the outlines of the self a little more distinct.

In my own case, there came a moment—a few years shy of my fortieth birthday, and on the verge of making several large changes in my life—when the notion of a room of my own, and specifically, of a little wood-frame hut in the woods behind my house, began to occupy my imaginings with a mounting insistence. This in itself didn’t surprise me particularly. I was in the process of pulling my life up by the roots, all at once becoming a father, leaving the city where I’d lived since college, and setting out on an uncertain new career. Indeed, it would have been strange if I hadn’t entertained fantasies of escape or, as I preferred to think of it, simplification—of reducing so many daunting new complexities to something as stripped-down and uncomplicated as a hut in the woods. What was surprising, though, and what had no obvious cause or explanation in my life as it had been lived up to then, was a corollary to the dream: I wanted not only a room of my own, but a room of my own making. I wanted to build this place myself.

To know me even slightly is to know how ill-equipped I was to undertake such an enterprise, and how completely out of character it would be. Like my father—who only very briefly owned a toolbox, and who regarded the ethic of the do-it-yourselfer as about as alien as Zen—I am a radically unhandy man for whom the hanging of a picture or the changing of a washer is a fairly big deal. To Judith, my wife, I am “the Jewish fix-it man”—this being a contradiction in terms, a creature no more plausible than a unicorn. Apart from eating, gardening, short-haul driving, and sex, I generally preferred to delegate my commerce with the physical world to specialists; things seemed to work out better that way. Unnecessary physical tests hold no romance for me, and I am not ordinarily given to Thoreauvian fantasies of self-sufficiency or worries about the fate of manhood in the modern world. I’m a writer and editor by trade, more at home in the country of words than things.

At home, perhaps, yet not entirely content, and in this dim restlessness may lie a clue to the unexpected emergence of my do-it-yourself self. For if the wish for a room of my own answered to a need I felt for a literal and psychic space, the wish to build it with my own hands, though slower to surface, may have reflected some doubts I was having about the sort of work I do. Work is how we situate ourselves in the world, and like the work of many people nowadays, mine put me in a relationship to the world that often seemed abstract, glancing, secondhand. Or thirdhand, in my case, for I spent much of my day working on other peoples’ words, rewriting, revising, rewording. Oh, it was real work (I guess), but it didn’t always feel that way, possibly because there were whole parts of me it failed to address. (Like my body, with the exception of the carpal tunnel in my wrist.) Nor did what I do seem to add much, if anything, to the stock of reality, and though this might be a dated or romantic notion in an age of information, it seemed to me this was something real work should do. Whenever I heard myself described as an “information-services worker” or a “symbolic analyst,” I wanted to reach for a hammer, or a hoe, and with it make something less virtual than a sentence.

But the do-it-myself part came later; first came the wish for the space—specifically, for a simple, one-room outbuilding where I could write and read outside the house, at least during the summer months. Even after a substantial renovation, our house is tiny, and as Judith’s due date approached, it seemed to grow tinier still. As our rooms filled up with the bassinet and booster seat, the crib and high chair and changing table, the walker and stroller and bouncer and monitor, a house that had always seemed a distinct reflection of two individuals living a particular life in a particular place began to feel more like some sort of franchise, a generic nonplace furnished in white polyethylene and licensed fictional beings. Whatever the virtues of such an environment for raising a child, it was not one where I could easily imagine reading a book without pictures in it through to the end, much less getting one written.

Probably this sounds like nothing more than the panic of a new father, and I don’t discount that, but there were other factors at work here too. At roughly the same time, I was preparing to give up my office in the city, where I had a job at a magazine, to begin working out of my house, writing full-time. My office had never been much to look at—it was a standard corporate cube in a “sick building” with toxic air. Even so, it was a space where I enjoyed a certain sovereignty, where I could shut my door and maintain my desk in a state easily mistaken for chaos, and I was giving it up at the very moment that my house was shrinking. As for Judith, she already had a room of her own—the studio where she went each day to paint in perfect solitude. Now even this cluttered and fumy barn became a place I gazed at longingly.

I too needed a place to work. That at least is the answer I had prepared for anybody who asked what exactly I was doing out there in the woods with my hammer and circular saw for what turned out to be two and a half years of Sundays. I was building an office for myself, an enterprise so respectable that the federal government gives you tax deductions for it.

But the official home-office answer, while technically accurate and morally unimpeachable, doesn’t tell the whole story of why I wanted a room of my own in the woods, a dream that, in its emotional totality, fits awkwardly onto the lines of a 1040 form, not to mention those of casual conversation. I was glad to have a sensible-sounding explanation I could trot out when necessary, but what I felt the need for was not nearly so rational, and much more difficult to name.

It was right around this time that I stumbled upon a French writer named Gaston Bachelard, a brilliant and sympathetic student of the irrational, who helped me to locate some of the deeper springs of my wish. “If I were asked to name the chief benefits of the house,” Bachelard wrote in a beautiful, quirky 1958 book called The Poetics of Space, “I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” An obvious idea perhaps, but in it I recognized at once what it was I’d lost and dreamt of recovering.

Daydreaming does not enjoy tremendous prestige in our culture, which tends to regard it as unproductive thought. Writers perhaps appreciate its importance better than most, since a fair amount of what they call work consists of little more than daydreaming edited. Yet anyone who reads for pleasure should prize it too, for what is reading a good book but a daydream at second hand? Unlike any other form of thought, daydreaming is its own reward. For regardless of the result (if any), the very process of daydreaming is pleasurable. And, I would guess, is probably a psychological necessity. For isn’t it in our daydreams that we acquire some sense of what we are about? Where we try on futures and practice our voices before committing ourselves to words or deeds? Daydreaming is where we go to cultivate the self, or, more likely, selves, out of the view and earshot of other people. Without its daydreams, the self is apt to shrink down to the size and shape of the estimation of others.

To daydream obviously depends on a certain degree of solitude, but I didn’t always appreciate that it might require its own literal and dedicated place. For isn’t walking or driving to work or waiting on line for the ATM space enough in which to daydream? Not deeply or freely, according to Bachelard; true reverie needs a physical shelter, though the architectural requirements he sets forth for it are slight. In Bachelard’s view the room of one’s own need be nothing more than an attic or basement, a comfortable winged chair off in the corner, or even the circle of contemplative space created by a fire in a hearth. In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf sets more stringent specifications for the space, probably because she is concerned with one particular subset of daydreamer—the female writer—whose requirements are somewhat greater on account of the demands often made on her by others. “A lock on the door,” Woolf writes, “means the power to think for oneself.”

Both Woolf and Bachelard are obviously writing as moderns, for the notion of a room of one’s own—a place of solitude for the individual—is historically speaking a fairly recent invention. But then again, so is the self, or at least the self as we’ve come to think of it, an individual with a rich interior life. Dipping recently into a multi-volume history of private life edited by Philippe Ariès, I was fascinated to learn how the room of one’s own (specifically, the private study located off the master bedroom) and the modern sense of the individual emerged at more or less the same moment during the Renaissance. Apparently this is no accident: The new space and the new self actually helped give shape to one another. It appears there is a kind of reciprocity between interiors and interiority.

The room of one’s own that Woolf and Bachelard and the French historians all talked about as necessary to the interior life was located firmly within the confines of a larger house, whether it was an attic nook, a locked room, or a study off the master bedroom. I shared that dream, as far as it went. But none of these images quite squared with my own, which featured not only four walls but also a roof and several windows filled with views of the woods and fields. Not just a room, it was a building of my own I wanted, an outpost of solitude pitched somewhere in the landscape rather than in the house. And so I began to wonder (not one to leave any such thing unexamined) where in the world could that part of the dream have come from? Who, in other words, put a roof on it?

 

The deepest roots of such a dream are invariably obscure, a tangle of memories and circumstances, things read in books and pictures glimpsed in magazines. But the simplest answer to that question is an architect by the name of Charles R. Myer, an old friend from my college days whose off-hand suggestion set this whole project in motion. Though that was the very last thing I would have expected at the time, since I had dismissed the suggestion out of hand, deeming it tactless and quite possibly insane.

It was Charlie Myer who’d helped us renovate our tiny bungalow in the northwest corner of Connecticut, where most of this story takes place. It is, or at least it was, a resolutely nondescript clapboard house built in the 1930s from a Sears, Roebuck mail-order kit by a farmer named Matyas. The house is tucked into a roadside corner of an obstreperous wedge of land that climbs and leaps up the rocky hillside behind it like an unwieldy green kite. Not surprisingly, this land eventually defeated the farmer, but in the years since we’d moved in and begun to reclaim the remaining few acres of his falling-down dairy farm from the forest’s encroachment, we’d grown unreasonably attached to the place. I say “unreasonably” because any truly sensible person would have moved rather than attempt to rescue a house as ordinary and unsound as this one.

I mention all this because the beginning of this story—the inception of my building—takes place in the midst of this renovation, at a second-story bedroom window that looks back toward the hillside. It was in April, I believe, and the renovation of the house was at long last approaching completion, after a year so emotionally trying and financially devastating that I still don’t like to talk about it. We were not out of the woods quite yet—the new second floor had been framed, roofed, and clad in plywood, but the window in question was still nothing more than a rough opening to the air outlined in two-by-six studs.

On good days that year, Judith and I regarded Charlie with gratitude and even a measure of awe: it was already evident he had succeeded in transforming our humdrum little bungalow into a house of real character and, for us then, what seemed a perfect fit. On certain other days, however, when the complexity of Charlie’s design had brought our contractor to the cliff of despair and move-in day had retreated yet another month, I eyed Charlie with suspicion, if not outright fear, seriously wondering whether this man wasn’t really Ahab disguised as an architect, piloting us all toward certain ruin in quest of some dubious ideal only he completely understood.

But on this particular April morning I was taking the more benign view, at least to start. After going completely roofless for the better part of March, our bedroom was at last starting to resemble a room. Charlie was down from Cambridge on one of his monthly site inspections; when I arrived, his Trooper was already beached in the crisscrossed field of mud that had formerly been our front lawn. His car looked lived in, its backseat buried beneath a heap of rolled-up blueprints, action figures (Charlie has two boys), Styrofoam coffee cups, and wadded cigarette packs. After climbing the contractor’s rickety extension ladder and stepping out onto the new plywood subfloor, I saw Charlie’s bearish frame in the new window opening; clomping from one boot to the other to keep warm, he was peering out at the early spring landscape, still only incipiently green, with a cigarette cupped in his hand. This was the first time either of us had had the chance to glimpse what amounted to an entirely fresh perspective on the property—the startlingly new landscape a well-placed window can create. One of the aims of Charlie’s design had been to redirect the house’s gaze away from the road in front and back toward the hillside and our gardens, and it was clear from here that he had succeeded.

Charlie greeted me with his customary “Hey,” a quick throaty bark he somehow manages to work some warmth into. He immediately dropped his cigarette, grinding it into the plywood with his boot. I’ve told him maybe a half-dozen times his smoking doesn’t bother me, and anyway the “room” we were standing in was wide open to the weather, but Charlie likes to think of himself as someone who’s quit, so he allows himself to smoke only in the car or outdoors, and then only when alone. This was an accommodation that seemed very much in character, especially in the way it carefully layered an intricate regime of self-discipline over the absence of that very quality. In Charlie the supreme self-control and orderliness I associate with architects seems to be at constant logger-heads with deeper forces and appetites that he is too much a creature of the senses to master completely.

It is a contest that is perhaps most openly waged in his attire, which despite his best efforts invariably puts you in mind of a hastily made bed. This morning, for example, Charlie had on under his suede jacket a very sharp new J. Crew shirt, but already it was climbing up out of his chinos, which were themselves riding alarmingly low. The man’s rumpledness is so deep-seated it would probably defeat Armani, assuming Charlie could afford such tailoring; he’s just too baggy and lumbering a guy. He’s also too much of a Yankee: Charlie’s the kind of New Englander (he grew up in Cambridge, in a family of Quakers that came to Massachusetts in 1650) for whom the absolute worst thing you can say about someone, or something, is that it’s pretentious.

Not that this makes him the least bit careless about his presentation; to the contrary, Charlie has the architect’s clichéd self-consciousness about image and sensitivity to detail; it’s just that he’s loathe to come across that way. In fact he considers it a high compliment whenever a client tells him he doesn’t seem like an architect, since what people usually mean by this is that he listens well, is practical-minded, and prizes comfort as much as beauty. (Comf’table, pronounced in a cushy three-syllable version, is a favorite word; so is neat, deployed strictly as a superlative.) And, anyway, with two hundred hirsute pounds distributed somewhat unevenly over a six-foot frame, and a face of unusual sympathy and expressiveness—it’s animated by a footloose pair of shrubby eyebrows that almost touch in the middle—Charlie doesn’t look the part. But though the tail of his shirt may be on the loose, marching across his breast pocket you will invariably find a serried rank of pens and markers, their arrangement as fixed as the stars. I once asked him how his little system worked. “System?” he stammered. “You’ve got the wrong architect!” Yet after the gentlest prod he spelled it out in detail: “So, okay, the felt-tip here in first position? That’s a Stylist, for taking notes during meetings. Next up’s the black Expresso Bold, for rough schematic drawings, your basic big picture stuff, followed by the colored marker—usually red, but sometimes green—which I use to indicate clients’ changes on working drawings. And last but not least, the classic black Uniball fine-point, which is reserved exclusively for drafting.” Inside a very human exterior lurks the soul of an architect struggling to get out.

It eventually became clear that, on this particular morning, the architect was in fact out and about. Charlie seemed pleased with the new room and its windows, but I could tell that something in this picture was bugging him. When I asked him what it was, he tried to demur, but his eyebrows had started to dance. One of the errors in Charlie’s self-conception is that he’s extremely good at hiding his feelings.

I pressed, and he pointed out the window at the view.

Looking out the bedroom window, you could follow the informal axis along which our garden had developed, as we gradually extended a slender finger of civilization from the back door out into what Judith had taken to calling the Wilderness: the irrepressible second-growth forest and scrub that was steadily marching down the hillside, threatening to engulf what was left of the farm and the little house. At ground level, from the old first-floor windows, this narrow corridor of grass with its adjoining beds of flowers, its rose arbor and fieldstone walls, had seemed a genuine accomplishment. But from here our hard-won path out into the land seemed more tenuous and paltry than I’d remembered it, and I guessed this was what was troubling Charlie about the view. The axis was all but lost in the big, turbulent landscape framed by the new window, expiring abruptly just past the arbor, which now seemed a few short steps from the back door. A nice pie of meadow was now visible in the distance, part way up the hillside, but the path held out no hope of ever reaching it. Suddenly it looked pointless. The elevated view Charlie had created had diminished the scope of the garden, and with it the reassuring marks of our presence in this landscape. We were back where we’d started more than a decade ago, the little house cowering behind its moat of lawn, struggling to fend off the advancing forest.

What the garden’s axis needed now, the architect had concluded, was a destination—some sort of distinct object in the distance that would draw your eye out into the land and up the hill, somehow tie the cultivated foreground into the larger landscape above. I could sort of see his point, but it seemed to me this particular problem belonged down near the very bottom of a to-do list that had grown dauntingly tall. Judith and I were still camped out at my parents’.

“So you mean like a bench or something?”

“That would help. Absolutely. But I’ve got a neater idea.” He looked at me and grinned slightly, trying to gauge my appetite for neat new ideas, the last set not having yet been completely digested or paid for. “What I think we need to do is build something out there,” he began, extending an index finger through the rough opening and wagging it in the general direction of the meadow. “I haven’t figured out exactly what yet, but I think—in fact I know—that a little structure somewhere out there could really, really work. You need to think about it.”

Just then I doubt there was anything I wanted to think about less. The prospect of embarking on any new construction project was so far out of the question as to be laughable. Our contractor was running four months behind schedule, he’d just admitted that he had no idea where to find the “neat” postage-stamp-size windows Charlie had spec’d for the gable ends, or how in the world he was ever going to bend a four-by-four piece of lumber to form the porch’s “neat” curving lintels. Our savings had been cleaned out, and we were about to return to the bank for a second mortgage. The very last thing we needed now was another neat idea from Charlie.

I decided the best thing to do was just to let the suggestion lie, even after Charlie, warming to his plan, offered to design the new building free of charge. I didn’t know whether to regard this as an act of generosity from a friend or a particularly flagrant case of the monomania to which members of his profession seem to be prone. The odd thing about it was, I had never thought of Charlie that way. Compared to the Ayn Rand stereotype of the architect as a power-mad empire builder, a chilly figure at home only in the realm of his own ideal forms, Charlie had always seemed to me a fairly contented citizen of the real world, somebody with a deep appreciation for life as it is really lived, in all its unplatonic messiness. Yet here he was, actually suggesting that what the view from the window of his new building needed most of all was another Charlie Myer building.

I thanked him for the generous offer and promptly changed the subject to something compelling, like plumbing fixtures.

 

But I guess the notion had been planted, because many months later, when my thoughts turned to a room of my own, I found it was from the bedroom window that I invariably imagined it. Eventually I constructed a fairly detailed little daydream about the place, in which I followed myself walking down the garden path on a dewy summer morning with a cup of coffee in my hand, stepping under the rose arbor, ambling up the hill into the woods, and eventually coming upon my hut, which was planted somewhere far enough from the road that the world outside its door faded to rumor. What did the hut look like? The particulars were indistinct, except that the building seemed more woodsy than the house. It was shingled rather than clapboarded, for example, and had a steeply sloped gable roof.

Rehearsing this scenario in bed late one night, during one of the frequent bouts of sleeplessness I credited to incipient fatherhood, it occurred to me that my image of the building was based at least partly on a tree house I’d had as a child, growing up on Long Island—the last time I’d had a room of my own off in the woods. Strictly speaking, this wasn’t a tree house, since there were no trees involved in its construction, at least not living ones. It was more like a little cape on stilts, a gable-roofed room maybe ten feet by six, and raised five feet off the ground on four pressure-treated posts. My father had hired a contractor named Goeltz to build it for me. Together they’d knocked off the design from a picture of a fancy playhouse my father and I had admired in the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog.

The reason I didn’t have a normal, dad-built tree house is that, as I’ve indicated, I didn’t have anything even approaching that kind of dad. He was, and remains, one of the world’s great indoorsmen, a delegator of all conceivable outdoor tasks—lawn mowing, car washing, gutter cleaning, and tree-house building. By the time I was ten, which was when I’d kicked off my campaign for a tree house in the woods behind our ranch, he didn’t even own the tools needed to build one, having “accidentally” nailed his tool chest behind the walls of a cedar closet he’d tried to build for my mother in the basement. Whether consciously or not, my father had clearly wanted to make sure the cedar closet would be his last do-it-yourself project, and it was.

Not that I’m complaining, because it was due solely to his confirmed unhandiness that I ended up with the fanciest tree house in the development, one that boasted a pair of shuttered windows, a pine-plank floor, and a shingled roof. But the very best thing about my tree house (and the thing about it that, as a parent now myself, I find most astounding) was that no one but a kid could possibly gain admittance to it: the only way in was by climbing up a flimsy rope ladder and squeezing through a trapdoor in the floor that couldn’t have been more than eighteen inches square. As much as the tree house itself, the tiny trapdoor was a gift of extraordinary generosity: my parents had underwritten my dream of a place from which even they would be excluded.

Arguably this was a foolish thing for them to do, because later on the tree house would serve as the setting for various illicit activities. Though even then, it all seemed something less than authentically depraved—a matter of symbolism mainly, not that that was unimportant. Paging through a Playboy or smoking pot up in the tree house, the point was in many ways less sexual or pharmacological than sacramental, odd as that might sound. For this was high childhood ritual, and more than anything else, it was the tree house itself that these ceremonies commemorated, this airborne room of my own, which I came to regard as a temple of my privacy and independence.

 

Even more than adults do, children seem instinctively to grasp the deepest meanings of houseness—the full significance of territory and shelter, the metaphysics of inside and out, the symbolism of doors and windows and roofs. Shelter, for example, is a concept that nothing could underline as emphatically as a hail of well-thrown rocks. When I read Beowulf in college, all those vivid scenes of the mead hall under siege from Grendel made me think of those first thrilling nights my friends and I spent sleeping out in the new tree house, withstanding the predawn assaults of our enemies. Our local Grendel was an older boy named Jeff Grabel, who took it upon himself to terrorize us for reasons that were never articulated, but which we spent hours speculating about. The prevailing theory held that the dispute was territorial, since the tree house had been built in the middle of the half-acre wood that separated his family’s house from mine. Though this property technically belonged to my family, Grabel had had the run of it before the construction of the tree house, so it made sense he would have regarded our outpost as an alien incursion. For more than a year he dedicated his every effort to erasing our presence from the woods while we, with a matching tenacity, dedicated ours to preserving a toehold.

“Every child begins the world again,” Thoreau wrote in Walden, and it’s certainly true that the games of boys can be almost cartoonishly atavistic, dredging up from who-knows-where the primordial struggles of the race. Between Grabel and me the cause was nothing less than that of chaos against civilization, Grendel against the mead hall, the Sioux against the settler. (The first time I had occasion to meet Jeff Grabel off the field of battle, years later, I was surprised to find he could form an English sentence; during raids he had whooped exclusively.) The symbol of civilization we’d set out to defend was my little stilt-house in the woods, four walls and a gable roof, its archetypal form signifying home, settlement, and in the context of that forest, defiance. The hearth around which we gathered after dark was a flashlight, whose beam reflecting down off the ceiling held us in a warm circle of light. For mead we had cans of Hawaiian Punch. And outside all around us chaos raged.

Grabel and his allies chucked stones that would thud against the wood walls of the tree house with enough force to rock it on its posts. We would retaliate with water balloons, frequently delivered by catapult. Usually we felt fairly safe up there in the trees, the house’s windows shuttered against the hail of stones, but Grabel could keep it up all night, and sometimes we’d begin to feel trapped. Climbing down out of the tree house before dawn for any reason was out of the question. And this was occasionally a problem, as when one of us had to pee during the night. At first we relied on the equivalent of a bedpan, but this did not accord with the warrior image we were cultivating, so eventually we devised a more satisfactory solution: a curved length of black plastic pipe slipped through a knothole in the wall. The beauty of this appliance was that it could double as a weapon: its range and trajectory were adjustable to some degree, and we could hear Grabel scramble for cover whenever the long black snout emerged from its slot.

The tree house was always at its best under siege, creaking in the wind, its posts bending slightly, the better to withstand the blows. Bachelard says that this is a property of houses in general, that they only come into their own in bad weather, when the poetry of shelter receives its fullest expression. A house under siege from the elements becomes “an instrument with which to confront the cosmos,” he writes. “Come what may the house helps us to say: I will be an inhabitant of the world, in spite of the world.”

 

That was at night. During the day Grabel slept (or went to elementary school), and the significance of the tree house shifted. Instead of serving as a battleground, the building became a safer, more solitary, and dreamier place, my rural retreat from the cares of the big ranch house where, nominally, I lived with my three sisters, two parents, and numberless pets. Yet the tree house was in fact not the first such retreat I’d had. Even this room had its precursors, though these were strictly ad hoc and sited within the walls of my parent’s house. I’m thinking of the huts a child builds with an appliance carton, or two chairs and a blanket, or of one particular closet I cleared of coats and outfitted (with dials and gauges drawn in Magic Marker) to resemble a Gemini capsule. (NASA’s ingenious, high-tech envelopes of space have probably inflected my notion of the ideal room since the first time I watched Jules Bergman fold himself into one on television.) Lori, the oldest of my sisters, kept house for a time in another closet directly beneath the basement stairs, which gave the space a steeply sloped roof, lending it the feel of a cottage. Though these huts were firmly held in the embrace of our parent’s house, they formed another interior deep inside it, a second, more comprehensible frontier of inside and out, private and public, self and world, that we children could control.

Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space is the only book I’ve ever read that takes these sorts of places seriously, analyzing them—or at least our memories and dreams of them—as a way to understand our deepest, most subjective experience of place. He suggests that our sense of space is organized around two distinct poles, or tropisms: one attracting us to the vertical (compelling us to seek the power and rationality of the tower view) and the other to the enclosed center, what he sometimes calls the “hut dream.” It is this second, centripetal attractor that inspires the child to build imaginary huts under tabletops and deep inside coat closets, and draws the adult toward the hearth or the kitchen table, places of maximum refuge that hold us in a small, concentrated circle of warmth. These, in Bachelard’s terms, are huts too.

Of course Bachelard, a Frenchman, is describing a European’s sense of space, and an American—especially an American with childhood memories of a tree house and a quasi-adult dream of building a hut in the woods—can’t help but wonder if maybe we experience space somewhat differently in this country. For in addition to the centripetal impulse that Bachelard so tenderly describes—our wish to be “enclosed, protected, all warm in the bosom of the house”—isn’t there also a centrifugal impulse at work in the American dream of houses, one that is always pushing us outward, flinging open windows and reaching out into the surrounding landscape?

One of the all-time great American houses—and one that no doubt stands behind any American’s wish for a room of one’s own—exhibits exactly this quality, at least in its author/architect/builder’s description of it. At Walden, after procrastinating for most of the summer of 1845, Henry David Thoreau finally built a hearth in time for winter, but he always seems much less enamored of his house’s sense of enclosure than of its unusual transparency. He delights every time a sparrow or a field mouse manages to infiltrate his cabin, which appears to have been no great feat. Thoreau waited until the freezing weather of November before he plastered the interior, so much did he enjoy the free passage of wind and sunlight through the knotholes and chinks in his walls.

With his cabin “so slightly clad,” Thoreau wrote, “I did not need to go out doors to take the air, for the atmosphere within had lost none of its freshness. It was not so much within doors as behind a door where I sat, even in the rainiest weather.” It’s almost as though Thoreau’s dream house keeps wanting to dissolve itself back into the landscape; he cannot make his walls thin enough, and has nothing but scorn for the whole hypercivilized distinction between inside and out. What he calls his “best room,” in fact, was no room at all, but the “pine wood behind my house. Thither in summer days, when distinguished guests came, I took them, and a priceless domestic swept the floor and dusted the furniture and kept the things in order.”

However whimsical, Thoreau was giving voice to a concept of American space that others of a slightly more practical bent would eventually pick up on. Indeed, it could be argued that Thoreau’s crude hut by the pond, or at least his account of it, has had a profound impact on the course of American architecture. Certainly Thoreau was militating for a transparency to nature and an open plan—for “a house whose inside is as open and manifest as a bird’s nest”—long before American architecture attempted to build these things.

The modernist glass house eventually fulfilled Thoreau’s dream of transparency—and brought its inhumanness to light. For although the glass house was a brilliant conceit, the material embodiment of the American romance of nature, it proved to be an inhospitable shelter. It fell to Frank Lloyd Wright to realize Thoreau’s dream of a centrifugal house without forsaking the satisfactions of shelter that Bachelard describes. Wright designed houses with strong, compelling centers (“It comforted me,” he said in accounting for his love of massive central hearths, “to see the fire burning deep in the solid masonry of the house itself”) that nevertheless unfolded outward, pushing into the surrounding landscape and dematerializing their walls—metaphorically scraping off Thoreau’s regretted plaster in order to admit nature once again, though on our own terms now. Outdoor nature for Bachelard is something the archetypal house girds against, or offers refuge from. For Thoreau and Wright and generations of American house builders, the land is what the house wants to embrace.

 

It must have been some such sense of American space that compelled me to situate my dream of a hut out in the woods, first as a child and then, some thirty years on, as a parent-to-be. Being the most literal people the world has ever known, it’s hard to imagine any American possessed by such a dream contenting himself for very long with the sort of imaginary hut-within-the-house Bachelard describes. Or even, for that matter, with Virginia Woolf’s room of one’s own, since her room is not a built thing so much as an agreed-upon thing, a consensual space located within a house still under the control of others. We Americans have always taken our metaphors very seriously, ever since we first decided it would be a good idea to site and actually build the “city on a hill” that generations of less literal-minded people had been content to regard as a nice figure of speech. But giving form and an address to our most abstract mental constructs—to our wildest dreams—seems to be what we do here. “Build therefore your own world,” Emerson urged, and we have tried.

This doesn’t, however, quite explain how my own grown-up dream of a hut expanded to include the improbable idea of building it with my own hands. Any number of qualified general contractors could have rendered my dream perfectly literal with no help from me, and I’m sure it would have turned out a lot more square and true than it did. This was the part—the do-it-yourself part—that I could not have foreseen. Judith suspects that the prospect of a house vibrating with the howls of an infant—our son, Isaac, was born shortly before construction began—would have made any time-consuming outdoor project look attractive just then. Maybe, but you’d think I could have come up with an easier and more socially acceptable avenue of escape, like taking on paid work for which I had some acumen.

At least some of the blame for this unlikely turn of events should probably go to a captivating if slightly irresponsible book that Charlie lent me soon after our fateful exchange before the bedroom window. The book was called Tiny Houses, and had been written, or drawn (since it contains very few words), by an architect by the name of Lester Walker. Essentially a pattern book, and very much in the American grain, Tiny Houses presents photographs and architectural drawings of some forty one-person structures. The book includes plans for most of the tiny houses I knew about—Thoreau’s cabin; Jefferson’s honeymoon cottage (where he lived for several years while Monticello was being built); George Bernard Shaw’s writing hut—and a great many others I didn’t. There are ice-fishing shanties built on top of frozen lakes; a handful of funky prefab cottages; a forty-two-square-foot “rolling home” built in the back of a 1949 delivery van; several minuscule vacation cabins (including an “inside-out” summer house in which everything but the bed is arranged along the exterior walls of a tiny sleeping hut—perhaps the ultimate centrifugal house); a self-sufficient mobile home modeled on a space capsule (!); a two-hole outhouse that a painter had converted into a meditation hut, and, the tiniest house of all, a wooden bus shelter that measures two feet four inches square and can hold two children “but only if they are standing.”

As Charlie may very well have hoped, I found myself spending a fair number of my insomniac hours in the company of Tiny Houses, marveling at the ingenuity of their designs, the enterprise of their builders, and more than anything else, the distinct and exceedingly quirky character of these structures. The best of them were houses cast in the first-person singular, each the precise material expression, in wood or canvas or aluminum or plastic or simple tar paper, of a single individual. By studying the plans and snapshots of these houses you felt you understood something essential about their builders, as though the building were a second face, another window on the self. After paying a visit to his friend Daniel Ricketson’s vine-tangled Gothic Revival shanty in Brooklawn, Massachusetts, Thoreau wrote in his journal that in the building’s architecture “I found all his peculiarities faithfully expressed, his humanity, his fear of death, love of retirement, simplicity, etc.”

I doubt that a big house could ever offer quite so intense a distillation of a single character or voice, so tight and uncompromising a fit of space to self. George Bernard Shaw’s writing hut, for example, an eight-by-eight pine shack at the bottom of his garden, was constructed on a steel turntable that allowed him to single-handedly rotate the building during the course of the day, in order to follow the arc of the sun. What could better suit a playwright than a house that looked at the world not from any one angle, but from every possible angle in turn?

Books like this have a way of gently interrogating the reader’s imagination, provoking the kinds of questions that can only be answered by way of a daydream. One cannot skim Tiny Houses without wondering, What would my first-person house look like? Would it be fixed or mobile, and what should it be made of? Where’s the best place to site it, and what would I want its windows to look out on? And yet there is one fairly obvious question the book plainly doesn’t want you to ask, which is, Who could I hire to build it for me?

“One of the great thrills in life is to inhabit a building that one has built oneself,” Walker writes in his introduction, neatly closing off that particular avenue of speculation. “My goal was to inspire people of all ages and degrees of carpentry skill…to take hammer in hand and build themselves a little dream.” There was something intrinsically do-it-yourself about the best of these buildings. You could see how their character was part and parcel of the work that went into making them, work that bore all the marks of the amateur. And one of those marks, as that word’s root reminds us, is love.

A house in the first person did not seem like something a third party could build. To hire the local Goeltz, to knock the thing off from a picture in a catalog, was to miss the point, or at least, the possibility. For besides getting his son off his back for a while, what had my father really gotten out of his hut-building project? What had he learned from it? Not nearly as much as he might have, or as I stood to were I to build my house myself. I began to see how there might be a connection between the kind of mental life I hoped such a place might house and the kind of work I’d have to learn in order to build it, a connection hinted at in words such as independence, individual, pragmatic, self-made. To build a house in the first person, a place as much one’s own as a second skin, would require an exploration of self and place—and work itself—that simply could not be delegated to somebody else. The meaning of such a place was in its making.

And anyway, this Lester Walker made building sound so easy, so roll-up-your-sleeves doable, as he chipperly introduced his plans for “very, very inexpensive small dwelling projects that would take a week or two to build.” Obviously Walker had neither my proficiency nor Charlie’s architecture in mind. If I strung together all the days I ended up working on it, my own first-person house took closer to six months to build and cost somewhere on the far side of $125 a square foot. (Thoreau famously claimed to have spent only $28.12½ building his cabin, but no construction cost accounting can ever be believed.) Yet, not having any way of knowing these things in advance, I began to entertain and then actually to believe that perhaps I could build such a building myself, and that doing so could prove not only economical and interesting but necessary in some mysterious way.

For someone as attached to words and books and chairs as I am, gratuitous physical labor wouldn’t ordinarily hold much appeal. Yet I had lately developed—in the garden, as it happened—an appreciation for those forms of knowledge that seem to yield most readily to the hands. Different kinds of work, performed with different sets of tools, can disclose different faces of the world, and my work in the garden had revealed a face of nature I’d never seen before, not as a reader or a spectator. What I’d gleaned there was a taste of what the “green thumb” has in abundance, this almost bodily sense of plants and the earth that comes from handwork, sweat, and a particular quality of attention that involves very little intellect, but all of the senses. It reminded me just how much of reality slips through the net of our words, and that time spent working directly with the flesh of the world is the best antidote for abstraction.

Of course I knew something about gardening. And while it seems to me building has some striking things in common with gardening—both are ways of giving shape to a landscape; of joining elements of nature and culture to make things of usefulness and beauty; of, in effect, teasing meaning from a tree—the intellectual and physical abilities each discipline calls for could scarcely be more different. In the garden a casual approach to geometry, a penchant for improvisation, and a preference for trial and error over the following of directions will rarely get you into serious trouble. Building a house is another story. It seemed to me that the difference between gardening and building was a little like the difference between cooking (which I like to do) and baking (which I can’t), a difference that has everything to do with one’s attitude toward recipes. Mine has always been cavalier.

Yet after a while the sheer improbability of building something myself became the most important reason for attempting it. Just because I hadn’t come by the necessary skills or habits of mind naturally (and certainly not genetically) didn’t mean I couldn’t cultivate them. During the renovation of our house I’d spent enough time observing the intricate discipline of the architect and wondering at the carpenter’s fluency with the things of this world to have acquired an admiration for these alien habits of mind, and over time my admiration blossomed into envy. Watching the carpenters patiently translate Charlie’s sheaf of abstractions into the reality of a habitable and meaningful room, I realized that what I beheld was the very foil of my own impatient and disorderly brain.

Straight and plumb, square and level, right and true: To someone like me, who can always see at least two sides of every issue, who spends his days in the company of words he dearly loves but knows better than to trust, these concepts glistened in the light of an obsolete but still longed-for certainty. Staunch, dependable, beyond the reach of argument, they were qualities you could actually build a house with. I envied all that: the deliberate, first-this-then-that of architecture, the old reliable syntax of carpentry, the raising of nonmetaphorical structures on the nonmetaphorical ground.

Writers sometimes like to draw glib parallels between building and writing, but it seemed to me nothing could be farther from the truth. Did the writer inhabit a world where “true” and “right” were things you could ascertain, where abstractions stood or fell of their own weight, where the existence of something didn’t depend on a consensus? At the end of his day the builder alone could say—and yet didn’t need to say, because there it was—he had added something to the stock of incontestable reality, created a new fact. It sounded too good to be true. This might not be a universe where I’d feel even remotely at home, but it was one that I resolved to visit, in the hope of finding something I needed to know.

 

I was in no hurry to tell anyone about the do-it-myself part of my plan, fully expecting a cold shower of skepticism, if not outright ridicule. Judith especially, who was already armed with many excellent reasons to be dubious about the project, had to be approached carefully. As she pointed out the first time I broached the idea to her, over dinner one evening, she’d never once seen me try to repair a broken chair, let alone build anything from scratch. But I was ready for this, and the notion that I was proposing to build the thing myself precisely because I was so ill-equipped to do so proved to be a deft rhetorical stroke, a jujitsu move that effectively disarmed her skepticism by embracing it. By the end of the conversation Judith could fairly be described as supportive, though she strongly, and as it turned out wisely, urged that I look for someone who could help me—someone, as she put it, “who at least has a clue.”

When I finally decided to call Charlie, we’d been living in the house he’d designed for nine months, and already the place fit us like a set of familiar clothes. We were almost whole again financially, and the bruises of the construction process had all but healed. For now, I was working in the loft of the barn where Judith paints, and that was tolerable—as long as I didn’t mind the turpentine fumes rising from her palette in winter, the atticlike heat that collected up there in summer, and the yammering drizzle of her talk radio all year long. Painters and writers clearly use different sides of the brain when working, which makes sharing a sound system, if not a space, virtually impossible. The barn loft was a room to work in, but it certainly wasn’t a room of my own.

Since moving back into the house, I’d gotten into the habit of dressing in front of the bedroom window, a fine vantage from which to assess the daily progress of the seasons, the weather, the garden. This is the window where I’d stood with Charlie a year before, and every morning I’d find myself drawn to the same spot, daydreaming my way down the garden path, a shirt button at a time, in the general direction of that notion of his, which by now seemed very much my own. I still wasn’t picturing anything terribly specific, not yet. But no longer nothing, either.

And so on one of those mornings, in the spring before the summer that brought Isaac, I called Charlie first thing to tell him my plan. I told him that not only did I want to go ahead with the building we’d discussed, but that I was thinking of building it myself. I expected a protest, and probably would have backed right off had I detected any sign of one. But Charlie didn’t even inhale hard. He acted as if my being a builder were the most natural thing in the world. Which was daunting.

I told him that, much as I appreciated his offer of a free design, I intended to pay him for it. But he needed to understand that whatever plan he came up with, it had to be simple enough for someone like me to build.

“You mean idiot-proof,” Charlie said; he hadn’t asked.

“I won’t take that personally.”

I launched into a rambling monologue about the little temple I envisioned. “It could be like a…with a desk looking out on…and we can’t forget to…”—this long flight of long-pent words straining to capture this still dreamy room of my own. Charlie let me go on like this for a while. And then he broke in to ask a perfectly straightforward question to which I had no answer.

“So where do you want to put this building?”

Aside from someplace in the landscape framed by that window, I had no idea. Much as I’d been daydreaming about the building, I’d neglected to settle on a spot for it. I hadn’t even ventured out those three hundred feet to walk the land yet, at least not on foot. I realized I’d flunked my first test in Concrete Reality.

“Look, there’s no point talking about this or any other building in the abstract,” Charlie explained, “because the site is going to dictate so much about it. This thing is one kind of guy if we perch him on the edge of the meadow looking back toward the house, and something completely different if he’s sitting off in the woods all by himself. So that’s the first thing you need to do…”

Charlie was trying, gently, to bring me and my daydreamy notion down to the ground.

First this, then that.

The time had come for me to site my building, to fix this dream of mine to the earth.