A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder

by Michael Pollan

  “First we shape our buildings,” Winston Churchill famously said, “and thereafter our buildings shape us.” I’ve often wondered how this building shaped me and my work in the years I did all my writing in it. Certainly the books and essays I wrote here were deeply rooted in the view from my desk, firmly planted in my garden. And since I’ve left the writing house my work has ventured farther afield from the garden I used to overlook and out into the wider world. Today the view from the room where I write includes the skyline of a city, so perhaps it isn’t surprising that the writing might also have enlarged its purview, and grown a bit more political.

  When the time came to move away, I gave some serious thought to putting the writing house on a flatbed truck and bringing it with me to California. But as you will soon learn, the building was as carefully fitted to its site as it was to me, and it’s hard to imagine it displaced to an urban backyard in Berkeley. So in 2003 when we pulled up stakes in New England it stayed behind.

  But though I may have abandoned the writing house, I couldn’t bear to sell it or the house. So when we moved west we leased the place to a young couple who, like we do, work at home. Bill now works in the writing house, which he’s put to a very different purpose. Bill manages real estate for living, and has filled the little building with steel file cabinets and more office equipment—photocopiers, faxes, printers, shredders—than I would have thought it could ever hold. There’s a high-speed Internet connection now, and the place, which I try to check in on every summer, has a completely different feel to it. With the daybed piled high with file folders, the space for daydreaming has shrunk down to a cramped couple of square feet or so. What it feels like now is a crowded real-estate office plopped down in the woods.

  I miss it sorely and look forward to the day when I’ll be able to reclaim it and work in the writing house again. Still, I do spend a fair amount of imaginary time there, which is not nothing. Very often when I’m having trouble sleeping, or fretting over a sentence that refuses to unknot, or corralling a paragraph to go where I want it to, I’ll put myself at the big ash desk, with the windows hitched up in August mode, and feel the soft breeze of a summer morning passing through the space. A place of my own: as it began it is once again, which is to say a cherished daydream. It is one I can usually count on to clear out my head, so I guess you could say I still get some good work done there, in the hut by the pond three thousand miles away.

  Acknowledgments

  I had a great deal of help in the making of A Place of My Own—both the building and the book. I can’t imagine a better guide to the world of architecture than Charles Myer, or to the world of carpentry than Joe Benney—these friends, my Virgils, were the best of teachers and companions. Besides giving me an education in the intricacies of their respective crafts, Charlie and Joe both read the manuscript and made valuable suggestions.

  Mark Edmundson read several drafts of the book and never failed to improve it by his comments; I felt him by my side at every step. I was also fortunate to have the wise and generous editorial help of Allan Gurganus and Mark Danner. Ileene Smith read the final draft with scrupulous care; only another writer who has had the benefit of her judgment and her ear can know the value of her contribution.

  In Ann Godoff I have everything a writer could ask for in an editor: wisdom, encouragement, patience, and friendship. Amanda Urban, my agent, was not only unflagging in her enthusiasm, as always, but also inspired in her editorial suggestions. My thanks, too, to Elsa Burt, Enrica Gadler, Jim Evangelisti, Don Knerr, Susan Dunbar, Don Statham, Jessica Green, Gerald Marzorati, Dominique Browning, Malka Margolies, Christopher Stamey, and Liz Denton.

  But, finally, it is Judith to whom I owe this book. There is not a page in it that doesn’t bear the mark of her thoughtfulness, encouragement, and sacrifice. Though Judith made it a point never to hit a single nail, neither the book nor the building would stand if not for her generosity. In more ways than I can say, A Place of My Own is her gift.

  A Place of My Own

  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-servic
es 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, roo
fed, 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.