A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

June 24, 2018

 “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” one of Hemingway’s short stories, can be interpreted in many ways, but for me it’s always meant the place where I write.
     Some of these places haven’t been literally well-lighted or exactly spic-and-span. I’ve written in bedrooms on my childhood desk and on my teenage desk (a la Snowy’s and Bev’s mahogany veneer desks); on a portable typewriter sliding around on a kitchen table; on note pads in beds, in armchairs, and in cars. And for the past forty-one years I’ve written in my garret, the upstairs of our Cape.
     But when summer comes and my garret gets hot, if I don’t want to listen to the noise of a fan I bring my writing downstairs. In the recent computer years this means moving my laptop down to the dining-room table, where I face the windows in the back door for a slot of backyard scenery, or I carry it on out to the back porch, where I set the it on the little kitchen table covered by a red-checked tablecloth from my family’s past, a tablecloth so worn and holey that Don implores me to buy a new one. I won’t. Not yet. Here the scenery is the whole backyard.
     It’s said that for a writer the best scenery is a blank wall. I have sometimes been able to arrange this or at least to face away from a window. But really, the scenery and surroundings don’t matter. Now I have the countryside; in Boston with my typewriter on the same dining-room table, I faced the apartment building’s parking lot and the traffic on Storrow Drive. And elsewhere other views in between. It all disappears as you go into what Stephen King calls “the zone.” You can even forget the temperature! Last week I worked on a Christmas scene in Lazy Beds at that little table on the porch. The thermometer was in the eighties, but in my mind the season was winter.