The (un)tidiness of desks: Are you an Auden or a Murakami?

Auden’s friend Igor Stravinsky called him “the dirtiest man I have ever liked”.

WH Auden’s writing space: “a brownish cavern ©James Oses

I am not by nature a very tidy person. I do aim for basic levels of order and hygiene in my working space, but at various times of my writing life I have also shared my desk with barrels of fermenting cider, a small printing press, and various bits of snooker equipment. This certainly puts me one up on German poet Friedrich von Schiller who believed he could only write well when he could smell rotting apples so kept a selection in his desk drawer.

Those of us who live life in the cluttered lane received some much-needed self-validation about 10 years ago when the University of Minnesota released a research paper called Physical Order Produces Healthy Choices, Generosity, and Conventionality, Whereas Disorder Produces Creativity.

This is the kind of story the media loves and it reproduced the findings as proof that when it comes down to it a messy desk indicates a genius at work (despite what a cynic might describe as fairly considerable shortcomings in the research). My own feeling is that my messy desk simply indicates that I am a bit messy rather than the next Mark Twain. For example, Haruki Murakami has lots of things on his desk. A wooden foot with a spider engraved on it (from a trip to Laos), a marble sculpture with a wasp on top (from Scandinavia), a cat sculpture, a simple coffee mug (from Switzerland, it has the country’s flag on it), a paperweight with an Alfred Knopf logo design, and a container in the shape of a huge peanut. But the desk is still neat and tidy.

Haruki Murakami’s desk: Not a mug ring in sight

Compare this to Virginia Woolf.  Her friend Lytton Strachey complained that she surrounded herself with ‘filth packets’ as she wrote, cigarette ends, pen nibs, and various bits of paper. Indeed, a photo of her writing desk by Annie Liebovitz clearly shows the surface is scarred with plenty of mug rings and spilt ink. This feels a lot more like most people’s working environment. The point at which you have to start worrying is when you reach WH Auden levels of, let’s not beat about the bush here, yuck.

“Be regular and orderly in your life,” Gustave Flaubert said, “so that you may be violent and original in your work.” While Auden’s work was certainly original, it’s hard to level the charge of an orderly writing room against him.

In general, he was punctual in his habits and excellent at meeting deadlines, checking his watch with the same regularity as some people check their social media. But he did it all in the most appalling mess in his NY flat on the Lower East Side which he called “my nest”, writing with the curtains closed. Sounds rather cosy, doesn’t it? Well, political theorist Hannah Arendt called it his “slum apartment”, and artist Margaret Gardiner called it a “brownish cavern”.

His friend the American poet Charles Miller politely defined this “Auden-scape” in his 1983 memoir Auden: An American Friendship as “cluttered” but his description in the book of the main table covered in books, magazines, half-drunk coffee cups “scummed over”, bits of bread, a large dish of cigarette butts and olive stones, is distinctly unappealing. Cutlery and dinner plates were poorly cleaned. The atmosphere reeked of nicotine and stale coffee. Gardiner said even the air had the feeling of brownness about it. Auden’s friend the composer Igor Stravinsky called him “the dirtiest man I have ever liked”. Auden said he hated living in squalor “but I can’t do the work I want to do and live any other way”.

Sometimes tidy and untidy can co-exist. While she was on honeymoon in Spain in 1956, Sylvia Plath wrote a letter to her mother describing the table in the dining room which she and her new husband Ted Hughes shared. They wrote opposite each other, his side extremely messy with paper everywhere and an open bottle of blue ink on top of piles of papers, hers neat and tidy with books and notebooks lined up (plus her bottle of black ink, the top tightly closed).  

What I’ve been reading this week: I whizzed throgh Lauren Groff’s novel Matrix which I enjoyed. I’m not sure it "will blow readers' minds" as the cover blurb suggests, but it is an intriguing read and made me want to read up about England's early Queens. I also reread A Midsummer Night’s Dream having watched an excellent production of it earlier this year - although my favourite Shakespeare is As You Like It, this runs it a close second. Finally, I found Leonie Rushforth’s first poetry collection Deltas stimulating, especially the title poem. It also has a lovely cover.