Some English teacher somewhere along the line taught me that in literature, the house is a symbol for the soul. I’d take credit, except that each time I remember this equation, it’s got a vague citation hovering around it. And it always comes to me when we visit my in-laws on the east coast. We spend some amount of time in this massive Cape house that has been in the family for two generations, long enough to qualify as haunted. I don’t mean that cabinets drift open or windows slam shut. There is no poltergeist tapping in the walls. In fact there is nothing scary about the place, unless you count the fact that it sits there staring at the sea year after year, the door like a toothless mouth, swallowing up generation after generation. That is scary, kind of. That the house will live longer than any of us, has already outlived so many. Memory is so solitary, and solitude can be scary. My memories of the place start sixteen years ago, when my husband’s family first took me there. I remember how happy they were to show it to me, as if it they were introducing me to an old cousin, or an aunt—definitely a member of the family, a huge, quiet spinster who was a delight to visit, always welcoming and quiet, spreading her peace.
The attachment to a house begins in infancy, really. Our first playground is the house we’re born to. Then we play house as kids, and keep right on playing house up until we’ve got our own mortgage. I can still remember my first apartment in college, walking around my kitchen, grinning like an idiot, feeling so official. Camping is a form of playing house; what is a tent but a pretend house?
Probably it was Hubert McAlexander, a professor of mine twenty years ago, who first made the association with house and soul. He taught me most of what I know and love about literature, especially all the good southern stuff, in which houses abound. I think of Thomas Wolf’s Look Homeward Angel, featuring his boyhood home which doubled as a boarding house. Or Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, in which the house on Sutpen’s Hundred holds the secret of that family’s horrible demise. But the novel that really nails this idea of house = soul has got to be To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf. I’m thinking of the middle section of the book, “Time Passes.” The section is told from the house’s point of view and, indeed, the scene never leaves this house in the Hebrides islands, near Scotland, where the Ramsay family has vacationed year after year. The biggest plot point of the section is that light and shadows move across the house. Off stage, a lot happens: World War I occurs. Mrs. Ramsay dies. People are married; children are born. The house falls into neglect. Ten years pass before the final section of the book wherein some of the family return to take that trip to the lighthouse, one that the youngest Ramsay so wanted to take early in the novel, but was denied due to rough weather.
Woolf’s book is a testament to how ill-defined family life really is. The moments that define you as a family are not the carefully planned Thanksgiving dinners that look like something out of Real Simple. Neither do the fiascos define you, the reunions where Aunt Judy gets drunk or a cousin gets caught smoking dope. What defines a family is the trivial, the everyday, the moment we really, really wanted to go to the lighthouse and didn’t get to go. Boom, ten years pass. Damned if that moment wasn’t the last of its kind.
I can’t go to my in-laws Cape house without thinking of this novel. This trip, maybe because of the various projects I’m planning in my own (old) house, I couldn’t help studying things like grout lines and windows. I marveled at the depth and length of the third floor bathtub. You can’t buy a cast iron tub deeper than 16 inches; if you want a heavy soaker like that you’ve got to get an old one restored. I also studied the windows, which are in rough shape. The tracks are busted; the cords all broken, yet still they open. The total number of glass panes exceeds thirty, probably closer to fifty. In most rooms the floors meet the walls with simple wide trim, nothing ornate, just functional. That no significant improvements have been made, I think serves as testament to the subject of Woolf’s “Time Passes.” We really don’t want new furniture, nice windows, and garage doors that glide. What we want of these old houses is that everything stay exactly the same. Then those defining moments, those insignificant things like my dad bent over his desk while the radio played, or my mom scrubbing the stove top, those moments might always be available to us. We must leave that house, because of course, time does pass, but wouldn’t it be grand if we could just board up the windows and close the place season after season, only to come back and find it exactly as it was?
Not possible, of course. The family, like the house, deteriorates, moving from the growing organism with endless needs, bulging up to the attic, to the waning, thinning, spread out creature with arms all over the country. The aging, haunted house reminds us that we are not what we once were, and yet what a comfort, especially a house that is never remodeled, inside of which the furniture all stays in the same place and the windows grow cranky but still operate.
Having just, hours ago, returned from Maine and all the old hauntings that lie there for me, this post is especially poignant for me, Chris. I’m thinking, too, of William Maxwell’s childhood home and the ways he wrote again and again about it in so much of his work, the way it was tied to his beloved mother. He also has the incredible section in So Long… about climbing around on the rafters of the new house being built, its skeleton and mystery. And indeed as much as I am not in love with our current house, I watch Hayden move through it with such delight and intimate knowing—his return to it today after nearly three weeks away was inspiring; he was truly overjoyed to be back. xo
I remember that house in Maxwell’s book as vividly as I remember the Ramsay house; thanks for recalling it. It’s funny, too, how our current houses, which may or may not feel like much, will be everything for the littles growing up in them.
What a lovely tribute to what I imagine is a lovely house, creaks and cracks and all. I recently reread To the Lighthouse for the first time since college, and oh, that middle passage is powerful! The house so lonely and silent as the seasons blow through.
It was you who gave me the haunted house. That is exactly what it is.
Thanks Christy-No discussion of houses, especially old houses, is complete without touching on their smells. That evocative combination of, in the case of my in laws’ home in VT, woodsmoke, six generations of dogs, old wool carpets, mothballs, hundreds of books mustifying away on their shelves – thanks for your blog! Pam
yeah, the odor of time
gangy’s house in chicago returns in many different settings, in my dreams. I went there, while on a visit, just a drive by and came all unglued, it looks so different now. its too much to see it now
This is so disturbing. As I mentioned in my earlier post, “Book Air,” the whole memory thing falls apart when the place is destroyed OR altered beyond recognition.
This is beautifully written, Christy. You’ve captured perfectly that odd feeling we get when we visit an old house that seems to resist the passage of time, even as the world swirls around it. I especially liked this:
“…it sits there staring at the sea year after year, the door like a toothless mouth, swallowing up generation after generation.”
Thanks for these kind words; I sense an old house in your past…