Town Mouse
For those of a creative temperament, is town life more suitable than country life?
Are you more likely to be filled with divine inspiration while rambling over the Quantocks, notebook in hand, or sitting on the top deck of the number 9, gliding down Piccadilly?
The Romantic poets praised country living, and wrote about clouds and mountains and albatrosses. But, when we look at the facts, they didn’t seem actually to spend much time there. Coleridge is well-known for living in Nether Stowey, Somerset, but he only stopped there for about ten minutes before running away from his wife Sarah and young son Hartley and buggering off to live in Germany – where he indulged his love of transcendental idealism at the University of Göttingen.
It was the same with Wordsworth. He liked writing poems about the Lake District but his London poems are surely better. They are less self-conscious, as in Composed on Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802:
Earth has not anything to show more fair, Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty.
William Blake never seemed to long for a rural idyll. He found inspiration everywhere, and saw angels in Peckham Rye. In the following century, William Morris’s News From Nowhere was a delicious fantasy about a day in the future when the Strand would be covered with green fields. But Morris himself, who was born rich, spent most of his time in Hammersmith, going to political meetings and weaving tapestries while composing ballads.
The 19th-century flâneurs – or loafers – of Paris certainly had no desire to get out of the city. They liked to drift purposelessly through the arcades, making notes on what they saw, observing the city from a distance. Victor Hugo spent his afternoons walking round the city or sitting on the top deck of the bus. This vantage point, he said, was his ‘travelling balcony’.
The critic Walter Benjamin later claimed the flâneurs enjoyed taking a tortoise on a lead out on their urban rambles, because they liked to let the laidback reptile set the pace. Whether or not this is true, Baudelaire was certainly a poet of the city, as was Verlaine after him.
During the punk era, Johnny Rotten proclaimed, ‘I don’t want a house in the country. I’m very happy where I am.’ In fact I often bump into the Sex Pistols drummer, Paul Cook, when out being a flâneur in London. He lives in Shepherd’s Bush.
A recent survey has revealed that urbanites are moving to the country at a younger age: in 2008, they moved, on average, at the age of 47; now they go, on average, at 37. Perhaps the artist is happier living in town and making more or less frequent excursions to the country. Mrs Mouse says she wants a country cottage one day, when we are rich, but I am not so sure if this is a good idea.
The artist would probably not want the hassle of maintaining a rural villa in the manner of an evil Roman oligarch like Clodius. Far too much hassle. Surely better to remain free and be a guest at other people’s country houses? So much less effort.
In any case, we can always go to Richmond Park for a walk – though lately that haven of peace has been invaded by competitive amateur cyclists who have ruined the atmosphere by turning this rus in urbe into a racetrack.
In our own day in London, the artist Gavin Turk has a sprawling warehouse studio alongside gigantic metal-recycling depots in east London. And Damien Hirst is rumoured to be opening a studio in Soho, though he did spend a year painting alone in a shed in north Devon some years ago.
One thing is for sure – good ideas come to those who are in solitude. I remember when working for the Guardian in Nineties London that there was a craze for ‘brainstorming’.
This is the idea, apparently based on a game invented by the Surrealists, that you can put a group of 15 people in a room above a pub for a day and they will come up with some brilliant ideas which will transform the fortunes of the company.
In our case, we had to undergo the humiliation of being ordered about by a man from an ad agency dressed up as a Butlin’s Redcoat. He informed us over morning coffee that we would be fined were we to express any negative thoughts. Inside, my head was screaming, ‘This is all bullshit!’, but I kept my mouth shut.
The idea we conceived on this day off was the Guardian Igloo. This would be a portable igloo that we would take to festivals. Its interior walls would be plastered with cuttings from the paper. Punters would crawl into the igloo and experience the Guardian from the inside.
I rest my case.
‘William Blake never longed for a rural idyll – he saw angels in Peckham Rye’