April 11, 2024 Writers' Houses Sherlock’s Double: At William Gillette’s Castle By Nicolette Polek Photograph courtesy of the author. Anyone can lay a funerary GIF at one of the 238 million virtual tombstones at findagrave.com. A rose JPEG accompanied by the words “im sorry the world did not treat you well” is laid on Kafka’s grave page amidst various uploaded photos of tombstones; “Your statue was unveiled in Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol today,” reads a post for Willa Cather. Someone leaves an update on Federico Fellini’s page that tonight they “will watch La Strada in your memory.” Many of these messages seem to have come after a pilgrimage to a physical site. They read like confirmations of an encounter: as though their writers, unsatisfied with what they’d found in the material realm, had taken to virtual channels to yoke a final closeness with the dead. The playwright and actor William Gillette’s online grave is littered with notes from recent visitors to his house museum, updating him on his property: “Interesting man, a shame he did not have children to enjoy the castle and train ride,” or “when i vist [sic] i always notice something … deer in your yard, the fawn was nursing from its mother.” Another: “Went to your home today… You would be proud that it is in impeccable order.” Gillette Castle lies up a coily road in East Haddam, Connecticut. I visit on the first hot day of May. An elaborate stone pathway leads me from the parking lot to a gray, cobbly estate that overlooks the Connecticut River. A rabbit passes the entrance sign and disappears into the forest. I live nearby, and have developed a chronic wandering habit in my final semester at divinity school. The more direct and pursuant my inquiries of God have become, the greater my conflictual desire to roam has grown. Perhaps my proclivity to wander is a symptom of my frustration with the jigsaw splodge of academia, or of my desire for a single, quiet path of pilgrimage. It has become increasingly apparent to me that one of the key tenets of the spiritual life was imitation: of Christ, of the saints. And so, rather serendipitously, I show up to this castle made by a man whose life was defined so completely by imitation. William Gillette looked exactly like Sherlock Holmes—a tall man with a smoking pipe and cape—or, rather, Sherlock, as we imagine him, looks like William Gillette. “The careers of the master detective, Sherlock Holmes, and the master actor-playwright, William Gillette, are inextricably combined,” writes Ruth Berman in A Case of Double Identity. Gillette is best known for adapting Sir Conan Doyle’s stories to the stage, then later playing and perfecting the part of Holmes in more than a thousand performances. “Elementary, my dear Watson” was adapted from a line of Gillette’s. The deerstalker hat was his invention. Gillette’s embodied adaptation was so successful that playbill images of Gillette became source images for subsequent book editions of Sherlock Holmes. Certain covers bear Gillette’s exact likeness. Gillette became Sherlock; Sherlock became Gillette. Before the two became one, Gillette was a moderately popular playwright and actor from Hartford, Connecticut. An inventor as well, Gillette created a machine that perfectly emulated the sound of a horse’s hooves “approaching, departing, or passing at a gallop, trot, or any other desired gait,” as a way to heighten the realism of the stage. Much of his acclaim was thanks to two Civil War plays, Held By the Enemy (1886) and Secret Service (1895), written after his beloved wife, the actress Helen Nichols, passed away from a burst appendix at twenty-eight. Gillette withdrew to the woods. He never remarried, and spent six years away from public life. Meanwhile, Sherlock Holmes was dead. Sir Conan Doyle had killed him off in “The Final Problem,” when he falls into a gorge in Switzerland. Doyle himself wished to resurrect Holmes for the stage, but neither he nor other playwrights were able to get it right. It was Doyle’s agent who eventually recommended Gillette for the project. When the two men met in 1899, Gillette showed up dressed as his interpretation of Holmes and examined Doyle with a magnifying glass. *** At the castle, which is open to the public for tours and surrounded by hiking trails, my tour group consists of eight children and three mothers, who at first regard me with enthusiasm, joking that I’ve joined a group of monsters. “Oh please, you go,” one mother insists, so I spill ahead, peering at the corners of the wooden staircase. The tour guide notes that Gillette owned fifteen cats. The children gasp. I inspect a Japanese tea set. “Gillette was very concerned with what other people thought of him,” says the tour guide, pointing to a window that is actually a mirror, an apparatus that allowed for Gillette to see how his guests would act when he left the room. When peering into its reflection from the second-floor master bedroom, I can see what is happening downstairs at the bar—a boy in a Dartmouth sweatshirt stares into his phone while his date, dressed in velour, takes selfies. Stalin, too, had an intricate surveillance system in his home, in order to know who to kill, and though Gillette’s motives were less ideological, this self-surveilling house appears as an uncanny reflection of a person fully curled in upon themselves. Like a dog resembles its owner, a house can begin to mirror the neuroses of its inhabitants. “It is my business to know what other people don’t know,” Holmes declared in the story “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.” I pass what looks like a wooden dagger hanging from the ceiling, which I later learn is a fire-extinguishing device. In Viktor Shklovsky’s essay on “Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery Story,” he stresses that Doyle never follows the dictum of Chekhov’s gun. Instead, “The gun that hangs on the wall does not fire. Another gun shoots instead.” The same logic applies to Gillette’s castle. Some of what you see becomes something else. Dead-end staircases, trick furniture, and intricate lock systems abound. Near the main entrance is a secret door that leads from his office so he could “escape unwanted guests.” The castle is thoroughly adorned with furniture pieces with double meanings, trick latches, reflections and deflections. Gillette even refused the word castle and often referred to it as “the pile of rocks.” Gillette rarely did interviews, didn’t keep a journal, and kept most of his life secret—a pattern of behavior especially fitting for a man whose craft involved the grafting of much of his self into another man’s fiction. Walking through the great hall of the castle, made from white oak, I begin to feel that I am inhabiting an intercessory space between the man and his character; a place where a problem, puzzle, or personality was in the process of being worked out. Perhaps all houses serve this secondary function, an exercise in holding together what is meaningful; like Gillette, we sometimes prefer to obscure this process even to ourselves, in labyrinthine corridors and secret passageways. The children at the end of the tour complain that they want to eat hot dogs, and I’m confronted with an unexpected emptiness. Perhaps I’d come to the castle expecting to glean something of Gillette, but I find him impossible to extract from the character who eclipsed him. Perhaps I’d secretly hoped for evidence that Gillette had returned to himself again, in the privacy of his own home. And maybe he had—after all, a man is not his materials. I think of the anonymous people who wander their digital way to findagrave.com in order to update Gillette on his estate. When they do so, do they imagine him as a man who spent his life on the stage, practicing his lines? Or do they imagine a detective in his silk robe and violin? Nicolette Polek is the author of Bitter Water Opera and Imaginary Museums.
March 26, 2024 Writers' Houses With Melville in Pittsfield By J. D. Daniels View of Mount Greylock from Herman Melville’s desk in Pittsfield. Licensed under CCO 4.0, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. The fictional Pittsfield, Massachusetts, native Mack Bolan first appeared in Don Pendleton’s 1969 novel The Executioner #1: War Against the Mafia. A self-righteous vigilante (“I am not their judge. I am their judgment”), the by-now-lesser-known Bolan was the inspiration for the popular Marvel Comics antihero Frank Castle, also called the Punisher, who made his debut in 1974’s The Amazing Spider-Man #129 and who has been played by Dolph Lundgren, Thomas Jane, and Ray Stevenson in three movies and by Jon Bernthal in a recent Netflix television series. (Season one, episode one: Castle is reading Moby-Dick.) Bolan’s and Castle’s origins are not the same. Castle’s family was murdered by the mob—that’s how the red wheel cranks into motion, that’s his permission to kill. But Bolan’s story is different. His father gets in debt to the mob, gets sick, and falls behind on loan payments. His sister, Cindy, starts turning tricks for the mob to help pay off her father’s debt. When Bolan’s little brother finds her out, he tells their father. Their father shoots his son, Bolan’s brother, wounding him, then kills his wife and daughter, Bolan’s mother and sister, before killing himself. War Against the Mafia begins with Bolan turning away from the fact that it was his own father, not the mob, who murdered his family. Given that Bolan was from Pittsfield, where Herman Melville lived from 1850 until 1863, and given that Castle in 2008’s Punisher: War Zone snarls in a church, “I’d like to get my hands on God,” and given that “War Against the Father” could be another name for the satanic Captain Ahab’s pursuit of Moby-Dick as a murderous revolt against God the Father, it was no surprise to me that these overlapping references filled my head as I drove toward Pittsfield through blinding sleet. “You Are At 1724 Feet Highest Elevation on I-90 East of South Dakota,” said a brown sign near Becket, Massachusetts. Hence my elevated thoughts. Read More
March 22, 2024 Writers' Houses Looking for Lorca in New York By Zain Khalid Federico García Lorca at Columbia University, 1929. Public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. For a son of the titular city, reading Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York is akin to curling into your lover, your nose dipped in the well of their collarbone, as they detail your mother’s various personality disorders. Yes, Federico, yes, my mother is thoroughly racist and takes every opportunity to remind me, her sometimes destitute child, about the silent cruelty of money. “At least you got to leave,” I want to tell him. “Imagine being stuck with her for the rest of your life.” He would likely understand my irrational attachment; after all, he was so consumed by Spain, its art and its politics, that his country would go on to swallow him whole. Still, it is crucial for those of us with this sort of umbilical tether to unwind it and test how far it might stretch. In June 1929, following a voyage on the sister liner of the Titanic, Lorca arrived from Spain by way of Southampton, England, to New York, a city he would immediately call a “maddening Babel.” The poet was thirty-one, nursing his wounds from a breakup with a handsome sculptor, Emilio Perojo, whom Lorca maintained used him to gain access to the art world. Lorca had also become estranged from a pair of his Spanish friends and contemporaries, Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, and felt hemmed in by the success of his most recent work, Gypsy Ballads. He wrote, “This ‘gypsy’ business gives me an uneducated, uncultured tone … I feel they are trying to chain me down.” With the help of his parents and at the urging of Fernando de los Ríos, a law professor and friend of the family, Lorca enrolled in a summer program at Columbia University. For the better part of a year, in room 617 of Furnald Hall, and then in room 1231 of John Jay Hall, he would write Poet in New York. The language is hallucinatory and toxic, peyote laced with sulfur: pigeon skulls lie in corners; cats choke down frogs; blond blood flows on rooftops everywhere; tongues lick clean the wounds of millionaires. V. S. Pritchett wrote about the book: “What we call civilization, [Lorca] called slime and wire.” Read More
January 30, 2024 Writers' Houses At the Britney Spears House Museum By Emmeline Clein Photograph by Emmeline Clein. Besides Britney, bottled water is Kentwood’s biggest export. Across most of Louisiana, this town is more famous for the water than the woman. “Why are you going to the water bottle town?” the man sitting next to me at the bar asks. I’m in New Orleans, on Carondelet Street. I’m eating at an oyster counter near my grandfather’s former office. Not his favorite, the Black Pearl, where he used to eat a dozen daily on his lunch breaks, grading each one on a scale of 1–10 in his notebook. He died at the start of spring this year, smack in the middle of Carnival, the ambulance stuck in parade traffic for an hour. When I tell the man next to me I’m going to Britney Spears’s hometown to see her house, he says he saw her perform before she became Britney Spears, when she was still Britney from Kentwood, at a concert called Louisiana Jukebox. She was there with her mother, answering audience questions after the show. A childhood friend of my mother’s was there, too, and had incidentally emailed me about it the night before. It was disturbing, she remembered; Britney was so young, but her “song was so sexual, and in person, she looked like the girl next door who every man wants to devirginize.” The next morning, the drive through St. John the Baptist Parish is mostly swamp. Highways on thick stilts through the cypress glens; the long, low bridge over Lake Pontchartrain. Two men fishing, smoking, laughing. Once you cross into Tangipahoa Parish, you’re mostly on dry land, which means Bible billboards and fast-food spots. Read More
November 27, 2023 Writers' Houses Lifesize Dioramas: At Carolee Schneemann’s House By Hannah Gold Photograph by Hannah Gold. Carolee Schneeman’s house near New Paltz. In 1965, a stone house near New Paltz was slated for auction. A cousin of the owners, a young and broke painter, begged them to let her buy it with her musician partner. She feared the house, which was limping along, would be torn down. Soon after the artists purchased the house, the painter heard a voice in her dreams: Take a chisel to the concrete stucco, and you will find golden stones beneath; use a crowbar to peel up the linoleum flooring, there are chestnut boards below; hammer at the drop ceilings, there are wide beams above. The painter did as she was told, and found what she was promised. The house began to breathe again. The painter lived in, or perhaps with, the house for more than five decades, long after the musician departed. There were other lovers, and a series of cats—some of the cats were reincarnations of the previous cats. She made films in the rooms and worked in a studio on the second floor. She became, in time, famous. Four years ago, she died in the downstairs bedroom. This is the story, anyway, as told by the painter, who was known to take creative liberties. Carolee Schneemann named herself. “I made it up,” she said of the surname, “I wanted a big masculine German name.” She was born in 1939, if not 1934. Her birth certificate seems to have been altered with one careful pen stroke, closing off the four into a nine. Census records concur. Still, even last winter, at her first retrospective in the U.K., the Barbican’s Carolee Schneemann: Body Politics, the museum materials showed not just the factual date, but the later date, the one Schneemann used when she told her life story. Read More
November 15, 2023 Writers' Houses Kurt Vonnegut’s House Is Not Haunted By Sophie Kemp Kurt Vonnegut’s house. Photograph by Sophie Kemp. In my earliest childhood memories—the big blur we will call the gear shift between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—Schenectady, the city I was born in, is a distant star. Fuzzy, soft, a blurred edge that feels so far away in the way that childhood always feels so far away. Schenectady, the city I was born in, is a small upstate city between the rivers Mohawk and Hudson. Home of the perfect 12345 zip code. The location of the General Electric Power headquarters. Girls wearing low-rise jeans to rent VHS tapes at the Hollywood Video on Balltown Road. Street names: Brandywine, McClellan, Union, Glenwood Boulevard, Nott, Van Vranken. A white clapboard church hovering atop a hill on a rural route—I used to take modern dance classes there. An ice-skating rink next to an Air Force base where the pilots flew to Antarctica, always flying so low when they went over my house. NXIVM ladies planning their volleyball trips to Lake George. My parents knew the exact address of where the Unabomber’s mother and brother lived, in a historic district called the Stockade. And as for me, I do not remember when I first registered that Kurt Vonnegut lived in Alplaus, a small hamlet in Schenectady County, named after the Dutch expression aal plaats, which means “a place of eels.” (There were no eels that I am aware of.) I think it was in high school. I think my hair was cut short. I think it was when I was a virgin. I think it was when I got a job as a bookseller at the Open Door on Jay. I think I was probably sixteen. I already loved Kurt when I found out that for a few years after World War II he lived an eight-minute drive from the house I grew up in. As a teenager in Schenectady, I read not all but most of his books. It was because of my father, who also loved Kurt. He gave me a copy of Slaughterhouse-Five, and it was the first time that I fell in love with a novel, because it was brutal and hilarious and weird and terrifyingly sad. Slaughterhouse-Five is set in Dresden and Luxembourg and Outer Space and also Ilium, New York. Ilium, it is argued by most Vonnegut readers and scholars, is probably Schenectady. It appears in several of his other books. Player Piano, Cat’s Cradle, and a few different short stories. Here is how Ilium is referenced, in one passage of the Slaughterhouse-Five: “Billy owned a lovely Georgian home in Ilium. He was rich as Croesus, something he had never expected to be … In addition he owned a fifth of the new Holiday Inn out on Route 54 and half of three Tastee Freeze stands.” Read More