One always imagines that writers need the solitude of a mountain cabin for creative work, with nothing in the background but the occasional birdcall or snapping twig. One thinks of Henry David Thoreau hidden among the foliage at Walden Pond or Robert Frost in his little log cabin in Ripton, Vt., or, a more extreme example, Marcel Proust buried in his cork-lined study. And it was, after all, the merest knock of an unexpected visitor that brought to a halt Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ferocious writing spell that produced “Kubla Khan” (or so he claimed).
On the other hand, the Left Bank of Paris was always a favorite spot for writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Jean Paul Sartre, both of whom seemed to thrive in the noisy atmosphere of cafes.
For 20 years I’ve devoted nearly every morning of my life to writing, and -- as with most writers, I suspect -- it has been terribly important to me to have the right place to work. As a graduate student at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland in the 1970’s, I found a teashop where I could sit undisturbed for hours with books and manuscripts piled up around me. The tea came in shiny metal pots, and the waitress -- her name was Fiona -- freshened the pot every hour or so. A large plate of scones was always on the table, and you paid only for what you ate. The shop was a sleepy and, I suppose, unprofitable enterprise, but for me it provided just the right amount of distraction. I sat in that poorly ventilated but homey tearoom every morning for nearly seven years, composing innumerable college essays, a Ph.D. thesis, a book of poems, and a novel that would never be published.
When I took my first teaching job, at Dartmouth College, I was given faculty housing in a quaint faculty apartment building just off campus. A bachelor, I needed a minimum of space -- a bedroom with a study seemed positively luxurious. I fitted out the study with a big oak desk, a typing table, a glass-fronted bookcase, filing cabinets, a telephone. Then I sat down to work.
But I couldn’t. It was just too damn quiet. So I wandered downtown a few blocks where I discovered a restaurant called Lou’s. It was modeled on the old-fashioned American diner, and I confess to an inordinate fondness for diners. They call up in me nostalgia for a past I never had, a society where everyone gathered over coffee to chat about everything and nothing, a place where romances were kindled, good humor flourished, and any job could be put off till another day.
Lou’s became, for me, the ideal study. I arrived every morning at eight, carrying my spiral notebook and assorted texts. I never varied my diet: cups of coffee with dry English muffins (and a scoop of peanut butter on the side, for protein). Lou, the elderly owner of the place, took a liking to me, and he made sure that a particular booth at the back was always empty when I got there. The waitresses, too, became my friends. I never had to tell them what I wanted; they just brought it. And I would sit there for two or three hours writing poems, scribbling academic articles, underlining my copy of Paradise Lost. I wrote three books in that booth, and I don’t think any of them would have made it into print without Lou’s hospitality.
What I liked about Lou’s was the distant clatter of dishes, the purr of conversation, and the occasional interruption of a friend. Restaurants provide a kind of white noise, but, unlike “real” white noise, the sound is human. Noses are blown. People cough. You feel connected. There is also a strange parallel between cooking and writing: Writing, like cooking, is a bringing together of elemental substances for transmutation over a flame. It seems fitting that writing and cooking should be going on simultaneously under the same roof.
Writing is a desperately lonely activity. While that problem isn’t exactly “solved” by writing in restaurants, it is somehow softened. Surrounded by people you don’t necessarily have to interact with, you feel free to concentrate. Once I’m involved in the tactile process of writing -- the pleasurable transference of emotions and ideas into language -- I find that I don’t have to worry about “concentration.” If I can’t concentrate, it means I’m working on the wrong thing or I probably didn’t get enough sleep the night before. Whatever the reason, I don’t blame the restaurant.
Restaurant “society” is, of course, a human web, and if any part of it is disturbed, the whole fabric shakes. I was fully aware of who else was sitting in Lou’s. Every public eating place has its regulars, and the regulars are a tightly knit group, loyal to their spot. They often don’t even know each other by name, but they depend upon the tacit assumption of shared good feeling -- toward each other as well as toward the place itself. I pretty much knew everyone who ate frequently at Lou’s by name after a year or so. And the high and low points of our lives were often shared. When I got married, for instance, the regulars at Lou’s all signed a card of congratulations. I even attended the funeral of an elderly gent who had never said a word to me but who sat for three years in the adjoining booth for at least half an hour every morning. Until the funeral, I had known him only as Herb, the man who liked underdone boiled eggs with a side of dry toast.
As a novelist, I found my time in Lou’s an indisputable part of my education. Like Emile Zola, I soon discovered that local hangouts offer a transparent window onto any community. Lou’s was classless, which meant that taxi drivers, window washers, insurance salesmen, haberdashers, dentists, and professors sat cheek by jowl over coffee and homemade doughnuts. Looking up from my work, I could take in an array of conversation and dialects; I learned a great deal about how America works from that little booth. I became, alas, a world-class eavesdropper, often scribbling overheard conversations in my notebook and, later, including versions of them in my fiction.
When I left Hanover in 1982, one of my largest fears was that I’d never find another place to work that was nearly as cozy as Lou’s. But this was not the case. When we moved to Middlebury, a small Vermont town just across the Green Mountains, we bought a small house from which I could easily walk downtown. Middlebury offered a dazzling array of alternatives to Lou’s. I eventually settled on an ice-cream parlor and soda fountain straight out of Norman Rockwell that goes by the unlikely name of Calvi’s. Located on the village green, Calvi’s has proved ideal for poetry writing. As one enters, an array of newspapers and magazines lines the left wall. The soda fountain dominates the right, presided over by a large brown photograph of the current owner’s grandfather, the Calvi who founded the establishment in the late 19th century. In the back are booths and tables, with the stuffed heads of antlered moose and elk staring balefully from the walls. A screened-in porch off the back hangs somewhat perilously over the Otter Creek and its roaring waterfall. The roar of that waterfall is White Noise squared.
Calvi’s is sleepier than Lou’s, by far. It is dark in the back, and the waiters and waitresses (who always wear soda-jerk jackets in the old style) are so unobtrusive that one has to stand on the table and dance to get a coffee refill. I don’t care anymore. There is just enough clatter to reassure me, and I have found the regulars as interesting and friendly as those at Lou’s.
I have taken my devotion so far as to make Calvi’s the setting for a long, quasi-philosophical poem about appearance and reality called “At the Ice Cream Parlor.”
Apart from the vaguely social aspects of writing in restaurants -- the delicious sense of being alone within a communal context -- there is a further advantage. In a public place one doesn’t normally use a writing machine more complicated than a pencil. In the age of word processing, diners are ideal places for rediscovering this remarkable product of our civilization. The pencil is surprisingly efficient, in fact. You can delete what you don’t like with a quick horizontal stoke that both rids you of the unwanted phrase and simultaneously preserves the deletion -- just in case it was better than the revised version, which is often the case. One also experiences the visceral connection between hand and brain that is somehow lost in the subliminal click of keyboards and the computer screen’s unyielding gaze. At the computer terminal one misses the slight rustle of paper, the smell of freshly sharpened pencils or wet ink, the ancient and alluring sensations of text making.
Writing in restaurants has the added advantage of making one’s vocation highly portable. I recently spent a sabbatical year in Italy, for instance, and I found myself quickly adapting to the local scene through my connection to one particular cafe. My wife and I were living in a lovely village south of Naples that happened to be rich in cafes. The Sirena (or Mermaid) was a cafe-bar on the chief promenade that looked out over the old harborfront, with the Mediterranean winking in the middle distance. It occurred to me almost immediately that this must be the best place in the world for a writer to work. Seated at one of its dozen or so tables, I could take in the baroque spectacle of Italian town life with ease. While I was eating a fresh pastry and drinking a cup of foamy cappuccino, the Muse never seemed too far away.
My wife is also a writer, but her love of the typewriter has usually kept her out of my restaurants. In Italy, how ever, our little villa on a cliffside overlooking the sea quickly proved inhospitable as a place to work; it was just too damp and cold, especially in winter. So we both made our way to the Sirena in the morning, me with my notebook and pencil, she with her battery-operated portable typewriter, which gave the locals plenty to gossip about. I would sit in one corner scribbling poems, while she sat on the opposite side of the room typing away on a novel. After a couple of weeks of this, the owner of the Sirena insisted that my wife keep her typewriter behind the bar so that she wouldn’t have to lug it into town every morning.
I wrote most of a book of poems in the Sirena, and when I pick up that volume, I can smell the cappuccino and taste the almond-flavored pastry. I can hear the clinking of cups and low murmur of Italian chatter. It’s the same with all of my books or essays, even my book reviews. I remember exactly where they were written, in what diner, restaurant, truck stop, bar, or country inn. Every word is redolent of some particular cuisine, some idiosyncratic atmosphere that I’ll have made, temporarily, into a kind of home. My only worry is that, in a future filled exclusively with Burger Kings and Kentucky Fried Chickens, both of which clog their atmospheres with canned music, I will have to change my profession. The Muse cannot stand Muzak.
Jay Parini, a poet and novelist, teaches at Middlebury College. His most recent book, The Final Station, a fictional account of Leo Tolstoy’s last year, was published by Henry Holt & Company.