Notes on Process, Part I

Setting, or, Seeing is believing

I can’t speak for other novelists, but when I am in the preparatory stages of a new novel, as I am right now, the most important idea to get ahold of - before character, even before plot - is setting. And by setting I don’t even mean place and time, like Boston in 1915, or Salem Village in 1682. I mean the granular details, the minutiae of the physical spaces in which my characters will play out whatever drama I have in store for them. Sibyl Allston’s Beacon Hill townhouse in 1915, with sliding doors between the front and back parlor inlaid with peacocks, or Connie Goodwin’s grandmother’s cottage in Marblehead, with sagging wood floors and too many books and no electricity. If I can’t see them in my head, conjure them in as much detail in my mind’s eye as I can my childhood bedroom - cocoa brown walls, the exact creak of the antique bed I slept in, glassy-eyed Madame Alexander dolls now lost to time - or any other space intimately known and remembered and understood, then I am not yet ready to write.

Because I am predominantly a writer of historical fiction, I have to build the setting in my head with research. Usually that research is straightforward. Sometimes, as is the case with Bonfire (no link yet, it’s just a working title, as I am imagining this book as a backdating, and updating, of The Bonfire of the Vanities), I am trying to reconstruct a setting that no one has bothered to record.

(This is a rendering of 660 Fifth Avenue, “the Petit Chateau,” done around 1880 by the architect Richard Morris Hunt for Alva Vanderbilt, on deposit at the Library of Congress)

If you are not an architect, or lapsed graduate student of American visual culture (like some people who worked on this show), you might not know how evocative and haunting architectural renderings can be. They are designed not only to accurately represent the building that is being designed, but to seduce the client into a dream of their fantasies realized. As food for a fantasist they are delicious. I am setting Bonfire in an imaginary version of this Gilded Age mansion, and I have found several renderings that are almost evocative enough for me to start building my own rendering in my mind.

The trick is, I need to see the fourth floor.

No shortage of gorgeous photographs exist of the sumptuous interiors of the Petit Chateau. Katherine Howe the Greater reproduces many of them in this book, which I fortunately have on my shelf. But the Herter Brothers didn’t design the kitchen. They didn’t decorate the laundry. They took no interest in the garret where the laundress slept. They didn’t put scrollwork and embellishments on the rear stairs connecting the butler’s pantry with the kitchen. They took no notice of the scullery. As such, only one visual story persists about how daily life unfolded in a mansion like this. The vast majority of people who lived and worked in this house did so in spaces that are now impossible to see.

(This image is also credit to the Hunt collection at the Library of Congress)

Sometimes, we have hints. This floor plan of the basement of the Petit Chateau gives us some useful information - there are windows, for instance, though they were just below street level, so the sunlight coming in would have been indirect. The cook has her own bedroom, right close to the kitchen. The service areas have some outdoor spaces, suitable for both shaking things out but also probably sneaking a smoke for just a minute. The servants have a hall, a place to gather for meals or rest or maybe some busy work - silver must be polished, buttons sewn on. In the Merchant’s House Museum downtown, the only remaining early 19th Century house in New York with a preserved interior, the service area in the basement is furnished with outmoded Greek revival furniture cast off from the family upstairs. Did the service area in the Petit Chateau feature formerly grand furniture cast off in the name of fashion? Or did it have cheap and sturdy things, Sears Roebuck-type offerings, cheap and plentiful and available by delivery? I don’t know.

But I still haven’t seen the fourth floor, which almost certainly held garret rooms for the household workers who weren’t housed in the basement. Five flights of stairs, every day, up and down, all day long, narrow and winding in a spiral at the back of the house, with unobtrusive doorways offering fleet glimpses of capacious rooms festooned at breathtaking expense in styles borrowed from Imperial Europe. I know the fourth floor was there. Count the windows in this photograph.

(This image I cribbed from Wikipedia)

Look at that tiny little window in the turret, which seems to open onto a narrow balcony. Whose room was that? Who sat in that window, gazing down along the length of Millionaire’s Row? The Library of Congress can’t tell me, because they have plans for all the floors of the Petit Chateau except that one.

So I must keep looking. But even Richard Morris Hunt wasn’t unaware of the people, other than his wealthy and influential clients, who would be moving through the spaces that he had been hired to imagine.

(This image also credit to the Hunt collection of the Library of Congress)

There he is - a footman in livery, his hand resting on the heavy brocade curtain between the front entry hall and one of the grand salons. His back is to us, rendering him nonspecific, lacking in individuality, legible only by his height (for scale) and his wigged uniform (one of Alva’s many social pretentions). One could argue that he is accorded no more importance in this image than the curtain itself, or the detail lovingly inscribed on the doors and mantels; that this human being is being deployed as a decorative object, primarily to signify wealth. The alternative interpretation, however, would take note of his central placement in the composition. He is in the setting, but not of it. He is looking through the curtain, which he himself has drawn back. He sees everything that is happening. He sees more than we do.

So what’s next?

I have more work to do on setting. While the fictional house of Bonfire is starting to form inside my mind, I need more materials. Planks of wood, bolts of cloth, if I’m going to extend this building metaphor. I have some library time coming up, in which I will approach this world-building process though learning more about the people who lived there. I have a few more architectural history avenues to pursue. How will I know I have enough? That’s always the question. I wish I knew the answer. In the meantime, if you want to check on my progress, you can spy on my Pinterest bookmarks.

I am also continuing to speak to assorted podcasts here and there, which I will share in due course, and will have a few in-person events in the spring. By which point I hope to also have a draft of Bonfire. Right now, it’s a hazy rendering in watercolor, my pitch to myself of how beautiful it might be, if I let it.