The New York Times Book Review, March 16, 1997, p. 8.
Mr. Pollan Builds His Dream House
The author wanted a place to write so he made one, then wrote
a book about it.
A PLACE OF MY OWN
The Education of an Amateur Builder.
By Michael Pollan. Illustrated. 320 pp. New York:
Random House. $24.
By Verlyn Klinkenborg (Verlyn Klinkenborg is the author of
"Making Hay" and "The Last Fine Time.")
It occurred to me while reading "A Place of My Own" that
Michael Pollan's new book was probably written in the tiny
writing house in the woods whose construction it records: a
neat circularity, but not too neat. Mr. Pollan leaves room at
the end of the book -- a weep-hole, to use the cabinetmaker's
term -- for an exit outward into the flow of time. The book
closes with an evocation of "move-in day" that subsumes the
past and makes possible the future, leaving the reader keenly
aware of the actual, extra-literary, worldly ongoingness of
Mr. Pollan's "simple, one-room outbuilding."
If you hike to the clearing above Walden Pond where Thoreau's
cabin once stood, you find a vacancy bordered by stones, apt
enough in the way the site thrusts you back upon Walden
itself. But were you to happen accidentally upon Mr. Pollan's
personal woods, there it would stand: a cedar-shingled writing
house sheltering Mr. Pollan writing. Thoreau built a first
draft of a cabin, a hut that was hauled away shortly after he
left the pond and that soon collapsed into a cellar hole dug
for it by Emerson's gardener. Mr. Pollan has built a
collected-works kind of cabin, one that he says will "outlive
my intentions for it in all sorts of unforeseeable ways." I
found myself almost wishing Mr. Pollan had used the novelist's
old-fashioned trick of looking forward in a concluding chapter
at the prospect of his characters' lives. Mr. Pollan and his
writing house are wed at the end of "A Place of My Own." But
will they be happy, and will the fruits of this wedding be
many and prosperous? Only time will tell.
When a writer builds a house, even a 104-square-foot
"uninsulated, unplumbed outbuilding," you take it for granted
he'll build it with words. Yet for Mr. Pollan, a writer,
editor and "radically unhandy man," the point of building his
writing house with his own hands was to build it, so to speak,
away from, if not quite against, words. " It is not easy," he
says, "getting past words. Yet that is what I felt a growing
desire to do, and what attracted me to making a building in
particular." Like many writers, Mr. Pollan (his previous book
was "Second Nature") has grown up to do what he loves doing,
without necessarily noticing the number of things it has
prevented him from doing along the way. "Work," he writes, "is
how we situate ourselves in the world, and like the work of
many people nowadays, mine put me in a relationship to the
world that often seemed abstract, glancing, secondhand. ...
Nor did what I do seem to add much, if anything, to the shock
of reality, and though this might be a dated or romantic
notion in an age of information, it seemed to me this was
something real work should do." Having married and moved to
the country, with a baby on the way, Mr. Pollan found himself
wanting not another line of work but a different angle on the
work already at hand.
This he discovered the first time he walked his property
looking for a place to put his writing house. "From out here,"
he writes, "the whole problem of site selection looked
somewhat different. I realized I wasn't just looking for a
view, but for something more personal than that -- a point of
view."
One of the things that make Mr. Pollan such an attractive
writer is the modest way he presents his discoveries. The word
"epiphany" is just a little too large for his tool belt.
Building his writing house himself "precisely because I was so
ill-equipped to do so" was bound to lead to revelations of a
personal kind. But instead of portentously assessing the
gravity of each such moment -- making the world stop on its
axis, as writers so often do when they stub a toe on the
obvious -- Mr. Pollan takes what lay hidden a moment before
and quietly turns it into an unobtrusive element in the
texture of his world. The role he assigns himself here isn't
that of buffoon, though slapstick dogs an amateur carpenter,
or that of sage, though sagacity abounds in this book. Mr.
Pollan takes the role of the self: deliberative, half-amused
and tolerant. While fretting over the choice of his building
site, he says, "Maybe I'm the kind of person who just needs to
think all his second thoughts in advance." And though he has
been many selves by the time the book ends, including " 'the
Jewish fix-it man' ... a creature no more plausible than a
unicorn," he is ultimately revealed as an optimist, whose good
cheer begins at home and spreads outward.
Mr. Pollan carries a box of books to his nearly completed
writing house, which stands glowing in the dark woods, and he
says, "So this was the house for the self that stood a little
apart and at an angle, the self that thought a good place to
spend the day was between two walls of books in front of a big
window overlooking life. The part of me that was willing to
wager something worthwhile could come of being alone in the
woods with one's thoughts, in a place of one's own, of one's
own making."
As for getting away from words, the task was doomed from the
start, and not merely because Mr. Pollan plainly intended to
make a book about the building, built largely of bookshelves,
that he was making. As a do-it-yourselfer, Mr. Pollan was
caught between two men, Charles R. Myer, the Cambridge
architect and friend who designed his writing house, and Joe
Benney, a local "master of the material world, equally at home
in the realms of steel, wood, soil, plants, concrete and
machinery."
Much of this book's dynamic hangs on the conflict, actual and
implicit, between architect and contractor. But the
intellectual energy with which "A Place of My Own" bristles
derives mainly from Mr. Pollan's forays into the publications
and constructions of the architectural vanguard during the
past century. His respect for the work that architects do is
enormous but, as he discovers, often falsely grounded. He had
thought that "the work of building engaged them in a dialogue
with the world, while the rest of us are lucky to add our two
cents to the conversation of culture. But apparently the
prestige of that conversation is so great today that
architecture, perhaps worried it was on its way to becoming
dowdy and irrelevant, was desperate to find a place for itself
nearer to the spotlit heart of our information society." This
discovery was, as he admits, a setback: "I'd come to building
looking for a way to get past words, only to learn from an
influential contemporary architect that architecture was
really just another form of writing."
Mr. Pollan's concerns are deeper than his allusions to the
"age of information" and the "information society" suggest.
Reading Le Corbusier and Robert Venturi, walking through Peter
Eisenman's House VI, Mr. Pollan finds himself puzzled by the
way architecture seems to have disenfranchised itself, to have
thrown away its proprietary values. "lt seemed to me," he
writes, "you wouldn't seriously argue that architecture was a
language unless you'd forgotten the specific heft of a cool
brick, or the smell of fresh cedar warmed in the afternoon
sun."
But architecture -- like every other discipline -- can only
deconstruct what it first converts into text, and it can make
its own deconstructions look significant, no matter how
impractical they may be, only by overvaluing what it purports
to deconstruct. Throughout this book, Mr. Pollan tries,
philosophically hopeless as this sounds, to isolate the
building of his writing house from the toils of language. Or,
to put it another way, he tries to restore language to
proportion in the sensory world, to remind the reader that
"our bodies were making meaning out of the world long before
our language had a chance to."
These are deep matters, but what makes them deep is not the
wrestling with language but the wrestling with the world. Out
of so much that's valuable in "A Place of My Own," I find
myself admiring the irony, elegantly raised by Mr. Pollan,
that for some writers in this age the task is to rescue
experience from information, to save a kind of worldliness --
which includes the knowledge of handling words well -- from
the relentless textualizing of a society that is interested
only in representations of worldliness. It is Mr. Pollan's
purpose to remind readers including himself that there's a
dimensionality to the world that isn't merely 3-D.
[End]
Mr. Pollan Builds His Dream House
The author wanted a place to write so he made one, then wrote
a book about it.
A PLACE OF MY OWN
The Education of an Amateur Builder.
By Michael Pollan. Illustrated. 320 pp. New York:
Random House. $24.
By Verlyn Klinkenborg (Verlyn Klinkenborg is the author of
"Making Hay" and "The Last Fine Time.")
It occurred to me while reading "A Place of My Own" that
Michael Pollan's new book was probably written in the tiny
writing house in the woods whose construction it records: a
neat circularity, but not too neat. Mr. Pollan leaves room at
the end of the book -- a weep-hole, to use the cabinetmaker's
term -- for an exit outward into the flow of time. The book
closes with an evocation of "move-in day" that subsumes the
past and makes possible the future, leaving the reader keenly
aware of the actual, extra-literary, worldly ongoingness of
Mr. Pollan's "simple, one-room outbuilding."
If you hike to the clearing above Walden Pond where Thoreau's
cabin once stood, you find a vacancy bordered by stones, apt
enough in the way the site thrusts you back upon Walden
itself. But were you to happen accidentally upon Mr. Pollan's
personal woods, there it would stand: a cedar-shingled writing
house sheltering Mr. Pollan writing. Thoreau built a first
draft of a cabin, a hut that was hauled away shortly after he
left the pond and that soon collapsed into a cellar hole dug
for it by Emerson's gardener. Mr. Pollan has built a
collected-works kind of cabin, one that he says will "outlive
my intentions for it in all sorts of unforeseeable ways." I
found myself almost wishing Mr. Pollan had used the novelist's
old-fashioned trick of looking forward in a concluding chapter
at the prospect of his characters' lives. Mr. Pollan and his
writing house are wed at the end of "A Place of My Own." But
will they be happy, and will the fruits of this wedding be
many and prosperous? Only time will tell.
When a writer builds a house, even a 104-square-foot
"uninsulated, unplumbed outbuilding," you take it for granted
he'll build it with words. Yet for Mr. Pollan, a writer,
editor and "radically unhandy man," the point of building his
writing house with his own hands was to build it, so to speak,
away from, if not quite against, words. " It is not easy," he
says, "getting past words. Yet that is what I felt a growing
desire to do, and what attracted me to making a building in
particular." Like many writers, Mr. Pollan (his previous book
was "Second Nature") has grown up to do what he loves doing,
without necessarily noticing the number of things it has
prevented him from doing along the way. "Work," he writes, "is
how we situate ourselves in the world, and like the work of
many people nowadays, mine put me in a relationship to the
world that often seemed abstract, glancing, secondhand. ...
Nor did what I do seem to add much, if anything, to the shock
of reality, and though this might be a dated or romantic
notion in an age of information, it seemed to me this was
something real work should do." Having married and moved to
the country, with a baby on the way, Mr. Pollan found himself
wanting not another line of work but a different angle on the
work already at hand.
This he discovered the first time he walked his property
looking for a place to put his writing house. "From out here,"
he writes, "the whole problem of site selection looked
somewhat different. I realized I wasn't just looking for a
view, but for something more personal than that -- a point of
view."
One of the things that make Mr. Pollan such an attractive
writer is the modest way he presents his discoveries. The word
"epiphany" is just a little too large for his tool belt.
Building his writing house himself "precisely because I was so
ill-equipped to do so" was bound to lead to revelations of a
personal kind. But instead of portentously assessing the
gravity of each such moment -- making the world stop on its
axis, as writers so often do when they stub a toe on the
obvious -- Mr. Pollan takes what lay hidden a moment before
and quietly turns it into an unobtrusive element in the
texture of his world. The role he assigns himself here isn't
that of buffoon, though slapstick dogs an amateur carpenter,
or that of sage, though sagacity abounds in this book. Mr.
Pollan takes the role of the self: deliberative, half-amused
and tolerant. While fretting over the choice of his building
site, he says, "Maybe I'm the kind of person who just needs to
think all his second thoughts in advance." And though he has
been many selves by the time the book ends, including " 'the
Jewish fix-it man' ... a creature no more plausible than a
unicorn," he is ultimately revealed as an optimist, whose good
cheer begins at home and spreads outward.
Mr. Pollan carries a box of books to his nearly completed
writing house, which stands glowing in the dark woods, and he
says, "So this was the house for the self that stood a little
apart and at an angle, the self that thought a good place to
spend the day was between two walls of books in front of a big
window overlooking life. The part of me that was willing to
wager something worthwhile could come of being alone in the
woods with one's thoughts, in a place of one's own, of one's
own making."
As for getting away from words, the task was doomed from the
start, and not merely because Mr. Pollan plainly intended to
make a book about the building, built largely of bookshelves,
that he was making. As a do-it-yourselfer, Mr. Pollan was
caught between two men, Charles R. Myer, the Cambridge
architect and friend who designed his writing house, and Joe
Benney, a local "master of the material world, equally at home
in the realms of steel, wood, soil, plants, concrete and
machinery."
Much of this book's dynamic hangs on the conflict, actual and
implicit, between architect and contractor. But the
intellectual energy with which "A Place of My Own" bristles
derives mainly from Mr. Pollan's forays into the publications
and constructions of the architectural vanguard during the
past century. His respect for the work that architects do is
enormous but, as he discovers, often falsely grounded. He had
thought that "the work of building engaged them in a dialogue
with the world, while the rest of us are lucky to add our two
cents to the conversation of culture. But apparently the
prestige of that conversation is so great today that
architecture, perhaps worried it was on its way to becoming
dowdy and irrelevant, was desperate to find a place for itself
nearer to the spotlit heart of our information society." This
discovery was, as he admits, a setback: "I'd come to building
looking for a way to get past words, only to learn from an
influential contemporary architect that architecture was
really just another form of writing."
Mr. Pollan's concerns are deeper than his allusions to the
"age of information" and the "information society" suggest.
Reading Le Corbusier and Robert Venturi, walking through Peter
Eisenman's House VI, Mr. Pollan finds himself puzzled by the
way architecture seems to have disenfranchised itself, to have
thrown away its proprietary values. "lt seemed to me," he
writes, "you wouldn't seriously argue that architecture was a
language unless you'd forgotten the specific heft of a cool
brick, or the smell of fresh cedar warmed in the afternoon
sun."
But architecture -- like every other discipline -- can only
deconstruct what it first converts into text, and it can make
its own deconstructions look significant, no matter how
impractical they may be, only by overvaluing what it purports
to deconstruct. Throughout this book, Mr. Pollan tries,
philosophically hopeless as this sounds, to isolate the
building of his writing house from the toils of language. Or,
to put it another way, he tries to restore language to
proportion in the sensory world, to remind the reader that
"our bodies were making meaning out of the world long before
our language had a chance to."
These are deep matters, but what makes them deep is not the
wrestling with language but the wrestling with the world. Out
of so much that's valuable in "A Place of My Own," I find
myself admiring the irony, elegantly raised by Mr. Pollan,
that for some writers in this age the task is to rescue
experience from information, to save a kind of worldliness --
which includes the knowledge of handling words well -- from
the relentless textualizing of a society that is interested
only in representations of worldliness. It is Mr. Pollan's
purpose to remind readers including himself that there's a
dimensionality to the world that isn't merely 3-D.
[End]