Unimaginatively, I usually take the same route for a morning walk when on holiday in Cornwall, over the dunes to Brea Hill, inspiration for Betjeman’s poem ‘Back From Australia’. I know the scenery so well I no longer see it.
But for a change the other day I walked along the other side of the estuary and it was like seeing an entirely new landscape: the gently scalloped sandbanks, the clarity and blueness of the water, the breadth of the sky where it met Pentire Point. There were no clouds, which emphasised the white of the sails, the seagulls, the cabbage butterflies.
Imagine having this as the view from your study, I thought. How inspired you would feel. Hell, even Carol Ann Duffy, the poet laureate, might have managed to cobble something together to commemorate the birth of Prince George after contemplating this vista.
But then I wondered if I was over-romanticising things. Views are fine for artists and poets but surely novelists need something else. Something grittier and less distracting. Julian Barnes can only write when facing a blank wall in his study in north London. Hemingway was the same. He may have liked to write in Key West but he nevertheless stared at an empty wall while he did so, standing up as he typed, to add a little discomfort and energy to his prose. Orwell liked to write from an Islington flat that visitors described as ‘bleak’; that and a ‘primitive’ farmhouse in Jura, which was also bleak, especially in autumn when he went there to write.
Truman Capote liked to stare at the ceiling when he wrote, lying horizontal. Somerset Maugham stared at his bathtaps (while having a contemplative soak). Ideas come to Ian McEwan when he tilts back his chair, puts his feet on the radiator and considers the unromantic view from his window, of the grey and satellite-dish-covered Post Office tower.
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