Jackie Hemond
Sometimes reading is not enough. Sometimes people seek a tactile experience. While writing the musical “Hamilton”, Lin-Manuel Miranda often visited and wrote at the Morris-Jumel Mansion in Upper Manhattan, where George Washington’s first cabinet met and where Aaron Burr once lived. There are lots of literary landmarks to visit, such as the café in Edinburgh where J.K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter, William Faulkner’s house in Mississippi called Rowan Oak or Ernest Hemingway’s home in Key West, Florida where cats, descended from Ernest’s original cats, still roam.
But better still are literary places which are available for rent where one can commune more privately with the author’s spirit. For $190 a night you can stay in John Steinbeck’s Writer’s Studio in Pacific Grove, California from which you can see Monterey Bay. He owned the one-bedroom cottage in the 1940s and wrote parts of his book The Sea of Cortez there.
Closer to home is Rudyard Kipling’s retreat in Dummerston, Vermont, called Naulakha, where one can soak in Kipling’s bathtub. Each night costs $490. You get the bathtub and the rest of the house which sleeps eight. Included is the use of Vermont’s first tennis court.
Even closer to home is Emily Dickinson’s bedroom in Amherst, Massachusetts. It is the same bedroom to which she decamped when company called and where she wrote and hid hundreds of her poems. The room is only available for a maximum of two hours for $100 per hour. One of the drawbacks is that you can’t close the door. And, you probably aren’t allowed to sleep in her bed or wear the white dress sported by a headless mannequin in the room.
In Manhattan, the Metropolitan Museum is letting out rooms for the night in partnership with Airbnb because of a budget shortfall of $10 million. Instead of a literary muse, the museum’s cachet is history and art. Available rooms are in The Little House designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, or ornate bedrooms from a Roman villa or a Venetian palace. Prices range from $2,000 to $5,000 per night, although the New York Dutch Room can be snagged for a mere $1,300 per night.
In writing this column, I am inspired. Perhaps, someone will want to spend a night in the Kent Memorial Library. May I book you a room?