I remember exactly how all this started. It started in a bookshop, like a lot of things in my life have done. It started two years ago, when I sat down to read an extract from one of the books on sale, and fell in love; not with the author, but with the bookshop’s armchair, which had fair swallowed me up. It was like coming home. Pull yourself together, I scolded myself; but it wasn’t as easy as that. And reader, I’ve done a bad thing. Look, this has precedence, OK? Martin Amis, humouring some hack from the Beeb by granting an interview, joshed that it was a badly-kept secret that writers spend a lot of their time writing, and a lot of it reading. This was in the context of describing his working day, and he said it whilst sitting on an elegant sofa (or couch, or settee, depending on you and yours), an object of repose between whose rolled arms and camel back one could easily picture the leisurely Amis conducting the latter of the tasks described: leafing through a contemporary novel or three; perusing a magazine; re-reading a Guardian article about how people like to stick the boot into Martin Amis and wondering whether smiling once in a while might not go a long way. No wonder the enfant terrible of 80s lit-fic reads a lot: he evidently has a lovely nice bit of reproduction Regency upon which to do his reading. Seeing Mart and his sofa was like seeing a man with his faithful dog. They were meant to be together.
Nor is Mr Amis alone. In a TV advertisement currently doing the rounds, the near-messianic actor Kevin Spacey seeks somewhere to sit down. His voiceover manages to transform this ordeal into a quest for Nirvana and transcendence, but a comfy chair is what he’s after, bless him; in a sequence of scenes, he parks his posterior on a variety of lifestyle-enhancing perches – in the balcony of the Old Vic, at a shoeshine bar, and so on – before ultimately attaining enlightenment as he sinks into a particular airline’s first class seat. Ahhhhh. Feline bliss settles upon his mug (indeed, the tenor of this selection process has been cat-like from the get-go). By Jiminy, Kevin looks happy to be sitting down.
You might wish to dismiss Mr Spacey’s sponsored game of musical chairs, and by extension perhaps this article, as flip, frivolous, unimportant. But, quite apart from writerly concerns, for a man six and a half feet tall, the question of sitting arrangements is weighty. You try sitting for the seven hours of a transatlantic flight with the wings of the headrest buried in the base of your neck, a backache because the seat has been sculpted for the full curve of a normally-sized spine rather than for the lower half of yours, and your kneecaps either up your nose all the way to America or wedged into the hinges of the fold-down tray (which now can’t fold down), certain to be instantly broken if the person in the seat in front so much as clears their throat. Mr Spacey is, according to IMDB, five feet, ten-and-a-half inches tall, so he understands these things; although one rather suspects he may be rather better positioned with respect to circumventing them.
And it would be pretty easy to bang on for five hundred words or so about the profusion of slights and inconveniences offered by seats of all sorts to the man of height, but I’m not going to do that here. Suffice to say, I think, that Mr Spacey’s experience, as depicted in that one ad, at least, appears to exist only in parallel to my world, which is a world where all the furniture seems to have been made for elves. To recreate the sensation for yourself, buzz down to your local public library and sit on the diddy furniture in the kiddies’ section [note to self: should this have a legal disclaimer?]. That mild embarrassment you feel, that sense of transgression: that’s what it feels like to be big. So imagine sitting in a chair one day and discovering that you felt normal, as though the chair had been tailored exactly to fit your frame, and that it was because this was the perfect chair; and that it belonged to someone else.
It would be fair to say I returned to that bookshop. In fact, I worked there for several years, running writers’ groups and teaching classes. It wasn’t solely on account of the chair, you understand, but late in the evenings, when everyone else had gone, I would luxuriate in the comfort offered by that most perfect of chairs, feeling whilst in it like I belonged in the world, a man reprieved from a sentence of imprisonment inside a doll’s house. On several occasions I nodded off through sheer tranquillity – it was that sort of chair. The rest of the time, out in the real world, whenever passing any furniture retailer or antiques grotto I’d be lured in by the temptation to try out their wares, only to emerge a while later, sobered and wiser. A comparable chair was not to be had. Oh, I could describe it to you, reader, but would you see the real beauty of it? You are, after all, not me, or so I’ve been led to believe. Were I tell you that it had a high back, and wings for that late hour when your lolling heavy head needs to be softly caught, would you nod approvingly? If I delineated its perfect balance of uprightness and comfort, its ability to make you feel simultaneously alert yet relaxed, empowered and at rest, would you see these things for the minor miracles they are? One suspects the whole descriptive venture might be on a par with trying to persuade one’s pals of the physical perfection of one’s beloved: no amount of eulogising can surmount the problem that your audience might happen to prefer blondes, or Scandinavian half-back recliners, or whatever. Associate whatever image you must with the signifier ‘chair’ so that it becomes cet objet du désir for you, too. Then imagine seeing it every day; watching the arses of others lowering into its thick, firm cushion; flinching as strangers made it creak as they shove it about.
Like Amis said: when you’re a writer, you read. It’s an imperative: reading is the nutrition your mind requires in order to create. This chair situation was preventing me from consuming words, at least within my own four walls. In the last year – until very recently, in fact – my rate of reading had dropped to a level I’m too ashamed to share. My work was suffering. I was reminded of that the horseshoe-nail that prevents a kingdom from falling, in the old saw.
My partner, having spotted my unbridled chair-lust and pieced two and two together, had hatched a plan. She little appreciated the specificity of my chair needs, however, and when she unveiled, at Christmas, an armchair bearing more than a passing resemblance to the bookshop one, my heart first leapt in huge gratitude of her perceptiveness and thoughtfulness and generosity, and then it sank. What if the chair were too small? Rather, what if, as usual, I was too big? I approached the chair with trepidation. I sat down in it.
It was too small. It was way too small, which was odd, given that it didn’t look so (its dimensions, actually, seemed more-or-less identical to those of my dream chair). I feigned complete satisfaction, rubbing the arms of the chair in the way people on DFS commercials do. I felt like my world had fallen apart – the furniture fetishising part of it, anyway. I was distraught.
So it’s all worked out fine, then, in the end. Since my partner gave me that uncomfortable chair, I’ve been reading far more than ever before – as an opening gambit I polished off Bolano’s 2666 in under a week – and I’ve been sitting in my chair, at home, feeling like a human being of ordinary proportions. Like Kev and Mart, I’ve found my place in the world. Sometimes my cat joins me.
Only occasionally do I come close to detection. Now and again, one or other of my creative writing students, yanking the old wing-backed armchair into place, will say, “Didn’t this chair used to be a different colour?”
And I’ll say I don’t remember.
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N. Quentin Woolf is a writer and broadcaster who regularly contributes to bespoke's pages.
He also runs several writing workshops and events. For more information visit:
workshops@nquentinwoolf.co.uk
