Intruder alert – Alison Healy on unexpected guests and getting work done

Unexpected visitors can really ruin your concentration if you are working from home. Just ask Samuel Taylor Coleridge. A knock on the door completely derailed his train of thought when he was writing Kubla Khan in 1797.

The poet had claimed that the entire structure of Kubla Khan came to him in a dream when he was staying in a farmhouse in Somerset. His predilection for opium contributed to the vivid and exotic dream.

When he awoke from his stupor, he had 200 to 300 lines of poetry in his head. He began to excitedly write the lines, well, as excitedly as you can when you are wielding a quill and wrestling with an ink pot. But then misfortune struck.

A person from the village of Porlock knocked on his door. He was on business, according to Coleridge but the type of business remains shrouded in secrecy. Door-to-door salesman? Opium dealer? All we know is that he stayed for an hour. By the time the poet returned to his desk, the rest of the poem had floated outside his grasp.

Blowing a Gaskin – Frank McNally on gasconades, gasúns, and Ireland’s Bay of Naples

---

In the long run – Alison Healy on the bizarre Olympic marathon of 1904

---

Valour invalidated – Frank McNally on a mysterious Irish anti-hero: the “Great Gaiscí”

---

Frank McNally on royal typos, Tennyson’s Tories, and the mystery of ‘Operation Sonnet’

---

He got no further than 54 lines and never finished the poem. It’s a good job the identity of the caller remained a mystery because his life may have been in jeopardy otherwise.

The American scholar and teacher Jonathan Livingston Lowes was particularly irate about his intrusion. According to the US literary critic Walter Jackson Bate, the lecturer liked to tell his students: “If there is any man in the history of literature who should be hanged, drawn, and quartered, it is the man on business from Porlock.” A bit of an overreaction, perhaps? Other scholars suggest the pesky person from Porlock provided a handy excuse because the poet had run out of steam.

It’s difficult to have sympathy for Coleridge. He was in the middle of nowhere with no modern-day distractions. No danger of him having a quick look at Twitter before getting down to work. No risk that his work would get derailed because of an errant email, or a microwave that suddenly needed cleaning.

Writers working from home nowadays have to contend with a parade of persons from Porlock. I bet Coleridge never had to deal with a delivery driver insisting he had ordered a patio table with six chairs. Lucky old Coleridge never wasted a moment dealing with scam messages from his fake children pretending they had lost their phones and urgently needing money.

How could you return to Xanadu after that?

All Coleridge had to bother him was an odd visit from his pal Wordsworth, when he got bored wandering lonesome as a cloud and counting all those dancing daffodils. And yet he still kicked up such a fuss about the person from Porlock.

He was luckier than poor Harper Lee who couldn’t make any headway at work because of her enthusiastic callers. After To Kill a Mockingbird was published, she reportedly told a friend she couldn’t write. “I have about 300 personal friends who keep dropping in for a cup of coffee. I’ve tried getting up at six, but then all the six o’clock risers congregate.”

Both writers were known for suffering from prolonged bouts of writer’s block so perhaps these unwelcome callers are the literary equivalent of the dog eating their homework?

At least Tchaikovsky was upfront about it when he suffered a bad bout of writer’s block in 1888. He was about to start work on the Fifth Symphony, but he told friends the urge to create had deserted him. “I’ve no ideas or inspiration whatsoever!” he wrote to friends with a dramatic flourish and went on to worry that he may yet feel that “my head is empty, that my time is past”. And yet he fished something out of that head because he finished The Fifth Symphony a few months later.

Tchaikovsky, Harper Lee and Coleridge could all have benefited from a spell in Tokyo’s Manuscript Writing Café.

This excellent idea provides a distraction-free zone for writers. When you arrive, you must log your target for that day, and you cannot leave until you reach it.

There is unlimited coffee, and you can sign up to mild, normal or hard progress checks, depending on your level of laziness.

Opting for a hard progress check involves someone standing behind you and silently urging progress, as well as interrogating you about your progress every hour.

So, you have endless coffee, but you cannot leave until you have finished your work. And there’s someone peering over your shoulder wondering when you will be finished. It sounds suspiciously like a typical day in a newsroom, if you ask me.