For the past decade I have suffered from noisy neighbours in the flat below mine. First it was the stream of student tenants, thundering up and down the communal staircase day and night, banging doors, shouting to each other, playing their guitars. Then at last the flat was bought by a middle-aged owner-occupier, who completely gutted and refurbished the place; the deafening noise and pervasive dust from the months-long building works was almost unbearable. Now that his works are over, I have to put up with the day-to-day clatter and clamour of a neighbour with a lot of Gen Z house guests and a penetrating voice.
Noisy neighbours are a plague for those who work at home. Naturally, I find it most maddening when I am in the middle of writing a book or article. (I am no stranger to the earplug, having tried many kinds, but why should I have to stuff my ears with bits of silicone, foam or wax in order to hear myself think?) My only comfort comes from the knowledge that many writers, far more illustrious than I, have suffered from exactly the same thing.
Marcel Proust’s collected Letters to the Lady Upstairs chronicle his despair with the noise emanating from the apartment above his in Paris. There Madame Williams played the harp, her American dentist husband loudly drilled his patients’ teeth, and workmen frequently hammered away. The noise-phobic Proust lined his room with cork but the cacophony got through nonetheless. And then there were the sexy goings-on next door. ‘Beyond the partition, the neighbours make love every two days with a frenzy of which I am jealous,’ he wrote to his landlord’s son.
The confirmed bachelor Henry James complained of being disturbed in his work by the ‘romping little wretches of children’ living above his flat in Kensington. ‘As if a regiment of cavalry were engaged in manoeuvres’. In Trieste, James Joyce protested about the Italians ‘shouting and singing’ outside his window, while in Hull Philip Larkin bemoaned the ‘hellish racket’ of the TVs, radios and ‘infernal thudding’ of his neighbours, once telling a friend he dreamt of ‘murdering them all for the sake of peace’. For Franz Kafka, noisy children in his native Prague ‘drives me from my bed, out of the house in despair, with throbbing temples.’ And Thomas Carlyle, who called noise ‘the most intolerable of all evils’, built a soundproof study in his house in Chelsea because he hated hearing the organ grinders, crowing roosters, horses’ hooves and creaking wheels of passing carts.
For Franz Kafka, noisy children in his native Prague ‘drives me from my bed, out of the house in despair, with throbbing temples’
But of course writers are not the only victims of their neighbours’ noise pollution. It is hell for any homeworker, especially creatives for whom the ability to concentrate is imperative, such as artists. Lucian Freud was obsessed with peace and quiet, frequently moving studios because external sounds intruded. He once abandoned a perfectly good studio because a nearby piano teacher’s scales were driving him mad. ‘I could hear every scale, every mistake … it was like being slowly killed by Chopin.’ And Francis Bacon was not above leaning out the window and screaming obscenities at neighbours if they so much as rattled a dustbin while he was painting. As for Salvador Dalí, while living at his longstanding base in New York’s St Regis Hotel, he took his revenge on noisy downstairs occupants by deliberately dropping heavy things on the floor – chairs, hammers, whatever came to hand – calling it ‘artistic percussion’.
Composers are likewise noise-averse. Igor Stravinsky left Paris partly because of the big-city hubbub and ended up in suburban Los Angeles, but even genteel suburbia was not always tranquil. When his neighbours’ lawnmowers disturbed his composing sessions, he retaliated by loudly playing on the piano the most dissonant parts of The Rite of Spring, until the neighbours begged him to stop. Beethoven too was famously short-tempered about noise (before deafness set in) and when the clatter of neighbours outside got too much he simply dumped a bucket of water out the window at them. And so to our very own Noel Gallagher, who griped endlessly about his London neighbours ‘making more racket than I ever did with Oasis’. He threatened revenge by recording ‘the loudest album ever made’.
So yes, when it comes to battling against noisy neighbours, it is reassuring to know that one is in distinguished company. And crucially, that this scourge did not, in the end, prevent the masters from creating their masterpieces. I just have to remind myself of that the next time I am labouring away wearing earplugs because my neighbour’s DJ nephew is in situ and rehearsing his ‘set’.
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