Prospero | Immersion therapy

Why do baths incubate ideas?

Many writers, artists and philosophers have sought inspiration in the tub

By M.H.

BATHS ARE everywhere—and not just in bathrooms. Once you start to look for them, they can be found in the works of great writers, artists and thinkers. They have been tied to ideas and creativity since Archimedes’s “Eureka!” moment, when the rising of his bathwater as he got in helped him to formulate his principle of volume. The milk of 7,000 donkeys was reportedly needed to fill one of Cleopatra’s beautifying daily baths.

How people choose to bathe is particular and private, an intimate ritual that goes beyond cleansing. Douglas Adams spent much of his life cogitating in baths, to the bemusement—and occasional fury—of his flatmate. “A towel,” he wrote in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, “is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.” From time to time, Winston Churchill strategised from his bath, including during the second world war. “Performance” (1970), a psychedelic and seedy crime drama, emphasised the steamier side-effects of hot water. After one scene, where Mick Jagger engages in a ménage à trois in an art deco bathtub with Anita Pallenberg and Michèle Breton, “even the bathwater,” a studio executive shuddered, “was dirty.” Elsewhere, baths have a stultifying effect, leaving the bather vulnerable. In “Oresteia” Agamemnon is stabbed to death in the bathtub by Clytemnestra; in 1793 Charlotte Corday plunged a knife into Jean-Paul Marat’s chest while he convalesced, a murder immortalised in Jacques-Louis David’s painting.

For Esther Greenwood, the protagonist of “The Bell Jar”, the key to a restorative bath was its temperature. “The water needs to be very hot, so hot you can barely stand putting your foot in it. Then you lower yourself, inch by inch, till the water’s up to your neck,” she advised. Benjamin Britten required both extremes, starting with a freezing bath in the morning—a hangover from his school days—and finishing with a scalding one in the evening. Franz Kafka, by contrast, linked his poor opinion of himself as a dilettante to his daily soak: “what I have written was written in a lukewarm bath.”

Pierre Bonnard—whose work is currently on view at the Tate Modern—painted a series of works of his wife, Marthe, in the bath. Marthe’s body lies rigid in the water in “The Bath” (1925); her skin is rendered in greys, yellows and faded blues, making it unclear whether she is peaceful or nearing death (she took the baths for unknown health reasons). “Nude in the Bath”, another painting from 1925, shows her legs stretched out, almost cadaverous in appearance. The world outside, hinted at by a bright yellow rug with a red rose pattern, contrasts with the sterile white bathtub; Marthe has almost been subsumed by the water. In a later painting from 1936, however, a richness of colour seeps into the bath itself. Hues of deep purple and warm orange illuminate the figure inside: it is as though the dip has revived her, and brought her back into the world.

What lies behind the magic of a bath? It is partly the movement of water itself. It froths and foams, glimmers and reflects the light, or takes on shadows. In 1975 Salvador Dalí, in one of his surreal moods, sketched his bath as a “liquid tornado”. The drawing is an explosion of vitality; one bathtub bears women’s faces on each end, while the figure inside is almost completely obscured by the water.

In a bath you can hear the rain outside like fingertips on the windows, feel the sun beat down on your face—often the only part of the body not submerged in water—and watch the steam rise. Baths can be almost womb-like, the body both weightlessly suspended and protected by the density of the water. They are their own world, a space for working or relaxing, either shared or private, boiling or bitterly cold. And, for creative people who spend hours stewing in their own heads, they are finally a chance to let the body stew instead. “There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure,” Esther Greenwood says in “The Bell Jar”, “but I don’t know many of them.”

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