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| Fairfield Porter, Interior with a Dress Pattern (1969) |
Alec Wilkinson, in his recent “Jazz Hands” (The New
Yorker, March 11, 2013), a profile of the jazz
pianist Jason Moran, misses a glorious opportunity to describe Moran’s Harlem
apartment. He says that the living room has “a view of the Hudson River” and
that it contains an “upright piano from his parents’ house.” But with regard to
how the room is furnished and decorated, he doesn’t say. Wilkinson would no
doubt scoff at my hunger for such details. “Jazz Hands” is, after all, a piece
about jazz, not interior decoration. Nevertheless, descriptions of the rooms in
which people live help illumine their character.
John Updike, in his absorbing essay “Fictional Houses” (Odd
Jobs, 1991), refers to “the cozy quality of
the brick rows of Pennsylvania small towns” and “the many subtle styles, much
patched and revised, of wooden farmhouses” in New England, and says, “To
describe these houses is halfway to describe the life lived in them.” In my
opinion, the same can be said about the rooms, apartments, lofts, offices, and
other places that the subjects of New Yorker profiles live, work, and hang out in: to describe
these places is “halfway to describe the life lived in them.”
Whitney Balliett, in his great jazz profiles, often
depicted the rooms his subjects lived and performed in. For example, in his
“The Human Sound” (The New Yorker,
December 26, 1970; included in Balliett’s 1979 collection American
Singers), a profile of Bobby Short, he
describes Short’s Carnegie Hall apartment as follows:
The small foyer on the first floor contained a desk, a big
Queen Anne armchair, a bicycle, and a staircase. A turn-around kitchen opened
off it. The living room, at the top of the stairs, was two stories high, with a
vaulted ceiling and a row of high windows facing north. At one end were a small
bar, a bathroom, and a second set of stairs. The stairs led to a spacious
balcony, which served as Short’s bedroom. A bedroom window faced a small roof,
where his cats, Rufus and Miss Brown, were aired. The furnishings were
high-class Camp. A heavy glass-topped coffee table rested on a zebra-skin rug,
and on the rug, beneath the table, were two metal lizards—one gilt, one brass.
A pair of big daybeds, which were covered with bright African-looking material
and leopard-skin pillows, flanked the table. Near the foyer stairs were a huge
wooden lion, a stolid eighteenth-century Italian refectory table, and one of
those roofed-in wicker wing chairs that still haunt old summer cottages on
Naushon Island. An antler chandelier hung in the living room, and it was echoed
by a Teddy Roosevelt leather chair with tusks as arms. Pictures of every
description jammed the walls, and the window side of the room was lined with
books and bric-a-brac.
Balliett’s room descriptions are so lovingly detailed, I want to enter them, sit in that Teddy Roosevelt
chair with the tusk arms, and soak up the atmosphere. Here’s another Balliett
apartment description – this from his great Jim Hall profile, “The Answer Is
Yes” (The New Yorker, March 31, 1975;
included in his 1977 collection Improvising):
When the Halls were married, he moved into her apartment,
on West Twelfth Street. It faces south and is at eye level with chimney pots
and the tops of ailanthus trees. Sunlight fills the living room all day. The
off-white walls are hung with a lively assortment of lithographs, oils, and
drawings. A tall cabinet, which contains hundreds of L.P.s, is flanked by full
bookshelves. A sofa, a hassock, a fat floor pillow, a couple of canvas Japanese
chairs, and a coffee table ring the window end of the room. An upright piano
sits by the front door, and Hall’s electric guitar rests on a stand by the
kitchen door.
The above-quoted passages are typical Balliett apartment
descriptions. They’re almost “description for description’s sake,” akin to 17th
century Dutch still life – “devised as a feast for the attentive eye” (Svetlana
Alpers, The Art of Describing, 1983).
It seems to me that New Yorker descriptions of physical interiors divide into at
least three categories:
1. Description done purely for the pleasure of describing interesting, beautiful things;
2. Description that illumines the subject’s character;
3. Description that furthers narrative.
The first two types are closely linked. For instance,
Balliett descriptions are both “feasts for the attentive eye” and illustrations of the occupants’ lifestyle. A classic
example of the third category is found in Janet Malcolm’s Ingrid Sischy
profile, “A Girl of the Zeitgeist” (The New Yorker, October 20 & 27, 1986; included in Malcolm’s
1992 collection The Purloined Clinic).
Malcolm begins her brilliant piece with a description of Rosalind Krauss’s
loft:
Rosalind Krauss’s loft, on Greene Street, is one of the
most beautiful living places in New York. Its beauty has a dark, forceful,
willful character. Each piece of furniture and every object of use or
decoration has evidently had to pass a severe test before being admitted into
this disdainfully interesting room – a long, mildly begloomed rectangle with
tall windows at either end, a sachlich
white kitchen area in the center, a study, and a sleeping balcony. An
arrangement of geometric dark-blue armchairs around a coffee table forms the
loft’s sitting room, also furnished with, among other rarities, an antique
armchair on splayed, carved feet and upholstered in a dark William Morris
fabric; an assertive all-black Minimalist shaped-felt piece; a strange
black-and-white photograph of ocean water; and a gold owl-shaped Art Deco table
clock. But perhaps even stronger than the room’s aura of commanding originality
is its sense of absences, its evocation of all the things that have been
excluded, have been found wanting, have failed to capture the interest of
Rosalind Krauss – which are most of the things in the world, the things of
“good taste” and fashion and consumerism, the things we see in stores and in
one another’s houses. No one can leave this loft without feeling a little
rebuked: one’s own house suddenly seems cluttered, inchoate, banal.
Malcolm’s piece is structured around apartments, lofts,
and studios. It uses them not just as organizing principles, but as a means of
analyzing their occupants’ various notions of style.
An example of a room
description that falls in all three of the above categories is Mark
Singer’s memorable depiction of Goodman Ace’s living room (“Goody,” The New
Yorker, April 4, 1977; re-titled
“Words Fool Me,” and included in Singer’s wonderful 1988 collection Mr.
Personality):
These days, the cottage of Ace’s own cottage industry is his
apartment in the Ritz Tower – four spacious rooms of white walls and
black-and-white tiles. The living room leads to a terrace that offers a view of
Park Avenue below and Central Park to the northwest. Ace often used to sit on
the terrace and read and work – a habit he sustained until a few years ago,
when flocks of pigeons began to roost there. “Shoo, pigeons!” didn’t get rid of
the birds, nor did the pigeon repellants, plastic windmills, or signs that said
“No Pigeons Allowed,” so he finally gave up and retreated indoors. The
apartment contains the same furniture that it has had for twenty years – off-white
leather upholstery, a vague flavor of Art-Deco-in-decline, the aura of a stage
setting. On one of the armchairs, there is a green cushion with white
lettering that says, “LAUGHTER IS
THE MUSIC OF THE HEART.” A white grand piano stands in one corner of the room,
and atop the piano are a ceramic vase filled with artificial roses, a
thirty-year-old photograph of Jane Ace, an unframed photograph of Groucho
inscribed “Dear Goody, Here Is Me. Groucho,” and an ineluctably stubborn pile
of unanswered mail.
That “ineluctably stubborn
pile of unanswered mail” functions as a segue to a discussion of Ace’s letter
writing, particularly his Groucho Marx correspondence.
Interior description in today’s New Yorker profiles isn’t as detailed as it once was. The
mention of one or two telling particulars appears to be preferred to extensive
notation of a room’s contents. For example, here is the extent of David
Remnick’s description of Israeli spymaster Meir Dagan’s Tel Aviv apartment: “The
apartment is decorated with his canvases. They are naïve, sentimental,
Orientalist—desert landscapes, a Bedouin, an old man in the Iranian town of
Tabriz” (“The Vegetarian,” The New Yorker, September 3, 2012). In two quick, vivid strokes, Lauren Collins
sketches the Paris office of Gerard Depaerdieu’s lawyer, Hervé Temime: “Temime,
who represented Roman Polanski, sat at a desk, in front of spectacular windows
framed by bright-yellow velour curtains. His printer was filled with
bright-yellow paper” (“L’Étranger,” The New Yorker, February 25, 2013). Elizabeth Kolbert vivifies a
room in Oostvaardersplassen’s administrative offices when she writes, “Vera
picked me up one day at my hotel in Lelystad, and we drove over to the
reserve’s administrative offices, where we had a cup of coffee in a room
decorated with the mounted head of a very large black Heck bull” (“Recall of
the Wild” (The New Yorker,
December 24 & 31, 2012).
There are exceptions to the minimalist approach. Jeffrey
Toobin, in his “Madoff’s Curveball” (The New Yorker, May 30, 2011) neatly conveys the look of Fred
Wilpon’s office as follows:
The headquarters of the Wilpon empire resembles an English
manor house transplanted to a high floor in Rockefeller Center. Wood panelling,
thick carpets, and pastoral landscapes in heavy frames offer a serene contrast
to the hubbub below. Soft drinks are decanted into crystal glasses. (No Coke;
Pepsi is a Mets sponsor.) True, the muted television in the reception area is
set to SNY—the Wilpons’ successful cable sports channel—and there is the
obligatory LeRoy Neiman painting. But the Neiman shows the trading floor of the
New York Stock Exchange, rather than his customary jock kitsch, and the
over-all feel of the offices is boardroom, not locker room.
Judith Thurman, in her “Ask Betty” (The New Yorker, November 12, 2012), unreels an admirable
Balliettian run of interior detailing when she describes Betty Halbreich’s Park
Avenue apartment:
You could not describe Halbreich’s décor as soberly
tailored. The den is paneled in knotty cypress (“big in the fifties”), with
pink chintz upholstery (“It used to be tartan”). The master bedroom has gingham
walls and needlepoint rugs. There is a laundry suite, and a walk-in closet
dedicated to Christmas decorations. In the formal dining room (Wedgwood-blue walls,
opaline-glass chandelier, antique breakfront groaning with heirloom china),
Halbreich’s banquet table was set for two.
But these depictions pale in comparison with my all-time
favorite New Yorker interior description
– John McPhee’s masterful evocation of the room in Otto’s farmhouse restaurant
“where the customers sit and have their aperitifs while they wait for a message
from the kitchen that it is time to go to table for dinner” (“Brigade de
Cuisine,” The New Yorker,
February 19, 1979; included in McPhee’s classic 1979 collection Giving
Good Weight):
I remember from the first moment I walked into it the
compact and offhand rural European character and feeling of that room. With its
nonchalant miscellany of detail, it was beyond the margins of formal design,
but it was too pleasurable merely to have been flung together and too thematic
not to imply a tale. There were a pair of bullfighter prints – one called “La
Lidia” and the other a depiction of a desencajonamiento – and protruding sharp-horned from the wall between
these pictures was the head of a fighting bull. The animal had been raised on
the dehesa of Pepe Alvarez and
killed in the ring with a sword. Crossed Spanish swords had been hung above the
fire. All around the room were wrought-iron Spanish sconces with small amber
bulbs. There was a three-hundred-year-old map of the Danube, a
two-hundred-year-old map of “Magna Britannia.” There were hand-carved cabinets.
There were tall wicker chairs, Queen Anne chairs, and Spanish brass-studded leather
chairs in groups on a red tile floor. I eventually learned that many of these
things had come down through the chef’s family – to America from England via
Spain. There were heavy red curtains on brass rods. The ceiling slanted upward
in the mansard manner, with boards of tongue and groove. The silent paddle fan
hung down between exposed checked beams. Staring back at the bull were the
small glass eyes of a taxidermal fox – just its head and neck, on a plaque –
and near it were photographs made in Alaska of dog foxes and vixens. A poster
in one corner said “Extinct is forever” and presented line drawings of
vanishing and vanished creatures – Cape lion (1860), quagga (1883), Labrador
duck (1875), solenodon, snow leopard, northern kit fox.
Lofts, apartments, offices, farmhouses, rooms, having been
willfully acquired, furnished, and decorated tell us much about their
occupants, and their description is a major resource of the art of the
profile.
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