All the Time in the World

by Jessica Kerwin Jenkins

  The old Italian tradition and its English interpretation blended in eighteenth-century America with the influences of precolonial African architecture, and that of the Dutch, who had built porches since the medieval era and who introduced the stoep, or “stoop,” to New York. All at once in the 1740s, every proper American house had to have a sitting porch, also known as a “piazza,” a place to watch the world go by. Boston artist John Singelton Copley (1738–1815) discovered the “peazer,” or “peaza,” as he alternately called it, on a trip to New York, writing to his half brother, “Peazas are so cool in Summer and in Winter break off the storms so much that I think I should not be able to like a house without.” Pattern books, which helped carpenters and clients select building details, promoted the plan, and by the mid-nineteenth century the porch was ubiquitous.

  The myth of the American porch gained traction, as celebrated by writers—including William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Edith Wharton, and Ernest Hemingway—who gave the porch a nostalgic, romantic aura. Washington Irving (1783–1859) loved to sit on the porch, as he wrote, “with a book in my hand, sometimes reading, sometimes musing on the landscape, and sometimes dozing and mixing all up in a pleasant dream.” On balmy evenings it offered refuge from the kitchen’s heat. But the porch was also the semiprivate, semidark spot where courting couples—including Zelda Sayre (1900–1948) and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—sipped icy lemonade and made their whispered declarations.

  Scott and Zelda met on the verandah of the Montgomery, Alabama, country club in the summer of 1918, when Scott, then a dashing twenty-two-year-old army lieutenant, cut in on a dance with the beautiful and audacious Zelda. She had a face like “a saint, a Viking Madonna,” Fitzgerald noted. They spent the rest of the summer on her parents’ porch, swinging in the evenings, discussing poetry, and drinking in the scent of honeysuckle that wafted from the garden. And falling in love. “Without you dearest dearest I couldn’t see or hear or feel or think—or live,” Zelda would later tell him. “I love you so and I’m never in all our lives going to let us be apart another night.”

  After a tumultuous courtship, Scott and Zelda were married two years later in a quiet ceremony in New York. After not so quietly leaving a string of hotels—they were thrown out of the Waldorf for dancing on the tables—the Fitzgeralds rented a gray-shingled farmhouse in Westport, Connecticut, where Scott began his second semi-autobiographical novel, The Beautiful and the Damned.

  In that book, a young couple rather like the Fitzgeralds rent a little gray house in Westport. Sitting close together on the porch in the evenings, they watch the light, Scott wrote. “They would wait for the moon to stream across the silver acres of farmland, jump a thick wood, and tumble waves of radiance at their feet.”

  As early as 1415, London’s mayor ordered lanterns made of transparent horn to be hung in front of houses along the major roads, to light the way on winter evenings. Apart from similar efforts in other cities, the only other glow brightening dark European streets through the sixteenth century came from the occasional lantern carried by a night watchman or the fire burning outside his guardhouse. These civic efforts created a cozy feeling, sure, but could hardly be considered lighting.

  Then, in the eighteenth century, the urban nightscape was transformed. In 1736, London’s administration paid for four thousand hours of night lighting, compared to only three hundred hours several decades before. Philadelphia lit up, and Boston too. New York City required every seventh house to display a candle, lit during the “Dark Time of the Moon.” When candles and oil lamps gave way to gaslight, the streets became ever brighter—and nowhere more so than in Paris, where the number of gaslights grew from 203 to 12,816 over a span of four years. “Right in the middle of the heart of the city there appears a golden dot, another one here, a third there, a fourth—one cannot say how quickly they follow one another, they can no longer be counted,” German poet Julius Rodenberg (1831–1914) wrote. “The whole of Paris is studded with golden dots, as closely as a velvet gown with gold glitter. Soon they wink and twinkle everywhere, and you cannot imagine anything more beautiful, and yet the most beautiful is still to come. Out of the dots emerge lines, and from the lines, figures, spark lining up with spark, and as far as the eye can see are endless avenues of light.”

  Even those miraculous twinklings couldn’t compare with the effects of electrical lighting only a few decades later. “One could in fact have believed that the sun had risen,” a journalist wrote, reporting on scientific experiments with outdoor arc lighting in Lyon in 1855. “The light, which flooded a large area, was so strong that ladies opened up their umbrellas—not as a tribute to the inventors, but in order to protect themselves from the rays of this mysterious new sun.”

  As demand for the technology grew, many resisted electricity’s brilliant new glow. It was just too bright. It lent a “corpse-like quality” to those subjected to its glare, one Londoner argued, and it could make a crowd look “almost dangerous and garish.” Robert Louis Stevenson penned “A Plea for Gas Lamps” in 1878, hoping to dissuade London’s authorities from installing obnoxious electric streetlamps like those in Paris. “A new sort of urban star now shines out nightly,” he wrote, “horrible, unearthly, obnoxious to the human eye; a lamp for a nightmare!”

  Stevenson did not get his way. Electricity seduced the masses, especially those who had basked in the glow of Paris’s Avenue de l’Opéra, lit by giant arc lamps every 150 feet. “The effect is magnificent,” wrote a visitor, “and at this moment there exists nothing in this city of splendid effects to compare with this magical scene.” In 1885, the French architect Jules Bourdais (1835–1915) hoped to take France’s love of electrical lighting to its logical conclusion when he proposed a twelve-hundred-foot-high Sun Column to the Universal Exposition’s planning commission. His ornate granite tower, to be constructed near the Pont-Neuf, would house a museum of electricity at its base, and, topped with a giant, high-powered searchlight and parabolic mirrors, light up the entire city. Exhibition planners, perhaps wisely, decided to go with Gustave Eiffel’s tower instead.

  Used in ancient Egypt as early as 1500 BCE, incense sanctified religious rites throughout Asia and the Middle East, but also presented an ingenious way to measure time. Chinese sailors burnt incense at sea, using the smoldering sticks as an indicator for when to change course. The Chinese phrase meaning “in the time it takes to burn an incense stick” became popular, and smart incense-makers marked sticks with graduated timelines, which meant that an alarm clock could be fashioned by tying a small bronze bell to either end of a short silk thread draped over a slow-burning stick. The ember end burnt down until it reached the thread, then sizzled through, letting the bells fall into a bronze bowl with a rousing clang. Another kind of incense, elaborately designed lozenges, emitted differently scented or colored smoke as the time passed.

  But beyond its practical uses, the true allure of incense lies in its olfactory charms. Chinese courtiers of the T’ang era (618–907 CE) crumbled bits of incense into their love potions and perfumed their homes with incense fumes, favoring anise, basil, ambergris, civet, clove, frankincense, jasmine, and sandalwood. An old sage wrote: “The use of incense gives manifold benefits.… At the dead of night, when the morning moon is in the sky, [those of the] artistic and sad poetical fold burn incense, and their hearts are elated and they whistle carelessly. By the bright window copying old famous scrolls, or leisurely humming, fly-whisk in hand, or when reading at night under the lamp, incense is burned to drive away the demon of sleepiness. Therefore incense may be called the ‘Old Companion of the Moon.’ ”

  In Heian era Japan (794–1185), courtiers crafted their own incense blends, competing to develop new scents. The diarist and poet Sei Shonagon (ca.966–1013) wrote: “To wash one’s hair, make one’s toilet, and put on scented robes; even if not a soul sees one, these preparations still produce an inner pleasure.” Those swooning in the smoke spoke of “listening” to incense, and some enj
oyed the scents so deeply that sniffing the fumes became a pastime in itself.

  Before long, sweet-smelling aristocrats played at identifying different types of incense from the odors alone, assigning them historically suggestive, lyrical new names. Their innocent delight became something of an obsession in the fifteenth century, when connoisseurs and collectors invented koh-do, the “Way of Incense,” a ritualistic game that had almost as many formal rules as a tea ceremony: no one could disturb the air by opening a door or a window, for example, and polite competitors kept unnecessary conversation to a minimum.

  In preparation, participants bathed and dressed in unscented clothing and ate only light foods. Then, burning a series of sticks, the host tested their knowledge. Before hazarding a guess, true aesthetes took no less than three inhalations of an offered scent, and no more than five. Sometimes they came up with a new name altogether, flaunting their knowledge of ancient poetry. A particularly evocative scent might be called Moonlight on the Couch, echoing a few well-known lines of verse: “Dark shadows of the moonlight / Cast athwart my couch, / Sink deep into my being.” Evocative and sensuous, incense reached the height of its popularity in Japan in the eighteenth century, when courtesans traded incense sticks with their suitors at the end of the night.

  It wasn’t chic to arrive on time, and it was unseemly to stay till the end, but attendance at the Paris Opéra was imperative for the city’s fashionable swans and gentlemen of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. During the season, patrons poured through the opera house doors in London and later New York, perhaps stopping briefly for a shoeshine before making their way to the luxe box seats. “Society goes to the opera to see and be seen,” an American proclaimed. “It goes to exchange gossip, to chatter about the things of the day, to criticise a fashion, or a book, or a new preacher.” Rarely, however, did the operagoers pay much attention to the action on the stage. As the ravishing eighteenth-century Venetian Giustiniana Wynne noted, she and her sisters were “the real show” at the opera in Turin. (Casanova, who visited her family’s opera box, confirmed as much.) And why not? During the course of the season in Italy, a dedicated attendee might watch the same opera for thirty consecutive performances.

  In those days, a lady treated her theater box as an extension of her salon. Meanwhile, the men worked the crowd, coming and going, and, in London, dropping by “fop allies,” the aisles surrounding the orchestra section, or the “pit,” where they made romantic assignations. Sometimes, in their wandering, they even bumbled out onto the stage. “Some of our young Sprigs of Fashion made a point of sporting their persons so prominent on the Stage, as to spoil the effect of the representation,” an English critic huffed in 1794.

  But London’s young sprigs had nothing on the Italian crowd. Italy’s theaters were known as the most ornate but also the rowdiest in Europe. Upper-crust patrons ate, drank, gambled, gossiped, read, and even brawled in their boxes. “The noise here during the performance was abominable,” wrote an English visitor to Milan, “except while two or three airs and a duet were singing, with which every one was in raptures.” Similar conditions were reported from Naples to Rome to Venice. German composer Richard Wagner (1813–1883) fretted over what he saw as the Italian audience’s indifference. “During the conversation and visits paid from box to box the music still went on, with the same office one assigns to table music at grand dinners, namely to encourage by its noise the otherwise timid talk,” he snipped. Likewise, French composer Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) was stunned to witness a Milanese audience “full of people talking in normal voices,” he wrote in 1832. “The singers, undeterred, gesticulated and yelled their lungs out in the strictest spirit of rivalry. At least I presumed they did, from their wide-open mouths; but the noise of the audience was such that no sound penetrated except the bass drum.” As decibel levels in the box seats hit their highest pitch, pit audiences liked to shout “Zitti, zitti”—“Be quiet”—to the rollicking crowd above.

  When they deigned to listen, the Italians expressed their approval with uproarious applause. Sometimes, after an especially rousing phrase or high note, they’d interrupt the singers to demand that the choice bit be sung once again—or even twice. “In the second act the singers themselves wept and carried their audiences along with them so that in the happy days of carnival, tears were continually being wiped away in boxes and parquet alike,” an aficionado wrote of performances of La Sonnambula in Milan in 1830. “I, too, shed tears of emotion and ecstasy.” They could be just as ruthless when they didn’t like what they heard. They hissed. They whistled. They shouted. Composer Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847) watched horrified as the Roman crowd turned on his colleague Giovanni Pacini during an 1831 premiere. “Those in the pit stood up, began talking loudly and laughing, and turned their backs to the stage,” Mendelssohn wrote.

  Usually the scene was statelier when a monarch was in the house, as when Ferdinand II, King of the Two Sicilies, visited Lecce in the mid-1850s. But even his august presence couldn’t guarantee decorum. “Ever and anon, as was his wont, he rose to pull up his breeches,” an observer remembered. “Each time this happened, presuming he was about to retire, the audience rose with him in unison.”

  Only opera’s true connoisseurs kept above the fray, “several clerics, several shopkeepers, several schoolboys, sucklings of the muses and soldiers just returning from or about to leave for a tour of duty,” as a nineteenth-century Parisian described this rare breed. But then, even most rulers and regents were no more absorbed by the opera than their subjects. Sighed Louis XIV (1638–1715), “I do not know how opera, with such perfect music and an altogether regal expenditure, has succeeded in boring me.”

  Long before the invention of the movie camera, French-born painter Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg (1740–1812) created a spectacle that took London by storm. Hired at the Drury Lane Theatre in the 1770s, de Loutherbourg used silk screens, transparencies, sophisticated lighting techniques, and mechanical models to create elaborate sets and a depth of perspective never seen before. Model ships were perfectly rigged. Lighting effects caused the sun and the moon to rise. “The eye of the spectator might be so effectually deceived in a playhouse as to be induced to take the produce of art for real nature,” wrote one critic.

  But in the winter of 1781, de Loutherbourg’s light-and-pictures production, “Eidophusikon”—an “imitation of Natural Phenomena, represented by Moving Pictures”—caused a sensation of a different order. Staged in a small red-velvet-lined theater in his home, the story was told without actors, only a synthesis of moving lights, transparent panels of stained glass or painted gauze, and pasteboard scenery, embellished with cork, mosses, and lichens, that served as a backdrop for intricately crafted mechanical figurines. Captivated audiences watched an artificial dawn rise over London. They traveled by noon to Tangier, and continued on to Niagara Falls. Picturesque clouds fluttered by on an invisible cloth panel pulled across the top of the stage. One theatergoer recalled a shipwreck scene containing “horrors of wind, hail, thunder, lightning, and the roaring of the waves, with such marvelous imitation of nature, that mariners have declared, whilst viewing the scene, that it amounted to reality.” Toward the end of the show, the moon set over Japan’s rocky shores, and in the finale Satan massed his troops on the banks of a fiery lake, a scene in homage to Paradise Lost. A critic considered de Loutherbourg’s efforts a “new species of painting … one of the most remarkable inventions in the art, and one of the most valuable, that ever was made.”

  Inspired by the production, painter Thomas Gainsborough made a small wooden peep show to display landscapes he’d painted on glass, lit from behind by a candle. Other artists thought bigger, hanging larger-than-life-size transparencies of temples and other follies painted on thin canvas in London’s Vauxhall Gardens, turning the place into a nightly wonderland. One artsy entrepreneur took out a patent on a technique for painting a panorama on a 360-degree surface, opening a show in Leicester Square. “I was so captivated by t
he sight that I held my breath, the better to take in the wonder, the sublimity of it all,” raved a viewer. There were cityscapes, naval battles, and natural marvels to see.

  In the same spirit in the mid-nineteenth century, American showman John Banvard (1815–1891) traveled the world with a 1,320-foot-long painting of the Mississippi River rolled onto two spindles. Over the course of two hours, he unfurled the mural and spun tales about riverboat pirates while his wife played waltzes on the piano. “You flit by a rice swamp, catch a glimpse of a jungle, dwell for an instant on a prairie,” a viewer wrote, “and are lost in admiration at the varied dress, in which, in the Western world, Nature delights to attire herself.” Likewise, the Mareorama, erected near the Paris Exposition in 1900, titillated visitors, who watched painted views of the Mediterranean roll past while standing on the deck of an enormous, pitching model steamship. Sure, it was fun, but such spectacles provided “solid intellectual entertainment instead of light frivolous buffoonery,” an ad promised, “something that when you shall have returned home you can say, I have added a great deal to my stock of information, I have a better idea of certain things—I am more qualified than before to give an opinion on that subject.”

  This was all mild amusement, however, compared to the over-the-top, three-day masquerade party—the “voluptuous festival”—that English novelist William Beckford (1760–1844) threw to celebrate his twenty-first birthday. Beckford hired de Loutherbourg to transform his family’s country estate into a fantasyland, a series of grottoes and temples with an ancient Middle Eastern–cum–Egyptian bent—dim, hung with gauzy cloth, and exotically perfumed. “I still feel warmed and irradiated by the recollections of that strange, necromantic light which de Loutherbourg had thrown over what absolutely appeared a realm of Fairy or rather, perhaps, a Deamon Temple deep beneath the earth set apart from tremendous mysteries,” Beckford remembered years later. That shadowy realm perfectly suited de Loutherbourg’s tastes: he would eventually achieve infamy as the charlatan occultist Count Cagliostro’s right-hand man, and later, after the count swindled him, too, set off on his own as a mystical healer and pharmacist until a mob shut him down.