The Professor and Other Writings

by Terry Castle

  But the ideal room in Shelter-Mag Land is unpeopled—stark, impervious, and preternaturally still. As aficionados know, just about every room shown in a shelter magazine has been meticulously staged by unseen stylists: flowers placed just so; covetable objects illuminated; expensive art books arranged on tables; takeout menus, sex toys, and drug paraphernalia discreetly removed. The place is usually flooded with heavenly light—as if an angel had just descended outside, or a nuclear flash had irradiated the environs. When windows in a room are visible, one typically can’t see through them: they remain opaque, like weirdly glowing light boxes. The unearthly illumination from without is mesmerizing. Whether or not one likes the space on view, one finds oneself absorbed, drawn in by the eerie promise of peace and immutability. It’s seductive, sanitized, calm-verging-on-dead: mausoleum chic.

  The standard interiors shot might be categorized as a degraded form of still life—a kind of iconography distinguished, traditionally, by the absence of human subjects. And as with the painted form, the viewer is faced with puzzles and paradoxes. Confronting the perfectly styled objects before us, are we, the spectators, in the presence of life or death? Where are the human beings? In the traditional nature morte (the French name for the mode is telling) the depiction of food and drink—fruit, bread, goblets of wine, limp game birds—alluded to organic processes (here’s something good to eat), but a “life” inextricably dependent on the death and decay of other living things. In the most profound and unflinching still-life arrangements (Zurbaran’s, say, or those of the seventeenth-century Dutch school) the viewer is suavely implicated in the cycle of mortality. A human skull sometimes appears, Hamlet-style, as an explicit and sobering memento mori.

  There’s one big problem here, and you don’t need to rent old Ingmar Bergman movies to see it. There’s a real skeleton at the door, and whoa—looks like he’s aiming to get in. He was first spotted in Shelter-Mag Land, scythe in hand, one sunny September morning a few years ago, and recently he’s turned up again—in true Seventh Seal fashion—in one of its favorite “style destinations.” (Two days into the unfolding Katrina disaster, New Orleans Style: Past and Present, the most lavish of recent shelter books devoted to the doomed southern city, had sold out on Amazon.com. I know—I was trying to order it.)

  It’s fair to say that even while seeking to exploit readers’ existential fears, the shelter-lit industry has itself been traumatized over the past five years, its Benday-dots dream world cracked open by explosions from without. The first shock to the system was 9/11, an event so cognitively strange, so incomprehensible according to shelter-mag logic, that what to do about it—rhetorically, psychically—remains unresolved in most interiors publications. What sort of high-gloss feature to run when other people not only won’t go away but also want to blow your trendy “sanctuary” to bits? “Home,” after all, is what terrorists set out to destroy: the everyday illusion of comfort and safety, the rolling-along-as-usual feeling that is bourgeois life. Floods and fire and civic breakdown in the Gulf Coast states put a further grisly spin on the problem. It’s hard to focus on window treatments when bodies are floating by outside.

  It’s true that in the aftermath of 9/11 at least one gallant Un-Mother—to her credit—tried to address the matter as best she could. Dominique Browning, the melancholic editor of Condé Nast’s House and Garden and a dead ringer for the Lady of Shalott, ran a number of columns in which she wrote awkwardly yet movingly about the effect of the attacks on her mental world.* These columns were painful—I remember starting to cry while reading one—not least because one saw Browning struggling against the banality of the context in which she wrote. Such pathos in Shelter-Mag Land was a shock, like finding a dismembered corpse in a beautiful meadow. Et in Arcadia ego indeed.

  A similar pathos suffused a Metropolitan Home essay by Emily Prager (“Safe as Houses,” September 2004), the only interiors article I’ve come across so far to tackle 9/11 at any length. Prager, a longtime Greenwich Village resident who witnessed the collapse of the South Tower, candidly recounted how the day’s events left her “wounded in my sense of home.” The piece ended with its author in a state of panicky ambivalence, wanting to flee New York yet unable to follow through on any of the fantastical moving plans she kept devising. Scarcely a comforting endpoint—but at least Prager seemed able to articulate her confusion.

  Other responses, however, have been less honest and sometimes freakishly dissociated. For example, the editor of Elle Decoration (a publication aimed largely at fashion-conscious working women in their twenties and thirties) recently offered this schizoid hodgepodge of girl talk and carpe diem:

  Colour. Pattern. Decoration. Ornamentation. It’s all coming back. I think it’s to do with celebrating life—perhaps it’s because, in these terrorist-aware times, we’re more conscious than ever that this life isn’t a rehearsal, it’s the main event. And what simpler way to add some joy and pattern to your life than with flowers.

  Though priding itself on being hip, even the Home & Garden section of The New York Times has gone a bit bipolar lately. Opposite a jaunty piece about co-op residents cat fighting online (December 2, 2004), the editors ran a full-page public service ad for a government disaster-readiness Web site, complete with a huge picture of a grim-faced FDNY firefighter and apocalyptic copy. (“After a terrorist attack your first instinct may be to run. That may be the worst thing you could do.”) The emotional dissonance was nerve-jangling, corrosive, surreal. Maybe the best thing, after all, would be to go round to the neighbors and make it up with them.

  Yet the most disturbing case of 9/11 schizophrenia involves the now defunct nest. Often heralded as the most iconoclastic interiors publication since Fleur Cowles’s short-lived Flair of the 1950s, nest set out to be everything the ordinary shelter magazine was not: louche, sly, sexy, so dark and downtown in sensibility it was funny—an interiors rag for the John Waters set. Typical features had to do with Hitler’s decorating tastes, the phallus-studded home of Miss Plaster Caster (she who once made plaster moulds of rock-star penises), Lucy and Ricky’s sound-stage “apartment” on I Love Lucy, how to arrange kitty boxes when you live with 114 cats, and the joy of clear-plastic sofa covers. My all-time favorite piece was about the Toys “R” Us–style “playrooms” of “adult babies”—men and women who find sexual gratification by wearing diapers and lying in oversized baby cribs. Every now and then amid the camp one would encounter authentic blue-chip writing: Muriel Spark on “Bed Sits I Have Known,” John Banville on Gianni Versace’s Miami villa (outside which the designer was shot), the poet Eileen Myles on what it was like to sleep on a city sidewalk—as she had done—in a cardboard box for two weeks.

  The magazine was quite stupendously mannered—redolent of Ronald Firbank trawling for hunky handymen at Home Depot. Yet manner proved bootless when nest fell victim to a grotesque and unfortunate coincidence. Attached to the cover of the fatal thirteenth issue—Summer 2001—was a black silk mourning ribbon, the sort of thing one might find on a Victorian scrapbook or photo album. (nest regularly violated ordinary packaging conventions.) On the cover itself was a cleverly Photoshopped image of the U.S. Capitol wrapped in a huge white shroud with black-and-white funeral bunting. It transpired that Rei Kawakubo, the fashion force behind Comme des Garçons, had been asked by nest’s editor and presiding genius, Joseph Holtzman, to design a “mourning” dress for the Capitol building, precisely to ready it for “whatever calamity may befall us in the future.” The shroud tarp and bunting were the result: Christo meets Edgar Allan Poe. The “national grief” theme was in turn playfully reflected in the issue’s editorial content: one item had to do with the planning and decoration of Abraham Lincoln’s funeral cortege, another with Sarah Bernhardt’s coffin bed.

  One can hardly overstate the spookiness of it all—for those morbid enough to notice—when the imagined “tragedy” came to pass a few weeks later. The Summer 2001 nest suddenly seemed ghoulishly prescient, akin to the British journalist W. T. Ste
ad’s uncanny 1892 short story about a White Star ocean liner’s sinking in the ice fields of the North Atlantic (Stead himself would go down on the Titanic twenty years later), or “King’s Cross,” a melancholy Pet Shop Boys song of 1987 that seemed to predict the terrible Underground fire at that ill-starred station a few months later. Odder still, however, was the official nest response to the devastation at Ground Zero and the Pentagon.

  There wasn’t one. No comment on Kawakubo and the shrouded Capitol; no mention of the attacks; no nuttin’. Given nest’s Manhattan address and relentless downtown feel, the absence of immediate acknowledgment was creepy, as if the magazine had suffered a brain injury and been rendered selectively mute. The blankness and blockage never went away. nest carried on for several more years, through the Fall 2004 issue, but one couldn’t help feeling that the debunking zest had gone out of it; the punkish will to provoke seemed tainted and damaged. I lost some of my enthusiasm for the magazine after the 9/11 watershed: nest, it seemed, was just too hip to be human.

  In retrospect the aphasia seems part of a more pervasive syndrome. Despite the rad profile, nest was as knee-deep in bathos and bourgeois denial as any other shelter mag. But who among us isn’t? How could anyone reconcile the scarifying truth—all men are mortal—with that illusion of calm and safety to which most of us still regularly aspire in everyday life? Regardless of means, status, or political investment, just about everyone craves warmth, light, four walls, and some bits of furniture—a shelter, in a word, from miseries we know are out there and others still to come. Our vulnerability is too extreme to be “integrated” in any supposedly therapeutic fashion.

  So we devise psychic buffers. The habits of bourgeois life—first adumbrated in Northern Europe as early as the sixteenth century—have been for some time the buffer of choice, civilization’s all-purpose comfort-and-happiness maximizer. But the bourgeois outlook could hardly be called valiant or hardheaded: it’s all about not staring death in the face. Under its sway one seeks a world without pain. The search is doomed, of course—the “safe house” a house of cards. But maybe we needn’t start thinking about that yet.

  I find myself hung up on the predicament: how to strike a balance between the longing for security (that infantile need on which shelter mags batten) and the more grown-up recognition that any “serenity” to be achieved is illusory, or at best fleeting. I’m a dawdler on the road to unhappy consciousness. Yet there are signs—this essay among them, perhaps—that I’ve started to wean myself of the more brainless aspects of my addiction. I’ve let some of the crap subscriptions lapse: Old House Interiors (too boring-Berkeleyin-the-seventies) and the ludicrous, vamping Architectural Digest. House Beautiful had started to irk me: its former male editor—odd and smarmy—was always twaddling on in fake-folksy manner about his adorable daughter “Madison.” But is he gay or straight? That’s what I want to know.

  And I’m getting tired of the whole Let’s-Pretend-There’s-Nothing-Wrong trip; it’s become so breathless and false. Death has lately been popping up rather explicitly in Shelter-Mag Land, but hidden in plain sight, as it were, like the purloined letter. Something one might call “taxidermic chic,” for example, has become a huge fad: cow skulls, fossils, stuffed rodents in doll clothes, lizards embalmed in varnish or the like—all deployed as “edgy” urban décor. (Trendy rag-and-bone-cum-interiors shops like Evolution in SoHo and Paxton Gate in San Francisco make a bundle out of this strange and desiccated style.)

  In the face of such dissociation—dead meat as Addams Family décor?—I’ve even had bouts of outright revulsion. The worst came not long ago as I was innocently paging through Homes and Gardens. I had found a feature—instantly mesmerizing—about a renovated English farmhouse built in 1604. My sort of wattle-and-daub thing exactly! One could just see Vanessa Bell in it, paintbrushes in hand. I was fascinated to read how the current owners, a handsome couple with children, had kept “the carcasses of the original kitchen” in the interest of authenticity. And I also loved the milky gray “period” color chosen for the drawing room: a Jacobean hue named “Silken Flank.” But the pièce de résistance was undoubtedly the Vintage Hospital Bed—late-nineteenth-century and loaded with pricey Stieff teddy bears—taking pride of place in their daughter’s bedroom.

  A lovely white iron bedstead: funky, fresh-looking, impeccable shabby chic. I wanted it immediately. But suddenly I found myself imagining all the people who had slept—and possibly died—in this particular bed over the past hundred years. In fact, the more I looked at it, the more it reminded me of those metal beds you see lined up in haunting photographs of First World War military hospitals, in which a ward full of grievously injured young men—heads bandaged, empty pajama sleeves pinned up—lie propped against pillows and (if they can) glumly regard the camera. Teddy bears notwithstanding, one could almost smell the carbolic. How many blind or limbless soldiers, I wondered, had succumbed in little Scarlett’s bed?

  From there my thoughts went naturally on to the avian-flu epidemic of 1918–19. That appalling global contagion killed more than 20 million people: surely one or two of them must have expired in this particular bedstead? Bird-to-human influenza viruses have been in the news, of course, so the speculation was not unduly morbid. If the earthquakes, floods, or dirty bombs don’t get us, I gather, the Asian poultry will.

  In Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, there’s an unforgettable passage in which the ill-starred heroine, brooding on mortality, wonders on what “sly and unseen” day she will die. “Of that day, doomed to be her terminus in time through all the ages, she did not know the place in month, week, season or year.” Tess could have used www.deathclock.com, where you fill out a health questionnaire and get back your exact date of death. Having discovered when mine will be—January 28, 2038—I’ve found myself wondering lately where I will die. On a city street? In an overturned car? In some dark and fathomless polar sea into which my plane has crashed? But what about at home, in bed, Evian on the nightstand and Wally the mini dachshund snoring stertorously under the covers? Given my “home” fixation, that would be an especially poetic fate. Will my 400-thread-count Egyptian-cotton bed linens be any comfort to me then? And what about the teak milking stool? If she ever knew—and I doubt she did—the Un-Mother isn’t telling.

  Travels with My Mother

  The artist Agnes Martin (1912–2004)

  OFF TO A GREAT START at lunch at the Phoenix airport: Terrorist Threat Level Orange for “high” as usual, women’s restrooms jammed, and then the waiter in Aunt Chilada’s Cantina—garish faux-Mexican with a jalapeño pepper theme—calls me “sir” when he takes our order. Fume for a second, then descend into bath of elemental shame. Why does this always happen to me? Do I really look like a guy? No doubt I will suffer the lonely death of the sexual pervert. Can’t get mad about it, though: my mother, thankfully, seems not to have heard the waiter’s mistake. She is sitting right across from me in her US Airways wheelchair, peering around inquisitively at the lissome Hispanic busboys, off-duty pilots eating lunch, and our monstrously fat fellow diners. She can’t drive anymore and hasn’t been out of her house in San Diego for quite a while, so this Santa Fe trip is a huge and somewhat nerve-racking adventure for her. Given the ear-splitting noise around us, I have been spared, though, her usual critiques of my personal appearance; restaurant clatter and the boomy voices of Fox News emanating from the big-screen TV at the bar, thank God, have clearly flooded out her hearing aids. Justice served, too: Paris Hilton dragged shrieking back to jail after three days on the lam.

  My mother, eighty-one and widowed for twelve years, is tottery, near-sighted, psoriatic, and deaf, and apart from a residual compulsion to lament her elder daughter’s unfeminine appearance, has largely reverted in old age to a state of Blakean innocence and moral simplicity. (Little Lamb—you rackety old thing—who did make thee? I have some questions I’d like to ask Him.) True: ravages of macular degeneration notwithstanding, she still spends an hour every morning “putting
her face on,” with predictably fantastical, Isak Dinesen–like results. (She once had her eyelids tattooed to look like blue-black eyeliner.) She is still in love—in a distant way—with George Clooney, though playing with the Paint program on her computer (adapted for low vision) and writing the news every day to her pals in the Brit Group, a gossipy little chat room for elderly British expatriates, have cut into her movie watching. And she can still plunge a knife—without warning—deep into one’s narcissistic wounds. Not long ago, apropos of nothing, she took mournful pleasure in observing that with my whimsical new blue-framed glasses, floppy dyed-blonde locks, and middle-aged paunch, I was beginning to resemble David Hockney. But she has become a lot less dangerous overall. I take advantage of her inattention and quiz Blakey under my breath: Do you think I look like a MAN? B. gives me an appraising glance but is noncommittal. Then everything lands on our table in a steaming, salsa-drenched heap: guacamole, sour cream, and chicken tostadas in huge encephalitic, butterfly-shaped tortillas—nacho chips on steroids—and a tumbler-sized margarita for me, even though it’s only 11:00 a.m. Yummyburgers!

  The trip is a belated seventieth birthday present for my mother—very belated, I’m afraid, given her present advanced age. Previous Girlfriend nixed it back in 1995 and I caved; my mother is still indignant (“I never liked her or her weird diet”). Said PG was four feet ten and ninety pounds: a tiny, frail, somewhat eccentric Jewish-Canadian vegan with gluten allergies who wore rubberized Doc Martens and played the medieval vielle. We once visited all the Cathar fortresses together. I miss her a lot sometimes, especially when I’m listening to the music of the trobadors or pondering l’agonie du Languedoc. But I have to admit Blakey is a better fit. B. is solicitous if not saintly around my mother. Helps her fold up her white metal cane from the Braille Institute and calls her “Mavis” in a polite, Boston-bred, upper-middle-class-lesbian-daughter-in-law way—much as Mary Cheney’s lover, one imagines, addresses her in-laws as “Dick” and “Lyn.” B. played squash at Yale—is still v. buff—and has pledged to help me push the wheelchair around. Neither of us has been to Santa Fe before but we believe it to be flat.