August 20, 2020 37
That seems to feel itself from home”),
we hear first from Charles Lamb (“O
what a dislocation of comfort is con-
tained in that word moving”) and the
eighteenth- century poet William Cow-
per (“The confusion which attends a
transmigration of this kind is infinite,
and has a terrible effect in deranging
the intellects”), before setting off on an
absorbing tour of “flitting.”
From the Middle Ages onward, ten-
ants across Europe and Britain flit-
ted once or twice a year, timed to the
agricultural cycle, when they weren’t
“moonlight flitting” (forced by debt to
leave under cover of night). Cowper es-
pecially possessed a powerful affinity
for the home, in both an emotional and
material sense. “The presence of fa-
miliar items like cups and trays were to
him the handrails of a narrow bridge or
the bannisters of an agonisingly steep
and long staircase,” Harris writes. “He
sang the sofa with all the conviction
Virgil had reserved for singing
‘arms and the man,’ insisting
that the sofa mattered.” His
long work The Task: A Poem,
in Six Books—whose six parts
included “The Sofa,” “The
Timepiece,” and “The Gar-
den”—was published in 1785,
just before he left the house in
Olney, Buckinghamshire, that
he’d called home for eighteen
years. Harris notes that “the
set- piece celebrations of home
life in The Task were purposely
charming in their conversa-
tional ease, but layers of feeling
were at work in them.”
Another unexpected essay
is the Oxford scholar Seamus Perry’s
“77 St. Mark’s Place,” which was W. H.
Auden’s address in the East Village
from 1954 to 1972. Like moving house,
disorderly housekeeping—that is, to-
tally willful, even joyful, unabashed
messiness—is not a subject I’d seen
addressed in an essay before. Auden
proves the ideal study. Edmund Wil-
son described his friend’s apartment
as “uncomfortable, sordid, and gro-
tesque”; Charles Miller claimed it
“reeked of stale coffee grounds, tarry
nicotine, and toe jam mixed with metro
pollution and catshit, Wystanified
tenement tang.” (The stench of urine
likely featured in that bouquet; the
poet preferred to relieve himself in the
bathroom sink instead of the toilet, “a
male’s privilege,” he once said.)
That upon moving there in 1954,
Auden set his father’s barometer on
the mantelpiece, and above it a water-
color painting, may not qualify as Hur-
ston’s “decorating a decoration.” But
as a small moment of orderly intention,
this careful curation of a mini- tableau
speaks to a heightened sense of decor in
a man whose approach to homemaking
was otherwise chaotic—on the surface,
that is. Systems- wise, he was a domestic
dominatrix. Chester Kallman, his life
partner, nicknamed him “Miss Master”
for being a nag. But Perry goes beneath
the surfaces, exploring the relationship
between Auden’s “fertile disarray” and
his theories about poetics, which “re-
peatedly emphasise the importance of
form and order,” as well as his expertise
“in the infinite varieties of unrequited
love” (to use Hannah Arendt’s words).
In her essay on Roman houses,
Susan Walker, an honorary curator at
the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, fo-
cuses on the fourth century, when the
Roman emperor Diocletian, attempt-
ing to stabilize his empire, commenced
a vast restructuring of far- flung out-
posts. In the process, the ancient city
of Volubilis was abandoned. Yet judg-
ing from a ruin known as the House of
Venus, Walker writes,the move simply appears to have
encouraged the privatisation of
public space and the concentration
of wealth amongst a few surviving
individuals who were no longer ac-
countable to the formerly ubiqui-
tous Roman taxman.Drawing on bronze busts and other
relics that have been removed to muse-
ums, she walks the reader through the
building’s layout—an orderly grid of
stones, weeds, air, and “saucy” tesserae
floor mosaics depicting mythological
scenes. Its owner, she concludes, “was
clearly a person of culture and no little
wit, with ample financial resources,”who installed at least two separate
chambers for the purpose of sexual
encounters.Visiting house museums has been a
popular pastime in the United States
since at least the 1850s, when the state
of New York bought the stone farm-
house overlooking the Hudson River
that George Washington used as head-
quarters toward the end of the Revolu-
tionary War. In 1864, after Nathaniel
Hawthorne died, tourists flocked to
the little red cottage in Stockbridge,
Massachusetts, where he’d written The
House of the Seven Gables. (That house
was eventually repurposed as practice
rooms for Tanglewood musicians, but
the colonial mansion in Salem, Mas-
sachusetts, that inspired the book has
operated as a museum since 1910.) At
last count there were more than 22,000
such history museums, historical so-
cieties, and similar organizations in
the US, with house museums ranking
as the most common among them. In
2002 Richard Moe, then president of
the National Trust of Historical Pres-
ervation, tossed a bomb at his own in-
dustry with an article in that nonprofit’s
quarterly publication, Forum Journal,
titled, “Are There Too Many House
Museums?”
Of course not. The problem is that
they are so expensive to keep open,
chronically underfunded, and reliant
on volunteer staff—a set of circum-
stances that makes historical redecora-
tion and adornment harder to keep in
dialogue with other campaigns to spot-
light and address longstanding eco-
nomic and racial inequities. This is of
special concern when you consider that
at least one study found that Ameri-
cans consider museums, of all kinds,“to be the most trustworthy source of
information, more than movies, books,
and professors.”^2 The majority of house
museums are devoted to white nota-
bles, and if gender parity isn’t exactly
evident, quite a few women are rep-
resented. One can visit the homes of
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ernest Hem-
ingway, Robert Frost, and even L. Ron
Hubbard—as well as Pearl Buck, Ra-
chel Carson, Willa Cather, and Emily
Dickinson, and that’s just the begin-
ning of the alphabet.
The list of African- Americans is
short, but features the homes of Louis
Armstrong, Mary McLeod Bethune,
and Frederick Douglass, and with any
luck those of James Baldwin and Nina
Simone soon enough (those projects are
both in progress). Also operating are
sites that are committed to un- white-
washing history, such as the Royall
House and Slave Quarters in Medford,
Massachusetts, which explores the his-
tory of slavery in New England;
the nineteenth- century free
black community preserved at
the Weeksville Heritage Cen-
ter, in Brooklyn, New York; and
the Tenement Museum on Man-
hattan’s Lower East Side, which
brings to life multiple chapters
of the urban immigrant experi-
ence—from 1864 to the 2010s—
with a collection of more than
five thousand domestic artifacts
that furnish apartments to look
and feel exactly as they would
have in their own time.
In “A House of Air,” Lee
reflects on the writers’ houses
in America, France, Ireland,
and England that she came to know
through her work as a biographer. She
notes that pilgrimages like hers are at-
tempts “to understand the life of the
other person, to find out more about
them—and to pay tribute.... A strong
but muddled impulse, a mixture of awe,
longing, desire for inwardness, and in-
trusive curiosity.” I would add that such
trips humanize those who live in our
minds as legends. I appreciate how see-
ing where Georgia O’Keeffe or D. H.
Lawrence lived and worked discour-
ages me from regarding them as idols
who hovered above the fray, free from
quotidian concerns like scrubbing a
pot. Writing of Samuel Johnson’s house
in London, Rebecca Bullard, a writer
and associate professor of English at
the University of Reading, notes that
“homes reveal the most authentic ver-
sion of a biography’s subject, free from
mannered or even hypocritical public
behavior.” For decades and centuries,
the personal lives of prominent fig-
ures were protected from scrutiny on
the grounds that what happens behind
closed doors was “private” and there-
fore sacrosanct, even when those pri-
vate doings, no matter how nefarious,
were an open secret among colleagues
and whisper networks.Regardless of what is being pre-
served, house museums offer an in-
comparably atmospheric experience,
a series of unexpected intimacies im-
possible to replicate in biographies or
documentaries. My visit several years
ago to Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Stee-pletop, in Austerlitz, New York, where
she lived with her husband (and, for a
while, her lover) was full of such fris-
sons. The house and grounds have re-
mained basically untouched since her
death in 1950. Wandering through her
gardens, I smelled the scents she’d cho-
sen to surround herself with; inside the
old frame farmhouse, I caught the slant
of light through the bedroom window
as she would have seen it. Standing in
her study, surrounded by her books, I
knew how comfortable it would be to
sit in her armchair reading all day—
and felt a pang to realize that, of course,
the most recent volume there was pub-
lished in 1950; our libraries stop when
we do. I was particularly moved by, of
all things, her white- tiled bathroom,
with its monogrammed towels, half-
empty bottles of witch hazel and pre-
scription pills, and a standing scale
(she was fastidious about maintaining
her small figure). But last year the cost
of keeping the place open finally came
to be too much, and Steepletop was
forced to close to the public.
Steepletop’s misfortune may be a
harbinger of what other house muse-
ums will suffer during the coronavirus
pandemic. Already news reports are
sounding alarms for such institutions in
Spain, Austria, Hungary, and England,
where Charles Dickens’s London
house, kept intact since 1925 through
an independent trust and ticket sales,
could shutter as soon as September.
Recently the Tenement Museum,
which relies on admissions and gift-
shop sales for more than 75 percent of
its revenue, had to enact major layoffs
and furloughs. But hope springs eter-
nal. On July 2, after buying and metic-
ulously restoring Mary Heaton Vorse’s
dilapidated house in Provincetown,
Massachusetts, the new owner, Ken
Fulk, opened its doors as a residency
program for local and visiting artists of
all kinds.
Fulk is a San Francisco–based in-
terior designer known for his deep
knowledge of the decorative arts and
his celebrity- studded client list. That
he’s spending his free time maintain-
ing the legacy of an early Greenwich
Village labor reporter and social critic,
with the hope that her genius for com-
munity activism will electrify our cur-
rent moment, calls to mind another
unexpected creative haunting, between
Zora Neale Hurston and the musician
and composer George Lewis.
He was a boy when Hurston died
and a young man when her books came
back into print. Her “Characteristics
of Negro Expression” got him think-
ing about “adornment as a compo-
sitional attitude,” and “decorating a
decoration” as a “recursive move,” he
explains in the liner notes to his album
The Will to Adorn, a set of four cham-
ber works. Lewis suggests that listeners
“imagine the music as a response to the
complexity of the scene that greeted
Hurston in her fieldwork.” The boister-
ous, decoration- strewn title track was
performed and recorded live in 2011 by
the International Contemporary En-
semble at Columbia University’s Miller
Theatre, just around the corner from
where Hurston studied anthropology
with Franz Boas in the 1920s. Let that
trajectory help bury the calumny that
design instincts are among the lesser
pursuits. Visionaries don’t just happen
to live in homes; they also—to varying
degrees—make those homes speak
particular languages. QW. H. Auden in his apartment, Manhattan, 1972DonalF.^ H
olway/The^ NewYork^Times/Redux(^2) See David Thelen and Roy Rosen-
zweig, Presence of the Past: Popular
Uses of History in American Life (Co-
lumbia University Press, 1998).