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Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper
by Alexandra Harris
Thames & Hudson, 320 pp., £19.95

For Cecil Beaton, the 1930s was ‘the far-off decade before the Second World War’. At his tiny rented manor house in the Wiltshire countryside, Ashcombe, he spent the years of the housing shortage gluing together a whimsical stage set, as Alexandra Harris writes in Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (2010), ‘a contained world where weekends could be spent in costume with friends, posing in period tableaux and arranging enormous floral displays to stand among rococo furniture and ormolu mirrors’. Like the Petit Trianon it recalled, Beaton’s mini-idyll was always threatened by larger, primarily domestic forces—one cause of its camp intensity. Long before the war requisitions, the crumbling Georgian follies of Beaton, Evelyn Waugh and other ‘romantic moderns’ were doomed by modernity. The lifestyle they offered was already anachronistic when the Bright Young People rented into it, which was the point.

With chapters like ‘Ancient and Modern’ and ‘Concrete and Curlicues’, you might expect Moderns to be in the business of Pugin-style contrasts, but as the book’s title suggests, Harris, a Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool, is more comfortable as a mediator. Throughout, she argues convincingly and imaginatively for the influence of English history and aesthetics (and even weather) on the region’s modern movement. But it is Harris’s ability to make fascinating connections, linking unexpected figures or reconstructing the influence of a particular place on successive generations, that makes Moderns such a worthy read. Beaton’s riot of rocaille had more to do with modern living than you might imagine. But the reverse is also true, and Harris shows that ‘Betjeminism’, that particularly English habit of backward-looking, was not unique to political conservatives. Virginia Woolf did it too, in Between the Acts (published posthumously in 1941).

That novel also looked ahead to war with Germany. What about austerity at home in the far-off decade? For all her discussion of social history and place, Harris seems shy of the slum, the bread queue and the burgeoning Spirit of ’45. She considers the views of modernist architects and the landed gentry, such as novelist Elizabeth Bowen, who inherited Bridesheads, but the housing problem is mostly missing from Moderns. Only once does Harris focalise the crisis, when she turns to that most political of poets, Stephen Spender, who wrote in 1933, ‘It is too late to stay in great houses, we must advance to rebuilding’.

For a politically correct book that tends to recuperate the ‘romantic moderns’ as misunderstood progressives, this glimpse of socialist sentiment is surprisingly brief. Spender wrote from a ‘smart house commanding the market square of Lavenham in Suffolk’, according to Harris, and had much in common with the rest of her cast, but his views on housing were clear. A building boom was more important than more walks in the bois. It is possible that Spender’s political opinions are simply too strong for Harris, who favours a subdued palette of cold pastels: Moderns is a book of surprises and transitions, not cadmium red commitments. When Harris refers to Spender’s defense of the importance of political subject matter in literature, The Destructive Element (1935), it is only to comment on Woolf’s ‘surprising, but significant’ decision to write for the Daily Worker in 1936.

Less surprising but equally significant is the publication in the same year of Lettice Cooper’s novel, The New House, which applies modernist technique to the Zeitgeist, out-hoofing Woolf on her own turf while remaining an eminently accessible read. As James Lees-Milne began work on the new Country Houses Scheme at the National Trust, which would turn private palaces into the public monuments we know today, and an elderly Edwin Lutyens raised the last great house of England, Middleton Park, for the last Earl of Jersey, Cooper wrote about the removal of a Northern industrial clan from their mid-Victorian mansion to a cottage across town. The event is both quotidian, a hassle to be managed, and symbolic, and the characters of The New House know it. Like the cast of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), they are given license to be unusually reflective for a few quickened hours. Thinks Rhoda, the novel’s protagonist,

Today… is like a crack in my life. Things are coming up through the crack and if I don’t look at them, perhaps I shall never see them again. Ordinary life in the new house will begin tomorrow and grow over the crack and seal it up.

The New House is about the interface between personal and social change, and many of the things ‘coming up through the crack’ in Rhoda’s life are datable. By 1934, when the novel was being written, 300,000 new houses were being built in Britain. There was still a shortage when war broke out. Cooper was writing for her times, yet The New House holds up remarkably well. A snapshot of a single day like Dalloway and Cheerful Weather for a Wedding (1932), by Julia Strachey, the novel tells the story of the Powells on the morning, afternoon and evening of their removal from the prosaically named Stone Hall, built a century before with money from the steel industry. The family patriarch is dead, his engineering business, now run by the only son, Maurice, is heading into overdraft, and suburbs are encroaching on the Hall. A self-made developer wants to demolish the former country house and use the land for a housing estate. ‘Those big, old-fashioned places are awfully inconvenient to run, and they swallow a pot of money’, says a fellow businessman to Maurice, not very consolingly. An uptight neighbour and Maurice’s wife, Evelyn, ‘hate to think of the house pulled down, and nasty little red houses, full of common people and screaming children, all over that lovely garden’, but as The New House demonstrates, fear of change does not make it stop.

On removal day the eldest Powell daughter, Rhoda, is torn between worry over what’s next and a sense that she has been left behind. Having remained at home to care for her widowed mother, like her self-effacing Aunt Ellen did a generation before, Rhoda risks completing the Victorian pattern: spinsterhood, small pension, ignoble end. Her little sister Delia, on the other hand, went down to London for work, made herself useful, and is now encouraging Rhoda to do the same. Delia is about to marry Jim, a doctor, and open a new office with him. Does Rhoda want her old laboratory job? The crack widens. A move to London would have been unthinkable a day before, but today, with Stone Hall emptied out and her life laid out before her, Rhoda is tempted. When did she decide to give up on work, love and children, and accept Aunt Ellen’s fate? Did she ever decide at all? For that matter, when did Maurice decide to run the family business? And why can’t he be satisfied, wonders Evelyn, with their chintzy modern villa?

The New House is told almost entirely in dialogue and free indirect speech, and like Dalloway it leaves no middle-class mind unplumbed. Its working class minds are arguably better conceived than Woolf’s, too. But Cooper was no romantic modernist. Her characters recollect the past and enjoy aesthetic epiphanies, but never as ends in themselves. Each of the Powells is busy making decisions, weighing up the consequences of action and acting—often to their own dismay, and almost always to the dismay of others. The result is a novel of crossed swords, of conflict and struggle minutely observed. On the afternoon of the move Rhoda challenges her willful mother’s judgement of Evelyn’s, and implicitly her own, housekeeping:

“It was nice of her to come,” Mrs. Powell remarked. She added, with more conviction in her voice: “I always wonder how she manages to leave her house and go out so much in the mornings.”

“Her house is always all right, Mother, whenever you go there. I think she does everything that’s necessary first.”

“I suppose so.” Doing what was necessary seemed to Mrs. Powell to be less than right. A house to her had always been something to fuss and slave for, a thing which should be encouraged to demand sacrifices, and, by so doing, increase your sense of virtue.

“Well, what’s the sense of doing any more?” They had argued about this so often, and it was no use, no use at all, Rhoda knew. You could not argue with someone who was so entirely conscious of being right that she ruled out reason. It would be the same in the new house as it had been in the old. You changed nothing by changing places. She would want to go for a long walk, and her mother would want the curtains taken down and washed that afternoon. Either she would go out and feel guilty, or she would wash the curtains and feel rebellious. The new house was a trap like the old one, and she was caught in it. She exclaimed suddenly and childishly:

“I hate houses!”

All at once she felt near tears.

Her mother looked at her, and said gently:

“You’ve had such a lot of bother with them lately, and you’re tired. I hate houses too, sometimes! Come along and have some lunch. Aunt Ellen’s got a lovely picnic lunch all ready in the sitting room. …”

Mrs. Powell prods and immobilises Rhoda into an everyday submission, but she is not inhuman like Dalloway’s Dr. Bradshaw. As she is driven away from her home, she thinks, ‘We ought to have been able to stay here… Had not things always been arranged so that she could do and have what she wanted?’ A pretty daughter and spoilt wife, Mrs. Powell was never allowed to do or have anything else; however responsible we are for our actions, we are also, always acted upon. Imagining the outside world as a ’rush of red bricks and gimcrack-looking pink wooden windows and doors… the harassed women in cretonne aprons, the screaming children with toy cars and cycles, dashing into the road’, she wonders why Providence hasn’t intervened to keep the ‘quiet garden round her’. Cooper was a socialist, but above all she was a novelist in the empathic tradition, and lest we judge Mrs. Powell too harshly we are reminded, ‘She had never been into a slum… she had lived within the circle of her own life, the smallest possible world in a very large one’. The same is not true for thirty-three year old Rhoda, and when riding away she thinks ‘That was it!’ we are relieved she has sided with the world. So is Delia. Hearing her sister laugh spontaneously in the back of the car she is ‘surprised but pleased’.

Rhoda’s transition may be surprising, but it isn’t exactly romantic. If anything it is anti-pastoral. Rhoda and her mother remove to a converted lodge on ‘half an acre of garden’, but, much to Mrs. Powell’s chagrin, the new house is bordered on one side by a ‘raw, new housing estate’ plowed into ‘what had lately been farm land’. If Rhoda escapes to London, the slide from country to suburb to city will be complete. Her story reflects an English landscape, just not the pastoral one revived by the ‘romantic moderns’ of the 1930s. ‘A removal, Rhoda perceived, is like a slow journey across difficult country, full of halts and pauses, interspersed with odd meals and cups of tea consumed hurriedly, like meals and drinks in a station waiting-room’. To move on to the road is uncomfortable, but necessary. Rhoda spends much of the day thinking about how unfair her forebears were to their workers and servants and unmarried daughters, the people they built their Halls upon. By the end of the novel she is ready to ‘get right with Time’ in order to save herself from the past, but also because she believes that the new social leveling is better—for everyone. Our insight into Mrs. Powell and Aunt Ellen confirms this. The former was happiest when she was being useful, the latter when she was being loved. Both should have done better, as Rhoda thinks, with 50/50. The same applies to space. In The New House, where wealth and happiness are figured in spatial terms, to have more than one’s share is to have 30 acres instead of one-half. To have enough is to have a bedsit of one’s own.

The two factors are related. It is the Spender argument: a little bit red, a little bit boring but only right. Cooper’s rendering of mental states is too sophisticated, however, to allow politics to unduly intrude upon her narrative. Maurice flirts with socialism because he is a man of his times, but his curiosity stems from guilt and boredom, something of which he is dimly aware. He and another conflicted business owner agree that they shall probably never sell up and become workers themselves; they want to give their children the best start, even if it softens them. Rhoda’s stance on equality is openly motivated by self-interest. In The New House, politics hews to psychology. The novel is so finely detailed that it never ceases to be about the quickened moment, and does not risk the clunkiness associated with the worst political novels. If its narration lacks the ‘vibration and saturation’ Woolf prized in Proust, and herself wrote toward, that is because Cooper favours the slow burn. Like Austen before her or Colm Tóibín today she impresses on the level of the passage, not the line, though her prose is pitch-perfect. When she stops short of aestheticising interiority it is not because she is afraid of high-modernist fireworks. Simply, she writes toward a bigger picture. Cooper traces inner life to outer action, making sense of interrelations in the process. For her, free indirect speech does not merely open up characters, it opens out the world.

The result is an aesthetics of the external. The New House is full of gardens and interiors, bright kitchens and well-chosen cushions, everything sharply perceived, and this is what links it to Romantic Moderns. When it is not political, Cooper’s world is a phenomenal one, like Woolf’s, shading into memory. But there’s a bit of Beaton in it too: ‘Delia knew what she wanted for her flat… and meant to have plain, pale wood, with bowls of jade and orange, or great heaps of cushions, raspberry red, silver green, and the deep, blue-purple of anemones’. Striking, isn’t it? However crisply beautiful, though, this list of colours seems insignificant until you remember that Delia is a Powell of Stone Hall on her way to becoming a person of the middling sort, crammed willy-nilly into a London flat. Her mother is horrified. She is ecstatic. There is much talk in The New House about the difference between an 1890 or a 1930 mind, and Delia’s décor sums it up as well as any socialist musing. On what scale can you live and love? How much space should you take up? How much can you demand? These are the questions Rhoda has resolved, just barely, at the end of the novel. But Cooper was no romantic. ‘A day can change two lives but not two people’, she writes, referring to what has passed between Rhoda and her mother since morning. The events of tomorrow will matter. This is a political point, and it makes the The New House most modern.

Featured image: Hampstead Garden Suburb from Willifield Way, William Ratcliffe, c. 1914. Photo: © Tate, London 2013

Wrong answer. Like the flat character he is, the officer screeches his mantra, ‘Facts, facts, facts!’—these have recently been discovered to govern the realm of home décor—and lectures, ‘You are not to have, in any object of use or ornament, what would be a contradiction in fact’. Coketown is a long way from Marlborough House, where Cole became superintendent of the Department of Practical Art in 1852, after the close of his Great Exhibition, but like that centre of design reform, Dickens’s fictional industrial town represents the ‘triumph in fact’ in mid-nineteenth century Britain. Free trade, laissez faire and the division of labour would have been rationalising its economy just as the new science of decoration, advocated by well-connected civil servants, would have been rationalising its taste. Or trying to.

Cole and his friends were fierce opponents of unrestrained representational decoration on ‘objects of use’ like Sissy Jupe’s carpet. At Marlborough House, the Cole circle—designer Owen Jones, painter Richard Redgrave and architect Matthew Digby Wyatt—established a Museum of Ornamental Art made up of exhibits left over from the previous year’s Great Exhibition and loans from the royal collection to show the public what good taste looked like up close. However, according to Deborah Cohen in Household Gods: The British and their Possessions, ‘by far the most popular attraction among museum visitors […] was the so-called Chamber of Horrors, a collection of specially chosen objects intended to humiliate inept consumers and duplicitous manufacturers, presented under the rubric, “Instances of Bad Taste”’.

The reformers certainly had their choice of materials. The Great Exhibition, organised with the intention of improving public taste and educating artisans, had backfired spectacularly. As head of the Exhibition Committee, Cole had flooded the Crystal Palace with ‘art manufactures’ that ‘wed high art with mechanical skill’, in the words of Prince Albert, but ‘examples of the hideous and the debased, of a bastardisation of taste without parallel in the whole recorded history of aesthetics’ had overwhelmed the products of art industry, according to Cohen, and ‘threatened to bury correct taste altogether’. In the rush to impress the masses, ‘British manufacture had sunk to execrable levels of taste’. The public (and the Queen) had loved it. Now, in the Chamber of Horrors, ‘accompanying each item in the catalogue were critical remarks offered, according to one reporter, “with the view of… improving the judgment of the people in general”’. Perhaps the Queen’s, too. Cohen writes,

A pair of scissors in the shape of a stork was based upon ‘false principles’, the museum’s visitors learned, because the bird’s beak opened the wrong way. So far as carpets went, ‘flatness should be one of the principles for decorating the surface continually under the feet’.

Cole’s circle followed the line of A.W.N. Pugin in The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (1841), which claimed that Gothic architecture was ‘true’ because it used honest materials in structures with clearly exposed tectonic functions, adding a functionalist argument for the Gothic revival to his earlier, religious one in Contrasts (1836). The doctrine of functionalism was new to England, and although the design reformers did not follow the Gothic letter of Pugin’s law, they were moved by its spirit. They believed that ornament ‘should be simple, chaste, in line with the object’s function and, for the English, Protestant’, not Catholic, according to Cohen.

Soon, the reformers began to bandy the notion—first popularised by Pugin—that objects could exert good or bad influences on their owners. ‘Cole insisted that there existed fixed and absolute canons of taste’ just as there existed a fixed moral canon: right and wrong. For the Gothic revivalists, classical porticoes on Christian churches were dishonest; now, for the reformers, faux marble and unnaturally fluffy carpets were like ‘dangerous miasmas in the air’, according to Cohen, leaching sin into ‘the very fabric of existence’. Cole probably never took his doctrine to the classrooms of industrial towns, but if he had, he would have lectured against the things Sally Jupe liked best. In Hard Times, the officer insists that carpets and wallpapers should be decorated not with roses and horses but with ‘combinations and modifications (in primary colours) of mathematical figures which are susceptible of proof and demonstration. This is the new discovery. This is fact. This is taste’. This is morally correct.

Dickens wrote to W.H. Wills in July 1851, ‘I have always had an instinctive feeling against the Exhibition, of a faint, inexplicable sort’. Nevertheless, he supported it; Household Words praised the pragmatic Crystal Palace in particular. The didactic, elitist efforts at Marlborough House were less acceptable. When the Museum of Ornamental Art opened Household Words went on the offensive, and as Phillip Collins points out in an essay on Hard Times, Dickens’s number-plan for the novel’s nasty interrogation scene reads, ‘Marlborough House Doctrine. Cole.

A decade later, Dickens returned to the topic of home décor in Our Mutual Friend. The novel traces a network of ‘slime and ooze’—money-market corruption, bottomless pretense and false appearances—from the banks of the Thames and the dust heaps of still-rural Holloway to a ‘bran-new quarter of London’, the fictional Stucconia. The first chapter of the novel closes with the discovery of a corpse in the river; the second opens with the introduction of the Veneerings, a family of ‘bran-new people in a bran-new house’ in a terrace of flimsy façades. For these parvenus, everything is new, from their furniture to their ‘bran-new baby’ to ‘they themselves’; ‘and if they had set up a great-grandfather’, jokes Dickens, ‘he would have come home in matting from the Pantechnicon, without a scratch upon him, French polished to the crown of his head’.

For, in the Veneering establishment […] all things were in a state of high varnish and polish. And what was observable in the furniture, was observable in the Veneerings—the surface smelt a little too much of the workshop and was a trifle sticky.

The Veneerings are arrivistes; but worse than that, the surface they show the world—‘in a state of high varnish and polish’—occludes attempts at identification. Henry Cole and the government officer would have deplored them as immoral; Dickens certainly did. But where the design reformers saw artifice and a dishonest use of materials, Dickens saw—well, material. As early as 1836 he had invoked veneer as a pejorative in The Pickwick Papers: ‘That’s not the way to address old solid Spanish mahogany, Dam’me, you couldn’t treat me with less respect if I was veneered’. In the 1830s, veneer was losing its reputation fast. According to Clive Edwards, author of Victorian Furniture: Technology and Design, ‘the period between 1700 and 1830’ had been ‘the heyday of the hand sawyer and hand veneer-cutter’. But, although many of the finest seventeenth and eighteenth century cabinets were produced using veneer, during the nineteenth century the word ‘veneer’ acquired an unpleasant connotation: it was often assumed that the veneer was used to cover up ‘cheap and nasty’ work underneath.

Unsurprisingly, London was the heart of the sham furniture trade. There, ‘until about 1830′, according to Adrian Forty in Objects of Desire: Design and Society Since 1750, ‘most furniture was made by journeymen employed in the workshops from which it was sold’. This would remain the case in much of Britain until the turn of the next century. ‘However, between 1830 and 1850, the regular employment of cabinet makers declined’, and by 1850 self-employed men—called garretmasters—‘outnumbered the former by ten to one’ in the capital. Large new retail stores located between Tottenham Court Road and Euston Road, like Maple’s, ‘had sufficient capital to hold stocks of furniture for some time, and found that their expenses were much reduced by not having to employ directly the men who made the furniture’. Garretmasters possessed no capital except their tools, and had to sell furniture quickly to stay in business. That meant selling on the cheap. As soon as a piece was finished it was carted to the West End, where retail stores, all too happy with the new arrangements, came to be called ‘slaughterhouses’.

Competition was fierce, and the East End trade resorted to ‘scamping’, or turning out nice-looking work of inferior quality. Forty writes,

Nothing made scamping easier than machine-cut veneers, which became available cheaply with the introduction of steam-powered circular saws in the 1830s. Previously, veneers, cut by the most skilled branch of the hand sawyers, had been relatively expensive, and used only in high class cabinet work. However, as one old hand sawyer explained […] the circular saw changed all this by cutting veneers thinner and faster.

By 1850, he concludes, ‘all veneers were cut by steam power, and their price was much reduced as a result’. Correspondingly, the market for veneered furniture—just the type condemned by design reformers—was larger than ever. If you could own furniture that looked expensive rather than cheap, made of rosewood rather than deal, why not? Of course, consumers were being cheated. In 1835, the year before Dickens referred to veneer in The Pickwick Papers, Parliament convened the first of three Select Committees on Design and Manufacture to assess the poor quality of Britain’s industrial wares. As the editor of the Mechanics’ Magazine observed when testifying before the Committee, ‘The great object with every English manufacturer is quantity’, or profit, not quality. The days of craftsmanship seemed to be over.

Slaughterhouses were unconcerned by diminishing standards of quality. According to some, they actively encouraged scamping. One garretmaster characterised their attitude to Henry Mayhew, author of London Labour and the London Poor (1861): ‘Make an inferior article so as it’s cheap: if it comes to pieces in a month, what’s that to you or me?’ Like the Veneerings, and the protagonist of Our Mutual Friend, John Rokesmith/Harmon—who assumes multiple identities without, for most of the novel, fearing discovery—retailers could depend on the anonymity of the metropolis (and laissez faire disorder) to protect their interests. While the Select Committees ground on, eventually producing the Great Exhibition and its monstrous other, the Chamber of Horrors, slaughterhouses grew larger and more powerful. Of course, Fleet Street was alert to their tricks and manners. In 1858, one periodical complained that ‘the employment of […] veneers is a mask or deception; for the wood which does not meet the eye is cheap and inferior, but like many other masks, it has grown to be a custom of our age’. The Furniture Gazette piped, ‘Obviously, the first intent in veneering is to deceive—to represent as solid substance what is only surface’.

W. Maclerie wrote sarcastically in Tinsley’s Magazine, ‘Veneer is both useful and ornamental and in itself perfectly unexceptionable, so long as it is honestly acknowledged to be veneer’. Of course, such would never happen—veneer is inherently dishonest. Maclerie’s recommendation? Rather than ‘live with deception’, people should eliminate ‘veneers in society’. Dickens had a better idea: expose the Veneerings. Thanks to improvements in the saws that cut veneer, it was getting thinner all the time. The less respectable manufacturers were said to get as many as fifteen or sixteen sheets from an inch of solid wood. The commercial upper class represented in Our Mutual Friend is just as dishonest—and flat. Dickens would use his skills as a satirist to expose them for the ‘repellent, hollow human beings’ he was convinced they were.

In Aspects of the Novel (1929) E.M Forster makes a distinction—by now famous—between round and flat characters in novels. Both, he says, are necessary: ‘a novel that is at all complex often requires flat people as well as round, and the outcome of their collisions parallels life […] accurately’. In this view, Mr. and Mrs. Veneering could be considered ‘functional’—the design reformers may finally rest in peace—for the ‘outcome of their collisions’ is that they throw other characters into high relief. Usually they collide with Twemlow, ‘an innocent piece of dinner-furniture that went upon easy castors’, whom they use for his aristocratic connexions. He is the powerful Lord Snigsworth’s first cousin. He is also a character tending toward roundness, for whom ‘the Veneerings were a source of blind confusion’.

Unlike the Veneerings, Twemlow is made of solid material ‘and at many houses might be said to represent the dining-table in its normal state’. On ‘occasions of ceremony’ he can be ‘pulled out to his utmost extent of twenty leaves’. Twemlow is a useful person to know. Indeed, as Snigsworth’s cousin, Twemlow is used to being used; he is generally able to ‘take the soundings’ of a hollow society. However, ‘The abyss to which he could find no bottom, and from which started forth the engrossing and ever-swelling difficulty of his life, was the insoluble question whether he was Veneering’s oldest friend, or newest friend’.

At the beginning of his number-plan for Our Mutual Friend, Dickens scribbled, ‘The Veneerings. (Who is their oldest friend?)’. The question is important. Forster writes that ‘in their purest form’ flat characters ‘are constructed round a single idea or quality’, and Twemlow’s ‘insoluble question’ constructs the Veneerings in toto. Calling each and every one of their new acquaintances ‘our oldest friend’, the Veneerings are radically insincere—the kind of people who refer archly to ‘our mutual friend’ so-and-so. Twemlow can ‘take the soundings’ of the usual society figures, but like deceptive work in wood, the Veneerings are almost too flat to measure. He has ‘noticed in his feeble way how soon the Veneering guests become infected with the Veneering fiction’ at the grand dinners they host, but Twemlow is too inexperienced to diagnose his own infection.

He must work it out of his system. In Book II, Chapter III of the novel, ‘A Piece of Work’, Mr. Veneering’s friends ‘rally round him’ to help him buy a seat in Parliament. When called upon for assistance, they always agree—‘We must work’. Their language recalls that of another sawyer describing ‘cheap and nasty work’ to Henry Mayhew. Ladies’ sewing boxes were particularly cheap and nasty, it seems:

Such boxes are nailed together; there’s no dove-tailing, nothing of what I call work or workmanship, as you say about them, but the deal’s nailed together, and the veneer’s dabbed on, and if the deal’s covered, why the thing passes.

For the sawyer, ‘work’ denotes craftsmanship or skilled labour—the kind of activity that would produce an object of the functional integrity demanded by the design reformers. In ‘A Piece of Work’, the same word conspicuously denotes its opposite: unproductive labour. When Veneering asks Twemlow to ‘write down to Snigsworthy Park’ for his powerful cousin’s help, Twemlow bravely refuses. ‘“One thing, however, I can do for you,” says Twemlow; “and that is, work for you”’. His work consists of going to his club and establishing himself, ‘immoveable, to be respectfully contemplated by Pall Mall’ for the whole day. ‘Towards six o’clock in the evening, Twemlow begins to persuade himself that he is positively jaded with work’.

At the same time, Mrs. Veneering is working even harder. She goes to the home of Lady Tippins, a society doyenne who enjoys the Veneerings’ lavish dinners, ‘to entreat Lady Tippins to work’. Offering her carriage for the purpose, Mrs. Veneering ‘incoherently communicates’ that she herself ‘will return home on foot—on bleeding feet if need be—to work (not specifying how), until she drops by the side of baby’s crib’.

And Lady Tippins really does work, and work the Veneering horses too; for she clatters about the town all day, calling upon everybody she knows, and showing her entertaining powers and green fan to immense advantage, by rattling on with, My dear soul, what do you think? What do you suppose me to be? You’ll never guess. I’m pretending to be an electioneering agent. [...] And why? Because the dearest friend I have in the world has bought [a constituency]. And who is the dearest friend I have in the world? A man of the name of Veneering. [...] And we are carrying on this little farce to keep up appearances, and isn’t it refreshing!

At eight o’clock the fatigued workers gather for dinner at Veneering’s mansion. They cheer ‘We’ll bring him in!’ and agree ‘that they must “work” to the last, and that if they did not work, something indefinite might happen’. Soon that thing is revealed. When Veneering has been ‘brought in’, and the work is over, Twemlow returns to his flat for some rest. There, ‘upon his sofa, a tremendous consideration breaks in upon the mild gentleman…’: ‘Now I have time to think about it, he never saw one of his constituents in all his days, until we saw them together!’

A collision: there is no ‘oldest friend’. Finally, Twemlow can see through the veneering—can see that the ‘deal’s nailed together’ and the ‘veneer’s dabbed on’. He can tell that ‘the surface smelt a little too much of the workshop’, and that it is ‘a trifle sticky’. For Veneering does not work. Twemlow moans, ‘I am not strong enough to bear him!’—but he is. He is solid and shapely. ‘When there is more than one factor’ in a character, writes Forster, ‘we get the beginning of the curve towards the round’, and after Veneering’s election Twemlow begins to curve. In the novel’s last scene, at the Veneering’s dinner table, where he is used to being used, Twemlow takes a most decisive stand, defending the marriage of Eugene Wrayburn (round) and Lizzie Hexam (flat) against the Voice of Society.

‘Part of the genius of Dickens is that he does use types and caricatures…’, says Forster, but ‘his immense success with types suggests that there may be more in flatness than the severer critics admit’. Exposing veneer, he sounds depths.

Dickens never took a hard line on the décor of his own homes. He was too romantic for that. ‘He believed in French polish, in having things sparkling about him,’ according to David Parker, former curator of The Dickens Museum in London’s Doughty Street, ‘but he also believed in keeping what he had, and letting it accumulate narrative significance’. His taste in furniture tended toward the William IV style—described by Andrew Sangers as ‘Regency putting on weight’—popular when he set up his first house at Devonshire Terrace in 1839. Dickens was no reformer of taste. He did like to decorate, though, and he was not shy of giving strong opinions. Writing to Angela Burdett Coutts in 1854, the year he published Hard Times, he advised that

The little bookcase in the glass opposite the fire must positively have below it a table—of convenient depth in reference to the size of the room—always to stand there, as if it were part of that bookcase. Firstly, because the bookcase as it stands, is quite insanely perched in the air, without appearing to have any root in the ground—which is always disagreeable; and second because there must be no table in the middle of the room or you destroy the fireside.

If Dickens sounds a bit like the ‘government officer’ here, he must be forgiven. Angela Burdett Coutts was not a little girl named Sissy Jupe, and she did not reside in Coketown.

Featured image: Carved solid and laminated rosewood sofa, attributed to John Henry Belter (1804-1863), New York, c. 1856

It cannot be doubted that people in Hampstead do the things that people in Hampstead are supposed to do. On Sunday mornings (even in December) they sit outside cafés and bathe crusty bread in runny yolks; run with poor form but great gusto along the sidewalks, Heath-bound; and engage large babies and small dogs in a number of activities that elicit from them (variously) yaps, yelps, and bays, as well as quieter forms of protestation. (Leads tangle and prams rock to and fro.) Police attend the scene: something might happen. A flasher flashed last week on the Vale of Health; an old lady from Highgate was knocked on the head by an assailant, masked as assailants still are masked in societies that persist in recognising faces as characteristic, personal, perhaps even singular.

Statistical probability is against a crime spree, however, as momentarily abandoned pocketbooks, laptops, large babies, and small dogs will attest. Nothing much happens here—where assailants wear masks. Eggs dematerialise and newspapers metamorphose into free, flying things, ready to be ground into pavement, it is true, but the higher forms of life remain intact; and to keep remaining intact, the higher forms of life must continue doing nothing much. But what do they do, we cannot but wonder, once they have eaten their eggs, crumpled their papers? For the people of Hampstead can be seen abandoning their tables and running past and sauntering off (engaging large babies and small dogs in a number of activities), but they can also been seen eating, running, and standing in much the same attitude, all day long.

Soon it becomes clear enough. All day long—especially of a Sunday—the people of Hampstead do nothing in shifts. (Indeed all the people of London do nothing in shifts—especially of a Sunday—in Hampstead.) In the City we know the day and time because a woman in a suit behind a window chews lox on baguette and sips orange juice through a straw; crumbs dot her stripes in a pattern that reads ‘eight o’clock in the morning.’ The stride of important men tells us, later, as surely as the crumbs, ‘six o’clock in the evening.’ Angry legs aim pubwards: best not to carry the City straight home. But back at home in Hampstead (of a Sunday) the scene doesn’t change, though the cast does, and the time is hard to come by. We must shift sets to know the whole story. And so we step up Parliament Hill, short of breath, dodging mud-dipped dogs and babies (for here they are free to engage in their own activity), until we are stopped short by the expanse of London, which is really rather poky…

But then there is the City! And there is St. Paul’s, surmounted by that great pagan shrine, the Shard. And here we are in Hampstead (where assailants wear masks) commanding all! A fellow nearby says, “My father is a Saint Paws specialist. He worked for English Heritage and opposed the Shard of course. But he likes it now, says it sets it off.” Which is true—from this perspective. A South Londoner would surely disagree; but then how does one find a South Londoner, on Parliament Hill, to ask? No one looks out of place. And yet there is no small amount of diversity here. The American and French voices of Hampstead High Street have been joined by the Korean, Indian, and Polish voices of every other; though joining together, it must be admitted, they dissolve. Perhaps this is just as well: the air and the views up here are greedy and eat up sound. The Shard in particular is rapacious. It draws all of London into itself and produces a feeling or two, mute, indecipherable, in return.

“Form…,” says the fellow nearby, but before we catch the rest his voice is borne away to the home counties.

We can be certain that the scene has changed, and the cast. Atop the ancient hill people do not wield leads and prams; they hoist things (kites, cameras, each other) into the fresh, thin air. From the crowd of quiet people a girl is borne aloft, and now another, and another, on the shoulders of others like them: gymnasts. A Santa Claus capers around. This is a public place, belonging by rights to all Londoners; yet it is still a Hampstead place, curious, peculiar, panoramic, where the people who congregate (all day long) are honorary Hampstead people—characteristic, personal, perhaps even singular. As below, so above. The scene won’t change on this set, though the faces will. But they are the faces of friends, or of the children of friends, or even, yes, of the friends of the children of friends. Their fathers are Saint Paws specialists; they are gymnasts. They do nothing in shifts.

The same cannot be said of the people you pass on other parts of the Heath. Venturing into that idyll, the Kenwood Estate, we see emerging before us the form of a masked assailant… but no, it is only a middle-aged woman wrapped in a shawl, very chic, and tethered to a pug. But it is so dark here—how can one tell? Morning and evening come several times a day to Parliament Hill, which, despite its height, belongs to the City of London, not the sky. One never knows the time of day there, but one is sure that time is passing (in whatever direction) atop that noble eminence. Here, though, it is so dark—and London, invisible. Gnarled roots bar the way. Is a highwayman galloping near? Our feet are mired in muck. Do we hear a charwoman’s song? Our ears strain; we hold our breath; the sound of footsteps grows loud—for there are no faces here—and two voices pass. “…best day of my life,” she says. “Aww baby,” he says. This is not the repartee of Regency courtship. It is not even Victorian emotionalism. It is our own.

The deep locality of Hampstead has its limits. And yet—there is a jangle, a rattle of metal clanging metal ahead. A gate is shut! And we are locked in. At the edge of the forest we remember that statistical probability is against a crime spree, however, and so we remain calm—hitch ourselves up—and over—the railing. In a society that persists in recognising the characteristic, personal, and perhaps even the singular in the higher forms of life, we are confident that we will encounter no masked assailants as we stride as briskly as dignity will allow to the edge of the Heath—

Where we join up with others again. Where we repeat: it cannot be doubted that people in Hampstead do the things that people in Hampstead are supposed to do. Here, on Sunday evenings, especially in December, they sit in pubs and bathe bangers in mash; promenade past shops which remain wide open, despite the loss of heat; and engage large babies and small dogs in a number of activities that elicit from them (variously) yaps, yelps, and bays, as well as quieter forms of protestation. Police attend the scene: something might happen. But nothing ever does. And the time is well known.

Featured image (top): P Matthews

Classical Architecture: The Poetics of Order
by Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre
The MIT Press, 318 pp., £21.95

Hermine Wittgenstein once said her sister’s house in Vienna was “built for the gods.” And no wonder: it was designed by their brother, Ludwig, the luminous mind behind the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), a little text that set out to resolve all the questions of Western philosophy. Of course, it didn’t hurt that when Haus Wittgenstein was built, the family was one of the richest in Europe—not that they didn’t suffer for it. The Wittgensteins “seemed to act towards one another as if they were at court,” said Brahmns, who played in their music rooms; three of Ludwig’s brothers killed themselves. The pathologies we’ve come to associate with Vienna 1900 are all dutifully present in the Wittgenstein family tree: steely father, nervous mother, and a streak of morbidity, depression, and “perversion” that would make Freud’s day. Edith Hamilton’s too.

As a rule, the aristocratic Wittgenstein boys were not allowed formal schooling, but in light of their brothers’ deaths, Ludwig and his older brother Paul were finally—in their teens—sent off to formal establishments. Ludwig achieved good marks at the K.u.k. Realschule in Linz, but he had trouble spelling, and socializing. He later wrote, “My bad spelling in youth, up to the age of about 18 or 19, is connected with the whole of the rest of my character (my weakness in study).” Famously hard on himself, and difficult with others, Ludwig doubtless exaggerating the degree of his “weakness.” Nevertheless, modern commentators have suggested he had Asperger’s syndrome, and the diagnosis sounds about right. In addition to his social problems, the young Ludwig was interested in language, mathematics, music, religion and architecture. All the great systems.

By the time he began work on his sister Margarethe Stonborough’s house in the autumn of 1926, Ludwig had studied engineering and aeronautics, given them up for philosophy, fought in the Great War, and published the Tractatus. He was now Wittgenstein, the philosopher who had pioneered a totalizing, logical theory of how language reveals the world. Wittgenstein’s work fired up logicians from Cambridge to Vienna, but Ludwig felt misunderstood; his abstract system was not an expansion of the reach of logic and language, exactly, but a tracing of their boundaries. Beyond the reach of the great systems was a murky zone where logic, language, and representation failed—and human meaning was made. The unsayable was not unconquered territory, it was the guarantor of meaning, a stony-lipped Baal, and deserved to be treated with a reverential silence—inaugurated by the publication of Wittgenstein’s work, of course.

The Tractatus was to be the Trojan horse of positivist philosophy, a self-destructing bomb of a book that would demonstrate the follies of system-building. But it backfired. In his introduction to the Tractatus, Bertrand Russell famously ‘misunderstood’ Wittgenstein’s project, reading it as an attempt to establish the conditions for an ideal language—more naïve system. This became the popular view, and never one to tarry, Wittgenstein quit philosophy. He had already given up his fortune; now he laboured, and taught. In the Philosophical Investigations (1958), published posthumously, Wittgenstein would find an aphoristic, slippery, but unmistakably empirical form for making his points about language and the world; but for a small stretch of time in the late 1920s, before he went back to Cambridge to sort out his philosophical career, Wittgenstein was an architect.

Fig. 1  Haus Wittgenstein (1926-8), Kundmanngasse, Vienna.

In The Poetics of a Wall Projection (1985), Jan Turnovský uses Wittgenstein’s philosophical crisis as a “background” for thinking about the urproblem of modern architecture: What happens when the best laid plans—and purest geometries—fail to meet the demands of reality? Turnovský’s foreground is the Wittgenstein House (Fig. 1), where he conveniently discovers “traces of a virulent struggle… to maintain the coherence of an abstract concept in face of massive resistance from the ‘material,’” particularly in the rigid building’s “formless” service areas and, absurdly, brilliantly, in the seemingly inconsequential wall projection (originally ‘Mauervorsprung‘) of the book’s title (Fig. 2). Unlike other critics of the house, most of them philosophers, Turnovský is happy to “reduce the difference between Wittgenstein’s philosophies to a polarity between the conceptual and the empirical,” the Tractatus versus the Investigations, and focus on design. Students of philosophy are warned.

This is a designer’s book, and an anxious designer’s bible. It considers the tiny compromises and imperfections—read: the ego-shaking disasters—that keep us up at night. The wall projection, or “WP,” as Turnovský lovingly calls it, is one such imperfection. On plan it nearly balances out a breakfast room wall—at the expense of the room’s “logic.” Yet it is intentionally placed. The WP is no mere compromise; in Turnovský’s view it is a dialectical battleground on which the “categorial, compositional will-to-order” of abstract planning gives way to the demands of “concrete existing conditions related to construction, use, or site,” but only to preserve more order. A Hegelian synthesis in plaster.

Turnovský explains, “The WP divides the front interior wall surface of the breakfast room into an ideal, symmetrical window wall and a residual surface that corresponds exactly to the thickness of an imagined ‘exterior’ wall. The WP is the embodiment of a sub-concept—an ad-hoc measure that attempts to sustain a conceptual impulse in the face of ‘material’ opposition.” Don’t get him wrong: the ad-hoc measure is heroic, a last-ditch effort to establish harmony between competing forces. But in a rationalist system like Wittgenstein’s the margins for creating harmony are narrow—perhaps irrationally narrow. The genius of the WP is that it tries to create harmony anyway. If it fails, it fails poetically. If it succeeds, it bridges the gap between the rational and the real.

Which was a big deal. For like Karl Kraus, who read the state of the world in a misplaced comma, and Wittgenstein’s friend Adolf Loos, who determined the health of a society by its décor, Turnovský makes a social theory of his aesthetics. He is an heir to the Viennese tradition of blowing things out of proportion, the art of the feuilleton, and he manages his inheritance well. This style of analysis always begins with something gone awry—it’s crisis analysis more than critical analysis. Civilization is responsible for our misery (Freud). Language is losing its integrity (Kraus). The buildings along the Ringstraße are hollow set pieces, proof of cultural decline (Loos). In Turnovský’s world, architecture is in a state of perpetual crisis; in its “divided character,” caught between the conceptual and the empirical, it is always “a matter of a dominant tendency, or priorities,” and the result isn’t so much “creative tension” as a rabid struggle between incommensurable parts.

Of course, reality isn’t as bad as that. Palladio’s Villa Rotonda puts form first, but cannot ignore the slope of its site; a rambling British country house may be romantically random, but “structural considerations alone preclude a complete formless, absolutely unordered architecture.” In the Wittgenstein House, as in the Tractatus, “the ordering force of an abstract concept is manifest”—it’s a Palladio, not an early Lutyens. Still, quips Turnovský, far from achieving a systematic consistency, the Wittgenstein House exhibits “all the signs of a territory abandoned under duress.” Walls intended to be symmetrical “collide in such an undesirable way that the original axiom of symmetry can hardly be sustained.” Chimney flues “destroy” ideal rooms; an even grid of tiles is thrown off by a jog in the wall. Reality intervenes. Wittgenstein’s first instinct is to fight it off; then to ignore it. Finally he accepts the challenge of “material opposition” and devises the WP. Turnovský implies that this is the beginning of Wittgenstein’s turn towards a more humane, empirical modernism. The century’s too.

If the social and the aesthetic were in harmony in the 1920s, of course, it was not for long; a painful switchback loomed ahead in the next decade. It is no coincidence that the Philosophical Investigations would not be published until 1953, when Wittgenstein was dead.

Fig. 2  The Wall Projection, or WP, circled.

But something is amiss. In the throes of his crisis analysis Turnovský doesn’t really acknowledge—except perhaps in his title—that the dialectical way of building is not only ancient, it’s downright classical. According to Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre in Classical Architecture: The Poetics of Order (1986), classical architecture is obsessed with “rigorous quantification, exactitude, and detail.” They chalk up this obsession to divinatory thinking, “governed by taboos of pollution and the cult of purity,” not logic. The temenos, or “meticulously ordered temple precinct dedicated to a god or hero in archaic Greece,” encapsulates the logic of divinatory thinking: it is a “world where there is no contradiction.”

“Indeed,” continue Lefaivre and Tzonis, quoting from Aristotle’s own Poetics, “what characterizes any work—a tragedy, a musical piece, a temple—put together according to the rules of composition originated in classical poetics and rhetoric is its identity as something ‘complete and whole,’ ‘perfect,’ whose particular order sets it off from its surroundings. It is… like an ‘organism,’ distinct from its environment because of its internal constitution and the strong demarcation of its limits. Every classical work is, in a sense, a temenos, cut off from the rest of the universe by its special order. To fashion this work is to make a world within the world.”

Human consciousness doesn’t only grow over time; it shrinks too. Classical notions of unity were capacious, dialectical—a far cry from the earnest literalism that plagued the 19th century. In classical architecture, technical perfection could be sacrificed for visual perfection; a thing was still allowed to pose as something it wasn’t, like an actor wearing makeup. The most famous example is the Parthenon, completed in 432 BC, with its great bowed guts that appear stick straight to the naked eye. A more common one is entasis, the slight curve in the shaft of a column introduced to correct the illusion of concavity produced by a straight plane. You can probably spot an example on your own street—for boring old columns have always mediated the abstract and the empirical; that’s why they don’t look like toothpicks and you believe they will remain standing. And the vocabulary of classical architecture is full of similar tricks for maintaining temenos. Before the days of design reform and its continental cousin, rational modernism, designers could achieve perfection though illusion. The gods didn’t give a fig.

Neither, in the end, did Wittgenstein. The WP could be seen as an example of Takterstickung (a term from music), or overlap, which according to Lefaivre and Tzonis “involves a violation of the integrity of a unit of composition” through the “conceptual overlapping of two sections [in which] the end of a part or an element is fused with the beginning of another” (Fig. 3). In Baroque architecture, Takterstickung was used to create surprising—even disturbing—effects: a rule bombastically broken reinforces the rule. In more conventional circumstances two units might overlap to save space, maintain the integrity of a metric pattern, or minimise the effect of a termination. The technique can be used to disturb or reinforce order, or both at once—for Lefaivre and Tzonis invite disorder into classical architecture by suggesting that it can have a tragic function.

By juxtaposing poetic and ordinary worlds, according Aristotle’s formula, tragedy restores and renews our sense of the reality around us. It purifies. “The building, as temenos, can be seen as bringing about catharsis as tragedy does,” write Lefaivre and Tzonis. “It reflects the existing reality that through foregrounding reorganizes on a higher cognitive level. It provides a new frame in which to understand reality, in which to ‘cleanse’ away an absolute one.” Tragedy deviates from the “normal idiom,” distancing viewers from the helter skelter of everyday life the better to help us reimagine it. In this view, estrangement (to use Brecht’s term) is just as important to classical architecture as order. Indeed, in the dialectical view of temenos order is estrangement—from the norm. We are different when a play ends; somehow more and less ourselves. So too when we look upon, or inhabit, great buildings.

Fig. 4  An example of Taktersticking from The Poetics of Order: “Note the sharing of the termination by two consecutive parts of the façade, or Takterstickung. From Neufforge (1757-1780).”

When we are habituated to their conventions, however, temenoi become “polluted.” The conventions of tragedy—of acting, in drama; of speech, in rhetoric; of buildings, in architecture—must be made strange again in order to remain pure. From here, avant-gardism is the logical next step: the endless search for purity in the guise of the new. And by invoking contexts of reception, of course, Lefaivre and Tzonis expose classical architecture to the debates on symbolism raging when their book was published. Do pediments signal the public functions of buildings, as the postmodernists said (while constructing pasteboard pediments)? Or are they symbolically oppressive, as their critics claimed? Either way, attention to classical form and meaning is lost; but at least the opening up of temenos—which reflects favorably on Lefaivre and Tzonis, who are not New Urbanist ideologues, by the way—allows us to imagine a modernist temenos. And about time.

Because modernism at its best was tragic. To posit the International style as less dialectical than classicism would be a grave injustice, for it managed to appropriate the rules of classicist composition, smash them into De Stijl, and disregard both. The work of Adolf Loos, advisor on the Stonborough project, and forebear of figures like Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, is a case in point. His signature building, Old Vienna’s Goldman and Salatsch building, now called the Looshaus, was built with steel and poured concrete and covered in a veneer of lime-washed plaster and fine Cipollino marble. Those familiar with Loos’s Ornament and Crime (1908), where he said that “the evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from utilitarian objects,” may be shocked to see that the Looshaus is not only veneered but classicised. The building provoked campaigns of protest and one very serious neighborhood meeting with its sharp lines and “naked” upper-story windows, but the Looshaus doesn’t look precisely modern or classical. It obeys its own law, a pioneering blend of abstract and material contextualism.

In defense of his design Loos wrote an article explaining its relation to an explicitly Viennese past, reminding his readers that “Wien ein kalkputzstadt ist.” Heavy cornices and steep roofs, characteristic in Danzig or Salzburg, had never been typical in Vienna, “even from medieval times.” The simplicity of his design for the Goldman and Salatsch shop and apartments was not a break with the Viennese context; it was a continuation from within the Viennese architectural tradition. The Looshaus was unconventional, not insensitive to the past. But its tribute was not simple. Even today the building poses a complex, unsystematic challenge to the Michaelerplatz, where it sits across from the imperial Hofburg, while managing somehow to fit right in.

The chimerical Looshaus exemplifies its designer’s willingness to engage with convention, utilizing as he saw fit the ornaments of the past to create a building suited to its spatial, cultural, and temporal context: a larger, calmer, three-dimensional version of his polemical thesis in Ornament and Crime, which was never as literal as it seemed. Whereas the historicism of the Ringstraße is uncritical, using the past to flimsily symbolise the future, Loos’s critical conventionalism could be viewed as a process of vetting the historical precedent for snatches of contemporary relevance. Loos’s writings posed ultimata, but his built work—including his Raumplan villas, which brilliantly housed decadent freeform interiors in proto-modernist boxes—was relentlessly dialectical. A house had to please everyone, he said. It could not afford to be a machine for living in, or l’art pour l’art. A house was not that simple.

Fig. 4  The Looshaus (1910-11), Michaelerplatz, Vienna. Photograph: Istvan

Turnovský calls the WP a work of “poésie pure” with no stable, unequivocal meaning or function. It’s not simple. He may be right, if we grant tectonics a symbolic function to begin with; but then the same would be true for most architecture, and the WP would lose its interest. Perhaps Turnovský’s focus on the exceptionally rigid Wittgenstein House obscures his point as much as it makes it—denies his argument its avowed universalism. The fact is, modernism and classicism were never as stuffy as we think; dialectics moved in them from the start. Naturally, there is no widespread agreement on the nature of these movements: where Vitruvius sees classicism in stone as a “petrified” wooden architecture, an iconographic system for typifying and expressing functionalist truths, others see a more abstract system of pattern and play. And those I-beams on the Seagram building? Totally misleading. But Mies was emphasising points of termination, making a temenos, creating worldly order, not worshiping false gods.

Wittgenstein believed in the gods before he became a builder, but evidence shows he learned his lesson quickly. Turnovský notes that the frontal surface of the WP is “simultaneously in profile and en face,” venturing that this makes it “supra-cubist, since two opposing perspectives come together in it,” but it is perhaps more accurate to say that Wittgenstein used Takterstickung, willy nilly, as Turnovský admits, to preserve order. Wittgenstein did not abandon the single viewpoint; he recovered it for perception. In the social theory of certain postmodernist architects this would be bad, very bad: order is hegemonic, totalitarian. In the real world, though, order is not so easily defined. Classical architecture accepts paradox at base and builds order out of opposites. The Baroque builds opposites out of order, achieving a higher synthesis still. Neither move is more socially conservative than the other: Renaissance classicism was just as radical as fascist co-options were reactionary: context rules.

This is something the hyperbolic Turnovský often forgets. But then most of us do. And he and Lefaivre and Tzonis ultimately agree on the basics: there can be neither a totally rational nor a totally irrational architecture. All buildings combine abstract and empirical considerations, material and immaterial forces. But where Turnovský revels in confounding contraries Lefaivre and Tzonis love order, even unto disorder. One suspects that we’re all just the same, preferring one or the other approach more than we actually disagree on what makes buildings great. We are closer than we know. Turnovský is more interested in movement than synthesis, but the medium he loves is frozen; Lefaivre and Tzonis are more interested in synthesis than movement, but the order they love is fluid, relative.

Their advantage, perhaps, is not one of insight—though their book possesses no surfeit of scholarly acuity—but of expanse. The Poetics of Order contains the world of The Poetics of a Wall Projection, but we cannot say the opposite. When Turnovský enthuses that the WP is a “miniature architectural universe,” containing opposites in a single form, he might as well call it a temenos. But he won’t. Back in the 1980s, when these texts were current, I can imagine Lefaivre and Tzonis signaling to Turnovský with eager eyes. They are smoking outside an academic conference on the fate of architectural theory. Turnovský is ambling away, staring at rooflines and skylines, into space and himself. He refuses to look down and around. If he is naïve, it is by choice, and it is only appropriate: naivety is our modernist inheritance. Turnovský spent it well. He was a man of his times.

Like Wittgenstein, you might conclude, who built a house for gods that were dead. But as it turns out, the house was never quite a temple; Hermine exaggerated. Turnovský impishly reveals at the close of his book that the all-too-human Ludwig decided against the WP in the end. It exists only on plan. In its place is a niche, an unsymmetrical wall, and the usual disenchantment.

Featured image (top): East Window (2007) at St Martin-in-the-Fields, Shirazeh Houshiary in collaboration with Pip Horne

Alan Hollinghurst. Photograph: Robert Taylor (picador.com)

Victorianism is no new interest for you. Your books are full of references to the period and its architecture. What do that era and its artefacts connote for you?

My adolescence was very coloured by Victorian poetry—Tennyson in particular. The public school I went to—Canford, in Dorset—was a great Victorian house built by Charles Barry for the Guests—Sir John Guest, who was an iron founder, and his wife, Lady Charlotte, who was the first translator of the Mabinogion. Lady Charlotte had a little press at Canford Manor, and was a friend of Tennyson’s. In fact one of The Idylls of the King was first printed on that very press. At Canford a strong romantic, Victorian-Gothic element was married with a very beautiful natural setting: the manor, the river Stour… it was rather like ‘The Lady of Shalott’, and very much part of the atmosphere of my growing up. I remember wanting to champion Victorian buildings and objects which were reviled by my father’s generation, dismissed with the infamous ‘Victorian monstrosity’ tag. It was just about this time in my adolescence that the demolition of St Pancras was threatened and successfully resisted by the Victorian Society. I was very excited by Victorian buildings. And I do put them into my books a lot. There’s a Victorian country-house in each of my last three novels. I think I’ve really got to go easy on them.

Do you think of Victorian architecture as a particularly gay aesthetic?

No, I don’t. Does any kind of erotics come into it? I don’t know. But one gets into very dubious territory when tries to speculate about what a gay aesthetic might be. I believe gay aesthetics take so many different forms as to make the very idea of a definition seem almost meaningless. They may, in the vaguest sense, involve certain kinds of camouflage and certain kinds of display. But I myself don’t think of Victorian architecture—or any other kind of architecture—in those terms.

Architecture is a theme in all your books. Do you think of your novels as having an architecture?

I do loosely use the term architecture when I’m talking about a book—referring to my own wish to discover what its architecture is, for instance—but what I really mean by the phrase is style and structure. These might be strengthened and ramified in the books by recurrent motivic images—like the mirrors in The Folding Star. Musical analogies seem to me more apt because of the temporal dimension music and novels share. I used to see my first four books—even before they were completed—as the movements of a symphony. It’s not an analogy that I want to press too hard—these analogies only go so far—but at the time it did seem to me a helpful way of imagining my own project. Writing a book is like going into the unknown—to feel you’re contributing to something which has an overall architecture is rather reassuring. It’s something which writers don’t much, if ever, talk about: they frequently reflect on particular books but rarely comment on how their whole body of work might cumulatively appear to them. …

Read the rest here

Featured image: Irish Butcher’s gorgeous proof book cover for Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child (2011)

Not unlike Davies’ heroine, Hester Collyer (Rachel Weisz), who struggles in darkness for most of the film—first as a voice, reading her suicide letter over the blue-black montage of the film’s opening, and later as a woman, beautifully realized by Weisz, who rarely leaves the dingy walk-up in which she is shipwrecked. Like Lily Bart, the tragic society girl of Davies’ previous adaptation, The House of Mirth, Hester gives up bourgeois comfort for something higher, which proves fleeting. Both women are left with little else, in the end, but rooms of their own.

More than The House of Mirth, though, which bulges with the many settings of Edith Wharton’s novel, The Deep Blue Sea is framed by its spatial dilemma: the opening sequence drops us off on Hester’s street in London, where darkness is punctuated by only a few gas lights. A long crane shot tells us we’re watching a Davies film, but it also establishes an atmosphere of the impending, splicing the DNA of stage and film melodrama is one elegant gesture. Supporting players move in and out of a block of flats as we ascend, story by story, to Hester’s window, which replaces the proscenium as our portal into her emotional life.

Hester peers out, then shuts her curtains against the weak light; she is ready to act on her letter. The next ten minutes are a miracle of compression. Davies reduces the play’s exposition—How did fortyish Hester, the wife of a judge, end up here?—to a flickering swirl of montage, as good as anything he has shot, that represents Hester’s consciousness as it slides toward oblivion. The effect is pure film, but by summarizing Hester’s love affair with Freddie (Tom Hiddleston) instead of following it around town, it keeps us close to the “stage” of the flat. Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto dissolves into ambient sound, then voices, as Hester makes her way back up to the surface of the living: an inversion of Lily Bart’s journey at the end of Mirth.

Understandably, it takes a little while—the length of a few cigarettes—for Hester to readjust to the burden of being alive. She sits still and remembers, and Davies takes us back a few months to a visit with Collyer’s mother, who tells Hester to “beware of passion… It always leads to something ugly.” Barbara Jefford’s turn as the phallic mother-in-law is brilliant; the scene, probably unnecessary. In showing us the life Hester led before her split, though, it does more than show us the repression of passion; it exposes the lacquer and polish of Collyer’s world. The scene’s perverse light helps us to understand Hester’s darkness, and depth, even as Davies’ storytelling becomes heavy-handed.

The rest of the film unfolds in a linear fashion, charting a day of emotional crisis—and changing light—with theatrical attention. There are only a few set changes. Hester never ventures far from her flat, which is also Freddie’s when he is around, but jealousy and anger lead her down the street to a pub and, eventually, the Aldwych tube station, where she has an Ann Karenina moment. Davies is a classicist, and when Hester is framed by columns, or an arch, like Lily Bart, she is usually dead center. (So merciless is Davies, Lily’s walk of shame at the end of Mirth takes her under a triumphal arch.) Unlike Lily, however, Hester inhabits the small world of a revolving stage; transitions are the focus, not tableaux. When Freddie suddenly appears from nowhere, like an actor rushing from the wings, we feel he has just left the pub.

Rachel Weisz as Hester Collyer in Terence Davies’ The Deep Blue Sea (2011)

In Mirth, on the other hand, characters posture and pose, sometimes against CGI backdrops, like escapees from The Decoration of Houses. We must rely on verbal clues to know which estate they are on, and even which country they are in, until the film’s final devolution back to New York. This is appropriate; Wharton’s novel is about yacht-hopping Edwardian Society; but the milieux is perhaps too delightful to Davies, who cannot resist a high camp interpretation of it. The resulting film adaptation is a hall of mirrors, reflecting human nature off of camp sensibility, and vice versa, until we are unsure whether film’s final line, “I love you,” is earnest or ironic.

The same uncertainty rings through Of Time and the City (2008), Davies’ acclaimed autobiographical documentary. In it, Davies pieces together archival and newsreel footage of his hometown, Liverpool, and speaks. His queenly commentary supplements a fairly conventional string of images, and without it, alas, we would understand much less about Liverpool and midcentury Britain. When Davies goes on one too many tirades, though, spitting insults at “Betty Windsor,” or when he closes the film—after opening it—with an opera of helicopter-shot Architecture, we are so deep in his pysche, and sensibility, that time and the city have all but disappeared.

Which is perhaps Davies’ victory. By laying himself bare he wins the right to represent the Liverpool he wants: all porticos and rainbows. The problem? That Davies’ framing of Liverpool reduces the hour he spends in its terrace houses and council estates, the spaces of his adolescence, ignoring the real wages of time. It is Proust in reverse. Davies’ privileging of melodrama over social satire in Mirth has a similar effect: just when we are ready to cry at the tragedy of it all, Davies cuts in with artifice. The aesthete within rejoices, the intellect mourns—for only wit can weigh in on tragedy, not wallpaper. Even members of Society know as much.

A product of early fifties theater, The Deep Blue Sea is camp at its core; some have even called the character of Hester a “disguised” gay man, a reduction that serves neither Rattigan’s biography nor criticism of the play. But the film’s camp is an amplification of reality, not a distraction from it. Tragedy in The Deep Blue Sea is a living, breathing, moving thing, as much like the tragedy of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Il desert rosso as the melodrama of Douglas Sirk. Hester poses, of course, but like Antonioni’s Giuliana she also walks and runs and quips. Small as it is, she has the space in which to do so: a cinematic stage.

The final shot of the film is its opening, inverted. A day has passed and Hester has learned, and decided to go on living. Davies lets off the pressure; light floods the screen. As in Mirth, he tracks to the window of his heroine’s hopeless room, but instead of turning back to Hester, as he does to Lily, he keeps tracking out and out—back down the block of flats, past the friends who have taught Hester about true love—to something unexpected: children playing in the rubble of the Blitz.

We knew all along we were in London “around 1950,” we even saw Hester through a war flashback, but we did not know, for the darkness, that she was living on a ruined street. The children scamper off. A lone doorframe stands in the rubble, and we close in on it until, in the last moment of the film, we have seen through its frame to the other side of tragedy. There are no rainbows here, there is no “I love you,” but the view from Hester’s street offers a hope as raw and real as it is stylized.

Via Frieze

In The Poetics of Space Gaston Bachelard writes, “In Paris there are no houses, and the inhabitants of the big city live in superimposed boxes.” He is complaining not about architectural modernism, with its characteristic “towers in parks,” but about the phenomenological flatness of Haussmann’s Paris. For Bachelard, a Second Empire apartment could never be a home—or at least not an “oneiric home,” cousin of the castle and the hut, and a cradle of imagination. Lacking cellars and attics, “no longer aware of the storms of the outside universe,” he suggests, the “boxes” of Paris are no place to dream.

The narrator of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way, on the other hand, “endowed by love” for Gilberte Swann with a heightened sensibility, “had singled out and sanctified one particular family from within the social Paris just as it had from within the Paris of stone one particular house whose carriage entrance it had sculpted and whose windows it had made precious.” His parents “did not see in [the house] anything unique,” just as they saw nothing unique in the Swanns: “I was the only one who could see these ornaments.” But there they were: dreams written across superimposed boxes.

We have all known a love like this; perhaps that is why Bachelard recants. A few pages after his Paris barb, he acknowledges that the dream of living elsewhere—in this case a hut, the primordial home—can manifest itself, quite literally, wherever one sits. “In most hut dreams we hope to live elsewhere, far from the over-crowded house, far from city cares. We flee thought in search of a real refuge. Bachelin [a “forgotten writer” whose novel he is discussing] is more fortunate than dreamers of distant escape, in that he finds the root of the hut dream in the house itself,” where simultaneously he sits by the hearth with his beloved father and feels himself “living in the round house, the primitive hut, of prehistoric man.” Now it seems that any house (or apartment) will do for dreaming; and dreams, as Proust’s narrator would agree, are powerful enough to refashion, even transfigure space.

At the end of “Place-Names: The Name,” revisiting the Bois de Boulogne, where as a child he marveled at the promenading figure of Mme. Swann, the narrator of À la recherche concludes, “The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions which formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.” Places are as ephemeral as our fleeting impressions—they are our impressions; but so too are impressions a register of space and place, the location of their emergence, not just the ticking of the clock.

“Place-Names”: a view down the Champs-Élysées from the Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile to La Grande Arche de la Défense. Photograph: Michael Mangi

Diana Fuss explores the dialectic of space and imagination in her 2004 book The Sense of an Interior: Four Rooms and the Writers that Shaped Them, going beyond fiction and phenomenology to consider the lives of four “creative geniuses.” Emily Dickinson, Sigmund Freud, Helen Keller, and Marcel Proust are her subjects, linked by their associations with rooms and, to a lesser extent, sensory disorders. “How do writers inhabit domestic space?” she asks in the book’s introduction. “How does domestic space inhabit writing?” Largely eschewing architectural history and literary scholarship (one is too literal, “ignoring the metaphorical in favor of the functional,” the other too figurative, viewing “houses as metaphors for something else”), Fuss attempts to reconstruct the interiority of her subjects, like a chatty home improvement show, “room by room.”

From the outset, Fuss rejects literary readings that “present the house as nothing other than subjectivity,” as well as those “posing the house as an ‘analogue’ for the text,” and indeed she does neither of these things in The Sense of an Interior; but neither does she provide us with a sound architectural history. So what does Fuss do? For starters, she rehashes old ideas. “In Proust’s novel, time inhabits space,” she writes in the essay “Proust’s Nose,” just as space inhabits time; there is no absolute interiority or exteriority. Getting to her Proustian point: “Involuntary memory… effects an immediate temporal and spatial dislocation that suspends not only then and now but also here and there.”

Joseph Frank and Georges Poulet made similar arguments long ago, advocating for the salience of space in readings of À la recherche, neither with the doggedness of Fuss. Like her forebears she wants to theorize textual spaces, but she also wants to investigate places—real spaces, which she diagrams—“for how they mold the interior lives of the writers who inhabit them,” as if walls could talk. If this sounds dangerous, that’s because it is. Challenging the “too easy bifurcation between literal and figurative space reinforced by the separate disciplines of literature and architecture,” an admirable project, Fuss slides haphazardly between registers, achieving none.

Too often she veers into the kind of artless biographical criticism that treats authors’ lives like texts for decoding. Discussing the arrangement of mirrors in Proust’s famous bedroom, she writes, “The surface of the Proustian mirror remains opaque, suggesting that, even where the aperture of the self is concerned, Proust was no above erecting protective defenses around the alluring but dangerous practice of radical introspection.” Likewise, “the most obtrusive object in the room, [Proust's piano] dominated [his] subconscious life, its ivory keys simulating his mother’s voice more powerfully than any telephone line.” Fuss has plenty of interesting things to say about technology, death, space and time, but the avidity of her speculative prose, tightly woven with self-congratulating metaphors, jars. One is reminded of Pale Fire‘s Preface: the academic kiss of death.

Like Vladimir Nabakov’s fictional critic Charles Kinbote, who confuses annotation and interpretation to hilarious result, Fuss is a stickler for details. Schematically, her rendering of Proust’s apartment at 102 boulevard Haussmann seems absolutely precise; the Chinese screen is precisely where it should be. Lined up against Fuss’ fast and loose turns at biography, however, this kind of precision takes on an air of absurdity. Here is Fuss on Proust’s reasons for having his telephone line removed: ”At the dawn of a world war, in which Proust was to lose a number of his friends, the telephone had become too painful a reminder of exactly what it had always been: a disembodied voice carrying messages from the dead.” Was Proust a psychic? Is Fuss? Better to stick with the telephones in his novel, and letters, than conjure a zombie telephone somewhere in-between.

But what else can she do? Like the subjects of her book, Fuss is “entombed.” She is not conducting literary criticism, so here is no new analysis of Proust’s novel; she is not conducting an architectural history, so here is no thorough analysis of Proust’s physical environment; and she is not conducting biography, so here is no evidenced analysis of, well, Proust. It is not that The Sense of an Interior is bad (in 2005 it won the MLA James Russell Lowell Prize for outstanding scholarly book of the year), but that its essays, “Proust’s Noise” in particular, rarely amount to more than associational wordplay. After all the theory, Fuss’ contention in “Nose” is simply that for the Proust of 102 boulevard Haussmann “life is what is lived on the inside,” in his apartment, senses, imagination, and ultimately, writing, but that his “sense of an interior” required constant negotiation with the “external world.” Outside of academe we know there are no pure states, but inside it, where this book was written, the point is probably worthwhile. It makes one happy to be an academic—as Proust was reportedly a sexual—voyeur, instead of the real thing.

Toward the end of his book, Bachelard becomes interested in rooms as well. “There is consolation in knowing that one is in an atmosphere of calm, in a narrow space,” he writes, agreeing with Rilke (Proust, Woolf) that a great deal of spatial “concentration” is required for poetic production. He concludes that it is admirable “to make space withdraw, to put space, all space, outside, in order that meditating being free to think,” a sentiment echoed by Fuss when she writes, “Paradoxically, Proust found it necessary to suspend the senses in order to write about them. To think the experience of involuntary memory, Proust had to stop doing it, if only for the time it took to convert sensory impression into literary language.”

The author is one thing, his text another. When Bachelard writes, earlier in The Poetics of Space, “Every great image has an unfathomable oneiric depth to which the personal past adds special color,” we are moving in the spirit of Proust’s survivor, the narrator of À la recherche, not the man himself. In the last lines of Swann’s Way, the narrator returns to the Bois de Boulogne, where “the real sky was gray,” unlike the Elysian images of his memory. “It is not until late in life that we really revere an image,” continues Bachelard, “when we discover that its roots plunge beyond the history that is fixed in our memories. In the realm of absolute imagination, we remain young late in life. But we must lose our earthly Paradise in order to actually live in it”—like the narrator in the Bois—”to experience in it the reality of its images, in the absolute sublimation that transcends all passion.” No matter the sky.

Featured image (top): Fabien Baunay