The Professor and Other Writings (15 page)

Which brings me back, by a somewhat gothic route, to shelter mags and their allure. One essential part of their appeal, it seems to me, lies precisely in the fact that they proffer—even brazenly tout—an escape from the parental. (The step-parental, too, thank God.) They do this in several ways, perhaps most conspicuously through a glib, repetitious, wonderfully brain-deadening “express the inner you” rhetoric. Now, supposedly no one actually “reads” shelter magazines; you just drivel over the pictures. Patently untrue in my experience: I devour all the writing, too—such as it is—no matter how fatuous and formulaic. I take special pleasure in the “editor's welcome”—usually a few brief paragraphs (next to a little picture of said editor) about new decorating trends, the need for beauty in one's life, how to create a private “sanctuary” for yourself, the meaning of “home,” etc. It's always the same stupefying tripe, but soothing nonetheless.

Who is this editor? She (rarely he) might best be described as the Un-Mother. She is typically white, middle-aged yet youthful, ap
parently straight, and seldom much more ethnic-looking than the Polish-American Martha Stewart. She is often divorced, and may (paradoxically) have grown-up children. But her authority is of an oblique, seemingly nontoxic kind—more that of a benevolent older sister or a peppy, stylish aunt than any in-your-face maternal figure. And the therapeutic wisdom she dispenses—almost always in the cozy second person—is precisely that you don't have to do what your mother tells you to do. In fact, your ma can buzz off altogether. You can now buy lots of nice things and make “your own space” from which all signs of the past have been expunged.
Yay! No more USS
Roncador!

If you enter the words “not your mother's” on Google, you'll get nearly 400,000 results, a huge number of which point you immediately toward shelter-mag articles. “Not your mother's [whatever]” turns out to be an established interiors trope, endlessly recycled in titles, pull quotes, advertisements, photo captions, and the like. “Not Your Mother's Tableware” is a typical heading, meant presumably to assure you that if you acquire the featured cutlery you will also, metaphorically speaking, be giving your mom the finger. (Other online items that are not your mother's: wallpaper, mobile homes, Chinette, faucet sponges, slow cookers, backyard orchards, and Tupperware parties. Beyond the realm of interior decoration—it's nice to learn—you can also avoid your mother's menopause, divorce, Internet, hysterectomy, book club, Mormon music, hula dance, antibacterial soap, deviled eggs, and national security. Thank you, Condi.)

“Your House Is You, So Start Reveling in It” is a virtual creed in Shelter-Mag Land, one derived from the holy books of interior design.

“You will express yourself in your home, whether you want to or not,” proclaimed the prophet Elsie in
The House in Good Taste
—best to “arrange it so that the person who sees [you] in it will be reassured, not disconcerted.” In
The Personality of a House,
a rather more florid copycat volume from 1930, Emily Post was no less insistent: “[Your
home's] personality should express your personality, just as every gesture you make—or fail to make—expresses your gay animation or your restraint, your old-fashioned conventions, your perplexing mystery, or your emancipated modernism—whichever characteristics are typically yours.” Narcissism in a go-cup: the ladies say it's okay.

Now, in 2006, the message is ubiquitous, sloganized, inevitable. “Not Everything in Your Home Is All About You, You, You,” reads an ad for flooring in a recent issue of
Elle Decor
. “Oh, Wait. Yes, It Is.” Unsurprisingly, it is taken for granted that one's inner life, externalized in décor, will be an improvement on whatever has gone before. “What do you think you want?” asks
Elle Decoration
(September 2005). “A bigger house? A better view? Frette bed linen? A matching set of original Saarinen dining chairs?” It seems that “you” have very expensive tastes. But that's fine too, because shelter literature is all about consumption, luxury goods, and the pipe dreams of upward mobility.

When one has pretensions to taste, such dreams can be hard to resist. Out of necessity my own decorating style has long been fairly down-market and bourgeois: your standard Academic-Shabby-Chic-Wood-Floors-Vaguely-Ethnic-Somewhat-Cluttered-Bohemian-Edith-Sitwell-Crossed-with-Pottery-Barn-Squeaky-Dog-Toys-Everywhere-Eccentric-Anglophile-Lesbian. (The last two elements being signified by various grubby Vita Sackville-West first editions on the shelves. No one else on the Internet seems to want them.) Yet raffishness notwithstanding, the entire visual scheme is as fraught with socioeconomic symbolism as any. Having been plucked out of the (semi-) prosperous middle class as a child, I have spent thirty years or so trying to wiggle my way back in. Indeed, to the degree that such mobility is possible on an academic salary, I've sought fairly relentlessly to upgrade to even higher status; 1920s-Artistic-British-Boho-with-Inherited-Income has usually been the target look, as if Augustus John and Virginia Woolf had mated. (The “British” part
has no doubt been a way of renegotiating childhood fiascos on my own terms.) Say the words “Bloomsbury” or “Charleston” and I become quite tremulous with longing.

That the “express yourself” ethos of the shelter mag is both illogical and manipulative should go without saying. While encouraging you to find your “personal style,” the Un-Mother also wants to show you how. Even my own fanatically considered décor, I'm forced to admit, may be part of some greedy stranger's business plan, a version of that nostalgic “vintage” or “Paris flea market” style heavily promoted to urban college-educated women of my generation throughout the United States and Western Europe over the past decade or so. (Other incessantly marketed “looks” now vying for dominance in Shelter-Mag Land: “mid-century modern,” a variety of Baby Boomer Rat Pack retro distinguished by funky space-age design, Case Study houses, pony skins on the floor, and, if you're lucky, lots of Eames, Mies, and Corbu; and the more minimalist, Asian-inspired W Hotel look, involving wenge wood, stark-white walls, spa bathrooms, dust mite–free bedding, solitary orchids in raku pots, etc. The latter mode, like the frigid minimalism of the British cult architect John Pawson, always strikes me as simply the latest twist on twentieth-century fascist design.) But whether my never-ending quest for antique finials, faded bits of toile de Jouy, old postcards, and other quirky “flea-market finds” is a product of disposition or suggestion, I am, I realize, as much a slave to commodity fetishism as any McMansion-owning reader of
Architectural Digest
(hideous bible of parvenus from the Hamptons to Malibu).

Resentful, matriphobic, pretentious, gullible: could the shelter-lit addict be any less appealing? Unfortunately, yes, as a brief foray into Shelter-Mag Land's heart of darkness, its paranoid psychic core, will reveal. Here the real-world rooms on display—static, pristine, and seemingly uninhabited—are key. To be “at home” in the World of Interiors, one rapidly gathers, is to bask in the privacy of your own
space, serene and unabashed, while the rest of the world goes kaboom all around you. Not for nothing does the industry term “shelter magazine” play subliminally on “bomb shelter.” Self-fortification is one of the goals here; likewise the psychic eradication of other people.

Some shelter-lit purveyors are tough minded enough to cop to it: that the urge to “project the self” through décor can be deeply allied with misanthropy. “I live inside my head,” the decorator Rose Tarlow declares in
The Private House
(2001), “often oblivious to the world outside myself. I see only what I wish to see.” In her own home, she acknowledges, other people aren't really part of the scene:

Having now become “interested in a home only for myself,” she would like nothing better, she says, than to live in a “nun's cell,” a sort of little medieval crypt world. (“I imagine a bed covered in a creamy, heavy hemp fabric in a tiny room that has rough, whitewashed plaster walls, a small Gothic window, a stone sink; outside a bird sings. Peace prevails.”) The book's illustrations—chill, austere, and undeniably gorgeous—give form to the tomblike aesthetic: not one of the exquisite rooms shown (all designed by Tarlow) has a human being in it.

Shelter-Mag Land is a place in which other people are edited out, removed from the picture, both literally and metaphorically, so that one is free to project oneself, for ever and a day, into the fantasy spaces on view. In any given interiors piece this “disappearing” of other people is usually a two-part process, beginning retrospectively, as it were, with the ritual exorcism of the last owner before the current one. Former owners invariably have atrocious taste, one discovers,
and every trace of them must be removed. When the former owner is also the Mother in Need of Banishment, positively heroic measures are necessary. A 2004 article in the
New York Times Magazine
has a telling item about how Goldie Hawn's daughter, the actress Kate Hudson, bought “the Los Angeles house she grew up in” precisely in order to gut the interior and remodel it in “her own image.” No Goldie vestiges will be allowed to remain. “Goldie's taste is more classic,” notes a male designer assisting Hudson. “Kate wants to turn everything on its ear.” Don't look now, Private Benjamin—the kid's just decoratively cleansed you.

But other people need cleansing, too, most urgently the lucky oinkers now in possession. It is common for interiors magazines—higher-end ones like
World of Interiors
especially—to suppress the names and images of current owners. There are exceptions, of course:
Elle Decor,
for some reason, likes to run pictures of blissed-out property owners—usually Ralph Lauren–ish white people relaxing on patios, cuddling their French bulldogs, or flourishing salad tongs in a gleaming Corian-countertopped kitchen. In some cases, especially when he's gay and humpy, the designer responsible for the new décor will be shown lounging about the premises looking highly pleased with himself, like a porn star who's just delivered big time.

And small children—especially if beautiful, blonde, and under five—sometimes get a pass, though they are liable to appear in curiously fey and stylized ways. For several years now I've been keeping tabs on a shelter-mag cliché I call the Blurred Child Picture: a light-filled shot of some airy urban loft, all-stainless kitchen, or quaint Nantucket cottage, in which the child of the house is shown—barefoot, pink, and perfect—either whizzing by in the background or bouncing joyfully on a bed. The face and limbs are often fuzzy, as if to suggest a sort of generic kidness in motion. These hallucinatory urchins usually turn out to bear excruciatingly hip names—Samantha, Cosmo, Zoe, and Miles are current favorites—and seem
as branded and objectified as the furnishings around them. The ongoing reproductive anxieties of young, white middle-class American professional women—a crucial segment of the shelter-magazine demographic—would seem to prompt such wish-fulfillment imagery: here's your new space and a designer child to put in it.

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

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

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