Unlike
most people’s houses, personal photographs do not adorn the mantels or the
walls of the Hudson house offering snapshots from a life, yet the house is very
personal. Photographs do not offer
narratives of a life in this house–but things do.
my final blog entry on the Hudson house, I want to linger on an object very
likely to be overlooked on a visit to the house. It is a plain, metal desk lamp that sits on
the piano in the music room. Here is a
picture:
The
lamp deserves attention not only because of where it came from (more on that in
a moment) but because of the room it is in.
The music room, a very sophisticated and beautiful room, is also the
first room guests to the house will know as it is used as a kind of formal sitting
room. Yet the room is also a bit of an
anomaly in the Hudson house as its primary centuries of inspiration are the
eighteenth and the twentieth. Its décor
is more French than American, its furniture more impressive than cozy, and its
colors more bright than gloomy. In the
music room, John Ashbery’s statements about the Victorian origins of the house
(which I discussed in the previous blog on wallpaper), don’t really apply. Here is an image of the lovely room:
are many things to notice about this room and the plain, metal desk lamp isn’t
one of them. How can one notice it when there
are more impressive sources of light, including a chandelier? When it almost blends in with the color of
the piano? When it is dwarfed by an
eclectic array of sheet music? When it
sits next to a Trevor Winkfield? And
underneath an Alex Katz? And across from
a Willem de Kooning? And yet it is
arguably the most personal object in the room and the one that says the most
about the origins of the house.
The desk
lamp belonged to Henry Lawrence, Ashbery’s grandfather, a physics professor at
University of Rochester who did some of the early experiments with x-rays. Ashbery has spoken in interviews of his
particular fondness for this grandfather, who he believes he resembled and with
whom he shared a love of books and learning.
Ashbery has other things of his throughout the house, but this desk lamp
is perhaps the most publicly displayed since the music room is the place in
which guests are invited to sit and talk.
Its presence there, modestly but slightly out of place, functions as a
quiet signal of the personal nature of the house and the nineteenth-century
aesthetic that lies behind this room.
“What lovely antiques…(fap, grunt). Isn’t it funny the
way something can get crowded clean out of your memory, it seems new to you
when you see it again, although some part of your mind does remember, though
not in any clear-cut way?” (The Vermont
Notebook, 1975)
Walk
through the house and one keeps meeting Henry Lawrence through the things
Ashbery has kept. The doorknocker on the
upstairs library. The University of Rochester scrapbook. The vest hanging in the closet.
The tourist maps bought during
a trip to Europe in the mid-1920s. The
desk lamp functions as a memory trigger, even if you have never seen it
before. What is that? Where is it
from? What is it doing in the music
room?
of the house responds to these questions.
There are not only “lovely antiques” throughout but also stories about
them. Just as the unobtrusive desk lamp
carries in it its Rochester origins— Ashbery’s childhood there, his perception
of Henry Lawrence’s intellectual life, Lawrence’s own origins nearby in the
1860s—so do other objects in the house.
And those that do not overtly carry these deep origins, like the Popeye
wastebasket purchased in 1979 (discussed in blog #2), do not obstruct the view
of these older, more personal things but mingle with them, purposefully
inciting one’s mind and memory to action but just “not in any clear-cut way.”
Thanks
again to Stacey Harwood and David Lehman for the invitation to blog, and to David
Kermani and John Ashbery for giving me permission to write about the very
special Hudson house—and thank you so much for reading.