'All Homeless Objects that Require a World'

My office on campus is invariably described as “Spartan” or “monastic.” What’s meant is uncluttered; no tchotchkes. There’s a desk with a lamp, a file cabinet, a waste basket, a swivel chair for me and two wooden ones for visitors. On the wall above my desk hangs a cork bulletin board, empty except for a family photo, a postcard of Louis Armstrong, a button with a picture of Dr. Johnson, and a fortune from a Chinese restaurant: “Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.” The other walls are blank. Some of my colleagues pity me, as though I were living in poverty. In contrast, the office next to mine is a warehouse. On the wall hangs a surfboard, among many other things.

Too much stuff makes me nervous. Just as I don’t like crowds, I don’t like crowded rooms. Freud’s office in Vienna tells me its occupant was nuts. And yet some of my favorite paintings are densely decorated interiors painted by Vuillard. I picked up another book from the library’s discard cart: Elizabeth Wynne Easton’s The Intimate Interiors of Edouard Vuillard (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1989). His rooms are sumptuously colored. His people, usually women, become part of the interior decoration. Consider Large Interior with Six Persons (1897). So many colors and contrasting patterns ought to be a mess. Vuillard fills his frame with endlessly interesting detail. Easton quotes a lengthy passage from Vuillard’s journal written in 1894. The painter wakes in the morning and surveys his room. He makes a long inventory of objects, including “the hinges, my clothes at the foot of the bed; the four elegant green leaves in a pot, the inkwell, the books, the curtains of the other window, the walls of the court through it,” and so on. Then he writes:

“I was struck by the abundance of ornament in all these objects. They are what one calls in bad taste and if they were not familiar to me they might be unbearable. It’s a chance to think about this label ‘in bad taste’ that I am quick to say and that keeps me from looking. There I was looking and nothing gave my nerves a shock on the surface, I took interest in each of their qualities, and that was enough to push away distaste.”

Vuillard sees a poignancy even in the tacky and banal. I still prefer my surrounding stripped-down, but a Vuillard interior is like to an alien and beautiful world. I think of these lines from W.H. Auden’s “Canzone” (1942):

“We are created from and with the world

To suffer with and from it day by day:

Whether we meet in a majestic world

Of solid measurements or a dream world

Of swans and gold, we are required to love

All homeless objects that require a world.”