People outside of New York don’t get New York City apartments, or maybe it is that suburbanites don’t get what it means to be in a city. They complained to me when I lived in New York City that there was so much hustle and bustle on the streets that a person could never get any rest while normal places, those that developed in the suburbs after the Second World War, allowed the streets to empty out and go to sleep and so everyone could get restful. But that was not the case in cities where you could live in a residential neighborhood while a block away from a busy commercial area, such as happened to me a number of times, as when a child when two blocks away in one direction and three in another there was a bustling place where everything could be had, like restaurants and supermarkets and pharmacies and movie theatres and haberdasheries (remember those? What happened to them? Dress shops never closed up.) My parents’ apartment fronted on a park that received great sunlight and people sitting on their benches while their children made noise in the street, though that was not cacophonous, any more than children riding their tricycles in the suburban neighborhood in which I now live. Yes, my parents and I heard the El train just a block away, but it was the other side of it that was the other side of the tracks while my side was residential, just as living a block away from Broadway in an upper storey with a view of midtime Manhattan made you private and serene once you left the streets and followed a different pace of things, those of home life, rather than the ways of commerce and occupations.
Once you get inside, people arrange themselves where you will. We can say that people can then express themselves as what they are, though that is not quite right because we are all the kinds of people we are at work and at home and home is not a moral or aesthetic matter but a different set about problems that have to be organized: cleanliness and food preparation rather than office meetings, even if neatness counts in both of those places. Some people just have in their homes the accumulation of objects collected over the years, changing very little. Some give the place something a bit decorated in one room or part of a room because of not having enough money to give the place a finished, designed look. Some people have a particular object that stands out, like the big flowered urn on a table that my mother placed at one end of her living room. Often those striking pieces are appliances, as nowadays will happen when a big television set is put up on the wall is the central focus of the living room, but that goes back for a long time, back to the Seventies when people used gigantic stereo systems with tape decks as their main focus of attention, their consoles replacing the credenza of a previous generation, though appliances had a long way back, to the Stromberg Carlson radio that was at center stage as a piece of furniture, standing alone on the floor and before the time when radios were downsized to be on a table, its glowing dial the entrance to the world that replaced the fireside as the center of the hearth and so appropriately led to FDR’s fireside chats that explained what was happening in the world. It would be nice to have those again to tie us all together. Biden is clear and accurate but he is not eloquent, and Obama, who was a very good teacher when he wanted to be, chose not to do so, to direct people, as even Jimmy Carter cared to do when he tried to redirect the public consciousness when he made his speech about American “malaise”, but it didn’t fly.
I know real estate agents who love their work because they can go into other people’s homes and see how they live. They can intrude for a legitimate reason rather than just out of curiosity to knock on a door and say I want to see how you live. Visiting nurses are allowed in, as are plumbers and housekeepers. When I was young and dating girls who lived at home, there was the ritual of meeting her parents so that her father could check you out. I felt liberated when I was a bit older and met women only with their roommates, though I wonder whether those younger women had to reveal their mothers and their siblings and their apartments while I was a mystery to them of my family and our surroundings. Going into a home is like looking inside yourself, the door that opened into your eyes or from your posture or in in what you say, and what is inside is not blood and guts but a personhood, filled with feelings and ideas and mental stances and layers of identity that can be revealed one layer at a time, like in “Get Smart”, where one door into the secret inner sanctum is unlocked one after the other. Not that a house, mind you, reveals all. It is only one way of being, just a mighty powerful one.
Paddy Chayefsky was onto something with his kitchen dramas where Marty was nagged by his mother to meet some girls while she was providing him dinner at the kitchen table. That is where it would happen, where intimate family matters could get broached. Or in Chayefsky’s “The Catered Affair”, people were even in the family reluctant to discuss how much to pay for a big wing ding, it being a very very private matter. To notch it up a peg, think of “A Streetcar Named Desire” as a major work of art because you deal not only with very distinctive characters, like Stanley and Blanche. You see Williams getting for the viewer to intrude with some embarrassment into what is happening inside the home, including the events whereby Blanche is intruded into the Kowalski home, and then their friend Mitch is intruded into their family dynamics, Stella bemused by her openness at welcoming guests to come into her house and Stanley also puzzled. Actors will spend time trying out how to enunciate that single word “Stella!”. Is it bewilderment or anger or sexual energy that makes him want to reclaim his home and his wife, to make things right again after his life and family have been intruded.
Or the fictional Woody Allen being generously welcomed into her giant West End apartment in “Hannah and Her Sisters” by the ex-wife, played by his real life girlfriend Mia Farrow, so as to see her parents sing a love duet (the mother played by Margaret O’Sullivan, Mia Farrow’s real mother, a one time major movie star) and also, the fictional Woody Allen able to find another love. That was a good time for Woody Allen, love always full of both promise and fulfillment, something rare in his films, which tend to be bittersweet, love having terrible costs and largely only hope filled, Allen returning to his nature when things went very bad with Farrow. It is important to intercut the two levels of fictional story with the real lives of movie actors, something movie fans have done for a very long time, because that is the real experience of movies, knowing how Clark Gable didn’t like George Cukor as the first director of “Gone With the Wind” because Cukor was gay, and then Gable lost Carol Lombard in a plane crash and then how he aged, making his last movie, “The Misfits”, with Marilyn Monroe about that situation, both people past their prime. Resonances and ironies abound in and with the movies.
Thinking that entering apartments is a window into the interiors of people is, as I say, a mistake, just the ones students make when they say that the family is the fundamental feature of social life, everything else in the world just a way to sustain that. It is not even true on the face of it. The military and patriotism will draw people to leave their family life so as to go to war. Sociology is replete with how occupations and ideologies and institutions become priorities in the lives of people, their real, raw experiences whereby negotiating a job is the definition of what will be one’s self forever afterwards. Indeed, the genius of sociology is to displaced the family as the center of activity while the novel as a form of literature does just the opposite, which is to reveal families as fully as can be, histories of people never recorded in books except by novelists who do so by making fiction out of interior lives that are so true to life, or made to seem so, that people will think it the real thing, though who knows.
So there are limits to what is important about inside apartments but it is full of very heavy burdens nonetheless. Here is one way to see the difference between apartments and the outside. In occupational and group activities, people are enjoined to remember the events of the past, whether in bank books or receipts or job diaries recorded automatically by their work computers. These records are necessary so as to recall failures of personal memory because it would be very difficult to organize life if a history could not be reconstructed, whether through tax returns or in a vita or with vaccination stamps. Paper is a remarkable invention because it enables scratches with a pen to provide a history that is treated as authoritative, like a rent receipt proving where you live and so from where you can vote. Papyrus were used to record commercial transactions. The transfer of wheat must have happened if it had been written down. Written memory makes life cumulative, a set of consequences from one time to the next or the one after that, and so make life rational.
Life in apartments is just the opposite. The aim is to be sane, which means rational, by forgetting events. You don’t remember how you originally arranged the furniture and it doesn’t matter because you stay with that even if only because it is familiar. You every once in a while get rid of the clutter in your bathroom medicine chest because old prescriptions are dated or no longer of use and you may remember that an ungent you no longer need can be dispensed with. You quickly forget as best you can of the scenes you had with your spouse and your children so that calm can pervade the household, no bad vibrations in the same place where you still live to reactivate bad feeling, as might happen if a demon was sequestered in the spot at the hearth where you had an altercation, or else just frightened into the attic so that it will remain there rather than return to the more active part of life, in the front rooms as happened to Jane Eyre’s Lord Rochester, who could not keep his demon repressed. We forget our transgressions or at least we suppress them.
This shard of truth remains with Sigmond Freud, whatever of his corpus has been put to rubbish. Personal life and its aura in places are to be forgotten so as to get on with life even if the more desired process would be to rework the past experience so as to abolish its bad sequelae and so resolve and therefore eliminate the past. Rather, there is simply the blessing of forgetting to remember so that a place is ever fresh and therefore allowed as familiar. There are pleasant associations that have not been allowed to be forgotten. It was, most of the time, pleasant to come home to my apartments, to anticipate my relaxation, because my dangers and threats would be in abeyance while I felt assured at the presence of the other people there, perhaps because or even mainly because I had submerged ill will so as to find common cause and affection with these people. It isn’t that the work at home to make it home is not work; it is just very rewarding.