Hudson house, final entry--metal desk lamp

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.

For 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:

There 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?

The rest 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.

Comments

[Rosanne Wasserman]

Thanks, Karin, for these wonderful posts! We were glad to see the little parrot again, and your clear, detailed, thoughtful tour into past and present. I'm ordering that William King book, btw.

[DL]

Thank you for this brilliant series of posts, Karin. Can't wait for the next installments!