INTERIOR LIFE
While the rest of America is reading (and bickering about) The Goldfinch, I’m finishing Donna Tartt’s 1992 book The Secret History, a murder mystery set at a small, exclusive liberal arts college in Vermont. It follows a coterie of six students studying ancient Greek with a lunatic-renegade professor named Julian Morrow. Each morning they gather in his classroom for lessons in grammar and translation.
The book’s plot is well-paced, its language glorious. But what’s most enchanting is Tartt’s evocation of college life. The types of students (California girl, old money scion, prep school jock, working class transplant, rich kid drug dealer) are cataloged with devastating precision. And so are the details of campus life, circa 1992: stealing a slice of cheesecake from the communal fridge, decorating a dorm room door with a naked Barbie doll, listening to rap from a boombox on the roof, playing Hackey Sack at night on the lawn. It’s all bringing me back, not without some nostalgia, to my own college days.
In the first chapter there’s a stunning description of Morrow’s office, where the students sit sequestered from the rest of the college most of the week. Here there was “… a big round table littered with teapots and Greek books, and there were flowers everywhere, roses and carnations and anemones, on his desk, on the table, in the windowsills. The roses were especially fragrant: their smell hung rich and heavy in the air, mingled with the smell of bergamot, and black China tea, and a faint inky smell of camphor. Breathing deep, I felt intoxicated. Everywhere I looked there was something beautiful – Oriental rugs, porcelains, tiny paintings like jewels – a dazzle of fractured color… .”
That passage reminded me of Edouard Vuillard’s interiors, that convey the same sense of refined, hothouse sensuality. Like Morrow’s classroom, Vuillard’s interiors have dappled light, still air, and uninterrupted quiet. They’re stuffed full of exquisite decorations, overripe blossoms, books and papers. The students in The Secret History drink from mismatched china cups and read from tattered, cloth-bound books. The women in Vuillard’s interiors lounge with novels, cut flowers, and embroidery in their laps. In these small rooms, in contemplation and discipline, they find freedom.
L'Intimité by Edouard Vuillard, 1896. Courtesy of Petit Palais.