Out of the Past:
Hello, Mr Robsjohn-Gibbings
27 May 2015
An odd little book arrived in the mail yesterday. It was published by Knopf in 1945. The illustrations are by Mary Petty, the New Yorker cover artist and occasional cartoonist best known for the monstrously oversized pinafores with which she dressed her discreet, efficient parlormaids. One of these parlormaids figures in several drawings for the odd little book, which is called Goodbye, Mr Chippendale. The author is a now-forgotten interior decorator and furniture designer, T H Robsjohn-Gibbings (1905-1976), whose chosen style was a kind of Graeco-Modern. He was, for a while, so popular with high-end clients that there is something almost churlish about his otherwise slim and graceful attack on the hold that “antique” furniture and “period” rooms had, and continued to have until quite recently, on American housewives. I suppose you might say that the obsession with what my father-in-law calls “Louie the Phooey” came to an end with the demise of the American housewife herself.
I had not seen this book since, oh, say, 1962 — at the latest. At some point in the early Sixties, I drifted through the card catalogue in the Bronxville Public Library, probably trolling the subject drawers for “Chippendale.” I stumbled on the card that led to the book. I quickly realized that the book was not for me; it was against Chippendale. It was for Modern. No, no, no! (But “Robsjohn” — was this name, so like my own, trying to tell me something?)
What was I doing looking up Thomas Chippendale (1718-1779) in the early Sixties? I don’t really know, but I was certainly looking for information, not complaints. I associated Chippendale with ball-and-claw feet, which fascinated me. I don’t know the reason for that, either. In our living room, there was a love seat fitted out with ball-and-claw feet (the two feet in the front only, however). It would be years and years and years before I realized that the foot clutching the ball belonged to a predatory bird, ever since which recognition I have found ball-and-claw feet to be somewhat gruesome. The love seat is now in my living room, very nicely upholstered in scarlet silk shot with gold sheaves. The upholstery and the ball-and-claw feet are hidden, however, by slipcovers.
In those days, my idea of heaven was 1740. A stately house, or even just a house, somewhere outside of but not too far from London. I had never been to London. I had been all over the United States, but it would be some time before I crossed the Atlantic. When I finally did see London (and England), it was even nicer than my dreams. But by then I had outgrown my fixation with the Eighteenth Century as the best of all possible times.
What had happened initially, really, was that Handel’s Water Music became the sound track of my life, and I simply wanted to make my world look like my theme songs. I cultivated an interest in Alexander Pope, reading his poetry aloud it fits of uncomprehending affectation that it would send me to the Emergency Room now to witness. Also, I decided that electric lamps were hideous innovations, and it’s a wonder that I didn’t ruin my eyes reading Pope by candlelight. Ergo: Chippendale?
It was at about this time that my mother, who was definitely one of Robsjohn-Gibbing’s targets, as besotted by antiques as anybody, began to introduce Victorian elements into our home. She did this with flair and aplomb — I must grant her that — but I was appalled. I loved Pope; I loathed Dickens. The Nineteenth Century was, to me, the river of death that cut me off from a Golden Age. I still find photographs of Victorians in their finery tremendously uncomfortable to look at. Everyone looks so hot! And the clothes usually look rumpled or dirty, especially the men’s. (I expect that photographs of eighteenth-century personalities would be even more sordid, but we don’t have any and my impressionable youth was untroubled by them.) Victorian furniture and Victorian knick-knacks were as repulsive to me as rotting meat. My mother’s treachery intensified my pursuit of actual knowledge about old stuff.
The only thing that I remembered about Goodbye, Mr Chippendale when I ordered it via Alibris a month or so ago — aside from the Mary Petty drawings, which are indeed lovely — was the mention of something called “the Turkish corner.” I had never heard of such a thing. It sounded appalling (Robsjohn-Gibbings shudders magisterially), but I’d have like to give one a spin, or, to put it better, a lounge. The idea seems to have involved placing a divan in an alcove, preferably behind a swooping portière, and lighting it with a lantern reminiscent of the Blue Mosque. In Petty’s illustration, a plain-faced matron is shown stretched out with a book. She is dressed like a matron, not a houri. That’s the joke, of course, because Turkish corners were designed to suggest very different pastimes. Somewhere, in the Sixties, there must still have been a few holdout Turkish corners in American mansions, but they were probably tattered and moth-eaten by then.
Robsjohn-Gibbings, who was a British import himself, has an interesting, not wholly successful writing style. He wants to be jocular, and he wants to write for Americans — he’s quite passionate about American design, which must needs be the design of democracy itself — but the rhythm escapes him. He can be quite funny, but he can’t sustain the comic tone, and a good deal of what ought to have sounded witty comes across as plummy and even slightly fatuous instead. This is especially the case when wires are crossed with the author’s distaste for housewives.
As far as the interior of houses goes, the average American man has most of his thinking regarding this part of his life done for him by his wife and her sisterhood of the interior-decoration seraglio, of whom the kindest thing that can be said is that they have revealed, with glamorous femininity, ideas of unparalleled confusion. (98)
A surprising number of currents pass through the short span of Goodbye, Mr Chippendale. Robsjohn-Gibbings could not have known where many of them would lead, and about others, such as the plight of the American housewife, he was not curious. He never stops to reflect that affluent married woman of his day were precluded from doing almost anything besides cooking for their families and decorating their homes — more accurately, overseeing the paid-for services of others. If they were silly and bored, no wonder! My mother would have loved to run a business, but as she was never a good student, and barely literate as a result, it’s hard to imagine that she would have been much more successful than Lucy Ricardo. When Kathleen and I were getting to know one another, one of the things that bonded us was discovering that our non-working mothers — and Kathleen’s mother had been a fashion editor at Parents’ Magazine — had both made rather businesslike projects of us. I should have much preferred benign neglect.
Robsjohn-Gibbings is also keen on New Deal planning. He has a thing for the dams of the Tennessee Valley Authority that might seem misplaced in a book that lives to dish Elsie de Wolfe. He can have had little prevision that planning would come a cropper in the United States, the victim of know-nothing, anti-intellectual anti-Communism. (I’m waiting for a study of the extent to which Communists and their enemies alike made life stupid and miserable for millions, perhaps even billions, of people.) He doesn’t like plastics, but Petty presents us with a classic “Chippendale” armchair, ball-and-claw feet and all, that shimmers spectrally in transparent Lucite, an almost eerie prevision of the Kartell Louis Ghost chair. He has no use for “genuine” antiques, but his complaints about the Grand Rapids furniture industry neglect to mention their kitchifying effect. He praises chairs “built for the human body,” blithely untroubled by the inevitability of La-Z Boy recliners. Most interesting of all, he never discloses his day job. I’m sure the dust jacket did that for him.
Now, I suppose, I’d better read Goodbye, Mr Chips, or at least see the movie.