The American Home
BY IRIS BARRY.
drINE word often on American lips is " home." It kl strikes oddly on my English ears when they say that such a film star has three homes, that such a couple are buying a home on Long Island : for in our use of the word I do not think you can buy a " home," and I am positive you cannot possess three. From New York to Hollywood, from Chicago to New Orleans, a home is generally just the house one lives in and out of which one will probably move before long. It must always have been so, since the Dutch and the English and the French fled from all that home had meant, across the Atlantic to tear from virgin soil a little shelter against elements and enemies, and look to a future where they and their children might peacefully enjoy freedom of conscience. From ship to shack, from cabin to frame- house, on horseback and in ox-carts they went, and each place-often several to a generation—where they came to their journey's end was a home. Its windows gave a view on the future ; and so it is still in America to-day. Houses with a past there are, up and down the States. The finest I have seen is a fine mansion in the serenest Colonial style, facing New Jersey from the shore of Staten Island. For two hundred years the home of a Huguenot family settled here early in the seventeznth century, it is empty now and being allowed to drop apart, though much of the superb family furniture remains. The fourth of the lovely Ionic columns of its facade is at a tilt, ready to fall, but elderly members of the family and their friends (with that inimitable precise humour of the true American) still tell great and gay tales of its past, especially of the 'nineties. Maryland and Virginia are full of similar houses, some already derelict, some still inhabited by older members of families with that sense of the past which we think makes a home. In parts of New England the countryside, depopulated as Essex, is full of places with atmosphere, some of which are being reclaimed by the wealthier New Yorkers as country seats. Manhattan itself possesses among very different landmarks, a brownstone house on Fifth Avenue where still lives in an atmosphere of gas-chandeliers and lace- curtains a maiden lady who, with the English feeling for home, holds her fortress against all tempting offers from the makers of skyscrapers.
But these are not typical of the American " home," which is generally new and whose inmates have almost certainly lived there not more than ten years, more probably only two. Perhaps it is the real estate agents who are responsible for the present connotation of the word, for their advertisements abound in it, conjuring up visions not only of bricks and mortar but of a place where a man will read newspapers leisurely on Sunday, and children run in from school.
One is immediately struck by a certain sameness in all American houses : no matter what size the house, it already seems familiar. For one thing, there are never any doors in living-room doorways, everything is as open as a bungalow, and the sound of the radio as well as central heat permeates everything in a way which somehow startles the English visitor's feeling for privacy. Then the walls are invariably scrumbled, the electrical fittings ornate, either pseudo-Renaissance or ultra-modern. There is only necessary furniture, and a striking absence of those oddments, worn pieces, photographs and general human residue which give to our idea of home so much romance. New York apart- ments, or houses on the hedgeless lawns of Long Island, are all alike in this ; and the smallest places enjoy labour- saving comforts that only the wealthy English aspire to. The more sumptuous " homes " are merely larger, not so much finer. The rent, unfurnished, for a New York apartment may be £3,000 a year, for a six-room dwelling at the sunlit top of a towering block, with two bathrooms, one of which is really a luxurious boudoir, a maid's room and bath, all reached by noiseless elevator from a splen- diferous entrance, guarded by a regal commissionaire and decorated again in pseudo-Spanish or modern German. A luxurious apartment of ten rooms eir more, with terrace, may be £10,000 a year. The rent for a two-room apart- ment in a less gorgeous block (probably not on the cast, or smart, side of Fifth Avenue) may be a mere £400, there may be only one bathroom, and the cloth-of-silver- covered divan in the main living-room may well be the bed, since a wealth of clothes and linen closets, recessed into the hall and bathroom, make it possible to keep such a combination-room wholly deceptive in appearance. But there will still be ornate fittings and no doors to the
living-rooms, and the bathroom and kitchen still make Me sigh with admiration. A tiny house in the least smart part of Long Island, for instance, had a bathroom all tiled in lavender; with black bath and square black
recesses over the black washbasin to hold soap, while an alcove held a majestic and complicated shower, with good provision for drainage underfoot. The humblest kitchen, beautifully sunny, has its electric refrigerator, its noble China cupboard over the tiled sink, and, at a convenient height, a gas cooker with cooking-table attachment and a bevy of plugs for electric toasters, grillers, coffee- percolators and such. Crowning touch, from a cupboard flat in the wall comes forth on a hinge an ironing board, with its electrical iron, regulated to three degrees of heat.
Other New Yorkers contrive something more romantic and English, though less convenient, out of converted, old (30 or 40 years old) houses in Greenwich Village or near the East River. These do not necessarily have central heating, but the furniture (inherited or acquired) is older, there are more worn books and an atmosphere of more repose, and all the rooms have doors. At the top of a workman's dwelling (which will be pulled down next year to make room for a sumptuous block of apartments) I have even seen something that looks very like " home " to me, with its two large and one small room, its view down the river, its mantelpieces over the fireplace, its ekr.ed doors, and—above all—its rental, which is, even here in this fabulous city, a mere £7 a month.
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