If Walls Could Talk
By DOMINIQUE BROWNING
Published: October 8, 2010
Many adults have a fantasy that if they could go back to college — now that the desire to party, drink and sleep around has faded to a burnished memory — they’d get so much more out of it. The publishing industry often reflects this wish. Every season brings offerings that are right at home on anyone’s continuing-ed syllabus: innovative, original ways to study world history through lenses trained on the minutiae of salt or cod, earthworms or spices, tea or telephones. Now, finally, for those of us who wrestled with Rocks for Jocks, pined amid Physics for Poets and schlepped through college on 101s of any and every subject — the beloved survey courses — here’s that most popular professor, Bill Bryson, with a fascinating new book, “At Home: A Short History of Private Life.”
AT HOME
A Short History of Private Life
By Bill Bryson
Illustrated. 497 pp. Doubleday. $28.95
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Excerpt: ‘At Home’ (randomhouse.com)
Bryson is best known for “A Short History of Nearly Everything,” which took a cosmic perspective on the creation of the place we call home, our planet — no, make that our solar system — and created a run on yellow highlighters. Why he insists on calling these histories “short” is beyond me, when each runs to more than 450 pages. Perhaps they’re short when compared with the stacks of tomes that have to be ingested, digested and egested in order to produce them? With “At Home,” Bryson’s focus is domestic; he intends, as he puts it, to “write a history of the world without leaving home.” You can take this class in your pajamas — and, judging by the book’s laid-back, comfy tone, I have a sneaking suspicion that Bryson wrote much of it in his.
Or he should have. Pajamas might be one of the few subjects not covered in “At Home.” Bryson’s conceit is nifty, providing what business majors might recognize as a “loose-tight” management structure, flexible enough to maintain a global scope without losing track of the mundane. Join this amiable tour guide as he wanders through his house, a former rectory built in 1851 in a tranquil English village. “At Home” takes off from the second half of the 19th century, when, Bryson reminds us, “private life was completely transformed. . . . It is almost impossible to conceive just how much radical day-to-day change people were exposed to.”
Moving from room to room, talking while we walk, please notice that the backs of those antique parlor chairs are never upholstered. They were kept against the wall “to make it easier to walk through rooms without tripping over furniture in the dark.” Now admire the suits hanging in the closet: “When buttons came in, about 1650, people couldn’t get enough of them and arrayed them in decorative profusion on the backs and collars and sleeves of coats, where they didn’t actually do anything. One relic of this is the short row of pointless buttons that are still placed on the underside of jacket sleeves near the cuff.” These, Bryson insists, “have always been purely decorative and have never had a purpose.” (Actually, I can think of a few men for whom the purpose of those buttons is to leave them unbuttoned, a sartorial display of status that only those with custom-tailored suits will recognize.)
A trip to the larder involves a discussion of the servant classes. In the dining room we learn about vitamins (not even a word until 1912). As we move to the second floor, you may be interested to learn that stairs are very dangerous places; they “rank as the second most common cause of accidental death, well behind car accidents, but far ahead of drownings, burns and other similarly grim misfortunes.” A visit to the cellar is the occasion for a survey of building materials in the Western world — stone, wood, brick, concrete. And we can’t talk about hydraulic cement without going into the history of the Erie Canal.
Reach into the freezer for a pint of Ben & Jerry’s “Everything but the . . .” and there you’ll find the history of ice, beginning with the blocks that were carved out of Wenham Lake in Massachusetts in 1844 and shipped to London. (“For several decades, ice was America’s second-largest crop, measured by weight.”) Consider the contents of the bedroom: “It has been calculated that if your pillow is six years old (which is the average age for a pillow), one-tenth of its weight will be made up of sloughed skin, living and dead mites, and mite dung.” This may be more than you want to know, but one thing is clear: Climate change notwithstanding, the history of pestilence, plague and the potty — not to mention sewage — should make us glad to be living in the here and now.
Throughout “At Home,” I kept thinking, “Who knew?” But many’s the time I realized, actually, I did know. If you have any interest in furniture, food, fashion, architecture, energy or world history, chances are you’ve stumbled across some (or all) of the information Bryson has on offer. Countless books have been written on every subject covered in “At Home”; many are credited in the ample bibliography. But while Bryson may not have done much original research, it takes a very particular kind of thoughtfulness, as well as a bold temperament, to stuff all this research into a mattress that’s supportive enough to loll about on while pondering the real subject of this book — the development of the modern world. Very few of us know much about everything, and the appeal of Bryson’s sprawling history is in the warp of the material as much as its weft — in the way the whole thing is strung before it is woven. (And speaking of weaving, in the 17th century “India dominated the cotton trade, as we are reminded by the endless numbers of words that came into English from there: khaki, dungarees, gingham, muslin, pajamas, shawl, seersucker, and so on.”)
Bryson has mastered the art of making sweeping generalizations and bold pronouncements. With the discovery of how to extract rock oil (what we now call petroleum) on an industrial scale, George Bissell “changed the world completely and forever.” The realization that land did not have to be rested between plantings also “changed the world.” “The history of early America is really a history of coping with shortages of building materials.” “If you had to summarize it in a sentence, you could say that the history of private life is a history of getting comfortable slowly.” About guano, used as a fertilizer, “suddenly there was nothing in the world people wanted more.” It must be hard to keep track of so many things. Then again, word processing, and with it the ability to cut and paste with ease, has also changed the world.
“At Home” is baggy, loose-jointed and genial. It moves along at a vigorously restless pace, with the energy of a Labrador retriever off the leash, racing up to each person it encounters, pawing and sniffing and barking at every fragrant thing, plunging into icy waters only to dash off again, invigorated. You do, somehow, maintain forward momentum and eventually get to the end. Bryson is fascinated by everything, and his curiosity is infectious. As a reviewer, I ought to be concerned with matters of focus and organization. Bryson himself seems to have had moments of anxiety on the matter. “We might pause here for a moment,” he writes, about midway through, “to consider where we are and why.”
Indeed. We have wondered, many times, just exactly where we are and why. By the time he thinks to do a head count, we have just examined the skeleton of the Statue of Liberty, watched the erection of the Eiffel Tower and met the nouveaux riches of the Gilded Age — while standing in the gloomy recesses of a windowless corridor. No matter. Bryson’s enthusiasm brightens any dull corner. I recommend that you hand over control and simply enjoy the ride. You’ll be given a delightful smattering of information about everything but, weirdly, the kitchen sink.
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