Conservative Homes and Gardens

...Tom Wolfe has brought to our attention the radical utopian component of modern architecture: Moldings (especially "crown moldings"), architectural orders, pediments, overdoors, and even overhanging table tops were all to be abolished because they symbolized hierarchy...

...I propose, therefore, to discuss, quite literally, the planting of hedges and the cultivation of the conservative d~cor...

...as the late Virgil Fox once said, "Home is where the organ is...

...Dinsha of Fairfield, New York...

...stands with fluted or cabriolet legs are available...

...it is the monastery...

...Praz himself, who had the Evil Eye, lived in a flat in Rome's Palazzo Ricci which he filled to the rafters, albeit in very precious arrangements, with Empire antiques, a collection of wax portraits, and furniture serendipitously connected with the literary figures he had studied all his life...

...McCarthy's early THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984 23...

...Modern furniture's simplicity descends from the puritanical ethic of Marxism...

...Some people, of course, suggested a homosexual affair, but there was never any evidence of that, and Schine, at least, was clearly heterosexual...

...A stairway treatment with exposed pipes, as at the Frick house, might be recommended in an age of low ceilings...

...The crisis of the Church today has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with poetry...

...According to a footnote, Professor Bishop's diatribe is "based on" a recent book by John Adams, who served as general counsel to the Army during McCarthy's investigation of certain security problems in that branch of the armed forces...

...electric light "makes the salon look like a railway station, the dining room like a restaurant...

...It is also a tribute to the lost age of craftsmanship, incomprehensible to academic bohemian snobs whose idea of craftsmanship is embodied in a Swedish automobile or a French cheese...

...THE TRUTH ABOUT JOE McCARTHY An exchange...

...A taint put there by Pr ssor Bishop: I lived through the whole McCarthy controversy and never heard of it till now...

...How is he to acquire the proper house, since taxes will probably prevent him from inheriting it...

...As the late Mario Praz said in The Romantic Agony (1933), "the friend of the Muses ends as custodian of a Museum...

...This instrument is, however, only a substitute for that grandest of all plutocratic excesses, the pipe organ...

...Since a good many of The American Spectator's readers are under that age, it is a pity that its December issue gave space...

...It is notwrong to love these objects...

...Joseph W. Bishop, Jr...

...In that most intimate of interiors, the mind, the conservative carries with him everywhere certain antidotes to modern spiritual ataxia: Among these may be Plato, Bach, and the Book of Common Prayer (the real one...

...At least in the United States, it is a confusion among thepoets themselves...

...The Hubbard firm specializes in reproductions of eighteenth-century instruments...

...the second he recalls constantly because of a faculty for music and without an absurd electronic headdress...

...Peter V. Sampo Thomas More Institute of Liberal Arts One Manchester Street Merrimack, NH 03054 Please send me information about this program...

...Burke warned us: "All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off...

...They need occasionally to step back from the immediate concern to take in the whole, much as the painter steps back from his canvas and the poet reads his words aloud...

...If you are getting tired of out-andout baseless smears, how about a little guilt by association...

...Contrary to appearances, large, sturdy Louis XV fauteuils are perfectly comfortable, as long as one sits up in them...

...It is absolutely studded with falsehoods, half-truths, slanders, innuendoes, and simple errors...

...The conservative following of the harpsichord predates the present vogue of "ancient music...

...If the conservative can find a formal house to rescue from the formless existence of the modern bourgeois--in a neighborhood of stable identity (i.e., that hasn't been invaded by the collectors of "depression glass")--then he will restore to the front door its ceremony, and he will put the plants in the yard where they belong...

...His requirements will be much simpler...

...Let's watch this accomplished mudgunner at work...

...the best manual for decorating it is Edith Wharton's The Decoration of Houses (1897), which explained to the Gilded Ag~ why it had gilded badly--a thoroughly anti-Victorian, antibourgeois piece of reactionary 22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984 aestheticism...

...Senate on December 2, 1954, and died in Bethesda Naval Hospital on May 2, 1957, so nobody under 45 in America today can have any very dependable personal recollection of the "McCarthy controversy" that caused such a fulor in the first years of the decade of the fifties...

...one way to acquire roots is to plant trees...

...Kirk is endeavoring to bury in lilacs...

...But look at that collection of names: Martin Dies and Karl Mundt, both perfectly honorable members of Congress over periods of many years (typically, Bishop never gets around to saying what was "shabby" about Mundt's role in the Army-McCarthy hearings...

...This is to say nothing of the peculiar desecrations perpetrated by the nouvellesfagues strangely attracted to such urban villas...

...it is a pleasant enough place to await the end of the world...

...his archaic dignity would cause astonishment, and then he would suffer the mortification of having people mention it to him...

...To claim that we face greater burdens than past citizens have faced is to skate on the edge of a special kind of hubris...

...ZiJberkok, the last virile man in Fellini's City of Women...

...His memoir, The House of Life (1964), takes the form of a guided tour of his flat: Autobiographical anecdotes hang upon the associations conjured up by his possessions...

...any guest so weak in character as to slouch in front of me may literally feel the pain of my displeasure...

...The anthropomorphic bronze mantel clock, which shows signs of having been made by human hands, demands only the service of winding...

...Other electronic innovations, insofar as they are necessary, must be concealed...

...Leaping to a new accusation, Bishop dredges up one of the oldest and lowest of them all...

...A harpsichord is perfect for painting pastoral or apotheosis scenes on...

...Interior decoration is too full of ideological content to be dismissed as a frivolous subject...

...Thurber of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, THE GREAT UNIVERSITIES provided the ground for the important political leaders, philosophers, theologians, scientists, lawyers, poets, and religious of the past...

...he desires only to live as his ancestors did, probably with their furniture, as Russell Kirk, who possesses the Empire table levitated by his spiritualist forebears...

...The trend culminated in the houses of the dandypoet Gabriele d'Annunzio, a past master of the science of putting things on top of other things...

...Donald M.D...

...The conservative's taste may display a tendency towards utopian nostalgia...

...J o e McCarthy was "condemned" by the U.S...

...Early on, he says of McCarthy in 1950, "Those who knew anything about him, mostly newspapermen, thought very little of him...

...How is he to preserve the integrity of his taste when the decadent, demotic twentieth century assaults it on every front...

...I f conservatism is the total criticism of modern life, how is the conservative to live...

...If corrupt taste is an inlet to moral and theological error, and one hopes to pass through things temporal without finally losing the things eternal, this is no trivial question...

...A recent "house walk" given by the Evanston Historical Society revealed that many of these venerable old dwellings are begging for deliverance from their New Class owners who read Architectural Digest and grow ferns where they would only put something obnoxious and illuminate it with "track lighting...

...But the monumental bureau du roi, which resembles an organ console and is almost more bronze than wood, must be reserved for studying DE MAISTRE and giving dictation...

...certainly the spectacle of a nuclear holocaust is frightening...

...It is the rococo mousetrap of the ethnic nouveau riche grandmother, those little rooms filled with tiny sofas, "kidney" tdbles, curio cabinets, and worse, the curios ! --it is gold paint that gave gold leaf (and the szlachta) a bad name...

...Russell Kirk's neoVictorian Italianate villa, "Piety Hill' '--which Dr...

...The aristocratic (or aristocratizing) conservative must acknowledge the patrician aspirations evident in many pre-1930 grand bourgeois city houses...

...it is of the proper size for a traditionalist priest to celebrate a house mass thereon "in total comfort...

...The next line of defense is his circle T. John Jamieson, a frequent contributor to these pages, is landless but secluded in Evanston, Illinois...

...Name Address City State Zip Telephone salvaged doors, windows, fireplaces, wainscoting, and a two-story Corinthian portico from a circa 1850 Detroit mansion that was once in the family...

...The conservative must own at least enough property to place a hedge, wall, or wrought-iron fence between his house and the infidels...

...How's that for smearing somebody without going in for any heavy lifting, such as producing a little evidence...

...The basis of the infatuation was never clear...

...He eventually married a former Miss Universe...

...In his last years, pensioned by Mussolini and ennobled by King Victor Emmanuel, the Prince of Montenevoso retired to a villa on Lago di Garda which he named "I1 Vittoriale" and expanded and embellished and girded with walls until it became the Vatican City of ddcadence...

...J. Parnell Thomas, another congressman, who was ultimately convicted of accepting kickbacks from his staff...

...The best ~[efense of the principle of private property is owning some...

...Father Coughlin, a demagogic priest silenced by his bishop...

...Oils, vestments, candles, wine, water, bread--truly they are all preposterous things from which to fashion worship...

...not even a flat accusation--just a statement that unnamed persons "strongly suspected" McCarthy of wrongdoing...

...For what is the Bible if not great literature, its people--Abraham, David, Joseph, Mary, Judas--all characters in a divine plot, fashioned in the image and likeness of their Creator...

...Savor this masterpiece of the genre: "A succession of politicians and assorted rabble-rousers had done well [denouncing Communism] in the thirties: Martin Dies, Karl Mundt (who later, as a senator, played a shabby role in the ArmyMcCarthy hearings), Father Coughlin, J. Parnell Thomas, Gerald L.K...

...Or to be around during the French Revolution when the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris was first sacked and then renamed the Temple of Reason...

...The curves of a good Louis XV console sweep with the force of a Bach arpeggio...

...Church," he once wrote, "which I constantly find myself admiring, despite its frequent astounding imbecilities, has always kept clearly before it the fact that religion is not a syllogism but a poem...

...The ridiculous spectacle of a crotchety old pastor attempting to remove The Catcher in the Rye from his school's bookshelf pales when placed against the manifest folly of a bloodless Sidney Webb or the lugubrious intonations of a Carl Sagan...

...Though they succeeded in contriving outposts of antimodernism for themselves, I would hesitate to call the Nietzschean inventor of the trappings of Fascism and the aesthete who studied him models for the American conservative...

...but the incident can hardly substitute for an explanation of what the "McCarthy controversy" was all about...

...Our college program is based on the Humanities as discerned in the great books of Western civilization and as seen through the eyes of the Christian humanist...

...they cannot afford these necessary improvements, however, because of fre_9 quent trips to warm climates in pursuit of the illusion of the Noble Savage...

...gilded gesso...

...No proof, please note...

...It is cruel in our day, however, for a host to ridicule a guest, as the Baron de Charlus did, for sitting by mistake in a Directory chauffeuse after directing him to sit in the Louis XIV chaire...

...That is the doctrine of the Higher Materialism, to be distinguished from the conspicuous and acquisitive materialism of the bourgeois (who finds it incomprehensible) and the envious and Manichaean materialism of the socialist (who finds it criminal...

...In fact, a faith in a Messiah born of a Virgin Jewess is preposterous as well...

...William Beckford (1759-1844), builder of the gargantuan Fonthill Abbey, called Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill "a miserable child's box--a species of gothic mousetrap--a reflection of Walpole's littleness...

...In the next paragraph, speculating on why McCarthy stuck by Cohn and Schine, Bishop swings his slimebuck again: "Their presence help~ spel an anti-Semitic taint in MctSartt~ 3 record...

...they are to be enjoyed until the moment when duty demands their sacrifice...

...No wonder misstatements come easily to Bishop...

...a reflection of it and its owner may be seen in the fortified compound of Dr...

...Ah, to spite the anti-historicist by owning reproductions which are themselves antiques...

...The Age of Romanticism, the nineteenth century, having discovered the psychological significance of d~cor, became obsessed with interiors and employed them not only to evoke moods but to erect poses...

...I mean to expound here the theory of the conservative hedge...

...The sight unquestionably moved many people watching on television, and Professor Bishop is clearly one of them...

...The Vittoriale bizarrely combined ecclesiastical bric-b-brac with military hardware to represent d'Annunzio's conflicting poses as Monk of St...

...is the Sam Harris Professor o fLaw at the Yale Law School little more than an extended rehash of a famous episode during those hearings when Joseph Welch, a Boston lawyer retained by the Army, whipped out a handkerchief and purported to cry into it...

...The Society For Putting One Thing On Top Of Another was a reactionary cabal because it subscribed to the grand and awful principle of subordination...

...The electronic clock is not necessary...

...Ornament is crime" for the same reason that property is theft...

...What the American Catholic Church needs to recover most is its unique sense of the world, that of a sacramental Church whose legions are of sinners, a Church of the flesh, rooted in the earth the Lord created and found good but not of it...

...We are to be left only with those funny little Venetian blinds or else with no privacy at all...

...he can't even get an ordinary fact straight when he is presumably trying...

...its rectilinear form is designed for the mechanical man who will live by the rectitude of the dictatorship of the proletariat...

...McCarthy, Bishop goes on to tell us, ou~-red-baited them all...

...Or to live through the Plague...

...His disgust with modern manners will cause him to avoid the public in general, and to stay out of places where he is likely to be spoken to by strangers...

...Writing of Roy Cohn, McCarthy's counsel, and G. David Schine, a friend Of Cohn's who was also on the committee's staff, the "Sam Harris Professor of Law at the Yale Law School" gets off this beauty: "Schine was a handsome rich kid, a recent graduate of Harvard although rather lightly furnished in the upper story, with whom Cohn had become infatuated...

...Moses' flight from Egypt, the eloquence of the Song of Songs, the Christ born in a Bethlehem manger, Paul's exhortations to the Corinthians, each has in common with great art the sense of something timeless and transcendent yet taken from the things of the earth...

...of acquaintances, which will necessarily be small, consisting mostly of men who acquired their ideas in a better age and who are therefore mostly over seventy...

...She called the Victorian upholsterer "the house dress-maker," who "pads and puffs his seats as though they were to form the furniture of a lunatic's cell...

...The difference between the Baroque and the rococo is the difference between the architectonic and the merely decorative...

...Later in the very same paragraph, Professor Bishop sneers that "it was Joe's way, when asked for substantiation of his charges, simply to leap to new accusations...

...I will excuse the Hamiltonian who fills his house with Federal(ist) period antiques in view of the symbolic value of the gesture...

...the shape of the easy chair she regarded as "dropsical...

...For that, Professor Bishop relies on his own rancid and faulty recollection, plus a stew of unsubstantiated allegations so vicious that by themselves they would serve as a splendid example of the very "McCarthyism" he is supposedly c6mplaining about...

...to Joseph W~ Bishop, Jr.'s account of various aspects of that controversy, for it is easily the most inaccurate and misleading article I have ever read on a subject notoriously conducive to misstatements...

...IT]here was never any evidence of that...

...i . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . T. John Jamieson CONSERVATIVE HOMES AND GARDENS Survival in the modern age...

...He may build it...

...A long, lithe, shapely bureau plat dripping with ormolu evokes the grace of the antediluvian society that invented it and is the perfect place to read the 1792 quarto of Burke and write proper letters with a proper pen...

...He will therefore stay close to club and home...

...John Barrington Bayley designed an eighteenth-century chinoiserie pavilion in 1968 for Dr...

...THOMAS MORE INSTITUTE OF LIBERAL ARTS For Catalogue and Brochure Write To: Dr...

...Wharton insisted that civilized people could only live by the light of wax tapers...

...It is such a delicious act of blasphemy against the "ornament is crime" school to own meubles covered with tapestry, marquetry, ormolu, boulle, and (by all means...

...Actually, the article is William Rusher is the Publisher of National Review and a nationally syndicated columnist...

...But, on the other hand, the amenities of civilization are not to be conceded to the barbarian: The bookseller, the tailor, and the club are in the city, and so the conservative must sometimes be found there...

...William Rusher, with a reply by Joseph W. Bishop, Jr...

...in 1970 he incorporated these into a much smaller house of exquisite detail, which also possesses a working gasolier and solid walnut flooring made from the frame of an old barn...

...He may live in the country...

...Or brand-new ones so well executed that they fool the dealers and might better be classed as forgeries, produced by a factory outside Paris which uses original designs and techniques and hand-drills the worm-holes and ages the varnish by burying the articles in mud for a month...

...Just as artists and writers can get so close to their work as to be blinded to its beauty, impervious to its symbols, so too can priests and nuns lose their perspective, taking the drama of life for granted...

...and Gerald L.K...

...Smith...

...The only alternative is personal, not political...

...one must marry either a musician or an artist...

...But the only thing more preposterous than faith in an unseen God is faith in a very visible man, who over his several miUenia on this orb has amassed a pathetic record of cruelty, barbarism, and fanaticism in nearly every place at nearly every time...

...There is, of course, no television in the Conservative House, but there is Tiepolo...

...Francis and Hero of Fiume...

...The best manual for managing the formal house is the first edition of Emily Post's Etiquette (1922), which explains to the dispossessed how they may survive with only three servants...

...More than just the shrine of the lares etpenates, and center of ancestral pieties, the Conservative House is the last stronghold of sacred order...

...It is also possible to build a new house out of old materials rescued from the march of urban regress: Such is Dr...

...In this same sense sacraments are nothing but holy metaphors, inspiring the imagination to understand where the pure intellect comes up short...

...What it needs least is the sort of Fundamentalism that Mencken spent a lifetime attacking...

...The best of these reproduce historic styles and possess butler's pantries, dressing rooms, powder rooms, and dining rooms with doors--instead of "living spaces...

...Yet ia manie de batir may quickly lead to the loss of a very important conservative hedge--financial independence...

...its subtle rocaille culminates in the paroxystic swirl of the cartouche surmounting the stretchers...

...the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984 2 1 prototype was an out-building at Tsarskoe Selo...

...A conservative's house is indeed his castle: A Czarist friend of mine points to his threshold and says, "Democracy stops here...

...Do they teach you such tactics at Yale Law these days...

...and many of them strongly suspected him of taking bribes from large corporations, such as Pepsi-Cola, to push bills they favored...

...Smith, America's leading anti-Semite...

...Nevertheless, though it may lack a chapel and a priest's hole, the Conservative House is a place where cross and icon are reverenced, and is a sanctuary of another sort...

...the third defines his spiritual life, from moment to moment, in defiance of an apostate priesthood...

...Those who feel they have to sit in the dark and look at something may turn on the picture lights and peer at Rinaldo and Armida without subjecting themselves to commercials...

...The first he possesses by virtue of a classical education...

...But what must it have been like to hear with Augustine about the fall of Rome, and all it stood for...

...Moral dilemmas are not new...

...But the greatest of all artistic periods was the Baroque, whose aesthetics fused the Sublime with the Beauti . . . . ', rarity and impracticality of I Pieces and the plenitude of fine t~oms ,'--- reproductions from the otherwise mentable reigns of Louis Philippe and Napoleon III will cause the Baroque interior to be more legitimist than ultramontane--but no matter, just as long as American conservatism begins to acquire a cosmopolitan accent it badly needs...