“Setting Up Home”

My boyfriend and I have been "setting up home", which sounds incredibly archaic. In more modern terms, we have moved in together for the first time, into an unfurnished flat (white goods included). Thankfully, it is a very tiny flat, so furnishing it from bottom up has not been as difficult as it might have been. Some things were kindly given to us second hand by our families – the bed, and a chair. Sometimes, for the sake of practicality or where we wished to avoid the bugs and lice of previous owners, we extravagantly splashed out on something NEW – our sofa, for instance, terrifyingly purchased via the internet.

Those are the basics taken care of. For the rest, we had to ask ourselves, what kind of space did we want to live in? This is not a question that seems to preoccupy many people our age. We are unusual in our peer group for beginning this dull, adult life so soon. I was talking to a friend after she finished her finals (mine having finished a year ago, since which time I have already worked and left a challenging professional role) and we were discussing our ambitions for careers. A career, here, was opposed to the unbelievable banalities of, say, ‘setting up home’. She recounted the unimaginable horror of friends who had made a photo album of setting up and decorating their house. ‘There main conversation is about cushions and curtains!’ – what could be worse?

Perhaps a more pertinent question is what the alternatives are for people of my generation. Lachlan Harris, recently writing for the Guardian, condemned my contemporaries as the ‘live-at-home-forever, get-a-blog-but-not-a-real-job generation’. Though I instinctively feel a pang of defence for those who write recreationally, or more seriously, there is a more general and valid observation here: growing up is not admirable. Indeed, growing up (in the sense of getting a ‘real job’ and doing ‘real’ things that maintain one’s own existence: cooking, washing, cleaning) is really seen as a failure, I think. Much better be a penniless student living in squalor, or travel the world living out of a suitcase. Living in any kind of semi-permanent environment is apparently a denial of youth.

So, it seems I am writing this as the antithesis of youth, one who has caved in to the banal and insignificant world of cushions and curtains, instead of getting out there and changing the world. In the light of my short experience since university, this surge of hostility seems to be a simple denial of just how dull the necessary facts of live are. Once you have lived on your own, you realise that if you have very much time remaining after you have fed yourself, kept yourself and your surroundings clean, and earned enough to sustain your barest existence, you’re doing rather well.  If this grind does not appeal, travelling, studying and living at home will not solve your problems, only delay them.

So, is it simply incredibly sad that, looking round my flat now, I am filled with calm and aesthetic joy at the space I have created? That I enjoy folding down the desk of my £25 oak bureau every time I use it, and that I admire the form and the glaze of a little ceramic bowl that we bought, every time I drop my keys into it? Half of me thinks so –every time a friend comes round I wax lyrical about how being so domestic really isn’t for me, and I don’t care about all this stuff really. In a sense, that is true. In the long run, I want my study and love of aestheticism to reach beyond this tiny flat. I would like to support my own existence by doing something meaningful, even if it is small, which will make the world slightly more interesting or beautiful for my having lived in it. ‘Setting up home’ is not where it ends, but I think it is a valid beginning – a sense which has been joyfully confirmed by the reading of a lecture by William Morris, part of a series entitled Hopes and Fears for Art.

In reading his first essay, on ‘the lesser arts’, I cannot tell whether the sympathy I feel for his sentiments is as a fellow aesthetic objector, in a world which fundamentally has not changed since his lectures, or whether I sympathise because in the present day I see realised his fears of the 1870s. I suspect the former. On the one hand it is heartening – I am not alone! On the other hand, it is terrifying. We, at least I, think of the Victorian period as a time when money was invested in beautiful details, which today we would consider superfluous, but which we nevertheless value greatly in our Victorian heritage. The last house I lived in was a tiny Victorian terrace, built for the factory workers who worked on the outskirts of Oxford. It was tiny when I lived in it, yet 50% larger than its original size thanks to an extension at the back, affording a kitchen downstairs and bathroom upstairs. It was built to house a family on probably a fraction of the income I received on a modest salary in publishing. Yet, it was beautiful. Without a careful observation of detail, it is hard to tell why this house would generally be considered beautiful, in contrast with much budget housing that has been built since the Second World War. It seems, on first appearance, to be quite plain and uninteresting.

Then, you notice that the brick work has been laid so that every other brick is grey coloured and has been laid width-ways, so that its end rather than its side forms the face of the wall. This results in textured, chequerboard effect. The windows are well proportioned, the bottom one, indeed, obeying the age-old golden ratio. Above the windows and door some stones fan out, larger than their chequerboard neighbours, and painted in contrasting white, lending richness to the red brick. Below the windows, small protruding ledges are also painted white. Lastly a horizontal seam of bricks separate the ground and first floor, of three bricks in height, all laid lengthways. The top and bottom row are in purely red brick, raised outwards from the face of the wall in two ridges. The middle row is set back and of grey brick. Trivial details? Not in monetary terms: this house is worth twice as much as some 1960s flats elsewhere in Oxford, which are of twice the size. More importantly, if these details had been omitted, you would have noticed, as would (I suspect) the many other inhabitants it has seen pass through over the last 120 or so years.

Leaving this little house to one side, the Victorians gave us the Royal Albert hall, the arts and crafts movement, the sumptuous pre-Raphaelite pictures, quality furniture (such as the bureau, £25, I currently write at). And yet, Morris despaired of the popular disinterest in the arts that he perceived around him, save the slavish following of ‘fashion’. He bemoaned ‘the cravings of the public for something new, not for something pretty’. His very use of the word ‘pretty’ is revealing. It is used by Morris with respect and earnestness, while now it is more likely to be used in a derogatory, or at least dismissive way. If there are two qualities which can immediately disqualify a work from being modern art they are (a) prettiness and (b) likability. I’m not arguing that everything that is pretty or likable is interesting, enduring, thought-provoking, moving or anything else, but it strikes me as odd to wage war on these qualities to quite the extent that modern ‘high art’ has. And it's not only 'high art' that has renounced the beautiful, but our high street too. As a famous contemporary of Morris observed: 'Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months' (Wilde). 

My instinct is that little has changed since Morris and Wilde made these observations. Many of my contemporaries would much rather purchase a new desk at a cost of over £100, built out of plastic rather than wood, than risk being considered ‘old fashioned’ and buy something beautiful for a quarter of the price (such is our valuation of some treasures of the past). If so little has changed in over 100 years since Morris wrote and delivered this lecture, I can’t help but wonder if things have never really been much different from how they are today: the arts largely unvalued and struggling for funding, the ultimate value of the ‘new’ at the expense of anything enduring, both in material quality and taste. It is when Morris writes of a past golden age he is at his least convincing: ‘Time was when mystery and wonder of handicrafts were well acknowledged by the world, when imagination and fancy mingled with all things made by man’. This ornamental and poetic language, though undoubtedly beautiful, seems to expose the fictional nature of these elegised, bygone days. No specifics. It is almost as if Morris is not seeking to refer to an historical moment in the past – ‘In the year * when…’ – but rather evaluating time. Time does not exist in a meaningful sense any more, it only ‘was’ when slippery ideas such as ‘mystery’ and ‘wonder’ were latent in every useful object. Maybe there was never such a time, when the potential for beauty in the everyday really mattered to the general public, not just to a textile designer like William Morris, not just to those privileged to a thorough education in some aspect of the arts. Perhaps it is arrogant and immoral of me to believe that this ‘time that never was’ would have been desirable. If most people do not greatly enjoy opera, or theatre, or novels, or poetry, or art, or symphonies, who am I to say they are important (except in so far as everyone is entitled to his or her opinion)?

This matters to me. It matters a lot. I want to study how the arts work, how they affect people and investigate how they have significance in our lives. I want to explore whether the idea of beauty has any traction beyond a historically-contingent fashion. I dream of throwing away all my savings on an MPhil, and when that money runs out, of possibly even being funded towards a doctorate, so that at some point beyond this, I am seen as qualified enough to make a difference. But all  this fanciful dreaming is predicated on the notion that the arts are important, that they do affect people, that people’s lives are qualitatively enhanced by access to art of all types. If this isn’t true, what a load of inconsequential nonsense I am invested in.

In some ways I face a greater challenge than Morris. In this lecture, Morris was arguing about the importance of beauty in everyday things, whereas I bat for art forms which are considered horribly elitist. Classical music?! Opera?! Painting?! Poetry?! Many will say that you need an elitist education in order to appreciate these. Tolstoy argued that true art was only that which could be appreciated without any sort of education or knowledge. Unfortunately for Tolstoy, that left very little in Western culture at least which could be considered true art. Really, almost all human inventions require a little knowledge or skill to be appreciated. Even Glamour Magazine: you can’t appreciate even this most democratic culture, without the education which teaches you to read. I had a similar education whereby I learnt to ‘read’ music. As far as I remember, it was not more difficult that learning to read books, it’s just that it is not valued enough in society to be taught to everyone. 

My battles aside, let us return to Morris: have the battles he fought for (the importance of beauty in the everyday) been lost? In one way, we have lost this value (if we ever had it), in that we do not prioritize quality of workmanship, or durability – certainly not on a nationwide scale. I myself am a culprit – I own cheap clothes that I knew when I bought them would only last a matter of months. Behind me, sitting at my oak bureau, there is a melamine bookcase, which we bought for the sake of having something straight away, and will throw away as soon as we can afford a wooden one. On the TV, the programmes on everyday aesthetics such as garden and interior design often focus on the quick achievement of superficial transformation at a low price, rather than the gradual care and acquisition of furniture than lasts and gardens that develop beautifully year after year.

However, we do watch such programmes, and we do spend money on making our surroundings pleasant. Bizarrely, I often think people spend their lives trapped in ugly towns and cities until they can escape into their own houses, where they can finally let rip their appreciation of the beautiful by painting their walls, hanging pictures, buying cushions and curtains, and all those things which my generation consider trivial, banal and even pathetic. But it matters. It’s a truism so boring that I hesitate to commit it to paper (to screen) – the people and things closest to us have the greatest effect on our lives. That’s why we take such care over finding partners to live with, over the friends we confide in, on (I imagine) teaching our children to be decent human beings, on training our pets to be affectionate and well-behaved. So I think it’s ok that to talk about cushions and curtains. As Morris points out, ‘everything made by man’s hands has a form, which must be either beautiful or ugly’. So, in my mind, all things being equal, we are quite justified in taking care that we make the world more beautiful, rather than ugly.