Some Real Estate Opportunities
[Editor's note: The Feckless Bellelettrist is proud to present the first in what I hope to be an occasional series of "guest essays." The author is my longtime friend Thomas de Monchaux. Thomas is well-known as a writer about design, architecture, and architects, but is—first and foremost and as long as I've known him—a writer. He knows that the same elements of composition that make for sound, human-scaled dwellings—proportion, contrast, surprise, light and shadow, details, tactility, a sense of ambulatory spaciousness and ease, among others—are no less important to the experience of spaces created by words on a page or a screen.
In what you’re about to read, Thomas is making a new home for thoughts, memories, impressions, and that home is also a journey that is, as most journeys are, a voyage of rediscovery. In this kind of recursive storytelling—the best kind of memory writing—the reader will begin to share the author’s eye for echo, coincidence, and the slant rhymes of experience. For that effect to work to its fullest, the piece, by the standards of today's attention spans, necessarily runs long. The essay begins on a train, but does not move according to a timetable. Nor does it run in a straight line, but at the meander of thought. My eyes tend not to find Substack a great format for long essays—the endless scroll—so I recommend that you print this one out, for maximum enjoyment, though I've done my best to present it in discrete sections so a reader may pause and return. If you read this on your phone, I won't take responsiblity.
For reasons that would take me a long time to articulate properly, there has always been writing that slips between the cracks of prestige magazine publishing. A number of those magazines passed on this piece before it came to rest here. Although there are many new faces and voices at those magazines, the reasons why some very good writing and very good writers get overlooked haven't changed much since 2004, when some friends and I tried to start a publication devoted to such elusive, difficult, or unclassifiable prose. The Feckless Bellelettrist is a conflict avoidant, bright-sided, and non-polemical persona (and, by virtue of this medium, entrepreneurial), so all I'll say by way of parting is that Thomas receives a majority percentage of all new paid subscriptions arising from this post. I have, by way of special offer, lowered the monthly subscription fee (for lack of a one-time donate button), should you wish to support him and endeavors like this one. Enjoy!—F.B.]
It is easy to see the ends of things, and harder to see the beginnings. If you leave New York City from Pennsylvania Station and take the train that runs north along the east coast of the Hudson River, the city appears to end almost as suddenly as Los Angeles famously gives way to its own seeming prior state of nature, to beach sand and desert sand. Along the Hudson River, a sliver of apparent wilderness snakes down all the way to the New Jersey Palisades. Green bluffs and hills appear on the shore opposite 66th Street, and it sure seems that they could keep rolling unbroken, through the Berkshires and Adirondacks, all the way to the Hudson Bay. Contemplating that geography from your blue vinyl seat on the left side of the train, it is easy to imagine, just as John Cabot did aboard the Half Moon sailing up that same river in September of 1609, in search of the Northwest Passage, that just around the next broad bend would be—instead of un-navigable shallows and an intervening continent—the west coast, the Golden Gate, the Pacific Ocean, the Islands of Spice.
It is an illusion. New York City is without much beginning or end: just part of the great seamless continental conurbation that smears formlessly from Virginia to Maine. The illusion is easier to see through if you take the train from New York to Boston, paralleling Interstate 95 and the marshy coasts of Long Island Sound, where all feels like one vast Bridgeport: multi-level parking structures, loading docks on inscrutable white metal warehouses, prim rows of vinyl-sided houses, skinny brick churches, weed trees.
I came to know that path in all seasons, during the two years when I went up to Boston every two weeks to take my father to the neurologist and eat lunch with him in the cafeteria at the residential facility to which my brother and I had moved him after my mother died. In the beginning, Parkinson’s Disease is subtle and mutable, elusive to detect and diagnose. Only by the end of my father’s time with it did I understand what I’d been seeing.
In the end, the disease is irreversible. After you have reached your plateau with the drugs that keep some of its effects at bay, then you just get worse. The ultimate stage is a sudden, untreatable psychosis: the patient’s formerly transitory fixations and hallucinatory illusions, which are how the illness enters the mind from the body, eventually take over entirely. Beyond a door at the end of the hall on which my father lived for those two years was a wing for those who were going to die, too late, from inside such private realities. Someone had stuck a piece of decorative white picket fence onto the bottom half of that door, as if it lead to a green meadow. During his two years at that facility, my father lost the ability to walk and to process information as he once had. Though some bright sliver of his mind lasted all along, even to the last day of his life—outwitting the picket fence. When I first moved him into that facility—prim, suburban, an unexpected undercurrent of cruelty in its overnight operations that revealed itself over time—I asked if he minded, if he missed his old sprawling apartment on the streetcar line, the treetops of the plane trees. “No,” he said, “I’m easy.”
Neurological disease erases any illusion of difference between individual human beings. It abrades us down, past our cultivated personae, to universality. A quarter century of Parkinson’s Disease successively opens and removes and disappears each Russian doll and leaves one as the tiniest, the doll without a face. A couple of years after my father died, I saw some of a documentary film made by an actor about his aunt, the celebrated writer Joan Didion. I watched the stillness of her face and the deliberation with which she listened when questioned, the wide-open eyes, the speech that was slow and then faster as it found and its way into some remembered and repeated set piece, like a slow broad river running livelier through a narrows. I watched this particular kind of radical transparency—even through the screen—of how she looked and how she spoke, and I thought as I watched that woman who was nothing like him, there’s dad.
After two years at the suburban facility—its seething and underpaid and underage staff in their red shirts, its ferocious, brittle, cheerful director in her low heels—my brother and I moved our father out to a facility in the scrubby yellow hills far above my brother’s new hometown of Oakland, California, where he lived for eighteen more months. That facility was better, just. I persuaded myself there was some kind of Californian mellowness and sunniness to its vibe, even as it was basically the same place.
This was literally true, architecturally speaking. Institutional buildings of this kind, because of economic efficiency and liability law, tend to be built to a pattern of standardized templates. The Massachusetts place, all red bricks and plastic white Colonial trim, sat in the dank hollow of a drained marsh in an outer suburb, entirely within an encircling ring of asphalt parking. At the California place, the plastic trim was fake Arts and Crafts. But the building—sublimely, ecstatically, uncannily—happened to ride a high narrow ridge of the Santa Cruz mountains that overlooked the San Francisco Bay. Bright through the haze was the Golden Gate. The Pacific beyond. No architect had intended the building to address the view, but by accident of how the standardized plan had been dropped onto the land, my father’s rooms happened to face it, and it was toward the Golden Gate that he turned, unseeing, when he died.
When I’d first moved my father into the Massachusetts place, I collected what I imagined to be the principal orienting landmarks of his former domestic landscape—the small rolltop desk with its secret drawers, the campaign chest with its non-original hardware, the lesser of the two beat up Windsor chairs, the three muddy portraits of ships—to be installed with him into his new rooms. Onto the remaining Scandinavian shelves went the books—travelogues, yellow-edged Penguin and Pelican paperbacks, accounts of the Age of Sail, The Family of Man—that my brother and I fancied were a map of his mind.
Much of the rest was dispatched in a hasty estate-type sale, of the kind my mother would have loved to attend. Before the sale a modern-age incarnation of a rag-picker—she had grey clothes, grey hair, grey skin, grey eyes—desultorily drifted around the old apartment and hung paper price tags by small lengths of string, on the objects she thought might sell. She told us to expect nothing much. “Maybe,” she said with a kind of wince and shrug that conveyed disgust and disavowal, “if everything was midcentury modern…”
The new California place was called Sunrise. My brother paid a graduate student five twenty dollar bills to install the very same furniture and bric-a-brac and books that we shipped out with him. The C-shaped layouts of the Massachusetts rooms and the California rooms were precisely identical: an outboard dayroom and a bedroom, with a nominal kitchen inboard by the hollow plastic door—double-width to accommodate wheelchairs and rolling beds—to the hall. The graduate student had worked with visible speed and without visible care. The mysterious heavy bronze statuette that features in my earliest memories was perched on an unboxed slippery stack of old New Yorkers. Heavy things rested on light things. Plastic crap—all the abject and colorful petroleum-based gear of age and disease, cases and props and prosthetics, almost like the happier accoutrements of infancy—was all shuffled into the good old things of oak and silver, without discernment. When a little later I arrived to see this hasty admixture of trash and treasure, it induced in me the effect of something cut apart and pasted together like a ransom note.
I don’t know whether that ransom note effect bothered my dad during the interval he lived with it—“I’m easy”—but it worried me back then: that the so-close-but-not-quite dissonance of the decor—a spatial and visual aphasia—might be estranging to someone unable to assimilate new information. An old thing in a new relative position would be, for him, no thing at all, and so in the symptomatology of the disease, a prompt for hallucination and perserveration. So I spent days putting everything, from the small rolltop desk, through the exact order of books on the cheap Scandinavian shelves, to the complicated constellation of heavy glass and porcelain oddities (nominal paperweights) on the desk, all just as it was. I was of course fixing the only thing I could fix.
I thought of those days of artifice and reconstruction when this year, having arrived in the old riverine whaling town of Hudson, New York, on that train from Manhattan, I walked up Warren Street into the auction house gallery that was displaying a similar skim of the worldly goods of Joan Didion. They were to be sold off in a week’s time to benefit a Parkinson’s Disease charity—eventually to the figure of something like two million dollars.
Didion had died just before Christmas, the year before. Warren Street, the town’s long sloping main drag, is all 1850s townhouses above and 1950s glass storefronts below, what would have been greengrocers and stationers are now antique stores or empty or Instagrammable furnishings stores selling Chinese not-quite-Danish chairs. There are old stone banks on the corner lots. There’s a pharmacy chain branch unchanged since 1980. A former old motel in a former Nickelodeon movie house that is now a fancy boutique hotel. The trade is mostly to weekenders up from the city: on a Tuesday I saw only three people on the street, one an old man in a flannel chore coat manning a combination walker and oxygen tank, the other a young couple I’d seen on the platform in Manhattan. It was the first authoritatively cold day of what had been another warm and humid autumn, though crisp and sunny, and in the already low and raking light of early afternoon the town was painterly, luminous and bleak: Hopper; de Chirico, and—with Didion’s California in the mind’s eye—Diebenkorn.
The lofty old space occupied by the auctioneers had the look of a nineteenth century dry goods store or a saloon set from an old Hollywood Western—though with its interior now coated in layers of matte white paint and durable grey carpet. You could imagine John Wayne, all spurs and buckskin, creaking his way across the floorboards to the sound of the player piano. Into this space the auctioneers had installed a kind of life-size diorama of the 3000-square-foot prewar co-op apartment where Didion had lived between 1988 and her death in 2021, at 33 East 70th Street between Madison and Park.
There was in fact a Diebenkorn—a muted blue, green, and pink lithograph called Twelve, catalogue Lot 12, dimensions 43 by 34 inches, which would go on to sell for $85,000. At the auctioneers’ gallery it commanded a meticulous reconstruction of the entryway at East 70th. It was paired and reflected in Lot 129, An Edwardian Giltwood and Gilt-composition Circular Mirror, 43 inches tall with a 31 inch diameter mirror plate, a modern replacement, with, “minor nicks and losses to the gilt surface,” eventually sold for $7000. In this setting, laureled with its yellow metal leaves, potted orchids nearby, it summoned the cheesy dignity of Hollywood Regency. Past this entryway, to the right, was a spacious iteration of Didion’s living room: low and soft slipcovered couches, small enough to be loveseats, and flowery yellow chairs, all with a kind of 1980s slouchiness, squared up against a 1970s square white laminate coffee table, which displayed photos of the actual room under reconstruction. There was a Peacock Throne Victorian Style Woven Rattan Armchair, which together with four toile pillows illustrating rustic 18th century shepherdesses, and at a height of 4 feet and ten inches, only two inches shorter than Didion’s own famous height itself, constituted Lot 16, which would sell for $28,000.
To the left was the main event: a glittering wall of mirror-backed cabinets, glass-shelved, glass-fronted, containing all the small effects: crystal, glassware, silverware, correspondence paper, oil lamps, travel trinkets, linen napkins and tablecloths, and above all the sunglasses. There was a modest selection of old eyewear—drugstore readers unglamorously supplementing the lots of old shades.
At eye height in pride of place at the center of the arrangement, the singular oversized spectacles Didion had worn in a 2015 advertisement for a French fashion house (Pair of Celine Faux Tortoiseshell Sunglasses, Lot 5, 2 1/4 inches by 5 1/2 inches by 5 3/4 inches, hammer price of $27,000). Those sunglasses gazed out from this glittering display at a reconstruction of Didion’s rather homespun study: wooden wheeled armchair and embroidered footrest below two battered desks at right angles, on each a big old typewriters (lot numbers 72 and 73, IBM Wheelwriter 5 Typewriter, 5 in x 20 1/2 in. x 18 1/2 in, for hammer prices of $5500 and $6000.)
The books on the shelves behind—a section on the Kennedys, a section on Geology, a section on the Iraq War, a section on Modern Art, a diligent assortment of canonical novels—were all a little dreary. Taken together they were visually unappealing, a holdover from when books were personal sources of information rather than aesthetic tools for the domestic construction of a publicly broadcast private persona. This reconstructed study was defended from the rest of the space by the kind of nylon ribbon barriers that you usually see organizing the lines at airports.
During the hour I spent at the display, there appeared two kinds of visitors: the pilgrims—my age and younger—all in black and in ballet flats or combat boots, all of them women. Then there were the Martha Stewart types, men and women—my age and older— in ensembles of quilted vests, waxy Barbour coats, and Wellington boots that combined actual Yankee willful decrepitude with its picturesque simulations by Ralph Lauren.
The Martha Stewart types were gimlet-eyed and moved methodically from item to item, touching and inspecting everything with proprietary confidence. One gave a running report into a phone. “Yes I know it’s small,” she said, “she was a small person.” The pilgrims moved more slowly. I asked each pilgrim which item, of everything, they would take home if they could. One was Utilitarian: “I really need just one good chair in my apartment.” One was Romantic: “I would be happy with a hairpin; I want to give it to someone I love.”
Overhearing, the friendly docent opened up one of the glass cabinets and withdrew a low cylindrical tin, and opened the top for the Romantic to see: dozens of paper clips and push pins, of the standard colorful plastic kind. Lot 74, Group of Writing Ephemera, hammer price $4,250. “No hairpins,” the docent said, “but a lot of this stuff has stuff inside.” I thought about somehow stealing one of the pushpins and then thought what the hell would I do with it? The involuntary and fantastical and only answer came that I would draw blood from my palm and spill it onto one of the white cloths on display among all the silver—perhaps from lot 153, Group of Table Napkins, “a set of eight scalloped edge napkins embroidered ‘JDD’, a set of three napkins embroidered ‘D’, 19 inches by 19 inches, a few with scattered stains consistent with use,” hammer price $14,000.
Although Didion herself was Episcopalian, the American Protestant tradition that most preserves Catholic aesthetics, the whole affair of the auction went even deeper into Catholicity: the silver vessels and implements redoubled in reflection, the white linen, the glass-fronted cabinets like a Rood Screen before an altar, everything a second-degree relic of a celebrated saint or a sainted celebrity. The contemplation of a body in its last passion. The promise of life everlasting. Two of the Martha Stewart types stood back to back, regarding in opposite directions the goods in the reconstructed living room, and boomingly addressed each other. “It makes me think what’s going to happen to my stuff after I’m gone,” said one. “Oh,” said the other, “I’ll sweep up after you.”
When my father died, the facility needed his former rooms within 72 hours, for the next name on their waiting list. I swept up. I spent the day after the day after he died hastily deconstructing the room that I had once slowly reconstructed, shoving things fast into boxes. The room got dimmer and louder as the sun set and I rolled up the rugs. I focused on imagining that at some point in the future, from a moment of perfect calm, I would array all of this methodically and touch each thing one more time; would catalogue it like an archeologist by some elegant indexical system; would with some correct combination of Utilitarianism and Romanticism retain just a few things, just the right things, of his clothes and his books, those maps of his body and his mind. I thought at least that I would see them all again; would see them for the last time at the same time as knowing that I was seeing them for the last time.
During the Delta Surge, circumstances beyond my control caused most all of my father’s clothes and books and furniture, formerly in a storage unit in the Port of Oakland, to be thrown away. The rolltop desk may yet be in an obliging stranger’s garage somewhere in Alameda. Probably not. I have been afraid for more than a year to telephone and find out that this isn’t true. The handful of things I have that were his are not solemn souvenirs but things I borrowed in order to use. They drifted into pockets and backpacks, unreturned: a green floral necktie, a translucent yellow screwdriver, a pair of shoe brushes. This was why, when I heard about the Didion auction, I felt urgently the need to see all of someone’s earthly ephemera dealt with mystically and methodically, valorized through sublimated Catholic rituals of pilgrimage and display—monstrance. And then valued as not just cultural but material capital in the most stimulatingly calculable way of all, at auction.
In pathetic fallacy, I thought a lot about how right there, at that auctioneers in Hudson, all those objects assembled would be in each other’s company, would have critical mass and collective memory, for the last time—before they were scattered into the lives of collectors, hobbyists, connoisseurs, and other professional practitioners of speculation and acquisition.
The one hour a week, during my later childhood, when my brother and I had the sole company of our father was at Catholic Mass, at the 5:15 Sunday evening service in a narrow brick church. In my memory—New England—it is always already dark. The observance of the sacrament required that we couldn’t talk with him nor, kneeling, sitting, standing shoulder to shoulder, much look at him. Sometimes, afterward, he’d bring us along to his weekly race up and down the orderly aisles of the Stop & Shop supermarket. In memory the pews and aisles shuffle into each other, ransom-note-style. Going to see Didion’s goods at the auctioneers in Hudson precisely combined sensations of praying and shopping.
As a stylist and a formalist, Didion’s literary effects, by her own account and self-evidently, came out of a careful reading of Hemingway: a seeming austerity and apparent restraint; an artful simplicity of language; and within the same sentence sometimes a shocking smash-cut juxtaposition of the banal and brutal, the commonplace and sublime. This was both universalizing and—because you couldn’t tell which part of the sentence to more closely identify the author with—strangely anonymizing. It’s another kind of ransom note aesthetic.
The journalist Barbara Grizzuti Harrison—not a fan—identified these effects in a 1979 takedown essay, Joan Didion: Only Disconnect. She offers a dozen various Didion sentences that, with a bathetic juxtaposition of whatever is on either side of the central comma, go like this: “‘In the years after Luis was shot, water hyacinths clogged the culverts at Progreso.’” “Some of the effects she produces are quite pretty,” she allows, “even momentarily beautiful.” Style concerns her not only as the form of Didion’s work, but as its content: about Lucille Maxwell Miller, the murderess described in Didion’s Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream, she suggests, “The crime for which Didion indicts Maxwell Miller is of being tacky. This, you see, is where the lavender pillows come in. […] It isn’t Didion’s sense of morality that has suffered a blow, it’s her sense of style. Which is why, although I have nothing in principle against pretty houses or lavender love seats, Ms. Didion’s lyrical angst strikes me as transparently ersatz.”
Grizzuti Harrison is getting at something about upper middle class contempt for, or striving apprehension around, the aesthetics of the material culture of upper working class domestic life in America—noting Didion’s noting of Maxwell Miller’s personal style. From Didion’s 1977 essay Many Mansions, constituting an unfavorable comparison of the nouveau-riche ranch-style California governor’s residence with its Victorian precursor, Grizzuti Harrison singles out Didion’s concluding line that, “There is no way to say this without getting into touchy and evanescent and finally inadmissible questions of taste, and ultimately of class. I have seldom seen a house so evocative of the unspeakable.”
“When I am asked why I do not find Joan Didion appealing,” Grizzuti Harrison writes, “I am tempted to answer—not entirely facetiously—that my charity does not naturally extend to someone whose lavender love seats match exactly the potted orchids on her mantel, someone who has porcelain elephant end tables.” Those would be Lot 173, hammer price $3000, Group of Three Glazed Earthenware Elephant Form Garden Seats, “comprising: a pair, a single, the pair 17 1/2 x 15 x 81/2 in., the single 22 1/2 x 20 x 9 1/4 in. . . . Minor wear, crazing, and a few minor losses.”
The crime is the same: as Didion, in Grizzuti Harrison’s summation, convicts Maxwell Miller for the crime of being tacky, so does Grizzuti Harrison convict Didion. That she could with such precision summon the evidence—the porcelain elephants, the orchids on the mantel, the lavender loveseats—speaks to how very much photographed and very much published were the face and body of Didion, and therefore all the decor around the edge of the frame. And all of it, from the books to the body to the automobile to the furnishings, in some midcentury confluence of patriarchy and establishment media, can be read as elements of one continuous body of work, one unbroken persona, one self-similar aesthetic event. Didion is tacky, in Grizzuti Harrison’s indictment, because her social aspirations—Sacramento’s wan version of Society arrives at the embers of the original American version on the Upper East Side—cause her to value appearances and to deploy style instrumentally and argumentatively.
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. That was the immemorial and strangely Hemingwayesque sentence that I typed onto the keyboard of Didion’s IBM Wheelwriter 5, in order to have touched every heavy clicky key. Fox hunting and riding to hounds is something that landed gentry do on their estates. If you don’t account for taste and manners, the distinction between gentry and the rest is those estates: their ownership of enclosed land. That word estate of course denotes both an inheritance and land understood as property; the compound real estate and the word realty date to a 17th-Century distinction between movable and immovable—thus real—assets, between furniture and territory, apocryphally as a consequence of all the sweeping and accounting that had to be done after London’s Great Fire of 1666.
Some Real Estate Opportunities is a pamphlet-like self-published photography book produced by the artist Ed Ruscha in 1970. It is 7 1/4 tall by 5 5/8 inches wide by 3/16 of an inch thick. Each page shows a black and white photo of a vacant lot in Southern California, from Anaheim to Los Angeles to Van Nuys, each one all telephone lines and scrubby palms against low grey skies. Bundled with the similar 1965 book Some Los Angeles Apartments—a copy of the pamphlet constituted Lot 52 in the auction, hammer price $5,500. The capital in that real estate would be petrochemical or transactional, rather than the social or pastoral kind to be found in the more ancient estates that feature quick foxes and lazy dogs: it’s possible to read in Ruscha’s laconic documentation of the former some tacit and indeterminate satire of the latter. Situated among Didion’s effects, the book became something of a mise-en-abyme: estates within estates; collections within collections; a catalog within a catalog; a list of lots within a list of lots.
Ten minutes’ drive west out of the town of Hudson on State Route 9, past the autobody shop and the closed cement factory, then along the Old Post Road and the gas station, there is an acre of land at the end of a long and narrow drive that ends in a loop that makes a kind of island of the pine trees within. Driving through the subtle rises and hollows of Route 9, you can detect yourself—sometimes by a glimpse of distant blue hilltops between winter trees, sometimes by a less visually verifiable geomancy—aligning between those long mountain ridges of the Berkshires to the east and the Adirondacks to the west, a detection that still instills some kind of deep country feeling.
The acre is a narrow slice of a former working farm, returned to dense second growth forest and criss-crossed with old stone walls, that belonged to a friend my father met when they both worked as architects and urbanists in Manhattan in the 1970s, and who taught him back then how to spend a weekend upstate. When I was a sophomore in high school, when the Hudson Valley was unfashionable and land was cheap, my father bought that acre from that friend on a handshake and built on it a small square cottage, shaped like a Monopoly house.
I remember thinking, my children’s children’s children will never know my father, but they will know something about their ancestor by this little hinterland: by how he designed this house, their house, and how he placed it onto the land, just at the crest of this little hill, positioned just so to face the pine-needle-strewn slope down to a seasonal stream and an old stone wall beyond, to capture the steady northern light in the biggest windows, to situate the front porch exactly between this old conifer and this young spruce.
When I was a sophomore in college he sold it—I deduce now that he enjoyed designing it and building it far more than dwelling in it; plus there was the matter of those mysterious mortgages and other houses of cards that my brother and I would eventually try to traduce with a forensic accountant. We burned through the proceeds of the streetcar suburb apartment, minus the forensics, in renting the identically-configured rooms, and all the associated costs of private health care, at the facilities in Massachusetts and California. For a while, his affairs cost in a month what mine cost in a year. There was no particular material inheritance; no estate, real or otherwise, in the end. There was no land. There is no land. And by that measure the generational mobility of my family, at least by my particular line of descent, qualified by social class and quantified by actual capital, is downward.
On my way out of the auctioneers’ gallery I talked with the docent, as we stood together in the reconstruction of Didion’s entryway on East 70th Street. He said that he had expected everything to feel a little more West Coast. It seemed to him that among the reproduction Colonial tables and Chinoiserie that the only truly Californian piece of furniture was Lot 11, “American Oak, Walnut and Bird’s Eye Maple Partner’s Desk, J. Breuner, Sacramento, California . . . fitted with a paper label inside of one drawer, ‘KNOX COLLECTION AGENCY, 112 Sutter Street, San Francisco, in three parts, 32 in. x 6 ft. x 45 in,” that would go for $65,000. The desk was purchased by Didion’s own parents, Frank and Eugene Didion, at an estate-type sale in California.
Think about the meaning of that collection agency: before it came to the Didions, what hopes and debts were behind the desk’s initial acquisition and seizure? Breuner was a German carpenter who emigrated to California to pan for gold in the middle of the 19th century, before realizing in the usual way that it was better business to sell to the prospectors and their heirs. Some of his cabinetry furnished the old California governor’s mansion that Didion memorialized in Many Mansions as, “my favorite house in the world.”
The docent explained that American antiques from the east coast tended to be relatively dainty, whereas west coast antiques were heavier, as a consequence of the types of timber out there, but also for the more labyrinthine reasons that the prototypical fancy furnishings that upper class emigrants first sent west by ship and oxcart tended to be constructed more heavily in order to be undamaged by the journey, and so that became the subsequent standard.
The docent and I agreed that it was somehow strange to think of this oak behemoth traveling east instead of west—somehow it seemed that Eastern furnishings, in the settler and colonial manner, would ever travel west. He explained that he too, was singular among his kin in having migrated back east; that his own ancestors had been German immigrants who had settled out west in the 19th Century, somewhere in the Oregon Territory. They logged and worked a vast terrain of old growth forests and rushing rivers. “The land is gone out of the family,” he said, “The land is gone to God knows what. There were ten thousand acres.”
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