The Old Year—And The New
At the end of every year since about 1995, I recall Sir George Scharf, founding director of London’s National Portrait Gallery and the biographical subject of my most recent book written with my friend, colleague and fellow archival adventurer, Robyn Warhol. As we describe in the book, the seventeen we spent reading his diaries sometimes offered were sometimes full of delightful surprises, and sometimes, especially for Scharf’s later, sicker years, only tedium and pain. Thus, when we were especially annoyed we defaulted to the unofficial subtitle of the book: The Most Boring Man in the World. The thirty years of Scharf’s “personal” diaries continually deflated our expectations for intimate revelation: daily entries usually listed the names of titled or otherwise famous people he had met that day, notes about the weather, and detailed accountings of every penny he spent on cream, notebooks, club memberships, or shoelaces.
There were, however, some exceptions to the monotony of his diaries: we could count, for narrative and indeed for rare expressions of feeling, on Scharf’s inevitable New Year’s diary entries that served as summaries for the year. It was here that his snobbery took even more tangible form as he registered increased intimacies with aristocrats and patrons. It was here that he offered a narrative arc for his evolving professional successes closely tied, of course, to the aforementioned patrons. It was here—and in the early years only—that he took stock of his debt and the assistance of his friends. It was here that he expressed delight in or concern about the health of his relatives, especially his mother and aunt. And it was here in a New Year’s summary that we first began to see a pattern that was to reshape our understanding of George: his loving and genre-bending entries about one Jack Pattison, a young man whom we came to see as George’s beloved. “As I wrote Pattison the clock struck twelve,” he says in the year-end summary for 1862. The note struck here resounded with other details—gifts registered in the accounts, dinner-party table charts that depicted George at the head and Jack at the foot, “faithful Jack’s” presence at the deathbed of George’s mother. We tracked the presence of Jack in subsequent year-end summaries, for example in 1867: “By Pattison being so constantly in our house of an evening I have found a pleasure in home that I have rarely felt before.” A few years later, when Jack moved his things into George’s house, we realized realize that we might have rare evidence of an intra-class male homosexual relationship, embodied in a household of two men.
Scharf made no New Year’s resolutions in his diary. Like those of many of his Victorian compatriots, the New Year’s entries looked not forward, but back. As we know from the talismanic mention of Jack’s name, this narrative component of his diaries ended with the chiming of midnight of the old year. The looking back was crucial, it seems, to Scharf; the narrative that emerged so faithfully on December 31 or sometimes January 1 of each year had the power to turn the accretion of dull daily entries into a powerful story of increasing success and class ascendance. This story was so important to Scharf that one year, when he was presumably parted temporarily form his diary, he wrote out his summary on the stationary of the Marlborough House where he was spending the New Year and then inserted it into his diary in the correct place. The letterhead itself provided support for the master-narrative; his presence at a great country house reiterated his record of triumph.
I start with Scharf—or rather with George, as Robyn and I came somewhat presumptuously to call him over the years—partly because he is part of my own professional and life narrative. Just as there is a before and after Harvey, just as there is a before, and (so far only) a during COVID, there is a before and after George, a before and after seventeen years of reading his words and writing about them with Robyn. While most people identify with their biographical subjects—or indeed start to write about them because they identify with them—it took a while for me (and for Robyn, for whom the joint project sometimes allowed me to speak) to relate to George beyond his palpable love of food. A snobby middle-aged Victorian bachelor, obsessed with detail, and who had no perceptible sense of humor, George did not in the first instance ring any familiar bells. Over the years, however, as we became middle-aged and then something more in our pursuit of him, we began both to see, or rather to feel, connections: to his methodical tidiness, to eagerness to be loved, and most of all, to his earnest desire to tell his story in his own way. Although I will never succeed at writing down every penny I spend, and although I have no tidy story of increasing success to tell, I learned from George to look back on New Year’s Day to the events of the previous year.
This year, I look back at Homing in what I think will be two entries, thereby one-upping George and his singular year-end summaries. I will try, in what I hope is still the long middle of my blog, to define the term that has served as its title and my inspiration. It is time, provisionally, to define the term “homing,” of at least to give it more shape and life. Some of you will, understandably, be wondering why I did not do this before—say in the first entry “Why This Blog?” The answer to this excellent question, is that I did not know. I had an instinct that lead me away from some choices (for example calling the blog “Home” or “Home Making,” or even the very Victorian and inviting “At Home.”) But—and perhaps this is only casuistry and self-justification—I wanted to write my way through the problem and the term. The much-anticipated end of 2020 gave me the chance to think about many of the things I did and did not do as that annus horribilis unfolded; the blog, which may have kept me from paralysis and despair, is, whatever else it is, something I did.
In the spirit of George, I will begin with what to most people will be the most boring part of the word: the “ing” that signals that it is a gerund. The internet defines gerunds as “verbal nouns”: in the case of “Homing” you can see a noun becoming a verb and then becoming a noun again. Home, the noun, is a place of much doing, a good place and container for verbs from “cooking” and “bedmaking” to “arguing” and “making up.” I have always been attracted to gerunds for their shape-shifting powers, but also because an “ing” imposed on something we have always only thought of as a simple noun, can reveal the actions, the work—physical and emotional—that create and sustain the existence of that noun. In this case, a perhaps too-familiar word gets a less familiar and slightly awkward ending, making what Freud calls Heimlich (homely) into the unheimlich (unhomely)—terms I talk about in my first post. “Home” seems safe and stable, “Homing” in its awkwardness perhaps less easy to take for granted.
“Homing” also suggests a process with a definite goal. It honors the desire felt by many people to move towards a home: to find one, make one, buy one, return to one. I hope it also invokes the cultural script that makes these desires seem normal, indeed themselves desirable. “Homing,” as opposed, say, to “At Home,” suggests that the ideal home, like all ideals, is difficult, perhaps impossible, to achieve. In the language of geometry (of which I know very little) it is an asymptote, an act that brings us ever closer to a goal without ever achieving it.
I like that “Homing” freezes us on our way home, capturing a desire and a direction but not necessarily a place.
“Homing” also defamiliarizes because it is not usually a term used for humans. When I decided to use it, I thought of homing pigeons. Non-human homing brings up the question of agency and choice: pigeons, whatever their natural proclivity (I am getting out of my comfort zone again!) must be trained to return to a home that is not in any sense theirs. Since settling on a title I have been introduced to—or reminded about—other uses of “homing,” as in “homing device,” “homing beacon,” and even “homing bullet.” All of these inanimate nouns that turn “homing” into an adjective have in common the idea of tracking. A homing bullet follows its target, who becomes, oddly, a home for the bullet. While I have briefly mentioned home as a place of violence—and will, I imagine, do more often in the New Year—it is the idea of “tracking” I want to mention here. I like to think of homing—and indeed of the blog it names—as being a sort of tracking: of myself, of others, of cultural norms, of historical change.
If I may wrest myself from the fine points of gerunds to talk about the term as I whole, this is what I would say. “Homing” signifies a paradox. When it does what I want it to do, the term allows me to attend simultaneously to the ideal of home and to the ways in which that ideal is impossible, problematic, and dangerous. It allows me to celebrate the small acts that make up living in a home and to attend to the racial and economic inequalities surrounding home ownership, access, and shelter. It allows me, I hope, to celebrate the domestic and to think about the gendered history that confines women to the domestic sphere. Homing has room, makes a place for this sentence: “I can’t wait for my kids to come home for Christmas” and this one: “Domestic abusers have turned to home security devices and remote thermostats to monitor and torture their victims.”
On a more personal note, “Homing” also allows me to talk about many seemingly unconnected things that are important to me—and that of course turn out to be connected after all. It was only a few months ago, that I realized I have long been writing and thinking about home but without centering the concept. Take George Scharf (I won’t say please). Robyn’s and my book about him is all about forming and reforming households—from the one George made with Jack before the latter’s surprise marriage, to the one he formed with his mother and aunt that mysteriously did not include his father, to the aristocratic ones he visited in a puzzling mixture of capacities (employee, guest, friend). After starting this blog, I turned to the book and was shocked to see there were no entries in the index under “household” or even “home.” This blog allows me to rethink—with some frustration—my already-published work.
If the blog has allowed me to make Victorian connections, it has also made a place for more personal memories. It is not surprising that many of the stories of my childhood center on the idea of home—although the particular mix of travel and generational housebound-edness may be specific to me. What is more surprising, perhaps, is how resonant home was during my college years. The two “disasters” of the blog’s subtitle served this last year as ways of anchoring home in time, and as events that made home particularly visible to me. I don’t know if those disasters will continue to structure the blog, but they inevitably shape it—especially, of course, the ongoing disaster of COVID, which, despite our New Year fantasies about the end of 2020, will persist beyond this year-end summary into 2021 and beyond. But that is a story for another year. This one.