Volume 26, Issue 2/3

Introduction: New England Decorum

New England is the only place in America where decorum has entered the vernacular. It has done so through architecture. New England is first of all a settled countryside, houses of medieval simplicity clustered along a road, among them a town hall and a church of the same style and scale as the houses them selves, with the addition of columns and steeple. The houses are white, built parallel to one another at generous intervals, with scarcely a post or a stone between them to hint at boundaries. Barns and out buildings trail away behind them. Their only adorn ment might be a carved lintel, a fan-light window, or a beaded frontlet above the door. Their primary grace is an elegance of proportion, enforced on one's notice by continuous repetition, emphasized by a notable absence of the passion to individualize which has long raged in the neighborhoods of our Republic.

In fact, so powerful is the spirit of decorum maintained among these towns that all the diverse populations that pass through them defer to it more or less. These old houses inspire something one sees nowhere else in this country, a self-effacement in certain of their owners so complete as to forbid any trace of their own presence—the curtains at the windows, the pumpkin on the step, the flag by the door, all a scrupulous, anonymous observing of convention. The severest absence of ornament is itself an ornament, an ostentation. That is the principle of the conservation of New England as a landscape, as a style of life.

We think of the vanished tribes who built these houses as dour and ethereal, forgetting that their epic fecundity inspired Malthus to extrapolate, and Adam Smith to suggest, that if we and Britain should remain one country, convenience would finally shift the capital here. Our most prodigious birth occurred in these plain houses, their sides flushed and windows dazzled by plain old maples, gone unworldly red.

New England is prodigious in a small way, like a Dickinson poem or a Shaker chair. Its light on a clear day is a miniaturist's light, that makes it a piece of fine work, precisian, exacting, and naive. It is not possible, surely, to see every brick in a wall, every leaf on a tree. This must be a provincial error, to be mended in Paris. New England presents itself as if through a lens that makes much of little and more of less. Its very thrift is a form of profligacy, as in the care given to pumpkin culture, and in the eager traffic in knobby squash of uncertain use that must be carried in two arms and stowed in the trunk of the car, and in the persistent encampment of locals on their shadowy lawns among the detritus of their drawers and attics, which the mere affixing of a sign to a tree has trans formed into goods one might possibly desire.

It is no irony that a landscape that denied itself even so small a thing as a cross on a steeple top should become an iconography. That is transcendentalism, after all. These ancients have gone and left us such a patrimony as poor men leave, plain barns, stony pas tures, trees that bear good apples, a taste for homely food, an admiration for tight houses and sound boots. To figure the interest on our Yankee fortune, think by what measure these things are more than themselves.

Marilynne Robinson
—Northampton, Massachusetts, 1985

Entries