8 hours ago
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It can take a surprisingly long time to become conscious of something that has been a feature of one’s life for as long as one can remember. I was 66 before I realised that I had always liked sitting in a corner. This revelation occurred in a restaurant while I was waiting for a friend. I’d got there right on time – I’ve known for more than 40 years that I have a mania for punctuality – and after being shown to a corner table I took what was obviously the best of the two seats on offer: the one in the corner. When I was growing up my mum said that if a man was out with a lady he should always walk curb-side; was there a version of this whereby the gentleman should always let the lady have the corner seat and sit with his back to the interior equivalent – the foot traffic – of the open road, with the attendant risk of being assaulted from behind by the chill blast of air conditioning? If so, that bit of chivalry had been invalidated by my friend’s texting to say she was running an incredible seven minutes late.
As soon as I sat down I was happy. Because I was in a corner. Realising is one thing, but I also want to understand. Where does the satisfaction and pleasure of the corner come from? What does it mean? The following reflections are personal and contingent but, as Diane Arbus once said: “I do feel I have some slight corner on something about the quality of things.”
The first stop for any investigation of this kind is The Poetics of Space, in which Gaston Bachelard points out that the pleasure of being in a corner has nothing to do with the expression – and sensation of – being cornered. In that situation you are under pressure, threatened; being in a corner, by contrast, is a position of safety. And while turning a corner means putting a previous phase of life behind you, a corner seat means that the only things behind you are walls and maybe cushions. You are content to stay put, with no desire to move on. The constant possibility of danger in gangster films means that the mob boss tends to favour the corner seat of a trattoria so that he can see who’s potentially coming to whack him. In the non-drama of normal restaurant-going, where the main threat is noise – music, loud voices, atrocious acoustics – the pleasure has little to do with surveilling the room. It’s a semi-uterine feeling of being partly enclosed. Booths offer a way of multiplying this feeling of enclosure, expanding it beyond actual corners to entire sides of a restaurant, but the best spot will still be the booth – more exactly, the corner of that booth – in the corner of the room.
These are shared but not universal urges. Why do some people crave the solace of the corner more than others? In my case I put it down – as I do most things – to having no brothers or sisters. Alone – and being an only child means one is instinctively on one’s own – in a restaurant, I like the way that I can sit tacitly concealed in my aloneness.
The Corner Table (1886) by the American artist Irving Ramsey Wiles depicts a woman seated in the corner of a restaurant, posed and poised in a fashion familiar to any reader of Henry James or Edith Wharton, between restriction and independence. She’s on her own but it’s not clear whether she will be dining alone or if she’s waiting, as I was in the opening paragraph, for a companion. Over her right shoulder is a glimpse, in a mirror, of her view of the restaurant (a partial optical allusion to Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère?) depicting a male diner being served by a waiter in another corner, with the corner of a painting on the wall above their manly heads. A narrative connection between these paired elements is suggested but unresolved. Either way, she is self-contained, and this self-containment is protected and shared, reflected upon by – and within – the painting’s multiple angled recessions.
Consider, by contrast, how exposed are the three customers in Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (1942). They’re in a brightly lit corner diner while enjoying none of the comforts of cornerhood: their backs are displayed to the street. If we are discussing the man in the far left of the picture, we are literally talking about him behind his back. Beyond the frame, out of sight to the far right, there may be a seat enabling someone to look at the other diners and out at the street. If there is, that’s where I would want to be. From there, implicitly, it might be conceptually possible to see viewers looking at the painting.
My desire to be in the corner is not confined to public settings like this. The reading chair in my study is in the corner. Sitting in it, I am conscious that the open book I’m holding forms another micro-corner of sorts so that – if the book is as absorbing as The Corner by David Simon and Ed Burns – I’m enclosed in the corner of the corner room of a flat on the top floor of a house. The feeling is most intense after dark, when the chair is bathed in the glow of a lamp, after I’ve locked the door of the flat from the inside, with the key in the lock. No one can get in but this is less a security measure than an expression of fulfilled intent: for the rest of the night I am not venturing out again for anything or anyone.
On this particular evening, in this little nook, I’m looking through the catalogue of an exhibition devoted to the Nabis, the clique of artists from the last decade of 19th-century Paris. Given their fondness for intimate interiors I guessed that the corner would be featured in their works – and so it turns out. The painting that best expresses the psychological comfort of the corner is The Red Room, Etreat (1899) by the Swiss-born Félix Vallotton. (Described as a “loner among friends”, Vallaton was himself painted, perched on a chair in the corner of his studio, by friend and fellow Nabi Édouard Vuillard the following year.) Vallotton’s painting shows a woman in a red armchair to one side of an unlit fire, tucked in the corner of a room with Rothko-red walls. Her eyes are closed. At her feet a child tears up a piece of paper on a patterned dull rug. It would be convenient to claim that the painting shows a mother in a state of blissful content, a feminine version of the opening of Dickens’s Dombey and Son: “Dombey sat in the corner of the darkened room in the great arm-chair by the bedside, and Son lay tucked up warm in a little basket bedstead…” Her expression, however, refuses to confirm – to conform to – this snug reading. And there is a further complication. One of the blobs of red to her left actually represents a bed squeezed into the corner – in an alcove, to be precise – so she’s not quite in the corner. But the flattened vertical colours mean that this bed is perceived less as a physical object than an abstract magnification of the psychological space and comfort – the illusion – of being in a corner. (Hence, perhaps, my saying that she was “tucked in” to the corner.) The opposite of Henry Fuseli’s rearing and unsettling Nightmare (1781), this is the nest where dreams of corner-ness sleep.
