Obsessive Compulsive Houscleaners Anonymous Meeting Here.

I’m back to one of my pet subjects, which is the care and feeding of your house.

It’s springtime, time for me to start hanging clothes and sheets out on the line again, though I can’t, because The Most Ethical Man in the World pulled it down last summer during one of his as-yet-unfinished home improvement projects. It’s springtime, time when all totally compulsive women across America start doing things like cleaning the backs of their refrigerators (I have never done this and don’t see how on earth I could; I can’t even move the thing to find a magnet that rolled underneath it the other day). There are, apparently, women who do things to their grout with toothbrushes on a weekly basis. To which I say, Hurrah, huzzah, all well and good, but Edith shall choose to obsess over other matters.
This is not to say that I’m a poor housekeeper. Many of my friends think I’m an excellent housekeeper. Previous essays that I, Miss Edith, have posted here would certainly indicate that housekeeping is something to which I pay attention. But it must be said that I pick and choose my battles. I like ironed linens, yes. I keep the kitchen floor very clean. But other issues (like the refrigerator’s behind, say, or dusting the books) fall so by the wayside that I don’t even know where the wayside is. People who insist that you keep books dusted are clearly non-readers. If I had to keep all my books dusted… I’d never do anything but dust. It’s just stupid.

So why am I thinking about all this again? Because I’ve finally broken down and begun to read Martha Stewart’s Homekeeping Handbook: The Essential Guide to Caring for Everything in Your Home. This is, if you ask me, an obvious, and somewhat desperate, response to the best-selling, very popular, very frustrating Home Comforts by Cheryl Mendelson.
Miss Edith was an early champion of Ms. Mendelson, to the point where Edith once attended a reading Mendelson was doing in New Haven. (Edith does not go to readings, as a general rule; they give her a headache. But this was too good to pass up.) Mendelson writes in a manner that’s nearly lost: the very finely phrased sentence, laser-like in its precision, beautiful in its lack of frilliness. There’s something Victorian about her, but she doesn’t sound fusty to me, just extremely observant. Her first novel, Morningside Heights, was by a long shot the best novel I’d read in years, when I first read it some years ago; it was all I could talk about for weeks. Her second novel, Love Work Children, was a little disappointing, but no mind: the third is due out later this year, and yes I will get my hands on it as soon as I possibly can.
All this fiction is peachy, but the fact remains that Mendelson is best known for Home Comforts. This is an extremely detailed and careful book, a major reference work in the tradition of Mrs. Beeton, and to my mind, a near-perfect creation. Many people have found Home Comforts infuriating, upsetting, anti-feminist, and all sorts of bad things. I tend to think that the people who get angriest about the book are people who just are missing the point entirely. The book is not intended as a lifestyle guide. It is intended as a reference to teach one how to do things that we’ve stopped knowing how to do since our mothers entered the full-time work force in the 1960s and ‘70s. Mendelson nowhere says that women should stay home and do housework; she simply laments the fact that home life suffers because household maintenance has suffered; what really gets her is the extremely true fact that even when one does suddenly want to clean house, make things nice – this is key – one often can’t because one doesn’t know how.
The book is designed to increase one’s skills, not to burden one with housework and homework.
Mendelson is up front about her own apartment, which she insists is not squeaky clean, and I believe her. She’s more calm than Martha Stewart, who really does offer herself as a role model, and seems intolerant of the possibility that one might fall short. You sense that with Martha, not ironing the sheets is some kind of moral failing, a venal sin. With Mendelson, it’s “yeah, well, I can see that; you can get around to it sometime. It’s really not that important.”
There’s a difference in motive and intent, too, between these women and their parallel books. Martha is interested in cleanliness for the sake of appearances; she wants a happy veneer on everything. (She says she’s interested in hygiene, but somehow her photos make this claim less believable.) Mendelson is interested in cleanliness for the sake of peace of mind and bodily health; she wants your kitchen clean so that you won’t get sick, and stresses health factors over and over again, to the point where she can inspire paranoia in the reader. (I’ve never washed my pillows, and I only care about that when I read Mendelson on pillows.) You get the feeling that Mendelson doesn’t care what kind of pots you have, as long as they’re clean and well maintained. Martha actually implies that if you’re not using Le Creuset, you’re just a pitiful mouse leaving droppings in the pantry.
What I’m finding most offensive, though, in Martha Stewart’s book, is her way of talking about her various homes when describing a household problem that needs solving. However many estates this woman has (two? Three?), she apparently has staff to keep them all meticulously clean and scraped and newly-finished. She talks about the pine floors she had installed in her kitchen a few years ago, which were a mistake and already need replacing. Good god, she should see Edith’s pine floors, which are chipping and splintering away as I type. They date from 1920, are original to the house, and will probably still be here when we move out in 2020. Basically, the degree of unrealism I get in reading Martha Stewart’s book is aggravating, even though much of her advice is sound. Mendelson’s book is, bit by bit, do-able, and assumes nothing whatsoever about your household, your income, your way of life. Stewart’s book is just chock-full of assumptions, and is nowhere near as well-written.
I will admit here, rather late in this essay, that I’m only about half-way through reading Martha Stewart’s tome. In this time, I’ve learned how to stock a bar, something I didn’t expect her to discuss (and something I don’t remember Mendelson addressing), and I’ve learned that the method I use for folding fitted sheets – which Mendelson does not recommend – is the one Martha approves. Martha’s tone is definitely grating, and – I’ll be frank here – I’m finding her to be, if anything, more compulsive than Mendelson. But I will soldier on, dear readers. I will finish this book. And it’s going to make me a better person. Or else.
More as more, darlings…