Hoarders beware – one day your mementos may be up for auction
Throughout our lives, we accumulate stuff that reflects the person we feel ourselves to be. When we are no longer around, the stuff remains, becoming a poignant problem for our heirs and executors. The solutions present themselves in the diminishing order of dignity: mementos for family and friends; charity shop; house clearance; tip. But, for the famous, the possibility exists of a posthumous last appearance in the form of an estate sale.
On Wednesday, Stair Gallery in Hudson, New York, will hold an auction of some 200 objects from the estate of Joan Didion. The writer, who died last year aged 87, specialised in a form of self-revelation so exquisitely stylish that it became a form of concealment. She was stylish in person, too: “An American Icon”, as the auction catalogue has it. A famous photograph of the cool young writer with her Stingray Corvette inspired innumerable literary wannabes; in old age, she modelled for the fashion brand Celine, whose austere elegance matched her own.
Yet the objects selected for the sale seem strangely at odds with Didion’s public image. The cheerful hideousness of a trio of elephant-shaped ceramic garden seats (scathingly noted in a disobliging 1980 essay by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison) belies the superfine sensibility of Didion’s prose; and there is an awkward intimacy about the minor lots: the nine pairs of prescription glasses and assorted blank notebooks; the monogrammed table napkins “with scattered stains”, the battered set of Elizabeth David cookbooks and surprisingly larky apron emblazoned with the legend, “Maybe broccoli doesn’t like you either”.
Yet, it is for these modest objects, rather than the Richard Diebenkorn abstract, or the Regency pembroke table at which, the catalogue grimly notes, Didion’s husband “John Dunne suffered the fatal heart attack that took his life”, that the online bidding is keenest. The eagerness to snap up a collection of Didion’s blank notebooks is understandable – at Elizabeth David’s estate sale in 1994, a jar of wooden spoons sold for £400. The tools of a famous person’s trade are fetish objects: the (forlorn) hope is that acquiring them will transmit some of their original owner’s magic.
But what of the reading glasses, the sea shells, the kitsch red and blue glass bells for which the bidding is so hectic? Perhaps the charm of these secular relics lies in their very banality, proving that the icon was more like us than we imagined. But their display for sale – albeit one whose proceeds will go to charity – has a sense of pathos and of an intimate life invaded.
Our belongings represent us – my grandmother’s brooch and my grandfather’s woodcarvings remind me of them every day. Still, the Didion auction is a timely reminder to curate our lifetime’s collection of stuff sooner rather than later.
♦ Radio 3 can’t do right for doing wrong: critics complain that it is too modern, and blame it for dumbing down. A recent letter to The Daily Telegraph
expressed “despair at what will be offered next”. As a constant listener, I decided a while ago that I would listen to whatever was broadcast before making a judgment. It hasn’t always been easy, but the discoveries have joyfully outnumbered the downsides.
For comfort listening, there is always Classic FM, (favoured by the great public intellectual and music lover, Isaiah Berlin). But for the vigorous expansion of my musical horizons, I cherish Andrew Mcgregor, Jess Gillam and their colleagues at Radio 3.