Architecture of St. Veronicas and The White Visitation

[Mark Wright AIA]

Howdy Rob

The fastidious totalitarian unity of the Palladian great houses of
England, especially the two you give as examples, have nothing to do
with P's description of The White Visitation. Neither is "an orgy of
self-expression". You are not using your eyes. But you can be right, I
don't mind very much. On page 73 P does call TWV a "Palladian house
down in (a) resentful and twilit hollow" —note that he notes especially
that it has no view of the sea— which does not square in any way with
his detailed description on page 83. The wild pile he describes at the
chapter's close could in part be mid or late Georgian but would never
have been accepted as "Palladian" by Lord Burlington or William Kent
(the architects of Holkam Hall) and the "terra-cotta facings on every
floor" and "looming minarets" specifically imply Victorian era building
technology and an overlay of one of the exotic 19th cent. oriental
fashions. But maybe P just wasn't up on such matters. His use of the
word "Palladian" is imprecise at best unless The White Visitation goes
through a cinematic metamorphosis at the end of the chapter. Which
perhaps it might, come to think of it.

But the original question was about St. Veronica's... On page 114
Slothrop bumps into Darlene near St. Veronicas and Mrs. Quoad's abode,
which P locates in the East End where "the dome of faraway St Paul's"
is "visible in the smoke of certain afternoons." This isn't the City,
it's away east in preterite territory where Slothrop is given to
wander. To be sure this is not much of a spot for a Victorian
great-house, but it is a perfect sort of place to build an up-to-date
humanitarian Victorian hospital for incurables and lunatics, lately
brought out of Bedlam. It would sprawl on its grounds and flee its own
center just as P describes. You could probably find pictures of just
such an institution via Wikipedia.

Whoever asked the original question might go to a library and check out
Summerson's "Unromantic Castle" and "Georgian London", or one of Mark
Girouard's works on English architecture of the Victorian era. If he is
fortunate he will be able to find the Country Life series: "Caroline"
"Baroque" "Early Georgian" "Mid Georgian" and Late Georgian". These
rare-ish books will not be shelved for circulation. If he is anywhere
in the NYC area, I invite him to contact me offlist and arrange to come
by for a peek at my own copies, which will show him "Whig eccentricity"
at its highest and best. Or he could go to the NYPL, the one with the
lions out front.

The architect in me wants to pull rank.
The Brooklynite in me says "I got ya Whig Eccentricity right heah!"
Mark

> 
> These give a general idea of the sort of thing Pynchon was thinking
> of  
> with 'The White Visitation', a clifftop estate with Palladian stately
>  
> home, ruined abbey, gardens etc which has since been turned into a  
> hospital and military base:
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holkham_Hall
> 
> http://www.dover-kent.co.uk/places/street_names.htm#radigund
> 
> The history of Basildon Park also closely matches that of 'The White 
> 
> Visitation':
> 
> http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-vh/w-visits/w-findaplace/w- 
> basildonpark.htm
> 
> http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-vh/w-visits/w-findaplace/w- 
>
basildonpark/w-basildonpark-history/w-basildonpark-history-threats.htm
> 
> best



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