Garro, who has been managing the house for four years, is still seeing new things. "Sleeper was so clever. When you're in the Master Mariner's Room (Fig. 6) and you look back over the doorway to the Red Indian Room, you see this spiderweb over the door, and then you see it in a full window near the Master Mariner's desk, and then you see it again over the door going to the North Gallery. And when you open that door, you see it again." Throughout the house there are visual tricks and clues in one room that hint at the theme of the next.
Given nearly thirty years' work, Sleeper could have created an autobiographical statement, a monument to ego, a pedagogical lesson in good taste. Instead he delighted his guests with his witty displays, and then he hid out. Most of his personal papers and all of his business records have vanished, leaving us free to wonder at his fancy, as that old-fashioned word has it. He has the transparency of a perfect host. He is elusive. (On evenings when he hosted costume parties, Sleeper liked to surprise his guests by appearing from behind a hidden door.)
"There are those who maintain that the house with its crooked passageways, doors leading to nowhere, secret staircases, dramatic surprises and shadowy recesses is Sleeper's most revealing statement about himself—a riddle with a different answer for everyone who tries to solve it," write two experts on the house, Nancy Curtis and Richard C. Nylander.1 Beauport may be a game of hide and seek: Look at me! No, look away! I'm gone. Know me- you can never know me. Admire me! Go away! Go home.
Perhaps a guide to Beauport can be found in Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space. Home is body and soul, Bachelard says. It is our first world; it is always a cradle. The "chief benefit of a house" is that it protects dreams, he writes. "The house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace." And, as if he had toured Sleeper's dreaming house, "over picturesqueness in a house can conceal its intimacy."2 Sleeper dazzles us with the magician's chief skill of diverting our attention so he can pull a rabbit out of his hat.
Coming out of Beauport is not like emerging from other historic houses besotted with talk of highboys or the family's hardships. Rather it is like emerging from the movies. You come out into the grounds—outdoor rooms with framed views—blinking, smiling, and remembering your favorite parts.
In some houses each object is a tent stake driven into the ground; each knickknack holds the house and the inhabitants to the earth. Beauport is a boat upon the water. You would never set sail with such an improbable cargo, and yet the place floats.
1 Nancy Curtis and Richard C. Nylander, Beauport: The Sleeper-McCann House (David R. Godine in association with the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, Boston 1990), p. 11. 2 Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Beacon Press, Boston, 1994), pp. 6-7, 12.
Howard Mansfield is the author of several books about preservation.
Gemellion, Artist unknown, Limoges, France, 13th century Champlevé Enamel on Copper, 8 7/8” diameter Collection of The Walters’ Art
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