At the outset of Chapter II, the author expounds directly about De Selby’s theories for the first time. In particular, his views on residential architecture are discussed. These views are best exemplified in illustrations in De Selby’s Country Album of two types of houses: one with a roof and walls of loose tarpaulins that roll down from the gutters around large doors and windows, and another with one wall facing the prevailing wind and tarpaulins providing the remaining structure including the roof. These homes are built on masonry but surrounded by latrines.
You see, De Selby blames houses and living indoors generally for mankinds current softness and dissolution, so it seems he wants to make shelter as thin and rudimentary as possible.Â
It is presumed these designs for houses are risible, but they actually would not be so bad in the right climate. In southern Greece or other Mediterranean climes, perhaps southern California or Chile, such houses would probably suffice as shelter, provided the tarpaulins could be made taught and were opaque.
But in De Selby’s drawings, the tarps are loose and flowing, making the houses resemble “a foundered sailing-ship.” (p. 21) Thus, it is clear that De Selby’s tent-houses would scarcely be shelter at all in northern Europe, whence he and his critics hail. (To say nothing of the ill health-effects of the latrine moats surrounding his houses.) Accordingly, we see a common view of De Selby in which he is hailed as a genius but nearly all his ideas are explained as unfortunate examples of momentarily lapses of his geniusness.Â
This may seem a familiar human tendency, for example, in politics:
President Trump is a compassionate guy, it just so happens that everything he says evidences a complete lack of compassion or sympathy, for reasons not under his control and against which he has no defense.
Or, in defending your best friend to your wife:
Honey, I know Dan got arrested for disorderly conduct at our wedding, and did cocaine at our reception, and has huge gambling debts, and is unemployed, and dumped his last girlfriend for no reason after eight years, and may have possibly stolen some stuff last time he stayed here, but deep down, he’s really a good guy.
And so in this case, where De Selby’s genius is evidenced in the fact that he apparently has legions of intellectuals devoting their lives to analyzing and chronicling everything he ever wrote and did, while spending much of that effort explaining why most all of those writings and doings were not actually spectacularly wrong or insane. It’s absurd and quite funny. And the humor of it only grows as the author delves further into De Selbyiana throughout the book, and the inanity of De Selby and his commentators is taken to even greater extremes.
We are introduced here to the first of De Selby’s comentators by name, La Fournier, a French intellectual whose work on De Selby is entitled L’Engime de l'Occident. He attributes the “regrettable lapse” of De Selby’s work on houses to his having later discovered his own doodles and then sought to explain them in a way that accounted for his estimation of his own genius. (pp. 21-22)
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