The Art of Lying Down (12 page)

Herman Melville’s
Moby-Dick
describes an instance of bed sharing that most people would happily
pass up. Warned by the innkeeper that another guest will be sharing his bed, Ishmael, a sailor and the narrator, grows increasingly tense as the roommate fails to materialize. “I don’t know how it is, but people like to be private when they are sleeping. And when it comes to sleeping with an unknown stranger, in a strange inn, in a strange town, and that stranger a harpooneer, then your objections indefinitely multiply.” Visions of everything that could possibly happen during the night pass through his mind. As the thought of the stranger’s bed linens prompts an outbreak of itching, he decides to settle down on a wooden bench but then gives up this idea, blows out the candle, and falls into bed. “Whether that mattress was stuffed with corn-cobs or broken crockery, there is no telling, but I rolled about a good deal, and could not sleep for a long time.” Finally he hears heavy steps, and the stranger enters the room. “Such a face! It was of a dark, purplish, yellow color, here and there stuck over with blackish-looking squares.” Just as the terrified Ishmael realizes that this fearful apparition is covered in tattoos, the “wild cannibal” puts out his light and jumps into bed. “I sang out, I could not help it now; and giving a sudden grunt of astonishment he began feeling me.” At some point poor Ishmael manages to doze off, to awake the next morning—what a miracle!—with the cannibal Queequeg’s arm around him “in the most loving and affectionate manner.”
Ishmael remarks: “You had almost thought I had been his wife.”

Every once in a while, members of Europe’s and North America’s highly individualized cultures, whose etiquette normally calls for avoiding physical contact with strangers, engage in communal sleeping. Under pleasant circumstances, these episodes seem less like breaches of taboo than like relics handed down from the past, awash in the romanticism of youthful camping trips and even somehow appealing. Alpine huts, with their closely packed mattresses for skiers or hikers, come to mind. Conversations fueled by beer or mulled wine can last far into the night there. In certain train compartments, sometimes at the conductor’s signal, the seats are folded out to create a sleeping area that fills the entire space. Places like these bring together people who otherwise have nothing to do with one another and who continue on their different ways once the encounter is over. According to her memoirs, railroad sleeping cars were also a favorite field of operation for the French writer Catherine Millet, one of the most famous present-day pioneers of female promiscuity.

The question of whether children should sleep in a bed with adults evokes the disturbing practice of gerocomy, a curiosity of medical history that stretches back into antiquity and was publicized in England in John Floyer’s
Medicina Gerocomic, or the
Galenic Art of Preserving Old Men’s Healths Explain’d
(1727). The presence of one or more youthful bodies, the theory goes, could breathe new life into an old, worn-out one. The idea that the child would lose a corresponding amount of vitality does not appear to have been a concern. Of course, the step from such practices to sexual temptation and abuse was a small one. It seems possible, if not likely, that gerocomical “treatments” were just a pretext for sexual acts that people did not discuss directly.

We’ll never know whether all these welcome or unwelcome encounters actually took place or are just the products of active literary imaginations. But other humans are not the only beings that can disrupt our reclining and sleeping time. The most significant annoyances—bedbugs—are especially active in summer and betray their presence with their nauseatingly sweet smell. Otherwise known as
Cimex lectularius
, they nest in mattresses, crawl out at night, and bite those sleeping there, leaving traces of their saliva, which causes itching and welts. At least there’s one small comfort: they don’t transmit disease.

The revolutions in how people lived during the nineteenth century were so fundamental and extensive that they affected nearly everything, including how we lie down. On the one hand, opportunities for workers to recline were limited to strictly defined times and places, subjecting relaxation to a rigid system of discipline. On the other hand, tireless efforts were devoted to using new technology to optimize the act of lying down and precisely track the postures of those performing it.

Torture or medicine? James K. Casey’s “Dormant Balance”

The key question was how to relieve the back without having to lie completely flat. This search for practical hybrid forms of sitting and lying was motivated by an epidemic of back pain, as well as by the desire to help bedridden individuals whose backs suffered from constantly lying down. Doctors experimented
enthusiastically with mechanical devices in the hope of curing back problems. In 1828, one James K. Casey of New York was granted a patent for a frame that could smoothly lower a patient from a vertical to a horizontal position without any effort on his or her part. Casey called his invention the Dormant Balance, and he promised that if the patient was willing to undergo this procedure two to three times per day, it could cure a crooked back. Those who wanted to spend more time horizontally were advised to use a soft mattress or other support. If we believe the illustrations that accompanied Casey’s patent application, patients could relax and even read throughout this treatment.

The predecessors to flexible reclining furniture were “bed machines” with mattresses divided into separate sections for the back, thighs, and lower legs. Originally, they were joined with cumbersome wooden hinges, but by the late nineteenth century models with metal hinges had appeared. The same design principle was applied to adjustable seats in trains, hair salons, and dental practices, as well as operating tables. The designer’s biggest challenge was enabling a smooth transition from sitting to lying down and back again. A surgical chair, for example, needed to accommodate all possible positions between sitting upright and lying flat. In one 1889 model, the surface consists of seven components:
a support for the head and feet, two movable armrests, and the main area itself, divided into four parts. Advertising for a metal lounge chair claimed that it was capable of seventy different positions. A mechanized reclining chair made an appearance in 1893 at the Chicago world’s fair, where its manufacturer, the Marks Adjustable Folding Chair Co., enthusiastically announced, “It combines in one a handsome Parlor, Library, Smoking and Reclining chair, a perfect Lounge and a full-length Bed, and is altogether the
Best Chair in the ‘Wide, Wide World.’
 ” Thanks to such imaginative designs, chairs not only provided padded places to sit but also made a kind of halfhorizontal floating possible. A new understanding of the idiosyncrasies of sitting, lying down, and every stage in between was fueled in large part by anatomical knowledge of the hundreds of muscles involved.

A descendant of these mechanical marvels is the La-Z-Boy recliner. An old-fashioned-looking easy chair that can rotate and lean back, it has maintained its popularity for generations. Like nothing before them, these versatile lounging devices show just how much furniture belongs to us “like our skin,” as the writer Hajo Eickhoff once wrote. “They form our boundary. They assume the functions of extended arms and legs, with which they complete us, and in so doing they develop typical human characteristics that we believe originate in their own being.”

In addition to new technologies and materials, the nineteenth century brought a new way of seeing that triggered new forms and furniture. Movement—whether of humans, birds, or other animals—had fascinated scientists and scholars since antiquity, but never before had the laws of movement been pursued with such obsession. Eadweard J. Muybridge (1830–1904) is best known for positioning cameras at intervals and using them to photograph athletes and horses in motion. During an 1887 experiment in California, he turned his lens on clothed and nude human subjects engaged in lying down in bed or getting up again. Measured against the technical standards of the day, Muybridge’s stop-motion photos represented a perceptual revolution; for the first time it was possible to see an everyday movement normally hidden from view and break it down into its separate steps.

Multifunctional furniture patented in the United States offered the middle class comfort without overloading people’s typically small houses with heavy conventional pieces. A single item could serve as a chair, sofa, bed, and even cabinet. Beds were available that their owners could pivot horizontally and vertically, flip up, or even fold together entirely—a range of metamorphoses to offer the best possible position for any situation and the best use of limited space. One late manifestation of this trend, steel-frame sofas that turn into beds, is still common.

Sleeping in motion: sleeping car of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company from 1847

Does this pillow really help? Portable patented “pillow” for railroad travel

Using space optimally was an urgent issue when it came to sleeping cars on trains, and these modes of transportation proved to be a fruitful area for adjustable reclining. To develop their creations, engineers and designers drew on existing approaches in ship’s cabins. Early versions left a lot to be desired in terms of comfort: occupants of the top berth were so close to the ceiling that they couldn’t sit up, while those below were practically on the floor, where they could observe the feet of passersby up close. The legendary George M. Pullman obtained a patent for a smokers’ sleeping car for
gentlemen and a nonsmokers’ counterpart for ladies. In the original version, bed compartments were hung from the ceiling, but other solutions soon appeared. Pullman’s competitor Theodore T. Woodruff came up with a seating bank with a backrest that could be lowered to create two cots. Sleeping cars were exported from the United States to Europe, the original home of the railroad, in 1875. Soon “boudoir trains” were traveling between cities like Vienna and Munich. One inventive soul even developed a small portable box that travelers could easily convert into a support for the head and upper body. It doesn’t seem to have caught on.