Baths are very comforting: gentler, calmer than showers. The slow clean. For a while, though, across a patch of nervous books in the mid-twentieth century, baths were troublesome. They were prone to intrusion and disorder. They were too hot, too small, too crowded with litanies of junk: newspapers, cigarettes, alcohol, razors.
Part of the dream of a good bath is its isolation. If someone else does arrive, you can hope that the intrusion is at the very least a sexy one. Hedger and Eden in Willa Cather’s Coming, Aphrodite live in the same apartment block and meet just outside the communal bathroom, but it’s not quite the sensual interaction one might aspire to: “I’ve found his hair in the tub, and I’ve smelled a doggy smell, and now I’ve caught you at it. It’s an outrage!” says Eden, realizing that Hedger washes his English bulldog in their shared tub. Later, it will seem as though Hedger has been trying to move his life into Eden’s, without her noticing; their domestic intermingling unfolds through voyeurism and distrust, two strangers in the forced intimacy of a shared bath.
For Zooey Glass, the titular character of J. D. Salinger’s New Yorker short story of 1957, it’s his mother who comes in and out of the bathroom, leaving Zooey in “his own small craft … listing precariously in the wake”. Zooey’s protests – and he protests often, and loudly – have no effect on his mother, who is pleased to have trapped Zooey so neatly, where she can worry at length about his younger sister’s breakdown. One by one, Zooey’s family’s problems crowd into the bath to join him. The teenage narrator of Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle accidentally invites two strangers in when she is bathing in a tub in the ruined castle’s kitchen. The scene descends into pandemonium, with a dog attacking the strangers and Cassandra having “just covered [her] face with soap, which always makes one feel rather helpless”. She opens her eyes. The soap gets in them. As the book courses on, it’s hard to lose that impression of her, soap-blind and off-guard.
Cassandra manages a cheery warning and is met with a gracious, “Good heavens, I do beg your pardon”. But when she thrusts her arm out through the makeshift curtain of bedsheets protecting the bath from the strangers’ gaze, they are alarmed to find that far from being clean, Cassandra has turned green, having earlier used the tub to dye clothes. Despite her “brain wave” of sitting on a large dinner dish within the tub, the dye stains her, and unfortunately, the dish comes with its own problems. “The gravy runnels”, she tells us, “were a bit uncomfortable.” Zooey is haunted even when his mother leaves, giving the door the “weighty stare … of a privacy lover who, once his privacy has been invaded, doesn’t quite approve when the invader just gets up and leaves”.
That’s the deep-seated problem of twentieth-century baths – they seem to leave you dirtier than you started. Cassandra comes out green; Zooey emerges and comments, “I just took a bath and I’m sweating like a pig”. He spends the rest of the story conspicuously perspiring. In The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood takes a hot bath and feels her problems dissolving. “All that liquor and those sticky kisses I saw and the dirt that settled on my skin on the way back is turning into something pure”, she tells us. It’s not a particularly convincing image. It’s hard not to see her instead submerged in that filth, the bathwater viscous with her own disgust, her eerie calm a matter of having imbibed, rather than drained away, the dirt that she feels steeped in. Later in the novel she will consider suicide, only to change her mind as there is no bathtub in which to attempt it. “I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water”, Esther says. It’s a kind of baptism.