Walking New York: Reflections of American Writers from Walt Whitman to Teju Cole 9780823263172

Citation preview

WALKING NEW YORK

This page intentionally left blank

WALKING NEW YORK REFLECTIONS OF AMERICAN WRITERS FROM WALT WHITMAN TO TEJU COLE

STEPHEN MILLER

Empire State Editions An imprint of Fordham University Press

New York

2015

Copyright © 2015 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means— electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other— except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the per sistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the publisher. Printed in the United States of America 17 16 15

5 4 3 2 1

First edition

In memory of my grandparents Meyer and Rose Groper, who came to New York from Poland and Romania around the turn of the twentieth century

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

List of Maps

ix

Preface

xi

Acknowledgments

xix

1

Reflections on Walking: From Plato to Baudelaire

2

Britons Visiting New York: Fanny Trollope, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens

10

3

Walt Whitman: Magnetic Mannahatta

23

4

Herman Melville: Lost in the City

43

5

William Dean Howells: Boston vs. New York

59

6

Jacob Riis: Walking for Reform

75

7

Henry James: What to Make of the Bristling City

94

8

Stephen Crane: Adventures in Poverty

113

9

Theodore Dreiser: From Broadway to the Bowery

127

10

James Weldon Johnson: A Black Man in Manhattan

145

11

Alfred Kazin: Reveries of a Solitary Walker

162

12

Elizabeth Hardwick: West Side Stories

178

1

viii 13 14

Contents

Colson Whitehead and Teju Cole: Disoriented, Deracinated, Exhilarated

195

The Synthetic Sublime

205

Notes

211

Bibliography

235

Index

243

Maps

Manhattan, from the Battery to 23rd Street

24

Manhattan, from Houston Street to 57th Street

58

Manhattan, from 14th Street to 72nd Street

112

Manhattan, from 65th Street to 125th Street

144

ix

This page intentionally left blank

Preface

Manhattan’s streets I saunter’d pondering

M

—Walt Whitman

any novelists, poets, and essayists have liked to walk in New York. “What I really like to do is wander aimlessly in the city,” writes Joseph Mitchell in an unfi nished memoir. “I like to walk the streets by day and by night.” Mitchell, who died in 1996, wrote essays about the people he met on his walks, from fishermen and bartenders to gypsies and eccentric writers. In “New York, Luminous,” André Aciman writes that sometimes “on impulse” he takes a long walk. Writing about one such walk, Aciman hopes “to draw something new from the city, though I don’t know what it is yet.”1 Many people who are not writers, of course, have liked to walk in New York. In articles about America’s most walkable cities, New York is often at the top of the list. “My favorite thing about Manhattan is walking everywhere,” the comedian Mike Birbiglia told a New York Times interviewer. New York offers a wide variety of walking tours. Jonathan R. Wynn, who has written a study of tour guides in New York, reckons the city has 1,780 licensed walking tour guides.2 There are innumerable books about walking tours in New York. Many are idiosyncratic tours. Empire City (2002), an anthology of writing about New York, includes an essay by Lee Stringer, “Down and Out and Up Again: Walking Freestyle Through the Upper East Side and Sleeping xi

xii

Preface

Rough in Central Park.” It is from his book Time Out Book of New York Walks, which describes twenty-three walks one can take in the city. Many tour books focus on a writer or painter who lived in New York— for example, Andy Warhol’s New York City: Four Walks, Uptown to Downtown.3 On the Internet, I found a tour called “Ghost Doctors’ Ghost Tours of New York.” This book is in some ways a verbal walking tour of New York. The city is seen through the eyes of several British writers and twelve American writers: Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, William Dean Howells, Jacob Riis, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, James Weldon Johnson, Alfred Kazin, Elizabeth Hardwick, Colson Whitehead, and Teju Cole. Their New York is mainly Manhattan. Only Whitman and Kazin write about walks in other boroughs, such as Brooklyn and Queens. Many observers talk about the pleasures of walking in New York, but the writers I discuss often were irritated and disturbed by what they saw on their walks. Howells disliked walking in a city that was crowded, dirty, noisy, and ugly. Nevertheless, Howells continued to take long walks in New York, a city that fascinated him, even though he loathed it at times. Some American writers have said that New York overwhelms the imagination and numbs the mind. Returning to New York after an absence of two decades, Henry James was “agreeably baffled” by the city. In his journals, Alfred Kazin asks, “O New York, New York, carousel and carnival of the too-rich, busy, full life, how can one ever do justice to your insane human fullness?” Writing about his walks around Manhattan’s waterfront, Phillip Lopate confesses, “my head grew dizzy from absorbing impressions.”4 And in Paul Auster’s City of Glass (1985), Quinn, the main character, is bewildered when he walks in New York. “New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know its neighborhoods and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost.” If New York has been described as mentally numbing, even disorienting, it has also been described as something special, even magical. In 1807, Washington Irving wrote that “the antient [sic] and venerable city of Gotham [was] renowned and delectable, the best of all possible cities.”5 In The Great Gatsby (1925), Nick Carraway, the fi rst-person narrator, observes, “The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city

Preface

xiii

seen for the fi rst time, in its fi rst wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.” Joan Didion, who grew up in Sacramento, writes that “New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.”6 Didion moved to New York in 1956. In 1964, she left for Los Angeles, but she moved back to New York in 2005. Some American writers have not been charmed by New York. “I don’t like the city better, the more I see it, but worse,” Thoreau said. “I am ashamed of my eyes that behold it. It is a thousand times meaner than I could have imagined. . . . The pigs in the street are the most respectable part of the population.” Thoreau did not like to walk in any city. “When we walk,” he says, “we naturally go to the fields and woods.” Many Americans would agree. “There is a long-standing distrust of cities and of urban life in the United States,” notes Ray Hutchinson, the editor of The Encyclopedia of Urban Studies.7 Some American writers have disliked New York because of its large immigrant population. The novelist Hamlin Garland said that New York “is too near London. It is no longer American.” He added, “I might speculate upon the influence of the Irish, and Jews and Italians upon New York and Boston.” 8 In Sinclair Lewis’s novel Dodsworth (1929), the main character finds New Yorkers rude and overbearing. “People running with suit-cases nicked his legs, small active Jews caromed into him . . . a surf of sweaty undistinguishable people swept over him.” Does he dislike New Yorkers in part because many of them are Jewish? At the time he was writing roughly one out of every four New Yorkers was Jewish. Toward the end of the novel, another character says: “Oh, but New York—Self-conscious playing at internationalism! Russian Jews in London clothes going to Italian restaurants with Greek waiters and African music! One hundred per cent mongrels! . . . And never, day or night or dawn, any escape from the sound of the Elevated! New York—no.” Jean-Paul Sartre, who visited New York in 1946, hated it. In “Manhattan: The Great American Desert,” he says that as soon as he arrived he suffered from “le mal de New York.” According to Andy Martin, Sartre “suffered stubbornly from a sense of disorientation.” He was determined to dislike everything about capitalist America, where, he said, people are being treated as things. He preferred to get around New York by car.9 On the way to Hollywood in January 1947, Evelyn Waugh stayed in New York for a few days. He wrote a friend that the skyscrapers were nothing but “great booby boxes . . . absolutely negligible in everything

xiv

Preface

except bulk.” He said hell was “sitting through all eternity in a traffic block listening to the conversation of a New York taxi driver.”10 (One can reasonably assume that Waugh did very little walking in New York.) And in a sonnet entitled “New York City,” John Updike calls New York “This Pandemonium.” The last two lines of the poem are: “this hell holds sacred crevices where lone / lost spirits preen and call their pit a throne.”11 Updike implies that New York is fi lled with lonely, delusional solipsists. In his letters, Saul Bellow often criticizes New York. In June 1955, he wrote, “I couldn’t agree more about Manhattan and its miseries, and I will get out of here soon.” A year later Bellow published Seize the Day (1956), a novel that depicts the city as a phantasmagoric place fi lled with deracinated and solipsistic people. Fourteen years later, in “New York: World-Famous Impossibility,” Bellow thundered: “New York is stirring, insupportable, agitated, ungovernable, demonic.” According to Bellow, “no single individual can judge it adequately,” yet he does judge the city’s intellectual life. “New York is now the business center of American culture, the amusement or frivolity center. . . . It has no independent and original intellectual life.” This is a view that many observers would disagree with. The art critic Hilton Kramer said in 1977 that “New York is still the cosmopolitan cultural center of this country.”12 Three decades earlier, E. B. White had also described New York as the cosmopolitan cultural center of America. In “Here Is New York,” published in 1949, he speaks of the New Yorker’s “sense of belonging to something unique, cosmopolitan, mighty, and unparalleled.” According to White, New York will always be a magnet city for artists and writers. “The city is always full of young worshipful beginners—young actors, young aspiring poets, ballerinas, painters, reporters, singers.”13 New York, White says, has also been a magnet city for foreigners. “The collision and the intermingling of these millions of foreign-born people representing so many races, creeds, and nationalities make New York a permanent exhibit of the phenomenon of one world.”14 The “settlers,” as White calls them, come to New York “in quest of something.” They give the city its energy. Describing these settlers, White writes in a sentimental vein. “Whether it is a farmer arriving from Italy to set up a small grocery store in a slum . . . or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain his heart, it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of fi rst love.”15 In 1957, White, who grew up in

Preface

xv

the close-in suburb of Mount Vernon, left New York, moving to a small town in Maine, but he returned to the city frequently. In “The Synthetic Sublime,” written fi fty years after E. B. White’s essay, the novelist and essayist Cynthia Ozick, who grew up in the Bronx, agrees with White that New York will always be a magnet city for writers.16 She lists twenty-seven writers who lived in the vicinity of Greenwich Village. Because many novelists and poets are now connected with a university, New York probably has declined as a magnet for writers. Yet writers continue to be drawn to New York. The Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk lives in New York. So does the Australian novelist Peter Carey, the English novelist Martin Amis, and the Irish novelist Colm Tóibín. “The international language is now American English,” the critic Harold Bloom says, “and New York City is therefore the literary place-of-places.”17 A character in John Dos Passos’s novel Manhattan Transfer (1925) says, “This is certainly the city for everyone being from somewhere else.” In the same year Manhattan Transfer was published, Theodore Dreiser said: “Where can you find a more cosmopolitan city than New York?”18 Yet, some newcomers to New York have become disenchanted with the city. In 1925, John Steinbeck came to New York from California, but a construction job left him little time or energy to write. “My knowledge of the city was blurred,” he wrote in 1943. He remembers “the roar of the subway, climbing three fl ights to a room with dirty green walls, [and] falling into bed half-washed.” Nevertheless, he returned to New York in 1941 and lived there until his death in 1968. The poet Hart Crane, who came to New York in 1917 from Ohio, was at first exhilarated by the city, but a few years later he wanted to leave New York. “The N.Y. life is too taxing,” he wrote in 1923. “New York takes such a lot from you that you have to save all you can of yourself or you simply give out.”19 Crane left New York for Mexico in 1930, and on a voyage back to New York two years later, he committed suicide by jumping overboard. Of the writers I discuss in this book, only Herman Melville, Henry James, and Colson Whitehead were native New Yorkers. Melville lived in New York until his father’s business collapsed—he was eleven at the time— and the family moved to Albany. Soon after Melville married, he returned to New York, but three years later he moved to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he stayed for thirteen years. He returned to New York permanently in 1863. James also was a native New Yorker, but his

xvi

Preface

early childhood was spent in England and France and in Albany. His parents moved back to New York when he was four. When he was twelve his parents left New York for Europe. He lived in New York again in 1875, after he published his fi rst novel, Roderick Hudson. He moved to Eu rope permanently in November 1875, when he was thirty-two. In 1904, he visited New York after an absence of two decades. Whitehead grew up in Manhattan but now lives in Brooklyn. Alfred Kazin did not think of himself as a native New Yorker, though he grew up in Brownsville, a poor Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. For him New York was Manhattan, a world elsewhere. Six writers discussed in this book came to New York from farther afield. William Dean Howells came from Ohio (he moved to New York after living in Boston), Stephen Crane from New Jersey, Theodore Dreiser from Indiana, James Weldon Johnson from Florida, Elizabeth Hardwick from Kentucky. Walt Whitman came from West Hills, Long Island, which is about thirty-five miles from Manhattan. Two writers are immigrants: Jacob Riis from Denmark and Teju Cole from Nigeria. I am a native New Yorker. I was born in Manhattan and raised in the Bronx, but I have not lived in the city since the mid-1960s. I have visited New York frequently over the years because my two daughters lived there for more than a decade, one in Brooklyn, the other in Manhattan. They no longer live in New York, but every year I spend a few days in the city. According to an ex–New Yorker, “there is a collective attitude that permeates the soul of all New Yorkers, a kind of cosmopolitan parochialism, if you will, that says no matter where we end up, New York will always be our home.”20 I do not think of New York as my home, but I feel a deeper attachment to New York than I feel to any other American city. I did not decide to write this book because of my affection for New York; I decided to write it because so many American writers have described their walks in New York, which, Ginia Bellafante says, “has been a compelling character in American letters.” Bellafante runs the New York Times Big City Book Club, an online discussion group about books “in which the city features centrally.” Though we associate the American Renaissance with Boston (or Concord), Harold Bloom notes that “it is equally at home in the New York City of Whitman, Melville, and the burgeoning James family.”21

Preface

xvii

In Writing New York: A Literary Anthology (1998), Phillip Lopate notes that “few cities have inspired as much great writing as New York.” In Our New York (1989) Alfred Kazin in turn says, “New York may very well be the biggest subject for American literature in our century.”22 I could have discussed at least a dozen other writers who were walkers in the city, but doing so would have made this work longwinded and repetitive. The twelve American writers I discuss were chosen for two reasons: they interested me, and they offered a distinctive take on the city. Several writers discuss issues that remain current—immigration, the culture of Wall Street, the regulation of capitalism—but this work focuses on writers, not issues. In “The Daydreamers,” Robert Pinsky writes, “All day all over the city every person / Wanders a different city. . . .”23 Each writer I discuss wanders a different city.

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgments

I

want to thank the following people for helpful advice: Maria Ascher, Barbara Surovell, Jeff Field, Tony Kaufman, and Steve Klaidman. I am grateful to my wife, Eva Barczay, for hours of conversation about the writers I discuss. I appreciate the comments of the three reviewers of the manuscript, which were very helpful. I also am grateful to Gregory McNamee, who edited the book. His suggestions were invaluable. I also want to thank Eric Newman of Fordham University Press for his help in preparing the manuscript for publication. This work includes four maps of different parts of Manhattan, which were supplied by Creative Force Maps. Parts of this book, in different form, appeared in the New Criterion and the Sewanee Review.

xix

This page intentionally left blank

1

Reflections on Walking From Plato to Baudelaire

I

n 2008, Geoff Nicholson published a book called The Lost Art of Walking. Walking may indeed be a lost art for most people who live in advanced industrial societies, yet in recent years many writers have celebrated it. Journalists who cover health issues often talk about the mental and physical benefits of a twenty-minute daily walk, and several writers have argued that a long walk can be a transforming experience— that walking offers psychological and even spiritual rewards. In The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (2012), Robert Macfarlane says that walking may trigger distinctive “ways of feeling, being and knowing.” And in a recent New Yorker cartoon, a dog who is also a psychiatrist asks a patient lying on a couch: “Have you tried taking long walks?”1 Before the advent of mass transit and the mass production of automobiles, walking was a necessity for most people, not a choice. In most parts of the world, the rural poor still trudge in the fields and tramp along the roads. A reviewer of The Old Ways says: “Most people walk not for romance or recreation or enlightenment; they walk because they’re too poor to do otherwise.”2 Just so, during the Depression, many Britons walked in search of employment. In As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969) Laurie Lee says: “Among them were carpenters, clerks, engineers from the Midlands; many had been on the road for months, walking up and down the country in a maze of jobless refusals, the treadmill of the mid-Thirties.”3 People have gone on long walks not only in search of work but also for religious reasons. Religious pilgrimages, which often require walking, 1

2

Reflections on Walking

still remain popular. Macfarlane mentions Irish Catholics in Galway who go on barefoot pilgrimages. The most popu lar contemporary European pilgrimage may be El Camino, or the Way of Saint James, a pilgrimage often done on foot (at least part of the way) to Santiago de Compostela, where the Church of San Diego/Saint James is located. There are also quasi-political pilgrimages—what Rebecca Solnit calls “inspired walking.” The most famous may be Mahatma Gandhi’s walk in 1930 to protest British rule. He and seventy-eight followers walked 240 miles in twenty-three days. This walk may have inspired many walks in the 1960s, including the five-day, fi fty-four-mile walk in March 1965 by Martin Luther King Jr. and civil rights activists from Selma to Montgomery (in Alabama) to protest segregation. In 1970, the March of Dimes held the first Walkathon. National Public Radio recently discussed the life of a woman named Mildred Norman, a selfdescribed “peace pilgrim” who spent more than twenty years on the road, walking for peace.4 Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the wealthy and the powerful usually traveled on horseback or in a horse-drawn vehicle. Yet, aristocrats occasionally chose to go for a walk. For centuries in Mediterranean countries and their colonies, families and friends have strolled at dusk in the plazas of towns and cities— a custom called the paseo in Spain, the passeggiata in Italy. Writing about his visit to Rome in 1581, Montaigne says: “the commonest exercise of the Romans is to promenade through the streets; and ordinarily the enterprise of leaving the house is undertaken solely to go from street to street, without having any place in mind to stop at.”5 Until the eighteenth century, few writers wrote about the pleasures of walking in either the country or the city. In the Vintage Book of Walking there is only one citation from an ancient Greek writer, namely Xenophon. It describes a long march through the Middle East by troops under the command of the Persian emperor Cyrus. Should a forced march be considered a walk? We do know that some ancient Athenians enjoyed walking in the countryside. In Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, the title character tells Socrates, “I am going for a walk outside the city walls. . . . You see, I’m keeping in mind the advice of our mutual friend Acumenus, who says it’s more refreshing to walk along country roads than city streets.”6 Socrates seems to agree with Phaedrus. “He is quite right, too, my friend.” Yet later in the dialogue Phaedrus tells Socrates: “As far as I can tell, you never even set foot beyond the city walls.” Socrates admits that

From Plato to Baudelaire

3

he doesn’t like to walk in the country. “Forgive me, my friend. I am devoted to learning; landscapes and trees have nothing to teach me— only the people in the city can do that.” He is walking outside of the city now because Phaedrus has shown him “the leaves of a book containing a speech.” 7 Walking in Athens gave Socrates the opportunity to buttonhole people in order to engage them in a conversation about the ideas they held. In the Apology he says, “God has assigned me to this city, as if to a large thoroughbred horse which because of its great size is inclined to be lazy and needs the stimulation of some stinging fly. It seems to me that God has attached me to this city to perform the office of such a fly; and all day long I never cease to settle here, there, and everywhere, rousing, persuading, reproving every one of you.”8 Since ancient times, most writers have agreed with Phaedrus that it is more pleasurable to walk in the country than in the city. Walking in Rome, Juvenal says, is unpleasant and dangerous. The streets are crowded and dirty, and you may be brained by a falling tile or by “cracked or leaky vessels / tossed out of windows.” At night you may be accosted by a drunken bully who is intent on beating you up, or knifed by “some street-apache.”9 In the sixteenth century, the revival of interest in the ancient world turned Rome into a tourist attraction. Rome’s ruins, Montaigne says, are testimony “to that infi nite greatness which so many centuries, so many conflagrations, and all the many conspiracies of the world to ruin it had not been able to extinguish completely.”10 (Montaigne, though, may have explored Rome’s ruins on horseback more than on foot.) Joseph Addison, the eighteenth-century English essayist, walked in many Italian cities because he wanted to see famous historical sites, which he wrote about in a popu lar travel book, Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (1705). Addison especially enjoyed walking in Rome, which he called “the pleasantest City I have yet seen. . . . There are Buildings the most magnificent in the world, and Ruins [even] more magnificent than they. One can scarce hear the name of a Hill or a river near it that does not bring to mind a piece of a Classic Authour.”11 Walking in London and the British Countryside Addison is better known for his essays about London, which appeared in the Spectator, an im mensely popular journal he published with Richard Steele along with a handful of other contributors. The Spectator was

4

Reflections on Walking

a great advertisement for walking in London. In the first issue of March 1, 1711, written by Addison, Mr. Spectator (the pen name of all the contributors) remarks that he usually spends his days walking around London, mostly going to coffeehouses (he mentions six) and theaters (he mentions two). “In short, wher- ever I see a Cluster of People I always mix with them.” He doesn’t do much talking; he is an observer, “a Spectator of Mankind.”12 Mr. Spectator may be the first flâneur, though the French word did not come into use until the nineteenth century, fi rst appearing in English in 1854. A fl âneur, the Oxford English Dictionary says, is “a lounger or saunterer, an idle ‘man about town.’ ” The flâneur is an aimless stroller rather than a walker with a destination, and in that sense Mr. Spectator, who lives on an inheritance, is a stroller around London. He visits many places, including Vauxhall Gardens, where Londoners walked, met friends, dined, listened to music, and picked up prostitutes. He also visits the Royal Exchange, a two-level shopping mall built in 1669 around a great courtyard. “There is no Place in the Town which I so much love to frequent as the Royal Exchange.” He likes this “grand scene of Business” because it is a cosmopolitan place where a “Body of Men [are] thriving in their own private Fortunes, and at the same time promoting the Publick Stock.”13 In an essay written by Steele, Mr. Spectator describes a day spent walking around London. In the early morning he goes to the market at Covent Garden: “I could not believe any Place more entertaining than Covent-Garden; where I strolled from one Fruit Shop to another, with Crowds of agreeable young Women around me, who were purchasing Fruit for their respective Families.”14 Later in the day he goes to the Royal Exchange, where he enjoys looking at pretty women buying or selling things. In the evening he goes to Will’s, a famous coffeehouse that John Dryden had frequented. Though many eighteenth-century British writers read and praised the Spectator, most did not agree with Addison that walking in London was enjoyable. In Trivia, Or the Art of Walking the Streets in London (1716), the poet and playwright John Gay gives advice about “How to walk clean by Day, and safe by Night.” (In Latin, trivia means a crossroad where three roads join; London had many such intersections.) According to Gay, London was a fi lthy, noisy, and dangerous place. Its streets contained many disgusting things, including dead cats and rats, so it was important “to keep [to] the wall” while walking. Gay warns about walking in London at night. There are thieves lurking everywhere; and

From Plato to Baudelaire

5

there are prostitutes who steal your money while you’re sleeping. One stanza is entitled “How to know a Whore.”15 Gay also argues that “luxury,” which roughly means commercial expansion, has made walking in London hazardous because it has increased the number of sedan chairs and carriages. This lends credence to Rebecca Solnit’s observation that “urban walking has always been a [shady] business, easily turning into soliciting, cruising, promenading, shopping, rioting, protesting, skulking, loitering, and other activities that, however enjoyable, hardly have the high moral tone of nature appreciation.”16 The novelist Tobias Smollett agrees with Gay that walking in London could be unpleasant and even dangerous. According to Matthew Bramble, the main character in Humphrey Clinker (1771), Londoners are madmen who are “seen every where rambling, riding, rolling, rushing, jostling, mixing, bouncing, cracking and crashing in one vile ferment of stupidity and corruption—All is tumult and hurry; one would imagine they were impelled by some disorder of the brain, that will not suffer them to be at rest. . . . The foot-passengers run along as if they were pursued by bailiffs.” Yet walking in London found a few champions. Writing to his friend William Wordsworth, the essayist Charles Lamb remarked, “London Streets and faces cheer me inexpressibly.” Lamb enjoyed “night-walks about her crowded streets,” where he saw “the Lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street, the innumerable trades, tradesmen and customers, coaches, waggons [sic], playhouses, all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden.” He was not interested in nature. “I don’t much care if I never see a mountain in my life.” When he was living in the suburb of Edmonton, he enjoyed walking toward London. “I walk 9 or 10 miles a day alway [sic] up the road, dear Londonwards. Fields, flowers, birds, & green lanes I have no heart for.”17 The early twentieth-century essayist Max Beerbohm was irritated by what he called “walkmongers,” people who insisted on going for a walk in the country: “Whenever I was with friends in the country, I knew that at any moment . . . some man might suddenly say ‘Come out for a walk!’ in that sharp imperative tone which he would not dream of using in any other connexion. People seem to think there is something inherently noble and virtuous about going out for a walk.”18 And Virginia Woolf, Leslie Stephen’s daughter, swam against the current insofar as she wrote about the pleasures of walking in London. “The greatest pleasure of town life in winter . . . [is] rambling the streets of London.” A few paragraphs later, she exclaims: “How beautiful a London street is

6

Reflections on Walking

[in winter] . . . with its islands of light, and its long groves of darkness.” Woolf is exhilarated by being part of a crowd: “As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of the vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room.”19 Still, in Britain and the United States, the literature of walking has been dominated by those who like to walk in the country. Leslie Stephen, a leading Victorian essayist and renowned walker, echoes the thoughts of most walking enthusiasts when he writes, “Walking is primitive and simple; it brings us into contact with mother earth and unsophisticated nature.”20 Reviewing a biography of the English poet Edward Thomas, the literary critic Helen Vendler takes it for granted that only a walk in the country lifts the spirits. “Thomas was a compulsive walker (especially during the periods of ner vous energy succeeding months of low spirits), and he loved the natural world, from clouds to birds.”21 Poets and essayists have long exalted the pleasures of walking in amoena loca, pleasant places— a park, say, or a garden, or a rural path. In The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton writes of walking “amongst orchards, gardens, bowers, mounts, and arbours, artificial wildernesses, green thickets, arches, groves, lawns, rivulets, fountains, and such-like pleasant places.”22 In the eighteenth century, many British writers discussed the pleasures of walking in the country. Addison wrote about walking not only in London but also in the countryside, especially in mountainous areas. When we view “huge Heaps of Mountains, [and] high Rocks and Precipices,” Addison says, we are “flung into a pleasing Astonishment at such unbounded Views, and feel a delightful Stillness and Amazement in the Soul at the Apprehension of them.”23 In his Guide to the Lakes (1835), Wordsworth writes, “A stranger to mountain imagery naturally on his first arrival looks out for sublimity in every object that admits of it.”24 One could view a sublime mountain from a carriage, but most nature writers were prodigious walkers. The letters of the poet Thomas Gray, who called London a “tiresome, dull place,” are fi lled with accounts of walking tours he took in the Alps, the Scottish Highlands, and the Lake District.25 And the nineteenthcentury English essayist William Hazlitt took a similarly dim view of London: “I go out of town [London] in order to forget the town and all that is in it.” A walk in the country is another matter: “Give me the

From Plato to Baudelaire

7

clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours’ march to dinner. . . . I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy.”26 The Crowds of Paris Jean-Jacques Rousseau loved to walk in the country. In the posthumously published Confessions (1781), he claims that walking stimulates thinking: “The sight of the countryside, the succession of pleasant views, the open air, a sound appetite, and the good health I gain by walking . . . all these serve to free my spirit, to lend a greater boldness to my thinking.”27 But Rousseau disliked walking in Paris. In Reveries of the Solitary Walker (1782), he recounts that he walked in Paris only in order to get out of Paris. “I live in the middle of Paris. When I leave my home I long for solitude and the country, but they are so far away that before I can breathe freely I have to encounter a thousand things that oppress my heart, and half the day goes by in anguish before I reach the refuge I am looking for. . . . As soon as I am under the trees and surrounded by greenery, I feel as if I were in the earthly paradise and experience an inward pleasure as intense as if I were the happiest of men.”28 By contrast, Charles Baudelaire—who once translated Poe’s short story “The Man of the Crowd,” which is set in London—enjoyed walking in crowds. To be lost in a crowd, Baudelaire argues, is intoxicating. “The solitary and pensive stroller finds this universal communion extraordinarily intoxicating. . . . He makes his own all the professions, all the joys, and all the sufferings that chance presents to him.” In another work Baudelaire speaks of “the religious intoxication [ivresse] of great cities.” According to Walter Benjamin, Baudelaire “speaks of a man who plunges into the crowd as into a reservoir of electric energy.”29 Spleen de Paris, a section of The Flowers of Evil, was originally entitled The Solitary Walker. Baudelaire had no interest in nature. When a writer asked Baudelaire for verses about nature, he replied: “But you know perfectly well that I can’t become sentimental about vegetation and that my soul rebels against that strange new religion [of nature worship]. . . . I have always thought . . . that there was something irritating and impudent about Nature in its fresh and rampant state.” In an essay praising makeup, Baudelaire argues that nature “is a bad counselor in matters of ethics.”30

8

Reflections on Walking

Baudelaire once wrote to a friend, “I detest the countryside, particularly in good weather. . . . Ah! speak to me of those everchanging Pa ri sian skies that laugh or cry according to the wind.” Yet he also claimed that he hated Paris. In a prose poem, he writes, “Horrible life! Horrible city!” In 1858 he wrote a friend about his desire to leave “that cursed city where I’ve suffered so much, and where I’ve wasted so much time.”31 In a similar mood, Baudelaire once confessed that he wished to live in Honfleur, the Normandy town where his mother lived, but his biographer doubts that Baudelaire really meant what he said: “The inveterate lover of Paris streets was incapable of leading a life of blessed retirement. When he decided, in May 1860, that he wanted to see his mother again, he first tried to organize a visit for her to Paris.”32 Baudelaire had one thing in common with Rousseau, though: he associated walking with writing. According to a friend of Baudelaire’s, “the poems were habitually made up by Baudelaire in cafés or while walking down the street.” Baudelaire often became lost in thought when he walked, “paying no attention to his surroundings, and stopping now and then to gesticulate and mutter to himself.”33 In “The Sun,” Baudelaire speaks of “stumbling over words as over paving stones.” Walter Benjamin observed that “no one ever felt less at home in Paris than Baudelaire.” But Baudelaire did not feel at home anywhere. The Flowers of Evil are “proof of my disgust and loathing of all things.” In Paris, Baudelaire could cultivate his disgust and loathing. The poet Jules Laforgue says Baudelaire “was the first to speak of Paris from the point of view of one of her daily damned.”34 Baudelaire preferred Paris to other cities because its gloomy weather reflected his gloomy state of mind. His poems about Paris frequently mention the city’s weather. In “The Seven Old Men” he says “a dirty and yellow fog flooded the city.” In “Meditation” he says “a gloomy atmosphere envelops the city.”35 In the second edition of The Flowers of Evil, published in 1861, Baudelaire included several poems about Paris and Parisians under the heading of Tableaux parisiens. Baudelaire’s Paris is a phantasmagoric place, a foggy underworld fi lled with self-destructive people. At the end of “Morning Twilight,” he says of gamblers and prostitutes: “The debauchees were returning home, worn out by their [nighttime] work.” For Baudelaire, walking in the crowd relieves the despair that weighs heavily on him when he is alone in his rented room— a despair that he usually calls spleen. In one poem he talks of enjoying fleeting eye contact with a passing woman. “To a Passer-By” begins: “The deafening

From Plato to Baudelaire

9

street roared around me.” Suddenly a beautiful woman in mourning passes. “He drank from her eyes . . . a pale sky where a storm is brewing . . . . A flash of lightning . . . then night!” It is a moment of exhilaration, but it is only a moment. In “The Swan,” Baudelaire writes, Paris changes! But my melancholy remains the same. New palaces, scaffolding, blocks, Old neighborhoods— everything becomes for me an allegory . . . Baudelaire occasionally lashes out against bourgeois culture, but his despair is religious, not political. In “The Swan” he describes a swan stretching his neck toward “the ironically and cruelly blue sky . . . as if he were shouting reproaches at God.”36 After the swan has escaped his cage, “he scuffles his webbed feet on the dry pavement / while dragging his white plumage on the rough ground.” Later in the poem, the poet thinks of the swan again, and the bird reminds him of a thin and consumptive black woman he has seen who is trudging along in the mud. According to Claude Pichois, “it is impossible . . . to imagine Baudelaire’s work without its Christian dimension, even if his peculiar form of Christianity is one from which the Redeemer is absent.”37 Christian writers often talk of life as a journey. John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) begins with the line, “As I walked through the wilderness of this world.” Baudelaire walks through the wilderness of Paris, but there is no progress for him. The despair remains. In “Spleen (1)” he says: “The soul of an old poet wanders on the roof gutters / With the sad voice of a shivering phantom.” We cannot say with any certainty that the writers who are discussed in the ensuing chapters were familiar with Baudelaire, but all would surely agree with Baudelaire’s remark: “What bizarre things we fi nd in a big city, when we know how to stroll about looking!”38

2

Britons Visiting New York Fanny Trollope, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens

P

eople who write about walking in the country sometimes talk about walking as “the means for inner voyages,” as Robert Macfarlane puts it. In The Living Mountain (1977) the Scottish writer Nan Shepherd says that when she walked in the mountains she was searching for profound “interiors” and deep “recesses” in her psyche.1 The British writers who walked in New York in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had no interest in exploring their psyche. They walked out of curiosity; they wanted to know more about America’s fastest growing city. The best-known British walkers were Fanny Trollope, her son Anthony Trollope, and Charles Dickens, but there were many others as well. The fi rst British assessment of New York may have been by Daniel Denton. In A Brief Description of New York, published in London in 1670, Denton talks about walking in New York’s fields. A man can own “such a quantity of land [in New York], that he may weary himself with walking over his fields of Corn, and all sorts of Grain.” Denton makes a point that subsequent walkers in the city would make: New York is a land of opportunity. “I may say, & say truly, that if there be any terrestrial happiness to be had by people of all ranks, especially of an inferior rank, it must certainly be here: here any one may furnish himself with land, & live rent-free.”2 A century after Denton, Patrick M’Robert, a Scotsman, no longer talked about walking in New York’s fields. Walking in New York is

10

Fanny Trollope, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens

11

unpleasant, M’Robert says, because the streets “are in general ill paved, irregular, and too narrow.” Writing in 1794, Henry Wansey, an Englishman, had a better opinion of New York’s streets. “New York is much more like a city than Boston, having broad footways [that are] paved, with a curb to separate them from the road. The streets are wider, and the houses in a better style.”3 In 1807, Englishman John Lambert praised Broadway. “The Broadway and the Bowery Road are the two fi nest avenues in the city.” Broadway, he says, “is well paved, and the foot-paths are chiefly bricked.” According to Lambert, New York is “the fi rst city in the United States for wealth, commerce, and population.” Lambert mentions two groups of New Yorkers that many observers would write about over the next one hundred fifty years: Jews and African Americans. “There are several rich and respectable families of Jews in New York; and as they have equal rights with every other citizen in the United States, they suffer under no invidious distinctions.” African Americans do not have such rights: “There are about 4,000 Negroes and people of colour in New York, 1,700 of whom are slaves.”4 William Cobbett, an English radical and notorious anti-Semite, was happy that he did not encounter Jews on his visit to New York in 1818. The city, he says, offers “museums, picture galleries, great booksellers shops, public libraries, playhouses and in short, an over- stock of all sorts of amusements and of fi neries with the most beautiful streets and shops in the world and without a single beggar, public prostitute, pickpocket or Jew.” But there were prostitutes in New York—at least in certain areas of the city. There are at least “500 ladies of pleasure,” M’Robert says, who “keep lodgings” in a part of the city called “the Holy Ground” because it belongs to St. Paul’s Church. “Here all the prostitutes reside, among whom are many fine well dressed women.”5 By the 1850s, prostitution had become a major industry in New York. In 1851, the diarist George Templeton Strong complained that New York was a “whorearchy.” According to Strong, “no one can walk the length of Broadway without meeting some hideous groups of ragged girls, from twelve years-old down . . . with thief written in their cunning eyes and whore on their depraved faces.”6 Fanny Trollope, the author of the best-selling Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), disliked most American cities and most Americans, but she liked New York, which she calls “one of the finest cities I ever saw. . . . We always found something new to see and to admire.” She

12

Britons Visiting New York

also points out that “there a great number of negroes in New York, all free; their emancipation having been completed in 1827.” 7 Mrs. Trollope, who spent seven weeks in New York, was impressed by “the splendid Broadway. . . . This noble street may vie with any I ever saw, for its length and breadth, its handsome shops, neat awnings, excellent trottoir [sidewalk] and well-dressed pedestrians.” Mrs. Trollope may have walked a lot in New York, since she complains that hackney coaches are “abominably dear.” She clearly is familiar with New York’s streets. “The trottoir paving in most of the streets is extremely good, being of large fl ag stones, very superior to the bricks of Philadelphia.” She speaks of “the peculiar manner of walking” of American women, but she does not elaborate.8 Mrs. Trollope mentions a New York custom that made walking difficult on May 1. On that day—called Moving Day—many New Yorkers either renegotiated their lease or moved elsewhere, so the streets were clogged. “Rich furniture and ragged furniture, carts, waggons, and drays, ropes, canvas, and straw, packers, porters, and draymen, white, yellow, and black, occupy the streets from east to west, from north to south, on this day. Every one I spoke to on the subject complained of this custom as most annoying, but all assured me it was unavoidable.”9 For most of the nineteenth century, walking in New York was an ordeal all year round. There were “great heaps of mud, garbage, and animal excrement piled up in the streets,” write Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace in Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. “To this base were added the noxious by-products of slaughterhouses, tanneries, dyers, distilleries, glue works, bone boilers, and stables.” The herds of pigs that roamed the city made some inroads on the resulting accumulation, “but what goes in must come out, and the porkers added their own contributions to the vile stew.”10 William Chambers, a Scottish visitor, wrote in 1853 that “the necessity for seeking vehicular conveyances arises from . . . the condition of the principal thoroughfares. . . . The mire was ankle-deep in Broadway, and the more narrow business streets were barely passable.” It was also difficult to walk on the sidewalk. “All along the foot-pavements [sidewalks] there stood, night and day, as if fi xtures, boxes, buckets, lidless flour-barrels, baskets, decayed tea-chests, rusty iron pans, and earthenware jars full of coal-ashes.”11 A woman going for a walk on New York’s streets would also have to watch out for the spittle of American men, who spit “the hateful

Fanny Trollope, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens

13

tobacco” everywhere. Attending an opera, Mrs. Trollope “heard, without ceasing, the spitting.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said he would forgive Mrs. Trollope her criticisms of the United States if Domestic Manners of the Americans helped put a stop to spitting.12 Traffic was terrible on all major New York thoroughfares. So was the noise. In an article about New York for a Pennsylvania newspaper in 1844, Poe complained, “The street-cries, and other nuisances to the same effect, are particularly disagreeable here. Im mense charcoal-waggons infest the most frequented thorough-fares, and give forth a din which I can like to nothing earthly.”13 “Broadway,” the historian Luc Sante says, “was quite unmanageable well before the middle of the nineteenth century. . . . It was plied by every sort of truck, wagon, cart, and coach, although the bulk of traffic was made up of the all-purpose two-wheeled delivery carts driven by white-smocked carmen that were the terror of all.” Broadway, though, was the fi rst street in the city to benefit from improvements. The fi rst sidewalk built of brick (in the mid-1700s) was on Broadway. So were the fi rst numbered houses (starting in 1793), the first gas lighting in the city (1825), and the fi rst electric arc lights (1882).14 Thirty years after Fanny Trollope wrote Domestic Manners, her son, novelist Anthony Trollope, also visited New York. Like his mother, Trollope traveled widely in the United States, but he stayed in New York for only two weeks. Trollope admired America far more than his mother did, and he admired many things about New York, especially its schools and hospitals: “New York is a most interesting city. . . . In no other city is there a population so mixed and cosmopolitan in their modes of life.” Yet, in the same paragraph he makes two negative comments. “In the fi rst place, there is nothing to see; and, in the second place, there is no mode of getting about to see anything.”15 When Trollope says there is no mode of getting about in New York, he means there are no cabs—that is, carriages that take you where you want to go. He has to take either “street omnibuses” or “street cars.” The latter run on rails and generally hold more people than the omnibuses, but they are very crowded, and it is difficult to know one’s stop because the street signage is poor. There also are “public carriages—roomy vehicles, dragged by two horses, clean and nice.” These vehicles could be called cabs (or taxis), but, Trollope adds, “they have none of the attributes of the cab. As a rule, they are not to be found standing about. They are very slow. They are very dear. . . . Under these circumstances, I think

14

Britons Visiting New York

I am justified in saying that there is no mode of getting about in New York to see anything.”16 Trollope does not rule out walking, but in one passage he notes that New York’s streets are fi lthy. “See that female walking down Broadway. . . . Look at the train which she drags behind her over the dirty pavement, where dogs have been, and chewers of tobacco, and everything concerned with fi lth except a scavenger. At every hundred yards some unhappy man treads upon the silken swab which she trails behind her.”17 Like so many walkers in New York, Trollope rambled along Broadway and other major thoroughfares. “I have never walked down Fifth Avenue alone without thinking of money,” he wrote. “I have never walked there with a companion without talking of it.” Though Trollope praises New York’s “commercial grandeur,” he wishes that New Yorkers did not always talk about money: “The making of money is the work of man; but he need not take his work to bed with him, and have it ever by his side at table.”18 William Dean Howells and Henry James, among others, would repeat Trollope’s complaint about New York’s addiction to commerce. Dickens Walks in Five Points Twenty years before Trollope visited New York, Charles Dickens spent five months in the United States, staying in New York for three weeks. Dickens wrote about his visit in American Notes for General Circulation, a book that was reviled in this country. According to a recent critic, “it is generally considered the worst thing he ever wrote.”19 The book, though, contains a vivid and well-written description of an extended walk Dickens took in Lower Manhattan. The thirty-year-old Dickens was a celebrity—the best-known novelist in the English-speaking world. At fi rst he found it difficult to go anywhere without being hounded by journalists. Though his time was taken up with festivities in his honor, including a ball and a banquet, he managed to elude reporters occasionally and go for walks. Once he was “out half the night,” as he put it, walking in the slums with a police escort. He also enjoyed late night walks with a new friend, a professor of Greek at Harvard whom he had met when he was in Boston in late January.20 Dickens was a prodigious walker. In England his usual routine was to walk thirteen miles in the afternoon after writing all morning, but

Fanny Trollope, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens

15

he occasionally walked as many as thirty miles. In 1860, he wrote: “So much of my traveling is done on foot. . . . My last special feat was turning out of bed at two, after a hard day, pedestrian and otherwise, and walking thirty miles into the country to breakfast. . . . My walking is of two kinds: one, straight on end to a defi nite goal at a round pace; one, objectless, loitering, and purely vagabond.” In another essay, he sounds like a fl âneur. “We have a most extraordinary partiality for lounging about the streets. Whenever we have an hour to spare, there is nothing that we enjoy more than a little amateur vagrancy—walking up one street and down another, and staring into shop windows, and gazing about us as if . . . the whole were an unknown region to our wondering mind.”21 Dickens walked everywhere, but he preferred to walk in London. Michael Slater makes a connection between walking and writing: Dickens’s “habit of roaming the streets of London at all hours and looking in at all sorts of strange places . . . from the beginning of his career through to its end, was absolutely essential to Dickens the writer.” Dickens liked to walk by himself, but he also liked to walk with a favorite companion on what he called “a great, London, back- slums kind of walk.”22 The chapter on New York is written as if Dickens were a guide leading a walking tour of Lower Manhattan. He begins the tour at the Carlton House on Broadway, where he stayed. “Shall we sit down in an upper floor of the Carlton House Hotel . . . and when we are tired of looking down upon the life below, sally forth arm-in-arm, and mingle with the stream?”23 Broadway impressed Dickens: “Was there ever such a sunny street as this Broadway? The pavement stones are polished with the tread of feet until they shine again.” He noted the different kinds of carriages, the hats and clothes of the Negro coachmen, the dress of fashionable women: “We have seen more colours in these ten minutes, than we should have seen elsewhere, in as many days.” He referred to the “thin stockings” and the “pinching of thin shoes” of women who were walking rather than riding in a carriage. Fashionable women avoided many of New York’s streets, but they walked on Broadway, which Dickens called “a wide and bustling street” with many “glittering shops.” On his wanderings, Dickens noticed two Irish laborers who seem to be looking for an address. Having read many books about America before leaving England, Dickens knew that the “Irish question” was heating up. Many Americans worried that recent Irish immigrants,

16

Britons Visiting New York

who mostly were Catholic, could not be assimilated. The Native American Party, more commonly called the Know Nothing Party, was founded in the 1840s and called for stringent anti-immigration regulation; its members also wanted to exclude the foreign-born from political office. Though the Know Nothing Party collapsed in the late 1850s, anti-Irish feeling remained strong in part because Irish immigration to New York (and also to Boston) greatly increased in the late 1840s, owing to the terrible famine in Ireland. By 1860 New York was the second-largest Irish city in the world.24 In 1835, Philip Hone, a one-term mayor of New York a decade earlier, wrote in his diary that the Irish were responsible for corrupting New York’s politics. “These Irishmen, strangers among us, without a feeling of patriotism or affection in common with American citizens, decide the elections in the city of New York.” Hone, like many Americans, also worried that the new immigrants (not only Irish immigrants) would become a permanent underclass. In 1847, he deplored “the constant stream of European paupers arriving upon the shores of this land of promise. Alas! how often does it proved to the deluded immigrant a land of broken promise and blasted hope!” The foreigners upon our shores, in Hone’s view, were mostly “indigent and helpless, having expended the last shilling in paying their passage-money, deceived by the misrepresentations of unscrupulous agents, and left to starve amongst strangers.”25 Dickens did not address the question of political corruption, but he defended Irish immigration. He argued that Irish immigrants had played an important role in building the country’s canals and roads. “It would be hard to keep your model republics going, without the countrymen and countrywomen of these two labourers. For who else would dig, and delve, and drudge, and do domestic work, and make canals and roads, and execute great lines of Internal Improvement!” Dickens was being mildly sarcastic; many Americans bragged to him about the country’s “improvements,” which usually were the work of immigrant laborers. Most Irish immigrants, Dickens writes, were hardworking laborers like the two Irish men he described, who “are brothers, those men. One crossed the sea alone, and working very hard for one half year, and living harder, saved funds enough to bring the other out. That done, they worked together, side by side, contentedly sharing hard labour and hard living for another term, and then their sisters came, and then another brother, and, lastly, their old mother.”

Fanny Trollope, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens

17

New York, Dickens notes, is a city of immigrants. Walking on Wall Street to the East River, he saw the “noble American vessels . . . that have brought hither the foreigners who abound in all the streets.” The immigrants, he wrote, “pervade the town.” He did not think immigration was a disaster for either for the United States or most immigrants. Yet, in a subsequent chapter he notes that on his return voyage he met immigrants who had decided to return to their native land. “The history of every family we had on board was pretty much the same. After hoarding up, and borrowing, and begging, and selling everything to pay the passage, they had gone out to New York, expecting to find its streets paved with gold; and had found them paved with very hard and very real stones. . . . They were coming back, even poorer than they went.”26 After walking to the East River, Dickens returned to Broadway, where he saw “blocks of clean ice . . . being carried into shops and barrooms, and . . . pine-apples and water-melons profusely displayed for sale.” He walked to the Bowery, which was not as fashionable as Broadway. Instead of “the lively whirl of carriages,” there was “the deep rumble of carts and waggons.” Near the Bowery he came upon a strange-looking building, which he calls “a “dismal-fronted pile of bastard Egyptian.” It is “a famous prison, called The Tombs. Shall we go in?” The Tombs, the New York House of Detention, was built in 1838, its architecture based on an engraving of an ancient Egyptian mausoleum. Demolished in 1902, the building was replaced with another structure that was torn down a few decades later. (The current building on the site, part of the Manhattan Detention Complex, was built in 1974.) Dickens had long taken a strong interest in institutions of confi nement. When he visited a city, he usually toured its prisons, insane asylums, and orphanages. A “civil and obliging” guide replies matter-of-factly to Dickens’s questions about the place. Dickens asks: “Those [cells] at the bottom [of the prison] are unwholesome, surely?” The guide answers: “Why, we do only put coloured in ’em. That’s the truth.” The man took it for granted that it was all right to treat “coloured people” differently from white people. Dickens notices that a boy was “shut up here.” The guide replies: “He is the son of the prisoner we saw just now; [he] is a witness against his father; and is detained here for safe-keeping, until the trial.” Dickens asks, “This is rather hard treatment for a young witness, is it not?” The guide responds, “Well, it an’t [sic] a very rowdy life, and that’s a fact.”

18

Britons Visiting New York

Dickens notes that executions took place in the prison yard. The law required that this “dismal spectacle” be witnessed by the judge, jury, and “citizens to the amount of twenty-five.” In several articles, Dickens strongly opposed public executions, which were abolished in Britain in 1866. Leaving the Tombs, we are suddenly back on New York’s “cheerful streets” again, walking on Broadway and looking at fashionable women. Dickens warns us: “We are going to cross here. Take care of the pigs. Two portly sows are trotting up behind this carriage, and a select party of half-a-dozen gentlemen-hogs have just now turned the corner.” Dickens anthropomorphizes a “solitary swine.” The creature “leads a roving, gentlemanly, vagabond kind of life, somewhat answering to that of our club-men at home. . . . He is a free-and-easy, careless, indifferent kind of pig. . . . He is in every respect a republican pig, going wherever he pleases, and mingling with the best society, on an equal if not superior footing, for every one makes way when he appears, and the haughtiest give him the wall, if he prefer it.” In the next paragraph, Dickens gives the reader a very different view of New York’s pigs. They now are repulsive animals that do not even look like pigs. “They are the city scavengers, these pigs. Ugly brutes they are; having, for the most part, scanty, brown backs, like the lids of old horse-hair trunks: spotted with unwholesome black blotches. They have long, gaunt legs, too, and such peaked snouts, that if one of them could be persuaded to sit for his profi le, nobody would recognize it for a pig’s likeness.” Seven years later, a cholera epidemic resulting in the death of more than five thousand New Yorkers led city officials to mount a strong campaign against pig ownership. In the next decade, thousands of pigs were slaughtered or driven away, as were thousands of stray dogs. By 1860, write Burrows and Wallace, “New York’s porkers had been definitely exiled north of 86th Street.”27 After the warning about pigs, Dickens resumes the tour. Now it is evening. “The streets and shops are lighted now; and as the eye travels down the long thoroughfare [Broadway], dotted with bright jets of gas, it is reminded of Oxford Street or Piccadilly.” New York’s main streets differ from London’s main streets in one respect: street entertainers are rare. Dickens asks: Where are the “Punches, Fantoccinis, Dancing-dogs, Jugglers, Conjurors, Orchestrinas, or even Barrel-organs”?28

Fanny Trollope, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens

19

The streets are relatively quiet but the bars are full. Dickens peers through a window into a crowded bar. “What are these suckers of cigars and swallowers of strong drinks, whose hats and legs we see in every possible variety of twist, doing, but amusing themselves?” Some people in the bar amuse themselves by reading newspapers. Dickens sarcastically calls newspapers “good strong stuff; dealing in round abuse and blackguard names . . . pimping and pandering for all degrees vicious taste . . . imputing to every man in public life the coarsest and the vilest motives.” Dickens frequently attacked the American press. In the last chapter of American Notes he speaks of the “evil eye” of the American press and says “ribald slander [is] its only stock in trade.” He was angry that the press accused him of coming to the United States solely to persuade the American government to sign an International Copyright agreement so he could get royalties from the sale of his books in this country. In a letter to a friend, he said, “I have never in my life been so shocked and disgusted, or made so sick and sore at heart, as I have been by the treatment I have received here . . . in reference to the International Copyright question. . . . There fall upon me scores of your newspapers; imputing motives to me, the very suggestion of which turns my blood to gall; and attacking me in such terms of vagabond scurrility as they would denounce no murderer with.”29 Dickens begins walking again. “Let us go on again,” he says. He is walking to Five Points, an area of “poverty, wretchedness, and vice”— home to many poor blacks but fast becoming a place inhabited mainly by recent Irish immigrants, located near today’s Chinatown. Five Points is a dangerous place, so Dickens takes two policemen with him. Entering Five Points, Dickens warns us that this part of the tour will be unpleasant, even frightening. “This is the place: these narrow ways, diverging to the right, and left, and reeking everywhere with dirt and fi lth. . . . Many of those pigs live here.” After describing taverns frequented by sailors, Dickens asks, “What place is this, to which the squalid street conducts us?” The “squalid street” is like a demonic force that takes us to “a kind of square of leprous houses, some of which are attainable only by crazy wooden stairs without.” He takes us into an area of darkness. “Ascend these pitch-dark stairs, heedful of a false footing on the trembling boards, and grope your way with me into this wolfish den, where neither ray of light nor breath of air, appears to come.” We are in total darkness when a young Negro lad

20

Britons Visiting New York

lights a match, illuminating “great mounds of dusky rags upon the ground.” The match goes out, and the Negro lad leaves, soon returning with a flaring taper. Dickens describes a phantasmagoric scene. “Then the mounds of rags are seen to be astir, and rise slowly up, and the floor is covered with heaps of negro women, waking from their sleep. . . . From every corner, as you glance about you in these dark retreats, some figure crawls half-awakened, as if the judgment-hour were near at hand, and every obscene grave were giving up its dead.” The people are like shades in the underworld. We are back on the street again. The lanes and alleys are “paved with mud knee-deep.” We see “ruined houses, open to the street, whence, through wide gaps in the walls, other ruins loom upon the eye.” We see “hideous tenements which take their name from robbery and murder: all that is loathsome, dropping, and decayed is here.” The next place Dickens calls on is a lively nightclub, Almack’s— soon to be renamed Dickens’ Place in its illustrious visitor’s honor—where people dance to the music of a black fiddler and his “small friend,” who plays the tambourine. Dickens, who liked to dance, describes the perfor mance of a dancer whom he calls “the greatest dancer known.” After the per formance is over, Dickens asks, “And in what walk of life, or dance of life, does man ever get such stimulating applause as thunders about him, when, having danced his partner off her feet, and himself too, he fi nishes by leaping gloriously on the bar-counter, and calling for something to drink, with the chuckle of a million of counterfeit Jim Crows, in one inimitable sound!” Jim Crow means minstrel singer— a white man in blackface who entertains white audiences by singing and dancing in a crude parody of African American singing and dancing. (“Jumping Jim Crow” was a popu lar early nineteenth-century song sung by minstrel singers.) The dancer Dickens saw at Almack’s, however, was not white. Known as Juba, and later Boz’s Juba, again honoring Dickens, William Henry Lane was one of the first black performers in the United States to play onstage for white audiences, and he was the only black performer in his time to tour with a white minstrel group.30 Thus a black dancer is imitating a blackface white dancer who is parodying black singing and dancing. We leave Almack’s and arrive at The Tombs again. Dickens was disturbed that men and women “against whom no crime is proved” were put in such a place. “Such indecent and disgusting dungeons as these cells, would bring disgrace upon the most despotic empire in the

Fanny Trollope, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens

21

world! . . . Are people really left all night, untried, in those black sties?” Dickens paints a grisly picture. “But if any one among them die in the interval, as one man did, not long ago? Then he is half-eaten by the rats in an hour’s time.” The last paragraph of the walking tour begins on an apocalyptic note. “What is this intolerable tolling of great bells, and crashing of wheels, and shouting in the distance? A fire. And what that deep red light in the opposite direction? Another fire. And what these charred and blackened walls we stand before? A dwelling where a fire has been.” We could be in a short story by Poe, whom Dickens met twice in New York. He promised to help Poe fi nd an English publisher, but his efforts were not successful. In the middle of the paragraph, Dickens changes tone abruptly. Now he sounds like a neutral journalist. “It was more than hinted, in an official report, not long ago, that some of these conflagrations were not wholly accidental.” The implication is that people are lighting fires to cash in on the insurance. . . . There was a fire last night, there are two to-night, and you lay an even wager there will be at least one, to-morrow.” Dickens ends the paragraph with a sarcastic remark: “So, carry ing that [the notion that fi res were set deliberately] with us for our comfort, let us say, Good night, and climb up stairs to bed.” The walking tour is over. In the remaining pages of the chapter on New York, Dickens describes visits he made to several institutions of confi nement in the New York area: a “lunatic asylum”; an almshouse, or home for paupers; a jail; a prison; and a “Refuge for the Destitute: an Institution whose object is to reclaim youthful offenders, male and female, black and white, without distinction; to teach them useful trades . . . and make them worthy members of society.” Dickens strongly criticizes several local institutions and mildly praises others. In the last paragraph, Dickens writes that he has enjoyed the company of numerous New Yorkers. “There are those in this city who would brighten, to me, the darkest winter-day that ever glimmered and went out in Lapland.” Yet, his portrait of the city is mostly negative. New York has horrible slums and many disgraceful institutions of confinement. On Broadway there are fashionable women and glittering shops, but there also “ugly brutes”—that is, herds of pigs. Like Fanny Trollope, Dickens hated the ubiquitous tobacco spitting, though he claimed that the disgusting habit was more widespread in Washington, which he calls “the headquarters of tobacco-tinctured saliva.” There the noxious custom

22

Britons Visiting New York

“inseparably mixed up with every meal and morning call, and with all the transactions of social life.”31 Dickens returned to New York twenty-five years later. On this visit he had little time for walking because he was busy giving readings from his work. In the fi rst month of his trip, he occasionally went for walks in Boston, but toward the close of his trip he was suffering from gout in his right foot, so he did very little walking in New York. At a farewell banquet in his honor at Delmonico’s— a famous New York restaurant— his foot was so swollen that he could not get his shoe on.32

3

Walt Whitman Magnetic Mannahatta

W

alt Whitman agreed with Dickens that Manhattan had terrible slums. In 1842, the year American Notes was published, Whitman, a twenty-three-year-old journalist, said that several streets on the Lower East Side were “some of the dirtiest looking places in New York.” Whitman admired Dickens. “I cannot lose the opportunity of saying how much I love and esteem him for what he has taught me through his writings.”1 The two writers began their careers as journalists and both liked to walk in both the city and the country, yet in one respect Whitman is closer to Baudelaire. Just as Paris is a mirror of Baudelaire’s psyche, New York is a mirror of Whitman’s. If Baudelaire sees Paris as a gloomy city fi lled with people driven by self-destructive passions, Whitman sees New York as an energetic city fi lled with people trying to get ahead in life. Both Baudelaire and Whitman speak of themselves as phantoms, but Whitman is a happy phantom. In “Sparkles from the Wheel” he says: “Myself eff using and fluid, a phantom curiously floating, now / here absorb’d and arrested.”2 In his prose, Whitman often speaks of New York, whereas in his poetry he usually says Mannahatta or Manhattan. A four-line poem called “Mannahatta” begins, “My city’s fit and noble name resumed, / Choice aboriginal name.” In 1879 Whitman explained why he liked the word Mannahatta. “More and more, too, the old name absorbs into me— mannahatta, ‘the place encircled by many swift tides and sparkling waters.’ How fit a name for America’s great democratic island city!”

23

1st Ave

STUYVESANT TOWN

Avenue C

Lexington Ave

E 16th St

E 15th St

E 14th St E 13th St E 12th St

E 13th St E 12th St

Szold Pl

FDR Dr

ve 4th A

2nd Ave

Irving Pl

Union Sq E

E 19th St E 18th St E 17th St E 16th St Stuyvesant Square E 15th St

GRAMERCY PARK

GREENWICH VILLAGE

ve Wa

W4

Gre enw St ich atio Ave Hor St St h t e 2 Jan W 1 t S St nk St une Ba t rry Beth Pe les S t S ar h t1 h C 1 W WEST B le VILLAGE ecker S t St r e ph sto i r Ch

Union Square

Gramercy Park

E 11th St

University Pl

W 14th St

5th Ave

Avenue of the Americas

7th Ave

8th Ave

FLATIRON DISTRICT

E 23rd St E 22nd St E 21st St E 20th St

3rd Ave

CHELSEA

Park Ave S

Madison Square Park

t St

Avenue D

Avenue C

Avenue B

Avenue A

Cooper Sq

Greene St

t

nS

kso

Jac

Samuel Dickstein Plz

Wooster St

ff St Columbia St Sheri Willett St

Pitt St Ridge St Attorney St Attorney St Clinton St Suffolk St Norfolk St Essex St Ludlow St Orchard St Allen St

Eldridge St Forsyth St Chrystie St

Bowery

W Broadway

Pl Baruch r hD Baruc

Sheriff St

Extra Pl

t

Church St

ery

om

Centre St

Elk St

s Pl

Saint Jame

Broadway

Brookly Queen n s Exwy

t

t

Wate rS

th S

Wh

all

iteh

Sou

h St Greenwngicton St Washi

Battery Pl

New St d St Broa

e

S End Av

Pea rl S t Front St W ate Fron r St t St

Nassau St Dutch St William St Gold St

Pa

rk

Ro

w

Church St

Liberty Plz

St

t

t

t

eS

rin

the

Ca

Ave

Trinity Pl

St

St

eS

Pik

St

rl St

Pea

River Ter

ur

ntg

on

rs S

tge

Ru

ver

Oli

r St

Baxte

North End

r Rive

St l St ore hal MoWhite

St

Manhattan, from the Battery to 23rd Street

rne

Mo

fers

St

son

Hud

478

uve

Go

Jef

Baxter St

k Varic

S Allen

t

tS Wes

Bowery St Elizabeth Mott St St Mulberry

t

on S

k St Varic

Huds

t

wich S

Green

St

Crosby St Lafayette St

gton

Mercer St

hin Was

Greene St

7th Ave S

W 9th St W 8th St

Bar Co row S mm t erc eS Ca Cor t Do rmi nel wn ne ia S ing St t St

St

Sullivan St Thompson St Laguardia Pl

Pl

t

10

Macdougal St

rly

th S

E 10th St san E 9th St yve E 9th St Stu Tompkins 8th St St. Mark’s Pl l E 8th St P East Square Washington Mews Astor River Waverly Pl E 7th St Waverly Pl Park EAST Washington Pl E 6th St Washington Pl Washington VILLAGE E 5th St E 5th St E 5th St Square W 4th St E 4th St Washington Sq S E 4th Walk Great Jones St E 3rd St Bond St E 2nd St Shinbone Al Pl kes E 1st St t Lu Hamilton Bed NOHO E Houston St St Sain n f o Fish Park to rd Mor St St y o r Le St St Stanton St son King Rivington St Clark ston St Prince St u Sarah D W Ho ington St Riv t Roosevelt nS ancey St to Del rl a Ch Pkwy Spring St t am S Delancey St Vand ancey St St SOHO Kenmare St Del k ic in Broome St Broome St Dom LITTLE t nnel St nd Tu ITALY ry S l St Watts Holla Cana Hen Grand St Canal St s St BOWERY Seward Watt ses St LOWER Hester St Park ros Howard St St Hester St Desb St ter EAST York St y Wa t St Canal St Vestr t on SIDE S r y t F h a Walker St Laig St dw St h St roa rt t rry Beac Hube EB White St CHINATOWN Che th S St Bayard St t e Sou r S o Franklin St n o N Mo klin St i St t Columbus ll s Pe Do ivi S Leonard St Fran yer D Rutgers South Park t sS co S Park Worth St t Mos St on St Foley on t Harris y St Thomas St s i r d S Square Ja Ma nroe ive Duane St Mo st R 9A Reade St Ea St r Ma te Chambers St Warren St nha Wa tta Park Pl nB TWO TRIBECA CIVIC rdg St y ra Murray St Mur CENTER Ro BRIDGES bert F Park Pl Wagn e S r Barclay St Sr Pl Beek pruce Dov North man St Vesey St er S EmpireSt Vesey St Park t Brook Fulton Ferry lyn Brd g State Park Fult Dey St on WTC Cor St tlandt St M John S t t aide ct S nL spe Liberty St n Pro Cedar St Fletch Albany St Thames St er St Pine St Albany St Carlisle St Wall St r Pl Recto Rector St Exchange Pl Gouv St BATTERY W Thames St ern ver St Bea Mill LnHanover eur Ln is Morr PARK Rector Sq Park t CITY eS Ston 1st Pl Pl tery FINANCIAL Bat t ge S DISTRICT BridSta te St Battery Park th

W

Magnetic Mannahatta 25

(1278). Whitman was not right about the meaning of Mannahatta; the word should be translated as “the hill island.”3 Whitman liked to point out that New York is an island city; he spoke about the “hurrying human tides” on New York’s streets and the “hurried and sparkling waters” that surround the city. In another poem entitled “Mannahatta,” the city is thriving because of its port. “Immigrants arriving, fifteen or twenty thousand in a week, / The carts hauling goods . . . .” In the poem he praises New York for its energy, its manners, and its hospitality. Trottoirs throng’d, vehicles, Broadway, the women, the shops and shows, A million people—manners free and superb— open voices— hospitality—the most courageous and friendly young men, City of hurried and sparkling waters! city of spires and masts! City nested in bays! my city! The poem is so upbeat that it sounds as if it belongs in a brochure put out by the city’s chamber of commerce. Henry James called Whitman “that happy genius,” but Whitman was not always happy or in a celebratory mood. He often alludes to “dark patches” in his psyche, and he admits to moments of despair— about himself, about New York, and about American democracy. In “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” he says: “I too am but a trail of drift and debris . . . .” Whitman could be critical of New York. In 1856, he said that it was “one of the most crime-haunted and dangerous cities in all of Christendom.”4 David Reynolds notes that if in Whitman’s journalism “he often lamented the city’s fi lth and crime, in ‘Song of Myself ’ he turned to its dazzle and show: ‘The blab of the pavement, tires of carts, sluff of bootsoles, talk of the promenaders.’ ”5 In his early journalism, Whitman tended to focus on the dark side of New York, but in many pieces written a few decades later Whitman celebrates New York. In “Hot Weather New York,” written in 1881, Whitman mentions “the suffocating crowding of some of its tenement houses,” but the piece mainly celebrates the city; he talks about the city’s “buoyant wholesomeness,” and says “there is a good deal of fun about New York” (907–908). Two years earlier, he talks about the city’s “humanity . . . and its countless prodigality of locomotion, dry goods, glitter, magnetism, and happiness” (844). Magnetism was a popu lar notion in mid-nineteenthcentury America. In August 1842 Whitman wrote that he had ceased

26 Walt Whitman

being “a devout disbeliever in the science of animal magnetism.” He now thought “it reveals at once the existence of a whole new world of truth, grand, fearful, profound.”6 According to the proponents of animal magnetism, some people had an uncanny power to attract and influence people. Whitman says the Quaker minister Elias Hicks was a great speaker because of his “powerful human magnetism” (1238). He also speaks of Edgar Allen Poe’s “indescribable magnetism” (873). Whitman thought that he, too, possessed animal magnetism. Talking to a friend about a boy, he said: “I am trying to cheer him up and strengthen him with my magnetism.” In 1891 a man visiting Whitman was “overwhelmed by the magnetism of Whitman’s presence.” 7 Whitman thought Manhattan was a magnet city that attracted ambitious Americans and ambitious immigrants. In 1835, when he was sixteen, he moved to Manhattan from Brooklyn and found work as a printer. A year later a major fi re destroyed Manhattan’s printing and publishing district, putting thousands out of work, including Whitman, so he left Manhattan and sought work in Long Island. For five years, Whitman lived in various places on Long Island and had a variety of jobs. He taught school, edited a weekly newspaper, worked for the Democratic Party, and taught school again. Whitman moved back to Manhattan in 1841, working as a compositor while living in boardinghouses. Publishing articles, poems, and short stories, Whitman began to make a name for himself as a writer, and in March 1842 he was appointed chief editor of the New York Aurora. Two months later he was fired, the publishers accusing him of “indolence, incompetence, loaferism and blackguard habits.”8 “Loaferism” was a popu lar word in the 1840s and 1850s. It was the ideology of young mainly working- class men and women who usually rejected regular work. The Bowery was the center of “Loaferdom,” a place where rowdies known as the b’hoys and the g’hals congregated. “His whole persona in Leaves of Grass,” Reynolds says, “reflects the b’hoy culture.”9 Whitman liked the idea of loaferism. “I have sometimes amused myself with picturing out a nation of loafers,” he wrote in 1840. “Only think of it! An entire loafer kingdom!” Five years later he was more critical of loaferism; he attacked “law-defying loafers who make the fights, and disturb the public peace.”10 Many so-called loafers had become members of violent street gangs. Loaferism had turned into what Whitman called “rowdyism.”

Magnetic Mannahatta 27

Loaferism, though, remained an important strain in Whitman’s thought. “Loaf ” is one of Whitman’s favorite verbs; he uses it four times in “Song of Myself,” twice in the fi rst five lines alone. He calls Specimen Days (1882), the short autobiographical essays he began composing in the 1860s, “a melange of loafing, looking, hobbling, sitting, traveling— a little thinking thrown in for salt, but very little” (884). For Whitman, loafi ng was a way of looking at the world—not an excuse for avoiding work. Though Whitman lost many jobs, he always got another one. Moving back to Brooklyn in 1845, he worked as a journalist for several newspapers, ran a printing office, managed a bookstore, and worked with his brother building houses. He never stopped writing. “There was not a single kind of popu lar periodical he did not serve either as an editor or a contributor.”11 When Whitman was editing the Aurora, he took a swipe against “Catholics and ignorant Irish” for supporting a bill that would allow public funds to go to parochial schools, and he attacked the Irish influence on New York politics—referring to the “coarse, unshaven, fi lthy, Irish rabble.” Whitman may have been infected by anti-Irish feeling, but we cannot be sure; the remarks about the “Irish rabble” may have been the publisher’s, not Whitman’s. Whitman denounced the Native American Party and he supported immigration. “Let us receive these foreigners to our shores, and to our good offices,” he said in 1842.12 Years later he would write: “I like well our polyglot construction-stamp, and the retention thereof, in the broad, the tolerating, the many-sided, the collective. All nations here— a home for every race on earth” (1075). Whitman lived in Brooklyn from 1845 to 1862 except for three months in New Orleans in 1848. In Brooklyn he would occasionally go on “rambles” with William Cullen Bryant. “We were both walkers, and when I work’d in Brooklyn he several times came over . . . and we took rambles miles long, till dark, out towards Bedford or Flatbush” (819). After he fi nished work, Whitman usually took the ferry to Manhattan. When he was living in Washington in the 1860s he wrote his mother: “Don’t you miss Walt, loafi ng around & carting himself off to New York, toward the latter part of every afternoon?”13 Whitman possessed a “saunterer’s knowledge” of several American cities, but he especially liked to walk in New York. “Through Mannahatta’s streets I walking, these things gathering,” he says in “Our Old Feuillage.” Whitman liked to walk on the Bowery, which was “more democratic, with a broader, jauntier swing, and in a more direct contact with vulgar life,” than Broadway, “its high-bred aristocratic brother,

28 Walt Whitman

half-a-mile off.”14 But he usually wrote about walking on Broadway. “I knew and frequented Broadway—that noted avenue of New York’s crowded and mixed humanity” (701). He walked on the main streets in many cities in the United States, but he had “acquired years’ familiar experience with New York’s, (perhaps the world’s,) great thoroughfare, Broadway” (838). Walking on Broadway, Whitman saw many notables, including “Andrew Jackson, Webster, Clay, Seward, Martin Van Buren . . . Charles Dickens, the fi rst Japanese ambassadors, and lots of other celebrities of the time” (701). On one of his early walks on Broadway, when he was “a boy of perhaps thirteen or fourteen,” Whitman saw a “fur- swathed old man, surrounded by friends and servants” (702). It was John Jacob Astor, reported to be the richest man in America. He also “remembers seeing Edgar A. Poe” and having “a short interview with him” in Poe’s office (701). Poe, who lived in New York from 1844 to 1849, published a piece of Whitman’s in the magazine he edited, Broadway Journal. Whitman admired Poe, yet he found Poe’s verses disturbing. They have “an incorrigible propensity toward nocturnal themes, a demoniac undertone behind every page” (873). In “Song of Myself ” Whitman writes, “The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains / of my gab and my loitering.” Whitman was a flâneur who enjoyed striking up conversations with workers, policemen, and fi remen, but he also walked on Broadway with a destination in mind. He would go to the New York Society Library at Broadway and Leonard Street, where he fi rst heard Ralph Waldo Emerson speak. He would go to the Broadway Theatre, near Pearl Street, where his “senses and emotions” were “thrilled . . . by the deep passion of [Marietta] Alboni’s contralto” (1187). He attended exhibitions at the American Art-Union, on Broadway near Franklin Street. He undoubtedly went to P. T. Barnum’s American Museum at Broadway and Ann Street, which was a museum, a zoo, and a theater. He may have heard Jenny Lind, the Swedish soprano, sing there in September 1850. According to Whitman, Lind “had the most brilliant, captivating, popu lar musical style and expression of any one known” (1290). Yet, Lind, he said, “never touched my heart in the least.”15 In the 1840s, Whitman became interested in daguerreotypes and he went to the gallery of John Plumbe at 251 Broadway. He also paid many visits to the nearby gallery of Mathew Brady, which was also on Broadway. He called Brady “a capital artist” whose “pictures possess a

Magnetic Mannahatta 29

peculiar life-likeness.”16 In July 1849, Whitman went to Clinton Hall at 286 Broadway in order to have his head analyzed by a phrenologist. It was fashionable to have a phrenologist assess one’s character by feeling the bumps on one’s head. Poe had his head examined; so did Horace Greeley and Mark Twain.17 Whitman also went to lectures at the Broadway Tabernacle, located at 340–344 Broadway, between Worth Street and Catherine Lane. The Tabernacle was a Presbyterian church that allowed its premises to be used for speakers and organizations that espoused progressive causes. “I went frequently to these meetings” Whitman says, and “learn’d much from them.”18 In the late 1850s and early 1860s, Whitman frequented Pfaff ’s beer cellar on Broadway just north of Bleecker Street. Two decades later, breakfasting at the new Pfaff ’s on 24th Street, he and the owner talked about “ante-bellum times . . . and the jovial suppers” at the old Pfaff ’s (911). He also went to Taylor’s Saloon, on Broadway near Leonard Street, where he had lunch with other writers, including the Transcendentalist Bronson Alcott. There was one place on Broadway that Whitman never went into: Grace Church, which still stands on Broadway and East 10th Street. Opened in 1846, it was frequented by wealthy patrons, who were mainly concerned—Whitman says—with trying to “look grand.” According to Whitman, Grace Church was more about the display of wealth than the worship of God. In the Brooklyn Eagle he wrote: “We don’t see how it is possible to worship God there at all.”19 The most memorable Broadway event for Whitman was his fi rst sight of Abraham Lincoln. In a lecture Whitman delivered several times (in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia) on the anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination, he says: “I shall not easily forget the first time I ever saw Lincoln. It must have been about the 18th or 19th of February, 1861. . . . I saw him on Broadway, near the site of the present Post-office. He came down, I think from Canal street, to stop at the Astor House” (1038). Built in 1836, the Astor House— on Broadway between Vesey and Barclay—was New York’s leading hotel in the 1840s and 1850s. Lincoln had stayed there in February 1860, when he gave a speech at Cooper Union. The south half of the hotel was demolished in 1913, the north half in 1926. Whitman sets the scene of Lincoln’s arrival. “The broad spaces, sidewalks, and street in the neighborhood, and for some distance, were

30 Walt Whitman

crowded with solid masses of people, many thousands. The omnibuses and other vehicles had all been turn’d off, leaving an unusual hush in that busy part of the city. Presently two or three shabby hack barouches made their way with some difficulty through the crowd, and drew up at the Astor House entrance” (1038). Lincoln’s entrance is described in almost slow motion. “A tall figure step’d out of the centre of these barouches, paus’d leisurely on the sidewalk, look’d up at the granite walls and looming architecture of the grand old hotel—then, after a relieving stretch of arms and legs, turn’d round for over a minute to slowly and goodhumoredly scan the appearance of the vast and silent crowds” (1038). Whitman remembers seeing other famous men on Broadway—men who had been welcomed with roars from the crowd. They include Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and the Hungarian revolutionary Lajos Kossuth. “But on this occasion, not a voice—not a sound” (1039). The crowd is quiet and so is Lincoln. “There were no speeches—no compliments—no welcome— as far as I could hear, not a word said. Still much anxiety was conceal’d in that quiet. Cautious persons had fear’d some mark’d insult or indignity to the Presidentelect—for he possess’d no personal popularity at all in New York city, and very little political” (1038). The crowd did not heckle Lincoln, but it did not cheer him either. “The result was a sulky, unbroken silence, such as certainly never before characterized so great a New York crowd” (1038). Looking at Lincoln from the top of an omnibus, Whitman writes, I had, I say, a capital view of it all, and especially of Mr. Lincoln, his look and gait—his perfect composure and coolness—his unusual and uncouth height, his dress of complete black, stovepipe hat push’d back on the head, dark brown complexion, seam’d and wrinkled yet canny-looking face, black, bushy head of hair, disproportionately long neck, and his hands held behind as he stood observing the people. He look’d with curiosity upon that immense sea of faces, and the sea of faces return’d the look with similar curiosity. In both there was a dash of comedy, almost farce, such as Shakespeare puts in his blackest tragedies. (1039) Then Whitman sounds a note of alarm. “The crowd that hemm’d around consisted I should think of thirty to forty thousand men, not a single one his personal friend—while I have no doubt (so frenzied were the ferments of the time,) many an assassin’s knife and pistol lurkd in

Magnetic Mannahatta 31

hip or breast-pocket there, ready, soon as break and riot came.” The next paragraph begins. “But no break or riot came” (1039). Whitman’s fears about an assassination attempt were reasonable. A number of observers had warned of assassination plots. According to the Pinkerton Detective Agency, there was a plot to assassinate Lincoln when he passed through Baltimore. The silent pageant ends abruptly: “The tall figure gave another relieving stretch or two of arms and legs; then with moderate pace, and accompanied by a few unknown looking persons, ascended the porticosteps of the Astor House, disappeared through its broad entrance— and the dumb-show ended” (1039). Two months later the attack on Fort Sumter took place. Whitman was on Broadway when he heard about it. “I had been to the opera in Fourteenth street that night, and after the per for mance was walking down Broadway . . . on my way to Brooklyn, when I heard in the distance the loud cries of the newsboys, who came presently tearing and yelling up the street. . . . I bought an extra [special edition of a newspaper] and cross’d to the Metropolitan hotel . . . where the great lamps were still brightly blazing, and, with a crowd of others, who gather’d impromptu, read the news” (706). Built in 1852, the Metropolitan Hotel was on Broadway and Prince Street. It was demolished in 1895. The Appeal of Crowds In “A Broadway Pageant” Whitman describes another Broadway event— a parade featuring visiting dignitaries from Japan. They had arrived on June 16, 1860, on an American warship, and now were traveling up Broadway “in their open barouches, bare-headed, impassive.” Whitman is less interested in the Japanese visitors than in the crowd that attends the parade. He implies that the crowd has a kind of magnetism. “I too arising, answering, descend to the pavements, merge with the crowd, and gaze with them.” Whitman, like Baudelaire, was exhilarated by crowds. Two years after writing “A Broadway Pageant,” Whitman moved to Washington for a variety of reasons. In 1873 he moved to Camden, New Jersey, but he often returned to New York. Visiting there in 1878, he talks about the city’s crowds: “I resume with curiosity the crowds, the streets I knew so well, Broadway, the ferries, the west side of the city, democratic Bowery” (823).

32 Walt Whitman

Whitman often talks about the pleasure he gets from walking in New York’s crowded streets. In “Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun,” he praises “Manhattan crowds, with their turbulent musical chorus!” In a prose piece he talks about how much he likes to walk in the “area comprising Fourteenth street (especially the short range between Broadway and Fifth avenue) with Union Square . . . [and] down Broadway for half a mile.” At five o’clock it “must have contain’d from thirty to forty thousand fi nely-dress’d people, all in motion, plenty of them goodlooking . . . the trottoirs everywhere close-spread, thick-tangled” (843). Broadway often was crowded late into the night. In Democratic Vistas he speaks of “the heavy, low, musical roar [of Broadway], hardly ever intermitted, even at night” (938). Whitman also liked to ride the Broadway omnibuses and talk to the drivers, “a strange, natural, quick-eyed and wondrous race” (703). He told an acquaintance that he used to “spout” passages from Shakespeare while riding the omnibus. “In that seething mass—that noise, chaos, bedlam—what is one voice more or less?”20 He claimed the omnibus rides inspired Leaves of Grass. “I suppose the critics will laugh heartily, but the influence of those Broadway omnibus jaunts and drivers and declamations and escapades undoubtedly enter’d into the gestation of ‘Leaves of Grass’ ” (703). Whitman liked to walk as well on “the stretch of Fifth avenue, all the way from the Central Park exits at Fifty-ninth street, down to Fourteenth.” There is a “Mississippi of horses and rich vehicles, not by dozens and scores, but hundreds and thousands—the broad avenue fi lled and cramm’d with them— a moving, sparkling, hurrying crush, for more than two miles” (844). Whitman claims that walking in New York is good medicine for his soul. “I find in this visit to New York, and the daily contact and rapport with its myriad people . . . the best most effective medicine my soul has yet partaken” (824). A walk in New York is also a tonic against despair about the American future. “An appreciative and perceptive study of the current humanity of New York gives the directest proof yet of successful Democracy” (824). In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, many writers had become pessimistic about the United States. Some decried the increasing gap between the rich and the poor; others argued that the new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe would be difficult to assimilate. Whitman himself said that America’s digestion was strained by the “millions of ignorant foreigners” coming to its shores.21 In the

Magnetic Mannahatta 33

1870s he worried about the growth of poverty. “If the United States, like the countries of the Old World, are also to grow vast crops of poor, desperate, dissatisfied, nomadic, miserably-waged populations, such as we see looming upon us of late years . . . then our republican experiment . . . is at heart an unhealthy failure” (1065). He also thought corrupt legislators had accorded “special advantages” to “a few score select persons” and that these people were “forming a vulgar aristocracy, full as bad as anything in the British or European castes” (1068). Despite these concerns, Whitman was an optimist about the American future. A walk in New York strengthened his optimism—making him “defiant of cynics and pessimists” (824). Though he criticized “the enormous greed for worldly wealth . . . all through [American] society,” he did “not share the depression and despair on the subject which I fi nd possessing many good people” (1066). In another essay he writes, “I count with such absolute certainty on the great future of the United States” (1011). Whitman especially liked the crowded streets of Lower Manhattan, but he also walked in parts of upper Manhattan that were semirural. In 1878, he was staying “away up on Fifth avenue, near Eighty-sixth street, quiet, breezy, overlooking the dense woody fringe of the park— plenty of space and sky, birds chirping, and air comparatively fresh and odorless” (819). Visiting New York in 1881, he writes: “I fi nd I never sufficiently realized how beautiful are the upper two-thirds of Manhattan island. I am stopping at Mott Haven, and have been familiar with the region above One-hundredth street, and along the Harlem river and Washington heights” (908). On earlier visits he stayed at the home of John H. Johnston at 112 East 10th Street. Johnston, the owner of a large jewelry business, had begun a correspondence with Whitman in April 1876.22 In 1881, Whitman was preparing a new edition of Leaves of Grass. After working on the book for two or three hours, he would “go down and loaf along the Harlem river” (908). Then he would go for a walk: “I haltingly ramble an hour or two this forenoon by the more secluded parts of the shore” (909). He haltingly rambled because he had suffered a stroke in 1873. “I call myself a half-Paralytic these days,” he wrote in 1876, “and reverently bless the Lord it is no worse” (780). In Specimen Days he often speaks of hobbling somewhere—meaning that he walked with a cane. In 1887, Whitman no longer could hobble anywhere. In a note to the English edition of Specimen Days, he writes: “At present (end days of

34 Walt Whitman

March, 1887—I am nigh entering my 69th year) . . . I have been growing feebler quite rapidly for a year, and now can’t walk around—hardly from one room to the next” (1194). A year later, he suffered another paralytic stroke that confined him to a wheelchair. In 1889, on his seventieth birthday, he writes about how poor his health has been in the past year. Yet he claims he is not downhearted. “I get along more contentedly and comfortably than you might suppose— sit here all day in my big, high, strong, rattan-bottom’d chair” (1343). In Praise of “Business Materialism” Whitman liked to walk in cities where commerce was bustling. Visiting St. Louis, he was impressed by the “hurrying crowds, vehicles, horse-cars, hubbub, plenty of people, rich goods, plate-glass windows, iron fronts often five or six stories high” (870). Visiting New England, he was similarly impressed by “Boston’s im mense material growth— commerce, fi nance, commission stores, the plethora of goods, the crowded streets and sidewalks” (900). Whitman is the rare American writer who praises commerce. In Democratic Vistas he writes, “I hail with joy the oceanic, variegated, intense practical energy, the demand for facts, even the business materialism of the current age” (986). He says “even” because he knows that many cultured Americans looked down on “business materialism.” In 1880 he wrote that business is “an im mense and noble attribute of man . . . the tie and interchange of all the peoples of the earth.”23 Some critics argue that in his earlier years Whitman had been antipathetic to business but that in his later years his view of business softened because he liked being praised by industrialists, including Andrew Carnegie. Whitman did become more strongly pro-business in his later years, but he always thought New York was an exhilarating place in large part because of its commercial bent. Looking at Broadway from City Hall Park, Whitman sees “one mighty rush of men, business, carts, carriages, and clang.”24 Whitman liked to look in shop windows. In “Song of Myself ” he writes of “looking in at the shop-windows of Broadway the whole forenoon, flatting the flesh of my nose on the thick plate glass.”25 He probably looked into the windows of Stewart’s dry goods store at 280 Broadway on the corner of Chambers Street, which opened in 1846. Isabella Bird, an English writer, said the store, known as the Marble Palace, was a sight

Magnetic Mannahatta 35

that would “astonish” English visitors. It is “an immense square building of white marble, six stories high, with a frontage of 300 feet. . . . There are four hundred people employed at this establishment.”26 In 1862 Alexander Stewart opened a bigger store— the so- called Iron Palace— on Broadway between 9th and 10th Streets. Both buildings still exist. In Democratic Vistas, Whitman stresses that commercial expansion promotes prosperity. “I perceive clearly that the extreme business energy, and this almost maniacal appetite for wealth prevalent in the United States, are parts of amelioration and progress” (951 n.). Whitman also writes in Democratic Vistas that “the depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infi nitely greater” (937). If the business classes were so depraved, then how could he say that “the extreme business energy” of Americans is good for the country? Whitman is inconsistent. He attacks the business classes, yet he admires the energy and cleverness of entrepreneurs. He accords the highest praise to workers, however: “Few appreciate, I have often thought, the Ulyssean capacity, derring do, quick readiness in emergencies, practicality, unwitting devotion and heroism, among our American young men and working-people” (845). Whitman did not praise Americans who belonged to “Society,” a word he capitalizes and puts in quotation marks. He means people who do not have to hustle to make a living: ministers, academics, and the idle rich. Walking in Central Park, Whitman sees “New York’s wealth and ‘gentility’ ” driving around in “private barouches, cabs and coupés” (845). These people “are ill at ease . . . cased in too many cerements, and far from happy” (846). Whitman also refers to “cerements”— that is, grave clothes or shrouds—when writing about “Society” in Boston: “Of Boston, with its circles of social mummies, swathed in cerements harder than brass—its bloodless religion, (Unitarianism,) its complacent vanity of scientism and literature, lots of grammatical correctness, mere knowledge” (1061). The people who comprise “Society,” Whitman suggests, are snobbish and effete. They lack energy. Society is weaker in New York, Whitman argues, than it is in Boston. New York “still promises something, in time, out of its tremendous and varied materials, with a certain superiority of intuitions, and the advantage of constant agitation, and ever new and rapid dealings of the cards” (1061). Whitman thought of himself as a New York writer: “Walt

36 Walt Whitman

Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son.” He said that Leaves of Grass “arose out of my life in Brooklyn and New York.”27 An entrepreneurial New Yorker, Whitman tried to sell his book of poems by saying that he had developed a new poetic “product.” The poems in Leaves of Grass are a “barbaric yawp”—written mainly in unrhymed lines of varying length. (An exception is “O Captain! My Captain!”) He is “a bard out of Manhattan”— an original American poet who owes nothing to the Old World. Whitman claimed that his poetry was also new in content, the work of a man who was “one of the roughs,” “turbulent, fleshly, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding.” Whitman advertised himself as a writer whom “Society” would deplore. He was wild like a hawk. “I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable.” He liked to talk about sex: “Copulation is no more rank to me than death is. / I believe in the flesh and the appetites.” He hinted at homosexual liaisons, and he talked about his body in an unseemly manner: “The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer.” Whitman wanted to persuade readers that he was not genteel. Two leading Bostonians were persuaded. James Russell Lowell remarked, “Whitman is a rowdy, a New York tough, a loafer, a frequenter of law places, a friend of cab drivers!” Charles Eliot Norton called him a fusion of “Yankee transcendentalism and New York rowdyism.” Norton also said Leaves of Grass was “preposterous yet somehow fascinating.”28 Whitman cultivated his rough image in his person as well as his poetry. He changed his name from Walter to Walt, and he changed the way he dressed. In his twenties he dressed like a dandy; he wore a high hat and a frock coat with a flower in his lapel, and he walked with a cane of dark polished wood. Now he dressed like a laborer, a man who spent most of his time outdoors. On the frontispiece of Leaves of Grass he wears an open-necked shirt. On his head is the hat of a laborer. His posture is jaunty— one hand on his waist, the other in his pocket. Whitman was a small businessman of sorts. Justin Kaplan notes that “at fi fty-six, after twenty years as a professional author, Whitman was still his own publisher, his own production and sales manager and shipping clerk.”29 The entrepreneurial Whitman did a number of shady things to promote his literary product. He printed in the New York Tribune a letter Emerson had sent him about Leaves of Grass without getting Emerson’s permission to do so. He told Emerson that the first edition of Leaves had “readily sold” a thousand copies when in fact very few copies

Magnetic Mannahatta 37

were sold. He reprinted this lie in a letter to Emerson—whom he called his “dear Friend and Master”— and he placed the letter at the end of the second edition of Leaves, published in 1856. He also took a sentence from Emerson’s original letter and had it stamped in gold on the spine of the second edition. The sentence is: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.”30 Whitman also wrote and published unsigned reviews in praise of his own work. In 1876 he wrote an unsigned article for a Camden newspaper, complaining that “Whitman’s poems . . . have been met, and are met today, with the determined denial, disgust, and scorn of orthodox American authors, publishers and editors, and in a pecuniary and worldly sense, have certainly wrecked the life of their author.” Whitman was attacked, but he also was admired by many writers. Whitman, David Reynolds argues, “was beyond scruples. He felt his cause was worthy, and he would do anything in his limited power to push it.”31 Whitman had something in common with a popu lar nineteenthcentury figure: the patent-medicine salesman. He claimed that his poetic product promoted physical and spiritual health: You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And fi lter and fibre your blood. Whitman asks: “Who wishes to walk with me?” If you walk with him (that is, read him), you will become healthier— spiritually and physically. He ends “Song of Myself ” with: “I stop somewhere waiting for you.” Whitman described Leaves of Grass as “a language experiment . . . an attempt to give the spirit, the body, the man, new words, new potentialities of speech.” He wished people would carry around Leaves of Grass and read it in the open air.32 It is easy to see how Whitman became a hero to the counterculture of the 1960s. He talked about freeing oneself from the “cerements” of tradition, being natural, celebrating the body, having guilt-free sex. He was a loafer who did what he pleased and went where he wanted to go. He was always on the road, tramping a perpetual journey. But the “real” Whitman was an ambitious and hardworking writer. And the “real” Whitman was not very “rough.” At Pfaff ’s, a gathering place for bohemian writers, Whitman was quiet and reserved. Whitman is not easy to

38 Walt Whitman

characterize, but he did say of himself: “There is something in my nature furtive like an old hen!”33 More important, Whitman praises two things the counterculture despised: materialism and commerce. While riding a ferry to Manhattan and walking in the city, he gradually came to the conclusion that the works of man are “equally great” as the works of Nature. “Always and more and more, as I cross the East and North rivers . . . or pass an hour in Wall street, or the gold exchange, I realize . . . that not Nature alone is great in her fields of freedom and the open air, in her storms, the shows of night and day, the mountains, forests, seas. . . . The work of man too is equally great—in this profusion of teeming humanity—in these ingenuities, streets, goods, houses, ships—these hurrying, feverish, electric crowds of men, their complicated business genius, (not least among the geniuses,) and all this mighty, many-threaded wealth and industry concentrated here” (938–939). Praising America’s “complicated business genius,” Whitman has more in common with Benjamin Franklin than with Allen Ginsberg. Dark Patches The historian Lewis Mumford wrote that “wherever one goes in New York, whether one knows it or not, one walks in the steps of Walt Whitman.”34 Whitman often wrote about walking in New York, but some of his most powerful lines (in poetry and prose) are about riding a ferry. “I have always had a passion for ferries; to me they afford inimitable, streaming, never-failing, living poems” (701). Whitman often talks about the approaching the city by water. Crossing by ferry from Jersey City, he refers to “the city part of the North [Hudson] River with its life, breadth, peculiarities—the amplitude of sea and wharf, cargo and commerce.” Gazing on “the unrivall’d panorama,” he writes: “Little, I say, do folks here appreciate the most ample . . . picturesque bay and estuary surroundings in the world!” New York is a city of “magnificent entrances” (1277–1278). A year earlier, in 1878, Whitman had looked at the city from the Upper Bay: “Nothing on earth of its kind can go beyond this show. To the left the North river with its far vista . . . to the right the East river— the mast-hemm’d shores— the grand obelisk-like towers of the bridge, one on either side, in haze, yet plainly defi n’d, giant brothers twain, throwing free graceful interlinking loops high across the tum-

Magnetic Mannahatta 39

bled tumultuous current below” (822– 823). He is referring to the Brooklyn Bridge, which was under construction and would open in 1883. Whitman is the fi rst American writer to suggest that an urban landscape could be sublime. “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” one of Whitman’s best poems, is in part an attempt to describe the sublime landscape he sees from the ferry. The fi rst part of stanza three recalls a watercolor by Winslow Homer. Everything is bright and breezy and glittering. He speaks of the movements of seagulls, ships, sailors, and clouds as well as the “centrifugal spokes of light” on the water. As darkness descends, the scene resembles a watercolor or painting by Whistler of the Thames at night: On the neighboring shore the fi res from the foundry chimneys burning high and glaringly into the night, Casting their fl icker of black contrasted with wild red and yellow light over the tops of houses, and down into the clefts of streets. Riding the ferry is like walking on Broadway in that a pageant of motion and light exhilarates both rider and walker. Riding the ferry is different from walking on Broadway in one respect: the crossing is like a religious ritual that connects the past with the future. “I too many and many a time cross’d the river of old.” In the middle section, the poem changes abruptly. Instead of celebrating New York, he is questioning himself. In the fi fth stanza he asks, “What is it then between us?”—the poet and the reader, that is. Whitman now talks about walking rather than riding the ferry, but it is the walk of a man who is troubled by dark thoughts: I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan island . . . I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me, In the day among crowds of people sometimes they came upon me, In my walks home late at night or as I lay in my bed they came upon me . . . . The walker here is like Frost’s walker in “Acquainted with the Night,” who says: “I have outwalked the furthest city light.” In the sixth stanza, Whitman turns the tables on the reader. Instead of confessing his own dark thoughts, he says his “dark patches” are like

40 Walt Whitman

the reader’s dark patches. “It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall / The dark threw its patches down upon me also.” Having dark patches is the human condition. Or as Whitman says in “Song of Myself ”: “The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.” What follows is a confession— a cata logue of bad thoughts and bad deeds. Whitman is often taken to be a poet who believes in the goodness of “natural” man, but in the following passage he sounds like a Calvinist: The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious, My thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre? Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil, I am he who knew what it was to be evil, I too knotted the old knot of contrariety, Blabb’d, blush’d, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d, Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak, Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant, The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me, . . . In the eighth stanza, Whitman concludes the dark middle-movement of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” with several questions: We understand then do we not? What I promis’d without mentioning it, have you not accepted? We the reader understand that the poet’s confession is implicitly our confession. Whitman is saying that you cannot celebrate New York unless you fi rst acknowledge the “dark patches” in yourself. After this “understanding,” the poem shifts to a major key and the poet celebrates the great show of light and motion on New York’s harbor. Though Whitman usually ends his poems and prose pieces about New York on a positive note, in Democratic Vistas he acknowledges that all cities have their dark side. Cities are “crowded with petty grotesques, malformations, phantoms, playing meaningless antics. Confess that everywhere, in shop, street, church, theatre, bar-room, official chair, are pervading fl ippancy and vulgarity, low cunning, infidelity” (939). In “Broadway,” written four years before Whitman died, everyone walking on Broadway seems feverish with energy—in the grip of a maniacal desire for success. The poem begins:

Magnetic Mannahatta 41

What hurrying human tides, or day or night! What passions, winnings, losses, ardors, swim thy waters! What whirls of evil, bliss and sorrow, stem thee! Whitman concludes with three lines that are difficult to fathom. Addressing Broadway, he says: Thou of the endless sliding, mincing, shuffl ing feet! Thou, like the parti-colored world itself—like infi nite, teeming, mocking life! Thou visor’d, vast, unspeakable show and lesson! Why does Whitman speak of Broadway’s “sliding, mincing, shuffl ing feet”? Is he suggesting that to get ahead in New York you have to grovel? Or is he merely suggesting that, given the crowds, you have no choice but to slide and shuffle? Why does he speak of Broadway’s “mocking life” and what does he mean by “visor’d”? Are all human beings opaque? Finally, why is Broadway an “unspeakable show”? Unspeakable usually refers to a person whose conduct is beneath contempt, but Whitman seems to mean that it is impossible to convey in language the range of emotions he feels while walking on Broadway. When he was writing this poem, did Whitman recall McDonald Clarke, the so-called Mad Poet of Broadway? Born in 1798 in Bath, Maine, Clarke moved to New York in 1819. After his marriage to an actress collapsed, his mental health declined, and he was in and out of mental institutions. He also was impoverished, since the only money he made came from the sale of his books of poetry. He often could be seen walking down Broadway and acting eccentrically. In March 1842 he was destitute and demented when a policeman put him in a jail cell for his own safety. Transferred to an insane asylum, Clarke committed suicide by drowning himself in water flowing from an open faucet. Whitman wrote a eulogy for Clarke— saying that he “possessed all the requisites of a great poet.” He also wrote a poem, “The Death and Burial of McDonald Clarke”— depicting him as a persecuted author who died alone and without friends.35 We cannot say whether Whitman had the Mad Poet of Broadway in mind when he wrote “Broadway,” but we can say that this cryptic poem offers a darker portrait of New York than we see in most of the poems and prose pieces Whitman wrote about the city. When Whitman was an old man living in Camden, he said New York, with its “art

42 Walt Whitman

delirium” and “crowd of scrawlers,” was “death to the spirit . . . a good market for the harvest but a bad place for farming.”36 The city we see in “Broadway” could be called manic Manhattan rather than magnetic Mannahatta. It is a city that resembles the New York of Herman Melville.

4

Herman Melville Lost in the City

M

elville does not celebrate New York. His view of the city is always dark, though in “Bartleby, the Scrivener” the darkness has its comic aspects. Melville agrees with Whitman that New Yorkers are fi lled with energy, but he regards energetic New Yorkers as foolish dreamers who pursue impossible dreams of wealth or fame. In the opening pages of Moby-Dick, Ishmael talks about dreaming New Yorkers: “Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fi xed in ocean reveries.” Yet, writing a decade earlier, Nathan Parker Willis observes that few New Yorkers went to the waterfront: “If quiet be the object, the nearer the water the less jostled the walk on Sunday. You would think, to cross the city anywhere from river to river, that there was a general hydrophobia— the entire population crowding to the high ridge of Broadway, and hardly a soul to be seen on either the east River or the Hudson.”1 Melville lived in New York longer than Whitman did. He was born in a house on Pearl Street. Two years later, his father moved the family to a larger house on Cortlandt Street. In the ensuing eight years, they moved twice to bigger houses—fi rst to a house on Bleecker Street and then to one on Broadway between Bond and Great Jones Streets. His father’s import business—fine clothes, accessories, and furnishings from France— seemed to be thriving, but in reality his father was a reckless 43

44

Herman Melville

businessman who lived beyond his means. In 1830, the business went bankrupt, and the family fled to Albany, where relatives helped Melville’s father fi nancially. Working in the fur business, Melville’s father was heavily in debt when he died in 1832 of pneumonia. Melville’s view of New York’s commercial life undoubtedly was colored by his father’s failure in business. His father was an energetic entrepreneur, the kind of hurrying New Yorker whom Whitman celebrated. Melville’s story, “Jimmy Rose,” published in 1855, is about a New York trader who, like Melville’s father, has a house on Broadway and gives lavish parties. Suddenly his business collapses and the same people who drank his expensive wine now berate him as a rascal and scamp for not paying his debts. As if commenting on New York’s commercial life, the narrator says: “Sudden and terrible reverses in business were made mortal by mad prodigality on all hands.” In the summer of 1847, the newly married Melville moved back to New York, living at 103 Fourth Avenue between 11th and 12th Streets. Melville liked to walk in the city. “We breakfast at 8 o’clock, then Herman goes to walk,” his wife wrote in 1847. Herman, she added, also walked “down town” after dinner, where he “looks at the papers in the reading room.”2 She is probably referring to the reading room of the Mercantile Library on the corner of Nassau and Beekman Streets. A year later, Melville joined the New York Society Library, on Broadway near Leonard Street, and he often walked there to take out a book. In 1850, Melville and his family moved to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where they lived for thirteen years. Melville returned to the city frequently. In June 1851, he told Hawthorne that he had gone to New York “to bury myself in a third- story room, and work on and slave on my ‘Whale’ while it is driving through the press.” A few weeks later, he wrote that he was “disgusted with the heat and dust of the babylonish brick-kiln of New York.”3 In November 1863, the Melville family moved back to New York. They now lived at 104 East 26th Street in a house that Melville bought from his brother Allan. Melville lived there for the rest of his life. He died in September 1891, six months before Whitman. Whitman and Melville apparently never met, though they had at least two acquaintances in common, the poet William Cullen Bryant and the critic Evert Duyckinck. The latter was a major figure in New York’s literary circles. He was the literary editor of the influential Democratic Review, to which Whitman contributed short stories; he also was the editor of the weekly Literary World, which Melville wrote for.

Lost in the City 45

Whitman and Melville could have met at Duyckinck’s house at 20 Clinton Street, but there is no evidence that they did. They could also have met at the Battery. “They easily could have stood side by side gazing at the Bay . . . for this was a mutually favorite spot.”4 In 1846, they could have met at the opening of the American Art-Union’s new exhibition space on Broadway near Franklin Street. Melville attended the opening, and Walt Whitman reviewed the exhibition a few weeks later. Melville seems to have known Whitman’s work. In September 1885, he wrote to James Billson, a young Englishman who admired his work, to thank him for a poem about Whitman that Billson had clipped and sent him. “The tribute to Walt Whitman has the ring of strong sincerity.” This response may be what Henry James called the mere twaddle of literary graciousness, for Melville does not say that he has read Whitman. Stronger evidence that Melville had done so comes from a magazine editor who in February 1888 wrote to Melville: “As you said so much of Whitman, I will run the risk of showing you my chapter on him.”5 Whitman favorably reviewed Melville’s Typee and Omoo in the Brooklyn Eagle. One wonders if he read Melville’s Pierre, or the Ambiguities (1852). The last third of Pierre takes place in New York, though the narrator never mentions the city by name. Book XVI is entitled “First Night of Their Arrival in the City,” but the narrator strongly implies that the city he is talking about is New York. He says that a popu lar young lecturer is the author of “A Week at Coney Island,” and he says the city is “haunted by publishers, engravers, editors, critics, autograph-collectors, portrait-fanciers, biographers, and petitioning and remonstrating literary friends of all sorts.” Melville wants readers of Pierre to assume he is talking about New York, but he also wants readers to see “the city” as any place where commerce is the dominating force. “The city” is akin to the “the Town” in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, a place where vice and sin flourish, and a place where unscrupulous people prey on the innocent and naïve. In Pierre the narrator says, “In our cities families rise and fall like bubbles in a vat.” When Pierre moves to “the city,” he hopes to making a living as a writer, but he soon realizes he will fail because he cannot write a popu lar book. “At last the idea obtruded, that the wider and the profounder he should grow, the more and the more he lessened the chances for bread; that could he now hurl his deep book out of the window, and fall to on some shallow nothing of a novel, composable in a month at the longest, then could he reasonably hope for both appreciation and cash. But the

46

Herman Melville

devouring profundities, now opened up in him, consume all his vigor.” He cannot write a commercial novel because his mind is in the grip of “devouring profundities.” Frustrated and despondent, he seeks relief by going for long walks on what seems to be Broadway, though the street is not named. “He had found some relief in making his regular evening walk through the greatest thoroughfare of the city; that so, the utter isolation of his soul, might feel itself the more intensely from the incessant jogglings of his body against the bodies of the hurrying thousands.” The “hurrying thousands” intensify his feeling of isolation. By contrast, Whitman feels a sense of a rapport with Broadway’s “hurrying human tides.” Pierre soon prefers to walk on stormy nights because “the great thoroughfares were less thronged.” On the stormy nights “the innumerable shop-awnings flapped and beat like schooners’ broad sails in a gale, and the shutters banged like lashed bulwarks; and the slates fell hurtling like displaced ship’s blocks from aloft.” Melville imagines the city as a ship buffeted by a storm, and Pierre thinks of himself as a ship captain who braves the elements. “Pierre felt a dark, triumphant joy; that while others had crawled in fear to their kennels, he alone defied the storm-admiral.” Looking for ways to stoke his sense of isolation, Pierre walks in the city’s seamy quarter. On “howling, pelting nights” he walks down “the dark narrow side-streets, in quest of the more secluded and mysterious tap-rooms. There he would feel a singular satisfaction, in sitting down all dripping in a chair, ordering his half-pint of ale before him, and drawing over his cap to protect his eyes from the light, eye the varied faces of the social castaways, who here had their haunts from the bitterest midnights.” If Dickens sought out the dives in Five Points because he was a journalist who wanted to know more about New York’s dark side, Pierre goes to the city’s dives because he enjoys being an outcast among outcasts. Pierre is akin to Dostoevsky’s underground man, arrogantly proud of being different. Pierre now decides to walk in the most desolate areas of the city. “Now nothing but the utter night-desolation of the obscurest warehousing lanes would content him, or be at all sufferable to him.” He walks in the city but sees nothing. He is lost in himself. On his quasi-allegorical journey toward utter isolation, Pierre experiences a crisis that is both spiritual and physical. “A sudden, unwonted and all-pervading sensation seized him. He knew not where he was; he

Lost in the City 47

did not have any ordinary life-feeling at all. He could not see; though instinctively putting his hand to his eyes, he seemed to feel that the lids were open. Then he was sensible of a combined blindness, and vertigo, and staggering; before his eyes a million green meteors danced; he felt his foot tottering upon the curb, he put out his hands, and knew no more for the time. When he came to himself he found that he was lying crosswise in the gutter, dabbled with mud and slime.” Recovering from this “fit,” Pierre decides that he will not walk on these desolate streets again. “This circumstance warned him away from those desolate streets, lest the repetition of the fit should leave him there to perish by night in unknown and unsuspected loneliness.” Pierre’s dark night of the soul affects him profoundly. He no longer can write. Looking at the blank paper, “his eyes rolled away from him in their orbits; and now a general and nameless torpor— some horrible foretaste of death itself— seemed stealing upon him.” In the fi nal pages of the novel, the tormented Pierre walks on what seems to be Broadway. He plans to kill a man who he thinks has betrayed him. “It was between four and five of the afternoon; that hour, when the great glaring avenue was most thronged with haughty-rolling carriages, and proud-rustling promenaders, both men and women.” Melville describes the same scene that Whitman describes in several poems and essays but he gives it a completely different coloration. Melville’s Broadway is phantasmagoric— almost nightmarish. The east side of the street was relatively empty, but the “on the west pave, up and down, for three long miles, two streams of glossy, shawled, or broadcloth life unceasingly brushed by each other.” The crowd is a dark force, and Pierre has a “wild and fatal aspect.” He confronts the man he has stalked and stabs him to death. It is hard to know what to make of Pierre. At times he seems to be a spokesman for Melville, but at the end of the novel he is mentally disturbed. Is Pierre an indictment of commercial America or, more specifically, a blast against the New York literary scene? Andrew Delbanco observes that “Pierre was Melville’s belated valedictory message to the New York literary scene— a message that might be summed up as ‘Up yours.’ ”6 Melville is not only casting a cold eye on the New York publishing world; he is saying that a commercial society has no interest in “profundities.” Writing his father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, in 1849, Melville brags that he wants to fail: “So far as I am individually concerned, & independent of my pocket, it is my earnest desire to write those sort of books which

48

Herman Melville

are said to ‘fail.’—Pardon this egotism.”7 The letter is desperate bravado on his part; he wanted to make money but “profundities” often got in the way. It infuriated Melville that he could not be “independent” of his pocket, that he had to think about supporting his family. Writing to Hawthorne in 1851, he said, “Dollars damn me; and the malicious Dev il is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. . . . What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,—it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.”8 Pierre has the same problem Melville has: he would like to write commercial books, but he cannot. Moreover, Pierre—like Melville— does not feel at home in the bohemian world of artists and thinkers. In the novel these people congregate in a deconsecrated church called the “Church of the Apostles.” (Melville may have been thinking of the original Grace Church on Broadway and Rector Street. In 1845 it had been sold and turned into stores and a museum of Chinese curiosities.) The bohemians are “ambiguously professional nondescripts in very genteel but shabby black, and unaccountable foreign-looking fellows in blue spectacles. . . . Here they sit and talk like magpies. . . . These poor, penniless, dev ils . . . are mostly artists of various sorts; painters, or sculptors, or indigent students, or teachers of languages, or poets, or fugitive French politicians, or German phi losophers.” The narrator calls the artists and thinkers who meet in this place “glorious paupers, from whom I learn the profoundest mysteries of things.” Is he serious or sarcastic? He seems to be making fun of their wooly-mindedness when he says: “Their mental tendencies, however heterodox at times, are still very fi ne and spiritual upon the whole.” Nevertheless, he likes these people because they are out of step with commercial America. Since Pierre’s life in “the city” is disastrous, would he have been better off staying in the country? Early in the novel Pierre takes a long walk in the woods, yet after the walk Pierre remains despondent. “Pierre could not now find one single agreeable twig of thought whereon to perch his weary soul.” Pierre suffers from “utter pauperism of the spirit.” His state of mind cannot be relieved by a walk anywhere. Melville did not believe in the restorative powers of nature. Near the close of Pierre the narrator says: “Say what some poets will, Nature is not so much her own very sweet interpreter, as the mere supplier of

Lost in the City 49

that cunning alphabet, whereby selecting and combining as he pleases, each man reads his own peculiar lesson accordingly to his own peculiar mind and mood.” We read into nature our own hopes and fears. A melodramatic, self-pitying soul, Pierre often is tedious. (Delbanco writes that Pierre is “Ahab gone camp.”) Melville may have worried not only that his novel was a botch but also that he was becoming a botch himself. Van Wyck Brooks notes that when Melville was putting the book through the press, he was “roaming half-blind through the streets of New York, after dark, for the sake of his eyes, a victim of overstrain and vertigo.”9 The “terrible vertigo” Pierre felt while walking in New York may be based on Melville’s own experience. In 1856 Melville visited Hawthorne in Liverpool, and in his journal Hawthorne wrote: “Melville has not been well, of late; he has been affected with neuralgic complaints in his head and limbs, and no doubt has suffered from too constant literary occupation, pursued without much success, latterly; and his writings, for a long while past, have indicated a morbid state of mind.”10 Though Melville suffered from a morbid state of mind, he did not go mad. A few years after he wrote Pierre, he published “The Fiddler,” which is about failure in the arts. The story opens with the narrator’s complaint: “So my poem is damned, and immortal fame is not for me!” The poet, whom we soon learn is a man named Helmstone, is so despondent that he rushes out of his apartment onto Broadway, where he meets a friend who introduces him to a man named Hautboy. The three of them attend a circus and have lunch at Taylor’s, where Whitman occasionally ate. Helmstone is impressed by Hautboy, who is goodhumored and cheerful; Hautboy has “a certain serene expression of leisurely, deep good sense.” Helmstone eventually learns that Hautboy is a failure. He once had been “an extraordinary genius,” a highly regarded fiddler who was in great demand, “but to-day he walks Broadway and no man knows him. . . . Crammed once with fame, he is now hilarious without it. With genius and without fame, he is happier than a king.” The next day, Helmstone tears up all his manuscripts and begins taking fiddling lessons from Hautboy. Melville must have felt like tearing up his manuscripts. It was a wretched business for a man devoured by profundities to try to make a living as a writer. Melville, like Hautboy, had once been “crammed with fame,” but in the late 1850s he was fast becoming an unknown writer whose novels mostly were forgotten. In the 1880s a British admirer, who thought

50

Herman Melville

Melville “the one great imaginative writer fit to stand shoulder to shoulder with Whitman,” said that “no one seemed to know anything of him.”11 A Story of Wall Street That Is Not About Wall Street Pierre is a botch, but “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” published a year later, is a disturbing and funny masterpiece. Its subtitle is “A Story of Wall-Street,” but Bartleby is not remotely like the men and women who work there. Melville had often walked on Wall Street because his brother Allan, who was his literary agent, was a partner in a law fi rm on 10 Wall Street. (Later, Allan had his own office at 14 Wall Street.) In Democratic Vistas, Whitman says that after passing “an hour in Wall Street” he is impressed by “these hurrying, feverish, electric crowds of men” (939). Bartleby works on Wall Street, but he does not hurry anywhere. He is motionless. When the narrator interviews Bartleby for a job as copyist, he calls Bartleby “a motionless young man.” This is an odd way to describe someone, since it is normal to be relatively motionless in an interview. The narrator is thinking about what he would soon learn about Bartleby— that he is motionless in mind as well as body. Later in the story the narrator says: “I remembered that he never spoke but to answer. . . . I had never seen him reading—no, not even a newspaper; that for a long periods he would stand looking out, at his pale window . . . upon the dead brick wall.”12 We see Bartleby through the eyes of the narrator— a somewhat pompous but kindhearted lawyer who is in turn flabbergasted, irritated, disturbed, despondent, frustrated, and exasperated by his employee’s conduct. He does not know what line to take with his very strange employee. He refers to Bartleby’s “dead-wall reveries” several times, but what exactly does a dead-wall reverie mean? Bartleby is a mystery. Neither the narrator nor the reader has a clue about what motivates him. For two days, Bartleby does the work assigned to him. Yet on the third day he refuses to do some proofreading. Bartleby’s refusal has become a famous sentence in American literature: “I would prefer not to.” When the narrator asks Bartleby why he would prefer not to do the work he asked him to do, the scrivener repeats himself: “I would prefer not to.” The narrator is incredulous, but he also is unnerved by Bartleby’s politeness.

Lost in the City 51

Bartleby continues to be a copyist, but he refuses to do any other work. The narrator soon learns how “motionless” Bartleby is. “I observed that he never went to dinner; indeed that he never went any where.” One Sunday the narrator goes to the office, but his key does not work and he cannot enter. He calls out, and the door opens. “The apparition of Bartleby appeared, in his shirt-sleeves, and otherwise in a strangely tattered deshabille.” Seeing Bartleby at the office on a Sunday, when Wall Street “is deserted as Petra,” the narrator becomes despondent. “For the fi rst time in my life a feeling of overpowering stinging melancholy seized me.” He thinks of all the people “sailing down the Mississippi of Broadway” and contrasts them with “the pallid copyist.” Why, he wonders, is Bartleby so different? He asks Bartleby to tell him something about himself, but Bartleby refuses. “I would prefer not to.” Soon Bartleby refuses to do any work at all. When the narrator asks why, Bartleby offers a cryptic reply: “Do you not see the reason for yourself ?” The narrator thinks that Bartleby may be suffering from eyestrain. A few days later, he asks Bartleby if he will resume copying when his eyes improve. “I have given up copying,” Bartleby announces. The narrator now becomes resolute; he says that in six days Bartleby must leave the office. “I would prefer not,” replies Bartleby. The narrator responds: “You must.” Bartleby does not reply. The narrator is at his wit’s end. He does not know what to do about this strange man who refuses to leave his office yet will not do any work. Attempting to make sense of the situation, the narrator concludes— and here Melville is making fun of Christians who see everything that happens as a sign from God—that housing Bartleby is “the predestinated purpose of my life. I am content. Others may have loftier parts to enact; but my mission in this world, Bartleby, is to furnish you with office room for such period as you may see fit to remain.” The narrator is content only for a brief period. When people notice that a “strange creature” is living in his office, the narrator decides to vacate the premises himself. He fi nds new quarters, but the landlord of his old office is furious because Bartleby is still there. “You must take him away, sir, at once. . . . These gentlemen, my tenants, cannot stand it any longer.” He says that Bartleby “persists in haunting the building generally, sitting upon the banisters of the stairs by day, and sleeping in the entry by night.” The narrator tries another ploy. He becomes Bartleby’s job counselor. “Would you like a clerkship in a dry-goods store?” he asks. Bartleby

52

Herman Melville

does not respond with his usual refrain. Instead, he offers a puzzling reply that for Bartleby is verbose: “There is too much confi nement about that. No, I would not like a clerkship; but I am not par ticu lar.” He is par ticu lar. He will not move. The narrator makes one last appeal. He asks Bartleby to go home with him, “and remain there till we can conclude upon some convenient arrangement for you at our leisure.” Bartleby refuses. Trying in vain to reason with this motionless man, the narrator suddenly feels the need for motion. He fl ies out of the office, runs up Wall Street toward Broadway, and jumps on an omnibus. He spends a few days driving around the city and the suburbs in his “rockaway,” a onehorse carriage. When the narrator returns to his office, he learns that Bartleby has been removed to the Tombs—the prison Dickens had inspected. He visits Bartleby, who still is motionless, “standing all alone in the quietest of the yards, his face toward a high wall.” Bartleby refuses to talk to the narrator. A few days later, when the narrator visits the Tombs again, he learns that Bartleby, after refusing to eat, has died. Throughout the story, the narrator has tried in vain to fi nd out something about Bartleby’s past. In the last paragraph he admits he has failed, but he heard “one little item of rumour” that cannot be verified: “Bartleby had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington, from which he had been suddenly removed by a change in the administration.” The narrator assumes that the letters in the Dead Letter Office—letters that never reached their destiny— contain only good news: “pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death.” The narrator concludes: “Ah Bartleby, ah humanity!” Does the narrator mean that our hopes are like letters that never reach their destination? Melville may have thought his two most recent novels, Moby-Dick and Pierre, never reached their destination insofar as they failed to gain a large readership. Responding to a query (in 1885) from James Billson, Melville says: “You mention [that] . . . you had unearthed several of my buried books.”13 But it would be wrong to read “Bartleby” as a tale about a writer whose books have been buried. It is tale about a man who does not hope. Bartleby has dead-wall reveries rather than the ocean reveries. The Confi dence-Man (1857), Melville’s last novel, is about the reveries that people have, reveries that open them to swindling and ex-

Lost in the City 53

ploitation. The con man who plies his trade on a Mississippi riverboat has many identities. In one chapter he is a “herb-doctor” who is peddling liniment to a crippled man. After the cripple finally decides to buy the liniment, the swindler says, “I rejoice in the birth of your confidence and hopefulness.” The con man shrewdly says that he will take no money for the liniment, but the cripple, touched by his gesture, insists on paying for it. “As the herb-doctor withdrew, the cripple gradually subsided from his hard rocking into a gentle oscillation. It expressed, perhaps, the soothed mood of his reverie.” The cripple’s reverie will end in disillusion, yet for the time being the reverie sustains him. Melville may have thought his father’s ocean reveries about financial success were foolish and self-destructive, but he implies that humankind cannot live without some kind hopefulness about the future. Without reveries, we would all become motionless like Bartleby. The Solitary Walker After the failure of Pierre, Melville may have felt like saying, “I would prefer not to” to the New York publishing world, but he never became motionless. He continued to write, though he quit writing novels. He traveled, going to Europe and the Middle East and then voyaging to San Francisco by way of Cape Horn. After he moved back to New York in November 1863, he wrote poetry and he wrote his great novella Billy Budd. He also walked a great deal in his native city. From 1866 to 1885, Melville had to walk six days a week from his office at 507 West Street down to the Battery. He walked along the piers of the Hudson River because he was a deputy inspector for the U.S. Customs Ser vice. To get to work, he would take the omnibus down Broadway and walk west to his office. In later years, when he was assigned to an East River pier at 79th Street, he would go to work on the new Third Avenue El and walk east to the river. Walking in New York, Melville may have been spent most of his time wandering in the deserts of his mind. An English admirer of Melville says that when he was in New York he got a passing glimpse of his “tall, stalwart figure and grave, preoccupied face.” Hawthorne suggests that Melville often was lost in thought. He describes a conversation he had with Melville while walking along a beach at an English resort. “Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies behind human ken. . . . It is strange

54

Herman Melville

how he persists— and has persisted even since I knew him, and probably long before—in wandering to-and-fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting.”14 Melville, though, was not always lost in thought. In 1857, Melville’s sister Augusta wrote that “Herman by birth & from his residence in the city of New York is known as a New Yorker; all his books are published in that city; all his interests are there.”15 Melville was disturbed by the Astor Place riots of 1849, which he could hear because he lived nearby. The riots began when a crowd of predominantly Irish workers, who hated all things English, tried to storm the recently built Astor Opera House to prevent the English actor William Macready from performing Macbeth. When the police arrived, the rioters attacked them. Eighteen men died on the scene, four died a few days later, and fifty were wounded. For Melville, who had signed a petition allowing Macready to perform, the riots proved that the proverbial energy of New Yorkers could quickly become a destructive force. In 1863, Melville wrote a poem, “The House-top,” about New York’s draft riots, which took place a few months before he moved back to the city. Objections to the provisions of the war time draft laws, which allowed a man to avoid the draft if he paid the government $300 or found a substitute, led to three days of riots and more than 120 fatalities. (Some scholars put the figure much higher.) Many blacks were lynched, and federal troops were brought in to restore order. Whitman’s brother George wrote from Kentucky, where he was stationed: “I could hardly believe, that a thing of that kind would be alowed [sic] to get such headway in the City of New York.” George Templeton Strong, a prominent New York lawyer, held that Irish workers were mainly to blame. “I am sorry to fi nd that England is right about the lower class of Irish. They are brutal, base, cruel, cowards, and as insolent as base.”16 The rioters were indeed mainly Irish, but some Irish workers and Irish priests tried to stop the violence. “The House-top” begins with the speaker standing on a roof in New York.17 He says he cannot sleep because of the sultriness of the air. At fi rst he hears nothing and sees only stars. Then he hears a muffled sound—“the Atheist roar of riot”— and soon he sees “red Arson.” The town, he says, is taken by its rats—ship-rats And rats of the wharves. All civil charms And priestly spells which late held hearts in awe—

Lost in the City 55

Fear-bound, subjected to a better sway Than sway of self; these like a dream dissolve, And man rebounds whole aeons back in nature. The poem, which twice refers to “the Town,” is more a sermon about the nature of man than a discussion of the riots. The rioters are “Atheists” because their passions are not constrained by “civil charms and priestly spells.” They behave like “natural” men—that is, barbarians. When Melville talks about “rats,” he is thinking about mankind in general. Melville was not anti-Irish. In Melville’s view, all human beings are capable of behaving like rats. He dislikes writers who think man is innately good. He admires Hawthorne because of “this great power of blackness in him . . . [which] derives its force from its appeals to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free.”18 Melville may seem to take a dark view of all things American because he takes a dark view of humankind, but he does like one thing about American democracy: intellectual freedom. In a letter to Duyckinck, written in March 1849, Melville says: “I would to God Shakespeare had lived later, & promenaded in Broadway.” Melville was interested in talking to him, for in Queen Elizabeth’s time being frank was dangerous. If Shakespeare could live in nineteenth-century America, Melville imagined, he might talk about things that he could only hint at in his plays: “The muzzle which all men wore on their souls in the Elizabethan day, might not have intercepted Shakspers [sic] full articulations. For I hold it a verity, that even Shakespeare, was not a frank man to the uttermost. And, indeed, who in this intolerant Universe is, or can be? But the Declaration of Independence makes a difference.”19 If Shakespeare were alive, Melville could have had the kind of conversation with him that he enjoyed having with Hawthorne. But Melville’s conversation with Hawthorne was mostly a one-way street. According to Hawthorne’s wife, when Melville and Hawthorne got together, Melville did all the talking. “Nothing pleases me more,” she said, “than to sit & hear this growing man [Melville] dash his tumultuous waves of thought against Mr. Hawthorne’s great, genial, comprehending silences.”20 After retiring from his government job, Melville continued to be a walker in the city. Oscar Wegelin, a New York book dealer and antiquarian who met Melville while working as an apprentice in a Nassau Street bookshop, remembered that the old man “would take long walks in

56

Herman Melville

those latter months, voyaging as far afield as Central Park.” Melville, Wegelin said, had a “rapid stride and almost a sprightly gait.”21 Melville often walked on Broadway, but he probably thought more about the Tombs, where Pierre and Bartleby end up, than about the stores and the hurrying crowds. When Billson gave him a copy of James Thompson’s City of Dreadful Night, he replied: “As to his pessimism, altho’ neither pessimist nor optimist myself, nevertheless I relish it in the verse if for nothing else than as a counterpoise to the exorbitant hopefulness, juvenile and shallow, that makes such a bluster in these days—at least, in some quarters.”22 In his view, many New Yorkers were driven by exorbitant hopefulness. Since both Melville and Whitman walked on Broadway in the early 1880s, one can imagine them passing each other, Melville lost in thought, Whitman chatting with a policeman. Whitman and Melville had very different views of Broadway’s crowds, but their view of Grace Church was the same. Melville, like Whitman, thought it was the preserve of the rich. The fi rst half of Melville’s “The Two Temples” is a thinly veiled criticism of the people who attend Grace Church. The church is not named, but Putnam’s rejected the story because it was “immediately identifiable as New York’s fashionable Grace Church.”23 The narrator begins by saying that “This is too bad. . . . I tramped this blessed Sunday morning, all the way from the Battery, three long miles. . . . Here I am, I say, and, after all, I can’t get in.” He is prevented from entering by a “disdainful . . . fat-paunched, beadle-faced man,” who tells him there is no gallery seating, which the narrator interprets to mean there are no seats for people who look poor. The narrator says that he would have been allowed in if he had worn his new coat or if he had given the warden a banknote. “Then gallery or no gallery, I would have had a fi ne seat in this marble-buttressed, stained-glassed, spic-and-span new temple.” This is a church for rich people, who arrive in “flashing carriages” and sit in “padded pews.” The narrator manages to attend ser vices by sneaking in through a back door and climbing into the tower. When the ser vice is over, he tries to leave, but the back door is locked. In desperation, he rings the church’s bell, and soon the man who denied him entrance comes in, calls him a scoundrel, and drags him outside, where he is arrested as “a remorseless disturber of the Sunday peace.” The narrator has to pay a fi ne “for having indulged myself in the luxury of public worship.”

Lost in the City 57

Melville had another thing in common with Whitman: in 1857, both hoped to make money by giving lectures. Whitman printed a circular announcing his availability as a speaker for the fee of ten cents a person. In the last five years of his life, Whitman gave several lectures on Lincoln, the last one at Madison Square Theatre in 1887. Melville would have liked to go on the lecture circuit, but he probably realized that his dark view of humankind made it unlikely that he would be a success. In September 1857, he wrote to an acquaintance to say, “I have been trying to scratch my brains for a Lecture. What is a good earnest subject? ‘Daily progress of man towards a state of intellectual and moral perfection, as evidenced in [the] history of 5th Avenue & 5 Points.’ ”24 In The Spirit of America, published in 1910, nineteen years after Melville died, Henry Van Dyke writes, “The Spirit of America is best known in Europe by one of its qualities—energy.”25 Melville would probably agree with Van Dyke that Americans are an energetic people, but he was not a great admirer of American energy. In a short poem entitled “Fragment of a Lost Gnostic Poem of the 12th Century,” Melville writes, Indolence is heaven’s ally here, And energy the child of hell: The Good Man pouring from his pitcher clear, But brims the poisoned well.26 In other words, the passions of a good man can become a destructive force: “brims [fi lls to the brim] the poisoned well.” Melville, like Whitman, enjoyed walking in New York, but it is unlikely that walking, to quote Whitman, was “effective medicine” for Melville’s beleaguered soul.

Central Park S

W 59th St W 58th St W 57th St

Fdr Dr

2nd Ave

Queensboro Brdg

E 58th St

First Ave

Tudor City Pl United Nations Plz

Vanderbilt Ave

W 25th St

1st Ave

Lexington Ave Gramercy Park

E 19th St E 18th St E 17th St E 16th St Stuyvesant Square E 15th St

GRAMERCY PARK

STUYVESANT TOWN

E 14th St 2nd Ave

Irving Pl

Union Sq E

GREENWICH VILLAGE

E 23rd St E 22nd St E 21st St E 20th St

3rd Ave

enw St ich atio Ave t Hor St th S e Jan W 12 t kS St Ban St une t rry Beth Pe les S t S ar h t1 h C 1 W WEST Bl e VILLAGE St ecker S t er h top ris Ch

E 13th St E 12th St

rly

ve Wa

University Pl

E 11th St t St E 10th St St san e t0 h v St 9th W E 9th St y E 9th St 1 Stu W Tompkins W 8th St 8th St E 8th St l Square Washington Mews Astor P Waverly Pl E 7th St Wave rly Pl EAST Washington Pl E 6th St Washington Pl Washington VILLAGE E 5th St E 5th St Square W 4th St E 4th St Washington Sq S Great Jones St E 3rd St Bond St E 2nd St Shinbone Al E 1st St Bed NOHO E Houston St St n f ord to Mor St St y o t St Ler on St S Stanton St n g to s Kin us Clark Prince St W Ho Crosby St Lafayette St

Avenue B

Avenue A

Mercer St

Greene St

Macdougal St

Sullivan St Thompson St Laguardia Pl

St

Clinton St Suffolk St Norfolk St Essex St

k Varic

t

Manhattan, from Houston Street to 57th Street

Extra Pl Bowery St Elizabeth Mott St St Mulberry

t

on S Huds

wich S St

Green

ton hing Was

Bar Co row S mm t erc eS C Cor t Do armi nel wn ne ia S ing St t St

Greene St

7th Ave S

Pl

t th S W4

oor

sev

Gan

t St

Union Square

E 25th St

ve 4th A

Gre

5th Ave

W 14th St

Ave

Avenue of the Americas

FLATIRON DISTRICT

7th Ave

11th

W 15th St

CHELSEA

8th Ave

W 21st St W 20th St W 19th St W 18th St W 17th St W 16th St

Madison Square Park

Park Ave S

E 25th St

W 24th St W 23rd St W 22nd St

Sutton Pl S

1st Ave

KIPS BAY

E 29th St E 28th St E 27th St E 26th St

New St

MIDTOWN SOUTH CENTRAL

3rd Ave

E 33rd St E 32nd St E 31st St E 30th St

Chelsea Park

Queens M idtown Tu E 41st St nnel

TUDOR CITY

Lexington Ave

Fashion Ave

8th Ave

9th Ave

10th Ave

Dyer Ave

MURRAY HILL Park Ave

E 40th St E 39th St E 38th St E 37th St E 36th St E 35th St E 34th St

W 31st St W 30th St W 29th St W 28th St W 27th St W 26th St

E 44th St E 43rd St E 42nd St

E 41st St

Bryant Park

HELL’S W 38th St GARMENT DISTRICT KITCHEN

W 34th St

Madison Ave

5th Ave

Avenue of the Americas

7th Ave

11th Ave

W 40th St

E 48th St

E 48th St E 47th St E 46th St E 45th St

MIDTOWN

W 39th St

E 53rd St

2nd Ave

THEATER DISTRICT

TURTLE BAY (Midtown East) Beekman Pl

E 56th St E 55th St E 54th St E 53rd St E 52nd St E 51st St E 50th St E 49th St

CLINTON

W 48th St W 47th St W 46th St W 45th St W 44th St W 43rd St W 42nd St W 41st St W 40th St Lincoln Tunnel

W 34th St W 33rd St

E 61st St E 60th St E 59th St

E 57th St

W 56th St W 55th St W 54th St W 53rd St W 52nd St W 51st St W 50th St W 49th St

W 37th St W 36th St W 35th St

The Pond

Grand Army Plz

Central Park West Dr

W 61st St Damrosch Park W 60th St

5

William Dean Howells Boston vs. New York

I

n the last year of his life, Herman Melville took out a new novel about New York from the New York Society Library. It was William Dean Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes, published in 1890. The novel is about Basil March, a writer/editor who moves from Boston to New York. It is loosely based on Howells’s own move from Boston to New York in 1888. Howells, though, moved back to Boston in 1890— only to return to New York a year later when he accepted the editorship of Cosmopolitan. “I look forward to a winter in New York with loathing,” he told his father in 1891. “But it will be well for the work I am trying to do. . . . Between the two cities I prefer New York; it is less ‘done,’ and there is more for one to see and learn there.”1 Howells was for only four months the editor of Cosmopolitan, which at the time was known for publishing quality fiction, but he stayed on in New York, maintaining an apartment in the city for the rest of his life, though he lived elsewhere for extended periods of time. Howells and Basil March have much in common. When Howells began writing A Hazard of New Fortunes, he lived at the same address March lives at in the novel: 330 East 17th Street. March walks in many parts of New York. So did Howells. Writing a friend in 1888, Howells talked about his walks in the city: “I have been trying to catch on to the bigger life of the place. It’s im mensely interesting, but I don’t know whether I shall manage it.”2 Howells found New York interesting but disturbing. In several passages in A Hazard of New Fortunes March takes a dark view of New York and 59

60 William Dean Howells

commerce in general. “What I object to,” March says, “is this economic chance-world in which we live, and which we men seem to have created. . . . And so we go on, pushing and pulling, climbing and crawling, thrusting aside and trampling underfoot: lying, cheating, stealing.” Though March makes many observations that Howells would agree with, he is not Howells’s spokesman. Howells enjoyed the company of entrepreneurs. Reminiscing about his fi rst trip to New York, Howells writes that on the ferry to New York (he had spent the night in a New Jersey suburb) “I had the company of a young New-Yorker, whom I had met on the boat coming down, and who was of the light, hopeful, adventurous business type which seems peculiar to the city, and which has always attracted me.”3 A journalist from Ohio, Howells became an influential literary figure in Boston in the late 1860s. In 1866, he was appointed assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly; five years later he became editor-in-chief. He also was a well-known novelist, publishing several novels in the 1870s and 1880s that were critical as well as commercial successes. In 1881, Howell resigned from the magazine to devote himself to writing novels. By the mid-1880s, when Howells began writing a monthly column for Harper’s Monthly, he was the leading American novelist and critic. In 1908, he would be elected first president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Howells’s Bostonian friends were surprised and dismayed by his decision to move to New York. Boston’s leading intellectuals for the most part looked down on New York as an uncultured city driven by commerce. Emerson disliked New York; Thoreau hated it. Lydia Child, a Bostonian who moved to New York in 1841, said that in New York “the loneliness of the soul is deeper, and far more restless, than the solitude of the mighty forest.” Yet Child, who wrote a column about life in New York for a Boston newspaper, was impressed by New York’s “infi nite varieties of character.”4 For several reasons Howells decided to return to New York. One was the death of his older daughter Winny (Winifred) on March 2, 1889. She died after a long illness from a mysterious ailment. Boston now held too many painful memories for Howells and his wife, Elinor. Even before Winny was buried in Cambridge, Elinor and the Howells’s two remaining children had left for New York. Only Howells attended Winny’s burial.

Boston vs. New York

61

The second reason was a political/literary one. Howells was fl irting with socialism, and he wanted to write a novel that looked at the evils of capitalism. New York was better for his purposes than Boston because it was the nation’s fi nancial center. Moreover, in New York the gap between the rich and poor was greater than in Boston, and in New York there was more poverty. The slums of New York were among the worst in the world. In the early 1880s, Howells had not yet become a strong critic of capitalism. His novel The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) is a sympathetic portrait of a businessman. Silas Lapham, a self-made man who became wealthy by manufacturing high-quality paint, is not cultivated, but he has a rough charm. “Make Lapham vulgar but not sordid,” Howells wrote in his notebook.5 Lapham is an honest businessman, but he gets into fi nancial trouble when a former partner browbeats him into buying risky securities. The reader feels sorry for him when he inadvertently gets drunk and makes a fool of himself at a dinner party attended by cultivated people. In 1886, a year after Silas Lapham was published, Howells made a statement that permanently damaged his literary reputation; he said novelists should concern themselves “with the more smiling aspects of life” in the United States. The essay is not as vapidly upbeat as this remark suggests, but Howells does say that American civilization is on the right track. Two years later, Howells’s view of America changed dramatically. In 1888, he wrote his friend Henry James, “After fi fty years of optimistic content with ‘civilization’ and its ability to come out all right in the end, I now abhor it, and feel that it is coming out all wrong . . . unless it bases itself anew on a real equality.” Howells, though, knew he would never become a political activist. He makes fun of his own lack of political commitment: “Meantime, I wear a fur-lined overcoat, and live in all the luxury my money can buy.”6 Why did Howells become so disenchanted with America? One event strongly affected his political views: the Haymarket Riot, which took place in Chicago on May 4, 1886. At a demonstration in favor of an eight-hour workday, a bomb was thrown. In the ensuing melee, which was punctuated by gunfire from police officers, eight police officers and at least four civilians were killed. Nine leading demonstrators were indicted, though there was no solid evidence that these men were responsible for the bomb or the gunfi re. Two escaped arrest and one avoided prosecution by turning state’s evidence. The remaining six

62 William Dean Howells

were tried, and five were sentenced to be executed. One apparently committed suicide the night before; the other four were executed. Howells thought the trial was a gross miscarriage of justice. In November 1887 he wrote a friend: “For many weeks, for months, it [Haymarket] has not been for one hour out of my waking thoughts; it is the fi rst thing when I wake up. It blackens my life. . . . I feel the horror and the shame of the crime which the law is about to commit against justice.” 7 Howells drew up a petition asking the governor of Illinois to grant the convicted men clemency. He asked his literary friends to sign the petition, but they all declined to do so. Deeply disturbed by the events in Chicago, Howells read many books about socialism. He supported the People’s Party, founded in 1887, which advocated the public ownership of corporations, yet he disliked being called a socialist. “I should not care to wear a label,” he said to a reporter. “I do not study the question [of socialism]; the question studies me. In great cities one does not easily avoid it.” In his view, socialism is the only remedy for the terrible poverty found in New York, yet he admitted that “socialism is not imminent.”8 Howells greatly admired Tolstoy, but he thought Tolstoy’s prescription for change—described in What Then Must We Do?—made no sense. “His remedy is to go into the country, and share the labor of his peasants. . . . I don’t exactly see how this helps except that it makes all poor alike; and saves one’s self from remorse.” Howells wrote a friend: “To work for others, yes, but to work with my hands, I’m not sure, seeing that I’m now fi fty, awkward and fat.”9 Howells had no interest in taking up manual labor, yet he wished he were a more effective spokesman for radical change. In 1888, he wrote a friend: “Words, words, words! How to make them things, deeds. . . . With me they only breed more words.” If he were based in New York, he could write novels that look at the “unsmiling” aspects of American life. He told a friend that his anguish about American conditions was “running into another novel,” in which he would “deal with some mere actualities; but on a new ground—New York, namely.”10 Howells was not a stranger to New York. He had spent four days there in 1860 in the failed hope of getting a job with the New York Post. Touring New York mainly by omnibus, he thought the city was ugly. “I have not the least notion where I went or what I saw, but I suppose that it was up and down the ugly east and west avenues.” He wrote the Boston publisher James T. Fields: “Better fifty years of Boston than a cycle

Boston vs. New York

63

of New York. The truth is, there is no place quite so good as Boston— God bless it! and I look forward to living there some day.”11 Howells disliked many of the New York writers he met on his fi rst trip to the city. The so-called Bohemians were “a sickly colony, transplanted from the mother asphalt of Paris, and never really striking root in the pavements of New York.” The Bohemians frequented Pfaff ’s beer-cellar, Whitman’s favorite literary hangout. Howells went there, but he did not enjoy himself. He drily says: “As I neither drank beer nor smoked, my part in the carousal was limited to a German pancake.”12 He did like one writer he met at Pfaff ’s, Walt Whitman. “The apostle of the rough, the uncouth, was the gentlest person; his barbaric yawp, translated into the terms of social encounter, was an address of singular quiet, delivered in a voice of winning and endearing friendliness.” Howells did not think much of Whitman’s poetry. “I like his prose . . . much better.”13 In the fall of 1865, after spending three years as the American consul in Venice, Howells moved to New York to work for the Nation. He and his wife rented a house on Ninth Avenue, and Howells renewed his acquaintance with several writers he had met on his first visit to the city. They included Richard Henry Stoddard, a poet and critic, and his wife Elizabeth Stoddard, a poet and novelist. The Stoddards held a salon whose attendees included Herman Melville, so Howells may have met him. In February 1866, Howells was offered a job at the Boston-based Atlantic Monthly. He was happy to leave New York, yet he said his four months in New York “were as happy a time for me as I have ever known.” Howells liked his job with the Nation and he liked his literary friends, but he did not like New York. Referring to a brief stay in New York in November 1861—he was sailing from New York in order to take up his diplomatic post in Venice—he remembers “the cold and wet outdoors, and the misery of being in those infamous New York streets, then as for long afterwards the squalidest in the world.”14 Yet in the same essay Howells also says New York was “really handsomer” in the 1860s than it is in the early 1890s, when he was writing “First Impressions of New York.” In the 1860s “the sky-scrapers were not yet, and there was a fi ne regularity in the streets that these brute bulks have robbed of all shapeliness. Dirt and squalor there were aplenty, but there was infi nitely more comfort.”15 In A Hazard of New Fortunes, Basil March’s wife, Isabel, says to him, “You know I don’t like New York. I don’t approve of it. It’s so big, and

64 William Dean Howells

so hideous.” According to one scholar, Howells “always preserved a sentimental preference for Boston,” and he characterized his years in New York as “years of exile.”16 Yet Howells’s anti–New York remarks usually are addressed to his Bostonian friends, as if he wanted to reassure them that he preferred Boston to New York. Howells could never make up his mind which city he liked better, but he stayed in New York. “There is little or nothing left for me in Boston,” he told a fellow novelist in 1887. New York, he would write in 1902, was “splendidly and sordidly commercial.”17 A Huge Disorder In 1888 Howells walked in New York to gather material for A Hazard of New Fortunes, but he also walked all over the city for another reason; he and his wife spent six days looking for an apartment. They looked at nearly one hundred apartments and houses. “It’s wearing, sickening business,” Howells wrote his father.18 In A Hazard of New Fortunes, Basil and Isabel March also spend an inordinate amount of time searching for an apartment. Henry James thought the apartment search, which takes up the fi rst hundred pages of the novel, went on too long, but Thomas Hardy liked it. “I like the opening; one seems to see New York, and hear it, and smell it.”19 In quest of an apartment, March and his wife “accidentally” fi nd themselves on a street in the Lower East Side. “The roadway and sidewalks and door- steps swarmed with children; women’s heads seemed to show at every window. . . . A peddler of cheap fruit urged his cart through the street, and mixed his cry with the joyous screams and shouts of the children, and the scolding and gossiping voices of the women.” After describing the tenements, the narrator says: “It was not the abode of the extremest poverty, but of a poverty as hopeless as any in the world, transmitting itself from generation to generation.” Howells had become pessimistic about “conditions” in America. “Conditions make character,” March says. “People are greedy and foolish” because of the conditions of American life. March’s observations do not support his generalizations about hopeless poverty. Later in the novel, March notes that the slums of the Lower East Side are no longer populated by Irish and German immigrants. The children of earlier generations of immigrants, who were impoverished when they fi rst arrived, have escaped poverty.

Boston vs. New York

65

March’s wife, who is less enamored of socialism than he is, frequently questions his views. He thinks highly of Lindau, a socialist, but she dislikes him. “She really could not reconcile herself to . . . the violence of Lindau’s sentiments concerning the whole political and social fabric. . . . It alarmed her to hear American democracy denounced as a shuffl ing evasion.” She also thinks that Lindau drinks too much of her husband’s beer. As the novel progresses, the Marches begin to enjoy living in New York. Isabel March loves traveling by elevated train, especially at night, where she forms a “fleeting intimacy” with “people in second and third floor windows.”20 Getting off the train, the Marches are dazzled by the variety of lights. “The track that found and lost itself a thousand times in the flare and tremor of the innumerable lights . . . and the coming and going of the trains marking the stations with vivider or fainter plumes of flame-shot steam . . . formed an incomparable perspective. They often talked afterward of the superb spectacle, which in a city full of painters nightly works its unrecorded miracles.” The nighttime “spectacle” Howells describes brings to mind paintings by John Sloan, George Bellows, and Edward Hopper. The Marches also admire the city’s energy. “The perspectives of the cross-streets toward the river were very lively, with their turmoil of trucks and cars and carts and hacks and foot-passengers, ending in the chimneys and masts of shipping, and final gleams of dancing water.” The Marches even enjoy shopping—or at least looking at shoppers. “They were amused to find One-hundred-and-twenty-fifth Street inchoately like Twentythird Street and Fourteenth Street in its shops and shoppers.” The Marches revel in New York’s immigrant culture. “There is no doubt that the chief pleasure of their life in New York was from its quality of foreignness.” Though Basil March thinks New York’s immigrants are deluded to think that America is a land of opportunity, he is happy that they came. He prefers “the east side to the west side [elevated] lines because they offered more nationalities, conditions, and characters to his inspection.” He enjoys guessing the ethnicity of the immigrants he sees. The Marches spend “a good deal of time and money” in an Italian grocery. They also dine in Italian and Spanish restaurants. The restaurant “they prized most [was] the table d’hôte of a French lady, who had taken a Spanish husband in a second marriage, and had a Cuban negro for her cook, with a cross-eyed Alsacian for a waiter, and a slim young South American for cashier.”

66 William Dean Howells

Why, Basil March wonders, do immigrants come to New York, since the city is a “huge disorder,” where there is a “fierce struggle for survival, with the stronger life persisting over the deformity, the mutilation, the destruction, the decay of the weaker”? In America, March says, “some one always has you by the throat, unless you have some one else in your grip.” March’s description of his own commercial transactions does not accord with these gloomy generalizations. The Marches have another complaint about New York: the “vast, prosperous, commercial class,” which they see while strolling on Madison Avenue, seems uninteresting. “The men’s faces were shrewd and alert, and yet they looked dull; the women’s were pretty and knowing, and yet dull.” The people they see on Madison Avenue mainly are Jews. (The narrator uses the term “American Hebrew.”) As if Howells were worried that he might be accused of anti-Semitism, he has the narrator say: “Perhaps the observers [i.e., the Marches] did the promenaders [the Jews] an injustice; they might not have been as common-minded as they looked.” March now jokingly says to his wife: “I understand now why the poor people don’t come up here and live in this clean, handsome, respectable quarter of the town; they would be bored to death. On the whole I think I should prefer Mott Street myself.” It is a weak joke because March and his wife would never live on Mott Street, which is on the Lower East Side. Earlier in the novel Isabel March has to return briefly to Boston, so she gives her husband strict guidelines for selecting an apartment. “He must remember that it was not to be above Twentieth Street nor below Washington Square; it must not be higher than the third floor; it must have an elevator, steam heat, hall boys, and a pleasant janitor. These were essentials.” A hall boy is someone—usually a teenager—who lives in the building and does a variety of minor chores. Howells, like Basil March, found the people he saw on Mott Street more interesting than the people he saw on Madison Avenue, but he would never think of living on Mott Street—or anywhere on the Lower East Side. Rambles on the Lower East Side Howells took many walks on the Lower East Side. He usually walked by himself, but occasionally he strolled with friends. In the mid-1890s he went on walks with two young writers he had befriended: Stephen

Boston vs. New York

67

Crane and Abraham Cahan. He wrote about his walks in Impressions and Experiences, which appeared in 1896. In an “East-Side Ramble” Howells inspects a basement apartment on the Lower East Side. One scene has a phantasmagorical quality— resembling the scene Dickens encountered on his tour of Five Points. “My companion struck a match and held it to the cavernous mouth of an inner cellar half as large as the room we were in. . . . Out of this hole, as if she had been a rat, scared from it by the light, a young girl came, rubbing her eyes and vaguely smiling, and vanished up-stairs somewhere.”21 We learn nothing more about the mysterious girl. Howells describes a typical tenement apartment. “There was always the one room, where the inmates lived by day, and the one den, where they slept by night, apparently all in the same bed, though probably the children were strewn about the floor.” The residents of these dark and airless apartments lived much of their lives on fi re escapes and in the street, but nasty smells were everywhere. “The New York tenement dwellers, even when they leave their lairs, are still pent in their highwalled streets, and inhale a thousand stenches of their own and others’ making.”22 Howells was outraged by the “dreadful” apartments he visited, but his outrage quickly faded. “I soon came to look upon the conditions as normal . . . for the inmates of the dens and lairs about me.” Howells also looked at tenements on the west side of Manhattan. The “American quarter,” which was inhabited mainly by poor Irish, was also known as Hell’s Kitchen. He ends “An East-Side Ramble” by calling for the “public control” of the tenements.23 According to Howells, all tenement dwellers are prisoners of their impoverished condition, but he notes that the immigrant Jews do not think of themselves as prisoners. Howells is disturbed that most Jewish immigrants make their living by buying and selling things. The Lower East Side is a “vast bazaar” where everything but pork can be bought or sold. “These people were desperately poor, yet they preyed upon one another in their commerce, as if they could be enriched by selling dear or buying cheap. So far as I could see, they would only impoverish one another more and more, but they trafficked as eagerly as if there were wealth in every bargain.”24 Howells’s quarrel is not with Jewish commerce; it is with commerce in general. “To me its [the Jewish bazaar’s] activity was a sorrowfully amusing satire upon the business ideal of our plutocratic civilization.” A few sentences later, he says: “The whole place seemed abandoned to

68 William Dean Howells

mere trade.”25 Howells, who thinks a commercial transaction is a zerosum game, doesn’t suggest what else the new immigrants could do to make a living. Many Jewish and Italian immigrants became peddlers. If they were successful, they became shop owners. Howells is very sympathetic to immigrant Jews. He could even be called philo-Semitic, since he befriended Jewish writers, read Yiddish newspapers (he knew German), reviewed a book of Yiddish poetry, and helped Abraham Cahan find a publisher for his novel Yekl, which he favorably reviewed. The Jews, he says, “had not the look of a degraded people; they were quiet and orderly, and I saw none of the drunkenness or the truculence of an Irish or low American neighborhood among them.”26 Howells says that all the immigrants in the Lower East Side—mostly Jews and Italians— are locked into poverty: “for the great mass the captivity remains.” Yet, he acknowledges that most immigrants think they will climb out of poverty. The Italian immigrants, he says, are “shrewd for their advancement in the material things, which seem the only good things to the Americanized aliens of all races.” It annoyed Howells that most immigrants were preoccupied with “material things,” and it annoyed him that most were not appalled by the “conditions” they faced in America. “The difference which money creates among men is always preposterous . . . yet this difference is what the vast majority of Americans have agreed to accept forever as right and justice.”27 It puzzled him that most immigrants did not become socialists. Ugly Streets In the mid-1890s, Howells became almost completely disenchanted with New York. “New York Streets” is a cata logue of everything he dislikes about the city. Walking in New York in the mid-1890s was more difficult than that it had been fi fty years earlier because the city was more crowded. “South of the Park [Central Park], the whole island is dense with life and business,” Howells says. Crossing a street was not easy. According to Richard Zacks, “not a single traffic light or even a stop sign regulated the mad flow of tens of thousands of horses, carriages, wagons, public horse and cable cars. Anarchy ruled the corners, and foreigners complained about the dangers of crossing busy streets. . . . Vehicles could ride in any direction on any street.”28

Boston vs. New York

69

Howells disliked the traffic, but he disliked many other things about New York as well. It annoyed him that New York’s streets and houses are numbered; they are hard to remember and show “a want of imagination.” He disliked New York’s main avenues, which are hideous, though their hideousness is hidden by the elevated railroads, which “disfigure them, if thoroughfares so shabby and repulsive as they are, can be said to be disfigured.” He disliked walking toward either the East River or the Hudson River because the dwellings “degenerate into apartment-houses, and then into tenement-houses of lower and lower grade till the rude traffic and the offensive industries of the river shores are reached.” He disliked the waterfront; “huge factories and foundries, lumber-yards, breweries, slaughter-houses, and warehouses, abruptly interspersed with stables and hovels and drinking-saloons, disfigure the shore.”29 New York is not only ugly, it is also noisy. “The horse-cars run . . . under the elevated tracks, and no experience of noise can enable you to conceive of the furious din that bursts upon the sense when at some corner two cars encounter on the parallel tracks below, while two trains roar and shriek and hiss on the rails overhead, and a turmoil of rattling express-wagons, heavy drays and trucks and carts, hacks, carriages, and huge vans rolls itself between and beneath the prime agents of the uproar. The noise is not only deafening, it is bewildering.”30 The newly asphalted streets are less noisy, but this improvement has an unfortunate side effect. “Of late, a good many streets and several avenues have been asphalted, and the din of wheels on the rough pavement no longer torments the ear so cruelly; but there is still the sharp clatter of the horses’ shoes everywhere; and their pulverized manure, which forms so great a part of the city’s dust, and is constantly taken into people’s stomachs and lungs, seems to blow more freely about on the asphalt than on the old-fashioned pavements.”31 Howells was also irritated by the abundance of signs. “If one thing in the business streets [that] makes New York more hideous than another it is the signs, with their discordant colors, their infi nite variety of tasteless shapes.” The signs for Howells are a kind of noise to the eye. They are “trying to shout and shriek each other down. . . . The darkness does not shield you from them, and by night the very sky is starred with the electric bulbs that spell out, on the roofs of the lofty buildings, the frantic announcement of this or that business enterprise.”32 Howells was also dismayed by the sight of “hundreds of miles of little shops.” The proprietors of these shops took advantage of their customers;

70 William Dean Howells

they “levy tribute on the public through the profit they live by.” The shopkeepers were “solely devoted to marketing the things made by people who are overworked in making them.” In the next paragraph, though, Howells seems to change his mind about small businesses. “I prefer the smaller shops, where I can enter into some human relation with the merchant. . . . I must say now that they add much in their infinite number and variety to such effect of gayety as the city has. They are especially attractive at night, when their brilliant lamps, with the shadows they cast, unite to an effect of gayety which the day will not allow.”33 Howells criticized most New Yorkers: The poor were offensive and the rich were vulgar. “I do not wish to speak other than tenderly of the poor, but it is useless to pretend that they are other than offensive in aspect.” The houses on Fifth Avenue, where the rich live, “suggest money more than taste.” Rich women dressed like dandies, and rich men were slovenly. “You see few men dressed in New York with the distinction of the better class of Londoners.”34 Even the sight of slum kids playing in the streets disturbs Howells. They would be “most pleasingly effective” in a picture, but to see them in real life “is to inhale the stenches of the neglected street, and to catch that yet fouler and dreadfuller poverty-smell which breathes from the open doorways. It is to see the children quarreling in their games, and beating one another in the face, and rolling one another in the gutter, like the little savage outlaws they are.”35 Howells complains of “the apparently desperate tastelessness and the apparently instinctive uncleanliness of the New-Yorkers.” In this sentence, Howells is so angry about conditions in New York that his writing is sloppy. The weasel-word “apparently” makes no sense; either New Yorkers are tasteless and unclean or they aren’t. Second, how can “desperate” modify tastelessness? It suggests that New Yorkers are trying to be tasteless. Finally, how did New Yorkers— a mix of different races and ethnic groups— acquire their “instinct” for uncleanliness?36 Howells liked to walk in one area of New York: Central Park. Walking in Central Park was a kind of purification rite. “When I come home from these walks of mine,” he wrote, “I have a vision of the wretched quarters through which I have passed, as blotches of disease upon the civic body . . . and I am haunted by this sense of them, until I plunge deep into the Park, and wash my consciousness clean of it all for a while.”37 According to Howells, New York’s streets are so dirty, noisy, and smelly because of “the economic warfare in which our people live.” He

Boston vs. New York

71

sees a strong correlation between commercial expansion and the growth of poverty. “Business and poverty are everywhere slowly or swiftly eating their way into the haunts of respectability and destroying its pleasant homes.”38 He seems to be saying that economic growth increases poverty rather than reduces it. “Doing” New York Again Praising A Hazard of New Fortunes, Henry James told Howells to continue to “do” New York, whereas “I must do, or 1/2 do, England in fiction.” James thinks Howells has more New York novels in him. “Since New York has brought you such bonheur give it back to her with still larger liberality. Don’t tell me you can’t do anything now, or that life isn’t luxurious to you, with such a power of creation.”39 Howells wrote three more novels that are set in New York, but they are a steep falling off from A Hazard of New Fortunes. The Coast of Bohemia (1893) is an anemic satire of New York’s art world, but it does have a powerful description of what it was like for a person from the American heartland to arrive in New York by train. Cornelia, who has come to New York to study art, is looking for the horse-car line that will take her to where she is going to live. “Cornelia strained forward from the doorway and tried to make out, in the kaleidoscopic pattern of lights, which was the Fourth Avenue car; the street was full of cars and carts, and carriages, all going every which way, with a din of bells, and wheels and hoofs. . . . A sickening odor came from the mud of the gutters and the horses and the people.” In The World of Chance, which appeared less than a year after The Coast of Bohemia, Howells describes what it is like to live in an apartment that is near an elevated train. On a hot summer day the windows are kept open, so the people in the apartment find it difficult to hear each other, owing to “the rush and clank of the elevated trains, the perpetual passage of the surface cars, with the clatter of their horses’ hoofs, . . . the grind and jolt of the heavy trucks, the wild clatter of express carts across the rails or up and down the tracks, the sound of feet and voices, the cries of the fruit-venders, and the whiffs of laughter and blasphemy that floated up from the turmoil below like fi lthy odors.” A dying political radical lives in the railroad apartment. He is writing a book about “an ideal city . . . all planned and built, not from the greed and the fraud of competition, but from the generous and unselfish spirit

72 William Dean Howells

of emulation.” The ideal city has one characteristic that greatly appealed to Howells. It has no horse cars. “Electricity brought every man and everything silently to the door.” In 1894, Howells wrote a novel about an ideal country: A Traveler from Altruria. The novel, which James (and most observers) found tedious, is about a society where everyone is a Christian socialist. In Altruria there are no cities; there are only regional centers (“capitals”) that serve as meeting places. They are “clean and quiet and beautiful as the country” because of “the elimination of the horse. . . . All transportation in the capitals, whether for pleasure or business, is by electricity.” Howells may have disliked horse cars more than he disliked capitalism. Luc Sante points out that “horses added to the squalor of the streets by their excretions.” According to one turn-of-the-century estimate, an average of 2.5 million pounds of manure and 60,000 gallons of urine were deposited on the streets every day. By the second decade of the twentieth century horse cars were rarely found on New York’s streets. The electric trolley had replaced them. New York had become a cleaner city for another reason—the appointment in 1895 of Colonel George E. Waring as Commissioner of Sanitation. “He transformed a lackluster department into a merit-based, white-uniformed force . . . that got the city’s streets ‘really clean’ for the fi rst time in its history.”40 In an introduction to a new edition of A Hazard of New Fortunes, written in 1909, Howells talks about New York’s new modes of transportation. “The transitional public that then [in 1888] moped about in mildly tinkling horse-cars is now hurried back and forth in clanging trolleys, in honking and whirring motors; the Elevated road which was the last word of speed is undermined by the Subway, shooting its swift shuttles through the subterranean woof of the city’s haste.” New York’s public transportation system had improved immeasurably, so New York was “not so bad a monster as it seemed then [in 1888] to threaten becoming.”41 Howells, though, still thought about moving back to Boston. Letters Home (1902), the last novel Howells wrote about New York and the best since A Hazard of New Fortunes, is an epistolary novel in which a handful of people who have moved to New York write letters home to friends or family members in Iowa, upstate New York, or Boston. The man who writes the fi rst letter is a wealthy Bostonian intellectual who is spending some time in New York because he wants to see how New York differs from Boston.

Boston vs. New York

73

“The whole place is fi lthier,” he writes his sister-in-law. Referring to the construction of a new subway line, he speaks of “the pulling down and building up, the delving for the Rapid Transit, and I do not know what else. . . . Now and then a rain comes and washes it all way . . . but the fi lth begins again with the fi rst week day, and you go about with your mouth and eyes full of malarious dust. . . . Then the noise, the noise! . . . Boston is noisy, too, but there are large spaces when you can get fairly well away from the noise, and I know of none here.” Another letter-writer in Letters Home—he is a young man from Iowa— enjoys watching construction sites. One day he watches “laborers digging the foundations for a sky- scraper at one of the corners. They had scooped forty or fi fty feet into the earth, below the cellars of the old houses they had torn down, and were drilling into the everlasting rock with steam drills. A whole hive of men were let loose all over the excavation, pitching the earth and broken stones into carts, lifting the carts by derrick to the level of the street, and hitching the horses to them, and working the big steam shovels hanging from the derricks.” Howells was fascinated by the energy of commercial New York, a city addicted to change. “You lose your bearings a good deal in New York,” a letter-writer in Letters Home warns. Howells and his wife did not lose their bearings in New York except in one respect: they became obsessed with fi nding the perfect apartment. They moved countless times. “Between 1900 and 1902, they moved from 40 West Fifty-ninth Street to 115 East Sixteenth Street to 38 East Seventy-third Street to 48 West Fifty-ninth Street, then back to 40 West Fifty-ninth Street and back again to 48 West Fifty-ninth Street.”42 In the mid-1900s Howells and his wife paid for a sumptuous twelveroom apartment that was under construction at 130 West 57th Street. The building, which still stands, was completed in 1908. It has high ceilings and large windows because it was designed as a place for artists. Childe Hassam lived there. Howells moved into the apartment in January 1909, but a year later his wife died and Howells could not bear to stay there, so he leased it and moved into a nearby hotel. In the last decade of his life the restless Howells lived in Maine (at Kittery Point and York Harbor), Savannah, Saint Augustine, and Boston, but he always returned to his apartment in New York, where he died on May 11, 1920.

74 William Dean Howells

In 1915, five years before he died, Howells wrote: “I have been seriously considering Boston versus New York.” (Howells’s biographers add: “possibly for the hundredth time.”) He did return to Boston occasionally, but he remained a New Yorker. Twenty-seven years earlier he had said to Henry James: “At the bottom of our wicked hearts we all like New York.”43 He still felt the same way.

6

Jacob Riis Walking for Reform

W

alking down Third Avenue in November 1888, William Dean Howells witnessed something that made him “sick, sick at heart.” He watched a French immigrant pick up a dirty piece of cake or biscuit, eat it, and then “search the garbage of the gutters, like a famished dog.”1 If Howells had been walking in New York in the early 1870s, he might have seen Jacob Riis doing the same thing. During his first three years in the United States, Riis often was homeless and penniless. Many years later Riis, who had become a well-known author, met Howells. In his autobiography, Riis writes, “Mr. Howells asked me once where I got it”— the “it” being the title of his most famous book, How the Other Half Lives.2 In the early 1870s Riis, who was twenty-one when he emigrated from Denmark in 1870, walked the streets of New York out of desperation— searching for food and shelter. “I joined the great army of tramps, wandering about the streets in the daytime with the one aim of somehow stilling the hunger that gnawed at my vitals, and fighting at night with vagrant curs or outcasts as miserable as myself for the protection of some sheltering ash-bin or door-way.”3 During those years, Riis “made the acquaintance,” as he puts it, of the area that Dickens and Howells wrote about—the slums of the Lower East Side. In 1873, Riis’s fortunes began to improve—he held numerous jobs, mainly outside of New York— and in 1877 the New York Tribune hired him on a trial basis. Six months later, he got a staff appointment working as a police reporter. His beat was the Lower East Side, but he also 75

76

Jacob Riis

covered Hell’s Kitchen, a slum on the West Side of Manhattan from roughly 30th Street to 59th Street and from Eighth Avenue to the Hudson River. In addition to covering crime, he covered fires, the Health Department, the Coroner’s Office, and the License Office. Most police reporters stayed in their press office on Mulberry Street, across the street from police headquarters. They played cards, getting their stories from police bulletins. Riis disliked card playing, and he preferred to dig up his own stories, which he got by walking in the slums. “I walked every morning between two and four o’clock the whole length of Mulberry Street, through the Bend and across Five Points down to Fulton Ferry. There were cars on the Bowery, but I liked to walk, for so I saw the slum when off its guard.” 4 He followed the police on patrol and went out with health inspectors, always looking for stories. Riis walked in the slums at other times as well. He “spent hours in the alleys of Mulberry Bend, Gotham Court, and Hell’s Kitchen. He . . . walked in all seasons and at all times of day.” A Quaker philanthropist opened Gotham Court, a complex consisting of two rows of six tenements, in 1850 as a “model tenement,” but it soon became “notorious for overcrowding, filth, and crime.” Mulberry Bend, which was near Five Points, mainly was home to Italian immigrants. Riis called it the “foul core of New York’s slums.”5 Riis was not a flâneur. He “preferred walking at a quick pace, almost a jog.” And he was not a neutral observer of the slums. Riis “regularly and overtly inserted editorial commentary into his stories.” He was a reform-minded journalist who wanted Americans to know how badly slum dwellers lived. “I can fairly lay claim,” Riis writes in his autobiography, “to a personal knowledge of the evil I attacked.”6 Riis spent more time walking in New York’s slums than any other writer discussed in this book. Though he claimed walking in the slums was not dangerous for those who went there on business, once he barely escaped being knifed. Turning a corner, he suddenly met up with “a gang of drunken roughs ripe for mischief.” The leader was threatening him with a knife. Just as Riis was vainly attempting to wrestle the knife from him, a police captain and a precinct detective showed up and began beating the roughs. “I gathered all my strength,” Riis says, “and gave the ruffian’s hand a mighty twist that turned the knife aside.”7 Riis was not always happy with his beat. In the mid-1880s he asked his editor if he could be transferred to Newspaper Row, where he

Walking for Reform

77

could work as a general reporter. His editor said no. “Unless I am much mistaken, you are fi nding something up there that needs you. Wait and see.”8 In 1890, Riis published How the Other Half Lives. The best-selling book impressed Theodore Roosevelt, who went to see Riis at his office. “I was out,” Riis says, “and he left his card, merely writing on the back of it that he had read my book and had ‘come to help.’ . . . No one ever helped as he did.” After Roosevelt was appointed president of the Board of New York City Police Commissioners in 1895, Riis became his informal advisor. “For two years we were to be together all the day,” Riis remembered, “and quite often most of the night, in the environment in which I had spent twenty years of my life.” Doris Kearns Goodwin points out that Riis “had introduced Roosevelt to the realities of immigrant life in the slums.”9 Riis’s mentoring, she notes, “had begun to work a marked change in Roosevelt,” making him more willing to use the power of government to effect social reform.10 Riis’s life is a great immigrant success story. Two decades after being down and out in New York, he was an influential writer and a close friend of a man who would soon become president. In 1903–1904 Riis, who wrote a campaign biography of Roosevelt, visited the White House many times. When Riis died, Roosevelt said he was “one of my truest and closest friends.” He added, “If I were asked to name a fellow-man who came nearest to being the ideal American citizen, I should name Jacob Riis.”11 Riis’s death was front-page news in many newspapers. From Tramp to Journalist Riis was from a middle-class Danish family; his father was a schoolteacher and journalist. He was one of fourteen children, many of whom died when they were young. Only four of the fourteen lived past their twenties. In his teens, Riis disappointed his father by choosing to become a carpenter instead of taking up teaching or journalism. Riis came to the United States to fi nd work so that he could eventually return to Denmark and marry the woman he loved: Elisabeth Giørtz. She had reluctantly turned down his marriage proposal. Her stepfather, a wealthy Danish industrialist, did not approve of her marrying a carpenter. Riis was hopeful that the United States would prove to be a land of opportunity. Looking at New York over the railing of

78

Jacob Riis

his ship, which was docked at Castle Garden, a former concert hall that in 1854 became a processing center for new immigrants, Riis says: “my hopes rose high that somewhere in this teeming hive there would be a place for me.”12 When Riis landed in New York, he no longer wanted to be a carpenter, but he was not sure what he wanted to do. In 1872, he wrote in his diary that he wanted to be a missionary “in a foreign, heathen country!”13 In the next three years he tried out many different lines of work, but he never lost sight of his main goal: returning to Denmark to marry Elisabeth. Riis could not fi nd work in New York, so he signed a contract that paid him to go to western Pennsylvania, where he would build huts for miners. When he was in New York he went for a walk on Broadway, but before doing so he did an odd thing: he bought a revolver and “strapped [it] on the outside of my coat.” Having read the frontier novels of James Fenimore Cooper, Riis thought the East was the same as the Wild West and that there might be “buffaloes and red Indians charging up and down Broadway.” A policeman told him to leave the weapon at home. Carrying a gun was not unusual in New York. The diarist George Templeton Strong said that most of his friends carried a revolver when they went out at night; they feared what Strong calls “civic scum.”14 Riis’s job in western Pennsylvania did not last very long. Owing to a “temporary slackness in the building trade,” he became a coal miner. He quit after a day. “I have never set foot in a coal mine since.” Soon Riis was heading back to New York. The Franco-Prussian War had broken out, and he wanted to fight on the French side. He was disappointed to learn from French officials that there were no plans for a volunteer army. Homeless and penniless, Riis decided to leave the city again. “I shook the dust of the city from my feet, and took the most direct route out of it, straight up Third Avenue. I walked till the stars in the east began to pale.”15 He climbed into a milk wagon in order to sleep; when the driver showed up, he dumped Riis into the gutter. At Fordham College in the Bronx, monks offered him a meal. Riis, a devout Protestant, recalls, “I ate of the food set before me, not without qualms of conscience.”16 He was worried that the monks would try to convert him, but they did not. What follows in the next sixty pages of The Making of an American is the story of a man who, to paraphrase Whitman, tramped perpetual journeys. In search of work, Riis traveled to New Jersey, Philadelphia,

Walking for Reform

79

Buffalo, Pittsburgh, many parts of Ohio, and Chicago. He usually got a job because he possessed many skills, but he often lost jobs because he had a bad temper. He also left jobs because he did not like what he was doing. He was a restless man who liked to roam. He worked as a carpenter, brick maker, lumberjack, farm hand, and handyman. He repaired ships, trapped furs, made cradles, planed doors, and built railroads. In his last year of tramping, he sold furniture, then flatirons, and fi nally the novels of Dickens. A few months after leaving New York for the second time, Riis was working in a brickyard in New Jersey when he learned that a company of volunteers would soon sail for France. He still hoped to fi ght in the Franco-Prussian War, so he hurried back to New York. He was too late; the volunteers had left. In the ensuing days, he made a nuisance of himself at the French Consulate. When the consul tried to throw him out, he got into a fight with him. Riis then signed on as a stoker for a French steamer, but when he arrived at the pier the ship had already left. Once more Riis was homeless and penniless in New York, “too shabby to get work, even if there had been any to get.” He contemplated suicide. “I was finally and utterly alone in the city, with the winter approaching and every shivering night in the streets reminding me that a time was rapidly coming when such a life as I led could no longer be endured.” Lying in the street, he felt “an overpowering sense of desolation” come over him, but suddenly “a wet and shivering body was pressed against mine.” It was a stray dog that had “shared the shelter of a friendly doorway with me one cold night and had clung to me ever since with a loyal affection that was the one bright spot in my hard life.”17 A tramp and his loyal dog: this could be a scene in a Charlie Chaplin movie. Riis knew that if he stayed in the street he would perish, so he took refuge in a police station. At the time, police stations offered lodgings for tramps, but dogs were not allowed. These lodgings were terrible places, crowded, smelly, and dangerous. Riis woke up in the middle of the night; someone had taken the gold locket that he wore under his shirt. He complained to the sergeant, who called him a liar. He grabbed Riis and threw him out. The dog, curled up on the steps of the police station, saw Riis in the grip of the sergeant, so he fastened his teeth in the sergeant’s leg. “He let go of me with a yell of pain,” Riis says, “seized the poor little beast by the legs, and beat its brains out against the stone steps.”18

80

Jacob Riis

Riis now went into a “blind rage” and attacked the sergeant. Two other policemen grabbed Riis, took him to the nearest ferry, and ordered him to leave town. Riis had no money for a ticket, so he paid with a silk handkerchief. “My dog did not die unavenged,” Riis says. When Riis became a well-known reformer, he strongly criticized police station lodgings, which he called “one of the foulest abuses that every disgraced a Christian city.”19 In February 1896, Roosevelt closed them forever. After leaving New York for the third time, Riis had innumerable jobs. At one point he was working with a railroad construction gang in western New York, but the job was backbreaking. “I was on the road again looking for work on a farm. It was not to be had.” He thought he could fi nd a job in Buffalo. “I walked day and night, pursued in the dark by a hundred skulking curs that lurked behind trees until I came abreast of them and then sallied out to challenge my progress. . . . I had walked fi fty miles without stopping or eating.” He found work in a shipyard, but he lost this job because he got into argument over religion with his Catholic boss. “It was about this time I made up my mind to go into the newspaper business.”20 He applied to two Buffalo newspapers for a job, but they turned him down. Riis now became a salesman for a furniture company in Jamestown, New York, but he soon found another sales job after reading an advertisement for agents to sell “a patent flat and fluting iron.” He was a successful flatiron salesman in Ohio, but he was a failure in Chicago. He claims that the other employees robbed and cheated him. “In six weeks they had cleaned me out bodily, had run away with my irons and with [the] money they borrowed of me to start them in business.” He soon learned that “the fi rm for which I worked had connived at the frauds.”21 He also learned that his beloved Elisabeth was engaged to a cavalry officer. Riis wanted to die—but noted, “one does not die of love at twentyfour.” He walked to New York, surviving by selling flatirons. In New York “he went to a business college on Fourth Avenue . . . to learn telegraphing.” He peddled in the morning and attended school in the afternoon. After a brief stint as a journalist for a Long Island newspaper, whose owner refused to pay him, he tried to make a living by “peddling books, an illustrated Dickens.”22 Fittingly, the Dickens novel the company gave him to canvass with was Hard Times. Riis could not make enough money to support himself and a dog he had acquired, a Newfoundland pup. People often gave the dog scraps, but they ignored Riis.

Walking for Reform

81

Once again Riis was down and out in New York, “bankrupt in hope and purpose. Nothing had gone right.”23 He and his dog were sitting on the steps of Cooper Union, where Lincoln had given a major speech in 1860, when he heard a voice calling him. It was the head of the telegraph school he had attended. The man told him that a news agency was looking for a bright young fellow to break in. Riis accepted the man’s offer to give him a letter of introduction to the news agency. Yet Riis says: “That night, the last which Bob [his dog] and I spent together, we walked up and down Broadway, where there was quiet, thinking it over.”24 What Riis was thinking over was the religious meaning of the job offer, for he had a providential sense of things. “I saw a hand held out to save me from wreck just when it seemed inevitable; and I knew it for His hand, to whose will I was at last beginning to bow in humility that had been a stranger to me before.”25 The unexpected job offer shored up his wavering faith and gave him humility, even if there might have been a bit of smugness in his self-assuredness. Riis also mentions Grace Church, which both Whitman and Melville thought was the preserve of the rich. “In the shadow of Grace Church I bowed my head against the granite wall of the gray tower and prayed for the strength to do the work which I had so long and arduously sought and which had now come to me.”26 After praying before Grace Church, Riis took Bob to a new home and walked down to Park Row, then called Newspaper Row because it housed the city’s major newspapers. He accepted the job with the New York News Agency. His fi rst assignment was “a lunch of some sort at the Astor House—the hotel where Lincoln had stayed in 1861.”27 A year later, a small Brooklyn newspaper, the South Brooklyn News, hired Riis. Soon he would buy the paper, selling it a year later at a 500 percent profit. During that year Riis learned that Elisabeth’s fiancé had died. With the proceeds from the sale of the newspaper, he bought a ticket to Denmark and proposed to her again. This time she accepted, and in March 1876 they were married in Denmark. They returned to the United States, and a year later Riis was hired by the New York Tribune. Thirteen years later he would publish the book that made him famous: How the Other Half Lives. How the Other Half Lives: The Text In writing about the slums of New York, Riis was not breaking new ground. It had been a popu lar subject for at least half a century. Before

82

Jacob Riis

Dickens wrote about Five Points, several writers had described this “hell of horrors,” as one journalist put it in 1834. By midcentury there were innumerable pamphlets by anonymous authors “who described the slums for the titillation of middle-class readers.” There also were serious works of journalism that described the terrible living conditions of the poor in New York.28 One of the most popu lar books about New York’s slums was George Foster’s New York by Gas-Light (1850), which was a compilation of articles he had written for the New York Tribune. Foster, like Dickens, takes the reader on a nighttime tour of Five Points. He even mentions the spot where Dickens saw Juba, the black minstrel. Because it is “nearly dawn,” Foster says, we must wait until tomorrow night to “return and look in at some of the regular dance-houses and public places in this neighborhood— especially the well known ‘Dickens’ Place,’ ” which was closed during the summer on account of cholera.29 Foster’s writing about “the squalid undercrust of a fine city” is sensationalist and cliché-ridden. The sight of Five Points, he says, makes “the blood slowly congeal and the heart go grow fearful and cease its beatings.” The inhabitants of this region are “obscene night birds who fl it and howl and hoot by night.”30 According to Foster, some birds of the night are worse than others. He depicts the Jews as a criminal class, albeit one that holds a certain fascination for him. “The roundness and suppleness of limb, the elasticity of flesh, the glittering eye-sparkle— are as inevitable in Jew and Jewess, in whatever rank of existence, as the hook of the nose which betrays the Israelite as the human kite, formed to be feared, hated, and despised, yet to prey upon mankind.”31 In articles about New York’s slums, it was taken for granted that the inhabitants mainly were immigrants or the children of immigrants. In the 1880s, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Ireland still remained the top three places of origin for immigrants, but by the turn of the century these were Italy, Russia, and Austria-Hungary.32 Owing to the influx of immigrants, the city’s population swelled from 1.9 million to 4.8 million from 1880 to 1910. In 1910, immigrants constituted more than 40 percent of the population. Many observers argued that the United States could not absorb so many immigrants. “Give us a rest,” Francis Walker said in 1892. Walker was a highly regarded economist, the president of MIT and the American Economic Association. “No one can be surely enough of an optimist,” he said, “to contemplate without dread the fast riding flood of immigration now setting in upon our shores.”33

Walking for Reform

83

Others argued that the main problem the United States faced was not the quantity of new immigrants, but the quality. They bemoaned the “race” of the new immigrants. Referring mainly to Italians from southern Italy and Jews from eastern Europe, Henry Cabot Lodge lamented that “the immigration of those races which had thus far built up the United States, and which are related to each other either by blood or language or both, was declining, while the immigration of races totally alien to them was increasing.”34 In 1891 William C. Oates, a congressman from Alabama, toured the area Riis wrote about. “A house to house visit to Mulberry Street,” he said, “will satisfy anyone that there are thousands of people in this country who should never have been allowed to land here.” Oates mentions Jews and Italians. “Many of the Rus sian Jews who inhabit other streets in New York, and other cities are of no better class than the Italians just referred to.” In 1892, a writer for the New York Times made the same point: “Ignorance and dirt are the chief characteristics of the average immigrant of to-day. . . . It is plain that the United States would be better off if ignorant Russian Jews and Hungarians were denied a refuge here.”35 In How the Other Half Lives Riis takes a negative view of Italians and Jews. “The two races . . . have this in common: they carry their slums with them wherever they go, if allowed to do it. . . . The Italian and the poor Jew rise only by compulsion.” Riis, though, is inconsistent. He also observes that all immigrants are driven by a desire to better their condition: “The poorest immigrant comes here with the purpose and ambition to better himself and, given half a chance, might be reasonably expected to make the most of it.”36 Riis’s biographer argues that “Riis spent far more time painting positive portraits of the ‘other’ than he did on making insupportable generalizations.” Riis’s portrait of Italian immigrants is more positive than negative, but not his portraits of Jewish and Chinese immigrants. A contemporary reviewer rightly said: “The ‘Heathen Chinee’ and the Russian Jew fleeing from persecution in his own land, fi nd no mercy in Mr. Riis’s creed.” Alan Trachtenberg notes that “the presence of unambiguous ethnic and racial stereotypes and slurs is a major stumbling block for readers of the book.”37 Riis judges the Chinese immigrants more harshly than any other immigrant group. (They were a small group, numbering roughly ten thousand in New York.) The Chinese, he claims, make no effort to assimilate. “In their very exclusiveness and reserve they are a constant

84

Jacob Riis

and terrible menace to society. . . . The Chinese are in no sense a desirable element of the population.” But Riis does not recommend expulsion. “Rather than banish the Chinaman, I would have the door opened wider—for his wife; make it a condition of his coming or staying that he bring his wife with him.”38 Riis seems to be attacking the Chinese Exclusion Act, passed in 1882, which prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers for ten years. The act was not lifted until 1942. In the two chapters that Riis devotes to Jewish immigrants, he rehearses standard anti-Semitic clichés. He speaks of “the unhesitating mendacity of these people, where they conceive their interests to be concerned in one way or another.” He says that “money is their God,” and that Jews have a “native instinct for money-making.” He says Jews are a “race” that can easily be identified. “The jargon of the street, the signs of the sidewalk, the manner and dress of the people, their unmistakable physiognomy, betray their race at every step.” He also criticizes Jews for not accepting Christianity. “They stand, these [Lower] East Side Jews, where the new day that dawned on Calvary left them standing, stubbornly refusing to see the light.”39 Riis’s remarks about Jews are riddled with contradictions. He deplores their narrow self-interest, yet he also mentions the work of Jewish charities. “Half of them [the new immigrants] require and receive aid from Hebrew Charities . . . lest they starve.” He also notes that many Jews do not spend all their time trying to make money. There are many dancing schools on the Lower East Side because “the young people in Jewtown are inordinately fond of dancing.”40 Luc Sante argues that Riis’s attitude toward Jews “noticeably softens through the course of his works.” In his autobiography, Riis says he now despises France because of “the Dreyfus infamy.”41 Most anti-Semites did not speak of the “Dreyfus infamy,” but instead supported the prosecution of Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jewish officer who supposedly delivered state secrets to the Germans. Riis befriended Felix Adler, a German Jew who was the founder of the New York Society for Ethical Culture. In 1884 Adler gave a series of public lectures on “the Tenement House Question.” Riis covered these lectures and attended meetings of the Tenement House Committee, on which Adler served, meeting at police headquarters on Mulberry Street. Riis said of Adler, “His clear, incisive questions . . . were at times like flashes of lightning on a dark night. . . . The passing years have given him a very warm place in my heart. Adler was born a Jew.” In the concluding chapter of his autobiography, Riis lists a number of people he

Walking for Reform

85

admires, including Adler, and he says of them: “Jew and Gentile who taught me why in this world personal conduct and personal character count ever for most,—my love to you all!”42 Though Riis made absurd generalizations about “races,” he never said that Jewish immigration (or Italian immigration) should be curtailed. Max Fischel, who became his assistant in 1891, was the son of Jewish immigrants from Prague. If Henry Cabot Lodge and others were concerned about the “race” of the new immigrants, Riis was concerned about their living conditions. “The tenement [is] . . . the destroyer of individuality and character everywhere.” Or, as Felix Adler said: “it is not the squalid people that make the squalid homes, but the squalid homes that make the squalid people.”43 In the introduction to How the Other Half Lives, Riis writes, “In the tenements all the influences make for evil. . . . They are the hot-beds of the epidemics that carry death to rich and poor alike, the nurseries of pauperism and crime that fill our jails and police courts.” Epidemics killed far more people in the tenements than elsewhere in the city. Riis’s biographer points out that “nine out of ten who died from an epidemic disease in New York were from the tenements.”44 Many people resisted the notion that conditions shaped character. Riis quotes an exchange he had with a Protestant minister. “Are you not looking too much to the material condition of these people, and forgetting the inner man?” the minister asked. “No!” Riis responded. “For you cannot expect to fi nd an inner man to appeal to in the worst tenement-house surroundings.”45 What is a tenement? Riis, quoting an official report, writes that it “is generally a brick building from four to six stories high on the street. . . . Four families occupy each floor, and a set of rooms consists of one or two dark closets, used as bedrooms, with a living room twelve by ten. The staircase is too often a dark well in the centre of the house, and no direct through ventilation is possible, each family being separated from the other by partitions.”46 The chief characteristics of a tenement were darkness and airlessness. Like Dickens, Riis takes the reader on a walking tour of the Lower East Side. Riis had been reading Dickens since he was a child. (His parents subscribed to Dickens’s journal, All Year Round.) Riis’s writing is not as good as Dickens’s, and he occasionally resorts to clichés (“the wolf knocks loudly at the gate in the troubled dreams that come to this alley”) and strains for effect. Walking into a “tough tenement” on Cherry Street, he says: “Be a little careful, please! The hall is dark and

86

Jacob Riis

you might stumble over the children pitching pennies back there.”47 Riis frequently stops the tour, so to speak, to give his opinions about the traits of a par ticu lar ethnic or racial group. A walker in New York, Riis says, often encounters a surprise when he turns a corner because the city changes from street to street. Riis notes that slum children rarely leave their neighborhood. In a class of forty-eight boys in a down-town public school “twenty had never seen the Brooklyn Bridge that was scarcely five minutes’ walk away, three only had been in Central Park, fi fteen had known the joy of a ride in a horse-car.”48 According to Riis, the worst place on the Lower East Side is a section of Mulberry Street called the Mulberry Bend, which is “within hail of the old depravity of the Five Points.” In the 1860s, the tenements in Five Points had been razed, but the general area remained a slum. In some respects, Riis says, Mulberry Bend resembled the marketplace “in some town in Southern Italy than a street in New York.” Women carried “enormous bundles of fi re-wood on their heads, [and] loads of decaying vegetables from the market wagons in their aprons. . . . Each [has] a baby at the breast supported by a sort of sling.” The men did not work very hard. They “sit or stand in the streets, on trucks, or in the open doors of the saloons smoking black clay pipes, talking and gesticulating as if forever on the point of coming to blows.”49 Sometimes Riis traveled by elevated train. “Leaving the Elevated Railroad where it dives under the Brooklyn Bridge at Franklin Square, scarce a dozen steps will take us where we wish to go. With its rush and roar echoing yet in our ears, we have turned the corner from prosperity to poverty.” We can see things from the train that we cannot see while walking, so Riis says that we should “take the Second Avenue Elevated Railroad at Chatham Square and ride up half a mile through the sweater’s district,” the sweatshop district, where people worked in stifl ing conditions. “Every open window of the big tenements . . . gives you a glimpse of one of these shops as the train speeds by. Men and women [are] bending over their machines, or ironing clothes at the window, half-naked.”50 At Rivington Street, Riis asks us to “continue our trip on foot.” It is a Sunday evening. “Men stagger along the sidewalk groaning under heavy burdens of unsewn garments, or enormous black bags stuffed full of finished coats and trousers. Let us follow one to his home.” We mount “two fl ights of dark stairs, three, four, with new smells of cabbage, of

Walking for Reform

87

onions, of frying fi sh, on every landing, whirring sewing machines behind closed doors betraying what goes on within.” We enter an apartment. The woman in charge of the sweatshop is reluctant to speak to Riis, but she talks to him after hearing a few words in “her own tongue from our guide.” In a footnote, Riis writes that he was always accompanied on these “tours of inquiry by one of their own people. . . . Without that precaution my errand would have been fruitless; even with him it was often so.”51 Riis was disappointed that the new immigrants—mainly Jews and Italians— did not learn English quickly: “They must be taught the language of the country they have chosen as their home. . . . Whatever may follow, that is essential, absolutely vital.” The crowds on a main street in the predominantly Jewish area of the Lower East side are “pushing, struggling, babbling and shouting in foreign tongues, a veritable Babel of confusion. An English word falls upon the ear almost with a sense of shock, as something unexpected and strange.”52 Riis worried that the new immigrants did not want to be assimilated. “The one thing you shall vainly ask for in the chief city of America is a distinctively American community. There is none; certainly not among the tenements.” Yet he admitted that previous immigrant groups—the Irish and the Germans—had tried to become assimilated, and had succeeded: “The Irishman’s genius runs to public affairs . . . the German rag-picker of thirty years ago . . . is the thrifty tradesman or prosperous farmer of to-day.”53 Unlike Howells, Riis was hopeful that conditions in the slums would improve, and they had done so already. “New York is to-day a hundredfold cleaner, better, purer, city than it was even ten years ago.” Unlike Howells, Riis thought that business can be a force for the good: “Business . . . has done more than all other agencies together to wipe out the worst tenements. . . . In ten years I have seen plague-spots disappear before its onward march, with which officers, police, and sanitary science had struggled vainly since such struggling began as a serious business.”54 How the Other Half Lives: The Photographs In his autobiography Riis talks about the genesis of How the Other Half Lives. He remembers covering a meeting of New York ministers about “the losing fight the Church was waging among the masses.” At the

88

Jacob Riis

meeting a man— a builder— cried out: “How are these men and women to understand the love of God you speak of, when they see only the greed of men?” The builder’s remark about greed made a deep impression on Riis. “I wanted to jump up in my seat at that time and shout Amen! But I remembered that I was a reporter and kept still. It was that same winter, however, that I wrote the title of my book, ‘How the Other Half Lives,’ and copyrighted it. The book itself did not come until two years after, but it was good as written then. I had my text.”55 Riis may have had How the Other Half Lives in his head, but it is doubtful that he would have written the book if he had not become an amateur photographer. Riis became a photographer out of frustration. He felt that his articles about the living conditions of the poor did not have much of an impact. “I wrote, but it seemed to make no impression.” He wished “there was some way of putting before the people what I saw there. A drawing might have done it, but I cannot draw.” Reading the newspaper one morning in the fall of 1887, Riis learned about a new photographic technique that had just been developed in Germany. “A way had been discovered . . . to take pictures by flashlight.” This is “the thing I had been looking for all those years.”56 One of Riis’s friends, John T. Nagle, a statistician with the Health Department, was an amateur photographer, so Riis asked him if he would be willing to take photographs of slum dwellers with the flashlight technique. Nagle thought it was a good idea, and he recruited Henry G. Piffard, a dermatologist who was head of an amateur photography club. Piffard not only knew about the new flashlight, but he had also modified it to make it safer, since it involved using magnesium mixed with gunpowder in a cartridge fi red from a gun.57 Soon Riis, Nagle, and Piffard spent several nights roaming the Lower East Side and taking photographs. (Another amateur photographer, Richard Hoe Lawrence, a banker, joined them.) “The spectacle of half a dozen strange men [there were reporters with them] invading a house in the midnight hour armed with big pistols which they shot off recklessly was hardly reassuring,” Riis says. “It was not to be wondered at if the tenants bolted through windows and down fi re-escapes wherever we went.”58 “We got some good pictures,” Riis says. The amateur photographers, though, soon lost interest in the project. Riis hired a professional photographer, but he did not work out, since he tried to sell the photographs

Walking for Reform

89

behind Riis’s back. So Riis became a photographer himself. Instead of using a revolver for the flashlight, he used a frying pan mixed with the same chemicals. It was a dangerous mechanism. “Twice I set fire to the house with the apparatus, and once to myself. I blew the light into my own eyes on that occasion, and only my spectacles saved me from being blinded for life.”59 Photography never really interested Riis, but was a means to an end. “I had a use for it, and beyond that I never went.” Soon after Riis became a photographer, he learned how photographs could be a powerful a tool for reform. One night he went with the “sanitary police” to check on overcrowding in a tenement. The Health Department submitted a report about what they saw, but “it did not make much of an impression— these things rarely do, put in mere words.” The photographs Riis took did make an impression. “From them there was no appeal.”60 Riis’s photographs greatly strengthened the case for new housing legislation. Riis hoped there would be a market for the photographs, but he had no luck with magazine editors. “For more than a year I had knocked at the doors of the various magazine editors with my pictures, proposing to tell them how the other half lived, but no one wanted to know.”61 Riis soon realized that he could use a magic lantern to project slides of the photographs on a large screen. The photographs would be especially powerful when blown up in this way. On January 26, 1888, Riis delivered a lecture and slide show at the New York Association of Amateur Photographers. It was called “The Other Half. How It Lives and Dies in New York.” Several newspapers reviewed the lecture, which was illustrated with a hundred images. One, the New Jersey News, called his photographs “shocking.”62 Riis gave the lecture at other heavily attended venues as well. An editor of Scribner’s magazine who had come to a lecture asked him to write it up for the magazine. The article appeared in the Christmas issue (1889), with nineteen woodcuts based on the photographs. A few days later, Riis received a letter from Jeannette Gilder, the editor of The Critic, who asked him if he had thought of turning the article into a book. She knew a publisher who would be interested in it. Soon Riis was writing How the Other Half Lives, which he finished in ten months while working full-time as a journalist. The book, published by Scribner’s, included forty-four illustrations, including the woodcuts that were printed in the original article. It also contained fi fteen of Riis’s original photos—using the new halftone technique. “The technique,

90

Jacob Riis

still in its infancy, made the photos look gray, muddy, and out of focus.”63 In The Making of an American, Riis writes that he has never been able to “satisfactorily explain” the success of his book. He thought that it sold well because it was published soon after the publication in England of William Booth’s account of London’s slums, In Darkest England. Booth’s book may have helped boost Riis’s sales, but there is an obvious reason why Riis’s book was popu lar; it was the first guided tour of the slums of New York that included photographs. “Before Riis, no one had photographed poverty with the express purpose of questioning the social order and shocking people into action.”64 There had been photographs of the slums of Glasgow, but only to preserve for posterity what certain neighborhoods looked like before they were demolished. Thus, the push for reform in New York was abetted by three relatively new technologies: flash photography, which enabled Riis to take pictures of slum residents indoors; improvements in magic lantern technology, which enabled Riis to make slides of photographs; and a new halftone technique that made it possible to print reproductions of photographs in books and magazines. After reading How the Other Half Lives, the poet James Russell Lowell wrote Riis a letter: “I felt as Dante must when he looked over the edge of the abyss at the bottom of which Gorgon lay in ambush. I had but a vague idea of these horrors before you brought them so feelingly home to me.” The key word is “looked.” Riis’s photographs, which depict a harsh and frightening world, impressed Lowell more than Riis’s prose. Riis, his biographer says, “later acknowledged that the portrait of the slums he had painted in his book was much darker than the reality warranted.”65 Riis quit photography in 1898 “or perhaps even earlier,” but he continued to use slides of photographs in his lectures, which he gave for the rest of his life.66 After he resigned from his job as reporter in 1901, he depended on the income from his books and his lectures. Riis was reluctant to give up a salaried job, but he could no longer withstand the rigors of being a police reporter. In 1900, he suffered a bout of angina pectoris and was diagnosed with an enlarged heart. When Riis died in 1914, the obituaries did not mention his photographs. The story of the rediscovery of Riis’s photographs is one that rivals Riis’s own progress from poverty to fame.67 It is also a story about an immigrant: Alexander Alland, a Russian Jew who came to the United States in 1923, arriving alone and penniless.

Walking for Reform

91

Alland fled Russia in 1920 after his mother and brother had been killed in pogroms during the Russian Revolution. He lived in Turkey for three years, where he worked in Istanbul as an assistant to a photographer in a department store. Ten years after he arrived in the United States. Alland had become a successful freelance photographer and photography instructor who was an expert on photographic murals, helping create one in 1939 for the World’s Fair. After reading How the Other Half Lives, Alland wanted to know where Riis’s photographs were housed, but no one he spoke to in the city’s museums, libraries, and photo archives knew anything about them. In the early 1940s he got in touch with Riis’s second wife and widow, who told him to get in touch with Riis’s son Billy, who had found a box of magic lantern slides at the farm in western Massachusetts where Riis lived the last year of his life. The major breakthrough came in 1946, when the house Riis had lived in for many years in Queens was slated for demolition. During a cleanup preceding the demolition, a box was found that contained 412 glass plates, 161 slides, and 193 paper photos. The owner of the property found Billy Riis’s address and took the box to him in Manhattan. (Billy was not home at the time, so he placed the box on Riis’s doorstep.) Billy Riis took the box to Alland, who restored the photographs and gave them to the Museum of the City of New York. In 1947, the museum mounted an exhibition of “fi fty prints by Alexander Alland from the original negatives by Jacob A. Riis.” They soon became the museum’s most sought-after works. Riis had a low opinion of his talents as a photographer. “I am downright sorry to confess here that I am no good at all as a photographer.” This is not the view of historians of photography. Alan Trachtenberg holds that the photographs “are a major achievement, stunning encounters with a reality never before seen in American visual art. . . . His pictures mark an incandescent moment in American visual art.” Riis today is more famous for his photographs than his books.68 It is appropriate that Riis is more famous as a photographer, for he is an uneven writer. He can describe a slum scene vividly, but when he reaches for generalizations his prose becomes opaque and his syntax gnarled. Roosevelt said that Riis “was one of the few great writers . . . who was also a great doer,” but this is not quite right: Riis was not a great writer, but he was surely a great doer. His writing, lectures, and work on civic committees resulted in many reforms. “We tore down unfit tenements, forced the opening of parks and playgrounds . . . and

92

Jacob Riis

the remodeling of the whole school system.” (A law was passed requiring that new public schools have an outdoor playground.) He also pushed for “the demolition of the overcrowded old Tombs”—the building Dickens inspected and Melville’s Bartleby spent his last days in—”and the erection on its site of a decent new prison.” Riis was instrumental in the creation of the settlement-house movement, in the passage of child labor laws, in the closing down of lodgings in police stations (they were hotbeds of crime and disease), and in the passage of laws making multiple-family dwellings healthier and safer. He was proud of his efforts to make sure that the worst tenements were razed. “Directly or indirectly, I had a hand in destroying seven whole blocks of them as I count it up. I wish it had been seventy.”69 The infamous Mulberry Bend was replaced by Columbia Park. Lewis Mumford, who was born in 1895, writes in Sketches from Life, “During the period when I was growing up, a series of gigantic shifts and upheavals took place in the urban scene around me; and many of these were, astonishingly, changes for the better.” 70 Riis played an important role in these “changes for the better.” “All things come to those who wait—and fight for them,” Riis writes. “Yes, fight!” Riis greatly benefited from having the support of a fighter who happened to be politically powerful: Theodore Roosevelt. The story of their fi rst walk on the Lower East Side is well known. It began on June 7, 1895, at 2:00 in the morning. The two men were in disguise because Roosevelt wanted to see whether the policemen in the area were on the job. Most were not. What Roosevelt learned on this walk led to major reforms in the Police Department. During his two years as police commissioner, many policemen on the beat worried that “Mr. Roosevelt’s spectacles might come gleaming around the corner at any hour. “71 During the course of three decades, Riis had walked the slums of New York for different reasons. He had walked them in search of food and shelter; he had walked them in his capacity as a police reporter; he had walked them looking for scenes to photograph; and he had walked them with Roosevelt in order to point out what reforms were needed. On one walk, Riis showed him the lodging house where his dog had been killed. Roosevelt later wrote, “I used to visit the different tenement-house regions, usually in company with Riis, to see for myself what the conditions were. It was largely this personal experience that enabled me while on the Health Board to struggle not only zealously, but with

Walking for Reform

93

reasonable efficiency and success, to improve conditions.” 72 For his part, Riis considered the nighttime walks with Roosevelt the highlight of his life. “It is long since I have enjoyed anything so much as I did those patrol trips of ours on the ‘last tour’ between midnight and sunrise. . . . I had at last found one who was willing to get up when other people slept—including, too often, the police— and see what the town looked like then.” 73

7

Henry James What to Make of the Bristling City

I

f Jacob Riis lashed out against New York’s unhealthy tenements, Henry James complained about New York’s ugly skyscrapers. In the second chapter of The American Scene (1907), a book about his impressions of the United States after an absence of two decades, James talks about his arrival in the “terrible town”— adding that he will soon explain “why [it is] ‘terrible’ to my sense.” New York is terrible in part because it has so many skyscrapers, which “are the last word of economic ingenuity only till another word be written.” The skyscrapers, James says, are “consecrated by no uses save the commercial at any cost. . . . They are simply the most piercing notes in that concert of the expensively provisional into which your supreme sense of New York resolves itself.”1 Though James deplored the skyscrapers, he found them arresting. Looking at them in dense fog, he writes, “The weather, such as it was, worked wonders for the upper reaches of the buildings, round which it drifted and hung very much as about the fl anks and summits of emergent mountain-masses.” Looking at the “special sky-scraper that overhangs poor old Trinity [church] to the north,” he says: “the vast money-making structure quite horribly, quite romantically justified itself, looming through the weather with an insolent cliff-like sublimity.”2 James disliked many things about the new New York of 1904–1905, as opposed to the old New York of his childhood, yet he was reluctant to come to a conclusion about the city. In the “Preface,” he writes, “I would take my stand on my gathered impressions,” and in Chapter 1 he 94

What to Make of the Bristling City 95

calls himself a “restless analyst.” But he does acknowledge that New York means more to him that any other American city. He quotes “a voice of the air” (an alter ego) who says “it’s all very well to ‘criticize,’ but you distinctly take an interest. . . . You care for the terrible town, yea even for the ‘horrible,’ as I have overheard you call it, or at least think it.”3 James prided himself on not settling on an answer to any given topic. In a letter written in 1879, he says: “Nothing is my last word about anything—I am interminably supersubtle & analytic—& with the blessing of heaven, I shall live to make all sorts of representations of all sorts of things. It will take a much cleverer person than myself to discover my last impression— among all these things— of anything.”4 He was a native New Yorker—born in April 1843 at 21 Washington Place, just off Washington Square. His father had purchased the house after the family had lived elsewhere on Washington Square. The family had also lived at Astor House, where Lincoln stayed. James’s brother William was born in the hotel. The young Henry’s maternal grandparents lived at 19 Washington Square, now Washington Square North, in a house that still exists, owned by New York University. During James’s early childhood, the family lived mainly in Europe. In 1847 it returned to New York for seven years—living fi rst at 11 Fifth Avenue. A year later the family moved to a new house at 58 West 14th Street. The young Henry would frequently walk down Fifth Avenue to visit his grandmother on Washington Square. Describing the area, the narrator of Washington Square (1880) says, “It has a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long, shrill city.” James seems to be referring to his own childhood when, in Washington Square, the narrator adds, “It was here that your grandmother lived, in venerable solitude, and dispensed a hospitality which commended itself alike to the infant imagination and the infant palate; it was here that you took your first walks abroad.” When James was twelve, his father decided to return to Europe, but James’s father was a restless man who never lived in any one place for very long. The family also lived in Newport, Rhode Island. When the family was in New York, James would usually see his grandmother. He would also visit his cousins, who lived in what was then uptown— Murray Hill. They would go on long walks—from Central Park to the Battery. In 1875, after publishing a collection of stories, James lived for almost a year at 111 East 25th Street, near Madison Square. Melville lived nearby, at 60 East 26th Street, but it is unlikely that they ever met.

96

Henry James

Many years later, James briefly referred to Melville, linking him with two minor writers: George William Curtis and Ik Marvel (the pen name of Donald G. Mitchell). The prose of the three writers, James says, was “as mild and easy as an Indian summer in the woods.”5 This is an odd thing to say about the author of Moby-Dick, a novel that we have no evidence James ever read. In the fall of 1875, James moved permanently to Europe. He wrote his family: “I take possession of the old world—I inhale it—I appropriate it!” James preferred to live in Europe, but he enjoyed returning to New York. Visiting New York in April 1883, he writes: “I never return to this wonderful city without being entertained and impressed afresh. New York is full of types and figures and curious social idiosyncrasies.” James wishes someone would write a good novel about New York. “I only wish we had some one here, to hold up the mirror [to this city]. . . . It is altogether an extraordinary growing, swarming, glittering, pushing, chattering, good-natured, cosmopolitan place.”6 Two decades later, in August 1902, James wrote Edith Wharton: “do new york! The 1st-hand account is precious.” 7 A few months later James was thinking about doing New York himself—not necessarily in fiction. In October 1902, he told a friend that he had been thinking a lot about New York “as it used to be.” He asked the friend, who lived in New York, “I wonder if you ever kick the October leaves as you walk in Fifth Avenue, as I can to this hour feel myself, hear myself, positively smell myself doing.” He thought old New York may have disappeared. “But perhaps there are no leaves and no trees now in Fifth Avenue— nothing but patriotic arches, Astor hotels and Vanderbilt palaces.”8 Soon he decided that he would return to the United States for an extended visit. James arrived on August 30, 1904, and left on July 5, 1905. During that stay, he spent far more time in New York than anywhere else, approximately two and a half months. He usually stayed with an old friend, Mary Cadwalader Jones, the sister-in-law of Edith Wharton, who lived at 21 East 11th Street. He also stayed with Wharton, who lived at 884 Park Avenue, and he occasionally stayed with Lawrence Godkin, the son of his late friend E. L. Godkin, the editor of The Nation, who lived at 36 West 10th Street. James wrote that the best way to take in the life of a city was “to walk the streets.” Addressing New York as if she were a beguiling but somewhat disreputable woman, he wrote, “there was enough about her . . . to conduce to that distinctive cultivation of her company for which the

What to Make of the Bristling City 97

contemplative stroll . . . was but another name.” James took contemplative strolls in many parts of Manhattan, from Central Park to the fi nancial district, from Upper Fifth Avenue to the Lower East Side. His “rambles,” he wrote, “were delightful.”9 The Mystery of the Business Field Although James resisted coming to a conclusion about New York, he repeatedly complained that New York was obsessed with commerce. He deplored “that perpetual passionate pecuniary purpose which plays with all forms, which derides and devours them.”10 The alliteration makes it seem as if James were sputtering with rage. The skyscrapers, James wrote, “are impudently new and still more impudently ‘novel’—this in common with so many other terrible things in America.” For James, then, it was not only New York that was terrible. It was America. The United States, he wrote, was a “vast crude democracy of trade,” resulting in the triumph of “the new, the simple, the cheap, the common, the commercial, the immediate, and, all too often, the ugly.”11 In October 1904, roughly two months after he arrived in America, James wrote his friend Edmund Gosse (the English literary critic) that the United States was a “living and breathing and feeling and moving great monster,” though he added that “it is all very interesting and quite unexpectedly and almost uncannily delightful and sympathetic.” A few months later, he no longer found the country interesting. Writing an English architect friend from Chicago in March 1905, James wished he were back in England. He complained of the “unimagined dreariness of ugliness . . . and of the perpetual effort of trying to ‘do justice’ to what one doesn’t like. If one could only damn it and have done with it!”12 James liked one thing about America, though: the private bathrooms. “They put one up (always everywhere), with one’s so excellent room with perfect bathroom and w.c., . . . the universal joy of this country . . . a feature that is really almost a consolation for many things.”13 James visited at least sixteen cities on his trip, but he did not write about all of them. There are no chapters in The American Scene on Chicago or the cities he visited on the West Coast. (He planned to write a second volume, but apparently lost interest in the project.) There are chapters on Philadelphia, Washington, Charleston, Baltimore, Richmond, Boston, and Newport, but James did not explore these cities in the way he explored New York. He liked Washington, which he called

98

Henry James

“the City of Conversation,” but he did not do much walking there, instead spending most of his time with Henry Adams and his circle of friends. James knew a great deal about Newport and Boston, since he had lived in both places, but they did not fi re his imagination in the way New York did. In November 1904, while in Boston, he told Edith Wharton that he had nothing to say about the city. “Il n’y a pas à dire. Boston doesn’t speak to me; never has, in irresistible accents, or affect me with the sweet touch of an affinity.”14 James’s memory of Boston was thin, whereas his memory of New York was thick. Describing his arrival in New York, he wrote, “One’s extremest youth had been full of New York, and one was absurdly finding it again, meeting it at every turn, in sights, sounds, smells, even in the chaos and confusion of change.”15 James anticipated that he would see many changes in New York. Nevertheless, he was shocked by the extent of the city’s transformation. New York was like a painting that has been “violently overpainted,” a familiar old world, but also a strange new world that made him feel old: “This impact of the whole condensed past at once produced a horrible, hateful sense of personal antiquity.”16 What seemed to disturb James the most was Wall Street, which he called a “heaped industrial battle-field.” New York’s financial sector was a tedious, nightmarish, and chaotic world. There was “the consummate monotonous commonness . . . of the pushing male crowd, moving in its dense mass—with the confusion carried to chaos for any intelligence, any perception.” Wall Street expressed “the universal will to move—to move, move, move, as an end in itself, an appetite at any price.”17 James did not clarify why he thought Wall Street without intelligence or perception. He probably meant that fi nanciers are narrow-minded— that, as Anthony Trollope said, they talk continually about money. Yet, many of his cultured friends were investors who had close connections with Wall Street. James held that commerce was all-powerful in New York, yet he admitted that some old buildings had been saved— City Hall, for example. He also noted that the New York of his childhood remained “comparatively unimpaired.” According to him, “the precious stretch of space between Washington Square and 14th Street had a value, had even a charm, for the revisiting spirit.”18 In May and June of 1905, James walked where he had once lived— Washington Square and its environs. He wrote of “the delicacy . . . the

What to Make of the Bristling City 99

mystery . . . [and] the wonder, in especial, of the unquenchable intensity of the impressions received in childhood.” He regretted that “the felicities of the backward reach . . . had also its melancholy checks and snubs.” The house in which he was born no longer existed, and several other buildings had disappeared as well. A large church on 14th Street, which was under construction when he was a child, had been torn down: “After passing from youth to middle age and from middle age to antiquity, [it] has vanished as utterly as the Assyrian Empire.”19 James repeatedly noted that commerce was the engine of change in New York. To bolster his point, he mentioned Columbia University’s move in 1897 from 49th Street and Madison Avenue to 116th Street and Broadway. He asked, rhetorically: Is not this change the result of the “local unwritten law that forbids almost any planted object to gather in a history where it stands, forbids in fact any accumulation that may not be recorded in the mere bank book?”20 James was speculating; he had no idea why Columbia University moved uptown. James insisted that in the United States “the great black ebony god of business was the only one recognized.” Yet James knew many Americans who recognized other gods. In Washington, he pointed out, “nobody was in ‘business’—that was the sum and substance of it.” James adds that some people he met at Henry Adams’s house in Washington were acquainted with “ ‘goods’ and shares and rises and falls and all such sordidities,” but they did not talk about it.21 One wondered what James thought of his grandfathers. His maternal grandfather was a linen merchant; his paternal grandfather made a fortune in real estate, mainly in Syracuse and Albany. The latter’s fortune provided James with a modest income for his entire life. James’s view of what he called the “business field” was not wholly negative. He wished he knew more about this world. “The imagination might have responded more if there had been a slightly less settled inability to understand what every one, what any one, was really doing.” He spoke of his “baffled curiosity, an intellectual adventure forever renounced.”22 How much curiosity did James really have about the business world? He disliked the face of the “business man.” He argued that American women “appear to be of markedly finer texture than the men, and that one of the liveliest signs of this difference is precisely in their less narrowly specialized, their less commercialized . . . physiognomic character.”23 Commerce coarsens the face as well as brutalizes the mind.

100

Henry James

At the end of Chapter 2, entitled “New York Revisited,” James speaks again about the business field, which offers “material for the artist, the painter of life, as we say.” He could not do justice to it. He says, almost wistfully, “the determination of the audibility in it of the human note (so interesting to try for if one had but the warrant) is a line of research closed to me, alas, by my fatally uninitiated state.”24 The Machinery of Assimilation James admitted that he did not fully understand the business field, but he had no such reservations about his understanding of immigration. He spoke confidently of “the machinery of assimilation.” In their introduction to a selection from The American Scene, the editors of Empire City write, “James, revealing the patrician sensibility of his class, . . . recoiled at the sight of the masses of immigrants.”25 James, though, did no such thing. He went out of his way to see immigrants and talk to them. He not only visited Ellis Island, which opened in 1892, but he also walked in the Italian and Jewish sections of New York, went to restaurants frequented by immigrants, and observed immigrants chatting and strolling in Central Park. James was interested in the manners of immigrants—manners understood in the broadest sense. He was curious to see if their move to a democratic and strongly commercial country had changed them in any way. Having traveled extensively in Italy, James was especially interested in Italians in America. He visited the Italian neighborhoods in Manhattan, but his fi rst encounter with Italian immigrants took place while he was walking in a town on the New Jersey shore, where he was staying for two days as the guest of his American publisher. Seeing Italian immigrants who were working as landscape gardeners, James hoped to chat with them, but they ignored him completely. “It was as if contact were out of the question.” If he had met similar workers in Italy, there would have been a conversation “founded on old familiarities and heredities.”26 These Italian gardeners were not interested in idle chatter, or in being deferential to a person who did not belong to the laboring classes. They were busy working and making money. A week or two later, James met an immigrant when he was visiting his brother William in New Hampshire. Walking by himself in the countryside, James lost his way, so he asked directions from a man who had just emerged from the woods. Because the man did not reply, James thought he might be French- Canadian, so he addressed him in French.

What to Make of the Bristling City 101

The man remained silent, so he addressed him in Italian. No reply again. James said in English, “What are you then?” This question finally “loosened in him the faculty of speech. ‘I’m an Armenian,’ he replied, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for a wage-earning youth in the heart of New England to be.”27 The encounters with the Italian gardeners and the Armenian constituted evidence for James of “the ubiquity of the alien.” The United States was a country fi lled with immigrants, far more now than when he was a child. The “ubiquity of the alien” was obvious to James in New York. Riding in an “electric car” [streetcar], he sees “a row of faces, up and down, testifying, without exception, to alienism unmistakable, alienism undisguised and unashamed.”28 According to James, “the great fact about his companions [on the streetcar] was that, foreign as they might be, . . . they were at home, really more at home, at the end of their few weeks or months or their year or two than they had ever in their lives been before.” The immigrants were at home because the United States was a “cauldron” of immigrants from different countries. The country was a “a prodigious amalgam . . . a hotch-potch of racial ingredients.”29 The immigrants felt at home in New York, but James did not: “This sense of dispossession . . . haunted me . . . in the New York streets and in the packed trajectiles [the streetcars] to which one clingingly appeals from the streets.” But he did not recoil from the immigrants. Indeed, he wrote, native-born New Yorkers “must make the surrender and accept the orientation. We must go, in other words, more than half-way to meet them.”30 It is easy to misunderstand what James meant by “dispossessed.” He was not saying that these new immigrants—mainly Italians from Southern Italy and Jews from Eastern Europe—were ruining the American character. He completely dismissed the notion of an American character based on Anglo-Saxon or Nordic stock. “Who and what is an alien, when it comes to that, in a country peopled from the first under the jealous eye of history?—peopled, that is, by migrations at once extremely recent, perfectly traceable and urgently required. . . . Which is the American, by these scant measures?—which is not the alien, over a large part of the country?”31 In his remarks on immigration, James took issue with the views of many of his friends, who feared that the new immigrants could not be assimilated. In 1895, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, an acquaintance of James who succeeded Howells as the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, published

102

Henry James

“The Unguarded Gates,” which begins: “Wide open and unguarded stand our gates, / And through them presses a wild motley throng.” In his History of the American People (1902), Woodrow Wilson said that the new immigrants were “men of [the] lowest class from the south of Italy, and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland, men out of the ranks where there was neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence.” In 1911 William Williams, the Ellis Island Commissioner, said: “The new immigrants, unlike that of the earlier years, proceed in part from the poorer elements of the countries of southern and eastern Europe and from backward races with customs and institutions widely different from ours and without the capacity of assimilating with our people as did the early immigrants [emphasis mine].”32 Wilson’s and Williams’s remarks about inferior races were commonplace in academe. In 1901, the distinguished sociologist Edward A. Ross warned about “race suicide,” by which he meant the mixing of AngloSaxon and Nordic “races” with inferior Mediterranean and Jewish races. In The Passing of the Great Race in America (1916), Madison Grant called for the exclusion of inferior Alpine, Mediterranean and Jewish breeds as the only means of preserving America’s old Nordic stock. In 1922, the Saturday Evening Post published several articles about “race” by the novelist Kenneth Roberts, who warned that “a mixture of Nordic with Alpine and Mediterranean stocks would produce only a worthless race of hybrids.”33 James occasionally used the word “race” to designate an ethnic group, but he disagreed with the immigration doomsayers. He thought the “wild motley throng,” as Aldrich puts it, would be assimilated easily. “The machinery [of assimilation] is colossal—nothing is more characteristic of the country than the development of this machinery, in the form of the political and social habit, the common school and the newspaper.” Visiting Ellis Island, he was struck by “the ceaseless process of the recruiting our race, of the plenishing of our huge national pot au feu, of the introduction of fresh— of perpetually fresh so far it isn’t perpetually stale—foreign matter into our heterogeneous system.”34 James thought that anyone could become a member of “our race,” an American. Assimilation works, but in James’s view it has a cost: the Italians he met in the United States were not as charming as the Italians he met on his travels in Italy. “The Italians meet us, at every turn, only to make us ask what has become of that element of the agreeable address in them, which has, from far back, so enhanced for the stranger the interest and plea sure of a visit to their beautiful country. They shed it utterly, I

What to Make of the Bristling City 103

couldn’t but observe, on their advent, after a deep inhalation or two of the clear native air.” Howells, who lived in Italy for several years, agreed with James. He discerned a “malign change here that has transformed the Italians from the friendly folk they are at home to the surly race they mostly show themselves here.”35 In his biography of James, Leon Edel writes that James “was struck by the alienation of the immigrant Italians when compared with Italians in Italy.” James was struck by how unalienated the Italian immigrants were. They were so “at home” in America, where there was “equality of condition,” that they felt no need of the deferential manners they had employed in Italy.36 James wrote that all immigrants were transformed when they came to the United States. The foreigner “presents himself thus, most of all, to be plain— and not only in New York, but throughout the country— as wonderingly conscious that his manners of the other world . . . have been a huge mistake.” Fifty years earlier, Anthony Trollope had made a similar remark about the Irish in America: “The Irishman when he expatriates himself to one of these American States loses much of that affectionate, confiding, master-worshipping nature which makes him so good a fellow when at home. . . . To me personally he has perhaps become less pleasant than he was. But to himself—! It seems to me that such a man must feel himself half a god, if he has the power of comparing what he is with what he was.”37 Jewish Assimilation Did the machinery of assimilation work for Jewish immigrants as well? Many German Jews already were assimilated. Some Americans, as we have seen, thought that Jews could never become good citizens, but the virulent brand of anti-Semitism that was widespread in late nineteenthcentury France—the notion that Jews were a “race” of treacherous cosmopolitans—was not commonplace in the United States. Henry Adams was the odd man out because he talked incessantly about the noxious influence of wealthy and powerful Jews. When the Dreyfus affair was boiling over, John Hay jokingly said that Adams’s obsession with Jews was so extreme that “he now believes the earthquake at Krakatoa was the work of Zola and when he saw Vesuvius reddening the midnight air he searched the horizon to find a Jew stoking the fi re.”38 Emile Zola had defended Dreyfus with his powerful condemnatory letter “J’accuse,” still fresh in memory—though apparently it did not sway Adams.

104

Henry James

Though clichés about Jewish commercial craftiness and Jewish looks occasionally turn up in James’s fiction, his letters show no traces of antiSemitism. In 1876, he wrote to his mother about his friendship with the Jewish journalist Theodore E. Child, jokingly alluding to the fact that “he has a nose, but is handsome and looks very much like Daniel Deronda.”39 In 1877, he wrote, “I dined a week ago at Lady Goldsmid’s— a very nice, kind, elderly childless Jewess, cultivated, friend of George Eliot etc.” 40 In 1883, he wrote to the poet Emma Lazarus, who was Jewish, in order to give her a letter of introduction to someone in London who knew Robert Browning, whom Lazarus wanted to meet. 41 In “The Impressions of a Cousin,” a short story written in 1883, James ridiculed anti-Semitism. The story takes the form of a diary kept by an anti-Semitic woman, a painter who returned to New York after a long stay in Europe and is temporarily living with her cousin. The woman dislikes living in New York because the city and its people are not pictorially interesting, but the story is mainly about the interest she takes in her cousin’s fi nancial affairs. She fears that her wealthy cousin’s fi nancial advisor— a Mr. Caliph—is a crook. Her reasoning is this: He is a crook because he is Jewish. “I have an intimate conviction that he is a Jew, or of Jewish origin. I see that in his plump, white face . . . in his remarkable eye, which is full of old expressions—expressions which linger there from the past.” The reader soon realizes that the diarist’s version of events cannot be trusted. The diarist is totally in the dark about Mr. Caliph, who may or may not be Jewish. The story is not one of James’s best because the diarist is tedious, but James makes it clear that this nasty, meddlesome, antiSemitic woman is a fool. In the 1890s, after the Dreyfus affair heated up, James was on the side of Dreyfus, but one of his close friends, the French novelist Paul Bourget, was anti-Dreyfus and anti-Semitic. James never broke with Bourget, but in one letter, written in French, he held that he did not understand what was going on in France, adding that in England “we get along well with the Jews [le bon ménage que nous faisons avec les juifs].”42 In another letter to Bourget, written in En glish, he mentioned “poor” Ferdinand de Rothschild’s death: “I always had a lingering liking for him.” The main point of the paragraph was to tell Bourget that the Prince of Wales had attended Rothschild’s funeral. “What strikes me more than anything else, in connection with his death, is the difference marked between English and French nerves by the fact that the Crown Prince (by whom of course I mean the P. of W.) assisted [attended]

What to Make of the Bristling City 105

yesterday, with every demonstration of sympathy, at his [Rothschild’s] severely simple Jewish obsequies.”43 The English royal family did not subscribe to the French notion that Jews were untrustworthy rootless cosmopolitans. It is a long way from the palace of a Rothschild to a tenement on the Lower East Side. In England, James did not know poor, Yiddish-speaking Jews. He was curious about the culture of these new immigrants to America, and he wanted to see if the machinery of assimilation worked for them as well. On a warm evening in June 1905, then, James visited the Lower East Side. He was accompanied by several new Jewish acquaintances, who probably had been recommended to him by Howells. He walked around the area and had dinner with a Jewish family. Afterward, James’s group “wound up” in a “half- dozen picked beer-houses and cafés.”44 James’s fi rst impression of the Lower East Side was a commonplace one: the area was densely packed with people. In one paragraph, James uses the word “swarming” three times. He was also struck by the ceaseless activity of the quarter. Amazed by the “whole spectacle,” James ransacked his imagination for an appropriate analogy. “It was as if we had been thus, in the crowded, hustled roadway, where multiplication, multiplication of everything, was the dominant note, at the bottom of some vast sallow aquarium in which innumerable fish, of over-developed proboscis, were to bump together, for ever, amid heaped spoils of the sea.”45 The analogy does not work. Fish do not bump into each other, and the allusion to the Jewish nose—the “over-developed proboscis”—is an unfortunate attempt at humor. After comparing Jews to fish, James compares them to worms and fi ne glass particles. “There are small strange animals, known to natural history, snakes or worms, I believe, who, when cut into pieces, wriggle away contentedly and live in the snippet as completely as in the whole. So the denizens of the New York Ghetto, heaped as thick as the splinters on the table of a glass-blower, had each, like the fi ne glass particle, his or her individual share of the whole hard glitter of Israel.”46 The comparison to worms makes no sense, and the jump from worms to fi ne glass particles is confusing. A few paragraphs later, James compares Jews to squirrels and monkeys. Tenement fi re escapes are like “the spaciously organized cage for the nimbler class of animals in some great zoological garden. This general analogy is irresistible—it seems to offer . . . a little world of bars and perches and swings for human squirrels and monkeys.” A few sentences

106

Henry James

later, James says the Jews he sees from the window of the apartment where he is having dinner are “an ant-like population.”47 Worms, monkeys, squirrels, ants— some observers reasonably conclude that these analogies show that James was anti-Semitic. In my view, the analogies are James’s misguided attempt to give the reader a sense of how densely populated the Lower East Side was, then ten times as densely populated as the rest of New York, and how energetic its Jewish inhabitants were.48 If we take these clumsy analogies to be signs of James’s anti-Semitism, then why does James say he is impressed by the Jewish immigrants? He speaks of “the intensity of the Jewish aspect,” and the Jewish “reverence for intellect.” He notes that the Jews are an “intellectual people.” He talks to Yiddish writers. He dashes into “a small crammed convivial theatre,” where he sees part of a Yiddish comedy of manners. He admits that he is baffled by Yiddish culture, but he does not subscribe to the popu lar notion— one advanced by Jacob Riis—that Jews are obsessed with making money. “Truly the Yiddish world was a vast world, with its own deeps and complexities.”49 James enjoyed talking to Jewish writers in the cafés of the Lower East Side, but the way they spoke English pained him. The cafés, he writes, were “torture-rooms of the living idiom.” He thought the new immigrants—not only Jewish immigrants—would radically transform the English language. “The accent of the very ultimate future, in the States, may be destined to become the most beautiful in the globe and the very music of humanity . . . but whatever we shall know it for, certainly, we shall not know it for English.”50 James was wrong about “the fate of the language,” but he was right to argue that the Jews, like the Italians, would be transformed by the colossal machinery of assimilation. The Jews of New York, he wrote, were different from the Jews he saw in the ghettoes of Europe because the Lower East Side was a New Jerusalem compared to the “dark, foul, stifl ing Ghettos of other remembered cities.” In the United States, Jews had a much greater opportunity to better their condition. “What struck me in the flaring streets . . . was the blaze of the shops addressed to the New Jerusalem’s wants and the splendour with which these were taken for granted.”51 James understood the dynamics of immigration much better than his friend Howells did. “The wants, the gratifications, the aspirations of the ‘poor,’ as expressed in the shops . . . denoted a new style of poverty.” It was a new style of poverty because the Jews assumed their poverty

What to Make of the Bristling City 107

was a temporary state. James, like Howells, wondered if the Jews were right to be optimistic about their future, given “the icy breath of Trusts and the weight of the new remorseless monopolies.” He concluded, “their dream, at all events, as I noted it, was meanwhile sweet and undisguised.”52 The main point James makes about Jews is that they are similar to other immigrants insofar in that they, too, think that America is a land of opportunity. Walking in Central Park on a Sunday afternoon, James noted that the immigrants all appeared to be “enjoying . . . their rise in the social scale, with that absence of acknowledging flutter, that serenity of assurance, which marks . . . the school-boy or the school-girl who . . . expects to ‘move up.’ ”53 Ten years after The American Scene was published, Abraham Cahan, born in a village in Lithuania, made a similar comment about Jewish immigrants. In The Rise of David Levinsky, the fi rst-person narrator says: “The scurry and bustle of the people were not merely overwhelmingly greater, both in volume and intensity, than in my native town. It was of another sort. The swing and step of the pedestrians, the voices and manner of the street peddlers, and a hundred and one other things seemed to testify to far more self- confidence and energy, to larger ambitions and wider scopes, than did the appearance of the crowds in my birthplace.” James’s view of immigration was similar to Whitman’s: people are transformed when they come to America. Assimilation works. “It is a drama that goes on, without a pause, day by day and year by year, this visible act of ingurgitation on the part of our body politic and social, and constituting really an appeal to amazement beyond that of any swordswallowing or fi re-swallowing of the circus.”54 James did not say the United States would become a “melting pot,” the title of a popu lar early twentieth-century play by Israel Zangwill. Rather, he argued that ethnic strife was unlikely because the different ethnic groups would be so busy trying to “move up” that they would not be preoccupied with ethnic questions. “The existing order is meanwhile safe, inasmuch as the faculty of making money is in America the commonest of all and fairly runs the streets.”55 The Bristling City James repeatedly used the word “bristling” to describe New York. Taking the ferry to New Jersey a few hours after arriving in New York, he wrote

108

Henry James

of the “big, bright, breezy bay; of light and space and multitudinous movement; of the serried, bristling city, held in the easy embrace of its great good-natured rivers.” Arriving on New York’s Lower East Side, he wrote, “The scene here bristled, at every step, with the signs and sounds, immitigable, unmistakable, of a Jewry that had burst all bounds.”56 James seemed to like the fact that New York bristles, yet he praised Philadelphia because it “was the American city of the large type, that didn’t bristle.” James added that he did not “just now [want to] go into the question of what the business of bristling, in an American city, may be estimated as consisting of.” But he did go into it, if somewhat vaguely. A city that had a strong “society”—that is, an elite noncommercial class— was not likely to bristle. “Philadelphia . . . was beyond any other American city, a society, and was going to show as such, as a thoroughly confirmed and settled one.” By contrast, New York “had appeared to me . . . not a society at all.”57 In James’s view, “society” is a force that thwarts commercial change. The more powerful “society” is in a city, the more reluctant the city will be to tear down old buildings and replace them with skyscrapers. In Philadelphia there was “the absence of the note of the perpetual perpendicular, the New York, the Chicago note.” Because there were few skyscrapers in Philadelphia, James rarely had to use an elevator. He made it clear that he disliked them. “It was to befall me . . . not to find myself more than two or three times hoisted or lowered by machinery.”58 James spent roughly two weeks in Philadelphia on four different occasions, but he told Edith Wharton that he was finding it hard to write about the city. “Taken as a subject to play with a little, [the city] melts away from one forever.” He does not seem to have spent much time walking in Philadelphia. In another letter to Wharton, he added, “I saw no very marked differences” between Philadelphia and Washington.59 James found non-bristling Philadelphia pleasant but dull. He found bristling New York terrible but fascinating. In January 1905, he wrote a friend: “I’ve been spending a month in the horrific, the unspeakable, extraordinary, yet partly interesting, amusing, and above all fantastically bristling New York.” A month later he wrote Wharton: “What I have seen, since N.Y., has not been that—interesting: nay, not a bit!”60 Bristling New York left him with a jumble of impressions. Describing a restaurant fi lled with many foreign-born Americans, he wrote, “the ambiguity is the element in which the whole thing swims for me. . . . It breathed its simple ‘New York! New York!’ at every impulse of inquiry;

What to Make of the Bristling City 109

so that I can only echo contentedly, with analysis for once quite agreeably baffled, ‘Remarkable, unspeakable New York!’ ”61 In the opening paragraph of the chapter on Philadelphia, James admitted that his portrait of New York was incoherent. He argued that the critic could get away with being incoherent so long as he owned up to it—and so long as the impressions he offered possessed “richness.” As James put it, “the last thing decently permitted him [the critic] is to recognize incoherence—to recognize it, that is, as baffling; though of course he may present and portray it, in all richness, for incoherence. That, I think, was what I had been mainly occupied with in New York.”62 After returning to England, James told Wharton that he was having trouble writing The American Scene. “I have more impressions than I know what to do with or can account for. . . . I fear that it may be very fantastic & irrelevant stuff I am producing.”63 James, though, had come to one conclusion about New York: the New York of his childhood— old New York—was a far more agreeable place than the new New York he had visited in 1904–1905. In the last decade of his life, James wrote three short stories about men who return to New York after a long absence. In all three stories, the new New York is depicted as superficial and sordid. In “Crapy Cornelia,” a man is determined to propose to a wealthy woman, Mrs. Worthington, who is “polished and prosperous,” but he thinks there is a certain vulgarity about her display of wealth. At Mrs. Worthington’s apartment, he meets by chance a woman he knew many years ago. Cornelia is “crapy” because she usually wears black. She is neither beautiful nor polished nor wealthy, but she is cultivated. Cornelia, who stands for old New York, is charming and warmhearted. By contrast, Mrs. Worthington is cold and glittering, scattering “excesses of light.” He abruptly decides not to propose to Mrs. Worthington. He says to Cornelia: “She [Mrs. Worthington]] doesn’t know anything that we know.” One wonders why he wanted to marry Mrs. Worthington in the fi rst place. In “The Jolly Corner,” a man returns to New York after an absence of thirty-three years in order to supervise two properties he owns. He also sees a woman friend who has continued to love him during the three decades he has been living abroad. One property is being turned into apartments. The man fi nds to his surprise that he enjoys supervising the work of turning this property into apartments. In other words, he enjoys the wheeling and dealing of commercial life. He thinks about

110

Henry James

what he would have become if he had stayed in New York. “If he had but stayed at home he would have anticipated the inventor of the skyscraper.” The other property is his childhood home, which he has left empty for many years. He soon decides that the self that he might have become may be a ghost in the dark vacant house of his childhood. Determined to see his terrible alter ego, he lingers in the house. He fi nally does see him. He is a powerful plutocrat—a man who has lost two fingers, a man who has “a rage of personality before which his own collapsed.” The alter ego is a more masculine, more aggressive version of himself. After fainting, he awakes to find his woman friend at his side. Critics admire the story, but it strikes this reader as predictable and implausible. It is predictable because the other self is an obvious figure, a greedy plutocrat. It is hard to believe that a woman would remain so attached to someone who has been away for thirty-three years. It is also implausible that anyone would own a large town house in New York and leave it unoccupied for such a long time. In “A Round of Visits,” the last short story James wrote about New York, the protagonist returns to New York because a close friend who has been his fi nancial advisor has swindled him. He wants to tell various people about what his friend has done to him, but they are not interested in listening to him. They have their own worries. The fi nal visit he pays is to an old acquaintance who has fallen on hard times. The man was about to commit suicide before the protagonist came in. After the protagonist leaves, he hears a shot. The man has killed himself. Colm Tóibín, the editor of the New York Stories of Henry James, writes, “it is perhaps not surprising that the last moment of James’s last New York story involves a New Yorker blowing his brains out with a revolver.”64 In these three stories, the new New York is sordid, vulgar, and nightmarish. The only decent people are those who come from the old New York. But these stories are not James’s last word on New York. In A Small Boy and Others (1913), he looks back in nostalgia to the old New York of his childhood. He remembers “constantly and delightfully” walking down Broadway, which was “the feature and the artery, the joy and the adventure of one’s childhood.” James’s Broadway “stretched . . . from Union Square to Barnum’s great American Museum by the City Hall.” On some Saturday mornings, James walked as far as Wall Street because the family dentist had an office there. He was taken to the dentist by his aunt. While he was in “the house of pain,” his aunt would shop at Stewart’s on the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street. After

What to Make of the Bristling City 111

his dental session, he would be rewarded with a visit to an ice cream parlor.65 In August 1910, James returned to the United States because his brother William was dying. After his brother died in late August, James stayed in Cambridge for almost a year, making several trips to New York. In January, he spent twenty-three days at Mary Cadwalader Jones’s house on 21 East 11th Street. He did not do much walking because he had a bad heart and was in New York to consult with doctors about his condition. But he often took a short walk to the Players Club at 16 Gramercy Park, where he had lunch.66 Back in Cambridge, James wrote Wharton in February that New York “relieved and beguiled me— so long as I was debout.” The last six days of his trip were “practically spent in bed.” Back in New York again in April, he wrote the novelist Hugh Walpole: “I have been spending some weeks in New York—which is a very extraordinary and terrific and yet amiable place, as to which my sentiment is a compound of an hourly impression of its violent impossibility and of a sneaking kindness for its pride and power (it’s so clearly destined to be the great agglomeration of the world!) born of early associations and familiarities.”67 James never tired of terrible, bristling, remarkable, unspeakable New York.

E 72nd St E 71st St

verse 72nd Street Tra

W 71st St

E 70th St E 69th St

5th Ave

W 66th St W 65th St

65th Street Transverse Rd

CLINTON

Fdr Dr

E 40th St E 39th St E 38th St E 37th St E 36th St E 35th St E 34th St

MURRAY HILL

Ave

Manhattan, from 14th Street to 72nd Street

University Pl

ich

GREENWICH VILLAGE

1st Ave

2nd Ave

1st Ave

E 23rd St E 22nd St E 21st St E 20th St

Gramercy Park

E 19th St E 18th St E 17th St E 16th St Stuyvesant STUYVESANT Square E 15th St TOWN

GRAMERCY PARK

e

s

Gan

St atio Hor St e Jan

enw

Union Square

E 25th St

v 4th A

t St

or evo

Gre

5th Ave

Ave

W 14th St

Avenue of the Americas

W 15th St

7th Ave

11th

8th Ave

FLATIRON DISTRICT

Union Sq E

CHELSEA

TUDOR CITY

New St

Madison Square Park

W 21st St W 20th St W 19th St W 18th St W 17th St W 16th St

Queens-Midtown Tunnel

KIP'S BAY

Lexington Ave

W 24th St W 23rd St W 22nd St

Park Ave S

W 25th St

E 29th St E 28th St E 27th St E 26th St E 25th St

Irving Pl

MIDTOWN SOUTH CENTRAL

3rd Ave

E 33rd St E 32nd St E 31st St E 30th St

Chelsea Park

Tudor City Pl United Nations Plz

Vanderbilt Ave

E 41st St

E 14th St 2nd Ave

W 34th St

E 41st St

Lexington Ave

Fashion Ave

8th Ave

9th Ave

10th Ave

Dyer Ave

HELL’S W 38th St GARMENT DISTRICT KITCHEN

E 48th St

E 44th St E 43rd St E 42nd St

3rd Ave

Bryant Park

Madison Ave

MIDTOWN

W 31st St W 30th St W 29th St W 28th St W 27th St W 26th St

E 53rd St

E 48th St E 47th St E 46th St E 45th St

Park Ave

W 40th St

W 39th St

W 34th St W 33rd St

TURTLE BAY (Midtown East)

E 49th St

THEATER DISTRICT

W 48th St W 47th St W 46th St W 45th St W 44th St W 43rd St W 42nd St W 41st St W 40th St

W 37th St W 36th St W 35th St

E 58th St E 57th St E 56th St E 55th St E 54th St E 53rd St E 52nd St E 51st St E 50th St

7th Ave

11th Ave

12th A ve

W 56th St W 55th St W 54th St DeWitt W 53rd St Clinton Park W 52nd St W 51st St W 50th St W 49th St

E 61st St E 60th St E 59th St Sutton Pl S

Central Park S

W 59th St W 58th St W 57th St

Lincoln Tunnel

E 62nd St The Pond

Grand Army Plz

Central Park West Dr

Damrosch Park

5th Ave

W 60th St

LENOX HILL

E 64th St E 63rd St

W 64th St W 63rd St

Avenue of the Americas

W 61st St

E 68th St E 67th St E 66th St E 65th St

Beekman Pl

W 64th St W 63rd St W 62nd St

3rd Ave

W 69th St W 68th St W 67th St

LINCOLN SQUARE

West Dr

Pl Freedom

W 70th St

1st Ave

W 72nd St

2nd Ave

West Dr

Henry Hudson Pkwy

E 74th St E 73rd St

Dr West

W 73rd St

E 13th St E 12th St

E 11th St

8

Stephen Crane Adventures in Poverty

I

n the summer of 1892, Stephen Crane, a freelance journalist, was covering a lecture given by Jacob Riis in Asbury Park, New Jersey, on the plight of tenement dwellers in New York. A few months after hearing Riis, Crane moved to New York. He did not want to become a journalist/reformer like Riis; he wanted to write fiction about the urban working class and underclass. It was not his fi rst time in New York. He had often visited the city, but he thought it would be best to live there if he were going to write about what interested him. He rented an apartment at 1064 Avenue A, sharing it with two medical students. In the next four years Crane would spend many hours walking in New York—mainly on the Lower East Side and the Tenderloin District on Manhattan’s West Side— and he would write two novels and many journalistic sketches about New York’s underclass. According to the editors of Crane’s New York sketches, “no nineteenth-century American fiction writer knew New York City’s demi-world more intimately than Stephen Crane.”1 Whitman says that he pondered while sauntering Manhattan’s streets. Crane rarely pondered when he walked. He was not interested in weighing the pros and cons of commerce or considering whether the new immigrants from eastern and southern Europe could be assimilated. He was mainly interested in conveying what nighttime in the city looked like. His descriptions of New York have the intensity of an expressionist painting, as if he wanted to stress the phantasmagoric 113

114

Stephen Crane

nature of street life in New York. Crane often describes a scene as if he were a cinematographer shooting a fi lm noir: “The mists of the cold and damp night made an intensely blue haze, through which the gaslights in the windows of the stores and saloons shone with a golden radiance. The street cars rumbled softly. . . . Two interminable processions of people went along the wet pavements, spattered with black mud that made each shoe leave a scar-like impression.” In another sketch he writes: “The yellow gas-light that came . . . through the dust-stained windows on either side of the door, gave strange hues to the faces and forms of the three women who stood gabbling in the hall-way of the tenement. They made rapid gestures, and in the background their enormous shadows mingled in terrific confl ict.”2 Frederic Lawrence, a friend of Crane’s who often walked with him, said that Crane was “in search of the local color that would give life to the great work.”3 The “great work” is Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, which Crane would publish at his own expense in 1893. He had begun the novel in 1891, when he was a student at Syracuse University. Crane took in his new surroundings, Lawrence says, “with keen and sympathetic” interest—but with a writer’s detachment. When Crane moved to New York, it had a large underclass of prostitutes and tramps. New York in the 1890s “reigned as the vice capital of the United States. . . . More than 30,000 prostitutes worked daily. . . . No man could walk far at night without being propositioned by a streetwalker.” Luc Sante says that until World War I New York was a magnet city for tramps.4 Born in 1871, the fourteenth child of a Protestant minister, Crane grew up in Port Jervis, New York, and Asbury Park, New Jersey. He had been a published writer since the age of seventeen, when he began writing occasional articles for the New York Tribune, the newspaper Riis worked for as a police reporter. Crane wrote general interest articles but he also wrote articles that appeared in a column called “On the Jersey Coast.” He continued to write while briefly attending Lafayette College and Syracuse University. In the summer of 1891, he covered a lecture on William Dean Howells given by Hamlin Garland at Avon-by-theSea, New Jersey. In his article about the lecture, Crane quoted Garland as saying that A Hazard of New Fortunes was “the greatest, sanest, truest study of a city in fiction.”5 Crane introduced himself to Garland, and they struck up an acquaintance. When Crane moved to New York, he did not have a steady source of income. The Tribune had recently fi red him because the publisher was angered by a sarcastic article he had written about an Asbury Park

Adventures in Poverty

115

parade. Crane eked out a living as a freelance writer, placing articles in newspapers and magazines. Cosmopolitan, the magazine Howells briefly edited, published one of his pieces. Crane fi nished Maggie early in 1893. He had no luck finding a publisher, so he self-published it under the name of Johnston Smith. He could pay for the printing because he had inherited some money from his parents’ modest estate. According to one report, he asked friends to read the novel on the elevated train, so that “passengers would think the metropolis was Maggie-mad.” He also sent a copy to Garland, who guessed who the author was. Garland told Crane to send a copy to Howells. Howells liked the novel “im mensely,” and he invited Crane to tea at his apartment at 49 West 49th Street.6 In an interview published in the New York Press, Howells called Maggie “a remarkable book,” adding that Crane was a young writer who “promises splendid things.” Yet Howells had one reservation: “there is so much realism of a certain kind in it that unfits it for general reading.” 7 Howells objected to Crane’s vulgar language; he did not object to Crane’s depiction of the underclass. Maggie describes walkers in the city, but the male walkers are not flâneurs like James or Howells; instead, they usually are drunken men going home after a night at a tavern or angry men prowling the streets in search of a fight. The people in Crane’s fiction usually are bad-tempered, and in Maggie violent confrontations on the street are commonplace. We are in a world of street gangs, where kids who venture out of their neighborhood are beaten up. In the opening scene Jimmie, who is Maggie’s brother, throws stones at other kids. When he grows up and becomes a horse-wagon driver, he often curses pedestrians. “He was continually storming at them from his throne. He sat aloft and denounced their frantic leaps, plunges, dives, and straddles.” In Crane’s fiction, violence and drunkenness are not exclusively male traits. Howells was impressed by Maggie’s “horrible old drunken mother, a cyclone of violence and volcano of vulgarity.”8 Maggie’s father is violent; in the opening pages he kicks Jimmie in the head, while Maggie’s mother grabs him by the neck and shakes him. Soon Jimmie smacks Maggie. Maggie alone is not violent. One of the best scenes in the novel is Jimmie’s fight with his mother. Drunk in the hallway of the tenement, she is challenging anyone in the building to a fight. “Her eyes were darting flames of unreasoning rage and her frame trembled with eagerness for a fight.” Jimmie attempts to drag her back into the apartment, whereupon “she raised her hand and

116

Stephen Crane

whirled her great fist at her son’s face.” She hit him again after he pushed her into the apartment. Maggie “shrieked and ran into the other room. To her there came the sound of a storm of crashes and curses.” There is also violence in a bar. Jimmie and two friends want to beat up Maggie’s sleazy boyfriend, who is a bartender. Punches are thrown and so are glasses. “High on the wall it [a beer glass] burst like a bomb, shivering fragments flying in all directions. Then missiles came to every man’s hand. . . . Suddenly glass and bottles went singing through the air.” Rejected by her mother and brother for living with her boyfriend, Maggie becomes a “forlorn woman.” She walks aimlessly, so men assume she is a prostitute. “Soon the girl discovered that if she walked with such apparent aimlessness, some men looked at her with calculating eyes. She quickened her step, frightened.” It is risky for young women to walk alone at night in the city. In the next chapter, which takes place a few months later, Maggie has become what the men thought she was— a streetwalker. Crane uses a trite phrase to describe her; she is “a girl of the painted cohorts of the city.” The chapter begins with a scene that could be in A Hazard of New Fortunes, a description of middle-class people leaving the theatre on a rainy night. “Electric lights, whirring softly, shed a blurred radiance. . . . The pavements became tossing seas of umbrellas. Men stepped forth to hail cabs or cars. . . . An endless procession wended toward elevated stations. An atmosphere of pleasure and prosperity seemed to hang over the throng.” Maggie is not a member of this “endless procession.” She is looking for clients. Isolated and desperate, Maggie goes on her last walk in the city. She approaches men in the theater district, but they reject her advances, so she walks toward the river—which river Crane does not say. Her potential clients get scruffier and scruffier, but there still are no takers. “The girl went into gloomy districts near the river, where the tall black factories shut in the street and only occasional broad beams of light fell across the pavements from saloons.” Several men turn her down, saying they have no money. “She went into the blackness of the final block.” The last man she encounters is “a huge fat man in torn and greasy garments.” He seems interested in her. He follows her “chuckling and leering.” She rejects his advances by jumping into the river. Although Crane depicted the degrading life of a streetwalker, he insisted that Maggie was not a sermon about the evils of prostitution. “You can’t fi nd preaching on any page of Maggie!” In an interview with

Adventures in Poverty

117

Howells that appeared in the New York Times (October 1894), Crane quotes Howells as saying: “A novel should never preach and berate and storm. It does no good. As a matter of fact, a book of that kind is ineffably tiresome.”9 In 1896, Howells praised the revised Maggie, which came out under Crane’s name. Crane had toned down the novel’s vulgar language. “What strikes me most in the story of Maggie,” Howells wrote, “is that quality of fatal necessity which dominates Greek tragedy.” On New Year’s Day 1896 Crane thanked Howells for the “interest which you have shown in my work.”10 The Eternal Trample of the Marching City Though Garland and Howells admired the fi rst version of Maggie, the self-published novel did not sell well. Crane was still poor. In the fall of 1893, he moved into a large studio apartment at 143–147 East 23rd Street, the former Art Students League building. He shared the place with three artists who were as poor as he was. One man slept on a cot; the other three men slept in one large bed. The four men pooled their shoes and clothing. According to Crane’s biographer, “the fi rst man up in the morning, or the one with a job interview, got the choicest selection from the community closet.”11 Crane continued to write. Late in 1894, after fi nishing The Red Badge of Courage, he wrote George’s Mother, a novella about a mother and a son who lived in the same tenement Maggie and her family live in. Crane thought it was better than Maggie, but in one respect it is not as interesting: George’s mother, a teetotaler who nags her son to go to prayer meetings, is tedious. George is a more fully delineated character than Maggie, and his descent into drunkenness is more plausible than Maggie’s sudden descent into prostitution. He meets an old acquaintance while coming home from work. The man says “Let’s go get a drink!” Soon George is introduced to the man’s drinking buddies. Though at one point George “sometimes wondered whether he liked beer,” he cannot stop drinking. Drinking is his ticket to an evening of male camaraderie. If he does not go out drinking, he would have to spend more time with his nagging mother. He seems to be shy with women. He likes Maggie, whom he sees on the stairs of the tenement, but he says nothing to her. The drinking takes its toll. Eventually George loses his job and starts hanging out with petty hoodlums.

118

Stephen Crane

There is only one false note in Crane’s depiction of George: “He had a vast curiosity concerning this city in whose complexities he was buried. It was an impenetrable mystery, this city.” George does not have a “vast curiosity” about anything. One cannot imagine him thinking about New York’s “impenetrable mystery.” He seems mainly interested in having a good time after a hard day’s work. The first paragraph of George’s Mother contains a description of the city that recalls photographs of New York by Alfred Stieglitz. “There were long rows of shops, whose fronts shone with full, golden light. Here and there, from druggists’ windows, or from the red street-lamps that indicated the positions of fire-alarm boxes, a flare of uncertain, wavering crimson was thrown upon the wet pavements.” Later in the novel, the city’s lights are harsher. “A few yellow lights blinked. In front of an-allnight restaurant, a huge red electric lamp hung and sputtered.” At the end of the novel, Crane describes the view from George’s apartment window. It looks out on a “fair soft sky, like blue enamel, and a fringe of chimneys and roofs, resplendent here and there.” The next sentence shatters the reverie. “An endless roar, the eternal trample of the marching city, came mingled with vague cries.” The phrase “marching city” sounds ominous. It suggests that New Yorkers are under orders. Adventures on the Bowery and in the Tenderloin District Crane never marched anywhere. He was a free spirit, a serious writer, but also a jokester of sorts who enjoyed trying to fool people. One day he wore ragged clothes and entered a store on Beekman Street where his brother Edmund was working. He had warned his brother that he might do this and told him not to give him more than a nickel if he came begging. His brother silently obliged.12 Crane also played a literary joke. He wrote about a fire that never happened. He sets the scene dramatically—not telling the reader about the fi re until the fi fth paragraph. “We were walking on one of the shadowy side streets west of Sixth avenue.” His companion is a stranger who is chattering away, “imparting to me some grim midnight reflections upon existence.” Suddenly there is the “muffled cry” of a woman and the crash of broken glass. Crane now sees the fi re, which is roaring in the basement of an old building, which houses a bakery. A crowd is gathering to watch it, fascinated and horrified by the sight. The crowd buzzes with rumors. What happened to the policeman who dashed in the building to save a baby? Did he come out? Crane quotes two differ-

Adventures in Poverty

119

ent opinions on this question. We hear a “crash of sounds” coming from the approaching fi re trucks.13 The description of the fi remen climbing their ladders resembles a scene from a painting by John Sloan or Everett Shinn. “When the ladders were placed against the side of the house, fi remen went slowly up them, dragging their hose. They became outlined like black beetles against the red and yellow expanses of flames. A vast cloud of smoke, sprinkled thickly with sparks, went coiling heavily toward the black sky. Touched by the shine of the blaze, the smoke sometimes glowed dull red, the color of bricks.”14 Howells said the article was “a piece of realistic reporting.”15 Crane, however, made it all up. Crane, though, was serious about finding out what it was like to be a tramp in New York. To write about tramps, he felt that he had to be a tramp—if only for a few days. His brother Edmund said that if Stephen was “poorly dressed and ill fed, it was simply because he stripped for the race. He held his career above his comfort, or any other personal consideration.”16 In “An Experiment in Misery,” Crane describes a night— actually, a composite of three nights—that he spent in a Bowery flophouse. He was commissioned to write it for a newspaper syndicate. Howells and Garland had recommended Crane to the syndicate. A half-century earlier the Bowery, which starts at Chatham Square and turns into Fourth Avenue at Cooper Square, had been New York’s main theater and opera district. Whitman often went to the Bowery Theatre to see Shakespeare performed. By Crane’s time, it had become home to flophouses, bars, dance halls, and brothels. “In 1894,” Joseph Mitchell wrote in 1941, “the Bowery was just beginning to go to seed; it was declining as a theatrical street, but its saloons, dance halls, dime museums, gambling rooms, and brothels were still thriving. In that year, in fact, according to a police census, there were eighty-nine drinking establishments on the street, and it is only a mile long.”17 In 1903 an Italian immigrant, Menotti Pellegrino, wrote a novel, The Mysteries of New York, in which the narrator says that on the Bowery there are “women stationed at every corner, in every doorway, near the pillars of the elevated tracks . . . until the dawn.” To see what life was like for the underclass who inhabited the Bowery and its environs, Crane and a friend dressed up like tramps. He speaks in the third person: “It was late at night, and a fi ne rain was swirling softly down, covering the pavements with a bluish luster. He began a

120

Stephen Crane

weary trudge toward the downtown places, where beds can be hired for coppers.” He ends up at Chatham Square, where “there were aimless men strewn in front of saloons and lodging houses.”18 After free soup at a local saloon, Crane learns where he can sleep for three cents. His account of the flophouse is nightmarish. “From the dark and secret places of the building there suddenly came to his nostrils strange and unspeakable odors that assailed him like malignant diseases with wings.” The room where he sleeps is a phantasmagoric place. He sees “limbs wildly tossing in fantastic nightmare gestures, accompanied by guttural cries, grunts, oaths. And there was one fellow off in a gloomy corner, who in his dreams is oppressed by some frightful calamity, for of a sudden he began to utter long wails that went almost like yells from a hound.”19 In another sketch, Crane talks about the time he stood in line with other tramps during a blizzard—waiting for a charitable institution to open its soup kitchen. Some men try to shelter themselves from the storm. “A covered wagon drawn up near the curb sheltered a dozen of them. Under the stairs that led to the elevated railway station, there were six or eight, their hands stuffed deep in their pockets, their shoulders stooped, jiggling their feet.”20 Crane’s down-and-out New Yorkers are energetic, but not because they are trying to get ahead in life. They are trying to stay warm. When the tramps think the soup kitchen is about to open, they push toward the door. “The crushing of the crowd grew terrific.” After the door opened, “a thick stream men forced a way down the stairs.” Crane ends the sketch with a cinematic description of a blizzard. “The wind drove it [the snow] up from the pavements in frantic forms of winding white, and it seethed in circles about the huddled forms, passing in, one by one, three by three, out of the storm.”21 The day after Crane’s adventure, a friend found him lying in bed and looking ill. “Why didn’t you put on two or three more undershirts, Steve?” the friend asked. To which Crane replied: “How would I know how those poor dev ils felt if I was warm myself ?”22 In search of material, Crane not only dressed like a tramp, but he also disappeared for days. On cold and rainy days, he walked around wearing rags and shoes with holes in them. He bragged that his disguise was so good that an old friend did not recognize him when he was sitting in City Hall Park. Crane’s escapades affected his health. He had a terrible cough, which was not helped by chain-smoking, drinking, and a bad diet.

Adventures in Poverty

121

Crane was mainly interested in New York’s underclass, but he also spent an evening with a wealthy family. He found the family tedious. Crane didn’t agree with conventional wisdom, which is that rich people are unhappy. Yet he notes that the plutocrat’s wife looks miserable. “Her features were as lined and creased with care and worriment as those of an apple woman.”23 Crane also wrote about a jaunt he took to Coney Island. It ends with a Whitmanesque description of a ferry ride back to Manhattan. “We sat on the lower deck of the Bay Ridge boat and watched the marvelous lights of New York looming through the purple mist. . . . We could hear the splash of the waves against the bow. The sleepy lights looked at us with hue of red and green and orange. Overhead some dust- colored clouds scudded across the deep indigo sky.”24 In January 1895, Crane left New York for a four-month trip. The newspaper syndicate that commissioned him to write about Bowery flophouses wanted him to write colorful stories about life in the West. In Nebraska, he met the young Willa Cather, who interviewed him for her college newspaper. In Mexico bandits captured him, but he escaped. By late spring he was back in New York, wandering around the city with friends, but he often went to see his brother Edmond in Hartwood, New York, near Port Jervis. In the city, he slept at a friend’s apartment on East 23rd Street. By the end of 1895, Crane’s fortunes had changed dramatically. He was a famous writer, owing to the critical and commercial success of The Red Badge of Courage. He was a busy man, working on another novel, publishing a book of poems, and writing short stories, mainly about the Civil War. Newspapers and magazines asked him to write for them. McClure’s magazine sent him to Washington to gather material for a political novel, but after spending a month in the capital Crane gave up the idea. Back in New York, Crane wrote a piece about opium dens in the city. There reportedly were 25,000 opium smokers in New York. Crane went into detail about the technical aspects of opium smoking, but he did not defend the habit. He described opium’s effect: “The influence of dope is evidently a fi ne languor, a complete mental rest. The problems of life no longer appear. Existence is peace. . . . The universe is readjusted. Wrong departs, injustice vanishes. There is nothing but a quiet harmony of all things—until the next morning.”25 Crane was beginning to fi nd his fame irritating. He complained that editors were pestering him. “You don’t know how that damned city

122

Stephen Crane

tore my heart out by the roots and flung it under the heels of it’s [sic] noise,” he wrote a friend. He complained that his friends “feel bitterly insulted if I do not see them twelve times a day.” He said he was “very very lazy, hating work, and only taking up a pen when circumstances drive me.” He preferred horseback riding to writing. He bought a horse, which he rode when he visited his brother in Hartwood, New York. “A good saddle-horse is the one blessing of life.”26 Crane always returned to New York. According to a friend, he spent many evenings at a dingy tenement “somewhere in the Thirtieth Streets west of Broadway,” where he threw dice “for unpretentious stakes.”27 This was the Tenderloin district, which ran roughly from 14th Street to 42nd Street and from Fifth Avenue to Eighth Avenue. It had many respectable restaurants and theaters, but it was also known for its gambling dens, brothels, bars, and dance halls, which usually doubled as houses of prostitution. Crane lived in the area for eighteenth months during 1895–96, on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 33rd Street. The most famous dance hall was the Haymarket at Sixth Avenue near 30th Street. When it opened in 1872, it was a favorite place for gangsters, but by Crane’s time it had become somewhat tame and respectable. A painting by John Sloan, completed in 1907, shows two elegantly dressed women—probably prostitutes—entering the Haymarket. It closed in 1911. Crane mentions the Haymarket dance hall in an article about the Tenderloin district that he wrote for the Hearst syndicate. Crane quotes a man who is nostalgic for the good old days, when the Haymarket was a wild place. “Everything [was] wide open, my boy; open; every thing wide open! . . . Diamonds, girls, lights, music. Well, maybe it wasn’t smooth. Fights all over Sixth avenue. . . . Used to hold over-flow fights in the side streets. Say, it was great!” The new Haymarket, he says, is “dead as a mackerel.” And “the Tenderloin is a graveyard. Quiet as a tomb.”28 Crane disagrees. He says the spirit of the old Tenderloin is still alive. “There still exists the spirit that fl ings beer bottles, jumps debts and makes havoc for the unwary; also sings in a hoarse voice at 3 a.m.”29 To prove his point, Crane mentions a brawl in a dance hall. Two men get into a fight over a woman with whom they want to dance. A waiter throws one of the men out. Another waiter throws the other man to the floor while a bartender kicks him in the head. The woman “wouldn’t stand by and watch him get hurt,” so she conks the bartender over the head with a beer glass.30 Other waiters now join in the fray and throw the man and woman out.

Adventures in Poverty

123

Crane, though, concedes that the Tenderloin “has grown too fine” in recent years. The “old spirit of the locality” is gone; there is “very little nature.”31 Crane seems to equate the “natural” with drinking, fighting, gambling, and running after women. Crane enjoys shocking readers by decrying the decline of violence in the Tenderloin. He wants to impress upon the reader that he is a hardboiled journalist who relishes the seamy side of New York. In December 1896, Crane published a striking sketch of a street in New York that was not in the Tenderloin District: Minetta Lane in Greenwich Village. In Crane’s time, Minetta Lane was relatively safe, but a few decades earlier it had “swarmed with the most dangerous people in the city.” Crane writes that in the bad old days on Minetta Lane “to gain a reputation . . . a man was obliged to commit a number of furious crimes, and no celebrity was more important than the man who had a good honest killing to his credit.”32 The Italians were now moving into Minetta Lane, but a few decades earlier it had mainly been populated by blacks. Crane interviewed Mammy Ross, an old black woman who reminisced about some of the “sublime figures of crime.” One was Apple Mag, who “used to argue with paving stones, carving knives, and bricks.” Mammy Ross remembered “the beautiful fights and murders of the past.”33 Crane is making fun of the vogue for melodramatic stories about New York’s dark side. He is also making fun of nostalgia in general. The good old days in Minetta Lane were days when violence was commonplace. Crane, as we have seen, viewed the underclass as bad-tempered. In “Men in a Storm” Crane says: “The men, in keen pain from the blasts [of the storm], began almost to fight.” One man’s face “is red with rage” because the men behind him are shoving. But it is not only the underclass that is violent. In any place where a large amount of alcohol is consumed, there is a good chance that a fi ght will break out. Crane describes a party in Greenwich Village where two men suddenly start to fight. “Then, suddenly, in the middle of the floor there was a fi ght.” It seems that one man thought he had been swindled by the other. Soon people intervene to try to break up the fight. “The floor became a surge of men, tussling, tugging, and gesticulating in tremendous excitement.”34 Crane liked to cover stories where the likelihood of violence was high. He asked McClure’s “to send him to the scene of the next great Streetcar strike.”35 In 1896 he left New York in order to cover the Cuban

124

Stephen Crane

insurrection against Spain. In the remaining years of his short life, he would be a war correspondent in Greece and Cuba. A Walk, an Arrest, and a Hearing Crane’s fame continued to grow, and newspaper and magazine editors sought him. The publishing magnate S. S. McClure wanted him to write a series on New York’s police department, headed by Theodore Roosevelt. McClure apparently introduced Crane to Roosevelt, who admired Crane’s novels. In the summer of 1896 Roosevelt, Crane, and Jacob Riis dined together at least once. In August, Crane sent Roosevelt an autographed copy of George’s Mother. Roosevelt thanked him and requested an autographed copy of The Red Badge of Courage, his favorite Crane novel. The cordial relationship between Crane and Roosevelt soon ended, though. One reason for the end of their friendship may have been a series of articles about New York’s police department that Crane wrote for the Port Jervis Evening Gazette. Crane attacked the department’s poor handling of the 1896 Democratic Convention, where gatecrashers got in and ticket-holders were kept out. He also attacked the department for stringently enforcing New York’s blue laws, a policy that Roosevelt pushed. Finally, he attacked the department for wrongfully arresting a woman on Sixth Avenue. “This is a form of outrage that has become very frequent of late,” Crane wrote, “and . . . the exemplary punishment of some of the official brutes would have a beneficial effect in serving as a warning to over zealous policemen.”36 Roosevelt may not have seen these columns, which appeared in an obscure newspaper. The main reason for the end of the friendship was Crane’s involvement in a case of wrongful arrest, which occurred a few weeks after Crane’s criticism of the police department for having overzealous policemen. At 2:00 in the morning on September 16, 1896, Crane was walking in the Tenderloin district after leaving a restaurant on Broadway with two chorus girls. Two men quickly walked past them. Soon a policeman in civilian clothes, Charles Becker, appeared, and he arrested the two women, charging them with soliciting the men who had passed by. One woman claimed she was Crane’s wife, so Becker let her go, but he took the other woman, Dora Clark, into custody. The woman who was not arrested told Crane that he should go to the precinct house and contest the charge. Crane hesitated, but he decided to go to the precinct house, where the desk sergeant told him that

Adventures in Poverty

125

Dora Clark was known to be a common prostitute and that Crane should go home and forget about it. Crane did not take the sergeant’s advice. He turned up the next day in court. “Your Honor, I know this girl to be innocent. . . . There is no truth in what the officer has charged!”37 The judge released her. Unfortunately for Crane, Dora Clark did not drop the case. She pressed charges against Becker and another policeman who was with him at the time. Enraged by the charges, Becker accosted Dora Clark in the street, kicking her, grabbing her by the throat, and knocking her to the ground. So Dora Clark claimed. Crane, who was in Philadelphia at the time, agreed to testify in Dora’s behalf. He telegraphed Roosevelt about his intent. Roosevelt, who thought Crane should not get mixed up in the matter, told Hamlin Garland: “I tried to save Crane from press comment but as he insists on testifying, I can only let the law take its course.” On October 10, Harper’s Weekly reported that “Commissioner Roosevelt and other high authorities . . . are skeptical of the accuracy of Mr. Stephen’s Crane’s observation.”38 Meanwhile, the police department was determined to sully Crane’s reputation. They raided Crane’s apartment and found paraphernalia for smoking opium. Crane said he had never smoked opium; he claimed they were souvenirs from his investigation of New York’s opium dens. Police investigators told Roosevelt that Crane was an immoral man who consorted with prostitutes and smoked opium. Years after Crane’s death, when Roosevelt was president, he called Crane “a man of bad character [who] . . . was simply consorting with loose women.” Roosevelt was talking to a photographer who had befriended Crane when both were in Cuba. The photographer objected to Roosevelt’s characterization. “You see, I happened to know the story behind that incident. My friend, Crane, was merely taking the part of an unfortunate young woman who was being hounded by the police.”39 Roosevelt was not persuaded. At the hearing, held on October 15 at police headquarters, Crane had to wait in isolation while the police lawyer successfully demolished Dora Clark’s credibility. When Crane was called to testify, the police lawyer probed into his private life, suggesting that Crane was living on money from Tenderloin women. Crane refused to answer most questions. After Crane testified, the janitor where Crane was living testified that Crane had been living with a woman. At 2:30 in the morning, “the longest trial ever held at police headquarters” ended, and Charles Becker was exonerated.

126

Stephen Crane

When the Dora Clark controversy began the New York press had called Crane a man who wore the “badge of courage” for defending her. After the Police Department hearing, many papers criticized Crane for his bohemian life. His “reputation was shattered.”40 Before the Police Department hearing, Crane had written an article about his defense of Dora Clark. He called it “Adventures of a Novelist.” The self-mocking subtitle sums up Crane’s view of his New York years: “The distinguished author’s narrative of how he sought ‘material’ in real life in the ‘Tenderloin’ and found more than he bargained for.”41 Crane was not amused by what had happened. He disliked the notoriety he had attained for objecting to a wrongful arrest. He knew that Dora Clark was a prostitute, but he also knew that she had not solicited the two passing men. Hamlin Garland told Crane to leave New York. “I’ll do it,” Crane said. In November 1896, he left for Jacksonville, Florida, on his way to Cuba. He never lived again in New York. Soon after he left Dora Clark was arrested again, “for fighting with another prostitute.”42 Twenty years later, Becker was arrested and convicted of “complicity in the murder of his gambling partner.” He became the fi rst New York police officer to die in the electric chair.43

9

Theodore Dreiser From Broadway to the Bowery

E

arly in 1895, Theodore Dreiser, who was the same age as Stephen Crane—they were born in 1871—rented a room near the Bowery. He was feeling “down and out,” he later told a biographer. “I got terribly depressed. My money was dwindling. I thought, my gosh, I would have to go back to newspaper work.”1 Like Crane, Dreiser hoped to make a living as a freelance writer. And, like Crane, his main interest was writing fiction. When Dreiser moved to New York in 1894, he wanted a full-time job as a reporter because he did not think he could make a living as a freelance writer. It was a difficult time to look for work because the Panic of 1893 had greatly increased the number of unemployed in many professions, including journalism. Though Dreiser was a seasoned journalist who had written for newspapers in Chicago, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh, he could not get an interview with one in New York. Taking a break from his job search, Dreiser found himself in City Hall Park, across the street from Park Row, where New York’s major newspapers were housed. Earlier in the same year Crane had sat in the same park, having disguised himself as a tramp in order to write about Bowery flophouses. “About me on the benches of the Park,” writes Dreiser, “was . . . that same large company of ‘benchers’ so frequently described as bums, loafers, tramps, idlers.” 2 Eventually the New York World hired Dreiser, but he was paid by the column. He did not get many assignments, so he worried that he would be yet another young man from the provinces who failed in New York. 127

128 Theodore Dreiser

Born in Terre Haute, Indiana, Dreiser was the ninth of ten surviving children of an immigrant who had fallen on hard times. His father had been the manager of a factory but ended up as a millworker. In his teens Theodore worked as a dishwasher and hardware store clerk. He went to Indiana University, his tuition paid for by the principal of the school he attended, who thought he showed a great deal of promise, but he left after a year. He soon became a successful journalist—fi rst in Chicago and later in St. Louis and Pittsburgh. Dreiser eventually found journalism a burden, and he quit his newspaper job in Pittsburgh and moved to New York, feeling that if he remained a reporter, he would have no time for literary work. “The ability of a man to work and do something in this world receives such a cold shock by the great grind of a daily paper.” Besides, he disliked newspapers. “There is an im mense amount of sham about the newspaper of to-day,” he wrote in 1896.3 “New York still grows in literary popularity,” he added. “If you have it in you to be great you must come to New York.” It was risky to move to New York in the middle of a depression, but it was a risk Dreiser was willing to take. “Genius struggles up,” he wrote. “Talent often lingers and wears itself out in journalism.”4 Dreiser thought he was a genius and that New York was a magnet city for ambitious people where some succeed, but most fail. Life was a struggle everywhere, but it was an especially difficult struggle in New York. He lamented the “flotsam and jetsam of the great city’s whirl and strife.”5 Dreiser’s interest in moving to New York was whetted by a oneweek trip he made to the city in the summer of 1894 at the behest of his older brother, Paul Dresser, an actor who had changed the spelling of his surname when he was twenty. Thirteen years older than Dreiser, Dresser began his career as a performer—he wore blackface and acted in minstrelsy—but he soon became a very successful songwriter. During the visit to New York the two brothers often walked on Broadway, and Paul pointed out Broadway’s many famous stores, including Tiffany’s, Brentano’s, and Lord & Taylor. They visited the sheet music company Paul was affi liated with, whose office was on Broadway and 20th Street, and they ate at Delmonico’s on Broadway. Paul also took Theodore to the newly opened Metropole Hotel at Broadway and 42nd Street. In both places Paul was greeted by many people, from waiters to representatives of the boxing, gambling, and theatrical worlds. Dreiser thought that if his older brother had made it in New York, so could he, but he had many moments of doubt. “I was haunted by the thought that I was sure to fail.”6 Dreiser did not fail, but he struggled to

From Broadway to the Bowery

129

make a living. He wrote four articles for the New York World, but the last one is dated February 16, 1895, so it is not clear what he lived on during the spring and summer. His brother, a generous man, may have helped him out, but Paul Dresser was often on the road. Dreiser occasionally stayed with his sister, Emma, who was living with her common-law husband L. A. Hopkins in an apartment on West 15th Street. She and Hopkins ran a lucrative prostitution ring out of their apartment, but she was worried that Hopkins, who was emotionally unstable, might harm her or their two children. Dreiser concocted a ruse that enabled Emma to leave Hopkins and move into an apartment on West 17th Street. Dreiser rented a room on East 4th Street, but it was not easy for him to pay the rent. Striking up a conversation with a “pretty and gracious” young Italian woman near Houston Street, Dreiser told her he had no money. She offered him a room over her father’s restaurant.7 The family let him stay there for nothing, but he feared they were looking for a son-in-law, so he left. Dreiser thought about making a living by writing stories, but the stories he read in the best-known magazines had no connection with life as he knew it. He walked around the city—thinking about articles he might write. Once he saw Mark Twain in Chinatown, wearing a fur-collared overcoat and top hat and tapping the sidewalk with a goldheaded cane. Dreiser tried to interview Twain, but Twain turned him down, saying “I don’t mind you newspapermen . . . saying that you saw me. But no more than that.”8 In the fall of 1895 Dreiser’s luck changed. He created a job for himself by persuading Paul that it would be a good idea for the music company he was affiliated with to publish a monthly magazine, which Dreiser would edit. The company thought it was a good idea, and in October 1895 the fi rst issue of Ev’ry Month came out. It was subtitled “An Illustrated Magazine of Popu lar Music, the Drama, and Literature.” Dreiser now had a salary, so he moved away from the Lower East Side. He rented a room at 237 West 15th Street and took his meals at the Continental Hotel, whose dining room looked out on Broadway. Writing his future wife, he said, “the crowd, street cars, vehicles and pedestrians all tend to dispel gloomy moments, and so I love to lounge at tables and look out.”9 Ev’ry Month, which attained a respectable circulation of 65,000, published four newly released songs in each issue; it also published short stories, poems, and reviews of plays. (It published one of Crane’s stories

130 Theodore Dreiser

about the Civil War.) Dreiser wrote many literary pieces for the magazine, including a laudatory review of The Red Badge of Courage, an essay on the greatness of Balzac, and an essay on the decline of the American theatre. His main contribution was a column called “Reflections.” Using a variety of pseudonyms, he attacked political corruption, inveighed against “the oligarchy of wealth,” and complained that newspapers were more concerned with making money than reporting the news. “The temple of news is fi lled to overflowing with money changers of the most grasping, and rapacious kind.”10 Dreiser also wrote essays about the city. Dreiser, like Whitman, was impressed by Broadway. A modern painter, he says, should paint “brilliant Broadway. . . . In Broadway surges the cosmopolitan, dallying crowd, and all night the stream of humanity flows past, crowding itself here before a poster and there before a window.” There is a strain of sarcasm in Dreiser that we do not fi nd in Whitman, who enjoyed looking into a shop window, whereas Dreiser looked disdainfully at others who were looking into a shop window. “In Broadway, then, before many trifles, dawdle the mob.”11 In another essay, Dreiser offered a lyrical description of New York on a spring evening, “the myriad shop lights, the patter of pedestrians upon the pavements below, the lolling creatures, talking from out the windows, the thin smoke curling from distant chimneys, the stars.”12 This trite description with its banal alliteration (patter, pedestrians, pavement) is fluff that Dreiser probably felt he had to include to please his publishers, who wanted the magazine to be upbeat. Most of Dreiser’s essays about New York were not upbeat. In an essay on suicide, he quoted a sentence from a newspaper. “Yesterday at three o’clock, a young man threw himself in the East River from the pier at the foot of Thirty-fourth street.” Dreiser commented: “Dramas and romances pale before this concise and common metropolitan phrase.”13 How common was it for New Yorkers to throw themselves in the river? Perhaps Dreiser was thinking of Crane’s heroine, Maggie. Speculating about the young man’s last hours, Dreiser noted that the man “may have wandered about all day until that hour, hoping vainly against hope, only to fully realize at last that there was nothing, nothing more, except to go.” According to Dreiser, the more the man walked, the more hopeless he felt. The city’s elegant stores deepened his gloom. “He may have glanced through gorgeous shop windows, upon wealth of endless value.” Dreiser, in effect, writes a melodramatic short story about a young man who “went slowly to his self-acknowledged doom.”14

From Broadway to the Bowery

131

We can see in this speculative sketch the glimmerings of Hurstwood’s story in Sister Carrie: A man in New York walks toward his doom. In another essay about failure in New York— also based on a newspaper account— a poor, sick woman has to work because her husband “was a wandering vagabond.” To care for her child, she gets a job in a rag shop, “where by sorting fourteen long hours out of twenty-four, she could earn a few cents. . . . But after a time even strength to earn this much failed her, and one night she crept homeward—weak, fevered, blind with pain, and unable to climb the long fl ight of steps that led to her tenement lodging.” She was found the next morning “before her own doorstep.” She died soon afterward, and “late in the afternoon the coroner’s wagon came and took the body away.” Dreiser does not say what became of the child. Instead, he ends with a sarcastic comment: “But, of course, this is only one case, and our human hearts are small, so we need not worry.”15 Dreiser implies that indifference to suffering is worse in New York than elsewhere. In “The Loneliness of the City,” written in 1905, Dreiser argues that he and his wife, who married in December 1898, “live alone” in an apartment house in the Bronx because the hundred or so people who also live there do not socialize with each other. (The Dreisers lived at 399 Mott Avenue, on the corner of 144th Street.) “No one ever sees any exchange of courtesies between them. They are not interested in the progress of the lives of the people about them. You might live there a year, or ten years, and I doubt if your next-door neighbor would even so much as know of your existence.”16 How can Dreiser be sure that there is no socializing in the apartment house? Second, one wonders how much effort Dreiser himself made to meet his neighbors. In another essay, Dreiser warns those who are thinking of moving to New York to think twice. “Usually the thought of miles of streets, lined with glimmering lamps; of great, brilliant thoroughfares, thronged with hurrying pedestrians and lined with glittering shop windows; of rumbling vehicles rolling to and fro in noisy counter procession, fascinates and hypnotizes the mind, so that reason fades to an all-possessing desire to rush forward and join with the countless throng.” Resorting to cliché, Dreiser writes, “All is not gold that glitters. . . . Certainly, the city glitters, but it is not always your gold.” The city’s “fascinating surface . . . conceals the sorrow and want and ceaseless toil upon which all this is built.”17 This article was occasioned by a strike of mainly Jewish sweatshop workers that began in July 1896. Dreiser had mixed feelings about Jewish

132 Theodore Dreiser

immigrants. He attacked the working conditions of people employed in sweatshops, most of whom were Jewish immigrants, yet he also wrote that “hundreds of thousands of illiterate immigrants every year” were driving down wages and lowering “the moral standard of the nation.”18 If Howells was philo-Semitic and James a neutral observer of Jewish immigrant culture, Dreiser was mildly anti- Semitic. Abraham Cahan’s Yekl, he wrote, is “undoubtedly an authentic account of the lives of people . . . who, though near neighbors, are great strangers to us.”19 By 1897, Dreiser had become a well-known New York editor, and he was offered the editorship of a new magazine. He turned it down because he wanted to spend more time doing his own writing. In the spring or summer of 1897 he left his job at Ev’ry Month. It is possible that he was fired, owing to a disagreement with the publishers about the magazine’s content.20 The publishers may have disliked Dreiser’s gloomy essays about New York, which often harped on the gap between the rich and the poor. Talking about poverty and failure in New York was not likely to increase the sales of the company’s sheet music. He also may have quarreled with his brother, for they saw very little of each other over the next five years. Dreiser looked down on Paul’s sentimental music, and he did not approve of Paul’s consorting with prostitutes and gamblers. Dreiser’s return to freelance writing was a success. “Between the fall of 1897 and the fall of 1900,” his biographer says, “he had in print almost one hundred articles. Another eleven would appear before 1902.”21 In Ev’ry Month Dreiser often wrote about failure, but now he mainly wrote about success. Indeed, he was one of the chief writers for a new magazine called Success, to which he contributed thirty articles. In the fi rst issue of January 1898, Dreiser interviewed Joseph Choate, a leading American lawyer who would soon become ambassador to Great Britain. In subsequent issues he interviewed Thomas Edison and Philip D. Armour, the meatpacking king. Dreiser also interviewed Howells, though some critics question whether the interview, entitled “How He Climbed Fame’s Ladder,” ever took place. Dreiser, it is argued, concocted the piece out of other interviews and remarks that Howells had made in his book, My Literary Passions. The article must have met with Howells’s approval, since two years later he invited Dreiser to his apartment for an interview. In “The Real Howells,” Dreiser’s account of this interview, he implies that Howells is a second-rate writer. Howells, he says, is “greater than his reputation.” He is referring to Howells’s character, not his writing. “His greatness is his goodness, his charm, his sincerity.”22 He praises the man, not the writer.

From Broadway to the Bowery

133

In the article, Dreiser mentions only one of Howells’s novels: A Traveler from Altruria, which is one of Howells’s worst. Dreiser also asks a condescending question. “Do you fi nd that it is painful to feel life wearing on, slipping away, and change overtaking us all?” This is a euphemistic way of saying, “How does it feel to be over the hill?”23 In the article, Dreiser mentions his fi rst sighting of Howells on a New York street. Dreiser is walking with several people when “some one who knew him [Howells] said, ‘Here comes Howells.” ‘Dreiser watches Howells walk down the street. “I saw a stout, thick-set, middleaged man trudging solemnly forward. He was enveloped in a great fur ulster, and peered, rather ferociously upon the odds and ends of street life that passed. He turned out again and again for this person and that, and I wondered why a stout man with so fierce a mien did not proceed resolutely forward, unswerving for the least or the greatest.”24 Dreiser implies that Howells is well off (the great fur ulster), that he is pompous (he trudges solemnly), and that he lacks strength of character (he does not proceed resolutely forward). Is Dreiser suggesting that Howells’s novels are like Howells’s walk—that they do not go straight ahead, that they lack forcefulness? In the interview, Dreiser and Howells are talking about poverty when Dreiser suddenly says to Howells: “You have had no direct experience of this great misery.” Howells replies: “No, but I have observed it.” Dreiser thought Howells had led too comfortable a life to be a fi rstrate novelist. Yet two years later, when he was in the depths of depression, Dreiser wrote Howells that he was moved by a review Howells had written of a biography of Longfellow, adding that in the “fitful dream” that is life, he was heartened by the “mental attitude” of the three writers he most admired, Hardy, Tolstoy, and Howells.25 Dreiser may have liked some of Howells’s essays, but he did not admire Howells’s novels. In an essay written in 1911, Dreiser argued that Howells’s novels are deficient in “real life.” Howells “won’t see American life as it is lived; he doesn’t want to see it.”26 Dreiser was wrong. Howells made a great effort to see what life was like in the slums of New York. Moreover, how much direct experience of poverty did Dreiser himself have during his first five years in New York? His sister Emma and his brother Paul often helped him. And in 1899, when he began writing Sister Carrie, he was a successful freelance writer who could afford an apartment in a middle- class neighborhood on the Upper West Side, for he and his wife now lived at 6 West 102nd Street.

134 Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser, though, did struggle to make a living in his early days in New York, and he drew on this experience when he wrote Sister Carrie. Sitting on a bench in City Hall Park in December 1894, he recalled, “it was then . . . that the idea of Hurstwood was born.”27 Failure and Success: Sister Carrie Howells, Crane, and Dreiser moved to New York mainly because of literary ambition. In Sister Carrie, Hurstwood moves to New York to hide; he does not want to see anyone from his past life in Chicago, where he had been the manager of a “resort” (tavern) frequented by Chicago’s leading businessmen and politicians. When he and Carrie fi rst arrive in New York, he tells the horse-cab driver to take them to an unfashionable hotel, a place where he is unlikely “to meet Chicagoans whom he knew.” A few days later, Hurstwood runs into an acquaintance from Chicago while walking on Broadway. “There was no time for simulating non-recognition,” so the two men exchange meaningless pleasantries. The man clearly is not interested in remaining in touch with Hurstwood, since he does not take down the address of the tavern on Warren Street in Lower Manhattan that Hurstwood partly owned. Living in a city of roughly two million people, Hurstwood can usually avoid meeting people from his past, but he cannot avoid brooding about the “terrible mistake” he made in Chicago: stealing money from his employers. “The disease of brooding was beginning to claim him as a victim.” The brooding has affected him mentally. “His eye no longer possessed that buoyant, searching shrewdness.” The brooding has also affected his walk. “His step was not as sharp and firm.” Later in the novel, Dreiser says that “walking was not easy” for Hurstwood, since he was forty-three and “comfortably built.” Near the end of the novel, when Hurstwood has been reduced to beggary, he is a “shambling figure.” Dreiser frequently talks about the way his characters walk. A person’s gait is a window into his or her psyche. “Carrie stepped along easily.” She is exhilarated by New York. She becomes friendly with a Mrs. Vance, a neighbor, who takes her on a walk on Broadway. Carrie enjoys seeing the “showy parade.” She notices that some of the women have “rouged and powdered cheeks and lips” as well as “scented hair”—they are prostitutes—but this aspect of Broadway doesn’t bother her. The shops dazzle her, “the jewelers windows [that] gleamed,” the florist shops, furriers, haberdashers, and confectioners.

From Broadway to the Bowery

135

After her stroll on Broadway, Carrie “conceived a new idea of the possibilities of New York.” She dreams of entering into this glittering world. Her dreams do not include Hurstwood. When he returns to the apartment after searching for a job, she does not want to talk to him. She “did not care to have her enticing imaginations broken in upon.” Though Hurstwood came to New York to start a new life with Carrie, he is always “thinking, thinking, thinking” about the past. His brooding affects his relations with his business partner, who shows no desire to engage in another business venture with him when the tavern’s lease is not renewed. The lease is not renewed because the new owner of the property plans to build a modern office building on the site. In search of a business, Hurstwood finds a tavern on the Bowery that he wants to buy, but the owner asks for three thousand dollars in cash, more than Hurstwood has. Hurstwood soon becomes so desperate that he takes a job in Brooklyn as a scab; he drives a trolley when the regular drivers are on strike. Strikers attack him while he is driving, and he runs away. A few months later, he becomes a manual laborer in a Broadway hotel, but he loses his job when he comes down with pneumonia. After spending three weeks in Bellevue Hospital, he gives up looking for a job and resorts to begging. In Sister Carrie, as in A Hazard of New Fortunes, there is a lot of talk about apartments. When Hurstwood and Carrie move to New York, they rent a spacious six-room apartment on tree-lined West 78th Street near Amsterdam Avenue. After Hurstwood’s business venture fails, they move to a four-room apartment at 112 West 30th Street, “a half block west of Sixth Avenue.” When Mrs. Vance learns where Carrie lives, she says to herself: “They must be hard up.” When Hurstwood tells Carrie that they will have to rent a twobedroom apartment, she decides to leave him. She moves in with an actress who has an apartment on 17th Street. After her theatrical career takes off, she is offered a suite at bargain rates at the Wellington, a new hotel on Broadway. Carrie’s last residence is the Waldorf, “the fashionable hostelry then but newly erected.” It was built in 1893 on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 34th Street. After Carrie leaves him, Hurstwood declines rapidly. He moves into “a third-rate Bleecker Street hotel.” Then he moves into “a fi fteen-cent lodging-house in the Bowery.” His last residence is “a dirty four-story building in a side street quite near the Bowery.” Here he commits suicide by turning on the gas heater in his room.

136 Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser’s chronicle of Hurstwood’s decline and fall is one of the most powerful narratives in American fiction. Crane’s Maggie is also an isolated soul who commits suicide, but Hurstwood is a more fully developed character, and his decline takes a much longer time than Maggie’s. When Hurstwood fi rst begins to look for a job, he “sallied forth” from his apartment, as if he were strongly motivated. Soon he spends most of his days sitting in hotel lobbies and reading the newspaper because “he could not think of where to go.” He becomes a weary flâneur who walks aimlessly—walks not to see things but to fi ll the time. “He walked several blocks up the street. His watch only registered 1:30. He tried to think of some place to go or something to do.” On another day “he went out into the streets and tramped north, along Seventh Avenue, idly fi xing upon the Harlem River as an objective point. . . . Passing Fifty-ninth Street, he took the west side of Central Park, which he followed to Seventy-eighth Street. . . . Coming back, he kept to the Park until 110th Street, and then turned into Seventh Avenue again, reaching the pretty river by one o’clock.” (Seventh Avenue abuts the Harlem River at 155th Street.) For a brief time Hurstwood forgets about his bleak future. “The spring-like atmosphere woke him to a sense of its loveliness, and for a few moments he stood looking at it, folding his hands behind his back.” When he returns from this walk, he learns that Carrie has left him. In the last thirty pages of the novel, Hurstwood walks with a purpose; he is a beggar. “For weeks he wandered about the city, begging, while the fi re sign, announcing her engagement, blazed nightly upon the crowded street of amusements.” The fi re sign refers to the marquee that has Carrie’s name on it. Her career as an actress has taken off; she is appearing in a new Broadway play. At the end of the novel, Hurstwood seems to have given up begging. He walks to fi ll up the time and keep warm. He has a “wandering propensity.” Like other homeless people, he waits in line for food. In the morning he hopes to get a hot meal at a soup kitchen run by a Catholic charity at the Ninth Regiment Armory at 15th Street and Seventh Avenue. At midnight he waits in line to get a loaf of bread from Fleischmann’s Model Vienna Bakery—the originator of the breadline— on the corner of Broadway and 10th Street: “The whole line at once moved forward, each taking his loaf in turn and going his separate way. The ex-manager ate his [loaf of bread] as he went plodding the dark streets in

From Broadway to the Bowery

137

silence to his bed.” Dreiser drives home the point that Hurstwood has come down in the world by calling him “the ex-manager.” Hurstwood tries to see Carrie, but the theater employees throw him out. “Hopelessly he turned back into Broadway again and slopped onward and away, begging, crying, losing track of his thoughts.” Hurstwood now wanders aimlessly through the slush. He is a man of the Bowery, not a man of Broadway. “Along Broadway [on a snowy night] men picked their way in ulsters and umbrellas. Along the Bowery, men slouched through it with collars and hats pulled over their ears.” The Bowery cast its shadow on Broadway insofar as people in the arts often had dramatic changes in their careers. A case in point is Dreiser’s brother, Paul Dresser. In 1897, he was one of the nation’s leading songwriters. By the end of 1903, he was broke. His sister Emma took him in, so he did not end up on the Bowery. She now lived at 203 West 106th Street. Dresser died in 1906 at the age of forty-eight from either a cerebral hemorrhage or a heart attack. Two years before Paul died, Dreiser said his brother was in bad shape: “Depression and even despair seemed to hang about him like a cloak.”28 Failure and Success Dreiser’s remark about his brother’s depression could be applied to his own state from 1901 to the fi rst half of 1903. Dreiser’s depression played a large role in his decline from a successful writer/editor who in 1899 was listed in the fi rst edition of Who’s Who to a man who scavenged for a food on the Brooklyn waterfront. In 1901 Dreiser began a second novel, Jennie Gerhardt, but he had a hard time working on it because he was depressed and worried about money. Recalling the dark days when he lived alone in Brooklyn early in 1903, Dreiser later said: “Here in a tumble down street near the water front . . . I hid myself away . . . daily determined to complete at least one saleable article, poem or short story. . . . I had written a book to be sure, but who cared?”29 Dreiser was referring to Sister Carrie, which Doubleday published in November 1900. Though Frank Norris, who was a reader for Doubleday, called Sister Carrie “a masterpiece,” for a variety of reasons Doubleday did not want to honor its initial agreement to publish the novel. Dreiser insisted on the agreement, so Doubleday published Sister Carrie but made no effort to publicize it. The novel received some good reviews, but

138 Theodore Dreiser

royalties amounted to only $68.40. A revised version of the novel, printed in the United States and England in 1901, netted him $150.30 Dreiser was desperate for money, but he still thought he could make a living as a freelance writer. Unfortunately, he was not as successful as he had been earlier. “In 1898 he had published almost fi fty articles, poems, and stories; in the year and a half after he finished Sister Carrie, he sold only thirteen.” To save money, Dreiser and his wife moved to a cheaper apartment at 1599 East End Avenue, facing the East River. From his window Dreiser could see Blackwells Island, which housed a prison, insane asylum, and charity hospital. “The sight had a most depressing effect on me.”31 Dreiser and his wife decided they might be able to live more cheaply outside of New York, so they settled in various towns in Virginia and West Virginia. At fi rst moving away from New York lifted Dreiser’s spirits, but soon depression set in again. “I wandered here & there in Virginia & West Virginia, unable to write. My mood [was] made worse by the fact that the money that was being sent me was being used up & I was getting no where.”32 The depression put a strain on the marriage. His wife left him, rejoined him in Philadelphia in July 1902, and left him again in January 1903. When Dreiser was living in Philadelphia, he sought treatment for his depression, and a doctor put him on a regimen of powerful drugs. The treatment did not relieve the depression. “All the horror of being alone and without work, without money and sick swept over me and I thought I should die.”33 In Philadelphia Dreiser thought he might get a job as a streetcar conductor, but the hiring office was closed. He decided he might find it easier to fi nd work in New York, so he returned to the city in February 1903 with $32 in his pocket. He found a small apartment at 113 Ross Street, near the East River, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. It cost only $2.50 a week. Soon he would move to a room that cost only $1.25. He now was willing to work as a reporter again, but he could not fi nd work. A local paper in Brooklyn told him that he was overqualified. During February and March of 1903, Dreiser spent much of his day walking the streets—thinking about what kind of work he might do, thinking about ideas for articles, thinking about how to cut his expenses. Walking was one way to save money. He rarely took a streetcar or a ferry. Thirty years earlier Jacob Riis had also walked the streets of New York in search of work. Riis was deeply depressed, but perhaps

From Broadway to the Bowery

139

not as depressed as Dreiser was in 1903. Dreiser would later write that he had been “beset by a ner vous depression which . . . all but destroyed my power to write, or to sell that which I might write.” He also claimed that he thought about committing suicide. “The sight of the icy cold and splashing waters [of the East River] actually appealed to me.”34 In April 1903, Dreiser’s life turned around as a result of a chance encounter with his brother Paul, whom he had not seen in a long time. The story sounds as if Dickens had written it. Dreiser had walked across the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan to apply for a job as a laborer with the New York Central Railroad, whose offices were at 42nd Street and Fourth Avenue. He got a job with the railroad and was told to report the following week. Instead of going back to Brooklyn, he decided to spend the night in a flophouse at 164 Bleecker Street. After pawning his watch, he was walking down Broadway when he passed the Hotel Imperial, a luxury hotel. A cab drew up to the hotel and out came Paul, who was still a successful songwriter, though soon his luck would change. Paul was so upset by the sight of his shabby younger brother that he insisted on giving him $75. A few days later he persuaded Dreiser to enter a sanitarium near White Plains. After five weeks in the sanitarium, paid for by Paul, Dreiser’s depression abated, and he went to work for the New York Central. The job required heavy lifting, which he could not do, so he was transferred to a twelve-man crew of Italian immigrants, which worked on masonry projects for the railroad. He stayed on the job until December 1903. He left when Paul got him freelance work for the New York Daily News. In 1904 he became the editor of a new magazine called Smith’s, which was aimed at “the every-day reader who seeks entertainment.”35 His wife rejoined him, and they moved to an apartment at 399 Mott Avenue in the Bronx. Paul’s career soon would collapse, but Dreiser’s career was taking off. In 1906 he became the editor of Broadway Magazine, a monthly. In 1907 he became the editor of The Delineator, which was the most popu lar women’s fashion magazine in the country, owned by the Butterick Company, which made patterns that were widely used by dressmakers. In that same year, another publisher reissued Sister Carrie; it now was a critical and commercial success. He and his wife moved again to a larger apartment on Morningside Heights. He would never again be impoverished in New York. Many essays that Dreiser wrote for the Daily News were reprinted in a collection entitled The Color of a Great City (1923). Though several

140 Theodore Dreiser

essays discuss various aspects of poverty in New York, the book offers a less gloomy view of the city than we see in Sister Carrie or in the essays Dreiser wrote for Ev’ry Month. In many essays he celebrates New York’s variety and energy, but he also writes about those who lack energy— those who are down and out in the city. Walking aimlessly in Manhattan, Dreiser suggests, is the way one learns about the city. “I was given to rambling in what to me were the strangest and most peculiar and most interesting areas I could find. . . . Indeed, I was never weary of walking and contemplating the great streets, not only Fifth Avenue and Broadway, but the meaner ones also, such as the Bowery, Third Avenue, Second Avenue, Elizabeth Street in the lower Italian section and East Broadway.”36 Like so many walkers in New York, Dreiser enjoys New York’s ethnic variety. He is “fascinated by these varying nationalities, and their neighborhoods.” There are “the Syrians in Washington Street— a great mass of them; the Greeks around 26th, 27th and 28th Streets on the West Side; the Italians around Mulberry Bend; the Bohemians in East 67th Street, and the Sicilians in East 116th Street and thereabouts. The Jews were still chiefly on the East Side.”37 Dreiser’s favorite immigrants are the Italians. “The section [of Manhattan] that has always interested me most is the one that lies between Ninety-sixth Street and One Hundred and Sixteenth on the East Side of Manhattan Island. . . . Here, regardless of the presence of the modern tenement building, . . . you may see such a picture of Italian life and manners as only a visit to Naples and the vine-clad hills of southern Italy would otherwise afford.”38 Dreiser, like James, was struck by the energy and ambition of immigrants. And, like James, he was amazed by the colossal scale of immigration. “Day after day you will see express wagons and trucks leaving the immigration station at the Battery, loaded to crowding with the latest arrivals, who are being taken as residents to one or another colony of this crowded section. There are Greeks, Italians, Russians, Poles, Syrians, Armenians and Hungarians. Jews are so numerous that they have to be classified with the various nations whose language they speak. All are poverty-stricken, all venturing into this new world to make their living.”39 Dreiser was less interested in the way immigrants lived than in how they made a living. Of pushcart vendors, he wrote, “You see them everywhere; vendors of fruit, vegetables, chestnuts on the East Side, selling even dry goods, hardware, furs and groceries; and elsewhere . . . the

From Broadway to the Bowery

141

Greeks selling neckwear, flowers, and curios.”40 He described an Italian fruit and vegetable vendor who walked over the Williamsburg Bridge before dawn to the Wallabout Market in Brooklyn to buy the produce that he sold at his stand at 23rd Street and Sixth Avenue. The Irish policemen often harassed him, telling him to move on, but when they left he returned to his former spot. In another essay, Dreiser wrote of the frenzy of commercial activity on the Lower East Side. “A whole section of Elizabeth Street is given up to the sale of stale fish, at ten and fifteen cents a pound, and the crowd of Italians, Jews and Bohemians who are taking advantage of these modest prices is swarming over the sidewalk and into the gutters.” A pushcart vendor yelled, “A goldfish! A goldfish! Only one cent!”41 In “The City Awakes,” Dreiser noted that on the Williamsburg Bridge at three or four o’clock in the morning there was an “unbroken line of Jews trundling pushcarts eastward to the great Wallabout Market over the bridge.” Dreiser seems to dislike the Jewish peddlers. “They are so grimy, so mechanistic, so elemental in their movements and needs.” What do “mechanistic” and “elemental” mean? Dreiser, though, does not say that the Jewish immigrants should be barred from entering the country. Jewish immigrants “are New York, too . . . adding rich, dark, colorful threads to the rug or tapestry which is New York.”42 Dreiser’s view of immigration was similar to James’s: the machinery of assimilation is colossal. Dreiser wrote about a wide variety of New York workers: harbor pi lots, political bosses, track walkers, junkyard dealers, slaughterhouse workers (he calls them “red slayers” because they are covered with blood), and still-cleaners (who clean the enormous vats used by oil refi neries). He devoted a chapter to the world his brother inhabited: songwriters, sheet music publishers, singers, and orchestra-leaders. There is also an essay about the sandwich man, “this creature of two signs, this perambulating pack horse of an advertisement.” The sandwich man belongs to the underclass—the world Crane wrote about a decade earlier. “I remember seeing once . . . a score of these decidedly shabby and broken brethren carry ing signs for the edification, allurement and information of the Christmas trade. They were strung out along Sixth Avenue from Twenty-third to Fourteenth Streets. . . . I noticed that in the budding gayety of the time these men alone were practically hopeless, dull and gray.”43 Dreiser noted that many people who show up at the Bowery Mission, where there was a “free lunchroom and an employment bureau,”

142 Theodore Dreiser

were severely depressed. Many suffered from “mental and physical lethargy. . . . Their bodies are poisoned by their own inactivity and sense of defeat.” Most are “too taciturn or too evasive or shy or despondent to wish to talk to anybody.” He described people on the breadline: “each man reaches for a loaf and, breaking line, wanders off by himself.”44 These are close to the words Dreiser used to describe Hurstwood in Sister Carrie. Dreiser knew the world of the tramps better than Crane knew it. He knew it better because he too had been deeply depressed. By contrast, Crane was a jaunty urban explorer who enjoyed his occasional adventures in poverty. Walking on a winter’s morning at Broadway and 14th Street, Dreiser encountered an “unkempt and bedraggled woman, not exceptionally old . . . pushing a great rattletrap of a cart in which was piled old rags, sacks, a chair, a box and what else I know not. . . . I followed to see [where she was going] and saw her enter, finally, a wretched, degraded west side slum, in a rear yard of which, in a wretched tumble-down tenement . . . she appeared to have a room or floor.”45 Not all the homeless Dreiser encountered were listless and pathetic. In “Bums,” Dreiser describes a proud homeless person whom he saw on a ferry between New York and Jersey City. He is dirty but not “cast down.” At one point the man looks at the assembly of commuters, who are staring at him, and announces: “I’m a dirty, drunken, blue-nosed bum, and I don’t give a damn! See? See? I don’t give a damn!” Once the gates of the ferry were lifted, “he went dancing off the boat and up the dock, a jaunty, devil-may-care air and step characterizing him.”46 In “On Being Poor,” Dreiser takes a somewhat upbeat view of being poor in New York. He claims that poverty gave him mental freedom; he can keep “my own mind, my own point of view.” Yet Dreiser had to do a lot of hack writing in order to survive, so in what sense was he mentally free? In any case, the poverty he describes in this essay is not extreme. He lived in a room that “costs me no more than four dollars a week.”47 When his brother rescued him, Dreiser was staying at a flophouse that cost twenty-seven cents a night. Dreiser observed that in New York there were many free things to do; one can read in public libraries, go to free museums. And then there was the city itself. He agreed with Whitman that walking in the city was a tonic against depression: “I know it [New York] to be a shifting, lovely, changeful thing ever, and to it, the spectacle of it as a whole, in my hours of confusion and uncertainty I invariably return.” He offered a cata log

From Broadway to the Bowery

143

of things about New York he liked: “A distant, graceful tower from which a flock of pigeons soar. The tortuous, tideful rivers that twist among great forests of masts and under many graceful bridges. The crowding, surging ways of seeking men. These cost me nothing, and I weary of them never.”48 During his fi rst ten years in New York, Dreiser may have walked in more areas of the city than any other writer. After he was successful, he continued to walk in the city. His secretary at The Delineator said that Dreiser liked to walk in the Italian slums that Howells and Riis wrote about, which were near his office in the Butterick building, one of New York’s fi rst skyscrapers. Built in 1903, the fourteen-story Butterick building still stands at 161 Sixth Avenue, between Spring and Vandam Streets. Dreiser’s biographer notes that his secretary remembered him “each evening walking with a rolling gait along MacDougal Street to the elevated train, humming spirituals or popular tunes of the nineties.”49 Yet Dreiser always felt himself to be a visitor from the heartland. In 1913 he wrote: “I have lived in New York for years and years and yet I do not feel that it is My city. One always feels in New York, for some reason, as though he might be put out, or even thrown out.”50

8th Ave

Frederick Douglass Blvd

Manhattan Ave

Amsterdam Ave

E 114th St

E 113th St E 111th St Central Park N E 110th St E 109th St E 108th St

Dr

The Great Hill The Pool

E 105th St E 104th St E 103rd St E 102nd St

The Loch

E 101st St E 100th St E 99th St

West Dr

East Meadow

E 98th St E 97th St E 96th St

97th St Transverse Rd

The Lake

E 77th St E 76th St E 75th St Conservatory E 74th St Pond E 73rd St

Eas

W 75th St W 74th St W 73rd St

E 78th St

t Dr

W 76th St

Strawberry verse Fields 72nd Street Tra

E 72nd St E 71st St E 70th St E 69th St

W 66th St W 65th St

W 64th St

The Mall 65th Street Transverse Rd

W 64th St

Manhattan, from 65th Street to 125th Street

5th Ave

W 69th St W 68th St W 67th St

West Dr

Freedom

Pl

W 70th St

E 68th St E 67th St E 66th St E 65th St E 64th St

3rd Ave

W 72nd St

W 71st St

LINCOLN SQUARE

YORKVILLE

LENOX HILL

York Ave

UPPER EAST SIDE

E 79th St

79th St Transverse Rd

The Ramble

E 88th St E 87th St E 86th St

1st Ave

West Dr

Belvedere Lake

W 78th St W 77th St

E 89th St

2nd Ave

E 85th St E 84th St E 83rd St E 82nd St E 81st St E 80th St

Great Lawn

W 79th St

Henry Hudson Pkwy

Madison Ave

Central Park

Park Ave

86th St Transverse Rd

Central Park W

W 83rd St Riverside W 82nd St Park W 81st St W 80th St

E 93rd St E 92nd St E 91st St E 90th St

The Reservoir

Lexington Ave

West Dr

UPPER WEST SIDE

Columbus Ave

W 85th St W 84th St

E 95th St E 94th St

W End Ave

W 86th St

EAST HARLEM (El Barrio)

E 107th St E 106th St

W 95th St

W 89th St W 88th St W 87th St

Jefferson Park

E 112th St

W 111th St Cathedral Pkwy West Dr East D Harlem r Meer

W 96th St

W 94th St W 93rd St W 92nd St Joan of Arc Park W 91st St W 90th St

Pleasant Ave

E 115th St

East

Riverside Dr

wy

Morningside Ave

ide Dr

E 120th St E 119th St

E 107th St

ay

Huds

E 121st St

E 118th St E 117th St E 116th St

West Dr

Broadw

Henry

Marcus Garvey Park

W 119th St W 118th St W 117th St

W 99th St W 98th St W 97th St

Triborough Brdg

E 124th St E 123rd St E 122nd St

FDR Dr

Mornings

W 106th St W 105th St W 104th St W 103rd St W 102nd St W 101st St W 100th St

W 122nd St W 121st St W 120th St

Morningside Park

W 110th St W 109th St Riverside Park W 108th St W 107th St

on Pk

k Pl

W 123rd St Seminary Row

W 116th St W 115th St W 114th St W 113th St W 112th St W 111th St

Mount Morris Park W

coc

MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS

9A

E 125th St

Han

Lexington Ave

Claremont Ave

La Salle St

10

James Weldon Johnson A Black Man in Manhattan

J

ames Weldon Johnson was never down and out in New York. After he fi rst moved there, he soon became a successful songwriter; in later years, he was a successful journalist, historian, anthologist, and civil rights activist. In “My City,” he celebrates Manhattan, where he lived for roughly thirty years. Here is the second stanza: But, ah! Manhattan’s sights and sounds, her smells, Her crowds, her throbbing force, the thrill that comes From being of her a part, her subtle spells, Her shining towers, her avenues, her slums— O God! the stark, unutterable pity, To be dead, and never again behold my city.1

Johnson is a much better prose writer than poet, but those lines do express Johnson’s strong feeling for New York. Unlike Dreiser, Johnson came to feel that New York was “my city.” Johnson, who was the same age as Crane and Dreiser, came to New York when he was a young man. He and his brother Rosamond were a sought-after songwriting team: James wrote the lyrics, and Rosamond, who had studied at the New England Conservatory of Music, wrote the music. Most Broadway musicals featured at least one of their songs, many of which remained popu lar for decades. Judy Garland sings “Under the Bamboo Tree” in Meet Me in St. Louis; T. S. Eliot quotes the same song in “Fragment of an Agon.” In 1901, the Johnson brothers

145

146

James Weldon Johnson

began to collaborate with Bob Cole, a leading black songwriter. A New York critic called the trio “those ebony Offenbachs.”2 One wonders if the Johnson brothers met the songwriter Paul Dresser, since they moved in the same circles. Dresser’s career was in decline just as theirs was taking off. In his autobiography, Along This Way (1933), Johnson says the trio was so prominent on Broadway that “we got used to seeing notices and paragraphs and articles about ourselves in the press of New York. . . . In truth, we became, in a measure, Broadway personalities.” He remembers a friend’s “amazement when one night during a visit of his to the city, as he and I were walking up the famous street, a little newsboy ran up to me shouting, ‘Mr. Johnson, you want the latest edition?’ ”3 In his autobiography, Johnson does not say much about the city in general. He was mainly interested in New York’s black culture. He “took in something of night life in Negro Bohemia, then flourishing in the old Tenderloin district,” the same area that Crane had frequented a few years earlier. The clubs of Negro Bohemia, Johnson recalls, “were of diverse sorts. There were gambling clubs and poker clubs, . . . there were clubs frequented particularly by the followers of the ring and turf. . . . Among the clubs of Negro Bohemia were some that bore a social aspect corresponding to that of the modern night club. They had their regular habitués, but they also enjoyed a large patronage of white sightseers and slummers and of white theatrical performers on the lookout for ‘Negro stuff,’ and, moreover, a considerable clientele of white women who had or sought to have colored lovers.”4 Johnson and his brother came to New York from Jacksonville, Florida, where they grew up. In 1899, they only came for the summer because James was the principal of the only black high school in the state of Florida. He also practiced law in Jacksonville, the fi rst black to pass the state bar exam. He was losing interest in a legal career, though, so he devoted less and less time to his law practice. Looking back on their decision to go to New York to try their luck in musical theater, Johnson says: “now I can see that it was almost quixotic. . . . Two young Negroes away down in Florida, unknown and inexperienced, starting for New York . . . to try for a place in the world of light opera.”5 When the Johnson brothers arrived in New York, they rented rooms on West 53rd Street, which was fast becoming an area where blacks lived. Their summer in New York was a success. Toloso, the comic opera they wrote, was not produced, but it served to introduce them “to prac-

A Black Man in Manhattan 147

tically all of the important stars and producers of comic opera and musical plays in New York,” including the “great Oscar Hammerstein.” 6 The next summer they returned to New York again. For three years James only spent summers in New York, but in the fall of 1902 he gave up his job in Jacksonville and moved to New York. Rosamond, who had moved there a year earlier, wanted to know “why in the world was I hanging on in Jacksonville.” 7 In the fi rst decade of the twentieth century, New York was a mecca for blacks in the entertainment business. In Black Manhattan (1930), Johnson remembers, “the fi rst modern jazz band every heard on a New York Stage, and probably on any other stage . . . made its début at Proctor’s Twenty-third Street Theatre in the early spring of 1905.”8 Success meant hard work. In an essay on songwriters in New York, Dreiser writes of a songwriter whom he calls Gussie, “a bad negro,” by which he meant a man who lacks self-discipline. One day Gussie was “radiant in bombastic clothing, the next [day] wretched from dissipation and neglect.”9 James and Rosamond were not like Gussie; they had a great deal of selfdiscipline. Rosamond Johnson and Bob Cole formed a vaudev ille act that soon became very successful, Rosamond playing the piano while Cole sang and danced. In New York, “Jim Crow–ism,” as Johnson calls it, was much weaker than it was in the South, but even in New York blacks suffered humiliating restrictions. Johnson points out that until two black-owned hotels opened up in 1901, “there was scarcely a decent restaurant in New York in which Negroes could eat.” When the Johnson brothers went to see the producer Florenz Ziegfeld, who lived in a hotel in New York, they were told to take the ser vice elevator. Ziegfeld, who would soon become “the greatest of all American producers of musical plays,” came down and insisted that James and Rosamond go up with him in the main elevator. “This incident,” Johnson says, “was indicative of Mr. Ziegfeld’s attitude on race. As a producer, he not only recognized that there was Negro talent, but he dared to give that talent an opportunity.”10 On the night of August 15, 1900, a race riot occurred in Manhattan. It grew out of an “an altercation between a white policeman in plain clothes and a Negro, in which the former was killed.” The night the riots began Johnson and his brother were told by a young white man to stay off the streets because “a mob was raging up and down Eighth Avenue and the adjacent side blocks from 27th to 42nd Streets attacking Negroes wherever they were found, and that it was not safe for any

148

James Weldon Johnson

colored person to go through that section.” A friend of theirs, whom they were supposed to meet, was beaten over the head with pieces of lead pipe. “He struggled away and ran to a squad of policemen on the Avenue, but they met him with more clubbing. . . . It was a beating from which he never fully recovered.”11 In Black Manhattan, Johnson claims that the police did nothing to stop the rioters— and sometimes the police even aided the rioters. “When Negroes ran to policemen for protection, even begging to be locked up for safety, they were thrown back to the mob. The police themselves beat many Negroes as cruelly as did the mob.” In Along This Way, Johnson writes that “the riot of 1900 grew out of an altercation between a white policeman in plain clothes and a Negro, in which the former was killed. New York police beyond doubt fomented the outbreak, but it had more than local significance; it was, in fact, only a single indication of the national spirit of the times toward the Negro. By 1900 the Negro’s civil status had fallen until it was lower than it had been at any time since the Civil War.”12 The riots suggest that it could be dangerous for blacks to walk at night in New York, especially in a predominantly Irish neighborhood. Black-Irish relations had been tense for at least a half- century. In 1900, 1905, and 1910 there were race riots in the city. W. E. B. Du Bois observed, “the black man is in continual danger of mob violence in New York as in New Orleans.”13 Many blacks in New York resented Irish immigrants for taking away jobs that they had once held as household servants and dockworkers. In Black Manhattan, Johnson writes that immigration in general had not been good for blacks. “Foreign immigration bore down particularly hard on the New York Negro because so large a proportion of the immigrants came into the port of New York— and remained there. The struggle was waged chiefly in the wider fields of domestic ser vice, common labour, and the so-called menial jobs. Gradually but steadily the Negro lost ground.” But he also notes that New Yorkers generally were not strongly racist: “New York, more than any other American city, maintains a matter- of-fact, a taken-for- granted attitude toward her Negro citizens.”14 Though Johnson worried about the effect immigrants had on black employment, he admired Jewish immigrants for combatting antiSemitism by forming politically influential organizations. He thought blacks should combat prejudice in the same way Jews did. He also thought blacks should ally themselves with Jews. The Jew “in fighting

A Black Man in Manhattan 149

for his own rights, in some degree [might] fight for ours also.” Johnson admired Jews. In his autobiography, Johnson writes that if a “jinnee” should command him to become a member of another race, “I should answer, probably, ‘Make me a Jew.’ ”15 But Johnson insists that he is perfectly content with being who he is. In addition to writing songs, Johnson took courses in literature at Columbia University. He also took long walks—but not because he enjoyed walking in the city. Charles Anderson, the head of the Colored Republican Club, liked to walk and he wanted Johnson to walk with him. “These walks that seemed like nothing to him taxed me terribly. His antidote for fatigue was to stop in somewhere and get a pint of champagne. I frequently had to rebel against walking another step. I remember that on one afternoon we started from Bowling Green and ended up at the Marie Antoinette Hotel at Broadway and 66th Street.”16 Anderson pushed Johnson in a new direction—politics. In 1904 Johnson became secretary of the Colored Republican Club and, later, its president. On one of their walks, Anderson suggested to Johnson that it would be a good idea to go into the U.S. Consular Ser vice. After thinking it over Johnson said: “Charlie, if the President will appoint me, I’ll go.”17 He was appointed, and in 1906 he sailed for Puerto Cabello, Venezuela. Why would Johnson want to leave New York, where he was a success, to take a consular post in a remote town in Venezuela? “Arriving at this decision,” he says, “was not an easy matter, not nearly so easy as the decision to leave Jacksonville. New York had been a good godmother to me, almost a fairy godmother, and it gave me a wrench to turn my back on her.”18 Johnson wanted to leave New York for a number of reasons. He was bored with writing songs for Broadway musicals. “I found that less and less was I able to go at the work for Broadway on sheer enthusiasm. . . . Being light enough for Broadway was beginning to be . . . a somewhat heavy task.” He also wanted “to avoid the disagreeable business of travelling round the country under the conditions that a Negro theatrical company had to endure.” He was referring to Jim Crow laws, which existed in many cities. His brother Rosamond and Bob Cole were forming a Negro touring company and he would have to go on the road with them. Another reason was “the lure of the adventure of life on a strange continent.”19 Perhaps the main reason Johnson left New York was to give himself more time for writing. “I had not yet made a real start on the work that I had long kept reassuring myself I should sometime do.” His duties at

150

James Weldon Johnson

the consulate would be light, so he would have time to write poetry, and time also to complete the novel he had started: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912). “I was getting away, if only for a while, from the feverish flutter of life to seek a little stillness of the spirit.”20 Strolling in Harlem When he was a boy in Jacksonville, Johnson learned about New York from his parents, who “talked about the city much in the manner that exiles or emigrants talk about the homeland; and I had long thought of New York, as well as Jacksonville, as my home.” His mother was born in Nassau, but she grew up in New York, attending one of the “public schools for colored children.”21 His father, who was born a free man in Richmond, went to work in New York as a boy. During the Civil War, Johnson’s maternal grandmother took the family to Nassau, in the Bahamas, because she thought the South would win the war and enslave all American blacks. Johnson’s father, who had already met Johnson’s mother, soon followed the family to Nassau, and in 1864 Johnson’s parents were married. After the war, Nassau fell on hard times and Johnson’s father decided to move to Jacksonville because he thought he could get a job at a winter resort hotel. In the winter of 1869, the family settled in Jacksonville, and Johnson’s father became the headwaiter at a new resort hotel. In 1884, Johnson spent a summer in New York with his grandmother, who was visiting her sister in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Describing his visit, Johnson says: “We would . . . take the ferry to Grand Street in New York. I loved the ferryboats—the rushing crowds, the stamping teams and yelling teamsters, the tooting whistles, the rattling windlasses and clanging chains when we left and entered the slip.” Like Whitman and James, Johnson “enjoyed the sensation of approaching the great city.” He “especially enjoyed riding on the Broadway stage coaches.”22 He also enjoyed shopping at Lord and Taylor’s, riding in a goat wagon in Central Park, and walking across the recently opened Brooklyn Bridge. Recalling this trip, Johnson says: “I was born to be a New Yorker. . . . Even then I had a dual sense of home.” He speaks of being a New Yorker as if it were a state of mind. It means “being born, no matter where, with a love for cosmopolitanism,” downplaying and even ignoring ethnic and racial differences. “There should be nothing in law or public opinion to

A Black Man in Manhattan 151

prohibit persons who fi nd that they have congenial tastes and kindred interests in life from associating with each other.”23 Johnson says that he did not experience racial prejudice on this trip to New York. He played street games with “the white boys and girls who lived near on our side of the street and those across.” New York, he implies, was very different from Jacksonville. Since the turn of the century racism had increased dramatically in the South. Writing in 1933, he observed that during the past thirty years, blacks in the South “had been completely disfranchised, segregated, and ‘Jim Crowed’ in nearly every phase of life, and mobbed and lynched and burned at the stake by the thousands.”24 Jim Crowism was not limited to the South. It was in full force in Salt Lake City, where the Johnson brothers and Bob Cole stopped in 1905 on their way to San Francisco. In Salt Lake City, they found it hard to fi nd a restaurant that would serve them or a hotel that would accommodate them. They were forced to stay at a flophouse, and Johnson made a vow never to set foot again in the city again. San Francisco was different. “With respect to the Negro race, I found it a freer city than New York. I encountered no bar against me in hotels, restaurants, theaters, or other places of public accommodation and entertainment.”25 Johnson liked San Francisco, but he always thought of himself as a New Yorker. In 1910, he married a native New Yorker, and in 1914 he returned to New York after resigning from the diplomatic ser vice. “My sole justification to myself in making the decision to return to New York was that I should have [the] opportunity to make my way by writing.”26 Johnson left New York in order to fi nd time to write. Now he returned to New York because he thought an aspiring writer should live there. In 1913, he changed his middle name from William to Weldon because he thought it sounded more literary. Johnson soon became the editor of the New York Age, the oldest African American newspaper in the city. The job did not pay well, so he tried to make money by taking up songwriting again. He collaborated with several composers, including Jerome Kern, but the venture was not a success. “My failure to effect a ‘comeback’ on Broadway led to some extremely blue days for me. For the fi rst time in my life I was confronted with the actual want of money.”27 In the entertainment business, one could become a success overnight— but go from success to failure almost as quickly. What happened to Paul Dresser also happened to the performing team of Rosamond Johnson

152

James Weldon Johnson

and Bob Cole. When Johnson returned to New York for a brief visit in 1907, on a sixty-day leave of absence from his Venezuelan consulship, he learned that the fi rst year of the Johnson/Cole touring company had been a fi nancial disaster. In 1911, the two men closed the company and returned to vaudev ille. While they were doing their fi nal show at a New York vaudev ille theatre, Cole suffered a “mental breakdown.” A few days later, he committed suicide. Johnson was “shocked and disturbed beyond measure” by the death of a close friend and former songwriting partner. The New York Times reported the death in a two-paragraph article, noting that Bob Cole and his partner, Rosamond Johnson, “were among the best known Negro performers, appearing in vaudev ille and also in musical comedies of their own writing.”28 Rosamond soon signed up with another vaudev ille touring group. He continued to compose songs and later he became a successful musical director and singer. He sang the role of Frazier in the original production of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. Three years after Cole’s suicide, Johnson learned about the suicide of someone else he knew, a former Columbia University professor named Harry Thurston Peck. Peck published two poems Johnson wrote in the journal he edited. He also encouraged Johnson, who recalled that Peck “talked with me quite a while in his precise, punctilious manner.” In 1910, Columbia University fi red Peck because his secretary had sued him for breach of a promised marriage. Johnson lost touch with Peck, but in 1914 he saw him on 43rd Street. “I saw a man approaching, walking in a dazed sort of way. As he came nearer I recognized him to be Harry Thurston Peck. He was dressed, as was his custom, in a frock coat and silk hat, but both were extremely shabby. He passed, looking neither right nor left; he seemed entirely oblivious to his surroundings; I felt a strong impulse to go after him and speak to him. . . . The thought flashed through my mind that I might offer him some little help. But I hesitated, something held me back, and some intangible apprehensions intervened; it may have been the shadow of race.” A few days later Johnson read that Peck had committed suicide. Johnson berated himself for not talking to Peck. “I never recall this incident without a pang of regret that I did not speak the words that were in my mind to say to him.”29 Johnson did not fail in New York. Though he struggled to make a living for a few years, he soon became an influential figure among African Americans. In 1916 he became Field Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). A few years later, he became the fi rst black executive secretary of the NAACP.

A Black Man in Manhattan 153

He still wrote poems and essays, but now he saw himself mainly as a civil rights activist. “My own literary efforts and what part I played in creating the new literary Harlem were . . . mere excursions; my main activity was all the while the work of the Association.”30 On July 28, 1917, Johnson organized an unusual march in New York. He and W. E. B. Du Bois led a silent parade of ten thousand people up Fifth Avenue. They were protesting the recent race riots in East St. Louis, where whites killed roughly one hundred blacks and drove six thousand from their homes. They also were protesting lynching, which still occurred on a regular basis in the South. “The streets of New York have witnessed many strange sights,” Johnson writes, “but . . . never one stranger than this. . . . The parade moved in silence and was watched in silence.” African American Boy Scouts distributed printed circulars that explained why there was a silent march. “We march because we are thoroughly opposed to Jim- Crow Cars, Segregation, Discrimination, Disfranchisement, lynching, and the host of evils that are forced on us.”31 In his work for the NAACP, Johnson combatted racism, which he thought “involves the saving of black America’s body and white America’s soul.” In his writing, Johnson had a different aim: to persuade blacks and whites that blacks had made an im mense contribution to American culture. “The only things artistic in America that have sprung from American soil, permeated American life, and been universally acknowledged as distinctively American, had been the creations of the American Negro.”32 Blacks, Johnson argued, have been most influential in the area of popu lar culture. In the “Preface” to The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), Johnson mentions several popu lar dances that originated in the black community, but he mainly discusses black music: ragtime, the blues, and Negro spirituals, which he also calls “slave songs” and “Negro folksongs.” He is struck by wonder every time he hears these songs. “The sentiments are easily accounted for; they are, for the most part, taken from the Bible. But the melodies, where did they come from? Some of them so weirdly sweet, and others so wonderfully strong.” In 1917, he argued that “the fi nest contribution that this country could offer as its own to the world was the American Negro spirituals.”33 In 1925, he and Rosamond published The Book of American Negro Spirituals. In his work for the NAACP, Johnson wrote about race relations throughout the nation. He thought San Francisco was “the best city in the United States for a Negro,” but he noted that Harlem, “with its cosmopolitan Negro population,” was a magnet for black writers and

154

James Weldon Johnson

musicians. Harlem in the 1920s was “the center of the new Negro literature and art.” There was “no other city in the country where the same thing could have happened,” Johnson says, “and it could not have happened in New York had there been no Harlem at hand.”34 For a half-century, New York’s black population had slowly been moving uptown. In the 1860s and 1870s, many blacks lived in Greenwich Village. By 1890 “the centre of the coloured population had shifted to the upper Twenties and lower Thirties west of Sixth Avenue. Ten years later another considerable shift northward had been made to West Fifty-third Street and to San Juan Hill (West Sixty-fi rst, Sixty-second, and Sixty-third Streets).” According to Johnson, “the trek to Harlem” began in the first decade of the twentieth century. Johnson’s in-laws had “followed the tide uptown and moved to Harlem.” In 1914, Johnson and his wife moved there. In the fi fteen years that followed, the Johnsons moved several times, but remained in Harlem.35 Johnson points out that Harlem was “taken over [by blacks] without violence,” whereas in many other American cities violence often erupted when blacks began to move into white neighborhoods. Johnson wrote in 1930 that “race friction, as it affects Harlem as a community, has grown less and less each year for the past ten years; and the signs are that there will not be a recrudescence. . . . Although Harlem is a Negro community, the newest comers do not long remain merely ‘Harlem Negroes’; astonishingly soon they become New Yorkers.”36 In his preface to the Book of American Negro Poetry, Johnson calls Harlem “that most wonderful Negro city in the world.” It is wonderful in part because Harlem residents like to stroll. “In the evenings of summer and on Sunday they get lots of enjoyment out of strolling. Strolling is almost a lost art in New York; at least, in the manner in which it is so generally practiced in Harlem.”37 According to Johnson, “strolling in Harlem does not mean merely walking along Lenox or upper Seventh Avenue or One Hundred and Thirty-fi fth Street.” Harlem’s streets, he says, are “places for socializing. One puts on one’s best clothes and fares forth to pass the time pleasantly with friends and acquaintances and, most important of all, the strangers he is sure of meeting.” A stroller saunters along. A stroller “hails this one, exchanges a word or two with that one, stops for a short chat with the other one. He comes up to a laughing, chattering group, in which he may have only one friend or acquaintance, but that gives him the privilege of joining in. He does join in, and takes part in the joking, the small talk and gossip, and makes new acquaintances. . . .

A Black Man in Manhattan 155

This is not simply going out for a walk; it is more like going out for adventure.”38 “The Ridiculous Aspect of the Whole Business” In late nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century America, many whites—perhaps most—believed strongly in the notion of racial characteristics. In Howells’s novel An Imperative Duty (1892), a physician is courting a young woman who is one-eighth black, though she does not know it. Her aunt feels that she has to tell the suitor about her niece’s racial composition, for her black traits “might come out in a hundred ways. I can hear it in her voice at times—it’s a black voice. I can see it in her looks! I can feel it in her character— so easy, so irresponsible, so fond of what is soft and pleasant!” Johnson, like Howells, usually dismisses the notion of racial traits. In a letter to a Florida newspaper Johnson argues that the so-called racial faults of blacks were merely “habits” acquired during two hundred years of slavery. Johnson usually talks about culture rather than race. He refers to the musical culture of the American Negro. Yet, he occasionally speaks about the racial traits of blacks. In his preface to American Negro Poetry, he speaks of “the Negro’s extraordinary sense of rhythm,” and he extols the Negro’s “remarkable racial gift of adaptability” that has enabled him to become successful in a white culture. 39 “Racial gift of adaptability” is an odd notion, since all humans have the trait of adaptability. Johnson also writes, “Is it not curious to know that the greatest poet of Russia is Alexander Pushkin, a man of African descent?”40 In that light, Johnson could be called a man of French descent. Pushkin’s greatgrandfather on his mother’s side was a prince from present-day Cameroon. Johnson’s maternal grandparents were half-white; his mother’s father was part French, part Haitian black, while his mother’s mother was the child of a white planter and an African woman. For the most part, Johnson makes fun of those who talk about racial characteristics. He speaks of “the ridiculous aspect of the whole [race] business.”41 A case in point occurred when he was sitting in a railroad car designated for whites—in 1887 Florida passed Jim Crow laws on railroad travel—but was not expelled because he persuaded the white passengers that he was a Cuban. He did so by speaking Spanish. Thus, a black is not a black if he speaks Spanish. Or, to put it another way: Jim Crow laws do not apply to black Cubans.

156

James Weldon Johnson

Why did Johnson want to stay in the white car? Not because he was eager to fraternize with whites. “As an American Negro, I consider the most fortunate thing in my whole life to be the fact that . . . I was reared free from undue fear or esteem for white people as a race.”42 He wanted to stay in the railroad car designated for whites because it was much nicer than the one designated for blacks. In 1896, the Supreme Court held that separate but equal facilities were constitutional, but when it came to railroad cars and other facilities the notion of equality was a joke. Johnson’s gambit was not unusual. Many blacks, historian Brent Staples points out, were “sometimes willing to be seen as white in order to temporarily escape the penalties of blackness. They posed as ‘Portuguese’ or ‘Spanish’ in order to rent rooms at ‘whites only’ hotels and eat at segregated restaurants without suffering the humiliation of having screens erected around their tables. . . . Given a choice between sitting upright several nights running in the fi lthy, smoke-fi lled Jim Crow train car and resting comfortably in the ‘whites only’ Pullman sleeper, many of the colored elites understandably chose the latter.”43 The railroad car incident was trivial. Another racial incident almost cost Johnson his life. After a devastating fire in May 1901, Jacksonville was under martial law. A light-skinned black journalist from New York was writing an article about the fire’s effect on the city’s black population, and she asked Johnson to go over the article to make sure it was accurate. He consented, and they walked into a park to discuss the article. Some people who saw Johnson and the woman walking together jumped to the conclusion that he was consorting with a white woman. Soon the militia was sent out to arrest him and charge him with “Being out with a white woman.” The soldiers hit him and yelled, “Kill the damned nigger!” Fortunately, a young officer took control of the situation, and escorted Johnson to the head of the militia, who knew Johnson and was embarrassed by the way Johnson had been treated. He dismissed the charge after Johnson said, “I tell you at once that according to the customs and, possibly, the laws of Florida, she is not white.”44 Johnson adds, “In spite of appearances, he [the major], of course, knew that I spoke the truth.” Why does Johnson say “of course,” implying that it was absolutely clear to the major that the woman is not white? How does a white-looking black woman prove she is not white? One wishes that Johnson had said more about what constituted proof of whiteness or blackness. He says only that the woman stayed at “a school for colored girls supported by Northern philanthropy.”45

A Black Man in Manhattan 157

In his autobiography, Johnson writes of working for a white doctor who treated him as an intellectual equal. “Between the two of us . . . ‘race’ never showed its head.” Johnson liked traveling in France for the same reason. “I recaptured for the first time since childhood the sense of being just a human being. . . . I was suddenly free; free from a sense of impending discomfort, insecurity, danger; . . . free from the problem of the many obvious or subtle adjustments to a multitude of bans and taboos; from special scorn, special tolerance, special condescension, special commiseration; free to be merely a man.”46 The Jacksonville incident convinced Johnson that he should quit his job as principal in Jacksonville and move to New York permanently. “Shortly after the happenings just related, Rosamond and I decided to get away from Jacksonville as quickly as possible and go to New York.”47 Perhaps the incident also made Johnson think about the question of very light-skinned blacks. A few years later, he began to write a fi rstperson novel about a man who is the son out of wedlock of a white southern gentleman and a light-skinned black woman. The man eventually decides to pass for white, which is why the novel is called The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Johnson could not pass for white, so the novel is not based on his own life. The narrator’s career is similar to the career of a light-skinned “black” friend of Johnson’s, Judson Douglass Wetmore, who decided to pass for white when he attended the University of Michigan law school. I put black in quotation marks because that is how Johnson’s biographer fi rst describes him. Presumably, Wetmore was regarded as black because one of his parents was black. Johnson’s biographer says nothing about the race of Wetmore’s parents.48 Most events in the novel, however, are based on incidents in Johnson’s own life. Johnson drew on the memory of his trip to New York with his grandmother to describe the narrator’s view of New York from the water. “We steamed up into New York harbor late one afternoon in spring,” the narrator says. “The last efforts of the sun were being put forth in turning the waters of the bay to glistening gold. . . . The buildings of the town shone out in a reflected light which gave the city an air of enchantment.” The narrator’s view of New York abruptly becomes less like Whitman’s and more like Dreiser’s. “New York city is the most fatally fascinating thing in America.” New York is a “like a great witch” who lures people from the heartland and from across the seas. “All these become the victims of her caprice.” New York offers many dangerous temptations.

158

James Weldon Johnson

“As I walked about that evening I began to feel the dread power of the city; the crowds, the lights, the excitement, the gaiety.” The narrator soon becomes addicted to gambling. He gets a job rolling cigars, but soon he gives up the job and begins to lead a dissolute life. “I got up late in the afternoons, walked about a little, then went to the gambling house or the ‘Club.’ ” The club is a nightclub where the narrator, who had studied classical piano, becomes a regular pianist. “I developed into a remarkable player of ragtime.” The narrator’s New York world is the Tenderloin district—the same world Johnson inhabited when he came to New York to work as a songwriter. “My New York,” the narrator says, “was limited to ten blocks; the boundaries were Sixth Avenue from Twenty-third to Thirty-third streets. . . . Central Park was a distant forest, and the lower part of the city a foreign land.” The club is popu lar with whites as well as blacks. Some whites stay for a few minutes, others until morning. Some white women are steady customers. During the course of several evenings, the narrator becomes acquainted with an attractive and cultured white woman who has a black companion. One evening she begins to fl irt with the narrator. Her black companion, whom the narrator calls “a surly black despot,” comes in. A few minutes later the “black despot” takes out a revolver and shoots the woman in the neck. After rushing out of the club, the narrator walks far from the Tenderloin district. He wants to distance himself from what he has just witnessed. “Just which streets I followed when I got outside I do not know, but I think I must have gone towards Eighth Avenue, then down towards Twenty-third Street and across towards Fifth Avenue. . . . How long and far I walked I cannot tell, but on Fifth Avenue, under a light, I passed a cab containing a solitary occupant, who called to me, and I recognized the voice of my millionaire friend.” The millionaire friend is a man who admired the narrator’s piano playing at the club and invited him to play at a party he gave. The friend was surprised to see the narrator walking on Fifth Avenue, where blacks rarely walked. “What on earth are you doing strolling in this part of the town?” The millionaire friend invites the narrator to go on an extended trip to Europe. The narrator accepts. He enjoys attending concerts and operas in the leading cities of Europe, but eventually he decides that he wants to go back to the United States and compose music that is influenced by African American folk music. The millionaire thinks he is

A Black Man in Manhattan 159

crazy. “My boy, you are by blood, by appearance, by education and by tastes, a white man. Now why do you want to throw your life away amidst the poverty and ignorance, in the hopeless struggle of the black people of the United States? Then look at the terrible handicap you are placing on yourself by going home and working as a Negro composer. . . . I doubt that even a white musician of recognized ability could succeed there by working on theory that American music should be based on Negro themes.” The millionaire’s remarks would sound unconvincing if they had been made in the 1920s or 1930s, when black musicians and composers were becoming popu lar with white audiences. In his autobiography, Johnson recalls, “I have been amazed and amused watching white people dancing to a Negro band in a Harlem cabaret.”49 But the millionaire makes this remark in the fi rst decade of the twentieth century, when blacks were just beginning to enter the musical mainstream. The narrator does not heed the millionaire’s advice. Returning to the United States, he travels throughout the rural South, “jotting down in my note-book themes and melodies, and trying to catch the spirit of the Negro in his relatively primitive state.” He loves what he hears in black churches. “Anyone who can listen to Negroes sing, ‘Nobody knows de trouble I see, Nobody knows but Jesus,’ without shedding tears, must indeed have a heart of stone.” Yet, after seeing a black man murdered by a white mob, doused with gasoline and burned alive, he gives up the idea of becoming a “colored composer.” He not only gives up his vocation; he also gives up his identity. “I fi nally made up my mind that I would neither disclaim the black race nor claim the white race; but that I would change my name, raise a mustache, and let the world take me for what it would.” He does not say how he would respond if someone asked him about his parents. The narrator says that shame led to this decision. “It was shame, unbearable shame. Shame at being identified with a people that could with impunity be treated worse than animals.” But he also suggests that ambition was a factor. He hopes to become successful in New York. “Once again, I found myself gazing at the towers of New York, and wondering what future that city held in store for me.” The last chapter of the novel is devoted to the narrator’s life as an ex- colored man. In this chapter, many things happen— too many things, as if Johnson was not especially interested in the narrator’s life once he became “an ex-colored man.” At fi rst the narrator feels “completely lost” in New York and “oppressed by a feeling of loneliness,”

160

James Weldon Johnson

which is not surprising because he avoids the people he knew when he was black. “I shunned the old Sixth Avenue district as though it were pest infected.” He concentrates on getting ahead. In the course of ten pages, the narrator becomes successful in the business world; he works in the fi nancial sector and becomes an expert in New York real estate. He marries a white woman though at fi rst she rejects him when he tells her the truth about his parents. His wife gives birth to a girl, but a few years later his wife dies while giving birth to a boy. After his wife’s death, the narrator “gradually dropped out of social life.” The narrator is not happy in his new identity. “Sometimes it seems to me that I have never really been a Negro, that I have been only a privileged spectator of their inner life; at other times I feel that I have been a coward, a deserter, and I am possessed by a strange longing for my mother’s people.” Why does he not confess to his friends and colleagues that his mother was black? He argues that if he made such a confession, his children would suffer. “There is nothing I would not suffer to keep the ‘brand’ from being placed on them.” Though he feels he has to remain an ex-colored man, he thinks his decision to become one was a terrible mistake. In the last sentence of the novel, he says: “I cannot repress the thought, that, after all, I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage.” The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is a flawed novel. Its characters (except for the narrator) are one-dimensional. Nevertheless, it is a powerful exploration of the question of race and identity. Was Johnson’s friend Judson Douglass Wetmore an unhappy man because he lied about his “race”? In Along This Way we learn a lot about Wetmore, who is described thus: “neither in color, features, nor hair could one detect that he had a single drop of Negro blood.”50 Wetmore went to college with Johnson and became his law partner in Jacksonville. Soon after Johnson moved to New York, Wetmore moved there as well, setting up a law practice with a black man. In 1907, Johnson, who was on leave from his consulship in Venezuela, met Wetmore in New York and learned that he now was practicing law on his own at 5 Beekman Street in Lower Manhattan and that his clientele was “almost entirely white.” Johnson also met the woman who would become Wetmore’s wife. “The young lady was a Jewess . . . she knew that he was colored but her family did not.”51 Johnson refers to Wetmore again in 1910, noting that his friend’s marriage “made no change in his relations toward me; nor, in fact, any

A Black Man in Manhattan 161

marked change in his relations with other Negro friends. . . . One of his fi rst acts was to have me up to his apartment for dinner with him and his wife.” For more than a decade, they saw little of each other; they renewed their friendship sometime in the 1920s, when Wetmore attended a lecture Johnson gave at the Ethical Culture Society. Johnson learned that his friend had divorced his fi rst wife, and that he would soon marry a white woman from Louisiana: “I did not see [him] frequently but our old intimacy was in some measure re-established. He had made considerable money.”52 In the summer of 1930, Johnson’s wife read in the New York Times that Wetmore had committed suicide by shooting himself in the heart. Wetmore had invested heavily in the Florida real estate boom and lost a great deal of money in the stock market crash of 1929. Did he kill himself because he was ruined financially or because he regretted having become an ex-colored man? It is impossible to answer this question, yet it is probable that financial ruin more than racial guilt drove him to suicide. Wetmore’s story is one that Dreiser could have written. An ambitious man moves to New York, becomes a wealthy man, loses everything in the fi nancial collapse of 1929, and commits suicide. Johnson met Dreiser in the mid-1920s. He had pictured Dreiser as “a morose and dour individual,” but he found the novelist “more jovial than somber.”53 For most of his adult life, Johnson worked hard to combat racial prejudice, but his novel and his autobiography tell a story about New York that is only partly about race relations. Both books are about men who are drawn to New York, a magnet city for ambitious people in many fields, from the arts to fi nance. It was harder for blacks to succeed in New York than it was for whites. “Fewer jobs,” Johnson says, “were open to them than to any other group.”54 New York, though, was a far cry from Jacksonville. In New York, Jim Crowism was a weak force.

11

Alfred Kazin Reveries of a Solitary Walker

A

lfred Kazin, born in 1915, was an influential literary critic in the postwar era. “By the 1960s he was the most powerful reviewer in America.”1 Kazin is best known, however, for his memoir A Walker in the City (1951), about growing up in the poor Jewish neighborhood of Brownsville in Brooklyn. Kazin was a walker in New York for his entire life. His biographer speaks of “his endless walks . . . [and] his fascination with the city.” In October 1949, Kazin wrote in his journal: “Walking in the street as usual, between boredom and fatalism, I nevertheless realize to the depths of my being something I have so rarely admitted to myself—that I am grounded in this city, these streets, among these people, as a matter of course, without even the possibility of hypothetical denial.”2 When Kazin died in 1998, the New York Times said he walked New York’s streets “as if Herman Melville, Edgar Allen Poe and Walt Whitman were beside him.”3 One could say that Howells, James, Dreiser, and Crane also were beside him, for Kazin was steeped in the classics of American literature. Kazin writes about his New York walks in two other memoirs— Starting Out in the Thirties (1965) and New York Jew (1978)— and also in Our New York (1989), an autobiographical essay with photographs by David Finn. His most detailed accounts of his walks are in two journal collections: A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment: From the Journals of Alfred Kazin (1996), and Alfred Kazin’s Journals (2011). Kazin chose the entries in A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment, which are not dated. (He rewrote 162

Reveries of a Solitary Walker

163

many of them.) In the posthumously published Journals, Richard Cook selected the entries. They constitute only one-sixth of Kazin’s entire journal. “Since boyhood,” Kazin says in Our New York, “I have made a point of entering in a personal journal my daily experiences of city life in all its familiarity and strangeness. . . . The journal reflects the passion of a lifetime—watching New York, taking it all in as one walked about, recognizing at every step that one was privileged to be moving . . . on one of the central stages of the modern world.”4 Kazin spent most of his life in New York, though he lived elsewhere from time to time, teaching abroad and at universities in Massachusetts, Indiana, and California. After teaching in Massachusetts, he was happy to return to New York. “I am percolating inside with excitement, can’t stop bubbling,” he wrote in September 1957. “It’s New York again, New York. Is all this trouble worth it—for a place? Are places this important? It certainly feels it, just now—New York!” Two months later, he added, “How alive the city is, how alive, how alive, how alive. . . . Each of these streets is a current under my feet.”5 Kazin, like James Weldon Johnson, was a success in New York at a young age. A few years after graduating college, he became a regular book reviewer for the New Republic, the New York Times, and the New York Herald Tribune. At the age of twenty- seven he published a study of American literature that made him an “international authority on American literature.” Soon he was hired by Fortune magazine. “The whole humming Time-Life Building was somehow a slice of the New York feast at its richest and most intoxicating,” Kazin writes in New York Jew. “It was impossible to feel oneself less than brilliantly informed and interesting in the Time-Life building.” He dined with Henry Luce, the founder of Time, and he often had lunch with James Agee, Time’s movie critic. He and Agee would usually eat in an expensive French restaurant, their lunch paid for by their expense accounts.6 Kazin left Fortune, and for several years he had to scramble to make a living as a freelance writer, but he never was down and out in New York in the way Riis, Crane, and Dreiser had been. All the Lonely People By the late 1950s Kazin was a successful writer, publishing articles in many journals, giving lectures, appearing on radio and television. He also took one-year appointments at several prestigious universities. His

164 Alfred Kazin

third wife recounted that waiters and shopkeepers were beginning to recognize him. A woman at a Broadway fruit stand asked, “Aren’t you the famous critic?” Yet many of Kazin’s journal entries for the 1940s and 1950s reveal a man who was fi lled with “bitterness and hopelessness.”7 One reason for Kazin’s despondency was the collapse of his fi rst two marriages. In 1944 he left his first wife, Natasha Dorn, for another woman. Soon this relationship ended. Kazin hoped to be reconciled with his wife, but she would not have him back. “Everything was falling apart,” he says. He lived in a series of temporary residences—in hotel rooms, in studio apartments, in the apartment of married friends. He speaks of the “jagged line of my wanderings since Asya and I broke up.”8 In April 1944, Kazin wrote of the loneliness of New York men. “I see them in the gateways of the city, in cheap cafeterias, in subways. . . . I became, for all practical purposes, one of them. I mean those who are essentially by their present constitution of life, homeless, intellectual, and desperate.”9 He added that many of these men might be homosexuals. He often ate by himself in cafeterias, like someone in an Edward Hopper painting, and he rode the subway alone. In November 1951, a year after his second marriage ended, Kazin wrote, “I was mad with loneliness, and at Chambers St. suddenly got into the rain, walked about in a stupor—whom to call up, what movie to go to, etc. etc.”10 There is a rough correlation between Kazin’s personal life and his view of the city. When his third marriage was falling apart, Kazin recalls “looking out at . . . the ramshackle shops and dreck of Broadway in the 80s . . . somehow it all looked like my life with Ann. How many times did our hero walk these blocks, often at night, like a stunned child, after wifey screamed me out of the house?” He thinks of Frost’s poem, “Acquainted with the Night.”11 When his personal life was going well, Kazin usually wrote about how much he enjoyed walking in the city. In a journal entry in 1942, before his first marriage collapsed, he wrote: “I love to walk, to take long, running leaps and lunges on the leisure-class streets of New York—Fifth and Madison and Park. . . . Every day I work at the [New York Public] Library I walk at least a mile up from 42nd street and Fifth Avenue to the [subway] station at 59th and Lexington.”12 After Kazin married Judith Dunford in 1983—his fourth marriage and apparently a happier one than the previous three—he mentioned several enjoyable excursions. “Yesterday lovely expedition to Christine’s Polish eatery at Second and Thirteenth Street. Only Judith could make a bus trip from Ninety-sixth to Fourteenth on Second Avenue pure joy. . . . I

Reveries of a Solitary Walker

165

thought I was weary to death of New York . . . but not when I walk or ride with Judith [emphasis mine].” Waiting for his wife in a Holiday Inn in Chinatown, he was impressed by Canal Street’s commercial life. “I had forgotten what a marvelous flea market Canal Street is. Can never get over the ability of these hucksters of all races to make a living from second- and third-hand junk.”13 Yet even after his fourth marriage, Kazin often felt lonely. “Why in the world was I condemned to so much isolation, why as always are there so few friends?” he asked himself in 1989.14 Loneliness is one of the main themes of Kazin’s journals. “The city so unbearably hot and lonely for me that I found myself wandering about in a deep state of confusion. . . . The chaos in my nature fi lls me with despair.” He notices that many New Yorkers walk by themselves and sit on park benches by themselves. In the last entry in A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment he calls himself “a spectator . . . wandering New York all my life in constant amazement at the number of people walking briskly alone talking to themselves, glowering as they sit fiercely alone on park benches.”15 Like the muttering park benchers, Kazin was a lost soul. Alluding to Dante’s Inferno, he wrote, “Midway in the journey of our life I fi nd myself in a dark wood where the straight way is lost.” But he was different from most lonely New Yorkers; he was a successful writer. When he was working, he felt good about himself. “There is a whole new dimension of strength in me every time I work at night; the hell with all my inner aches and pains! I can work anytime I please!”16 Kazin was of two minds about his loneliness. Though he was “bitter, bitter” because he lacked the “talent for sociability,” he at times wore his loneliness as a badge of honor—precisely because loneliness is a prerequisite for being a great American writer. The last sentence of A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment is a quotation from Henry James: “The starting point of my life has been loneliness.”17 Yet loneliness is painful— and it may lead to mental illness. “In this rainy, soggy June, half the people I see seem to me distended, mad, sloppy, and eccentric, and self-indulged to the point of physical incoherence. . . . At the corner of Times Square I heard a sickly looking man cry out, I don’t have to apologize to anyone? hear? not to anyone?” (It is not clear why Kazin turned the man’s querulous remarks into questions.) He noted the odd behavior of a man on West 96th Street. “A decent looking fellow with a package . . . suddenly stopped in front of a tree (and a poor looking tree it is) and on a sudden impulse, kicked it.”18

166 Alfred Kazin

The lonely and despondent Kazin saw loneliness and unhappiness everywhere. A journal entry for April 1962 reads: “Walked down to 72nd St. subway [station] this morning. On the little curve of sidewalk just in front of the subway entrance, a miserable looking young Negro woman with that look of stupefaction you often see on Negroes. . . . A man pushed her aside to get into the subway, and she looked more miserable. The city is full of these miserable faces, miserable people.” In Our New York he wrote, “there were so many people [in New York] like oneself, mirroring one’s most intimate moods, one’s daily gains and failures.”19 Kazin realized that his journals would be tedious if he talked continually about what he called “my obstinate unhappiness,” so he made an effort to be an observer of street life. “No one knows so much of the physical conditions of NY streets as I do—no one gazes so attentively at the dreck, the fissures. . . . Because these have been my green fields all my life— and because I seem to have lived in these streets more than anywhere else.”20 It was not easy for Kazin to be an observer, for he often was lost in his “private reveries.” Walking, he wrote, “was my way of thinking, of escape into myself.” Yet Kazin often tried not to escape into himself. Walking in Brooklyn on a Sunday morning, he noted that the rows of low red houses (soon to be demolished) look like Edward Hopper’s “Sunday Morning”. . . . I go along Fulton toward Brooklyn Bridge and the harbor, past the cobbled streets, the boarded-up saloons, the pool parlor, the old-fashioned German bakery with the wrecker’s ball poised over it . . . past the little stores darkened by gray muslin curtains that are the evangelical chapels of the Puerto Ricans and Mexicans in the neighborhood; past the usual drunk of some sixty years, with a gray stubble and vomit over his coat, sitting on a Fulton Street doorstep waiting for the bars to open.21 Kazin knew that walking was good for his psyche; it helped him think better and write better. He is depressed when the weather makes walking difficult. “Deep winter. . . . All the streets and skies and buses and people merge into a gelatinous muddy mess. I am depressed by the inability to walk freely—the sky comes down on me from morning on.”22 Kazin mentioned a dream he had about a walk. “I have a dream of an infi nite walk— of going on and on, forever unimpeded by weariness or duties somewhere else, until the movement of my body as I walk

Reveries of a Solitary Walker

167

becomes the shadow of the world as it turns on its axis, until I in my body and the world in its skin of earth are somehow blended in a single motion.”23 It seemed to be a dream about achieving peace of mind, something he only partly attained in his fourth marriage. On one of his walks Kazin saw Bernard Malamud, an old friend. “He once met up with me when I was waiting for the bus at Eightysixth and Broadway. Exhaling fiercely, he told me that he had just done his quota [of walking] for the day.” Malamud was walking for his health, but when he was a young man he walked for another reason. Kazin recalled that Malamud “once said to me: ‘I walked the streets endlessly—looking for my future.’ ”24 In another entry about Malamud, Kazin noted, “I remember most of all his walking about the city ‘dreaming,’ dreaming aloud—it reminded me of the importance of such walking about, of its solitariness as well as its search for knowledge.” Though writing about Malamud’s walks Kazin was mainly thinking about his own walks. When he was a young man, he was “constantly prowling and exploring New York, in search of my future without my knowing what I was looking for.”25 Discovering Old New York Walking in New York, Kazin realized that he was fascinated with the American past, especially the world of old New York, the New York of the 1880s and 1890s. When he was writing A Walker in the City, he wrote to his friend Josephine Herbst, “The walks into the city are now the explorations of the world away from that early restricted life.”26 He walked away from the Jewish world of Brownsville into the gentile world of late nineteenth-century American literature and art. The title of Kazin’s memoir is misleading; “city” refers to Manhattan, yet most of the walks Kazin describes took place in Brooklyn. In the fi rst paragraph he wrote, “It is over ten years since I left [Brownsville] to live in ‘the city.’ ”27 His return to Brownsville stirred up memories of his childhood there, and it also reminded him of the time when he began to take a strong interest in the culture of old New York. For someone growing up in Brownsville, “it took a long time getting to ‘New York.’ ” Brownsville was connected to Manhattan “only by interminable subway lines and some old Brooklyn-Manhattan trolley car, rattling across Manhattan Bridge.” When Kazin was growing up in the 1920s, Brownsville was home mainly to poor Jews, many of them recent immigrants. “We were the end of the line. We were the

168 Alfred Kazin

children of the immigrants who had camped at the city’s back door in New York’s rawest, remotest, cheapest ghetto.”28 Kazin’s parents came to the United States in the great wave of Jewish immigration that began in the 1880s and lasted until World War I. His father was proud of the fact that he arrived in 1907, which was the peak year of Jewish immigration. His father and mother came from Minsk (now in Belarus, then in Poland). They met in 1912 on the Lower East Side, where they lived. His father, a journeyman painter, could read English. His mother, who worked in their Brownsville apartment as a dressmaker, could not. She spoke to Alfred in Yiddish and he replied in English. Kazin’s parents struggled to make a living. “It puzzled me greatly,” Kazin says, “when I came to read in books that Jews are a shrewd people particularly given to commerce and banking, for all the Jews I knew had managed to be an exception to that rule. I grew up with the belief that the natural condition of a Jew was to be a propertyless worker like my painter father and my dressmaker mother.”29 Returning to Brownsville in the late 1940s, Kazin noted that it no longer was predominantly Jewish. Many Jews, though not his parents, had left, and many blacks had moved in. Brownsville, he noted in his journals, “is now more than half black.” He mentioned how things had changed—“the old drugstore on our corner has been replaced by a second-hand furniture store”—but he was not especially interested in the new Brownsville.30 In 1979, Kazin returned to Brownsville again. “My old block on Sutter Avenue has been completely eviscerated, nothing but rubble, brick.” Brownsville was now a slum. In Our New York, Kazin noted that “Brownsville is one of the saddest, most derelict, most crime-and violence-ridden neighborhoods in the city.”31 A Walker in the City is not about the transformation of Brownsville; it is about Kazin’s intellectual awakening—his growing interest in the world beyond Brownsville. Kazin did not hate Brownsville; he felt constrained by it. “Beyond! Beyond! Only to see something new, to get away from each day’s narrow battleground between the grocery and the back wall of the drugstore!”32 He played handball on the drugstore’s back wall. “Beyond” is mainly Manhattan, but “beyond” is also in Brooklyn. “There was a new public library I liked to walk out to right after supper, when the streets were still full of life. It was to the north of the Italians, just off the El on Broadway, in the ‘American’ district of old frame houses and brownstones, and German ice-cream parlors and

Reveries of a Solitary Walker

169

quiet tree-lined streets.” The new library was “packed with books that not many people ever seemed to take away. But even better was the long walk out of Brownsville to reach it.”33 Walking on these streets, Kazin was “a half-hour nearer to ‘New York.’ ” The brownstone houses are similar to those that were built in nineteenth- century New York. “I had made a discovery: walking could take me back into the America of the nineteenth century”34 The young Kazin walked in Manhattan as well. He usually rode into the “city” on the subway or trolley. He often went with his father. In his journal he notes that his laconic father “included me in his walks and expeditions” around New York, taking him to parks, museums, and concerts. (His mother never went.) He calls these trips “adventures in America.”35 Kazin also went to Manhattan on school excursions. On a school trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art he was entranced by “pictures of New York some time after the Civil War— skaters in Central Park, a red muffler flying in the wind; a gay crowd moving round and round Union Square Park; horse cars charging between the brownstones of lower Fifth Avenue at dusk.”36 The paintings, photographs, and books about old New York “had some strange power” over Kazin’s mind, so that when he walked at dusk he often felt as if he were transported back to the New York of the 1880s. “Dusk in America any time after the Civil War would be the corridor back and back into that old New York under my feet that always left me half-stunned with its audible cries for recognition.”37 Old New York gripped Kazin’s imagination even when he walked in Brooklyn. “Walking past our police station on East New York Avenue, I would always be stopped in my tracks by an abysmal nostalgia for the city as it had once been.” A walk in Brooklyn often “plunged me so suddenly into my daylight dream of walking New York streets in the 1880s that I would wait on the corner, holding my breath, perfectly sure that my increasingly dim but still almighty Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt would come down the steps at any moment.”38 Kazin worried that he would never belong to this new world he had discovered. “Beyond was the strange world of Gentiles, all of them with flaxen hair, who hated Jews, especially poor Jews. . . . Gentiles were Gentiles. The line between them had been drawn for all time. What had my private walks into the city to do with anything?”39 Kazin had no trouble “walking” into Protestant American culture. He records in his journal that in 1939, he “suddenly realized . . . that I

170 Alfred Kazin

had a passionate and even professional interest in American culture and literature. . . . I have never been able to express the pleasure I derive from the conscious study of ‘Americana.’ ” In a another entry, he writes, “No one could love America’s Protestant thinkers—Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson, Lincoln, et al.—more than I do.”40 God and the American Writer, his last book, is devoted to Protestant writers, though he briefly mentions several Jewish and Catholic writers. The more the young Kazin learned about old New York, the more his walks in “the city” became walks into the American past. “I could never walk across Roebling’s bridge [the Brooklyn Bridge], or pass the hotel on University Place named Albert, in Ryder’s honor [Albert Pinkahm Ryder, the painter], or stop in front of the garbage cans at Fulton and Cranberry Streets in Brooklyn at the place where Whitman had himself printed Leaves of Grass without thinking that I had at last opened the great trunk of forgotten time in New York in which I, too, I thought, would someday fi nd the source of my unrest.”41 Kazin never found the source of his unrest. He always remained “lost in this labyrinth of my own soliloquy,” but he did learn one thing: he loved the culture of old New York. For the rest of his life Kazin liked to walk in Lower Manhattan because it contained traces of old New York. In March 1988 he wrote: Through Tompkins Street to the [East] River. What an effect of long-lived-in, old New York, East Side New York, Tompkins Park give[s]. . . . Walked along the river . . . looking across to the gritty factories, foundries, warehouses of my dear old, old Brooklyn (as in the 19th century pictures, a church steeple rising above the industrial muck). . . . At the widest part of the island, you get this amazing view. . . . The profusion, the mass of New York, weight on weight, but unlike the chocolate-covered brownstone city of the 19th century what I see is the springiness of all those different buildings thrusting themselves sometimes antically against the sky. The “electric vitality” of New York, as always, the effect of this mix, this grand mix.42 “Walking Brooklyn Bridge” Kazin’s favorite New York walk was across the Brooklyn Bridge. When he was married to Natasha Dohn, they often walked across the bridge

Reveries of a Solitary Walker

171

on Sunday. After World War II, when he was living by himself in Brooklyn Heights, he would regularly walk across it. In A Walker in the City he writes about his first walk across the bridge at the age of fourteen, going from Manhattan to Brooklyn. The walk was a sudden impulse on Kazin’s part. “There had been some school excursion that day to City hall and the courts of lower New York, and looking up at the green dome of the World [the home of the New York World] as we came into Park Row, I found myself separated from the class and decided to go it across the bridge alone.”43 Kazin begins his walk by describing what it was like to be at the bridge at rush hour, when people are hurrying to get on the elevated train. “Evening was coming on fast, great crowds in thick black overcoats were pounding up the staircases to the El; the whole bridge seemed to shake under the furious blows of that crowd starting for home. Rush hour above, on every side, below: the iron wheels of the El trains shooting blue-white sparks against the black, black tracks . . . trolley cars bounding up into the air on each side of me, their bells clanging, clanging; cars sweeping off the bridge and onto the bridge in the narrow last roadways before me.”44 Kazin walks past the newsstands and hotdog stands on the arcade leading to the bridge, and he climbs the steps to the bridge’s walkway. “Dusk of a dark winter’s day that fi rst hour walking Brooklyn Bridge. Suddenly I felt lost and happy as I went up another fl ight of steps, passed under the arches of the tower, and waited, next to a black barrel, at the railing of the observation platform.”45 Kazin closes with a lyrical passage: Only the electric sign of the Jewish Daily Forward, burning high over the tenements of the East Side, suddenly stilled the riot in my heart as I saw the cables leap up to the tower, saw those great meshed triangles leap up and up, higher and still higher—Lord my Lord, when they will cease to drive me up with them in their fl ight?— and then, each line singing out alone the higher it came and nearer, fly flaming into the topmost eyelets of the tower.46 The bridge’s soaring cables suggest transcendence— a “beyond” that cannot be put in words. The walk across the bridge was a sublime experience— so emotionally powerful that it unsettled him. He writes about going home by trolley. “The trolley car clanged, clanged, clanged taking me home that day from the bridge. Papa, where are they taking

172 Alfred Kazin

me? Where in this beyond are they taking me?”47 The “beyond” that he felt on the bridge is disturbing. He doesn’t know what to make of it. Kazin often thought about his first walk on the bridge. “All those first summer walks into the city, all daily walks across the bridge for years afterward . . . were efforts to understand one single half-hour at dusk, on a dark winter day, the year I was fourteen.” The first walk undoubtedly was a memorable event for Kazin, but the language he uses to describe the experience is not the language of a fourteen-year-old boy. The language is similar to the language of a diary entry in May 1949, in which he says that looking up at the cables is a religious experience. “This is my only understanding of the divine. . . . How the lines course and return and course back again on every side of me! Plenitude over the river, in the full light of day. I open my arms to the plenitude. In the day it is the threads that I see, for it is in me that they do their work. At night, in the rain and the mist, it is the towers—the implacable surface of the divine.”48 Kazin writes about his first walk roughly two decades after it happened, so his account of what he felt at the time inevitably is colored by what he read about the Brooklyn Bridge during those two decades. In his journal Kazin says he “remembered with joy” what Lewis Mumford wrote about the bridge.” He quotes two sentences from Mumford’s The Brown Decades (1931), and he praises Mumford, calling him “an indefatigable walker, seeker, sketcher of city scenes.”49 If the Grand Canyon is America’s iconic work of nature, the Brooklyn Bridge is American’s iconic work of architecture. It was painted by numerous artists, including Childe Hassam, John Twachtman, Joseph Stella, and John Marin, and it was photographed by many photographers, including Alfred Stieglitz, Alvin Langdon Coburn, and Walker Evans. The painter John Sloan, who did a sketch of the bridge late in life, writes in his journal (May 31, 1910): “I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge for the fi rst time. I enjoyed it im mensely. . . . On the bridge I thought of Whitman’s Brooklyn Ferry.”50 Writers were inspired by the bridge as well. Whitman rhapsodized about the bridge in 1878, five years before it was completed. In his autobiography James Weldon Johnson speaks of the thrill of walking across the bridge in 1884, a year after it opened. Hart Crane published his long poem, The Bridge, in 1930. Lewis Mumford talks about a memorable walk across the bridge at twilight—going from Brooklyn into Manhattan. Three- quarters of the way across, he contemplates the Manhattan skyline: “Here was my city, im mense, overpowering, flooded with

Reveries of a Solitary Walker

173

energy and light.” Henry James was the only naysayer; he did not like the bridge, which he called a “monstrous organism.”51 Kazin first wrote about the Brooklyn Bridge in an article that appeared in Harper’s Bazaar in September 1946, with photographs by Henri CartierBresson, who walked across the Brooklyn Bridge with him. While working on the article, Kazin thought of writing a book about his walks in New York. It would be a “spiritual autobiography,” he told Van Wyck Brooks, “based on the inner world of a man walking in the streets.” He already had a title: A Walker in the City.52 After that book was published, Kazin walked across the Brooklyn Bridge innumerable times, and he frequently wrote about what the Brooklyn Bridge meant to him. Even when he was not walking across the bridge, the thought of its existence lifted his spirits. “I realized Brooklyn Bridge as the found place, the inexpressible lofty and secure place in the midst of New York’s confusions and vertigo, the babble of tongues. . . . Always there, mysterious, spidery, incredibly there.”53 A few years before he died, Kazin wrote in his journal that “the still largely unknown wonder of the city loomed so large in my mind that I imagined myself climbing Brooklyn Bridge with Papa and was emperor of all I surveyed in the world harbor of New York.”54 The language Kazin used to describe his walks on the Brooklyn Bridge was overwrought, but Kazin was an overwrought man, and he knew it. “What a disease, what sentimentality, what rhetoric! . . . Above all, what selfcenteredness!” he writes in his journal. He was a man of feeling like Rousseau. “Every night, reading Rousseau’s Confessions in delight.” He could describe his unhappiness histrionically: “From Job to Joseph K— What did I do to get the fates (or God), so angry with me?”55 One year after Kazin died, Judith Dunford and family members and friends walked to the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge. After saying the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, and reading the passages on walking across the bridge from A Walker in the City, Dunford threw Kazin’s ashes into the East River.56 Failure and Success on the Upper West Side “New York is dying,” Kazin wrote in May 1976. Kazin’s gloomy view of New York’s future may have been colored by the imminent collapse of his third marriage, but he was just as gloomy about New York’s prospects a few years later, when he was happily married to Judith Dunford. In New York Jew (1978), Kazin quotes a writer in a literary weekly who

174 Alfred Kazin

says “New York is just a failure.” He quotes the same remark a decade later in Our New York, this time mentioning the writer’s name: Murray Kempton, an influential columnist.57 In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s many observers thought New York was a failure. In Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “The Cafeteria,” published in 1968, the narrator says, “This metropolis has all the symptoms of a mind gone berserk.” In The Triumph of the City (2011), Edward Glaeser writes: “When I was a child in Manhattan in the 1970s, people fled New York because its crime and grime made it, for many, an unpleasant place to live.”58 According to Joanne Reitano, for almost three decades—from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s—New York was plagued by “rampant arson, ravaging disease, surging welfare rolls, high unemployment, untrammeled drug use, brazen crime, fi lthy streets, sprawling graffiti, crumbling schools, huge rats, extensive homelessness, fiscal bankruptcy, police corruption, and political scandals.” In September 1990 Time magazine wrote about “The Rotting of the Big Apple.” After riots between blacks and Hasidic Jews occurred in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn in August 1991, the New York Times said the city had become “a cauldron of hate.”59 For Kazin, evidence of New York’s failure could be found everywhere, but it was especially noticeable on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where he lived. “There are certainly many failures on these streets,” he writes in New York Jew. Walking on Central Park West, he notes that the park side of the street is “lined with derelicts, one of whom was passively studying his battered naked feet. . . . Street after street along the park—the abandoned, the forgotten, the drifters, the hopeless, disgorged as shit.”60 Walking up Broadway in June 1982, he noted that “the streets positively smelled of menace.” Four years later, while walking on Amsterdam Avenue with his wife, he was robbed. “A young black boy in a blue tee shirt . . . insidiously removed my wallet from my left side pocket and sped off.” The seventy-one-year old Kazin chased him in vain, yelling “Stop Thief!” Someone found his wallet and returned it to him later that night.61 Kazin had never liked the Upper West Side. “In my college days the upper West Side had always presented to me a face strained, shadowed, overcrowded.” In March 1966 he wrote in his journal, “Through these streets pass some of the most unattractive people in the world. The smell of food in the streets, the cripples and junkies and drunks, the old

Reveries of a Solitary Walker

175

Jews, the young Negroes, the grease smell over everything. This is my society; these are my streets.”62 In the 1970s and 1980s, Kazin thought the Upper West Side had gone from bad to worse. On upper Broadway there was “every possible color of skin, decrepitude, eccentricity. . . . A mob united only by the streets they walk in.” In New York Jew, he writes, “On peeling benches lining the traffic island down the middle of Broadway, very old-looking women, who cannot be as old as they look and who are hideously made up, sit tensely and somehow angrily taking in a little sunshine. They are frequently impeded in this by drunks drooling and drawling over them . . . [and] by junkies who are reeling but determined to make conversation.” There was also “the madwoman of Broadway,” who prowled the street in house slippers. “She still can be seen in the drugstore talking into a telephone plainly marked ‘out of order.’ ”63 A decade later, in Our New York, Kazin recounted the “daily carnage” on Broadway: Drunks outside the single-room-occupancy hotel dazedly eye me as I make my way past mounds of glass, hills of garbage, blacks comatose on the pavement, blacks playing craps at eight in the morning. . . . On good old Broadway the river of life is at its flood, thick and angry with bodies jostling one another every which way. . . . Between One-hundredth Street and the subway at Ninetysixth, I was stopped by five beggars to the block.64 Walking on Broadway could be unsettling. “When I walked out on Broadway, I felt myself so engulfed by the furious life of the street that I had to go back and write to keep from drowning in these many lives.” Walking on Broadway could also be irritating. “For some time, in these cluttered, almost putrefying streets, I have been trying to figure out just what it is that irritates me so much.”65 In the 1980s, Kazin was irritated by many things. He was irritated by New York’s decline, and he was irritated by the election of the “monster” Ronald Reagan, who in his view promoted callousness and greed. In the 1970s, he was irritated that several old socialist friends had moved to the right, becoming Republicans and praising capitalism. “The ex-radical intellectuals,” he argues in New York Jew, “were in fact total arrivistes and accommodating in their thinking.” In Starting Out in the Thirties, Kazin thought it was reprehensible that an ex-communist intellectual had become “an apologist for the American businessman.” Kazin never discussed the ideas of the ex-radicals he condemned. He

176 Alfred Kazin

admitted that he had no interest in economics or in public policy questions; he said Dissent— a magazine that promoted democratic socialism—was “the dullest magazine in the world.”66 Kazin also thought the critic Lionel Trilling was “accommodating.” In New York Jew he says Trilling is a writer of “tremulous carefulness and deliberation,” saying that Trilling was a timid soul who would never write anything that might undermine his career in academe. He also says that he ran into Trilling while walking on Broadway and that Trilling “seemed shocked by my suggestion that we have coffee at the Bickford’s on Broadway and 111th, outside of which I happened to meet him.”67 In a letter to the New York Times Book Review, nineteen scholars and writers objected to Kazin’s portrait of Trilling— arguing that it was “a grotesque misrepresentation of the truth.” Kazin often made enemies because of what his friend Daniel Aaron called his “penchant for moral grandstanding.”68 According to Kazin, many “accommodating” people lived on the Upper West Side. He also called such a person an “alrightnik,” a Yiddishinflected colloquialism meaning, the Oxford English Dictionary says, “a person who has succeeded in life fi nancially but is regarded as vulgar or self-satisfied; a nouveau-riche person, an arriviste.” In 1979, Kazin thought of leaving New York. “What am I doing in this overcharged, overpopulated, fouled-up city?” In August 1981 he bought a house in Roxbury, Connecticut. He needed a “respite from New York City,” his biographer says. “To live in the city and write about it, he needed to keep from feeling engulfed by it.”69 The house in Roxbury was mainly a weekend retreat, though, for Kazin and Dunford kept their apartment on the Upper West Side. In the last decade of his life, Kazin was gloomy about New York’s future. In Our New York, he grumbled, “New York today is marked by . . . extremes [of ] high and low, delirious consumption and constant menace, cultural frippery and undeclared war. . . . Nothing else just now is as sacred as money.” In August 1994 he wrote in his journal: “My lost city.”70 Yet Kazin still liked many things about New York. He liked to walk in Lower Manhattan because he felt as if he were walking in Old New York. Even a walk on upper Broadway could take him back to the turn of the century. In January 1991, he described Broadway as if he were describing a photograph by Stieglitz or Steichen: Last night, the streets were wet, and seemed to reflect the thousand and one brightnesses streaming from the still lighted shop

Reveries of a Solitary Walker

177

windows and streets lamps. There was a friendly fog in the middle. The whole thing suddenly gave me that strangely familiar feeling of having returned to the last years of the nineteenth century. . . . I have never lost this association between shadowy dark streets and suddenly fi nding myself in another century.71 Kazin also liked New York because it still was a “world city” that continued to attract energetic people from everywhere. In September 1984, he wrote, “Watching the young Korean girl at the ‘vegetable’ store this morning, watching her compulsive orderliness at the counter and her eager energy, I thought of how the tenement Jews of my youth used to work. The Orientals of NY are the metropolitan Jews of the 80s.”72 In the postscript to Our New York, Kazin seems to question the main thesis of the book, which is that New York is dying. Kazin talks about the immigrants who drive taxis in New York. “The taxi drivers fascinate me by their foreignness.” After mentioning drivers from Russia, the Czech Republic, Haiti, Egypt, Romania, India, and Trinidad, he adds: “Just now there are lots of Sikhs. . . . I just can’t get over New York as planet Earth’s still-favorite shore of refuge, fi rst port of call.” 73 In the postscript, Kazin sounds upbeat about New York’s future. “In its giddy, daredev il, vaguely inhuman but still protective way, having taken in more people from all the rest of the world than any other American city, it embodies and even flaunts the headlong pace, the buoyancy, the sky’s-the-limit quality so near to the American temper.” 74 How can New York be dying, he wonders, if it continues to attract people from all over the world? Whatever view Kazin took of New York, gloomy or upbeat, he could never leave the city. Walking New York was his life’s work. “Talk about having too much ‘New York material!’ that material is my life. . . . Every street is part of my story and my story is set in street after street of New York.” When he was working on A Walker in the City, he wrote in his journal: “I dream of capturing what Whitman in the greatest New York poem, ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,’ called ‘the glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings— on the walk in the street, and the passage over the river.’ ” 75

12

Elizabeth Hardwick West Side Stories

A

lfred Kazin met Elizabeth Hardwick at a Partisan Review party in the 1940s. He liked her work, recalling, “Elizabeth Hardwick from Kentucky wrote extraordinarily sensitive stories and essays.” Though Kazin was a Jew from Brooklyn and Hardwick a Presbyterian from Kentucky, they had much in common. Both came from working- class families; both went to Manhattan to escape the narrow worlds of their childhood; and both were successful critics in their twenties (Hardwick was a year younger than Kazin). In December 1947, Saul Bellow wrote a friend: “I’m glad [Elizabeth] Hardwick didn’t take the axe to me. She’s very formidable.”1 Hardwick and Kazin also had roughly the same political views. In March 1983, she congratulated Kazin for an article he had written attacking neoconservative intellectuals. Richard Cook, the editor of Kazin’s journals, says Hardwick and Kazin “remained friends for most of the time they knew each other.” One wonders what “most” means. Did they ever quarrel? In December 1989, Kazin saw her at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, when both were being inducted into the academy. Kazin remarked, perhaps sarcastically, “E. Hardwick (as expected) knows everybody fondly.”2 She possessed the sociability gene that he lacked. But Hardwick, who lived in New York for most of her adult life, differed from Kazin not only in her sociability; she also was reticent. “In general I’d rather talk about other people,” she told Darryl Pinckney, who interviewed her for the Paris Review. She never wrote an autobiography, though 178

West Side Stories

179

some people urged her to write a memoir of her marriage to Robert Lowell. She also had a dry sense of humor, whereas Kazin was humorless. She admitted in the interview that some remarks she makes “don’t bear scrutiny. . . . Sometimes I try to lighten the gloom of discussions but I notice that no one laughs.”3 Hardwick, like Henry James, resisted the idea that one could explain New York in a phrase or two. In the interview, Pinckney said to her: “I have the impression that in your most recent stories about New York . . . you are using the city almost as a text and the characters you have chosen are instruments of decoding.” Hardwick did not agree. “I don’t know about decoding New York,” she replied. “It’s a large place, oh yes. And it’s a place, isn’t it? Still very much a place, or so I think.”4 The reply also shows Hardwick’s dry sense of humor— she thinks New York is still a place. Hardwick disliked the word “decoding,” yet in several essays, one novel, and a handful of short stories Hardwick tried to decode New York insofar as she tried to clarify what was special about the city— what made it different from Boston, where she had also lived. Like Howells, she often compared Boston to New York. Was Hardwick a walker in the city? She may have been. Her essays do not talk about walking in New York, but in many of her New York stories the main characters go for walks. And in her novel, Sleepless Nights (1979), the narrator remembers several women who are walkers on Broadway. (Hardwick’s Broadway is the same as Kazin’s. It runs roughly from the intersection with Amsterdam Avenue to 116th Street, where Columbia University has its main campus.) Hardwick told Pinckney that Sleepless Nights is “not entirely taken from life, rather less than the reader might think,” but some events in the novel are similar to events in Hardwick’s life. In 1939 Hardwick left Kentucky to attend Columbia University’s graduate program in English literature. In Sleepless Nights the narrator quotes from a letter written in 1940: “Dear Mama: I love Columbia. . . . The best people here are all Jews—what you call ‘Hebrews.’ ”5 In the fall of 1961 Hardwick and her husband, Robert Lowell, moved into a duplex apartment on 15 West 67th Street, where she lived until she died in 2007. In Sleepless Nights, the narrator quotes a letter, written in 1962, which begins: “Dearest M.: Here I am back in New York, on 67th Street in a high, steep place with long, dirty windows.” Is this a real letter where “M.” stands for Mary McCarthy, a close friend of Hardwick’s?

180

Elizabeth Hardwick

In 1979, the year Sleepless Nights appeared, Hardwick told an interviewer: “Even when I was in college [in Kentucky] . . . I’m afraid my aim was—if it doesn’t sound too ridiculous—my aim was to be a New York Jewish intellectual. I say ‘Jewish’ because of their tradition of rational skepticism; and also a certain deracination appeals to me.” Six years later, she qualified the remark. “I said that as a joke, but it was more or less true.”6 In Sleepless Nights, the narrator tells stories about a wide variety of deracinated people, many of them not Jewish. The novel takes place mainly in New York, though parts are set in Kentucky, Boston, and Amsterdam, all places where Hardwick lived. The narrator is not lonely— she claims she has many friends—but she suffers from insomnia. She tells stories to herself in order to cope with her sleepless nights. The narrator looks back at the people in her life not in anger but with a detached curiosity. In her Paris Review interview Hardwick said: “I don’t see anger as an emotion to be cultivated and, in any case, it is not in short supply.” 7 The stories she tells herself are therapeutic; they help her in her fight against depression. They strengthen her resilience. “This is what I have decided to do with my life just now. I will do this work of transformed and even distorted memory and lead this life, the one I am leading today.” The narrator is not mean- spirited, but she is tough-minded about the illusions of people who are drawn to New York. Talking about a gay man from Kentucky who was her roommate in her early years in New York, she says: “J. suffered in his loves from seizures of optimism, a blighting frenzy quite unknown to me. A meeting, an attraction, aroused in him a rich, agitated possessiveness. He rushed into the future with the first glance, swept along by a need for connection that extended the moment before it had begun. He was one of those who look into new eyes and say: Now I am going to be happy.” The narrator and her gay friend live in the Hotel Schuyler on West 45th Street. It is in midtown Manhattan, “within walking distance of all those places one never walked to,” roughly the area that James Weldon Johnson wrote about in his novel. The hotel was “more than a little sleazy and a great deal of sleazy life went on there.” Nearby streets are fi lled with sleazy people. “Turn the eyes westward— a nettling thicket of drunks, actors, gamblers, waiters, people who slept all day in their graying underwear.” The narrator enjoys the jazz clubs on West 52nd Street, a seedy area. “Dirty slush in the gutters, a lost black overshoe, a pair of white panties,

West Side Stories

181

perhaps thrown from a passing car.” Many jazz musicians have a penchant for “murderous dissipation.” Billie Holiday, whom the narrator meets, is driven by “luminous self- destruction.” Hardwick does not romanticize drug addiction. “Tell me,” the narrator says to herself on one of her sleepless nights, “is it true that a bad artist suffers as greatly as a good one?” Her last view of Billie Holiday is disturbing. “Once she came to see us in the Hotel Schuyler. . . . We sat there in the neat squalor and there was nothing to do and nothing to say and she did not wish to eat. In the anxious gap, I felt the deepest melancholy in her black eyes. She died in misery from the erosions and poisons of her fervent, felonious narcotism.” The Hotel Schuyler, “which is gone now,” is a place that Dreiser might have written about. (Hardwick admired Sister Carrie.) It is fi lled with people who escaped from their home towns in the hope of making it in New York. “Most of them were failures, but they lived elated by unreal hopes, ill-considered plans. They drank, they fought, they fornicated. They ran up bills. . . . They were not poverty-stricken, just always a little ‘behind.’ Undomestic, restless, unreliable, changeable, disloyal.” New York is a magnet city for narcissistic dreamers—for people whose reveries are sheer fantasy. The narrator also talks about the academics and intellectuals she knows, most of whom live on the Upper West Side. She views these people with detached amusement. An acquaintance who works at the Museum of Modern Art is “a snob, a dandy, and a Marxist.” We learn that this man, who for many years has been writing a book on architecture, comes “from someplace, Akron,”; and we learn that he has been the narrator’s lover. Her view of him is fi lled with sardonic wit. “A good deal of Alexander’s life had been assigned to women. Much of his time had gone into lovemaking. . . . The last time, a month ago, he told me that for a long period in his life he made love every night. He sighed, remembering his discipline and fortitude.” Alexander is a pompous narcissistic intellectual—his Marxism cannot be taken seriously—who has been sleeping with many women while living with one woman for fi fteen years. He thinks he has “a special power, or perhaps a special duty, to please women.” He is crushed when his companion suddenly leaves him and marries someone else. He had resisted marriage because bachelorhood kept alive “his lingering, half-hearted vision of self-realization.” The narrator remembers a party of academics and professional people on the Upper West Side. “There was talk about poverty. Poverty is very

182

Elizabeth Hardwick

big this year, someone said.” She finds these people smug even when their lives are a mess. “How pleasant the rooms were, how comforting the distresses of New Yorkers, their insomnias fi lled with words, their patient exegesis of surprising terrors. Divorce, abandonment, the unacceptable and the unattainable, ennui fi lled with action, sad, tumultuous middle-age years, shaken by crashings, uprootings, coups, desperate renewals.” The passage could be a gloss on Alfred Kazin’s personal life. The well-educated women talk about marital failure, but on the Upper West Side there is a more obvious kind of failure, the kind Kazin often describes in his journals. The narrator remembers two bag ladies she often sees on Broadway. She knows one of them, a Miss Cramer, a former neighbor. Miss Cramer has fallen on hard times and become demented. “She is wearing torn canvas shoes and no stockings to cover her bruised, discolored legs, nothing to help the poor naked ankles caked with barnacles of dirt.” She once was a member of the middle class; she drove a car every summer to the Catskills. “Today she pauses at the end of block where trucks and cabs and cars are flowing and raging with their horns.” Walking on Broadway, Miss Cramer approaches “an appalling wreck of great individuality, a black woman who wanders in and out of the neighborhood, covers the streets with purposeful speed. . . . The whole part of her lower face is always bound tight with a sort of turban of woolen cloth. Fear of germs, disfigurement, or symbol of silence?” The narrator watches as Miss Cramer and the black lady “meet suddenly at the corner and both stop for a moment. The wind is so strong a beer bottle rolls in the gutter.” The two women do not seem to realize how much they have in common. “The two women do not know what they look like, do not see their lives, and so they wander about in their dreadful freedom like old oxen left behind, totally unprovided for.” It may be better, the narrator suggests, for the two women not to “see their lives.” Though the narrator sees disorder and failure on the streets of New York, she also takes note of the ways in which people try to give life color and meaning. During the Christmas season, “there is a reindeer in the window of the steaming Chinese laundry; there is a wreath of peppermint paper in the ferocious prostitute’s window and a lighted tree has been in the hardware store since Thanksgiving.” Sleepless Nights is about various kinds of failure in New York—failure in one’s career, failure in one’s relationships, failure to have enough

West Side Stories

183

money to live decently. It is also about resilience—how people cope with failure and cope also with deracination. Toward the end of the novel, the narrator remembers a Miss Lavore, whom she met at the rooming house near Columbia where they both lived. Miss Lavore was “large and strong and homely and in her late fi fties.” Miss Lavore is unmarried and likely to remain that way, but she “had a life.” Miss Lavore went “nearly every night of the week . . . to Arthur Murray’s dancing classes.” The other women in the rooming house “timidly inquired sometimes about the possibility of sharing this night world, which could after all be purchased.” Miss Lavore said dancing required a great deal of skill. She recommended bowling. One night, when the narrator is coming home on the subway, she sees Miss Lavore at the other end of the train. “She was wrapped, it seemed, in a pleasant, hard-earned fatigue.” She had a cake on her lap, which she ate. After falling asleep, Miss Lavore woke with a start when the train reached her stop. The narrator remembers how she followed Miss Lavore as she walked from the subway to the rooming house. The atmosphere is vaguely menacing. “We passed open bars and closed shops. One corner would be deserted, as if an entire side street had turned off its lights and closed its eyes. Another would be fi lled with people standing in groups, alert, sleepless, looking about for the next stop of a night that had just begun. . . . Whistling noises fi ll the air suddenly and die down once more.” It is dangerous for a woman to walk by herself at night. The conclusion of this odd vignette is low-key. “At last Miss Lavore and I nod in the elevator and slip into the hall of the strange apartment with its peculiar cells for the protection of a vast overwhelming privacy.” The narrator has no interest in befriending Miss Lavore. She is curious about her; she admires her independence. “Miss Lavore: now, there was a warrior with red feathers in her hair and the paint of many ambushes on her full cheeks.” On the last page of Sleepless Nights, the narrator tries to sum up her past life. There were magical moments. “In truth, moments, months, even years, were magical. . . . The moon changed the field to the silvery lavender of daybreak.” There also were days that lacked meaning. “And yet the old pages of the days and weeks are splattered with the darkbrown rings of coffee cups and I fi nd myself gratefully dissolved in the grounds as the water drips downward.” Gratefully dissolved? Is she saying that it is good that she does not remember too much of the past?

184

Elizabeth Hardwick

In the last paragraph of Sleepless Nights the narrator talks about how much she likes to stay in touch with friends. “Public assistance, beautiful phrase. Thus, I am always on the phone, always writing letters, always waking up to address myself to B. and D. and C.—those whom I dare not ring up until morning and yet must talk to throughout the night.” The narrator suggests that loneliness can be mitigated by the imagination. One can speak to friends even when they are not present. Hardwick once said that there are only two reasons to write: desperation or revenge.8 Sleepless Nights may have been written out of desperation, but it does not reek of revenge. In the novel, Hardwick muses about the mystery of character. She also ruminates about New York, a city that is exhilarating despite its dark side. “A brilliant night outside in New York City. It is Saturday and people with debts are going to restaurants, jumping in taxicabs. . . . What difference does it make to be here alone?” Loneliness in New York is better than loneliness elsewhere. The narrator also enjoys New York’s phantasmagorical aspects. “Here in New York I just saw a horse and rider amidst the threatening taxi cabs. The man rides the horse indeed as if he were driving a cab, nervously, angrily, looking straight ahead, in his own lane.” In The Truants, a memoir of New York intellectuals, William Barrett talks about the difficulties Hardwick faced when she fi rst came to New York. “Plunged now into this intense intellectual milieu, she had a good deal to cope with, and for a while it seemed touch and go whether she might not head back to Kentucky. But, as it turned out, she had enough talent, brains, and human resourcefulness to cope with all these difficulties, and she has survived—magnificently so.”9 Manhattan Mystique Hardwick often talked about what she liked about New York. She told an interviewer that New York is “a very good place for women. There is more work for you, more pay, and you are more free.” By New York she means Manhattan—mainly the Upper West Side. If you lived in New York in the late fi fties, the upper West Side was “the place to be,” writes Ann Birstein (Kazin’s third wife).10 In an essay Hardwick compares Boston unfavorably with New York. “In Boston there is an utter absence of that wild electric beauty of New York, of the marvelous excited rush of people in taxicabs at twilight, of the great Avenues and Streets, the restaurants, theatres, bars, hotels,

West Side Stories

185

delicatessens, shops.” Boston is dull at night. “In Boston the night comes down with an incredibly heavy, small-town finality. . . . Nearly every Bostonian is in his own house or in someone else’s house, dining at the home board, enjoying domestic and social privacy.”11 Hardwick wrote essays about several writers who lived in New York: Melville, James, Wharton, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Wharton’s novels, she argues, tell us very little about New York. “In her novels, Manhattan is nameless, bare as a field, stripped of its byways, its fanciful, fabricated, overwhelming reality, its hugely imposing and unalterable alienation from the rest of the country—the glitter of its beginnings and enduring modernity as a world city.”12 One wishes that Hardwick had explained more fully why she thought New York was unalterably alienated from the rest of the country. Hardwick occasionally throws out generalizations without further elaboration. She was aware of this tendency in her writing. “I don’t know why I am so hopelessly led to condensation in both my fiction and my essays. Some people fi nd it hard to follow my meaning because I don’t spell it out, not entirely.” In an essay on Henry James’s Washington Square, she writes, “the city, its streets, its fluid, inconstant, nervewrung landscape, had a claim upon Henry’s imagination.”13 Are the landscapes of all large cities not fluid and inconstant? In an essay on Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Hardwick uses the word “Manhattanism.” Melville’s story, she says, has “nothing of the daunting hungry ‘Manhattanism’ of Whitman.” The quotation marks around Manhattanism suggest that she is aware of the term’s oddness. She quotes two lines from Whitman: “O an intense life, full to repletion and varied! / The life of the theatre, bar-room, huge hotel, for me!”14 (They are from “Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun.”) According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “Manhattanism” was coined by the architecture critic Rem Koolhaas in 1978, five years before Hardwick used it, to signify “a culture or ideology associated with modern-day life in a large city (spec. New York).” If Koolhaas associates Manhattanism with “hyper- density,” Hardwick associates Manhattanism with energy. New York attracts ambitious and energetic men of commerce— schemers and wheeler- dealers. It also attracts ambitious and energetic writers and painters. Bartleby has nothing in common with such people. Melville’s story, Hardwick rightly says, is “a sort of fable of inanition.”15 Manhattanism, Hardwick implies, also stands for transience, “a life lived in transition.” She speaks of “the undomesticity of a great city like

186

Elizabeth Hardwick

New York, undomestic in the ways other cities are not.” She notes that in Whitman’s day many men lived in boarding houses. “Whitman did a lot of ‘boarding round,’ as he called it.” Many people “lived in a space that is not biography . . . an escape from the hometown and the homestead, an escape from the given.”16 She uses the past tense, but she seems to be referring to the present as well. Manhattan may have a high percentage of deracinated, transient people. Bartleby is a transient, but he “is not a true creature of Manhattan” for a different reason. “He shuns the streets and is unmoved by the moral, religious, acute, obsessive, beautiful ideal of Consumption.” Bartleby is not interested in crowds, shoppers, or department stores. He is not interested in anything. Nevertheless, Hardwick sees Manhattanism in Bartleby. “There is something of Manhattan in Bartleby and especially in his resistance to amelioration.”17 Hardwick’s generalization is not persuasive. Most people, not just residents of Manhattan, resist amelioration. In the last paragraph of “Bartleby in Manhattan,” Hardwick mentions Manhattanism again: “There is Manhattanism in the bafflement Bartley represents to the alive and steady conscience of the lawyer who keeps going on and on in his old democratic, consecrated endurance.”18 She seems to be saying that baff lement is a characteristic of Manhattanism, but Bartleby is not like anyone else in the story— and he is probably not like anyone else in Manhattan. He is baffl ing— and exasperating. Manhattanism, a term Hardwick does not fully clarify, abets the Manhattan mystique—the notion that Manhattan (not the other four boroughs of New York) is utterly different from other American cities. Walkers in the City In several short stories Hardwick doesn’t talk about what is distinctive about Manhattan. Instead, she describes the lives of a wide variety of New Yorkers, many of whom are from elsewhere. All are walkers in the city. “I want to go out for a walk” says Dr. Felix Hoffman in “The Temptations of Dr. Hoff man,” a short story that appeared in 1946, when Hardwick was thirty.19 Dr. Hoff man, a prominent German Protestant theologian, lives with his wife and daughter in an apartment on Riverside Drive. The narrator, who lives in the same building, befriends the family, but she doesn’t know what to make of the theologian, and she

West Side Stories

187

doesn’t understand the currents of feeling in the Hoff man household. She only knows that when Dr. Hoffman is angry with his wife or daughter, he goes out for a walk. One night, before going to bed, the narrator looks out the window and sees Dr. Hoff man walking. “It had stopped snowing and the Drive was almost deserted except for the buses that went by from time to time. As I stood there I saw Dr. Hoff man walking below. I recognized his posture and when he stopped to cross under the streetlight I got a glimpse of his face, but I couldn’t see him clearly enough to know what mood he might be in.” A man walking at night under a streetlight: the scene could be a painting by Edward Hopper. Dr. Hoff man is a mysterious man with a past that he will not reveal. Has Dr. Hoff man lost his faith? The narrator does not know. She eventually becomes weary of thinking about the question. The theologian— a solitary walker—baffles the narrator, just as Bartleby baffled the narrator of Melville’s story. In “The Oak and the Axe,” a man and his wife go for a walk in New York, but the walk is not satisfactory. “She found that when she forced an afternoon walk on both of them, they were likely to return more worn and silent than before.” The woman is Clara Church, a successful magazine editor who recently lost her job. Her husband, Henry Dean, is a man of leisure who lives on a small inheritance. When Clara fi rst met Henry, she was impressed by his knowledge of Old New York. “His mind . . . was nostalgic and remembering. The Murray Hill Hotel, the Lafayette café, the Men’s Bar at the Ritz- Carlton, Mrs. Vanderbilt’s Fifth Avenue mansion lighted for the evening, the brownstone Dutch Reformed Church at Forty-eighth Street—the thundering demolition of these beloved New York structures still echoed in his heart.” She enjoyed Henry’s company, but he warned her that he was indolent. “I can’t get rid of this genuine stagnation at the core.” Eventually they marry. The marriage is fi ne when Clara is working, but when she loses her job she realizes that her presence disturbs Henry’s routine. “Only now that Clara was without a job did she realize how busy she had been and how little their marriage had altered Henry’s life. He had his rhythm, which kept him from putting a bullet in his head.” Henry is a flâneur. He wanders around the city— sitting in Washington Square, having coffee in drugstores, going to the Metropolitan Museum. Clara, he feels, is silently rebuking him for his indolent ways, so he decides to leave her—moving back to the old hotel he had lived

188

Elizabeth Hardwick

in on West 57th Street. She has gotten in the way of the life he likes to lead. “The Purchase” is a witty story about a very different walker in the city. Johnson Palmer, a successful painter from Virginia, walks from his apartment on Park Avenue (he brags that it is rent controlled) to a loft on Hudson Street in the West Village. He ostensibly wants to see the work of a younger painter, but he mainly is interested in the painter’s wife. Palmer is not indolent like Henry Dean; he is ambitious and energetic. “New York was glorious; he could walk down the open avenues and see all the wonder and possibility of the city as if he had just come from Virginia.” Palmer is also self-satisfied. “He was sometimes gnawed by doubts and regrets, but he was also supported by solid assets: by Alice [his wife], by his friends, his charm, his freedom, his delight in a thousand pleasures. Feeling a superb access of energy, he went on past the midtown area, which was his usual destination, and made his way down to the Village.” Palmer soon gets his comeuppance. He becomes entangled in an aff air with the painter’s wife. She agrees to the affair because she is bored with her life; she wants the wealthy Palmer to show her a good time. The affair unsettles Palmer; he is disturbed because the woman doesn’t love him, and he is annoyed because she dictates the logistics of the aff air. He loses his exuberance. “In the afternoon, he walked down Third Avenue, idly looking in the shopwindows. Palmer was so much accustomed to popularity—to easy, gratifying relations with people—that he found his present situation wounding.” The painter’s wife is one of Hardwick’s best creations. She is a matterof-fact woman who is not impressed by artists. “All you painters do is fool around, when any other man would be trying to make a buck or two.” By fooling around, she means going on long walks, which her husband likes to do. She also means having affairs. The stories Hardwick wrote in the 1940s and 1950s have a traditional narrative structure. The story usually ends when the main character fi nds out something about himself or herself. In the 1970s Hardwick argued that traditional narratives cannot do justice to the nature of modern life— especially life in New York. She began to write stories in which the narrative element is nonex istent or weak. At their best these stories are mysterious and haunting accounts of life in New York; at their worst they are exasperatingly obscure. In “Cross-Town,” published in 1980, Hardwick attempts to follow Tolstoy’s dictum: “make it strange.” We begin in the present: “In the

West Side Stories

189

evening there was a moon” that hung over Lexington Avenue “where the stores were at last closed and where many little shoes and blouses were enchained for the night’s sleep.” We seem to be in a fairy tale— a tongue-in-cheek one. Hardwick is not a solemn writer. She often makes fun of her own imaginings. The narrator of the story says: “Sometimes while waiting for a taxi at Seventy-ninth Street, after midnight, it is possible, with a certain amount of effort or with a little too much wine, to imagine the city returned to trees, old footpaths, and clear, untroubled waters.” She imagines New York before it was settled. In one sentence she talks about pirates and “the first embezzling stockbroker.” While riding in a taxi, the narrator thinks about post– Civil War New York. “As for me, I do not miss the carriages or lament the old New York horse droppings in front of the mansions in the West Thirties.” She imagines a resplendent party during the Gilded Age, where tycoons are accompanied by attractive young women. “Goddesses on the arm of plain, unimpressive gods, running to shortness, but shrewd as trolls down in the ground where the minerals are.” The reverie ends when the taxi arrives at the narrator’s house. “My neighbor can be seen walking her dog.” So many walkers in New York are dog walkers. A few pages later the narrator is worried about her dogwalking neighbor. “Yet how often she is on the street late at night, sometimes at one end of the block and then again at the other. It is troubling.” The narrator talks about New York’s past; she also talks about various people she knows in New York who are not from New York. A painter and his wife, who are from New Haven, live in a “large, light apartment on Seventh Avenue in midtown.” A man and woman from Louisville tell her they are moving permanently to an apartment on York Avenue. What is the point of these disconnected thoughts? The narrator is trying to figure out what New York means to her. “New York. Even when you have been here so long, can it be your autobiography?” Her deepest emotions have nothing to do with New York. “Not the scene of fi rst love, disillusionment, parents, family, formation.” New York is mainly a daily hassle about little things. “Has my reservation, my appointment been confi rmed? Perhaps yes and maybe not.” The narrator of “Cross-Town” fl its from one topic to another— talking about odd news items she sees on television or about New York’s weather, which she writes about as if she writing a mythic tale. “The

190

Elizabeth Hardwick

cold winds blow from the north, from empty space with fir trees like great chandeliers of ice.” In the last paragraph she talks about Rousseau. “Surely it was thinking about himself and the meaning of his life that brought Rousseau to paranoia.” Why mention Rousseau, a solitary walker in the French and Swiss countryside? Hardwick seems to be saying that it is foolish to think about oneself too much. It is also foolish to think about New York too much. Lonely New Yorkers, she implies, think too much about everything. Darryl Pinckney calls the story “a hymn to the city,” but the narrator does not seem impressed by the people who live in New York.20 Manhattan is fi lled with deracinated people, obstinate people. “What obstinacy is in the air. A whole city built on obstinacy. Don’t yield.” In 1985, Hardwick told Pinckney: “I don’t have many plots and perhaps as a justification I sometimes think: If I want a plot I’ll watch Dallas.”21 Yet, after writing “Cross-Town” Hardwick took a few steps back toward a traditional narrative. The plot is weak in “On the Eve,” but there is a coherent narrative. It is about a day in the life of a successful New York intellectual, a man who likes to walk in the city. An omniscient narrator begins: “On the loveliest of winter mornings in New York City, un enfant de siècle, nearly fifty years old, is walking with a brisk, almost military purposefulness down Broadway.” Hardwick is never sympathetic to men who walk briskly and self-confidently. They usually are smug and self-satisfied. In the next paragraph we learn the man’s last name. “He, Ackermann, moves along with a sort of athleticism of the brain, a refreshing jog of ideas, and a bit of concern for the future of his lungs and arteries.” By not giving Ackermann a fi rst name, the narrator wants the reader to look at him from a distance. The narrator repeats the military analogy. “He is impressive as he goes down the blowsy street like a commandant of the regiment. . . . And if his pace is interrupted by the arrogant fleetness of truant youth or the stumbles of shabby old people— no matter.” Ackermann enjoys being an influential intellectual. The narrator jarringly asks: “What is the purpose of your life, Ackermann?” Why ask such a question of a character unless we are meant to think that Ackermann is asking himself the question, which seems unlikely. A teacher, a writer, and a critic, Ackermann is a busy man. The narrator speaks of Ackermann’s “travels, consultation, his dominating position on two conservative foundations, his acquaintance with the

West Side Stories

191

president, his books and articles.” Ackermann, we learn, “is a neoconservative, something of a hero of the counterrevolution; and handsome as a minor fi lm star with his strong head and coarse curly hair.” Hardwick did not like neoconservatives. In her interview with Pinckney she said: “I am not sympathetic with the political attitudes of certain members of the New Right who happen to be Jewish intellectuals.”22 Like Kazin, she thought neoconservative intellectuals were arrogant and smug, like Ackermann. But Hardwick was less politically self-righteous than Kazin, so her satirical portrait of a neoconservative intellectual is not as harsh as Kazin’s would have been. She softens her portrait of Ackermann in several ways. She shows him to be a dutiful brother. He visits his sister Miriam, who is recovering from pneumonia. Ackermann dislikes Miriam’s left-wing opinions—Miriam admires Castro and the Sandinistas— and her disorderly life, but he prefers not to argue with her. Miriam, who produces documentaries for a television station, is a self-indulgent person who “is late for every appointment.” She begins to cry and complain. “With an almost scriptural regularity she checks off the ordained rhythms of her life. Feckless children, uncertain income, boring husband, and recalcitrant lover.” Miriam is like one of the people the narrator of Sleepless Nights meets at a party on the upper West Side. After leaving his sister, Ackermann is walking on Broadway again when he sees “a terrible figure of solitude approaching him.” It is a minor conservative intellectual whom Ackermann finds tedious. The man, who “has written a few things soon forgotten,” is a regular at conservative functions. The man “appears at conservative meetings and panel discussions and in the open forums sits in the front rows with his crooked, knowing smile and gives off somehow the intense glitter of his roiling disconnections.” The man buttonholes Ackermann and tells him of “all the attacks Ackermann and his kind had received in magazines and newspapers in the last months.” Ackermann fi nds it hard to pay attention to him, given the distractions of walking on Broadway. Ackerman finally gets rid of the man by hailing a cab. Ackermann lives in a “new co-op in the East Eighties,” but he does not go home. He walks now on Madison Avenue, “a feline thoroughfare with goods and mirrors meant to intimidate bone and flesh.” Walking past clothing stores, restaurants, and a bookstore, Ackermann ruminates about contemporary clothing styles and modern novels, but he mainly is thinking about the memoir he is writing, which he hopes to work on

192

Elizabeth Hardwick

for the next ten days because his wife is attending a conference in Sweden. Daydreaming about his life, he remembers Joanna, an heiress with whom he had an affair ten years ago. “Joanna lingers in his thoughts.” She was devoted to many liberal causes. He recently saw a picture of her in the Village Voice: “Joanna in the shrieking bowels of Penn Station, trying to persuade a homeless woman to go off to a shelter.” Back in his apartment, Ackermann continues to think about Joanna and about his life in general. “Here is the snowy night, die Winterreise, the solitude and sleepy nostalgia, the down of memories, the years shuffl ing away, the dust of youth.” He decides to go to Penn Station. “With Joanna he will rescue a homeless lady.” Why does Ackermann, who supposedly is not an impulsive man, go to Penn Station in the middle of the night? Perhaps he simply wants to do something because he realizes that he has spent most of his life writing and talking. “This life at the desk, in the lecture hall, and at the magazines, the meetings, the opinions, groupings, alliances, friends and enemies— enemies, there’s always that.” His attempt to do something comes to naught. He doesn’t find Joanna in Penn Station, which has more or less shut down for the night. “Only a few taverns and one big magazine stand are awake in the unswept gloom.” He sees a homeless woman but he does not approach her. He goes outside to catch a taxi. “All he meets as he waits for a cab is a transvestite in a muskrat coat, hobbling home on sequined heels.” “On the Eve” describes two famous New York streets, Broadway and Madison Avenue. It also mentions two famous buildings: the Ansonia (on Broadway between 73rd and 74th Streets) and the AT&T building (on Madison Avenue and 56th Street). In Seize the Day, Saul Bellow describes the Ansonia as if it were a building in an Expressionist painting. “It looks like a baroque palace from Prague or Munich enlarged a hundred times, with towers, domes, huge swells and bubbles of metal gone green from exposure, iron fretwork, and festoons. . . . Under the changes of weather it may look like marble or like sea water, black as slate in the fog, white as tufa in sunlight. This morning it looked like the image of itself reflected in deep water, white and cumulous above, with cavernous distortions underneath.” Hardwick’s description of the urban landscape usually is precise. By contrast, her description of Ackermann’s thinking is vague. Ackerman, she says, “is writing a memoir, a political autobiography full of messages as blunt and demanding as those of the prophets of the house of Ahab.” She then compares Ackermann to a Slavophile. “And yet he

West Side Stories

193

wishes it [the memoir] to be here and there nostalgic and poetical since he is fi rst and last a student of literature and, like a Slavophile of the last century, mystical in his native fervors, his passionate, dream-tossed Americanism.” “Slavophile” is an odd term to use to describe a neoconservative New York Jewish intellectual, but “dream-tossed Americanism” is clear enough: Hardwick insinuates that neoconservatives are mindlessly patriotic. The story, with its many allusions to the political wrangles of the last quarter of the twentieth century, may puzzle future readers, but it does get one thing right about New York: its frenetic and overheated intellectual life. In the late 1960s she complained to Mary McCarthy that New York was getting on her nerves. “Here, news, events, take up all of one’s time. . . . This hateful sense of crisis, or of just something new happening every minute, destroys the mind and the sense of wanting to do anything except wait for the next ‘happening.’ ” Two years later she complained again to McCarthy that “the phone rings all day,” and one has to go to plays all the time and there is the “occasional unwarranted invitation, malignant growths of mail, bills, anxiety about the cost of things, the look of things.”23 In an undated essay written in the 1970s or the 1980s, Hardwick said it was dangerous to go for a walk in New York, especially if you are old. “In New York City the very old have become victims of the very young. Poor, crippled people, eighty-two years old or even in one case one hundred and three years old, are beaten, killed for two dollars, ninety-five cents, for nothing. . . . Here in the city the worst thing can happen to a nation has happened: we are a people afraid of its youth.”24 New Yorkers were not afraid of all young people. They were afraid of young people who dressed a certain way, who looked as if they might be members of a gang. Hardwick does not seem to have thought of leaving New York. In 1985 she said to Pinckney: “Yes, I’m faithful to New York, one might say.” She calls New York “our great metropolis.” Yet in 1990 she wrote “New York City: Crash Course,” in which speaks of “our hysterical, battered and battering, pot-holed bankrupt metropolis.”25 The essay, which she did not reprint in a subsequent collection of her essays, is an impressionistic survey of ugly events in New York’s past. Perhaps she didn’t reprint it because by the mid-1990s her view of New York had become less negative, as had the view of many other New Yorkers. For instance, in June 2013, the essayist Roger Angell wrote about the astonishing transformation of New York: “Burglaries

194

Elizabeth Hardwick

and street robberies in New York City have declined by an astounding eighty per cent since 1990, and even lifelong Manhattanites like me have almost forgotten the mixture of anxiety and scary anecdote we all shared back in the seventies and eighties, whatever our address.”26 In the last paragraph of “New York City: Crash Course,” Hardwick seems to be interrogating someone who has moved to New York. “From where have you come and why are you here?” She says that “each resident of the recalcitrant city [is] a puzzle.” She implies that newcomers tend to stay, though they endlessly complain about living in New York. “Once here a lingering infection seems to set in and the streets are fi lled with the complaints and whines of the hypochondriac who will not budge.”27 As if she were showing New York to a visitor, Hardwick writes, “Here it is, that’s all, the place itself, shadowy, ever promising and ever withholding, a bad mother, queen of the double-bind. . . . Nevertheless.” Then she quotes Whitman: “Give me faces and streets— give me these phantoms incessant and endless along the trottoirs!”28 New York, Hardwick implies, is a place where ambitious people in the arts often fail—or are not as successful as they had hoped to be. Many also fail in their personal relationships, so they end up lonely and depressed. Yet, they stay in New York because the city is cosmopolitan and exhilarating. Moreover, to paraphrase Hardwick, a certain deracination appeals to them.

13

Colson Whitehead and Teju Cole Disoriented, Deracinated, Exhilarated

I

n “The Synthetic Sublime,” written in 1999, Cynthia Ozick asked: “Where are those urban walkers and scribes—Joseph Mitchell, Meyer Berger, Kate Simon, Alfred Kazin?”1 Berger, who died in 1959, wrote a column (“About New York”) for the New York Times for many years. A collection of his columns, Meyer Berger’s New York, was published in 2004. Kate Simon, who died in 1992, wrote New York Places and Pleasures: An Uncommon Guidebook (1971). Simon, who came to New York from Warsaw when she was four, also wrote an autobiography, Bronx Primitive: Portraits in Childhood (1982). In the decade after Ozick wrote her essay, however, the city continued to attract urban walkers and scribes—among them Colson Whitehead and Teju Cole. Whitehead, a native New Yorker born in 1969, is the author of The Colossus of New York, a collection of thirteen short essays about the city. Reviewers compared Whitehead’s book, published in 2003, to E. B. White’s essay “Here Is New York,” but Whitehead’s prose is very different from White’s. The narrator of Whitehead’s book is a tour guide who sounds like a pot-smoking Mad Hatter. He is zany, even silly, bent on dizzying the reader with a whirlwind of surrealistic thoughts. Here is what he says about Grand Central Station: “Of course the Dutch were quite shocked to fi nd Grand Central Station under that big pile of dirt. Alas the Indians and their strict no-refund-without-receipt policy. And, lo, as the earth cooled, Grand Central bubbled up through miles of magma, lodged in the crust of this island, settled here. The fi rst immigrant. Still unassimilated. Ever indigestible.”2 Whitehead plays a 195

196

Colson Whitehead and Teju Cole

comic riff on Henry James’s notion that New York is a “chaos of confusion and change.” Whitehead’s narrator likes goofy aphorisms. In a chapter entitled “Rain,” he notes, “Forming an attachment to an umbrella is the shortest route to heartbreak in this town” (62). In “Subway,” he talks about gum laws, not gun laws: “Accidentally touch the underside of the seat and become an advocate for stricter gum laws” (52). In “Downtown,” a paragraph begins: “It’s a full moon. Lunar effects are readily observable in emergency rooms and ATM vestibules. People need more money. If only they could withdraw common sense” (131). The notion of an ATM offering people common sense is bizarre but brilliant. The narrator walks on Broadway, but Whitehead’s Broadway has nothing in common with the lower Broadway of Whitman and Melville or the upper Broadway of Kazin and Hardwick. The chapter entitled “Broadway” begins, “Once a year he takes the walk. There can be no destination. No map. Live here long enough and you have a compass. . . . He will ask no questions this day. The street will not scheme this day. Let it happen. These are the terms of the truce he has made with Broadway.” In the second paragraph he says, “only suckers try to double-cross Broadway and it always ends up in one-way tickets out of town” (73). The sentence is jarring because its subject changes from suckers to the mysterious “it.” Whitehead is suggesting that a walk on Broadway— a walk anywhere in the city—is disorienting. The short sentences he usually employs, often laced with phrases from clichés, imply that living in the city is a hallucinatory experience. “In this city you always end up where you began. Settle for extending the radius bit by bit, give up on more. He’s lived here all his life and friends flee and she fled, too, but Broadway is still here” (75). The walker on Broadway seems to be in a daze. “He walks and then he slows. Kinda tired. No small bit hungry. Scrutinize menus in windows for hearty fare.” There seems to be a train of thought in this passage, but then it disappears. “The prices are outrageous, he checks his wallet and touching his pocket becomes mortal again, reduced to what he pays in rent. No more strolling, he must stop, because Broadway only gives this once a year, and grudgingly” (84). Whitehead often seems to be describing a dream about walking in the city rather than a real walk. In this dream world, odd aphorisms are delivered. “If only there were zoning laws to regulate strange thoughts. Keep them in other neighborhoods” (80). A few sentences

Disoriented, Deracinated, Exhilarated 197

later, the narrator says: “Forget this block because there’s nothing in your size” (81). The people who inhabit Whitehead’s dream city are nameless and featureless, as if to suggest that life in New York is a solipsistic blur in which random people enter and exit one’s life. Whitehead says very little about the urban landscape, even though there are chapters about places in the city: “Broadway,” “The Port Authority” (New York’s main bus terminal), “Central Park,” “Coney Island,” “Brooklyn Bridge,” and “Times Square.” A chapter entitled “Brooklyn Bridge” makes fun of writers who draw profound meanings from walking across the bridge. “Let’s pause a sec to be cowed by this magnificent skyline. So many arrogant edifices, it’s like walking into a jerk festival. Maybe you recognize it from posters and television. Looks like a movie set, a false front of industry” (101). In this chapter, the walker is a nameless “she” whom the narrator addresses. When she reaches the middle of the bridge, the narrator says, “Don’t look back, you will be shocked by negligible progress. A man pitched a tent here once and was hauled away. He told the police, I renounce all boroughs. You have the right to remain. You have the right to shout to the gods. If you have no philosophy one will be appointed to you” (105). The rest of the paragraph is a whirl of random thoughts about tourists on the bridge and the men who built the bridge. The last chapter, “JFK,” describes someone leaving the city on a plane from John F. Kennedy International Airport. The narrator sounds as if he is talking about himself, but then he seems to be talking to someone else: “Wake up. With a shudder fi nally kicked out of the dream. . . . Settle in for the journey and forget. Please forget. Try to forget bit by bit, it will be easier on you. Leave it behind.” Whitehead ends his antic ruminations by intimating that New York is a phantasmagoria. “Then the plane tilts in its escape and over the gray wing the city explodes into view with all its miles and spires and inscrutable hustle and as you try to comprehend this sight you realize that you were never really there at all” (158). New York is a bad dream but it is also a real place characterized by “inscrutable hustle.” Whitehead ends the chapter on Broadway with: “He’ll be back next year. Around the same spot on the calendar depending on frontal systems and his own inner weather. Because they understand each other, him and Broadway. He will come once a year until he dies and another takes his place. Move those feet. Walk and walk. These are the terms of the truce he has made with Broadway” (85).

198

Colson Whitehead and Teju Cole

Walking in Search of One’s Identity “Walk and walk” would be a good epigraph for Teju Cole’s novel Open City, published in 2011. The main character, a psychiatrist, spends most of his spare time walking in the city. Cole’s prose has nothing in common with Whitehead’s. It is dry, witty, and ornate. Open City, though, has a lot in common with Sleepless Nights. In both novels the narrative element is weak, though Cole’s novel is more plotted than Hardwick’s. Both novels are the ruminations of a deracinated New Yorker— a person who has come to the city from somewhere else. Both narrators talk about themselves, but not in the way Kazin does. They are reserved. There is a mystery about them. The novels differ in two respects. Hardwick’s narrator mainly thinks about resilience; Cole’s narrator mainly thinks about identity. Second, Cole’s narrator walks in many areas of Manhattan, from Wall Street to Washington Heights, so we learn more about the city from Cole’s narrator than from Hardwick’s. Open City, like Sleepless Nights, probably has many autobiographical elements, but Cole’s narrator should not be confused with the author. Cole’s parents are both Nigerian. In the novel, the narrator’s father is Nigerian but his mother is German. Cole is an art historian. The narrator of Open City is a psychiatrist. The novel opens: “And so when I began to go on evening walks last fall, I found Morningside Heights an easy place from which to set out into the city.”3 (Morningside Heights, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, is where he lives.) “These walks, a counterpoint to my busy days at the hospital, steadily lengthened, taking me farther and farther afield each time, so that I often found myself at quite a distance from home late at night, and was compelled to return by subway. In this way, at the beginning of the fi nal year of my psychiatry fellowship, New York City worked itself into my life at walking pace” (3). The narrator, whose given name is Julius, no last name offered, explains why he walks. “The walks met a need: they were a release from the tightly regulated mental environment of work, and once I discovered them as therapy, they became the normal thing, and I forgot what life had been like before I started walking” (7). Like Kazin, the narrator needs to walk. Walking helps him think, but it also helps him keep his brooding under control. The offspring of a white mother, from whom he is estranged—we never learn why— and a black father who died when he was fourteen,

Disoriented, Deracinated, Exhilarated 199

Julius dislikes it when people he meets presume a connection by virtue of his African origin or his skin color. He gets into a taxi driven by an African, but he is thinking about something so he forgets to greet the driver. The driver feels slighted. “Hey, I’m African just like you, why you do this?” (40). Julius makes a halfhearted apology, but he is annoyed. “I was in no mood for people who tried to lay claims on me” (40). Many black people try to lay claims on him. A black postal clerk calls him “Brother Julius” and proceeds to recite poems he has written while no one else is waiting in line. Julius says, “I made a mental note to avoid that par ticu lar post office in the future” (188). When Julius is sitting in a restaurant, a guard, Kenneth, from a museum he has visited recognizes him and tries to befriend him by saying that he is from Barbuda and that he is really interested in African culture. Julius says: “Kenneth was, by now, starting to wear on me, and I began to wish he would go away” (53). Though Julius refuses to allow people to lay claims on him because of his race, he takes a strong interest in New York’s African American past. He visits a memorial for the site of an eighteenth-century African burial ground in Lower Manhattan. He knows a great deal about the history of blacks in New York. The city, he says, “long remained the most important port for the building, outfitting, insuring, and launching of slavers’ ships” (163). Walking on Ninth Avenue, he thinks about the draft riots in 1863, when many blacks were lynched, and he soon feels as if he has walked into the past. “That afternoon, during which I fl itted in and out of myself, when time became elastic and voices cut out of the past into the present, the heart of the city was gripped by what seemed to be a commotion from an earlier time. I feared being caught up in what, it seemed to me, were draft riots” (74). Julius thinks he sees the body of a lynched man dangling from a tree, but he soon realizes it is “a less ominous thing: dark canvas sheeting on a construction scaffold, twirling in the wind” (75). The incident is plausible because Julius, like Alfred Kazin, is preoccupied with New York’s past. At times he looks at New York as if he were an archaeologist. Before the World Trade Towers were built, “there had been a bustling network of little streets traversing this part of town. . . . Gone, too, was the old Washington Market, the active piers, the fishwives, the Christian Syrian enclave that was established there in the late 1800s. . . . And before that? What Lenape paths lay buried beneath the rubble? The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten” (58–59).

200

Colson Whitehead and Teju Cole

What does New York’s past have to do with him? He is a Nigerian immigrant. His family never was enslaved. Nevertheless, he does feel some emotional tie to American blacks. “Ellis Island was a symbol mostly for European refugees. Blacks, ‘we blacks,’ had known rougher ports of entry” (55). Julius, though, knows it is a stretch for him to say “we blacks.” He is never sure what story is his story: the slave story or the immigrant story. He fantasizes that a New York subway line will take him to a past in which he fits in. “I wanted to fi nd the line that connected me to my own part in these stories” (59). As the novel progresses, he concludes that no such line exists, and that he has many pasts: the past of race and nationality and the past of his own memories and interests. Julius’s best friend is not a Nigerian immigrant or an American black, but instead a gay Japanese American, a retired professor of early English literature whose course Julius took in college. When Julius visits Professor Saito in his apartment on Central Park South, they talk about Beowulf. Professor Saito also tells him about having been interned during World War II. In the novel, many people who come to New York from elsewhere have stories to tell. A Liberian named Saidu tells the most heartbreaking story. Trying to emigrate to the United States, Saidu makes his way through several West African countries to Portugal, from which he fl ies to New York. When he deplanes at JFK, he is taken into custody. Locked in a detention facility in Queens for undocumented immigrants, Saidu is gloomy about his prospects. “Now they will return to me to my port of entry, which is Lisbon” (70). Julius visits him at his girlfriend’s urging, her church having organized bimonthly visits to the detention facility. Saidu asks Julius to visit him again if he is not deported, but he does not do so. Julius then breaks up with his girlfriend, so there is no one to urge him to go there. Julius says, “I was the listener, the compassionate African who paid attention to the details of someone else’s life and struggle. I had fallen in love with that idea myself ” (70). But there is only so much compassionate listening he can do. Because he is a psychiatrist, he has to listen to people’s stories all day. One of his patients is a historian of Native American descent. She writes about the extinction of Native American tribes by the early European settlers. She tells him, “there are almost no Native Americans in New York City, and very few in all of the Northeast. It isn’t right that people are not terrified by this because this is a

Disoriented, Deracinated, Exhilarated 201

terrifying thing that happened to a vast population. And it’s not in the past, it is still with us today; at least, it’s still with me” (27).” The Native American historian is obsessed with her people’s past. Professor Saito is not. He talks about what happened to his people, including himself, but he does not let the past take over his life. He is dying. On Julius’s last visit, Professor Saito says to him, “The reality, Julius, is that we are alone out here” (182). Julius suffers from a minor identity crisis when he cannot remember the PIN of his ATM card. He becomes flustered and disoriented. He compares himself to a minor character in a Jane Austen novel— someone who has a “mental weakness” because of a nervous condition. His memory of Jane Austen’s novels is a component of his identity. So is the music of Mahler, which he loves. After learning that Professor Saito has died, Julius walks in Chinatown. He goes into a store on a back street. “The shop . . . was a microcosm of Chinatown itself, with an endless array of curious objects” (190). He is the only customer. “In the midst of this cornucopia sat an old woman, who, having looked up briefly when I came in, was now fully reabsorbed in her Chinese newspaper.” Julius feels exhilarated. “Standing there in that quiet, mote-fi lled shop . . . I felt as if I had stumbled into a kink in time and place, that I could easily have been in any one of the many countries to which Chinese merchants had traveled, and, for as long as trade had been global, set up their goods for sale” (191). He has temporarily escaped from being preoccupied with his identity. The woman in the shop says something to Julius in Chinese and gestures outside. There is a Chinese marching band on the street. “The old woman and I watched them from the eerie calm of the shop, in which only the ceiling fans were audible, and row after row of these members of a Chinese marching band marched past, with their tubas, trombones, clarinets, trumpets” (191). Julius experiences a moment of harmony and exaltation— a moment out of time. “I followed them with my eyes until the procession trickled beyond the last of the bronze Buddhas that sat looking outward from the shop’s window. The Buddhas smiled at the scene with familiar serenity, and all the smiles seemed to me one smile, that of those who had stepped beyond human worries, the archaic smile that also played on the lips on the funeral steles of Greek kouroi, smiles that portended not plea sure but rather total detachment” (191).The sounds of the band also remind him of Mahler’s Second Symphony. The song they were playing “matched the simple sincerity of

202

Colson Whitehead and Teju Cole

songs I had last sung in the schoolyard of the Nigerian Military School, songs from the Anglican songbook Songs of Praise” (192). The moment of harmony, a moment where all identities have merged and the Buddha’s smile and the kouroi’s smile are one, cannot last. Julius’s race is inevitably a factor in his relations with other people. He is in Central Park with an African American woman and a Nigerian woman who is the sister of an old friend. The Nigerian woman tells him she has a boyfriend. Suddenly she says to Julius, “Are you trying to fi nd out if he’s black?” (203). He is startled. “I assured her that no, I had no such interest” (203). Julius’s race comes up unexpectedly again. One of his patients is a Navy veteran of the World War II who is suffering from depression. When Julius is talking to the patient about possible medications, the veteran interrupts him: “Doctor, I just want to tell you how proud I am to come here, and see a young black man like yourself in that white coat, because things haven’t ever been easy for us, and no one has ever given us nothing without a struggle” (210). In the next chapter, Julius sees two young blacks on the street. “They acknowledged me, and I them” (211). When he sees them again, he says, “There had earlier been, it occurred to me, only the most tenuous of connections between us, looks on a street corner by strangers, a gesture of mutual respect based on our being young, black, male, in other words, on our being ‘brothers’ ” (212). A few seconds later the men beat him up badly and take his wallet and his phone. Toward the end of the novel, Julius walks from the hospital where he works to a street in Washington Heights that faces the Hudson River. Julius is going to a party given by the Nigerian woman and her boyfriend. As he walks on what might be called upper-upper Broadway, he is very much aware of New York’s “chaos of confusion and change,” as Henry James put it. The neighborhood changes abruptly from a street dominated by medical professionals to a street populated by Dominicans and other Latin American shoppers. Near the George Washington Bridge he walks past an architecturally bizarre building that in the past had been the Loews 175th Street Theater. It is now called the United Palace, and it serves as a church for several congregations. Six blocks farther, he passes the Coliseum, which once had been the third largest movie theater in the country. “Now, greatly altered, it had become the New Coliseum Theatre, and it shared space with a large pharmacy and a hodgepodge of other storefronts” (235). A few blocks farther and he is in a quiet residential street, “a richer whiter neighborhood” (236).

Disoriented, Deracinated, Exhilarated 203

Julius’s walk in Washington Heights reminds him of a visit he once paid to the Cloisters Museum in nearby Fort Tryon Park, where he saw a herb garden. This leads to a digression on herbal medicine and some remarks about the sixteenth-century Swiss humanist Paracelsus. This stream of thought may seem pretentious. After all, how many people walking in New York end up thinking about Paracelsus? Yet it makes sense because Julius is a psychiatrist, and Paracelsus was interested in a question that psychiatrists wrestle with: how to understand people. According to Julius, “Paracelsus developed a fourfold theory around how the light of nature is manifest in individual men: through the limbs, through the head and face, through the form of the body as a whole, and through bearing, or the way a man carries himself ” (237). The brief digression about Paracelsus leads to a brief discussion of psychiatry, in which Julius concludes that “the mind is opaque to itself, and it’s hard to tell where, precisely, these areas of opacity are” (238). He remembers telling a friend: “What we [mental health professionals] knew . . . was so much less than what remained in darkness” (239). Julius is talking about his profession, but he is also talking about himself. At the party in Washington Heights, Julius learns something disturbing about himself. Out of the blue, the Nigerian woman accuses him of “forcing” himself on her eighteen years ago. “Things don’t go away just because you choose to forget them. . . . But will you say something now? Will you say something?” (245). Julius does not respond. A few pages before the woman’s accusation, Julius says, “From my point of view, thinking about the story of my life, even without claiming any especially heightened sense of ethics, I am satisfied that I have hewed close to the good” (243).After telling the reader about the woman’s accusation, Julius relates an anecdote about Nietzsche. To prove to his friends that he was right about something, Nietzsche deliberately burned himself with several lit matchsticks. “He carried the resulting scar with him for the rest of his life” (246). Is Julius still satisfied that he has “hewed close to the good,” or are we supposed to think the woman’s accusation has left a scar on Julius’s mind? The reader is not sure what to think—not even sure if the woman’s accusation is true. In the next chapter, Julius writes about his love of Mahler, and he describes a per for mance of the Ninth Symphony: “Mahler’s music is not white, or black, not old or young” (252). At the end of the concert, Julius opens the wrong door and fi nds himself on a fire escape outside the building, four floors up: “Now, I faced solitude of a rare purity. In the darkness, above the sheer drop, I could see the lights of Forty- second

204

Colson Whitehead and Teju Cole

Street flashing in the visible distance” (255). This moment is like Kazin’s moment of sublime solitude on the Brooklyn Bridge. Julius takes the subway down to 23rd Street, but instead of going home to his new apartment on West 21st Street he walks to the Hudson River. To his surprise, a man asks him if he would like to attend a boat party that is leaving soon at Chelsea Piers building. He accepts, but he feels isolated at the party. Seeing the Statue of Liberty, he remembers an anecdote about it: the Statue of Liberty was once a working lighthouse, but the light, especially in bad weather, fatally disoriented a large number of birds, which met their deaths. Is Cole saying that the experience of living in New York is so disorienting that it is dangerous? I do not think so. He is saying that for a brooding thinker like Julius, a walk in the city (or a boat ride on the Hudson) triggers a wide variety of thoughts. New York is an “open city”; its cosmopolitan culture continually surprises us. In a diner on Broadway between Duane Street and Reade Street, Julius sees a blond white man in a tracksuit teaching Chinese to a young Asian woman. In the diner an unlit neon sign reads “comida latina,” but the diner serves Chinese dishes as well as Dominican and Puerto Rican ones. Julius’s walks have been disturbing, disorienting, exhilarating, and life-threatening. They also have been an education of sorts. He has learned that just as New York is a palimpsest, he, too, is a palimpsest of sorts—a person with layers of identity. He is a Nigerian with an estranged white mother; he is a Nigerian American immigrant; he is an African American. He also has a distinctive cultural identity: he loves music, especially Mahler. Julius is unique, yet he has much in common with many residents of Manhattan. He is a lonely walker in the city.

14

The Synthetic Sublime

I

n Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time (2012), Jeff Speck argues that walkability is the key to a city’s viability: The more walkable a city is, the greater the likelihood that it will thrive.1 Most observers have said that New York is one of the most walkable cities in the world. Albert Camus, who spent a few months in New York in 1947, enjoyed walking in many areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn. After returning to France, he said: “I loved New York, with that powerful love that at times leaves you full of uncertainty and abhorrence.” Camus, Andy Martin writes, “admired colors, foodstuffs, smells, taxis, tie shops, ice cream, the ‘orgy of violent lights’ that was Broadway, a jazz bar in Harlem and the giant Camel icon of ‘an American soldier, his mouth open, puffing out clouds of real smoke.’ ”2 Like so many writers, Camus believed that New York was hard to fathom: “After so many months I know nothing about New York.”3 New York has changed a great deal since Camus walked its streets. The Third Avenue El—the last of the elevated trains to run in Manhattan—is gone, taken down in 1955. Anthony Hecht wrote a poem that alludes to the change, “Third Avenue in Sunlight.” The old Penn Station is gone, demolished in 1963. The billboard in Times Square of the Camel smoker is gone. In 1966, the billboard smoker began to puff Winstons, not Camels, and in 1999, all billboards advertising cigarettes were removed. In the decades since Camus strolled in New York, the city has added new parks, new skyscrapers, new museums, and new hotels. In 1966, the 205

206 The Synthetic Sublime

Metropolitan Opera House opened at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. In the 1980s, a private management company transformed Bryant Park, located behind the New York Public Library between Fifth and Sixth Avenues and 40th and 42nd Streets, from a seedy hangout for the homeless and for drug addicts—it was known as Needle Park—into an elegant park that features a restaurant and a fountain that turns into a skating rink.4 A major new tourist attraction is the High Line, a park built on an elevated freight rail line on Manhattan’s West Side. It runs from Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking District to West 34th Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues. The first section of the park opened in June 2009, the second section in June 2011. According to Cynthia Ozick, “more than any other metropolis of the Western world, New York disappears. It disappears and then it disappears again; or say that it metamorphoses between disappearances, so that every seventy-five years or so another city bursts out.”5 Many neighborhoods in Manhattan have changed dramatically. The Lower East Side has been gentrified. So have Soho and Tribeca. Harlem is gradually becoming gentrified. The Bowery is now home to an art museum and many upscale restaurants. In December 2010, Dan Barry visited a small new hotel, giving its history in a dizzying paragraph: “A small hotel, catering to Asian tourists, that used to be a flophouse that used to be a restaurant. That used to be a raucous music hall . . . that used to be a Yiddish theater, and an Italian theater . . . that used to be a beer hall . . . that used to be a liquor store, and a clothing store, and a hosiery store.” 6 New York’s “inscrutable hustle,” as Colson Whitehead puts it, is also transforming Canal Street. In the 1980s, Alfred Kazin wrote that Canal Street was “a marvelous flea market” where hucksters “make a living from second- and third-hand junk.” Canal Street is still a flea market, but it is gradually becoming gentrified; it has a new hotel, new condominiums, new shops— and a Maserati auto dealership just off Canal Street.7 The biggest change in New York is demographic. In 1950, there were 12,000 Chinese living in the city legally. In 2010, there were more than 650,000 Chinese in New York. Asians— Chinese, Indians, Koreans, Filipinos, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans—now constitute 13 percent of New York’s population. From 2000 to 2010 the Asian population increased by 36 percent. In the last century, the percentage of Jews in New York has declined from 28 percent to 12 percent. In 1950, more than half of the 10,000 New Yorkers living in Little Italy identified themselves as Italian American. By 2010, that had shrunk to 5 percent, and the census could not fi nd a single resident who

The Synthetic Sublime

207

had been born in Italy. Eighty-nine percent of the residents of the area who were foreign-born were born in Asia. “It’s really all Chinatown now,” one resident said.8 Owing to immigration, the city’s population is increasing. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more people are moving into New York than leaving it for the first time since 1950. The city’s population is a record-high 8.3 million people as of July 2012.9 Norman Manea, who came to the United States from Romania in 1988, agrees with Kazin that New York is a world city. In his memoir The Hooligan’s Return (2003), Manea walks on the Upper West Side. He does not focus on homeless or crazy people, but instead talks about the Upper West Side as a thriving commercial center, many of its shops run by immigrants. There is the photo shop where he is having the photo for his new ID processed; the neighborhood diner; the local Starbucks; and, of course, a McDonald’s, its entrance graced by a pair of panhandlers. Next come the Pakistani newsstand, the Indian tobacconist, the Mexican restaurant, the ladies’ dress shop, and the Korean grocery, with its large bunches of flowers and displays of yellow and green water melons, black and red and green plums, mangoes from Mexico and Haiti, white and pink grapefruit, grapes, carrots, cherries, bananas, Fuji and Granny Smith apples, roses, tulips, carnations, lilies, chrysanthemums. He is walking toward a restaurant in order to meet writer/friend “Philip”— clearly Philip Roth— and he is exhilarated by what he sees on his walk: “All the varieties of human faces and languages and ages and heights and weights people that unlikely morning, on which the survivor is celebrating the nine years of his new life.”10 Like Whitman, Howells, James, Dreiser, and Kazin, Manea celebrates New York as a magnet city— attracting immigrants from all over the world. “Immigration is . . . essential to urban success,” writes Edward Glaeser. “The growth of New York and Chicago over the last two decades is largely due to the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who have come to those cities. Cities are good for immigrants and immigrants are good for cities.” Morris J. Vogel, the president of the Lowest East Side Tenement Museum in New York, points out that immigrants are twice as likely as the native-born to start businesses. In 2011, 28 percent of all new businesses started in the United States had immigrant founders, even though immigrants make up 13 percent of the population.11

208 The Synthetic Sublime

The Tourist’s City and the Writer’s City “There is little prospect that any of the boroughs of New York will ever seriously rival Manhattan as a financial and cultural center or tourist attraction,” Eric Homberger writes in New York City: A Cultural and Literary Companion. He is probably right. Tourists will always prefer to walk in Manhattan. But what about writers? Many of them now live in Brooklyn, which has become so fashionable that in 2008 Colson Whitehead wrote an amusing piece entitled “I Write in Brooklyn. Get Over It.”12 Queens may be the best place for the twenty-fi rst-century writer/ flâneur because of its ethnic diversity. In the last chapter of Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker (1995), the narrator talks about walking in Flushing: “I love the early morning storefronts opening up one by one, shopkeepers talking as they crank their awnings down. . . . I follow the strolling Saturday families of brightly wrapped Hindus and then the black-clad Hasidim, and step into all the old churches that were once German and then Korean and are now Viet namese.” In “Someplace in Queens,” Ian Frazier writes, “Off and on, I get a thing for walking in Queens. One morning, I strayed into that borough from my more usual routes in Brooklyn, and I just kept rambling.” According to Frazier, Queens “has more ethnic diversity than any other place its size on earth.” Forty-eight percent of the population of Queens is foreign-born. Frazier talks to immigrants from Colombia, Korea, India, Pakistan, and Greece. Queens, he says, “specializes in neighborhoods that nonresidents have heard of but could never place on a map.”13 Queens has become more diverse since 1998, when Frazier’s essay appeared. In December 2012, Seth Kugel, a reporter for the New York Times, noted that it is “home to 2.2 million people, from (it seems) 2.2 million backgrounds.” Kugel describes a thirty-six-hour visit to Queens, beginning in Astoria, which had long been a Greek neighborhood but now is “wildly diverse, with Colombians, Brazilians and Slavs— and a big Middle Eastern commercial district . . . known as Little Egypt.” Kugel recommends taking the subway to Roosevelt Avenue–Jackson Heights, where you will see “a pharmacy sign that reads ‘Bangladesh Farmacia’ (to appeal to South Asian and South American constituents).” This is an area where stores change ownership rapidly, a Guatemalan restaurant, for instance, replaced by a Russian delicatessen. In this neighborhood you can also eat Indian food, Colombian food, and Uruguayan food. Take the subway to Rego Park, and you can eat in a restaurant that

The Synthetic Sublime

209

serves Bukharan Jewish cuisine from Uzbekistan. Take the subway to Flushing, and you will fi nd “New York’s most vibrant Chinatown.”14 Brian Yarvin lives in New Jersey, but he often takes the subway to Flushing because he loves walking there. When he gets off the subway, he is surprised by how quickly things change there: “Sometimes it will be just a new restaurant, or maybe a new hotel. . . . The area has an energy to it that I just want to bottle and sell.”15 When you walk in Flushing, Yarvin says, you are surrounded by food. The elevated train still runs in Queens, and Chinese street food vendors set up shop right under the elevated tracks. “At the end of the day, take a walk down Main Street. Embrace the crush of the crowds, browse in the shops, grab a few snacks and pretend for a moment that you’re in Asia. I did that while strolling there not long ago. Just as I was thinking that this was as urban as a place could be, I heard a rooster crow.”16 Are flâneurs a dying breed? When many people walk nowadays, they are in an electronic bubble, talking or texting or surfing on their cellphones or listening to music through earphones. These people pay little attention to the urban landscape. Nevertheless, it is safe to say that there will always be observant writers who saunter in New York—restless analysts pondering what to make of a city Ozick calls “faithfully inconstant, magnetic, man-made, unnatural—the synthetic sublime.”17

This page intentionally left blank

Notes

Preface 1. Joseph Mitchell, “Street Life,” New Yorker, February 11 and 18, 2013, 63; André Aciman, “New York Luminus,” in Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 151–152. 2. Robin Finn, “From Sleeping Bag to Starbucks,” New York Times, February 27, 2011; The Tour Guide: Walking and Talking New York (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 20. William B. Helmreich, a sociology professor, walked six thousand miles in New York over a four-year period. See William B. Helmreich, The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6000 Miles in the City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). 3. Lee Stringer, “Down and Out and Up Again: Walking Freestyle Through the Upper East Side and Sleeping Rough in Central Park,” in Empire City: New York Through the Centuries, ed. Kenneth T. Jackson and David S. Dunbar (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 937–945; Thomas Kiedrowski, Andy Warhol’s New York City: Four Walks, Uptown to Downtown (New York: Little Bookroom, 2011). 4. Henry James, The American Scene, ed. Leon Edel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 208; Alfred Kazin, Alfred Kazin’s Journals, ed. Richard M. Cook (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 347; Phillip Lopate, Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (New York: Anchor Books, 2005), 6. 5. Andrew Burstein, The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 56. 6. Joan Didion, “Goodbye to All That,” in Writing New York: A Literary Anthology, ed. Phillip Lopate (New York: Library of America, 2008), 890. 211

212

Notes to pages xiii–xvi

7. Henry Thoreau, “Letters from Staten Island,” Writing New York, 68; “Walking,” The Portable Thoreau, ed. Carl Bode (New York: Viking, 1964), 597; Hutchison cited in P. D. Smith, “Big Smokes,” Times Literary Supplement, February 4, 2011, 10. 8. Larzer Ziff, The American Nineties: Life and Times of a Lost Generation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 103. 9. Andy Martin, “Sartre and Camus in New York,” New York Times, July 14, 2012. 10. Selina Hastings, Evelyn Waugh: A Biography (London: Minerva Books, 1994), 514. 11. John Updike, Americana and Other Poems (New York: Knopf, 2001), 21. 12. Saul Bellow: Letters, ed. Benjamin Taylor (New York: Penguin Books, 2010), 135; It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future (New York: Viking Press, 1994), 217–218; Hilton Kramer, “New York and the National Culture: An Exchange,” Partisan Review 44, no. 2 (1977): 205. 13. E. B. White, “Here Is New York,” Essays of E. B. White (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 124, 126. 14. Ibid., 129–130. 15. Ibid., 121. 16. Cynthia Ozick, “The Synthetic Sublime,” Quarrel & Quandary (New York: Vintage International, 2001), 226–247. 17. Harold Bloom, “Cities of the Mind,” in Jesse Zuba, Bloom’s Literary Guide to New York (New York: Checkmark Books, 2007), ix. 18. Theodore Dreiser, A Selection of Uncollected Prose, ed. Donald Pizer (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977), 234. New York was also a magnet city for tramps. See Luc Sante, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (New York: Vintage, 1992), 313–319. 19. John Steinbeck, “The Making of a New Yorker,” Empire City, 667; Peter Conrad, The Art of the City: Views and Versions of New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 227. 20. Rebecca L. Rhodes, “I’ll Take (Lower) Manhattan,” AAA World, November–December 2011, 42. 21. Ginia Bellafante, “Big City Book Club,” New York Times, August 16, 2011; Zuba, Bloom’s Literary Guide to New York, ix. 22. Lopate, “Introduction,” Writing New York, xvii; Alfred Kazin, Our New York (Harper & Row, 1989), 219. 23. Robert Pinsky, Selected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 78. Edith Wharton set many novels and stories in New York, but she was not a walker there or in any other city. Bernard Berenson said that when he was travelling with her in Berlin, she had no “notion of what it is to wander the streets.” See Ernest Samuels, Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Legend (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 164.

Notes to pages 1–6

213

1. Reflections on Walking: From Plato to Baudelaire 1. Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (New York: Viking, 2012), 24; New Yorker, January 14, 2013, 75. 2. Rob Nixon, “Paths of Enlightenment,” New York Times Book Review, December 9, 2012. 3. Laurie Lee cited in Macfarlane, Old Ways, 315. 4. Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (New York: Penguin, 2000), 59; National Public Radio, December 31, 2012 (accessed at NPR’s website, January 1, 2013). In late nineteenth- century America and En gland there also were professional walkers—what we would call race walkers. In the 1870s and 1880s, walking matches were held at New York’s Madison Square Garden. 5. Michel de Montaigne, “Travel Journal,” in The Complete Works of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), 957. 6. For Xenophon, see The Vintage Book of Walking, ed. Duncan Minshull (New York: Vintage, 2000), 273–275; Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), 1. 7. Plato, Phaedrus, 1, 6–7. 8. Plato, “Apology,” in The Last Days of Socrates, trans. Hugh Tredennick and Harold Tarrant (London: Penguin, 2003), 57. 9. Juvenal, The Sixteen Satires, trans. Peter Green (London, Penguin, 1998), 21–22. 10. Montaigne, “Travel Journal,” 943. 11. Joseph Addison, The Letters of Joseph Addison, ed. Walter Graham (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), 27. 12. Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, Selections from the Tatler and the Spectator, ed. Angus Ross (London: Penguin, 1982), 199. 13. Ibid., 437– 438. 14. Ibid., 307. 15. John Gay, Selected Poems, ed. Marcus Walsh (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1997), 41, 56, 58. 16. Solnit, Wanderlust, 173–174. 17. The Portable Charles Lamb, ed. John Mason Brown (New York: Viking, 1949), 201, 91, 206. 18. Max Beerbohm, “Going Out for a Walk,” Max Beerbohm: Selected Prose, ed. Lord David Cecil (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), 273–274. 19. Virginia Woolf, “Street Haunting: A London Adventure,” Virginia Woolf: Selected Essays, ed. David Bradshaw (London: Oxford University Press, 2008), 177–178. 20. Stephen quoted in Vintage Book of Walking, 59. A University of Michigan study, the New York Times reports, “found that people learned significantly

214

Notes to pages 6–8

better after a walk in nature than after a walk in a dense urban environment, suggesting that processing a barrage of information leaves people fatigued.” See Matt Richel, “Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime,” New York Times, August 24, 2010. 21. Helen Vendler, “They Shined Together,” New York Review of Books, March 7, 2013, 30. 22. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, intro. William H. Gass (New York: New York Review Books, 2001), 2:74. 23. Steele and Addison, Selections from the Tatler and the Spectator, 371. Robert Macfarlane says that high mountains often provoke in him a “mixture of fear and something like lust.” Macfarlane, Old Ways, 279. 24. Wordsworth quoted in Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 372. 25. Gray quoted in Robert L. Mack, Thomas Gray: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 561. 26. William Hazlitt, “On Going on a Journey,” in Selected Writings, ed. Ronald Blythe (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1970), 136–137. 27. The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1954), 158. 28. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Peter France (London: Penguin, 1979), 133. 29. Charles Baudelaire, The Prose Poems and La Fanfarlo, trans. Rosemary Lloyd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 44; Baudelaire quoted in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 290; Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 175. 30. Baudelaire’s letter appears in A Self-Portrait: Selected Letters, trans. Lois Boe Hyslop and Francis E. Hyslop Jr. (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), 96; Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. P. E. Charvet (London: Penguin, 1972), 425. 31. Baudelaire quoted in Benjamin, Arcades Project, 284. Charles Baudelaire, Prose Poems, 41; Baudelaire quoted in Claude Pichois, Baudelaire, trans. Graham Robb (London: Vintage, 1987), 250. 32. Pichois, Baudelaire, 257. 33. Baudelaire’s friend quoted in F.W. J. Hemmings, Baudelaire the Damned: A Biography (New York, Scribner’s, 1982), 88, 46. Macfarlane says “the compact between writing and walking is almost as old as literature,” but the notion that walking is an aid to writing did not become popular until the mid-eighteenth century. Macfarlane, Old Ways, 18. 34. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 336; Baudelaire quoted in Pichois and Ziegler, Baudelaire, 274; Laforgue quoted in Benjamin, Arcades Project, 246.

Notes to pages 8–14 215

35. All the translations from Baudelaire’s poetry are my own. The poems are found in the bilingual Flowers of Evil, trans. James McGowan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 36. According to Pichois, “Baudelaire’s only political characteristic is his resolutely anarchic philosophy. Having been a left-wing anarchist, he was about to become a right-wing anarchist.” Pichois, Baudelaire, 178. 37. Ibid., 365. 38. Baudelaire, Prose Poems, 101. 2. Britons Visiting New York: Fanny Trollope, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens 1. Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways (New York: Viking Press, 2012), 213; Shepherd quoted at 201. 2. Quoted in Kenneth T. Jackson and David S. Dunbar, eds., Empire City: New York Through the Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 40. 3. Ibid., 84, 107. 4. Ibid., 112, 111, 115. 5. Cobbett quoted in Richard Ingrams, The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 148; M’Robert in Jackson and Dunbar, Empire City, 84. Built in 1766, St. Paul’s Church is the oldest public building in New York in continuous use. 6. Strong quoted in David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (New York: Vintage, 1996), 228. 7. Fanny Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, ed. Pamela NevilleSington (London: Penguin, 1997), 261–262, 271. 8. Ibid., 261, 273, 272. 9. Ibid., 271. 10. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 588. 11. Jackson and Dunbar, Empire City, 226. 12. Trollope, Domestic Manners, 264; for Longfellow, see Domestic Manners, xxx. 13. Edgar Allan Poe, “Doings of Gotham,” in Writing New York, ed. Philip Lopate (New York: Library of America, 2008), 101. 14. Luc Sante, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 47; for Broadway’s improvements, see 10. 15. Anthony Trollope, North America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Library, 2006), 1:390. 16. Ibid., 401, 414. 17. Ibid., 412– 413. 18. Ibid., 396, 395. 19. Jill Lepore, “Dickens in Eden,” New Yorker, August 29, 2011, 55.

216

Notes to pages 14–26

20. Dickens quoted in Michael Slater, Charles Dickens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 184. 21. Dickens, “Shy Neighborhoods,” Charles Dickens: Selected Journalism 1850–1870, ed. David Pascoe (London: Penguin, 1997), 204; Dickens quoted in Slater, Dickens, 53. 22. Slater, Dickens, 49, 144. 23. Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation, ed. Patricia Ingham (London: Penguin, 2000). Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from American Notes are from 90–108. 24. For a brief overview of Irish immigration, see Robert K. Landers, “A Hibernian Diaspora and Its Effects,” Wall Street Journal, March 3, 2012. 25. Jackson and Dunbar, Empire City, 167–168. 26. Dickens, American Notes, 245. 27. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 786. 28. Punches are Punch-and-Judy puppet shows; fantoccinis are marionettes; orchestrinas are instruments that can mimic the sound of an orchestra. 29. Dickens, American Notes, 270; Dickens quoted in Slater, Dickens, 193. 30. In December 2012, William Henry Lane’s contribution to tap dancing was celebrated at Washington’s Kennedy Center by the Chicago Human Rhythm Project in a per for mance called “Juba! Masters of Tap and Percussive Dance.” 31. Dickens, American Notes, 126. 32. Dickens found walking in Philadelphia boring. “It is a handsome city, but distractingly regular. After walking about it for an hour or two, I felt that I would have given the world for a crooked street.” Ibid., 110. 3. Walt Whitman: Magnetic Mannahatta 1. Whitman quoted in Justin Kaplan, Walt Whitman: A Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980), 108, 99. 2. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Whitman are from Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1982). Page numbers for quotations from Whitman’s prose will appear in parentheses in the text. 3. David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 109. Whitman’s brother Jeff named one of his daughters Mannahatta. 4. Henry James, A Small Boy and Others (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1913), 77; Whitman quoted in Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 109. 5. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 109. 6. Whitman quoted in ibid., 260. 7. Whitman quoted in ibid., 226. For the visitor to Whitman, see 278. Magnetism remained a popu lar notion for at least a half- century. Theodore Dreiser begins Chapter 1 of Sister Carrie (1900) with the title: “The Magnet

Notes to pages 26–42 217

Attracting: A Waif Amid Forces.” The narrator of Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) says of himself: “I was not a homely boy by any means, nor one devoid of a certain kind of magnetism.” 8. Publisher quoted in Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 102. 9. Ibid., 105. 10. Whitman quoted in ibid., 64– 65, 106. 11. Ibid., 82. 12. Whitman quoted in ibid., 99. 13. Whitman quoted in Kaplan, Whitman, 245. 14. Whitman quoted in Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 408. 15. Whitman quoted in Kaplan, Whitman, 178. 16. See Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 282–283. Reynolds does not give an address for Brady’s gallery. 17. See ibid., 247. 18. Whitman quoted in ibid., 171. 19. Whitman quoted in ibid., 237. 20. Whitman quoted in ibid., 161. 21. Whitman quoted in David Reynolds, “Politics and Poetry,” The Cambridge Companion to Whitman, ed. Ezra Greenspan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 87. 22. See Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 528. 23. Whitman quoted in ibid., 533. 24. Whitman quoted in Kaplan, Whitman, 112. 25. Whitman wrote a short essay, “Plate Glass Notes,” about the manufacture of plate glass in a St. Louis factory, See Whitman, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, 1176–1177. 26. For Bird, see Empire City, 235. 27. Whitman quoted in Kaplan, Whitman, 113. 28. Lowell quoted in Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 106; Norton quoted in Kaplan, Whitman, 204. 29. Kaplan, Whitman, 352. 30. Emerson’s letter to Whitman and Whitman’s letter to Emerson are in Whitman, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, 1326–1337. 31. Letter quoted in Kaplan, Whitman, 355; Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 355. 32. Whitman quoted in Kaplan, Whitman, 229; for Whitman’s plans for his book, see Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 352. 33. Whitman quoted in Kaplan, Whitman, 18. 34. For Mumford, see Empire City, 105. 35. For Whitman on Clarke, see Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 89–90. 36. Whitman quoted in Kaplan, Whitman, 31. For Whitman’s “Dark Patches,” see Alan Trachtenberg, “Dark Patches and Solitude: Whitman’s American Noir,” Yale Review 99, no. 2: 125–133.

218

Notes to pages 43–57

4. Herman Melville: Lost in the City 1. Parker quoted in Phillip Lopate, Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (New York: Anchor Books, 2005), 71. 2. Melville’s wife quoted in Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His Work and His World (New York: Vintage, 2006), 109. 3. The Letters of Herman Melville, ed. Merrell R. David and William H. Gilman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 128. 132. 4. Elizabeth Kray, “Walking Tour: Herman Melville’s Downtown New York City” (accessed at www.poets.org, January 22, 2010). 5. Letters of Melville, 278, 288n.9. 6. Delbanco, Melville, 196. 7. Letters of Melville, 92. 8. Ibid., 128. 9. Delbanco, Melville, 199; Van Wyck Brooks, The Times of Melville and Whitman (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1947), 166. 10. Hawthorne quoted in Delbanco, Melville, 252. 11. British admirer quoted in ibid., 319. 12. A dead wall is a blank wall unbroken by any windows or openings. 13. Letters of Melville, 277. 14. English admirer quoted in Delbanco, Melville, 319; Hawthorne quoted, 252–253. 15. Augusta Melville quoted in ibid., 120. 16. George Whitman quoted in Justin Kaplan, Walt Whitman: A Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980), 292; George Templeton Strong, “From the Diaries,” in Writing New York, ed. Phillip Lopate (New York: Library of America, 1998), 234. 17. The poem appears in Herman Melville, Stories, Poems, and Letters, ed. R. W. B. Lewis (New York: Dell, 1962), 324–325. 18. “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” ibid., 42– 43. 19. Letters of Melville, 79– 80. 20. Sophia Hawthorne quoted in Delbanco, Melville, 210. 21. Wegelin quoted in ibid., 318–319. 22. Letters of Melville, 277. 23. Werner Berthoff, prefatory material to “The Two Temples,” in Great Short Works of Herman Melville, ed. Werner Berthoff (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 151. 24. See David Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 168, 367; Letters of Melville, 189. 25. Van Dyke quoted in David Brooks, “The Missing Fifth,” New York Times, May 9, 2011. 26. The poem appears in Stories, Poems, and Letters, 380.

Notes to pages 59–67 219

5. William Dean Howells: Boston vs. New York 1. Howells quoted in Morton and Lucia White, The Intellectual Versus the City (New York: New American Library, 1964), 109. 2. Howells quoted in Rudolph Kirk and Clara Marburg Kirk, “Introduction,” William Dean Howells: Representative Selections (New York: American Book Company, 1950), cxxxii. 3. Howells, “First Impressions of Literary New York,” in W. D. Howells: Literary Friends and Acquaintance, ed. David F. Hiatt and Edwin H. Cady (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 70. 4. For Child see Empire City: New York Through the Centuries, ed. Kenneth T. Jackson and David S. Dunbar (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 180, 183. 5. Howells quoted in Morris Dickstein, “Introduction,” The Rise of Silas Lapham (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2007), xxxiii. 6. “The Smiling Aspects of American Life,’ in Howells, Representative Selections, 356–358; Howells’s remarks to James appear in Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson, William Dean Howells: A Writer’s Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 306. 7. Howells quoted in Goodman and Dawson, William Dean Howells, 280. 8. Howells, Representative Selections, cxxvi n. 323. 9. Howells quoted in Goodman and Dawson, William Dean Howells, 286. 10. Ibid., 301; Howells quoted in Everett Carter, “Critical Introduction,” A Hazard of New Fortunes (New York: Modern Library, 2002), xxviii. 11. Howells, Literary Friends and Acquaintance, 69; Howells’s letter to Fields in Goodman and Dawson, William Dean Howells, 58–59. 12. Howells, Literary Friends and Acquaintance, 62, 65. 13. Ibid., 67– 68. 14. Ibid., 92, 78. 15. Ibid., 69. 16. Clara Kirk and Rudolph Kirk, “Introduction,” Howells, Representative Selections, cxxxi n. 336. 17. Howells quoted in Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “Introduction,” A Hazard of New Fortunes, xiii; Howells, “Aesthetic New York Fifty- Odd Years Ago,” Literature and Life (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1902), 222. 18. Howells quoted in Goodman and Dawson, William Dean Howells, 293. 19. Hardy quoted in Howells, Representative Selections, cxviii n. 303. 20. Four elevated lines began in 1879. See Luc Sante, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (New York: Vintage Departures, 1992), 51–54. 21. Howells, “An East- Side Ramble,” Impressions and Experiences (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1909), 104–105. 22. Ibid., 105–106. 23. Ibid., 102, 110.

220

Notes to pages 67–76

24. Ibid., 108. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 109. 27. Ibid., 110, 205, 172. 28. Ibid., 181; Richard Zacks, Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt’s Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York (New York: Anchor Books, 2012), 2. 29. Howells, “New York Streets,” Impressions and Experiences, 182–183, 190, 184, 187. 30. Ibid., 190–191. 31. Ibid., 182. 32. Ibid., 199–200. 33. Ibid., 198–199. 34. Ibid., 204, 183. 35. Ibid., 186–187. 36. Ibid., 195. 37. Ibid., 185–186. 38. Ibid., 200, 184. 39. Henry James: A Life in Letters, ed. Philip Horne (London: Penguin, 1999), 227–228. 40. Sante, Low Life, 48; Jon A. Peterson, “George E. Waring Jr.,” Encyclopedia of New York City, 2nd ed., ed. Kenneth T. Jackson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 1378. 41. Howells, “Bibliographical,” A Hazard of New Fortunes, 5. 42. Goodman and Dawson, William Dean Howells, 370. 43. Howells quoted in ibid., 429; Howells quoted in Thomas Bender, New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City, from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 192. 6. Jacob Riis: Walking for Reform 1. Howells quoted in Everett Carter, “Critical Introduction,” William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes (New York: Modern Library, 2002), xxviii. 2. Jacob A. Riis, The Making of an American (New York: Macmillan, 1940), 199. 3. Ibid., 41. 4. Ibid., 153. 5. Tom Buk- Swienty, The Other Half: The Life of Jacob Riis and the World of Immigrant America, trans. Annette Buk- Swienty (New York: Norton, 2008), 161. Buk- Swienty notes, “Riis did rely to some extent on police bulletins, using them as a stepping stone for further investigation.” See Life of Riis, 144; Kenneth A. Scherzer, “Gotham Court,” Encyclopedia of New York, 2nd ed. (New

Notes to pages 76–82 221

Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 518; Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of the Poor, intro. Luc Sante (New York: Penguin, 1997), 46. 6. Buk- Swienty, The Other Half, 265; Sante, “Introduction,” How the Other Half Lives, xvi; Riis, Making of an American, 42. 7. Riis, Making of an American, 155–156. 8. Ibid., 153. 9. Ibid., 212; Riis quoted in Buk- Swienty, The Other Half, 249; Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 213. 10. Ibid., 213–214. 11. Roosevelt’s remarks, which were published in The Outlook, June 6, 1914, appear in the introduction to Riis, Making of an American, xi. 12. Riis, Making of an American, 21. 13. Quoted in Buk- Swienty, The Other Half, 80. 14. Riis, Making of an American, 23; Strong quoted in Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 774. 15. Riis, Making of an American, 27, 28, 32. 16. Ibid., 32–33. 17. Ibid., 43– 44. 18. Ibid., 44– 45. 19. Ibid., 46. 20. Ibid., 61– 62. 21. Ibid., 68, 71–72 22. Ibid., 72, 73, 75. 23. Ibid., 76. 24. Ibid., 77. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 76–77. 27. Ibid., 78. 28. Luc Sante, “Introduction,” How the Other Half Lives, ix. Sante mentions two books about the slums, both by James D. McCabe: Lights and Shadows of New York Life (1872) and New York by Sunlight and Gaslight (1882). 29. For Foster, see Kenneth T. Jackson and David S. Dunbar, eds., Empire City: New York Through the Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 220. 30. Ibid., 213, 215. 31. Ibid., 218. 32. For changing countries of origin, see Vincent J. Cannato, American Passage: The History of Ellis Island (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010), 92. 33. Walker quoted in ibid., 50.

222

Notes to pages 83–90

34. Lodge quoted in ibid., 92. 35. Quotes in ibid., 52, 92. 36. Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 24–25, 23. 37. Buk-Swienty, The Other Half, 239; Sante, “Introduction,” How the Other Half Lives, xviii; Alan Trachtenberg, “Introduction,” How the Other Half Lives (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), xxvi–xxvii. 38. Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 80– 81. 39. Ibid., 92, 83, 87, 82, 87. 40. Ibid., 84, 86 41. Sante, “Introduction,” How the Other Half Lives, xix; Riis, Making of an American, 41. 42. Ibid., 160, 280. 43. Riis, How the Other Half Lives, xxiii, 185. 44. Ibid., 6; Buk- Swienty, The Other Half, 195. 45. Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 198. 46. Ibid., 19. 47. Ibid., 27, 37–38. 48. Ibid., 137. 49. Ibid., 47– 49. 50. Ibid., 26, 95. 51. Ibid., 96. 52. Ibid., 101, 91. 53. Ibid., 21, 25, 22–23. 54. Ibid., 146, 201. 55. Riis, Making of an American, 161. Did Riis get the title from Rabelais’s Pantagruel? Rabelais’s narrator, having just discovered an entire land inside the mouth of the giant Pantagruel, says that “one half of the world knoweth not how the other half liveth.” It is more likely that Riis got the title from a work we know he read: an 1845 report, Conditions of the Laboring Population of New York, written by John H. Griscom. On the fi rst page, Griscom writes, “It has often been said that ‘one half does not know how the other half lives.’ ” See Buk- Swienty, The Other Half, 197. 56. Ibid., 173–174. 57. Buk- Swienty, Life of Riis, 207. 58. Riis, Making of an American, 174. 59. Ibid., 176. 60. Ibid., 172, 177. 61. Ibid., 192. In 1877, Riis bought a magic lantern slide projector, using slides to advertise farm- supply stores. It was an entrepreneurial venture that did not last long, and he soon returned to journalism. 62. Buk- Swienty, The Other Half, 215. 63. Riis, Making of American, 196; Buk- Swienty, The Other Half, 241. 64. Buk- Swienty, The Other Half, 217.

Notes to pages 90–98 223

65. Lowell’s letter is reprinted in Riis, Making of an American, 199. One of Lowell’s poems is an epigraph to How the Other Half Lives; Buk- Swietny, The Other Half, 241. 66. Buk- Swienty, The Other Half, 287. 67. For the rediscovery of Riis’s photographs, see ibid., Life of Riis, 286–288. 68. Riis, Making of an American, 172; Trachtenberg, “Introduction,” How the Other Half Lives, xvii–xviii; Buk- Swienty, The Other Half, 288. 69. Riis, Making of an American, xi, 223, 225. 70. Lewis Mumford, Sketches from Life: The Early Years (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983), 21. 71. Riis, Making of an American, 231, 214. 72. Roosevelt quoted in Buk-Swienty, The Other Half, 253. In 1900, when Roosevelt became governor of New York, he walked around the slums again with Riis—inspecting sweatshops to make sure that existing labor laws were being observed. 73. Riis, Making of an American, 213. 7. Henry James: What to Make of the Bristling City 1. Henry James, The American Scene, ed. Leon Edel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 72, 77. 2. Ibid., 81, 83. 3. Ibid., i, 7, 108. 4. Henry James, Henry James: A Life in Letters, ed. Philip Horne (London: Penguin, 1999), 104. 5. Henry James, Literary Criticism, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Library of America, 1984), 683. 6. Henry James, Selected Letters, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 117, 184. 7. Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters: 1900–1915, ed. Lyall H. Powers (New York: Scribner’s, 1990), 34. 8. Henry James, Letters, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 4:245–246. 9. James, American Scene, 107, 110, 114. 10. Ibid., 111. 11. Ibid., 76, 67. 12. James, Letters, 4:332, 355. 13. Ibid., 355. 14. Ibid., 334. 15. James, American Scene, 1. 16. Ibid., 4, 80. 17. Ibid., 84, 83, 84. 18. Ibid., 87.

224

Notes to pages 99–106

19. Ibid., 89, 91, 190. 20. Ibid., 142–143. 21. Ibid., 222, 345, 342. 22. Ibid., 80. 23. Ibid., 64– 65. 24. Ibid., 80, 115. 25. Kenneth T. Jackson and David S. Dunbar, eds., Empire City: New York Through the Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 477. 26. James, American Scene, 118–119. 27. Ibid., 119. 28. Ibid., 125. 29. Ibid., 125, 121. 30. Ibid., 86. 31. Ibid., 124. 32. Vincent J. Cannato, American Passage: The History of Ellis Island (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010), 96, 214; Maldwyn Allen Jones, American Immigration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 239. 33. Gordon Wood, “In Quest of Blood Lines,” New York Review of Books, May 23, 2013, 21–22. See also Jones, American Immigration, 268, 275–277. 34. James, American Scene, 120, 64. 35. Ibid., 128; Howells, Impressions and Experiences, 205. 36. Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 612; James, American Scene, 125. 37. James, American Scene, 127; N. John Hall, Trollope: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 239. 38. Hay quoted in Ernest Samuels, Henry Adams (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 321–322. 39. James, Selected Letters, 141. Child died in 1892 while traveling in Persia. In the preface to volume 14 of the New York Edition of his work, James alludes to his friendship with him. 40. Ibid., 154. 41. Ibid., 185. 42. James, Letters, 4:78. 43. Ibid., 90. 44. James, American Scene, 137. 45. Ibid., 131. 46. Ibid., 132. 47. Ibid., 134. 48. For another view of these paragraphs as well as a general discussion of James’s anti- Semitism, see Jonathan Freedman, The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 117–154. 49. James, American Scene, 132–133, 138.

Notes to pages 106–117 225

50. Ibid., 139. 51. Ibid., 133, 135. 52. Ibid., 136–137. 53. Ibid., 179. 54. Ibid., 84. 55. Ibid., 237. 56. Ibid., 2, 131. 57. Ibid., 274–275, 277. 58. Ibid., 275. 59. James and Wharton, Letters, 44, 48. 60. Ibid., 49; James, Letters, 4:338. 61. James, American Scene, 208. 62. Ibid., 273. 63. James and Wharton, Letters, 54–55. 64. “Introduction,” The New York Stories of Henry James (New York: New York Review Books, 2006), xxvii. 65. Henry James, A Small Boy and Others (New York: Scribner’s, 1913), 64– 66. 66. See Sheldon M. Novick, Henry James: The Mature Master (New York: Random House, 2007), 474. The Players Club still exists at the same site. 67. James, Letters, 4:574, 572, 577. 8. Stephen Crane: Adventures in Poverty 1. “Preface,” Stephen Crane, The New York City Sketches of Stephen Crane and Related Pieces, ed. R. W. Stallman and E. R. Hagemann (New York: New York University Press, 1966), ix. 2. Ibid., 34, 189. 3. Linda H. Davis, Badge of Courage: The Life of Stephen Crane (Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1998), 53. 4. Ibid.; Richard Zacks, Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt’s Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York (New York: Anchor Books, 2012), 3; Luc Sante, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (New York: Vintage Departures, 1992), 318. 5. Crane, New York City Sketches, 267. 6. Davis, Badge of Courage, 59, 62. 7. Ibid., 84. 8. For Howells’s comments, see Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Other Writings about New York, intro. and notes by Robert Tine (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2005), 237. 9. Crane quoted in Davis, Badge of Courage, 56. For the interview with Howells, see Crane, New York City Sketches, 89. 10. For Howells’s remarks, see Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, 237; Davis, Badge of Courage, 141.

226

Notes to pages 117–127

11. Davis, Badge of Courage, 73. 12. Ibid., 53. 13. Crane, New York City Sketches, 97–100. 14. Ibid., 102. 15. Ibid., 97. 16. Davis, Badge of Courage, 76. 17. Joseph Mitchell, Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 128. 18. Crane, New York City Sketches, 34. 19. Ibid., 37–39. 20. Ibid., 92. 21. Ibid., 95–96. 22. See Davis, Badge of Courage, 80. 23. Crane, New York City Sketches, 49. 24. Ibid., 75. 25. Ibid., 147. 26. Davis, Badge of Courage, 143, 148, 154. 27. Ibid., 120. 28. Crane, New York City Sketches, 163. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 164. 31. Ibid., 166. 32. Ibid., 179. 33. Ibid., 181–182. 34. Ibid., 94–95, 211–212. 35. Davis, Badge of Courage, 143. 36. Ibid., 162–163. 37. Crane’s account of the Dora Clark controversy is in Maggie, 199–205. For newspaper accounts of the Dora Clark controversy, see New York City Sketches, 217–225. 38. Davis, Badge of Courage, 163. 39. Ibid., 335. 40. Ibid., 167. 41. Crane, Maggie, 199. 42. Davis, Badge of Courage, 167. 43. Ibid., 165–166, 335. 9. Theodore Dreiser: From Broadway to the Bowery 1. Jerome Loving, The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 96. 2. Ibid., 90.

Notes to pages 128–139 227

3. Theodore Dreiser, A Selection of Uncollected Prose, ed. Donald Pizer (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977), 73, 51. 4. Ibid., 72, 73. 5. Loving, The Last Titan, 96. 6. Ibid., 89. 7. Ibid., 96. 8. Richard Lingeman, Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey (New York: Wiley, 1993), 93. 9. Loving, The Last Titan, 106–107. 10. Dreiser, Uncollected Prose, 52 11. Ibid., 43. 12. Ibid., 56. 13. Ibid., 69. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 82. 16. Ibid., 157–158. 17. Ibid., 95–96. 18. Howells quoted in Loving, The Last Titan, 113. 19. Ibid., 111. 20. Richard Lingeman says that Dreiser was fi red. See Lingeman, Dreiser: An American Journey, 101. 21. Loving, The Last Titan, 122. 22. “The Real Howells,” Uncollected Prose, 146. 23. Ibid., 142. 24. Ibid., 141–142. 25. Ibid., 143; Lingeman, Dreiser: An American Journey, 191. 26. “Novels to Reflect Real Life,” Uncollected Prose, 188. 27. Howells quoted in Loving, The Last Titan, 90. Soon after Sister Carrie was published, Howells ran into Dreiser at their publisher’s office. “You know, I didn’t like Sister Carrie,” Howells said, then hurried off. See Lingeman, Dreiser: An American Journey, 168. 28. Loving, The Last Titan, 182. 29. Ibid., 171. 30. In England, Sister Carrie received good reviews. “At last a really strong novel has come from America,” the Daily Mail said. See Lingeman, Dreiser: An American Journey, 182. 31. Ibid., 174, 175. 32. Ibid., 187. 33. Ibid., 198. 34. Dreiser, The Color of a Great City (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 78; Loving, The Last Titan, 171. 35. Lingeman, Dreiser: An American Journey, 220.

228

Notes to pages 140–150

36. Dreiser, Color of a Great City, xxi. 37. Ibid., xi–xii. 38. Ibid., 268. 39. Ibid., 87– 88. 40. Ibid., 112. 41. Ibid., 277, 279. 42. Ibid., 5, 6. 43. Ibid., 260, 263–264. 44. Ibid., 205–206, 174, 131. 45. Ibid., 155–156. 46. Ibid., 41– 42. 47. Ibid., 78. 48. Ibid., 79. 49. Lingeman, Dreiser: An American Journey, 233. 50. A Traveler at Forty (New York: Forgotten Books, 2012), 85. 10. James Weldon Johnson: A Black Man in Manhattan 1. James Weldon Johnson, Writings (New York: Library of America, 2004), 873. 2. Eugene Levy, James Weldon Johnson: Black Leader, Black Voice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 86. 3. Johnson, Writings, 341. 4. Ibid., 298, 324. 5. Ibid. 296–297. 6. Ibid., 297. 7. Ibid., 335. 8. James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan, intro. Sondra Kathryn Wilson (New York: Da Capo, 1991), 120. 9. Dreiser, Color of a Great City, 248. 10. Johnson, Writings, 319, 329–330. 11. Ibid., 304–305. 12. Johnson, Black Manhattan, 127; Writings, 305. 13. Joanne Reitano, The Restless City: A Short History of New York from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Routledge, 2006), 115. 14. Johnson, Black Manhattan, 45, 157. 15. Levy, James Weldon Johnson, 158; Johnson, Writings, 282. 16. Johnson, Writings, 375. 17. Ibid., 378. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 377–378. 20. Ibid., 378–379. 21. Ibid., 187, 137. 22. Ibid., 187–189.

Notes to pages 151–162 229

23. Ibid., 187, 476. 24. Ibid., 187–188, 474. 25. Ibid., 358–359. 26. Ibid., 466. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 435; New York Times, August 3, 1911. 29. Johnson, Writings, 342–343. 30. Ibid., 560. 31. Ibid., 486. 32. Ibid., 482, 495. 33. Ibid., 694, 495. 34. Ibid., 360; 558; Johnson, Black Manhattan, 226. 35. Ibid., 59, 147; Writings, 465; Levy, James Weldon Johnson, 317. 36. Johnson, Black Manhattan, 155–157. 37. Johnson, Writings, 713; Black Manhattan, 162. 38. Ibid., 162–163. 39. For Johnson’s letter, see Levy, James Weldon Johnson, 64; Johnson, Writings, 690, 697. 40. Johnson, Writings, 697. 41. Ibid., 228. 42. Ibid., 220. 43. Brent Staples, “Escape into Whiteness,” New York Review of Books, November 24, 2011, 25. 44. The incident is recounted in Johnson, Writings, 313–317. 45. Ibid., 317. 46. Ibid., 238, 361. 47. Ibid., 318. 48. Levy says only that “Wetmore’s harsh father dominated a home to which he brought fi rst one stepmother and then, after her death, yet another to raise his son.” See Levy, James Weldon Johnson, 16. Noelle Morrissette describes Wetmore as “a light- skinned black man.” See Autobiography of an ExColored Man (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2007), xx. 49. Johnson, Writings, 496. 50. Ibid., 217. 51. Ibid., 399. 52. Ibid., 411, 572. 53. Ibid., 556. 54. Johnson, Black Manhattan, 161. 11. Alfred Kazin: Reveries of a Solitary Walker 1. Edward Mendelson, “The Hidden Life of Alfred Kazin,” New York Review of Books, August 18, 2011, 51.

230

Notes to pages 162–169

2. Richard M. Cook, Alfred Kazin: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 2; Alfred Kazin, Alfred Kazin’s Journals, ed. Richard M. Cook (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 135. 3. New York Times, June 6, 1998. 4. Alfred Kazin, Our New York, photographs by David Finn (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 14. 5. Kazin, Journals, 223, 225. 6. Cook, Alfred Kazin, 2; Alfred Kazin, New York Jew (New York: Knopf, 1977), 56–57. 7. Cook, Alfred Kazin, 237; Kazin, Journals, 59. 8. Kazin, New York Jew, 96; Kazin, Journals, 69. 9. Kazin, Journals, 59. 10. Ibid., 158. 11. Alfred Kazin, A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment: From the Journals of Alfred Kazin (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 215. 12. Kazin, Journals, 33. 13. Kazin, Lifetime, 306, 311. 14. Cook, Alfred Kazin, 377. 15. Kazin, Journals, 116–117; Lifetime, 340. 16. Kazin, Lifetime, 52; Journals, 142. 17. Kazin, Journals, 528; Lifetime, 34. 18. Kazin, Journals, 421, 554. 19. Ibid., 278–279; Kazin, Our New York, 129. 20. Kazin, Journals, 379, 494. 21. Cook, Alfred Kazin, 211; Kazin, New York Jew, 151, 210–211. 22. Kazin, Lifetime, 230. 23. Kazin, Journals, 100. 24. Kazin, Lifetime, 257. 25. Kazin, Journals, 536; Lifetime, 264. 26. Cook, Alfred Kazin, 156. 27. Kazin, A Walker in the City (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1951), 5. 28. Ibid., 8, 88, 12. 29. Ibid., 38–39. 30. Kazin, Lifetime, 51; Kazin, Walker, 77. 31. Kazin, Journals, 474; Our New York, 73. 32. Kazin, Walker, 87. 33. Ibid., 165. 34. Ibid., 170. 35. Kazin, Lifetime, 331. 36. Kazin, Walker, 95. 37. Ibid., 96. 38. Ibid., 97. 39. Ibid., 99.

Notes to pages 170–177 231

40. Kazin, Journals, 33–34; Lifetime, 161. 41. Kazin, Walker, 172. 42. Cook, Alfred Kazin, 211; Kazin, Journals, 544. 43. Kazin, Walker, 105. 44. Ibid., 106. 45. Ibid., 106–107. 46. Ibid., 107. 47. Ibid., 107–108. 48. Ibid., 105; Kazin, Journals, 129. 49. Kazin, Lifetime, 264–265. 50. John Sloan’s New York Scene, ed. Bruce St. John (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 428. See also Richard Haw, Art of the Brooklyn Bridge (New York: Routledge, 2008), and Alan Trachtenberg, Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). 51. Lewis Mumford, Sketches from Life: The Autobiography of Lewis Mumford (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982), 130; Henry James, The American Scene (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 75. 52. Cook, Alfred Kazin, 114. 53. Kazin, Journals, 496. 54. Kazin, Lifetime, 279. 55. Kazin, Journals, 379, 574; Lifetime, 299. 56. See Cook, Alfred Kazin, 411. 57. Kazin, Journals, 443; New York Jew, 291; Our New York, 209, 204. 58. Edward Glaeser, The Triumph of the City (New York: Penguin, 2011), 118. 59. Joanne Reitano, The Restless City: A Short History of New York from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Routledge, 2006), 181, 202, 204. 60. Kazin, New York Jew, 291; Lifetime, 259. 61. Kazin, Journals, 490, 528–529. 62. Kazin, New York Jew, 182; Journals, 354. 63. Cook, Alfred Kazin, 398; Kazin, New York Jew, 290–291. 64. Kazin, Our New York, 204. 65. Kazin, New York Jew, 184; Lifetime, 221. 66. Kazin, New York Jew, 190; Kazin, Starting Out in the Thirties (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1965), 7. For Kazin’s view of Dissent, see Journals, 532 n. 24. 67. Kazin, New York Jew, 193, 43, 191. 68. Cook, Alfred Kazin, 318–319, 197. 69. Ibid., 343; Kazin, Lifetime, 206. 70. Kazin, Our New York, 209, 213; Journals, 575. 71. Kazin, Journals, 566. 72. Kazin, New York Jew, 60; Journals, 509. 73. Kazin, Our New York, 218. In February 2014 the poet Charles Simic wrote, “One time riding in a cab in New York, I found out that my driver had

232

Notes to pages 177–190

been a shepherd in Mongolia tending sheep just a few years earlier.” Charles Simic, “What a Beautiful Mess!” New York Review of Books, February 20, 2014, 4. 74. Kazin, Our New York, 219. 75. Kazin, Journals, 545; Lifetime, 54. 12. Elizabeth Hardwick: West Side Stories 1. Alfred Kazin, New York Jew (New York: Knopf, 1978), 44; Saul Bellow, Letters, ed. Benjamin Taylor (New York: Penguin Books, 2010), 49. 2. Richard M. Cook, Alfred Kazin: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 364–365; Alfred Kazin, Alfred Kazin’s Journals, ed. Richard Cook (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 491 n. 64, 559. 3. Elizabeth Hardwick, “The Art of Fiction No. 87,” Paris Review 96 (Summer 1985). 4. Ibid. 5. Hardwick, “Art of Fiction”; Darryl Pinckney says she withdrew from Columbia in 1944. See “Introduction,” The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick (New York: New York Review Books, 2010), x. 6. Hardwick quoted in Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “Elizabeth Hardwick, Writer, Dies at 91,” New York Times, December 4, 2007; “Hardwick: Art of Fiction.” 7. Ibid. 8. Hardwick, New York Stories, xxiv. 9. William Barrett, The Truants: Adventures Among the Intellectuals (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1983), 48– 49. 10. Hardwick quoted in David Laskin, Partisans: Marriage, Politics, and Betrayal among the New York Intellectuals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 224; Birstein quoted in Cook, Alfred Kazin, 213. 11. “Boston,” A View of My Own: Essays in Literature and Society (New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1962), 150. 12. “Mrs. Wharton in New York,” Sight-Readings: American Fictions (New York: Random House, 1998), 26. 13. “Hardwick: Art of Fiction”; Hardwick, “On Washington Square,” Sight-Readings, 27. 14. Hardwick, “Bartleby in Manhattan,” Bartleby in Manhattan & Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1983), 217. 15. Ibid., 218. 16. Ibid., 222–223. 17. Ibid., 223, 230. 18. Ibid., 231. 19. All quotations are from The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick. 20. Pinckney, “Introduction,” New York Stories, xxi. 21. Hardwick, “Art of Fiction.”

Notes to pages 191–207 233

22. Ibid. 23. Hardwick quoted in Laskin, Partisans, 257; Hardwick quoted in Paul Mariani, Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell (New York: Norton, 1994), 376. 24. Hardwick, “Domestic Manners,” Bartleby in Manhattan, 91–92. 25. Hardwick, “Art of Fiction”; Hardwick, “New York City: Crash Course,” Granta 32 (Spring 1990): 113. 26. Roger Angell, “The Crime of Our Life,” New Yorker, June 10 & 17, 2013, 82. 27. Hardwick, “New York City: Crash Course,” 122. 28. Ibid. 13. Colson Whitehead and Teju Cole: Disoriented, Deracinated, Exhilarated 1. Cynthia Ozick, “The Synthetic Sublime,” in Quarrel & Quandary: Essays (New York: Vintage International, 2000), 229. 2. Colson Whitehead, The Colossus of New York (New York: Random House, 2003), 118–119. References are given in parentheses in the text hereafter. 3. Teju Cole, Open City (New York: Random House, 2011), 3. References are given in parentheses in the text hereafter. I have not given page numbers for other works of fiction because the works are available in many editions. 14. The Synthetic Sublime 1. Jeff Speck, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012). See also Allison Arieff, “Reading the City,” New York Times, December 17, 2012. 2. Camus quoted in Herbert R. Lottman, Albert Camus in New York (Corte Madera, Calif.: Ginkgo Press, 1997), 9; Camus quoted in Andy Martin, “Sartre and Camus in New York,” New York Times, July 14, 2012. 3. Martin, “Sartre and Camus in New York.” 4. For a history of Bryant Park, see Kate Lauber, “Bryant Park,” in The Encyclopedia of New York, 2d ed., ed. Kenneth T. Jackson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 186–187. 5. Cynthia Ozick, “The Synthetic Sublime,” in Quarrel & Quandary (New York: Vintage International, 2000), 226. 6. Dan Barry, “On the Bow’ry,” New York Times, March 11, 2010. 7. C. J. Hughes, “Canal Street, Is That Really You?” New York Times, December 2, 2010. 8. See Sam Roberts, “Little Italy, Littler by the Year,” New York Times, February 22, 2011. 9. Sophia Hollander, “New York’s Boom Time,” Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2013.

234

Notes to pages 207–209

10. Norman Manea, The Hooligan’s Return (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 4–5. 11. Glaeser, Triumph of the City, 252; Morris J. Vogel, “The Lessons of 97 Orchard St,” Washington Post, March 10, 2013. 12. Eric Homberger, New York City: A Cultural and Literary Companion (New York: Interlink Books, 2003), 246; Colson Whitehead, “I Write in Brooklyn. Get Over It,” New York Times, March 2, 2008. 13. Ian Frazier, “Someplace in Queens,” in Empire City: New York Through the Centuries, ed. Kenneth T. Jackson and David S. Dunbar (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 918–926. 14. Seth Kugel, “36 Hours in Queens, N.Y.,” New York Times, December 23, 2012. 15. Brian Yarvin, “The 7 Train from Times Square to Asia,” Washington Post, March 21, 2010. 16. Ibid. 17. Ozick, “The Synthetic Sublime,” 227.

Bibliography

Aciman, André. “New York Luminous.” In Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Addison, Joseph, and Richard Steele. Selections from the Tatler and the Spectator. Edited by Angus Ross. London: Penguin Books, 1988. Auster, Paul. City of Glass. In The New York Trilogy. New York: Penguin Books, 2006. Barrett, William. The Truants: Adventures Among the Intellectuals. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1983. Baudelaire, Charles. Baudelaire: A Self-Portrait: Selected Letters. Translated by Lois Boe Hyslop and Francis E. Hyslop Jr. London: Oxford University Press, 1957. ———. The Flowers of Evil. Translated by James McGowan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. ———. The Prose Poems and La Fanfarlo. Translated by Rosemary Lloyd. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. ———. Selected Writings on Art and Literature. Translated by P. E. Charvet. London: Penguin Books, 1972. Beerbohm, Max. “Going Out for a Walk.” In Selected Prose. Edited by David Cecil. Boston: Little, Brown, 1970. Bellow, Saul. Letters. Edited by Benjamin Taylor. New York: Penguin Books, 2010. ———. “New York: World-Famous Impossibility.” In It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future. New York: New York: Viking Press, 1994. ———. Seize the Day. New York: Fawcett Premier, 1968.

235

236

Bibliography

Bender, Thomas. New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City, From 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. ———. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. Brooks, Van Wyck. The Times of Melville and Whitman. New York: Dutton, 1947. Buk- Swienty, Tom. The Other Half: The Life of Jacob Riis and the World of Immigrant America. Translated by Annette Buk-Swienty. New York: Norton, 2008. Burrows, Edwin G., and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Burstein, Andrew. The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving. New York: Basic Books, 2007. Cahan, Abraham. The Rise of David Levinsky. 1917. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960. ———. Yekl and The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of Yiddish New York. 1898. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1970. Cannato, Vincent J. American Passage: The History of Ellis Island. New York: Harper Perennial, 2010. Cassuto, Leonard, and Clare Virginia Eby, eds. Cambridge Companion to Theodore Dreiser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Cole, Teju. Open City. New York: Random House, 2011. Conrad, Peter. The Art of the City: Views and Versions of New York. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Cook, Richard M. Alfred Kazin: A Biography. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Crane, Stephen. Maggie: A Girl of the Street and Other Writings about New York. Introduction and notes by Robert Tine. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2005. ———. The New York City Sketches of Stephen Crane and Related Pieces. Edited by R. W. Stallman and E. R. Hagemann. New York: New York University Press, 1966. Davis, Linda H. Badge of Courage: The Life of Stephen Crane. Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1998. Delbanco, Andrew. Melville: His World and Work. New York: Vintage Books, 2006. Dickens, Charles. American Notes for General Circulation. Edited by Patricia Ingham. 1842. London: Penguin Books, 2000. ———. Selected Journalism 1850–1870. Edited by David Pascoe. London: Penguin Books, 1997.

Bibliography

237

Dos Passos, John. Manhattan Transfer. 1925. Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1953. Dreiser, Theodore. The Color of a Great City. 1923. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1996. ———. A Selection of Uncollected Prose. Edited by Donald Pizer. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977. ———. Sister Carrie. Introduction and notes by Herbert Leibowitz. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2005. ———. A Traveller at Forty. 1913. New York: Forgotten Books, 2012. Edel, Leon. Henry James: A Life. New York: Harper & Row, 1985. Freedman, Jonathan. The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Gay, John. Selected Poems. Edited by Marcus Walsh. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2003. Glaser, Edward. Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. Goodman, Susan, and Carl Dawson. William Dean Howells: A Writer’s Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Goodwin, Doris Kearns. The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roose velt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013. Gordon, Milton M. Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. Greenspan, Ezra, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Hardwick, Elizabeth. Bartleby in Manhattan & Other Essays. New York: Random House, 1983. ———. Herman Melville. New York: Viking Press, 2000. ———. “New York City: Crash Course.” Granta 32:111–122. ———. The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick. Edited by Darryl Pinckney. New York: New York Review Books, 2010. ———. Sight-Readings: American Fictions. New York: Random House, 1998. ———. Sleepless Nights. 1979. New York: New York Review Books, 2001. ———. A View of My Own: Essays in Literature and Society. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1962. Hazlitt, William. “On Going A Journey.” In Selected Writings. Edited by Ronald Blythe. London: Penguin Books, 1970. Helmreich, William B. The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6000 Miles in the City. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. Hemmings, F. W. J. Baudelaire the Damned: A Biography. New York: Scribner, 1982. Homberger, Eric. New York City: A Cultural and Literary Companion. New York: Interlink Books, 2003.

238

Bibliography

Howells, William Dean. The Coast of Bohemia. 1899. London: Dodo Press, 2008. ———. A Hazard of New Fortunes. 1890. New York: Modern Library, 2002. ———. Impressions and Experiences. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1909. ———. Letters Home. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1903. ———. Literary Friends and Acquaintances. Edited by David F. Hiatt and Edwin H. Cody. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968. ———. Representative Selections. Edited by Clara Marburg Kirk and Rudolf Kirk. New York: American Book Company, 1950. ———. The World of Chance: A Novel. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1893. Ingrams, Richard. The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett. London: HarperCollins, 2005. Jackson, Kenneth T., ed. The Encyclopedia of New York. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Jackson, Kenneth T., and David S. Dunbar, eds. Empire City: New York Through the Centuries. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of American Cities. New York: Random House, 1961. James, Henry. The American Scene. Introduction and notes by Leon Edel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968. ———. The Complete Notebooks of Henry James. Edited by Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. ———. Daisy Miller and Washington Square. Introduction and notes by Jennie A. Kassanoff. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2004. ———. Henry James: A Life in Letters. Edited by Philip Horne. London: Penguin Books, 1999. ———. Henry James: Selected Letters. Edited by Leon Edel. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987. ———. Henry James Letters, Vol. IV 1895–1916. Edited by Leon Edel. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984. ———. Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers. Edited by Leon Edel. New York: Library of America, 1984. ———. The New York Stories of Henry James. Selected by Colm Tóibín. New York: New York Review Books, 2006. ———. A Small Boy and Others. New York: Scribner, 1913. James, Henry, and Edith Wharton. Letters: 1900–1915. Edited by Lyall H. Powers. New York: Scribner, 1990. Johnson, James Weldon. Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson. 1933. New York: Da Capo Press, 2000. ———. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Other Writings. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2007. ———. Black Manhattan. 1930. New York: Da Capo Press, 1991. ———. Writings. Edited by William L. Andrews. New York, Library of America, 2004.

Bibliography

239

Jones, Maldwyn Allen. American Immigration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960. Juvenal. The Sixteen Satires. Translated by Peter Green. London: Penguin Books, 1998. Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980. Kazin, Alfred. Alfred Kazin’s America: Critical and Personal Writings. Edited by Ted Solotaroff. New York: Harper Perennial, 2003. ———. Alfred Kazin’s Journals. Edited by Richard Cook. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. ———. An American Procession: Major American Writers, 1830–1930. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984. ———. God and the American Writer. New York: Vintage Books, 1998. ———. A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment: From the Journals of Alfred Kazin. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. ———. New York Jew. New York: Knopf, 1978. ———. On Native Grounds. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1956. ———. Our New York. Photographs by David Finn. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. ———. Starting Out in the Thirties. Boston: Little, Brown, 1965. ———. A Walker in the City. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1951. Lamb, Charles. The Portable Charles Lamb: Letters and Essays. Edited by John Mason Brown. New York: Viking Press, 1949. ———. Selected Prose. Edited by Adam Phillips. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1985. Laskin, David. Partisans: Marriage, Politics, and Betrayal among the New York Intellectuals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Levy, Eugene. James Weldon Johnson: Black Leader, Black Voice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973. Lingeman, Richard. Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey. New York: Wiley, 1993. Lopate, Phillip. Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan. New York: Anchor Books, 2005. ———, ed. Writing New York: A Literary Anthology. New York: Library of America, 1998. Lottman, Herbert R. Albert Camus in New York. Corte Madera, Calif.: Gingko Press, 1997. Loving, Jerome. The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Macfarlane, Robert. The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot. New York: Viking, 2012. Manea, Norman. The Hooligan’s Return: A Memoir. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. Melville, Herman. Great Short Works of Herman Melville. Edited by Werner Berthoff. New York: Perennial Classics, 2004.

240

Bibliography

———. The Letters of Herman Melville. Edited by Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960. ———. Pierre or The Ambiguities. Edited by William C. Spengemann. New York: Penguin Books, 1996. ———. Stories, Poems, and Letters. Edited by R. W. B. Lewis. New York: Dell, 1962. Minshull, Duncan, ed. The Vintage Book of Walking: An Anthology. London: Vintage Books, 2000. Mitchell, Joseph. Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Works of Montaigne. Translated by Donald Frame. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958. Mumford, Lewis. Sketches from Life: The Autobiography of Lewis Mumford—The Early Years. Boston: Beacon Press, 1982. Nevius, Michelle, and James Nevius. Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City. New York: Free Press, 2009. Nicholson, Geoff. The Lost Art of Walking. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008. Novick, Sheldon M. Henry James: The Mature Master. New York: Random House, 2007. ———. Henry James: The Young Master. New York: Random House, 1996. O’Connell, Shaun. Remarkable, Unspeakable New York: A Literary History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. Ozick, Cynthia. “The Synthetic Sublime.” In Quarrel & Quandary. New York: Vintage International, 2000. Patell, Cyrus R. K., and Bryan Waterman, eds. Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pichois, Claude. Baudelaire. Translated by Graham Robb. London: Vintage Books, 1991. Reitano, Joanne. The Restless City: A Short History of New York from Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Routledge, 2006. Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Vintage Books, 1996. Riis, Jacob A. How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York. Edited by Sam Bass Warner. 1890. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010. ———. How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York. Introduction by Luc Sante. New York: Penguin Books, 1996. ———. The Making of an American. 1901. New York: Macmillan, 1940. Rischlin, Moses. The Promised City: New York’s Jews 1870–1914. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977. Roman, James. Chronicles of Old New York: Exploring Manhattan’s Landmark Neighborhoods. New York: Museyon, 2012.

Bibliography

241

Sante, Luc. Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York. New York: Vintage Departures, 1992. Slater, Michael. Charles Dickens. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Sloan, John. John Sloan’s New York. Edited by Heather Campbell Coyle and Joyce K. Schiller. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. ———. John Sloan’s New York Scene: From the Diaries, Notes and Correspondence 1906–1913. Edited by Bruce St. John. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. New York: Penguin Books, 2001. Sorkin, Michael. Twenty Minutes in Manhattan. London: Reaktion Books, 2009. Speck, Jeff. Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. Stavans, Ilan, ed. Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing. New York: Library of America, 2009. Thoreau, Henry David. “Walking.” In The Portable Thoreau. Edited by Carl Bode. New York: Viking Press, 1947. Trachtenberg, Alan. Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. ———. “Dark Patches and Solitude: Walt Whitman’s American Noir.” Yale Review 99, no. 2 (April 2011): 125–133. Trachtenberg, Alan, Peter Neill, and Peter C. Bunnell, eds. The City: American Experience. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Trollope, Anthony. North America. 1865. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Library, 2006. Trollope, Fanny. Domestic Manners of the Americans. Edited by Pamela NevilleSington. London: Penguin Books, 1997. Updike, John. Americana and Other Poems. New York: Knopf, 2001. Walser, Robert. The Walk. Translated by Christopher Middleton with Susan Bernofsky. New York: New Directions, 2012. White, E. B. “Here Is New York.” In Essays of E. B. White. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. White, Morton, and Lucia White. The Intellectual Versus the City: From Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright. New York: Mentor Books, 1964. Whitehead, Colson. The Colossus of New York: A City in Thirteen Parts. New York: Anchor Books, 2004. Whitman, Walt. Complete Poetry and Collected Prose. Edited by Justin Kaplan. New York: Library of America, 1982. Woolf, Virginia. “Street Haunting: A London Adventure.” In Selected Essays. Edited by David Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Wynn, Jonathan R. The Tour Guide: Walking and Talking New York. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.

242

Bibliography

Zacks, Richard. Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt’s Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York. New York: Anchor Books, 2012. Ziff, Larzer. The American 1890s: Life and Times of a Lost Generation. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979. Zuba, Jesse. Bloom’s Literary Guide to New York. New York: Checkmark Books, 2007.

Index

Addison, Joseph: London essays, 3–4; Remarks on Several Parts of Italy, 3 Adler, Felix, 84–85 African Americans: Greenwich Village, 154; Irish immigrants and, 148; Lambert, John, 11; Trollope, Fanny, 11–12 Alfred Kazin’s Journals (Kazin), 162 aloneness, 165 Along This Way ( Johnson), 146 American Art-Union, Walt Whitman, 28 American Notes for General Circulation (Dickens), 14–15 The American Scene ( James), 94; cities visited, 97 Amis, Martin, xv The Anatomy of Melancholy (Burton), 6 Andy Warhol’s New York City: Four Walks, Uptown to Downtown, xii Ansonia, 192 apartments: Dreiser, Theodore, 135. See also tenement apartments Art Students League building, Stephen Crane, 117 As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (Lee), 1 Astor, John Jacob, 28

The Atlantic Monthly, William Dean Howells, 60, 63 Auster, Paul, City of Glass, xii The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man ( Johnson), 150, 157–160 b’hoys, 26 Barrett, William, The Truants, 184 bars, Charles Dickens and, 19 “Bartleby the Scrivener” (Melville), 50–53 Baudelaire, Charles, 7–9; Tableaux parisiens, 8 Beerbohm, Max, 5 Bellafante, Ginia, xvi Bellow, Saul, xiv; “New York: World-Famous Impossibility,” xiv; Seize the Day, xiv Benjamin, Walter, on Baudelaire, 7, 8 Berger, Meyer, Meyer Berger’s New York, 195 Big City Book Club, xvi Bird, Isabella, 34 Black Manhattan ( Johnson), 147, 148 Bloom, Harold, xv; American Renaissance, xvi Bohemians, Howells, 63

243

244

Index

The Book of American Negro Poetry ( Johnson), 153 The Book of American Negro Spirituals ( Johnson and Johnson), 153 Bourget, Paul, Henry James and, 104–105 Bowery: Crane, Stephen, 118–124; prostitutes, 119; Whitman, Walt, 27–28 Brady, Mathew, 28–29 brick sidewalks, 13 The Bridge (Crane), 172–173 A Brief Description of New York (Denton), 10 bristling city, Henry James, 107–111 Britons, best-known, 10 Broadway, 11; Clarke, McDonald, 41; Dickens, Charles, 15; James, Henry, 110–111; Kazin, Alfred, 175; Melville, Herman, 56; Whitehead, Colson, 196; Whitman, Walt, 28 “Broadway” (Whitman), 40–41 “A Broadway Pageant” (Whitman), 31 Broadway Tabernacle, Walt Whitman, 29 Broadway Theatre, Walt Whitman, 28 Bronx Primitive: Portraits in Childhood (Simon), 195 Brooklyn Bridge: The Bridge (Crane), 172–173; Kazin, Alfred, 170–173 Bryant, William Cullen, Herman Melville and, 44 Bryant Park, 206 Burton, Robert, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 6 Camus, Albert, 205–206 Canal Street, 206 Carey, Peter, xv Central Park, William Dean Howells, 70–71 Chambers, William, 12 Chinatown, 201 Chinese immigrants, Jacob Riis, 83–84 cholera epidemic, 18 Christianity in Baudelaire, 9 cities, distrust, xiii City of Glass (Auster), xii

city walking: versus country walking, 2–3; London, 3–5, 4–5; Paris, 7–9 Clarke, McDonald, 41 cleanliness, 12–13; tobacco spittle, 12–13; Whitman, Walt, 23 The Coast of Bohemia (Howells), 71 Cobbett, William, 11 Cole, Teju, xvi, 195; Open City, 198–204 The Color of a Great City (Dreiser), 139–140 The Colossus of New York (Whitehead), 195–197 Columbia University: James, Henry, 99; Johnson, James Weldon, 149 commerce, 14; Howells, William Dean, 60, 67–68; James, Henry, 97; Melville, Herman, 44; Whitman, Walt, 34–35, 38 The Confidence Man (Melville), 52–53 Cosmopolitan, 59 cosmopolitanism, xv country walking: amoena loca, 6; The Anatomy of Melancholy (Burton), 6; Baudelaire, Charles, 7–9; Beerbohm, Max, 5; versus city walking, 2–3; literary presence, 6–7; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 7; Vendler, Helen, 6; walkmongers, 5; Wordsworth, William, 6 Crane, Hart, xv; The Bridge, 172–173 Crane, Stephen, xvi, 113; arrest, 124–126; Art Students League building, 117; Bowery, 118–124; Clark, Dora, 124–126; ferry ride, 121; freelance writing, 115; Garland, Hamlin, and, 114; George’s Mother, 117–118; Haymarket dance hall, 122; homelessness, 119–120; jokes, 118–119; Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, 114, 115–116; Minetta Lane (Greenwich Village), 123; New York police department, 124–125; New York Tribune, 114; opium dens, 121; Port Jervis Evening Gazette, 124; The Red Badge of Courage, 117; Roosevelt, Theodore, 124–125; success, 121–122; Tenderloin District, 122–124; tramps, 119; violence and, 123–124

Index 245 “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (Whitman), 39–40 “Cross-Town” (Hardwick), 188–192 crowds, Walt Whitman and, 31–32

Du Bois, W. E. B., James Weldon Johnson and, 153 Duyckinck, Evert, Herman Melville and, 44–45

The Delineator (Dreiser), 139 Delmonico’s, Charles Dickens, 22 Democratic Vistas (Whitman), 32, 34–35 Denton, Daniel, A Brief Description of New York, 10 Dickens, Charles, 10; Almack’s nightclub, 20; American Notes for General Circulation, 14–15; American press, 19; bars, 19; Broadway, 15; Delmonico’s, 22; Dickens’ Place nightclub, 20; fi res, 21; Five Points, 19–20; immigrants, 17; institutions, 21; Irish immigrants, 15–16; Jim Crow, 20; pigs, 18; street entertainers, 18; tobacco spittle, 21–22; The Tombs, 17–18, 20–21; walking styles, 15 Didion, Joan, xiii disappearances of New York, 206 disorientation, Jean-Paul Sartre, xiii Dodsworth (Lewis), xiii Domestic Manners of the Americans (Trollope), 11–12 Dos Passos, John, Manhattan Transfer, xv Dreiser, Theodore, xvi; apartments, 135; birthplace, 128; career success, 139–140; characters’ walks, 134–135; The Color of a Great City, 139–140; The Delineator, 139; depression, 137–138; Dresser, Paul, 128–129, 139–140; essays, 130–131; Ev’ry Month, 129–130, 132–133; homelessness, 141–142; Howells, William Dean, article, 132–134; immigrants, 140–141; indifference to suffering in New York, 131; Jennie Gerhardt, 137; Jews, 132; journalism, 128; move to New York, 128; New York World, 127; Sister Carrie, 134–137; Sister Carrie publication, 137–138; warnings to those considering moving, 131; workers in New York, 141–142 Dreyfus affair, Henry James, 104

“An East-Side Ramble” (Howells), 67 El Camino pilgrimage, 2 elderly in New York, 193 electric lights, 13 electric trolleys, 72 Empire City, xi–xii The Encyclopedia of Urban Studies (Hutchinson), xiii ethnic groups: Dreiser, Theodore, 140; Lambert, John, 11. See also African Americans; immigrants; Jews Ev’ry Month, 129–130, 132–133 failure in New York, Sleepless Nights (Hardwick), 181–183 failure of New York, 173–177 ferry rides, Stephen Crane, 121 “The Fiddler” (Melville), 49 fi res, Charles Dickens, 21 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Great Gatsby, xii–xiii Five Points: Dickens, Charles, 19–20; Riis, Jacob, 81–82 fl âneur, 4 Flushing, 208 Foster, George, New York by Gas-Light, 82 Frazier, Ian, “Someplace in Queens,” 208 Gandhi, pilgrimage, 2 Garland, Hamlin, xiii; Crane, Stephen, and, 114 gas lighting, 13 Gay, John, Trivia, Or the Art of Walking the Streets in London, 4–5 gentrification, 206 George’s Mother (Crane), 117–118 “Ghost Doctors’ Ghost Tours of New York,” xii God and the American Writer (Kazin), 170 Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (Burrows & Wallace), 12

246

Index

Gotham Court, Jacob Riis, 76 Grace Church: Melville, Herman, 56; Riis, Jacob, 81; Whitman, Walt, 29 Grant, Madison, The Passing of the Great Race in America, 102 The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald), xii–xiii Greenwich Village: African Americans, 154; Crane, Stephen, 123 Guide to the Lakes (Wordsworth), 6 Hardwick, Elizabeth, xvi; Boston versus New York, 184–185; “Cross-Town,” 188–192; decoding New York, 179; desperation, 184; elderly in New York, 193; essays on writers in New York, 185; Kazin, Alfred, and, 178; Manhattan, 184–186; move to New York, 179–180; “New York City: Crash Course,” 193–194; “The Oak and the Axe,” 187–188; “On the Eve,” 192–193; “The Purchase,” 188; revenge, 184; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 190; Sleepless Nights, 179–184; “The Temptations of Dr. Hoffman,” 186–187 Harlem, James Weldon Johnson, 150–155, 153–155 Harper’s Monthly (Howells), 60 Haymarket dance hall, 122 A Hazard of New Fortunes (Howells), 59–60, 63–66; James, Henry, 71 Hazlitt, William, 6–7 Hell’s Kitchen, Jacob Riis, 76 High Line, 206 Holiday, Billie, in Sleepless Nights (Hardwick), 181 Homberger, Eric, New York City: A Cultural and Literary Companion, 208 homeless, Jacob Riis, 75, 79–81 homelessness: Crane, Stephen, 119–120; Dreiser, Theodore, 141–142 Hone, Philip, on immigrants, 16 Hotel Schuyler, 181 house numbers, 13 “The House-top” (Melville), 54–55 How the Other Half Lives (Riis), 77, 81–93 Howells, William Dean, xii, xvi; apartment hunting, 64; The Atlantic Monthly, 60, 63; Bohemians, 63;

Boston versus New York, 74; Central Park, 70–71; The Coast of Bohemia, 71; commerce, 60, 67–68; conditions make character, 64; Cosmopolitan, 59; disenchantment with America, 61–62; Dreiser article, 132–134; “An East-Side Ramble,” 67; Harper’s Monthly, 60; A Hazard of New Fortunes, 59–60, 63–66; immigrant Jews, 68; James, Henry, 71; Letters Home, 72–73; Lower East Side, 66–68; “New York Streets,” 68–71; on poverty, 64–65; return to New York, 60–61; The Rise of Silas Lapham, 61; shops, 69–70; signage, 69; socialism, 61, 62; tenement apartments, 67; A Traveler from Altruria, 72; ugliness of the city, 62–63; Whitman, Walt, and, 63; The World of Chance, 71–72 Humphrey Clinker (Smollett), 5 Hutchinson, Ray, The Encyclopedia of Urban Studies, xiii immigrants, xiii; Dickens, Charles, 15–17; Dreiser, Theodore, 140–141; English and, 87; Hone, Philip, 16; Howells, William Dean, 68; Irish, 15; Johnson, James Weldon, 148–149; Know Nothing Party, 16; Manea, Norman, 207; Native American Party, 16; numbers, 82–83; Open City (Cole), 200–201; The Passing of the Great Race in America (Grant), 102; pushcarts, 140–141; Queens, 208–209; Riis, Jacob, 83–84; slums and, 82; Whitman, Walt, and, 27; Wilson, Woodrow, 102. See also ethnic groups immigration, 207; James, Henry, 100–103; urban success and, 207 “The Impressions of a Cousin” ( James), 104 international residents, xv Irish immigrants: African Americans, 148; Dickens, Charles, 15–16; Whitman, Walt, and, 27 Irving, Washington, xii

Index 247 James, Henry, xii, xv–xvi; The American Scene, 94; bathrooms, 97; birthplace, 95; bristling city, 107–111; Broadway, 110–111; cities visited for The American Scene, 97; Columbia University, 99; commerce, 97; “Crapy Cornelia,” 109; Dreyfus aff air, 104; Hardwick, Elizabeth, 185; on A Hazard of New Fortunes (Howells), 71; immigrant assimilation, 100–103; “The Impressions of a Cousin,” 104; Jewish assimilation, 103–107; “The Jolly Corner,” 109–110; Lower East Side, 105; Melville, Herman, and, 95–96; move to Europe, 96; New York Stories of Henry James (Tóibín, ed.), 110; old New York versus new New York, 109; return to New York, 96–99; Roderick Hudson, xvi; “Round of Visits,” 110; skyscrapers, 94; A Small Boy and Others, 110; society, 108; terrible town, 94–95; Wall street, 98; Washington Square, 98; Washington Square, 95; Wharton, Edith, 96 jazz clubs, 180–181 Jennie Gerhardt (Dreiser), 137 Jews: assimilation, Henry James, 103–107; Cobbett, William, 11; Dreiser, Theodore, 132; Howells, William Dean, 68; Kazin, Alfred, 168–169; Oates, William C., 83; Riis, Jacob, 82, 84 Jim Crow: Dickens, Charles, 20; Johnson, James Weldon, 147–148, 151 Johnson, James Weldon, xvi; Along This Way, 146; The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, 150, 157–160; Black Manhattan, 147, 148; The Book of American Negro Poetry, 153; The Book of American Negro Spirituals, 153; Columbia University, 149; Du Bois, W. E. B., and, 153; fi rst trip to New York, 150–151; Harlem, 150–155; immigrants, 148–149; Jim Crow–ism, 147–148, 151; “My City,” 145; NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), 152–153; Negro Bohemia, 146; New

York Age, 151; race riots, 147–148; racial incidents, 155–157; racial traits, 155–156; songwriting, 145–146; suicides of friends, 152; Tenderloin District, 158–159; Toloso, 146–147; Wetmore, Judson Douglass, and, 160–161 Kazin, Alfred, xii, xvi; Alfred Kazin’s Journals, 162; aloneness, 165; American culture, 169–170; Broadway, 175; Brooklyn Bridge, 170–173; Canal Street, 206; dream of walking, 166–167; failure of New York, 173–177; Fortune, 163; God and the American Writer, 170; Hardwick, Elizabeth, and, 178; Jewish immigrants, 168–169; A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment: From the Journals of Alfred Kazin, 162; loneliness, 164–166; Malamud, Bernard, 167; Manhattan, 169; marriages, 164–165; New Republic, 163; New York Herald Tribune, 163; New York Jew, 162; New York Times, 163; old New York, 167–170; Our New York, 162; reveries, 166; Starting Out in the Thirties, 162, 175–176; Time-Life Building, 163; Trilling, Lionel, 176; Upper West Side, 174–175; A Walker in the City, 162, 167–168 King, Martin Luther, Jr., walk to Montgomery, 2 Koolhaas, Rem, 185 Kramer, Hilton, xiv Kugel, Seth, 208 Lambert, John, 11 Lane, William Henry, 20 Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 36; inspiration, 32; as language experiment, 37 Lee, Laurie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, 1 Letters Home (Howells), 72–73 Lewis, Sinclair, Dodsworth, xiii A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment: From the Journals of Alfred Kazin (Kazin), 162

248

Index

lighting: electric, 13; gas, 13 Lincoln, Abraham, Walt Whitman and, 29–31 Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, 206 literary people, xv Little Italy, 206–207 The Living Mountain (Shephard), 10 loaferism, 26–27 London: Addison, Joseph, 3–4; Beerbohm, Max, 5; Dickens, Charles, 15; Gay, John, 4–5; Gray, Thomas, 6; Hazlitt, William, 6–7; Lamb, Charles, 5; Mr. Spectator, 3–4; problems with, 4–5; Smollett, Tobias, 5; Woolf, Virginia, 5–6 loneliness, 165–166 Lopate, Phillip, xii; Writing New York: A Literary Anthology, xvii The Lost Art of Walking (Nicholson), 1 Lower East Side: Crane, Stephen, 113; Howells, William Dean, 66–68; James, Henry, 105; Riis, Jacob, 85–86 Macfarlane, Robert, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, 1 Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (Crane), 114, 115–117 magical nature, xii–xiii magnetism, Walt Whitman, 25–6 The Making of an American (Riis), 78–79 Manea, Norman, 207 Manhattan: Hardwick, Elizabeth, 184–186; Kazin, Alfred, 169; map from 14th Street to 72nd Street, 112; map from 65th Street to 125th Street, 144; map from Battery to 23rd Street, 24; map from Houston Street to 57th Street, 58 “Manhattan: The Great American Desert” (Sartre), xiii Manhattan Transfer (Dos Passos), xv Manhattanism, 185–186 “Mannahatta” (Whitman), 23, 25 maps: Manhattan from 14th Street to 72nd Street, 112; Manhattan from 65th Street to 125th Street, 144; Manhattan from Battery to 23rd

Street, 24; Manhattan from Houston Street to 57th Street, 58 Marble Palace, 34–35 March of Dimes Walkathon, 2 medicine for the soul, 32 Melville, Herman, xv–xvi; American energy, 57; “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” 50–53; Broadway, 56; Bryant, William Cullen, 44; commerce, 44; The Confi dence Man, 52–53; draft riots, 54; Duyckinck, Evert, 44–45; early years, 43–44; Grace Church, 56; Hardwick, Elizabeth, 185–186; hopefulness of New Yorkers, 56; Moby Dick, 43; on money, 48; nature and, 48–49; New York Society Library, 44; Pierre, 45–49; retirement, 55–56; on Shakespeare, 55; state of mind, 49–50; “The Fiddler,” 49; “The House-top,” 54–55; “The Two Temples,” 56; walks to work, 53–54; Wall Street, 50–53; Whitman, Walt, and, 43–45, 57 Metropolitan Opera House, 206 Meyer Berger’s New York (Berger), 195 Minetta Lane (Greenwich Village), Crane, Stephen, 123 Moby Dick (Melville), Ishmael, dreaming New Yorkers and, 43 Moving Day, Fanny Trollope, 12 Mr. Spectator, 3–4 M’Robert, Patrick, 10–11 Mulberry Bend, Jacob Riis, 76, 86 “My City” ( Johnson), 145 NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), Johnson, James Weldon, 152–153 nature, Herman Melville and, 48–49 Negro Bohemia, James Weldon Johnson, 146 New Republic, Albert Kazin and, 163 New York Age, 151 New York by Gas-Light (Foster), 82 New York City: A Cultural and Literary Companion (Homberger), 208 “New York City: Crash Course” (Hardwick), 193–194

Index 249 New York Herald Tribune, Alfred Kazin and, 163 New York Jew (Kazin), 162 New York Places and Pleasures: An Uncommon Guidebook (Simon), 195 New York Society Library: Melville, Herman, 44; Whitman, Walt, 28 “New York Streets” (Howells), 68–71 New York Times, Alfred Kazin and, 163 New York Tribune: Crane, Stephen, 114; Riis, Jacob, 75–76 New York World, Theodore Dreiser and, 127 “New York: World-Famous Impossibility” (Bellow), xiv Nicholson, Geoff, The Lost Art of Walking, 1 nightclubs: Almack’s, 20; Dickens’ Place, 20 noisy streets, 13; Howells, William Dean, 69 Norman, Mildred (Peace Pilgrim), 2 “The Oak and the Axe” (Hardwick), 187–188 Oates, William C., Jews, 83 The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (Macfarlane), 1 omnibuses, Walt Whitman, 32 “On the Eve” (Hardwick), 192–193 Open City (Cole), 198–204 opium dens, Stephen Crane, 121 Our New York (Kazin), 162 Ozick, Cynthia, xv; disappearances of New York, 206; “The Synthetic Sublime,” 195 Pamuk, Orhan, xv Paris, 7–9; Baudelaire, Charles, 7–8, 7–9; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 7 paseo, 2 passeggiata, 2 The Passing of the Great Race in America (Grant), 102 Peace Pilgrim (Mildred Norman), 2 Pfaff ’s, Walt Whitman, 29 Phaedrus (Plato), 2–3 phrenology, Walt Whitman, 29

Pierre (Melville), 45–49 pigs, Charles Dickens, 18 pilgrimages, 1–2. See also quasi-political pilgrimages; religious pilgrimages Pinckney, Darryl, on Elizabeth Hardwick, 190 Pinsky, Robert, xvii Plumbe, John, 28 police department, Crane’s series, 124–126 political pilgrimages, 2 post–Civil War New York, 189 poverty, William Dean Howells, 64–65 prostitutes, 11; Bowery, 119; Crane, Stephen, 114; Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (Crane), 117 “The Purchase” (Hardwick), 188 pushcarts, immigrants and, 140–141 quasi-political pilgrimages, 2 Queens, 208 race riots, James Weldon Johnson and, 147–148 racial issues: Johnson, James Weldon, 155–157. See also Jim Crow The Red Badge of Courage (Crane), 117 religious pilgrimages, 1–2; El Camino, 2 Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (Addison), 3 Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Rousseau), 7 Riis, Jacob, xvi; Adler, Felix, 84–85; attack, 76; Chinese immigrants, 83–84; destitution, 79–81; dog, 79–80; early years, 77–78; Five Points, 81–82; Grace Church, 81; homelessness, 75; How the Other Half Lives, 77, 81–93; immigrants speaking English, 87; immigration, 85; Italians, 83; Jewish immigrants, 84; Jews, 83; Jews as criminal class, 82; Lower East Side, 85–86; The Making of an American, 78–79; Mulberry Bend, 86; New York Tribune, 75–76; Newspaper Row, 76–77; photography, 88–93; Roosevelt, Theodore and, 77; slums, 76–77, 81–82; South Brooklyn News, 81; tenements, 85

250

Index

The Rise of Silas Lapham (Howells), 61 Roderick Hudson ( James), xvi Roosevelt, Theodore: Crane, Stephen, and, 124–125; Riis, Jacob, and, 77 Roth, Philip, 207 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 7; Hardwick, Elizabeth, 190; Reveries of the Solitary Walker, 7 Sartre, Jean-Paul, “Manhattan: The Great American Desert,” xiii Seize the Day (Bellow), xiv settlers in New York, xv Shephard, Nan, The Living Mountain, 10 shops, William Dean Howells, 69–70 sidewalks, brick, 13 signage, William Dean Howells, 69 Simon, Kate: Bronx Primitive: Portraits in Childhood, 195; New York Places and Pleasures: An Uncommon Guidebook, 195 Sister Carrie (Dreiser), 134–137; publication, 137–138 skyscrapers, Henry James, 94 slavophile, 192–193 Sleepless Nights (Hardwick), 179–184 slums: immigrants and, 82; Riis, Jacob, 76–77, 81–82 A Small Boy and Others ( James), 110 Smollett, Tobias, Humphrey Clinker, 5 society, Henry James, 108 Society people, Walt Whitman, 35–36 Socrates, 2–3 “Someplace in Queens” (Frazier), 208 “Song of Myself ” (Whitman), 25 South Brooklyn News (Riis), 81 Specimen Days (Whitman), 27 Speck, Jeff, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time, 205 Spectator, 3–4 Starting Out in the Thirties (Kazin), 162, 175–176 Stephen, Leslie, 5, 6 Stewart’s dry goods store, 34–35 street entertainers, Charles Dickens, 18 Stringer, Lee, Time Out Book of New York Walks, xii

Strong, George Templeton, 11 “The Synthetic Sublime” (Ozick), 195 Tableaux parisiens (Baudelaire), 8 “The Temptations of Dr. Hoff man” (Hardwick), 186–187 Tenderloin District: Crane, Stephen, 113, 122–124; Johnson, James Weldon, 158–159 tenement apartments: Howells, William Dean, 67; Riis, Jacob, 85. See also apartments Thoreau, Henry David, xiii Time-Life Building, Kazin, Alfred, 163 Time Out Book of New York Walks (Stringer), xii tobacco spittle, 12–13; Dickens, Charles, 21–22 Tóibín, Colm, xv Toloso ( Johnson and Johnson), 146–147 The Tombs, Charles Dickens, 17–18, 20–21 tourist’s city, 208–209 traffic, 13 transportation: Howells, William Dean, 72; Trollope, Anthony, 13–14 A Traveler from Altruria (Howells), 72 Trilling, Lionel, Alfred Kazin, 176 Trivia, Or the Art of Walking the Streets in London (Gay), 4–5 Trollope, Anthony, 10; transportation, 13–14 Trollope, Fanny, 10; Domestic Manners of the Americans, 11–12; Moving Day, 12; tobacco spittle, 12–13 The Truants (Barrett), 184 “The Two Temples” (Melville), 56 Updike, John, xiv Upper West Side: Kazin, Alfred, 174–175; Sleepless Nights (Hardwick), 181–182 urban success, immigration and, 207 The Vintage Book of Walking, 2 violence, Stephen Crane, 123–124 Vogel, Morris J., 207

Index 251 Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time (Speck), 205 walkathons, 2 A Walker in the City (Kazin), 162, 167–168 walking: benefits, 1; historical necessity, 1 walking tours: “Ghost Doctors’ Ghost Tours of New York,” xii; guides, xi walkmongers, 5 Wall Street: James, Henry, 98; Melville, Herman, 50–53 Wallace, Mike, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, 12 Wansey, Henry, 11 Washington Square ( James), 95 waterways, Walt Whitman, 38–39 Waugh, Evelyn, xiii–xiv Wetmore, Judson Douglass, 160–161 White, E. B., xiv–xv Whitehead, Colson, xv, 195–196; Broadway, 196; The Colossus of New York, 195–197; inscrutable hustle of New York, 206 Whitman, Walt, xvi; American Art-Union, 28; American future, 33; the Bowery, 27–28; Brady, Mathew, 28–29; Broadway, 28; “Broadway,” 40–41; “A Broadway Pageant,” 31; Broadway Tabernacle, 29; Broadway Theatre, 28; cleanliness of the city, 23; commerce, 34–35; counterculture and, 37–38; “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” 39–40; crowds and, 31–32;

dark side of the city, 40; Democratic Vistas, 32, 34–35; energy of the city, 23; Grace Church, 29; Hardwick, Elizabeth, 185–186; hobbling, 33–34; Howells, William Dean, and, 63; Irish immigrants and, 27; Johnston, John H., 33; journalism career, 25; Leaves of Grass inspiration, 32, 36; Leaves of Grass as language experiment, 37; Lincoln, Abraham, 29–31; loaferism, 26–27; Mad Poet of Broadway, 41; magnetism of the city, 25–26; “Mannahatta,” 23, 25; materialism, 38; medicine for the soul, 32; Melville, Herman, and, 43–45, 57; New York Society Library, 28; Pfaff ’s, 29; phrenologist visit, 29; Plumbe, John, 28; on Poe, 28; publishing, 36–37; rough image, 36; rough image versus real man, 37–38; Society people, 35–36; “Song of Myself,” 25; Specimen Days, 27; urban landscape, 39; waterways, 38–39 Woolf, Virginia, 5–6 Wordsworth, William, Guide to the Lakes, 6 workers, 141–142 The World of Chance (Howells), 71–72 writer’s city, 208–209 Writing New York: A Literary Anthology (Lopate), xvii Yarvin, Brian, 209