New York in Fiction (1964)

One of the most familiar clichés for characterizing New York City is “The Melting Pot,” the phrase suggesting that the more ethnic and cultural groups that pouredinto New York, the quicker they would all melt into a common type. However, as Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan have recently discovered, this metaphor has been repudiated by history. In New York, people of all sorts freely mix with each other; but only slightly do they melt. Even in the mid-sixties, New York remains still a collection of distinctive groups, defined not only by racial, geographical, and ethnic origins but also by profession, income, and even sexual inclination. Though an individual may move from one group to another or have overlapping allegiances, he invariably belongs to some sort of identifiable, but informal community.

Although the diversity of these communities is a major component of New York’s distinctive character, it is, paradoxically, both visible and invisible to the foreign visitor. The phenomenon is visible in the sense that it can be observed from a distance, such as from the Grand Central’s elevated railroad tracks, and yet invisible in that it is hardly at first hand. The various communities are not tourist attractions; and unless the visitor has a friend or relative in one of these groups or he is unusually adept at making new acquaintances (a fear of strangers makes this harder to do in New York than in, say, London), immediate acquaintance with New York’s cultural variety will escape him.

Generally, if the outsider cannot know a milieu at first hand, he must resort to secondary sources. Realistic, unsentimental films about New York are few (Marty, Shadows, maybe On the Waterfront). The only recent book I know to cope with cultural variety, Glazer and Moynihan’s Beyond the Melting Pot (1963), deals only with ethnic or racial categories and then only with a few of the many within that range—Irish, Italians, Jews, Negroes, and Puerto Ricans. The best entrée, I suggest, would be a stack of contemporary novels, each portraying life in a different subculture. These novels, no matter their value to literature, can convey the characteristic styles of certain communities, which thus become more immediately familiar to us.

In contemporary literature, New York emerges as a predominantly Jewish city; and although it does in fact have a larger Jewish population than the state of Israel, this literary image distorts the truth of numbers, reflecting instead, first, the emergence of the Jewish writer upon the American literary scene and, second, the concomitant shift in American literary focus from rural life to urban. Whereas earlier novelists like William Dean Howells, or Theodore Dreiser, portrayed characters who immigrated to the city, these recent novels are by and for people who grew up in an urban milieu. Indicatively, the most acclaimed Jewish-American novelist, Saul Bellow, not only sets his works in cities but also makes his characters’ responses to the great cities, New York and Chicago, a major theme of his work. Among the most memorable passages in his second novel, The Victim (1947), is its opening description of that peculiarly indigenous miasma that grips New York in midsummer:

On some nights New York is as hot as Bangkok. The whole continent seems to have moved from its place and slid nearer the equator, the bitter gray Atlantic to have become green and tropical, and the people, thronging the streets, barbaric fellahin among the stupendous monuments of their mystery, the lights of which, a dazing profusion, climb upward endlessly into the heat of the sky.

With a keen awareness of how to correlate scene and individual characters, Bellow creates in the relationship of Asa Leventhal and Kirby Allbee a bond of similarly heated, yet stolid intensity.

In his novella, Seize the Day (1956)— to my mind, his most perfectly realized work—Bellow more completely evokes a New York milieu, a certain segment of Manhattan’s West Side, and its effect upon its residents.

Along Broadway in the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties, a great part of New York’s vast population of old men and women lives. Unless the weather is too cold or wet they fill the benches about the tiny railed parts and along the subway gratings from Verdi Square to Columbia University, they crowd the shops and cafeterias, the dime stores, the tea rooms and club rooms.

In America, the elderly often become “remittance” people who are given money to live away from their children—in hotels that, like their tenants, once saw better days. As they congregate together, they clip coupons, endorse checks, make small speculations, and await the weekend visits of their children and grandchildren. It is then and there that, as in Bellow’s novel, the conflicts of the generations are played out.

Yet this same neighborhood of the elderly is also, especially in its side streets full of “efficiency” or “studio” apartments, many of them in “residence hotels.” These attract not only students and transient young couples but also a certain segment of New York’s disproportionately large population of homosexuals, who appear to define their style by where they live. The wealthier homosexuals reside in the East 50’s and ‘60’s-they are probably successful in fashion design, acting, and the allied arts; the more flamboyant and “kept” drift to Greenwich Village, west of Seventh Avenue, where a homosexual style is aggressively conspicuous; while the lonelier and scruffier gravitate towards the middle West Side. Thus, in Edward Albee’s play The Zoo Story, the intruder Jerry defines himself as soon as he remarks that he lives in a rooming house in the West ‘70’s. No fiction so accurately examines this last area as two of Hubert Selby, Jr’s stories in Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964), anatomizing the patterns of frivolous relationships, opportunistic exploitation and boisterous campiness of certain homosexuals.

The intellectual life of the upper West Side is captured and satirized in Wallace Markfield’s To an Early Grave (1964), which so deftly characterizes the nouveau quality of New York’s intelligentsia. Rarely the sons of intellectuals, they are ambitious men who boost themselves into the world of culture, rather than grow into it; thus, they tend to retain manners, accents, passions, tastes, and sentiments that reflect their origins. In one of the funniest scenes, a character writes a review of a book of sociological essays while peeking at Playboy; and as Markfield’s novel makes clear, only in New York is Yiddish the lingua franca of all intellectuals (including Gentiles).

Perhaps because so few dedicated writers can afford to live in Greenwich Village proper and because the area now emits a commercialized odor contrary to its bohemian origins, the Village nowadays is more usually the setting for a lubricious attempted best-seller than a serious work. Still, James Baldwin’s Another Country (1962), though not set specifically within the Village, best captures two major qualities of Village life: a curious mixture of self-styled outsiders who have little in common except for their feelings of “alienation”—Negroes, homosexuals, actors, musicians, disaffected students—and its style of intense human and sexual relationships beneath a facade of casualness.

East of the Village and extending south of Fourteen street to Chinatown and the downtown business district is the Lower East Side. Originally the immigrant’s first step into Manhattan, the area was successively inhabited by waves of Irish, Germans, Jews, Italians and Eastern Europeans; and as the ability to move out of the area became a sign of a person’s success, the area accumulated the residue of each group until, by now, it houses the largest ethnic variety of New York’s poor. As its tenements are usually dingy or crowded, the Lower East Side has the most active street life. Although Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep was originally published in 1935 (only to disappear until re-emerging in 1964 as a best-selling paperback) and it describes events taking place yet twenty years earlier, no other novel captures as brilliantly the area’s rich confusion of various accents and languages. When young David Shearl accidentally puts a soup ladle in the middle tram track, he suffers an electric shock; a crowd that the gathers around his fallen body vocalizes the neighborhood:

“Holy mother o’God! Look! Will yiz!”

“Wot?”

“There’s a guy layin’ there! Burrhnin!”

“Naw! Where!”

“Gawd damn the winder!”

“It’s on Tent’ Street! Look!” “Oy! Oy Vai! Oy Vai! Oy Vai!”

“Git a cop”

“An embillance—go cull-oy!”

“Don’t touch him!”

“Bambino! Madre Mia!”

“Mary. It’s jus’ a kid!”

“Helfetz! Helftz! Helftz! Yeedin! Rot Rotivit!”

Among the better recent novels about lower East Side Jews are Edward Adler’s Notes from a Dark Street (1961), Norman Fruchter’s Coat Upon a Stick (1962) and Jerome Charyn’s Once Upon a Droshky (1964).

To the east of Manhattan lie the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn, a working-class and middle class residential area, to which no one goes except to visit relatives and sleep. Thomas Wolfe once entitled a short story, “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn,” perhaps to explain why subsequent novels about Brooklyn are always so very gray in atmosphere—from Henry Miller’s Black Spring (1936) to Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant (1956); what is alive in this area is not the ugly dingy buildings but the people within them, not the life on the streets but that in the houses. Thus, the most memorable books about Brooklyn and Queens evoke nostalgia for the writer’s family, such as Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City (1951). However, as Kazin himself confesses in that memoir, to make his way in the world, he needed to leave Brooklyn.

The Harlem-born Negro writers nowadays have much the same attitude towards where they grew up, and this explains why so many recent novels by New York Negroes portray not Harlem but Negroes in other milieus—among intellectuals, homosexuals, dope addicts, Greenwich Villagers, theatre crowd. Indicatively, then, the best novelistic introduction to Harlem is by an Oklahoma-born Negro writer who, although he teaches in predominantly white universities, chooses to live in Harlem—Ralph Ellison. His Invisible Man (1952) captures that peculiar version of opportunity that Harlem offers the young Negro—he may be restricted in the larger white world, but within Harlem his possibilities are almost limitless. Ellison also brilliantly captures Harlem speech which he once described as “the rich babel of idiomatic expression around me, a language full of imagery and gesture and rhetorical canniness” a language, one would add, that is rich with penchants for outrageous metaphors and ironic commentary. In this passage from Ellison’s novel, one Negro tells another about a black nationalist on horseback leading a race riot:

Riding up and down the block yelling

“I, Ras, commands you to destroy them to the last piece of rotten fish!” And ‘bout that time some joker with a big ole’ Georgia voice sticks his head out the window and yells, “Ride ‘em cowboy. Give ‘em hell and bananas.” And man, that crazy sonofabitch up there on that hoss looking like death eating a sandwich, he reaches down and comes up with a forty-five and starts blasting up at the window—And man, talk about cutting out! Crazy, man. Everybody else trying to git some loot and him and his boys out for blood!”

Less familiar is New York’s community of Negro West Indians, residing largely in Brooklyn, whose style of life and aspirations more resemble those of other immigrant groups, such as Jews, than the distinctive indigenous culture of American Negroes; and the special character of this community is captured in Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959).

Perhaps the largest difficulty in writing about New York is that it seems impossible for a novelist accurately to portray a cultural group not his own. Even Warren Miller, who claims to have resided in Harlem for five years, simply fails to evoke true Negro speech in The Cool World (1959): and Miller’s plot turns upon an incident as incredible as a fourteen year-old prostitute losing herself in the subway. This failure means that no subculture enters American literature until it produces writers who can deal with their inherited origins and allegiances. However, one new writer, Irvin Faust, whose first collection of stories, Roar Lion Roar (1965) was published this year, has been more adept at portraying various cultural groups. Successfully exploiting his experience as a high school teacher and guidance counselor, he writes fictions that deal intimately with Negroes, Jews, homosexuals, foreign students, and Puerto Ricans. In his title story, English with a Puerto Rican accent, for the first time to my knowledge, becomes literary material.

The neglected minority of New York City, in both its literature and life, is the old upper class. Once very important, its pre-eminence in New York has, it seems, been superceded by what one commentator calls “a new aristocracy of talent and fame” whose dominance is closely tied to the public media. As the old upper class loses its fortunes to inheritance taxes, its prestige to the talented, its daughters to the upwardly mobile, and its sons to dissipation, it retreats into itself; and this historical tendency, the tragedy and the fact of it, is the theme of Louis Auchincloss’s fine New York novels, such as Portrait in Brownstone (1962) and Venus in Sparta (1958).

As more and more people move out of the City to the country, the suburbs become a sixth borough of New York, so to speak, sort of a nicer Brooklyn which, though too dull to visit, can be a very nice place to live. Of a new generation of emerging novelists who write about the new upper-middle class suburbia with small affection, no one has so accurately observed the life style of its Jewish segment—its language, ambitions and modes of rationalization—as Philip Roth in the title novella of Goodbye, Columbus (1959). Some of John Cheever’s stories, collected in The Brigadier and the Golf Widow (1964) and The Housebreaker of Shady Hill (1958) offer masterly executed portraits of older, usually gentile suburbanites.

All in all, then, these novels offer a better tour of the feel of New York’s variousness than any guidebook I know. Many of the portraits are critical, some even severely unfavorable; for the city novelist knows that New York is capable of inflicting pain. Yet, each of these writers also knows that New York offers a wealth of opportunities, experiences, and cultural activities, by sheer bulk unsurpassed by any city in the world. Perhaps this explains why one rarely comes across novels about people who leave New York and enjoy their new existence. I suppose successful emigration is possible in real life, but it would seem impossible for a novelist to present it convincingly. The New York writer, like his characters, knows a certain truth—that one suffers New York, for fear of an even greater loss.

Richard Kostelanetz

New York in Fiction (1964)