Writing
about New York is both rewarding and daunting. Rewarding, because
it's an inexhaustible topic that has a ready audience of passionate
experts. Daunting, for just the same reasons. Every book about the
city is doomed to come up short in content, meeting along the way a
well-informed army of nit-pickers, assumption-questioners, and
evidence-doubters. If New York has become, on a global and artistic
plane, everybody's city, it is also a highly localized spot where
nobody else's experience is likely to match one's own. Such are the
personal and proprietary instincts of New Yorkers that "my town"
hardly ever coincides with "our town."
Co-editor
Cyrus R. K. Patell, a professor of English at NYU, meets the omission
problem head-on in his introduction to this book. Acknowledging the
immense scope of his subject, he remarks: "don't kvetch
too much if you find that some familiar figure has been omitted or
given short shrift. Or, rather, kvetch
all you want: complaining, after all, is one of New York's great
cultural traditions" (2). To get the kvetching
out of the way, let's note up front that in this book you won't find
much in the way of formal analysis or citations of the great passages
of prose and poetry that convey the wonder that is New York. Except
for Whitman, poets and prose writers who sing the city's praises (and
curses) get little note: Hart Crane, Federico Garcia Lorca, John Dos
Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, Frank O'Hara and the New
York School merit only fleeting mention. Skyscrapers, subways, and
other distinctive features of the environment (Times Square, Central
Park, the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island) that figure heavily in
the literary mythos of New York are similarly left in the background.
While movies are mentioned frequently, there is no discussion of the
graphic novel and the angst-haunted work of Art Spiegelman, Alan
Moore, or Frank Miller. A more thematic approach might have led to
essays on crime and detection, domestic and public space, fashion and
gender, downward mobility and homelessness, and the relation of
literary form to the ever-changing built environment. And for those
who want to grapple with the textual fallout of the key event of the
past decade, there is no chapter or sub-section on the literature of
9/11. Happily, however, much of this material can be found
elsewhere, in works such as Shaun O'Connell's wide-ranging
Remarkable, Unspeakable New York
(1995) or Kristiaan Versluys' profound Out of
the Blue: September 11 and the Novel (2009).
Kvetching
aside, the Cambridge
Companion series tries to do something
worthwhile but tricky: it seeks to give students an authoritative
overview of complex topics through a series of short essays locating
significant works in historical context. The need for coverage that
Patell casually dismisses in his introduction is actually the driving
force behind the volume and each essay within it. As I learned
myself when contributing to a Cambridge
Companion (the forthcoming volume on London),
it is no easy task to find an imaginative organizing principle that
will be fresh to specialists and enlightening for newcomers to the
field. But working within these confines, Patell and his co-editor
Bryan Waterman have assembled a strong team of scholars and an
attractive array of topics. One cannot but be grateful for all the
insight and erudition assembled here. The contributors have made a
bold stab at mapping the literary ground as it looks in our
context-oriented, politically engaged new millennium.
According
to Patell, the volume provides a series of guides for the reader,
"opinionated companions who will show you around some of the
different eras, enclaves, genres, and ideas that mark the city's
literary and cultural history" (2). Hence, a readable,
detailed chronology of literary history sets the stage for fifteen
essays on Dutch New York, the early theater, the novels of Brooklyn,
the bohemians of Greenwich Village, immigrant and ethnic literature,
African American literary movements, and so on. There are also
fifteen images, ranging from an 1849 drawing of the fictional
forebear Diedrich Knickerbocker through photographs of Walt Whitman,
Edna St. Vincent Millay, Allen Ginsberg, and Patti Smith, and up to a
stage shot of the Five Lesbian Brothers performing Brave
Smiles at the WOW Café in 1992. The
scholarship is thorough and up-to-date. In addition to extensive
notes at the end of each essay, there is a fifty-title general
bibliography.
While
books on New York are often heavily weighted toward the modern
period, the better half of this one deals with the nineteenth century
and before. Underlying the individual essays is an overdue assertion
of New York's place in the country's early cultural history: "Most
college survey courses in US literature undervalue New York's
contribution to American literary history," Patell writes. "New
York receives little attention as a literary center even, curiously,
in courses that include the turn into the twentieth century, when New
York was clearly the site at which the national cultural mythology
was being produced by new mass media and by the publishing industry.
One of the goals of this Cambridge Companion
is to suggest what a reconfigured US literary history might look like
if its center of gravity were shifted southward from Boston to New
York" (5).
This
line of argument is convincingly sustained by the wealth of material
in the opening essays: "From British Outpost to American
Metropolis" by Robert Lawson-Peebles; "Dutch New York from
Irving to Wharton" by Elizabeth L. Bradley; and "The City
on Stage" by Bryan Waterman. In a lively essay that recalls
Peter Conrad's exuberant The Art of the City
(1984), Lawson-Peebles writes that
"gourmandizing lies alongside fornication at the incontinent
heart" of New York's emergent textual body politic (13).
Bradley shows how Washington Irving's mock epic History
of New York (1809) created a fictional Dutch
culture, full of whimsy and excess, that "remained New York's
preferred founding myth for the twentieth century and beyond"
(39). Waterman uncovers the deep roots of American theater in Royal
Tyler's self-reflexive The Contrast
(1787), "the first play by an American writer to be
professionally staged" (43). In it we meet for the first time
the New York brand of such far-reaching topoi as the tour of the city
for out-of-towners, the deception of country bumpkins, the tension
between pretense and sincerity, and the incessant theatricality of
all areas of social life. Waterman then conducts his reader around
subsequent theatrical monuments, including Benjamin Baker's A
Glance at New York (1848), which introduced
the stock character of the Bowery "b'hoy;" Augustin Daly's
melodrama Under the Gaslight
(1867) with its sensational train-tracks rescue; and Clyde Fitch's
The City (1909), which
stressed as never before the idea that New York is the ultimate
testing ground of character: as the defeated protagonist realizes,
the city "strips [a man] naked of all his disguises . . . to the
City he can't lie!" (55).
A
second group of essays explores mid-nineteenth-century Manhattan. In
"Melville, at Sea in the City," Thomas Augst underscores
how the city and its democratic ethos permeated Melville's life and
writing, from his birth near the waterfront into a prosperous but
soon to be ruined household; to his multiple, often unlucky sojourns
as a professional writer; and finally to his long decline into
obscurity as a customs inspector who trudged to the wharves six days
a week for nearly twenty years. Demonstrating how Melville almost
wilfully sabotaged his own career with the anti-publisher tirades of
Pierre (1852), Angst
brings out Melville's complex relationship to the aims of the Young
America movement, which sought to relocate the country's literary
capital from Boston to New York. In "Whitman's Urbanism,"
Lytle Shaw uses the Great Gray Poet's well-known evocations of
Manahatta (Whitman never called it New York) as a starting point to
chart his influence on later poets. While Crane, Langston Hughes,
Lorca, George Oppen, and O'Hara make the list, Shaw shows--in a group
of subtle, comparative readings--how Allen Ginsberg "drew out
the utopian, unfamiliar, and even contestatory elements of Whitman in
order to turn him into a countercultural ally from the 1950s onward"
(79).
The
nineteenth century portion of the book closes with what I find the
most entertaining essay here, Caleb Crain's "The Early
Literature of New York's Moneyed Class." After summarizing the
substantial work recently done on New York low-life and the
"Sunshine-and-Shadow" genres, Crain notes that "the
literature of New York's overclass was nearly as prolific as that of
its underclass" (94), and he dives delightedly into such
silver-fork works as Charles Astor Bristed's The
Upper Ten Thousand (1852), George William
Curtis's The Potiphar Papers
(1856), and the fashion and gossip columns of the city's foremost
flâneur, Nathaniel
Parker Willis. From Crain we learn that "the middle-aged rich
men of 1850s New York hated the polka almost as consistently as they
hated abolitionists" (99), and that Willis opined that a city
without an opera was "like a saloon without a mirror" (97).
Most intriguing is Willis's pre-Darwinian theory that, trivial as it
seemed, fashion mattered immensely "because it determined which
virtues the ruling class would welcome into their beds and thereby
into the elite" (98).
The
remaining essays explore the literature of twentieth- and
twenty-first century New York. Martha Nadell's "Writing
Brooklyn" moves with assurance between portraits of the Brooklyn
Bridge and the borough's neighborhoods, and between genres that
include stories, poems, and the coming-of-age novel or memoir,
ranging from Whitman and Jack Kerouac to Henry Roth and Daniel Fuchs,
Thomas Wolfe and Betty Smith to Hubert Selby and Jonathan Lethem.
Sarah Wilson's "New York and the Novel of Manners"
intriguingly links the familiar territory of Henry James, Edith
Wharton, and William Dean Howells to surprisingly similar concerns in
Abraham Cahan, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and James Weldon Johnson.
"Immigrants, Politics, and the Popular Cultures of Tolerance,"
Eric Homberger's informative study of the popular 1920s play Abie's
Irish Rose, exemplifies the critical method
employed throughout the volume: the play "is a prism in which
powerful cultural forces - ethnic relations, the impact of mass
immigration, and the cross-generational complexities of assimilation
- are refracted, exaggerated, and also unexpectedly clarified"
(134). Melissa Bradshaw dissects the tensions between authenticity,
activism, and nostalgia in "Performing Greenwich Village
Bohemianism." And, in a refreshingly personal essay on "African
American Literary Movements," Thulani Davis speaks of "the
Baldwin I knew" (172) and the impact of earlier writers,
including Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Leroi Jones
/Amiri Baraka, on contemporary African American authors.
To
justify the familiar claim that New York played a central role in
disseminating literature, Trysh Travis (in "New York's Cultures
of Print") charts the transition from the expanding
nineteenth-century marketplace to the "golden age" before
and after WWII, when the desire for profit was temporarily
counterbalanced by a concern for quality and liberal cosmopolitan
values. The gears shift audibly with the next essay, Daniel Kane's
"From Poetry to Punk in the East Village," which traces the
influence of a Rimbaud-esque "poetry as lifestyle" idea in
the emergence of the punk scene in the 1960s and 1970s Lower East
Side scene. But in a nice geographical segue, Robin Bernstein's
"Staging Lesbian and Gay New York" then explores the
downtown world of off- and off-off Broadway. Crammed with detail and
insight - such as that penis-oriented Jewish humor is what makes Tony
Kushner's Angels in America
(1992-94) palatable to mainstream audiences - the essay concludes
with a passionate celebration of GLBTQ theater's value to American
culture.
A
thought-provoking brace of essays by the editors winds up the
Companion with a
flourish. In "Emergent Ethnic Literatures," Patell
meta-critically explores an issue germane to the entire volume: "the
problems with the [limited] ways in which late twentieth century
institutional multiculturalism has encouraged us to read literary
texts, particular ethnic texts" (219). Beginning with the
controversy over the choice of Chang-rae Lee's novel Native
Speaker (1995) as a "One book, One City"
selection, Patell tackles "the assumption that ethnic writing
should have . . . a representative function" (220) that
celebrates and preserves cultural difference. He rightly points out
that "one of the abiding subjects of New York ethnic writing is
the impossibility of maintaining the purity of Old World cultural
traditions - or even New World cultural traditions - in an urban
situation where ethnic neighborhoods impinge as closely on one
another as they do in New York" (220). Favoring instead
philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah's notion of "cosompolitan
contamination" as the most useful model for reading the ethnic
literature of New York, Patell looks at the founding and development
of the Nuyorican Poet's Cafe and its role in creating a hybrid
literary style whose significant expressions include Piri Thomas's
memoir Down These Mean Streets
(1967) and Lin-Manuel Miranda's award-winning musical In
the Heights (2007).
Finally,
Bryan Waterman's "Epilogue: Nostalgia and Counter-Nostalgia in
New York City Writing" considers the omnipresent idea that the
best of New York is always already behind us, a sensibility that
haunted the bohemians of Greenwich Village in the 1920s, as Melissa
Bradshaw shows earlier in the volume, and that may be traceable back
even to the founding fictions of Irving's History
of New York. Yet Waterman locates an equally
persistent counter-strain that can be found in places as various as
the novels of Wharton and Doctorow, or the dystopian/utopian analyses
of critic and memoirist Marshall Berman, which remind us that
yesterday's glory was built on social and economic injustices we
often prefer to ignore. What cannot be ignored, however, is the
city's constant drive for rebirth, and the way in which it
continually makes Mirandas of all comers: "'Tis new to thee."
For those now arriving at the portals of New York culture, The
Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York
will provide a valuable welcome.
William
Chapman Sharpe is Professor of English at Barnard College,
Columbia University. His most recent book is New
York Nocturne: The
City After Dark in Literature, Painting, and Photography.
|