We’re finishing up a section of the Writing New York course devoted to the novel of manners. We include in this section James’s Washington Square, Crane’s Maggie, Wharton’s Age of Innocence, and Cahan’s Yekl, though we note affinities between these novels and both the nineteenth-century plays that Bryan discusses earlier in the course and the work of Walt Whitman. We note, also, the overlap between this tradition of manners and the idea of American literary realism. Setting up Wharton’s connection to realism in lecture the other day, I quoted from Henry James in The Art of Fiction: “One can speak best from one’s own taste, and I may therefore venture to say that the air of reality (solidity of specification) seems to me to be the supreme virtue of the novel, – the merit in which all its other merits . . . helplessly and submissively depend. If it be not there, they are all as nothing . . .”
As an example of James ‘s attempt to convey “solidity of specification,” I cited the “topographical parenthesis” from the third chapter of Washington Square, a passage that Bryan always calls to the attention of our students:
Some three or four years before this Dr. Sloper had moved his gods up town, as they say in New York. He had been living since his marriage in an edifice of red brick, with granite and an enormous fanlight over the door, standing in a street five minutes’ walk of the City Hall, which saw its best days the social point of view) about 1820. After this, the tide of began to set steadily northward, as, indeed, in New York, to the narrow channel in which it flows, it is obliged to do, the great hum of traffic rolled farther to the right and left of Broadway. By the time the Doctor changed his residence the murmur of
trade had become a mighty uproar, which was music in the ears of all good citizens interested in the commercial development, as they delighted to call it, of their fortunate isle. Dr. Sloper’s interest in this phenomenon was only indirect–though, seeing that, as the years went on, half his patients came to be overworked men of business, it might have been more immediate–and when most of his neighbours’ dwellings (also ornamented with granite copings and large fanlights) had been converted into offices, warehouses, and shipping agencies, and otherwise applied to the base uses of commerce, he determined to look out for a quieter home. The ideal of quiet and of genteel retirement, in 1835, was found in Washington Square, where the Doctor built himself a handsome, modern, wide-fronted house, with a big balcony before the drawing-room windows, and a flight of marble steps ascending to a portal which was also faced with white marble. This structure, and many of its neighbours, which it exactly resembled, were supposed, forty years ago, to embody the last results of architectural science, and they remain to this day very solid and honourable dwellings. In front of them was the Square, containing a considerable quantity of inexpensive vegetation, enclosed by a wooden paling, which increased its rural and accessible appearance; and round the corner was the more august precinct of the Fifth Avenue, taking its origin at this point with a spacious and confident air
which already marked it for high destinies. I know not whether it is owing to the tenderness of early associations, but this portion of New York appears to many persons the most delectable. It has a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long, shrill city; it has a riper, richer, more honourable look than any of the upper ramifications of the great longitudinal thoroughfare–the look of having had something of a social history. It was here, as you might have been informed on good authority, that you had come into a world which appeared to offer a variety of sources of interest; 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, following the nursery-maid with unequal step and sniffing up the strange odour of the ailantus-trees which at that time formed the principal umbrage of the Square, and diffused an aroma that you were not yet critical enough to dislike as it deserved; it was here, finally, that your first school, kept by a broad-bosomed, broad-based old lady with a ferule, who was always having tea in a blue cup, with a saucer that
didn’t match, enlarged the circle both of your observations and your sensations. It was here, at any rate, that my heroine spent many years of her life; which is my excuse for this topographical parenthesis.
[Click here to read an e-text of the novel at Project Gutenberg.]
On Monday, I’ll ask our students to recall this passage and to compare it to this description of Suffolk Street from Abraham Cahan’s novel Yekl (1897):
Suffolk Street is in the very thick of the battle for breath. For it lies in the heart of that part of the East Side which has within the last two or three decades become the Ghetto of the American metropolis, and, indeed, the metropolis of the Ghettos of the world. It is one of the most densely populated spots on the face of the earth–a seething human sea fed by streams, streamlets, and rills of immigration flowing from all the Yiddish-speaking centers of Europe. Hardly a block but shelters Jews from every nook and corner of Russia, Poland, Galicia, Hungary, Roumania; Lithuanian Jews, Volhynian Jews, south Russian Jews, Bessarabian Jews; Jews crowded out of the “pale of Jewish settlement”; Russified Jews expelled from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kieff, or Saratoff; Jewish runaways from justice; Jewish refugees from crying political and economical in justice; people torn from a hard-gained foothold in life and from deep-rooted attachments by the caprice of intolerance or the wiles of demagoguery–innocent scapegoats of a guilty Government for its outraged populace to misspend its blind fury upon; students shut out of the Russian universities, and come to these shores in quest of learning; artisans, merchants, teachers, rabbis, artists, beggars–all come in search of fortune. Nor is there a tenement house but harbors in its bosom specimens of all the whimsical metamorphoses wrought upon the children of Israel of the great modern exodus by the vicissitudes of life in this their Promised Land of today. You find there Jews born to plenty, whom the new conditions have delivered up to the clutches of penury; Jews reared in the straits of need, who have here risen to prosperity; good people morally degraded in the struggle for success amid an unwonted environment; moral outcasts lifted from the mire, purified, and imbued with self-respect; educated men and women with their intellectual polish tarnished in the inclement weather of adversity; ignorant sons of toil grown enlightened–in fine, people with all sorts of antecedents, tastes, habits, inclinations, and speaking all sorts of subdialects of the same jargon, thrown pellmell into one social caldron–a human hodgepodge with its component parts changed but not yet fused into one homogeneous whole.
I’ll suggest that here Cahan’s project is to make the Lower East Side seem less foreign and more full of potential than his readers might expect. Cahan’s narrator seems to identify both with the people he is depicting and with the readers for whom he is depicting them — and to exist in an ambivalent relation to each. Acknowledging what is idiosyncratic in the experience of Jewish immigrants, Cahan’s narrator nevertheless shows that they are not inscrutable (a tern often applied to immigrant groups from Asia in this period. As the novel progresses, however, we see a marked contrast between the eloquent prose of the narrator and the fractured English of his characters. It’s that kind of authorial superiority that strikes me as one of the Jamesian aspects of Cahan’s writing.
[Click here to find e-texts of the Yekl in a variety of formats.]
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