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American Realists: James and Cahan

March 5, 2010 in Books, Writing New York by Cyrus | No comments

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.]

Trilling on Manners

March 1, 2010 in Architecture, Writing New York by Cyrus | No comments

The subject of this morning’s lecture in Writing New York was Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence and its relation to the novel of manners. I explained why “manners” in this sense means more than simply “good manners” or “good taste.” Instead, it signifies the system of customs, mores, and codes that bind a social group together — a group like the Old New York society that Wharton depicts in her novel. One of the abiding subjects of Wharton’s novel is the way in which Old New York shares characteristics with the kind of tribal societies that ethnographers were beginning to study when Wharton was writing.

One of the quotes that I use to establish this idea comes from Lionel Trilling’s study The Liberal Imagination (1950):

What I understand by manners, then, is a culture’s hum and buzz of implication. I mean the whole evanescent context in which its explicit statements are made. It is that part of a culture which is made up of half-uttered or unutterable expressions of value. They are hinted at by small actions, sometimes by the arts of dress or decoration, sometimes by tone, gesture, emphasis, or rhythm, sometimes by the words that are used with a special frequency or a special meaning. They are the things that separate them from the people of another culture. They make the part of a culture which is not art, or religion, or morals, or politics, and yet it relates to all these highly formulated departments of culture. It is modified by them; it generates them. In this part of culture assumption rules, which is often so much stronger than reason.

The quote is useful because it gets at the idea of manners as  system that works through very subtle codes that have been internalized by its subjects, who use them almost unconsciously. “Good manners” are one of the tools used by the larger system of manners: having good manners identifies a person as an insider, someone who know the proper codes of behavior withina social group.

I like the idea that manners are an “evanescent” part of culture: that they belong to a system that is not “art, or religion, or morals, or politics,” but that is linked reciprocally to all of them.

But what I noticed today was the word “departments.” In referring to art, religion, morals, and politics as “departments of culture,” Trilling suggests that the study of manners offers ways of understanding that elude — but perhaps complete — them. And I can’t help thinking that he is therefore making an argument — by implication as it were — of the importance of literature, because it seems to have a special purchase on the regime of manners: it can dramatize the ways in which manners produce and regulate social subjects. And I wonder whether Trilling is also implicitly making an argument about the importance of literary study, which may enable students to understand things that other academic departments — call them “art,” “religion,” “philosophy,” or “politics”  — can’t. The chapter from which the quote is taken, after all, is called “Manners, Morals, and the Novel.”

The Liberal Imagination has recently been reprinted by the New York Review of Books with an introduction by Louis Menand.

[For an additional perspective on today's lecture, see this post at patell.org.]

Darkness and Daylight

February 24, 2010 in Books, Teaching, Writing New York by Cyrus | No comments

Today, during a fine lecture on the portrayals of tenement life in Stephen Crane’s Maggie and Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, our teaching assistant Kristen Highland discussed several books that draw on the “sunshine and shadow” made famous by Matthew Hale’s Sunshine and Shadow in New York (1869).

These included one that isn’t discussed much: Darkness and Daylight; Lights and Shadows of New York Life by three authors, reformist Helen Campbell, journalist Thomas Knox, and Chief of Detectives Thomas Byrnes. Kristen tells us that learned about Darkness and Daylight through a post over at Ephemeral New York.

Bryan and I came across Campbell in the the first chapter of Robert M. Dowling’s recent Slumming in New York: From the Waterfront to Mythic Harlem, which is one of the books included in an essay-review that he and I have just finished for the journal American Literary History. Campbell’s account, which gives the volume its title, is subtitled “A Woman’s Story of Gospel, Temperance, Mission, and Rescue Work”; the supplementary pieces are described as “A Journalist’s Description of Little-Known Phases of New York Life” (Knox) and “A Famous Detective’s Thirty Years’ Experiences and Observations” (Byrnes). Kristen writes that the book is “some 500+ pages of really juicy stuff with great images–about a dozen or so are by Riis.” During the lecture she pointed out that the volume brings together three interpretive frames through which the slums of the late nineteenth-century were often viewed: as a site for missionary work, as a site for sensationalist journalism, and as a site for criminality.

According to the publisher’s preface, the goal of Darkness and Daylight was “to give scrupulously exact descriptions of life and scenes in the great metropolis under three different aspects … It was essential that each of the writers selected for this undertaking should possess a thorough practical knowledge of the subject, combined with ability to describe what they have seen and experienced.” The preface describes Campbell’s contribution in this way:

The first division was assigned to Mrs. Helen Campbell, whose life has been spent in New York city, and whose wellknown sympathies for the poor and unfortunate, combined with long experience in city missionary work and charitable enterprises, peculiarly fitted her for this portion of the work. Her interest in missions and her labors among the lower classes have brought her face to face with squalor and misery among the hopelessly poor, as well as with degraded men and women in their own homes; while her ready sympathy gained for her access to their hearts, and thus gave her a practical insight into their daily life possessed by few. Who but a woman could describe to women the scenes of sin, sorrow, and suffering among this people that have presented themselves to her womanly eye and heart?

Campbell is a forerunner of Riis, and Dowling writes that she came to believe that “the only effective means of ‘training’ the poorer classes … is not from the outside in, but rather from the inside out. … By immersing herself in the waterfront culture, Campbell accumulates firsthand knowledge that would aid her and her outsider compeers in the struggle to reform the urban poor; looking ‘from within, out,’ she discovers an alien moral framework that was to be effectively torn down.”

If you know Crane’s novel Maggie, you can see why Campbell’s writings might make an effective pairing. Crane also seems to depict something like “an alien moral framework” within the slums, though it is a framework that seems to be a mutated form of the kinds of representations of morality found both in the mission and in the melodrama. In fact, the final chapter of the novel brilliantly conflates these two modes.

Kristen, whose research interests include the print culture of early national America and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century U.S. popular culture, was one of the panelists at last fall’s Lost New York conference: she curated a case at the Fales exhibition on the subject of the idea of “Gotham” and her companion essay appears in the Lost New York volume (available here as a PDF).

There are several digitized versions of the book available on the web. The Google has an 1892 printing digitized from a copy in the University of Michigan library; and 1892 printing digitized from a copy at Radcliffe; and a 1900 printing digitized from a copy in the New York Public Library. My favorite version is a full-color scan of the 1897 printing available at the Internet Archive.

Percy Jackson in New York

February 18, 2010 in Film by Cyrus | 1 comment

Best use of New York as a setting in the new film Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief?

For my money, it’s not the Empire State Building. Nope: it’s the water towers.

[The poster above, which shows the Empire State Building but also invokes the scene to which I'm referring, is the official UK poster. Note the title at the top: "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone."]

Where Is the Underworld?

February 15, 2010 in Books, Film by Cyrus | 1 comment

Woody Allen apparently once said to Groucho Marx, “I don’t know how you live in California. For a man of your piercing intellect to be able to live on the West Coast is incredible to me.”

When we get to Allen’s film Manhattan in our Writing New York course later in the term, one of the subjects we discuss is the rivalry between New York and Los Angeles over the production of what we might call the national imaginary. New York’s place as the preeminent producer of cultural images and symbols, by virtue of its role as the center of the U.S. publishing industry starting in the middle of the nineteenth century, was challenged and — arguably — overtaken by Los Angeles, which became the center of the U.S. film industry in the early part of the twentieth century.

Allen has a love-hate (well, mostly hate) relationship with Los Angeles. The year after Manhattan was released, he said:

What I feel about New York is hard to say in a few words. It’s really the rhythm of the city. You feel it the moment you walk down the street. There’s hundreds of good restaurants, thousands of brilliant paintings, you see all the old movies, all the new ones … It has to do with nerves, with the blood that runs through the city. It’s dangerous, noisy. It’s not peaceful or easy and because of it you feel more alive. It’s more in keeping with what human beings are meant to feel about the world … There’s more conflict than anywhere else. The struggle to survive here is much more exciting than Los Angeles, say, where everything is pleasant. I mean, all those people sitting in their tubs, can you imagine it?

I imagine that Allen would have approved of these passages from Rick Riordan’s book The Lightning Thief:

“Well now, there’s Mount Olympus in Greece. ANd then there’s the home of the gods, the convergence point of their powers, which did indeed used to be on Mount Olympus. It’s still called Mount Olympus, out of respect to the old ways, but the palace moves, Percy, just as the gods do.”

“You mean the Greek gods are here? Like … in America?”

“Well, certainly. The gods move with the heart of the West.”

“The what?”

“Cow now, Percy. What you call ‘Western civilization.’ Do you think it’s just an abstract concept? No, it’s a living force. A collective consciousness that has burned bright for thousands of years. The gods are part of it. You might even say they are the source of it …”

*

“You’ve been to Olympus?”

“Some of us year-rounders — Luke and Clarisse and I and a few others — we took a field trip during winter solstice. That’s when the gods have their big annual council.”

“But … how did you get there?”

“The Long Island Railroad, of course. You get off at Penn Station. Empire State Building, special elevator to the six hundredth floor.” She looked at me like she was sure I must know this already. “You are a New Yorker, right?”

*

“The entrance to the Underworld is always in the west. It moves from age to age, just like Olympus. Right now, of course, it’s in America.”

“Where?”

Chiron looked surprised. “I thought that would be obvious enough. The entrance to the Underworld is in Los Angeles.”

Previously. And. And more.

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Wooden Turnstiles

February 13, 2010 in Art, Books, History, Lost New York by Cyrus | 2 comments

In my last post, I mentioned that older son loves to read series of books — the longer the better. Before he read the Percy Jackson series, he read all of Mary Pope Osborne’s Magic Tree House books. He’ll still read the latest one for old times’ sake: he read the latest, Magic Tree House #43: Leprechaun in Late Winter and pronounced it “very good.” His little brother the kindergartener loves them too, so we read them aloud to him on the bus to and from school.

Appropriately enough given this week’s snowy weather on the East Coast, we’ve been reading book #36 in the series, Blizzard of the Blue Moon, which is set in New York in 1938 during the Great Depression. For those of you who don’t know the series, the premise is that eight-year-old Jack and seven-year-old Annie, two kids who live in “Frog Creek, Pennsylvania,” discover a magic tree house in the woods near their house: the tree house is full of books and when you point to one and say, “I want to go there,” well, you go there, wherever “there” is. Their first four adventures take them to the time of the dinosaurs, to the middle ages, and to ancient Egypt. They learn that the tree house belongs to Morgan le Fay, who is portrayed as the magical librarian of King Arthur’s Camelot. (She’s much friendlier than any other version of Morgan le Fay I’ve ever encountered: remember Helen Mirren’s characterization in John Boorman’s Excalibur?!)

The books are very formulaic, as Morgan sends them on various missions that last about 10 chapters. The description of the tree house embarking on its journey is always the same, and my son can now recite it by heart. He’s learning about genre, which is fine by me. But in book 29 Christmas in Camelot, Osborne varies her formula: it is Merlin who sends Jack and Annie on their missions, four of them to mythical places like Camelot, and four to real-life places like Paris at the time of the Exposition Universelle (for which the Eiffel Tower was built).

Blizzard of a Blue Moon is one of these Merlin missions, and my son is enjoying hearing about places he knows: like Central Park and the IRT subway, which costs a nickel in 1938. Reading the book made me remember those old cross-shaped wooden turnstiles that were still installed in a few subway stations when I was growing up. Here’s a picture from the New York Transit Museum:

Note the fare: 5 cents! (Click here for more information about this particular photo, which comes from a wonderful collection of photos and images at nycsubway.org. The site is a treasure trove for subway buffs; in addition to the pictures, there is a wonderful collection of map PDFs.)

By the way, Jack and Annie’s mission in 1938 New York involves rescuing a unicorn that has been enchanted. Where do you suppose they end up?

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Snowstorm

February 12, 2010 in Out and About by Cyrus | No comments

Snow in Washington Square Park, February 10, 2010

Our friend MaNNaHaTTaMaMMa was quoted by the Associated Press in an article on Wednesday’s snowstorm. The article appeared in the New York Post. Look for the quote attributed to “Deborah Quinn.”

Percy Jackson and the Epicenter of Western Culture

February 11, 2010 in Books, Film by Cyrus | 2 comments

My older son, who is in now fourth grade, devoured Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson books when he was in second grade, though he had to wait until third grade for the fifth and final book to be released. I haven’t read them myself, though I expect I will now that the movie is here. (Okay, I confess: I just had the first one, The Lightning Thief, which we had borrowed from the library, beamed to my Kindle).

My son loves fantasy — Star Wars, Harry Potter, Yu-gi-oh, Chronicles of Prydain, though not yet Tolkien — and he loves book series. But he’s also been quite taken with the narrative voice and general sensibility of — egads — Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, which means that the Percy Jackson books are like a perfect narrative storm for him. (He agrees that the two narrators have somewhat similar voices.)

The first chapter of The Lightning Thief is entitled “I Accidentally Vaporize My Pre-Algebra Teacher,” and it begins this way:

Look, I didn’t want to be a half-blood.

If you’re reading this beause you think you might be one, my advice is: close this book right now. Believe whatever lie your om or dad told you about your birth, and try to lead a normal life.

Being a half-blood is dangerous. It’s scary. Most of the time, it gets you killed in painful, nasty ways.

If you think you’re a normal kid, reading this because you think it’s fiction, great. Read on. I envy you for being able to believe that none of this ever happened.

But if you recognize yourself in these pages — if you feel something stirring inside — stop reading immediately. You might be one of us. And once you know that, it’s only a matter of time before they sense it too, and they’ll come for you.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Anyway, if you’re a reader of this blog, you’ve got a book that puts Mt. Olympus above Manhattan and makes the Empire State Building the access portal. Our former WNY TA Spence puts it this way: “In the novels, Olympus sits atop the Empire State Building (it moves with the epicenter of Western culture).” We’ve heard that they change quite a few things in the movie, but they didn’t change that:

What gives me pause: the director is Chris Columbus, director of the first two Harry Potter films, which are fine but don’t hold a candle to the later entries.

What I’m looking forward to: Uma Thurman as Medusa.

Vanishing City Vanishes for Now

February 9, 2010 in Events, Lost New York by Cyrus | No comments

Our friend David Freeland writes:

To all who were planning to attend tomorrow night, I’ve just received word that Dixon Place has decided to cancel this and all other events tomorrow because of the snowstorm that (if predictions are accurate) will be blanketing the entire New York region with lots of fluffy white stuff.  Fortunately, we will be rescheduling, so as soon as we determine a new date I will let you know!

William Kentridge: Lecture, Exhibition, Opera

February 8, 2010 in Art, Events, Exhibitions, Music by Cyrus | No comments

The NYU Dept of Comparative Literature, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Cooper Union Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, and NYU Dept of Media, Culture & Communication are pleased to present a public lecture by internationally renowned South African artist William Kentridge tomorrow night, February 9th at 8 p.m. at Cooper Union’s Great Hall (7 E. 7th Street at Bowery). The talk is free and open to the public. Photo ID is required for entry.

Kentridge’s talk “A Universal Archive … with Some Remarks on Black Holes” will explore visual memory, the need for dis-remembering, studies in the speed of light, and other topics and themes at the edges of the artist’s work.

William Kentridge is known for his stop-motion films of charcoal drawings as well as for works in etching, collage, sculpture, and the performing arts. An exhibition of three decades of Kentridge’s works will be at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (Feb. 24-May 17) later this year.

In March, Kentridge will direct a production of Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera The Nose at the Metropolitan Opera House. The production features Paulo Szot, who won a Tony Award last year for his performance in South Pacific at Lincoln Center. (Click here to watch a video about the Met’s production featuring an interview with Kentridge.)

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