Writing New York

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Whitman and Bryant

October 26, 2011 in Writing New York by Cyrus

In 1825, the poet William Cullen Bryant moved to New York City from Massachusetts, where he had been practicing law since 1816; with the help of some family friends, he had been appointed editor of a periodical called the New-York Review. He moved on to a similar post at another periodical, the United States Review and Literary Gazette, before gaining the more stable position of Assistant Editor at the New-York Evening Post, a newspaper that had been founded by Alexander Hamilton. The portrait above, by Samuel Morse, was painted in 1825.

Bryant helped to put the struggling paper on a more sound financial footing, and two years later he was both a part-owner and the paper’s editor-in-chief, a position he would hold for the next fifty years until his death on June 12, 1878. The New-York Evening Post made Bryant both rich and politically prominent in New York City. With the publication of a revised edition of his poems in 1832, both in New York and (with Washington Irving’s help) in London, Bryant became known as America’s foremost poet. His most adventurous years as a poet were behind him, however, and his later poetry is comparatively genteel and conventional.

Walt Whitman attended Bryant’s funeral and reminisced about Bryant in Specimen Days:

I had known Mr. Bryant over thirty years ago, and he had been markedly kind to me. Off and on, along that time for years as they pass’d, we met and chatted together. I thought him very sociable in his way, and a man to become attach’d to. We were both walkers, and when I work’d in Brooklyn he several times came over, middle of afternoons, and we took rambles miles long, till dark, out towards Bedford or Flatbush, in company. On these occasions he gave me clear accounts of scenes in Europe—the cities, looks, architecture, art, especially Italy—where he had travel’d a good deal.

The arc of Whitman’s career is the opposite of Bryant’s: he began as a journalist and ended up as the pre-eminent poet in the United States. Unlike Bryant, who was associated with elite publications, Whitman worked in the penny press and saw them as a force for democratization. Writing for the New York Aurora in 1842, Whitman proclaimed:

Among newspapers, the penny press is the same as common schools among seminaries of education. They carry light and knowledge in among those who most need it. They disperse the clouds of ignorance; and make the great body of the people intelligent, capable, and worthy of performing the duties of republican freemen.

The Aurora was a two-penny paper—a cut above the pennies both in price and in content—but it still catered to similar audiences. Nearly two-thirds of Whitman’s newspaper sketches can be classified as sensationalism. After being fired from the Aurora (ostensibly for laziness), Whitman worked for the Tattler, for which one of his assignments was to write the murder bulletins; his assignment at the Sun was police and coroner’s stories.

Many of Whitman’s early poems and stories were written to cater to the public’s taste for sensationalism. In 1842, he published a temperance novel, Franklin Evans, which would turn out to be his most popular work during his lifetime, selling some 20,000 copies.  Fully attuned to the public’s taste for sensationalism, the novel tells the story of a young orphan named Franklin Evans, who goes to New York, where his first drink leads to a series of tragic circumstances including robbery and murder. Whitman’s publisher believed that the novel would “create a sensation, both for the ability with which it was written, as well as the interest of the subject.”  Whitman himself was profoundly embarrassed by the book later in life. He would continue writing sensationalist sketches and stories throughout the 1840s.

Whitman’s immersion in the penny press and in sensationalist writing became a crucial part of the poetic imagination that would produce Leaves of Grass.  Indeed, Emerson once remarked to a friend that Leaves of Grass was a “combination of the Bhagavad-Gita and the New York Herald.”

Klinkowstrom’s New York

October 24, 2011 in Writing New York by Cyrus

For a number of years, we offered this extra-credit question on the Writing New York final examination: “Who was Baron Axel von Klinkowstrom and what is his significance to our course?”

To answer this question, you would have to have read the draft of my essay “Whitman’s and Melville’s New York, 1819–1855,” assigned as secondary reading on our syllabus. There you would have discovered a discussion of Klinkowstrom (1775-1837), a Swedish naval officer, who visited the United States in 1818 and lived in Manhattan and Brooklyn from 1819–20. Klinkowstrom was a precursor of such distinguished European commentators on American affairs as Alexis de Tocqueville, Charles Dickens, James Bryce, and (more recently) Bernard-Henri Levy

The primary purpose of Klinkowstrom’s visit to New York was to report on a new invention: the steamboat. He wrote a series of letters to the Swedish government in which he described not only the American development of steamboat technology, but also the state of American life, especially life in and around New York City.

“I was not prepared to find such a large and populous city on a coast where two hundred years ago there was only an insignificant village,” Klinkowstrom wrote on his first arrival in 1818. He added that “from the sea the city is not handsome, as the houses are not stuccoed, and the view is obstructed by the many ships whose tackle hugs the bridges in a double row, and whose masts form a forest.” He was immediately impressed by the city’s commercial spirit: “Although I have only hurriedly seen New York as yet,” Klinkowstrom wrote in 1818, “I do believe there is a livelier spirit of speculation there and that people are eager to become rich quickly through many enterprises.”

The following year, after he had taken up residence in Manhattan, Klinkowstrom commented on the city’s architecture and streets. Noting that “the houses in New York are usually painted in the English fashion, that is to say with a dark brick color and white trimming between the stones,” Klinkowstrom suggested that

the city would be rather gloomy if the streets were not wide and cheerful. Here and there trees are planted along the streets. The streets all have sidewalks which make walking very easy. In the newer part of the city, the streets are straight; but they seldom cross each other at right angles, and in the entire city there is not one handsome square.

Klinkowstrom praised Broadway and drew a watercolor of the intersection of Broadway and Fulton Street, facing City Hall, and he called this part of New York “really quite beautiful.” Klinkowstrom, however, wryly included a pig rooting about in the street on the right-hand side of the picture, and in his letters he noted the “harmful and unpleasant” custom of “allowing the swine to wander about freely on the streets. . . . These pigs have often caused ridiculous situations. Once during the fashionable promenade hour on Broadway I saw some of these animals rush on the sidewalk, making a sharp contrast with the elegant clothes, and one filthy pig bumped into a well-dressed woman. Often they trip people who are not sufficiently observant.”

New York, he concluded, “is not as clean as cities of the same size and population in Europe.”

[The picture, "Broadway-street and the City Hall in New York" (1824) is engraving by Carl Fredrik Akrell (Swedish, 1779–1868), after Klinkowstrom's watercolor. It is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Read more about it here.]

 

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The Bowery B’hoy

October 19, 2011 in City on Stage, Writing New York by Bryan

Today’s reading for vWNY is Benjamin Baker’s 1848 play A Glance at New York, best known for introducing NYC’s homegrown folk hero, Mose the Bowery B’hoy, to the American stage. The full text doesn’t seem to be available online, but you can find it anthologized here, with used copies going pretty cheap.

If you were reading along for George Foster’s New York by Gas-Light, you encountered the hero of Baker’s play in Foster’s chapter “Mose and Lize.” Writing just two years after the Bowery actor Frank Chanfrau first played Mose in Baker’s play, Foster, who wasn’t always fond of working-class culture, described Mose as, like Davy Crockett, the end-point of “free development to Anglo-Saxon nature.” He gives the b’hoys props for manning the city’s Fire Department:

Yonder we see [a b'hoy] standing fearlessly upon the very verge of a five-story roof, chopping deliberately away at some wooden spout it is desirable to sever, while the treacherous flames crawl like fiery serpents out at the window-casing, down the shingles, and at length grown bolder, come to lick his very feet. So absorbed is he in his perilous occupation that he has not heard the cries of warning which the crowd below have been sending up through the smoky din of the conflagration. In a moment more the roof is all on fire, the air has lost its last particle of vitality and can no more be breathed. Too late he discovers his peril; and, blinded by smoke, suffocated and choking with the hot air, he strikes out at random for the window whence he issued, now framed with glowing flame. For a moment his heart sinks, as he sees before him his horrible but inevitable fate. But in another he rallies — recalls the half-remembered fragments of a prayer his mother taught him, long, long ago — sends a look, a kiss and a blessing after “Lize,” who perhaps even then is dreaming of him in her tidy little garret bed-room — and disappears forever.

Whew!

We’ve built up a stockpile of posts about Mose and Glance and Bowery b’hoys over the years. (See links below.) For more, visit The Bowery Culture Archive, part of CUNY’s Lost Museum online exhibit. Also check out this blog post from NYC I SEE, which speculates that Mose may have been a prototype for Superman. Not sure what we think of that theory, but it’s a fun read nonetheless. Is there room in New York for a Mose revival? The Axis Company staged revivals of Baker’s play in 2003 and 2007. (We missed them, sadly.) And Magic Tree House author Mary Pope Osborne retells his story for 21st-century children in New York’s Bravest.

Previously on PWHNY:
Paul Bunyan in Billyburg
No Dainty Kid Glove Affair
New York’s Vauxhall Gardens
“Big Mose Must of Dropped It”
City on Stage

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Fashionable Mowatt

October 17, 2011 in City on Stage, Fashion, Writing New York by Bryan

In the epilogue to Anna Cora Mowatt’s comedy Fashion (1845) — modeled, as Edgar Allan Poe pointed out in an early review, on Sheridan’s plays — one character expresses her hope that Fashion will become fashionable. The play’s republican hero, an overprotective grandfather, reiterates his distrust of fashion, and yet another character, the heroine, concludes by asking the audience both to show mercy on the performers and to give them “your honest verdict,” which will allow them to “learn to prize at its just value — Fashion.”

All the punning on Fashion/fashion seems to betray not only an anxiety about the status of fashion in the antebellum city but about the reception of Mowatt’s play. As it turns out, Mowatt had a hit, which eventually opened the door for her to take the stage as a professional actress. If her play seems awfully like Tyler’s The Contrast in its Sheridean debts, there does seem to me to be less equivocating about its accommodation of fashion. Mowatt’s republican mouthpiece is now a grandfather rather than a bachelor hero, and the heroine’s concluding speech doesn’t reject fashion so much as accommodate it. For Mowatt, the nouveaux riches pose the biggest danger, because they overvalue fashion and seek to use it as part of their scramble for upward mobility. If you value fashion (and Fashion) justly, by contrast, you must be part of that natural nobility Trueman was always blathering about.

There’s much more to be said here than I have time to write about today, but it’s worth noting how performances of age, race, and gender play into this discussion of fashion — and performances of authorship as well. That’s the angle Poe took up when he wrote about Mowatt in his essay series “The Literati of New York.” He begins:

Mrs. Mowatt is in some respects a remarkable woman, and has undoubtedly wrought a deeper impression upon the public than any one of her sex in America.
She became first known through her recitations.  To these she drew large and discriminating audiences in Boston, New York, and elsewhere to the north and east.  Her subjects were much in the usual way of these exhibitions, including comic as well as serious pieces, chiefly in verse.  In her selections she evinced no very refined taste, but was probably influenced by the elocutionary rather than by the literary value of her programmes.  She read well; her voice was melodious; her youth and general appearance excited interest, but, upon the whole, she produced no great effect, and the enterprise may be termed unsuccessful, although the press, as is its wont, spoke in the most sonorous tones of her success.
It was during these recitations that her name, prefixed to occasional tales, sketches and brief poems in the magazines, first attracted an attention that, but for the recitations, it might not have attracted.

The same goes for Fashion‘s success: “Her first decided success was with her comedy, ‘Fashion,’” he writes, “although much of this success itself is referable to the interest felt in her as a beautiful woman and an authoress.” He concludes with an extended gloss on her beauty. (Read the full sketch here.) Though he has some appreciative things to say about her writing, it seems clear that Poe dismisses her success as itself the whim of fashion. He may have been right, of course, given that her status at the apex of female American authorship was extremely short-lived, requiring her to be perpetually rescued by literary and theater historians.

If you have access to JSTOR, you might be interested in two relatively recent pieces on Mowatt: one on Poe as prototype for the play’s character T. Tennyson Twinkle, and the other on the creation of Mowatt’s public persona.

Of course, whenever I think about Mowatt’s play, this is what comes more immediately to mind:

 

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vWNY Mid-term Contest

October 12, 2011 in Writing New York by Bryan

We’re half-way through our first semester of vWNY and, as promised at the outset, we’re holding a mid-term — contest, that is. Send an email to bryan.waterman@nyu.edu with correct answers to the questions below and we’ll enter you in a drawing for your choice of prizes: either the Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York or a copy of each of our volumes in the 33 1/3 series.

Questions are drawn from the texts we’ve covered to this point in our virtual course. Anyone reading this is eligible to enter. So:

1. Who wrote the song “Rhinestone Cowboy” and on what album did it first appear?
2. True or False: “Knickerbocker” is a completely fictional name invented by Washington Irving from the Dutch words knicker (“to nod”) and boeken (“books”), suggesting that the gentleman was prone to nodding off over books.
3. What theater does Jonathan, the comic Yankee farmer, visit in Royall Tyler’s The Contrast? [Hint: pictured above.] What plays does he witness on stage?
4. Where and what is Butter-cake Dick’s?
5. What’s the name of Mose’s g’hal?

Contest ends Friday, Oct. 14, at 5pm EST.

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The under-ground story

October 5, 2011 in Books, Writing New York by Bryan

On Monday Cyrus quoted a bit from the opening paragraph of Foster’s New York by Gas-Light, our text this week in vWNY. Here’s a little more:

NEW YORK BY GAS-LIGHT! What a task have we undertaken! To penetrate beneath the thick veil of night and lay bare the fearful mysteries of darkness in the metropolis — the festivities of prostitution, the orgies of pauperism, the haunts of theft and murder, the scenes of drunkenness and beastly debauch, and all the sad realities that go to make up the lower stratum — the under-ground story — of life in New York! What may have been our motive for invading these dismal realms and thus wrenching from them their terrible secrets? Go on with us, and see.

Here Foster offers us a useful example of a recurring figure in city writing: the narrator as tour guide, escorting the reader into the city’s lower depths, recesses and dark corners that would likely be off limits in real life. Part of the attraction for arm-chair tourists and virtual slummers, of course, was the titillation provided by descriptions of such festivities and orgies, which could confirm one’s middle-class sensibilities and provide soft-porn satisfactions all at once. On these points Foster delivers. But he also comes off as a bit of a prude and less than sympathetic to the lives of the “wicked and wretched classes” on whom the gas-light falls. On this point he exemplifies a specific model of the urban tour guide, one traced by our friend Eric Homberger to the “stern-faced Virgil” of Dante’s Inferno, a text popularized for nineteenth-century Americans in a new translation by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Here’s a taste of that text:

“Through me the way is to the city dolent;
Through me the way is to eternal dole;
Through me the way among the people lost.

Justice incited my sublime Creator;
Created me divine Omnipotence,
The highest Wisdom and the primal Love.

Before me there were no created things,
Only eterne, and I eternal last.
All hope abandon, ye who enter in!”

These words in sombre colour I beheld
Written upon the summit of a gate;
Whence I: “Their sense is, Master, hard to me!”

And he to me, as one experienced:
“Here all suspicion needs must be abandoned,
All cowardice must needs be here extinct.

We to the place have come, where I have told thee
Thou shalt behold the people dolorous
Who have foregone the good of intellect.”

And after he had laid his hand on mine
With joyful mien, whence I was comforted,
He led me in among the secret things.

There sighs, complaints, and ululations loud
Resounded through the air without a star,
Whence I, at the beginning, wept thereat.

Languages diverse, horrible dialects,
Accents of anger, words of agony,
And voices high and hoarse, with sound of hands,

Made up a tumult that goes whirling on
For ever in that air for ever black,
Even as the sand doth, when the whirlwind breathes.

And I, who had my head with horror bound,
Said: “Master, what is this which now I hear?
What folk is this, which seems by pain so vanquished?”

And he to me: “This miserable mode
Maintain the melancholy souls of those
Who lived withouten infamy or praise.

Commingled are they with that caitiff choir
Of Angels, who have not rebellious been,
Nor faithful were to God, but were for self.

The heavens expelled them, not to be less fair;
Nor them the nethermore abyss receives,
For glory none the damned would have from them.”

And I: “O Master, what so grievous is
To these, that maketh them lament so sore?”
He answered: “I will tell thee very briefly.

These have no longer any hope of death;
And this blind life of theirs is so debased,
They envious are of every other fate.

No fame of them the world permits to be;
Misericord and Justice both disdain them.
Let us not speak of them, but look, and pass.”

Longfellow’s translation wasn’t published until the late 1860s, but he worked on it for decades. In 1840 he had delivered lectures on Dante to the New York Mercantile Library Association. “All Hope Abandon, Ye Who Enter In”: Homberger tells us that this line in particular was repeated over and over in sermons and city literature. It was even posted above one of the entrances to the Tombs, the infamous New York City prison where Melville’s Bartleby (and countless real-life counterparts) died.

Foster doesn’t take his readers into the Tombs. He mentions the prison a few times, and in his final chapter notes the “morning roll,” one of the rituals of daybreak in the nineteenth-century city:

At the Tombs the morning roll is about commencing, and by the dim light of his dark lantern, policeman after policeman brings in the report of his watch, and deposits the culprits along the sticky and oozy benches. The magistrate, with spectacle on nose, deciphers by instinct the mis-spelled returns, and consigns the miserable wretches one after another to the welcome cells, to be thence despatched to the Penitentiary, the Hospital, or Potter’s Field — either fate a glorious relief from all they have been able to accomplish for themselves unaided in the world. (195)

Virgilian, alright. Foster opened his book by saying that these peeks into dark corners would allow “Philanthropy and Justice” to “plant their blows aright,” but he seems to be set in his conviction that the social divisions he witnesses are natural and not susceptible to reform. Along the way his narrator may have begrudgingly disclosed the appeal of the Five Points entertainment culture, the Bowery B’hoy and G’hal, and other pleasures of the social “under-ground,” but here he seems content to consign that under-ground to the Potter’s Field. It’s a moralizing strain that will appear in much reform writing of the later nineteenth-century, though it will eventually be contested by the underclass itself.

By way of postscript: The introduction of the tour guide figure provides us with occasion to mention our favorite New York City tour guide, Speed Levitch. In The Cruise, Levitch makes a nod to the Virgilian tradition in New York tour guide literature, dividing him and other famous historical and literary figures between rival tour companies Apple and Gray Line: “Spartacus, Brutus and his conspirators, they were Apple tour guides. Willie Wonka, he was Gray Line. Attila the Hun would have been a great Apple dispatcher, whereas Virgil would have worked for Gray Line.” Virgil’s placement must have something to do with his unflinchingness, his dour pronouncement of justice: the miserable deserve their misery.

Levitch’s philosophy of Cruise and Anti-Cruise — the freedom afforded by urban life and the forces marshaled against it — would suggest that Virgil and Foster would both likely fall on the Anti-Cruise side of things, which reminds me that when Levitch offers a discourse on the Anti-Cruise in the film, one of the chief examples he serves up is the Tombs. Embedding is disabled, but this will take you to the relevant clip.

Previously on PWHNY:

New York Nocturne
Darkness and Daylight
Slumming
Sunday in the Park with Speed

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Foster’s Praeteritio

October 3, 2011 in Books, Writing New York by Cyrus

At the end of my first post on Irving for vWNY, I cited the author’s description of New York as a “great crowded metropolis, so full of life[,] bustle, noise, shew and splendour,” so changed from the “quiet little City” of his youth. “It is really now,” Irving wrote to his sister, “one of the most rucketing cities in the world and reminds me of one of the great European cities (Frankfort for instance) in the time of an annual fair – Here it is a Fair almost all year round.”

George G. Foster’s New York by Gas-Light and Other Urban Sketches (1850) is a portrait of that city — or at least, the city that emerges when the sun goes down and the gas-lights come on. As William Chapman Sharpe points out in New York Nocturne: The City After Dark in Literature, Painting, and Photography, 1850-1950 (2008):

The installation of gaslight in London’s West End in 1807 ignited a series of innovations that permanently rearranged the rhythms of everyday life, transforming traditional patterns of industry, commerce, leisure, and consumption. The concept of ‘nightlife’ was born, along with the twenty-four -hour workday. With reliable lighting came safer streets, late shopping, and vastly expanded entertainments. The illumination of the city changed the very way people thought about — and thus lived in — the night. Darkness, so long a barrier to human activity, quickly became a stimulant. (p. 2)

Foster’s Gas-Light describes, in vivid detail, the effects of that stimulant on mid-century New York. The text itself is designed to serve as something like a gas-light trained on the city: his avowed purpose, stated at the outset, is to penetrate beneath the thick veil of night and lay bare the fearful mysteries of darkness in the metropolis.” Right away, the enquiring mind who glances at the first page of  Foster’s book  will find the promise of all the things that the would one day become the stock-in-trade of tabloids like the National Enquirer:

festivities of prostitution, orgies of pauperism, the haunts of theft and murder, the scenes of drunkennes and beastly debauch, and all the sad realities that go to make up the lower stratum — the under-ground story — of life in New York!

Exclamation point! Foster, a journalist and litreary aspirant, was a pioneer of what Stuart Blumin describes, in his introduction to our edition of Gas-Light, as “the new literary genre of nonfictional urban sensationalism.”

As we mentioned on the first day of the course, Foster begins begins by invoking the motif of the “walk down Broadway,” invoked with tongue-in-cheek humor as a safe haven from the promised depravities soon to be seen: “Fashionable, aristocratic Broadway! Certainly we shall find nothing here to shock our senses and make our very nerves thrill with horror.” Nudge, nudge.

Foster’s first chapter takes us on a nocturnal jaunt through the shadows of the city, and it ends with the dawn. Already we’ve seen brief depictions of “the sisterhood,” and Foster shines his light on “the public prostitute” at the end of his second chapter. She is the woman who “sinks willingly to the lowest type of human degradation” and thus “goes, in utter recklessness of herself and the world, to add one more to that frightful phalanx of female depravity which is the terror and the curse of an enfeebled and depraved civilization.” With that, our tour is over for the night, and Foster tucks us safely into bed — alone, presumably: “Let us forget, in sleep, these dreadful sights and gloomy reflections.” The night-time walk is the governing metaphor of Foster’s narrative: each of his chapters takes us on a “tramp” through an area of the city, and many of them explicitly deposit us safely back in bed at the end.

Foster’s narrative as a whole makes use of something like the rhetorical device known as praeteritio (also called apophasis or paralipsis) in which the speaker reveals something by promising not to talk about it. Here’s an example from Melville’s Moby-Dick: “We will not speak of all Queequeg’s peculiarities here; how he eschewed coffee and hot rolls, and applied his undivided attention to beefsteaks, done rare.” Gas-Light operates through a kind of reversal of praeteritio: Foster’s ostensible goal is to promote the  virtues of “civilization” at its best, but he does so by showing us exactly the kinds of things that the virtuous shouldn’t be looking at. Of course that means that the book functions in a way that is opposite to its avowed intentions: it can be read as a kind of guidebook that will show those who are looking for trouble precisely where to find it.

We’ll take another tramp through Foster’s text on Wednesday. Good night!

Q&A with Cynthia Kierner: Tyler’s The Contrast

September 29, 2011 in City on Stage, Teaching, Writing New York by Bryan

Following on yesterday’s Q&A with Alex Roe, who directed The Contrast for the Metropolitan Playhouse in 2009, today we’re happy to host a Q&A with Professor Cynthia Kierner of George Mason University, who edited the play with a substantial introductory essay for NYU Press in 2007. Professor Kierner directs GMU’s PhD program in History and Art History and is the author of Scandal At Bizarre: Rumor and Reputation in Jefferson’s America (Virginia, 2004).

PWHNY: When I teach The Contrast in an American Lit survey I discuss it as dealing with post-Revolutionary American culture broadly. In Writing New York it’s a more local affair, a picture of New York staged for New Yorkers by a visiting Bostonian. How do you teach the play?

CK: I first read the play in grad school, but never really thought about teaching it (or editing it) until it was one of the assigned texts for a discussion group (among high school teachers) that I was leading for a National Humanities Center Seminar in North Carolina. Although I thought that the play was really, really funny, I had never really thought that its humor would transfer to a discussion group of modern readers. It did. So, the main reason I decided to edit the play was to create an accessible edition for use in college-level courses. What fun to talk about dating and sex and shopping in a college history class! (The only online edition at that point was a real mess and not especially usable.)

I have used the book as a required text in undergraduate and graduate classes on the Revolutionary era and in an undergraduate course in American women’s/gender history. In both contexts, I tend to play up the gender angles. Among other things, this play is very much about the distinctive roles of women and men — at home, in the marketplace, and in society — and how, if at all, those roles differed in a republic. I also emphasize the extent to which, even after the Revolution, the U.S. was part of an Atlantic culture. The question of how distinctive Americans were within that Atlantic world is arguably the central one in Tyler’s play. And the notion of “American exceptionalism” continues to be hotly debated, even in today’s political discourse.

PWHNY: Cold War readings of the play often took for granted that Manly and Maria and Jonathan were unquestionably virtuous and the play’s heroes. Over time I’ve come to think that Tyler satirizes them as forcefully as anyone else. Does the play have characters we’re meant to embrace and emulate?

I agree completely that Tyler satirizes both Manly and Maria. Despite his admirable qualities — patriotism, loyalty, respect for his parents and for women, etc. — Manly is long-winded and wears bad (and old) clothes. Arguably, his patriotism, however inspiring during the war, was not the kind that would make him an effective role model in the post-revolutionary era. (Note that George Washington, that quintessential role model, was known for his reticence and also for going back to civilian dress after the war was over). I think that Tyler is much gentler toward Maria, but she’s not perfect either.

I can’t think of any single character that Tyler would have wanted his readers to emulate completely. I think that most of his characters have admirable qualities, but they also have flaws. And maybe that’s the point: Americans don’t have to be perfect as individuals to have a republic, but they do have to be sufficiently moderate and open-minded to make their experiment work.

PWHNY: Charlotte’s opening anecdote about her stroll on the Battery seems to set the stage (so to speak) for a long tradition of conflating New York with the theater: the town, that is, seems to be one big performance situation. Do you think Tyler was trying to get at something he saw, as an outsider, as specific to New York, or are we being given insight into the nature of commercial society?

CK: Interesting point (about conflating NY with theater). I think that for anyone whose experiences had been primarily rural — a category that would have included the vast majority of Americans ca. 1787 — any city would have struck them as “one big performance situation.” The thing that might have made New York special in 1787 would have been its new status as the capital of the United States, which made it the stage on which the nation’s leaders (and prominent New Yorkers) enacted official and quasi-official rituals as they constructed the public culture of the republic. Philadelphia occupied this position both before and after New York’s brief stint as the center of government. (Note that NY was not the largest city in the U.S. at that time, nor was it the one with the most significant theater history.)

PWHNY: What do you think The Contrast has to teach us today?

CK: My students are really interested to learn that theater was so controversial — that people regarded the stage variously as a source of corruption and a source of education. Does that make theater the “new media” of late eighteenth-century America? On an even more basic level, by including characters from so many different ethnic backgrounds, Tyler’s portrait of New York teaches readers that the city — and, by extension, the United States — was born diverse, and that contemporaries saw diversity as an important aspect of their society. That’s a crucial insight and a useful counterpoint to those who would see the story revolutionary era as a top-down founders-focused sort of history.

PWHNY: Thanks for this conversation!

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Q&A with Metropolitan Playhouse’s Alex Roe on The Contrast

September 28, 2011 in City on Stage, Writing New York by Bryan | 1 comment

Two seasons ago our friends at the Metropolitan Playhouse put on a fantastic staging of Royall Tyler’s The Contrast (1787). At the time I wrote a couple posts about it. Since we’re spending a week with the play here for #vWNY I thought this might be a good time to go back to the Metropolitan’s artistic director, Alex Roe, with a couple questions about his experience with that production. The Metropolitan Playhouse is located at 220 E. 4th St, between Avenues A and B. Alex describes their current play, Charles A. Taylor’s From Rags to Riches, (1903) as “a fascinating late melodrama that I see as a purposeful send-up of the genre, something like Airplane was to disaster movies, or the Scary Movie series is to horror.” In January the theater will center its annual Living Literature Festival on the nineteenth-century American author Horatio Alger. Submission deadline is September 30.

PWHNY: The Contrast: A) A Sheridan rip-off? B) An early American play? C) A New York play? D) A Boston play about New York? E) All or none of the above?

ALEX: Of these, I’d have to say an early American play — as it captures the spirit of a new country trying to define itself socially, politically, ethically, and philosophically. It parodies Massachusetts AND New York, but without siding with either. Really, it uses these as much as philosophical and cultural signifiers as actual places, and the two poles represented by them neatly stake out extremes of the infant nation’s concerns. As to its debt to Sheridan, to use its inspiration as a critique is trivial at best, to me, for it misestimates what the play is. If anything, Tyler makes a more interesting social satire than, say, The Rivals. One could draw numerous parallels to Tyler’s advantage, I think, and find that a hero like Manly is a combination of Falkland and Absolute — both a leading man and a buffoon; Dimple is malicious and vain, like O’Trigger and Acres; Maria an affected Julia; Charlotte an edgier Lydia. But in the end, what is interesting is these characters articulating American aspirations and foibles. In this, the play more closely resembles the Restoration comedies than the Georgian.

PWHNY: One of your key decisions in staging the play was to drop the period costumes and dress your actors in tanktops and jeans. Can you tell us what prompted this call and what you think its effects were?

ALEX: Well, not jeans, which would have worked against us, I think. We sought a look that would show the bodies of the actors as unadorned as possible, without revealing them as sexual objects (which would have been distracting) or tying them to a particular fashion tradition (so grey slacks and skirts instead of jeans, work pants, tights, or formal wear). Of course, the audience had to draw some fashion connection, and the look to me most evoked either a ballet or gymnastics squad — either of which was suitable, as it suggested an acting “team” presenting the show — or perhaps school children in uniform, which was also apt for a satire that reduces our behaviors to adolescent affectations.

But why? The Contrast is concerned with social affectation and signs of status. To present it in full period regalia would surely have been a treat for the audience, but might have obscured some of the satire. We sought to underscore how insubstantial is the obsession with the right hoop skirt, or for that matter, the right manner of courtship, the right conversation at a reception, the right reverence for the Father of the Country, etc. In our production, every character, whatever the identification, is as vain as Malvolio. That is not to say that there are no virtues, but rather that one must choose values when all are equally ephemeral. In our production, the emperor truly had no clothes, and characters were obliged to identify contrasts based on merit and integrity, not their outward show.

PWHNY: The Metropolitan stages work, for the most part, from the century following Tyler’s play, from the 1780s into the nineteen-teens. What do you think are the key changes over that century in how American theater worked?

ALEX: What may be most remarkable is how durable themes and conventions prove to be, in fact! Consider three plays from our repertoire: The Contrast, of course, Anna Cora Mowatt’s Fashion (from 1845), and our production now running through this October 16, of Charles A. Taylor’s 1903 play From Rags to Riches. Each play presents characters rather plainly written to embrace opposing or sympathetic current attitudes towards the world and its inhabitants; confront them with one another through a plot in which money, status, and sexual appetite drive their interactions; challenge the Machiavellian pursuits with appeals to honor and generosity; and follow those interactions to their illogical conclusion. Each play functions by presenting these characters in a self-consciously theatrical medium, and allowing us to embrace them even while we preserve our distance. And ultimately, each offers a lightly satirical but loving vision of American culture.

The specifics of setting change, but rather strikingly, the same interactions take place: duplicitous wealthy characters with European affectations or connections prey on a naive but infatuated maidens and their deceived but willing guardians; stiffly pure righteous characters oppose on grounds of dignity and virtue; successful merchants are in danger of losing their wealth to the follies or machinations of a younger generation; the specter of legal obligations and actions, in the form of wills, contracts, and lawsuits, alternately threaten and abet the heroes’ progress; and everything works out well enough in the end for the naive and selfless … though the evildoers are not punished. The description of American life is much the same from play to play.

Are the mechanics of the plays very different? Each establishes characters in the time honored tradition of actors pretending to be other people, liberally violating that pretense with asides to the audience, but essentially offering a degree of exposition at the start, followed by a foreshadowing of characters and dilemmas to come, and then a portrayal of those dilemmas through climax to denouement. Then each resolves with a scene that brings all the characters onstage for a final reckoning.

An historian might note the more complicated technologies that enhance the staging, so The Contrast plays largely in intimate scenes of a few characters, while Fashion presents a fancy dress ball to dazzle its audience, and From Rags to Riches brings firearms, breakaway furniture, dogs, and a demolishable wall onto the stage. In this case, the entertainment becomes increasingly more sensationalistic, as the public appetite changes over the century, but the central conceits for communicating with that audience are much the same.

One might note the introduction of musical diversion into stage performances, achieving its height in the melodramas of the mid- to late-19th century, but here too is a matter of degree, not kind, for indeed, The Contrast calls directly for two songs sung by its actors.

It is true that for these examples, I choose three satires. But to some degree, representational theater is always satire in that presents an imitation of life for an audience’s examination and reflection. In this light, a play like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, full of comic scenes, but hardly meant as a comedy, follows nonetheless the same rules of presentation.

What does change is the play’s acknowledged relationship to itself, as it were. In the beginning of the 20th century, plays flirt with new levels of self-consciousness. One result is a play that parodies its own form. The latest of the plays above, From Rags to Riches, includes sensational action and audience asides in the melodramatic tradition. But this play goes so over the top in broadly stereotyped characters, absurdly contrived plot coincidences, and frequent allusions in the lines to its own contrivances, that I cannot believe the author was not sending up the genre as he celebrated its popular appeal. By the end of the first half, an entire melodrama has played out, taking poor characters from rags to promised riches, just as the title suggests. In the later half, when the naive heroine falls in love with her tormentor, legal actions prevent any of the heroes from receiving their riches, and the plucky boy hero begins to squander the money he finally receives, one sees the melodrama asking what would really happen if these whimsical tales played out in the ‘real’ world. Here, the self-conscious play asks us to doubt its reality entirely.
The opposite request seems another result of a growing self-consciousness in the theater.

In the later part of the 1800s and particularly in the early 1910s, plays begin to want to abandon their theatricality entirely. After the rise of the sensation scene that flourished in melodramas, plays began to achieve more personal, less incendiary climaxes. Additionally, they do away with prologues and epilogues, and audience asides and soliloquies drop from the text. This change asks for the audience to have a more private interaction with the play, though it is still experienced as a public event. From our repertoire, William Vaughan Moody’s The Faith Healer and The Great Divide, James A. Herne’s Margaret Fleming, and Clyde Fitch’s The Truth and The City, all work on this more intimate level, however much theatrical pathos they may still seek to exploit. Perhaps they seek to reach an audience’s deeper, more complicated emotional life by asking that audience to forget they are in the theater. It certainly seems to be the assumption of an audience today that the older, more theatrical styles are shallower and more naive … though I am not convinced that that verdict is just.

PWHNY: Is The Contrast a play for our times?

ALEX: So long as we are encouraged to judge our leaders, families, friends, and neighbors by their outward displays of wealth, patriotism, power, and savvy; so long as we are dedicated to seeking admiration, influence, and love through our command of fashion — that is, for the foreseeable future of humankind — The Contrast is undoubtedly a play for our times.

PWHNY: Thanks for this exchange!

From Rags to Riches plays at the Metropolitan Playhouse through October 16.

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The city on stage

September 26, 2011 in City on Stage, Writing New York by Bryan

Cyrus’s discussion of Irving’s History over the last week or so lays the foundation for one of the big trajectories we trace in Writing New York: the idea of constructed histories — the literariness of the city’s history — and the very real effects those histories have had on the city’s development over time. (Elizabeth Bradley’s Knickerbocker is also instructive in this regard.)

The material I’m taking up over the next few weeks for #vWNY gets at another of our big issues: the way so much writing, especially over the course of the nineteenth century, channels anxieties about the theatricality of everyday urban life. The plays that we teach in this unit share preoccupations with fashion, manners, and the distance between public and private selves. They also fixate on the fluidity of social class. These issues aren’t unique to New York writing, of course, but they do seem to have played into the city’s reputation and self-conception for a very long time.

In lecture I use this bit from Luc Sante’s Low Life as a starting point:

Manhattan was a theater from the first. When, early on, it was a walled city, and further surrounded by a forest of masts, it enclosed in its ring a small universe. This enclosure is the model of cities as it is of theaters, as can be seen when one compares old representations of fortress cities and of Greek amphitheaters and later theaters like the Globe. In Manhattan, social stratification followed a course in which the waterfront and the area environs near it became undesirable, became like the galleries [in theaters], which the dead center, Fifth Avenue, would be the orchestra stalls. What, then, would be the stage? There are two answers. One of them in contained in the image of the city as a theater, consisting of rings, loge, and parquet, in which . . . the audience is the object of its own contemplation. Manhattan has eternally been fascinated by itself. . . . The other answer has to do
with the street that runs diagonally up the island — Broadway — putting itself on display and carrying in its train its dark twin, the Bowery.

Sante’s attention to lower Broadway (and, later, the Bowery) as a space of social performance anticipates the opening scene of Tyler’s play, in which Charlotte recounts for a friend her adventures walking on the Battery for an audience of soldiers and beaux. In our post-Erving Goffman world, the idea that we perform our way through everyday life is practically taken for granted. In Tyler’s day it was one of the reason some social conservatives distrusted theater: because it lent to the theatricalization of ordinary social exchanges. If everyone’s performing, whom can you trust?

The easy answer, on many reading’s of Tyler’s play, is that you need to trust Colonel Manly — a sentimental patriot, dressed in homespun, throwing off the trappings of England and celebrating his country’s native virtues (including Maria, the sentimental heroine). But I’m pretty sure Tyler isn’t letting these characters off the hook so easy. When we talk about the contrasts in The Contrast it usually involves making a list that goes something like this:

country / city
simple virtue / luxury
homespun / import
sentiment / politeness
revolutionary gravity / frivolity
democracy / aristocracy
veteran / beau
age / youth
marriage / seduction
patriarchal authority / filial insubordination
New England / New York
America / Europe
Country (USA) / City (NYC)

But, as I try to make the case in lecture (and in my chapter of the Cambridge Companion), I think one additional contrast undoes some of these others — the contrast between inexperienced theater-goers (especially Jonathan, the Yankee rube, who thinks he’s peeping in on the neighbors when he’s watching a play) and more sophisticated consumers of plays, including, we presume, this play’s target audience. By aligning himself with the theater, Tyler walks a thin line, and in some contemporaries’ minds probably fell over that line and landed flat on his face. It’s hard to take the play’s moralizing at face value when it’s thrown in its lot with a form so inimical to republican virtue. (Others, including George Washington, didn’t share these conservative qualms.)

Tyler’s play seems (inadvertently?) to expose Manly and Maria’s sentimentalism as so much show. Does it expect us to find a way to step outside our everyday performances? Or are we simply supposed to be more honest in recognizing the ways we act, in naming the performances from which the city won’t let us escape?

Previously on PWHNY:

The contrasts in The Contrast.
John Adams, Royall Tyler, and Woody Allen.
More thoughts on the Metropolitan Playhouse’s The Contrast.
Royall Tyler’s The Contrast at Metropolitan Playhouse.
The Battery’s Down: Lost and Found at South Ferry.

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