First, at the Ottendorfer Library (135 Seconds Ave.), a panel on preservation efforts on the Lower East Side, sponsored by the Lower East Side History Project. 6 pm.

Second, at Judson Memorial Church (Washington Square Park South), a memorial service for Harry Koutoukas, a cornerstone of the LES theater scene for decades. Start time unannounced, but more info about Koutoukas can be found at warholstars.org. At that site I found this memorial sermon, preached at Judson last Sunday, by one of the community ministers, Michael Ellick:

(h/t Carey Abrams)

Our students are taking a midterm tomorrow morning. The last lecture before the exam was Cyrus’s take on Abraham Cahan’s Yekl (1896).

I don’t have anything new to say about it at the moment, and indeed should be working on something else. But I thought I’d offer up some links to prior content for the sake of students who may be checking the blog tonight.

Last year Cyrus posted a general intro, including a sneak preview of Sarah Wilson’s essay on the New York novel of manners from our forthcoming Cambridge Companion. (This year our students have read her entire piece; next year we’ll actually be able to order the book!) Cyrus also gave some additional detail on one of his favorite topics — baseball — which ties nicely into the novel’s film adaptation, Joan Micklinn Silver’s Hester Street (1975).

Maybe once the exam’s out of the way — and a couple writing deadlines have been reached — we’ll be back in regular blogging form.

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.]

Tuli, at age 86, has over $3500/month uncovered medical bills. If the benefit slated for Bowery Poetry Club this Saturday features lower-key line-up, it’s also a little more affordable to ordinary folk ($10 min) and consists of the unsung backbone of LES poetry and arts scenes for the last forty years: Penny Arcade, Bob Holman, Clayton Patterson, Taylor Mead, David Amram, Peter Stampfel, John S. Hall and King Missile, Steven Taylor, Steven Ben Israel, Max Blagg and more. Thanks to organizer Carey Abrams (who, among other things, leads the Lower East Side History Project’s walking tour on the Beats) for bringing the event to our attention.

Saturday, March 6, 8 pm. Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery, btwn Houston and Bleecker).

Last year, Cyrus offered a general intro to the novel and later  posted about the archives of what Wharton refers to as the “new opera house,” for those who’d like to trace opera in the city beyond the temporal frame of this novel into the moment in which Wharton wrote.

Reaching back to his lecture on Whitman and realism (which this year’s students missed out on, since I took the Whitman this year) he found yet another occasion to share his appreciation of European realist painting.

We’ve also tracked some of Wharton’s engagement with the idea of the Knickerbocker. In recent popular representations of the city, Knickerbocker New York has informed both Mad Men and Gossip Girl, the latter of which included a great Wharton episode last season, complete with the kind of theater-audience-watching scene I love to bring to the class’ attention.

Speaking of the theater, it would be worth students’ while to think about the relationship between the novel of manners, which Cyrus has been lecturing on this week, and the comedies of manners we read early in the semester, including Royall Tyler’s The Contrast and Anna Cora Mowatt’s Fashion. How do the social concerns raised in the plays find themselves taken up or transformed in Wharton’s novel? Do “manners” perform the same cultural work in these multiple contexts or genres?

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.]

Views from Queensboro Bridge [Newtown Pentacle]

Recapping the Bike Shorts screenings at Public Assembly. [Brooklyn by Bike]

Staten Island: Into the Woods. [Ape Shall Not Kill Ape]

And for natural waterfalls, the gold goes to the Bronx! [Bronx Bohemian]

Nothing left but a ghost space: What was once the 125th St. Y. [Harlem Bespoke]

Photo by Mitch Waxman for Newtown Pentacle.

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.