Cambridge Companion

Robert Lawson-Peebles, who contributed the chapter “From British Outpost to American Metropolis” to the Cambridge Companion, taught at Oxford, Princeton, and Aberdeen, before moving to Exeter University, where he held the post of  Senior Lecturer in English at the School of English. Bob is currently Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow and Honorary University Fellow at Exeter. He holds a D.Phil. from Oxford University and received the bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Sussex University.

Bob’s scholarship deals with transatlantic cultural relations from the Viking settlement to the present day. He is the author of  Landscape and Written Expression in Revolutionary America: The World Turned Upside Downa (Cambridge UP, 1988, reprinted 2008); ;  Modern American Landscapes (1995); and American Literature Before 1880 (Longman, 2003). He has also edited the volumes Views of American Landscapes (with Mike Gidley, Cambridge, 1989, reprinted 2008) and Approaches To The American Musical, which appeared from Exeter in  1996. Current work in progress includes a biography of Benjamin Franklin and a book on the impact of jazz in Britain.

Bob’s contribution to the Cambridge Companion uses gastronomical motifs as a prism through which to view British American writing about New York. “The epic that is New York was founded in conquest,” he writes, and is “then transformed into the capacious corporeality that would be celebrated by Whitman.” Here is an excerpt from Bob’s discussion of Travels in North America, which was published in 1829 by Basil Hall, a retired Royal Navy officer:

Basil Hall was no ordinary seaman. He had traveled extensively in Europe and further abroad, sailed round the Cape of Good Hope to the East Indies and to China, and round Cape Horn to Northern Mexico. He had made excellent use of his experiences, undertaking scientific experiments and publishing the journals of his travels. He had already, at the age of twenty-seven, been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. But the opening hyperbole, followed by a delay of two pages, suggests that the “glorious breakfast” presented a challenge even to Hall’s sophisticated analytical powers. He responded by shaping his description into two related if roughhewn parts. Hall begins with the language of excess, then tries and fails to contain it with the language of politeness. …

A civilized nation is characterized by a civilized dining room. Basil Hall’s description of the dining room at the American Hotel therefore does more than simply reflect his pleasure on landing after twenty-eight days in ship’s quarters. His brief but detailed account of the environment emphasizes its comfort and refinement – and his own comforting, refined ability to describe it. …

Basil Hall’s breakfast … shows that New York could offer its own challenges to politeness. Hall’s description of his food is in a different register from his description of the dining room. Although the language of politeness made room for sensuality, it was held in check by refinement. But refinement is unable to restrain the language of excess. “A great steaming, juicy beefsteak” are the words of a hungry sailor, home from the sea, rather than those of a second son of a baronet and Fellow of the Royal Society. After this lubricious outburst, the profusion of the food challenges Hall’s repertoire of images, and pushes him beyond pleasure, further into a hedonism confirmed by the quotation from John Donne’s “Elegy XIX: To his Mistress Going to Bed.” For Donne, “Mahomet’s paradise” was merely a way-stage in disrobing en route to sexual afflux, celebrated by the cry “O my America, my new found land.” Hall reassigns Donne’s reference to the Koran from the sexual to the gustatory organ and – naval discipline reasserting itself – does not overindulge it. Although Hall knows that the culinary is less carnal than concupiscence, he realizes that he has still exceeded the bounds of politeness. Protesting that he is no “gourmand, or epicure,” Hall declares that he has “made upon this occasion a most enormous breakfast,” and is too embarrassed to ask for more. So, with reluctance, he “rose at last with the hungry edge taken off, [if] not entirely blunted.”

Next: Martha Jane Nadell.

Thulani Davis is the author of the piece “African American Literary Movements” in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York. A self-described “writer and interdisciplinary artist,” Thulani wrote the libretti for  Anthony Davis’s operas Amistad (which premiered at the Lyric Opera in Chicago in 1997) and X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, which premiered at the New York City Opera in 1986 and for which she received a Grammy nomination. Thulani later won a Grammy Award for Best Album Notes (for Aretha Franklin’s 1993 album The Atlantic Recordings). As a journalist, Thulani has served as City/State editor for the Village Voice.

In 2006, Thulani published a family history entitled My Confederate Kinfolk: A Twenty-First Century Freedwoman Discovers Her Roots. “I am not a historian,” she writes in the introduction to the book, adding, “I am also not a genealogist, though I am now much more agile in the face of old documents than I once was. But I am a journalist, who is, like many in my trade, very curious, very stubborn … So this text is not a history nor a genealogy but built from my own great interests: how we define being American, how we deal with race, and human character.”

Thulani has also written the foreword to Maurice Berger’s study For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights, just published by Yale University Press. An exhibition of images, objects, and clips related to the book will open this May at The International Center of Photography.

Thulani is currently pursuing a doctorate in American Studies at NYU, working on a research project that involves women in the post-Reconstruction era in the South. On one of her back burners is what she calls “a musical theater piece on the 1881 Atlanta washerwomen’s strike.”

For the Cambridge Companion, Thulani adopts the garb of a literary historian. “I often joke,” she writes in the opening paragraph of her chapter, “that whenever Europe sailed off to discover the rest of the world there was always an African aboard. In the case of New York, this was doubly true. A black Portuguese navigator came up the Hudson in 1525, and in 1613 Jan Rodriguez, a free black sailor, was dropped off from a Dutch trader on Manhattan and stayed.”

Here is a longer excerpt:

Arguably the most important antecedent to the work of the Harlem Renaissance was The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), written by James Weldon Johnson, a poet from Jacksonville, Florida, who had come to New York in 1902 to write shows. He and his brother, the composer J. Rosamond Johnson, and the performer Bob Cole formed one of the most successful theater teams in New York. In this novel, which was initially published anonymously and taken to be a genuine autobiography of “passing,” Johnson created a groundbreaking work endowed with an urbane central character whose complex internal life excavates some of the conflicts of racial identity fifty years out of slavery. The ex-colored man, the child of a white man and his black mistress in Georgia, grows up in New England, becomes a ragtime player in the Tenderloin, and is then taken abroad by a white patron. A later trip to Georgia to search out black folk music exposes him to a lynching, and sets his mind on passing. Some of the book’s most detailed passages recall the novelty of New York’s language, food, rhythms, and diversity. He later documented the growth of the city’s black community and its migration to Harlem in Black Manhattan (1930).

Now that we are in an era likely to be named after the country’s first African American president, the work of Wells, Du Bois, and Johnson has even greater signifi cance because of their interest in the breadth of the African American journey out of legal bondage and their focus on our relationship to the American state. They were asking the most pertinent questions, and in time we shall have to examine whether they’ve been answered.

In December 1905 the New York Herald ran a story under the headline, “Negroes Move to Harlem,” announcing that whites had been replaced by black tenants in flats on 134th between Seventh and Lenox Avenues. The article reported “the cause  of the colored influx was inexplicable.” A murder had actually allowed a young African American realtor to begin placing black tenants – at higher rents – into buildings on that street. In 1908, the black expansion into Harlem began in earnest. Theater artists were also driven out of Broadway to Harlem from about 1909 until the end of the First World War. Many small bars sprang up along 133rd (“The Jungle”) and 134th, offering blues, booze, and dancing, and some catered to gay night life. The area became home to Florence Mills, Bessie Smith, and Alain Locke, as well as James Weldon Johnson and Fats Waller, to name a few. My uncle, the critic Arthur P. Davis, often told the story of seeing Du Bois and Garvey, who had little use for each other, passing one another on Seventh Avenue without acknowledgment, one in quasi-military gear and the other with fedora and cane.

You can follow Thulani on Twitter by clicking here.

Next: Eric Homberger.

Today we profile Elizabeth L. Bradley, who has contributed the chapter “Dutch New York from Irving to Wharton” to the Cambridge Companion.

Betsy is Assistant Director for Public Programs and Lifelong Learning at the New York Public Library, where she has also served as deputy director for the Dorothy and Lewis Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. She holds a doctorate in English from New York University and a bachelor’s from Harvard. Betsy is the city’s reigning expert on the life, work, and influence of Washington Irving: she is the author of Knickerbocker: The Myth behind New York (Rutgers, 2009) and the editor of the Penguin Classics edition of Washington Irving’s A History of New York. Her writing and reviews have appeared in several publications, including BookForum. (Click here for BookForum’s review of Knickerbocker.)

In Knickerbocker, Bradley traces the life and after-life of Washington Irving’s fictional historian Diedrich Knickerbocker. To Irving’s “great amazement,” Bradley writes, “Knickerbocker outlasted the History‘s first print run, and its numerous printings after that as well. In fact, the ornery, insular Dutch bard became an instant icon for New Yorkers, who used him by their own means but always, finally, to the same end: to signal the city’s myopic sense of destiny and difference.” The book is elegantly written and full of delightful anecdotes. Philip Lopate calls the book “a delightful contribution to urban studies,” adding that “Bradley knows her facts and shrewdly and convincingly interprets them.”

In her contribution to the Companion, Bradley shows how the idea of the Knickerbocker comes to saturate the imagination of upper-crust New York to such an extent that even though she never mentions “Knickerbocker” by name in her novels, Edith Wharton nevertheless makes use of the cultural symbology that “Knickerbocker” has come to represent by the end of the nineteenth century. Here is an excerpt:

The gently born descendants of the “purely middle class” Dutch and English merchants whose lives are portrayed in novels such as The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence, as well as in the novellas that make up the collection Old New York, derive their authority over their respective New Yorks from an innate grasp of the finegrained linguistic and aesthetic cues that governed high society after the Civil War – what one Wharton character describes, with airy assurance, as “certain nuances.” The crucial importance of these “nuances” is most keenly felt in The House of Mirth, where wealthy climbers ask for the native New Yorker Lily Bart’s help in fine-tuning their “flamboyant copy” of high society, and later, in The Custom of the Country, where the inability of nouveaux riches to get the details of haute bourgeois “aspect and manner” right is handled with a Jamesian allusiveness by the narrator. In every case, the society depicted in Wharton’s novels is governed with a “Dutch deliberateness” by mandarins who adhere to old traditions and even older kinship ties, whether they be the “viceregal” van der Luydens of The Age of Innocence overseeing their vast cousinship from the Patroon’s house at “Skuytercliff”; the Trenors arranging tactical maneuvers in The House of Mirth from the terraces of Bellomont, their Hudson Valley seat; or the ethereal Ralph Marvell and his sister, Clare Van Degen, clinging to the values and Vermeer-like decorations of their ancestors in The Custom of the Country.

Unlike her literary predecessors, Wharton does not always trumpet the New Amsterdam foundations of the insular world she depicts, but they are no less apparent for being so rarely spoken aloud. Perhaps the most telling evidence of her debt to the Knickerbocker landscape may be found in the repeated mentions – in both her fi ctions and her memoir – of Knickerbocker’s creator himself. “We were brought up on the best books – Scott, and Washington Irving, and old whats-his-name who wrote the Spectator, and Gibbon and so forth,” a character in The Spark insists, “cheap journalism – that’s what most modern books are.” Whether or not Wharton agrees with this assessment, her own urban stories betray their debt to Irving’s first attempt to capture the traces of Dutch New York.

Betsy appeared on the Leonard Lopate show last January after the publication of her edition of A History of New York. You can listen to her here:

Tomorrow: Melissa Bradshaw.

Today we profile Robin Bernstein, who has written the chapter “Staging Lesbian and Gay New York” for the Companion.

Robin is a cultural historian who focuses on U.S. performance and theater, race, gender, sexuality, and childhood during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She holds a doctorate in American Studies from Yale and is currently Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and of History and Literature. Her most recent publication is Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater (University of Michigan Press, 2006), which includes memoirs and interviews by Edward Albee, Cherry Jones, Peggy Shaw, Craig Lucas, George C. Wolfe, and others. She is also the editor of Generation Q (Alyson Press, 1996) and the author of a children’s book titled Terrible, Terrible! (Kar-Ben, 1998).

Robin’s current project, “Racial Innocence: Performing Childhood and Race from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to the New Negro Movement,” is under contract to New York University Press. Her most recent article, “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race,” which appeared in the December 2009 issue of the journal Social Text, develops a new methodology by which to analyze material items so as to uncover otherwise inaccessible evidence of past performances.

Here’s an excerpt from Robin’s chapter:

The critical and popular acclaim for Angels in America was extraordinary but not isolated. During the fi nal decade of the twentieth century, a small coterie of lesbians and gay men including Kushner, Margaret Edson, George C. Wolfe, Jane Wagner, Charles Busch, Terrence McNally, Paula Vogel, Lisa Kron, and Craig Lucas authored plays – some with queer characters, some without – that enjoyed substantial runs in major theaters. The public comings-out of well-known performers such as Rosie O’Donnell, Ellen Degeneres, Sir Ian McKellan, Rupert Everett, and Lily Tomlin suggested to some that the twenty-first century would constitute a “post-gay” period in which sexual identity was irrelevant.

The 2003 Tony Awards Show appeared, to some, to inaugurate this “postgay” era: in that year, gay men nearly swept the Tony Awards, prompting Frank Rich, critic for the New York Times, to call the Awards ceremony the “first live gay network reality show.” Openly gay men and lesbians had won Tonys before (Cherry Jones, for example, thanked her partner while accepting a Tony for Best Actress in 1995). In 2003, however, the openly gay awardees reached critical mass for the first time. That year, actor and playwright Harvey Fierstein was named Best Leading Actor in a Musical for his drag role in Hairspray (which earned the title of Best Musical, as well as six other Awards); and the Tony for Best Play went to Take Me Out, the story of a gay ballplayer. It was Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, however, who stole the show when they accepted their award for Best Original Score for Hairspray . The two men lingered in a loving kiss on the lips. Then Shaiman said to Wittman, his partner of twenty-five years: “I’d like to declare in front of all these people, I love you and I’d like to live with you the rest of my life.” The New York Times serenely described the Awards show kiss as  theatrical “business as usual,” and most audience members seemed to agree. Of the eight million people who watched the Tony Awards that year, only ten telephoned CBS to complain about gay visibility at the ceremony, and only sixty-eight emailed the network.

Tomorrow: Elizabeth L. Bradley.