Recently in Writing New York Category

I'm a big fan of the pop-up books created by Robert Sabuda and Matthew Reinhart. My favorites are Sabuda's adaptations of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Clement Clarke Moore's The Night Before Christmas and Reinhart's Star Wars: A Pop-Up Guide to the Galaxy and Mommy? (with a story by Maurice Sendak.How delightful then that his apprentice) and his

Last November, Sterling Publishing brought out Moby-Dick: A Pop-Up Book, created by Sam Ita, who studied graphic design at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and apprenticed for five years with Sabuda and Reinhart, working on pop-up titles such as America the Beautiful, Encyclopedia Prehistorica, and Mommy?. He's created some fabulous Christmas cards for the Museum of Modern Art too.

Ita retains Melville's dialogue and dramatizes some of my favorite scenes. Here's a taste, though no 2-D picture can really convey what it's like to open the book and see the Pequod popup up from its pages.









Left: "Call me Ishmael"; right; Ishmael in bed at the Spouter Inn.

Raymond Weaver's 1921 biography Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic helped to start the Melville Revival of the 1920s that led to the author's current preeminent standing among American writers. Weaver would go on to edit the first published version of Melville's Billy Budd, which was discovered among the author's papers in 1924.

Today's Knickerbocker sighting comes from a letter that Weaver quotes. In August 1826, Melville, who had just turned seven, was sent by his parents to stay with his uncle, Peter Gansevoort. Allan Melvill wrote this letter to his brother-in-law:

I now consign to your especial care & patronage my beloved son Herman, an honest hearted double-rooted Knickerbocker of the true Albany stamp, who, I trust, will do equal honour in due time to ancestry, parentage & kindred. He is very backward in speech & somewhat slow in comprehension, but you will find him as far as he understands men and things both solid & profound & of a docile & amiable disposition. If agreeable, he will pass the vacation with his grandmother & yourself & I hope he may prove a pleasant auxiliary to the Family circle -- I depend much on your kind attention to our dear Boy who will be truly grateful to the least favour -- let him avoid green fruit & unseasonable exposure to the Sun & heat, and having taken such good care of Gansevoort last Summer I commit his Brother to the same hands with unreserved confidence & with love to our good mother and yourself in which Maria, Mary & the children most cordially join I remain very truly

Your Friend & Brother,
Allan Melville.

Allan added a postscript in pencil to the reverse of the letter:

Have the goodness to procure a pair of shoes for Herman, time being insufficient to have a pair made here.

Google Books has Weaver's biography in its entirety. Click here to see the quotation.

Part of Betsy Bradley's argument in her forthcoming book on the Knickerbocker myth is that by the end of the nineteenth-century the Knickerbocker sensibility had become so ingrained among New York's upper crust that a writer like Edith Wharton could draw on the Knickerbocker sensibility without ever having to name it. The society that Wharton depicts in The Age of Innocence (1920), for example, places a family with Dutch ancestry -- the Van der Luydens -- at the very top of their social hierarchy: their Dutch past gives them social clout that no other family can match.

This week's Knickerbocker sighting is an example of this sensibility at work without mention of the name "Knickerbocker." I've been catching up on the first season of the series Mad Men, which is set in New York in 1960 and centers on the life of Don Draper (Jon Hamm), the creative director at the Madison Avenue ad firm of Sterling Cooper. The fourth episode is called "New Amsterdam," and it turns on Don's decision to fire an upstart account executive named Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheimer), who has pitched his own idea to a client who isn't happy with the campaign that Don has conceived.

We've already discerned that Pete comes from a wealth family with whom he has had some conflicts. Earlier in the episode, the recently married Pete goes to his parents to ask for help with the down payment for a Park Avenue that his wife has found. His father, sitting in a tan smoking jacket and shorts with a Scotch, refuses, in large part because he disapproves of his son's choice of profession:

Pete: Why is it so hard for you people to give me anything?

Dad: We gave you everything. We gave you your name. And what have you done with it?

The punchline of the episode, and each episode seems to conclude with an unexpected turn, is that it isn't the father's name that's important, but rather the mother's. "Coop" (Robert Morse), the head of the firm and one of its founders, explains to Don and his boss, Roger Sterling (John Slattery) why they can't fire Pete:

Coop: New York City is a marvelous machine filled with a mesh of levers and gears and springs, like a fine watch, always ticking ..

Don: Sounds like a bomb ...

Coop: How much do you know about Pete's family?

Don: Nothing, except they put out a mediocre product.

Coop: His mother is Dorothy Dyckman Campbell. The Dyckmans owned pretty much everything north of 125th Street, which -- I don't know how good your geography is -- but that's a fair chunk of the island.

Don: So they're rich. So what?

Coop: Well, no, his grandfather dropped it all in the '29 panic. Some people have no confidence in this country.

Don: What's your concern, then?

Coop: Well, I don't want Dorthy Dyckman Campbell standing on the dock at Fisher's Island this summer talking about how badly Sterling Cooper treated her son. . . . We lose him, we lose our entree to Buckley, the Maidstone Club, the Century Club, Dartmouth, Gracie Mansion--sometimes. It's a marquee issue for us. See my point?

Don: Absolutely. He's more important to us than I am.

Coop: Don't fool yourself. There's a Pete Campbell at every agency out there.

Don: Well, let's get one of the other ones.

Coop: You're going to need a stronger stomach if you're going to be back in the kitchen seeing how the sausage is made.

Don: I thought it was a big watch.

Coop [laughs]: You handle the words. You know how much we want you here with us.
Roger: No doubt about that. Don's a big boy, Fred. Aren't you Don?

Don: Well, thank you . . .  sir.

Coop: There you go I'm glad we're all better now.

The Campbells, in other words, may not have the most money in New York, but they have something priceless: the Dyckman name and the social clout that comes with it.

Mad Men, by the way, is a well-written series that deserves the accolades it has received. Its setting reminds me of a show I loved as a child -- Bewitched (1964-72) -- nearly every episode of which seemed to end with the non-witch, ad-man husband, Darrin (Dick York, then Dick Sargent), coming up with a brilliant ad campaign (often aided by his witch wife, Samantha [Elizabeth Montgomery]) that happened to explain away the kooky enchanted circumstances that occurred during the episode. Imagine Bewitched transformed into an hour-long adult series that substitutes smoking, drinking, and sex for witchcraft and slapstick, and you'll have Mad Men. (Don's wife, Betty [January Jones], even has a hair style that resembles Samantha's!)

The first season is now available on DVD, and you can catch the second season on Sunday nights on AMC.

This summer's New York novels to date -- the books, that is, I've consumed on my vacation: Richard Price's Lush Life, Don DeLillo's Falling Man, Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, and about half of Kevin Baker's Dreamland.

All but the last are post-9/11 novels; I'm thinking hard, in particular, about similarities and differences between DeLillo's and O'Neill's -- why the prose is more satisfying in one but the other more satisfying overall, and what they each do with 9/11.

But reading Baker, finally, has me thinking, too, of fiction and history, one of DeLillo's favorite topics (and mine too). I'll have more to say about all of the above novels over the next while, but for now here's a bit from an essay DeLillo published in the Times Book Review back in '97, around the time Underworld came out. I'm trying to think about how well his description holds up in a new century, when poststructuralism has finally started to lose its grip on academic imagination but when DeLillo's old ruminations on terrorists and novelists are heralded as prophetic and prescient (even as his new, post-9/11 novels are panned); and I'm trying to think about how well his ideas apply to fiction -- Baker's, say -- that unabashedly takes on the generic label "historical fiction."

Fiction does not obey reality even in the most spare and semidocumentary work. Realistic dialogue is what we have agreed to call certain arrays of spoken exchange that in fact have little or no connection with the way people speak. There is a deep density of convention that allows us to accept highly stylized work as true to life. Fiction is true to a thousand things but rarely to clinical lived experience. Ultimately it obeys the mysterious mandates of the self (the writer's) and of all the people and things that have surrounded him all his life and all the styles he has tried out and all the fiction (of other writers) he has read and not read. At its root level, fiction is a kind of religious fanaticism, with elements of obsession, superstition and awe.

Such qualities will sooner or later state their adversarial relationship with history.

. . .

Language can be a form of counterhistory. The writer wants to construct a language that will be the book's life-giving force. He wants to submit to it. Let language shape the world. Let it break the faith of conventional re-creation.

Language lives in everything it touches and can be an agent of redemption, the thing that delivers us, paradoxically, from history's flat, thin, tight and relentless designs, its arrangement of stark pages, and that allows us to find an unconstraining otherness, a free veer from time and place and fate.

The language of a novel -- E.L. Doctorow's "Ragtime," say -- can be so original and buoyant that it necessarily transforms the past. The tonal prose creates its own landscape, psychology and patterns of behavior. It is stronger than the weight-bearing reality of actual people and events. It has a necessary existence, while the source material is exposed as merely contingent. In "Ragtime," history and mock history tool along together. They form a kind of syncopated reality in which diverse human voices ultimately come into conflict with a single uninflected voice, the monotone of the state, the corporate entity, the product, the assembly line. In this novel, language is a democratic experiment.

Find the full essay here. To be continued ... maybe when I've consumed a few more 9/11 novels, or at least when I'm ready to come back to Baker's thoughts on similar topics, as promised way back when. 

So I've spent the better part of the last week holed up in a cabin somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, without the Internet, about as far from Gotham as you can get. The Movie was playing in town on the local one-screener, of course, since we're still talking about planet Earth, but we skipped it in favor of fly fishing and hiking from ski lifts to waterfalls.

Until today, that is, when we caught a plane to Seattle (and a smaller one from there to central WA) and, within a couple hours of dropping off our bags, hit the theater.

Elizabeth L. Bradley, one of the contributors to Bryan's and my forthcoming Cambridge Companion to the Literatures of New York City, is publishing a book called Knickerbocker: The Myth that Made New York. Betsy is the Associate Director of the New York Public Library's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and her book traces the evolution of the idea of the "Knickerbocker" from Washington Irving's coining of the term in his History of New York (1809) to the present day. Betsy traces the way in which the "Knickerbocker" took on a life of its own after the publication of Irving's history, appropriated by a host of New Yorkers as a symbol for an authentic New York identity, even though Knickerbocker himself was made of whole cloth.  The picture of Knickerbocker at right is from the frontispiece by Felix O. C. Darley for the 1849 edition of Irving's History.

In anticipation of the publication of Betsy's book next year by Rutgers University Press, we'll be keeping an eye out for appearances in Knickerbocker in New York culture (outside of the confines of Madison Square Garden).

This week's sighting comes from the July 21 issue of The New Yorker, and appropriately enough, it involves the New York Public Library. Jill Lepore's article "The Lion and the Mouse: The Battle that Reshaped Children's Literature" tells the story of how Anne Carroll Moore, the first superintendent of the NYPL's Department of Work with Children, tried to suppress the publication of E. B. White's Stuart Little.

Here's a tidbit from the article that involves Knickerbocker:

About this time, E. B. White fell asleep on a train and "dreamed of a small character who had the features of a mouse, was nicely dressed, courageous, and questing." White had eighteen nieces and nephews, who were always begging him to tell them a story, but he shied away from making one up off the top of his head. Instead, he set to writing, and stocked a desk drawer with tales about his "mouse-child . . . the only fictional figure ever to have honored and disturbed my sleep." He named him Stuart.

Anne Carroll Moore had an imaginary friend, too. "I have brought someone with me," she would tell children, singsongy, as she fished out of her handbag a wooden doll she called Nicholas Knickerbocker. She even had letterhead made for him. "I'm the sorriest little Dutch boy you ever knew over your accident," she once wrote, signing herself "Nicholas," in a letter to Louise Seaman Bechtel. (When Moore forgot Nicholas in a taxi, her colleagues did not mourn his loss.)

In 1924, Moore published her own children's book, "Nicholas: A Manhattan Christmas Story." It begins with Nicholas's Christmas Eve arrival in a New York Public Library Children's Room filled with fairy creatures:

The Troll gave a leap from the Christmas Tree and landed right beside the Brownie in a corner of the window seat. Just then the Fifth Avenue window swung wide open and in walked a strange boy about eight inches high.

It has not aged well.

The article as a whole is fun to read, and if you like Lepore's writing, you should take a look at her latest book, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan, a fascinating account of slavery in eighteenth-century Manhattan and an episode in which 200 slaves were occused of conspiring to burn down the city, murder its white inhabitants, and take over the local government. You can find primary documents related to the episode that Lepore recounts (including a narrative by the presiding judge) in The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741: Daniel Horsmanden's Journal of the Proceedings, with Related Documents.

I've spent the better part of the last few months finishing a chapter on the early American novelist Charles Brockden Brown for the forthcoming Cambridge History of the American Novel (not to be confused with the Cambridge History of American Literature, the multivolume project Cyrus had a hand in producing).

Working on this piece reminded me again of something I was struck by while writing my dissertation (later revised as Republic of Intellect): that most critics and biographers have treated Brown as a Philadelphia writer, even though the majority of his best-known works -- his gothic novels Wieland, Ormond, Edgar Huntly, and Arthur Mervyn -- as well as his first magazine venture, The Monthly Magazine and American Review, were produced (if not always published) in New York. Brown may have come from a Philly Quaker background, that is, but he stands as an early example of an American writer who came to New York to launch his career. (Warning: the prior sentence risks anachronism, since New York was by no means established as the center of American publishing in the 1790s.)

Brown's first book, the philosophical dialogue  Alcuin, or the Rights of Women, recounts a series of conversations in a New York parlor, where the title character, an impoverished schoolmaster, carries on an exchange with the metropolitan salonierre Mrs. Carter on topics ranging from women's education to politics and the rules of polite conversation between the sexes. Here's a taste of the scene-setting, which reveals some of the narrator's insecurities as he anticipates the "scene" of conversation. Although the conversation itself is rather high-minded, think of these anxieties as an early version of Lou Reed's "New York Telephone Conversation." Alcuin narrates:

I looked at my unpowdered locks, my worsted stockings, and my pewter buckles. I bethought me of my embarrassed air, and my uncouth gait. I pondered the superciliousness of wealth and talents, the awfulness of flowing muslin, the mighty task of hitting on a right movement at entrance, and a right posture in sitting, and on the perplexing mysteries of tea-table decorum.

An early Woody Allen? Certainly there's room here for a comedy of manners. If you want to see how it unfolds, you can nab a used copy of the dialogue here, or find the Bicentennial Edition of Brown's works in your local library. That or shell out for volume one of the forthcoming Wadsworth Anthology of American Literaure, eds. Jay Parini and Ralph Bauer, which includes the dialogue in full with a headnote by yours truly. For more on Brown, visit the site of the Charles Brockden Brown Society.

Well, the summer reading season's on, even though I'm teaching a (mostly non-NYC) summer grad seminar for the next six weeks. And despite the fact that I'm sadly only a few pages into Richard Price's Lush LIfe (which I finally picked up last Sunday) I couldn't help stopping by my neighborhood bookstore today to buy Joseph O'Neill's Netherland. This is notable in part because it's the only time in recent memory (not counting the Harry Potter series, of course) that I've paid close enough attention to purchase a book on the very day it was released.

It will probably be late in the summer before I have something intelligent to say about these two new New York novels, so I'll just remark now that I'm not sure, yet, what to make of the media attention these books have received in the last few months, and often in the name of "the New York novel." Is there something about our current moment (other than the obvious post-9/11 moment we've not yet escaped) that makes audiences particularly receptive to a New York novel? Or is it just typical NYC narcissism -- and the fact that a lot of the media I consume is local or otherwise NYC-centric -- that makes these books stand out from all the other novels released this year? Are there other new novels receiving equal press that just aren't on my radar?

In any case, Netherland, I've come to understand from the reviews, is a post-9/11 novel that makes the city's multi-borough, multicultural subculture of cricket a major vehicle for contemplating cosmopolitan friendship in the new millennium. Here's a quick roundup of the commentary that has me so hopeful about it: Dwight Garner, a senior editor at the Times Book Review, declares upfront that this is not "the bracing, wide-screen, many-angled novel that will leave a larger, more definitive intellectual and moral footprint on the new age of terror," but nonetheless names it "the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we've yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell." The curmudgeon-critic James Wood, writing in this week's The New Yorker, marks it as the best postcolonial novel in recent memory and suggests that "[p]erhaps Joseph O'Neill is the writer this city has been awaiting: born in Ireland [to an Irish father and Turkish mother], reared in Holland, educated in England, and resident in Manhattan." And New York Mag, noting that "Netherland Is Everywhere," wonders how long it will take before the hipsters start playing cricket in droves. Everyone makes the requisite nod to The Great Gatsby.

Can it possibly live up to the hype?

New York seems, to me, to differ from other major world cities in the recyclability (is that even a word?) of its symbols -- especially its architecture and public art. To get what I mean, consider the Louvre by contrast. You experience it as an art museum, and yet if you've given your tour book even a glance you'll realize that it was once a royal palace. That history is somehow preserved, Revolution be damned: the new uses attached to the building don't really aim to erase old meanings.

New York, though, is notoriously forgetful, willfully ahistorical. Its oldest remaining building, St. Paul's chapel on lower Broadway, barely predates the American Revolution. New York's history is one of creative destruction -- pull down the old to make way for the new -- and even the bits that somehow manage to escape the wrecking ball more often than not find old meanings detached and new ones assigned. The somewhat tacky lighthouse that greets tourists flocking to the South Street Seaport was paid for by the citizens of New York, by subscription, to memorialize the Titanic's dead.

For several years, as we've concluded our Writing New York course with Tony Kushner's Angels in America, I've used Central Park's Bethesda Fountain as an example of public symbols whose meanings transform over time. Preparing to discuss Kushner's use of the fountain in the play's epilogue, I show a clip from Ric Burns's New York: A Documentary Film which discusses the fountain in the context of the Civil War's aftermath. According to Burns -- and to Kushner himself, who appears as a talking head in the sequence and discusses the fountain and its sculpture in moving terms -- the Angel of the Waters originally commemorated the Union's naval dead. Though Kushner doesn't make the explicit connection to his play, anyone who's seen Angels realizes why Burns would turn to Kushner for a sound bite at this point. The fountain, these viewers would know, serves as the setting for the play's final scene, in which Prior, who has now lived with AIDS for five years, turns to the audience and blesses it, invoking the oldest ritual uses of theater -- healing and the organization of community -- to grant the audience "more life" and new meanings for it. The HBO adaptation captures the scene well:



What Kushner does with the fountain here both draws on its prior meanings and transforms them. Prior, Louis, Hannah, and Belize each tell part of the story, in the process associating this angel (and themselves) with a Biblical story. In the Gospel of St. John, the pool of Bethesda is cited as a place where invalids gathered, waiting for a miracle: "For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had." This note prefaces Jesus' miraculous healing there of a man who'd been crippled for 38 years. Kushner's characters believe the story in varying ways and to varying degrees. What matters more is that they organize themselves around the idea of a hope for healing, period. And that they reassure one another that they will seek that healing together.

Kushner's characters don't invoke the Civil War association outright, even though the play contains several other references to the conflict, including an entire section named for John Brown's body. America's legacy of race problems haunts a play that's more overtly about the AIDS crisis, and certainly the culture wars that gained momentum during the Reagan Era seem at times to function like a second civil war. But perhaps it's best that Kushner didn't write the Civil War referent into the play -- considering that he and Burns appear to be the primary culprits for propagating a history for the fountain that may not be accurate. The linked article suggests that the Kushner/Burns story perpetuates a mistake; I haven't been able to find anything that would support their account about the fountain commemorating the Union dead.

The more verifiable story also lends itself to Kushner's appropriation of the fountain as a key symbolic presence in his play. This version holds that the sculptor, Emma Stebbins (the first woman to receive a major art commission in New York City and the only Central Park sculptor whose work was actually paid for), who also happened to be a lesbian, chose the Bethesda story for her subject because the fountain was to commemorate the completion of the Croton Aqueduct system, which brought potable water into the Central Park reservoirs from upstate and helped eventually to stem the devastating effects of recurring cholera epidemics on the city. Lives lost during Civil War, the end of an epidemic era: whether or not Kushner gets the details of the statue's origins correct, in effect he has cemented an association between the fountain and his play that, especially in the wake of the HBO production, will likely last a long while. The fountain now stands for a communal sense of hope and transformation, especially for those afflicted with AIDS under the benighted "leadership" of Ronald Reagan. More broadly it stands for the possibility of gay citizenship in America. It's hard to imagine Kushner's version of the angel losing its hold on public imagination any time soon.

In making the statue his own, in giving it a new story in his play, Kushner liberated it from a previous Broadway/Hollywood association -- with the 1973 movie musical Godspell, which you probably either love (for its kitsch value as a hippie Jesus story) or hate (for feeling the need to tell a hippie Jesus story in the first place). Here's the Bethesda fountain as it appeared there, as a site, early in the film, for the ministrations of the movie's version of John the Baptist:


(The fountain reappears later at the end of one of the film's more palatable sequences; in fact I find this song downright charming, like an old Coke commercial.)

A progressive reappropriation? I think so. It's clear that Kushner wanted to keep the religious connotations in place, though as ecumenically as possible, perhaps even letting the theater's magic replace religion's. But he also plays on the ways in which Central Park is itself a renewed and magical, even a sacred public space, in terms of America's civil religion. Between Godspell and Angels, the Park spent almost two decades with a rather rough reputation; its decline was nowhere more apparent than at the Bethesda Terrace, which became one of the major sites of the Park's renewal beginning in the mid 1980s. The restoration of the fountain -- itself a symbol of the restoration of public health -- stands for the possibility, at the end of the city's fiscal crisis of the '70s and early '80s, of a renewed civic body as a whole.

We debate, at the end of Writing New York, whether the community that Kushner brings together at Bethesda is as cosmopolitan as it seems on first glance. After all, no one knows -- or at least mentions -- what's happened to Hannah's son Joe, who's last seen in the play not doing so well after leaving his marriage. But in real life there's no denying something magical and indeed cosmopolitan happens at a place like Bethesda, realizing over and again the Park planners' dreams for what this space should be and do and mean. How else can you explain hordes of middle-American tourists falling under the spell of my favorite NYC street performer, Thoth?



A perfect example of how New York can still shelter extremes in human expression, Thoth calls his audiences to meditate on the relationship of the physical body to creative sound and movement, making full use of the gloriously restored arcades at the terrace. (Restoration work on the ceiling tiles, which began in the mid-'80s, was completed just last year.) If you want to see the distance between the sacred space that fosters Kushner's Utopian dreams and the profane and shallow shell where the rest of American culture is content to curl up and waste away, just try to imagine Thoth -- the modern angel of the waters -- on an American reality TV show hosted by David Hasselhoff. The footage exists; if you feel the need to watch it, go back and watch the previous link to purify yourself. Some landmarks, apparently, are better off left in their original contexts.