USA > New York > New York City > New York panorama : a comprehensive view of the metropolis > Part 17
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The instinctively creative qualities of the Negro are fully brought into olay in his use of language, and no trip to New York should omit a visit o the Savoy Ballroom, where all Harlem comes to dance and gossip. Re- lecting an abounding interest in theater, music and dance, the Harlem ingo contains the rich impressionism and conscious emphasis characteristic of people living as special minorities; for vitality, variety and quality of magery, it rates as one of the most exciting elements of the New York language. Harlem folk talking amongst themselves never feel "all right" -they're mellow as a chick; or if the opposite happens to be the case, they're beat to the bricks, or beat to the socks. One who talks too much is a gum-beater or solid gum-beater, while an unclassified nuisance is a bring- down or a hanger. Uninhibited dancers or party men are called rugcutters, sometimes with a lowbrow connotation; highbrows are high-jivers. The word jive has many meanings, among which are to joke with or kid, and
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to court a girl, as I'm jiving a chick. The jive is on refers to group excitathe ment, healthy or otherwise. When one owns a car he's on rubber, and feedor pretend is to be stiffin'. Lace up your boots, baby is a cryptic admonition take get wise to yourself. Anything wonderful is murder or a killer, and to capire. out "Stop!" one says Blackout! Hundreds of similar expressions make tl set Harlem lingo a pleasure to listen to, albeit sometimes difficult to undeneir stand or dig. In
Of all New York jargons, the most colorful and original is the popul: hole or jazz musicians' language. The Negro's contribution here has been and p significant as his influence in modern folk music. Greatest of all the gre.ponfe trumpeters of the day, Louis (Satchelmouth ) Armstrong has created mor fuat of this language than any other individual. The imaginative and freely rulestra laxed quality of the best modern dance music is found in this lingo. ind c
Loiter near the bandstands at Roseland and the Savoy, get a table ulay close in some of the smaller places such as the Onyx, the Uptown HousMetr and Hickory House, or simply stand on the sidewalk among the crowd ciself musicians gathered outside union headquarters on Fiftieth Street just o. Sixth Avenue, and you will catch words and expressions no more compre hensible to uninitiated non-musicians or ickies than Sanskrit. How at we to know that a Dracula is a key-pounding pianist who lifts his hanc up to his face, or that the bass fiddle is the doghouse, or that shmali musicians are four-button suit guys and long underwear boys? Similarly the initiate must learn that the gutbucket or riding chorus is the poly phonic climax to the playing of a tune or recording; that to be in th groove is to be playing very well; that riffs are deftly improvised rhythr. phrases ; and that a solid sender is a musician who is master of his instru ment and who can do expressive things with it. Who in the world but jazz musician would suspect that B-flat means dull, G-flat brilliant, and out of this world-though it has taken on ickie connotation-most com pletely in the groove? Jazz musicians relish their lingo and invariably sa cat for musician, Hi Gate! for hello, stinkeroo for poor, shmaltz for sugar music and wacky for anything stupid or foolish. They are thrilled or sen in their jam sessions (informal and experimental collective improvisa tions ), and have little respect for the papermen of the craft, or those who play only written music. Gettin' off or going to town on the last chorus o! gutbucket is one of the thrills of the business to good hot men.
The word swing, now popularly used as a noun to denote music in the most recent phase of the ragtime-jazz tradition, originated and is properly used as a verb to describe a method of playing in exceptionally expressive
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exciteythm patterns, either individually or collectively, and with organized and tion edom of improvisation. Swing, gate! is an exhortation to a solid sender take a Boston or let go with all the riffs, licks and kicks in his reper- to care. And as the sun rises over the housetops and the last bottle of milk ke thset down at the last apartment door, the cats deposit their instruments in andereir cases and depart with: "Take it easy, Pops, see ya on the downbeat."
In conclusion, it can safely be said that the New York language as a pulmole mirrors accurately the characteristic social relations of this immense en d prodigiously busy city. Propriety may be the rule in courts, hospitals, greenference rooms, employment bureaus, schools, waiting rooms and in all monuations wherein each person according to his station must exercise proper ly restraint. But when these restrictions are absent, in shops and subways, cabs d cafeterias, children's playgrounds and grownups' night spots, in all the le uy sparkle and grinding routine of the New World's Number One fousketropolis, you will find a language as stunning and stimulating as the city ed dielf.
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VII. LITERATURE
Market Place for Word.
NEW YORK CITY is frequently referred to as the "literary capital" of tl United States. It would be more accurate to say that it is the nation's ou standing literary market place, one of the great publishing centers of tl world. American publishers have tended more and more, since the mi dle of the 19th century, to concentrate on Manhattan Island; although number of important houses are still to be found in other cities. The san thing is true of magazines, literary syndicates, etc. New York is also tl chief production center for the playwright. Literary and dramatic agen naturally have their offices where the largest amount of business is co: ducted; and aspiring or successful writers, if they do not migrate her frequently have occasion to visit the city. Not to be overlooked is the i: fluence of New York reviewers and other groups in shaping the critic opinion and reading tastes of the country.
By virtue of the size of the reading public which it commands and tl consequent size of the author's potential royalties, New York has come acquire international importance as a publishing center. Whether or not may accurately be termed the country's "literary capital" is a more or le academic question. Earlier in the century, when the "midwestern renai sance" was at its height, H. L. Mencken created a tempest in a teapot I conferring the title of "literary capital" upon Chicago, withdrawing later when the movement headed by Sandburg, Masters and Anderson a peared to have spent itself. Until then, aside from the growing consciou ness and fast-spreading reputation of its Greenwich Village in the earli years of the century, New York does not seem to have given the questic a great deal of thought, but busily went on with its publishing, editin printing, book reviewing, its occasional making and unmaking of reput tions; with not a little writing, though by no means all the writing in th country, being done in the shadow of its skyscrapers. In other words, remained essentially a market rather than a self-conscious "capital"; ar. much of the same unsentimental, hard-faceted spirit that went into th
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tilding of its financial supremacy was manifest in its literary production. Relatively few of America's better-known writers, past or present, have en native New Yorkers; and there is little real basis for the common lief that as soon as a writer has made or is beginning to make a success : moves to Manhattan. As to the influence of New York in determining e literary taste and reading habits of America, something in the way of alification and distinction is called for. Through such book supplements those of the Times and the Herald Tribune, such weeklies as the New epublic, the Nation, the Saturday Review of Literature, and the New asses, and such newspaper columns as those by Harry Hansen, Lewis annett and others, New York exerts a ponderable influence upon re- ewers and readers in other sections, and so has a large share in molding erary opinion. But no one can accurately gauge the influence of New ork critics on the great mass of book buyers. The latter are perhaps more clined to be governed by local opinion; and reviewers in smaller towns id cities, while sometimes swayed by the metropolitan verdict, are as kely as not to display independent reactions. On the whole, it is prob- ly in the higher realms of literature that New York's critical influence operative. That influence obviously has nothing to do with the huge les of such contemporary authors as Lloyd Douglas and Temple Bailey, y more than it had with the sales of Harold Bell Wright and Gene ratton Porter in former years; and it is decidedly open to question how uch of its success such a book as Main 'Street owes to what the metro- olitan reviewers may or may not have said about it.
All this is in no wise intended as a refutation of New York's claims to les mais terary eminence. Those claims are very real ones ; the city occupies a place Il its own, and one that it will probably retain for some time to come. ut a "literary capital" it is not, in the sense, for example, that Philadel- 00 hia was during the last half of the 18th century, when, with such writers ; Tom Paine and Benjamin Franklin in the foreground, literature was ous osely associated and frequently fused with national politics. Neither does rlie tio
New York hold the cultural-one might say, the spiritual-hegemony that ras Boston's from about 1820 to shortly before the Civil War, during the ing
eriod of the Unitarian revival, the Transcendentalist movement, and the arly abolitionist movement. It was in the decade or two immediately pre- eding the Civil War that New York began coming to the front as the ountry's most important literary center, gradually taking the position that Philadelphia had more or less unconsciously lost and that Boston was lowly but surely relinquishing. This transitional phase may have been
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initiated as early as 1845, when Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" appear entury in the New York Mirror and attracted national notice. However, it is r of easy to confine such shifts within definite dates, as a very brief sketch the highlights in New York's earlier literary history may indicate.
That history might properly be said to begin with Washington Irvir reen the first outstanding man of letters that New York can claim. But a fof sat men before Irving had been prominent in the city, though they lived a: denatu wrote elsewhere as well. One of these was Tom Paine, already mention Koni in connection with Philadelphia. For three or four years after the Revoluad tion, Paine was frequently in New York; and the last seven years of hay" life were spent here and on a farm in New Rochelle that had been giv M ben arli The him by the government for his services to the Revolutionary cause. Phil Freneau, most important of American poets before Bryant, was born New York City in 1752, and for nearly a decade after his marriage 1789 he was chiefly engaged in journalistic work here, editing first toun Daily Advertiser, then later (following the failure of his National Gus o zette in Philadelphia ) the Time-Piece. Though Charles Brockden Brow fair the first American to make a profession of authorship, belongs to Phil foi delphia, his more noteworthy novels-including Wieland and Arth W Mervyn-were written while he was living in New York, from 1798 1801.
In connection with the pre-Irving era, note should be made of the exiso ti ence in New York City, beginning as far back as 1752, of a number " here periodicals of a literary or semi-literary nature: the Independent Reflectorfor the Occasional Reverberator, the Instructor, the John Englishman, thatho American Magazine, the New York Magazine, the American Minerva, thys Literary Magazine, the Lady and Gentleman's Pocket Magazine, that Monthly Magazine and American Review and the Rush Light. All of the were decidedly provincial in character.
It is more than birth and long residence in New York, more than thhe brilliant reputation he achieved in this country and abroad, that makde Washington Irving the city's outstanding literary figure of the early period He was the first important American writer to deal with New York an material for literature, the first to animate it with the breath of a largedi cultural world. His earliest published writing, the essays in Salmagunas (1807-8), was largely concerned with the Manhattan background; anda his first book was the humorously satiric Dietrich Knickerbocker's History of New York (1809). Returning in 1832 from a sojourn of 17 years into Europe, and establishing his home near Tarrytown on the Hudson, Irvin,
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atinued to dominate the New York literary scene for more than a quarter- tury, until his death in 1859.
Of Irving's minor literary contemporaries in New York, the best known re his intimate friend and Salmagundi associate, James Kirke Paulding, pioneer in the field of realistic American fiction; and the two poets, Fitz- eene Halleck and Joseph Rodman Drake, who collaborated in a series satiric verses on contemporary New York celebrities, published over the nature of "Croaker & Co." in the Evening Post. Paulding's novels Köningsmarke, The Dutchman's Fireside, Westward Ho! etc.) are little id today; but Halleck's "Marco Bozzaris" and Drake's "The Culprit y" still survive in the standard anthologies.
Much of James Fenimore Cooper's early life, from 1811 to 1835, was ent in New York City or its suburbs; and it was here that he wrote the rliest and in some respects the most successful of his novels-The Spy, be Pioneers, The Pilot, Lionel Lincoln, The Last of the Mohicans. As under and leading spirit of the Bread and Cheese Club, and in numer- s other activities, Cooper played a prominent part in New York literary 'airs of the 1820's and early 1830's. One of his later novels, Le Mou- oir (1840), deals with fashionable life in Manhattan.
With his reputation as the author of "Thanatopsis" and other notable ems already made, William Cullen Bryant came to New York from assachusetts in 1826 as sub-editor of the Evening Post. He was advanced exist the post of editor-in-chief three years later, and for half a century er dereafter he was one of the most influential and elevating forces in New ectofork journalism. Another poet-journalist of this early period, though one tho ranked very considerably below Bryant, was Nathaniel Parker Wil- , th, who for a decade or two before the middle of the century was asso- thuted with George Pope Morris on the New York Mirror, and later con- thesebuted to the Home Journal a colorful weekly interpretation of the Man- ttan scene. It was Willis who accepted Poe's "Raven" for publication in the Mirror, and who later gave the poet regular employment as well as the naki nefits of a generous friendship.
If New York, after adopting William Cullen Bryant, has no writers of k aninence to show down to the time of Poe and Whitman and Melville, rgejis does not mean that the city was barren of literary activity. During the Andst half of the 19th century, more than 50 magazines were published in
and anhattan or nearby, among them the American Review and Literary torjurnal, the American Monthly Magazine and Critical Review, the New Mork Mirror, the New York Review and Atheneum Magazine, the New
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York Literary Gazette, the Knickerbocker Magazine, the Americ. Monthly Magazine, the New York Review, the Columbian Lady's ar Gentleman's Magazine, the Literary News Letter, the American Revie and Whig Journal (later the American Whig Review), the Broadw. Journal and the Literary World.
Edgar Allan Poe's life in New York divides into two periods. A fe months after his marriage to Virginia Clemm in 1836, the poet took h child-wife and her mother to New York, where they boarded on Carmi Street until the summer of 1838. Then, unable to make a living, Poe r moved his family to Philadelphia. In the spring of 1844 they were back th New York, boarding in a farmhouse near Eighty-Fourth Street and Broa way, and it was here that "The Raven" (begun in Philadelphia ) was p je into final form. The publication of this poem early in 1845 brought Poe his one brief experience of a favoring fortune. Willis found a po iv. tion for him on the Mirror, other editors sought him out, and the fashio able salons paid him homage. For a few months in 1845, he was edit and nominal owner of the Broadway Journal. Early in the following ye ca he moved his household to "Turtle Bay" on the East River, then to tl cottage at Fordham that is now New York's chief literary shrine. But 1 this time the clouds were gathering about him once more. The winter 1846-7 was one of desperate poverty for the poet and his family, and its midst occurred the death of Virginia. Soon after this event, Poe begi the tragic wanderings that ended with his death at Baltimore in the a tumn of 1849.
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Less brief and fortuitous than in Poe's case was the association wi New York of two other literary titans, Walt Whitman and Herman Me ville. Both were born in 1819-Whitman at West Hills, Long Islan hat Melville in New York City. Except for the three years of sea-wanderin that generated the immortal Moby Dick and three or four lesser classi na and for the period of 1850-63 when he lived on a farm near Pittsfiel Massachusetts, virtually all of Melville's mature life was spent in Ne York. For two decades, from 1866 to 1886, he was an out-of-door inspe tor of customs on the Gansevoort Street pier-the name Gansevoort, iro ically enough, being that of his maternal grandmother and a precedii
Şar fe line of affluent ancestors. What Melville in those 20 years might have co tributed to American literature, had his genius received anything but t. tem scantiest critical recognition and material reward, is a matter for tras speculation.
Yet while Melville was renouncing authorship for a life of routi
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idgery, Walt Whitman was serenely though stubbornly maintaining his istic purposes in the face not merely of critical indifference but of vio- it critical abuse-along with poverty as well; and he continued to pur- e them with equal vigor and equanimity almost to the end of a life nger by a year than Melville's. Beginning in boyhood as "printer's devil" the Long Island Patriot, Whitman spent more than 25 years in associa- n with various Brooklyn newspapers, making frequent trips by ferry to inhattan, where he roamed the streets at night, hobnobbed with convivial nies at Pfaff's, or haunted the gallery in opera-houses and theaters. ese experiences, along with wanderings in eastern Long Island and (for few months of 1848) through the South to New Orleans, distilled in alembic of Walt's unique genius, went to the making of Leaves of ass, first issued by a Philadelphia publisher in 1855. Midway in the vil War, Whitman left Brooklyn for Washington, and the remainder his life was passed in the capital and in Camden, New Jersey.
With the close of the Civil War, a host of figures begins to crowd the al literary stage; so that such a brief sketch as this must henceforth phasize groups and main tendencies rather than individual writers. The cade or so immediately following the war constituted that "Gilded Age" which Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner wrote in 1873. Their vel has been described as a collaboration of the frontier and the effete st; for Clemens was at this time fresh from the mining camps, river ats, and printing offices of the pioneer West, while Warner was a per- t representative of the Genteel Tradition. Together the two men viewed WI Me lan eir country, in all its sprawling, promising, menacing inchoateness- wed it, significantly, in relation to the new and disquieting civilization at Wall Street appeared to be imposing upon the nation at large and its rt@blic life, a civilization dominated by New York City, capital of the ancial North and East. For while the transition from the rule of indus- ' to that of modern finance had not as yet been effected, Wall Street ready was rapidly assuming the role that it has played for the past half spentury and more-the Wall Street that Melville had written about in irofhurtleby the Scrivener, that was to be the despair of Lafcadio Hearn and dige inspiration of Theodore Dreiser.
CON Meanwhile, the Genteel Tradition in American letters, which had t th emmed in large part from Washington Irving, was finding its last local rag presentatives in such competent poets, critics, and journalists as Rich- d Watson Gilder, George William Curtis, Edmund Clarence Stedman, utid d Richard Henry Stoddard. The work of its earlier representatives was
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now little more than a lingering scent of lavender, soon to be dissipate in the heady ozone of the new industrial day and the new American lia with which Howells and James were to grapple with so poignant a si cerity.
It is in William Dean Howells' A Hazard of New Fortunes that Bost" may be said to have had its definitive, its more than a little bewilderede look at New York City and the commercial spirit that seemed to perva the metropolis and to emanate from it, spreading over the rest of the late to the imperilment of higher values. Virtually all the characters in tin book either take a definite attitude toward or stand in a definite relatifet to the world of business. And Howells, the Ohio farm boy become tie perfect Bostonian, is at a loss to grasp it all, but remains the Bay St:(c visitor, doing his best to be understanding and polite.
The short of it is that the United States of America, in the eyes of tior sensitive observer, was becoming that "banker's world," that "banken Olympus," which is described in The Education of Henry Adams and Adams' novel, Democracy. From now on for several decades, down throu the era of the "muckrakers" and after, the financier "Titan" was to beld luring theme, and the rise of many a Silas Lapham was to be traced. might seem, accordingly, that the preeminence of New York's Wall Stre would confer upon the city a moral-literary ascendancy comparable to til of Transcendentalist Boston in its prime. What militated against this vie the vastness of the new American nation, and the resulting diffuseness well as complexity of the American scene-as is apparent in those tis outstanding novels of the post-bellum years, The Gilded Age and Demer racy.
The pioneers, from Daniel Boone to the gold-seekers of 1849, hau pushed back the physical frontier ; it remained for the writer to take p session of the new and uncharted provinces, in the form of literary gionalism or sectionalism. Bret Harte had made a beginning before i Civil War, and he was followed by Mark Twain, Edward Eggleste George W. Cable, and numerous minor figures; by the southern regio alists, Sidney Lanier, Thomas Nelson Page, Joel Chandler Harris, Jan Lane Allen, and others; and by the New Englanders, Sarah Orne Jewet Mary E. Wilkins, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. A California gold campto flatboat on the Mississippi, the backwoods of Indiana, Creole New Orlea the Tennessee Mountains, the Ozarks, sentimental Dixie, a village on illo Maine coast-these were subjects, seemingly, far from the madding Stelei Exchange, far from the tide of metropolitan streets and the rhythm
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pat tropolitan life (though not so far, after all, as Sarah Orne Jewett and Fry E. Wilkins, among others, were to discover ).
s The regional theme had its day and passed, tending to merge in the l with the Genteel Tradition. One thing it revealed was the fact that Ost er rva herica henceforth was too large and varied a country to be subjected to cultural sway of, or even to take its prevailing literary tone from, New rk, Boston, Philadelphia, or any other single center of population. The er and less conscious regionalists of the 20th century, such as Sherwood derson, Willa Cather and Zona Gale, were to go on writing of the braska, Ohio or Wisconsin that they knew. They were also to keep ir places of residence in the hinterland; yet, like so many of the earlier St tional writers, they were to come to New York to make their publishing angements and to enjoy occasional intervals of recreation. And New rk, being not merely the market place but the editorial workshop, some- w feels that they belong to her. n ati € f ike
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