USA > New York > New York City > New York panorama : a comprehensive view of the metropolis > Part 18
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nd Some of the writers who did try living and working in New York were uving none too pleasant a time of it. That exotic citizen of the world- bed of no world-Lafcadio Hearn, was one of these. Having failed to find d. ong the natives of Martinique the superior way of life that he craved, Strd'arn came to Manhattan. He found it a nightmare-"frightful, devilish." tilled him to the conclusion that "civilization is a hideous thing," and to w: exclamation, "Blessed is savagery!" Nothing short of an earthquake, Rss he saw it, could produce any improvement. He was, in brief, hope- sly stunned by it all. Nevertheless, Hearn's was too keen a mind not to macceive that there was a story, a very big story, even in Wall Street. But was a story that he could never write, and he did not see how any writer hild manage it. "Fancy," he said, "a good romance about Wall Street, written that the public could understand it! There is of course a tre- ndous romance there; but only a financier can really know the ma- nery, and his knowledge is technical. But what can the mere littérateur sto walled up to heaven in a world of mathematical mystery and ma- inery." y
am Hearn refers here to a basic problem of the novelist who would deal th the unfamiliar world of big business-the problem of documenta- n. But it was not an insolvable one, as Dreiser, Norris, and others were ıp, pad prove. It was, however, a very real problem for the writers of this era tho saw the full complexity of the theme, and who were not so sure of tdeir bearings as was Emerson when he wrote: "It is only the young man 10 supposes there is anything new in Wall Street. The merchant who n
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figures ... is very old business. You shall find him, his way, that is, thinking concerning the world and men and property and eating anh drinking and marriage and education and religion and government-t. whole concatenation of his opinions-in Rabelais and Aristophanes. Pa urge was good Wall Street."
What Emerson is saying, of course, is that the mercantile spirit, the cor mercial attitude of mind and outlook upon the world, is the same dov the ages. This does not take into account the economist's distinctions wij regard to the forms of capital. The truth is that the industrial capital Emerson's day was not the same as the merchant and usury capital of former day; and by now, industrial capital was about to undergo a furth transformation into monopoly finance capital. Hearn was no more an eco omist than Emerson, but at least he realized that things were not quite simple as the Sage of Concord would make them out to be. There w something there; he took one look and gave it up, leaving the proble to other men, who were to wrestle with it with varying degrees of succe
But there was another side of the picture, another aspect of the civiliz tion that Wall Street, the commercial spirit, big business (call it what y will) had come to typify. That civilization was one of violent extrem and violent contrasts of wealth and poverty, of senseless luxury and u speakable destitution-contrasts that nowhere took on a more sharp-edg quality than in the nation's metropolis, with slum and aristocratic ma sion often within stone's throw of each other. This was apparent ev before the Civil War, at the time when George Lippard, pioneer of pro. tarian literature and a "Marxist before Marx," wrote his New York : Upper Ten and Lower Million. Now, in the last decades of the centur, New York's famous "Four Hundred," under the leadership of Wa McAllister and like arbiters, was disporting in luxurious orgies at Ne: port and on Fifth Avenue; while on the Lower East Side and the Bower and in other tenement sections of the city, there were hunger, want, ove crowding, crime and prostitution, with conditions rendered worse by Nd York's vast and constantly increasing immigrant population.
It was this other New York that Stephen Crane saw, and that he p tured in his masterpiece, Maggie, the story of a slum girl. With his cle and honest vision, his bitter hatred of human stupidity and corruptic Crane succeeded in creating the classic of the Bowery, home of the "cre tures that once were men," the lumpenproletariat. It is true that he fail of an ultimate, penetrating comprehension of slum and slum-dweller; was considerably frightened by what he saw. But his unrelenting integr.
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ad straightforwardness of vision carried him far, and paved the way for die social realism that was to spring up in the later 1890's.
As for New York's moneyed aristocracy, it was not until the early years the present century that it began to inspect itself, in the novels of dith Wharton. In The House of Mirth (1905), and later in The Custom the Country (1913), Mrs. Wharton subjected the social group of hich she was a member to a searching criticism within a distinctly class- nited set of values. The aristocrat had failed of being an aristocrat, and e fault lay with money, in the hands of the nouveaux riches; which was uch the same point of view, with the same element of snobbishness in as that of Henry James in his fragmentary Ivory Tower. Mrs. Wharton hally, in her popular success, The Age of Innocence (1920), was to ke refuge in nostalgia for the 1870's, when "society" was truly "good," "ving not yet been corrupted by the newcomer from "the Street" with his elcile millions and his ignorant disregard for the aristocrat's code of con- fct. E
2 It is interesting to note that the publication of The House of Mirth ortually coincided with that of Upton Sinclair's story of the Chicago nockyards, The Jungle. The new social realism that has been spoken of ifas now finding expression in the writings of such authors as Frank forris, Sinclair and Robert Herrick; and it appeared that Chicago, with af: stockyards and its wheat pit, was to be the principal locale of the im- else. It was certainly a sturdier-seeming if a cruder brand of realism that chicago offered at this period; and this it is, according to H. L. Mencken, lat accounts for the first westward shift of the "literary capital," a trans- frence that was to be repeated in the second decade of the century, when micago's "renaissance" began to flower.
Meanwhile, in New York the eight years from 1902 to 1910 might al- rost be called the "O. Henry Age." Fresh from an Ohio prison where, thether guilty or not, he had served a term for embezzlement, the "king et story tellers" had at once entered upon his task as chronicler of the tle lives of New York's little people-in Upton Sinclair's words, "the iscure and exploited masses of New York, the waitresses and hat- eressers, soda-jerkers and bums, the taxi drivers and policemen, O. blenry's 'Four Million.' " Fearful as he was of the dark and pain of life, et was yet no more fearful than were his readers, those same little people kr whom he wrote; and they loved him for it. They loved him, too, be- fuse he did know their lives, even though the meaning of it all eluded i'm as it did them. His faith in the "order of things that be" was little
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less than sublime, his gaze was never too prying, and his humor was healing balm.
Someone has said that O. Henry made the short story "the most dem. cratic form of literature in America." Critics will point to the mechanic quality of his tales, which is not to be denied; those tales are the culmin tion of that technique of the "well-made story" which was begun by P and carried on by Bret Harte. Yet O. Henry contributed much to mode interest in the short story form; and his works, like those of Jack Lond and Upton Sinclair, are eagerly devoured all over the world today. Hu dreds of thousands of copies have been printed in the Soviet Union; al the native of South American pampas or Siberian steppes may still lo himself in the joys and sorrows of a department store salesgirl in a Ne York hall bedroom of the 1900's.
If New York in these early years of the century was not displaying t vitality of that "hog butcher to the world," Chicago, it was, by way
Ast compensation, beginning to take on the cosmopolitan cast of culture th it has worn ever since, as entrepreneur between the Old World and t New. This was the era of Sloan, Luks, Bellows, and Henri in the graph arts-each very American in his way, but each aware of European curren The "Nude Descending a Staircase" appeared in 1913. And James Huneker, most cosmopolitan of American critics, was commuting betwe New York and Philadelphia. It was in this period that Greenwich Villag the only section approaching a Latin Quarter that America has been at to claim, assumed a place upon the cultural map, as artists and write ne alike took possession of the little old houses below Eighth Street. For decade or two it was to be the romantic thing for the budding young ge ius to move down to the Village and "starve it out." Many writers wł like Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis, were to achieve literary a commercial success spent their hopeful earlier days in New York's lit Bohemia. Later, from about 1916, the Village became the home of the : cial radical-of Max Eastman and Floyd Dell, of Art Young and B Minor; and as Freud appeared above the horizon, the Villagers went ter heavily for psychoanalysis, including the psychoanalysis of literature, al there was a strenuous revolt against "Puritanism." All of which, needle to say, added to the "color" and the increasingly noisy reputation of t American Montparnasse, which came to be associated with free love, fr verse, and all the isms, social and esthetic. he T.
New York may be the common gateway for European literature and l es erary trends; but even here, on at least two occasions, Chicago has stoler.
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arch. The first time was in the 1890's, when, with such a periodical as e Chap Book and such a firm as Stone & Kimball publishing the work such men as Ibsen, Maeterlinck and Beardsley, the city at the foot of ke Michigan contrived to out-yellow the Yellow Book. The second occa- on was in the 'teens of the present century, when the British Imagists, dington and others, saw fit to ignore New York and send their wares to irriet Monroe, the elocution teacher who, casually enough, had founded etry: A Magazine of Verse. It was also in Chicago that Margaret Ander- 1 and Jane Heap, with the ideological backing of Emma Goldman, inched that intelligentsia-shocking organ, the Little Review, "making compromise with the public taste." The Little Review did not tarry ig in Chicago, however, but after exhausting the list of printers who uld extend it credit, moved on to New York City, to be followed by a all group of those who wrote for it. In Manhattan this periodical en- red its most hectic days, centering about the banned publication of the st instalments of James Joyce's Ulysses.
While the Midwest was engaged in discovering itself in terms of liter- tre, New York writers were about to embark upon another and more bitious voyage of exploration, their objective being nothing less than : "discovery" of America, of the continent's "soul" and the meaning of vast sprawling civilization. There was a feeling in the air that the "great ree nerican novel," the "great American poem," were yet to be written. agit of this was to grow one of the best, if shortest lived, literary maga- ab ite or ge vh es that the country has known, the Seven Arts, which numbered among editors and contributors Waldo Frank, James Oppenheim, Randolph urne, Van Wyck Brooks, Louis Untermeyer, Conrad Aiken and others. e Seven Arts, unfortunately, was started on the eve of America's entry o the World War, and its career was cut short by governmental sup- an itt ession; but that career is notable in American literary history.
The fostering impulse behind the Seven Arts was one of "back to our tive roots"-the same impulse that was to find expression, some years er, in Hart Crane's poem The Bridge, and that eventually, in the 1920's, s to degenerate into a sterile cult of the skyscraper, of a skyscraper civili- a ion and its "Lively Arts." Combined with the expression of this im- lse was a new note of social liberalism, sounded with particular force in pages of the Seven Arts by Randolph Bourne, one of the most promis- ; critics America has had. His name and that of Van Wyck Brooks stand t conspicuously in the field of native criticism in the first quarter of the esent century.
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Short lived as it was, the Seven Arts had its effect, not only upon ind vidual writers such as Waldo Frank as evidenced in his City Block an later works, but upon the war and post-war generation as a whole. Sor members of that generation, after having gone through the blood ai mire of the trenches, might come back to America, take one look, give up as a bad job, and return to the terrace of the Café du Dome and t falling franc; but liberalism henceforth was in their blood-a liberalis that was to enable them to withstand the finely carved disillusionment of Wasteland, and that in the end, after 1929, was to bring them into the cial mêlée. In passing, it may be remarked that most of these "Exile chose New York for home and workshop, after their season of expatr. tion. It was, in fact, from New York that the expatriate movement starte in 1922, after Harold Stearns and his 29 fellow-Americans had sat dovo to look at their country, had found it sadly wanting, and had penned the Civilization in the United States. All of which may be regarded as the bilo ter frustrate end of that impulse for which Randolph Bourne and tar Seven Arts had stood.
While young Europeans of the post-war period were giving vent their disillusionment in the tragic clownings of Dadaism, America w witnessing the spectacle of "flaming youth." The Prohibition Era was c and in New York the speakeasy took the place of the café. As one poet the day has put it:
The philosophy of our time was written by bootleggers, And we went to the speakeasies for knowledge and hope, And the taste was bitter in our mouths.
This was the generation whose higher despair found voice in Scott Fil gerald's This Side of Paradise. It was a generation that read the Smart S and later found hilarious and "sophisticated" consolation in the Americ Mercury. "Debunking" was an essential phase of the period.
All, however, was not levity and smartness in this too tinny interlu The era had its serious-possibly a trifle over-serious, not to say ponderc -expression in the magazine, the Dial, which had come to New York the year following the Armistice. The Dial was not a new periodical, hat ing had an existence of nearly forty years in Chicago. Under the dist guished editorship of Francis F. Browne, it had been a conservative I authoritative medium of American thought. It now underwent a reinc,
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tion, or rather two reincarnations: the first under Robert Morss Lovett, isted by Randolph Bourne, Harold Stearns, John Dewey, Thorstein blen, and others, when it became a militantly liberal organ with a "re- struction program"; then under Schofield Thayer, when it put on a iet yellow garb, put aside liberal things and social-minded contributors, I began publishing what was taken by the intelligentsia of the 1920's to the last word in art and literature, from America and abroad.
The list of Dial contributors makes curious reading today, including as does Anatole France, Oswald Spengler, Benedetto Croce, Paul Valery, S. Eliot, Ford Madox Hueffer (now Ford Madox Ford), Van Wyck boks, William Butler Yeats, Arthur Symons, Ernest Boyd, Hugo von fmannsthal, Thomas Mann, George Saintsbury, Maxim Gorky, George bore, Conrad Aiken, Paul Rosenfeld, Sherwood Anderson, E. E. Cum- ngs, Amy Lowell, Carl Sandburg, George Santayana, John Dos Passos, mund Wilson, Lewis Mumford, Hendrik Van Loon, Kenneth Burke, trt Crane-even Michael Arlen. The managing editors under Thayer re, in succession, Stewart Mitchell, Gilbert Seldes and Marianne Moore. The Dial was noted for its annual writer's award of $2,000, instituted 1921, which went in turn to Sherwood Anderson, T. S. Eliot (for The usteland ), Van Wyck Brooks, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, Ezra ind, William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Burke. The magazine sed out of existence in 1928.
Another of New York's serious periodicals that expired in the 1920's, I one whose passing is still regretted by many, was the Freeman, edited Albert J. Nock. It was especially noteworthy for its news of English I Irish as well as continental literature.
But, on the whole, literary seriousness was at something of a discount; "light touch school," à la Carl Van Vechten and the earlier Aldous xley, was more popular. For these were the boom years of Harding S&
ormalcy" and Coolidge prosperity, when, riding high on a bull market, stock broker and uptown New York began discovering Greenwich Vil- e as a slumming ground. True, a few pioneer left-wing writers were at k-John Dos Passos, Michael Gold, John Howard Lawson, Isidor neider, Joseph Freeman, and others; but they were definitely in the hority, and with the exception of Dos Passos they were little heeded. In
ha Ten Days That Shook the World, John Reed had founded a new tradi- th; but that tradition, with the exception of such a notable early work as old's Jews Without Money, was yet to burgeon. In Manhattan Transfer Ich25), Dos Passos conveyed upon a remarkably ambitious canvas the
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surging and tumultuous rhythm of the metropolis-a rhythm that sprir from the interplay of social forces, mass action and events, mass emotich and the like-and succeeded in achieving a certain epic quality.
Following the stock market crash of 1929, the New York literary sce took on a decidedly different aspect, even though the change was not once highly visible. The economic crisis that oppressed the nation ast whole could not but have its effect upon writers; and it was from N York that the first literary reactions to the depression were to come. Af an initial period of bewilderment, there was much talk of "proletarian erature," and a whole new school of young novelists and poets sprang almost overnight. As it happened, the earliest "proletarian" novels ( bert Halper's Union Square is an example) dealt with the New Y scene, and the New Masses became the center of critical controversy the subject, with Granville Hicks, Joseph Freeman, Isidor Schneider, a others seeking to provide a critical orientation.
Out of this movement were to come a number of writers who hi since established themselves: Robert Cantwell, Albert Halper, Joseph Herbst, Grace Lumpkin, Fielding Burke, William Rollins, Robert Gessr. Edwin Seaver, Clara Weatherwax, Leane Zugsmith, Edward Newhou Ben Field, among the story tellers; Kenneth Fearing, Horace Gregc Harry Kemp, Alfred Hayes, Genevieve Taggard, Langston Hughes, amo the poets; Clifford Odets, Albert Bein, Em Jo Basshe, George Sklar, amc the dramatists. Not all of these writers are from New York, but a major of them have lived here. The settings they choose for their work are wid divergent, each writing of the social scene that he knows best; for proletarian school seems to have ushered in a fresh kind of sectionalism one that might be described as an industrial regionalism in literature. N York, none the less, remains the ideological seat of the movement, perhaps since 1929 it is nearer than it ever was before to being the co try's "literary capital," since it is here that the major critical battles- there have been some spectacular ones-are fought out, over literary-soc economic questions. After occupying the center of the literary stage several years, the proletarian movement seems to have subsided a little. did the left-wing drama on Broadway; but there are signs that, like drama, it is due for another period of popularity.
Out of the heightened social thinking and social awareness of the pression era came the first Writers' Congress, held in New York City June 1935. At this meeting, the League of American Writers was form on a broad basis of opposition to fascism and imperialist war. A seco
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ngress was convened in New York in June 1937. Waldo Frank was. League's first president; he was succeeded in 1937 by Donald Ogden wart. A record of the first Congress will be found in the volume en- ed Proletarian Literature in the United States; the papers read at the ond meeting are given in The Writer in a Changing World. The titers' Union, organized in 1934 and disbanded in 1937, was among : leaders in the campaign for a Federal Writers' Project. The Authors' ague functions as a trade union and advisory agency for writers.
Of the New York reviewers, Harry Hansen is one of the most popular ; air of "Olympian serenity," as some one has described it, is seldom fled. Lewis Gannett of the Herald Tribune and Robert Van Gelder and lph Thompson of the Times are widely read over the breakfast table. erschel Brickell of the Post is an intelligent commentator in his field. han Chamberlain's reviews in the Times were formerly a popular feature that newspaper; but Chamberlain, and formerly Archibald MacLeish, poet, is now with Fortune, one of the leading de luxe magazines. The rald Tribune's literary supplement is piloted by Irita Van Doren, that the Times by J. Donald Adams. The Saturday Review of Literature, ited for many years by Henry Seidel Canby and now under the direc- on of George Stevens, is lively and informative. The New Republic, th Malcolm Cowley as literary editor, maintains its reputation for liber- sm in the literary as in the social-political field; as does, though less con- tently, the Nation's book section, now edited by Margaret Marshall. ifton Fadiman's page in the New Yorker, a bit out of place amid the died lightness of that publication, is thoughtful and discriminating in comment and reaches an audience that might not otherwise be attained. he left wing is represented by the New Masses, which in addition to a gular weekly book department has a monthly literary section; and by win Seaver's column in the Daily Worker. Several of the monthly maga- hes, such as Harper's, Scribner's, the Forum, etc., contain book review Actions.
It is magazines of the type just mentioned that continue to reach the neral reading public of the country and to preserve for that public a link ith metropolitan life and modes of thinking. In this field, more than le landmark has disappeared. The Century, which for some thirty years as edited by Richard Watson Gilder, is no more; it ended under the litorship of Glenn Frank. The Bookman is another memory, a fond one for many readers, who recall its intimate glimpses of writing celebrities; publication today covers precisely the same ground. Attempts by Bur-
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ton Rascoe and others to revive this magazine in the after-war years prov unsuccessful. There are those, too, of an older generation, who rememb the Nation under E. L. Godkin, a long vanished Critic under Jeanette a: Joseph Gilder, and the days when William Dean Howells conducted t. "Editor's Study" in Harper's and was engaged in discovering Steph Crane and other promising young men.
From all the writing, editing, and publishing that goes on in New Yor it might well be assumed that there is a great deal of "literary life" the city. Such life is not lacking, but it follows a pattern of its own. Wil the exception of the Cafe Royal on the lower East Side, where Jewi writers and theatrical people gather, there is little in New York to rec the café life of the continent. Even the Algonquin, once frequented Dorothy Parker, Franklin P. Adams, Robert Benchley, Dashiel Hamme Alexander Woollcott, and many others, is now almost a tradition of t past as a haunt of the literati. The salon, which plays so prominent a pato in French literary life, seems to have attained little popularity in Nepa York. One exception is to be noted in Muriel Draper's "at homes," df continued and resumed at intervals, which are attended by publishe !! writers, musicians, and artists. The favored relaxation of the city's liter: is the author's tea, given often by a book or magazine publisher or byf bookshop proprietor. As a rule, writers living in New York tend to ff quent literary or political rather than social sets.
As for the literary club of the type popular in the 19th century, it now practically non-existent, in New York as elsewhere. From 1815, wh the Literary and Philosophical Society was formed, there were at vario po times many of these organizations in Manhattan: the famous Salmagun group, the Bread and Cheese Club, the Fortnightly Shakespeare Club, t. Quill, the Century, the Authors, the Lotus, the Knickerbocker, the Irving the Seventy-Six Society, and others. Today, about the only kind of "clul" in which the up-and-coming New York writer is interested is the Body, of the Month Club or the Literary Guild, which denote sales, royaltio and a nation-wide reputation.
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