The Bronx without Cliches
Grand Concourse.
by Eliot Wagner.
Bobbs-Merrill. 352 pp. $3.75.

If one judged by the once rambunctious voice of the radical movement, or the dry wrenching tone of a writer like Delmore Schwartz, one would imagine that the children of first-generation immigrants to New York City had, on the whole, taken extreme stands against family, poverty, and Orthodoxy. But from Eliot Wagner’s vivid, abrasive novel about lower-middle-class life in the Bronx, we get a much steadier view of the partly educated young people who reached voting age in the mid-30’s. The dominant note was not of rebellion but of automatic maneuvering for security. They moved less in new directions than toward old crannies in the wall; and despite the variety of their talents and interests, schools of them swam into the harbor of civil service.

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Such moderate in-between personalities on the American social scene as hospital clerks, social investigators, movie ushers, and minor officials in the city health department are, except as incidental figures, quite new to our literature. Eliot Wagner takes a simple interest in the way they get along, with a modicum of success, failure, or resistance, and Grand Concourse is the story of their reluctant allegiance to restrictive jobs and families. Gerald and Julie Margulies dream of lives of artistic productiveness or pure affection, but hand their earnings over to their father’s failing grocery store. Bald, middle-aged Sam Friedman plaintively hunts for love and adventure, but comes home to nurse his forlorn, hypochondriacal wife. Leon Eisler forgets his calculus and his hopes of becoming an engineer while he manages his father’s restaurant. All of them suffer continual assaults on their privacy. One member of the family always wants to sleep when another plays the piano. Brothers barge in while their sisters are undressing. When Julie is tired, her sister lies wide awake in their bed asking how far she has “gone” with boys. “Hey, Bunny, leave me my sex life,” she whispers, and this is about the maximum demand one can make on Tiffany Street. Mr. Wagner is very good at conveying the constant physical and emotional jostling that goes on in these weedy, knotted familial gardens.

Though the world of the Grand Concourse functions without much change or ingenuity, a number of well-drawn surprising types turn up, like Bernice, a sixteen-year-old Narcissa, voluptuous in the shimmering pool of her bedroom mirror but metal to a boy’s touch; and Joe Weiss, loose-talking, clownish, self-deprecating, fated for the brush-off. There is a lot of color in the coarse banter of these two, as well as in most of the book’s casual conversation. Gerald urges his sister to come to Orchard Beach: “Just get into that Sound and stand, like a dirty dish in the sink.” The fruit store proprietor says to a woman fingering his tomatoes with long fingernails, “Lady, you want tomato juice, go next door by the grocery.” News reports—a speech of Lindbergh’s, the attack on Pearl Harbor—are introduced very naturally, in the worrying, habitual, absent-minded way in which people do revert to them.

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Yet despite many such excellent touches, Grand Concourse is a rather gray novel. This effect is produced in part by Mr. Wagner’s understandable scruples against stooping to the clichés of picturesqueness. He wants to represent his old neighborhood accurately and has no illusions about its poverty having been intolerably distressing or unhealthy. Food and clothing were always available, and the basic problem was not one of survival but of squeezing out a certain amount of self-respect and relieving the monotony. Nor does Mr. Wagner glamorize the successful family that has gone beyond the Grand Concourse to the mansions of Riverdale. They may possess one serene room of Oriental Art objects, but, on the whole, material wealth hangs heavily around their necks.

The mild and moderate tone extends to the emotional scenes, and with one exception love, rage, jealousy, and damaged romance all have a compromising, unabsolute character. Though the story begins in high gear, with tense relations and strong conflicts, the final solutions are soft and agreeable. Sam gives himself up to his helpless wife, Gerald to his pliant cowy girl friend, Julie to her plodding restaurant manager. The once outraged Riverdale mother pays a conciliatory limousine visit to her daughter’s cold water flat in Greenwich Village. Everyone comes to terms with reality and makes, in each case, a modest settlement for the lesser evil.

It seems to me that Mr. Wagner has sponged a certain nervous drive out of his memory of Jewish city life. Though the title of the book is a rhetorical hint of those undercurrents of ambition and accident that chart a possible road from Tiffany Street to Riverdale on the Hudson, the characters actually hover in their old apartments in or near the slums, their only risks small routine gambles at the Jamaica race track. The one touch of economic enterprise in the book falls to the snarling Mr. Margulies who eats up the earnings of his children to satisfy his lust for a shabby unprofitable grocery store.

The garbage pails in the courtyard, the crowded apartments, recall the Michael Gold-Clifford Odets tradition of American urban Jewish literature, but the similarity of Eliot Wagner’s material to that of these older writers only serves to make us very conscious that he is writing in the 50’s, a decade after World War II. It is personal morality that counts in this novel, not the employment situation, and family quarrels hurt more than government policy. If Mr. Wagner wisely avoids the black-and-white simplifications of the earlier fiction about lower-class Jewish life, he cannot so easily spare its vigor, its humor, and its cosmic pity. He is content to take on the coloration of his subjects, to set things down and accept them. This modest ambition serves well enough for a first novel. I hope that in his next he will yield to some excess of feeling, some extremity of vision, even if it is only with respect to novel-writing as a craft. His honest pockmarked figures deserve a richer clay and a firmer mold.

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