Literary Brooklyn:
The Writers of Brooklyn and the Story of American City Life
By Evan Hughes
Henry Holt and Company,
352 pages
Is there a Brooklyn style of writing? There certainly are Brooklyn writers, God help us, in every converted loft and coffee shop from Williamsburg to Sheepshead Bay. But, as the novelist and Fort Greene resident Colson Whitehead once asked, “Is there some sort of borough-specific inspiration feeding the work of this fresh crop of writers?”
Whitehead had his tongue in his cheek. All that Brooklyn really boasts, he argued, is cheap rent and easy access to Manhattan: “You’d have to be a bit dense to confuse a geographic and economic accident with an aesthetic movement.” Yet the question persists by virtue of sheer confounding ubiquity. Virtually every nascent literary journal and small press is based in Brooklyn; bucking all national trends, bookstores sprout there with astonishing fecundity; find a pretty, young face on a dust jacket and 9 out of 10 times the writer lives somewhere in biking distance from Prospect Park (rumor has it that old and unattractive authors also make Brooklyn their home, but I can’t confirm this).
Whether there is a Brooklyn literary school is a question raised again, though never quite resolved, in Evan Hughes’s companionable new book Literary Brooklyn: The Writers of Brooklyn and the Story of American City Life. The book is organized chronologically, presenting snappy précis biographies of the borough’s significant literary figures since Walt Whitman while charting both Brooklyn’s history and the prevailing characteristics of the writing it has nurtured. On one hand, Hughes concedes that Brooklyn (population 2.6 million) is too multifarious to submit to taxonomy: “We shouldn’t mistake a massive place for an aesthetic camp.” But, on the other, he’s looking for trends and connections that can help in broadly defining Brooklyn-bred work and illustrate why it stands out.
The state of standing out, specifically of standing outside the mainstream, is at the heart of Hughes’s vision of archetypal Brooklyn literature. Walt Whitman, the onetime editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, is the great bearded prophet of this iconoclastic tradition. (More dubiously, Hughes calls him “Brooklyn’s first literary hipster.”) Hughes argues that the rough-hewn, egalitarian naturalism of Leaves of Grass, published in 1855, set the tone for succeeding generations, and that a more proudly independent and democratic flavor distinguishes Brooklyn writing from that of the cosmopolitan city: “More human in scale, less visually extravagant, not as wealthy or stylish, more suspicious of what is fashionable or famous, slower to hunger for the new—Brooklyn is more like America.”
But outsiders come in varieties. As Literary Brooklyn progresses through the 20th century, its subjects fall into roughly three categories: the Separatists, the Strivers, and the Slummers.
The Separatists constitute a somewhat accidental group, although they also produced some of the most enduring work. These are the writers who wound up in Brooklyn due to the lucky contingency of affordable housing and then profited from the withdrawal from the scenes in Manhattan. Richard Wright (1908–1960) is one of Hughes’s cases in point. Wright was in other respects a Striver, having made a name as a writer with almost no formal education and a childhood marked by poverty and persecution. But he found in Brooklyn, more so than in bustling Harlem, a quiet observer’s perch from which he could write his masterpieces (much of Native Son was composed in Fort Greene Park, Hughes tells us) and, not incidentally, where he could live in relative peace with his Jewish wife Ellen.
The borough offered a similar refuge to Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938), who disappeared into a dumpy flat in Cobble Hill to shield himself from the ongoing fanfare that greeted his debut Look Homeward, Angel in 1929. Hughes calls it Wolfe’s hideout—it was there that he wrote his gargantuan second novel Of Time and the River, and the location also put him in stimulating vicinity of the working-class bars and diners of Fulton Street and Red Hook. But perhaps the greatest of the Separatists was the poet Hart Crane (1899–1932), and Hughes revels in retelling the poet’s famous story. While working on The Bridge, his epic ode to American history and mythology, Crane was offered a room in the same Brooklyn Heights building where John Roebling, the chief engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge, had once resided. Crane had a clear view from his writing desk of the bridge that served as the symbolic linchpin of his masterpiece. “It’s particularly fine,” he wrote in a letter, “to feel the greatest city in the world from enough distance, as I do here, to see its larger proportions. When you are actually in it, you are often too distracted to realize its better and more imposing aspects.” For Crane, Brooklyn was like a far-off high ground from which he could survey the battlefield he would immortalize in his poetry.
For the Strivers it was something different: a place to get away from. The strongest chapter in Literary Brooklyn relates the stories of the Brooklyn-born children of Jewish immigrants such as Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Daniel Fuchs, Bernard Malamud, and Alfred Kazin, whose single-minded desideratum was to escape their backwater neighborhoods and make it among the Manhattan intelligentsia.
These writers were brought up in neighborhoods that often more closely resembled Eastern European shtetls than urban America, and from which Manhattan may as well have been an “overseas nation,” as Hughes puts it. Malamud, whose father worked seven days a week in a grocery store in a residential hinterland near Washington Cemetery, depicted the grinding loneliness of his family’s daily life in his 1957 novel The Assistant. Malamud was not alone in finding his most powerful material in the destitution and suffering that he had been so hungry to escape—and that deep-seated hunger animated his writing. The journey out of these neighborhoods, Hughes writes, “was not only an intellectual and material challenge; it was an emotional crucible.” It’s the passion and unrest born from this experience that makes the best of the Strivers work essential.
Hughes also devotes time to two Brooklyn natives driven by more conflicted and contradictory passions. Henry Miller and Norman Mailer seem to have been both Separatists and Strivers, simultaneously envious and contemptuous of mainstream success. Hughes comments that Miller’s ranting novels display “the outsider’s resentment commingled with the outsider’s pride.” Mailer was born to privilege, but he liked to pretend he was from the mean streets.
Passion is precisely what was absent from the Slummers, the writers who, beginning in the 1940s, began to move to Brooklyn in a self-conscious attempt to posture as outsiders—to grab some bohemian credibility. Literary Brooklyn is an extremely polite book, but it’s with this group that Hughes makes his first hems and haws of disapproval. The first wave of the trend was probably the inhabitants of the so-called February House, a Brooklyn Heights building that was home to Carson McCullers, W.H. Auden, the composer Benjamin Britten, Harper’s Bazaar editor George Davis, and, later, Paul and Jane Bowles. Truman Capote slummed it down the street in Clinton Hill around the same time, and among these temporary Brooklynites was born an aloof and generally condescending attitude toward the working-class natives. In Capote’s writing in particular you can see how the regional tradition of naturalism becomes mannered and sentimentalized, coated by a shiny laminate of irony. Hughes cites a particularly smarmy essay Capote wrote in 1946 about his adopted neighborhood: “In despair one views the quite endless stretches of look-alike bungalows, gingerbread and brownstones, the inevitable empty, ashy lot where the sad, sweet, violent children, gathering leaves and tenement-wood, make October bonfires….”
Literary Brooklyn loses some of its narrative steam after the advent of these proto-hipsters, and in discussing the luminaries of the second half of the century, his synopses become increasingly potted and hasty. It’s hard to blame him, as writers such as Pete Hamill and Paula Fox are decidedly less interesting than their antecedents, but I think Hughes misses an opportunity in his cursory glance at Hubert Selby Jr. His brilliant Last Exit to Brooklyn, published in 1964, brought Whitmanian naturalism to a logical if harrowing extreme, and its unsparing chronicle of the underworld has had a direct influence on urban realists such as Richard Price and David Simon, creator of The Wire.
Selby was one of the few lasting voices from the economically depressed Brooklyn of the 1960s and 70s; his grim landscapes yield to the gentrifying 1980s and 90s (here Hughes is stuck talking about the grotesquely overrated Paul Auster and Jonathan Lethem). That in turn ushers in the Brooklyn we have today: spruced-up and affordable, crime-free in all but its most outlying neighborhoods, enticingly multicultural but comfortingly well-stocked in lattes and vegan cuisine, and up to its ironic mustache in beautiful potential sex partners. It’s an easy place to meet authors and editors, scrounge for freelance work, or energetically debate the merits of Stanley Cavell over seasonal microbrews. Its magnetic attraction to young writers is well-nigh irresistible.
“Someday,” Hughes writes, “a Brooklyn writer of today might well write a book in the manner of Hemingway’s Paris memoirs, A Moveable Feast, or Anatole Broyard’s chronicle of postwar Greenwich Village, When Kafka Was the Rage.” Literary Brooklyn is not that book, and in his scrupulously unprovoking way, Hughes passes no judgments on the output of today’s Brooklyn writers. Yet some interesting inferences can be made. Hughes’s argument is that literature from Brooklyn has been special because of its liberating distance from the cultural capital of Manhattan. The outsider has more freedom to be an individual and possesses the objective clarity to give depth to an emotionally involved piece of writing.
Today that formula is inverted, and Brooklyn writers, instead of standing on the outside looking in, stand on the inside and look at themselves, or at one another. The number of books that are about young people or writers in different Brooklyn neighborhoods is constantly added to: the past years have seen Paul Auster’s Sunset Park, Peter Hedges’s The Heights, and Kate Christensen’s The Astral, named after a Greenpoint high-rise. With a few exceptions (Coney Island’s Joshua Cohen, author of the exuberant 2010 novel Witz, being one), the passion that animated Brooklyn books has given way to angst and disillusion. Now that writers are safely ensconced in their literary Mecca, they have nowhere to aspire to go; what remains is to record their lingering complaints and discontents. Finally, due to an increasingly conformist milieu, the tradition of naturalism has mostly been abandoned. In its place tends to be rococo experimentation, genre pastiche, or fabulism. (In 2007 Melvin Jules Bukiet identified a category of novels he called “Brooklyn Books of Wonder,” which use magical elements to take readers on a “gentle, healing voyage”—his targets were Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Kraus, and the McSweeney’s publishing venture begun by Dave Eggers.)
In short, the reason that Hughes is able to write so intelligently about the distant past of Brooklyn literature and not at all about the present is because he himself is a Brooklynite and lacks the necessary outsider’s perspective. When the great Brooklyn novel is written, then, don’t be surprised if the author is living in Queens.
