The Shock of Non-Recognition
A Treasury of Brooklyn.
by Mary Ellen and Mark Murphy and Ralph Foster Weld.
William Sloane Associates. 435 pp. $5.00.
The chief effect upon me of reading the material in this book—all of it about a place where I lived for more than twenty years—was a moderate shock of non-recognition and a rather awe-inspiring awareness of the distance from reality to which some authors will be lured by a pretty metaphor or a trick ending. Brooklyn may well be, as the editors aptly remark, a legend without a text, but, with quite a wealth of material on hand, they have done little to remedy the deficiency.
The introduction to this labor of love begins reasonably enough, as if it were going to get somewhere, and stops, after two pages, as abruptly as if it ran into a stone wall. It catapults the reader into a chaos of large and small fragments of writing culled from old documents, newspapers, magazines, novels, and biographies, and included on the basis of any conceivable relation to Brooklyn rather than to fulfill some definite purpose. It is a delightfully unpredictable volume, full of strange adventures in judgment and taste. The omission, to take only a single case, of the poetry of Hart Crane while publishing that of Nathalia Crane, is an example of the rather bewildering editing.
“In assembling this book,” the editors inform you at one climactic point, “we thought of scattering Whitman through it like chartreuse in a pousse cafe or perhaps the simile might be better if we said in a series of pousse cafés.” After which tormented flight of epicurean poetry, they limit the selection from Whitman to one mediocre, twelve-line obituary he wrote for a Brooklyn newspaper!
Withal, something of the Brooklyn fever and flavor gets into the book and it does contain some extraordinary material if very little extraordinary writing—most of it from accounts of Brooklyn politicians, gangsters, and such notable figures as Henry Ward Beecher, Dundy and Thomas, the skirt-chasing, gambling, dipsomaniac duo who built Luna Park, and, of course, the Durocher-MacPhail combine. The historical documents (letters, journals kept by early travelers, etc.) are interesting per se but are not arranged or selected in such a way as to give one a perspective on contemporary Brooklyn, a sense of its relation to the past. Likewise most of the writers who try to treat Brooklyn as a historical entity, fall under the spell of chronology, statistics, or sentiment and rarely exhibit any consciousness of the logic of growth or change in terms of the motivations of people. And since Brooklyn has had so rapid and convulsive an evolution, being built up by a series of displacements rather than accretions, it requires precisely such an approach to make any sense out of it at all.
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The fiction consists of short stories and parts of novels by some very talented and well-known authors, most of whose contributions to this volume happen to be of little merit because, in them, they have either sacrificed their sense of humanity to a single stylistic effect, have become infatuated with some personal sentiment that soaks up the story, or tried to develop some philosophic platitude. The only two fiction writers represented who do not turn their characters into mannekins, machine-tool their style, or cut their scenery out of wax are Edmund Wilson and Theodore Dreiser. Dreiser’s description of the ex-financier Hurstwood, working as a scab in the Brooklyn transit strike of 1895, is so authentically evocative of people, places, and events as to make the selections from Miller, Fuchs, Wolfe, and Irwin Shaw read, by contrast, like jazzy fairy tales.
Wilson is represented by a fragment from Memoirs of Hecate County and, also, an article written for the New Republic in 1931 about three people who attempted to commit suicide in Brooklyn on the same day. Particularly in this setting there is something very impressive about Wilson’s freedom from hackneyed responses and the effort he makes to perceive and judge in valid, personal terms. His discriminating and genuinely cultured appreciation of the people, temper, and even the houses of such sections as Flatbush, Bay Ridge, and Brownsville (referred to by the editors as “a bitter slums” and described by Wilson in 1931, much more accurately, as “a paradise of brick—all fairly low buildings and mostly very clean and neat, not an unattractive place to live”) cuts through layers of petrified attitudes and makes you realize just how obnoxious, snobbish, and deadening are most of the local color and human interest stories that appear in the New Yorker, other popular magazines, and the weekly supplements of newspapers.
A few specimens of this genre are included in the volume, among them a particularly irksome one by Meyer Berger about the ex-wife of two defunct, homicidal, Brooklyn dockyard leaders. Mr. Berger manages to squeeze every sentence he utters till it oozes charm, ebullience, and naivety but you can’t help suspecting that underneath all the eccentric behavior and easy acceptance of violence, the woman was much more sophisticated and knowing about society than Mr. Berger would have his readers realize—possibly even more than Mr. Berger realizes. Any recognition that the eccentrics depicted in the falsely modest, self-effacing style, so prevalent in many forms of American writing today and so conspicuous in this volume, are at all aware of the relation between their antics and social norms, is generally enough to ruin the drollery. It is the conspiracy to share a monopoly of consciousness between the reader and the writer while robbing the subject of every vestige of it, that makes these stories so degrading in human terms and so unfunny if you refuse to play the game.
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