Old New Yorks

In his 1948 essay "Here Is New York" E. B. White wrote that "To a New Yorker the city is both changeless and changing." What a visitor like me sees is countless New Yorks of the past living on in everything from the thrilling shine of the Chrysler Building--triumphantly shouting, "Progress!"--to the accidental decoupage archaeology of rock show handbills in the Village--derisively sneering, "Throw it all away." And New York seems to be always, aggressively, doing both.

As I've wandered the city this week, I've also wandered earlier New Yorks in books, traces of which remain visible in the streets around me. I've already written briefly about one of those, Edith Wharton's New York of carriages, balls, and finely delineated social strata. But I've also lost myself in E. B. White's exuberant postwar Manhattan and Lawrence Block's beat-era Greenwich Village.


{52nd Street, 1948, from the Library of Congress's American Memory project.}

White's essay needs no introduction; it's generally regarded as an essential portrait of the city. White writes not so much about specific places as about certain moods and typical scenes: the wrestle for a cab, Bowery winos bedding down, the casual attention of the crowd at an outdoor performance in Central Park. This is the city as gliding complexity and atmosphere:

It is seven o'clock and I reexamine an ex-speakeasy in East Fifty-third Street, with dinner in mind. A thin crowd, a summer-night buzz of fans interrupted by an occasional drink being shaken at the small bar. It is dark in here (the proprietor sees no reason for boosting his light bill just because liquor laws have changed.) . . . The owner himself mixes. The fans intone the prayer for cool salvation.

The prominence of the whispering fans in that scene is a reminder of how much of what White writes about is now lost: "Here Is New York" is a summer essay, written in the days before air-conditioning was widespread, and there is much in it of the street life and overheard intimacy generated by open windows and inescapable heat. The arrival of air conditioning is a seeming small thing relative to the scale of a city, yet it leads the windows, transoms, and back doors to be closed, people to be sealed off just a tiny bit more from one another and from the city they make together.



If White is writing about the city as one big agglomeration of individuals, Lawrence Block, in A Diet of Treacle (1961) is writing about how those individuals try to define themselves in opposition to that mass. It follows a trio of young people through beat-era Greenwich Village: Joe, who returned from Korea with emotional damage that expresses itself as a vague inability to do; Anita, a Hunter College student who visits the Village to escape the square life she can already see stretching before her; and Shank, the sociopathic pot dealer who will quickly get them in over their heads.

A Diet of Treacle was probably fairly provocative at the time it was published: it's full of scenes of pot-smoking and sex, and the characters show increasingly little regard for social conventions. But now it's more an interesting artifact, even a work of reportage, an account of the lingo and poses of late-1950s hipness, full of "cats" and "squares" and "bread." The portrayal of pot as a phenomenally powerful, life-changing drug is particularly quaint at this distance, but pot is an important part of what defines these kids: knowing it and using it marks them as different.

In his novel Lucky at Cards, Block portrayed the tug-of-war between the allure of the criminal life and the reliability of the straight side. In A Diet of Treacle, he shifts the terms a bit: though he demonstrates with the luridness of a school filmstrip the dangers of a life consumed by, for want of a better term, criminal hipness, he doesn't pretend that the straight life holds any real appeal for these kids, either. As Block portrays them, they really are stuck, their only safe choice being to sink back into the stultifying conformity of 1950s America.

Wandering Greenwich Village today you still see kids trying to make that choice--or, even more, trying to simply frame it, to decide what's conforming and what's not, what's hip and what's not, what's selling out and what's staying true. I find it almost painful to watch, but maybe I shouldn't. Should I instead take heart in the way that generation succeeds generation down there--and that despite (as the great blog Pinakothek lamented a few weeks ago) the ever-greater ease of buying a hip identity, every generation sees some of those kids slip through, shed poses, and find what truly matters to them? Should I take heart that, so far, Greenwich Village, despite changing and changing and changing, is still in some essential way there for them?

Meanwhile, I continue to wander today's city that will be different tomorrow, dressed as usual like an anachronism in my old suit, overcoat, and fedora, which I discovered yesterday must make me stand out from all the other oddities that comprise a New York street scene--enough at least to draw the attention of a contemporary iteration of one of Block's hipsters: as I walked down 25th Street just past Madison Square Park, a baggily-dressed long-haired teen, lost in the music of his headphones, raised his head just enough to see me, cocked a finger, and said, with an air of approval, "Fedora." Then he bopped on, going about his business, and disappeared into the crowd.

You can get away with robbing Peter, but only if you remember to actually pay Paul

A few weeks ago, in a comment on my recent post about Richard Stark's novels about Parker the bank robber, The All-Seeing Eye, Jr. (proprietor of the great new blog Pinakothek) referred to Parker's longest and most impassioned speech, a diatribe about the dangers of not paying your taxes. He didn't remember which book contained the speech, but last weekend I happened across it in The Score (1964). It turns out that the scion of the All-Seeing Eye had been led astray by his memory--the speech is delivered not by Parker but by one of his cronies, an older man named Littlefield--but the scene is fun enough to share regardless.

The discussion about taxes comes near the end of a planning meeting, as one of the crooks, Grofield (who steals primarily to support his low-level theatrical career and who shows up in some Stark novels of his own later on, including Lemons Never Lie), is astonished to hear Littlefield casually mention paying income tax.

"Income tax?" Grofield stared at him. "You pay income tax?"

"On every penny."

"I bet your return shakes them up."

"I account for every penny of income," Littlefield told him, "but I am forced, of course, to invent my sources."

"Why bother?"

Littlefield leaned closer to him. "You're a young man, you can still learn. Pay attention to this. You can steal in this country, you can rape and murder, you can bribe public officials, you can pollute the morals of the young, you can burn your place of business down for the insurance money, you can do almost anything you want, and if you act with just a little caution and common sense you'll never even be indicted. But if you don't pay your income tax, Grofield, you will go to jail."

"Oh sure," said Grofield. "Sure thing."

"Parker knows I'm right. You pay tax, don't you, Parker?"

Parker nodded. Under the Charlie Willis name he owned pieces of a few losing businesses here and there, and they gave him the background to cover his income on his tax return.

Grofield shook his head. "I don't get it. You're putting me on."

"Income taxes is federal," Parker told him.

"So's a bank for Christ's sake."

"I don't mean federal offense, I mean federal, whose money it is. A bank is stockholders, but income tax is government money."

Pop Phillips said, "Those are words of wisdom, Grofield. I only fell twice, and once it was income tax. I got three years, and I'm still paying the back taxes. Why do you think I'm not retired?"

"I'll put you onto my accountant," Littlefield said. "He'll get you straightened out."

Grofield got to his feet, looking agitated. "That's a lot of crap. Don't talk to me about that. Income tax!"

Littlefield shrugged. "You'll go to jail," he said.

Parker saw Grofield getting mad, and said, "Back to business. We got a lot to set up tonight."

I've quoted at greater length than usual because even beyond the fun of Littlefield's speech, this strikes me as a really successful batch of dialogue. I wrote before about the Parker novels as books about work; what we see here is the camaraderie of coworkers acted out. Everyone plays the right part: Littlefield confident in his knowledge; Grofield, the younger man, getting his back up at being more or less called an idiot; Parker quickly reading the shifting vibe and getting everyone back on track.

Change the content while keeping the tone and I've seen exactly this exchange in a late-night diner, around the counter at a farm supply store, on a slow day at the record store. It's the chatter of casual colleagues, and it does all the subtle work inherent in such talk--establishing bona fides, asserting and maintaining rank, transmitting knowledge, reinforcing group identity--while also simply serving to pass the time. Richard Russo and Wendell Berry at their best can fill pages with this sort of conversation and make them enthralling, and though it makes perfect sense that Stark--with his laser-like focus on the details of work--is good at it, too, I was still pleasantly surprised to encounter this exchange, with its quiet ring of ordinary truth.