New York

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NEW YORK

Commentators on New York City tend to insist that it has always been a commercial center rather than an intellectual one, and that "the literary" has had a very minor place among its residents' concerns. Literary critics writing about the period between 1870 and 1920 repeat this truism even while recognizing that those years also saw major publishers moving into New York from their original locations in Philadelphia and Boston and that the twentieth century would see this city become the nation's major publishing center. In fact the claim that New York had no intellectual or literary life is altogether misleading; what critics really mean is that it never boasted one ongoing, identifiable intellectual tradition, as did Boston. There, the predominance of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants with a common history going back to the Puritan hegemony created a literary tradition of shared experiences and values that are reflected in the works they produced. In New York, by contrast, the constant shifting of the population from one ethnic or national group to the next (from the Dutch to the English in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and then on to the "invasions" of Irish, Jews, African Americans, and Asians in the nineteenth and twentieth) meant not that literary traditions did not exist but rather that more than one intellectual tradition jostled and competed. The "problem" with New York City (as always) is its complexity.

This is especially evident in the ways that writers have reflected the city in their work. In the 1870–1920 period in particular one sees two major ways of imagining New York. On the one hand, there is a small but powerful group of writers who, by reason of wealth, family, social standing, or business connections, believed that they "possessed" New York City, that it was theirs by virtue of their birth and status. For these writers, the image of the city was enshrined in memories of their childhood, almost as a prelapsarian idyll existing prior to the influx of immigrants and other disruptive forces; consequently they saw the post–Civil War city as chaotic and threatening. The other contingent—consisting of a much larger group of people—were the newcomers themselves, writers whose origins ranged from other states to other countries. These writers too found the city frightening, but beyond the immediate threat of poverty, loneliness, and crime, they were gripped by its possibilities. New York City offered opportunities: for wealth, for learning, for individual growth, for transformations of all kinds. The ways these writers portrayed the city, and each other, demonstrate how the complexity of New York's intellectual traditions manifested the diversity of its peoples.

NATIVE-BORN NEW YORK WRITERS

Henry James (1843–1916) and Edith Wharton (1862–1937) are generally seen as New York's major "native" writers in the period between the Civil War and World War I. Both were born there to wealthy families, and both left, spending most of their adult lives elsewhere. Hence both imagined New York as the city of their childhoods. For James, writing in The American Scene (1907), that meant "the precious stretch of space between Washington Square [where his family lived] and Fourteenth Street" (p. 84)—in those days an area of large houses surrounded by pleasant gardens. Washington Square (1881) revisits the scene of that boyhood in the story of a woman who comes to realize that her suitor only wants her for her money and that her most honorable course is to remain single. In The American Scene, James's reflections on his return to the United States after many years abroad, he keeps the memory of a "pleasanter, easier, hazier past" (p. 85) as a contrast to the New York City of the new century, where not only rampant capitalism but "the alien" was "truly in possession" (p. 114). "The Jolly Corner" (1909), written during the same period, features a native New Yorker returning to his family residence on Washington Square after decades devoted to the arts in Europe, chasing the "ghost" of the commercial man he would have become had he stayed home. In these later works one sees James's uneasiness both with the capitalist explosion of the late nineteenth century and the immigrant invasions that followed in its wake.

Edith Wharton's sense of post–Civil War New York was similar to James's, but her childhood memories were not so pleasant. As a woman, and especially as a woman of her very exclusive social class, she could not wander freely as James had; rather, her childhood experience was of a restrictive, oppressive social scene. In her memoir A Backward Glance (1934) she evokes the rigidity of a New World aristocracy, where "the man who 'kept a shop' was . . . rigorously shut out of polite society" (p. 784). Despite her rebellion against the overbearing society of her youth, however, she never warmed to the commercial class that replaced it. In The House of Mirth (1905) she shows her repugnance for the newly rich and recently arrived through her story of the descent of a society belle through the social layers. The Age of Innocence (1920) revisits the rigid rules of her childhood but opts for the securities of the social order over the potential chaos of alternatives. Like James, Wharton had difficulty imagining a viable moral order in this commercial, increasingly "alien" urban landscape.

TRANSPLANTED NEW YORK WRITERS

If James and Wharton are in many ways writers about a city that seems to have gone beyond their class control, other native-born (but not New York City–born) writers came to the city for the new opportunities it offered. William Dean Howells (1837–1920), the Ohio native whose editorial career had perhaps more influence on the shape of American letters than any other man of his time, moved to New York after having established a career in Boston, where he edited the Atlantic Monthly. Although he came to take up the editorship of the New York–based Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Howells entered the city slowly and hesitantly, doing much of the job in absentia until he finally settled into his new environment in 1888. Perhaps because he had removed himself from New England's narrow definitions of the literary, Howells developed his theories about realism in fiction during his time in New York, calling for a literary mode that portrayed people and their motives as they actually were rather than as, in an ideal world, they should be. Howells also featured New York in his fiction, most notably A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), a semiautobiographical novel that traces the history of an editor as he and his family shop for housing and adjust to a new environment. The New York imagined in this novel is turbulent and pluralistic; its central plot involves a labor strike and a German socialist, and its protagonist wanders through streets filled with immigrants. Far more open to ethnic pluralism than James, Howells was curious about the city's new residents and encouraging of their own literary efforts. For him the city was both intimidating and exhilarating.

Perhaps because they shared the experience of growing up in deeply religious households, Stephen Crane (1871–1900) and Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945) saw a darker side to the city. Crane, a preacher's son from New Jersey, and Dreiser, an Indiana native whose father was a devout Catholic, came to New York with long-standing interests in the sensibilities of poverty and failure. Both gravitated to the branch of realism known as naturalism, which saw human beings less as individuals with energy and volition and more as creatures molded by their environment. For Crane this was manifested in fiction that portrayed the hopelessness of poverty, especially in short sketches like "Men in the Storm" (1894), where men stand in line in a driving snowstorm as they wait to be admitted to a homeless shelter, or in the novella Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893), which chronicles the short, desperate life—seduction, abandonment, prostitution, suicide—of a pretty girl from the slums. In Dreiser's New York fiction the city is more layered; as with Howells, there is an interest in real estate—apartments—manifested as protagonists search for housing, and Sister Carrie (1900) especially shows the pleasures that the city can offer to those who can afford it. For those who cannot, however, New York is the same city as it is for Crane; Hurstwood, Dreiser's male protagonist, dies in a flophouse in a scene much like those in Crane's work. For these writers, especially Dreiser, New York's lure depends on the money one has to exploit it.

Horatio Alger (1832–1899) and O. Henry (1862–1910), two writers immensely popular in their time, point to two other mainstream traditions fostered by the city on writers' imaginations. The "rags to riches" story had been an institution in American letters at least since Benjamin Franklin published his Autobiography (1818), but Alger made it the stuff of American myth in his compelling, if formulaic, stories of poor but honest country boys who come to the city and, after trials and tribulations, get rich. Like Dreiser and Crane, Alger uses the city's geography to demonstrate class divisions and, not incidentally, to teach newcomers how to navigate both its streets and its mores. Once codified in Alger's books, the "rags to riches" story became probably the dominant narrative of the late nineteenth century, appearing in titles such as Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) and Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery (1901). In a different vein, the New York imaged in the short stories of O. Henry (William Sydney Porter) is the world of ordinary people doing ordinary jobs. Although the stories themselves tend to hinge on a turn of the plot, they portray a city in which little people struggle to make and keep a living, an urban landscape in which human interactions make all the difference.

"OTHER" NEW YORK WRITERS

Like the New England writers and despite differences in class among them, James, Wharton, Howells, Crane, Dreiser, Alger, and O. Henry were all native-born white writers mainly from Protestant backgrounds. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century this gave them an advantage over all other residents—they were by birth what most people considered "American," and even though they had very different values and interests, they shared a worldview premised on the assumption that even if they were not particularly powerful as individuals, they were racially superior to most of the rest of the world. In part because of this worldview, most of these writers only feature white Americans in their fiction, and when they feature "others," they manage to convey their intrinsic dislike for these "interlopers." In fact the incursion of the interlopers was one of the main reasons that the white writers feared New York; between 1815 and 1860 the city's population jumped from 100,000 to 800,000, largely because of immigrants from Europe. Many of these newcomers were desperately poor: Irish peasants escaping the potato famine or Italian peasants escaping the isolated farms of rural Italy. Between 1880 and 1919 another seventeen million European immigrants landed; in 1910, one-quarter of the population was composed of Jews, most from the shtetls (villages) of eastern Europe. Members of the old white establishment felt overwhelmed, and a major reason that New York City appears in so much of their fiction as a chaotic place full of pushy, uneducated foreigners is that they were unable to surmount the cultural distance between themselves and the new arrivals.

African Americans did not exactly "arrive" during this period; they had lived in New York for two centuries. The state abolished slavery in 1799, and the first black congregation was formed by the Methodist Episcopal Church during Mayor DeWitt Clinton's administration in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Still, New York was often a dangerous place for black people. In 1741, in an incident known as the "Negro Plot," more than a hundred African Americans were arrested and charged with setting fires; twenty-nine were burned at the stake and eighty-eight deported. During the Civil War, African Americans were lynched by Irish Americans protesting conscription into the Union army. Throughout the city's history, residential patterns dictated ethnic enclaves that forced African Americans (as well as other ethnic groups) into virtual ghettos.

Despite this history, African Americans came to New York, as they did to other northern cities, for opportunity. They came especially in the early twentieth century during a period known as the Great Migration, when the families of thousands of former slaves left the increasing segregation and oppression of the South for the supposedly better conditions of the North. Many found themselves trapped in cold, urban spaces where racism was as bad or worse as that they had encountered at home, but others determined to make the North a new world. This would explode into the literary period of the 1920s and 1930s commonly known as the Harlem Renaissance, but in New York City two earlier writers helped prepare the way. Setting a tradition among African American writers of seeing New York as a moral trap for innocent black youths, Paul Laurence Dunbar's (1872–1906) The Sport of the Gods (1902) shows his protagonists (who had come here seeking the anonymity of the city to escape false accusations in their southern home) destroyed by the false sophistication of the New York underworld. James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938), on the other hand, saw the city in a more positive light. Born in Florida, Johnson, a lawyer, teacher, editor, songwriter, poet, and fiction writer who also served as U.S. consul to Venezuela and Nicaragua, arrived in New York in 1901. His novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, published anonymously in 1912, at first uses New York City as Dunbar does, as a place where his still-innocent mulatto protagonist is introduced to the underworld of gambling, alcohol, racial mixing, and the "new" American music, ragtime. Later in the novel, however, Johnson uses the city as a place where the narrator can shed his "colored" identity, becoming a successful businessman and raising a family. Although the conclusion suggests that the protagonist was wrong to have cut himself off from his ethnic roots, the fact that New York City facilitated his "success" in the white world signals the kind of transformation this particular urban space became for writers seeking to develop their own American voice. As Ralph Ellison would vividly demonstrate many years later, New York was transformative precisely because it was so chaotic; the character Reinhart, in Invisible Man (1952), takes on successive personalities as he passes from neighborhood to neighborhood, street to street. He can do this precisely because the city's size and pluralism facilitated anonymity.

For immigrants from abroad, this possibility made for both the appeal and the terror of New York. For many immigrants, especially those from eastern Europe, New York was all they knew of the United States. One of the reasons the city developed ethnic-centered neighborhoods was that immigrants tended to bunch together for psychological (and sometimes physical) security. Hence the rise of Little Italy, the Lower East Side Jewish ghetto, and Chinatown. In these areas common languages, experiences, religion, and culture helped to buffer the transition to the New World. While Jacob Riis's book of photographic essays Howthe Other Half Lives, first published in 1890, confirmed white Americans' suspicion that immigrants lived in appalling squalor, it also identified the ethnic topography of immigrant New York. In their literary portrayals of the urban experience, immigrant writers alternately celebrate the ethnic communities such enclaves provide, demonstrate how badly many immigrants wanted to leave those neighborhoods, and lament the loss of native cultures that transpires when they succeed. The works of Abraham Cahan (1860–1951), for instance, feature New York as the vivid backdrop against which his protagonists evolve from eastern European peasants to American Jews. Like Dreiser's, Cahan's New York is specific, palpable; he names streets, parks, buildings, fabrics, furnishings, and foods, placing his characters among these cultural markers as they grapple with both the material and psychological conundrums of culture-switching. Like Johnson's protagonist, Cahan's characters can disappear into the city, not in order to "pass" but rather to escape from the surveillance of their neighbors as they try out new identities. In "The Imported Bridegroom" (1898), for instance, a young rabbinical scholar brought to the United States to be a successful immigrant's pious son-in-law "escapes" his role as religious genius by befriending a group of socialists and applying his debating skills to their meetings. The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) explores the social geography of New York City as the Jewish community moves out of the downtown ghetto and begins populating enclaves in Harlem and Brooklyn. Again like Dreiser, Cahan uses the cityscape as an ongoing, dynamic environment in his fiction.

Anzia Yezierska (1885–1970), also a Jewish immigrant, focuses more narrowly on the Jewish ghetto in her writing, although some of the settings in her novels take her protagonists out of strictly Jewish enclaves into the world of her "other"—white Protestant Americans. For Yezierska, Hester Street, in the heart of the Lower East Side ghetto (a two-mile-square area of Lower Manhattan that contained at its height two million Jews from all over Europe), was also the locus of emerging Jewish American identity. In works such as Hungry Hearts (1920), her characters, mostly female, yearn to develop themselves "into a person," as they constantly reiterate; for Yezierska that means obtaining an education (most Jewish women coming from eastern Europe had little or no education), learning to dress and walk like Americans, meeting "real" (i.e., white Protestant) Americans and conversing with them as equals, and having control over their own destinies. For Yezierska, as for Cahan, success is imaged geographically in the move out of the ghetto into "good" apartments uptown; also like Cahan, material success is often countered by protagonists' realization that in moving uptown they have also lost their community and in many ways their culture. If New York City is imaged as squalid in Yezierska's downtown scenes, it is imaged as cold, often contemptuous, and friendless in her uptown ones.

In this passage from Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), David, the novel's first-person narrator and protagonist, has just arrived in New York from his native Russia, where he grew up in a small, pious town. He has been processed through immigration in Castle Garden and has been directed to the Jewish quarter, then located in the Lower East Side.

Ten minutes' walk brought me to the heart of the Jewish East Side. The streets swarmed with Yiddish-speaking immigrants. The sign-boards were in English and Yiddish, some of them in Russian. The scurry and hustle of the people were not merely overwhelmingly greater, both in volume and intensity, than in my native town. It was of another sort. The swing and step of the pedestrians, the voices and manner of the street peddlers, and a hundred and one other things seemed to testify to far more self-confidence and energy, to larger ambitions and wider scopes, than did the appearance of the crowds in my birthplace.

Abraham Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), p. 93.

Such loss is also registered by other immigrant groups of the 1870–1920 period. Irish American writers in particular approached the city as the locus of cultural and especially spiritual loss. Most Irish American writers of this period chose political and social commentary rather than fiction; for instance, the Chicago-born Finley Peter Dunne created the character "Mr. Dooley," an Irish saloon keeper who humorously critiques contemporary politics through humor and dialect. Those Irish writers who chose fiction over political commentary voiced the ambivalence of a community in transition between worlds, where immigrants who fled the hunger and oppression of the Old World find themselves manipulated economically and politically and threatened socially and religiously in the new. Like the first-generation Jews of the ghetto, first-generation Irish were appalled at the loss of faith and religious practice that their American-born children demonstrated. The immigrant Mary Anne Sadlier, whose didactic novels were published just prior to this period, presented New York as a place where Irish immigrants faced particular sets of problems, many resulting from the threat to their Catholic faith posed by the Protestant mainstream. James W. Sullivan (1848–1938), on the other hand, was a Pennsylvania-born Irish descendant whose writings focused on labor and the urban poor. His Tenement Tales of New York (1895) fictionalized the situations he observed, especially as they existed among ethnic enclaves. In "Slob Murphy," his story of the death of an eight-year-old slum boy, the Irish community is depicted as morally undermined by ignorance, alcohol, and indifferent priests.

These two contradictory views—that New York is a city of great opportunity and that New York is a city that destroys families and communities—do not terminate with the First World War; subsequent writers, immigrant and native, would continue telling the story of individuals struggling to achieve success among an ever-larger metropolis whose populace alternates between heartlessness and sentimentality. Although the physical presence of the city tends to dominate, the intellectual engagement in determining what the city means to specific groups and individuals—what the city offers, and what it takes away—is evident in nearly all of the fiction. While New York had been prominently featured in the works of earlier writers, most notably Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman, writers' fascination with the city came to maturity in the period between the Civil War and World War I, when distinct intellectual communities, often rooted in ethnic identifications, began to form. As James Weldon Johnson wrote in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man: "New York City is the most fatally fascinating thing in America. She sits like a great witch at the gate of the country, showing her alluring white face and hiding the crooked hands and feet . . . constantly enticing thousands from far within and tempting those who come from across the seas. . . . Some she crushes . . . others she condemns to a fate like that of galley-slaves, a few she favours and fondles, riding them high on the bubbles of fortune" (p. 442). For writers tracking the transition from traditional communities to modernity, New York City was the ideal location for attempting Émile Zola's "experimental novel"—a city of multiple forces and communities, where any mixture of good and evil, fortune and disaster, could plausibly explain the course of individual lives.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Dunbar, Paul Laurence. The Sport of the Gods. 1902. London: Collier-Macmillan, 1970.

James, Henry. The American Scene. 1907. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1907.

Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. 1912. In Three Negro Classics, edited by John Hope Franklin. New York: Avon, 1965.

Wharton, Edith. A Backward Glance. 1934. In Edith Wharton: Novellas and Other Writings, edited by Cynthia Griffin Wolff. New York: Library of America, 1990.