Tasting the Sweetness

On the patio under a clear, bright sky. With the usual randomness of undisciplined daydreaming, a goulash of jumbled thoughts sloshes around in my head, among them images of writer Alfred Kazin’s Brooklyn childhood. Maybe it’s a hint. I go inside and hunt up my copy of Kazin’s A Walker in the City, pull it down and settle with the last section looking for the gateway to slip once more into that earlier recollection of the writer’s childhood.

Alfred Kazin was born the son of Jewish immigrants in the Brownsville section of East Brooklyn in 1915. Until his death on his 83rd birthday he was prolific as an author, literary critic, teacher and cultural historian. His first book, On Native Grounds was published in 1942 attracting great acclaim for the twenty-seven year old. He followed the first with ten other books, writing up to the day of his death.

Kazin perhaps had much in common with contemporary New York Times journalist and walker, Nicole Krauss who wrote in harmony with Kazin, ‘I like to walk to be alone with the world, not to be alone. In this way, walking is a lot like writing. Both writing and walking (as I know it) are fueled by a desire to put oneself in relation to others. Not in direct contact—some aloneness wishes to be preserved—but contact through the mediation of language or shared atmosphere of a city street.’

A Walker in the City came out in 1951. This second book is a memoir of the writer’s youth in Brownsville, a marvelous odyssey of walks with Kazin through the streets and rooms of a child growing into youth and manhood—a minute portrait of a Brooklyn neighborhood in the 1920s and 30s. In the simplest labeling, it is the immigrant experience in early twentieth century America seen through the eyes of a boy walking the streets of his Jewish neighborhood. The book is filled with pages of deliciously simple prose that rolls around on the tongue like a favorite taste in perfect clarity. Here is a sampling of that prose from the book’s last chapter titled, “Summer: The Way to Highland Park.”

‘Summer was the passage through. I remember first the long stone path next to a meadow in Prospect Park where as a child I ran off one summer twilight just in time to see the lamplighter go from lamp to lamp touching each gas mantle with the upraised end of a pole so that it suddenly flamed. On the other side of those lamps, the long meadow was stormy-green and dark; but along the path, the flames at each lamp flared in yellow and green petals. Then, that summer I first strayed off the block for myself, the stone steps leading up from the lake in Prospect Park had stalks of grass wound between their cracks, were white with dust and drops of salt I thought came from the peanuts whose smell was everywhere in the park. But there was also some sugary taste in the air that day like the glazed wrapper around the cracker-jack box—and at the bottom of the box, caught by my sticky fingers, some fife or whistle which I blew that glorious warm Sunday full of cars from all over and the Stars and Stripes over the bandstand and the band in their colored coats and the dust flying up from everybody’s shoes as we came over to hear.

Summer was great time. I think now with a special joy of those long afternoons of mildew and quietness in the school courtyard, now a lazy playground, and of the main hall, where the dust rose up brown as we played quoits against the principal’s door.’

As the memoirist recalled… ‘I taste the sweetness of summer on every opening on my face.’ — A perfect description of the reader’s experience in A Walk Through the City.

Aftermath in Watercolor

Following the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, painter and thirty-year resident of the area, Jean Holabird chronicled in watercolor sketches the cleanup of downtown Manhattan. During the days and weeks after that fateful day she walked around those areas not barricaded, describing what she saw through a series of sixty-five watercolors. It was the artist’s way of coming to terms with the devastation she saw around her. Later, as she arranged her work chronologically, she began to make note of certain poems and pieces of poems, as well as other prose excerpts that reminded her of the apocalypse around her. Holabird compiled a book to honor those who died in the attacks, and those whose lives have been unalterably changed as a consequence of the attacks. The result of her work is a book called Out of the Ruins: A New York Record.

The images and excerpts below are a few examples of Jean Holabird’s vision and insights.

‘On September 26, 2001, we were allowed to go home. We had fled reluctantly, with only the cats, late on the afternoon of the 11th. The towers were down; a third building was lighting up with fire two blocks to the south. The intervening two weeks had been an ongoing ordeal; first trying to ascertain whether we still had a home at all, then begging for access to retrieve the prescriptions, checkbooks, and watercolors abandoned in our flight. We wondered at how fortunate we were to have survived so relatively unscathed.’ — from the opening pages.

FROM E.B. WHITE’S ESSAY, HERE IS NEW YORK… ‘All dwellers in cities must live with the stubborn fact of annihilation; in New York the fact is somewhat more concentrated because of the concentration of the city itself, and because, of all targets, New York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.’ — SUMMER 1948

FROM WILLIAM WORDSWORTH’S POEM, THE PRELUDE…

…but after I had seen

that spectacle, for many days, my brain

Worked with a dim and undetermined sense

Of unknown modes of being; o’er my thoughts

There hung a darkness, call it solitude

Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes

Remained, no pleasant images of trees,

Or sea or sky, no colours of green fields;

But huge and mighty forms, that do not live

Like living men, moved slowly throughout the mind

By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.

FROM JOHN MILTON’S POEM, PARADISE LOST…

…And here let those

Who boast in mortal things, and wondering tell

Of Babel, and the works of Memphian kings,

Learn how their greatest monuments of fame

And strength, and art, are easily outdone

By spirits reprobate, and in an hour

What in an age they, with incessant toil

and hands innumerable, scarce perform

Once Upon a Time in New York

New York City has always been in my mind the center of the world. Scrabbling about in old memories, I get the feeling that my fascination with the city began when I was about fifteen. I can distinctly remember as a high school student telling others I was going to live there one day. Well, that dream was eventually fulfilled and I spent a spectacular eleven years living in Manhattan, most of them downtown on Charles Street in Greenwich Village. Though I chose to attend university elsewhere, I still believe that my real education came with my years in New York.

I used to knock around with a guy in New York who loved walking the streets and discovering small bits of the city’s history. There must be a dozen or more places in New York’s five boroughs I would never have stumbled upon had I not been led there by my old friend, Norman. I expect it was he who instilled in me an interest in the history of New York.

In November of this year Doubleday released a new book by Edward Rutherfurd called simply, New York. Rutherfurd is known for his other books of historical fiction centering on European cities and sites, but as a longtime resident of New York, apparently he thought it was time to pay homage to his adopted city. He has done that in an 860 page epic of the city’s history between the years 1664 and 2009, which alternately fascinates, captures and disappoints the reader. At least that was my experience as a big fan of his other books, and true enthusiast for New York stories. It is a great read, but may let you down in some ways, and in some parts of its author-manipulated timeline.

To his credit, Rutherfurd offers a good cross section of New York’s melting pot, though he slights some ethnic groups in favor of others. There is a good long section about the early Dutch, and of course lots about the English. Those characters are full-bodied and carefully developed. But the same cannot be said of the Indians who first inhabited the area. There is expectation that later generations of Pale Feather’s line will be expanded, but Rutherfurd opts instead to replace children and grandchildren with the pointless trail of a passed on wampum belt made for Pale Feather’s Dutch father. I also hoped the Black character of Quash and his descendants would be followed a little differently, or at least more fully.

The city’s history is unraveled for the most part in fascinating chapters, but here too, one gets the feeling that some actions and events are weighted too heavily, leaving little room for other spikes on the historical map. The largest sections of the book deal with the city’s place in two major conflicts, the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. The earlier pages are the books best, but once Rutherfurd brings the city and his characters to post Civil War history, the story becomes watery. Elevated tram lines aside, it was surprising that something as big and iconic as the building of the New York subway system would be ignored. Apart from an excellent section on the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1910, pages devoted to the early twentieth century seem hurried, and by mid-century the descriptions too often bear resemblance to a guidebook stroll down Fifth Avenue.

As you might expect, the story takes us through the nightmare of 9/11, with four of the book’s characters headed downtown to the World Trade Center on that historical morning. But by this point the story is near its end, and the pages between 2001 and 2009 are fast and few.

I hope that my partially negative impressions don’t turn you away from reading this book. It’s big, it’s heavy, it’s long, and it’s not perfect, but it is a good read worth the time and price.