THE i m i YOKE ITOVEL: A STUDY IN UBBAN FICTION -DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of the Ohio State University By Eugene Arden, B.A., A.M. The Ohio State University

1953

Approved by:

Adviser / The New York Novel; A Study in Urban Fiction

Eugene Arden

A 164S Table of Contents

Preface 1

Chapter 1 ‘Two New Yorks l\.

Chapter 2 The hvll City 25

Chapter 3 A Pomantic View 80

Chapter The Islands of Manhattan 100

Chapter 5 Form and Content 161

Notes 223

Bibliography 2^6

Autobiography 259

LL Preface

The initial motivation for choosing this topic was personal; through a study of the New York novel, I felt that I could return to the roots of my experience. Born and brought up in New York, I sought to learn something of the city'8 history and influence, and to discover what dis­ tinctive part it had played in the nation's literary growth. But since New York was a capital city of the western world, of the same rank as London and Paris, I imagined that such a study as I ad in mind had already been done, I found, however, that no such study existed. The few buoks whose titles suggested an interest similar to mine had entirely different objectives, Arthur B. Maurice's New York in Fiction (1901), Charles Hemstreat's Literary New York (1903), and Rufus and Gtili© Wilson's New York in Literature: the Story Told in Landmarks of Town and Country

(19^7 ) are all concerned with literary associations; here is where Poe lived and there is where Bryant revised "Thanatopsis". George A. Dunlap's 1931). dissertation. The City in the American Novel 1789 - 1900, worked over virgin territory, but its coverage of thj.-ee eastern seaboard cities -- Boston, New York, and Philadelphia -- neither fulfilled the title nor allowed extended s tudy of a single complex of circumstances. There was certainly no scarcity of material for me to

.1- -2-

work with; the real problem was to find a plan of organ­ ization which would not fall into such mechanical headings as politics, finance, theatre, and so on. The plan which finally emerged was one which considered the novels accord­ ing to their intention and cultural meaning. I found two chief types of New York novels: in one, romance and optimism were the keynoted, and the city represented a a battleground where intrepid heroes overcame obstacles and achieved success. This kind of novel became an easy addition to the whole mythology in America which taught that virtue is ultimately rewarded, that honesty is the best policy, and that by manly perseverance any messenger boy can grow up to become the president of the United States, or even better, the president of a great railroad. But the nay-aayers, I found, had a more pervasive influence on fiction than did the optimists. It has been pointed out that the moat conspicuous failure of industrial democracy is to be found in the great modern cities. Wealth and squalor live there cheek by jowl, the life of one in startling contrast to the other. New York, though famous for its fabulous wealth, was even more infamous for its incredible slums. The materials for realistic and occasionally embittered novels were abundant, and with Dickens as a model, something new started to appear in the IBRD's and l830*s. New York vice, intemperance, and -3-

poverty were first exploited in cheap, sensational fiction, but led to what I believe was one of the earliest schools of American realism, crude and t entative as that realism may have been. It was a literature of protest, and though expressed in melodramatic terms, was based on a surge of real compassion for New Yorkers who were victimized by the conditions of their own city. The nature of my study demanded that I pay some atten­ tion to the forgotten novels wnich were once very popular. I attempted, however, to dwell at length only on novels of some literary merit. I also paused frequently to correlate the novels with their historical background. If the tone of my writing suggests that I am quarreling with the city, it may be only a lover’s quarrel; but it is a real one nevertheless• I would like to express gratitude for the guidance of brofessor Claude Simpson, who read the entire manuscript in its several stages of composition, and Professor William Gharvat, who helped me formulate the plan for this disser­ tation. Chapter One: Two New Yorks

The clearest Impression we get from novels of New York life is that they deal not with one but with two cities — contradictory in their natures, yet existing side by side with equal vigor. For well over a century, American novelists have designated New York as a place-name symbol for new o^/portunity, wealth, and power; yet at the same time other novelists have pictured New ^ork as a gathering place for all the depraved and frustrating in­ fluences in American life, ^'iriters could invoke either image of the metropolis, playing at will on the rural American* s yearning for wider horizons and a more exciting tempo of life, or on his fear and distrust of the great evil city waiting to corrupt his innocence. This **split vision" of the city pervades and dominates the New York novel. We find it at play in so sensitive and experimental a writer as John Dos Passos, and we find it too in such hack writers of pulp fiction as Osgood Bradbury and Ned Buntline, who fashioned "good" and "bad" New Yorks according to the preconceptions of their readers* Tnis self-contradictory set of values, informing virtually all of New York fiction, congealed into an urban rayth^of enormous influence. We can best understand these New fork novels if we stop first to exairiine the historical circumstances from which -5-

they emerged, A close relationship exists between the facts of Iffe about New York and the fiction portraying New York life. Indeed, the antithetical Images of two New Yorks are supported by empirical fact, for congressed into the city are both the best and worst of modern life. New York, like every metropolis, has simultaneously been considered a Babylon and a New Jerusalem. The coeval existence of slum and splendor, virtue and debauchery, promise and frustration repeatedly arrested the attention of observors; Henry George, on a business trip to New York in I666, was much struck by the "shocking contrast between monstrous wealth and debasing want. James P. Muirhead, the Englishman who compiled Baedeker*s Handbook to the United States, characterized New York in 1902 as "a lady in ball costume, with diamonds in her ears, and her toes out at the boots, The basis for the New York of romance and achievement is easily understood. Throughout the nineteenth century New York was a dynamic center of growth and activity un­ paralleled in the New World, establishing a pattern of supremacy which reaches unbroken into our own century. Leading and typifying the urban movement in America, New York contributed spectacularly to a new structure of Industry, trade, and all the impulses of aavanced civil­ ization, "Education, literature, science. Invention, the —6— fine arts, social reform, public hygiene, the use of leisure, the * good life' — all these were given lift and direction” by the activities which abounded in New ^ork as well as in other urban centersWhatever may have been the theoretical advantages of the simplicity of rural existence, "the ostentatious luxury of the newly rich in the growing cities was paraded in the press with a kind of prurient fascination as evidence of what a free society might achieve by way of the good life." We can well imagine what effects must have been achieved by descriptions of the Vanderbilt fancy dress ball of March 26, 1883, "the most sumptuous entertainment that had yet been given in America," or by Delmonico dinner parties costing almost a hundred and fifty dollars per person*' While the village parsons preached against such waste and materialism, the more ambitious village lads dreamed of conquest in the great city world. The particular prosperity and influence of New York derived originally from geographical advantages. Situated right at the ocean front. New York's harbor was "the best on the North Atlantic coast for a combination of trans- ft atlantic, coastal, and inland trade." Though the Hudson Hiver sometimes froze, those waters fared better on the average than the colder ports of New England or Canada to the north, and they fogged up less frequently than the -7-

quieter waters of Philadelphia and Baltimore to the south. Furthermore, the New York harbor’s natural configuration offered the largest wharfage space in the most compact area, a matter which was to prove vital in later periods of expansion. New York’s history has always been identified with commerce, the Dutch having originally founded the city for trading purposes. The city’s first heraldic design actually included representations of fur and flour, the first staples of New World trade. New ^ork also became a kind of county seat for the neighboring agricultural area, and early assumed its cosmopolitan character. A Jesuit missionary who visited the infant Dutch colony in 161^3 was struck by the wide variety of sects and nations represented among the inhabitants, and quoted the Direct­ or General as saying that the community included men of no less than eighteen different languagesBy the time of the Revolution, New xork was a prospering little 10 metropolis of 20,000 people, and shortly became the new nation’s capital. In 1797 New York led the country for the first time in port activity, but Boston and Philadelphia were very close behind and remained so until 1013 « It was during

the crucial decade from 1813 to 1823 -- before the * 3 “ opening of the Erie Canal -- that .Mev/ York hopelessly outstripped Its rivals. The real key to the port's success was Its part In the Cotton Triangle. By 181$ the cotton bale had become the most Important single unit In American commerce.New York's chief port activity was that of Importing, but the Black Ball line and other great fleets of the time, which had made New York their western terminus, had to have cargo for their return trip to Europe. The New York merchants solved this problem by buying up cotton and shipping It to Europe via the New York port. An additional advantage accrued from the coastal vessels going south to pick up the cotton; they took along cargoes of good» which had been Imported tibaxugh New York and were now to be sold In the South. All of this was possible, of course, only because the South failed to develop direct lines of exchange with Europe; the result was that New York danced, and the South paid the fiddler. When the Erie Canal was completed In 1825, freight charges from the West dropped from ^100 a ton to ^6 a ton, and within five years the Erie investors were enjoying annual dividends of 12%, By 1828 Federal duties collected at New York were high enough to pay for all expenses of the national government, with the exception of interest -9-

on previous debt, e.nd in 1814.0 New York moved into a 12 position second only to London as a world port. With­ out producing many of the articles of commerce, the city made itself a center where goods of every sort from every place were exchanged, the local merchants growing rich in the meantime from profits, commissions, freights, and other levies. As in London and Amsterdam, the accumulated profits from such business made i^ew York a world center of finance. This long history of financial leadership explains why, .for example, the New York Stock Exchange currently handles 90% of all corporate shares bought and sold in the .United States. Not only did New York become symbolic in the Ameri­ can mind of material accumulation, but the direct influence of the city on the far-flung areas of the country grew to enormous proportions. A pattern of city control extended to the southern cotton fields, the western grainlands, and later even to the sugar fields of Cuba. As Ida Tarbell points out, the phenomenon of absentee landlordism became more and more common during the nineteenth century. The resident manager of a mine or railroad or telegraph company did not necessarily represent local interests. He took orders from such great financial centers as New York.^^ The merchant-banker could advance money for flour -10-

before it was milled, or for cotton, before it was planted, a procedure by which New ^ork enjoyed a triple benefit. By placing fairraers and planters in a state of chronic debt, the city drew a steady stream of interest; it had first call on products from the interior for export through its own port; and most important, money advanced to country storekeepers influenced them to s took up with imports and domestic manufactures which came through New York rather than a rival port. By virtue of such financial domination, at least two decades before the Civil War most of the country became New York's hinterland, except for the immediate spheres of influence of Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, A climax of a sort was reached in the five years from l8ij.8

to 1852, when New York kept its hold on Western trade by completing two railroads just ahead of its rivals, and when the discovery of gold in California brought the clipper era to its height.,On the eve of the Civil War, the foreign commerce of New ^ork was nearly six times that of all New England, and New York was handling two- thirds of all the nation's imports and one-third of its exports. The East Hiver represented the greatest concen­ tration of ship-building in the country from I8l5 to I66O, and. the vessels with "of New York" painted on their sterns exceeded the combined tonnage of Boston, Philadelphia, -11-

Baltimore, and New Orleans. It is small wonder that A. P. Weber*a monumental study of nineteenth century urbanism declared that New York* s primacy stemmed from its port facilities and attendant economic triumphs, "Every great city," wrote Weber, "owes its eminence to „16 commerce." The particular eminence of New York in commerce and shipping led to a unique advantage during the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first decade or two of the twentieth. Foreign immigrants served to swell the city * 8 population in that period even more so than the migrants attracted to New York from rural or small town America, The European — fleeing from Old World perse­ cution or privation — naturally traveled over sea lanes already established by trade, and landed at one of the eastern seaboard cities, probably New York, through which about four-fifths of all immigrants were received. Many of the new arrivals passed inland, of course, where they settled on farms or in other cities. Enough of them re­ mained in New York, however, to have a profound effect on the city’s social, political, and cultural life. They swelled the population, forced the city to expand its myriad facilities, and gave New York an extraordinary character among the world's metropolises. Other cities drew immigrants, but none even approached the magnitude and -12-

Jaeterogeneity of New York* 8 settlements of the foreign

born. By 189O the city had half as many Italians as Naples, as many Germans as Hamburg, twice as many Irish as Dublin, and two and a half times as many Jews as Warsaw. Four out of five residents of Greater New York were either foreigners or of foreign parentage. 17 Just as established sea routes with Europe drew immigrants to New York, so did the best and fastest lines of communication help make New York a national power in journalism and general publishing. At the end of the nineteenth century there were 10? publishing companies in New York, more than triple the number in Philadelphia, 18 Boston, or Chicago. The concentrated population and commercial wealth also drew students, artists, and enter­ tainers to the city’s schools, theatres, and museums* The demand for theatricals was so great that scarcely enough talent could be recruited to tread the boards, and opera established itself as the patronized favorite of a Fifth Avenue set of coupon-clippers trying to renounce their 19 commercial origins as quickly as possible. The extraordinary opportunities for success which were available to the strong, the ambitious, and the ruthless suggested rich dramatic possibilities to writers of fiction. No inevitable relationship is implied, of course, between -13-

the social materials and the attitude toward those materi­ als. It should not surprise us, however, that many writers found in New York*s unparalleled growth and prominence the stuff of romance, of dreams come true, of ambition fulfilled, A large block of novels, as we shall see, testifies eloquently to the vitality of this view of New York as the land of milk and honey. Furthermore, we cannot forget that New York’s growth is but an important chapter in a long tale of urban ex­ pansion during the nineteenth century. New York’s impact on the popular imagination was due not only to its own spectacular growth, but to a general development world­ wide in its scope. As urban communities increased in number and importance, the rural folk’s feeling of iso­ lation was deepened by a knowledge of more pleasant town life not many miles away. If the chief historian of Scandinavian America is accurate, ”the cheerlessness and hardships of farm life accounted for the uncommonly high proportion of insanity among Norwegians and Swedes in the Middle West,” 20 Virtually the same reasons that impelled people to leave the farm for the village were likely to cause the ambitious or maladjusted villager to go to a larger town or city. Thus ’’the drift to the cities” be­ came a commonplace observation, though the long tradition -14-

of "the pure country air" never lost its vitality among writers of fiction. It is surprising, in fact, to find now frequently the hero and heroine of urban novels with­ drew once again to the goodness and purity of the village

after their disturbing experiences in the madcap wicked city. What happened was that a traditional attitude collided with the facts, and the facts made way for the tradition. The tensions between the city and the country achieved new proportions in the nineteenth century for a variety of reasons. Most significant was that more and larger cities could be physically maintained without disastrous effects on the urban inhabitants. New trans­ portation facilities made it easier than ever before in history to supply cities with food, water and fuel. Un­ sanitary conditions, with all the attendant discomforts and high infant mortality rates, were brought under some control; it was not until the nineteenth century, for example, that London’s birth-rate exceeded its death-rate. From that point on the city grew internally, in addition to drawing population from the countryside. Nearly all rural regions fell under a cloud as new opportunities opened in the cities and agricultural maciiinery reduced the necessary labor force on farms. Cities nearly the world over gained at the expense of the countryside. -x5~

Between 1850 and 1900 London and Paris more than doubled their populations, Berlin quadrupled hers, and similar gains were noted in such far-flung cities as Odessa, Cairo, and Bombay; Rural population during this period gained very little, or in some cases actually lost ground. In the United States, for example, cities gained tre­ mendously not only in the traditionally urban areas of New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, but all through the region north of the Potomac and Ohio Rivers. Between 1790 and i860 the percentage of Americans in cities of 8,000 or more inhabitants grew from 3 » 3 to 16.1, over half of this growth taking place after lôi+O; in the next forty years this urban population more than doubled again, to 32.9 percent of the population. It is even more significant that while the smaller towns and cities barely kept pace with the general increase, and medium-sized cities (20,000 - 100,000 population) made but moderate gains, the metropolises forged ahead out of 21 all proportion to the general increase. By no means, however, did all literature capitulate to the enthusiasm for growing cities and the concomitant "progress." Although the appearance of many great cities and technological improvements gave wide currency to optimism and a faith in the future of civilization, there was also a long and active tradition of philosophical —16— primitivism in American thought. Progress and manifest destiny may have been the dominant cults of the day, but writers of fiction and non-fiction alike evolved an enor­ mous literature of protest, and it is to this tradition that the best of the New York novels belong. They drew realistically upon the complex human relationships in the metropolis, the new social maladjustments, and the ’’con­ spicuous failure” of city governments; they dealt spe­ cifically with Incognizable aspects of metropolitan life — the vice, the slums, and the political corruption* The popular image of New York as the evil city is related to a spirit of anti-urbanism at least as old as the nation itself. Benjamin Franklin surveyed the extrav­ agant society of the eastern seaboard cities and consoled himself with the reflection that the bulk of the popu­ lation was composed of laborious and frugal inland 22 farmers ; Jefferson flatly referred to cities as ’’ulcers 21 on the body politic.” " Cooper’s Leatherslocking, as an old man in The Prairie, found a host of admirers and imitators when he declared that only in the wilderness could he "open his heart to God without having to strip it of the cares and wickedness of the settlements.” The somewhat more subtle evils of the city were noted later in the nineteenth century. Henry George, while still an obscure printer in Ban Francisco, inveighed against -17-

the whole drift toward concentration: "The great city," he wrote, "is swallowing up the little towns ; the great merchant is driving his poorer rivals out of business Sociologists, too, were appalled by the high incidence of irritability, exhaustion, insomnia, nervousness, and in- 26 sanity üo which the city dweller was particularly subject. The moralists found much in New York life which led

them to symbolize the metropolis as the evil city. Ne w York's saloons, for example, reached the number of 7500 in 1690, a staggering ratio of one saloon for every two hundred people. 27 Phenomenal Increases in divorce rates by the end of the century were correlated with the general growth of urban centers. The anonymity of city life, its distractions and temptations, the growing practice of living in boarding houses, and the harsh struggle for existence all contributed to the weakening of home life. Prostitution, primarily an urban phenomenon, thrived in great population centers by catering to unmarried men and out-of-town visitors anxious for a fling. New York’s commercialized vice operated as a vast industry geared to satisfy all tastes and purses, offering a choice of palatial sporting houses, widely scattered middle-class brothels, and basement dives on the Bowery where the 28 business was divested of all tinsel. Writers who attacked New Pork for its unhealthy -18-

livlng conditions found ample evidence in the city’s slums. Though many other American cities had disease spots, the slum evil was most deeply rooted in New fork, where land rentals were highest and the pressure of immigrants the strongest. In all Europe, only one city district, in Prague, was half as congested as parts of Manhattan. The field of public hygiene had made some advances in the nineteenth century, but they were largely cancelled out by the advent in 1879 of a new type of slum, the ’’dumbbell” tenement, in which only about one-third of the rooms had direct light and air. Unknown in any European city, these dumbbell tenements were virtually the only kind erected in New York during the final two decades of the nineteenth century. The slum became an increasingly familiar sight in over-crowdea and rapidly deteriorating quarters, and in turn did much to breed law­ lessness. Vile places like ’’Misery Row," "Poverty Lane," and "Murderers’ Alley” were both continuous recruiting grounds for juvenile delinquents and niding places for criminal bands. 29 Since the middle of the nineteenth century, however. New York’s chief notoriety has grown out of the city’s incredibly corrupt politics. The failure to develop a structure of government adequate to safeguard the popu­ lation affected every department of life in New York. -19—

Here again, of coursé. New York was not alone; the city governments of the United States were generally acknowl­ edged to be "the worst in Christendom — the most expensive, the most inefficient, and the most corrupt. In Philadelphia it was the "gas ring," and in Washington, D. C. it was the "real estate ring," Starting about a decade after the Civil War, one city after another fell to "bosses": Cox in Cincinnati, Butler in St* Louis, Ames in Minneapolis, Buckley in San Francisco, and so on*Tammany Hall, however, was the unparalleled example of what Bryce 31 called "the one conspicuous failure" of American dem­ ocracy, for it was more than an example of bad government in one city. It was the symbol of urban corruption every­ where, Its grip on the city’s vitals was tenacious, greedy, ruthless, and self-confident, Lincoln Steffens summed it up by thundering: "fammany is Tammany, the embodiment of 32 corruption," When Steffens analysed Tammany’s extraordinary hold on New -^ork, he indicted not only the leaders but the people of New York, "Tammany," he wrote, "is corruption with consent; it is bad government founded on the suffrage of the people. 'The politicians stole openly from t he city treasury, divided the money on the steps of City Hall, and implicated all of New York’s citizens by their —20—

complaisance, Caugtit in the web were clergymen who had favorite charities, lawyers who wanted briefs, real estate dealers who wanted to know in advance about public im­ provements, shopkeepers who didn't want to be bothered with strict inspections, and the average man who just didn't want to be bothered. When Tweed’s empire tumbled, it was reported that suit would be brought against the ring to recover stolen funds. "Who is going to sue?'* asked Mayor A. Oakley Hall, who could not think of anyone sufficiently important and without sin to throw the first stone, Though the influence of Tweed himself came to an end, that of course was not the end of political corruption in New York. Subsequent investigations in l86i|., 1890, a n d l69i{- sent some aldermen and bosses to jail or scurrying abroad, but more noteworthy is the way Tammany took up the reins of government after each burst of reform energy had spent itself. The famous clean-up of 1894* for example, made a hero of the preacher, Charles Parkhurst; it was followed three years later by the election of the Tammany henchman Robert A. Van Wyck, In our own century. New York's history has followed the same monotonous pattern of corruption interrupted occasionally by public indignation. -21-

Another source of corruption, according to Lincoln Steffens, was the city’s commercial spirit. Because "politics is business," and because business is based on profit rather than patriotism» on dickering rather than principle, the municipal government could not possibly fulfill its function of serving the total electorate. Politicians were interested only in prospects which could line their own pockets; they were for sale to whiskey rings and vice lords, A band of so-called Cadets, for example, flourished in New York under police protection; these men made a business "of ruining daughters of the tenements and even of catching and imprisoning in dis- orderly houses the wives of poor men. Prom such historical facts there emerged a well- defined attitude in the popular mind toward New -^ork; it was the evil city, where the meaning of honor and the uses of money and power were undermined or perverted. This mistrust of the city existed both in fact and in native "myth," making for social history on one hand and creative literature on the other. To be sure, the two levels of comprehension — the empirical and the imaginative — did not always correspond precisely; the "drift to the city" was not matched by a drift back to the countryside, as the New York novels would have us believe. Nor were all country girls tricked into prostitution or all village -22-

lada coarsened by their worldly ambitions In New York, But in the long run we find a truer correlation between the city’s history and fiction about the city than we might have expected, There is far more to cry about than to laugh about in New York life, and we find that while many romances paid homage to the excitements and oppor­ tunities of the metropolis, the most vital and insistent fiction maintained a steady assault on the city’s debili­ tating influences. Philosophically, this is a surprising phenomenon, in view of the otherwise more prevalent belief in progress -- a belief that it was America’s manifest destiny to bring settlements to the wilderness and to transform villages into towns and towns into cities. We are rempted to conjecture that the "evil city" view of New lork acred as a kind of emotional safety valve for the American people. It must have been soothing to vent one's fears and distrust on the nation's metropolis while enticing railroads and industry to one's native villagel Our primary interest here, of course, is literary, rather than historical or philosophical. But even a most summary examination shows us the basis for the view of New fork as a land of milk and honey on one hand and as the evil city on the other. The significant fact for this c!tudy is that the antithetical views existed side by side, and that from them emerged the tensions and assumptions -23-

which characterize the i^ew York novel. It is thus that both in fact and in fiction New York has been the place to make "a name" for oneself and also the place to find blissful anonymity; the promised land and the city of defeat; the den of iniquity and the center of grace, beauty and liberation; the melting pot for a thousand races and the scene of violent racial conflicts; the on- fabled rock and the island of loneliness. It is, further­ more, only in this light that we can understand what a New York novel is. The important action of such a novel takes place in the city, of course, and the setting frequently suggests a nervous vitality and continuous struggle. The characters are purposely heterogeneous in type, occupation, race, and religion, and almost always include a protagonist strange to the city — whether from a rural area or from Europe. rundamentally, however, these novels display a definite social attitude toward the metropolis, which in the final analysis is in support of either the "evil city" or the "land of milk and honey" view of New York. The study of urban fiction which follows is specifi­ cally conditioned by the image of two ^'iow Yorks. The novels cannot, of course, be taken as a substitute for history, but their significance is historical as well as -24- esthetic. They are rooted in the popular myths to which they give literary expression, and help us to understand an important phase of American culture* Chapter Two: The Evil City

The characterization o f New York as the evil city achieved the proportions of a national myth — verified in part by the facts of New York life and amplified by a long and vital tradition of mistrust for all urban centers. Jefferson, one of the earliest American critics of urban­ ism, gave eloquent tongue to a popular fear when he de­ clared: "1 dread the de^ when people are piled up one upon another in cities!”^ The philosopher-statesman was echoed in I836 by J. K. faulding and the editors of so sophisticated a publication as the Knickerbocker Magazine. The arguments posited by these urbane gentlemen were, of course, the familiar cliches of philosophical primi­ tivism: the rural man enjoyed a more natural life of simplicity, self-dependence, and greater health -- both moral and physical than was to be found in the cities; farmers were closer to nature and God than city people, who worshipped Mammon, Paulding confidently concluded: "An age of simplicity is, therefore, an age of morality," ana the Knickerbocker editors added: "It is to the agricultural portion of our community that we must look 2 for the preservation of our liberties." We may object to the patent over-simplification of such arguments, but we cannot doubt that they enjoyed wide currency in American thinking. Even while the §6 -26-

wilderness was being conquered by towns and villages, and they in turn by "megalopolitan" centers, protests and warnings were repeatedly sounded. In spite o f the cult of progress, there appeared, as Howard Mumford Jones recently stated, a growing sense that city life was not only irreligious and unnatural, but that the type of American produced by urbanism was somehow a sora?y, shoddy product when measured against the rich ideal of individ- 3 ualism. And this sense of dissatisfaction, as we shall see, proved a more powerful influence on American fiction than any philosophy of optimism. This particular attitude of the primitivist -- directing a mythology of suspicion against the dangers of a great metropolis — was certainly not peculiar to America's attitude toward New York, Not only the atti­ tude, but its expression in fiction, was fully exploited in the novels of London and Paris even before New York became important as a literary subject. The novels of Dickens, for example, did much to inform an international public of poverty, vice, and villainy to be encountered in London, Art the attitude actually dates back to the be­ ginnings of the English novel; Fielding, in Joseph Andrews, played upon two opposite poles of conduct — the evil city and the pure countryside. His virtuous young footman struggles against the temptations of London, not allowing -27-

clty friends to "teach him to game, swear, drialc, nor any other genteel vice the town abounded with." Joseph himself, in a letter to his sister Pamela, gives voice to complaints against the metropolis which are by now so well known as to have become cliches. If he is discharged for refusing to satisfy the appetites of Lady Booby, he will be happy, he says, to return to his old master's country seat, for "London is a bad place, and there is so little fellowship, that the next-door neighbors don't know one another. What was, however, merely incidental in Fielding^s

» novel became the very heart of Balzac's Pere Goriot. The Innocent and ambitious law student, Eugene de Rastignac, Is the embodiment of an unbroken succession of heroes -- veritable male Cinderellas — whose adventures in the big city have become a recurrent theme in modern literature. From the time of Balzac's Eugene to Thomas Wolfe's, the same myth has been adapted to the experience of every new generation: the upright young man from the village comes to the great city to study law or art, to go into business or journalism, or in some way to find scope for his grand ambitions. He finds that as a newcomer he must enter into fierce combat for a place of prominence in the hard-hearted city ("This Paris life is a perpetual warfare," young -28-

Rastignac writes his mother). What happens to the hero after he recognizes the city as his adversary depends upon the tradition in which the writer is working. In the romantic or optimistic view the hero withstands the forces of evil, or extricates himself from the possi­ bilities of moral compromise in the nick of time, and retires once again to the good rural life. In the more vital and realistic fiction the hero is corrupted by degrees and adopts the acquisitive values of the city; even when his ambitions are fulfilled, his material tIlumph becomes a moral defeat. He rarely, in any case, finds his happiness by returning to a grove on the countryside. In Balzac's novel, the pure young heart of the hero leaps when he beholds the luxuries of upper stratum life in Paris. But he rejects the diabolical plan of Vautrin for quick wealth and recoils in horror from his temptor's description of the w ays of the great world, "Why, your Paris must be a heap of filthI" he cries. He has the additional evidence of an implied contrast between the purity of his own two sisters in the country and the perfidy of Goriot's two daughters in Paris. hven virtue, however, has its breaking point. "Greed for luxury seized ni8 heart; the madness of luxury gripped him; the thirst -29- for gold parched his throat." After further experience in Paris, he agrees with Vautrin: "Wealth is virtue." The

Î novel Pere Goriot is Eugene’s education; he appears in later volumes of The Comedie Humaine as a ruthless millionaire, married to the daughter of his first mis­ tress. "Society makes the man," Balzac explained; "he develops according to the social centers in which he is placed." The man himself changes as the habitat is changed. "Throw the rabbit into the ocean, and he is still a rabbit; throw the young provincial into the welter of Paris, and he becomes a being new and strange. If we c an believe our urban fiction, the American provincial about to be thrown into the welter of New York was forewarned against the metropolitan evils. In prac­ tically every instance, his dear mother, his virtuous uncle, the village elders, and most of popular literature advised against the move. Even ancient folklore warned against the dangers of urban living; a country mouse went to visit his cousin in the city, and had such a harrowing set of experiences that he barely escaped with his life and sanity. How pleasant did the rude, simple fare of the country seem after the deluding finery of the city But all the warnings went unheeded, and the lure of the city supplied literature with one of its legendary -30-

figures* Knapsack in hand, clothing coarse and homespun, the bloom of outdoor health on his cheeks, the rustic hero entered New York to seek fame and fortune. Oppor­ tunity was there, and the stakes were high -- to b ecome richer than an Eastern prince, or poorer than the rudest serf; to live in splendor, power, and renown, or to die in foul patches and misery. Is it any wonder, then, that nothing, not evenf ables about a country mouse and a city mouse, could stop the growth of the cities? For each youth must have thought that ^ was Fortune’s darlingI There was not enough success, of course, for all who wanted it simply to reach out and take it. The con­ testants had many faces and many names, but they were all one; they were all the innocents to be sacrificed upon the altar of a godless city. For a kind of primitive naturalism was operative in these novels. The environment was going to trap these innocents and then swallow them up as the sea swallows its victims. "The current is against their escape. The tide that with us flows 7 city-ward never ebbs." A typical warning was sounded in Osgood Bradbury's The Belle of the Bowery (l8l;.6), when the virtuous heroine's .mother tells her that New York is a "wicked city where there are thousands of temptations"; the girl _3i—

xmst ’^a r d . .. against the wiles and seductions of the young men who inhabit the cityl The theme is dramatized by the heroine*s nearly falling victim to Henry Luroff (the name itself is instructive), who "has seduced more girls from the county than any other young man in the city. Not only virtuous girls, but virtuous men are in danger too, Edward Z. G, Judson’s The Hoys of New York (181^.9) declares that for the street-walker "the green countryman is her only game.Like so many others of its type. The Hoys seems so intent on describing all the horror of city evil that it makes the evil downright attractive. A certain "den of iniquity" is pictured with its "long and splendidly-furnished bar," on which "in elegant cut-glass decanters, are the glittering liquids... like a woman’s bright eyes." Bsnind the bar, against the wall "is hung a magnificent painting... the picture of a nude woman, standing in an attitude of voluptuousness." Such a scene can hardly be called discouraging to the young man in the country who wishes to go out into the world. "And," the author assures him, "there is not only one saloon with such pictures over the bar, but dozens, in Broadway and other streets of the city.We may reason­ ably doubt that Edward Judson, better remembered as the enormously successful hack writer "Ned Buntline," had any -32- ' illüsicns about the moral effect the B*Hoys would bave on a restless villager. His pen was for sale at so much, per word and be spent a lifetime pouring out pulp fiction based on tbe current daydreams and cliches about tbe sea, the wild West, and New York lowlife. But Judson’s inten­ tions are secondary; more important is tbe assumption we can make about bis familiar-* image of wicked New York. He must bave been catering to an already popular conception of tbe city, for a writer like Judson expected to be under­ stood witb ease by a mass audience, and was not likely to introduce into bis fiction any fresh concept of tbe city* Among tbe mid-nineteenth century back novelists, however, Judson must bow to Osgood Bradbury as tbe writer who used tbe image of evil New York witb the greatest repetition and insistence. In bis Female Depravity; or, Tbe House of Death (l852) a Negro servant exclaims: "0, masser, dis city be berry wicked. Great many bad men and women in it. But I pities de young white gals, specially if dey be poor; for de men gib ’em money and lead ’em astray from de path ob virtue." IP His novel Tbe Gambler’s League; or, Tbe Trials of a Country Maid (1857) deals witb ÔWO confidence men and their tool, tbe beautiful Arabella, who is forced to live with one of them. Depraved by a life of sin in New York, she develops a special talent for -33-

ensnaring country victims, as she hers elf had been en­ snared, She despises her seducer; "0, how I thirst for „13 nis blood!" -^^ut it is too late for Arabella, and, cries the author, let her fate be a warning to other country maids who yearn for the tinsel and luxury of city life. In the decades just following the Civil War- when tales of city evil achieved their widest popularity, the Henry Holt Company reprinted Theodore V/inthrop's 1861 novel, Cecil Dreeme. The moral of the tale was illustrated by the book's cover, which had the design of a spider spin­ ning its web, ready to ensnare the unsuspecting. "IfightI Night in the great city!" cries the novel, "Night! when the gas-lights, relit, awaken harmful purposes,,, when the tiger and tigress take their stand where the prey will be sure to come,..In actuality, the prey just after the Civil War was possibly a mere boy. New York had become the destination of hundreds of youngsters who had tasted excitement in the array, and who were lost to the old homesteads forever. One of their few real friends was Charles Loring Brace, who invited the newcomers to his Newsboys' Lodging House, where they roomed while support- xng ûhemselves by shinning shoes or selling newspapers, 15 Everett J, Wendell, assistant superintendent of the lodging House in l868, came across an installment in - 34“ '

Student and Schoolmate of a story called Ragged Dick; or. Street Life in New York by a writer named Horatio Alger, Invited to use the Lodging House as a source for more boys' tales, Alger began a series whose popularity was phenomenal. He later became a chaplain and then for a time schoolmaster of the Lodging House, identifying his whole life with the problems of these homeless youngsters. Perhaps his outstanding contribution to their welfare was an almost singlehanded exposure and stamping out of the vicious "padrone system," This particular form of slavery consisted of buying and importing Italian youngsters to play violins for many hours a day on the streets of New York. 'ihey were ill-clothed, ill-fed, generally beaten, and forced to turn over all their earnings to the mas­ ters. By stirring a storm of protest '(and refusing to be cowed by padrone ruffians), Alger succeeded in pro­ moting protective legislation. Phil, the Fiddler (I87I) is the novel in which he embodied his protest, and it was tnis novel which remained Alger's own favorite. Though Alger's heroes are generally rewarded with success in the face of hardships, the hardsliips them­ selves are far more striking than the boys' successes. Ragged Dick advises his friend from the country, "a feller has to look sharp in this city, or he’ll loss his eye teeth before he knows it.Even Dick "now and then -35- played tricks upon unsophisticated boys from the coiintry.”^'^ To be sure, Alger intended no relationship between en­ vironment and conduct. A philosophical consideration of that sort would have been beyond his' readers and perhaps even beyond Alger himself. His novels have as their basic theme the homily that honesty and ener^ will be rewarded in this world, the next, or both. His young heroes did not shrink from life, but conquered it. Thus, for all the meals missed and the cold nights spent huddled in alleyways, the Alger boys nevertheless helped make a magnet of the city. As late as 1Ô2Ô the manager of the Hewsboys* Lodging House reluctantly admitted that more boys were running away from home to try their luck in Hew York because of Alger*s stories than for any other 18 reason, A boy who might well have been a ttracted to Hew York by Alger * s tales is the chief character in a Beadle book by Charles Morris, Honest Harry; or. The Country Boy Adrift in the City (1882), The opposing forces here — as indicated by the title itself — are immediately engaged in battle, Harry has just come to Hew York when he encounters some young wharf rats jeering at an old drunk. The good country boy will not see "an old grand­ father treated that way," so he beats the bully who is —36- leader of the g ang and then significantly challenges the others: "Come on, my hearties... It’s country against the city, you know." The gang retreats, but as the author points out, one does not score such easy victories over the city* All through the s tory various members of the gang fall upon Honest Harry at une^ected moments, until they become tormenting furies. His earlier inde­ pendence must be compromised, and for self-protection he allies himself with another gang of wharf rats. "I wish I was back in Dover," Harry sighs to himself at last. "It’s just a fight for life here in the city. J. P. Hume’s Five Hundred Majority (1872) is an excellent example of how a novel could be constructed almost entirely in the popular tradition of the pure countryside against the evil city. The hero is the legendary young man. from the country who decides to seek his fortune in Hew York. His family, as we may expect, is violently opposed to the move, "I warned him agin it," bis exasperated uncle says ; "-told him there was more ’n enough people there already — that a good share of them, men and we erne n, wasn’t fit fur no young man of good morals to sociate with." But, as usual, he will not heed the good advice, "for the city, it must be recol­ lected, culls the flower of the country’s manhood, alas I -37-

too often to blight It." In Hew York he is suddenly ex­ posed to "the sensual and vulgar enticements which crouch along every avenue of the great city and which drag their thousands down to ruin," 'fhis particular novel ends happily — for the hero soon returns to the old homestead; but let not others who contemplate the same mad venture take heart. The author warns ; "Of the ten thousand young men from the country who, with favorable prospects and bright hopes, annually enter New York City with a view to permanent residence, nine thousand had better at once 20 cast themselves into the sea,"

A, parallel mythology of warning was created for the rural heroines who sought release from the monotony and drudgery of farm life. By the last quarter of the nine­ teenth century, novels began to reflect the appearance of these young women in urban centers, where they could

taste the excitements of city life while supporting them­ selves as domestics, office workers, or factory help. The thesis of these novels is simply that the city vic­ timizes these girls, taking advantage of their innocence and inexperience to make them slum drudges. Any excite­ ment they find is at the expense of cheir chastity, A newcomer to New York in Ï. S. Arthur’s Cast Adrift (1Ô73), for example, runs the gamut of city dangers. She is —38—

tricked into a brief acquaintance with an e vil character^ drugged, and robbed. An old lectier tnen cuts tier long tresses and strips her of her clothes. When she awakens in a damp cellar — sick, alone, and impoverished — she is so engulfed in i^sery that she commits suicide. In some ways the most effective — if the weirdest and least restrained — novel dealing with an unhappy young woman in the evil city of New j^ork is Joaquin Miller*s The Destiniction of Gotham (1886). The author was a bizarre far-Western poet whose Pacific Poems (1 6 7 O) had made him an overnight London sensation as "the Byron of Oregon." What he offers in this novel is a violent apocalyptic vision of the burning of New York -- the destruction brought about by a sudden release of all the terrible energies of evil abroad in Gotham. The tone of the novel is sometimes a hysterical screech: "The great city lies trembling, panting, quivering in her wild, white heat of Intoxication, excitement, madness — drunken and devilish pursuits of power, pleasure, and gold... Never grew a city sc great,... and her glory, her greatness, her sudden power and splendor have made her m a d."^ The horror scenes of urban poverty are all the more stark for being set in the midst of lyrical rambling. -39- '

The heroine, one of the many who “enter New York never to 22 return, " ends her life in a tenement hovel where she places tobacco stems around the bed, hoping that the swarms of rats will not eat their way through the tobacco, "It is a stormy sea," Miller writes, "You may hear a continual moan,,. The people here are wrecked seamen." Like the heroine of Miller’s novel, Cora Strang of

Edgar Fawcett’s The Evil That Men Do (I8 8 9 ) is pursued, betrayed, and ruined by men — the main force of both tragedies stemming from the barren, joyless life of a tenement working girl. "I came to this great, cruel city and got to be the slavin’ drudge I am," Cora says. Of the factory she worked in briefly, she adds: "The sights I did see In that place! Girls... sick... with their hands all sore and bleedin’, and some so poor that they daresn* t send out for more than a five-cent lunch, There is much to tempt Cora from her life of drudgery, but for a time she manages to "keep straight"; there was her past life in the country to remind her of virtue and "to smile at her from afar," So she resists the factory manager who offers her higher wages if she will be "a bit obliging," and so too does she resist her landlady’s son; then when she is a domestic, she fights off the butler as well as the master himself. Finally she falls; a playboy -ii.0-

(the archetypal city villain} seduces her. It is a short step to prostitution once she has been ”ruined,” and tippling hastens her degeneration. She is found at last in a Bowery alley one night, her throat slit by an old admirer. Cora and her country sisters were simply not equipped to deal with the dangers of city evil. Their background was limited and they were too trusting, con­ trary to the city girls who had been presumably taught the ways of the world. Emilie Ruck de Schell, who daring­ ly confessed that she was a "Bohemian" in an 1095 article for Arena, explained: City-bred girls are comparatively safe in the hands of even the most unprincipled men, for they have been trained,.. and know how to take care of themselves. But the girls who fall into Bohemian ways are too often gifted girls whose country or village homes have denied them the scope for the exercise of their talents. The glowing cheeks and fresh, unsophisticated manners of these daughters of a purer atmosphere cannot be but attractive to the blase’ men of the world. This is charming optimism, but not altogether the truth -- as Stephen Crane demonstrated so brilliantly in Maggie (1893). The pressures of a corrupt urban environ­ ment overcome that hapless girl just as surely as if she had come fresh and uninstructed from some sweet village. The perfidy of her brother and the foul mouth of her -Ip.-

drunken mother shoiild have taught Maggie much of the e vil ways of the world, but they leave her, instead, fully susceptible to the flashy charms of a bartender who seduces and betrays her. Maggie's end, like Cora's in The Evil That Men Do. is prostitution and death. The mythology of horror continues into our own day. In Benjamin Appel's recent novel, Power-House (1939), the heroine saves money "back home" for a trip to New York. Once there, she is enticed into a gambling club, where she loses her money, is given a drugged drink, and then ravished by a line-up of young toughs. "Ruined," she can never again take up her old life at home. The whole pro­ cedure, as described in the novel, is understood to be a perfectly usual means of recruiting for New York's vast number of bawdy houses. Occasionally, evil New York was used for comic purposes; at any rate the country bumpkin did not always feel helpless before the city. In Irving Bachelier's Eben Holden (1900), Uncle Eb declares: "S'pose we musn't talk t* no stangers there New York. I've read *n the Tribune how they'll pur tend t ' be friends an' then grab yer money an' run like Sam Hill. If I meet any o' them fellers they're go in' t ' find me purty middlin' poor comp'ny."^^ Such unconcerned boldness — with happy -42-

results — is a rarity, for the corruption of New York has reached not only prostitutes, racketeers, and poli­ ticians, but the children as well* Tough tenement boys in Howard Past’s A Place.in the City (1937) convince girl-friends to visit cellars with them; they torture a prim school teacher by leaving a contraceptive on her desk every so often. A good cop asks a priest, "Now, father, wouldn't you say that there is a judgment coming on this great city of ours, a great judgment to pay for its wickednessThe question is rhetorical; the feel­ ing which runs all through such novels is that doomsday is coming, that New York, like the two Old Testament cities of the plain, will be destroyed in its wickedness by f ire and brimstone from heaven.

What corrupts the provincial in New York? One ans­ wer, according to the novels, is money — the same force that corrupts the natives of the city. On the simplest level, urbanfiction could announce that rumors of easy, gracious living in the cities are deluding fairy tales, for urban existence is a vicious struggle. What, however, of those who do "succeed" by accumulating wealth quickly? They too, we are told, are generally corrupted, because -43-

success in tile city means compromise of principle and the adoption of acquisitive values and predatory ways. This was the tragedy of Eugene de Rastignac in Balzac’s ?4re Goriot,who succumbed to a city which was not only corrupt, but specifically corrupted by money, by a leisure class frantic for display and enjoyment. Similarly, America's financial center came to be known as ’’money-mad," Even novels primarily concerned with other matters make capital of the cliche: Miller’s Tiae Destruction of Gotham, for example, makes repeated references to "this gold-getting city" and "the great, greedy, and money-getting city." The attitude is summed up by the epithet, "The very-first of the Ten Commandments of New York: * THGÜ SHALT NOT BE 28 POOR’’" One of the earliest attacks on the "city of gold" is James Penimore Cooper’s Home as Found (1838), which regards New York as a shabby center of commercialism and, worse, of speculation, A Wall Street broker in the novel offers this remarkable account of a pare el of land:. This was the farm of old Volkert Van Brunt, five years since, o^f of which he and his family had made a livelihood for more than a century, by selling milk. Two years since, the sons sold it to Peter Feeler for a hundred an acre, or for the total sum of five thousand dollars. The next spring Mr. Feeler sold it to John Search,,, for twenty-five thousand. Search sold it at a private sale to Nathan Rise for fifty thousand the next week, and Rise had parted with it to a company, before the purchase, for a hundred and twelve thousand, cash.' -Wj.-

Tb.e really frenzied financiers who figured in post- Civil War novels would have regarded the land sale described by Cooper as sound investments. The great speculations were yet to come; when they did, particularly with the Civil War, Wall Street attracted thousands of new dabblers, investors and plungers. James K. Medbery, in a sober if anecdotal fashion, undertook to enlighten the public in 1879 with his Men and Mysteries of Wall Street. "The slang of the stockboard," he wrote, "found its way to the drawing room." Gold was the favorite with the ladies, clergymen rather affected mining stock and petroleum, lawyers dabbled in Erie, and solid merchants "preferring their customary staples, sold cotton or corn for future delivery, or bought cotton or salt on margins." Of New York in general during the sixties, Medbery wrote: "Eminent before, this chief metropolis of the seaboard now assumed absolute financial supremacy. Its alter­ nations of buoyancy and depression produced corresponding perturbations in every state, city, and village, in the land."^^ If a few moralists regarded the actual phenome­ non as a sickening fever, the reading public showed un­ flagging interest in Alger-like tales of rags to riches. Sometimes the national legend was clothed in virtue. Judge Thomas Mellon, father of Andrew Mellon, was said to nave recalled the joy with which he came upon a dilapi­ dated copy of the Autobiography of Franklin, "poorer than myself," who by his own bootstraps was "elevated to 31 wealth and fame." Richard B. Kimball*s Henry Powers, Banker (i860) is a novel of financial Hew York, with the familiar oppo­ sition of country against the city as its central tension. The chief character is once again an upright young man who comes from the "purer atmosphere" of a small town to Hew York, where he is struck by the "unceasing hum of action." Of his first day in New York, Powers exclaims, "One wonder succeeded another, until I felt beside myself." But in retrospect, he says of the country youths who wish to leave their, native villages for New York: "God help the youth who first attempts itl"^^ A revealing conversation takes place between Powers and Amos Garter, a clerk in a commercial establishment, to whom the newcomer turns for assistance. Powers is told he must have a reference before he can expect to find a job. When he asks why this is so. Carter answers, "For your character, to be sure." Then Carter continues: "Nothing is taken for granted here, unless it is that every man is to be considered a rogue until he proves himself to be otherwise." -1^.6-

”But how can anybody take me for a rogue when they know nothing of me?” ”That is just the difficulty,” returned Carter. ”When nothing is known of you, you are taken at the worst possible valuation. Don’t you see that is the only safe business rule?” ”No, I don’t; with us in the country it is just the other way.” ”It won’t do here, though... You’ll soon understand why.” _ “New York must be a pretty hard place... Henry Powers learns his lessons well, and "succeeds.” But he knows that he is a much different man now — hard, practical, and divested of ideals. The only advice he has for other newcomers is to be ruthless in dealing with any "combatant,” or to return at once to the village. Obscure men who, like Powers, had made quick and vast fortunes in commerce, or out West in wheat, beef, steel, or mining, soon sought new fields to conquer. They and the women they married when they were young and poor became socially ambitious, if not for their own sake then at least for their marriageable daughters. ”The newspapers accounts of Hew York society thrilled the newly rich," and in "a great glittering caravan” the multi-millionaires by sheer weight of numbers broke through "the archaic barriers." The husbands bought their wives brownstone mansions, and the wives swung into the tide of fashion with "receptions, balls, and kettle­ drums, elegant equipages with coachmen in bright-buttoned' - 4 7 - '

livery, footmen in topboot»^ maid-servants and man­ servants, including a butler, and all the adjuncts of fashionable life in a great metropolis. The mad pursuit of "position" — based on money and the advan­ tageous marriages that money could arrange — was on. "Society in New York became concentrated and centralized like the railroads or the slaughterhouse system; and New York’s social court over-shadowed all others." 35 It was a society vhere some fluctuation of one’s fortune, if not one’s conduct, was possible, though the "important things" were inviolable. All was not lost, for example, if one could still dine at Mrs. Astor’s; nothing had been gained, however, if one couldn’t. Not to rate an invi­ tation to an Astor ball was in the polite world "equal to a sentence of banishment for life." The crudities of earlier New York novels no longer sufficed, by the latter part of the nineteenth century, to deal knowingly with this New York society and ius struggles to remain exclusive. The opportunity was there for fiction of subtlety and impact, but few American writers of the period were in any way equal to the task — or the opportunity. Here and there, even in minor novels, are flashes of genuine wit or insight. The dynamic personality of Colonel Carver, for example, really a secondary character in Ellen Olhey Kirk's Q.ueen Money (i860), makes of him the center of gravity in that novel — the main characters spinning about him and his finan­ cial schemes. The Colonel* s favorite remark, looked upon as humorous and even vulgar at first, turns into a pro­ nouncement of doom for anyone tinisting him, "Talk is talk, but money buys the land. " booms the Colonel at every opportunity, and he believes precisely in what he says. The Wall Street brokers and speculators from t he ranks of high society end as his dupes -- reversing the usual procedure for once. The succession of compromised principles, quick wealth, and social ambitions became a recurrent pattern in New York novels whose theme was the connection between material success and moral f ailure. Charles Dudley Warner*s trilogy, ten years in the making, was the most ambitious treatment of this theme in New York literature of the nineteenth century. The story of a Wall Street fortune and its morally paralyzing effects was begun in

A Little Journey Into the World (I6 8 9 ), continued in The

Golden House (I8 9 I4.), and brought to a close as a cycle which is about to begin all over again in That Fortune

(1 8 9 9 ). -ij.9—

Th.e first of these three novels is in almost all respects the best. Working with fresh materials, Warner parallels a financial rise and spiritual disintegration more subtly than in the two novels which follow; the prose itself has a high polish and several extraordinary turns of phrase. "Americans," one character remarks, "are born with a fear of not being busy." Or, b etter, "Life was a good deal like reading the dictionary and remembering 37 none of the words." If the novel has a basic de­ ficiency, Warner himself was well aware of it. In an introductory sketch to a collected edition of his works

(I9 OI4.), he points out that the "demoralization in (Margaret Debree’s) soul" was the result "of certain well-known influences in our existing social life." When

Margaret dies in childbirth at the end of the volume, it is not the end of her story — not in the sense that Lily Bart’s story reaches its pathetic climax in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth; it is an ending of convenience, for the really sordid details would just begin at that point. Warner’s introduction apologizes, "I found it utterly impossible to go on with what might have been the bitter, logical development of Margaret’s career. Margaret starts as what we recognize as a stock character, having come to New lork from a small New England -50-

town. She is not a country biirapkin, but a woman of

charm and culture, and she attracts the attention and

love of iiodney Henderson, a stock market operator of

great nerve and dubious methods. After they are married and settled in new York, hargaret starts b " u n d e r s tanôing"

Kodney’s ways and ends by condoning them, though her

cnscience troubles her, a restlessness takes hold of

She flung herself onto an easy chair before the fire, and rook up a novel. It was a novel with a religious problem. in vain she tried to be interested in it, ^t home she would have absorbed it eagerly; they would have discussed it; uhe doubts and suggestions in it would have assumed the deepest personal importance. It.might have made an era in her thoughtful counury life. Here it did nor appeal to her; it seemed so unreal and shadowy in a rife that had so much uore of action than reflection in it... bhe began to feel the influence of that life whwch will not,-let one stand still for a moment,"^'"'

it is symptomatic thau hargar-et should begin to feel that " ..L-ral lines were net so clearly dram: as sne nad "v c chought. as her husband’s for uune grows, so too do hei- social ambitions. khen their new town house is —51“

opened, her new-found passion for display is satisfied only by inviting a thousand guests to the house-warming. After the great ball a country preacher is reported as declaring, "Behold how vain are the triumphs of the worldl See the result of the worship of MammoirK My friends, the age is materialized, a spirit of worldliness is abroad. But, observés Warner, though t he plain country girl thanked God for such a warning, she dreamed of Margaret’s career, and the country boy studied the ways of Henderson’s success and resolved that he too would seek his fortune in the bad metropolis. The boy and girl cannot know that even at her moment of social triumph, Margaret quite rightly sees herself as a "dead soul" led astray by the city’s allurements. Golden House is a much less interesting and more diffuse account of another good-hearted personality going to pieces under the subtle, disquieting influences of Hew York social and financial life. Jack Delaney "was un­ fortunate in coming into a certain income of twenty thousand a year. That was just enough to paralyze effort, and not enough to permit a man to expand in any di­ rection."^^ He plunges successfully on Wall Street and leads a carefree, irresponsible life which alienates him from his wife. After a market panic, however. Jack’s —S2—

specvilative ventures are ruined. Financial failure re­ forms the wayward hero and forces him out of the social whirl of New York. The author’s fear of carrying . Margaret’s career to its logical conclusion is again evident in this eleventh-hour salvation of Jack’s soul. If we feel less cheated here it is because Jack, a colossal bore, never concerns us as did Margaret. That Fortune jumps eighteen years and never lands on its feet. After Henderson dies suddenly, his widow Carmen marries a shadowy hanger-on named Mavick, The rather stale romantic interest is supplied by their daughter who falls in love with a young Lochinvar out of the West. Philip Burnet is a law clerk who has written a fairly successful novel. But the hero cannot press his suit for the hand of the fabulously wealthy heiress who is so far above him in social station, until the girl’s papa stupidly loses all of the family fortune. The values of the New York socialites are once again shown to be false and evil as compared to the unspoiled manliness of the country boy making good in the city. Not the novel so much as the trilogy is partially saved by the speculator to whom Papa Mavick loses his money: Murad Ault is remarkably like Henderson of A Little Journey Into the World in his predatory ways, and there is a shiver of recognition as the new millionaire and his -53" - family are making ready to crash, society. The cycle is about to start again. Another novel whose plot, characters, and theme are all conditioned by New York’s financial activity is Upton Sinclair's The Money Changers (1908), a book of consider­ able power, if without the surface polish of Sinclair’s later Lanny Badd volumes. When the heroine starts on a merry whirl in New York with money made in stock specu­ lations, her friend ^lontague decides to inform himself about the workings of Wall Street. Major Venable, to whom he applies for advice, reels off story after story of financial deals which have fleeced the weak and made millionaires out of the ruthless. "It always gave him delight to witness Montague’s consternation over his pictures of the city’s corruption. Another friend and financier. General Brentioe, helps in the education of Montague: "You buy up a piece of land with as big a mortgage as you can get, and you put up a million-dollar building and mortgage that. You start a trust company, and you get out imposing advertisements, and the public comes in. Then you hypothecate your stock in company number one, and you have your dummy directors lend you more money, and you can buy another trust company. They call that pyramiding... The more of them you get, the more prominent you become in the newsoapers, and the more the public trusts y o u . "4-3 -54- '

Precisely these practices caused hatred and distrust of money-men, city bankers, and all of "Wall Street," which is not so much a place as a national villain. When the little man who faithfully invested in a trust company headed by a prominent figure asks, after any one of the numerous "crashes," what has happened to his few hundred grubby dollars, a city corporation lawyer informs him that the trust "failed." He can put the blame on "con­ ditions," The little man is seldom so philosophical; he knows where else to put the blame. I’he irony of Sinclair's novel is that when the villain, one of the money capital’s great figures, engineers a panic on wall Street, both of Montague’s informed advisers, the Major and the General, are caught completely off-guard and lose heavily. "What I have seen in the Metropolis," Montague concludes, "has filled me with dismay, almost wl th terror,"^ "Never talk about money," Mdith Wharton’s mother 45 told her, "and think about it as little as possible," But the girl grew up in a society where such tranquillity was impossible. If her class had lost the will or the nerve to make money- the vulgarians of new capitalism were invading Fifth Avenue with success in proportion to income. The Knickerbocker aristocrats were amused, haughty, repulsed — and above all, helpless. Where proud -55-

papas and impeccable mamas had once examined a suitor’s forebears, examination of his bank assets became the new order of the day. Daughters who could not catch foreign titles were married off to barons of pig iron, and the best one could hope for was that contact with civilisation would soon "soften" the boors. Money opened the doors of high society to newcomers; the old aristocrats, unfortunately, had many unpaid bills. For a picture of this New York, in lieu of a Balzac or a Thackeray, we have the acidulous satire of Edith Wharton, Cold-blooded pursuit of an "advantageous marriage" was an integral part of her'world, and in The House of Mirth (1 9 0 5 ) she pictures her society as no one else ever did. Her unique success came not only because she knew her society so well — others knew it just as well -- but because she could maintain that rare double vision, being bored by its limitations but never losing her affection for it, attracted by its splendor and tradition but re- . pulsed by its sham. Lily Bart is generously endowed with refinement, taste, breeding, and social connection; in fact, she has everything but money. She must marry well, and in pursuit of her game she drags through an exhausting routine of dinners, yachting trips, and week-end parties with the very rich.* Simon üosedale offers himself and his millions, but Simon is a Jew. The obvious choice *— the reader knows this immediately — is the cultured and sympathetic Lawrence Seldon; but he hasn't any money, or at least not- what Lily would consider money. A product of her race and place, she is for sale, but the bid must be high. The characterization of Lily is extraordinary in the way it tugs the reader in opposite directions. She is a snob, something of a hypocrite, and not even bright in failing to recognize Seldon as the man to marry; on the other hand, her determiziation engages our sympathy, and we know she deserves better than the fate which frustrates her every attempt to overcome a legion of difficulties. Trapped by a society whose standards she foolishly be­ lieves in, Lily is ill-used and destroyed. Just before her end, she has the opportunity to strike back at her tormentors — she could even threaten to do so and profit enormously with this weapon. But, like Henry James' American, Lily will not use the incriminating letters which have fallen into her hands. We are taught the price of morality in an immoral society. In 1920 Mrs. IVharton again turned her attention to an earlier Hew York society this time of the I87O 's. When, - 57 -

according to her memoirs, New York dinner tables had not got much beyond sounding a good aeal like a "local items" ii6 column in a country newspaper, the main character and man about society in The Age of Innocence begins to feel a distinct dissatisfaction with the social mores of his world. At the opening of the novel Newland Archer is as horrified as the other blue-bloods that the Welland family should publicly escort to the opera their cousin. Countess Ellen Olenska, a woman under the shadow of high society’s disapproval. As his personal sense of rebellion grows, however, it takes the shape of falling in love with the countess, and begging her to run away with him, which she refuses to do. Instead, Archer marries May ¥ellan4 who is not so much a character as a symbol of all the pat assumptions then considered "proper" or "in good form" by New York society. Their marriage becomes a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on one side and hypocrisy on the other. May is just shrewd enough to mention her pregnancy to Ellen Olenska at a crucial moment, thus keeping Newland with her while Ellen goes off to Paris to live out her life in a congenially intellectual atmosphere. It is interesting to note this almost unique basis for criticism of New York. Most “3 8—

American novelists adopted a provincial attitude and re­ garded the city as dangerously alluring; but in the true cosmopolite*s eyes, Victorian New York was merely strait­ laced without being virtuous, plushy without being com­ fortable, and active without accomplishing anything worthwhile.

In spite of her mother’s injunction, Edith Wharton thought and wrote much about money, not so much for what it could buy as for what it could not buy. The subject is never far from the surface in Old New York (192i|_), a collection of four New York novelettes, each one dealing with a decade from the l81|.0* s to the l8?0*s. "False Dawn” has strangely come to be the most celebrated of these, though it has neither the moral depth of "The Old Maid" nor the sharp cold irony of "New Year’s Day." The latter offers a particularly interesting view of a vanished New York society which "attached no great importance to wealth, but regarded poverty as so dis­ hy tasteful that it simply took no account of it." Had that society known what its wealth could do, it might better have understood the heroic Mrs, Hazeldean, the secret of her love for her husband, the cause of her re­ lations with Henry frest, and the reason for her "cold celibacy" after her husband’s death. This story, so -59- '

confusing and dilatory at first, soon begins to move with, a pace found in none of the others; its climactic scene is of such great power that one feels the injustice of the scant attention paid to this fine little jewel. No one has offered a more distinct and consistent portrait of old New York aristocracy than Mrs. Wharton, nor has anyone else etched quite so sharply that society’s daily habits, complacent propriety, and its moments of crisis. However narrow a world it may have seemed to iîrs. Wharton, however materialistic it may have seemed to Charles Dudley Warner and many other American novelists, it was unquestionably the "great world" of wealth and authority in the American popular imagination. Certainly it called forth the subtlest resources of novelists who wished to communicate an imago of New York as the wicked city. It was simple enough to paint frightening pictures of the city’s obvious dangers — its slums, prostitutes, and, as we shall see, its unbelievably corrupt political machine — but it took talents of a different order to show that even "success" could mean failure. Penetrating as writers like Sinclair, Warner, and Mrs. Wharton were, they could do little to destroy the popular image of New York as the golden city. Whether written from the point of view of the "outsider" who has come to test his strength -60- in tile city, or from the point of view of the "insider" who is pressed into re-examining the mores of his own milieu, the New York novel has always been able to draw on either half of the cultural dichotomy — which recog­ nized New York as both the city of light and the city of darkness.

At the time that William Tweed was the most powerful man in New York, the political corruption and complaisant attitude of the city* s inhabitants were summed up by a few lines of dialogue in a popular stage comedy. Several politicians are supposed to have fallen asleep at Mulligan*s home from too much entertainment, "Will I wake them?" asks Mrs, Mulligan. "Lave them be," replies her husband, "While they sleep the city*s safe,"^® Tammany Sail, ih ich had degenerated into a corrupt machine by l85i}., elected Fernando Wood the Mayor of New York that year and launched aa era of such widespread thievery and greed that by the close of the Civil War party bosses were boldly treating public funds as private property. The police, demoralized by chicanery within their own ranks, were unable or unwilling to enforce even a semblance of resnect for the law. The period enabled -61-

"tfilliaia M. Tweed and his gang to organize and accomplish. the most extraordinary scheme of municipal robbery that the world has record of." The power of fweed had grown so absolute that when finally faced with public exposure, his gruff answer was, "Well, what are you going to do about it?" At last lie realized how precarious his position was, and in belated desperation offered the owner of the New York Times a sum variously reported at from one to five million dollars to suppress the-paper’s attacks, and one k9 to five hundred thousand dollars to Thomas Nast, whose cartoons in Harper’s Weekly were particularly damaging, "My constituents can’t read," Tweed explained, "but they can all look at pictures. The attempts at bribery failed, and after several cloak-and-dagger escapes from the police -- once getting as far away .as Spain -- Tweed ended his career by dying in New York’s Ludlow Street jail. Dismal as his career was, some of Tweed’s raids on public funds have a grim kind of humor in retrospect. Almost beyond belief are the scandals involving a County Courthouse which cost twelve million dollars to construct (nine millions going for graft), the ten-dollar spittoons sold to the city for a thousand dollars each, and the special deals with cormpt corporations. When, for example. Boss Tweed, Jay Gould, and Jim 5'isk were directors of the Erie Railroad, they -62-

allowed no building material to be shipped into the city from the Pennsylvania Blue Stone Company unless the^ were made partners in the quarry. Cnee the partnership was granted, the Erie carried no other stone to the city — and Tweed arranged for the municipal government to buy all of the company*s output at top priees Even with Tweed deposed in 1Ô71, the pattern of municipal corruption was virtually unchanged. As a result of an 1881^ investigation, three aldermen were sent to prison, six fled to Canada, and ten others were indicted (though mysteriously never broughtto trial). Nevertheless, a half-doz“en years later the Tammany executive committee included a convicted murderer, another convicted of felonious assault, four professional gamblers, and six members of the supposedly discredited 52 Tweed gang.

In 1905 George Washington Plunkitt, long leader of the Fifteenth Assembly District and Sachem of Tammany, published a little volume of extraordinary revelations, in which he boasted of holding four public offices in one year and drawing salaries from three of them simul­ taneously. He made the fine distinction in his career between honest and dishonest graft. It wasn' ü honest to blackmail saloon-keepers and brothel-ownersj but if —63— '

tJarough his governmental duties he discovered that the city was going to build a park or bridge in a certain area, of course he bought the designated land cheaply and sold it to the city dearly. That was "honest graft," By way of further illustration, he labeled as dishonest the Republican superintendent of a Philadelphia almshouse who stole the zinc roof f2*om the public building and sold it as scrap. A New -^ork Democrat, on the other hand, would have taken his graft honestly; he would have arranged for the city authorities to put up a new roof, and he would have got the building contract for himself, "A half a century ago," Plunkitt explained, "our cities were small and poor, ‘i’here wasn't many temptations lyin' around... The politicians are now surrounded by all kinds of temptations." The body politic would have to learn that hard fact. As for the reformer, he just "can't last in politics. He can make a show for ? ■ 5 k a while; but like a rocket, he always comes down." That, of course, was precisely the thesis of Lincoln Steffens, who pointed out so forcefully that good govern­ ment could never be won permanently by a burst of reform energy. Only a consistently interested and informed electorate could "turn the rascals out" and keep them out. No such electorate has ever sustained itself in — 61^—

New York, though, the Fusion movement under Fiorello H.

LaGuardia probably came closest to it. Novelists were slow to adopt the effects of municipal corruption as a theme. Newspapers, magazines, and preachers led the way in the battle; not until late in the nineteenth centuoTy did New York politics get serious and skillful treatment.in American novels. By then, exposures of such a sensational nature had already taken place that many political hovels appeared merely to b e making a good thing of a popular subject. The earlier novels, if they noticed political matters at all, tended toward burlesque and satire. Cornelius Ha thews' The Career of Puffer Hopkins (l8I|.2), for example, is an obvious farce, commendable only for its energy and caricature. A seasoned political observer teaches the ambitious young Fuff er to roll his eyeballs, call upon the Heavens, and wave flags while mailing a political speech. Prom such training, he advances to the larger issues of stuffing ballot boxes, managing teams of repeat-voters, and starting riots at the polls if most convenient to his party’s cause. When one is as eager as Puff er to learn all the under-handed tricks, he is marked for success, and at the end of the novel nis district in New York sends him to Congress. —6S“

The novel of ifew York’s political corruption really developed, however, only after the downfall of Tweed. Then, in Taromany and the Boss, the New York novelists found their villain, J. F. Hume’s Five Hundred Ma.jority; or. The Days of Tammany (l8?2) philosophizes.vaguely on the ’’over-excitement and intensified partisanship” of big city politics, which finds ”its strongest and most dramatic expression” amongst the ’’diversified and eager masses" of New York. But the specific source of evil is Tammany Hall itself, which will oppose and crush anyone it can who has a mind and soul of his own. It tolerates no political freedom, because it knows no moral principle. It is a corporation, soulless and absolute. It knows no motive above self. It recognizes no standard higher than interest. It believes every man had his price, and its policy is to buy when it cannot drive or wheedle. It reduces everything to a commercial basis. It is organized corruption.^^ Evil as New York’s political system is, it draws the young hero-lawyer of the story to the city and stirs his am­ bition. At the end of the novel, however, the reader is clearly expected to sigh with relief when hero and heroine leave the metropolis and return to the simple life of the village. Novels dealing with other facets of New York life occasionally paused to consider the city's political evils. Edgar Fawcett’s The Evil That Men Do (I8 8 9 ) —66— ' reflects on how temporary was tiie work of nineteenth. century reformers and crusaders in liew York, Just as rings seem about to topple over, "the old order is re- S 7 established," Henry Harland*s Grandison Mather (I8 8 9 ) includes a sketch of a familiar type, Mr, Galligan, an official in the accounting office at City Hall, is a "boss" and may therefore sit with feet on desk and stove­ pipe hat on head, chewing a toothpick. The author asserts that the mere sight of him would show that he is either a "burglar, prize fighter, or a New York poli­ tician. The political essays which punctuate Edgar Fawcett's A Hew York Family (I89I) grow from the plot materials of the novel. The hero’s son is a dishonest lawyer who attempts to extort money from no less a master at confidence games than Boss Tweed himself, and he is soon put at a complete disadvantage. The role that politics plays in the plot serves as an excuse for re­ peated outbursts by the author against Tweed ("a Napoleon of swingdling") and his followers ("ti-aitors who had go snatched the robes of rule"). About a grand new court­ house, Fawcett writes : Nearly fifteen hundred thousand dollars were "appropriated" for "carpenter-work and timber alone",., more than this amount went for —67—

"furniture, " which turned out to be shabby and meagre at best. But what sarcasm can the coming historian employ as potent as the mere statement that over a half a million was spent for "plumbing and gas work," and the outlay for - thermometers reached the humorous yet melancholy cost of almost eight thousand dollars?®^ The blame, Fawcett declares, must rest on the people for allowing themselves to be "robbed with ruthless greed." Knowing that "thieves ruled," the city’s populace failed to do anything about it, and were therefore implicated in the corruption. The condition of evil which resulted "was almost unparalleled by ary human precedent, By all odds the outstanding nineteenth century novel of New York politics is Paul Leicester Ford’s The Honorable Peter Stirling (I89I4.). It has been variously suggested that the materials of the novel were based either on Grover Cleveland’s career or on Ford’s own experiences in the First Ward of Brooklyn. The province of this novel, at any rate, is the daily prac­ ticalities of macnine politics, the author managing to make his moral points without turning the text into a sermon. Peter, a young lawyer, comes to New York at the urging of his wealthy college chum. Watts, wno declares, "New York’s the only place in the country worth living in,Peter’s mother tries to dissuade him; "They say New York's full of temptations." —68— ”I suppose it is. Mother, to those who want to be tempted*” "Don't you think you could do as well here?” ”üp to a certain point, better* But New York has a big beyond*” 6ij. The attitude of the author and the cultural assump­ tions of the novel are expressed in that little interchange between mother and son, for whether or not the incidents are in aim way based on the author's personal experiences, Peter is obviously Ford's mouthpiece* The teiaptations of New York are there, but, we are told, only the morally uncertain are in any danger* Peter is so level-headed, practical, and well-grounded in the difference between right and wrong that never for a moment does his integrity or common sense fail him. He is, in fact, so phlegmatic and stodgy that he is of an ilk altogether different from the sterotyped "hero”* Plodding and middle-of-the-road about everything, he never­ theless makes eminent good sense when he finally arrives at a conclusion* He doesn't drink, for example, but feels that he has no right to keep others from so doing as long as the drinker does not become a public nuisance or menace* He further defends the saloon as "the poor man's club,.,. For that reason, I have always spoken for the saloon.” Peter's mother is, of course, shocked* From her village home she writes him as only a well-meaning but uncompre­ hending villager could; "Peter, Peterl To think that -69- tliree years in New York should, bring you to talk sol I knew New York was a sink-bole of iniquity, but I thought you were too good to be misled. Peter’s career demonstrates what he meant by New York’s having "a big beyond.” When impure milk causes the death of several children in Manhattan’s slums, Peter prosecutes so vigorously that he achieves a local reputa­ tion as the poor man’s champion. In time he becomes ad­ viser and political leader of the Sixth Ward, an area whose tumultuous history of Election Day riots are recorded as early as iS^lj. by Philip Hone in his Diary. By the end of the novel, Peter has become a power in city and state politics, and seems destined to become governor. An excellent political novel. The Honorable Peter Stirling is ât its best when shrewdly observing public events and the intricacies of machine politics with the hero as politician in the foreground; unfortunately, the author also felt obliged to supply a love interest, and as a philosopher of the heart he was somethirg less than successful. As a result of the attempt and the inade­ quacy, portions of this novel are downright embarrassing. “The average woman, “ Ford fatuously remarks at one point, “loves a man, aside from his love for her, for his physical strength, and for his stiff truth telling.This is. -70- nevertheless, a more revealing and engaging work than any other novel of New York politics in the nineteenth century. It is especially notule for treating urban political corruption as the complex issue that it is, rather than relying completely on the trite image of Tammany bosses growing fat at the expense of the city.

The connections between politics and prostitution were fully developed in New York fiction only after the first World War, though considerable awareness and interest had already been shown by nineteenth century writers. Joaquin Miller's The Destruction of Gotham (18863 includ­ ed an impassioned sermon on the topic, and The Spider and the Fly; or, "Tricks, Traps, and Pitfalls of City Life, by One Who Knows (1873) luridly demonstrated that New York prostitution was a major industry. Procurement was carried on through fake advertisements, women's «aployment agencies (called "Intelligence Offices") and fortune-tellers’ dens, with further assistance from the "too great leisure, and unhealthy excitements of the theatre and b a l l - r o o m . "^7 Within a three-mile radious of City Hall, four hundred known houses of prostitution flourished during the I87O ’s. "There are assignation houses in the city of New York, where, by the connivance of the mistress, drugs will be mingled with wine or other refreshments. The girls in -71- tiiose houses and street-walkers who were under-paid drudges adding to their income on weekends totaled, by police estimates, not less than ^,000. Since the aver­ age "working life" of the prostitute was reckoned to be only about five years, a large-scale and continuous pro­ gram of procurement had to be carried on. Small wonder, then, that an innocent girl who came to New York from the country to try a new life was regarded by the home-folk as very foolish or very brave or a little of both.

The lurid warnings by "One Who Knows" were shortly to be substantiated by such sociological studies as George Kneeland*s Commercialized Prostitution in New York City (1913), which surveyed the "social evil" for the period of 1910 to 1912. The figure of 2$,000 prostitutes which had been estimated by the author of "Tricks and Traps of New York City" was probably accurate; by 1912 Kneeland could state that there were no less than 30,000, and probably as many as 50,000, In bars, hotels, theatres, dance halls, excursion boats, parks, and restaurants, "prostitution in New York City was widely and openly ex­ ploited as a business enterprise."^^ The procurement of new recruits to the profession was not too difficult, for part-time or full-time prostitution suggested itself or was forced upon many under-paid girls in major cities. “72” Eue eland reports that a study made of girls committed from New York City to the State Reformatory for Women at Bedford Hills, New York, revealed that the earnings of those young women before prostitution ranged from an average minimum of four dollars a week to an average maximum of eight dollars a week. ’*It will be noted that even the average maximum is below $9, an anount generally conceded to be the minimum at ;daich a girl can live decently in New York City.”70 Prostitution as a large-scale enterprise could not be carried bn, of course, without the connivance of the police and a corrupt political machine, facts which were periodically exposed by such different forces of reform as the minister Parkhurst, the muckraker Steffens, and novelists with a social message. The first major novel of this genre, and perhaps still the best one ever written in this country, is Susan Lenox; Her Fall and Rise (1915) by David Graham Phillips, a crusader in pol­ itics and a literal realist in his treatment of sex. His dense, two-volume novel chronicles the life of a de­ cent girl with normal impulses, who is ill-used by the forces of urban life. Alone and friendless in New York, Susan is drugged and forced into prostitution by a “Cadet” — not an uncommon occurrence during Tammany - 7 3 ” rule, according to the reports of Lincoln Steffens, Because the "boss" of the houses takes a fancy to her, she is able to learn of New York* s intricate system of organized prostitution, in which politicians, judges, and police officials exact tribute from brothels in return for immunity from prosecution. Her one true love affair -- oddly asexual in the midst of this vast tale of debauchery and lust — is ended by the murder of the playwright Brent, who has trained her for a career on the stage. Only then, as the beneficiary of Brent * s will and "hard" enough to face life without losing every battle, is Susan freed at last from the adverse fate which had trapped and plagued her. Her release comes only after a long history of iron­ ic defeats. When she sold her body for the first time to get money for her sick friend, he died just before she was able to help him; when she agreed to help the New York dress house (where she was a model for a time) by "obliging" an important buyer from Chicago, she later found out that the buyer would have placed his order with her company even if she had refused to oblige him; when she escaped from the procurer Freddie Palmer, it was bad luck that she happened to be seen by his henchmen inhile she is shopping, and forced back to his "house," It is not true that, as Oscar Cargill has stated, "we are —7ii-- irrltated*”71 We are rather awed that she keeps her sanity, her health, and her good heart; we are struck, too, by the profound irony of her career. Her heroic struggle to rise is of no avail as fortune deals her blow after blow, but from the last and bitterest blow — the murder of Trent — comes her liberation. That Phillips could regard Susan sympathetically vas itself a break with the tradition of urban novels. Though Crane and Dreiser had preceded him in this re­ spect, Phillips went even further in explicitly allying himself with his heroine * s cause. She was not merely a fallen woman for the moralists to cluck their tongues over, but quite literally the victim of a society which countenances the commercialization of sex and its sub rosa control'by politicians and gangsters. Sex, Phillips felt, should be treated by novelists with "simple cand­ or and naturalness, rather than reverently or rakishly." In an introduction to the novel, he contrasts his atti­ tude with what he calls the Anglo-Saxon and the Continent­ al attitudes, both of vhich falsely spice up innocuous facts of nature, one like a figure salaciously draped, and the other like a nude figure salaciously distorted, Phillips, however, seems to divest sex of passion; Susan's career is therefore mu.ch different from that of Nana, a better-known courtesan of modern fiction. Zola, “75“ too, had little patience with either the sly or repress­ ive treatments of sex in fiction, but his alternative was much more positive than Phillips* bland assurance that we need only **be natural” in our attitude. The great Frenchman knew better than Phillips how much of the animal there is in humanity, and he knew too how the will and intellect could be degraded by sexual passion out of control. Thus Phillips * panorama of New York vice never finds so revealing a symbol of degradation as Zola*s Muffat, tho is beaten by Nana as he crawls about the floor of her bedroom, naked and on all fours. It is the power of sex, too, which turns Nana*s greed into vulgarity and her boredom to cruelty, whereas Susan*s myriad experiences make her "wiser” but leave her personality virtually unchanged. Both Susan Lenox and Nana are strongest when deal­ ing with the demimonde of New York and Paris, and weakest when revealing life in elegant and cultured salons. There is in both novels a certain exaggeration, a certain straining to describe the sumptuous and luxurious. Zola, >ho depended much upon his notebooks, gained entree to great houses only in the latter part of his career, and he regretted that he had not known them when he was writing such novels as La Curee and Nana.The -76- great realist Balzac had previously declared, in ex­ plaining a similar dilemma of his own, that a writer could guess what goes on in kitchens, but he must learn by e^erience what goes on in drawing rooms — "that you cannot guess." The story of Susan*s rise is a long one — un­ doubtedly too long, for Phillips himself intrudes too often and at too great length — but no other Hew York novel manages so well to drench us in the details of politically protected prostitution in all its violence, greed, and corrupting influence» Though there is a core of sentimentalism in this portrait of a gangster's "girl" who is intelligent, interesting, and pure of soul, there is also a balancing sense of realism in Phillips * novel. Minus the honesty and the attention to accuracy in vital detail, the result would have been far less convincing, as it is, for exanple, in Waldo Frank's jazzed-up tale, Rahab (1922). This story of an ex-prostitute, now a "madame," is told in the form of her chaotic, boozy remembrances, and cast in tortured, poetic language which is frequently absurd. "Let us not rend the beauty of oUr parting with inquisitive words," one character says, " - words that can only claw a truth. The prostitute, the "paid-off" policeman, and the landlords wh? extract exorbitant rent for apartments - 77 - tiirned into ’‘houses” — all form part of the young­ ster * s molding environment in'Michael Gold* s Jews With­ out Money {1935)* ”fizr^s infested the dance halls. Here they picked up the romantic factory girls who came after a day*s work. They were smooth story-tellers. They seduced the girls the way a child is helped to fall asleep, with tales of magic happiness.For Michael Gold, New York is evil because its prostitutes and poli­ ticians are symptoms — like the sweatshops and tenements — of an economic order which deludes the common man with promises of a good life and then forces him to live in want and misery. The victim in such left-wing novels is no longer the innocent country youth who is dazzled and betrayed by the evil city, but the “common man” everywhere, who is exploited by industrial capitalists. "Wall Street," as we have remarked earlier, becomes a pervasive villain in this folklore. Of the younger, left-wing naturalists, the most vio­ lent and macabre is Benjamin Appel, who in Runaround (1937) examines the neighborhood intrigues of New York* s vote-getting racket, and in Power-House (1939) draws a vivid, melodramatic picture of the city* s underworld being protected by "fixers," machine bosses, ward-heelers, and police and judiciary officials. "The Power-House" is the supreme boss controlling the rackets, the houses of -78- prostitution, and machine politics, "The gambler, the politician, the fixer*,..." is the cry of Bill Trent, a local "Brain Guy" with plans for large-scale operations, "The small time’s always gutter stuff. Something’s happen­ ing through this whole God damned city.... .They call it monopoly,"73 Benjanin Appel, for all his distortion and sensa­ tionalism, depicts better than any other contemporary writer the irç)act of organized crime on New York, not as a problem in personal morality, but as a social force which is sickening the., entire social structure unto death. In his novels of New York come together all the strands of evil suggested by Phillips, Frank, and Gold — the modern urban threat to all decency and all happiness, which can no longer be met by "reform" in the old sense. The whole order, says Appel, must be exposed, crushed, and cast out, to be replaced by a New Order in xh ich a "power house" can never again gain control of the metro­ polis. Thus, in a century of writing, the New York novelists first warned against the evil city, then held up a mirror to reflect the ways of urban life to a nation of fascinated villagers, and finally became social forces hoping to change the ways of New York and make it some­ thing which it never was and perhaps never can be. At their best, these novels did much to explain the bucolic -79- fear of tile great evil city, and to chronicle the aggressive spirit of an age which refused to quail as the moral ists would have wished before the multitudi­ nous dangers of temptation. One way to cope with the evil city was to denounce it from the safety of a coun­ try seat; another 'wa^ was to go to the city and attempt to conquer it. From the latter choice emerged the stuff of urban history and literature. Chapter Three: A Romarfc ic View

In 1915 James Huneker wrote of New York that it wDuld demand "the resources of a Dostoievsky to paint our East Side in all it's exotic, variegated, and bewild­ ering colours»” There, he declared, was the raw, rich material for the Great American Novel» "But," he asked, "where is the novelist?”^ A similar question had been asked less rhetorically some thirty-five years before by Brander Matthews, vdao discussed the problem in the early l880’s with his close friends, and fellow New York writers, Henry Guy 1er Bunner and William Henry Bishop. They talked of "the individuality, the picturesqueness, and the charm of New York," and the "color everywhere, unending movement, incessant vitality," rich sources which Matthews himself had begun to use in his "snapshots of the metropolis" and Vignettes of Manhattan. Matthews pointed out that "London had been painted on the broad canvases of a host of robust novelists" and "Paris had been glorified by an immortal succession of men of genius"; in fact, "the novel of Boston was then more abundant than the novel of New York." Writers, he declared, had unfortunately not yet recognized the literary richness of New York soil, though "the field was here, and it was fertile, and furthermore it had not yet been pre-empted."^ If we remember that Matthews had attained considerable distinction as a writer and scholar, we can only conclude

go —81— that the vast New York literature prior to the ’eighties had been rather quickly forgotten. We can assume, of course, that Matthews knew some of the earlier New York novels: Cooper’s Home As Found, for example, and George William Curtis* Trumpsi he specifically mentioned and admired Cecil Dreeme, a posthumously published novel by Theodore Winthrop, who had died at the age of thirty-three on the battlefield of Great Bethel in l86l. But the bulk of popular fiction, which had been carefully designed to play on a national hate-love attitude toward New York, was completely lost. Though much of this literature de­ served no better fate, there is nevertheless a certain irony in the loss. The battle for realism waged so brave­ ly by Howells,. Crane, and Dreiser -- which was regarded as epoch-making in American letters at the end of the nine­ teenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries -- had already been fought, as we shall see, in the l850’s. Still, in the l880’s, Matthews could only find a handful of novelists ^ o seemed aware of New York’s possibilities as literary source material. He mentioned his boon companion, H. C, Bunner, as well as William Henry Bishop, Thomas Janvier, Henry James (specifically for Washington Square), and Edgar Fawcett (whose aspira­ tion, Matthews sighed, was more evidait than his inspira­ tion) ,3 Other than these few writers, Matthews wuld have —82— us understand that no one used New York as a literary setting. His own novels, as a result, take on the self- conscious attitude of an experiment or, one who has de­ cided to do for the great American metropolis what other novelists had done for the great European metropolises. No one had done this before, Matthews concluded, because of historical rather than literary circumstances. New York’s "sparse defenders" prior to i860 were still too close to the days of the draft riots, the Tweed Ring, and the Black Friday of Fisk and Gould, His own attitude toward New York was of course per­ fectly clear. He recognized the city’s deficiencies and dangers, but his primary interest was in the quaint, the colorful, and the romantic. His New York novels were neither cheerful nor sad, but almost always wistful, some­ how suggesting a pale young man talking to himself in a moonlit garden. The very manner in -fchich he tried to • explain New York’s "sparse defenders" reveals his attitude toward city life, as does his romantic list of scenses and events worthy of the novelist’s attention; the annual Horse Show at Madison Square Garden, families pouring into lower Central Park on Sundays, the hushed quiet of Wall Street on a holiday, the shrieking trains of the "L," and Mulberry Bend. This may also explain his admira­ tion for Theodore Winthrop’s Cecil Dreeme, with its sharp vignettes of lower Fifth Avenue, quaint restaurants, a night -83- at the opera, and maay scenes of deserted side-streets. Of the novels Matthews wrote to Illustrate his theory, A Confident Tomorrow (1899) is perhaps the best and certainly the most pertinent to our discussion. This novel he called his remote imitation of Pendennis, "which almost every novelist is moved to imitate sooner or later in the practice of his art."4 There are, indeed, many superficial similarities. Both novels intimately reveal their authors and are at least partly autobiographical. Though neither one is a first novel, they both read that way, for they tell the story that so many fledglings must get out of their systems — the hero *s awakening to the call of literature as a profession and his trials in the great metropolitan world of letters. The similarities between author and character are clearest in Pendennis. Thackeray’s mother and stepfather resided on an estate not unlike Pairoaks, and the author’s career at preparatory school and Cambridge was as erratic as Pen’s at "Oxbridge"; both published verses in rural newspapers, read briefly for the bar, deserted law for journalism, and then plunged into the excitement of London’s literary world. "I wonder," Thackeray wrote of Pen to Mrs. Brookfield, "whether he is interesting to me from selfish reasons, and because I fancy we resemble each other in maiy points," In the case of Matthews and his major character. Prank Bartain, we notice an interesting deviation from — 8 l { - ~ fact* As a youngster, Matthews traveled all over the United States with his wealthy father and once made a long trip abroad, "Borne" was a luxurious house on lower Fifth Avenue, where he was surrounded by a fine library and many beautiful objects of art. But according to his choice of literary tradition, these were not the proper circumstances for romantic, pure-hearted heroes. So Frank Sartain becomes a Kansas boy of extremely modest means who has absorbed all the schooling and culture his home town has to offer, and at the beginning of the novel he is about to enter the big city with a manuscript in his suitcase. Like a long succession of male Cinderellas before him, he is ready, if a bit awed, to give "manly" battle for his place in the metropolitan sun. The country boy is at a disadvantage for a time, and he is almost ready to admit that New York is too much for him — too complica­ ted, too sophisticated — and that "he had best go back to Topeka,Even the New York noises make him lose heart, for they remind him of "the call of some strange beast, hungry and insatiable, and insisting upon its human sacrifice night and morning,But Frank is the hero who is going to conquer the city, and after a time "the roar that rose from it no longer smote upon Sartai.n's ears as the shriek of a wild beast; it rang there now rather as a paean of progress; it was the chant of triumphant work*"7 -85- It is for such, passages (in addition to the general spirit of his fiction) that we classify Matthews * view of New York as romantic. For him the city is evidence of man*s worthiest achievements properly understood, the frenzied activity of the city is ”triumphant work,** the struggle to expand is **progress, ** and victory is the re­ ward of virtue. Sartain soon begins his "literary experiences" in New York, working for a publishing house, polishing his own fiction, and acting as editor of the unsuccessful Manhattan, "a magazine by New Yorkers for New Yorkers" (wiich includes a series of articles on the "villages" of Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia), There are some satirical pictures of the rivalries among literary hacks and vindictive editors, but Matthews is much more mellow and genial than Thackeray in analogous portions of Pendennis. Of the literary figures met by Sartain, he takes most warm­ ly to the middle-aged Meredith Vivian, a well-known New York novelist. The fledgling suggests to the master: "I suppose you have the same love for New York that Dickens had for London and that Daudet had for Paris2"^ Sartain himself dashes off a New York novel, whose inadequacies he recognizes as the result of limited first-hand exper­ iences. "What tempted me, " he explains, now speaking obviously as the author*s mouthpiece, "was the greatness —86— of tile opportunity New York affords to the novelist.**^ Both Sartain and Matthews were keenly aware that great cities like Paris and London had been "done," and New York was singly begging for similar major attention. "Then it was that Sartain resolved to write the prose epic of the great city; to try to do for New York what Zola had done for France. It is interesting to note that from the very be­ ginning of the novel Sartain’s vision of the city is con­ ditioned by literary sources. Seeing a parade of the famed New York 7th, he recalls Theodore Winthrop ’ s account in Cecil Dreeme "of the way that regiment had marched down Broadway more than thirty years before.Primarily, how­ ever, what this romantic Kansas boy in New York has in mind are analogous young heroes of foreign fiction. "He likened himself to Eugene de Rastignac, gazing bitterly down on Paris the afternoon of old Goriot’s funeral, and going to dine with the dead man’s daughter.The metropolis -- whether New York, London, Paris, or St. Petersburg -- may represent a unique challenge to the heroes of fiction, but the characters who spring to Sartain’s mind are really of an order much different from himself. Sartain has no Vautrin to educate him, nor has he Raskolnikov’s diseased belief in supermen who are ab­ solved of communal responsibility; he does net even have the genial worldliness of Major Pendennis, whose cynicism -87- conceived of nothing worse than "a good name, good manners, and good wits,” Sartain is simply a good- hearted boy who left the Midwest for New York because "he knew that a promised land lay before him"^^3 at the end of the novel he is still very much what he was at the beginning. The romantic qualities of Matthews ’ novel are em­ phasized by the inevitable love interest. The eldest daughter of Meredith Viviaa falls in love with Sartain — a fact which is perfectly clear to the reader and almost every character in the novel except, of course, the roman­ tic hero himself. He, in turn, is smitten with Esther Dirck, and their affair operates in the tradition of courtly love. He loses his heart to her instantly, though her face is veiled when he first sees her. He feels him­ self infinitely unworthy of anyone so pure and good as Esther, though he is himself almost bloodless in his stiff and tedious virtue. He hopes for an opportunity to prove his devotion by services to the lady, and dreams of himself catching the bridle of her runaway horse; for a long time he even follows the code of secrecy, lest his love be dis­ covered • He keeps his secret from Esther so well that they almost miss a happy ending, but after eighteen months of hesitant courting, they finally get married. This gay - 88- event takes place (and the novel ends) not a moment too soon, for even so polished and "professional" a writer as Matthews evidently could go to pieces over a too- romantic situation. After one of the hero’s visits to the heroine, she goes to the door-knob which he had held in his hand during the last few minutes of their conver­ sation, and "after a virginal glance around, to make sure no one could see her," she stoops and kisses it again and again.All works out well for the hero, both in his romantic and literary endeavors, and as the title A Con­ fident Tomorrow suggests, even brighter prospects are in view. We find, then, that the New York of this novel is primarily a cheerful setting for a cheerful story, signif­ icant only as it takes its place in a tradition which established the metropolis as a "promised land." Matthews’ enthusiasm for New York as story material was most heartily endorsed by his good friend, E. G, Bunner. Beginning his career as a journalist, Bunner became the mainstay of Puck, one of the earliest American comic weeklies to establish itself. In Puck and several other magazines, he published a profusion of verse and prose, jokes, parodies, character sketches, and editorials during his long career. How close a bond there was be- teen Bunner and Matthews may be surmised from the l88ij. publication of a collection called In Partnership; Studies in Story-telling, containing three stories by Bunner, -89- three by Matthews, and two which were actually written in collaboration, A short time-later, in 1036 and 1887, Bunner published his only two novels, both of which are local color studies of New York life, Bunner found -a romantic formula for his New York fiction which achieved vast popularity. He often spoke with disdain of the "bourgeoise conservatism" of the Village -- "but the French Quarter, ah, there was Bohemia, and there the true Pfaffian tradition survived. This Latin locale supplies axrple "atmosphere" for his first novel. The Midge (1086), whose narrative is frequently interrupted by little tone pictures of the city; The winter was nearly over. It was a soft, moist, slush day — toward the end of February, The city was soaked in soiled snow, rapidly melting into soiled water. The shop doors were open, and through them came the rumble of stage-ridden Broadway, pierced by the high, shrill, humming ring of the car-wheels on the tracks,16 In the slight plot, young lovers overcome several dis­ heartened difficulties, aided by a middle-aged bachelor who is himself secretly in love with the heroine. Though Brander Matthews later adopted the identical plot for The Last Meeting (1901), his is a much less successful novel. More robust a writer than Bunner, Matthews nevertheless lacked his colleague's elegance and wit, Bunner*s other novel. The Story of A New York House

(I8 S7 ) is similar to The Midge in its wistful tone and —90— romantic plctnres of New York local color* His simple plots, happy endings, Latin characters, graceful style, and nostalgic sighs found a large reading audience and maay imitators, none of whom ever achieved his popularity. The same quarter of New York was plied with some success by Thomas Janvier, who like Bunner was a journal­ ist and editor for much of his life. Romance and local color were Janvier*s passion all through his career, so it is not surprising that he would find his material in the quaint pockets of charm rather than in the mainstream of îfenhattai life. Such collections as Color Stodies (1885), Stories of Old New Spain (1891), Embassy to Provence (1893), and In Old New York (1891*.) typify his long interest in local color. Perhaps his best-known collection is At the Casa Napoleon (1911*-), published the year following the author*s death, and including materials which were written as early as 1891. The stories concern various visitors to New York who stop at a small Pranco- Italian hotel that had "an agreeable down-at-heel air." The characters — whether gamblers, adventurers, local Quarter people, or troupers — were thrown together for color and moral contrast, in a way ^ i c h suggests the influence of Bret Harte. The hero of the title story is again one of the host who had heard that business houses in New York were desperately seeking the services of —91— upright young men from the country. He suffers dis­ appointments, of course, but this is the New York of romantic fables, and all ends well when the hero has his fortune in hand at last. P. Hopkinson Smith was another of the turn-of-the- century writers whose romantic interest in the pictur­ esque led to the publication of singularly cheerful New York novels. The protagonist of Colonel Carter of Cartersville (I8 9 I) is an incarnation of the Southern "quality** gentleman, in this case trusting, courtly, naive, and perennially optimistic. Imbued by Smith with a full-blooded personality. Colonel Carter escapes stock characterization, and is easily distinguished, for example, from his Southern colleagues. Major Yancy and Judge Kerfoot. The Colonel* s mission in New York is to find financial support for a grandiose but impractical railroad scheme to provide Cartersville with an outlet to the Atlantic coast. The road and plan for financing it are both nonsense, but an English syndicate agent, who is enticed to the Carter plantation, pays handsomely for the mining rights to a coal field on the Colonel's grounds. Carter, who in another novel might have been fleeced by the big city financiers, ends his career happily in this case, able for the remainder of his days to dispense Southern hospitality without having to worry -92- about such, trifles as paying the bills. Another of Smith*s novels. The Fortunes of Oliver

Horn (1 9 0 2 ), adopts a particularly enthusiastic and ro­ mantic attitude toward Hew York. The hero of this part­ ly autobiographical novel is once again the young man seeking larger horizons in Hew York, as did Peter Stirling, Frank Sartain, and so many others; in this case, rather than a lawyer from New England or a writer from the Midwest, the hero is a painter from the South. Of the people in his home neighborhood, he declares; *'I*m beginning to think that about half the people in Kennedy Square are asleep.” His first impressions of New York are those already familiar in this pattern of fiction; the roar and din of the city is like a "mael­ strom which seemed ready to engulf him. ” But before long the determined Southerner finds his bearings, and the novel is punctuated with rhapsodies dedicated to the great city, Oliver becomes aware "that a new world had opened before him, — a world as he had always pictured it, full of mystery and charm. ...and as new and strange as if its members had been denizens of another planet," What kind of company did Oliver enjoy for the first time in his life2 "Real live painters who sold their pictures..And real musicians, too, who played at theatres.... Surely his happiness was full to the brim." Smith, himself a painter -93“ of some note In his own day, made e^qilicit in the second volume of this novel what special place New York holds in American culture. Many devotees of the arts, he wrote, had landed on the barren shores of America, barren of even the slightest trace of that life they had learned to love so well in the Quartier Latin in Paris and in the Ratskell- ers of Munich and Düsseldorf, -- and had wandered about in the uncongenial atmosphere of the commonplace until this retreat had been opened to them, 17 "This retreat" was the art life of metropolitan New York, whether of the garrets or salons, where pupils and masters, poets and musicians as well as painters, women as well as men, could all gather in easy, congenial society to ex­ change philosophies of art or simply "talk shop," without being "queer" outcasts from "respectable" society» Small wonder, then, that Smith, like Matthews, became a spirited champion of New York in his fiction, Henry James, William Henry Bishop, and Edgar Fawcett are the remaining authors singled out by Matthews as the ■ earliest to make use of the New York scene in their novels. These three, however, are considerably more critical of the city’s ultimate effect on its inhabitants than such writers as Matthews and Bunner, James, in fact, made it abundantly clear that he disliked the city; its noise wore on his nerves. He was an eager observer- of the social scene, but he found in the city much "individ­ ual loneliness" and "a touching vision of 'waste.A product of his observations is Washington Square (I8 8 I) largely an "indoor novel" about a father’s brutal rational­ ism, his goodhearted daughter’s pathetic inability to work out her one great problem happily, and the evil intentions of a suitor who ironical ly is the only one who could have made poor Catherine happy. What local color Brander Matthews found in this novel was of a subtle order: the contrast between Washington Square, which, James w?ote, had a "riper, richer, more honorable look,,,,the look of having had something of a social hist o r y " ^9 and the rest of the city which was "growing so quick" and forever "going straight up town.There is really nothing which would otherwise suggest that the novel could not have been set in Boston or Philadelphia. James’ later use of New York in The Jolly Corner (1908) is in striking opposition to any cheerful view of the city. In a ghost­ ly fashion, the protagonist of that novelette meets his alter ego, a symbolically disfigured other self who might have been, had he entered the city’s social and commercial life instead of living abroad. Though virtually all the action takes place in a Fifth Avenue town house, the broader implications of the novel hardly recommend success in New York as worth pursuing» William Henry Bishop agreed with Matthews and Bunner that New York was a potentially rich background for fic- -95- tion, but he differed from them in his satirical view of the city as a spectacle of pomp and vanity. The House of a Merchant Prince (I8 8 3 ), which he wrote to illustrate his argument, is a long and occasionally absorbing novel, but so loose in structure as to diffuse its effect, There are many targets of the author’s shafts of satire; the pastor of a fashionable Fifth Avenue church whose vague and plea­ sant sermons are designed primarily to offend no onej the literati who are always straining to be brilliant; the salons (reminiscent of similar settings in Cooper’s Home As Pound) at which the local poets always happen to have a few of their own things along to read; the fads of bored urbanites, today for î'îrs. Browning’s poems, tomorrow for the sight of a "noble savage" brought east from some reservation by a wealthy "philanthropist." But above all, this is a satire of men who would plan not only their own destiny, but that of several generations of their offspring as well. Rodman Harvey arranges the education and training of his children and the entailment of his fortune as carefully as if he were planning the future of an empire. Obviously, it all comes to nothing. The children are a commonplace lot, and the merchant prince turns out to have a compromised past as well. His grand new home on Fifth Avenue, a gaudy building with an essential flaw in its cornerstone, is the symbol of his dishonored career and sudden destruction. —96—

The main artery of this novel is Fifth Avenue it­ self, -which for Bishop and many other Ne-w York writers became the equivalent of the Mississippi River in Mark Twain*s Hannibal fiction. Here one gets the real feel­ ing of New York's constant and almost unbelievable growth. Ever higher and higher on the avenue went Rodman Harvey and the other new merchant princes to build the mansions demanded by socially ambitious daughters and mamas. South of these houses were the shops and former mansions now turned into genteel boarding houses or small hotels, and still further downtown were the dilapidated properties which had become commercial offices or slums. The race uptown (on other main thoroughfares too, of course) was more than an index of the city’s growth;, it was a means whereby the rich could live apart from the poor. And spotted all along the Avenue were the churches from which came forth the elegance of the city for the Sunday noon-time stroll — "a procession unique of its kind."21

Edgar Fawcett’s A New York Family (I89 I) is a domestic history similar to Bishop’s House of a Merchant Prince and B-unner’s Story of a New York House. The in­ gredients are once again the merchant whose produce busi­ ness expands with a mushrooming city, and the socially ambitious daughter who for prestige unhappily marries a -97- Knickerbocker swell in financial difficulties* The father hopes to establish a great family tradition, moves uptown to a grand house, but then suffers dis- appointment when all of his four children get into serious scrapes and prove unfit to carry on any tradi­ tion except a humdrum and uncertain one. There is much in Fawcett^s novel that might nevertheless inspire self-confidence in readers looking to the city for success. What the author says, in effect, is that the city* s treasures will fall to any who are ambitious, hard-working, and honest; the scoundrels, the wastrels, and the idlers receive"their just due in Fawcett*s New York. The novels discussed here generally purport to be cheerful about New York’s quaint pockets of charm or colorful past. But there is also a recurrent note of melancholia, a feeling that the city’s vitality is unnerving and aimless. Even in the novels of Brander Matthews, who was in love with the city and as uncriti­ cal as most lovers are, an indecisiveness asserts itself; the growth of New York stands for progress, but also demands "human sacrifice"; the city is a place of adven­ ture and excitement, but also the grounds on which "pitched battles” are forever raging. The glimpses into the past never suggest a seiise of permanence or achieve- - 9 8 - insnt; buildings are forever being torn down, traditions being discarded for the sake of fashion or expedience, and family ambitions crumbling in a single generation. The city’s growth, rather than suggesting a process of health, gives us the sense of viewing a monster which Henry James has described as "some steel-souled machine- room of brandished arms and hammering fists and opening and closing jaws#"^^ We might even say that some of the most "romantic" of these novels, in their notes of satire and disenchantment, have a legitimate place on the fringe of a vast literature of protest against the excesses and artificialities of New York life. Matthews believed he was breaking ground with his New York fiction. This belief was inaccurate, of course, but it is true that he did much to call the attention of other writers to a still fertile field. Yet the fiction of Matthews and his group, in general, was seldom arrest­ ing and never significant. They were, perhaps, too timid. Matthews himself explained in his memoirs that when he undertook to use the New York scene for his fiction, he never had in mind the writing of the Great American Novel; indeed, he added that he hadn’t even in mind the hope of writing the Great New York N o v e l . ^3 The fact of the matter is that he didn’t do either. America, he knew, was too various for his muse, and New Y)rk seemed to him as various -99- in its way as the nation itself. He was right, logic­ ally, but just such sane logic must have had much to do with the limitations of his fiction. New York, as he said, needed "doing," just as London and Paris had been "done." But we can only find him lacking when he tries to make a full meal out of what Dickens or Balzac would have regarded as a morsel. In short, this champion of the genteel, romantic tradition, like the others in his group, was simply unequipped to create significant fiction from urban materials. Chapter Pour: The Islands of Manhattan

Both attitudes toward New York — centered in myths about a Promised Land and an evil city — charac­ terize the vast literature about New York's semi- assimilated colonies* These self-contained communities, far more numerous in New York than anywhere else in the world, have long given the city a quality unique even among "world capitalse" In the garrets of Greenwich Village artists, the overflowing tenements of Harlem Negroes, and the ghetto-like settlements of European immigrants, one could — in Konrad Bercovici's phrase — ”go around the world in New York." These islands unto themselves have done much to make New York and the body of fiction about it appreciably different from all other cities and city novels; tensions which were either unknown or unimport ant elsewhere became critical in the New York novel• We get a haunting impression in these novels that we are seeing the city and America only as outsiders

W2 uld see them. Strangers when they come to New York, these "outsiders" huddle together for mutual protection according to race or ambition — the Negro rejected by a hostile white culture, the immigrant by a bewildering set of customs, and the artist by a commercial spirit which pervades the city. Like the ambitious villager who makes his entry into big city life, these "colony dwellers"

) 00 -101» arrive with, a vision of the Promised Land in their mind* s eye, only to suffer disillusionment ; and unlike ary other newcomers, they are subject to special pressures to remain loyal to the in-group. The immigrant was the first of these three types to loom large in urban fiction. Wearing his bright scarves, long beard, and peasant boots, maintaining Old World customs, he was a figure of local color for some enter­

prising writers as early as the I8 9 O*s. In the poverty of his overcrowded tenement dwellings, he caught the attention of such reformer-journalists as Jacob Riis. Because of his ignorance of electoral procedure, the immigrant was sometimes pictured as the hapless tool in schemes of political corruption; when the hero of Abe Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky arrived in New York, he was taught by the Tammany man "Cuff-Buttons" Leary "that a vote was something to be sold for two or three dollars In novels like Jews Without Money or Comrade Yetta, the Communist îüchael Gold and the Socialist Arthur Bullard saw the shamefully exploited immigrant as the wedge whereby the American worker might be unionized and made a full share-holder in American wealth. But to the popular New York novelist, Edgar Fawcett, the immigrant was a very lucky fellow indeed, for he had available to him unlimited opportunity, and he would surely succeed accord­ ing to his honesty and energy. Late in the story of -Ivc:- immlgration, when the Immigrant was no longer primarily Anglo-Saxon in origin, he occasionally became the villain of the piece, polluting our "native" customs and debasing "pure" American stock. The immigrant has thus played many roles in American fiction, though such a modern student as Carl ¥ittke in­ sists that the major immigrant themes, considering their importance to aa. understanding of America, have never re­ ceived really adequate attention in fiction,^ That is certainly true of the New York novel, with one brilliant and in many ways overpowering exception — the Jewish immigrant novel. A few of the minor national groups — the French near Greenwich Village, for exan$»le — were played to the hilt by local colorists like H. C , Bunner and Thomas Janvier, But for several crucial generations, a roll call of important Jewish novels included.the works of Abe Cahan, Henry Ear land, I“Iichael Gold, Konrad Bercovici, and Dudwig Lewisohn, who were using the plight of the semi­ assimilated Jew in New York to excellent advantage; at the same time, large Italian, Irish, and German colonies were coicparatively unused by literary hands, and the inhabi­ tants of Chinatovm were simply unknown except as back­ ground figures who washed laundry, smoked opium, and had tong wars. — 103 — In maay ways, of course, the themes and conflicts of the Jewish novel reflected the problems of most other foreign language groups in New York. There was, first, the Promised Land myth, sometimes fulfilled, but often used by novelists ironically to contrast the romantic dream with the disqp pointing realities; second, the problem of assimilation, which in turn became involved with the symbol of the melting pot, a happy over-simpli- fication of a long and sometimes bitter process of déracinât ion. This second theme frequently took the shape of conflict between second-generation Americans and their naturalized parents -- a conflict, in other words, between the values of the Old World and the New. We find, in general, that the immigrant of fiction is closely modeled after the immigrant of fact. Spring­ ing directly from historical circumstance, immigrant novels were often fresh and vigorous, and have an authenticity >h ich suggests a large autobiographical in­ fluence. Fleeing religious or political persecution, economic hardship, involuntary military servitude, and beguiled by tales of free land or gold in the streets of America, the immigrant must have had a beautiful vision of this Promised Land when he docked in New York. But once here, he quickly became a problem, for the language and customs were different from those that he knew, and - l o i ] . - iiis ignorance and inexperience made him game for all manner of exploitation. He was tied to ruinous job arrangements, fleeced of his money, cheated of his baggage, and in the case of a woman, enticed into es­ tablishments for immoral purposes» Even after some protective laws were put into force by the officers of this strange land, he was still without defense against the subtler confidence men, of %hom there were all too many. 3 Completely bewildered and probably homesick, he quickly sought out countrymen with whom he could con­ verse in his native tongue, and added himself to one of those immigrant groups which huddled together in dense colonies and maintained their own businesses, churches, benevolent societies, foreign language newspapers, and often their own parochial school,^ All through the nineteenth century this process of migration continued and increased, until by I89O Hew York became the greatest center of immigrants in the world. But the immigrant was not always welcomed; in fact, there is a long record of grievances against him. He was often ignorant, clannish, and familiar only with the most wretched living conditions. He gravitated to the poorest quarters of the city at the lower tip of Manhattan, and gradually pushed older inhabitants to the — 1 0 ^ — north.. Overworked, tmdernourished, he contributed great­ ly to the incidence and spread of disease. As early as

1 8 1 6 , the city inspector of health reported that the excessive mortality rate of the summer of that year was due partly to the unusual heat, but also the the "constant influx of immigrants, many o.f whom were of the poorer class." In 1 8 1 9 f the Society for the Prevention of Pauper­ ism in the City of New York wrote in its annual report: Pauperism threatens us with the most over­ whelming consequences.... (immigrants) are frequently found destitute in our streets^ ...c-they are found in our almshouses and in our hospitals.. .And we lament to say, that they are too often led by want, by vice, and by habit to form a phalanx of plunder and depredations, rendering uur city more liable to increase of crimes. Then, when an epidemic of smallpox broke out in 1 8 3 ^., the medical officials said the disease was carried here from abroad "among our poor and filthy population. Philip Hone, the important diarist who was briefly

Mayor of New York from 182^ to 1826, made an indignant entry for June 2, l836t "All Europe is coming across the ocean; all that part at least viio cannot make a living at home; and what are we to do with them? They increase our taxes, eat our bread, and encumber our streets- and not one in twenty is competent to keep himself."^ The tones of disapproval were to continue and intens­ ify as the rate of immigration increased and as the —106 — immigrants shifted in origin from English, Irish, German, and Scandinavian to Russian, GaL ician, Italian, and Magyar. The l8ij.7 potato famine in Ireland and the l8i{.8 political unrest in central and western Europe brought . twice as many immigrants to America in the l81(.7-^6 decade as had arrived in all the previous seventy years. Immi­ gration from Europe continued at an accelerating pace,

•though after I8 8 O, for out thirty years, a radical shift occurred. During this period southern and eastern Europe sent multitudes across the ocean, and bitter controversies flared up in the United States over such matters as "race- dilution,” literacy, standards of living, and the preserva­ tion of a fairly homogeneous population. Restrictive immigration acts were passed in 1913^ 1917j 1921, and 192^, and a shift to earlier proportions was achieved. Whereas, for example, only 8,8^ of the total number of immigrants in I91I4. came from English-speaking countries, the percentage rose to one-third by 1927, Not only were proportions reg­ ulated; the total niimber of immigrants was drastically curtailed. By the time America had begun its fling in the 1 9 2 0 *s, the greatest peaceful folk migration in all history had virtually ended, and with it ended a vital contribution of New York literature to the national culture. Some immigrant novels continued to be written, of course, but they were fewer in number and less compelling than — 107— those which, emerged directly from first-hand experience* Nowadays a second-generation American writes a tender memoir of his childhood in one of the immigrant qmrters -- Alfred Kazin*s A Walker in the City (1951) is a brilliant example. But such writers have long since chosen another way of life, and the sudden reverence for mama and papa in the tenement days is too frequently sentimental. In vitality and realism none can match the novels written a generation ago, before the problem of immigration was "solved” by severe restriction. The immigrant * s view of New York as a Promised Land receives confirmation in Edgar Fawcett*s A New York Family

(1 8 9 1 ). A German immigrant, industrious and sober, becomes eloquent in his joy at being in America, especially when he thinks of what he left behind. "He was glad of the luck that had let him gain a foothold on this new, kingless land. He loathed the country that he had left, with its droves of poverty-gnawed peasants and its martial despotisms." The future holds no fear for him, and he looks forward to a life of success and fulfillment in America* s greatest metropolis. "He was only a poor retail grocer nowadays, he told himself; but why should he not hereafter become a millionaire wholesale grocer, have a great shop near the City Hall, and be a grand merchant prince t h e r e ? " 7 As a matter of fact, his dream virtually -108- cornes true, though the wealth he acquires spoils his children, who cannot adjust to their new station in society. A familiar native theme, in other words, was adapted to Immigrant life. The city opens vistas of success to the ambitious, whether from Middle Europe or the Midwest, but the attendant city evils place the pro­ tagonists in constant jeopardy. Any failure of nerve may mean material ruin; aiy failure of courage, moral ruin, Maay other immigrant novels are oriented around this dichotomy between the New York of day-dreams and the dis­ illusioning realities. In Arthur Bullard*s Comrade Yetta

(1 9 1 3 ) the heroine and her father flee Russia after the remainder of the family is murdered by a mob of anti- Semites, "Benjamin often illuminated his talks on the Promised Land by references to the freedom and justice of

A m e r i c a , " G His words carry a tinge of irony for us as we follow Yetta through her years as a young sweatshop worker and see through her eyes and travail the shattered lives of consumptives bent over sewing machines no less than twelve or fourteen hours a day. We witness a similar scene in Edward W. Townsend’s A Daughter of the Tenements (1895)5 when a social worker finds that a little girl has stopped going to school because she has had to take the place of her dying sister at the machines in order that a once-hopeful immigrant family might continue to eke out -109- its bare existence. Perhaps the most depressing negation of the Promised Land myth occurs in Henryk Siehkiewicz » s After Bread

(1 8 9 7 )f in which a wily steamship agent convinces a dis­ gruntled Pole of the great future to be enjoyed in America, The Pole and his eighteen-year-old daughter emigrate to New York, knowing absolutely nothing of any foreign language or customs. They are simply overwhelmed by the din, the crowds, the carriages, wagons, streetcars, and strangest of all, the "black people with short woolly h a i r ."9 Had they known what to do, they might easily have reached a community of Polish Catholics in New York or in such inland cities as Buffalo, Detroit, Chicago, or Milwaukee, But they know nothing, and wander about the city, living on refuse, sleeping first in a basement and then on a waterfront wharf. The struggle, after adventures in and out of New York, proves too much for them. The old man* s strength fails him, and he dies, soon to be followed by his daughter, "of unknown name and origin, " as the news­ papers briefly note«,^0 Among the novelists dealing with the immigrant in New York, one figure towers above all others. Abe Cahan, founder of the Jewish daily. The Forward, was for decades a major power in New York politics, unions, and Jewish- American belles lettres. In three novels he skillfully “H O — examined tb.e relationship of the immigrant to his New York ghetto environment and to the strange powerful world of the Gentile, which he feared and distrusted on the one hand, and yet admired and eventually emulated on the other* Cahan’s major achievement is The Rise of David Levinsky (1917)» which has long enjoyed the reputation of being a minor classic and has been called "the most not­ able of the immigrant novels. David’s mother, like the heroine’s in Comrade Yetta, was killed in one of the anti-Semitic riots in Russia, which were "encouraged, even arranged, by the authorities as an outlet for the growing popular discontent with the Government ^ accongjlished Talmud student, he is given funds by a wealthy family to go to America* There he learns the tailoring trade, becoming an "operator," or a stitcher of pockets, under-collars, seams and the like. "My work proved to be much harder and the hours very much longer than I had anticipated. I had to toil from six in the morning to nine in the evening,"^3 As David Levinsky orients himself to American life, or to the New York version of it, two expected things happen to him: first, the bonds of orthodox religion fall away from this formerly brilliant Talmud student; secondly, he comes obsessed x*jith the idea of opening his own shop, of being "his own boss," This he manages by a long career -111- of opposition to the unions, keeping his lower paid workers "satisfied" by arranging longer hours than the union allowed on "piece work"; thus the workers are able to earn extra money each week, though they work them­ selves into an early grave in the process* David learns other neat tricks in his business career. For exanrple, when he owes money to two of his suppliers, but hasn’t yet been paid by his own debtors, David makes out a check to Company A and sends it to Company B, and makes another check to Company B and sends it to Company A. Naturally, the checks have to be re­ turned. Then David writes apologetic letters to both companies, explaining the "regrettable little error," and assuring them'that correct checks will follow. In a few days, he sends the checks out properly, though by that time he has collected enough bills from his own debtors so that his checks are adequately covered by the bank balance. A philosophy for existence David finds in his reading of Spencer’s Descriptive Sociology and Darwin’s The Origin of Species. Just as Dreiser had used the famous lobster and squid incident as an explanation of the way of the world for young Cowperwood in The Financier, so Cahan

employs the symbolic action of chickens fighting for grain in the education of David Levinsky, In the parable of the -112- chickens David seems to have "hit upon th.e whole Darwin­ ian doctrine," and, he concludes, "I almost felt as though Darwin and Spencer had plagiarized a discovery of mine."^^ So the pressures of his new invirortment make a new David Levinsky in every way, and he prospers, first modestly and then greatly. At a Catskills summer resort for tired, hot, or bored New York immigrants who have suc­ ceeded financially, he meets Anna Tevkin, the intellectual daughter of a well-known Hebrew poet . David falls in love, but this is no sentimental novel in which the hero overcomes obstacles to "prove" himself to the lady of his choice. Anna Tevkin doesn’t love David, and in one irç»ortant way she doesn’t even like him. She is a Social­ ist and David’s anti-union practices are infamous. So he WOOS and loses; she marries a high school teacher in­ stead, and David can never really understand why. In the end he is frustrated, alone, unhappy, and his success turns to ashes* The story of David Levinsky’s financial rise is also his personal fall. The book is a triumph — almost in spite of itself. There are passages of mawkishness and jarring triteness. All manner of events are "pregnant" with possibilities, results are often "momentous," one chapter is actually entitled "Enter Satan," and the first time the here kisses a girl, he declares, quite unconvincingly, "I suddenly felt ten years older."1^But these are momentary lapses. -113- Basically, the plot is tightly-knit, the scenes of shop life and business methods meticulously accurate in de­ tail without being over-laden or irrelevant, the characters alive in a three-dimensional world, and the whole novel charged with force, energy, and vision. Perhaps the bitterest of all immigrant novels is Jews Without Money (1930) by Michael Gold, for whom the image of a Promised Land takes on a special meaning. The author quotes his father as saying, "I left Rumania with great plans. In my head, in my heart, a foolish voice was saying: * America is a land of fun.*” He then tells of the frustrations. "Soon I came to understand it was not a land of fun. It was a land of Hurry-Up. But the experience of Gold*s father is made typical, rather than individual; it must prove a point, as must the other brief character sketches, Jewish folk tales, physical descriptions of the environment, and flashbacks to the early lives of East Side dwellers when they first arrived with their dreams and empty pockets. The novel seems a crazy quilt without pattern, until all the dis­ parate materials are unified in one explanatory thesis: these Jews without money cannot be understood as Jews, but only as people whose resources are inadequate for a decent life, people who have been pauperized, degraded, and generally victimized by the capitalistic system. The iiaplication of the novel is clear: the Jewish colony of immigrants on Chrystie Street is used because the author is most intimately familiar with the details of that life, but the message applies as well to the Italian colony, the Irish, or any other huddled group of workers who are not sharing fully in the wealth that they create. The novel is thus charged with a certain urgency and sincerity t&iich keep the reader’s interest intact from one reminiscence to the next. But its very source of strength is ultimately the novel*s weakness, for it is not so much a novel as a social message. Michael Gold himself makes explicit the attitude vhich proved so destructive to any sense of subtlety in character por­ traiture, In' a special introduction to the fifteenth printing of the novel in 1935^ he wrote, "Jewish bankers are fascists; Jewish workers are radicals; the historic class division is true among the Jews as with any other race," And so the Promised Land becomes very specifically the land for tdiich the author predicts a revolution of the social and economic order, and the novel ends with "0 workers’ Revolution...You are the true Messiah,..0 great Beginning.* Even if considered only as a novel whose justification is its message, Jews Without Money suffers by comparison with Arthur Bullard’s less popular Comrade Yetta. Bullard —iiS— was a Socialist who was capable of subtler distinctions than was Michael Gold, and -idio saw the liberation of the Aiaerican worker coming by the orderly means of an educa­ ted electorate and the victory of unionism; he also possessed a larger vision and was able to draw in per­ spective some of the characters whom Gold wo uld have made into unmitigated villains. One typical boss of a small sweatshop, for example, was formerly a worker him­ self, but he had "got wise" young, with the wisdom of the gutter, which says "you must either be a hammer or an anvil, preyed upon or preying.Having taken the desperate gamble of going into business for himself, he can be ruined by one had season or failing to meet a single deadline on an important order • "Sorely exploited by bigger capitalists, his one hope of success lay in the miracle of more cruel exploitation," and so it meant ruin for him to grant his women anything like decent conditions."^-9 Indeed, the strike caused by Yetta does close his shop for good. This petty capitalist is then the victim of the system just as surely as a consumptive stitcher or poor Yetta herself. Bullard is also able to show clearly that the workers were not necessarily brothers in bondage with one another's interest at heart. The cutters, for example, were highly skilled workers with a well-estaolished unaon and were in a position to insist that the bosses address -116- them as Mister, ”W3ay should they join forces with these new and penniless unions^ What had they to gain by putting their treasury at the disposal of struggling *buttonhole workers * such are the problems woven into the fabric of Comrade Yetta, It is hardly a great novel, but one which makes mature and realistic use of the environment and situation, rather than bluntly announcing a Message. What these immigrants learned by bitter experience was that the land of opportunity they had heard about existed not on the lower East Side, but outside the ghetto walls. The wealth and power were in the great "Amerdo anized" world, whose way of life the immigrant began to regard as superior to his own. Though new arrivals served to re­ affirm ties with Europe, some of the bolder immigrants quickly sought to break away and become "real Americans," In A Walker in the City, Alfred Kazin recalls his life in a Brooklyn colony of immigrant Jews, where he read Theodore Roosevelt*s Letters to His Children; "There," he concluded, "was America,, .the real America, his America. " He recalls too how on Saturday nights the Brownsville "sharpies", lounged about on Pitkin Avenue, "their greatest ambition,,,to be mistaken for prosperous Gentiles from Platbush." This pressure toward assimilation into the dominant culture causes a domestic tragedy in Abe Cahan’s Yekl, A Tale of tlie Hew York Ghetto (1896) . It takes

♦ three years of work in New York sweatshops before Yekl can send passage money to Poland for his wife and child* But the joy of reunion proves brief, for the contrast be­ tween this semi-assimilated immigrant and his "greenhorn" wife is great, and a shock to both* He is no longer "Yekl" but "Jake," and he thinks nothing of handling money or riding in trolley cars on the Sabbath* His interests are baseball and boxing, his Yiddish-is mingled with a patter of New York slang, and his friends consider him a sporty "American-type" gentleman* His wife Gitl, however, is a peasant in manner and dress, and so religious that she cannot shed the orthodox wig of a married woman* Forces •frhich neither of them can fully understand, much less con­ trol, finally break up their home* An analogous circumstance, but of greater complication, occurs in Cahan*s novelette. The Imported Bridgegroom (I8 9 8 ) Here the process of assimilation creates tension not only between husband and wife, but between an immigrant and his daughter*. Old Asriel Stroon knows himself to be a "boor," that is, a businessman with little education in the He­ brew scriptures; he has, however, a devout belief in orthodoxy and a profound respect for those who are steeped in Talmudic lore* He wishes above everything else to marry off his only daughter to some young rabbinical scholar* - 118 - Tüere the trouble starts; she considers herself "modern" and Americanized, and rather than a rabbi she dreams of an American-Jewish businessman or, best of all, a doc­ tor who has graduated from an American medical school. This conflict between father and daughter crystallizes about the question of a choice of husband, but it is symptomatic of a deeper divergence of views, showing itself in such matters as the daughter’s revolt against the orthodox wig for married women and a beard and side- locks for men. The daughter, Flora, is just short of horrified by a recently arrived Hebrew scholar who has obviously been picked for her. Asriel does not insist on their marriage, and for a time Shaya, the suitor, simply lives in Asriel’s house and amazes the pundits of the local synogogues with his learning. This is a satisfactory arrangement, for within the framework of Jewish reverence for pure scholar­ ship, it is considered a divine blessing for a "boor" like Asriel to be permitted to support such a scholar. Event­ ually, however, Shaya wins the affections of Flora, and she in turn influences him to read "Christian" (i.e., English) books and study for a medical career without her father’s knowledge. By the time Asriel discovers what has been going on behind his back, the young scholar has be­ come the scandal of the synogogues and has even taken -119- to eating trefe (non-koslier) foods in public restaurants. But the plan ironically goes awry for Flora. Shaya has a new circle of America friends, whereas she in her semi-assimilated way can enter only the periphery of his new circle. By his native intelligence, he so far sur­ passes her that she is the one who will appear forever gauche and "foreign" beside him. Her father, cursing the influence of this modern world of America, sells his property, leaves Flora a comfortable portion, and goes to spend his remaining days in Palestine. The defection of the second generation was often caused by the problem of -Intermarriage, A splendid novel on this theme was written by Henry Harland, who, long before he joined Aubrey Beardsley in founding The Yellow Book in l89ii-, had been a clerk in the Surrogate's Office and had struggled to write his Hew York novels. In The

Yoke of the Thor^ (l8 8 ?), a brilliant study of the pro­ posed marriage between a Jewish painter and a Christian girl, intermarriage was described by Harland from the orthodox Jew's point of view — as the Unpardonable Sin, Should such a marriage take place, it is regarded at best as a funeral, with the bridegroom's name to be published among the names of the dead in the Jewish newspapers. His immediate family would wear mourning and henceforward, if they should pass him on the street, they would refuse - 120 - to recognize him» ”In the synogogue he would be excom­ municated and cursed. All pious Jews would be enjoined from holding any intercourse whatever with him; from speaking with him; from buying of him, or selling to him; from giving him food, drink, clothing or shelter; for succoring him in danger or sickness; even from pro­

nouncing his n a m e .“21 The injunction against intermarriage derives from the fundamentalist * s literal reading of Deuteronomy vii; 2-6, viaich instructs the Hebrews to "make no covenant with them. • • ^Neither shalt thou make marriages with them. . • For they will turn away thy son from following me, that they may serve other gods; so will the anger of the Lord be kindled against you, and destroy thee suddenly." "And destroy thee suddenly" — such is the predic­ tion made to Elias when the young painter tells his uncle, a stern rabbi, that he is going to marry Christine. The extraordinary contest of wills between the prospective bridegroom and his uncle becomes so absorbing that Christine and her father become shadowy figures by com­ parison, The novel ends with the death of the overwrought painter, who, according to Harland, ought to have followed his natural impulses, instead of allowing the taboos of clannishness to pervert his judgment. The barrier be­ tween Elias and Christine was artificial and destructive, and made a tragedy out of a potential idyll of love. - 121 - If it is Harland»s thesis that religious differences are small beside love, Ludwig Lewisohn views the problem on a larger scale and concludes differently in The Island

Within (1 9 2 8 ). This grand and somber novel covers three generations of a Jewish family from a melamed (a teacher of Holy Scriptures who prepares boys for confirmation) in Poland, to a businessman in Germany, to a psychiatrist in Manhattan, Each generation slips further away from Jewish ritual and custom, the parents always in horror as the children tend to conform to the pressures of an alien culture and climate of belief* The theme of the novel thus appears at first to be the perennial conflict between the "old-fashioned” parent and the "modem" child, the ways of the "modern" child becoming "old-fashioned" in due time, and the conflict recurring in the saiae way be­ tween the second and third generations* But the meaning of the novel is somewhat more complex than that. What Lewisohn really says is that each generation contributes its bit to the great tragedy of modern-day Jewry: that each defection is a lie and a defeat; that each subter- fuge, intermarriage, change of name, or adoption of Christian custom is a sacrifice in strength; in effect, that the Jews* real strength is their very Jewishness, and it is a delusion to thijok that a more "fashionable" attitude can replace blood consciousness. The end result - 122 - can only be a mass split personality and the grimmest nnii^piness, for the Jew cannot be at peace with, him­ self and will not be left at peace in the community, for anti-Semitism is a force which exists everywhere in Western society, differing only in degree of brutality. We see two variations on the theme in Arthur Levy and his sister Hazel, the American-born generation of the family whose history has been traced through Poland and Germany. Hazel is a snob, and she deprecates her own religion and family in favor of the white Protestant cul­ ture whose ways she Imitates and into whose society she wishes to enter. She and her husband live in a fashion­ able Christian suburb, dressing, talking, and acting like their neighbors, except that their neighbors will have nothing to do with them. Their marriage is on the brink of collapse until her husband finally persuades her that they must move to a neighborhood where they can proudly be at ease with their own kind and join a Jewish congre­ gation. This she agrees to, though she remains sufficient­ ly corrupted to conclude, ’’But we’ll join a nice congrega­ tion, won’t we? I don’t like these Russians and Poles. .”^2 Arthur, on the other hand, tries to solve the problem by rising above it, and the pedestal he stands on is science. A graduate of the Columbia University Medical School, he turns to psychiatry. His first job is at a city mental institution where he finds Jewish patients -123- ml8treated by attendants who are appointed by Tammany connections and are ignorant of their responsibilities. Arthur resigns and joins the staff of a private Jewish hospital. Here, too, at a board meeting, a young physician fresh from the Harvard Medical School asks whether the women in the wards cannot be stopped from wailing so nois­ ily, "It created a bad impression in the neighborhood," The director answers tartly, "Call it ‘keening,* Dr, Gerson, and see how much better you feel about it at once."^^ The great test of Arthur*s scientific detachment is his own marriage to a fine young woman, a writer named Elizabeth Knight, The cards here are unfortunately stacked: not only is she obviously of a different relig­ ion, but she is an extreme suffragist, jealous of her every precious "right," By personality as well as con­ viction she is not interest in being a home-maker. Though Arthur and Elizabeth are sensible people, their marriage cannot last. It is not a question of blaming one or the other; their union was a mistake in the first place, Arthur can no longer deny his intrinsic Jewishness; he discovers "the island within," He declares, "I and many like me have tried to live as though we were American Protestants or, at least, the next best thing to that. And we’re not. And the real American Protestants -12J4-- know we*re not. And so we live in a void, in a spiritual vacuum.."^ Of course, new American generations of other ethnic groups had similar problems and conflicts with their elders, Edward ¥, Townsend*s A Daughter of the Tene­ ments (1 8 9 5 ) dwells on the desire of Garminella to remain in school until she can become a teacher hereself, while her step-father demands that she leave school as early as possible — certainly when she is fourteen — and become a wage-earner immediately. He had worked as a boy of eight, and so had his father before him, and he had no sympati^ with laws that kept children in school without parents* consent and put all kind of fancy notions in their heads, A wealthy social worker, pleading Garminella*s case, even offers to "hire" the bright young girl as an assistant, so that the family coffers will not miss the few dollars the child could earn. But this too is reject­ ed, for what would happen if this wealthy volunteer work­ er should suddenly regard her work as a game that had grown tiresome and leave it? They all did — "and Garminella might have no friend to keep her in the place." Then it wc uld be all the harder for the girl to go back to physical labor and tenement ways amongst the Italians on Mulberry Bend — there had been "plenty of that tragedy,"^' -125- Among the Irish colonies too, poverty and custom made it inoperative that the children become wage-earners as early as possible. But in Lillian W. Betts’ The Story of an East Side Family (1903) it is precisely the independ­ ence of having a job which leads to conflict between parent and child. This novel shows too how occasionally one of the better-looking daughters might attract the attention of a wealthy parvenu or a man of higher social standing, after which she sees her neighborhood and her parents as she imagines her prospective bridegroom would see them. There invariably follow clandestine meetings away from the home and out of the neighborhood, resulting sometimes in a marriage which would separate parent and child forever, but more often in pre-marital pregnancy. In the last case, the daughter’s homecoming is usually taken as legitimate cause for the father of the household to get wildly drunk and beat not only the erring daughter, but generally the mother too, "for not looking after the girl’s moral up­ bringing properly." In fact, it is drunkenness which appears as a major vice all through this novel and others about the Irish. "Mary knew that when I4ike Brady’s father was drunk and ugly aL 1 the children big enough to get out of the way disappeared at once and stayed away until their father was s o b e r , ”27 Another man maims and later kills his little -126— boy in a drunken fit. Not only men, but the women too spend many afternoons over a pail of beer. Husbands beating wives, and wives beating children, and the arrival of the paddy wagon are recurrent incidents all through the book. How close to reality all this must have been is borne out by sociological studies. An analysis of over

7000 cases of destitution in major cities showed drink to be twice as frequent a cause of poverty among the Irish as among any other national group. ’‘Intemperance of the bread-winner" cropped out as a cause of destitution in one case out of seven among the Irish and in the second generation the number rose to one out of six. In charity hospitals alcoholism was the complaint for a third of the Irish patients., though the same cause affected only one Italian out of sixty, one Pole out of eighty, and one Hebrew out of a hundred.^8 Such studies and others have shown how the behavior patterns of these groups varied. Sometimes the most sur­ prising differences occurred within a single group. It is known, for example, that about 8O/0 of the Italian immigrants had been peasant land workers in the old country, and yet the vast majority of them settled permanently in cities on a r r i v a l . 29 Also, the Jewish immigrant is unique in that his assimilation into - 127 - American life was just one more instance of his assimi­ lation into raarQT cultures for many centuries. Until the promised state of Israel recently became a fact, all Jews were considered in exile, so to settle in a New York ghetto was theoretically no different from settling

in a Warsaw ghetto. For other immigrant groups, of coimse, coming to these strange shores was not only an enormous undertaking, but one without any real precedent in their history. It would be a mistake, however, to think of these groups of immigrants as being completely different from one another. Differences there were, of course; but those are often emphasized out of proportion to their similarities . ' No matter what their origin, the immi­ grants (particularly between the Civil and the first World Wars) were predominantly of an underprivileged class of peasants or workers, usually with little speci­ fic foreknowledge of what to expect in the Promised Land, and faced in the vast majority of cases with the problem of picking up a new language while adjusting to an in­ evitable measure of disillusionment. Yet they generally managed, after great trials, to make a place and a future for themselves and their children in America. And all of them, in the very act of immigrating, took part in what has been called "the oldest and most persistent theme in - 1 2 8 -

American h i s t o r y , “30 thereby contributing much both to the nation and its chief metropolis. Like the Mayflower voyagers, after aJLl, the nineteenth century immigrant was an American only after he became an American,

The image of a “black ghetto" succinctly indicates the similarities that existed between European immigrants and Harlem Negroes. Though both groups were subject to assimilating influences, they were suspiciously regarded as “alien" by the dominant culture. Extraordinary ten­ sions among the "aliens" grew out of a divided response to the environmental pressures. The more "modern" and am­ bitious newcomers were anxious to enter the "superior" culture and assume its values, whereas the older, strict­ er school regarded assimilation as a pernicious form of déracinât ion. The problems of the Negro, in this sense, are merely variants of those faced by all outsiders. "Passing" (for light-skinned Negroes), inter-marriage, the disillusionment of finding New York, something less than the Promised Land, the conflict between newcomers and their children — all are applicable to immigrant and Negro alike. -129- Several significant differences exist, of course, between the immigrant and Negro colonies. The walls of the "black ghetto" have never really crumbled in New York, except to admit large numbers of dark-hued Puerto Ricans, but the immigrant islands have long since lost their original character. When one speaks, for example, of a Jewish neighborhood in New York, or Irish, or Italian, one no longer implies a strictly homogeneous group, and certainly the one-time meaning of a Rumanian- Jewish or Polish-Jewish neighborhood has been lost com­ pletely, Another- difference is that Harlem as an "island" took shape only after the immigrant colonies had long bean in existence. It was not until the 1920’s, in fact, that we could talk of a "Harlem novel". Though nineteenth century novelists made brief references to Negro life in New York, Paul Lawrence Dunbar's The - Sport of the Gods

(1 9 0 2 ) was the first novel to treat that subject matter seriously and at length, A naturalistic novel. The Sport of the Gods embodies something of the "plantation-school concept,"31 which im­ plies that the Negro becomes homesick and demoralized in the urban North, The inexperienced youths in this novel, Joe and Kitty Han ilton, migrate from the South to a treacherous New York environment which deterministically - 130 - produces their degeneration and disaster. When Joe Hamilton finally strangles his mistress after many sor­ did scenes, a character in the novel exclaims, “Here is another exaniple of the pernicious influence of the city on untrained negroes. Oh, is there no way to keep these people from rushing away from the small villages and. country districts of the South up to cities, where they cannot battle with the terrible force of a strange and unusual environment ? “ The answer is that “the stream of young negro life would continue to flow up from the South, dashing itself against the hard necessities of the city and breaking like waves against a rock, — that until the gods grew tired of their cruel sport,”32 Though the Haniltons are a Negro family, their atti­ tude toward New York and their experiences in the city follow a familiar pattern, reminiscent of the “evil city” and immigrant novels. In The Sport of the G-ods New York at first represents a promised land of freedom, where the protagonists expect to shed their troubles and start a fresh happy life, “They had heard of New York as a place vague and far away, a city that, like Heaven, to them had existed by faith alone. All the days of their lives they had heard about it, and it seemed to them like the centre of all the glory, all the wealth, and all the freedom in the world. New York, It had an alluring sound. Who would know them there? -131- But the forces of the city, so alluring and yet so disastrous to the inexperienced, quickly demoralize Joe and then his sister Kitty. A visit to the Banner Club — "a social cesspool"^)? — starts Joe’s decline, and a place in the chorus starts Kitty on a life which includes ’’experiences” obviously leading to no good end for her. Only the mother is saved. When Justice is finally served and her husband is released from prison, the aged couple return to their rural home, as do so many other protago­ nists of fiction who have ’’come to their senses.’’ At the time Dunbar wrote this novel, there was not yet a Harlem as we know it today. Just after the turn of the century, most of New York’s Negroes lived in cramped quarters near the Pennsylvania Railroad Station (the region to which the Hamilton family went on arrival), or else wedged in amongst the Irish on San Juan Hill, Another colony existed on West 53rd Street, but the Negroes there were mainly stage folk, musicians, and Journalists — and even there the over-crowding was notorious. By the turn of the century, more room somewhere on the island of Manhattan had to be made for the Negro, The needed space was found in Harlem, a district which had been by-passed by many of the white people expanding north into new sections. In 1905 an apartment in one nearly empty building on 13lj.th Street near Fifth Avenue was rented to a Negro family, and soon the rest of the - 132 - building was filled up by Negroes who followed • Other apartment buildings were then opened to Negro tenancy, the area spreading west to Seventh Avenue by 1910. In the two decades which followed, the Negro population in New York grew from less than 60,000 to more than 200,000, most of the new arrivals settling in Harlem. The greatest Increase took place during the first World War, when many Southern Negroes flocked to northern industrial centers and swelled the established Negro communities. For a time, the white residents did everything possi­ ble to stem the tide. They attempted to buy up houses occupied by colored tenants and have them vacated; they strove to prevent white realtors from selling or renting to Negroes.35 ' But it was all to no avail. One great factor, that of money, worked in the Negroes’ favor. Needing the apartments so desperately, they paid two or three times as much rent as the whites. Downtown they were badly cramped for space, and repeated incidents of inter-racial strife were breaking out in Hell’s Kitchen, the Tenderloin, and San Juan Hill. The Negroes arriving from the South served further to increase the pressure to expand the Harlem beachhead. By the end of the first Great War, the battle for Harlem was settled decisively in the Negroes* favor. -133- Tiieir victory, however, was to prove a bitter one. Forced to pay exorbitant rents, families had to double up in apartments to meet the rentals, and even then ex­ tra boarders had to be taken in* Every space was utilized -- sometimes even bathrooms were improvised to serve as extra bedroomsThus did Harlem become the most densely settled Negro community in the -world, extend­ ing from 125th Street to li+Tth Street between Fifth and Eighth Avenues, and soon to press do-wntown to meet the darker-hued Puerto Ricans surging up from 110th Street, In the 1920* s Harlem and its celebrities began to attract wide attention, white folk swarming into the "black ghetto" in the search of "exuberant escape in the so-called exotic primitivism of Negro cabaret life,"^^ In fiction, Carl Van Vechten was the first to capitalize successfully on this new, îwarming Harlem, though he and his imitators were really following the lead of Dunbar in treating the comparatively unworked scenes of Harlem low­ life, Indeed, Van Vechten expressed the indebtedness of his Nigger Heaven (1926) to Dunbar*s The Sport of the Gods by writing that Dunbar "described the plight of a young outsider who comes to the larger New York Negro world to make his fortune, but whs falls a victim to the sordid snares of that world, a theme I elaborated in 1926 to fit a newer and much more intricate social system, Tîaat "Intricate social system,” however, gets lost in the sensationalism of Nigger Heaven, vhich paints Harlem with too obvious a gusto. Van Vechten must have been fascinated by the barbaric rhythms of Negro jazz, the intoxicating dances, and the wild abandon of cabaret life after midnight; or at any rate, he must have known that his readers would be. His book enjoyed immediate popularity and became, according to Hugh M, Gloster, "a sort of guide book for visitors who went uptown seek­ ing a re-creation of the primitive African jungle in the heart of New York City." The songs and snatches of "blues” by Langston Hughes incorporated into the text of Nigger Heaven also helped to enhance the reputation of the book. Roi Ottley, in another study of Harlem, joined in crediting the Van Vechten novel with doing much to establish Harlem as a great vogue; Ottley also points out, however, that the loose money and the jazziness of the *twenties were more basically responsible for Harlem*s short happy career as the Mecca of the thrill-seeker.39 But the sensational qualities of Nigger Heaven do not obscure the fact that Van Vechten had much of serious interest to say about the urban Negro. The major problem he discusser is the rejection of the Negro by a predominant­ ly white society. There are no sermons pleading "tolerance," but the injustice of segregation is expressed by one -1 3 $ - character who bitterly remarks, “A white prostitute can go places where a coloured preacher would be refused admitt- anc e. Much more subtle, however, is the whole conflict between the growing race consciousness of the Negro and the opposing pressure of the white society, a conflict which turned Negro against Negro. Reflecting the "Africa for Africans" movement led by Marcus Aurelius Garvey in the years just following the first World War, the Negro intell­ igentsia demonstrated a rousing enthusiasm for primitive African art pieces and Negro folk spirituals, matters which figure prominantly in the characterization of Mary Love in this novel. But in spite of all outward signs of chauvinism, the Negro world of Harlem made frantic attempts to emulate white cultural values, Mary speaks heatedly, for example, of advertising statistics vhich showed that "her race spent more money on hair-straighteners and skin- lightening preparations than they did on food and cloth­ ing."^ The way to success for a Negro, to put it as plainly as possible, was to be as much a white as possible, to be something, in short, which he wasn’t^ This pressure to conform and imitate was bound to produce all sorts of disruptive tensions, both personal and communal. The Negroes’ problem, like the immigrants* problem, was that of the outsider. The "ghetto," both - 136 — for immigrants and Negroes, was not only geographical but cultural. To leave one* s own "kind" in favor of the great, white, "American" world wa.s possible only after an intense conflict of loyalties. Van Vechten cleverly organizes these tensions around one central and provocative consideration: that the Negroes have succumbed to white values to such a degree that amongst the Negroes themselves there is a pervasive system of color prejudice. The very dark, kinky-haired, negroid- featured of them were at the bottom of the social ladder, which was a situation not peculiar to New York alone or to the Jazz Age. Charles W. Chesnutt had earlier de­ scribed a Cleveland "Blue Vein Club" among Negroes in The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line (1899). 'The protagonist of the title story in this collection must choose between the faithful black wife of his youth and a refined "light" woman of his own caste. The problem is rooted in a convulsive urge to imitate white values. Hence to this day the "beauty preparations" designed to make Negroes look less negroid are a major industry and dominate the advertising space in Negro magazines and newspapers. Furthermore, the Negroes seem unwittingly to place themselves as a group below the whites. To work as a domestic for white people is acceptable, but to serve other Negroes is to lose face. In Nigger Heaven, some rich whites invite an -137- influential Negro couple to dine. The next day, the colored servants will no longer work for this white couple. "They said they wouldn* t wait on niggers. "42 At the top of the ladder were those Negroes for whom it was possible to pass as white, a decision often made on the basis of disillusionment. Dick Sill, a cynic who "passes,” hotly defends his position to Byron, the young hero of the novel who has just returned to Harlem from the University of Pennsylvania. Dick is a lawyer, but, he says, "the race doesn’t want colored lawyers. If they’re in trouble they go to white lawyers, and they go to white banks and white insurance companies.... Most of ’em.,, pray to a white God, You won’t get much help from the race."43 Byron, living amongst such ten­ sions, is himself a sorry figure of confusion and stupid­ ity. Outwardly he is a model hero of fictions he is handsome, well-educated, comes to Harlem with letters of introduction to influential leaders, and is loved by women both bad and good. Actually, his way of living becomes more and more dissolute, and he spends much time whining that there is no opening where he can utilize his education and that his education has made him unfit for menial labor, that. In short, the world is against him. He wants to be a writer and he is living in a Negro metropolis wa ich is practically unknovn to the outside — 1 3 8 — world; but he insists upon writing wild melodramatic tales of miscegenation cor^letely outside his realm of experience- We are not surprised that his stay in Harlem ends abruptly with an act of sordid, pointless violence* Claude McKay*s Home to Harlem (1928) bears many similarities to Nigger Heaven, though McKay has insisted that he is in no w ^ indebted to Van Vechten, The germ of Home to Harlem was supposed to be a 1925 short story of McKay’s which had been entered without success in a contest conducted by Opportunity magazine. Although Nigger Heaven was published in 1926, McKay explains that he did not read it until 1927, by which time he had al­ most completed the expansion of his two-year-old short story into a novelTo the reader in 1926, however, McKay’s novel must have se%ned very much a part of the Van Vechten vogue, in its descriptive tours through Harlem’s cabarets, pool rooms, gambling dives, dance halls, and houses of prostitution. As in Nigger Heaven, the more sensational elements of the novel are balanced by the treatment of serious racial questions. The two main characters are Jake, who deserts the TJ.S, Array in Brest because he is put to work in a labor battalion rather thaa allowed to fight, and his friend Ray, a sensitive well-educated Negro who has -139- an aversion for Harlem low-life. Confused by a social order •;Tinder white domination, Ray can see no meaning in his existence, and can find none in his wide reading. Dimly he begins to feel that his education has shackled rather than freed him and that his greatest contentment would be to lose himself "in some savage culture in the jungles of Africa,"^ Another novel of the Van Vechten type is Wallace Thurman* s The Blacker the Berry (1929) about Emma Lou Morgan, whose black skin alienates her from a light- skinned family in Idaho, from her classmates at the University of Southern California, and finally from her Harlem lover, a mulatto-Filipino, There is the familiar exploitation of Harlem local color in scenes of midnight vaudeville shows, ballroom dances, and frenzied drinking in speakeasies. The very material, in other words, which had once been standard in the "evil city" novel, were now manipulated to produce the opposite effect. The individual’s freedom of action in Hew York came to mean freedom from restraint; gay et y came to mean living in a state just this side of hysteria* It is clear that by the end of the 1920’s a stereo­ typed Hegro of Harlem had been created, acknowledged, and assumed^ his existence seemed confined to drink, sex, gambling, and brooding about racial matters, with an edge -340- of violence always in view. In attesipting to distinguish tile new Negro from what had been the "typical Negro" in earlier fiction — "no minstrel coon off the stage, no Thomas Nelson Page’s nigger, no Octavus Roy Cohen’s porter, no lineal descendent of Uncle Tom"4-6 — the Van Vechten-McKay-Thurman school created another type as damaging and unrepresentative as that which was re­ placed, Amongst the Harlem writers themselves a counter­ movement of realism in Negro fiction grew and was given impetus by Rudolph Fisher and the influential Countee Cullen, Less interested in the exotic and animalistic aspects of Negro life, Fisher and Cullen attempted to provide a more representative picture which would show that in Harlem too there was some regard for quiet living, hard work, serious thinking, and mature standards of morality. The Walls of Jericho(1928) by Fisher realistically describes the general social life of Harlem, including glimpses of church life, the Sunday promenade on Seventh Avenue, and the annual costume ball of the General Im­ provement Association (an organization which is probably a satire on the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), The Harlem scene is treated with con­ siderable detachment, and Fisher masters the Harlem speech and slang so skillfully that he has been called the peer of Ring Lardner in idiomatic writing - l i p . - Countee Cullen*s personal background fitted bim admirably to write One Way to Heaven (1932), a novel ■vdiich deals intimately with, the place of church and re­ ligion in the lives of Negroes in Harlem, The son of Reverend Frederick A. Cullen, founder of the Salem Methodist Episcopal Church, Count ee Cullen is able to include descriptions of watch-night meetings, convers­ ions of sinners, and other services of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, si 1 of which bear the mark of authenticity. The job of the Negro writer, Cullen once said, is to "create types that are truly representa­ tive of us as a people, "^8 thus explaining both the strength and the weakness of his novel. With the excep­ tion of a botched excursion into the salon of some Negro intelligentsia. One Way To Heaven offers a sane, realistic picture of typical Negro urban life; but it also suffers by the creation of types rather than individuals, and by a loose construction and placid narration -ràiich string the events together in such a way as to make their se­ quence seem almost accidental, Cullen, for all his good intentions, thus emerges a less compelling novelist than Van Vechten or even Claude McKay, though if taken together, the exotics and the realists suggest that Harlem offers the materials for extraordinary fiction. It might take a stroke of genius to fuse the two attitudes, but somehow the daily habits and tense excitements of Harlem would -1J42— have to be captiired. It might be that nothing short of the love-hate for the South of a Faulkner would do, or perhaps the double vision of an Edith Wharton writing about the nineteenth-century aristocracy of New York. The Harlem novel represents something of a break in the mainstream of American Negro literature, for it has little to do with the “plantation novel" of the nineteenth century. In New York fiction a new kind of Negro was created, one whose dreams and frustrations could have emerged only from an urban, industrial society. The milieu in which this new Negro moved was characterized by a delusive sense of opportunity, different from anything he had ever known in the South, where so many a Harlemite had been born. As the “black ghetto" swelled in size and repeatedly broke its boundaries, the New York Negro — soon to appear in force throughout the urban North — emerged in the twentieth century as an important figure in American literature. Nor, as it turned out, was he merely a stock character with an amusing drawl, but one of heroic as well as mean proportions, one whose way of life could be splendid as well as sordid and complex as well as simple. But Harlem in the mid-twentieth-century stands out­ side an important fact of American culture. An isolated national or racial community is by no means extraordinary -I W - ■ in America; but the history of this nation always has tended toward assimilation, toward the intermingling of groups, producing by medley that new creature on the earth, an American* The process whereby the dominant culture absorbs the minor ones has often proved slow and painful, but successful — perhaps inevitable — in the long run. We see, however, no such movement toward intermingling between the Negro and white peoples. Nor is it possible to think of New York* s Harlem solving its problems differently or independently of Negroes anywhere else in the United States — for color tension is national rather than local. It appears that all the Harlems in the United States will indefinitely remain black islands sur­ rounded by a sea of white faces — and as a result Negro fiction is likely to retain its characteristic admixture of exoticism and propaganda.

Many American cities have had their art colonies, but none has ever attained the status of New York’s Greenwich Village. Just as New York typified the wide­ spread urban movement in this country, so the Village be­ came a national symbol of the revolt against Philistinism. The "left bank" of New York became the left bank of the New World, especially during the joyous season just prior - 144 - to the first World War, Those were the days, as Alfred Kaain has pointed out, when the barriers were down, the magazines hopeful, the workers always marching, geniuses sprouting in every garret bedroom — "the world of which John Reed was the Byronic hero, Mabel Dodge the hostess, Randolph Bourne the martyr. Van Wyck Brooks the oracle,"49 This was not, of course, the first organized Bohemia in the United States — a distinction we must reserve for the Pfaffians, a group blessed with such figures as Whitman, Henry Clapp, and Ada Clare, whose modus vivendi started to make sense to Americans after the Panic of

185 7o Then the virtue of having a steady job and of sav­ ing money caved in, unexpectedly and miserably, in the face of general instability and bank failures. What was the use of scrimping and saving when a panic might come at any moment and destroy jobs and bank accounts?-^® What began to make sense after the l850*s, however, had to wait virtually until the twentieth century to become a way of life endowed with such fascination for the rest of the world that the Village became first a mecca, then an exuberant fad, and finally declined, particularly after the first World War, to a commercial side-show for tour­ ists, P, Hopkinson Smith and Stephen Crane were among the earliest novelists to draw upon Village materials and "Bohemian" life, As we have previously noted. The For- times of Oliver Horn designates New York as the only art­ ists* "retreat" in American akin to the Latin Q,uarter of Paris or the Ratskellers of Munich* Smith, to be sure, held a highly romantic view of New York, but to an artist of almost any temperament Greenwich Village must have seemed a haven on otherwise uncongenial shores. Crane, in spite of a more critical attitude toward the city, fashion­ ed The Third Violet (1897) into a similarly gay and optimist­ ic novel. His intrepid little band of artists is always in such happy spirits that we never fully believe in their struggle for a marginal existence in an old building symbolically placed between two large business structures. Billy Hawker is the main character, and his fellows are a cheerful starving crew nicknamed Wrinkles, Purple, Grief, and the lovely model who is friend to them all. Splutter. The girl Billy loves is Grace Panhall, an heiress who has the stock romantic notion of "life in the studios," which Crane satirizes bitterly. She had once been invited to a "studio tea" by an elegant and wealthy painter who "had the dearest little Japanese servants, and some of the cups came from Algiers, and some from Turkey... and I thought what a lazy, beautiful life the man must lead, lounging in such a studio, smoking monogramed cigarettes, and remarking how badly all the other men p a i n t e d . "3*1 But Hawker scoffs and tells her something closer to the truth; how, for example, - 1 4 6 - he had once been forced to make a bit of money by design­ ing the label for a tomato can, adding bitterly, "Later I got into green corn and asparagus, Crane’s use of garret materials long antedates their widest currency; in fact, not until just after the first World War do we get the best-selling Village novel vhich established Bohemian Life as a national cliché. James Huneker, vho had already warned against Trilby as bogus Bohemian!sm, offered another version in Painted Veils (1920), a highly sexed picture of hard-drinking, wise-crack­ ing Villagers. His main character, Esther Brandes, comes to Hew York to see a career in opera. Hers is the familiar story of the determined sraall-towner who achieves material success in Hew York — at the expense of her soul. As a singer she triumphs — the greatest Isolde since Lille Lehmann — but as a woman she becomes "the Great Singing Whore of Babylon. "53 Huneker’s sophisticated delicacy explains the popularity of his novel; he describes a stag party, for exarrple, which is probably unmatched for its eroticism, but never with an off-color word. If there is a central fault in his writing, it is in the character delineation, which is not really delineation at all, but a cataloguing of tastes. More as critic than novelist, Huneker writes that Ulick "played Bach with a fervour that was religious. ., C hop in came third in the immortal trio. •• .Schumann ran a close second to Chopin in his affections. .. .Brahms and the moderns were not neglected.**^4 And Mona ‘'preferred Flaubert to Paul de Kock, Balzac to Zola, Memoirs enchained her fancy... .Rabelais she dismissed and for Benjamin Constant and Stendhal she only entertained mild respect* She admired the electric energy of Julien Sorel... Floyd Dell’s Love in Greenwich Village (1923) is really a group of integrated short stories which are threaded together by the author’s comments. He uses .some fictional characters, some real ones with fictional names ( "Egeria" for Henrietta Rodman, the suffragist who taught sex. to her high school girls and agitated for simpler, saner dress), and also some characters who retain their own names, such as John Reed, Bill Haywood, Max Eastman, and the Masses crowd. The stories fulfill the expectations roused by the title, though not luridly. In one, a "writer" x-fho never writes falls in love with a young dancer who has run away from a New England mill town and the Puritan tyranny of her father. She wins fame and leaves him, for that "is what happened inevitably in this eager, hard, ambitious young world of dreams and struggle — that was love in Greenwich Village. —

Oarl Van VecJaten in Peter Whiffle (1923) employs the same kind of character melange as did Floyd Dell — real people, fictitious people, and real people with fictit­ ious names, all of whom come together at a Wednesday soiree of Mabel Dodge (who appears as "Edith Dale"). The "I" of the novel is reall;^ supposed to be Van Vechten, who receives a posthumous letter from Peter Whiffle in

1 9 1 9 , asking that he do a book based on Whiffle*s life. This is nicely fitting, for Peter Whiffle was another of those writers who never quite get around to writing any­ thing at all* Whiffle had p l ^ s enough. When Van Vechten meets him for the first time. Whiffle has come with his inheri­ tance to Paris where he has a comfortable apartment, keeps an orange cat named George Moore, and has an affair with a Chicago girl studying voice in Paris who thinks "that the Beast in the Jungle is an animal story ."^7 The "material" of his projected great book is an immense catalogue — of names of perfumes, names of foreign auto­ mobiles, kinds of jewelry, and so on, "Are you writing an encyclopedia?" Van Vechten asks, "No, my intention is not to define or describe, but to enumerate. Life is made up of a collection of objects, and the mere citation of them is sufficient to give the reader a sense of form and colour, atmosphere and style. And form, style, and manner in literature are everything; subject is nothing»** There isn*t to be a moral, an idea, a plot, or even a character. **I am not trying to imitate Dickens or Dostoevsky. They did not write books; they wrote news­ papers* Art eliminates all such rubbish. Art has nothing to do with ideas. Art is abstract.**^® STeedless to say, the **great work" is never written. Not until years later does Van Vechten stumble onto l-fhiffle again, this time in a Chinese shop along the Bowery. Peter is done with art and is now a Marxian revolutionary who dabbles in necromancy, drugs, and spiritualism. He dies in the self realization that his life has been wasted trying to do more than he was cap­ able of doing -- though, he says, a short lifetime*s experience is a small enough price to pay for such self- knowledge.

Not all who drew on Bohemia came away with a light heart, an approving nod of the head, or the conclusion that even suffering and defeat were a small price to pay for Ezperience. There has been a long tradition of attack on literary Bohemia, ranging from tongue-clucking disapproval to violent condemnation. To the Bohemians themselves, such attacks as came from the vast population of Philistia had always been a badge of honor which served -150- to enipliasize their own difference from the less sensitive clods of the workaday world. With different degrees of intensity, there has also been considerable criticism or spoofing from creative artists as well. As early as

1 8 9 7 , li, H. Bickford and Richard Stillman Powell composed a little travesty entitled Phyllis in Bohemia, in which not only the Bohemians, but the thrill-seeking visitors too, are broadly satirized, Phyllis is a sweet girl from some Arcadian hills who has' a romantic vision of a life which is free, gay, and unceasingly creative in quaint, charming garrets. Her fiance. Bob, tells her sourly, "Bohemia has a most extraordinas^ population. It is full of people who are always intending to do something and who never do anything. It is a forest of literary disappointments, of musical failures and of artistic e r r o r s , "^9 But she will not be persuaded, so, sufficiently chaperoned, she and Bob take apartments in a boarding house filled with generally misunderstood or unappreciated poets, painters, musicians, and journal­ ists, They put up with what Bob calls the "clatter and chatter" in all the Village, and eat in an Italian restaurant vhich he calls "a factory for spaghetti, Phyllis finally leaves Bohemia with Bob, if not disappoint­ ed, certainly quite satisfied to remain thereafter in Philistia. -151- Tiie light-hearted tone of banter in Phyllis in Bohemia is completely absent in Charles de Kay’s

The Bohemians5 A Tragedy of Plodern Life (1878), whose attack is more serions and more honestly bitter. De Kay’s chief target in this book is the counterfeit Bohemian who cultivates careless dress and habits, and denounces the bourgeois, but on Sunday combs his hair and dutifully goes to church. ’’Harpalion” Bagger is the chief hypocrite of the novel; he calls himself the greatest poet in America, but is in reality a fake, a rake, and a cheater, who can affect love for plebeian beer but who can also pander to wealthy patrons when it suits his own purpose. Harpalion’s little band, called the Expressionists, assemble in the back room of a restaurant probably suggested by Pfaff’s, which owes "its fame to its dinginess and dirt." The Expressionists wear "velvet jackets, loose cravats, and slouch hats" while carousing and drinking confusion to the Philistine. In one scene, Harpalion flings the door open and enters "with a swift, stealthy gait, such as Dante may have used when hurried along by great thoughts," His features are wrapped in abstraction, his loose necktie throïfn this way and that in agitated fashion, and his hair tumbled artistically above his forehead; otherwise he is scrupulously well - 1 5 2 - dressed and neat. His greeting from tb.e band is a cry in unison of "Hail, Mastert”^! William Dean Howells, too, turned his novel. Coast of Bohemia (I8 9 3 ), into a satire of the sky-light addicts of New York, though there is a grudging respect for his “Synthesis of Art Studies,” obviously the Art Students* League of New York in its early stages. His satirical picture may have been true of rich youngsters playing a game, as does, for exaaiple, the character Charm!an iiaybough. She has an attic studio in her mother* s luxurious home, complete event© a tiger skin on the floor in front of the fireplace, though her mother insists that the maid be allowed in once a day to dust and straight­ en up. When Charmian and her friends get hungry over their work, she is troubled to decide what is truly Bohemian to eat; ’'There was nothing for it but olives, and though olives had no savor of originality,.,if you picked them out of a bottle with the end of a brush handle, sharpened to a point, and the other person received them with their thumb and forefinger, the whole act was indisputably Bohemian, Thus Howells made mellow fun of make-believe Bohemia, though Albert Parry is not quite right in saying that Howells missed the larger scene in this novel of impoverished artists in New York working earnestly at - 153~ their schools and boarding houses,^3 The artist Ludlow, who has already achieved some success and so does not speak out of any personal rancor, is asked about the life of art students in New York; he is frankly dubious about the talented country girl’s going to New York: "The conditions are bad air, and long hours, and piti­ less criticism; and the rewards are slight and uncertain.,. New York is swarming with girl art-students, They mostly live in poor boarding houses, and some of them actually suffer from hunger and cold, The actual suffering plays a grimmer and more active

part in Ellen Glasgow’s Phases of an Inferior Planet (I8 9 8 ) From the moment we meet the main characters, Mariana and Anthony, they are miserable and disillusioned. She is a voice student who admits, "I had the artistic temperament without the art,and he is a clever but bitterly con­ fused Episcopalian minister who has renounced religion for science. They live in poverty in a boarding house which includes the usual motley collection of painters and poets -- some with talent, some without, and some with talent which has burned itself out, leaving only illusions. There is the usual flippancy, cynicism, and ultimate camaraderie in spite of the teinperamental scuabbles• A desperate peevishness at the world for fail­ ing to recognize their r eal or imaginary genius settles Itself into their personalities and even later on, when a few of them have secured fame and fortune, they remain xincertain, haunted and defensive* Even in the opening decades of the twentieth cen­ tury, when Bohemianism was all the rage and the MacDougall Alley stables were turned into studios, there continued to be considerable criticism of la vie de Bo heme in the Village* In his I908 volume. The Voice of the City, 0* Henry waxed caustic over the colony of artists in the Village. In "Extradited from Bohemia," Miss Me dora is regarded as **^a mad, reckless, headstrong girl" for going alone to "the wicked city." Her art teacher, "Professor Angelini," is in reality a retired barber; her introduction to the cafe^phonies is through a dinner date with Mr. Binkley, a "gay boy" of forty-nine, whose own passport to Bohemia is a ten-dollar loan he once made to a young maa who had had a drawing printed in Puck. In another story, "A Philistine in Bohemia," 0* Henry takes us to one of the many Village dives which cater to the tourist who imagines it "the real thing." The back of the restaurant is a yard tiiere, for atmosphere, clothes are hung on a line — "property clothes*. .never taken in by ’Tonio," There follows a rather bad pun about ragout* The guests mix their greetings of "Hello, Marne" with abandonee cries of "Garsong" and "we, monseer." - 155” Jibes occasionally came even from tiie inner circle of Latin Q,uarter habitues » An H, J, Glintenkanp cartoon in the December, 1915 Masses, .for exarç)le, quotes a gay blade in a Village saloon saying to a woman seated at his table; "Did you know that I am an anarchist and a free lover?" To this she replies: "Oh, indeedI -- I though you were a boy scout," One of the broadest satires came from the future sage of Main Street* Sinclair Lewis* "Hobohernia" (1917) chronicles the misadventures of a small­ town girl who suddenly suffers the pangs of "^pirations" for a "Career." Her swain follows her to Greenwich Village, where he engages in wild high Jinks to convince her of the errors of her ways and the falseness of Hobohemia, Free verse, he declares, is so called because it doesn't pay. The Hobohemian Players, a non-commercial theatre group dedicated to "Native American Drama," performs plays translated from the Polish, the Siamese, and the Eskimo. With the help of a press agent and a plot manufact­ urer, the swain (Dennis) invents the existence of a great Russian novelist, Zuprushin, The Village highbrows all agree that Zuprushin is a sublime artist, though none of them has ever stopped talking about his genius long enough to read siy of his novels (of vhich there are none, of course). The hoax, reaches it dizziest heighbs when Dennis, under Zuprushin*s name, publishes a short story -156- entitled "Fog of the Samovar," after which point Lewis throws away all restraint for the sake of a few obvious jokes . The satire, while it lasts, registers one of the many protests against the Village as "a cheap edition of Paris" and "a miiggy conglomerate of London" — both epithets applied by Guy Manners in Atmosphere; The Fact and the Fable (1922), Different both from the attacks on Bohemianism and from the irresponsible, synthetic gayety is the treatment of Greenwich Village by Willa Gather in "Coming, Aphrodite!" in Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920), The artist-hero in this story has all the earmarks of the Village cliché: he is indifferent about his personal appearance, owns very little personal property, is a sympathetic friend of the common laborer, tjid most important, paints for him­ self, making no atteirpt to please a commercial public. The cliche, however, is rounded into humaaity. He leads no riotous existence, has no succession of mistresses, is indifferent to strong drink, and he works at his paint­ ing for eight or ten hours a day instead of merely talk­ ing about it, Hot all of the garrets in Greenwich Village are inhabited by men whose lives turn out so productive and so fortunate, but Willa Gather at any rate shows us the kind of "Bohemian" who need not be at war with society or with himself. In the Village he is -157- abl© to retreat in pei.ce to live and to work, and in his own way to enrich our culture. This phase of Village life supplies few headlines for the yellow journals and did little to enhance the tourist trade, but in the final analysis gave us what is surely the best and the truest in the tradition of New York's left bank.

The islands within the city created by immigrants, Negroes, and artists did much to give New York its special character arh New York fiction its cosmopolitan tone. They suggested the rich variations of type to be found only in the urban framework! the colorful contrasts, the tensions and suspicions, and the image in which New York is so frequently cast — that of a microcosm of the world. Like the confident rural boys and girls who came to the city in search of fame and fortune, these exotic types held the view that New York was a kind of promised land. As the novels insistently showed, a taste of life in the city often disabused them of such day-dreams* Each generation, however, had to learn its own lesson by experience, for New York never lost its magnetic powero —1^8— In almost every New York novel, no matter what its theme or attitude, these "outsiders’* converge on the city, ready to give battle for a place in the sun. But there are no ’’insiders.” We look for them in vain, and find that only the city — as something organically more than all its parts — is the insider;, the theme of these stories is not so much concerned with man* s struggle against man, or against himself, but against an environment which is less a ’’setting” in the conven­ tional sense than a leading character. A few exceptions there surely are; Newland Archer and his grandmother in î4rs, Wharton*s The Age of Innocence give us the impress­ ion of being "insiders” from the very beginning, people who were born into a social scheme and belong to it, though Newland too experiences a temporary pang of re­ bellion against his society. But important differences exist between the ambit­ ious young lawyer from a small town in, let us say, Ohio, who comes to New York because of its "larger horizons, ” and the Italian peasant resettling on the lower East Side. The Ohio boy may have to endure a short period as a "hayseed,” but presumably he gets ower that quickly be­ cause an urban "education” is usually thorough and brutal. As we have remarked previously, whether he succeeds or fails, and whether or not his success turns -159- tc ashes, depend very much, upon the tradition the novelist is working in and what his fundamental attitude toward the city happens to be. The point is that before long the Ohio boy finds himself immersed in city life and part of it. Even P. Hbpkinson Smith’s dear old Colonel Carter and Oliver Horn adjust to New York’s tempo and customs; they do not seek out a colony of Southerners in the city. That Italian peasant, on the other hand, achieves no such quick assimilation. If he makes an abortive attempt to become "American” too quickly, he does so at the expense of "betraying" his fellows. We must remember that for a long time an Italian immigrant found his way not merely to a colony of countrymen, but to particular streets in New York where he could live among his transplanted townsmen! Nor was. the city quick to accept the ethnic outsider. Thus the novelist had at his command stirring tensions beteen the immigrant and the city, and between the new American generation and its immigrant colony environment. The habitues of Greenwich Villa ge were in ttms sense different from other colony dwellers. If the city rejected the Negro or foreigner, the artist rejected the city — withdrawing in disdain from its pervasive commercialism and "middle class morality," The Greenwich “160- Villager, too, represented a different class of charac­ ter, for his withdrawal was an act of will based on a particular Weltanschauung or temperament, rather than on accident of birth or color of skin. This implies that he could return to a "normal" milieu whenever he pleased, rather like rural heroes who came to New York to seek financial success. Indeed, the return to the old homestead proved the happy ending in many New York novels, though statistics showed no such actual drift back to the farm or village. When a protagonist took a fling at big city life and then returned to his country seat, the novel usually ended. That, perhaps, is vhere some of these novels should have begun, for our fiction has rarely explored what happened to those prodigals who actually returned home. One wonders what they did when they got there -- and whether they really lived happily ever after* Chapter Five: Form and Content

The literature which looks with dismay on the waste and frustration of New York life, or which adopts some variant of this attitude, has proved the richest and the most experimental of the New York novels. The more ro­ mantic or cheerful attitude, characterizing New York as the place of opportunity and fulfillment, has on the other hand tended to pour old wine Into old bottles* The fact Is that neither In form nor'In content did the romantics suggest anything beyond the single controlling Idea of the metropolis as a haven for great talents and grand ambitions, and as a result the moral Implications of life In New'York were largely missed. Theodore Wlnthrop, admired by no less a champion of the romantic attitude toward New York than Brander Matthews, was typical of the romanticists who treated familiar materials In familiar ways. His Cecil Dreeme, for example, abounded In the type of local color vig­ nette later made famous by the Matthews-Bunner-Janvier group. Except for the touches of local color, Wlnthrop’s novel Is Indistinguishable from the vast genre of senti­ mental melodrama, familiar In every clime and time. When, for example, the hero (Robert) is reminded of his late beloved father, he "sheds a noble tear"; when the Denman

j U \ —162— sisters write to Robert, tiiey must blush. ”a shy maiden*s blush" ; when Robert and the janitor force their way into Dreeme*s apartment at night to see if foul work has been done, the one candle blows out just as they open the door; Mr. Denman, trapped in a financial tangle, is forced to' give his daughter in marriage to the sleek villain; the supposed death of the heroine by drowning, her assumption of a disguise, her abduction and the nick of time death of the villain by an antique dagger, are all painfully fsmiliar»^ New York, in a novel of this sort, was merely a "setting" in the conventional sense, and led, as we might expect, to no experiments in technique or fresh organization of city materials. It remained for the early realists — in all their crudity and sensationalism — to explore the grimmer aspects of urban life, to broaden the canvas of the mod­ ern novel, and to help prepare the way for the naturalist and the technical innovators. As early as 1855^ indeed, what was considered the shockingly realistic use of New York* s low life came so much into vogue that the urbane Knickerbocker Magazine was moved to violent protest* Looking at the kind of ephemeral novel enjoying public favor. The Knickerbocker cried out in angry protest, creating the mock novel Soap-gat; A Tale of City Life, in -163- derisive imitation of “ttiose moral tales, read by good people of strong minds, with, benevolent desires to be acquainted with all that is wretched, and wicked, and low, in all the myriad forms of ugly vice and poverty, throughout our great and wicked city. The magazine editors clearly ezpected their readers in l8p^ to recognize precisely what kind of novel they were satirising in the Tale of 8 0 ^ -Fat. The situation, the characters, the sentimentalism — all were well-known, though none was quite as objectionable as the carefully described tours of New York’s demimonde and slums. All the characters are followed....through all the haunts of vice and infamy; not a wrinkle or plague spot is spared to us in the loathsome picture; the fetid, noisome sores are bared to view; the writhing, distorted lineaments, the withered limbs are laid naked to our eyes; the foul exhalations;...squalidness and rags, and drunkenness and ruin; . . .they form the back­ ground and hellish music of this black panorama, that moves on, ever, ever, ever before our sick­ ening gaze»-^ But The Knickerbocker attack had no effect in reform­ ing the course of the popular novel in America, Interest continued in detailed descriptions of the sordid side of New York life; for fifty years prior to the New York novels of Howells, Crane, and Dreiser, unpleasant reali­ ties of the New York scene were being utilized repeatedly by such nearly first-rate writers as G-eorge Williams Curtis and Bayard Taylor, and by such third-rate but widely-read — authors as Tlmotby Shay Arthur, G-eorge Lippard, Osgood Bradbury, and Edward Z. C, Judson (Ned Buntline). Poverty played a major role in these early novels of urban realism, Edward Judson*s The Mysteries and }Iiseries of New York (18I}.8), George Lippard*s New York: Its Upper Ten and Lower I4illion (1853), and Maria Max­ well’s Ernest Grey; or. The Sins of Society (1855) are typical of the novels which made capital of the city’s unbelievable slum hovels and factory exploitation. "And you, friend,...railing bravely against slavery," wrote Lippard, just look a moment from the window of your quiet home, and behold yonder huge building*.,. That is a factory. Yes. Have you no pity for the white men,. «who are chained to hopeless slavery, to the iron wheels of yonder factory’s machinery? Have you no thought of the white women.. «who very often are driven by want, from yonder factory to the grave, or to the brothels of New York? "4- Though sensational enough in subject matter to "shock" many of its readers, this very early school of crude realism often adopted a tone of moral fervor. Temperance novels inveighed against "low groggeries," "bloated drunkards," and "besotted brutes," and an even larger number of novels — Osgood Bradbury’s Female

Depravity; or3 the House of Death (1852) is typical — described with lurid horror the "poor, painted, tinseled creatures" who enticed "men quite as depraved as them­ —16^»- selves. • «to their dens of infamy and shame., " Much non­ fiction with similar subject matter appeared in the mid- nineteenth century, describing in a set of stereotyped images the poverty, degradation, and villainy of New York life. G. G. Poster’s New York in Slices ( 181^.9), New York by Gas-Light (IS^O), and New York Naked (l85?), Solon Robinson* s Hot Corn: Life Scenes in New York Illus­ trated , Peter Stryker’s The Lower Depths of the Great American Metropolis (1866), James D. McCabe’s Lights and Shadows of New York Life (1872), and Charles Loring Brace’s The Dangerous Classes of New York (18?2) were only a few of the widely-read non-fiction accounts of unsavory New York. Realistic novels, having become something other than "family reading," borrowed a leaf from non-fiction and disclaimed responsibility for the shocking nature of their contents — it was all just the simple truth. This had also been the plea of other realists: A, B, longstreet used it in Georgia Scenes (183^); Balzac in Pere Goriot assured the reader that "this drama is no work of fiction, no mere noveil It is all true..." Similarly, in prefaces and asides, we read one reminder after another that these novels are not the work of evil imagination, but rather are truthful representations of what existed in the real world of New York, Edward Judson’s preface to •‘ 2. 0 ( 3“'

The Mysteries and I^iserles of Mew York ( 18^.8) declared; I feel bound to tell the reader that strange as all may be, it is drawn from life, heart-sickening too-real life» Not one scene of vice and horror is given in the following pages which has not been enacted over and over again in the city,5 In an identical manner, George Lippard in The Empire City; or. New York by Night and Day (l850), Maria Maxwell in Ernest Grey (1855), Richard Kimball in Henry Powers, Banker (l868), and T . S. Arthur'in Cast Adrift (1873) defended their treatments of the most unpleasant aspects of New York life as "photographs from real life."^ Edward Sherman Gould ended John Doe and Richard Roe; or. Episodes of Life in New York (l862) by pointing out that it was a "history," and therefore he could not "dispose of" the various characters in matrimonial pairs or settle their entire futures. The story of the characters was brought down "to the present day," and what tomorrow or the next year would bring, the author claimed to have no better idea than the reader. Nearly all these early novels were crude and awkward; the plots were tortured by wildly improbable coincidences, the characters generally were without dimension, and the vrriting itself was studded with the constant use of such gems as "ill-gotten wealth," "a den of vice and corruption," and "lips which curled with scorn," In the l860’s, however. -167- two superior novels appeared which, gained a wide aud­

ience, George William Curtis’ Trumps (I6 6I) and Bayard Taylor’s John Godfrey’s Fortunes (l865) skill­ fully assimilated realistic detail and attitude, and bridged the gap between the earlier crudities in forgotten novels and the full command of urban realism in Howells and the naturalists. Curtis’ Trung?s employed the familiar technique of graphically describing New York poverty, vice, and dirt. In a slum saloon "bloated faces glowered through the open doors,,,Human forms — men no longer -- lay on benches, hung over chairs, babbled, maundered, shrieked or wept aloud*”7 The dreariness of poverty and filth was described: "Down in damp cellars sallow ghastly men and women wove rag-carpets, and twisted baskets in the midst of litters of puny, pale children, with bleared eyes, and sore heads, and dirty faces, tumbling, playing, shouting, whimpering — scampering after the pigs that came rooting and nosing in the liquid filth that simmered and stank to heaven in the gutters,"® It is small wonder that an English reviewer, taking this novel as a realistic picture of "America in general and New York in particular," decided that this country "must be a dreadfuH. place to be obliged to live in. — 1.6 8 —

l/Ilthln the plot of the novel, a set of "Wholly believable events leaves the heroine — a beautiful, goodhearted, wealthy girl — without a husband to the very end. The e^qjlanation offered by Curtis was that he merely transcribed life as it really was, without the responsibility for specific turns of events» ’’How, could we help it? How could a faithful chronicler but tell the story as it is? It is not at his will that heroes marry, and that heroines are given in marriage. He merely watches events and records results. Bayard Taylor adopted precisely the same attitude for his novel John Godfrey*s Fortunes,. ”I know,” the hero declares, when he is describing some of his dissolute adventures in New York, ’’that many good people will draw down their brows and shake their heads when they read this confession. But I beg them to remember that I am not preaching, nor even moralizing; I am simply stating the facts of iny life.

In a dedicatory preface to the novel, Taylor himself went still further. He did not merely shrug off respons­ ibility for transcribing reality, even unpleasant reality; instead, he declared emphatically, ’’Not what ought to be, or might be, is the proper province of fiction, but what Is. -169- The emergence of new subject matter was not, of course, a purely native development. If the Athenaeum reviewer of Trumps found Curtis* picture of New York too depressing to contemplate, he might well have pre­ pared himself for the shock by turning to Henry Mayhew*s London labour and the London Poor (1851-2), which des­ cribed "the misery, ignorance, and vice,..of the great Metropolis," Of the western world*s "capital cities," New York had no monopoly of slums, poverty, or villainy, as the novels of Charles Dickens demonstrated so brilliant­ ly, Indeed, in any study of urban American fiction we are so often confronted by strong echoes of Dickens that we begin to take his enormous influence quite for granted. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that from him or through his popularity many Americaa writers learned to look at fiction as an instrument of social action and to look at life through the eyes of the urban poor. In his novels there are, of course, both melodrama and exaggera­ tion, but so too are there vividly accurate renderings of the fog and drizzle, the slime and dust, and the crowded streets of London, So, too, is the now familiar defense by the realist whose readers find life too bizarre to believe: the case of Jarndyce vs, Jarndyce having been in Chancery for over a generation, Dickens wrote in his preface to Bleak House:'"Everything set forth in these -170- pages concerning the Court of Chancery is substantially true." The desire to deal with what was "substantially true" may serve, then, as the key to one of the great impulses of nineteenth century fiction. Social problems and domestic tragedies took their place by the side of adventure yarns and affairs of the heart as the subject matter of fiction. Realism became a dominant mode of expression in the metropolitan novel. The "truth, " of course, was variously interpreted and the achievements were not everywhere commensurate; we had no mid-century realist who could stand by the side of Dickens or Balzac. But we had competent journeymen who believed that not all heroes were invincible, heroines spotless, or endings happy. These writers turned to New York and the great cities of America, and saw life as a struggle -- often in unpleasant surroundings. They not only broke ground, but they sowed the seed which American naturalists were to harvest a generation or two later. It is clear now that by the turn of the twentieth century naturalism was winning its battle to be heard, even if some of the battle had yet to be fought. Thus the virtual suppression of Sister Carrie in 1900 has already been reduced to one of those odd little fables from a bygone era,^^ Dreiser's awkward but moving tale - 171 - of a small-town girl caught by the forces of urban society, first in Chicago and then in New York, had been preceded in the * nineties by the urban realism

of Howells’ A Hazard of New Fortunes (I8 9O), Crane’s

Maggie (1Ô93) and G-eorge’s Mother (I8 9 6 ), Puller’s The Cliff-Dwellers (1893)^ and Norris’ MeTeague (1899).

The way for these writers, however, had been cleared by forgotten champions of realism earlier in the nineteenth century. Such authors as George Lippard, T . S. Arthur, Edward Sherman Gould, Joaquin Miller, and George William Curtis first explored the slums, brothels, and saloons of New York, and sometimes even refused to end their novels happily, on the realistic grounds that too much of life in New York ended unhappily. To be sure, they had neither the skill nor the courageous convictions of Howells, Crane, or Dreiser (the ending of John Godfrey’s Fortunes, for example, flatly contradicts Bayard Taylor’s own preface to the novel), but they did raise several of the important problems waich were to be faced a generation or two later by the ns-turalists. But the realists’ disenchanting images of poverty and vice in New York, a liberating force at first, became in time as restricting as the romantic cliché. Urban life was somehow falsified by conventional over-simplifica- tion, which ill-served the enormous proportions of New -172- York, as well as the frustrations, loneliness, and com­ plexities of the city. More had yet to be done with the Yew York materials, and it is symptomatic that though novels which derive from nineteenth century realism are still being written, they no longer shock us as the earlier exemplars shocked the editors of the Knicker­ bocker l*Iagazine in 1855* Even the later and more significant naturalistic novels no longer excite the violent controversy they once did; Zola, Hardy, Crane, and Dreiser are required reading in our schools today, honest motion pictures are adapted from their novels, and inexpensive editions'of their works are standard titles in such reprint series as the Modern Library or Everyman’s Library, In literature as elsewhere, the bold experiments of one period frequently become the conventions of the next. The question -vdiich comes to mind now is whether all that could be done with New York materials had al­ ready been done by the photographic realism of G-eorge Lippard, the imitative romanticism of Brander Matthexjs, or the pessimistic determinism of Theodore Dreiser. The answer to this question, with no reflection on those three writers or others of their kind, is that they by no means reached the outer limits of what was possible to accomplish in New York fiction. I'-kich was yet -173- to be done with city materials shaped by new techniques and informed by fresh symbols. The most fruitful of these experiments in form be­ came part of the tradition which regards New York as the evil city, though avoiding the over-simplifications of earlier novels in that tradition. What these experi­ menters sought to do, by their special techniques and symbols, was to communicate a sense of the atomistic quaL ity of life in New York, and' to widen the general range and flexibility of urban fiction. In this attempt, as elsewhere, Howells was a transitional figure, finding a framework for A Hazard of New Fortunes (I89O) which enriched and reinforced its realism. Novels by Ernest Poole in 1915# Dos Passes in 1925, and Wolfe in 1939-40 went still further in experimenting with a vocabulary which would adequately symbolize New York as a gathering place for all the urban and industrial evils of modern America* It is to document this suggestion of the emergence of fresh and special organ­ izations of New York life that there now follow detailed, separate analyses of these novels.

Modern experiments with technique in fiction generally emphasize the artist ^ s imposition of an - 174 - order or rhythm on the world of action, by which oizr comprehension of the world is clarified or heightened* WilliaxL Dean Howells, however, shaped the first twelve chapters of A Hazard of New, Fortunes in such a way as to achieve something of a turnabout. In the realism of Howells, art does not so much shape the external world as the world shapes the art; our coniprehension of the novel is enriched by experience more than our experience by the novel. The technique en^loyed in the opening section of A Hazard appears to be that of photography. Urban life and scenes, epitomized in America by New York, are recognized in Howells* novel ”as they really are,” the vast, sprawling formless city determining the vast, sprawling, formless novel. Or so it would seem at first# On reflection, however, what appears most significant is that this novel is extraordinarily good photography, and, of course, "realism” is a relative term in any case. We get an accurate representation of New York not by accident; the novel is not "formless,” we discover, but carefully plotted. Howells sets the scene by allotting fully a fifth of his working space to a description of New York. What might have started as a conventional sketching of -175- background grows to inordinate length. -- indeed, for the

A.tlantic Monthly book reviewer in I89O, only an introduc­ tion to "a new Comédie Hu^mine” could justify as much space as Howells gives to his description of New York.^^ The error of the Atlantic reviewer is in assuming that Part I of the novel is merely introductory in nature be­ cause it appears so* As a matter of fact, the novel gets well under way during this "introduction" ; Fulkerson and the Marches are fully delineated, several lesser charact­ ers are put on scene, and the prior action bringing the various members of the cast to New York and in contact with one another is intricately worked out, A panoramic quality, continued and amplified in later sections, is established in Part I, Superficially reminiscent of Howells* many volumes of travel writing, A Hazard is rendered creative by the use of Basil and Isabel March as a double set of photo­ graphic lenses* Basil is both observer and actor, his wife less a participant than a confidante, though she is also something more, for hers is clearly the dominant will in their marriage* The Marches, whom we had met as honeymooners in Their 'wedding Journey (I87I), are now a middle-aged couple making a necessary but unhappy move from Boston to New York* They are, in effect, Howells* -176- incarnation of the normal male and female of nineteenth century urban America, We know they are compatible; we also know that sometimes they quite humaily and realistic­ ally get on one another’s nerves. They see themselves rather fondly as appreciating the "hi^er" things in life,

though one of H p s , March’s active reasons for not wanting to leave Boston is that she has just managed to have their children accepted into an exclusive Friday afternoon danc­ ing class. We appreciate the Marches, in short, because we understand them; they are familiar folk, and we recognize them as emerging from a realistic concept of average experience. Life, as we said earlier, rein­ forces our coisprehension of the novel, rather thaa the other way around. The framework of this portion of the novel is single enough, Basil, a coiqpetent but by no means outstanding insurance executive in Boston, is offered the editorship of a cooperative magazine to be founded in New York. To move from solid suburban Boston to the hurly-burly of New York is more than either of the Marches is willing to contemplate, "I don’t like New York," Isabel wails, "I don’t approve of it. It’s so big, and _so hideous," The Boston matron doesn’t "approve" of New York, but the decision is not hers to make, Basil is being pushed out of his insurance niche -177- oj a more aggressive employee, and in one of those fine little strokes of irony the insurance company offers him another post which would take him to New York for editorial work* Basil bows to fate, leaves the insurance company, and accepts the editorship of the new magazine* The Marches proceed to. New York with only one illu­ sion, that they will be able to take with them their Boston way of life and shut out of their new home the vulgarity of New York. The process of disabusing them­ selves of this illusion and meeting the city on its own inexorable terms is a long one, described through the action of house-hunting. On foot, in cabs, and by the elevated trains, the Marches travel' about the city for many days, and in the process of finding an apartment they also find a city, "At first all the New York streets looked to them ill- paved, dirty, and repulsive... .But they began to no­ tice that some streets were quiet and clean...* Isabel is a proper enough Bostonian to know that one can*t live anywhere in New York. "She found that there was an east and west line beyond "which they could not go if they wished to keep their self-respect."17 Thus, tne search for a home, xh ich becomes an odyssey in the metropolis, turns into a struggle between Isabel March -1?8— and the city, and the city, which is the hero, cannot lose. She is soon Willing to make compromises; there are “several flats which they thought they could al­ most make do.” She begins to wish they could ”end this sickening search,” and apartment buildings intrude in grotesque shapes on her nightmarish dr earns. They fall victim — Basil first — to some of the unique charms of the city. The elevated trains capti­ vate the searching pair. Basil declares : "Those bends in the L that you get in the .corner of Washington Square, or just be­ low the Cooper institute - they»re the gayest things in the world* Perfectly atrocious, of course, but incomparably picturesqueI And the whole city is so, or else the L wd uld never have got built here. New York m ^ be splendidly gay or squalidly g ^ , but, prince or pauper, it » 8 gay always."19 Isabel admits the city» s gayety, but insists that it is also frantic. "I can't get used to it. They forget death, Basil; they forget death in New York,”^® But at last she too confesses an infatuation - for the L: She declared it the most ideal way of getting about in the world, and was not ashamed when he reminded her of how she used to say that nothing under the sun could induce her to travel on it. She now said that the night transit was even more interesting than the day, and that the fleeting intimacy you formed with people in the second and third floor -179- interiors, while all the usual street life went on underneath, had a domestic intensity m i x e d with perfect r e p o s e . 21 Wandering through a variety of neighborhoods with the Marches, we gliicpse indoor and outdoor scenes of New York, arranged creatively by a writer who had long been a close observer of metropolitan ways and types. The middle-class furnishings offered the Marches are nightmares;, every .surface covered with vases, dragon candlesticks and Japanese fansj the easy chairs and sofas all with tidies and embroidered cushions; Japanese lanterns hanging from the ceiling; the rooms generally filled with easels, bamboo stands, statu­ ettes, and what Howells derisively sums up as "gim- cracks." The attempt to achieve splendor by cluttering the rooms is reminiscent of the Boston interiors des­ cribed by Howells in The Rise of Silas Lapham (l88ij.)* The street scenes are both drab aid colorful. We walk down tenement blocks with ash barrels lining the sidewalks, peddlers of cheap fruits mixing their cries with shouts of playing children and gossiping women, some of them seated on the high stoops and others lean­ ing carelessly out of the windows. At Washington Square Park are the familiar Latin faces and "the picturesque raggedness of southern Europe with old kindly illusion -180- that somehow it existed for their appreciation.*’^^ The suggestion of literary material is made explicit by Isabel when she says, ”You ought to get Mr, Fulkerson to let you work some of the New York sights up for Bvery Other Week. Basil; you could do them very nicely. The unmistakable authenticity of those "New York sights’* derives from Howells’ own long experience at precisely such writing. As- early as 1865 he had already done a series of vignettes called "Letters from New York" for the Cincinnati Gazette, and he then used much the same kind of material for his 1865-6 "Minor Topics" articles for the Nation. ^ Leaving Boston for New York in l886 to write "The Editor’s Study" for Harper* s Magazine -- a move symbolic of comp]e ting a shift in the nation’s literary center — Howells found the city ’immensely interesting," as he wrote a friend in Cambridge,25 He poked around the colorful streets of the Bowery, visited the Chinese quarters of Mott and Pell Streets, talked -with artists and immigrants in Washington Square, ate in the French and Italian res­ taurants of the Village, rode the elevated, visited the theatres on Broadway, watched the children and their nurses in Central Park, studied the turmoil of Wall Street, and went to the fish and vegetable markets - 181 - ear ly in the morning to watch, produce being brought into the city. In New York, Howells said, "one gets life in curious slices#"^^

In 1 8 8 8 , after a house-hunt of his own, Howells wrote Henry James that he wanted "to use some of (New York* s) vast, gay, shapeless life in my fiction. The city had obviously been an inspiration for him. In a 1911 foreword to the "Library Edition" of A. Hazard of New Fortunes, Howells described the book as a result of "a quickened interest in life around me." The hazard he writes about is not merely the Marches* j Fulkerson, the Dryfooses, Mrs. Leighton and Alma, Colonel 'Woodburn and his daughter — all are hazarding new fortunes in the "vast, gay, and shapeless" city. Their hazards, as worked out by Howells, constitute a novel which has been properly appx*aised by Matt hies sen as "the best of his New York novels," by Farrington as "his acutest study," and by Howells himself as "probably my best. It is true, of course, that A Hazard fails, finally, to impress us as a "great" novel. There are significant gaps in Howells* panorama — the very low classes, for instance,are either missing or too obviously scrubbed for the occasion. Then, too, we may well argue that Howells* ^confidence in man as an ultimately rational and kindly creature is grossly misplaced. But as the -182- novel continues at its leisurely pace, a respectably diverse gallery of characters and set of themes are cogently developed. The conflicts aroused by the struggle for control of Every Other Week are finally settled by the climactic street car strike, to which the characters react according to the points of view they represent: March, as Howells* spokesman, sympath­ izes with the cause of the underpaid laborers; Lindau, an embittered radical, defends the strike and its violence as part of the inevitable class warfare; Conrad Dryfoos, a kind of Christian Socialist, under­ stands little of the strike’s economic and political implications, but feels a genuine compassion for the poor; the elder Dryfoos, coarsened by quick and unex­ pected wealth, regards the strike as a specific instance of his "dog eat dog" appraisal of the world; Beaton, a socially irresponsible artist, is merely annoyed by the personal inconvenience which the strike causes him; and Colonel Woodburn of Virginia, a displaced person in Hew York, argues for the re-establishment of "responsible slavery" as the way to solve labor problems. Though scenes of industrial strife in America were still fresh subject matter for fiction in I8 9 O, the novel shows little experimentation in form once past the Marches’ -183- iiouse-iiuntA Hazard is nevertheless an iitrpressive exanple of the author's philosophy of realism in composition^ for the New York story in this novel is quite naturally and unobtrusively shaped by the New York materials, without wrenching or distorting the materials. New York is a recognizable metropolis in Howells' novel, and the characters inhabit the city and the story with equal reality. Seen in this light, the opening section of A Hazard, frequently criticized for its length, is the strongest portion of a first - rate novel.

Though both ÜDwells and Ernest Poole regarded themselves as realists,their methods were quite different. Whereas Howells, in the nineteenth century tradition of panorama, tried to encoiiipass the city by perambulating with major characters through its vari­ ous quarters, Poole sought a single, unified setting through which he could symbolize the tensions of modern urban life @ The Harbor (1915) is possessed of a large idea, that of tracing the New York port's development through three stages — individualistic ownership, monopolistic - 1814.- ownersMp, and finally the prospect of worker control, What Poole does is to use the harbor as a highly maneuverable symbol, shifting its meaning through various stages, from the intensely personal harbor experiences of the story * s "1" to the wider signif­ icance of the New York port both socially and meta­ physically, The novel, which reads at times like Marxist determinism and at other times like urban region­ alism, is in reality a tangled web of experience made meaningful through the use of the harbor as a multi­ level symbol. To Billy, a boy of seven when the novel opens, the harbor is at first a mysterious enchanting place, from which tugs, barges, ferry boats, and steamers sail out to the ocean ("but what was the ocean?") to visit "hea­ then lands," For his father, a practical harbor business­ man, the boy has an early, intense dislike, "It was as though my father had packed all the rich and romantic Far East into common barrels and crates and then nailed down the covers," He later cries out, "It was business now, only businessl"30 and blames the harbor commerce too for the "sharply separate lives" led by his father and mother. —X8^— It is to the harbor that the growing boy escapes whenever he can slip away from the family garden and the protecting embrace of mother and housekeeper* There he learns something of the world, by making friends with "I-licks” and "Dockers*" With them he roams the water­ front, seeing a docker crushed to death, a stoker drunk in a wheelbarrow, a striker and scab fighting, and a sailor and prostitute in embrace* The harbor is thus life outside the family garden, potentially beautiful and romantic, but made ugly by tensions which the boy can barely comprehend. The next step is temporary disenchantment* If the harbor is business and dirty love, then Billy will have none of it* Prodded by his mother, vaguely enlightened by a brush wLth culture at college, he becomes "tired of all these harbor problems," and he wants "to get at life

through A r t , "31 The author unfortunately suffers a poverty of word power to express the hero’s new attitude^ at college Billy writes "stories and sketches by the score," and in Paris he vrrites "short stories by the score*"32 But the harbor will not long be denied. It is ironic that in the midst of all the usual rejection slips, Billy finds the magazine editors are interested only in his realistic sketches of harbor life and harbor personalities, "It was curious, from my window that night what a different harbor I saw below. Ugly still? Of —186- course it was. But what a rich mine of ugliness for the pen of a rising young author like mei”33 Billy*s atti­ tude -- that of regarding the harbor merely as a source of material for his art — is an expression of what Bernard DeVoto has called "the literary fallacy," Isabel March expresses a similar attitude in A Hazard of New Fortunes when she observes that Basil ought to "work up" some of the Village sights for Every Other Week, Though Billy comes closer than Isabel to fulfilling a corollary of the literary fallacy — the belief that life is some­ how subordinate to literature — neither of them "repud­ iates" life, Isabel is the unknowing amateur, rather like the person who says that "a great book" can be made out of "this swell story"; Billy is just a fledgling who hasn't yet got over the wonder of being paid for doing what he likes best. As Billy learns more of life — which in this context means learning more about the harbor and what it symbolizes -- he equates the growth of his own social consciousness with a history of the port. First there were the strong, hardy individualists, men with a brand of romance in them, Mow, however, the harbor is no longer a place of "human adventures for young men, but of financial adventures for- mammoth corporations, "3^4- It is symptomatic that Billy's father is squeezed out of -187- iiis little business and becomes a corporation clerk, no longer entering such items as figs and almonds, indigo, ivory, and tortoise shells, but keeping count instead of barbed wire, boilers, car wheels, and gas engines. The high priest of the new phase is a techno­ crat named Dillon, whose god of efficiency Billy learns to worship. Plans are afoot to transform the sprawling disorganized port into a centralized, well-engineered machine, "Once I had seen a harbor. Then it had grown into a port. And now I saw a metropolis, the hub of a successful land,"35 The third phase of the harbor’s development is that of -worker control* Poole vividly pictures the dockers’ hardships and the incredible labors of the stokers, a scene of the letter’s toil foreshadowing O ’Neill’s The Hairy Ape* A stark account of a general dock strike dominates the second half of the novel, and tho-ugh the strike is broken by the ruthless, efficient methods of Dillon’s corporate masters, Poole (and Billy) are confi­ dent that in the next str-uggle, or in the one follo-wing that, the strikers will win, and that the downtrodden will inherit the earth, Poole’s use of the New York harbor as a symbol of modern experience suggests Hart Crane’s analogous use of the Brooklyn Bridge, What both men sought was a — 188— xmiTying image, one vblch, wotild synthesize the chaos of ■urbai existence and at the same time suggest the possibilities of grandeur in m o d e m life. Although Poole makes use of the harbor's traditionally romantic associations, the battle being waged for its possession is distinctly modern. The struggle is oriented around the question of whether men are to be governed for the good of the few or of the many, "Lucky people, to have had all this modern life condensed so cozily before your eyes," a discerning English author remarks to Billy and E l e a n o r e . C r a n e ' s bridge similarly serves as a point of focus and source of inspiration, the poet declaring that he must "absorb the machine" and "surrender, at least temporarily, to the sensations of urban life Enshrined in the Brooklyn Bridge, as Lewis Mumford points out, was all that the age had just cause to be proud of — " its advances in science, its skill in handling iron, its personal heroism in the face of dangerous industrial processes, its willingness to attempt the untried and the impossible,"38 The poem and the novel are dissimilar, however, in several significant respects. The harbor is bigger and vaguer, standing in a general way for the world; the result is rather like a snapshot 1 6 ich is enlarged until - 1 8 9 - the figures blur. The bridge, on the other hand, is sharper, more precise, and more relevant to an under­ standing of industrialized men who make dreams come true with a slide rule and ingots of steel. The poem, further­ more, invokes figures of the past - Columbus, Pocahontas, Pizarro, Cortes, Priscilla, Rip Van Winkle, Whitman, and Poe -- to give meaning and tradition to the world symbol­ ized by the bridge. The novel, however, seems to be written completely in the present tense, except for an optimistic vision of the future in its closing pages. The situation of a strike which temporarily fails but which promises to succeed-in the future had been used thirty years earlier by Zola in Germinal, The difference between the two is that Poole’s hope seems vague and sentimental, whereas Zola’s fin^ image of miners knocking against the bowels of the earth, like seeds germinating, is a dazzling vision by a mature artist. The Harbor, nevertheless, suffers less than one might expect from its being a fledgling attempt, for Poole was thirty-five when it was published and he had already written much for newspapers and magazines. If his later fiction failed to fulfill the promise of his first novel, it may well be that he never again found a symbol as useful or suggestive as the Port of New York, -190-

h In an essay surprisingly witty and urbane, Sinclair Lewis greeted the publication of John Dos Passos^ Manhattan Transfer in 1925 as ’’more important in every way than any­ thing by Gertrude Stein, Marcel Proust, or even the great white boar, Mr, Joyce's 'Ulysses,'” If Lewis' extrava­ gance gives us pause, he at any rate was one of the very first to appreciate that Dos Pass'os had done "what all of us frequently proved could not be done; he presents the panorama, the sense, the smell, the sound, the soul of New York.”^° What Dos PasSOS does in Manhattan Transfer is to allow the urban' subject matter to shape -the novel more completely than has ever been done by any other novel­ ist o On the surface, there would appear to be several dozen characters in Manhattan Transfer, a few of them ’’major” because they appear on scene somewhat more frequently than the others. Actually, however, the only real protagonist in this book is the city of New York itself; its alleyways, skyscrapers, theatres, and tene­ ments contribute as much to the total impact of the novel as any of the flesh and blood personages. Never do we glimpse New Ycrk’s inhabitants except as animate extensions of the city's gloom and gayety, promise and betrayal. -191- Manlaattan Transfer is, in short, a brilliant ex­ ample of the kind of novel vdaich has come to be known in the United States as "collectivistIn France, at about the time of the first World War, the same liter­ ary technique was called Unanism, of which Jules Romains was probably the chief exponentWhatever its name, the basic method is to embrace social masses on a pan­ oramic scale, rather than to present the story of a few chief characters in logical and chronological order* "The net effect is to create an ingression of varied yet typical experience, to move on a number of levels simultaneously, and to receive as the most lasting sense a general understanding of what it all portends As such, it becomes almost impossible to say ac­ curately what Manhattan Transfer is "about," for the sum is larger and something more than its parts, its people, and its sceneso Each incident is related direct­ ly to the whole rather than to what comes just before or after; indeed, we get a fleeting impression that the order of its scenes could be shuffled about and there would be nothing lost, for the final net impression would remain the same. The method is symbolic in the sense that the several dozen people who appear singly or in groups throughout most of the novel have no importance in themselves — are not "characters" in the -192- traditional sense, about wiiom the story is written. Any otner group of people might have been chosen at random from the city* s swarming millions, and their lives, glimpsed at climactic moments, impinging on one another according to the little ironies of fate, could have been arranged to give the same final impression of life in the metropolis. An image which is particularly useful in under­ standing Manhattan Transfer is that of a flickering flashlight. We stand in a vast, darkened city street with great buildings on either side. With our flash-, light we suddenly illuminate a window and peer for a moment at a lovers* embrace, an act of violence, or a man drinking alone; and in this world of chance, one event is as likely as any other. The light goes out and when we put it on again, it is directed at another win­ dow scene and we again glimpse a few lives acting out their destinies. Perhaps after we have looked into a score of windows, we begin to spend more time at Just a few of them, where the sights are either more in­ teresting or more typical of everything else we have seen in the city. In Just this way does Dos Passos offer a kaleido­ scopic view of life in New York, much of what we see ex­ posing both man and city at their worst — "an explosion -193-

in a c e s s p o o l , ”^3 as Paul Elmer lyiore put it. We are taken on a guided tour in which, the guide occasionally points at objects of special Interest but refuses to make any explanatory statements. If we are baffled or troubled, there is no help for us. If Ellen Thatcher is later called Elaine and still later Heleria, that is for us to figure out and keep straight. If the first three incidents of the book concern Bud’s arrival in New York, the birth of Ellen, and an East. Side Jew’s decision to shave his beard — none of these characters having anything to do with one another throughout the book -- then we must be patient and wait for the jigsaw pieces to fall into place before we can understand the over-all design. Even when characters whose orbits of experience are disparate do briefly touch, the impress­ ion is one of mechanical toys bumping and going off in different directions again. The seamstress Anne works on gowns bought by Ellen at Madame Soubrine’s, and when Ellen is at the shop for a fitting she witnesses the horrible burning of Anna, "Why should I be so ex­ cited?" Ellen asks herself. "Just somebody’s bad luck, the sort of thing that happens every day,,.,, A young man in a straw hat is looking at her out of the corners of his eyes, trying to pick her up,,,. At eight o ’clock she’s going to have dinner with - 1914.- Judge Shammyer and his Dos Passos employes a variety of techniques In Manhattan Transfer to achieve his staccato, panoramic view of the city* s social mass* The central plan of fusing disconnected experiences Into a mosaic Is an extension of the technique of his previous novel. Three Soldiers (1921)» The particular choice of three characters for that war novel — a San Franciscan of Italian parents, an Indiana farm boy, and a New Yorker with a Harvard education — vaguely Implies a cross section of America, the novel*s Ironic power deriving, from the way In which all three are bereft of manhood and individuality once fed into the army machine* In technical devices Manhattan Transfer also looks forward to the great trilogy, TJ.SoA» The "collectivist" nature of both novels Is apparent, and in addition Manhattan Transfer makes occasional and tentative use of news­ paper headlines and snatches of popular songs, which are later developed as the "newsreel" sections of U.S*A. If, in addition, we accept Jimmy Herf as the city- dweller through whom Dos Passos speaks, then his Interior monologues may be taken as roughly equivalent to the "Camera Eye" stream-of-consciousness in the trilogy. The tone poems used as headpieces for each chapter in -195" Manhattan Transfer, while not adopted as such for U«S .A., nevertheless suggest the general technique of establishing a mood for the story with materials which stand outside the story* Par more extraordinary than any of these devices in Mai hat tan Transfer is the way in which Dos Passos communicates time sequence. Never is there an explicit statement indicating when the story begins or ends. But we can reasonably assume that the time-span starts in the

1 8 9 0 ’s, for near the beginning of the novel a headline refers to the signing of the Greater New York Bill, which went into effect on January 1, I8 9 8 , During the course of the narrative there are references to the taking of Port Arthur (January 2, 1905), the murder of Stanford White (June 25, 1906), the Sarajevo incident (June 28, 19114.), the first World War, and the post-war deportation of Communists by the United States Department of Justice, The novel ends shortly after a reference to the reform movement against New York^s Mayor John P, By Ian (in office from 1917 to 1925), Passage of time in the novel is also indicated by the way in wfiich various characters progress or deter­ iorate, as we watch them in short glimpses at irregular intervals. Bud, for example, comes to the city hoping to get to "the center of things," drifts about from one ■“ 196 “ odd job and flophouse to another, becomes a Bowery bum, and finally commits suicide mid-way in the novel by jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge • Ellen* s life is traced from her birth through her girlhood, stage career, and three marriages»_ Congo Jake s^pears first as a French sailor who jumps ship in New York^ he becomes a bootlegger and marries "Nevada," once the kept woman of George Baldwin, who is Ellen's third husband — all of which is one instance of how various "disconnected" characters unezpectedly cross one another's paths in the course of the novel. Jimmy Herf, who is closest to a ■ "main character" in the conventional sense, grows up over-protected by his mother until her death, attends Columbia University, becomes a reporter, marries Ellen in Paris during the World War, is rejected by her sever­ al years after their child is born, and leaves the city in despair and loneliness. When the truck driver from whom he is hitching a ride asks, "How fur ye goin?" Jimmy’s answer supplies the novel with its closing liner "I dunno..Pretty far." But to summarize those lives is to give the erroneous Impression that we are dealing with characters whose fortunes act as a center of interest. On the contrary, any of those lives might have been ended at any point in the novel, or might simply not have been mentioned again -197- w h e n tile novel iiad run only a third of its course* In effect, each life and each incident contribute only to our momentary and fragmentary understanding of time and the city* At one point, Ellen is trying to decide whether she ought to take a small but rich part in The ZinniaG-irl. "1*11 have to sleep on it," she tells the producer when that scene ends * The next scene is a glimpse of Jimmy Herf meeting his drunkard cousin, Joe Harland, and as they walk to a restaurant together, Jimmy notices a headline: "Talented Young Actress Scores Hit in The Zinnia Girl." In another instance, the first time George Baldwin and ITellie McNeil meet is when he offers to handle her husband’s suit for damages after an accident. The strands of their lives are dropped for a time, and when picked up again George and Nellie are embroiled in a love affair. As Sinclair Lewis wittily puts it, Dos Passos omits tedious transitions — ruthlessly casting away the "And so the months and sea­ sons went by and Gertrude realized that Augustus did not love her" sort of plodding whereby most journeymen novelists fatigue the soul*^ Nor does Dos Passos make a conventional triangle of the Baldwin-Nellie-Gus affair» The only comment is an ironic one: some years after they have drifted apart, George sees Nellie in a nighbdLub and says to Ellen, "Think of it I was crazy in love with her -198- and now I can*t remember what her first name was*,,. Funny isn’t it?"^^ The method, in short, is for the author never to "announce" the passage of time, but always to indicate it by internal allusion or by the ordering of the plot. Things just "happen" to the characters at various points in time in an ultimately meaningless way. The impression we get is of a society whose members live in a state of disorder, for causality plays no part in governing the events of their lives* Handled skillfully it is a brilliant technique, especially when the individual scenes develop the various lives in parallel time-lines. Unfortunately, however, the internal order itself is jumbled, and the effect is occasionally chaotic. Accord­ ing to Bud’s account of himself, for example, no more than twelve years could have elapsed from the time he came to the city to his end as a Bowery bum about to commit suicide. He says, "I run away when I was thirteen.• I ’m twenty-five now," (p.122) Between the time of Bud’s arrival and his suicide are compressed Ellen’s birth, growth, and first marriage; the separate story-lines are evidently not progressing at even approximately the same rate. Ellen’s wedding trip presumd)ly occurs seven or eight years after Bud’s suicide, but the wedding trip precedes the suicide in the novel’s sequence of events. -199- Matters are further confused by Bud* s mention of himself as twenty-five years old at two widely separated points: pages 17 and 122. The intent in Manhattan Transfer, to be rid of in­ trusions and plodding explanations by the author, is achieved through the technique of ellipsis, which shows itself not only in the structure of the novel, but in the style of composition as well. The reader is led by Dos PasSOS* impresionistic prose directly into the mainstream of the novel*s incidents, experiencing them precisely the characters do. When Ellen is born, for exairpl.e, her father walks through the hospital ward seeing "rows of beds under bilious gaslight, a sick smell of restlessly stirring bedclothes, faces fat, lean, yellow, white." In another incident, a stage star enters: "A red accordion- pleated dress swirled past them, a little oval face framed by brown flat curls, pearly teeth in an open- mouthed laugh." When Ellen awakens after a party night, she feels "red buzzing in her eyelids the sunlight awakens her, she sinks back into purpling cottomfood corridors of sleep.A truck jambles shatteringly along the street..... "^7 These examples, multiplied by the score, give us the impression of experiencing life through the characters* sensations, rather than through the author* s. The episodic, disjointed appear- —200— ance of the novel is thus curiously justified, by the jumbled, disordered experience of the characters* In the attempt to be literally inipressionistic, Dos Passes like Joyce runs words together as units wherever experience suggests them as single impressions. Thus, "grimy, dark” becomes "grimydark” in the novel, and with similar logic and eyestrain we hear young Jimmy pray, "Nowilaymedowntosleep Ipraythelord mysoul totake.” Ingenious in some ways, the trick soon wears shabby, especially when we have to put up with ”tobaccosmoke,” "peroxidehaired,” and "gimleteyed.” Dos Passes himself recognized the limitations of his typographical trick by resorting to the eye-saving hyphen in such adjectives as "fat-throated.” (p*202), I - The New York that Dos Passos brings to life is one of violence and ironic tragedy* Fire symbolically streaks all through this urban novel. In the opening pages Ed Thatcher.witnesses a tenement building ablaze, a firebug almost destroys Madame Rigaud's delicatessens Stan Emery, dressed in a woman* s clothes after a weird escapade with Ellen, wants to chase after fire engines "red and gleaming" in the street; young Emery, whose drinking becomes suicidal, literally sets himself on fire tdiile in a drunken stupor; Anna, the radical seam­ stress who is forced to scab in order to live, is burned - 2 0 1 - alive in tlae work room of a fashionable dressmaker. In scene after scene we hear the dismal clanging of fire bellis approaching or retreating; crowds always collect to watch the flames^ standing before the fire as they do before the city itself — anonymous, fascinated and close to danger. What comes out of these snapshots of violence, weariness, and endless movement is a moral chaos, or what Joseph Warren Beach has called an "atomistic world. The iniiabitants of this urban realm are merely a bundle of behavioristic responses to the stimuli of environment. ‘Life in the metropolis requires, it is true, the outer signs of mass cooperation -- in a police force, a fire department, food and water supply, and transportation facilities. But the inner life and moral code of the Hew Yorker do not correspond to the outer necessities — each individual is an island unto himself, enclosed by the walls of a furnished room, the lonely meals at automats, the bar stool, the feeling that one is everlastingly alone: witi -ut privacy. When a pathetic victim imagines that "things are going to be different now," we can only smile at the dramatic irony, George Baldwin, for exanple, has an illusory moment of exuberance when Ellen Thatcher Oglethorpe Serf finally accepts his proposal of marriage, "Elaine, life’s going —202 — to mean somettd.ng to me now*.,.God if you only knew how empty life had been for so mai y years, I*ve been like a tin mechanical toy, all hollow inside." (p* 375) • George knows what his life has been, but he does not yet understand that it can never change, Malcolm Cowley has placed both Three Soldiers and Manhattan Transfer in the "art novel" tradition, whose tragic theme is that the artist-hero inevitably finds the world hostile, callous, and "unmanageable." The man of sensitivity has but two alternatives, both bleak. Either he succumbs to the values of the wcrld, surrenders his integrity, and becomes a materialist; or else he struggles without hope against the world and goes down to defeat in an uneven contest. Thus Cowley reads Manhattan Transfer with Jimmy Serf as the hero: "After one last drink he leaves a Greenwich Village party and commits an act of symbolic suicide by walking out along, bareheaded, into the d a w n . "^9 Cowley’s view is plausible, provided that we can accept Jimmy Herf as "hero." But to do this, we would have to ignore the transitional position of Manhattan Transfer in the corpus of Dos Passos’ work. Although Three Soldiers purports to have three heroes, we would be justified in seizing on Andrews (a composer) as the ctaracter who bears the major burden of the novel’s theme. Neither the U.S.A. trilogy as a whole nor aiy - 203 - of its parts can be said to have anything but a ’’collect­ ive hero,” Standing between these two -- and well on the way to collectivism — is Manhattan Transfer, in which

Jimmy Serf serves as the closest device to an author’s mouthpiece, but hardly as hero. And to designate Ellen as his partner-herolne (which Cowley does) only heightens the confusion, for of all of Ellen’s affairs, the one with Jimmy is the most shadowy, the least decisive, and actually the least interesting. What Jimmy does supply is a certain tone of despair with which we can sympathize. No matter how instructive it is to roll around the New York gutters with Stan Emery, George Baldwin, Gus >IcNeil, Ellen Thatcher, and the others, only with Jimmy do we get a view from the rooftops. Take him out of the con­ text of the novel for just a moment, and he is the artist- type in conflict with the world, as Cowley indicates. Put him back, and except for fragmentary moments of illumina­ tion he merges his identity with the collective mass of New York. (Dos Passos, in experimenting with technical devices, borrowed from, the expressionistic theatre of the post-war period and the early 1920’s to give his urban fiction a quality which was new in the American novel. Coming on the heels of George Yaiser’s The Coral (1917) and Gas (Part 1, 1913; Part 11, 1920), Karel Capek’s R.N.R. (1920), Eugene 0*Neill*s The Emperor Jones (1920) and The Hairy Ape (1922), Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine (1923), and George S. Ka-ufman’s and Marc Connelly’s Beggar on Horse­ back (192i{.), Manhattan Transfer joined the ezpression- istic drama in regarding man as dehumanized by the machine age. We no more e^ect to meet a heroic character in this novel than we expect to meet a heroic laths. Frag­ mentary scenes with mechanical figures come into focus and then dissolve abruptly into darlôiess. The exaggerations a7id. distortions inherent in the e^^iresslonistic method are neither cheerful nor photographically accurate — but they make available an inner core of truth which is other­ wise elusive. Dos Passos was to go on to develop the techniques and point of view of Manhattan Transfer in the greater achieve­ ment of U.S.A.. where his scope is as broad as the American continent. What he later wrote about the United States in a preface to the trilogy is what he might easily have written about New York, This is the eye with which he looks at his materials: U.S.A. is a slice of continent. U.S.A. is a group of holding companies, some aggregations of trade unions, a set of law bound in calf, a radio network, a chain of moving picture theatres, a column of stock quotations rubbed out and written in by a Western Union boy on a blackboard, a public library full of old newspapers and dogeared historybooks with protests scrawled on the margins in pencil... — 2 0 ^ —

U.S.A. is the letters at the end of an address when jou are ax^ay from home.

The ordeal of Thomas Wolfe was to create an American mythology. Fully aware how complex his intentions were, he wrote: It is not merely that in the cultures of Furope and the Orient the American artist can find no antecendent scheme, no structur­ al plan, no body of tradition that can give his work the validity and truth that it must have. It is not merely that he must make somehow a new tradition for himself, derived from his own life and from the enormous space and energy of American life..,,It is even more than this,.,the discovery of an entire universe and of a cong)lete language,,, .50 Thus does the poetic headpiece to Look Homeward, Angel cry out, "Remembering speechlessly, we seek the great forgotten language," the magic vjo rd wherewith to sum up America the unique. His vision was at once a national ideal and a tribal myth: Americans were the chosen people, different, the hope of the future, boasting legends of amazing feats of strength, courage, and loyal­ ty, yet suffering too moments of betrayal and darkness. The proportions of the dream, were heroic, and the myth- maker woxild have to fashion the American materials on a corresponding scale. — 2 0 6 —

To this end Wolfe spent the last dozen years of his short life writing a book -- not a "novel,” which he regarded merely as a unit of convenience to publish*’ ers — but a book of many volumes which would trace the intricate web of American experience in all of its variegated patterns. Through his vast work ran five major themes: the poignancy of youth, the decay of small­ town integrity, the country boy in the great metropolitan world, the artist in exile, and the search for a spirit­ ual father and homeland. The web of America which Wolfe was weaving remains incomplete, a partial chronicle of Eugene Gant-George Webber* s "buried life” in North Caroline, Harvard, New York, and Europe, It is with Wolfe’s vision of New York that we are here concerned, recognizing it as a segment of the grand mosaic. Roughly the last half of The Web and the Rock (1939) and the first half of You Can’t Go Home Again (19i|-0) come together to form a single vast picture of New York, On "that enfabled rock" roamed a special breed of men, perfci*ming deeds for a bard to retell: The city was their stony-hearted mother, and from her breast they had drawn bitter nurture* Born to brick and asphalt, to crowded tenements and swarming streets,•.taught to fight, to menace, to struggle in a world of savage vio­ lence and incessant din, they had had the city’s qualities stamped into their flesh and —207 “ movements, distilled through, all their tissues, etched with the city* s acid into their tongue and brain and vision. Their faces were tough and seamed, the skin thick, dry....Their pulse beat with the furious rhythm of the city’s stroke ready in an instant -fcd th a curse...and their hearts filled with a dark, immense, and secret pride. Their souls were like the asphalt visages of the city’s streets,...They lived like creatures born full-grown into present time...... Each day, with minds untroubled, they embarked upon adventures from which the bravest men bred in the wilderness would have recoiled in terror and desola- tion.5l It is as the traditional male Cinderella of folk­ lore that Wolfe’s autobiographical hero, George Webber, comes to the ”sky-roaring citadel that bears the magic name...of Manhattan.”- Self-conciously aware that as the country boy in'the big city his plight is legendary, he declares that "there is no truer legend in the world»”-^^ But for George, the folk-hero, "there really is no coming to the city. He brings the city with him," for the city has been his goal, his dream, even before he knew it himself. Overwhelmed at first, he characteristically decides that there is "no place like it," that I\ew York "lays its hands upon a man’s bowels," and that "he can never die." He plunges for hours into the swarming streets, ecstatic with the night parade, feeling "the promise of some glorious adventure.,"^'^ - 208 - Inevitably he suffers disillusion, America;* sa pub­ lishing capital does not clasp him to its bosom, and in fact he is soon uncomfortable even about calling himself a writer. The crowds take on "criminal visages of night, derived out of the special geography"; at the heart of the city*8 life is "a malevolent and destructive energy." The swarming rock belongs not to the one "who died on Wed­ nesday — for he, alas, is already forgotten — but (to him) who came into town last night, A second phase in the provincial* s discovery of New York causes another alternation of mood. Through Esther Jack, a stage designer some years his senior, George lives the cosmopolite*s life — replete with a studio, a backstage acquaintance with an arty theatre crowd, and an adoring mistress whom he occasionally pushes about in the best Latin style. From her, George gets a vision of the city’s life "that was as different from the swarm­ ing horror of his own Faustina vision as anything could be." Esther is "the city’s daughter," and hers is the city he longed to know, "the city of the native." In the "late April" of his love for Esther he would rush about madly in the streets, "and instead of the old con­ fusion, weariness, despair, and desolation of spirit, instead of the old horrible sensation of crowning, smothering, in the numberless manswarm of the earth, he -209- knew nothing but triumphant joy and power.'* Going to his first literary party, George is elated and his mood is reflected in his view of the city, which "had never seemed as beautiful as it looked that night,**^^ In time, of course, the pendulum swings over again. Esther "feeds" on his youth; the wealthy "patrons of art" (New York cloth­ ing manufacturers) are corrçîlacently ignorant of the art­ ist’s fury and despair; the drawing-room esthetes write papers for esoteric little magazines on how the "greatest of tragedians," Charlie Chaplin, uses his hands for effect; Esther’s theatre crowd is composed of egotists, homo­ sexuals, nymphomaniacs, and generally ill-wilied ne^orot- ics, whose values are sterile, depraved, cynical; and Esther herself, once the symbol of all that was fabulous in Karhattan, is now the symbol of an infamous web of corruption. The nineteenth century split-view of New York is thus expanded by Wolfe to mythical proportions — the "fabled rock" versus the "evil city," For Wolfe, George Webber’s struggles, his violent alternations of mood, are more than personal. They are national, they are timeless, just as were his vacillat­ ing views of the South, America, the Jews, his family, the artist’s life, the quest for fame, the Gemutlich- keit of Germany, all "committing him uneonditionally now to wonder or joy, now to fury or despair,The - 210 - provincial’s entry into tiie great world, b.e writes, is a tremendous and vital experience not only in the life of a man, but in the life of a nation, Wolfe spoke for all the innocents who were tainted by the evil city, but who rose above it to assert the victory of youth, justice, and honor. To express the fury of George Webber’s life and his vision of evil abroad in New York (and America), Wolfe found two symbols, the perfect products of an artless genius. From a nine-line news item in the New York Times, he dramatizes the plight of man in a mechaniz­ ed world, "An unidentified man," registered as C . Green at the Admiral Francis Dx-ake Hotel, "fell or jumped" from the twelfth story and splatteied his mortal remains on the pavement below, "Just a cinder out of life" was this G, Green, "life’s nameless cipher, life’s manswarm atom,,, a man-mote in the jungle of the city," The pavement on which he destroys himself comes from the Standard Concentrated Production Units of America, No. 1 — the vast assembly belt of America which also produces cur conventions, our neat standard hats of grey, and the dreary pimento sandwiches eaten for lunch by dreary clerks at dreary drug store counters. But for this one moment of glory, C . Green becomes "The Guy" instead of just "another guy," and to him in the name - 211 - of all tile other bloodless ciphers in the modern world, Wolfe devotes a chapter entitled "The Hollow Men," We are a night-time people in the cities, wrote Wolfe after hundreds of prowling excursions around Hew York. He saw everywhere the terrible signs of depression in the ’thirties, and chose as his symbol the public lat­ rine in front of the Hew York City Hall, There on bitter- cold nights he would find the defeated, homeless men seek­ ing refuge, some of them the traditional stumble bums to be found in good times or bad, but most of them "honest, decent middle-aged men with faces seamed by toil and want These were the wanderers, the uprooted, the unwanted, "Flot­ sam of the general ruin of the time," Wolfe called them, that disinherited portion of America which passed nights on the concrete floors of subway stations, park benches, deserted doon^ays, and public latrines. And towering above these forgotten men were the sky-scraping citadels of Hew York, wherein so much wealth was so conspicuously consumed. Here, then, is the burden of Wolfe’s attack; in the megalopolis man loses his individuality and his dignity. He becomes a "nameless cipher, life’s manswarm atom," and he suffers privation and defeat, not in the midst of want, but in the midst of plenty. - 212 - Tlie energy and passion with, whlcli Wolfe created his myth led to errors of excess which, at their worst, grievously damaged his reading of life. Critics point

out with some justification that at times his rhetoric turned to bombast, his lyricism to lomantic moans, his innocence to naivete^ They further charge that in an important sense Wolfe did not really “write” his novels, for only the cuts, revisions, and reorganizations by the great editor, Maxvrell Perkins,made publication possible in the first place. He has even been scolded because the character George Webber, disillusioned by the depression

of the 1 9 3 0 *s, "never makes contact with any sort of

organized l a b o u r , ”^9 But the attack {no kindlier term would be accurate) made by Bernard DeVoto in aa article

entitled "Genius is Hot Enougli”60 evidently distressed Wolfe more acutely than any of the other catalogues of his literary sins, and therefore deserves further comment, We might start by observing that if "genius is not enough," it .remains at any rate the most important single characteristic for a great writer to possess. There is simply no substitute for it; no philosophical acumen, no technical device, no high polish of style can quite disguise its absence. To recognize that Wolfs possessed -213- 80 valuable and irreplaceable a commodity as genius is to say more for iiim than can be said for all but a very small number of American writers of this century* We need not worship genius, nor need we allow it to blind us; but it seems not too much to expect that we will cherish it* This genius of Wolfe' a was uni'uly in nature and needed the guidance supplied by Maxwell Perkins, But the relationship between those two has been distorted to the point of falsehood, Perkins himself flatly stated that the extent of cutting Wolfe's books was "greatly exaggerated** and that **there was never any cutting that Tom did not agree to.John Skally Terry, who is Wolfe's official biographer, reported that "Perkins never re-wrote a single sentence of Wolfe’s;,,,he never changed a word* What he did, he said, was to give advice about material which was out of perspective, or which gave too much importance to side is sues.He did, in short, precisely what a great editor would be expected to do in the service of an extraordinarily talented young writer. Indeed, of ^ 1 the charges against Wolfe, his "dependence" upon the editor is the least credible and the most iripertinent, We might suggest that even if they had "collaborated," only the stature of the man Thomas Wolfe might have been lessened; but that — would have had nothing to do with the work of art it­ self, No literary problem would have been solved if the two men had decided to split the author’s royalties. There ^ one central and pervasive fault in all of Wolfe’s writing, particularly after Look Etomeward, Angel, In emotions, Wolfe, Eugene Gant, and George Webber never got much beyond their twenty-first birthday. His first novel, a magnificent tale of adolescence, thus remains his one great achievement. The later works, though touched by the wand of genius, remain plagued and damned by the voice of a naif. His vision of life in America had both the audacity and immaturity of a child genius. The myth he created, for all of its grandeur, had its author’s limitations, ”I believe that we are lost here in America,” Wolfe wrote in his Credo, "but I believe we shall be found," This belief of an artist who in a single, vast work wanted to capture the life and spirit of a nation was also America’s "everlasting living dream," He spoke to us as if from the infancy of a race to tell us that "the true discovery of America" is yet to come, and that its coming is as "certain as the morning, as inevitable as noon," Wolfe began his tumultuous career in print with the anguished cry of "0 lost I" but was to end it in the belief that the G, Greens would yet be -215“ redeemed. This is the same hope which animates the novels of Dos Passos, Poole, and Howells, The Harbor and A Hazard end, as does You Can't Go Home Again, on a note of affirm­ ation and with a deep-seated belief in the great future of democracy, in spite of temporary defeats , Only Manhattan Transfer seems to end in despair and frustration. But in addition to recording man^ s inhumanity to man, this novel points out that man does the greatest mischief to his own self. In subjecting himself to the loneliness and selfishness of a fragmented urban existence, the city man is his own worst enemy, "This town’s go in to hell," remarks Gus McNeil in Manhattan Transfer, Indeed, as Dos Passos pictures it, "this town"is hell, and there is a kind of Promethean release from "the rock" as Jimmy Herf leaves New York at the end of the novel. He has been beaten and broken by the metropolis, but never fooled by it. Once past his mother’s death, Jimmy becomes remarkably disenchanted with the possibilities of happi­ ness in the city, which is essentially why we feel him to be the mouthpiece of the author. Thus Manhattan Transfer, the least sentimental of these New York novels, joins in affirming a scale of values by saving the single character in the novel most worth saving, and by giving his defeat a touch of dignity. Yes, we are lost here in -216-

America, but what Howells, Poole, Dos Passos, and Wolfe tell us each, in his own way is that we shall be found again.

The main burden of our thesis here has been that New York has served in literature as a cultural symbol, rather than merely as a setting. Both in literature and in history that symbol has had two distinct meanings, each contradicting the other. The one which regards the city as a personal adversary we have found to be the most dominant in New York novels. The hero (or heroine) of such novels comes to the big city, generally against the good advice of village elders, and suffers when exposed to the size, pressure, and entrenched evil of New York, A mixture of melodrama and crude realism, the early novels of this type chi^onicled the main characters' surrender to the allurements of easy money and power. New York as a "den of iniquity" was established as a cliche, accurately reflecting the nation*s interest in and mistrust of its major metropolis. - 2 17 - On the other hand, neither warning nor common sense was sufficient to halt the drift to the city. For the privilege of being a New Yorker, thousands and then millions of people seemed willing to put up with con­ gestion, dirt, noise, and corruption which would have been unbearable anywhere else. But for all its dangers and discomforts , New York represented what the hero of The Honorable Peter Stirling called the "big beyond," A recurrent figure in such novels was the lax-ryer, politician, businessman, or eager young adventurer who found in New York the challenge and rewards worthy of his ambitions. The city was a magnet too for ivriters, artists, musicians, actors, and journalists, In New York these pursuers of the bright Medusa foxmd prominent teachers, schools, publishing houses, and sympathetic circles of kindred souls with xvhom to discuss aesthetic problems. Such novelists as Howells, Crane, Matthews, Phillips, and Huneker played freely on the assumption that New York was the national c enter of culture* Several voices, to be sure, were moved to violent protest. New York, superficially regarded as a haven for culture, became in reality a threat to culture. "Smaller cities," Lewis Mumford cried out, "are drax-rn into the megalopolitan network; they practice imitative­ - 2 1 8 - ly the megalopolitan vices."^3 Those vices were charse­ ized by Dos Passos as inevitable in the "atomistic" dissociated life of metropolitan dwellers . He perhaps better than any other novelist understood the moral debilitation which must result from living among people but never with them. And in New York’s standardized bigness, Thomas Wolfe saw the symbol of a disease which endangered the entire nation; hence his furious satire of "the Standardized Concentrated Production Units of America" and "The School for Utility Cultures," Yet if Wolfe’s view of New York seems truer than that of Dos Passos, it is because Dos Passos created an Inferno in which to roast his urban victims, whereas Wolfe recognized New York in its truer image of a tempt­ ing garden. This recognition is vital, for at the core of the city’s influence is its bright promise, its fascination which bewitches the natives and lures the outsiders. Even when remembered in all its squalor and frustrating waste of energy — as I remember it — New York has ihe magic quality of being first, biggest, richest, and most influential. In fact and in fiction it is a strange city, strange because it is so many cities. Even a native -- perhaps especially a native — can never wholly comprehend New York unless he can also comprehend much of the world. For in the sense - 2 1 9 - of its being a microcosm. New York tbe world. If its frailties are such, that the novelists have with Justification regarded New York as a source of evil, those frailties are at any rate universal in nature. But in the city, the evil is writ large. The pressures and tensions are more immediate and more persistent* The result s in human terms, as New York novelists have repeatedly shown, are disastrous. And yet there is nothing to be done, for though the New..York novel is essentially a literature of protest, neither the ob­ vious nineteenth century warnings nor the subtler twentieth century tales of disintegration have been able to turn the tide of New York’s growth, of piling new crowds upon the old, of compounding, in short, the original folly. Whether New York will continue to serve novelists as a symbol of growth and pre-eminence is of course a matter of conjecture. At this vjriting — the city’s three hundredth anniversary -- New York has achieved greater proportions than ever before in its history* Certainly there have never been so many people of differ­ ent origins carrying on so wide a variety of activities in so compact an area. It has been remarked, indeed, that the United Nations’ selection of New York as some- - 220 - tîaing of a world capital seems rather like belated recognition of an established fact. And yet — there are signs indicating that the limits of expansion have been reached and that a decline may follow shortly. The very fact, for example, that New York land values and rentals are so high has driven many corporations to establishing headquarters in West­ chester County or on Long Island, or out of the metropol­ itan area altogether. Business organizations are moving plants to sites with cheaper supplies of labor, power, and storage space; although publishers retain editorial offices in New York, much printing is done elsewhere. Hollywood, as the motion picture capital, once dealt a serious blow to New York’s entertainment industry, and now seems well on the way to capturing leadership in television production. But the most serious sign of trouble for New York is the decline in port activity, long the life blood of the metropolis. Racketeering on the waterfront is so powerful that as important a shipper as the H. S. Lines recently abandoned one of its midtown piers rather than try to cope with organized pilferage and terrorism. It would be idle to insist that these are signs of '’inevitable" doom. Similar predictions, warnings, and maledictions have been uttered in the past, but the city - 221 - has always come through periods of crisis stronger, larger, and richer than ever before. EventuaOly, per­ haps, the stupendous energy generated in this foremost of cities will be dissipated. The center of urban life may shift — urban life itself may change in nature to something different from i-iiat we know today. In the meantime, however, New York continues — as it has for more than a century — to be the s;'nn.bol of all that is glorious and all that is frightening in urban life. It remains the nation* s chief metropolis, and has served the American imagination in much the same way as London and Paris have served the English and the P’rench; its mode of life has come to be practiced imitatively through­ out the land, even if its values are called corrupt. To be sure, the novel of New York has borrowed much and is but one part of the larger national literature. But it has also made significant contributions. An extraordinary environment has molded New York’s popula­ tion — including those transplanted villagers, immi­ grants, and Negroes — into a unique kind of American: the metropolitan man. Because of the contradictions in his nature, we cannot quite define him, but w'e can always recognize him. In a sense, he is a "type," but one of equal stature in our literature with the New - 222 - Englander, the front1ersman^ or the plantation owner. And like those others, he is endowed with a way of life and a scale of values distinctly his oxm| he is subject to pressures, ambitions, and limitations germane to his environment. We see that his life is nothing except as part of the mass, and yet there is a kind of glory in his struggle with the environment. He cannot achieve success except as he surrenders an inner peace, and yet he feels that there is no success anywhere else». Yes, he is a type, and that is a solution of sorts, though we notice that his "typical''life, as represented by a long succession of novelists, has proved conclusive­ ly that Hew York is a land of milk and honey, and that Hew York is also a very wicked city. He is, in short, good and bad, rich and poor, happy and sad, native and foreign, white and colored, simple and complex — be­ longing to the manswarm and yet in revolt against it. He is, then, a type in the sense that Americans are a type, richly various even within a set of limitations. He is the hero of the Hew York novel, which has set a pattern for the national development of the ilmerican urban novel, and has thus added its own dimensions to our native literature. HOTES - 2214.-

C hap ter I: Two New Yorks

1 I am. borrowing Henry Nash Smith’s designation of "symbol" and "myth" as smaller and larger units of the same kind of thingSee his Virgin Land (Cambridge,

Hass o, 1 9 5 0 )* ^Lyman Abbot’s "Introduction" to Josiah Strong, The Challenge of the City (New York, 1907), P» v» 3 Ida Tarbell, The Nationalizing of Business

1878-1898 (New York, 1936), p. 119. ^ James F. Muir he ad, America, Land of Contrasts (New York, 1902), p* 193» ^Dixon Ryan Fox’s "Foreword" to Arthur H.

Schlesinger, The Rise of the City I8 7 8 -I898 (New York,

1933), p. XiV. ^Smith, op, cit., p, 193» "^Schlesinger, op. cit., p, 153» ^Robert G, Albion, The Rise of the New York Port 1815-1860 (New York, 1939), p. 16,

"^Ibld., p, 2 3 5 » ^^Cleveland Rodgers and Rebecca Rankin, New York; The World’s Capital City (New York, 1946), p, 16, ^“Albion, op, cit.. p, 98 ^^Ibid,, p, 2 2 4 , and Rodgers and Rankin, op, cit., PP, 30, 37, —22^— 3-3Rodgers and Rankin, op> cit», p» li^-Tarbsll, op, cit,« p, 6, Albion, op, cit., pp, 2lp., 267, and 287. ^^Adna P, Weber, The Growth, of Cities in the Nine­ teenth Century (New York, 1899), pp. 173-174» ^"^Schlesinger, op, cit., p, 73» ^^P, P. Browne, "American Publishing and Publishers," Dial, XXVIII (May 1, 1900), pp, 340-343» Dixon Wecter. The Saga of American Society (New

York, 1937), pp. 204, 458, 20 K, C. Babcock, The Scandinavian BJ.ement in the United States (Urbana, Illinois, 1914), PP. 136-137» 21 Schlesinger, op. cit., pp, 2, 78-79? Weber, op, cit., pp, 91“92„ 201-211; Josiah Strong, The

Twentieth Century City (New York, I8 9 8 ), p, 35 Josiah Strong, The Challenge of the City (New York, 1907), p, 1 8 j and Pred A. Shannon, "A Post Mortem on the Labor-Safety-Valve Theory," Agricultural History XIX C January, 1945), 35. ^^Smith, op, cit., p, 125

23schlesinger, op, cit., p, 8I, 24james Penimore Cooper, The Prairie (New York,

1 8 2 7 ), II, 92o —226 —

^^Eenry George, Q-or Land and Land Policy, Nation­

al and State (San Francisco, 1 8 7 I), p* 97.- On p. 93 lie ciiarges that- the "few" who are concentrating wealth in their hands are to be found mainly in London and New York.

B. Platt, "Certain Injurious Influences of City Life and Their Removal," Journal of Social Science, XXIV (April, 1888), 2k-30.

^^Schlesinger, op. cit., p. 355.

^Qlbid., pp. 156-157*

29ibid., pp. 1 0 8 -1 0 9 , lllo

Andrew D. White, "The Government of American

Cities," The Forum, X (Dec. I89O), p. 357. Without any attempt at' humor, the author declares that he was homesick only once during his travels in Europe — the stench and corruption of Constantinople reroinded him of New York.

James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, (London,

1 8 8 8 ), II, 2 8 1 , i^68, h73.

^^Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of the Cities (New York, 190i>.), p. 289 (italics mine).

^^Ibid.. p. 2 9 0 .

^^Ibid., p. 299.

^^Ibid., p . 301. -227-

Chapter 2: The Evil City

^As quoted in I4atthew Josephson, Portrait of the Artist as American (New York, 1930), p.- 22. ^Knickerbocker Magazine, VIII (August, 1836), 210. ^Howard Mumford Jones, "American. Literary History and the Problems of Urbanization" (Princeton, 1914-8 ). Aval 1Ë2 le only in mimeographed form from the A.G.L.S., Washington, D.C. ^erry Fielding, Joseph Andrews (London, 17l]-2), pp. 10, 15» Citations are from the Rinehart Edition

(New York, I9I4-8 ), ed, by Maynard Mack»

^Honoré de Balzac, Pere Goriot (Paris, 1835)^ PP»

IX, X, I4.9 , 71a 8I4., 8 7 . Citations are from the Modern

Library Edition (New York, I9I4.6 ), ed, by E» K, Brovnn, ^This is, of course, a modern variation of one of the best-known of Aesop * s fables® According to the Catalog of the Library of Congress, thirty-eight edi­ tions (some reprinted many times) of Aesop appeared in the United States from I8I4.5 to 1917» In addition, this particular fable appeared in at least seventeen other first editions by a variety of editors for home use, gift books, and school texts. Its currency in America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was one of the widest of all fables and folk tales. Frequently used as —228 — the title story of fairy tale collections, it appeared also in verse and play form. Detailed listings of the editions in print can be found in Mary Huse Eastman, Index to Fairy Tales, r^ths, and Legends (Boston, 1926),

P » 89 . ^ F» Hume (¥illys Niles, pseud*). Five Hundred Majority; or. The Days of Tammany (New York, I8 7 2 ), p. 21. O Osgood Bradbury, The Belle of the Bowery (Boston, I8]x6), pp. ^Ibid., p„ 33* ^^Edward Z, C, Judson, The B ' Hoys of New York

(New York, 18)4.9 ), p. 1. ^^Ibid.. pp. 37-38 ^^08good Bradbury, Female Depravity (New York, T852), p. 28. ^•^Osgood Bradbury, The Gambler* s League (New York,

1657), P=. 17

^^Theodore ¥inthrcp, Cecil Dreeme (New York, I8 6 I),

P* 2 3 9 . Herbert R. Mayes, Alger, A Biography Without a Hero (New York, 1928), p. 99* ^^Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick (New York, I8 6 8 ), p. 116* -229-

^7Ibid., 15.

Mayes, op» cit., p» 1 0 3 » Charles Morris, Honest Harry; or. The Country Boy Adrift in the City (Hew York, 1882), pp» 2, 9, 28» 20gume, op. cit., pp. 8, 21-22. Joaquin Miller, The Destruction of Gotham (New York, 1886), p» 7. ^^Ibid., P» 17 ^^Ibid., p. 130 ^Edgar Fawcett, The Evil That Men Do (New York,

1 8 8 9 ), pPo- 3 2 , 3i{-o Emilie Ruck de Schell, "is Feminine Bohemianism a Failure?" Arena, XX (July, I8 9 8 ), 74» Irving Bachelier, Eben Ik)lden (Boston, 1 9OO),

P» 2 7 7 » Howard Fast, A Place in the City (New York,

1937), P» 54» pR Miller, op» cit., pp. 58, 182, 20?» 29 James Fenimore Cooper, Home As Found (New York,

1 8 3 8 ), p. 1 0 1 . 30James K. Medbery, Men and Mysteries of Wall

Street (Boston, I8 7 O), pp» 9-10»

•^^Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons (New York,

1934), P» 9» -2 3 0 - 32Rîc]aai*d B« Kimball, Henry Powers, Banker (New

York, i860;, pp» I4.O, i|.6 » ^^Ibid.. pp» 5 1 - 5 2 ■^^Joseptison, THe Robber Barons « pp, 326-327, as quoted from May Van Rensselaer (Mrs, John King) and

P. P. Van de Water, The Social Ladder (New York, 192l|_) »

35ifcid., p. 3 2 9 . 36%bid» 37ch.arles Dudley Warner, A Little Journey Into the

World (New York, I6 8 9 ), pp* 9-10» 3Qibid.. pp» 119-120» 39Ibid., P» 201, ^Qjbid.. P» 334* ^Warner, .Golden House (New York, 1894) » P* I8 » ^Upton Sinclair, The Money-Changers (New York,

1 9 0 8 ), P» 2, ^3ibid., P» 46,

^Ibid., P» 3 1 5 * ^Quoted in Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (î:iew

York, 1 9 4 2 ), P» 7 4 . ^Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (New York, 1934)^ p, 1 9 5 * ^"^Edith Wharton, New Year’s Day, p* 154» -231- quoted in James L, Pordj, Forty-Odd Years in the Literary Shop (Hew York, 1921), p. 98.

^9d a b . XIX, 61. •^^J. L. Ford, op. cit., p. I4J4., Josephson, The Robber Barons, p. 136.

^'^Arthur Schlesinger, The Rise of the City I8 7 8 -

1898 (Hew York, 1933), P. 391. ^^illiam L, Riordin, ed., Plunkitt of Tammany Hall (Hew York, 1905), PP* 59-60. ^Quoted in Lloyd Morris, Incredible Hew York (Hew York, 1951), P* 232. ■^•^Hume, op. cit., p^ 22 ^^Ibid., p. 93. ^"^Edgar F awe ett. The Evil That Men Do (Hew York,

1 8 8 9 ), pp. 196-197. •^^Henry Harland, Grandison Mather (Hew York, I8 8 9 ), p* 2 3 9 . •^^Edgar Fawcett, A Hew York Family (Hew York,

1 8 9 1 ), pp. 1 2 2 , 1 2 5 o ^°Ibid.. p. 112.

^^Ibid., p. 1 0 9 . ^^George A. Dunlap»s The City in the American Hovel (Philadelphia, 193^4-), P» 165, s.nd Alice J. Du Breuil's The Hovel of Democracy in America (Baltimore, 1 9 2 3 ), p. 8 suggest the former, and Allan Hevins, "P. L. - 232- Ford,” DAB (1 9 3 d) j VI, ^1.73 suggests tiie latter theory. 63paul Leicester Ford, The Honorable Peter Stirling (New York, l89ij.), p. 6t o i d .. p. 3 4 . 65 Ibid., p. 1 3 9 - 66ibid., p. 3 1 7 . 67ibe Spider and the Fly; or. Tricks, Traps, and Pitfalls of City Life (New York, l8?3), pp. 2i^.-25<» 68ibid., p. 19. 69(jeorge Kneeland. Commercialized Prostitution in New York City (New York, 1913), P* 5l. ^^Ibid., p. 1 7 7 . 71oscar Cargill, Intellectual America (New York,

I9I4J-), p. 596. "^^Angus Wilson, Emile Zola (New York, 1952), pp. 9 1 -9 2 . "^■^Waldo Prank, Rahab (New York, 1922), p. 122« ^^%ichael Gold, Jews Without Money (New York,

1935), p. 33. 75Benjarain Appel, Powerhouse (New York, 1939), p. 19 o -233-

Cliapter 3: A Romantic View

^James Huneker, M~ew Cosmopolis (New York, 1915)5 p. 7 0 . ^J* Brander Matthews, These Many Years : Recollec­ tions of a New Yorker (New York, 1917), pp* 381-385• ^Ibid., p.. 3 8 2 .

^Ihid.. p. 3 8 8 . ^J. Brander Matthews, A Confident Tomorrow (New

York, 1899)5 P. 10i|.o ^Ibid., p. 6 '^Ibid., po 66. ^Ibid.. p. 2 3 * ^Ibid.. p. 21* ^^Ibid., p* 67* ^^Ibido, Po 10*

^^ b i d ., p* 2« ^^Ibid., (italics mine)* ^ b i d . , p. 2 7 0 o ^5Albert Parry, Garrets and Pretenders (New York, 1933), Po 71. 1 8 Henry Cuyler Banner, The Midge (New York, I8 6 6 ),

Po 2 1 7 * -234- 17 P, Hopkins on Smith., THe Fortimes of Oliver Horn (New York, 1902), I, 77, 150, 176-177, 200-201; II, l88.

^^Henry James, The American Scene (New York, 1907),

PP* 1 5 3 -1 5 4 *

Henry James, ¥as3alngr.ton Square, p» 91; in William Phillips* Great American Short Novels (New York, 1946)-

^°Ibld.. p. 99

^“William Henry Bishop, The House of a Merchant

Prince (Boston, I8 8 3 ), p* 344*

James, The American Scene, p* 73*

^■^Matthews, These Many Years, p* 390. Cf. Prank Norris, The Responsibilities of the Novelist, p. 8 7 , declares that a Great American Novel can be written only sectlonally. -235-

Chapter i]-î The Islands of Manhattan

—Abe Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky (New Yorkj 191?), p. 133. ^Carl Wittke, "Melting Pot Literature," College English. VII (1946), 190. ^ a t e Holladay Claghorh, The Incnigrant * s Day in Court (New York, 1923), pp. 1 - 5* ^Arthur Mo Schlesinger, The Rise of the City; 1878-98 (New York, 1933), P.- 65. g As quoted in Kate Hollad^ Claghorn, "The Foreign

IrniTiigr-ant -in New York City," U.S.Industrial Coircnission Reports (Washington, D. C 1900-02), XV, 449-450. ^Philip Hone, Diary ed. by Allan Ne vins (New York, 1936), p. 209. *^Edgar Fawcett, A New York Fainily (New York, I8 9I), p. 8. ^Arthur Bullard, Comrade Yetta (New York, 1913), p. 5. ^Henry Sienkiewicz, After Bread (New York, 1897), p. 480. ^Qlbido. p. 165. ^^Carl Van Doren, The American Novel 1789-1939 (rev. ed., New York, 1940), p. 300, —236— ^^Cahan, op. clt., p, 60. Ibid.^ p. ^ I b l d ., p. 282. p. 75 l^Micbael Gold, Jews Without Money (Wew York, 1930), pp. 102, 107. ^^Ibld.. p. 309 1 A Bullard, op. cit., p. 29. •^"ibid.. Po- 14-9. ^°Ibid.. p. 21}.9o 21 Heni*y Harland, The Yoke of the Thor ah. (Hew

York, 1 8 8 7 ), pp. 6ii-65. 22 Ludwig Lewisohn, The Island Within (Hew lork, 1 9 2 8 ), p. 2 9 6 . ^^Ibid.. p. 301}.. ^ b i d . . p. 276. 25 Edward W« Townsend, A Daughter of the Tenements (Hew York, 1895), pp. 119-120.

'See James William Sullivan’s Tenement Tales of Hew York (Hew York, 1895). The lead novelette is "Slob Murphy" about the boy Pat, vhose very death is used by his father for another spell of m Id drinking. A high incidence of intenroerance was frequently noted among the American-born Irish as well. See Stephen -237- Crane‘S Magp:ie (New York, 1893) • *^Lilliai Wo Betts, The Story of an East Side

Family. (New York, 1903)> P» 106» oft ''Edward A, Ross, The Old World In the New (New York, 1914)f pp. 32-33. ^^Claghorn, The Immigrant‘s Day in Court, p, 493. oo Samuel E» Morrison and Henry S. Commager, The Growth of the American Republic (3rd» ed.. New York,

1942), II, 174. ^“Hugh M'o Gloster, Negro Voices In American Fiction (Chapel Hill, 194^), P» 4^. ^^aul Lawrence Dunbar, The Sport of the Gods (New York, 1902), pp» 212, 213-214»

^ ^ I b i d . . PP» 7 7 - 7 8 »

^^ b i d .. Po 118 » 35 Claude McKay, Harlem: Negro Metropolis (New York,

1 9 4 0 ), PP» 16-20, ^^Ibido 37 Gloster, op» cit., p» 113» ^^Carl Van Vechten’s ’’Introduction,” p» VII, to ■James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (New York, 1928)»

■^^Gloster, op» cit., p. 158; and Roi Ottley, New World A-Coming (Boston, 1943), P. 66» -238- ^^Carl Van Vechten, NlR^er Heaven (New York, V^2è>), p. 1|6. ^ Ibld.. p* 11. ^ Ibid., Po lii.8o p, 119.- ^Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home (New York,

1937), pp. 282-283. ^Claude McKay, Home to Sai'lem (New York, 1928), p. 274- ^^Ibld., pp. 63-64. Gloster, op. cit., p. 177. ^^Prom "The Negro in Art," The Crisis, XXXII (August, 1926), 193, as quoted inGloster, op. cit., p. 178. ^^Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (New York, 1942), p. 166. Albert Parry, Garrets and Pretenders (New York,

1933), p. 57. ^^Stephen Crane, The Third Violet (New York, 1897), p. 180. 92 Ibid., p. 44 » ^■^James Huneker, Painted Veils (New York, 1920), p. 306.

^^Ibido, p. 102.

^^Ibid., p. 113. -239- Floyd. Dell, Love in Greenwich. Village (New York, 1923) s p. ijlj.* 97 Carl Van Veciiten, Peter Whiffle (New York, 1923), P. 29. Ibld«, pp, I}.8“i4.9, 52* 59 L» H, Bickford and Richard Stillmm Powell, Phyllis in Bohemia (New York, 1897), p. 15. "Powell" is a pseudonym for Ralph Henry Barbour, Ibid., pp- 90-92 Charles de Eay, The Bohemians, A Tragedy of Modern

Life (New York, I8 7 8 ), pp, 22, 25-26, William Dean Howells, The Coast of Bohemia (New

York, 1 8 9 3 ), P^ 201,- Parry, op, cit., p- 100,

Howells, op, cit., p, I8 , Ellen Glasgow, Phases of an Inferior Planet (New

York, 1 6 9 8 ), p, 2 3 6 , - 2 1 ^ 0 -

C hap ter $: Form and Content

^Alexander Cowle, The Rise of the American Hovel (New York, 1914-8 ), pp* l4lj.8 -i{I|.9 , analyzes the romantic clap-trap of this novel at great length* ^The Knickerbocker Magazine, XLV (April, l855)> 363* ^Ibid.* p. 3 6 5 » ^George Lippard, New York; Its Upper Ten and Lower I^lillion (Cincinnati, 1853)# P* 206, Edward Judson, The Mysteries and Miseries of New York (New York, I8I18), p, I. ^T. S. '■j?thur. Cast Adrift (New York, l8?3) ^ p . 7. 7 George William Curtis, Trumps (New York, I8 6 I),

p* 1 0 5 . 8 Ibid., p* 101}.* "^This was the comment of a reviewer in the Athenaeum, as quoted in William Griswold, A Descriptive List of American Novels and Tales Dealing with American City Life (Cambridge, Mass., l891), p * 0113 (sic).

^^Curtis, op* cit, , ' p* h-99» ^^Bayard Taylor, John Godfrey's Fortunes (New York,

1865), P* 3 2 0 .

^^Ibido. p* IV* - 2 1 p . -

^^Wh.en Frank Double day returned to his office from a trip abroad, his associates were talking enthusiastic­ ally of Dreiser*s forthcoming novel. The publisher took home a set- of proofs to read over the weekend, "There his wife discovered them, and there their doom was sealed,” îTeltje de Graff Doubleday considered Sister Carrie vulgar and Immoral, and her husband evidently agreed* The fiasco of suppression Is fully described In Robert H* Silas, Theodore Dreiser: Apostle of Nature (New York,

1914-9), pp. Ili|--ll5. Ilj.!i7^ew York In Recent Fiction,” Atlantic Monthly,

EXV (April, 1 8 9 0 ), 585.

l^Wllllam Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes

(New York, I8 9 6 ), I, 21*

-^Ibld.a p* 7 2 *

^7ibid,

~^Ibid,. pp* Tks 75, 77.

^^Ibld., pp* 66-67.

^°Ibld., p* 77.

^^Ibld., Po 95.

^^Ibld., p* 67. — 2i}-2— 2 3 Ibido, p* 8 1 .

M, Gibson, "Materials and Form in Howells* First Novels,” American Literature, XIX (May, 19i}.7), 1$9.

Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (New York, 19ij-2), p. 4- of. Lloyd Morris, Incredible New York (New York, 1951), p* 1 7 8 »

^'^Life in Letters of William Dean Howells, ed» by- Mildred Howells (New York, 1928), I, 1^70

^^Q,uoted in George Arms, "Howells* New York Novel,** New England Q.uarterly XXI (September, 19l{.8),, 313-31^-»

Albert Parry, in Garrets and Pretenders (Hew York,

1933)5 P» 1355 expresses amusement at Poole * s desire "to achieve the proper spirit of realism" in the romantic quarter of Paris, As a matter of fact, for all of Poole’s talk about realism. The Harbor retains much of the stock romantic. Even the dock strike is pale when set beside something like the mass suffering, intense depression, and tumultuous violence of the coal strike in Zola’s Germinal»

^^Ernest Poole, The Harbor (New York, 1915)5 P» 23»

^^Ibid., p, 66. -243-

^^Ibid,, pp. 67, 76,

^&bid., P* 129,

^^Ibid., P» 24.

^^Ibid., P* 216.

^^Ibid,, p. 377.

^^Eart Crane, ’’Modern Poetry of Hart Crane (Appendix B), ed, by Waldo Frank (Neiv York^

1933), P- 177.

■ Lewi8 M-uinfcrd, Sticks and Stones (New York, 1924), p » 116•

a way the -vdiole world is a harbor, " Eleanore says, Poole, op» cit., p. l80,

^^Sinclair Lewis’ review of Manhattan Transfer in The Saturday Review of Literature, II (December 5, 1925)5 361.

^ ”The group is of prime importance.... In 1908 Romains published a volume of poetry entitled La Vie unanime. ” The Reader’s Encyclopedia (1948), IV, 1154° This, of course, long precedes his development of the historical method in Men of G-ood Will, begun in 1931. A similar technique in the drama is employed in such a play as Vicki Bau.m’s Grand Hotel (which opened in

Neiv York in 1931) » - 2 4 4 -

^■^^G-eôrge Snell, The Slaapers of American Fiction (New York, 1947), p. 252.

quoted in Snell, ibid. . p. 253.

^ J o h n Dos Passes, Manhattan Transfer (New York, 1925), p* 399.

Lewis, op. cit.. p» 361.

^^Dos Passos, op. cit.a p» 219.

^^ibid.. pp. 6, 33, 2 4 0 .

Joseph Warren Beach, American Fiction 1920 - 1940 (New York, 1941), P. 42.

^"^Malcolm Cowley, "Dos Passos: Poet Against the World," After the Genteel Tradition (New York, 1937), p &> 17 3.

. j-ivzuLCLa nw u-j. o , x ü c c-H-v-TT a Novel (New York, 1936), p. 92.

^iThoraas Wolfe, You Can-1 Go Home Again (New York, 1940), P. 38.

^^Thomas Wolfe, The Web and the Rock (New York, 1939), pp. 219, 222.

^^Ibid.. pp. 2 2 3 , 2 3 2 , 2 7 8 -2 7 9 .

^^Ibid., p. 3 1 5 .

%bid.. pp. 3 8 0 , 3 9 0 , 447, 4 7 2 „ -2ii5-

Herbert J, Muller, Thomas Wolfe (Norfolk, Conn,,

I9 I4.7 ), p. 19.

^ ^You Can* t Go Home Again, pp. 1^.60-lj.82.

Po 7 2 9 .

^^Pamela Johnson, Hungry Gulliver (New York and London, 19l|.8), p. 123.

Bernard DeVoto, ‘‘G-enj.us Is Not Enough,” The Saturday Review of Literature, XIII (April 25, 1938), 3°it, 111.-15.

^^Majcwell Perkins, "Thomas Wolfe," Harvard Library Bulletin, I (Autumn, 1947), 272.

^^John Skal ly Terry, "En Route to a Legend," The Saturday Review of Literature, XXXI (November 27, 1948), p. 8.

^•^Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York,

1938), p. 2 9 0 .

^^?his is not an isolated incident: New York has lost coastwide trade since World War II, and has bare­ ly held its own in foreign trade. Such cities as Baltimore and New Orleans have in the meantime advanced from 10^ to 15% and 13^ to 17^ of the nation?s total cargoes. Time (Eebruary 2, 1953), P» 19. BIBLIOGRAPHY I* Tile list of novels used for this study was compiled by consulting a variety of sources: Baker, Ernest A,, Guide to the Best Fiction (London, 1913). Brooklyn Library Staff, edo, A List of Books on Greater New York (New York, 1907)* Coan, Otis and Lillard, Richard, America in Fiction (Stanford, 19l*.9) . Cook, Dorothy E», 19lp. Fiction Catalogue (New York, 19^1^) Dunlap, George A., The City in the American Novel 1789- 1900 (Philadelphia, 1936). Griswold, William, A Descriptive List of American Novels and Tales Dealing vnLth American City Life (Cambridge, Mass., I8 9 1 ). Hemstreet, Chai'les, Literary New York (New York, 1903) * Literary History of the TJnlted States, ed, by Spiller, Robert E., et» al, (3 Vols,, New York,

1948)* Maurice, Arthur B,, NeiJ York in Fiction (New York, 1901), Millet, Pred B., Contemporary American Authors (New York,

ISkh) * Wilson, Rufus and Otilie, New York in Literature: The Story Told in Landmarks of Town and Country (Elmira, N.Y., 1947)*

G Wright, Lyle H,, American Fiction 177k - l8S0 : A Contri­ bution Toward a Bibliography (rev* ed,, San Marino, California, 191^8). (ifoter Dr. Lennox Grey of the Depart­ ment of English, at Teachers* College, Columbia University, is compiling a catalogue of New York novels and re­ ports that he has some 2500 entries. The project is a long way from being finished, however, and was unfortu­ nately not available to me.) BIOGRAPHICAL details, whenever needed, were gathered from Mill ett, _o£.. cit «, several of the literary histories listed below and from the Dictionary of American Biography* ed. by Johnson, Allen and (later) Malone, Dumas (21 vols.. New York, 1928-36).

II Background Albion, Robert G., The Rise of the New York Port (New York, 1939). Arms, George, "Sowells" New York Novel," NEQ., XXI (September, 1914-8), 313-325» Asbury, Herbert, Gangs of New York (New York, 1929)» Beach, Joseph Warren, American Fiction 1920 - 19h-0 (New York, 19iA). Bercovici, Konrad, Around the World in New York (New York, 1938). Brace, Charles Loring, The Dangerous Classes of New York (New York, l672), — 2l}.8— Breen, Matthew P., Thirty Years in New York Politics (New York, 1899). Browne, P. P., "American Publishing and Publishers" Dial XXVIII (May 1, 1900), 3i;0-3i^.3* Bryce, James, The American Coinmonwealth (3 vols., London, 1888), Campbell, Helen and others. Darkness and Daylight

(Hartford, I8 9 I). Cargill, Oscar, Intellectual America (New York, 19lp.)» Claghorn, Kate Hollad^ , "The Foreign Immigrant in New ... York City, " U.S, Industrial Commission Reports (Washington, D . C 1900-1902), XV, W:9-i|.92, Claghorn, Kate Holladay, The Immigrant ' s Day in Court (New York, 1923). Cowley, Malcolm, ed,. After the Genteel Tradition (New

York, 1 9 3 7 }o De Schell, Emilie Ruck, "Is Feminism a Failure?" Arena,

XX (July, 1 8 9 8 ), 68-75* DeVoto, Bernard, "Genius Is Not Enough," Saturday Re­ view of Literature, XIII (April 25,

1 9 3 6 ), 3-4, 15-16. Du Breuil, Alice J., The Novel of Democracy in America (Baltimore, 1923). Sastman, Mary Huse, Index to Fairy Tales, Myths, and Leg;ends (Boston,. 1926). Elias, Robert H,, Theodore Dreiser; Apostle of Nature ( New York, 191+9 ) . Ford, James L., Forty-Odd Years in the Literary Shop (New York, 1921). Forster, G. G., New York in Slices (New York, l8I}.9) • Forster, G. G., New York by Gas-Li;?ht (New York, l850) . Forster, G, G., New York Naked (New York, l85?). Frank, Waldo, ed.. The Collie cted Poems of Hart Crane. (New York, 1933). George, Henry, Our Land and Land Policy, National and State (San Francisco, l8?l). Gibson, William M,, "Materials and Form In Howells' First Novels," ^ XIX (May, 1947), 158-166 o Gloster, Hugh M,, Negro Voices in American Fiction (Chapel Hill, 1948). Gunn, Thomas Butler, The Physiology of New York Boarding Houses (New York, l657) = Hone, Philip, Diary, ed. by Allan Nevins (New York, 1938)

Howells, Mildred, ed.. Life in Letters of William Dean Howells (2 vols.. New York, 1928) Huneker, James, New Cosmopolis {New^ York, 1915) • James, Henry, The American Scene (New York, 1907). -250- Joimson, James Weldon, The Autobiography of an Sx- Colonred Man (New York, 1928), Johnson, Pamela, Hungry Gulliver (New York, 19i{-8) • Jones, Howard Mumford, "American Literary History and the Problems of Urbsu ization" (Princeton, 19ii-ô), (Copies of this address are available from the A.C.L.S., Washington, D. C.) Josephson, Matthew, Portrait of the Artist as American (New York, 1930), Josephson, Matthew, The Robber Barons (New York, 1934J» Kasin, Alfred, On Native G-rounds (New York, 1942) * Kazin, Alfred, A Walker in the City (New York, 1951) » Kingsbury, P, J,, "The Tendency of Men to Live in Cities," Journal of Socxs.l Science, XXXIII (Nov,, 1895), 1-19, Kneeland, George, Commercialized Prostitution in New York City (New York, 1913)• Knickerbocker Magazine, VIII (August, I8 3 6 ), 201j and XXXXY (April, 1855), 363-6. Lewis, Sinclair, Review of Manhattan Transfer, Saturday Review of Literature, II (December 5, 1925), 361. McCabe, James D., Lights and Shadows of New York Life (New York, 1872), —2^1— McKay, Claude, A long Way from Home (New York, 1937) » McKay, Claude, Harlem: Negro Metropolis (New York, 19^0)* Matthews, Brander, These Many Years: Recollections of a New Yorker ( New York, 1917)• Mayes, Herbert R., Al^er, A Biography wL thout a Hero (New York, 1928), Medoery, James K., Men and Mysteries of Wall Street

(Boston, 1 8 7 0 ). Mori8on, Samuel 2. and Commager, Henry S., The Growth of the American Republic (2 vols., 3rd ed,. New York, 19ll-2), Morris, Lloyd, Incredible New York (New York, 1931). Muirhead, James P., America, Land of Contrasts (New York, 1902). Muller, Herbert J,, Thomas Wolfe (Norfolk, Conn., 1947)* Mumford, Lewis, Sticks and Stones (New York, 1924). Mumford, Lewis, The Culture of Cities (New York, 1938)» "New York in Recent Fiction," Atlantic Monthly, LXV (April, 1 8 9 0 ), 564-6, Norris, Prank, The Responsibilities of the Novelist (New York, 1903)* Ottley, Roi, New World A-Coming (Boston, 1943), Parkhurst, Charles, Our Fight with Tammany (New York, 1895). Parry, Albert, Garrets and Pretenders (New York, 1933), Perkins, Maxwell, "Thomas Wolfe," Harvard Library Bulletin, I (Autumn, 1947)? 269-279» -252- Flatt, Wo. B., ’’Certain Injurious Influences of City Life and Tlieir Removal, ” Journal of Social Science. XXIV (April, 1888), 2k-30» Quinn, Arthur H., American Fiction (New York, 1936), Riis, Jacob, How the Other Half' Lives (New York, 1690), Riordin, William L», ed,, Plunkltt of Tammany Hall (New York, 1905), Robinson, Solon, Hot Corn: Idf e Scenes in New York Illus­ trated (New York, l854)* Rodgers, Cleveland and Rankin, Rebecca, New York: The World’s Capital City (New York, 19^4-8), Ross, Edward A., The Old World in the New (New York, 191^J. Schlesinger, Arthur M., The Rise of the City: 1 8 7 8 -I898 (New York, 1933). Smith, Henry Nash, Virgin Land (Cambridge, Mass,, 1950). Snell, George, The Shapers of American Eiction (New York, 1914-7) . Spider and the Ply, The; or. Tricks. Traps and Pitfalls of City Life, By One Who Knows (New

York, 1 8 7 3 ). Steffens, Lincoln, The Shame of the Cities (New York, I90I+), Strong, George Templeton, Diary, ed, by Allan Nevins and Milton H. Thomas (Ij. vols.. New York, 1952), Strong, Josiah, The Twentieth Century City (New York, I8 9 8 ), Strong, Josiah, The Challenge of the City (New York, 1907). -253- Stryker. Peter, The Lower D^-pth.s of the Great American Metropolis (New York, 1866)* Tarbell, Ida M,, The Nationalizing; of Business; 1878 - 1898 (New York, 1936)* Taylor, Walter P'oller, The BcosK^inic Novel in America (Chapel Hill, 19i4-2) . Terry, John Skally, "En Route to a Legend, " Satwday Review of* Literature, XXXI (November

2 7 , 194.8 ), 7-9. Van Dor en, Carl, The American Novel 1789 - 1939 (rev. ed.. New York, 1940). Van Every, Edward, -Sins of New York (New York, 193Ô). Weber, Adna P., The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1899), Weeter, Dixon, The Saga of American Society; 1607-1937 (New York, 1937). Wharton, Edith, A Backward Glance- (New York, 1934)" Wittke, Carl, "Melting Pot Literature," College Eng­

lish, VII (Jan., 1946), I89 - 197. Wolfe, Thomas, The Story of a Novel (New York, 1936).

III. A Selected List of New York Novels Adams, S. H.. Our Square and the People in It (Boston, 1917) Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, My Cousin the Colonel (New York, 1905). -25i|“ Alger, Horatio, Ragged Dick (New York, 1868)*

Alger, Horatio, Phil the Fiddler (New York, I8 7 I). Appel, Benjamin, Runaround (New York, 1937)* Appel, Benjamin, Power-House (New York, 1939)* Arthur, Timothy Shay, Love in High Life; A Story of the “Upper Ten" (Philadelphia, I8I4.9 )* Arthur, Timothy Shay, Cast Adrift (New York, 1873) Bachelier, Irsring, Eben Holden (Boston, 1900), Barker, Benjamin, Clarilda; or. The Female Pickpocket (Boston, 1 8 4 6 )* Betts, Lillian W., The Story of an East Side Family (New York, 1903). Bickford, L, H,, and Powell, Richard S., Phyllis in Bohemia (New York, 1897). Bishop, William Henry, The House of a Merchant Prince (Boston, 1863). Bradbury, Osgood, The Belle of the Bowery (Boston, l6I|.6), Bradbury, Osgood, Female Depravity (New York, 1852}, Bradbury, Osgood, Jane Clark (New York, l855)» Bradbury, Osgood, The Gamblers^ League (New York, l857). Bullard, Arthur, Comrade Yetta (New York, 1913). Bunner, Hem^y Cuyler, The Midge (New York, 1866)* Bunner, Henry Cuyler, Story of a New York House (New

York, 1 8 8 7 ). Cahan, Abe, Yekl, A Tale of the New York Ghetto (New

York, 1 8 9 6 ), -255- Calian, Abe, Tlie Imported Brid^epyoom. (Hew York, 1 8 9 8 ), Gaiian, Abe, The Rise of David Levinsky (New York, 1917). Cooper, James Fenimore, Home As Found (New York, I8 3 8 ), Cooper, James Fenimore, Satanstoe- (New York, l8k5) «

Crane, Stephen, Maggie (New York, I8 9 3 ). Crane, Stephen, The Third Violet (New York, 1897). Cullen, Countee, One Way to Heaven (New York, 1932). Curtis, George William, Trumps (New York, I8 6 I). De Kay, Charles, The Bohemians, A Tragedy of Modern Life (New York, l8?8). Dell, Floyd, Love in Greenwich Village (New York, 1923)- Dos Passos, John, Mai hattan Transfer (New York, 1925). Dreiser, Theodore, Sister Carrie (New York, I9 OO), Dunbar, Paul Lawrence, The Sport of the Gods (New York, 1902). Dunlap, William, Thirty Years Ago (New York, I8 3 6 ). Fast, Howard, A Place in the Sun (New York, 1937) « Fawcett, Edgar, The Evil That Men Do (New York, 1889). Fawcett, Edgar*, A New York Family (New York, I891) . Fawcett, Edgar, A Romance or Old New York (New York, 1897) « Fawcett, Edgar, New York, A Novel (New York, I89S},. Fisher, Rudolf, The Walls of Jericho (New York, 1928). Fitch, Clyde, Smart Set (New York, 1897), Ford, Paul Leicester, The Honorable Peter Stirling

(New York, 189k)» Frank, Waldo, Rahab (New York, 1922). —2^ 6— Prothingliam, Washington, Once More; A Story of New York (New York, l8?5)» Glasgow, Ellen, Phases of an Inferior Planet (Wew York, 1 8 9 8 ). Gold, Michael, Jews Without Money (New York, 1930}» Gould, Edward Sherman, John Doe and Richard Roe; or, Episodes of Life in New York (New York, 1862). Harland, Henry, The Yoke of the Thorah (New York, l887),

Harland, Henry, Grandi son Mather (New York, I8 6 9 ).. Howells, William Dean, A Hazard of New Fortunes (2 vols,. New York, IS9 0 ). Howells, William Dean, The Coast of Bohemia (New York, 1093) Hume, J, P., Five Hundred Majority; or. The Days of Tammany (New York, 1872). Huneker, James, Painted Veils (New York, 1920), Janvier, Thomas A,, At the Casa Napoleon (New York, 1914) * James, Henry, Washington Square (New York, I88O), James, Henry, The Jolly Corner (New York, 1908}„ Judson, Edward C, Z,, The Mysteries and Miseries of New York (New York, 18I1.6 ), Judson, Edward C, Z,, The B * Hoys of New York (New York, 181{.9)» Kimball, Richard 3,, Henry Powers, Eanksr (New York, 1668), Kirk, Ellen Olney, Q.ueen Money (New York, iSSb), Dewisohn, Ludwig, The Island W i t m n (New' York, 1928) * -257- Lippard, George, The Empire City; or, I\Few York by Night and Day (New York, l850), Lippard, George, New York; Its Upper Ten ar>.d Lower I^llion (Cincinnati, lS53)- McKay, Claude, Home to Harlem (New York, 1928), Mathews, Cornelius, The Career of Puffer Hopkins (New York, 16I{.2) . Matthews, Brander, His Father*s Son (New York, 1895)• Matthews, Brander, A Confident Tomorrow. (New York, 1899). Matthews, Brander, Action and the Word (New York, 1900)* Matthews, Brander, The Last Meeting (New York, 1901).

Maxwell, Maria, Ernest Grey; or. The Sins of Society (New York, 1855)* I-îiller, Joaquin, The Destruction of Gotham (New York, 1886). Morris, Charly . Honest Harry; or. The Country Boy Adrift in the City (HswYork, l882). Phillips, David Graham, Susan Lenox; Her Fall and Rise (New York, 1915). Poole, Ernest, The Harbor (New York, 1915). Sedgwick, Catherine MariaThe Linwoods (New York, 1835). Sienkiewicz, Henry K., After Bread (New York, 1897). Sinclair, Upton, The Ploney-Changers (New York, 1908), Smith, F. Hopkinson. Colonel Carter of Cartersville (New York, 1891) Smith, F. Hopkinson, The Fortunes of Oliver Horn (2 vols*. New York, 1902). —2^8— Sullivan, Jarres Williaji, Tenement Tales of ITew York (New York, 1695). Taylor, Bayard, John Godfrey* s Fortunes (New York, 1865}• Thurman, Wallace, The Blacker the Berry (New York, 1929). Townsend, Edward W., A Daughter of the Tenements (New York, 1895). Van Vechten, Carl, Peter Whiffle (New York, 1923). Van Vechten, Carl, Nigger Heaven (New York, 1926).. Warner, Charles Dudley, A Little Joi-irney Into the World. (New York, 1889).

Warner, Charles Dudley, Golden House (New York, 189)4.) • Warner, Charles Dudley, That Fortune (New York, 1899)» Wharton, Edith, The House of Mirth (New York, 1905). Wharton, Edith, The Age of Innocence (New York, 1920), Wharton, Edith, Old New York (New York, 192ii.),

Winthrop, Theodore, Cecil Dreerne (New York, I86 I), Wolfe, Thomas, The Web and the Hock (New York, 1939).- Wolfe, Thomas, You Can*t Go Home Again (New York, I94.O) , - 2 5 9 -

AUTOBIOGRAFHS:

I, Eugene Arden, was born in New York, New York,

June 25, 1 9 2 3 . I received iny secondary school education in the public schools of New York City, undergraduate training was obtained at New York University, from which I received the degree Bachelor of Arts in 1944» From Columbia University, I received the degree Master of Arts

in 1 9 4 7 . I then received an appointment as Assistant Instructor at the Ohio State University in 1947, and as an Assistant from 1948 to 1950, during which time I was also completing the residence requirements for the de­ gree Doctor of Philosophy, From 1950 to 1952 I served as tutor at Queens College, New York City, and from

1 9 5 2 to 1 9 5 3 as lecturer at Hofstra College, Hempstead, New York* It was during this period, by off-campus research, that I wrote the dissertation. The New York Novel: A Study in Urban Fiction, to complete the require­ ments for the degree ’Doctor of Philosophy.