| Friday, April 30, 2010 1:03PM | | | | New York Stories | Posted By: Ronald Fried
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| Tags: Colm Tóibín, Roxanna Robinson, Darryl Pinckney, Quim Monzó, HenryJames, Edith Wharton, Elizabeth Hardwick | I can’t attend a literary evening without recalling Elizabeth Hardwick’s comment that the only thing she ever learned from a poetry reading concerned the physical condition of the poet at the time of the event. No poets read last night at Gilder Lehrman Hall in the Morgan Library—perhaps the most elegant and well-designed mid-sized auditorium in the New York—but I can report that each of the speakers appeared to be in good condition.
The evening was co-sponsored by New York Review Classics which is publishing editions of short stories by writers whose work is, in one way or other, haunted by New York. The panel was drawn from the writers who have edited the NYRB Classics editions: Colm Tóibín on Henry James, Roxana Robinson on Elizabeth Wharton, and Darryl Pinckney on Elizabeth Hardwick. The Catalan writer Quim Monzó was also on the panel because—well, we’ll get to him later. "New York Stories" was not a panel discussion, but more like a series of concise lectures. Edwin Frank, the editor NYRB Classics, moderated the event.
Tóibín, whose somewhat Jamesian bald dome seemed to brim with insights, began by arguing for the prominence of New York in James’ imagination. James lived in the city between the ages of five and twelve, and he always remembered it vividly. He viewed the James family house on 14th Street as a "house of the spirit". But New York is often obsessed with progress and disrespectful of history. The 14th Street house was eventually demolished, as was James’ grandmother’s home on Washington Square. James wrote that these demolitions "amputated my history." And in many ways, Tóibín argued, James never forgave New York, that "long, shrill city." Tóibín read from James’ appalled—and appalling—rants against Jewish immigrants, "small, strange animals" whom James likened to "snakes and worms." Tóibín added that if you think that’s bad, you should hear what he wrote about the Irish. But James’ abiding bitterness, Tóibín said, also fueled James’ muse. To crudely paraphrase, Tóibín suggested that childhood memories are essential to the novelist. But they may be most helpful to the writer if that precious past is destroyed by history. The past then lives on in the novelist’s imagination. If "the house you lived in" is destroyed, Tóibín said, "the house of fiction replaces it." In the end, James was oddly fond of New York, suggesting that the 1905 edition of his collected work be called the New York Edition in homage to what he called "my native city."
Roxanna Robinson was up next. Edith Wharton’s subject was New York’s affluent, privileged class, Robinson said. Wharton was born into the center of this class and her mother, Robinson stressed, was "adamant about its rules of behavior." Though Wharton was well-born, to use that old-fashioned phrase, she had several disadvantages as a prospective bride: she was an intellectual, not truly wealthy, and not a beauty. As a result, she was not married until the ripe old age of twenty-three when she paired off with a man whom she did not love, a man whose parents, at the time, were in a mental institution. Wharton, filled with rage at those social codes that obsessed her mother, also at first raged against New York, a city that was, Robinson suggested, "too democratic for her taste." Robinson singled out several short stories: "A Cup of Cold Water," "A Journey" ("incredibly powerful, very modern"); and "The Reckoning" (with its description of New York’s "bare and hideous" streets). Like James, though, Wharton eventually looked back on the city as a "place of great dignity" and was nostalgic for the "formalities" of nineteenth-century Manhattan. The Age of Innocence, Robinson added later, "is deeply respectful of New York."
Darryl Pinckney’s presentation about Elizabeth Hardwick expanded upon his essay in the current (May 13) issue of The New York Review of Books. As he did in that essay, he mixed literary analysis with memories of his friendship with the woman he callsed "Lizzie". Returning to New York—after time spent in Boston with her husband Robert Lowell— "meant everything to [Hardwick] as a writer," Pinckney said. Back in the city in the late ‘70s, Hardwick was nostalgic for the sounds of the anti-war protests in Central Park. She rarely ventured out of her ‘hood in later years. "I hate the Upper West Side," she told Pinckney. Midtown was more to her liking. She never went downtown or to Brooklyn like her friend Susan Sontag who always had to see the latest avant garde performance. But still Hardwick had a lifelong fascination with the city. She followed the columns of Murray Kempton (whose prose style she admired), and, of course, wrote a brilliant study of Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener. Pinckney read from some of the notes and fragments Hardwick left behind as she struggled to find her voice as a novelist. One sketch described a Whitmanesque homeless man seen at the 72nd Street subway station: "a street person of unshockable appetite." I do hope that these fragments might one day be published in some form. New York, Pinckney concluded, "saved [Hardwick] as a women and a writer." He later observed that for a writer New York is a place to both "lose yourself and find yourself."
Quim Monzó began by saying that he "never should have accepted this invitation," adding that the crowd would "hate me for destroying your language." Movies, Monzó said, formed his first notions of New York rather than books. For Monzó, whose formal education ended at the age of fourteen, "movies were New York." His mother, in fact, urged him to not read, telling her son, "You’ll read so many novels that you’ll become an idiot." "She was right," Monzó told the audience. But he did single out a few New York writers: Dorothy Parker, Truman Capote, J. P. Donleavy, and J. D. Salinger. Monzó said that he’d give up his left arm to have written some of Salinger’s stories. But he has no affection for Ernest Hemingway and other "street name-dropping writers"—a category of authors who always mention the specific street where a story takes place (which is very bad news for James Joyce). "It would be terrible," Monzó said, "if a book were as flat as reality." To this, he added: "I hate Hemingway," citing especially the clichéd depiction of Pamplona in The Sun Also Rises. This prompted Pinckney to later rise to Hemingway’s defense, pointing out that Hemingway’s style was not a cliché before everyone started to write like Hemingway.
By the end of the night, the event had accomplished what evenings of this sort should aspire to achieve: it sent me back to the books under discussion, many of which are fortunately available in indispensable editions by NYRB Classics.
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| 5-5-10 4:31PM: shaun said...
an extensive write up of the readings can also be found on The Mantle
www.mantlethought.org/content/pen-2010-new-york-stories
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