Literary Visions of the Poor
Kornblum, Peter
The "common people," Walt Whitman observed in 1871, are too often "degraded, humiliated, made of no account." American democracy must uplift "the specimens and vast collections of the ignorant,...
...American democracy must uplift "the specimens and vast collections of the ignorant, the credulous, the unfit and uncouth, the incapable, and the very low and poor...
...When today's Tom Jefferson speaks, "his arms spread wide to/include block after block/of dumping grounds...
...Our early images of an underclass focus on objective conditions, the squalid details of urban misery rendered by alert observers...
...The anonymous city drifter in Stephen Crane's story "An Experiment in Misery" (1898) has long since turned that corner: "The roar of the city in his ear was to him the confusion of strange tongues, babbling heedlessly...
...Green, "Nobody would get to know even a tenth of what went on among these people...
...Moments of amusing description and clever caricature cannot mask the vacuous quality of Wolfe's social vision...
...Those who speak with concern of the underclass are self-seekers, promoting their own interests...
...Every man's inner inner city . . ." For Albert Corde, "[C]ities were moods, emotional states," and Bellow has explored such moods in New York as well as Chicago...
...In a fictionalized Chicago of the future, the "condition of the people of the abyss was pitiable . . . they lived like beasts in great squalid labor ghettos, festering in misery and degradation...
...Many of the poems of Philip Levine present trenchant images of the urban landscape...
...Green exist as part of a nameless and reprehensible mass...
...Sammler's Planet (1970) the elderly protagonist steps gingerly about New York, watching out for the "lunatics" and "the minority mobs...
...Locked in our cells...
...Green," George Grebe is a "man of culture," a former classicist now attempting to "acquit himself decently" as an inner-city social worker...
...218 • DISSENT Literary Visions of the Poor In a short story of the early fifties, "Looking for Mr...
...Reflecting on his experience of such cities as Detroit and Fresno, Levine has commented that each displayed a "vitality" that depended on "exploited people who live like shit while there were the suburbs of the rich who enjoyed their privileges...
...Like George Grebe, Albert Corde in The Dean's December (1982) consciously looks for the "doomed people...
...Sinclair's hero-victim in The Jungle, Jurgis Rudkus, is tossed out to the "city's cesspools" since he "had lost in the fierce battle of greed, and so was doomed to be exterminated...
...Joining the vanities of class to the injuries of underclass, Wideman looks for the common meaning beneath Robby's visible chains: ". . . the bad news that we still walk in circles, each of us trapped in his own little world...
...The underclass, their "turbulence and whirling states," are more, for Corde, than distant statistics...
...The New York Sun's Jacob Riis provided a guide to the hidden realities of the metropolis: "Leaving the Elevated Railroad where it dives under the Brooklyn Bridge at Franklin Square, scarce a dozen steps will take you where we wish to go . . . with its rush and roar echoing yet in our ears we have turned the corner from prosperity to poverty...
...If there is an underclass, it can only be experienced through the eyes of Bellow's typically humanistic but vulnerable observer...
...it was the clink of coin, the voice of the city's hopes, which were to him no hopes...
...In Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), in place of Bellow's concerned spokesmen, we have the Ivy League dynamo and supertrader, Sherman McCoy, suddenly exposed to the violent appetites of an avenging Bronx mob—"the sounds, the orotund tropes and sententiae, the falsetto songs, the inquisitory shouts, the hippo mutterings...
...Robby was tempted by the "bright lights winking right in front of his face, just beyond his fingertips...
...His images, culled often from "the shittiest goddamn circumstances," point toward "the end of ownership, the end of competitiveness, the end of a great deal of things that are ugly...
...In his steps toward achievement, Wideman has been forced to practice a special mode of looking, always prepared to take "second readings, decode appearances, pick out obstructions erected to keep you in your place...
...The Dean seeks a heroic encounter with "the slums we carry around inside us...
...In the words of a local grocer who is unable to help Grebe locate Mr...
...Outside of such concerned messengers, urban statistics like Mr...
...The black underclass is reduced to annoying "insects" in Wolfe's best-selling fiction machine...
...In Brothers and Keepers (1984) Wideman traces his younger brother's descent into underclass despair and his own problematic assimilation as an intellectual achiever...
...The troubled, disenchanted narrator only finds evidence of our imminent doom and "degradation," a fate that approaches like "iron in the wind...
...The urban underclass, for Arthur Sammler, endures an internal condition, the "humiliations of inconsequence," which has also haunted Mr...
...Yet he remains sanguine and unperturbed since "Tom Jefferson is a believer...
...The merging of perceiver and reality is especially prominent in the writing of Saul Bellow...
...Corde is more directly affected by the "great hordes" in the alarming "city of destruction...
...More recent images of an underclass tend to blur the lines of mimesis and protest characterizing earlier American naturalism...
...Writing in 1903, Jack London portrayed the "chaos of misery" that reduced an entire community, East London, to "vast shambles...
...The underclass, as personified in the elusive welfare recipient, Mr...
...Wary of these seductive lights, his older brother has adopted a protective armor, a "systematic skepticism...
...In 1906 Upton Sinclair described the daily roundup of homeless beggars from the streets of Chicago: "[Tin the detention hospital you might see them, herded together in a miniature inferno, with hideous beastly faces, bloated and leprous with disease, laughing, shouting, screaming in all stages of drunkenness, barking like dogs, gibbering like apes, raving and tearing themselves in delirium...
...More recently, in "A Walk with Tom Jefferson" (1988), Levine has focused on the fortitude and spiritual vigor of an underclass figure, an elderly Detroit black...
...Thirty-five years after Whitman's passionate plea for an equalizing "mission of government," Sinclair testified to the persistent gap between social extremes...
...Five years later, in The Iron Heel, London delineated a similar doom for America...
...Unlike Bellow, Tom Wolfe does not actually care about the consequences of urban decay...
...Sammler's own refugee history...
...Wolfe's empathy rests with McCoy, fallen "Master of the Universe," rather than with the swarming unemployed hordes clamoring to convict and imprison the Park Avenue Yalie...
...Wideman uses his brother Robby's own words to convey the "chaos of a whirling soul, out there in the street doing wrong...
...Others seek "opportunistically" to contain or "hustle" the "doomed population of blacks—the underclass...
...In Mr...
...The festering underclass in London's The People of the Abyss know that "work of the world," in London's words, "goes on above them," and indeed, "the work of the world does not need them...
...The pathos of Robby "going nowhere," of "everything coming down on me," is set off against another kind of difficulty...
...In this "City of Degradation" one out of every four adults "is destined to die on public charity...
...In Levine's city of despair, "the poor White" is "fighting the poor Black" for "the same gray concrete housing,/ the same gray jobs/they both came north for...
...Profound social change, according to Whitman, can promise new hope for American democracy, "with a more universal ownership of property, general homesteads, general comfort—a vast, intertwining reticulation of wealth...
...In a poem of 1972, "Saturday Sweeping," Levine evokes an image of struggling survival amid decaying institutions: "Half/the men in this town/are crying in/the snow, their eyes/ blackened like/Chinese soldiers./The Gates are closing/at Dodge Mainland Wyandotte Chemical...
...The possibility of survival hinges on a thorough distrust of the "visible landscape...
...Readers can do well to find deeper, more thoughtful images in the writing of John Edgar Wideman, most especially in his detailed portrait of "Homewood," a black neighborSPRING • 1991 • 219 Literary Visions of the Poor hood in Pittsburgh...
...A man of "Biblical" vision rather than skeptical intellect, Jefferson refuses to admit "all this is a lost land...
...The development of American literary realism and naturalism often reflects the eclipse of Whitman's hope for "general comfort" and "universal ownership of property...
...The discontent of Bellow's meditative protagonists often finds its objective correlative in the urban wasteland...
...Green, can only be revealed through Grebe's search...
...The narrative is replete with trite images of the urban crisis...
...At the same moment, in another part of town, the English royalty squanders "$1,850,000,000" in "wasteful luxury...
...Pushing his way out of a Bronx courthouse, McCoy stubbornly confronts the "leaderless" and "ugly mob...
...They stabbed and stole, they did every crime and abomination you ever heard of, men and men, women and women, parents and children, worse than animals...
...Levine asserts the importance of dealing "with what is ugly, with punishing lives...
...Instead, this unassuming but dignified character "smiles and says the one word, `Tomorrow,' and goes in . . ." q 220 • DISSENT...
...Behind bars...
...Exposed to the deepest threats of the New York "Congo," McCoy still stands in the name of "a sane and decent world...
Vol. 38 • April 1991 • No. 2
