New York City: a Remembrance
Abel, Lionel
I had no desire to get to Jerusalem, no expectation of living in Athens, little interest in Rome. I was eighteen. What did I know then about Paris? My whole aim was to live in New York—where I...
...All I can do is paint...
...They asked, "Ricci, which of us is right...
...In its excitement and depression the city picked itself up and went to Russia...
...If a well-dressed man passed by they would call out after him: "For what you want, the best place is The Whoopee Club...
...In fact, the streets of New York were then safe at night...
...And that's what a human community is, after all—certain people...
...And I know certain people who will help you...
...then, there were the gangsters, about whom, by the way, there was no mystery...
...He was able to walk away from it—he was living in San Francisco...
...He had tried to hi-jack a beer truck, absorbed several bullets, and lost almost a hundred pounds...
...Down the dark streets, the silent streets...
...In fact, I think they wanted to be hard...
...Should I become a Marxist, I wondered, try to be a crackerjack at it, and win this fellow's admiration...
...WHAT IS NEW YORK TODAY...
...But how could one in New York...
...She felt that just to exhibit such beauty was quite sufficient, she was giving more than others deserved...
...what if its time has run out...
...One faction, supporting me, maintained, pointing to Joey, the gangster who had laid me out: "Joey shouldn't have kicked him in the balls...
...And in the theater too there was achievement...
...Of course, everyone knew it would do something...
...It's on MacDougal Street...
...In the late forties almost everyone I knew in New York got sick of the person nearest to him or her...
...We as individuals might get out of it, go somewhere else and be safe...
...What did I do for them...
...There was no other residential section in New York...
...OF COURSE, there was real political interest in the city, too...
...I lived for a while at Seventy-fifth Street off Central Park West, and on hot summer nights would go with a girl friend to Central Park for a swim in the lake...
...But do gangsters nowadays have moral problems...
...from Sheepshead Bay through Washington Heights, from river to river, it went: the whole shebang...
...They did the very opposite and joined themselves with Stalin, whom they could have defied with impunity...
...But at least we can say now that on one occasion during the thirties Trotsky's words were uttered magnificently in the Soviet Union—if only in the part of it that was New York City at the time...
...People began to join parties and organizations...
...Came the desire to get out of New York once the world fracas was over...
...Let's see what is missing today: the ferry from Christopher Street to Hoboken, the Sixth Avenue El, the nice inexpensive rooms, the open buses on Fifth Avenue, the theaters on Forty-second Street, where you wouldn't go without top hat and white tie, the apartments you could move into easily...
...there were people who talked about poetry—and people who actually wrote poetry, or who made paintings, the next best thing...
...New York City was Greenwich Village, it was e. e. cummings, it was Sam Schwartz's restaurant, it was Eugene O'Neill, it was the Provincetown Theater, it was the Sam Johnson where Eli Siegal recited Vachel Lindsay's The Congo or his own Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana, it was where Mark Twain once lived (no...
...M. J. is not a young woman now...
...Came guilt to the city, which was still safe, though Rotterdam and London had been hit, and Warsaw, Belgrade, Leningrad, and Moscow...
...who can like it...
...Your eye can never rest, but must always be thrust against something solid...
...the painter asked...
...New York cannot clean its streets...
...Wall Street might just as well have been in Illinois, and Madison Avenue was really a part of Ohio...
...I am referring to the remarkable lectures on art given by Meyer Schapiro at Columbia and at the New School...
...One of the gangsters did not admire me, and on several occasions expressed himself to this effect...
...Washington Square Park, as I recollect, was not then a stronghold of democracy: you went there when you were tired of other places, and it was a pleasure to sit there and feel sad...
...Came the first delinquents onto the darkened streets...
...There was no really good person then who would have wanted to meet the mayor...
...If it were a Saturday night, the signee would have to be detained until Monday, and if the night began on a holiday weekend, he might have to be kept under surveillance for two or even three days...
...The parks began to fill with the unemployed...
...As for the audience in the Hippodrome, it was shaken, down to its Communist Party members...
...The other faction held to the doctrine: "Hands don't count...
...was unprecedented and unduplicated...
...he was without even the expectation of money...
...Later, when such a committee, headed by John Dewey, was formed, Trotsky tore all the evidence against him to shreds, and at this date not even Khrushchev pretends to take it seriously...
...The novelist published the novel under his own name and made a reputation...
...councils— over a Labor Day weekend so that The Whoopee Club would be able to cash a check the man had been forced to sign...
...Mary McCarthy has said of this period that it was a time of liberation...
...And he thought that the role of literary men should be to develop the arcane, cabalistic side of the Marxist doctrine...
...And was...
...New York was not across the sea, and once there, a human being could live...
...Came guilt to its inhabitants who were still unscathed, while others were fighting and dying...
...I was to recall the incident to the official, and in such a way that the latter would be able to recollect it pleasantly, and offer the gangster who had slugged him a W.P.A...
...It must now change into something else...
...The first of May became tense and interesting...
...Told what he owed, the man would sign a check...
...Well-dressed men seen walking down Fourth Street were often seen, soon afterward, walking to MacDougal Street, where The Whoopee Club stood...
...Would the city have the enchantment it did...
...After all, if you were in New York City, then you were a Russian...
...Trotsky was accused of fascism and he was to make a speech over telephone from Mexico which was to be amplified by loudspeakers for an audience in the Hippodrome...
...Some six thousand people came to hear it, many of them Stalin supporters...
...Kenneth Rexroth said to me recently: "I just walked away from the Stalin-Trotsky controversy...
...They'll help you," said the friend...
...The city began to speak—and to shout—at its street corners through political agitators...
...You will notice that New York was certain people...
...No other great city followed New York...
...until then, at night, you could sit for hours without seeing another person, and in the dark and the quiet, your thoughts became eloquent...
...Then Stalin signed a pact with Hitler...
...A brilliant novelist subjected her most intimate acquaintances to the terror of her sarcastic style...
...Ricci was one of the first friends I had made in New York...
...The streets were still safe at night...
...Came the refugees, many of them painters: Chagall, Helion, Leger, Miro, Max Ernst, Tanguy, Masson, Matta...
...A politically minded friend counselled the painter, "Resist...
...Back home, but not at home, uneasy and ideologically depressed, the city then, like the rest of the world, submitted to shock after shock: the Russian attack on Finland, the Nazi attack on Poland, the defeat of France, the battle of Britain, the assassination of Trotsky, the Nazi attack on Russia, finally Pearl Harbor...
...and you enjoyed more freedom in New York City than Russians not in New York City did...
...In the richest city of the world there were bread lines...
...No, there were no crowds in the park then, no music, no chess, no mothers, no children...
...THE CLIMACTIC EVENT of the period, from my point of view at least, was a political one...
...Not that the sole interest or activity of the city at that time was politics...
...The thought was not peculiar to me, it entered into the minds of most of the people I knew, and soon a moment came when there was no longer any question as to whether we were going or not going to be Marxists...
...Finally, the city itself moved...
...Certainly it was as hard for the city to leave Russia as it had been to go there...
...Close up, in its dirty details, in the noise and haste of the streets, in its congestion of cars and men, it is most unlovely...
...Trotsky—through Shachtmandeclared that he would stake his life on the judgment of an impartial committee of inquiry which could study the evidence the Stalinists had collected against him...
...In his conversation, at least, he gave instances of what he had in mind...
...And in each case, the reason the particular individual was wasting himself or herself was far more interesting than anything he or she could have done...
...Matta tried to stop the general trend, of which he himself was part and symptom, by making a painting with the wonderful title: "Stop the Age of Hemorrl" New York City at that time had become for me little more than the streets over which a taxicab would take me to a boat leaving for Paris...
...it has a pathos like ours, it is entirely of time...
...Why not use this freedom...
...There is no group here now with the disposition or the force to save it...
...I still cannot understand why most of the really "aware" people in the city did not become the followers of Trotsky...
...But the owners of Whoopee were not born yesterday...
...There was wickedness in it, there were women—maybe there was even one woman...
...And who can like the city's straight-streetedness, simple-mindedness, rudeness, slovenliness...
...These projects remained just that...
...The man would drink, and having drunk, be told that he had treated the whole house to champagne, and owed anything from one to ten thousand dollars, depending on his general air, and also, on the quality of his clothes...
...I recall some friends of mine, whose writings were scarcely intelligible to me, shouting together during a May Day parade: "We write for the working class...
...London did not, nor did Paris...
...It was disgraceful to think of her having to do anything short of the most sacred work...
...To defeat this chance, Whoopee had its gangsters, whose role was to kidnap the man after he had signed his check, and detain him somewhere set up for the purpose until ten o'clock of the following morning, by which time the check would have been cashed...
...official had made a number of passes at Paddy 0., who had slugged him with appropriate indignation...
...CAME CHANGE: the Wall Street crash and the depression which spread out after it over the entire country...
...The sugar bowl, happily, went wide of the mark...
...And the rich became ashamed: for everyone not rich attacked them...
...But there was a real intellectual achievement during the period...
...I shall never forget the evening when he proved that Helen of Troy—his argument involved both word magic and economic determinism—was really a loaf of bread...
...Married people broke off...
...As for the gangsters, they said with one voice, "You see, hands don't count...
...Most of the time it was Stalin's...
...Came the blackout...
...I generally went to bed after dawn, and often spent midnight until morning walking...
...Came the black market in food, then in babies...
...This was expressed not in literary theory but in art history...
...A great thing, an incredible thing, what was perhaps its last great act...
...no human being has ever learned to hide the way money can...
...also their friends...
...The Empire State, the tallest building in the world, was then also the most vacant...
...Still, there was a thrill, at the time, in just dropping into a gin mill to buy a beer...
...Came the Puerto Ricans, invisibly, and not to be seen in their full consequence until about fifteen years later...
...Why should they...
...Ah," said the friend, "you can do something...
...They knew perfectly well that checks can bounce...
...The city was not poor, but it was in disgrace...
...I admired him for his relation to the gangsters who also dropped into the coffee pot about the same hour that we did...
...He wanted me to write a letter to a leading W.P.A...
...and asked me to do him a favor...
...On the contrary, people tended to be hard...
...This line met with success...
...But it was also Cabala...
...Not that the speech changed history...
...And a person might commit himself to a whole political program in the effort to save his furniture...
...official whom he had come to know in this way: Paddy O. had detained the man—not then high in W.P.A...
...The landlord naturally was determined to evict him...
...Hart Crane, who had celebrated New York in White Buildings, may have felt that the ship bringing him from Mexico, where he had gone on a Guggenheim, was taking him to a city he could no longer understand...
...You can do something else," said the friend, "you can fight...
...Yes, this was a new New York...
...Here is an example of his friendship for me...
...The telephone wires were cut and Max Shachtman, a leader of the Trotskyite organization, had to read Trotsky's speech, a copy of which, fortunately, had been prepared...
...It was a city...
...J. always referred to it as her novel, and must have regarded the author as he regarded his typewriter...
...The club was no more, and the gangster was completely disorientated...
...There was R. F.—a poet—who gave her his money and lived on practically nothing...
...But no city has ever endured except by fostering the kind of virtues New York City never had...
...It has become afraid of the snow...
...We would throw our clothes on the grass and jump in...
...There were picket lines, demonstrations, meetings, arguments...
...And howl Let it be noted that the movement of the city into the U.S.S.R...
...then, in one violent act, he gave, and took back from her, everything: R. F. hanged himself...
...Then Ricci said: "But I think Joey is right for wanting to kill him...
...Certainly if war comes New York will not escape destruction...
...New careers opened up for people interested in and with a talent for radical action, radical thought...
...A truer account of the matter would be to say that politics entered in some way into other activities...
...I passed out...
...Naturally, she refused to go to Hollywood, to which even Greta Garbo yielded...
...What did others give her...
...Help me do what...
...One day I ran into Paddy 0., a gangster who had played a star role during Prohibition in the doings of The Whoopee Club...
...And they'll give the evictors a good beating into the bargain...
...In addition to the persons of reputation, New York was at that time a certain number of people who had not done anything, but whom one was seriously urged to meet...
...You can be on their side...
...It is really in the past...
...There was M. J., who at twenty-three was too beautiful to do anything...
...Today we have the crime syndicate...
...An ideal like that, in the nature of the case, cannot but be shortlived...
...The wealth of the city hid itself—in vaults, in banks, in foreign banks...
...Him was me...
...Happy days...
...He wrote poetry and he pretended to be a hard guy, which in some ways he was...
...who can like what is happen ing to the language here, deteriorating even faster than the subway system,—who can like the cadence of the human voice in New York, or like what is happening to the human personality...
...Came the psychoanalysts, many of them refugees...
...Certain lines in his first book of poems give the essence of the pre-swing, pre-political, ragtime rhythm of the New York City which was then on the brink of an altogether new adventure: And you can fall downstairs with me With perfect grace and equanimity...
...All this has interest now only for what followed...
...The W.P.A...
...It is not hard to understand why he was...
...And there is no one in the city with enough power to chasten it...
...Who can like its lack of open spaces...
...Some went uptown, some to Brooklyn...
...Artists and writers began to court and be courted by political groups, to be herded into congresses, and, finally, into unions...
...Shall we take a hand in changing it...
...In a penthouse on top lived one of its stockholders, Al Smith, former governor of the State...
...Then, there were adventurers, millionaires, gangsters, characters—New York contained just about every sort of person...
...Not always, to be sure...
...body knew the house, but it was somewhere in the neighborhood), it was Romany Marie's where BeKtrand Russell or John Cowper Powys might drop in to chat...
...Those who could not employ them became ashamed, too...
...And these were the "advanced" cities of the world...
...There was the novelist who was going to give her his novel when he had finished it—M...
...Slater Brown, in a poem published in the New Republic, described the ex-governor looking down from his apartment on top of the nearly empty building: Hearing from every hill and valley Strains of the Internationally...
...The result was that you tended to be treated as a member of a group even if you didn't belong to one...
...Too many people for any of them to be interesting...
...The whole period stood under the sign of Hemorrhage...
...asked the painter helplessly...
...And did not its very irresponsibility make it at one time brilliant, interesting, unique—what great city beside New York went off to spend almost a whole decade in another country...
...Yes, New York, not just one section of it, but New York City entire, with its boroughs and bridges and unions and businesses, its subways and skyscrapers and museums and tenements, its publishing houses and bookstores...
...And their moral problem was solved...
...In making it like other cities, and one, too, that will not reflect our own image...
...Arshile Gorky moved to Connecticut, and hanged himself in his studio...
...IN THE IMPORTANT PART of New York, at that time, there was not a single person who had not once in his life looked exultant, exalted, or at the very least, distinguished There was not one person who had not at least once in his life said something which could be—and maybe was—repeated...
...It was a shock for me to realize that one was no longer praised for expressing one's own ideas...
...There, over cornflakes and coffee, Ricci would talk to me in a very tough way about poetry...
...The most important people in the city, those who had lived between Bleecker and Fourteenth Street, between Greenwich Street and Second Avenue, began to move...
...Came the assassination of Carlo Tresca, still unpunished...
...It was The City...
...In the early of the evening, they could be seen walking up and down Fourth Street soliciting customers...
...Yes, I was once excited by this city—but that was long ago...
...I think this period represents the beginning of New York City's decline...
...For my part, I thought a good contribution to Marxism would be the creation of a Marxist detective, who would solve crimes by calling upon dialectical materialism, even as G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown solved crimes by applying Catholic dogma...
...At about four in the morning we would sometimes stop into a coffee pot at the corner of Fourth and Cornelia Streets...
...POLITICALLY New York City then became the most interesting part of the Soviet Union...
...Oh, there were so many good things...
...And were it saved from itself, it would be a different city, not the New York we have known, which was always excessive, wanton...
...THIRTY-Two YEARS AGO there was Prohibition, and that, surely, is something one hardly longs to see restored...
...Once in a very long while it was Trotsky's...
...I wondered about what I should do, and then one morning, without having come to a decision, I punched him on the jaw...
...Everyone knew who they were, they were pointed out to you, and never with alarm...
...workers in the parks kept them clean, the subways were tidy and without incident...
...What is New York today...
...It appears that the newly exalted W.P.A...
...Each time the evictors carry a piece of your furniture out into the street, to rot there for all they care, these friends of mine—and yours— will pick up that piece of furniture and carry it back into your apartment where it belongs...
...I disagree...
...They were living up to an ideal of hardness...
...I think not, and I blame the city for what it has become, rather than the young man I cannot possibly be again...
...The baby carriages did not begin to arrive until about 1935...
...He jumped into the Atlantic...
...The only remaining question was: which of us would be crackerjacks...
...The Russian trials had taken place...
...But even if war does not come, and it may not, this city cannot grow as it once did...
...Its schools have broken down, its administration is unwieldy, inefficient, corrupt...
...The city may disintegrate, it may die...
...Bob Clarmont, the poet who had inherited, three years before, a million dollars from a wealthy man he had saved from drowning was discovered by newspaper men and photographed standing on line with the poor, his money spent, waiting for soup...
...It was during this period that people began to give up the values they had held to...
...Its irresponsibility today is expressed not positively at all, but negatively—as waste, dishonor, unconcern, dirt...
...Came Andre Breton, with his courtliness, rages, and pure, musical French...
...Certainly this incident could not occur today...
...I, like the gangsters, waited for Ricci's answer...
...but to be free to do that and still remain in Russia, they would have had to live in New York, as Odets did, during the thirties...
...It has a beauty, to be sure, at least when seen at night from a speeding car, from a penthouse very high up—or from the deck of a ship taking you away from it...
...He realized this, too, and promptly kicked me in the balls...
...There was the splendid fellow who had done nothing at all with his life, the woman who had done nothing with her dancing, the young man who had never stopped denying his great and evident gifts...
...Also the movement of the city had cultural consequences, one being that the ideas of Trotsky acquired a meaningfulness in New York they never attained in any capital of Europe, or in any other city in the States...
...In a big city, the ideal of hardness, is only too quickly realized...
...Shall we turn from it, despise it, as we watch its former qualities converted into faults...
...Just to protect yourself you joined up with somebody...
...My whole aim was to live in New York—where I have lived practically ever since...
...He hailed me in the street as if I were an old friend—the last time I had seen him before that, he was exclaiming: "Hands don't count...
...Those who lived outside this area were just pariahs—or did not even exist...
...To give an example: a painter had managed to live in the Village for some years without ever paying his rent on time...
...I knew then that I could beat him if he fought fair...
...One of the best things was this: except for the museums, theaters and opera, all that was humanly essential to the city was bounded by Bleecker and Fourteenth Streets, by Second Avenue and Greenwich Street...
...And it was the shock of this event, I think, which started New York City, bitter and demoralized, back from the U. S. S. R., to America...
...So New York is mortal, as mortal as we are, there is not a hint of eternity in it as in other great cities, its stones and glass and steel have no touch of the sacred...
...These gangsters were associated with a joint known as The Whoopee Club...
...He wrote Awake and Sing, which comes brilliantly out of Chekhov's Ivanov...
...One of the first friends I made in New York was a semi-poetic quasicriminal named Ricci...
...The city will have to stay and face the hydrogen music, to which, by the way, through its scientists, it will have contributed...
...Like most of humanity, but much more pleasantly, you were on the march...
...People began to read Marx and Lenin and to discuss economics, philosophy, dialectics...
...Of course, Stalin's organization in Mexico was on the job...
...To start with, the unemployed...
...M. J. was really beautiful: hers was a beauty that made one shudder...
...This is what would happen there...
...Everyone became ashamed of himself...
...This city is irresponsible—but was it not always so...
...And it did...
...Schapiro combined an extreme esthetic sensitiveness with great clarity of mind and social passion, and his discussion of painting, particularly modern painting, outclassed everything that was then being said or written about literature from a social point of view...
...The city has become too big, it is overgrown, it now impedes rather than aids those who grow up in it...
...Did it not give the name of its best borough to the first atom bomb project...
...Those days everybody moved in October, and living in New York was almost a wandering from apartment to apartment...
...Smith had become reactionary, or as the Communist jargon put it, "confused...
...I admired the hard line he took about everything that had ever been written in verse, and also on the motive for writing verse of the people we knew who wrote it...
...the great thing then was to understand Marx's or Lenin's...
...I launched another right and caught him squarely...
...But now he could not even hope to be late with his rent...
...Harold Rosenberg took the view that Marxism was two things: it was Talmud, to be sure...
...After some thought, he said, pointing to the gangster who had kicked me: "I think Joey is wrong for not understanding him...
...How can I?" asked the painter...
...Such was the practice...
...These were the men I admired Ricci for being acquainted with...
...I am less excitable nowadays...
...Should we not rather lament the passing of something extraordinary, which perhaps will never be seen again...
...I remember an anti-evictor I rather liked (he took a real joy in putting furniture back into apartments) praising someone for being a "crackerjack Marxist...
...Finally, both factions turned to my friend Ricci, who sitting at the counter sipping his coffee, was surveying the whole scene sarcastically...
...For it became the one part of that country in which the struggle between Stalin and Trotsky could be openly expressed...
...He was confused by this, and threw a sugar bowl at me...
...When I came to, the gangsters from The Whoopee Club were split into two factions, and as I lay on the floor of the coffee pot they argued out the ethics of what had been done to me...
...And the attackers became ashamed, for their attacks were not bringing results...
...And often I wonder: what would New York as it is now mean to me, if I, again eighteen, were to come here for the first time...
...But I do not want to give the impression that the New York of the period was a gentle city...
...We have heard recently that for three generations the secret dream of all writers in Russia has been to write like Chekhov...
...Maybe it is even more vulnerable than we are...
...Which side was that...
...If we had any fear then, it was that a policeman would come by...
...But if it takes a single moment of time to promise a beautiful woman a book, it takes many moments of unbeautiful time to write a book...
...And the gangsters of Fourth Street were fully equipped for it...
Vol. 8 • July 1961 • No. 3
