The Person Alone
Solomon, Barbara P.
In Edward Albee's two-character play, The Zoo Story, the publisher asks the young man who accosts him in Central Park if he lives in the Village. The boy, who eventually forces the...
...The pall McCarthyism cast over the country not only instilled fear but in all sorts of intangible ways robbed the younger generation of communication with those who preceded them...
...In place of the European cafe, where with a little initiative and the price of a coffee you can meet your own generation, we have instead the specialized school for the non-specialist...
...What the stranger doesn't realize is that it is fatal to be alone in the city and to have found no "style...
...This is the person who desires, more than fame and money, to "find himself...
...The writer is the first to feel the pinch of political repression, and he is especially harmed by the rigid separation of the university "academic intellectual" from the "creative personality...
...If they have some money perhaps they take an MA...
...One of the great appeals of the Method, is that as a school it offered tolerance for the unrooted, the kind of person who in different times might never have considered being an actor...
...In Edward Albee's two-character play, The Zoo Story, the publisher asks the young man who accosts him in Central Park if he lives in the Village...
...bohemian...
...A few paperbacks, a plant, and some dishes from Woolworth's and you're in...
...He has no natural place of congregation such as the concert hall, the art gallery, or the theater where he can meet his contemporaries...
...It is also a subtle composite including residents of no particular ethnic or economic group...
...THE STRONG THEME of the past decade in all the Arts—painting, sculpture, writing, the theater—has been the isolation of the individual caught in the prison of an overcrowded but lonely civilization...
...Since the Village is becoming the home of the well-heeled, and has always had more apartments to offer than rooms, it is now uptown for the true transient...
...As you climb up the last flight of stairs of some battered five-story brownstone you recognize the peculiar stale odor that emanates from the rooms of old people...
...You are convenient to subways, it's nice to be near a river, nice to be near a park—as for the bleakness, the shabby atmosphere, you assume this is the way of the city, you know no different...
...though they are drawn to the city, the city is not always equally drawn to them...
...the seekers who are unsure of what they are seeking...
...WHO ARE THEY and why do they come here...
...Those who neither leave the city nor "make it," curling inward in a shy defeat, find a less threatening existence...
...Then there are the countless times you knock at a door, and this comes as a real shock, you are confronted over and over again by a neatly dressed young man or woman immobilized in a small clean room...
...We ended, incongruously, chatting in the stilted atmosphere of the lobby of a large once-grand hotel...
...but the spectacle which it offers to a European sensibility is of a different order of grandeur: that of European landscape...
...I remember being eighteen and hearing for the first time in the warmth of a Paris cafe the word alienation...
...And I remember coming back to New York with its rooming houses, its poverty and prosperity, its fabulous life and its nothing life, and discovering, emotionally, what the word meant...
...They take mediocre jobs during the day and by night haunt the lectures, the courses...
...Experimental theaters, bookstores and cafes are now springing up where before there was nothing...
...In the newspaper ads the rooms on the West Side appear the most inviting...
...for Saul Bellow, in his somber Seize the Day, it is a run-down West Side hotel...
...As for the genuine bohemian or inteIlectual (a group so unsure of its own existence that the American language has never had a fitting noun: student...
...Yet despite some improvements, loneliness in the city is, unfortunately, never a mere question of decades...
...In all its violent electric beauty of buildings, bridges, mechanization and its infinity of nameless people, with all the virtues and vices of this time, it is the true twentiethcentury city...
...intellectual...
...Everyone was violently disagreeing with one another about the meaning of the word, but essentially they were all speaking the same language...
...NOT ONLY is there no moral home for the person who comes to the city, there is also no physical home—no place to go...
...Objectively, no doubt, New York is a city, and can be judged as one...
...the adventurous who are not adventurous enough...
...Because life in the rest of the United States is even worse...
...For Albee it is a shabby West Side rooming house...
...But what is least apparent is that all M along the West Side—from the fifties up to Morningside Heights, which is the home of students and professors, in the endless brownstones, whitestones, small tenements and once-uponatime well kept hotels of World War One vintage—lives, almost unnoticed, the anonymous wanderer, the single person hopelessly lost in the city...
...One of its great limitations, however, is that its appeal rested on a private emotional situation that has nothing to do with the theater...
...He describes the dreariness of his home and tells how he tried first to make a friend of the janitor's mangey dog, and when that didn't succeed, at least an enemy...
...New York may represent the "decline of the Roman Empire," but it is Rome nevertheless...
...Low rents, good space and one can pay by the week or month...
...I remember a particularly frustrating afternoon when I wished to discuss a manuscript with a friend—we walked along the Upper West Side finding I) cafeterias where you couldn't smoke, 2) bars that were too dark, and anyway we didn't want to drink, 3) restaurants that expected you to order a full meal...
...the underweared, housecoated recluses who have a bit of a job or a tiny pension, some at the bottle, some fussing over eggs at the stove, some reading and rereading yesterday's newspaper...
...Where does one go to talk...
...It results from the creation of a new kind of city: an artificial landscape in which the principles of urbanism no longer operate...
...twenties and thirties...
...No furniture is necessary...
...Their expression is a strange mixture of expectancy and resignation—almost as though they are waiting for the world to come in and find them...
...Traditionally, he learns his craft through his own experience...
...The new type of actor is not so much a member of the economically underprivileged seeking a short cut to fame, but the "poet actor...
...He is neither rich, chic nor shrewd enough to "make it" midtown or on Bleecker...
...In the flat, and time from which we are just pulling out, life for the intellectual has been particularly hard...
...Political lethargy, prosperity, plus the fantastically young marriage age, which is directly related to the political and economic framework, has all had a numbing and disrupting impact on the youth of the city...
...whereas American landscape offers us, in its turn, an urban beauty...
...In the past few years there are more and more foreigners, as students from Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, in a turn-about trend are now discovering America...
...In canvassing the neighborhood during an election one expects to meet, all in their proper habitat, the Puerto Ricans, the Irish, the Jews, and now, the young marrieds...
...Why does the person alone, the artist, the intellectual, persist in coming to New York if life here is so hard...
...And our eye will adapt itself at once, if we do not inhibit it, to this new landscape, in which the values that count are those of the velvety light, the sharpness of the far distances, the sublimity of the skyscraper and the shaded valleys in which the many colored motorcars lie strewn like flowers.—Claude Levi-Strauss, "Journey to the Edge of Our Jungle," Encounter, February, 1961...
...They become nursery school teachers, social workers, salesgirls in arty bookshops...
...As men are more quickly forced to resolve themselves in their work, it is particularly the young women who flounder in this nether-nether land...
...These are the discontented who are not discontented enough...
...The person between twenty and thirty who is past college age yet not completely adult, who is neither married nor a homosexual finds he is almost a misfit...
...The West Side is not only the familiar sandwich with a hard crust on the Park and River sides of semifashionable large apartment houses, the homes of the wealthy Jewish middle-class of an older generation, and the soft in-between of slum avenues and side streets crowded with Irish and newly arrived Puerto Ricans...
...You don't see many of them on the street, there is maybe one genu ine cafe in a sixty block radius and hardly any bookstores...
...What they do not find —these girls who do not wish to become suburban matrons but who do not possess either the shrewdness to become chic careerists or enough vitality and sense of self to become true individualists—is the sympathetic way of life they assumed the city could give the "sensitive" person...
...The worst off are the almosttalented...
...Anything, anything, is his mute cry, just to be among the living...
...Why do writers and artists stay less long in Europe than they did in the Ugly...
...One sees this and hopes that in the next decade things will be more open...
...The West Side, which in recent years has become the habitat of the artist, writer, musician and intellectual, as well as the footloose floater, barely recognizes the existence of this "subterranean" population...
...Of all the artists, the writer has suffered most during this period...
...students are beginning to picket Woolworth's and oppose Civil Defense programs where before they were silent...
...Thus, the abrasive effect of what should be the true formative years is being experienced only by a tiny "odd ball" minority—a minority tragically forced to grow up alone...
...His plans are indefinite, he has no roommate to split the costs so it is useless to lease or sublet a real apartment...
...This is not a "scandal" one can get angry about or protest nor is it a condition that a committee can correct...
...Because, for better or worse, we are a world power...
...Despite the vast numbers of young people living alone in this broad area there is little in the neighborhood that indicates their silent presence...
...I believe that one of the reasons the Art and Drama schools have become so popular in the past ten years is that they provide a safe haven for the wanderer, a world within a world...
...The most notable recent change during the last decade has been the invasion of the neighborhood by actors, TV people and young couples who can no longer afford the Village (witness the tremendous success of the Reform Democrats here...
...The boy, who eventually forces the publisher to kill him in a desperate attempt to experience some human contact, replies that he lives in a rooming house on the Upper West Side...
...Most are from out-of-town...
...Those who call New York ugly • . . have simply failed to make the necessary change of registration...
...and here in the city there is always the magic possibility of sudden change...
Vol. 8 • July 1961 • No. 3
