There is something about Boise, its isolation and its inbreeding and its density, that fosters a specialized kind of hatred of parent for child and child for parent. I think the West, the concept of the heroic West, has a great deal to do with it. The pioneers are closer than they are in other places … It has something to do with the great good place found. The second generation agrees almost by default with the first, and the third can think of nothing but going away. Going away is not easy. Its goal out there is specific: San Francisco, and San Francisco is 642 miles away.
The Americanist context, its grand themes of Manifest Destiny and Manifest Disappointment, are terrifically relevant to A Meaningful Life, the most severe of L.J.’s Brooklyn novels. It’s precisely the undertow of pioneer failure that gives the book its oxygen and reach, and which makes it more than a brilliant complaint or comic-existentialist howl in the night. By his description of his hero Lowell Lake’s failing attempt to pen a novel of “the founding and settlement of Boise, Idaho,” and by other near-subliminal touches (Lake suffers his premarital jitters at Donner Pass), we see Lake’s disastrous reverse-pilgrimage into Brooklyn, the easy destruction of his tissue-paper WASP idealizations upon immersion in the racial boiling pot of the inner city, in terms of an American incapacity or unwillingness to meet the true implications of its founding promises, made to itself and to the future. Every arrival aimed at some golden San Francisco of the mind falls leadenly short, landing in a Boise of regret and loathing. In this, Davis’s America opens unexpectedly into Kafka’s unattainable Castle, and the Zeno’s paradox chances of breaching its doors.
“Do you realize I’m the first member of my family to cross this thing in a hundred years?” said Lowell as they bridged the Mississippi at Saint Louis. His emotions were strange and sinking, but not precise enough to put a name to.
“Big deal,” said his wife.
They came to New York at night, hurtling through a hellish New Jersey landscape the likes of which Lowell had never dreamed existed, a chaos of roadways and exits, none of which made any sense, surrounded by smoke and flashes and dark hulking masses and pillars of real fire a thousand feet high, enveloped in a stench like dog’s breath and dead goldfish.
In Davis’s helpless vision, West collapses into East, the American future into the bloodstained European colonial past. Plus the contractor you hired just wrenched out and demolished the irreplaceable Carrara marble mantelpiece, without asking.
—Introduction for A Meaningful Life, 2009
Agee’s Brooklyn
I want to try and sing back at Brooklyn Is, James Agee’s song of Brooklyn, this astonishing secret text which like the heart of the borough itself throbs in raw shambolic splendor, never completely discovered, impossible to mistake. Agee is such a loving, explosive, and mournful singer; his prose aims the methods of Walt Whitman like a loving bullet toward the next century, brings that greatest singer of American identity smash up against the midcentury’s grubby, boundless polyglot accumulation of successive immigrant hordes, and predicts the outer-borough songs to come, the ones that could only have been written by immigrant sons and daughters themselves—Malamud, Fuchs, Paley, Gornick, Marshall—though Agee, much like Whitman, can seem to encompass and predict any author who ever tried to touch Brooklyn since: Henry Miller, Paula Fox, myself. Agee’s breath and voice come cresting at us out of the past, yet keenly modern and engaged in every syllable with the tides of the past that rush under the craft of his words—Agee can seem to be surfing the past, always in danger of being swallowed by the high punishing curl of time, always somehow riding atop it instead. Yet if he’s a singer he’s also a painter, brushstroking with his language the sun-bleached brownstone façades of Slope and Heights and Hill, the shingles and stucco of Flatbush and Greenpoint, the graffiti and commercial signage left like clues for future archaeologists—the brush of his prose is as fond and melancholy as Mark Rothko’s in his subway paintings or Philip Guston’s in his street scenes, before both painters sank their feelings for the city in abstraction. He writes as though drunk on matters of space and geometry and distance, always seeing the life of the city whole and in microscopic miniature at once, and persistently smashing together architecture and emotion, conveying in the grain of a “scornful cornice” or a “blasted mansion” or a “half-made park with the odd pubescent nudity of all new public efforts” or “drawn breathing shades” or an “asphaltic shingle” (his neologism suggesting “asthmatic,” “exalted,” “Sephardic,” and who knows what else) his sense that the archipelago of islands settled by the mad invaders of this continent and the refugees who followed, and the nature of the buildings and the streets and the signs the arrivistes constructed everywhere upon these New York islands, are in every way implicated in the experience of any given life lived even temporarily within their bounds, including his own. The shape of the land, in other words—and of the houses and trees and roadways, and the subways now running underneath them—has, in Agee’s view, subdued and civilized and corrupted those who had arrived to subdue and civilize and corrupt this place; they made it strange and were made strange by it in turn. Agee tackles head-on Brooklyn’s doubleness, the paradox of the borough’s weird preening inferiority complex at its proximity to Manhattan and its simultaneous bovine oblivious hugeness, its indifference to attempts at definition—including Agee’s own. He nevertheless made himself so open, such a portal for collective presence, that he truly can seem to have managed to allude to every icon of the place, every glorious shred of ruined culture a Brooklynite might ever flatter himself thinking only he’d cherished, and to have mentioned every talismanic name, Ex-Lax, Adelphi, DeKalb, finding vital concrete poetry in the enigma of the names, stitching time together, speaking to every Brooklyn dweller, past or future. In my own instance, Agee paints at one point a devastating cameo of Brooklyn Heights gentility and insularity (subtitled: the dusk of the Gods); reporting his snobbish host’s fear, that “Negroes” and “Syrians” are “within two blocks of us”; those same “Syrians” now own great swaths of the neighborhood in question, which truly belongs more to them than to any other constituency (and where is the great novel of Arab American immigrant life on Atlantic Avenue?); they are, in fact, the landlords of the apartment on Bergen Street in which I sit writing this today—so it may seem that Agee is at my shoulder. The essay’s prose is, at last, more than tidal, it’s cyclonic, as the narrative rises up on the swirling imaged-junked cone of Agee’s prophetic style to see the borough and its people whole, diving through parlor windows or into movie-theater seats or along a quiet Sunday street to sweep up another handful of lives in a few sprung, compacted sentences and sweep on. To end at the zoo, a perfect symbol of Agee’s ultimate insinuation: that all this mad paving and dressing up and scribbling on walls (or on pages) and pouring tea from china cups is still finally nothing more than a vision of the natural world—that all our cultural outcroppings, chaotic and placid alike, are just evidence of our peculiar animal activities, and that Brooklyn is only a particularly dense and dreamy version of the zoo that is all human life, an enclosure where any number of not terribly imaginative or visionary individuals can collectively realize a great visionary mass result, a kind of vast art installation made by instinctive, consolation-seeking animals, merely by living their beautiful, ordinary, mad lives in adjacency to one another.
—Introduction for Brooklyn Is, 2005
Breakfast at Brelreck’s
Under the shadow of the Williamsburg Savings Bank tower small, faintly visible men brave streams of traffic at the intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush avenues. Brooklyn’s two great streets arrive in good spirits there and are demoralized, having unexpectedly tangled with the more prosaic Fourth Avenue, which points toward but never reaches the sea, being interrupted by a cemetery. Fourth Avenue, strewn with oil-stained automobile-repair shops, destroys the human imagination, this is widely known. What’s less known is that it is also too much for Flatbush and Atlantic.
These nea
rly microscopic men in hats and coats scurry among an archipelago of desolate street corners, flattened brick-littered lots, a traffic island with a newspaper stand, and the Long Island Rail Road terminal, the only evidence for which above the ground is a pipe-and-plywood scaffold layered with decades of torn posterings.
A truck corners Fourth and humps over the curb beside a cigar store. A small boy runs from the traffic island, ducking behind the men crossing: From the newsstand he’s stolen a comic book, Blue Beetle #1. The Blue Beetle is a Charlton Comic, drawn by Steve Ditko, Marvel’s outcast. The men hasten, the avenues moan. The men are assembling for a late breakfast at a counter inside the bowels of the terminal. Some recognize one another. Others merely sense a kinship of worn shoes and pen-inky fingertips, an ache in the left quadrant of the rib cage, a dislike for a certain barber, a sister’s son in the army, circles drawn in newspapers around telephone extensions never dialed.
A sign painted in fifteen-foot-high letters on pink brick asks HAVE YOU HAD ANY LATELY? CLAMS, STEAMERS.
A pawnshop features a variety of typewriters, trumpets, and wrist-watches, plus one bassoon.
Two Chinese joints, No Pork Restaurant and Fu King Food Shop. Both serve from behind bulletproof glass.
Nobody can say what’s sold at Samuel J. Underberg’s, but with that signage he’s made sure they won’t forget his name.
Down inside the station against a backdrop of rusty squeals and staticky timetable announcements the men sit at the coffee-shop counter and fold their newspapers, lick their fingers, frown. The counter’s built into a corner of the station behind the ticket desk. The glass door which might shield it from the rumblings and oil smoke is tied open with a frayed white rope; hung from the rope’s a sign at least twenty years old showing a steaming cup and the single word OPEN. The sign behind the counter formed of movable red plastic letters with teeth which press into grooves in a green felt background says egg sandwich 39¢, egg and cheese 49¢, tuna 39¢, english 5¢, coffee tea 19¢, juice 15¢, juice tomato 19¢. Nobody’s ordered tea or juice tomato in a thousand years and counting.
The men all wear hats which featured originally a tiny peacock’s feather, now missing. The exception is one small man in a brown suit with frayed cuffs and a stained collar. He wears a blue cap with a B on it, a baseball cap with the bill missing so it resembles a beanie or yarmulke. When the talk starts it is always this man in the blue cap who starts it. The others have arrayed themselves at the counter around him according to their tolerance.
“Mighty Brelreck’s,” says the man in the blue cap now, his tone heavily sarcastic.
No one replies.
“Like sunflowers we turn our heads toward the radiance of Brelreck’s urn,” says the man in the cap. “Like sunflowers it is a fershlunken miracle we are still on our feet.”
“Writing poetry?” says another man without turning his head.
“Reading, not writing,” says the man in the cap. “It still occurs in certain quarters.”
This bait goes untaken. Coffee is slurped in quiet concentration, as though the world’s turning depends on certain metabolic balances being achieved at this counter deep beneath the pavement.
A woman bursts in—if a woman entered Brelreck’s on tiptoe she’d be bursting. This one’s a thin Negro lady with short hair barretted in certain places, wearing a windbreaker and a skirt and sandals. Her nails are painted a blue not unresembling that of the beanielike cap. She speaks with urgency to anyone listening.
“How do you get to Kennedy airport?”
A man in an ordinary hat answers. “Car or train?”
“I’m walking.”
“That’s a long way.”
“Just tell me.”
They’re all going to be involved, they can just feel it. “You don’t understand, lady,” says another man. “That’s however many miles. You can’t walk.”
“I walked here.”
“From where?”
“Myrtle.”
“A trifle, here from Myrtle. You’re talking that twenty times over.”
“Tell me, please.”
Shrugs all around.
The Brelreck’s man leans in and says, “Want a coffee?”
“Sit, sister, have coffee.”
“Yeah, we’ll treat you. You gotta consider this in depth.”
The woman sits between the primary advice-giver with the ordinary hat and the man with the cap. The man with the cap leans in now and says, “Idlewild.” Anyone can sense his pleasure in the syllables.
The woman stares at him like he’s naked.
“Formerly Idlewild, now named for our late president. The name’s already a relic, I see it in your eyes.”
Shrugs and eye-rolling all around.
“You know where you’re sitting?” says the man with the cap.
Woman shakes her head, takes a first sip.
“The last Brelreck’s remaining. You might not care, but Brelreck’s once had the city like this.” He shakes a gripped hand. “One hundred and thirty outlets including the observation deck of the Empire State, of which you’ve surely heard. Brelreck’s had a roasting plant on Avenue D you could smell in Sunnyside, and a plantation in Cuba. You from Cuba perchance?”
“No.”
“Ah.” He waits, but nothing’s coming. “Well, so where was I? Brelreck’s, of course—mighty Brelreck’s.” He shoots a look at the Brelreck’s man, who turns in disgust.
“That’s right,” says the man in the blue cap. “It’s nothing to be proud of. What happened to Brelreck’s, you ask? My fine lady, they overreached.” The grasping hand now shoots out, trembles on the brink of some unseen goal, retreats. “Went head to head with Chock Full o’Nuts. You don’t need me to tell you how that came out. Today we’re noshing in the ghost of a thing, madam, not a thing itself.”
“You really walking to Kennedy?” says the man in the ordinary hat. He and the others have had time now to get their minds around it. Why shouldn’t she if she wants to is the general drift.
She nods.
“You just go straight out Atlantic, all the way.”
Another guy leans in. “But we’re talking a long way. You never knew a street was so long as this.”
“You’ll think you’re crazy,” says another. “It just goes. Don’t give up.”
“A lot of the stores out that direction have yellow signs,” adds a guy who usually doesn’t say anything.
Everyone looks.
“Sue me,” he says, holding out his hands like now they shouldn’t wonder why he never talks. “I don’t know the reason. Maybe somebody had a special on yellow once.”
They all let this sink in, with annoyance.
“Anyway,” says the man with the ordinary hat. “You get all the way out there the end of Atlantic, you gotta take a hard right at something called the Grand Concourse.”
“Grand Concourse even have a walkway?” someone raises.
A bunch of guys wave it off. She’s become like a horse they’ve bet on. They all want to see it done. “She’ll walk underneath,” someone says.
“There’s one more thing you should know,” says the man in the blue cap.
The woman stares at him, puts down her cup.
“This place, it’s more than just Brelreck’s that drew you here.”
“Not now,” says another guy. But it’s hopeless.
“Aboveground around here, Flatbush and Atlantic, you notice how for blocks everything’s flattened out? All those empty lots?”
Woman makes the error of nodding, not that there’s any alternative.
“It’s no accident this place looks like that. Few grasp or understand this was meant to be the new Ebbets Field. They got as far as picking out the site and knocking it all down. Could have been a Fenway, a Wrigley. Something beautiful. Then the Dodgers—whoosh—Los Angeles.”
Somebody stage-whispers, “Get going, lady, it’s okay. You’ll be here all day.”
The woman looks at the Brelreck’s man, her
eyes asking if the coffee was really gratis. He nods.
“Forget Los Alamos,” says the man in the cap, his voice rising. “Forget the Bikini Islands. This is ground zero right here.”
The woman is nearly out the door. Some guys are more gentlemen than others, they tip their newspapers slightly in farewell.
“We’re dwelling here inside the scar from Brooklyn’s ripped-out heart or possibly lungs!” the man in the cap screams. “The vital organs!”
The place has no echo, the scream dies in the air. The woman is gone. The man in the ordinary hat jerks his head at the Brelreck’s man for more coffee. Newspapers are being wrinkled in serious consideration. Someone, we’re not saying who, has got a streak of egg on his lapel—wouldn’t happen if the schmuck would cook the yolk all the way like he was asked. The man in the blue cap snorts, scratches his nose, tries to settle.
“The vital organs,” he mutters.
They’ve heard it before.
Above, a truck has busted an axle and sags at the triangle’s curb, halting traffic on Fourth for miles. The woman exploits the tie-up to cross against the lights, and hurries down Atlantic. She sees a kid on a bicycle, waves him to a stop. He spins his pedal backward while she forms her question.
“How do you get to Kennedy airport?”
(thanks to Lukas Jaeger)
—Konundrum Engine Literary Review,
and liner notes for The Maggies’ CD
Breakfast at Brelreck’s, 2000
The Mad Brooklynite
I first spoke with the Mad Brooklynite on the Bergen Street platform, where we’d both stepped off the G train to wait for an F train, to take us deeper into the borough. The Brooklynite was a small man in a brown suit with frayed cuffs and a stained collar. He wore a blue cap with a B on it, in a typography I associated with the departed Brooklyn Dodgers. The bill of the cap was missing, reducing it to a sort of Dodgers beanie or yarmulke. “Do you have the time?” he asked. I did, and I told it to him. It was a quarter past three. “In Manhattan the train stations have clocks,” he said. “Apparently we’re a secondary class here in Brooklyn; our business could never be so important, and our need for the time of day is thus insignificant as well.” I offered a nod, and a slight smile. His point was striking—why were there fewer clocks in the Brooklyn stations? What was being expressed? The Brooklynite changed the subject. “Did you know the G train is the only train in the entire subway which never enters the island of Manhattan?” I shook my head. “The sorriest train in the system,” he continued. “It suffers from low self-esteem. Perhaps it should be allowed to change its route one day a year and enter Manhattan, just so it could taste the honor.” I smiled to make him know I understood his sarcasm. “But that raises an ontological issue,” he said, surprising me. “If a G train goes into Manhattan can it truly be regarded anymore as a G train? Perhaps its exclusion from the island is an intrinsic property.” I shrugged; I couldn’t know. “Here’s another: the Village Voice,” said the Brooklynite. “In Manhattan it’s given out free; in Brooklyn we pay a dollar and a quarter. Our attention is less valuable to their advertisers, I suppose. Perhaps if we had clocks in our stations and knew the time of day we’d be more efficient, and hence more likely to generate enough disposable income to afford Pilates instructors and phone sex.” I felt I could argue with the Brooklynite’s logic, but I didn’t choose to do so. The F train arrived, and we boarded. I shuffled away from the Brooklynite, found a seat, and began reading my newspaper. The Brooklynite stood by the doors. After the Carroll Street station the F line becomes elevated, and as we rose into the sunlight the Brooklynite turned to me and beckoned with a crooked finger. “Come, look.” Helpless to refuse, I stood and joined him at the doors. “Consider the Williamsburg Savings Bank tower,” he said. “Our sole skyscraper. Such a bare skyline, with just that blunt, homely phallus. Manhattan’s a porcupine, a formation in crystal, a piece of electronic circuitry. Brooklyn’s a bare crotch with a lonely erection. I’d be shocked if it didn’t someday wilt in shame.” I chuckled, but the Brooklynite only scowled more deeply. “Full of dentists, too,” he said. “And empty offices. They rent for three or four hundred dollars a month. I know a plumber who rents one just to store his tools.” He grew introspective. “My own dentist kept offices there, so long ago. Dr. Theodore Schemella. He’s surely passed. I wore braces as a child; I would ascend to his office, where he would tighten the bonds on my teeth with great effort. I recall his elbows trembling, like an arm-wrestler’s.” We passed over the Gowanus Canal, Brooklyn’s armpit; it went unremarked. “This trestle is unnecessarily high, don’t you think?” asked the Brooklynite after a brief silence. It was true: I’d never considered it, but the F train does rise an unaccountable distance from the ground there, as it moves toward Park Slope. “A terrific view of Manhattan,” he said sadly. “That’s the only justification. The rise here ensures we consider the island as we retreat to our hovels. It splays Brooklyn out like a grubby body beneath us, Manhattan like the banners of heaven in the distance. They want to rub our noses in it once more, before we fall again into darkness.” The Brooklynite grabbed my arm.
The Ecstasy of Influence Page 45