Eyes on the Street

by Robert Kanigel

  This all sounds very nice, inspiring in its way. But the book emerging from these insights was no simpleminded tribute to international banking or medieval trade fairs. For there was a wrinkle to the pretty picture, a surprising departure from what we’d expect, and from what Jane had expected.

  Systems of Survival had its roots in Jane’s fascination with the morality of the market, the honesty and industry that everyday trade required. In time, she got downright systematic about it, “jotting down precepts people are taught or that law prescribes for how business is carried on.” From business histories, biographies, scandals, and bits of cultural anthropology she’d note behavior extolled as admirable. “If a businessman was praised because his handshake was as good as his bond, I cast it as the precept, ‘Respect contracts.’ ” She did the same for despised or discouraged behaviors, too. And she kept it up for fifteen or twenty years. “I didn’t know why I was doing this except to help myself better understand how the world works.”

  All along, then, there’d been a prim, white-hatted figure in the room: trade, it should be plain by now, was a good and beautiful thing to Jane Jacobs. Whereas if you bludgeoned or connived your way to what you wanted, if you tricked or cheated, relied on force, or exacted vengeance, your hat was black indeed. Jane long resisted the idea that there could be anything morally virtuous in the actions of soldiers and spies, czars and cops, and others resorting to such behavior. But in time—in very great time, she’d make it sound—she began to conclude just that.

  A hunter can’t be aboveboard as he tracks his prey. A spy eavesdrops and otherwise deceives; she wouldn’t be much of a spy if she didn’t. A diplomat’s ability to lie convincingly is a job requirement. A Roman emperor has little use for the cobbler’s timid prudence and thrift; his tastes are more for lavish and unseemly entertainments. None of them could be mistaken for an honest, hardworking tradesman. Theirs was a different world, with its own rules.

  “Guardians,” Jane dubbed them. They believed in loyalty, hierarchy, vengeance, and deceit. Policemen owe loyalty to the force, soldiers to their platoon. Political parties demand obedience from their members. So do churches to the tenets of their faith. And much of this, Jane concluded, was, in its own way, good, necessary to the workings of the world. Society needs protection from criminals, invading armies, religious heretics, and unruly mobs. Guardians, abiding by their own rules, provide it. Their rules, Jane decided, are “as morally valid as [those of] ‘traders,’ ” and are grounded in concerns just as legitimate: learn of a vermin-infested restaurant and you want a city inspector with toughness and fight to shut it the hell down, now, no negotiation, no discussion. That’s the guardian spirit at work.

  Over the years, Jane refined these ideas, ultimately concluding that society rests on two broad sets of rules, expectations and moral precepts that are not a little different from one another, but fundamentally so, speak different languages, inhabit opposing universes. Roughly, the first group’s emphasis is honesty, industry, collaboration, and thrift; the other’s is tradition, loyalty, obedience, and force. Each represents what Jane called a “moral syndrome”; that medical-sounding word, “syndrome,” just refers to the gathering of these precepts into clusters.

  As Jane summed it up at Boston College in 1989, while still working on the book, society required “not one over-riding system of everyday right and wrong,” as might be more comfortable to believe, and not many systems either, as moral relativists might suppose, but just two, which had arisen and endured for good reasons. In her book, she would use this split to explore honor and loyalty among soldiers, the practices governing Wall Street, species of corruption that follow when one moral system butts up against the other, and much else by way of puzzles and muddles clarified.

  Jane opened one line of argument this way:

  As Machiavelli understood so well, the indispensability of loyalty infuses all the work of ruling and its derivatives. It is a moral buttress against all manner of guardian betrayals, military or not. It is not for nothing that officials swear fealty to a constitution or a crown.

  But, actually, Jane didn’t open this line of argument, not in her own name, anyway. These were the words of a character she’d created, a crime novelist by trade, named Jasper. For in Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics, to give it its full title, Jane not only took on a new subject and a raft of new ideas, but chose to write about them in a different form, one akin to fiction. “Didactic dialogue,” this genre was called, and it went back two millennia to the Platonic dialogues of ancient Greece, which feature Socrates wrangling with his philosopher friends in Athens. Except that in Jane’s version, there is no one intellectual leader of infallible wisdom—no Socrates. “My characters,” Jane wrote, “are equals, struggling together to make moral sense of working life.”

  One of her characters was Armbruster, a retired publisher who summons a few serious-minded friends and colleagues to his home in Manhattan. “I’ve become disturbed about dishonesty in workplaces,” he leads off once they’re introduced to one another and settled in with drinks. Like his creator, Jane, he’d once had a revelation in Hannover, West Germany, where he stopped at a local bank to have a consulting fee credited to his account, “a great web of trust” showering him with its blessing. These days, however, he feels the web is tattered. Corruption is everywhere. At a recent symposium, he saw computer science students shamelessly steal copyrighted software and peddle it for profit. Returning home, his senses newly alive to white-collar chicanery, all he sees around him are embezzlement, false advertising, fraudulent labeling, dishonest accounting, collusive bids, kickbacks, and insider trading. He decides he must better understand this breakdown of “morality in practical working life.” That’s why he’s gathered them here. Their imagined conversations constitute Systems of Survival.

  Jane, it seems, had grown frustrated and bored at the prospect of writing another conventionally long essay of a book. The dialogue form, with its “questions, answers, second thoughts, digressions, amended answers, speculations and disagreements,” struck her as ideally suited to philosophical sparring. She’d had little use for philosophy in school, she told an interviewer once. “It went over my head and I just forgot about it.” Now she was “astounded” to realize that in her didactic dialogues she was reinventing the wheel. “I could have saved myself a lot of work if I had read Plato” beforehand, she’d say.

  Armbruster’s apartment, where the conversations take place, lies in the middle of New York City. This represented a late authorial change of heart. Originally, Jane’s five characters—Armbruster and the crime writer, Jasper, a lawyer, an environmental activist, and Kate, a young scientist Jane imagined as a blend of Burgin and two of her nieces—had been Torontonians. But that was just not going to work. “Talking to Canadians,” she’d explain, was “like talking to a pillow.” They were too damned polite. The moment she made them New Yorkers, they “were happy to seize the argumentative bit in their teeth and say what they wanted, no matter how uncivil. Since these fictional people came out of my head and so are really me, no doubt this says something about my own impatient and uncivil impulses.”

  Normally, by Jane’s breakdown, trade was conducted according to Commercial precepts. Government, the military, and other such hierarchical institutions adhered to the Guardian syndrome. Commerce flourished. States, armies, and religions endured. It was only when the two syndromes collided in a single person or institution that you faced problems. For example, cops assigned arrest quotas and paid for meeting them. Or government fecklessly trying to run an energy utility. Or, as one more example of such an unhappy collision of values, Jane wrote in a chapter called “Trading, Taking, and Monstrous Hybrids,” how about the Mafia?

  With rituals worthy of the British Crown and loyalty the highest good, the Mafia might seem to embody classic Guardian sensibilities. “Where the Mafia most resembles legitimate guardians,” Jasper tells the others, “is in it
s protection of city or suburban neighborhoods where important members live”; look for scant robbery, purse snatching, or sale of street drugs on their turf. “A tight Mafia neighborhood is a wonderfully safe place to live as long as you remain uncurious why.” But, Jasper goes on, the Mafia doesn’t just protect the neighborhood; theirs is a business. They extort from legitimate companies, run illegal businesses like pimping, gambling, bootlegging, smuggling, drug dealing, and money laundering; in the Mafia, the two realms—Guardian and Commercial, guns and money—lie wickedly entwined.

  Jane had once chanced to observe a Mafia conclave at a Caribbean resort. It was February 1970 and the Jacobses were halfway through their second winter in Toronto. Jane and Bob flew to St. Maarten, the Dutch side of a Caribbean island shared with French St. Martin. “Dear Mother,” she wrote a few days into the trip. “Well, it is all true: turquoise water, flowering vines & trees, trade winds, goats & pelicans, velvety tropical night that descends incredibly swiftly at sunset, & all the characters one has glimpsed in novels. In short, we are having a wonderful time indeed.”

  Their travel agent had booked them into a grand, casino-strutting hotel right on the water, beyond their budget but apparently all that was available. They signed on for the two-day minimum, figuring to find a cheaper, more congenial place later, which they did. But in the meantime, they were in for a surprise—a meeting of two Mob families; once they realized what was going on, she and Bob were fascinated by every minute of it. From breakfast to nightfall, they acted the part of “two exhausted dopes just sitting in chairs,” or else strolling innocently around the waterfront. At one point, they saw two dons, stationed out in the warm, chest-deep water, who from time to time would summon subordinates. The lapping of the waves made electronic bugging impossible. The only women were the wives of the two dons and “one young beauty” who “not only looked like an inanimate fashion mannequin, but literally behaved like one,” shifting her position, even just to move, only when permitted; apparently, Jane learned later, she was being punished. On the last day, an all-morning shopping spree seemed to Jane “as if sultans were in town and everybody was showing their wares and bowing and scraping and entourages were following them with packages.” So here, nourishing Systems of Survival, was the Mafia up close, Jane a “discreet but fascinated observer.”

  “A brilliant exploration of the meaning of justice,” The Globe and Mail reviewer called the book. “The evidence of a voracious mind, an active devourer of libraries and reading rooms, is impressive and reassuring.” Not everybody thought so highly of it. Jane’s friend Toshiko Adilman reports that “a lot of people felt it didn’t work.” The broadcaster Max Allen, an admirer of Jane’s who had helped put together Jane’s Massey Lecture on Quebec separatism, was one of them; he’d spent his life with the spoken word and felt that Jane didn’t appreciate dialogue as its own subtle art. He told her so after the book came out, but by then she was onto the next one and, he says, didn’t much care. But not everyone rendered so harsh a verdict. Alan Ryan, writing in The New York Review of Books, saw the book offering “a very cold look at the depressive state of American politics and commerce, and an even colder look at what went wrong in the Soviet Union.” For him, it was “wonderfully lively and readable.” Of course, like Jacobs’s other books it was “so different from run-of-the-mill social science that it is hard to decide quite where its insights fit in.”

  Ryan referred to Armbruster, Jasper, and the others as “lightly sketched characters,” which smacks of euphemism. Jane’s five characters were supposed to be different yet managed to sound alike. Their conversations, which should have marched right along, stumbled over themselves. Jane’s little novelistic touches—“Armbruster clinked his ice for attention…”—mostly didn’t succeed in lifting the book beyond what it really was, a philosophical discourse among the warring sides of Jane’s intellect. As for Jason Epstein, it didn’t entirely take with him, not, at least, the way her three earlier books did; it was “didactic, rather than a living thing.” And certainly, “fiction” or not, it was no novel. “She didn’t have that gift. She couldn’t have been a novelist.”

  In the end, Jane herself seems to have agreed.

  I don’t think I was successful at changing prose rhythms for my different speakers.

  I tried to differentiate my characters’ speech, but I was unable to do it in the fundamental way I would have liked to. It would have been better to give each character his own idiosyncratic prose rhythm. That is what masters of dialogue do.

  III. ON THE ILIAMNA PORTAGE

  With the early 1990s, and Jane well into her seventies, the Early Days were upon her: Systems of Survival had its roots in the 1960s; her children’s book in the 1950s. Now, her aunt Hannah’s Alaska book from the late 1930s led her into her next big project.

  Hannah, Jane’s grandmother’s younger sister, had attended the same teacher training school in Bloomsburg as had both Jane’s mother and her aunt Martha. But after twenty years teaching in Pennsylvania, she had veered onto a new path. She began taking summer courses in anthropology at the University of Chicago. Soon she was being dispatched by the U.S. Department of the Interior to teach on Indian reservations in the Rockies and the Southwest. After four years of this, in 1904, at age forty-five, she went off to teach in Alaska. There she lived and worked among Aleuts, Kenais, and other natives in places with names like Afognak, Nondalton, and Iliamna. Some villages still testified to the long Russian presence in Alaska, the walls of their houses bearing images of the czar. Hannah traveled on horseback and by dogsled. From the deck of a pitching steamer, she clambered down the side by rope ladder. She endured winters deemed mild when the temperature stayed above ten below. Mainly, Hannah Breece set up schools, taught young native boys and girls, brought her notions of civilization to the inhabitants of remote Alaskan villages.

  When, after fourteen years, she returned to the States, her mind was stocked with scenes and stories of backcountry adventures, and she was encouraged to work them into a memoir. Collecting letters she’d written while in Alaska, she patched them together into a manuscript and sent it off to publishers—only to have it turned down. This was the manuscript that, in 1938, she brought to Jane, seeking her help. Jane reworked it within the limits of her ability at the time and sent it to other publishers. Again, no interest. In 1940, Aunt Hannah died. Jane laid the manuscript aside, finished up her studies at Columbia, got her first real editorial job at Iron Age, and set off on her career.

  But during the next half century, Aunt Hannah’s manuscript never entirely relaxed its grip on her. Jane had grown up hearing Hannah’s stories. “She was a great heroine to us all through my childhood.” A birch-bark basket the native women of Nondalton made for Hannah was part of Jane’s life growing up; her mother used it to hold letters and keys. Hannah’s manuscript “had hooked me; so I had the notion that some time I should try to do it justice.”

  One day, probably in 1993, after Burgin asked to see it, Jane started reading it again and “got such a bang out of it, I just decided it should be published.” This despite reservations about some of what good Aunt Hannah actually had to say, including what Jane termed “white man’s burden ideas.” Her task, Hannah Breece wrote in all earnestness, was to help the natives “overcome ignorance, poverty, disease, and superstition. [It] was to bring them benefits now available to them from civilization and from Uncle Sam’s care for his less fortunate children.” Jane was as bothered by such notions as she’d been half a century before. But then again, how could you understand Hannah’s time in Alaska without confronting them? A more sophisticated modern public, Jane felt sure, would be able to read Hannah without undue judgment.

  When the book came out, Jane wrote that she had done what Aunt Hannah expected of her, that she’d “improved organization, removed repetition and digressions that interrupt the flow, fact-checked distances, names, spelling, vegetation—the customary assistance an editor can give an inexperienced writer.” But that wasn�
��t all she did. For in July 1994, she and Bob, together with Ned’s wife, Mary Ann, joined a week later by Ned, flew to Alaska to see for themselves something of Aunt Hannah’s world.

  They’d gathered brochures that showed off Alaska’s placid blue waters, tree-topped islands, and sun-dappled mountain peaks; marked up old U.S. Geological Survey maps, retracing Hannah’s travels; worked out their itinerary for the two-week trip. As their departure date neared, Jane’s date book recorded their preparations:

  July 4: Get travelers’ checks; get emergency food; pack; get Mary’s money.

  July 5: Money for Mary M: $210; call Limo for morning. 8:30.

  July 6: Leave 10:05 am [for] Anchorage.

  They were to arrive there, gaining several hours on a flight mostly due west, at 5:30 that evening.

  Until 1967, when she visited Europe for the first time, Jane had traveled little. In the years since, she’d made up for it some with vacations in the Caribbean; with a trip to Japan, where she’d stayed at the inn in Kyoto; Hamburg in 1981; the Netherlands in 1984, where she gave a speech at the royal palace and met the queen; Hong Kong in 1992, from which she came back with new ideas about high-rises as incubators of diversity. She’d come a long way since her first travels, when foreign currencies left her flustered.

  Now, in 1994, Jane and family took floatplanes across the Kodiak Archipelago, set down at remote villages figuring in Hannah’s life. They met natives in whose families tales of Miss Breece had been passed down. At one point they flew over a dozen-mile stretch of rough country from Iliamna Bay, on the Gulf of Alaska, navigating, as Jane wrote, “along a crooked airpath between awesome mountain peaks and glaciers to both sides of us.” Beneath them lay the Iliamna Portage, which Hannah had crossed with a guide, variously on foot and by horseback. “I had lived in the Rocky Mountains and crossed the continent several times,” wrote Hannah, “but never before had I been in such a wild grandeur of chasms, valleys and mountain peaks.” She and her guide tramped along the edge of a mountain, looking down into a valley cut by streams from glacial ice fields. From there it was “into a valley where grass was higher than our heads and fireweed blazed everywhere.”