Going into the city, p.27
Going Into the City, page 27
Yet music wasn’t even our main point of aesthetic contact. Movies either, although Amir was a self-made cineaste and Carola has done film work with him and others. What bound us artistically was words. Carola is a writer—in my opinion more gifted than I am except in certain all too essential practical and conceptual matters—who kept working all through her poor and druggy hippie period, when she eked out the long story I so admired, “A Misunderstanding.” And she’s also a reader, one of the hungriest I’ve known. So having never processed a scrap of rock criticism as of Shelter Island, she began working through my old stuff, sampling Rolling Stone, and wolfing down Creem. In return, I joined her fiction club. Before September was over I’d downed two of her favorite novels, which became two of mine. One was Margaret Drabble’s 144-page 1965 The Millstone, the tale of a literary Fabian who remains a virgin too far into her twenties, conceives the first and only time she has sex, and decides she wants the kid. We gave it to our mothers for Christmas. The other was Doris Lessing’s 654-page 1969 The Four-Gated City, the culmination of Lessing’s quasi-autobiographical Martha Quest series, replete with sex, madness, adolescent seekers, and literary politics, its climax an apocalyptic future-fiction postscript that presages Lessing’s underrated forays into political space opera and spoke to my recent interest in genre fiction, which in sci-fi included such Bob Stanley picks as Samuel R. Delany’s half-structuralist Babel-17 and John Brunner’s pre-dystopic Stand on Zanzibar. Except that both are by and about British women, the Drabble and Lessing appeared to be radically dissimilar books—one so slight and wry, the other so ponderous and fantastic. But both depict the ’60s from inside the ’60s, both take child-rearing seriously, and both exploit pop forms—the Lessing science fiction, the Drabble the chick-lit now epitomized by Helen Fielding’s foolishly disrespected Bridget Jones’s Diary. And in both I see foreshadowings of Carola’s first published novel, The Only Ones, set in Queens and scheduled to materialize around the time this book does.
These affinities went back to Dreiser, as in: “I didn’t know then how short life is, or I would have said life is too short to spend a minute with anyone who doesn’t agree with me about Dreiser.” I had too many opinions to stake my life on any one of them, but facts are facts. Till death do us part, Carola and I will share the same two favorite twentieth-century novels. Moreover, we encountered each the same way: Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie during aborted baby steps toward an American studies specialty, and Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children—which each of us read ten laborious pages at a time until downing the final hundred in one long wee-hours rush—via Fred Gardner, who told me about it and bought Carola her copy. Although Georgia, now a high school English teacher, is also a Sister Carrie fanatic, I doubt another person on the planet would pair it with The Man Who Loved Children atop a life list. Together they must have a story to tell about why Carola and I love each other so much.
Because I had staked so much on it, I was nervous about rereading The Man Who Loved Children. It had been forty-three years; with music I can easily check back and rationalize my youthful overenthusiasms, but with fiction I feel enough outsider anxiety to want to be right every time, at least by my own outsider standards. So it was with some unease that I set about rereading it on a semi-vacation in the Dibbells’ Clinton house. There I soon concluded that all I had to worry about was whether Sister Carrie would match up. So having plowed through the last four hundred pages of the Stead, I took a day off and a deep breath and raced through the first hundred fifty of the Dreiser. The only way it didn’t match up is that this time I liked the Stead even better.
The two novels have plenty in common. They’re pessimistic, naturalistic hard reads weighing in at five hundred pages by writers of limited personal charm whose Communist ties didn’t win friends or influence people. Both care about class and obsess about money. Although Dreiser is too big a totem to omit from best-novels lists, his 1925 bestseller An American Tragedy generally tops his 1900 debut on the status meter. And The Man Who Loved Children cracked no such lists as the century turned, although it might yet sneak up on the canon like Moby-Dick. Importuned for a ten-best-novels list in 2006, Jonathan Lethem placed it third all-time, after Great Expectations and The Trial, and in 2010 the co-founder of the College of Jonathans, surnamed Franzen, explained at length to The New York Times Book Review why he’d been rereading the thing periodically since 1983—always worrying that it wouldn’t hold up.
When Sister Carrie first surfaced, Dreiser was a twenty-nine-year-old journalist who may or may not have co-written the huge 1890s hit “On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away,” the pinnacle of his songwriter brother Paul Dresser’s career. Although the novel was championed by Dreiser’s naturalistic forebear Frank Norris, it was initially reviled by almost everyone else, most saliently his publisher’s wife, as both sordid and obscene, as in its very dirtiest part: “Instantly, there flamed up in his body the all-compelling desire. His affection took an ardent form.” You can sum up its plot as “small-town innocent becomes rialto singing star, ditching two lovers along the way.” But you need to squint to notice how savvily Dreiser elucidates Carrie’s pop appeal—a half-conscious yearning that surfaces with winning awkwardness in her unperfected singing and on her very pretty yet unexquisite face. That’s because the foreground is occupied by class struggles—not the class struggle, although Dreiser grew up in poverty and died a member of the Communist Party, but the rises and falls of his three protagonists: the restless small-town girl Carrie; the buoyantly complacent ladies’ man Drouet; and the tragic Hurstwood, who achieves prominence as the affable manager of a swank Chicago eatery, leaves the good life behind for love of Carrie, and find his affability disastrously less fungible after he flees with her to Manhattan.
Dreiser feels these three weak people. Drouet is a roué, but he treats Carrie kindly, dimly perceives her distinction, and doesn’t make an honest woman out of her mostly because she’s so quick to figure out how shallow he is. Thirty pages are devoted to Carrie’s deadening quest for menial work, and by extension to every eighteen-year-old girl’s, and she never harms out of malice or schemes for the success she lucks into and deserves. Hurstwood is a decent, intelligent fellow who intuits Carrie’s superiority even though he lacks the sensitivity to husband it and the character to satisfy her modest material needs. He spends a good quarter of the book deteriorating into unemployment and homelessness step by unbearable step—when he scabs during a transit strike, you root for him, not the strikers. And everywhere Dreiser counts the money. How trolley fare erodes Carrie’s shoe-finishing wages. The jacket costing double a week’s pay that lures her into sin. How much of the stolen cash Hurstwood returns and how much is left. The size of Carrie’s raise when she gets to lead a chorus line. The array of denominations in which she’s handed her later leap to a hundred fifty a week. How many pennies Hurstwood needs to rent the Bowery room where he turns on the gas.
One reason Carola and I responded so deeply to this book is that we both cared about class for ingrained personal and evolving political reasons—by 1972 it had finally come into its own as a movement issue. In this respect The Man Who Loved Children hit even closer to home—the saw that it’s “one of the most truthful and terrifying horror stories ever written about family life,” to quote the Time blurb on the cover of a 1966 Avon reprint that has survived my two readings due to advances in cellophane tape technology, is only creditable if you allow that few families are horrified by poverty quite so byzantine and gothic. As awful as Sam and Henny Pollit are, they might have achieved a workable truce if egotistical idealist Sam had any grasp of domestic finance or office politics and budget-fudging Henny had reined in her needs as the spoiled daughter of a moneyed wastrel or milked her over-leveraged family for funds.
Yet in a book of five thousand details, Stead’s determination to pin down the Pollits’ fall from genteel eccentricity to genteel penury is dwarfed by her facility at imagining unique voices for Sam, Henny, and Sam’s daughter by his first marriage, Louie. And her genius is to make each of these voices a mark of genius itself. The voices don’t stop there—Louie’s structurally unnecessary stopover with her dead mother’s people is only one locale where other distinct conversationalists emerge. But those three signature vernaculars dominate everyone else’s except, crucially, Stead’s. All three—Sam’s baby talk and hideous eugenic-socialist theories, Henny’s tirades and snobbish contumely, the bibliophiliac grandiosity Louie affects as she balloons into adolescence—read slowly, as prose poetry so often does, and Stead’s own prose, which it’s said she seldom revised, is poetic as well. This doesn’t mean it’s literary, however—sentences patter on past their appointed destination, crawling with stray modifiers and substantives but always hewing to a hectoring beat of their own. If you try to read her too quickly, you miss all the fun, or whatever that species of pleasure is called. I prefer novels that move, as was soon the case with the ferociously utilitarian Sister Carrie, where nothing intervenes between reader and tale—only if you think prose should go down like fine wine is Dreiser’s supposedly barbarous style actually a hard read. But Stead’s not for oenophiles either. In addition to savoring descriptive patches that vie with anyone’s—the Baltimore precis that begins the chapter called “Tahoga to Spa” is a stunner—I began to hear her fed-up third person as a sane and welcome respite from the principals, who were nevertheless sure to fascinate the next time they opened their mouths.
Stead was Australian, the daughter of a naturalist very much like Sam Pollit. Her husband was an American Marxist economist named William Blake, an arbitrageur who turned to writing successful and then unsuccessful historical novels. The Man Who Loved Children was her fifth published book. She was persuaded to reset its story in Washington on the grounds that no one wanted to read about Sydney, but although it was well reviewed when it appeared in 1940, no one wanted to read about Washington either, and Mary McCarthy, ever the stickler and just conceivably miffed with the Blake-Steads’ failure to condemn the Hitler-Stalin pact, complained that she got her local color wrong. But that’s not how it read in 1970 or reads now—Sam’s Artemus Ward steals, to single out one touch McCarthy bitched about, are no less plausible than the rest of his personal lingo, which is said to mimic that of Stead’s father with devastating accuracy. And although the book does make a horror story of a family’s life if not “family life,” the horror story is also a fairy tale, a bildungsroman, and a low comedy.
Egomaniac and shrew Sam and Henny are, but their six kids are acutely drawn individuals who are having a ball, romping more than cowering through the pseudoscientific fantasia Sam would call nurturance and others abuse as their world never quite falls down. It’s rare for a major novel to observe children with such gimlet-eyed affection, and since a respect for the pre-adult imbued the different kinds of work Carola and I had taken up, that achievement alone drew us to this one. Soon we were cheering the belief in her own teenage “genius” that powers Louie’s struggle against abuse—ungainly as her verbal out-pourings are, her will, appetite, productivity, and sincerity are so indomitable that the half-accidental murder she half-commits feels like a natural event and the inauspicious escape she manages feels like a denouement. And throughout the book we were laughing. Arbiters of taste looking to put a seal of approval on The Man Who Loved Children like to sum Sam up as a monster, but he’s also a comedian, which is why his kids adore him and why his unexcerptable monologues make you grin and shake your head. Henny’s tirades are appalling—in their unleashed fury reminiscent in my experience only of Charlie Dibbell’s, with the codicil that her rhetoric puts her in a league with Pope and Celine. That rhetoric is an amazement almost as much as a terror, and like Sam’s exerts a head-spinning comic magnetism. “Black comedy” became a thing well after 1940, but Stead was onto it.
So what was there in these two underrated novels that made Carola and me bond with them for life? Start with Stead’s vision of childhood (for which there’s no equivalent in Dreiser) even though Blake, while a decent husband, denied Stead children of her own—she’s better at kids than Dickens, who we both adore. And although I was the one who’d grown up lower middle-class, Charlie’s long unemployment and Amir’s inability to hold down a job had sensitized Carola to the precariousness of Hurstwood’s prosperity with a specificity my father’s dimming Depression memories couldn’t match. Beyond that, I’ll quote two sentences from the Stead obituary Carola did for the Voice in 1983: “She cared less about the conflict between choice and the inexorable, consequence and inconsequence, pattern and disorder than she did about the mesh, and, astonishingly, she caught it. She got it in words.”
So Stead was a partisan of contingency. No utopian she. No utopian Dreiser either, obviously. But like Stead, if oh so differently, he too piled up language as an ardent admirer of the physical world. Both were leftists, but neither believed all that much good would come of it. Carola and I were younger and not yet aware that the rich were closing down on the affluent society (although the movement’s late-breaking class focus clearly reflected subliminal anxiety on that score), so we weren’t pessimists and in fact still aren’t—it’s not in our raising or our somatic makeup. But we were set on enjoying the world even if it didn’t evolve to our liking. And to do that we needed Stead’s penetrating complexity, needed Dreiser’s tragic tolerance—and needed pop that accounted for the dark stuff too.
One more thing. Stead and Dreiser were both skillful writers who used their skills to honor the rough not the smooth, the commonplace not the high-flown. Literarily, they had bad manners. Skillful writers too, our values compelled us to pursue the same goal with more jokes. We’ve always loved that in each other.
No one has affected my writing like Carola, but it was changing big-time anyway just as we fell in love. In June and July of 1972, as I juggled Ell*ns and waited on Carola and agonized to my shrink, I also hit my stride at Newsday, producing seven pieces I ended up collecting. There was a celebration of AM radio, an appreciation of Smokey Robinson as the domestic paragon he actually wasn’t, a leftist pan of John and Yoko’s agitprop Some Time in New York City, and the other half of the Elvis Presley essay I’d begun post-Vegas. There were two Rolling Stones pieces: my Ellin-assisted disquisition on “mass bohemianism,” which took weeks, and a concert review scrawled in ninety minutes on a legal pad and dictated over a pay phone at the press party, with the desk tacking on an apt hed for once: “They Need Us; We Need Them.” And there was the column where I took a transition by the horns by noting, after two paragraphs of blandly judicious praise, “Another thing that interests me about the Eagles is that I hate them.” Over the years, that sentence proved my most quotable quote this side of “Mick Jagger should fold up his penis and go home.”
Newsday was an afternoon paper, which meant overnight reviews were both expected and possible—I didn’t have to skedaddle before the encore and finish in half an hour to make deadline. After a show at Nassau Coliseum with its industrial acoustics or the Westbury Music Fair with its revolving stage or My Father’s Place with its hip booking policy, I’d drive to the office and grind out six hundred words, which usually took around two hours with the night-desk burnouts wondering what was holding me up. But Manhattan shows I’d do at home, then read to women I never met who always got something wrong (“Phelonious Monk”!) while transcribing my copy in preparation for the ritual headline debacle. And every Sunday evening at 308, I’d begin a thousand-word column for the following Sunday, work till four or five with thoughts of Carola’s nubby body luring me bedward, rise before eleven, hit Hempstead early afternoon, and finish the next evening although not always before Joe Koenenn left for dinner. Shortfalls are inevitable at such a pace—I count three David Bowies alone. But even the shortfalls reached for something. Without a peep from Joe or Don, I elaborated and hammered home my pet ideas about musical community and the aesthetics of the popular. I never soft-pedaled my politics, calling out sexism and campaigning in so many words for what I insisted on designating “black music,” thus arousing the explicit ire of many of the progboys outraged by my Yes pan. By the time I moved on, I’d handed in so much copy that I’d never suffer writer’s block again, and had examined my themes from so many angles that they’d sunk deep into my judgments, rhetoric, and joking around.
It was strange and stimulating to address an audience that had escaped Queens in the opposite direction. Sometimes this was only a metaphor—many of my readers were so young they were still figuring out how to go into the city themselves, including one I wish hadn’t. But often it was literal. So if there was anything to my idealistic fancy that music could crystallize a virtual community of shared pleasures and values outside the half-bohemian domain of the semipopular, it was my job to enjoy those pleasures and articulate those values while stretching the daily-newspaper aesthetic—to convince suburbanites to get with the Chi-Lites, Randy Newman, and the New York Dolls, pay closer attention to Helen Reddy, Gladys Knight, and the Rolling Stones, and see through Cat Stevens, Carly Simon, and Yes. Working for a daily complicated this process. No other writer at Newsday looked like a hippie, and no other critic was such a big-dome—the best was humorist Marvin Kitman, whose many years of TV coverage get less respect than they deserve just because he’s such a wag. So Forst and Koenenn were putting themselves out for someone who wasn’t the kind of front-of-the-book newshound desk burnouts believe in if they believe in anything. There’s evidence of reporting in many of my Newsday pieces, but seldom a direct quote. Interviews are reduced to an atmospheric lead or a few illustrative nuggets—I’ve always eschewed q&a’s, and once offended deposed Columbia Records headman Clive Davis by sitting with him for an hour without reproducing a single one of his sentences.
What I did instead was describe audiences I’d formerly only imagined, each an experimental minipolis in rock and roll’s invisible republic, many of them what Robert Palmer would later dub temporary autonomous zones. Teenagers boogieing on cue to Three Dog Night at the Coliseum. Housewives ten years my senior outclassing their adored Engelbert Humperdinck at Westbury Music Fair. The minute discriminations of Berkeley bar-band cognoscenti. John Sinclair’s utopian remaking of the Ann Arbor Blues Festival. A dull band brightening a sad state rehab center. The optimistic finery of the citizens of Watts outshining the depleted star power of the artists of Stax. Gladys Knight at the Waldorf (integrated, well-heeled), in Newark (African-American, working-class), and on Westbury’s revolving stage (“the usual sort of heterogeneous crowd” for black acts there). Helen Reddy’s half house at Westbury epitomizing the tolerance “of the healthy audience in this time of mass cults and snobbish cliques.” Casual fans ditching free Carole King one dank May afternoon in Central Park. Preteens turning up their discriminating noses at free “jazz for kids” in Central Park. A grab bag of laid-back second-raters beseeching three thousand sun-stunned weekend hippies to boogie at a half-deserted Islip Speedway “festival.” Sitting way up and way back with a utopian assortment of Grand Funk fans in Madison Square Garden. Hitching to and from a Dead concert when my muffler got busted.
