Sniffing the exhalation of their own herd

Apr 24, 2008 07:18 PM

In terms of literary or intellectual rallying points, geography has always seemed to me the least persuasive. Doree Shafrir's article "The Brooklyn Literary 100" in the New York Observer only underscores my prejudice against thinking that enough writers occupying a neighborhood does a "community" make. She begins like this:

The idea of a Brooklyn literary “scene” is one that has become so ingrained in the city’s consciousness that, in true Brooklyn style, it has now become fashionable to consider writerly Brooklyn in an ironic manner, to comment on the ridiculousness of the idea that a place can, in fact, be said to help define a literary community.

That idea is ridiculous, as most things defined in an "ironic" manner tend to be. We don't speak of a plumbing community or an attorneys' scene, and so the implication here is that those who live by their pens and laptops somehow share a common sensibility, even if they do all hang out at the same bars. Yet what connects Paul Auster to Jonathan Safran Foer other than mortgages in Park Slope? It's not as if National Book Awards or gushy write-ups in the Times are dispensed like MetroCards at the Bergen Street 2/3 stop (it only seems that way sometimes).

Modernism may have hit a high mark in the Paris of the 1920's, but again, as to the differences in style and talent between, say, Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, one of them might as well have spent the louche interwar years in Papua New Guinea. Saul Bellow once had an apartment in my hometown of Forest Hills, Queens, which was the birthplace of David Horowitz and is the current residence of fired Page Six reporter, gossip novelist, and book party pugilist Ian Spiegelman -- writers all, but strangers bound by zip code alone.

Still, when it comes to the life of the mind, we do tend to think in terms of cartography, if only as shorthand for a more complicated area of congruence. "New York" became the preferred prefix before "intellectuals" because of the ethnic and cosmopolitan associations with "the city," which, in the thirties, referred to the bustling, Gentile-occupied island of Manhattan exclusively. In the cultural imaginations of the radical sons of Jewish immigrants who grew up in various parts of the Bronx and Brooklyn, the city constituted a separate country to which they all yearned to gain admittance. If they wound up on the Upper West Side it was because it was cheap back then. But the New York Intellectuals never especially agreed or got along with one another; they founded Partisan Review to prove it.

The truth is, writing is a depressingly solitary activity. Discussion and debate in cafes and salons may provide germs of inspiration, but the maddening spadework is up to the lone individual when the Starbucks XM radio and the clangor of familiar company die down. This is why some of the best essays and novels of the last century have been composed in disordered flights from tyranny and stultification, or in states of isolated squalor. The Adventures of Augie March got done in various ports of call in Europe. Orwell eschewed the cocktail party. Koestler's Rubashov worked out his theory of history in between bouts of commissar interrogation, while his author worked him out in a Spanish prison cell.

Whenever I hear of a "scene" or supposed congeries of great artists and minds, I'm reminded of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies. Adam and Nina sit on the deck of a boat party to which absolutely everyone who's anyone is invited:

"Can't you just see the ghosts?" [Mrs. Hoop] said to Lady Circumference on the stairs. "Pitt and Fox and Burke and Lady Hamilton and Beau Brummel and Dr. Johnson" (a concurrence of celebrities, it may be remarked, at which something memorably might surely have occurred). "Can't you just see them--in their buckled shoes?"
Lady Circumcumference raised her lorgnette and surveyed the stream of guests debouching from the cloak-rooms like City workers from the Underground. She saw Mr. Outrage and Lord Metroland in consultation about the Censorship Bill... She saw both Archbishops, the Duke and Duchess of Stayle, Lord Vanburgh and Lady Metroland, Lady Throbbing and Edward Throbbing and Mrs. Blackwater, Mrs. Mouse and Lord Monomark and a superb Levantine, and behind and about them a great concourse of pious and honourable people... people who had represented their country in foreign places and sent their sons to die for her in battle, people of decent and temperate life, uncultured, unaffected, unembarrassed, unassuming, unambitious people, of independent judgment and marketed eccentricities, kind of people who cared for animals and the deserving poor, brave and rather unreasonable people, that fine phalanx of the passing order, approaching, as one day at the Last Trump they hopes to meet their Maker, with decorous and frank cordiality to shake Lady Anchorage by the hand at the top of her staircase. Lady Circumference saw all this and sniffed the exhalation of her own herd. But she saw no ghosts.
"That's all my eye," she said.