Alfred Kazin
NEW YORK FROM MELVILLE TO MAILER
My impression is that in New York anything might happen at any
momenl. In England nothing could happen, ever.
John Sparrow, Warden of All Souls, Oxford
Have you ever seen an inch worm crawl up a leaf or twig, and there
clinging to the very end, revolve in the air, feeling for something to
reach something? That's like me. I am trying to find something out
there beyond the place on which I have a footing.
Albert Pinkham Ryder (visionary painter 1847-1917)
It
is because so much happens. Too much happens.
Mrs. Hines in William Faulkner's
Light In August
In New York who needs an atom bomb?
1£
you walked away from a
place they tore it down .
Bernard Malamud,
The Tenants .
No New York streets are named after Herman Melville,
Henry James, Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton. New York does not
remember its own; it barely remembers Edgar Allan Poe in Fordham,
Mark Twain on lower Fifth Avenue, William Dean Howells on West
57th Street, Stephen Crane in Chelsea, Theodore Dreiser and Eugene
O'Neill in Washington Square, Willa Cather on Bank Street, Thomas
Wolfe and Marianne Moore in far-off Brooklyn, Hart Crane on
Columbia Heights, Allen Tate in the Village, E.E. Cummings in
Patchin Place, W.H. Auden in St. Mark's Place, Federico Garcia Lorca
at Columbia. It will not remember Ralph Ellison and Saul Bellow on
Riverside Drive, Norman Mailer in Columbia Heights, Truman
Capote in the U.N. Plaza, Isaac Bashevis Singer on West 86th, any more
than it remembers having given shelter to European exiles from Tom
Paine
to
John Butler Yeats, Arshile Gorky to Vladimir Nabokov.
It–
and you-will be astonished to hear that the following effusion-
My City, my beloved, my white
Ah , slender,
