86
PARTISAN REVIEW
Listen I Listen to me, and
I
will breathe into thee a soul,
Delicately upon the Teed, attend me-
was written by-Ezra Pound.
New York the city has been one of the great subjects of American
writing; more than New England, the South, the West, it has been a
great home to American writers as well as their chief marketplace. But
New York is so intent on whatever it is that is more important than
writing that its writers usually feel as ignorable, evanescent, and
despisable as those poor storekeepers on newly smart, renovated
Columbus Avenue now being removed because they cannot pay four
thousand dollars a month for a grocery that last month rented for nine
hundred. "In New York who needs an atom bomb?" someone says in
Bernard Malamud's
The Tenants.
"If
you walked away from a place
they tore it down."
The ever accelerating pace of New York, its historic fury, its
extremes of culture and deprivation, ostentation and misery, leave
whole segments of the population historically mute, not even aware of
a greater life that goes on far away from them at the Manhattan center
of the storm. Anonymous particles of dust trudge invisibly within
places that could be Yazoo City for all their connection with New York.
My parents lived out their lives in total insignificance, not even
knowing that a child of theirs might some day speak for them.
But a writer can himself
be
the wound that remembers. Herman
Melville, born to what Edith Wharton called those "qualified by birth
to figure in the best society," was always to feel that New York was his
nemesis and that living in it again the last twenty-five years of his life,
he had
to
be
as indifferent as it was to him. New York uprooted him as
a little boy after his father's sudden bankruptcy and death. New York
(or the savage ups and downs of economic life that seem New York
incarnate) broke up his family, forced him to become a sailor, deserter,
adventurer-and thus an author howling against this most hazardous
of trades. When he finally confessed his worldly failure as an author
and returned to New York in 1866 to eke out a living as a customs in–
spector, the New York in which he was totally forgotten as an author
was somehow bearable
because
it ignored him. He now confined
himself to poetry, privately published and paid for by relatives. His
anxious wife was afraid to have the family know that he was writing
poetry at all, his reputation for instability was already so dark. At the
very end, conserving in retirement the energy left him, he wrote the
now famous short novel
Billy Budd
that he may not have intended to
