ALFRED KAZIN
91
even loved it from the distance of Washington Heights, Brooklyn,
Queens. Like Ishmael clinging for life to the coffin that Queequeg had
lovingly cut designs into showing the gods and the whole cycle of life,
they had more freedom than they ever could in a small town. Freedom
to write, to love as you please, freedom to write of your own Spoon
River, Winesburg, Asheville, without your neighbors looking into
your pots .
But is Melville the last of these New York hermits-after Albert
Pinkham Ryder, Edwin Arlington Robinson, O. Henry, Louise Bogan,
Joseph Cornell? Can a writer or painter now get away from the radio
and television next door, the tenants' association, the investigator, the
drug pushers, the muggers? Immigrant New York, ethnic New York,
making a living from the streets, living in the streets, making it, living
the dream of making it-faster, fasterl-forced its children out into the
open, made them seek every public arena in the city, turned the city
itself into their chief image of love and frustration, the city as
the
great
preoccupation of American thought. From the same period of Mel–
ville's retreat into New York, the late sixties, we get the conjunction of
New York with creativity
about
the future: in John Augustus Roeb–
lings's Brooklyn Bridge, the incomparable center promenade over–
looking New York harbor as well as in the curveship that Hart Crane
from Ohio described as lending a myth to God:
o
harp and altar, of the fury fused
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry
The best things written about the American city as a stupendous
new fact were written usually by Midwesterners who caught the new
sense of scale involved just in moving to a city-Dreiser, Anderson ,
Cather, Lindsay, Sandburg, Fitzgerald, Lewis, Dos Passos, Heming–
way, Bellow. Much of modern American writing was conceived in the
outsider's dream of the big city, by those relatively new to it-and
much of America was still new to it up to 1945. Only those amazed by
the commonplace, like Dreiser, could uncover the clash of interests, the
vital struggles below the surface, the shock and clamor of the unex–
pected, the savagery that is so rooted in temptation and so precious to
temptation.
This is where American writing came of age, if you like; or ceased
to find the New World new. What vanished openly, with New York as
the theater and great arena of modern corporate life and mass life, had
