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PARTISAN REVIEW
subtly vanished long before-the totally independent sense of divinity
that Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman knew as essential to their own quest
for personality-that bitter Melville never ceased to look for-that
Dickinson in far-off Amherst handled as traditional imagery rather
than as an article of belief. The problem of the nineteenth century
was
the death of God, precisely because, as Marx said, man cannot deal
with his conviction of immortality so long as he is brutalized by the
struggle for existence. The modern world is not so much political as
ideological; the new wars of religion, left wing and right wing, betray
their fanaticism by proving interminable.
But this is getting ahead of our story: the onset was physical in
every sense, starting with the freedom of the body. Eros, as Auden wrote
in New York, is the builder of cities. Dreiser's Carrie, Crane's Maggie,
even James's New York heroine Milly Teale in
The Wings of the
Dove,
along with his other two spacious and astonishing novels from
London in the earliest 1900s,
The Ambassadors
and
The Golden Bowl,
turn on the long-buried sexuality that only Whitman the commoner
had the wit to celebrate in himself because sex was so wickedly and
beautifully alive in New York. The connection between sex and the
physicality of New York was equally clear to Gertrude Stein after her
first affair with a woman-the very look of New York conveyed to her a
message about purity; it corresponded to her new, cleansed state of
mind. "I simply rejoiced in the New York streets, in the long spindling
legs of the elevated, in the straight high undecorated houses, in the
empty upper air and in the white surface of the snow.
It
was such a joy
to realize that the whole thing was without mystery and without
complexity, that it was clean and straight and meagre and hard and
white and high."
Yehudi Menuhin said in 1943 that one of the great war aims was to
get to New York. This became a great rush just before and after what
Dos Passos called "Mr. Wilson's War," when many native sons
stopping in New York on their way to Paris came to love New York.
To this day Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald of St. Paul remains the
dramatic poet of New York's luxurious upper-class landmarks, like the
Plaza Hotel. New York was a dreamland to Fitzgerald, as it was to his
acolyte John O'Hara from Pottsville, Pennsylvania. But O'Hara's
mind was too ordinary, a mirror of his own brutal characters, to
duplicate Fitzgerald's delicate and tragic triumph. O'Hara loved and
aped the privilege that lies in large amounts of cash, the chance to sit
with the racing set and to name their horses. To Fitzgerald upper-class
New York represented the imagination of whatever is charming,
touched by the glamour of money, romantically tender and gay.
