The Morgan Library and Museum on Madison Avenue in Manhattan set the stage for the PEN World Voices event, "New York Stories," which took place on Thursday, April 29th, 2010. Through glass curtains and cherry-stained wood, two flights of fogged glass stairs down, past the women in black at the coat check, beyond the security guard in the red velvet coat, through the company of ancient Assyrian scrolls, the Gilder Lehrman Hall awaited. The event had begun.
In the presence of the ghosts of Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Elizabeth Hardwick, Thursday's stunning panel of Quim Monzó, Darryl Pinckney, Roxana Robinson, Colm Tóibín and Edwin Frank (moderator), traversed the three author's complex and, at times, antagonistic relationships with New York City.
After a few brief words by the Director of Education at the Morgan, a hawkish and crowd-policing figure, the panel was opened up by Edwin Frank, a nervous man from the New York Review of Books (NYRB), to a discussion of the symbolic meaning of the empty chair stage-right (over 900 writers were disappeared or killed last year because of their artistic endeavors), New York City as a displaced, sketchy place where over 800 languages are spoken and how the evening was to progress. Unaware of this going in, the layout of the evening was to be that each author on the panel would take up one author (Colm Toibin: Henry James, Roxanna Robinson: Edith Wharton, Darryl Pinckney: Elizabeth Hardwick) and Quim Monzo was to share some of his own personal recollections of how he came to know and understand New York City.
Colm Tóibín began by speaking to Henry James' at once complicated, resentful and loving relationship with New York City. With a poetic grace which stole Thursday night's show, Mr. Tóibín elucidated the ways in which the innards of buildings to James were sacred spaces, that the deep spaces of homes such as James' grandmother's near Washington Square park were more than mere buildings but were, for James, the very thing which grounded him within the ever-changing landscape of the city. When this was destroyed in James' younger years and replaced (the only constant within New York City is perhaps, change), he was thrown into a tailspin and with bitterness and insult, began to assault the mannerisms of the people within New York City (the fact that people seemed to move every 2-3 years, the poverty of affect within the city's inhabitants). From the people of 5th Avenue to the constant flood of immigrants (the "plague of locusts" as James adoringly referred to this influx) to the Jewish, Italian and Irish populations, no one was spared by James' pen. New York City was, as James called it, the, "torture room of the idiom." In The Jolly Corner, one of James' later short stories written in 1908, he imagined someone that was able to hold onto something in New York City, someone who was able to hold onto childhood, the creaks of well-worn stairs or the soft words which seem to wriggle their ways into the banisters and wooden flooring, those dark corners of safety, quiet and solitude in the place of home. In a beautiful turn of words, Tóibín poetically said, "When a novelist grows up, a novelist dies." For anyone that has lost a childhood home, lost those memories that can only be retrieved through places and objects (the nooks cut out of the walls to measure height, the carvings in the desk, the food spots and stains on a kitchen table and all the meals they represent), James' bitterness and constant intermixing of hatred and love towards the city which he believed took this home away from him can be understood quite well. In closing, Tóibín aptly explained that while the destruction of James' grandmother's home was, in a way, the destruction of the very thing which was key to him as an artist, the destruction also bore the spirited search for home which underlay every one of James' novels. New York City was always to be the city he remembered, its streets remaining the most homely of places for James which is perhaps why, as Mr. Tóibín explained, James insulted the city so much.
Roxana Robinson explored Edith Wharton's relationship to the city next. "All writers start of by feeling like outsiders," she explained. Through a Mandarin childhood torn between a snobbish mother who carried a rich name but lacked the monetary backing and a father who was rather poor and moved in and out of mental institutions, Wharton was to grow up in an environment of constant constriction, many rules, and a constant hatred towards the inner circles of the wealthy and well-to-do that her mother longed to be an accepted member of but never was. The wave of modernism had not yet hit the city of New York and through a feeling of being caged, Edith began writing in the 1890's with a rage directed towards the architecture, people and social circles in New York. Coming up from Washington, Wharton despised the clean-cut, ninety-degree angles of New York City, the city that planners had distinctly wanted to be a populous city unlike Washington, as well as the "brownstone boots." While physically surrounded by luxury, Wharton was immersed in an emotional poverty filled with the conflict of rules and emotions, constriction and restriction. Once Wharton left New York City, she seemed, in Ms. Robinson's view, to lose the connection to this very thing she despised and upon her return from Paris, could no longer recognize a city beset by a heavy wash of modernism.
Darryl Pinkney took up the complicated relationship of Elizabeth Hardwick to New York City, highlighting fragments from her notebooks which revealed a cinematic technique of viewing the city through fragmentary repose: the cigarette being thrown into the garbage can, the man selling flowers on the corner, the neurotic little dog being pulled on a leash through the streets of the bustling city. "There is much to think about in the paper. It's all there," she once stated in reference to the many papers in New York City. Mr. Pinkney's presentation of Hardwick, while at times entertaining, seemed to lose a number of the audience members, myself included. For one not familiar with her work and only presented with these fragments would consider Hardwick to be a rambling woman, in search of voice, in search of a clarity which can never be had in a city that remain ever-changing. But this is just the point. Reading through Sleepless Nights by Hardwick, one gets the sense of a woman unnerved, a woman infatuated with the minutiae of detail extrapolated to larger patterns occurring. It is a fascinating romp through an author with stylistic leanings infused with the modern, the fragmentary, the nomadic and networked. Mr. Pinkney, in choosing to read fragments, successfully brought this forth in snippets of imagery of a New York City under the microscope of Hardwick.
Quim Monzó began his recollections of how he came to know New York City through apologizing profusely for his grasp of the English language, stating that he shouldn't have accepted the invitation to speak to laughter from the audience. He later explained that his grasp of New York City came through the likes of black and white Frank Capra movies, music in the 1980's, and the short stories of the likes of Tom Wolfe, JD Salinger (of which, he later translated some), and many others. He rambled at times in a comical, performative fashion which the audience seemed to thoroughly enjoy but in the end, his main point was that places such as New York City or Barcelona (where he currently lives) have a way of becoming characatures through representation in media. The New York City that he knew from movies and music, while close in their descriptions were somehow off, somehow relegated to the realm of the dream or imagined--the "'idea of New York versus the 'real one.'" The "real" is life and the "idea" is literature, Mr. Monzó explained. "It would be awful if books were as flat as reality is."Mr. Monzó's style of surrealist, dream-like writing came through as he explained, "In the morning as a writer you can make a man fly but you have to do it properly for others to believe that this man can fly."And for anyone interested in reading how this is done, there are few better examples that Mr. Monzó's writing itself.
Through focusing the panel through three authors with well-established relationships to New York City, a fascinating sense of the historical, mixed relationship of love and hate towards New York City (that any New Yorker has most likely felt at least once in their lives) emerged. While it might have been productive to have Mr. Monzó lead a more focused discussion of a fourth writer, the panel as a whole was a fascinating romp through the eyes of authors intimately tied to a city that, whatever one feels about it, engrains itself within your skin and psyche as a force to be reckoned with or forgotten.
Panelist's Bios (click on their names to go to their works):
Edwin Frank (Moderator): the editorial director of the NYRB Classics series. He is currently working on a history of the twentieth-century novel.
Quim Monzó: born in Barcelona in 1952. He has been awarded the National Award for fiction; the City of Barcelona Award for fiction; the Prudenci Bertrana Award for fiction; the El Temps Award for best novel; the Lletra d’Or Prize; the Catalan Writers’ Award; the Maria Àngels Anglada; and the Trajectòria. He has also been awarded Serra d’Or magazine’s prestigious Critics’ Award four times. Together with Cuca Canals, he wrote the dialogues for Bigas Luna’s movie Jamón, jamón. He has also written the musical satire El tango de Don Joan with Jérôme Savary. He is a regular contributor to the La Vanguardianewspaper.
Darryl Pinckney: the author of the novelHigh Cotton, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and received the Vursell Award for Distinguished Prose from the American Academy of Arts and Letter in 1994.
Roxana Robinson: the author of four novels, most recently Cost, three collections of short stories, and the biography Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker,Harper’s Magazine, The Washington Post,The Wall Street Journal, More, and Vogue, among other publications.
Colm Toibin: the author of six novels including The Blackwater Lightship and The Master, both short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. His nonfiction includes The Sign of the Cross and Love in a Dark Time.Brooklyn won the 2009 Costa Novel Award. His books have been translated into eighteen languages. He was a fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at New York Public Library, and has taught at Stanford, Princeton, American University, and the New School. He writes frequently for such publications as The London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books.
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