20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or David Copperfield Read online

  I am not speaking of Harlem or the Bronx, where the standard of living is radically different from that of the much-advertised denizens of pleasure. Up in the Heights and beyond, as well as in the side streets farther down town, there are hundreds of thousands of men and women who go to bed at ten o’clock for the same reason that residents of Dodge City, Kansas, go to bed at ten o’clock – because they can’t think of anything else to do, and because they have to be up at seven. There are streets north of Central Park through which a cooler breeze blows in summer than many a Mid-Western hamlet can boast, where life is quiet and its pace even. These streets are peopled by the very types who are supposed to make the Middle West the “real America,” as alien to the New York of the magazine articles as their kinsfolk back home. They are in New York for many reasons, chiefly to make more money or because the head office in South Bend sent them there, and many of them wish that they had never come. But there they are, just as much New Yorkers as the patrons of Webster Hall or the Embassy Club, and a great deal more numerous.

  I am not creating a New York out of my imagination as do those writers who find a filmy fairyland in the New York Edison Company’s service along Pine and Nassau Streets. I have lived in New York’s Middle West. During my early days as a metropolitan rounder (fresh from Massachusetts) I was under the wing of a kindly family from Canton, Ohio, who lived in Washington Heights, and it was a great comfort to me in my nostalgia to feel that here, in this neighborhood, I was, to all intents and purposes, among home folk. My first dissipation in New York was a church supper, so identical with the church suppers I had known in New England that it was impossible to imagine that farther down on this same island was the gay Gomorrah I had heard and been warned so much about. The people at this bacchanalia of chicken salad and escalloped oysters matched to a man the people I had eaten chicken salad and escalloped oysters with in my home town. There was the same aroma of coffee and hot rolls as one entered the vestry, and the same satyristic little boys were chasing the same coy little girls around the Sunday School room with as much vigor and obnoxiousness as if they had all been raised on a farm. Practically all of those present were small-town people, with small-town outlooks, and I venture to say that not one of them would have been recognized by a specialist in New Yorkese as a New Yorker. And yet there they were, they and their kind, a million strong.

  Life in the New York Middle West goes along in its middle-class way with a dull rhythm which is in no way different from its model in Ohio or Michigan. Its pleasures are simple and inexpensive – movies, stock-company productions, church suppers, Masonic dances, and Sunday automobile riding in the country. When the day’s work is done, (and, as I understand it, even the real Americans in the Middle West have to attend to some sort of office work during the day aside from contemplating Nature in its more magnificent aspects) the same odor of cooking pervades the front halls, the same evening paper is read around the sitting-room table, the same problem of the evening’s entertainment arises, ending in a general dozing in arm chairs and early retiring. Of sophistication there is none, of restlessness there is none (unless it be a restlessness to get back to Kansas or Massachusetts some day), and of the care-free fountain-fay that is the New Yorker of the correspondents you could go from one block to another all night long and not find a trace. There are simply dull, solid, one-hundred percent Americans, who have never been in a night club in their lives and have no desire to be in one, whose bridge game has barely progressed from the bid-whist stage, and whose evening clothes are still in the trunk in the cellar and couldn’t be worn anyway.

  Whatever mysterious qualities the Middle Westerner has which fit him for the role of “real American,” his brother in New York possesses to an equal degree, although with perhaps not quite so much volubility. Just what the real America is supposed to be is a bit hard to define, for each commentator has a different idea. But almost all agree that the America of the Middle West is made up of bustling Babbitts, children of energy, forward-looking perhaps in politics but incurably chauvinistic and provincial in their world outlook. All of which might be a word picture of the rank and file of New York’s great Region of Respectability.

  For, when the final house-to-house analysis is made of New York, the Typical New Yorker will emerge as quite a disappointing and colorless figure. In a rather wavering and indefinite career in that city I have lived and worked in many sections. While trying to “find myself” (a search which I ultimately gave up) I have had jobs in Wall Street, the negro district of Harlem, the Tenderloin, and Park Row. At night I have gone home to Washington Heights, an East Side Settlement House, Greenwich Village, the roaring Forties, and Chelsea. About the only districts in which I have not, at one time or another, stayed are the wharf districts along the North and East Rivers, and certain sections of the Bronx and San Juan Hill. And, after fifteen years of this sort of thing, I still look a second time at the sight of a man in evening dress, waving toy balloons in a night club, and think: “Perhaps now I am seeing the New York life I have heard so much about.” I still look a second time at a gunman, although I have given several their start in life in my boys* club days. And, although my present work – and play – takes me almost nightly into the slightly lopsided maelstrom of the pixie activities in the theaters and night clubs, I can never bring myself to feel that this can be the gay, light-hearted New York Life that produces the Typical New Yorker. It is all so Middle Western and tentative.

  The New Yorker at whom one does not look a second time, because there are so many of him and, furthermore, because he would not justify a second look, is a composite of the small-town qualities of every State in the Union. He wears his soft felt hat in winter and his straw hat in summer and, when his day’s work is done, reads the same things in the New York Evening Sun or World that he read in his home-town evening paper before he came to New York: the domestic news on the front page (nothing with a foreign date-line) and the sporting news. He has a vague feeling that he is not au courant with the world’s events and thoughts, and so subscribes to The Literary Digest or Times – which his wife reads. He votes for Hoover because Smith is a Catholic, or for Smith because Hoover is an Anglophile, and feels much less strongly about the issue of Prohibition than the zealots on either side think. If anything touches his business interests, however, he is roused into action and becomes a Moving Force. He has two children and wants them to have a good education. He is one-hundred-percent American, one-hundred-per-cent business and one-hundred-percent dull. And much as he dislikes New York, he would live in no other place.

  On a scale such as statisticians draw showing the comparative sizes of the standing armies of Europe, this man would tower over the small figures of the night-club rounder, the sophisticated literatus, the wage slave of the East Side, and the other popular conceptions of the New Yorker as the S. S. Majestic standing on end towers above a soldier in a Swiss uniform. He cannot be called a “typical New Yorker” because there is no such thing, but, if the man seen in the Middle West by the visiting writers is a “typical American,” then this man is one too. Furthermore, he is the product of no one section of the country but of all sections.

  All of which would seem to give New York a right to claim that within its boundaries alone can be found the real, composite America. But New York does not apparently care enough to make such a claim, which lack of civic pride and booster-spirit is perhaps the most un-American thing about New York.

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  PREV TOC INDEX .......

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  Index of Titles

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  A • B • C • D • E • F • G • H • I • J • K • L • M • N • O • P • Q • R • S • T • U • V • W • Y

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  A

  Add Folk Plays

  African Sculpture

  TOP

  B

  Back to the Game

  Birth of a College Comic Paper, The

  Bridge of Sans Gene, The


  TOP

  C

  Cease Firing!

  Checking Up

  Christmas Garland of Books, A

  Clinical Notes

  Cooper Cycle in American Folk Songs

  TOP

  F

  Fascinating Crimes

  Football Sagas

  Four-in-hand Outrage, The

  TOP

  G

  Great American Folly, The

  TOP

  H

  Hockey Tonight!

  TOP

  I

  “I Am in the Book”

  “In this Corner—”

  “Island Irish”

  It Seems There Were a Couple of Cells

  TOP

  J

  Junior Drama

  TOP

  L

  Low State of Whippet Racing, The

  TOP

  M

  Meeting the Boats

  Mr. Mencken Reviews Mr. Nathan and Vice Versa

  TOP

  N

  New Social Blight, The

  No Results Whatever in Our Own Straw Vote

  TOP

  O

  On the Air

  TOP

  P

  Packer’s Assistant, The

  Passing of the Cow, The

  Passport Dope

  Political Parties and their Growth

  Problem of the Used Car, The

  TOP

  R

  ’Round and ’Round and ’Round

  TOP

  S

  Short History of American Politics, A

  Short (What There Is of It) History of American Political Problems

  Significant Results in Second Week of Our Own Straw Vote

  TOP

  T

  Try-Outs

  Two Editorials for “The Nation”

  Typical New Yorker, The

  TOP

  W

  Woolen Mitten Situation, The

  TOP

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