BOOK REVIEW Tripping the Light Fantastic Christine Stemell In Pursuit of Gotham: Culture and Commerce in New Yin-? by William R. Taylor. Oxford University Press, 1992, 272 pp. nlike the French or the English, Americans have long enjoyed heaping contempt on their greatest city. Yet ironically, while the provinces so zestfully deride New York, images ii." ., hale ill of the city?s streets, architecture, man- ners and speech have come to serve as a cultural repository from which, for a century, all Ameri- cans have habitually drawn to portray modern life, both in its brightest and darkest manifesta- tions. New York and New York?like im- ages waft persistently through the dreams and desires of the country?s populace. It is impossible to understand the pervasive New Yorkisrn of the Ameri- can twentieth century unless we com- prehend the power and fertility of the city itself. This is William R. Taylor?s en- terprise. In Pursuit of Gotham contains ten essays on assorted aspects of New York culture in what could be called the age of early modernism, from 1890 to 193 0. At the most general, Taylor is con- cerned with questions of representation and form, and with how the city came to be known and charted in particular ways. How did the New York skyline become a quintessential icon of urban- ity on the eVe of \Vorld War How did such images come to identify New York Christine Stem-ell reaches history and women?s sludz'es at Princeton. She is the author; most recently, of"Wbite Femm'm andBZeo? Realities: the Politics of Autbeetzrity, which appears in Race- ingJustice, edited by Tom'iMom'son. 70 identity, an identity reproduced and sold in millions of photographs, cine- matic takes and anecdotes? Taylor incorporates a series of finely delineated social histories into an over? arching cultural interpretation of great sophistication and power. He never strays far from the large questions about urban imagination and the big money?the pervasive effects of capi- talism in shaping both cultural rendi~ tions of New York and an audience for them. But he composes his analysis through an inlay of smaller studies of writings, images, and locales?a close look at particularities quite different from the overwhelming stress on monolithic ?discursive? forces which dominates cultural studies today. Taylor shows how early New York modernism?the broad social milieu in which artists began to conceive of themselves and their subjects?height- ened and multiplied an experience of polyglot detail. Canonical interpretations of mod- ernism have tended to stress formal ex- perimentation and disdain the study of context as a crude ?sociologizing? of art. To give one example: students of Picasso have long been transfixed by the artist?s rendering of women's bodies into planes and quite uninterested in the Barcelona prostitutes and bordellos from which Pi- casso drew his inspiration. Taylor?s ac- count opens up a different perspective, from which we can understand the rela- tionship between society and art in his- torically fascinating ways. He illuminates a widespread New York fascination with the ?jumble? and ?miscellaneity? of the streets, with a ?culture of pastiche? of heterogeneous social ?types,? ethnic groups, languages and stoiies. This anal- ysis helps to conceptualize the interest of some American modernists? an interest sometimes sus- tained, sometimes only momentary?in capturing and fixing urban ?otsam and jetsam in their art, in responding to metropoli- tan culture rather than suppressing it: the painter Stuart David, the writer Djuna Barnes, the poet Langston Hughes and even, in a very different way, the stringent avant- gardiste Marianne Moore. Taylor terms this mi- lieu a ?commercial culture, localized in the city itself and quite distinct from the nationally based mass culture which was to emerge in the 19205. Commercial culture, still rooted in nineteenth century street life, became a medium for entrepreneurship which, artistically, was both ?high? (as in the case of Alfred Stieglitz) and ?low? (as with vaudeville, nickelodeons and eventually movie houses). Commercial culture took the oddities, encounters and eclectic perspectives of the New York streets, repackaged them in new images and narratives and sold them back to a public comprised of both working-class and bourgeois urbanites ?keenly attuned to the panorama of goods and people? provided by public life. Thus Iosoph Pulitzer?s New York World pioneer of sensationalist yellow journalism, offered something for ev- eryone: crime stories, hard news, ad- vice to working girls, household hints, sporting news and, on Sundays, color comics legible to English and non~En- glish speakers alike. fter World War I, commercial cul- ture went national. Tin Pan Alley songwriters, for example, reworked snatches of melody from Harlem, the Lower East Side, Little Italy and the Tenderloin into sentimental ballads de- racinated from any particular social reference. ?Bei Mir Bist Du Schon? To Me You?re Beautiful?) was a typ- ical transposition: one of Tin Pan Al- ley?s greatest hits, it was originally a tune sung in Yiddish by peddlers on the Lower East Side, later set to swing by Black musicians at the Apollo The- atre, then set to English lyrics by Jew- ish musicians, and finally introduced nationally on the radio by the Greek- American Andrews Sisters. First New York businessmen, then New Yorkers gone to Hollywood, made piles of money from such trans? lations and homogenizations. This pro- ccss, which involved the unfathomable attractions of Americans to an urban life which on a conSCious level they mostly repudiated, has been diffi- cult for critics to understand. At the point in American history when cul- ture becomes ?mass culture, scholars usually separate into the declension- ists, who deplore the narcotizing ef- fects on the masses, and the populists, who stress mass culture?s supposedly liberating effect. Taylor sidesteps this debate by emphasizing a more civic- minded point??the absolute centrality of New York to America?s imaginative life. Conversely, he deplores the dam? age successiVe anes of huckstered im- ages~made increasingly palatable for armchair provincial tourists?have done to New York?s ability to repre5ent itself fully in even its own imagination. In characteristically reflective fash- ion, Taylor puzzles through just how this happened: how commercial cul- ture, grounded in a set of more or less democratic cultural brokerages, was packaged successfully and sold to a voyeuristic nation. By the 19305, the ?bright and possessive vision? of the first generation of New York mod- ernists had disappeared and ?the city experienced by those who lived and worked there? had been replaced in the national media by one ?abstracted from history, a city for tourists, a city frozen in time, and hence part of a national mythology about big cities.? Mass cul- ture commodified sections of the city and ?types? who lived in them. Times Square and its ?guys and dolls,? Green- wich Village and its ?bohemians. The cousuuzptz'ou ofcz'z?y Zufefrom afar; uz'a mass culture, has supplanted the living ofcz'ty Zz'fe. Taylor unravels the process through careful histories of these neighbor- hoods as well as the writers who fixed them in print. It's a considerable task to pry open sealed modernist narratives which so ostentatiously advertise their transparency and truth-telling quali- ties, and it?s a pleasure to follow Taylor as he does just that. Considering the os- tensible ?rebellion? of the Greenwich Village bohemians from commeICe, for example, he wonders why ?this free- dom from mercenary taint? was so cen- tral to their identities when, in fact, many of them made such a commercial success out of being bohemians. He shrewdly dissects the career of Mencken, showing how Mencken rose to the top of the ?New York opinion factory? by compressing a new middle- class, midtown style of scathing clever- ness-~a sort of Jazz Age, masculinist (and far more talented) Camille Paglia. And in an essay on Damon Runyon, one of the book?s best, he demonstrates how the journalist detached the slang of Broadway from the milieu in which language enacted itself: ?the way peo- ple talked was the story. ?It is ironic, Taylor concludes, ?that the very cir- cuitry of press, radio and film that de- livered Broadway slang and all the other freshly minted lingoes to the na- tion at the same moment deprived us of the vital communal impulses that made Broadway itself possible. With these final reflections, Taylor suggests that the consumption of city life from afar, via mass culture, has sup- planted the Zt?w'ng of city life. This has happened, it seems to me, in several ways. Those neighborhoods most plundered for representations of the metropolis?Times Square, the West Village?have sunk into a half-life in which they exist primarily to excite the imaginations of the out-of?towners who flock there to ogle the urban char- acters (street preachers, gay couples), absorb the energy of the streets {ever suckers of the three-card-montc deal- ers), and shop for clothes, sex or drugs. This kind of cultural parasitism has existed since the 19203, but gentrifi- cation in the 19805 introduced a new variety, as entrepreneurs packaged entire neighborhoods as ?neighbor- hoods? and sold them to the highest bidders. A new class of residents, in- stant New Yorkers, then became live- in tourists in their new domains. On the Lower East Side, in Soho, and in Tribeca the gentrifiers purchased the elements of a New York life, all famil- iar through media renditionswethnic diversity, funky housing, a hip-hop street life, and urban characters?and all carefully kept at a distance. Gentri- fication fostered a sensibility often im- mune to ?the passion for city life and the excitement of other subcultures? which Taylor believes once informed the metropolis; rather, it promoted a notion of New York as backdrop to the dramas of one privileged class?- Woody Allen?s Manhattan. Taylor is wonderfully impious about New York, if always caring; he never lets the reader forget that New Yorkers themselves have been the chief hustlers in the representation racket, forever hawking themselves and their experi- ences to the tubes. His interpretation is too complicated and deep~going to translate into political prescriptions. But his acute sense of our present imag- inative impasse, the ways in which the ?circuitry? of mass culture has short- circuited the city, is critical in under- standing the metropolitan desolation which surrounds us. Taylor began his intellectual career as a Young Turk of the American Stud- ies movement, which in the 19505 set out to free American cultural criticism from its deadening insecurities Vis-a-vis Europe by examining our art and lit~ erature within its ovm web of and symbols. Mostly Harvard-trained, many of these scholars, for all of their radical impulses and groundbreaking work, never quite left genteel New Eng- land?intellectually or emotionally?in their search for America?s soul. They needed to look outside Boston. How satisfying that William R. Taylor should have set out on his own quest for Amer- ica and found it in New York City. El REVIEWS 71