The following events all took place in New York City in the late spring of 2013.
We’re fifteen minutes late and they haven’t even started yet. The little room, however, is filling up quickly and we squeeze onto a bench while piles of books are stacked in front of us. I crane my neck toward the bar, estimating whether I have enough time to get a beer. I decide I do.
With an IPA clutched in my hand, I’m ready for some literature. It’s a Sunday night, and people keep streaming into the room. It is the East Village, so I suppose the crowd makes sense. KGB Bar always attracts a variety of characters, and their literary events occur almost every night. This evening, it’s all about Volume 1 Brooklyn, which sounds hip and cool and artsy, and something that I would want to participate in, if they’d let me.
Volume 1 Brooklyn is a literary community and think tank that conducts readings, publishes material from up-and-coming writers based in Brooklyn, and hosts a number of cultural and literary events. They established themselves in 2009, and have been dedicated to the concept of creating “free cultural events to bridge the gaps between various forms of culture and art”, as founding editor Jason Diamond writes on the collective’s website.
In fact, Jason Diamond is here tonight, a broad smile on his face as he surveys the chatty crowd. A stocky man with large, dark-framed glasses and some slight facial scruff, he seems to personify the Brooklyn-based intelligentsia, exhibiting a conscious combination of ease and carefully curated elements of style. He stands at the podium in the corner of the room, but does not yet command attention. He allows people to chat for a while longer, and to savor the pleasure of being together for the sake of literature. Perhaps this is what we so ephemerally refer to as a literary community.
I’m immensely pleased at sitting amidst this “literary community”, as if I’ve found a rare little treat no one else managed to spot. A lot of people seem to know each other, hands are shaken, backs are patted, and Diamond finally clears his throat into a microphone. Here we go.
***
I came to New York City in the summer of 2009, my desire to join the famed “New York literary community” as naïve as it was grandiose. Having never set foot in the city before, or even in the United States, come to think of it, my knowledge of the city’s literary intelligentsia was founded on a steady diet of Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, Dorothy Parker, Dylan Thomas, and Don DeLillo. Throw in some images of the notorious Chelsea Hotel, Patti Smith reading poetry at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, and Kerouac and Ginsberg hanging out at Tompkins Square Park, and the absurdly idealized mix was complete.
My perception of literary New York was stuck in the 1940’s, the 50’s, and even the wild 60’s, stuck in an era I believed to be fueled by alcohol, drugs, and an unbridled bravado nowadays more associated with musicians and actors than the literary inclined. However, coming to New York, I found none of that. Instead, posh nightclubs were bursting the Meatpacking District apart, artsy cafes were dominating the East Village, and living in Greenwich Village now was the ultimate pinnacle of success. Where had my debaucherous writers gone? Where could I find the Algonquin Round Table of the 21st century?
In Patti Smith’s autobiography Just Kids, she recounts the often anarchic ways she and her friends would make a living in the wild New York of the 1960’s. Smith describes the artistic energy that pulsated through the city, infecting everyone in its wake.
She remembers how, in Washington Square Park, “agitated revolutionaries distributed antiwar leaflets. Chess players drew a crowd of their own. Everyone coexisted within the continuous drone of diatribes, bongos, and barking dogs” (47). Smith lived in a New York where Times Square was “a garden of perversion” and the notorious Chelsea Hotel became a playground for the artistic and the eccentric. At El Quixote, the Chelsea Hotel’s bar, she describes how “at the table to my left, Janis Joplin was holding court with her band…At the last table facing the door was Jimi Hendrix, his head lowered, eating with his hat on, across from a blonde” (105).
Smith seems aware of the uniqueness of the moment she is experiencing. She reflects that “the Chelsea was like a doll’s house in the Twilight Zone”, and “everyone had something to offer and nobody appeared to have much money. Even the successful seemed to have just enough to live like bums” (112). In Smith’s narrative, the Chelsea Hotel becomes a microcosm of New York, where artists, intellectuals, and eccentrics occupy a space that is both run-down and elegant, simultaneously majestic and decrepit. Wealth is not important for success, only your environment is, she discovers as she roams the dark hallways of the hotel and the alleys of the city.
The Chelsea Hotel has now become a tourist attraction, and has lost the glamour of its past. Hidden between scaffolding on 23rd street, its dingy entrance hall is covered in plaques commemorating Dylan Thomas’, Leonard Cohen’s, and many others’ stays. But large signs on the door warn that photography is not allowed, and the grimy lobby is stale and empty. A heavyset woman in a t-shirt and slacks sits on a generic black couch, rummaging through her purse. The image is anticlimactic. The Chelsea Hotel’s days as an intellectual and artistic playground are definitively over, and with it, the entire spirit Patti Smith described seems to disappear slowly from the city streets as well.
Other literary landmarks seem to have followed suit. Places like the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village still shine bright in the imagination of literary hopefuls, and I myself undertook a pilgrimage there with the idea of perhaps romantically capturing a glimpse of a life that seemed so much more exciting than mine, now long gone.
At the White Horse Tavern, Dylan Thomas would fall off his barstool by lunchtime and Norman Mailer gulped gin liked water, but when I passed by, a dispersed crowd, none of them particularly literary in nature, were spilling out into the sidewalk. A group of college boys and girls wearing matching t-shirts chat animatedly over $2 Bud Light specials, clearly participating in some sort of bar crawl, while a group of tourists nibble on French fries and pull apart their burger buns, their Lonely Planet guide book sprawled on the table.
“Aquí venían muchos autores, antes”, one of the tourists says as the others nod appreciatively. “Antes”. Before. But not anymore, apparently.
***
The trend toward a subdued literary culture has not gone unnoticed, and authors, critics, and journalists have attempted to address the various ways and reasons for why author’s lives, and by association, their work, have experienced a gradual decline in wildness. One of those addressing this trend is the American author and journalist Katie Roiphe, who often writes of the shifting cultural and sexual politics of the 20th and 21st century. In her essay “The Naked and the Conflicted”, she specifically discusses the apparent decay of self-confident, testosterone-fueled sex writing in contemporary American literature. Her observations can also be attributed to the current literary community in general. “[Contemporary writers] are writers in love with irony, with the literary possibility of self-consciousness so extreme it almost precludes the minimal abandon necessary for the sexual act itself”, she writers, but it doesn’t even have to be about the sexual act itself (70). This self-consciousness seems to have permeated to writers themselves, and the way they have established a literary community in a city where genius and madness walk hand in hand, stumbling down the pot-holed sidewalks.
The city, and its established writers, comfortably settled in townhouses and renovated pre-war apartments throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn, seemed to me somewhat calmer, somewhat refined, for sure, but also somewhat tamer and contained. In “The Perverse Allure of Messy Lives”, Roiphe observes that “in some larger cultural way, we have moved in the direction of the gym, of the enriching, wholesome pursuit, of the embrace of responsibility, of the furthering of goals, and ways from lounging around in the middle of the afternoon with a drink” (143).
As I wandered around New York, attended readings, and joined a Marcel Proust book club, I found this calmness everywhere. My book club meets every Sunday in Crown Heights at 8pm, in Little Zelda’s, a small, cute café with plush green ottomans, an expensive espresso maker, and coconut macaroons. The owner, Michael, wants to open a cheese and wine bar next door on Franklin Avenue. Crown Heights, a neighborhood once reeling from race riots and high crime rates, is entering a phase of gentrification New York has seen many times before, in the East Village, the Lower East Side, and Williamsburg.
As we sit and sip craft lagers every Sunday night, we discuss the use of art imagery in In Search of Lost Time and finish promptly at 9pm, when Michael needs to close the café. We’re students, journalists, teachers, and librarians; all of us need to wake up early the next day, and go to work, to class, and to the gym. We have one beer and no more, and that’s how Proust is discussed nowadays in New York, in the heart of Brooklyn.
I don’t mean to be misleading. I enjoy my book club, and the way we all carve time out of our schedule to enjoy a drink and engage with prose in a way not too common anymore is laudable. But to me, these kinds of meetings are immensely characteristic of the way the literary society in New York is developing.
***
Where does this shift come from? I called Jason Diamond a couple of weeks after the reading at KGB Bar, and asked him about the trend toward calmness the city’s writers seem to be exhibiting. Diamond, apart from being the founding editor of Volume 1 Brooklyn, is also a blogger, writer, and an editor at Flavorwire. As such, he’s often in direct contact with what could now be considered New York’s contemporary literary scene.
He laughingly assured me that writers still “do like to party”, but agreed that the drinking and general debaucherous socializing New York artists enjoyed in the past simply wasn’t possible to that extent anymore.
“New York is so expensive, it’s almost impossible to be an artist,” he said. “The role of the writer has changed”, and he explained that the majority of writers, in order to survive, have to take on teaching jobs or other outside work in order to make ends meet. More work equals less time to drink at noon and write, he concluded. “The economic climate doesn’t help one bit”. Other authors share the sense that writers and their work are becoming more and more affected by the economic realities of New York and the United States as well.
A couple of years ago, the Russian American novelist Gary Shteyngart was interviewed by Modern Drunkard, one of those odd niche magazines that seem to litter the little bodegas of St. Marks. Shteyngart, author of the novels Absurdistan and Super Sad True Love Story, is known for his satirical plots describing a word desensitized and disconnected, ironically enough, by modern technology.
While talking about the heyday of American writers in New York, Shteyngart observes: “Don’t get me started. It’s so hard to be a writer these days. It’s so antiseptic. We’re this sterilized profession, we all know our Amazon.com rankings to the nearest digit. There’s a few people that still keep the tradition going in Brooklyn. It’s a big problem these days. Journalists might drink more than writers”. The notion that everything is sterilized is an interesting one, particularly because it implies writing has somehow become a profession striving for security, stability, and a certain type of calm that was mostly missing from a New York writer’s life in the mid 20th century.
In the same interview, Shteyngart continues: “We live in this antiseptic world…But the world I live in, in my mind, is still the world of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway. And Dostoyevsky. Drink it all away or gamble it all away at the drop of a hat. That doesn’t exist anymore”. When asked why this apparent “death drive” within writers doesn’t seem to exist anymore in New York, Shteyngart replies: “Because we’re all corporatized. We all know who pays us. The stuff I do, I doubt if it will sell ten years from now. It’s a shrinking alliance of those who still go out on a limb. People want entertainment that is safer. People don’t want to read a book or see a movie anymore”.
While Shteyngart’s sentiment is surely justified in some sense, I don’t think we can accurately say people don’t read anymore. A couple of months ago, Zadie Smith was conducting a reading at a tiny bookshop in Greenpoint. I showed up an hour early, my copy of White Teeth expectantly held before me, only to find out the tiny bookshop was already over capacity. I did not get to see Zadie Smith. I felt like a tween girl who just got outbid for the last Justin Bieber concert tickets. And I wasn’t the only one, judging from the number of despondent faces looking down on their hardcover copies of NW, wondering what they should do with it now. People still care about books, and they care about literature. There are plenty of people who get jokes about dipping madeleines in coffee, and there are plenty of people who make a midtown Manhattan pilgrimage in homage to The Catcher in the Rye‘s Holden Caulfield. These things won’t go away, at least not anytime soon. But Shteyngart’s complaint that a desire for safety seems to be permeating, if not the writer’s work in all its capacity, at least the writer’s lifestyle, doesn’t seem so unbelievable.
I was curious to know more about this apparent “sterilization” Shteyngart was talking about. Vince Passaro, an energetic and outspoken writer and literary critic whose short fiction has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, and GQ, among other places, seems to wholeheartedly agree with Shteyngart’s assessment.
“What was required for you to live was very different [back then],” he stated in a phone interview, echoing Diamond’s statements about the profession’s economic realities. As he talked, he became more and more agitated at the monumental challenge of being a writer in this era, let alone in this city.
“There’s about one hundred serious writers in this country living exclusively off their writing. That’s it,” he said.
Due to the intense difficulty and competition of the trade, the writing itself has changed. It’s become tamer, according to Passaro.
“The kind of novel that sells well is your standard, traditional realist narrative, in soft focus,” he laughed over the phone. Less mainstream books are rejected by publishers in favor of “safer” writing, he argued. As a result, “the value of corporate publishing would be internalized by writers of the next generation.”
Passaro recounts a well-known story, of how independent publishing houses in New York were slowly gobbled up by larger corporations in the 1970’s and 80’s, until the majority of the publishing world in the city lay in the hands of the powerful few. While being anti-mainstream was never particularly lucrative, it became even less so; “all everyone cared about was getting a piece of the ever-shrinking pie,” Passaro said.
Passaro also elaborated on Diamond’s idea that the role of the writer has changed, and the work an author needs to do to survive can be quite different from what hopeful writers-to-be initially imagined they would be doing.
Passaro cited rising rents and the rising cost of education as hindering factors in allowing writers to dedicate themselves solely to their craft.
“Writers need to live outside of society, they need to be a foreign particle, a virus, a bacteria, agitating it constantly,” he said. But “if you raise the tuition [of universities] to $50,000, you can’t be a socialist,” he laughed.
“So what do writers do? They get jobs teaching, they get spread out geographically,” Passaro explained. “Let me tell you,” he chuckled amiably into the phone, “the process of getting tenure can turn the wildest person into an absolute bore.”
The financial concerns Diamond, Passaro, and Shteyngart cite are all contributing to morphing and challenging the writer’s role in society, it seems. The writer cannot just simply write; it’s almost economically impossible to do so in this city. A bachelor’s degree has become an arguable necessity on the path to economic stability. But with more and more students (and potential writers) in debt, the creative lifestyle becomes more responsibility-laden, and less carefree. Therefore the writer has to teach, to freelance, to copy-edit, etc. These occupations take time, and a new generation with a new lifestyle and new responsibilities has replaced the old. We do not have the liberty to wake up at noon, drink whiskey all day and write until three in the morning.
Writers like Passaro and Shteyngart seem to be mourning this era, romanticizing the way writers could escape the “bureaucratization of all education,” before “grants, endowments, and CV’s” became a necessity, as Passaro explained.
“This careerism today is tracked to seek the approval of the bureaucracy, how can you be an independent artist?” Passaro angrily asked. “You can’t live in indentured servitude to universities and grants and still be a powerful voice.”
While the economic realities these writers outline are certainly undeniable, the starry eyed romanticism with which the wild heyday of New York’s literary community is painted needs a dose of reality.
Sarah Manguso, an American writer and poet who currently teaches at New York University, lamented that while “surviving financially” was definitely the hardest part of writing in New York, she also addressed the legendary appeal of a bygone, free literary life.
“It was rare for women to die like Dylan Thomas because they didn’t have the time. They were raising children and running houses. These self-proclaimed geniuses, male writers with their messy lives, indulged in what Ursula Le Guin has called ‘heroic infantilism’,” Manguso told me.
Manguso is a tall, thin woman, with large eyes that look at you intensely as if hoping you’ll say something brilliant, and then averting them when you say something that invariably disappoints. But now her eyes were fixed on me, eagerly trying to dispel the rosy picture of the carefree writer.
“There was always a woman or women doing these writers’ laundry and typing their manuscripts and cooking and cleaning and so on and so forth,” she explained, pointing out that the carefree lives of writers in the 50’s and 60’s almost always pertained to men. Women like Patti Smith or Dorothy Parker were an exception to the rule.
Her voice picked up energy as she continued: “Those old-fashioned archetypes are so sweetly antiquated and utterly irrelevant today, now that more women write and fewer women would choose to live with such assholes. Perhaps that’s the real reason for all this nostalgia the boys are bellyaching about. Now they need to share with the girls. Not much, mind you; everyone knows a woman can’t expect even a fraction of the career that an equally good male writer can, but it still must sting.”
Manguso’s comments made me think of the rosy haze with which we paint the past. Many contemporary writers share the nostalgia I feel for an era I never lived in. These writers, who didn’t have a chance to flex their creative muscles in those decades, see a time filled with opportunity and freedom, so unrestrained from the one we’re living in now.
“I don’t think you can be a writer without being nostalgic,” Diamond told me, and I agree that romanticizing the past spurs the writer’s imagination, but can also gloss over the less appealing realities of the past. While it’s undeniable that economic anxieties have forced writers in New York to take on secondary jobs, write less, and become more sentient, writers have opportunities and outlets that never existed before.
“I don’t think there’s ever been a time where there’s been so much different stuff,” Diamond told me excitedly. “I’m constantly in awe of what I’m seeing”, he said, his optimism standing in stark contrast with Passaro’s and Shteyngart’s words. So if this really is a new era for literature, then why do we still nostalgically walk by the Chelsea Hotel and lament its decline, or bemoan the loss of the romantic degeneracy of the East Village?
***
In “The Perverse Allure of Messy Lives,” Roiphe remarks that “it may be that we smolder a little against the wilier and subtler repressions of our own undoubtedly healthier, more upstanding times” (144). Perhaps this is why I was searching for the next Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller romance among the writers of contemporary New York’s literary landscape, and could only come up with Siri Hustved and Paul Auster, who seem quite comfortable in their Park Slope brownstone (not that there’s anything wrong with that). In his interview, Shteyngart mentions Brooklyn is perhaps experiencing the bohemian anarchy the literary community previously enjoyed in Manhattan, but most well-known authors are comfortably settled in Park Slope, one of Brooklyn’s more affluent and maintained neighborhoods.
It makes sense that writers in today’s New York should strive for security within their success. It makes sense to want a pretty brownstone in Park Slope (absolutely no one can afford to live in the Village anymore) and it makes sense to want to have a spouse and a dog and maybe even a child or two, and to want to send said children to university. It makes sense to not want to be burdened by debt, especially in a profession that is often conceived as doomed from the start. It makes sense, but it’s certainly not very romantic. We laugh at the thought of Dylan Thomas falling off his barstool or are thrilled by Burrough’s accounts of late-night drug binges, but such behavior is pathologized and classified nowadays as unsocial, unhinged, addicted, and perhaps even sociopathic.
But there is a reason we tell these stories over and over again, there is a reason the Spanish tourists came to the White Horse Tavern, and there is a reason I came to New York. There is an undeniable appeal about these men and women who were living life in all its capacities, and challenging their bodies and their minds with every drink taken, every word written, every dollar spent and every night that turned into day.
It gives us a thrill to think about how much easier and unrestrained things used to be, even if that’s not exactly true, as Manguso pointed out. We marvel at how different things were, how different the writing was, how much less things cost, and the social status a writer used to have. We rebel against our lot because we imagine things used to be different, and this allows us to see things with so much more vividness. When I look at the Chelsea Hotel, I look past the scaffolding and the sad, thick woman in the lobby and picture William S. Burroughs staring out into space. He was probably picturing what 23rd street looked like during the 1920’s, the faint wail of a jazz tune streaming through an open window. Our dreaming allows us to see in brighter colors, but it’s also distracting.
Diamond points out that although writers “don’t have as much status or as much money to party anymore,” writers have so many new mediums of expression and publication that it’s unreasonable to say we’re experiencing a decline. Economic realities have forced adaptation, for sure, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
“I think fiction has become more of a specialized art. We’re living in a renaissance of short stories,” Diamond explained, which were less time consuming to write and more applicable to experimentation.
“I take all of the history and all these groups with a grain of salt,” Diamond laughed when I asked him about romanticizing the past. “I don’t know how crazy they really were.”
***
At KGB Bar, the readings have started and the lineup is rather impressive. Everyone is quietly sipping their craft IPA’s and staring intensely at the little podium in the corner of the bar. Matt Dojny, a young, rather shy looking guy hesitantly reads from his debut novel The Festival of Earthly Delights, his voice soft but insistent. The crowd laughs appreciatively at his dialogue, with a protagonist as awkward as Dojny seems to be. Kathleen Alcott, an ethereal looking woman with blonde hair and a white dress, reads from her manuscript in progress, a work that recalls the style of Vivian Gornick and her tenement-infused memoirs. Finally, Teddy Wayne, an energetic man with thin-framed glasses and a serene-looking wife, reads from The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, a biting satire of tweens in the music industry (with a hilariously narcissistic Justin Bieber-like protagonist). When he’s finished and the crowd applauds appreciatively, we all engage in a series of informal questions with the authors.
Finally, Diamond gets to the microphone and clears his throat loudly. The chatter dies down, and he joyously announces: “Thank you all so much for coming, thank you, really, these kinds of readings would not be possible without you, so please, keep reading, keep listening, and we look forward to seeing you again!”
And with that, the crowd slowly filters out, some clutching new books of the authors they’ve just met, feeling very cultured indeed. It was a nice evening. It was quiet, respectful, and modest. Everyone’s smiling at each other, and people shake hands, wave, but nobody lingers. Tomorrow is Monday, and people have to get up early for work. As I stand on the sidewalk, I briefly wonder what this reading would have been like forty years ago. Whether we would have stayed, packed, in that tiny little room until 4 a.m. only to move on somewhere else, phrases flying and whiskey flowing.
But then I think about the writing, and the craft and dedication of the people I just heard read. I think about them working a full-time job and still finding the time to write an entire novel, and a moving one at that. I find myself thinking that it’s pretty revolutionary, the way we’re all trying to write today. As I turn toward 2nd Avenue, I see Wayne walking down 4th street, hand in hand with his wife, a Trader Joe’s bag filled with extra books swinging from his side.
No Harm Intended 