On the intense periphery

I started to read Mark Helprin’s masterpiece Winter’s Tale, and had to put it down, since my ability to take in fiction had already started to wane. However, there has been a bit of a seachange lately, and I happened to bring it out onto the island with me, perhaps thinking that I might pick it up, as outlandish as that would be, judging from where I have been, reading-wise. This book comes highly recommended by two of the best readers I know – Ted and Mitchell – both of whom are readers I will take any recommendation from. I don’t take recommendations from just anyone. Although it had been about two years since I read the first two (and a half) chapters of Winters Tale, the images stuck with me. It is the sort of book where you are presented with things you have never seen before. Never even thought of before. It skirts the edge of reality, and then goes right to the hot core of it. I remembered the opening, with the sentient white horse escaping from his stable in Brooklyn. I remembered that there was a whirling impenetrable white cloud-wall circling New York City, and no one quite understood what it was, but they knew it was mysterous and important. I remembered the baby being put in the miniature boat and being set adrift. I remembered the wild “Baymen from Bayonne”, who lived across the Hudson, right up at the edge of the cloud wall, separate from civilization, feared, and yet tribal towards their own. I remembered the big meeting of the thieves in an underground water tunnel. The book is dense and magnificent. It has an inevitable rhythm. It was all too much for me to take in back in 2008.

And now I am reading it, and – along with its deep and powerful writing, and the scope of its imagination – it is, to my mind, one of the best books of New York ever written. It IS New York. It was written before 9/11, but it has in it some of the feelings of vulnerability that EB White’s essay on New York has, a sense that what has been created is open to attack, and yet magnificent at its cruel hot center. I am ready to leave my island haunt now, and I think it is quite perfect that I am now deep in the throes of a book which is an extended poem to New York City, a place which had become a bit unbearable to me over the last year, and now unfurls again before me, filled with possibility. Possibility of joy, sure, but possibility of heartbreak too. As always.

The writing is almost too much to grasp, and sometimes I have to sit back after a paragraph or two, to process. To digest.

It has also been a perfect thing to go to after completing the giant book Titan, about the life of John Rockefeller, Sr. Winter’s Tale takes place in his era, the deep anxiety and rapaciousness of the gilded age, the subtextual fears that come about as a century changes from one to the next, technology versus man …. technology is awe-inspiring and helped make New York … but there are questions and worries inherent in the grasping nature of it.

I am deep into it now. No fear of putting it down now. My reading muscle is back in order.

It’s a poem to Manhattan, to history, but it is also a story of an orphan named Peter Lake, and Pearly Soames, the terrifying leader of a gang called the Short Tails, and a rich young girl dying of consumption named Beverly, and a magnificent white horse who stays by Peter Lake’s side.

Some of the electrifying passages about the city, my dear home:

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A great city is nothing more than a portrait of itself, and yet when all is said and done, its arsenals of scenes and images are part of a deeply moving plan. As a book in which to read this plan, New York is unsurpassed. For the whole world has poured its heart into the city by the Palisades, and made it far better than it ever had any right to be.

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And he was seldom out of sight of the new bridges, which had married beautiful womanly Brooklyn to her rich uncle, Manhattan; had put the city’s hand out to the country; and were the end of the past because they spanned not only distance and deep water but dreams and time.

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It was necessary for him to be in Manhattan because he was a burglar, and for a burglar to work anyplace else was a shattering admission of mediocrity.

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Of course, it’s bad to be a criminal. Everyone knows that, and can swear that it’s true. Criminals mess up the world. But they are, as well, retainers of fluidity. In fact, one might make the case that New York would not have shone without its legions of contrary devils polishing the lights of goodness with their inexplicable opposition and resistance. It might even be said that criminals are a necessary component of the balanced equation which steadily and beautifully east up all the time that is thrown upon its steely back. They are the sugar and alcohol of a city, a red flash in the mosaic, lighning on a hot night.

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Though he cared not at all for the mechanisms of equilibrium, if he had stopped, the life of the city wuold have fallen apart.

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But when the water was flowing, and could be released at any time whatsoever from the Jerome Park Storage Reservoir to charge through the tunnels faster than a horse could run, then it was considerably worse, and a great honor for the deceased to have two Short Tails pull his corpse through the tunnel, hurriedly slam it into a crypt while they listened breathlessly for the rush of approaching water, and then lope prone through the tubs of green moss, mad for breaking into the air, speeding along like wild jittery whipcords.

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Much has been written and said about Castle Garden, entryway for immigrants, inlet to a new life, bursting star. But seldom have those beyond its solemn silent spaces been ready to confess that once, in a different time, it loomed for them or for their parents like the gates of St. Peter. Its servants in deep ornante dress turned away those who were unsound and unfit, in a process of judgment that was both the work of bureaucrats and a dream. Many had crossed the ocean seeking light, and were suddenly hurled backward, tumbling through white waves and green oceans, until the light receded into the point of a star in total darkness.

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They knew that to survive in Manhattan he would have to know something of bitterness before he arrived.

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Manhattan, a high narrow kingdom as hopeful as any that ever was, burst upon him full force, a great and imperfect steel-tressed palace of a hundred million chambers, many-tiered gardens, pools, passages, and ramparts above its rivers. Built upon an island from which bridges stretched to other islands and to the mainland, the palace of a thousand tall towers was undefended. It took in nearly all who wished to enter, being so much larger than anything else that it could not ever be conquered but only visited by force. Newcomers, invaders, and the inhabitants themselves were so confused by its multiplicity, variety, vanity, size, brutality and grace, that they lost sight of what it was. It was, for sure, one simple structure, busily divided, lovely and pleasing, an extraordinary hive of the imagination, the greatest house ever built.

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sails that filled the ends of streets with billows of white or sharp angular planes, and then collapsed into the bordering buildings or made of themselves a guillotine

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The city was like war – battles raged all around, and desperate men were on the street in crawling legions. He had heard the Baymen tell of war, but they had never said it could be harnessed, its head held down, and made to run in place. On several score thousand miles of streets were many cataclysmic armies interacting without formation – 10,000 prostitutes on Broadway alone; half a million abandoned children; half a million of the lame and blind; scores of thousands of active criminals locked in perpetual combat with as many police; and the vast number of good citizens, who in their normal lives were as fierce and rapacious as other cities’ wild dogs.

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The entire city was a far more complicated wheel of fortune than had ever been devised. It was a close model of the absolute processes of fate, as the innocent and the gulity alike were tumbled in its vast overstuffed drum, pushed along through trap-laden mazes, caught dying in airless cellars, or elevated to platforms of royal view.

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When Peter Lake danced by the night fountain in the dark green square and was given coins for his dancing, he became a thief. Though it would take a long time for him to understand the principle, it was that to be paid for one’s joy is to steal.

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But here, in the dawn, was mortality itself. In the city were places to fall from which one could never emerge – dark dreams and slow death, the death of children, suffering without grace or redemption, ultimate and eternal loss. The memory of the child stayed with him. But that was not to be the end of it, for reality went around in a twisting ring. The irredeemable would be redeemed, and there was a balance for everything. There had to be. In the movement of the machines, he saw beyond everything he had yet known. Like waves, wind, and water, they moved. They were, in themselves, power and elation.

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“A bridge,” he proclaimed, “is a very special thing. Haven’t you seen how delicate they are in relation to their size? They soar like birds; they extend and embody our finest efforts; and they utilize the curve of heaven. When a catenary of steel a mile long is hung in the clear over a river, believe me, God knows. Being a churchman, I would go as far as to say that the catenary, this marvelous graceful thing, this joy of physics, this perfect balance, between rebellion and obedience, is God’s own signature one earth. I think it pleases Him to see them raised. I think that is why the city is so rich in assets. The whole island, you see, is becoming a cathedral.”

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It was a vast underground cave between the Bowery and Rochambeau. The walls of stone were gray and white throughout half a dozen grand galleries. Arches like those of a Roman aqueduct touched to floor and then bounced away. At seven-thirty on a Friday night, no less than five thousand people dined within this subterranean oyster bin. Four hundred oyster boys labored and cried as if they were edging a great ship into port, or rolling Napoleon’s cannon through Russia. Candles, gas lanterns, and, here and there, clear electric lights illuminated paths between rumbling little fires. The background noise was not unlike the famous record that Thomas Alva Edison had made of Niagara Falls, and the trajectories of the flying oyster shells reminded some old veterans of the night air above Vicksburg.

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For twenty years, he had been on the streets of that city, and he loved it. He was a guide, an intimate. And yet, from a distance, catching the sun in the clear, it looked like nothing he had ever known. Following its brown spine as far as his eye could see, he lifted his head to pass over the spires of tall buildings. A hundred plumes of smoke and steam curled about this sleeping thing, which would not have surprised him had it immediately come alive. Its growing animation was catapulted across the ice and though it was sleeping in dark chains, he had no doubt that someday it would rise and brighten, like a whale bursting from the sea into light and air.
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silvered canyons and warm red brick, the lisp of a huge broken clock, trees like bells shuddering sound in green, silent streets as dark and elegant as mirrors in dim light

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Peter Lake knew from this that the city would take care, for it was a magical gate through which those who entered passed in innocent longing, taking every hope, showing touching courage — and for good reason. The city wuld take care. There was no choice but to trust the architect’s dream that was spread before him as compact as an engine, solid and sure, shimmering over the glinting ice.

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“Drive hard, Peter Lake, drive hard,” said Beverly, holding the child.

He had never had a family. But there he was, suddenly, almost a husband and father. Small scenes can be so beautiful that they change a man forever. He would never forget that noontime on a lake of ice, nor would he ever forget her words.

“Drive hard,” she had said. He would. Things were different. All he wanted now was love.

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This was because Isaac Penn was the man behind the city’s mirror. He had almost supreme power over the city’s conception of itself, and, by small adjustments, could hypnotize and entrance it. If he wished, he wuold have it flail its limbs in an alarming fit. He could scare it to death, empty its streets, or make it want to hide in a hole. Because Isaac Penn could move New York in such a way that its strength would shame the giants of the earth, or lift the city’s hand to have it flick the dust from a baby’s eye, Peter Lake expected one of those meetings where he was made to feel like an aspiring young gnat.

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“Orphans don’t have vanity. I’m not sure why, but one needs parents to be vain.”

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“There is justice in the world, Peter Lake, but it cannot be had without mystery. We try to bring it about without knowing exactly what it is, and only touch upon it. No matter, for all the flames and sparks of justice throughout all time reach to invigorate unseen epochs – like engines whose power glides on hidden lines to upwell against the dark in distant cities unaware.”

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Distance and darkness converted an ebullient scene full of motion and glare into something sad and whole, of another time. He saw that Beverly had taken it and clasped it to her, as if it were a jewel in its intricate foil. She had by distance converted it into a painting, or an accidental photograph, that touched her to the quick. She had remained outside because she had never had the opportunity for society, and she was afraid. Innocent things, such as a dance in a tavern, terrified her …

There was, truly, nothing to fear. But she did fear, and it had brought her outside, to a position in which she could embrace the scene and know its spirit. This was not unlike Peter Lake’s far views of the city, from which he always learned a great deal more than he would have from within. No, he wouldn’t try to coax her in — even though she might be ordered there. He would not bring her in, he would join her on the intense periphery.