Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Innocent New York




I’d mentioned a few posts back that I was reading C. S. Lewis Chronicles of Narnia to my younger daughter.  The first book, “ The Magician’s Nephew” is a great set up for the more popular “The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.”  My girls had seen the movie umpteen times a while back and so its familiar and things move swiftly.  Meanwhile, with my older daughter, we’re reading Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence” which by comparison, is unfamiliar and plodding. 

Whereas with some authors we’ve read like Tolstoy or Achebe were people or stories I loved, this is something I’ve never read but feel we ought to know about.  The first novel written by a woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction back in 1921.  Set in a Manhattan that my grandparents’ grandparents knew or wondered about, it is widely lauded as an apogee of American literature.  I confess I have a hard time imagining or being particularly interested in this version of New York but still, its early days as we’re only to page 44.  Importantly the Penguin addition we’re reading has a lady in a frilly white dress, with a purple sash and matching hat band, pulling a bow and arrow evoking “The Hunger Games” so it got my daughter’s attention.  The back cover tells me the cover painting is the right decade but set in England, the wrong continent:  William Powell Frith, “The Fair Toxophilites”, 1872.



But man, this is a rickety, stuffy old world.  We spent a page or more last night on which old New York families could really claim to be truly distinguished.  It’s interesting so see an America, or a segment of it, so concerned with mimicking the Old World. I explained to my daughter that this was the conservative hidebound world of English and (in New York, at least) Dutch aristocracy that allowed few if any other ethnicities legitimacy.   It was a world that in my reading of American history is one that is gradually, painfully and wonderfully dismantled by essentially everyone else, including my own Irish ancestors, who eventually gain a seat at the table. 

Mrs. Henry van der Luyden had been Louisa Dagonet and her mother had been the granddaughter of Colonel du Lac of an old Channel Island family who had fought under Cornwallis and had settled in Maryland after the war with his bride the Lady Angelica Trevenna, fifth daughter of the Earl St. Austrey.  The tie between the Dagonets and the du Lacs of Maryland and their aristocratic Cornish kinsfolk, the Trevennas had always remained close and cordial.  Mr. and Mrs. van der Luyden had more than once paid long visits to the present house of Trevanna, the Duke of St. Austrey at his country seat in Cornwall and St. Austrey in Gloucestershire and his Grace had frequently announced his intention of some day returning their visit (without the Duchess who feared the Atlantic.)

Right.  Well.  Reading this out loud, before my daughter heads to bed, it certainly has a sleep-inducing effect.  Who cares?  Obviously they all did.  And Edith is no doubt setting this all up to illustrate their hopeless insularity.  But so far, wringing hands with Newland Archer as he wonders if May Welland is Ms. right, its slow going.  Despite the fact that 户对[1] trouble is brewing.

Last summer I took my girls and my nephew for a quick visit to the Morgan Library in Manhattan.  Somehow that is the vision that comes to my mind when I read about the Archer’s and the Mingott’s and the van der Luyden’s.  I suppose at that time, when Morgan was building his library, he would have been seen as a flashy new-money man.  Indeed there is a magazine illustration in the Morgan Library from that time that depicts the financier with an evil grin, out with a magnet in Europe drawing in all the treasures of the continent, with his great wealth. 

The library room itself is a remarkable storehouse of knowledge and stuffy refinement and at the time, it must have been not only priceless but comparatively utile collection of knowledge to have there in one place.  And of course, now the two or was it three stories of books with ladders and all the information therein could all be held on a 1TB hard drive and slipped in my breast pocket.   The illuminated manuscripts, the smell of the old hard covers and the visual impact of book upon book is still evocative and irresistible.  But like so much of the refinements that people once took so seriously, they are now relevant only as a museum collection.

Born two years after Edith won her Pulitzer, right there in New York City, Elmo Hope is skipping and thumping along, in my ears from the 1953 recording of “It’s a Lovely Day Today.”  Somehow he keeps riding the base note in a way that feels like a subway riding beneath all the pedestrian traffic overhead.  Like so many jazz greats; Sonny Rollins, and Mal Waldren and Herbie Nichols, Elmo’s parents were West Indian and moved to New York. 



Perhaps a bit more fair, a bit more colorful.  A bit more room at the top, than the New York of Newland Archer’s day.   But not for most ethnicities.  At the age of seventeen Elmo Hope was mistakenly shot by a New York City policeman when he tried to run away from a disturbance.  The case was dismissed as a frame-up.  The bullet had narrowly missed his spine. Digging his elegant, “spidery” style, where he “places a note almost anywhere, except on the beat” we can pause thankful that the cop, whatever his ethnicity, was a bad shot. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmo_Hope






[1] méndānghùduì:  the families are well-matched in terms of social status (idiom) / (of a prospective marriage partner) an appropriate match

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