FICTION: Pangs of Gianthood

(3 of 6)

He winds up in fly-blown Bowery lodgings with Becka, daughter of his old friends, the Lipshitzes. She is now widow and harlot but still handsome, still "square." He takes her to the Jewish Alps (168th Street), marries her. He joins the staff of Almon Strauss, a philanthropist who dreams of "a tremendous city rising . . .", a beautiful, spacious, open-hearted city to replace cruel chaos.

Becka, big with child, goes to hear Billy Sunday. In the hysteria she is crushed by an automobile; killed. John goes on working under Almon Strauss, planning a better city. But chaos increases. The evening that Black Tom, freighted with T. N. T., detonates off the Battery, the evening before the years when the War is to detonate in Europe, Almon Strauss's chief engineer shoots himself, John replaces him. But planning a new city seems futile. . . . John is wounded in France, recovers, stretches bridge spans in South America. Somewhat relieved, he returns to work again for Dreamer Strauss. But his surveys of Manhattan subways, sewage, traffic and domiciling reveal conditions so overwhelmingly horrible that even Dreamer Strauss loses heart. The planning bureau is abandoned. John Breen prepares to leave Manhattan forever. He will marry the divorced and devoted Josephine. They are both rich. They will take his father's name and idle over the world. . . .

At Josephine's door John reads a last note from Almon Strauss: ". . . Hundred-million-dollar foundation . . . stop planning . . . begin to rebuild the tenements. The city needs you." John Breen, last of the Van Horns, joins Dreamer Strauss to recreate Manhattan.

The Significance. "This is a plain history of a complicated, messed up, romantic and terrific city, a city full of fornication, murder and sudden death." The last notable book about Manhattan, Manhattan Transfer by romantic Author John Dos Passes (1925), confined itself far more narrowly to the contents thus described than does this new volume. Herein are the engineering, political and financial epics, flung together with the social epic in a welter quite as prodigious qua novel as Manhattan is qua city. The human touch is correspondingly unreliable, too; John Breen and the rest of the characters have reality as seldom as individuals in a crowd at Times Square. Yet enormous gusto informs their story. And at one, point the reader comes upon 19 solid pages of neo-Whitmanian yawp about what Manhattan is, e.g. "Fireful, alluring, magnetic city of lies. Home of harlots, preachers, princes, janitors ... Sodom, Gomorrah, Babylon, Jerusalem, Kansas City . . . City of tenderloins . . . hors d-oeuvres . . . circumcisions . . . captive elephants . . . cornetists practicing by day . . . contraceptions, contraptions . . . blind balboas . . . psychlones... night sweats . . . grey postmen . . . maztoth . . . Holy Eucharist . . . Standard Oil . . . college campus of the Diplodocus . . . petters . . . melons . . . ikons . . . City worth considering . . . worth-while city. . . ."