The Absent City: Istanbul and American Writing

One of the most common scams (and one of the most interesting uses of technology) in Istanbul is the Shoe Shine Drop. A shoeshiner walks just ahead of a tourist with his shoeshine box strapped to his shoulder, pulls a little hidden lever, and releases the catch that holds his brush to the box, dropping it at your feet. You pick it up, he offers you a free shoeshine, you graciously accept this token of gratitude for your act of largesse, and then he shouts bloody murder all the way down the street if you don’t give him twice the regular price. Never mind whether your shoes needed shining. I once had someone try this on me while I was wearing flip-flops.

I mention this because, for a North American in Istanbul, the straight that separates what you’re doing from what you think you’re doing can often be as wide, as difficult to navigate, and as fascinatingly beautiful as the Bosphorus—that narrow stretch of water which, as every tour guide will tell you, both divides and connects Europe and Asia, the East and the West. Sometimes generosity and open-mindedness can be very close to condescension and cultural blindness. Sometimes when you think you’ve made a deal, or a friend, you might also be getting taken to the cleaners.

That divide at the center of the city is also at the center of two recent books about American writers in Istanbul. Magdalena J. Zaborowska’s James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile (2009) takes a close and personal look at the much-neglected effects Istanbul had on Baldwin’s literary and theatrical projects with a series of interviews and closely considered analysis of his social circle and how his residency in the city affected his sense of belonging and identity. Kim Fortuny’s American Writers in Istanbul (2009) takes a longer view, with a chapter each on the reactions to the city of Melville, Twain, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Bowles, Algren, Baldwin, and Settle. The ways in which these American writers have reacted to the city often say far more about American attitudes than they do about the places and people they describe.

Istanbul, formerly Constantinople, occupies a curious position in the American imagination. Perhaps going west has for so long been synonymous with newness and progress that going east can seem like going in reverse. But as both Fortuny and Zaborowska show, an astute observer in such a position quickly realizes that objects in a cultural mirror may be closer than they appear. The question of whether or not Turkey is (or ought to be) part of Europe dominates discussion in Germany, France, Britain, and the Netherlands, but that question has a different resonance when posed in America, where it is less directly tied to an implicit issue of whether or not us includes them.

Fortuny’s book does an excellent job of exposing, and responding to, the hidden agendas and cultural blind spots of a long historical relationship between the city and various American identities and concerns. Zaborowska’s book is itself part travelogue; in exploring James Baldwin’s relationship to the city, it carries on the tradition of American travel writing in its own narrative of research, interviews, and cultural exploration. Present cultural concerns do not spring fully formed from the NATO charter, and the questions being considered in many Western countries now are the questions that have been posed for a hundred, if not five hundred, years.

Fortuny’s strength is close, contextualized reading, and her treatment of Hemingway’s telegraph press dispatches from the revolutionary war is particularly impressive. As the Allied occupational forces turned a blind eye, the Greek army landed at Izmir (Smyrna) and pushed rapidly north and east into Anatolia against the under-equipped and disorganized remnants of the crumbling Ottoman Empire with the weight of western European...