Brooklyn Is: Southeast of the Island: Travel Notes

Agee's Brooklyn

age e’s bro oklyn by Jonathan Lethem i want to try and sing back at James Agee’s astonishing song of Brooklyn, this astonishing secret text which like the heart of the borough itself throbs in raw shambolic splendor, never completely discovered, impossible to mistake. Agee is such a loving, explosive, and mournful singer; his prose aims the methods of Walt Whitman like a loving bullet toward the next century, brings that greatest singer of American identity smash up against the midcentury’s grubby, boundless polyglot accumulation of successive immigrant hordes, and predicts the outerborough songs to come, the ones that could only have been written by immigrant sons and daughters themselves—Malamud, Fuchs, Paley, Gornick, Marshall—though Agee, much like Whitman, can seem to encompass and predict any author who ever tried to touch Brooklyn since: Henry Miller, Paula Fox, myself. Agee’s breath and voice come cresting at us out of the past yet keenly modern, and engaged in every syllable with the tides of the past that rush under the craft of his words—Agee can seem to be surfing the past, always in danger of being swallowed by the high punishing curl of time,always somehow riding atop it instead. Yet if he’s a singer he’s also a painter, brushstroking with his language the sunbleached brownstone facades of Slope and Heights and Hill, the shingles and stucco of Flatbush and Greenpoint, the graffiti and commercial signage left like clues for future archeologists—the brush of his prose is as fond and melancholy as Mark Rothko’s in his subway paintings or Philip Guston ’s in his street scenes, before both painters sank their feeling for the city in abstraction. He writes as though drunk on matters of space and geometry and distance, always seeing the life of the city whole and in microscopic miniature at once, and viii persistently smashing together architecture and emotion, conveying in the grain of a“scornful cornice ” or a “blasted mansion” or a “half-made park with the odd pubescent nudity of all new public efforts” or “drawn breathing shades” or an “asphaltic shingle” (his neologism suggesting “asthmatic ,”“exalted,”“sephardic,”and who knows what else) his sense that the archipelago of islands settled by the mad invaders of this continent and the refugees who followed, and the nature of the buildings and the streets and the signs the arrivistes constructed everywhere upon these New York islands, are in every way implicated in the experience of any given life lived even temporarily within their bounds, including his own. The shape of the land, in other words—and of the houses and trees and roadways, and the subways now running underneath them—has, in Agee’s view, subdued and civilized and corrupted those who had arrived to subdue and civilize and corrupt this place; they made it strange and were made strange by it in turn. Agee tackles head-on Brooklyn’s doubleness, the paradox of the borough’s weird preening inferiority complex at its proximity to Manhattan and its simultaneous bovine oblivious hugeness, ix its indifference to attempts at definition—including Agee’s own. He nevertheless made himself so open, such a portal for collective presence, that he truly can seem to have managed to allude to every icon of the place, every glorious shred of ruined culture a Brooklynite might ever flatter himself thinking only he’d cherished, and to have mentioned every talismanic name, Ex-Lax, Adelphi, Dekalb, finding vital concrete poetry in the enigma of the names, stitching time together, speaking to every Brooklyn dweller, past or future. In my own instance, Agee paints at one point a devastating cameo of Brooklyn Heights gentility and insularity (subtitled: the dusk of the Gods); reporting his snobbish host’s fear, that “Negroes” and “Syrians” are “within two blocks of us”; those same “Syrians” now own great swaths of the neighborhood in question, which truly belongs more to them than to any other constituency (and where is the great novel of ArabAmerican immigrant life on Atlantic Avenue?); they are, in fact, the landlords of the apartment on Bergen Street in which I sit writing this today—so it may seem that Agee is at my shoulder. The essay’s prose is, at last, more than tidal, it’s cyclonic, as the narrative rises up on the swirling imaged-junked x [52.14.126.74...