Gotham Diary:
Reform
12 February 2014
When I was a boy, I thought that the title of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was highly unlikely. Okay, maybe one tree. Which would be more depressing, in a way, than no trees at all.
I knew that there were no trees in New York City. The trees were all out in the suburbs, where we lived. That was what the suburbs were for: living with trees.
My mother did not like the city, and whenever we had occasion to drive in — we always drove; we never took the train — she had a knack for the unsightly route. On our way to a theatre matinee, for example, we’d pass through a number of side streets in Hell’s Kitchen. My mother made certain that we knew what the neighborhood was called and why. My stomach sank into my shoes. I knew that it wouldn’t take much for her to stop the car and order me to get out. I knew that this was what she wanted to do, even if she never did. I knew that I exasperated her, and that in some profound way she had given up hope of not being exasperated by me. And I knew that the tough Hell’s Kitchen kids would make short work of me.
There were no trees in Hell’s Kitchen. Nor were there trees on Third Avenue, beneath the El. Once, perhaps twice, we drove to Yorkville, where the charity shops were, to drop off old clothes, before the elevated tracks were demolished. The El horrified me. It blocked out the day, and it made a growling racket. It was more hellish than Hell’s Kitchen. If you’d told me that I’d spend most of my adult life in an apartment a couple of blocks away, I’d have sobbed, and, in a way, it would not have been true. The charity shops are still here. Everything else is different. Fewer and fewer of the old tenement buildings that lined Yorkville’s avenues still stand. And there are trees, if perhaps not as many as there might be.
When I was twelve, I was allowed to take the train to Grand Central and to walk a predetermined route, along 42nd Street and then Fifth Avenue, to Polk’s Hobby Shop, near the Empire State Building. I would buy something for my electric trains — the most that I could afford was an unimpressive shunting engine, but at least it was the model of a kind of steam locomotive — and then retrace my steps. Thus began my discovery of my New York City, very different from my mother’s. Eventually, I discovered Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There were easily as many trees in Central Park as there were in Bronxville.
Now I am reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Kathleen bought it at an airport bookstore on her way to a conference last month. She read it and was very moved by it. When she told me that she saw a lot of herself in Francie Nolan, I knew that she really wanted me to read the novel. I don’t believe that I would give it a try for any other reason. As Roger DeBris says in The Producers, “It’s too depressing!” There’s the poverty of Williamsburgh at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, and there might be — I couldn’t tell, but “Betty Smith” certainly pointed in this direction — pedestrian prose.
But the prose is not pedestrian; it is very tricky. Not hard to follow, but full of winks and implications. It is, in short, Brooklyn Irish. By the same token, the poverty is effervescent.
***
It is not unusual for our after-dinner conversation to turn to some aspect of history. It is really a kind of mythology, only with “actual people.” (How “actual” is my grasp of the character of, say, Elizabeth Tudor? Worries on this score do not prevent me from spinning my yarns.) I am always talking about people, not movements or trends, and the people to whom I recur become a few atoms more massive every time I revisit them. Kathleen claims to learn a lot from the stories that I tell (which utterly lack beginnings and endings), but in fact I learn even more. Every now and then, as I’m talking about something familiar, an unforeseen suggestion steps out of my words.
This happened the other night, and the suggestion that emerged concerned the disappointment of reform.
The other night, it occurred to me to ask why I associate historical reform movements with disappointment. Why are programs of reform so vulnerable to incompetence? Pick a reform movement — the Reformation, the French Revolution, The New Deal, it doesn’t matter. Reforms begin with bold moves and striking changes, sometimes quite violent ones. But they almost always seem to fizzle out without accomplishing the intended goals. (Not only did the first Reformation — Luther’s — fail to reform Rome, but it also engendered a second — Calvin’s. Instead of universal Christianity, there were three and soon more implacable antagonists.) Why is this? “Too much too fast” seems to be a constant failing of reform movements. Might this not be because reforms are invariably envisioned in terms of years, of decades at the most? Because reformers expect to implement their reforms themselves?
If we can dream up a better way of doing things, then we can put it into practice — if only everyone would cooperate! But everyone never does cooperate. Making reform universally congenial requires multi-generational planning.
Because we don’t see the need for it, we don’t know how to engineer intellectual evolution. We don’t know how to devise development plans that will take several generations to unfold. We don’t know how to teach children how to carry on our missions — we only know how to present our missions as fully-formed things, and we exhort children to maintain them. If anything, we teach children to react against our missions.
This is a hunch, not a finding. It mirrors my thinking about environmental reform and the development of positive human stewardship — whatever that might turn out to mean.
In this connection, I’d like to mention Albert O Hirschman’s elegant tract, The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy, which not only analyzes the reactionary disdain for reform but shows that the reformers exhibit a complementary confidence that stands on no firmer ground.