Volume 2, Number 3 · March 19, 1964
A Sense of the Past
By Jean Stafford
New York Landmarks
edited by Alan Burnham
Wesleyan, 428 pp., $12.50
When Henry James revisited America in 1907, after an absence of twenty-five years, he found New York 'a terrible town.' He saw it as a prodigious, thrashing lout incessantly developing neoplasms, each more unsightly than the one it had bloodily excised to make room for the new one. History could not patinate the members of the monster because history had no time to evolve. Changing his metaphor and substituting a robot for the sub-human roughneck, he wrote in The American Scene that the city was in danger of becoming 'some colossal set of clock-works, some steel-souled machine-room of brandished arms and hammering fists and opening and closing jaws.' The skyscrapers were 'impudently new,' raucous, unapologetically 'triumphant payers of dividends.' Sites and buildings of honor and elegance remained, he granted, but they were so nudged by vulgarities and so diminished by the stalagmitic towers of commerce that they had to be hunted down with care and did not, as they had been intended to do, burst with surprise upon the delighted eye. Lamenting the obfuscation of Trinity Church, he wrote, 'Where, for the eye, is the felicity of simplified Gothic, of noble pre-eminence, that once made of this highly pleasing edifice the pride of the town and the feature of Broadway? The answer is, as obviously, that these charming elements are still there, just where they ever were, but that they have been mercilessly deprived of visibility.' If James were to rise from his grave today and if he were not speechless with indignation, his jeremiads would be a thousand times more sepulchral.
Review, 3057 words
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