American Dreams

I’ve never been to New York. Like most people though I have visited it. I have been to the New York of Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Edith Wharton and Walt Whitman. Each one shows you a particular New York. They are guides with their own agenda, happy to show you what interests them but indifferent to your own tastes. Martin Dressler by Steven Millhauser is about New York turning itself into New York. As such it is about The American Dream, and Martin Dressler is an American Dreamer.

At the end of the 19th century, when this book is set, Martin, the novel's main character, moves into a hotel built by a hopeful land speculator in the middle of farmland. The farmland is in the north of Manhattan Island:

Up here, in the wilderness, even the names changed: the Northern extension of Broadway was the Boulevard, a wide avenue of hard-packed dirt. From the high platform of the Eighty-first Street station he could see to the west the half-iced Hudson and the red-brown Palisades, to the east the thin dark river and bluish-brown hills of Brooklyn. (p.74)

It is, as I said, a book partly about New York turning into New York, the same place that Whitman observed:

On the river the shadowy group, the big steam-tug closely flank’d on each side by the barges—the hay-boat, the belated lighter,
On the neighboring shore, the fires from the foundry chimneys burning high and glaringly into the night,
Casting their flicker of black, contrasted with wild red and yellow light, over the tops of houses, and down into the clefts of streets.

That’s Crossing Brooklyn Ferry. There are times in the Millhauser’s book where Martin walks though the city of New York paying close attention to its energy and industry. He observes it as a capitalist but it is described as if he were a poet:

From trains rushing north and south he pointed at the tops of horsecars and brewer’s wagons, at wharves and square riggers and barrel heaped barges, at awnings stained rust-red from the showers of iron particles ground off by the El train brake shoes. He pointed at open windows through which they could see women bent over sewing machines and coatless men in vests playing cards around a table, pointing at intersecting avenues and distant high hotels - and there in the sky, a miracle of steel- frame construction, the American Surety building, twenty stories high… (p.95)

Both authors are clearly describing the same place: a city making itself - from the busy hands of women at sewing machines, to the steel-frame buildings and the foundry chimneys burning high into the night. A place of capitalist dreams.

The curious thing about The American Dream is that it is both the hard-headed, restless, pursuit of business, and a dream with all the fantastical, surreal and languid possibilities of a dream. The pursuit of business and the experience of dreams both seem to share other characteristics though. They have a never ending, never satisfied quality to them, and as they go on they both seem to become more and more elaborate, eventually over-extending and collapsing into thin air.

The beginning of Martin's vision starts when he is nine and he goes with his family to Coney Island. Standing in the sea, with his back to the beach, he has the first of many visions:

Here at the end of the line, here at the world’s end, the world didn’t end: iron piers stretched out over the ocean, iron towers pierced the sky, somewhere under the water a great telegraph cable longer than the longest train stretched past sunken ships and octopuses all the way to England – and Martin had the odd sensation, as he stood quietly in lifting and falling waves, that the world, immense and extravagant, was rushing away in every direction. (p.16)

Martin is attracted to vast networks of order. Here he is sitting in the lobby of hotel:

What seized his innermost attention… was the sense of a great, elaborate structure, a system of order, a well-planned machine that drew all these people to itself and carried them up and down in iron cages and arranged them in private rooms. He admired the hotel as an invention, an ingenious design, a kind of idea, like a steam boiler or a suspension bridge. But could you say that a bridge or a steam boiler was an idea? (p.24)

They are ideas that turn into things, and these things are impressive, but they also seem to urge us on to both greater achievements and greater follies. As the book progresses the capitalist fantasies become grander to match Dressler’s growing business success.

And at once he saw: deep under the earth, in darkness impenetrable, an immense dynamo was humming. Above the dynamo was an underground hive of shops, with electric lights and steam heat, and above the shops an underground park or garden with what seemed to be a theatre of some kind. Above the ground a great lobby stretched away: elevator doors opened and closed, people strode in and out, bells rang, the squeak of the valises mingled with the rattle of many keys and the ringing of many telephones, alcove opened into alcove as far as the eye could see. Above the lobby rose two floors of public rooms and then the private rooms began, floor after floor of rooms, higher and higher, a vertical city, a white tower, a steel flower – and always elevators rising and falling, from the cloud-piercing top to the darkness where the dynamo hummed. Martin had less the sense of observing the building than of inhabiting it at every point: he rose and fell in the many elevators, he strolled through the parlour of an upper room and walked in the underground park or garden – and then it was as if the structure was his own body, his head piercing the clouds, his feet buried deep in the earth, and in his blood the plunge and rise of elevators. (pp.173-4)

It is passages like this in the book where I feel the magic of Whitman tips into the madness of Fritz Lang where a city might look like the grand, anonymous vision above, and where people might feel like this:



Whitman and Lang sit either side of the time when this novel is set. Whitman can see the smokestacks without alarm, although not perhaps without unease:

I too lived—Brooklyn, of ample hills, was mine;
I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan Island, and bathed in the waters around it;

I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,
In the day, among crowds of people, sometimes they came upon me,
In my walks home late at night, or as I lay in my bed, they came upon me.

Lang, creating his movies after World War One, from a country prostrated by inflation and unemployment, has a less romantic vision in mind. It seems to me that both Whitman and Lang exist in the book Martin Dressler, as both exist in the idea of the American Dream. It is dream that is restless, and we live in a restless age. What has been built by the hands at the sewing machines, and the cranes pointing through the sky has been wonderful, but Whitman were he alive today would not be bathing in the waters around Manhattan, nor would he be able to take the fresh farm air from the ample hills of Brooklyn.


Martin Dressler
Steven Millhauser
Crown Publishers, New York, 1996

Time is the school in which we learn

In May, 1998, the day before I went to Japan, my mother and I walked along Oriental Parade in Wellington. It was a sunny day. We sat on one of the park benches on the Parade and looked out across the harbour to the dock cranes and the office blocks. My mother told me that one of things she missed when my father died was someone to tell things to. I knew that what she was telling me then was that this was what she would miss again when I went overseas. At that time I was supposed to be going for a year, but it turned into five, almost six years in the end.

The story my mother told me about missing the simple act of being able to tell my father something came back to me when I was reading Joan Didion’s book The Year of Magical Thinking.

In December 2003 Didion’s daughter fell ill and went into septic shock. While she was hospitalised and put into a coma, Joan’s husband John died of a heart attack. They had been married for forty years.

For a long time I read The Year of Magical Thinking and enjoyed it, but didn’t feel the impact I thought I was supposed to be feeling. When people write “I can’t imagine dying without this book” in the blurb on the back cover I think it is fair enough for the reader to expect impact.

The impact came in Chapter Seventeen when Didion’s record began to resonate against the stories in my own family:

I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I need to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of a response. I read something in the paper I would normally have read to him. I noticed some change in the neighbourhood that would interest him. (p.194)

I know that in 1978 the Terrace Tunnel opened in Wellington. I believe this was the final stage in the new motorway development. This was the motorway development that controversially bisected the Bolton Street Cemetery. I also know that Star Wars came to New Zealand in 1978. I know both of these things because my father died in 1978. My mother told me that my father wanted to see Star Wars when he was sick, and that they went, and that he enjoyed it but she didn’t because it was so loud and he was ill. She also told me that it seemed like a race at times when it came to the Terrace Tunnel; would he live to see it opened?

My mother and father were married for quite a long time given that he died when I was five. Given that he died when I was five I have not learned a lot about how a marriage works from my mother and father; just about how it is remembered. Although Didion’s book is about the death of her husband it is also about her marriage: “Marriage is memory, marriage is time.” The final part of the book is about how marriage and a person are begun to be remembered:

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.

Let them become the photograph on the table.
Let them become the name on the trust accounts.
Let go of them in the water.

Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of them in the water.

I have lived my life with the photograph on the table. It was only really when I became a father that I began to be bothered by silly questions. Was my father taller than me or shorter? What did his voice sound like? Was he a dad that changed nappies or was he a chauvinist? It is curious that this book makes me reflect on these things, because most of the book is not likely to.

Quite a lot of this book specifically describes the events surrounding John’s death, quite a lot is about the daughter’s illnesses. Didion’s observations are interesting. She notices for example that when tragedy erupts the survivors and witnesses normally note afterward how ordinary the day was before the lightening strike of catastrophe. She notices that although grief is actually seriously deranging it is not something people expect treatment for even in the modern American age of counselling and therapy. These are interesting things to say and combined with the awfulness of the events described make the first two thirds of the book compelling.

However, I felt that the book only really began to speak in its final third:

We are not idealised wild things. We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.

Time is the school in which we learn, / Time is the fire in which we burn: Delmore Schwartz again.

I remember despising the book Dylan Thomas’s widow Caitlin wrote after her husband’s death, Leftover Life to Kill. I remember being dismissive of, even censorious, about her “self-pity,” her “whining,” her “dwelling on it.” Leftover Life to Kill was published in 1957. I was twenty-two years old. Time is the school in which we learn.

I think this is very good writing. The death of my father means more to me now that it did when I was five. The phrase: “marriage is memory, marriage is time” makes sense to me now. Fifteen years ago I would not have noticed these six words in the book. Time is the school.

What do we learn in the school of time? Wouldn’t most of us rather be twenty-two again and able to sneer at the middle-aged? I used to think so, but now I must acknowledge that when I was twenty-two I had no wife, and no child, and was really only a boy who hadn’t noticed that his father was dead. I was a boy that didn’t really understand how loss operated in the life of those left behind. It is now the time for my generation to begin to understand those things for themselves.

The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion
Fourth Estate, London, 2005