If there’s a line in “The Last Spin” that places the story firmly in Manhattan (and, I would guess, somewhere in the northern reaches thereof, East Harlem or Washington Heights, say), that’s not a claim I can make for Edgar Allan Poe’s entry. Now, you would think Poe would have set something in Manhattan, given that the spent so much time in residence here. He lived on West 3rd Street for a time, and there was a great outcry a few years ago when New York University, determined to turn all of Greenwich Village into dormitory space, set out to knock down the Poe house and build something in its place. And he also lived on West 84th Street, which the city fathers have subsequently named after him. (But don’t give that street name to a cabby. These days it’s hard enough to pick one who can find West 84th Street.)
I read my way through all of Poe’s stories, or at least enough of each to determine where it took place, and while the man set stories in Charleston and Paris and in no end of murky landscapes, he doesn’t seem to have set anything in Manhattan. He spent quite a few years here, and while they may not have been terribly happy years, well, how many of those did the man have, anyway?
And how could I leave this Manhattanite out of this volume?
So I stretched a point and selected “The Raven.” He was living in Manhattan when he wrote it, and it takes place in the residence of the narrator, who is clearly a fictive equivalent of the author himself. How much of a stretch is it to presume that the book-lined chamber that serves as its setting (with its purple curtains and many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore) is situated like so many other book-lined chambers on Manhattan’s Upper West Side? On, say, West 84th Street?
Works for me.
But wait, you say. (Yes, you. I can hear you.) Wait a minute. “The Raven.” Uh, isn’t it, well, a poem?
So?
Yes, “The Raven” is a poem — and a magnificent one at that. And Poe is not the only poet to be found herein. It’s my great pleasure to present to you the work of two other poets, Horace Gregory and Geoffrey Bartholomew. Both are, to my mind, superb practitioners of their craft. Both are represented here by works set very specifically in Manhattan. And the works of both, like “The Raven,” are indisputably noir.
I became acquainted with Horace Gregory’s work almost as long ago as I read “The Last Spin,” and it too made an enduring impression. Specifically, I was taken with a group of Gregory’s early poems, originally published under the title Chelsea Rooming House, and consisting of poetic monologues by the various inhabitants of that building. There is a lingering darkness in the work that made my only problem that of deciding which of the poems to include, and the reader who samples these may well be moved to go on and read the rest of them.
Much more recently, Geoffrey Bartholomew published The McSorley Poems. McSorley’s is an historic saloon in the East Village — We were here before you were born, proclaims the sign over its door, and the sign itself has been making that claim since, well, before you were born — and Bartholomew has been tending its bar for a quarter of a century. He’s a longtime friend of mine, and when he offered me a prepublication look at The McSorley Poems, I found myself reminded of Chelsea Rooming House. The work of either of these poets, dark and rich and ironic and dripping in noir, would sweeten this book; together, they compliment one another; with “The Raven” for company, they make an even more vivid statement.
Yes, they’re poems, all of them, and fine poems in the bargain. And who’s to say that the notion of noir ought to confine us to prose? The term (which really only means black in French) first came into wide usage as a label for certain films of the 1940s and ’50s. When it moved into prose fiction, it seemed early on to be inextricably associated with big cities, as if the term urban noir were redundant. The novels of Daniel Woodrell have since been categorized quite properly as country noir, and Akashic’s great noir franchise, ranging as far afield as Havana and Dublin, makes it abundantly clear that noir knows no geographic limitations.
Nor does time serve as a boundary. If the term came about in the middle third of the past century, that doesn’t mean that the noir sensibility had not been in evidence before then. Consider Stephen Crane; his first novel, Maggie, A Girl of the Streets, could hardly better epitomize the noir sensibility, and our selection, “A Poker Game,” shows a dark soul indeed confounded by a rare example of innocent grace. Consider “Mrs. Manstey’s View,” the first published story of Edith Wharton, which appeared in Scribner’s Magazine in 1891.
Noir seems to me to transcend form. Film and theater can fit comfortably in the shade of its dark canopy, and so surely can poetry. Some operas make the cut — Verdi’s Rigoletto, it’s worth noting, had its plot lifted in Damon Runyon’s oft-anthologized “Sense of Humor.” And who could look at Goya’s black paintings and not perceive them as visual representations of noir? And what is Billie Holiday’s recording of “Gloomy Sunday” if it isn’t noir? Or the Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby, who died in the church and was buried along with her name? I’d include them, and I’d pull in Beethoven’s late quartets while I was at it.
Rather than exercise false modesty (which is the only sort of which I’m capable), I’ve included a story of my own, “In for a Penny.” It was commissioned by the BBC, to be read aloud, and their request was quite specifically for a noir story. Such commissions rarely bring out the best in a writer, but in this case the resultant story was one with which I was well pleased, and I’m happy to offer it here.
Really, how could I resist? How could I pass up the opportunity to share a volume with Stephen Crane and O. Henry and Edgar Allan Poe and and Irwin Shaw and Edith Wharton and, well, all of these literary superstars?
My mother would be so proud...
Lawrence Block
New York, NY
June 2008
Part I
The old school
Mrs. Manstey’s view
by Edith Wharton
Greenwich Village
(Originally published in 1891)
The view from Mrs. Manstey’s window was not a striking one, but to her at least it was full of interest and beauty. Mrs. Manstey occupied the back room on the third floor of a New York boarding-house, in a street where the ash-barrels lingered late on the sidewalk and the gaps in the pavement would have staggered a Quintus Curtius. She was the widow of a clerk in a large wholesale house, and his death had left her alone, for her only daughter had married in California, and could not afford the long journey to New York to see her mother. Mrs. Manstey, perhaps, might have joined her daughter in the West, but they had now been so many years apart that they had ceased to feel any need of each other’s society, and their intercourse had long been limited to the exchange of a few perfunctory letters, written with indifference by the daughter, and with difficulty by Mrs. Manstey, whose right hand was growing stiff with gout. Even had she felt a stronger desire for her daughter’s companionship, Mrs. Manstey’s increasing infirmity, which caused her to dread the three flights of stairs between her room and the street, would have given her pause on the eve of undertaking so long a journey; and without perhaps formulating these reasons she had long since accepted as a matter of course her solitary life in New York.