12.

A Hint of Things to Come

PAUL AUSTER, A RENAISSANCE IN FORT GREENE

When Paula Fox and L. J. Davis were writing about the beginnings of the so-called brownstone movement, its future was, at the very least, unclear. As Desperate Characters and A Meaningful Life suggest, if anything Brooklyn and New York were on the way down in the late sixties and early seventies, as was urban America at large. In 1968, a high-ranking New York official said, “The city has begun to die.” Seven years later, it went broke. Crack cocaine, the AIDS epidemic, and the city’s highest recorded crime rates were still to come. Brooklyn could have gone the way of Detroit.

Instead it has had a renaissance. This revival has often been traced back to the return migration of white-collar home owners and the brownstone movement, but to link the developments too closely is to imply a history more simple than the real thing. The college-educated renovators began arriving in earnest in the sixties, as Fox, Davis, and Jonathan Lethem’s parents did, and in 1971 Davis was already hailing brownstone Brooklyn—and not only the Heights—as a haven for writers. But home restoration and cultural vitality would not be the lead story for a long time to come. Many gave up waiting for Brooklyn to feel safe and prosperous, picking up stakes and leaving it behind. In the 1970s, Brooklyn lost 14 percent of its population and fully a third of its white residents. Violence in New York City reached a new high in 1981. Four years later, the leading cause of death for New Yorkers in their early twenties was homicide. (For ages twenty-five to forty-four, it was AIDS.) And the crime rate in the late eighties and early nineties surpassed the record mark again.

In other respects, conditions improved in the eighties as the city climbed out of its mid-seventies fiscal hole. During the mid-eighties bull market, the New York employment picture brightened considerably. Median family income increased by 29 percent over the course of the decade, compared to 8 percent for the nation as a whole. Mayor Ed Koch, who asked “How’m I doing?” as he made the rounds of the city with a smile, was reelected with 78 percent of the vote in 1985. But as economic inequality increased, the image of Brooklyn as a forbidding place had some basis in fact. In the midst of a downturn in 1991, a Guyanese boy in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn was killed by a car in a motorcade accompanying the Lubavitcher rebbe, the leader of a Hassidic sect, and several days of race rioting followed, during which a Jewish man was stabbed to death. The Crown Heights riots brought national attention, another scar on Brooklyn’s face. Real estate prices in the borough declined by 26 percent between 1989 and 1996. Decades after the brownstoners arrived, it wasn’t clear they were winning the day. Brooklyn neighborhoods varied widely and brownstone Brooklyn was spared the worst of the city’s ills. But young Dylan’s experience in The Fortress of Solitude, cowering at night on gentrifying Dean Street, reflects the reality that trouble was never too far away.

This rocky period, though, did not send the literary types packing. In fact, in many cases it kept them around. It drove living costs down far enough to allow artists to flourish. L. J. Davis, for instance, stayed on Dean Street and continued to write. Paula Fox remained in nearby Cobble Hill. In Paul Auster’s Oracle Night (2003), a writer buys a notebook in the same neighborhood in 1982. “Many writers here in Brooklyn,” says the owner of the store, a Chinese man. “Whole neighborhood full of them.” Auster himself moved to the area in 1979, when his career was, by his own account, in bad shape, but in the years to follow he gave Brooklyn some wider visibility to readers, a hint of more to come.

Born in 1947, Auster had spent his twenties and early thirties forever hard up while he struggled as a writer and translator and “everything I touched turned to failure.” In his absorbing memoir Hand to Mouth, he recounts this pre-Brooklyn period, when he and his then wife, the writer Lydia Davis, were often “no more than a short dry spell from real poverty.” The account is so full of cruel twists, humiliations, and defeats that one wonders how he kept it together. Having opted out of a life devoted to the pursuit of money, Auster found himself thinking about nothing but the pursuit of money as his wallet ran on empty. He began to consider himself an ex-writer and looked around for any source of income, only that didn’t work either: “I had made a total surrender, had capitulated on every point I had defended over the years, and still I was getting nowhere.” His marriage broke up and his father died two months later, hitting him hard. But the “terrible irony” was that his father’s will gave him some financial breathing room.

When Auster arrived in Brooklyn shortly thereafter, though, he was still virtually unknown. He lived first in Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill and then moved to Park Slope, where he still resides. His career changed dramatically beginning in the late seventies and early to mid-eighties. In 1982 he published The Invention of Solitude, a moving work that’s hard to place between memoir and novel, and then he made his breakthrough with the novella City of Glass (1985). It’s a tale of mistaken identity and risky intrigue that grew out of two phone calls Auster received at his Brooklyn apartment in 1980. The man calling asked for the Pinkerton Agency both times. Auster told him he had the wrong number, but he began to wonder what might have happened if he’d pretended to be a detective for the agency. In City of Glass, a New York writer named Quinn (a pseudonym Auster used in college) gets three calls asking for a detective named Paul Auster, and on the third he takes the case—“and at that moment the madness begins,” in Auster’s words.

City of Glass and its follow-ups Ghosts and The Locked Room, which together form his best-known volume, The New York Trilogy, bear the hallmarks of nearly all of Auster’s now copious body of work: a combination of a plot-driven style and straight-ahead prose with some of the classic tropes of postmodernism—blurred genre boundaries, framing devices, a hall-of-mirrors atmosphere, and a casting of doubt on the teller of the tale. Auster shows an abiding and central interest in “the music of chance”—the title of one of his novels. Uncanny coincidences are a consistent thread both in his fiction, sometimes at a cost to credibility, and in his nonfiction (notably “The Red Notebook” and the longer memoirs). When these unlikely events crop up, often at crucial junctures, a reader willing to believe in them can become swept into a way of looking at the world that is both pleasingly accessible and full of a wonderment that can send shivers down the neck. Life is strange and beautiful, the work seems to say. Look around. The comparison that comes to mind in this respect is John Irving. Both authors have become household names. Auster’s reputation has suffered some in recent years but he remains very popular, particularly overseas, where he sells extraordinarily well and where many regard him as a literary lion of the first order. His work has been translated into forty-one languages. In Germany, taxi drivers have asked for his autograph.

Brooklyn makes appearances throughout Auster’s work as a locale or a character’s hometown, but Auster hasn’t devoted too much artistic energy to capturing its particularities. He is not a practitioner of the social novel, and his books have focused more on favored themes and on conceptual and plot-related schemas than on place. Often they resemble parables, with a free-floating quality to the narrative. “The address is unimportant,” he writes in Ghosts, set in the late forties. “But let’s say Brooklyn Heights, for the sake of argument.” In that story, the neighborhood’s livable scale, its small-town urbanity, plays some role. The protagonist, a private eye named Blue, is able to follow the movements of Black (on behalf of a client called White) while living in a brownstone apartment across the street from Black’s, and on the same floor. Blue can trace Black’s activities and his comings and goings mostly from the window, or by following him on an errand or a short walk. The neighborhood’s past is mentioned—Henry Ward Beecher preaching down the street, Walt Whitman printing Leaves of Grass nearby—but this is a background concern in the story, a bait-and-switch identity drama whose mood of queasy disorientation recalls Mailer’s Barbary Shore, which takes place in the same neighborhood and period.

Oracle Night is set mostly in early-eighties Brooklyn and conveys a bit of the flavor of the place then. The protagonist, a writer who has not been working for some time, lives in Cobble Hill, and his wife has a job in the art department at a book publisher. In the novel, Court Street, a main thoroughfare of the neighborhood, is not grim or threatening, but it has a down-at-the-heel aspect that’s gone missing today. (Now you’ll find a Starbucks, upscale boutiques, and a recently expanded, light-filled bookstore.) The stationery store where the character buys the notebook is “the only bright façade in a row of shabby, undistinguished buildings.” Another shop selling household goods is a dusty hole in the wall with half-empty shelves. Someone breaks into the couple’s home and commits a robbery, and the landlord assumes it’s “one of them goddamn junkies.” But the culprit turns out to be someone the couple knows, and the tale takes a turn into an off-kilter reality where a notebook might have mystical properties and stories always have more stories within them, which might or might not be true.

Two films Auster wrote, Smoke and Blue in the Face (both 1995), revolve around a cigar shop in Park Slope, at the corner of Seventh Avenue and Third Street, where a novelist named Paul Benjamin, the protagonist, is a regular customer. Smoke features an ensemble cast and touches on the crime and drug use that was relatively common in other parts of the borough at the time, but its thematic weight comes not from such material but from those always unsettling moments when chance alters fate. (One creepy anecdote the main character tells, about a skier finding his father’s body encased in ice on a mountain, is borrowed from Ghosts. The father’s body is frozen at about the age the son has reached, making for a frightful mirroring.) Blue in the Face, codirected by Auster and full of celebrity cameos, has a more antic and buoyant feel.

In Auster’s novel Brooklyn Follies (2006), the place is a generally benign backdrop. An older man, estranged from his family after a divorce, picks a now fully gentrified Park Slope as a suitable destination to live out his days. He happens to run into a beloved nephew, who is visited in turn by an unexpected relative, and soon the protagonist is forming a new impromptu family of an unlikely kind. The novel, a rather frictionless tale about the surprising ways the past can loop back and affect the present, goes down like an egg cream. A note of foreboding that appears on the final page is not sufficient to shake the gentleness of the reading experience. The book portrays Park Slope as a pleasant village-within-a-city, diverse, good for people watching and chance encounters, and blandly appealing.

Sunset Park, Auster’s 2010 novel that takes place contemporaneously, once more concerns itself with “the imponderables of fate, the strangeness of life, the what-ifs and might-have-beens.” The book takes its title from the Brooklyn neighborhood where several of its main characters decide to squat in a forlorn, abandoned house across from the huge Green-Wood Cemetery. It’s a time of recession, and the leader of the group has trouble managing the rent on his quirky shop on Park Slope’s Fifth Avenue. A roommate of his is also escaping the cost of Park Slope, where she works as a real estate agent on prime Seventh Avenue, just where Pete Hamill’s father worked through beers at the pubs. Auster evokes, at moments, the ungentrified Sunset Park, a mishmash of immigrant populations where one of his characters wanders around depressed by “an area without banks or bookstores, only check-cashing operations and a decrepit public library, a small world apart.” Ultimately the book is about splintered families, one real and the other makeshift, and the tone of Austerian wonder modulates into some darker notes.

Although he has not delved too far beneath the surface of Brooklyn, Auster has stoked curiosity about its wider literary scene for three decades, since before there was steady talk of such a scene. He joined Davis and Fox as precursors to the literary newcomers of today. Tourists have been known to ask Park Slope residents where they can find Auster and his wife, the writer Siri Hustvedt. And where’s that bar from Smoke where the novelist hung out? (The interior is the Brooklyn Inn, a Boerum Hill favorite of the publishing crowd.)

*   *   *

Just when Auster was hitting his stride in the eighties, another important cultural development was taking shape in Fort Greene, the brownstone neighborhood where crime drove Marianne Moore away in the sixties and where “an air of lawlessness” in the seventies kept people indoors at night, as Barbara Habenstreit wrote. By the mid-eighties, as Nelson George writes in his memoir City Kid (2009), the area was becoming the place to be for a generation of black creative talent. The streets still had a raw edge to them, but George had seen worse.

Born in 1957, he was raised mostly in the Samuel J. Tilden housing projects in Brownsville. In his childhood, the impoverished Jewish community Alfred Kazin knew, a vista of dank little apartment buildings, was becoming an impoverished black community instead, a vista of government-run towers. Toughness reigned. “The motto of Brownsville … was ‘I’m from the ’Ville. I never ran and never will,’” George writes. But for him the reality was different: “My father ran.” George’s mother raised him and his sister alone in the projects: “We were just a living, breathing statistic from the infamous Moynihan report on dysfunctional black families.” But his mother believed in education, and he spent hours at the same public library where young Kazin had passed his time. George emerged as a pioneering music journalist, covering the rise and fall of Motown and R & B and the dizzying ascent of hip-hop. He had a regular column in the Village Voice called “Native Son,” in honor of Richard Wright, a formative influence, and he also became a prolific novelist, screenwriter, and filmmaker.

“That where I live!” a young film director named Spike Lee said when George told him in 1985 that he was moving to Fort Greene. George didn’t know until years later that his new place at 19 Willoughby Avenue was half a block from the house where Wright lived when he wrote Native Son. Artists of all kinds were arriving, passing around word of the cheap rent and the atmosphere of creative ferment, intangible but real. Lee, who had been living in a lousy apartment on Adelphi Street off of Myrtle, made a splash with his 1986 film set in Fort Greene, She’s Gotta Have It. A home-skillet sex comedy with a singular style, the movie sent ripples that spread far beyond Brooklyn. “Suddenly black nerds were chic,” George writes of the effect of She’s Gotta Have It, adding, “The bookish gal, the scholarly teen, the wannabe historian, the dedicated cinephile, while celebrated during black history month, had rarely been icons. Spike’s visibility changed that.” Lee’s bigger-budget follow-up, Do the Right Thing (1989), looks at race and violence through the prism of one sweltering day on a block in Bed-Stuy, and it made an even larger impact. Ethnic tension and crime were pressing matters in Brooklyn at the time; the murder in Bensonhurst of a black man by Italian Americans became a prominent issue in the mayoral campaign the same year the film came out. Do the Right Thing gave a picture of the contested streets on a personal level, where emotions ran high. It also launched many film careers into the upper echelons.

Lee became a cornerstone of a local artistic scene in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill that came to include a notable lineup: a number of jazz legends such as Wynton and Branford Marsalis; the writers Thulani Davis, Lisa Jones, Carl Hancock Rux, and in later years Danzy Senna and Touré; the artist Lorna Simpson; the actors Wesley Snipes, Rosie Perez, and Chris Rock; and the musicians Vernon Reid, Daddy-O of Stetsasonic, and Common. At the Brooklyn Moon Café on Fulton Street, still in operation, audiences watched spoken word and other acts by performers like Mos Def, Saul Williams, and Erykah Badu. The crowd applauded by snapping their fingers so as not to wake the neighbors. As George told me, the place was Brooklyn’s answer to Manhattan’s Nuyorican Poets Café. Although some novels and poetry emerged from this crowd, the impulse to create channeled itself most commonly into the performing arts. George ascribes the trend in part to an emphasis on collaboration. Participating in one another’s work, and feeding off of it, was part of the appeal.

This “golden age,” as George has called it, took shape just as New York City was recording all-time highs in crime, in the late eighties and early nineties. A lot of the violence occurred in areas rougher than Fort Greene, but it was no middle-class paradise. The projects on Myrtle Avenue still bred crime—“you didn’t fuck with Myrtle,” George told me—and drugs remained a destructive local force, with dangerously cheap crack cocaine replacing heroin. Drug pushers stood outside bodegas by the pay phones and worked Fort Greene Park. (One area kid began dealing drugs at age twelve around this time, on the streets near his family’s apartment at 226 St. James Place: Christopher Wallace, later known as Biggie Smalls or the Notorious B.I.G.) But again, as George has written, the advantage for the creative crowd was that fear of Brooklyn, particularly among whites, drove rents down far enough for artists to thrive. You could pick up odd jobs here and there and spend the rest of your time working on your labors of love in a nice apartment. The bohemian life was possible. There weren’t many restaurants and you had to be careful at night, but to people like George it was a great place to be.

“My friends and I used to joke,” he wrote in a recent essay, “that the presence of these crack dealers on select corners ‘protected’ us from real estate speculators and home-hungry Manhattanites.”

That didn’t last.