January 5th
For seventeen years, seven days a week, Joe Berman has efficiently presided over his newsstand at the corner of Eighty-sixth Street and Broadway. He opens it before five in the morning. Mrs. Berman, wearing a smart hair-do and a Persian lamb coat, relieves him for an hour at breakfast and for two hours in the afternoon and wishes that he would take things easier. But with the exception of this interlude of relief, Joe is alert and on duty until six thirty. Today is one of his crudest days. The temperature is 16° and a freezing wind rushes wildly up the two blocks from the river. Joe has an electric heater that keeps his feet from freezing, but the front of the stand is open to the weather. He wears a Navy pea jacket and woolen cap and stands behind a pile of magazines. Although his customers suffer in the cold, Joe is smiling and business-like and makes no complaints. He is used to the weather. Having been outdoors for so many years, he is probably in more vigorous health than most New Yorkers. Piled high with newspapers and flanked with magazines, Joe’s stand radiates intelligence throughout the neighborhood. It is the university of Eighty-sixth Street.
Being a merchant Joe sells the comic books and squalid story magazines as well as the newspapers, reviews, and intellectual magazines; and he knows all of them, including the Russian, Yiddish, German, and French language papers. He carries and gives prominent display to the New Times, which is published in Moscow. If you are interested in ideas, art, politics, racing, or news, you can hardly get along without Joe, who has the information you need. In the morning and evening the stand is blocked by hurried customers. But it attracts browsers also. Three or four people seem to be loitering in front of it and looking over the stock any hour of the day. Joe is a quiet, soft-spoken man who talks pleasantly when he is spoken to and is a mine of information about the publishing business. Since he rarely leaves his corner, it is surprising that he knows so much in detail about the people and business methods of the local newspapers. He gives me more informed gossip about the Times than I get for myself.
January 15th
When a playwright becomes successful he settles down to a busy and fascinating life in the microcosm of Broadway. For Broadway is one of the best places in which to learn and practice the craft of playwrighting. Nearly a hundred new plays turn up here in the course of a season. Good and bad, they are worth studying. Moreover, Broadway is a compact, voluble community in which plays are fiercely searched, analyzed and discussed by a multitude of keen minds absorbed in the lore of the theater. Nothing in the writing or acting of a drama escapes the sharp eyes that Broadway turns on its own product. From the point of view of craftsmanship Broadway offers a stimulating course of instruction.
But a serious writer needs more than craftsmanship in the composition of a play. He needs material; he needs material sorely. He must draw on the experience of human beings—either his own or that of other people. In this respect Broadway is virtually destitute. It is an eccentric and closed community that has very little concrete information about the life of the world. It is dependent upon information and experience brought in from the outside. President Lowell of Harvard once explained how universities acquire so much learning: “The freshmen bring a little in and the
seniors take none out, so that it accumulates throughout the years,” he said.
Something of the same situation applies to Broadway. Young people bring their own experience to Broadway from all parts of the country and from all groups of society. But for the most part they are isolated from the normal experience of ordinary people as long as they isolate themselves on Broadway. For the creative writer this can be a fatal experience. He cannot write illuminating plays about life from seeing other plays or from listening to the gossip that sputters around Broadway. At some time or other he must renew his association with people. Even books are not primary sources. There is no substitute for people.
August 1st
Herman Melville was born at 6 Pearl Street on this day in 1819. At the age of thirty-two he finished the great American epic Moby Dick at his farm in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. A wild, terrible dance on the rim of chaos, it was, he said, ”broiled in hell-fire.” It gutted him and wrecked his health. It was also a complete publishing failure. Two years after he had finished this mighty work, all the plates and unsold copies were burned in the fire that destroyed the Harpers’ publishing plant. That was the final stroke of evil that killed the genius of Melville. He lived for forty more years like a ghost—a quiet, solitary man, walking in limbo, perhaps haunted by dreams more malefic than Captain Ahab’s obsession with the white whale. Nothing else he wrote found a public, and he was not wanted as a lecturer. In 1866 the man who had wrestled with the angry sea got a routine clerk job as a custom’s inspector and walked every morning down Gansevoort Street to an office at the waterside. For nineteen years he kept his blameless accounts as a petty bureaucrat and drew his stipend—a man damned by the indifference of other men, but denied the consolation of death. Finally death did deliver him in 1891 at 104 East Twenty-sixth Street. About a quarter of a century later America woke up to the grandeur of his achievement.
August 24th
Since New York is an ocean port the dog days have special significance. They are likely to bury us in a thick blanket of fog. Today is a case in point. Sirius is not visible this morning, nor is anything else. For the cool air from the sea moving into the heat of the city has made a dense fog that extends as far north as Westchester County. The sun comes up like a reddish gold disk. But the fog is so thick that I cannot see the river from the front windows and can hardly see across the street. Planes are grounded. Trains are late. Automobiles move slowly through a white blanket of nothingness. By midmorning the fog is gone. But the damp heat stands in the canyons of the streets. “It must be in the nineties,” a sweaty taxi driver remarks as he keeps his cab crawling through the choked and irritable jangle of Times Square. It is 85° on top of the Whitehall Building, where the temperature of New York is officially recorded. But it is probably 90° or more in the streets where New Yorkers have their being—sweaty and dirty and limp.
In the evening, I attend a theater performance in a tiny, airless auditorium near Washington Square. Little beads of sweat run down the faces of the actors. Sweat melts the starched collars of the men actors, who are impersonating elegant English society people, and the frocks of the actresses stick to their necks and shoulders. Sitting in shirt sleeves, the audience stares at them listlessly through the moist heat of a steaming auditorium. When I reach home at one in the morning the candles in the living room have flopped over in the heat and are resting their tired heads on the table.
December 2nd
“Foreigner” is a word I have come to dislike. It preserves ignorance and prejudices that are obsolete in the modern world, and draws distinctions between natives and outlanders that are not genuine. The word derives from the Latin foris which means “outside” — purely a geographical distinction that applies as logically to other towns and other states as to other nations. The word itself is legitimate; we need a word to express the idea of “outside” places. But all national cultures, like ours, preserve a number of primitive and tribal attitudes. Primitive people feared and distrusted outside groups of people. Like the American Indians, who fought tribal wars, primitive people regarded other people as their natural enemies, and fought them instinctively.
After living in the blinding glare of international events for a number of decades, we have learned many things that primitive people could not know. Through the sensitive instrument of the United Nations, we have access every day to the problems of other nations and can begin to understand the sources of international troubles. But the word “foreign” still carries with it implications of fear and distrust; and, in the bumptious American point of view, it also carries implications of inferiority. When I first went to work abroad, I felt humiliated to discover that I, too, was a foreigner. In the remote provinces of China I was, in fact, yang-kuei-tzu (“foreign devil”), or ta-pi-tzu (“big nose”). American ignorance of foreigners is not as primitive as that, but it is steeped in the ancient superstition that strangers are enemies and that unfamiliar ideas are vicious. We do not accept foreigners as individuals. This is a strange attitude for a country that, with the exception of a few thousand red Indians, is entirely composed of foreigners. No nation in the world has drawn so heavily on the rich human resources of foreign nations.
Once Around the Sun is the diary — or, more accurately, journal — that Brooks Atkinson kept during 1950. “Every year is packed with a treasure of ordinary experience. I think I shall keep a book of days to chronicle one year in the endless revolution of the universe — one human cycle in the myriad of cycles that reaches out an unimaginable distance into time, space, and poetry. Let me try to put together a microcosm of type, ink and paper — the small change of civilization.”
At the time, Atkinson had been the New York Times’ drama critic for a couple of years, after working as their correspondent in China during World War Two and in Moscow just after. He and his wife, Oriana (a novelist and travel writer), lived in an apartment on the Upper West Side and a country house in New England for summers and long weekends. Thus Once Around the Sun captures a very special civilization — that of Manhattan at a time when it sat atop American economic, cultural, and diplomatic power at a time when these were essentially unchallenged. Broadway was perhaps at its pinnacle, with mainstream theaters bursting with musicals, new talents such as Arthur Miller coming to the forefront, and Off-Broadway just beginning to establish its own place.
The Yankees under manager Casey Stengel were the powerhouse of baseball, with Joe DiMaggio and Yogi Berra on their roster, taking the World Series from the Phillies in four straight games. Manhattan was where all the major radio and TV networks had their studios, and where the leading newspapers and magazines were based. Cruise ships docking along the Hudson still brought more travelers to and from Europe than any airlines. The United Nations buildings were finishing construction, with the first employees moving in in August.
Once Around the Sun is endlessly readable, a perfect bedside book — undoubtedly better sampled from time to time than read straight through. Atkinson’s range is remarkable. A page or two after writing about Joe Berman’s newstand, he is telling us about the stars or the birds he sees stopping in a park on their way north or south or Thoreau’s call for simplicity (which he says applies more to New York than Walden because New York is “intricate, complex, and powerful.” And he offers a reminder of the spirit of liberal democracy that is so much under attack these days: “Never has there been a time of evil and violence on such a colossal scale. But these times bewail not I for one mighty reason: our allies and ourselves rose in defense of freedom at the time when the honor of the world was degraded.”
Once Around the Sun is available in electronic format on the Open Library (Link)