Free The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick Page A

enterprise:
    You ran about in motor cars, you boarded ocean liners, crossed the continent in Chiefs and Super Chiefs … the present moment so filled with terror and tenderness, and experiencing every day such a queer intensity. Wondering so often who you were and what you were and who it might be necessary for you to be the next moment … and the heart so hungry for heaven knew just what, so unassuaged, so void … [But then] almost anything might happen to you in New York … the fabulous city like a great Christmas tree, so brilliantly lighted, with so many glittering gifts perpetually being handed out … You wouldn’t call it the natural climate of your soul … Longing as you were for some display of natural warmth and friendliness [that seemed] to have dissolved in gossip, analysis—sophistication … There was hunger, there was immense curiosity, there was solitude … Yet there were these sudden, these unaccountable moments—being overtaken by love—everywhere—on top of buses, in crowded concert halls—sometimes on winter evenings with the skyscrapers floating, flickering above you … merging with the crowds, examining the faces. This sense of brotherhood. You buried your loneliness in it.
    This was the loneliness that told Bolton she was “the most solitary … individual that ever at any moment in the march of mad events had trod upon the earth.”
    Then the paradox of her situation hits her: “Christ, how we loved our own aloneness … We were incapable of giving because there was so much within our reach to grab and snatch and gather for our own, our solitary souls.”
    Bolton was nearly seventy when she wrote these words. She had lived long enough to see that modern life, with its unspeakable freedoms mirrored in the gorgeous disconnect of the crowded city, has revealed us to ourselves as has the culture of no other age. She sees what Freud saw—that our loneliness is anguishing and yet, inexplicably, we are loath to give it up. At no period in psychological time are we free of the contradiction: it is the conflict of conflicts. This was Bolton’s wisdom, her only wisdom. When she wrote it in the late 1940s it sounded profound to her most literate readers.
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    The two greatest writers of the urban crowd in the nineteenth century were Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo. Each, in his own way, had grasped whole the meaning of these metropolitan masses rapidly developing in London and in Paris. Dickens especially understood its significance. To see a swiftly moving man or woman out of the side of your eye—to feel his or her presence at an angle of vision that allowed one to register only half a face, part of an expression, a piece of a gesture; and then to have to decide quickly how to react to this flood of human partialness—this was creating a radical change in social history.
    Victor Hugo, along with many other nineteenth-century writers, saw the same thing and understood, as Walter Benjamin put it, that there was no subject more entitled to his attention than the crowd. It was Hugo’s shrewdness, Benjamin wrote, that made him see the crowd “was getting ready to take shape as a public … who had acquired facility in reading” and was becoming the kind of purchaser of books that “wished to find itself portrayed in the contemporary novel, as the patrons did in the paintings of the Middle Ages.”
    These remarks of Benjamin’s on Victor Hugo occur in a famous essay he wrote on Baudelaire, the writer who meant the most to him. It was in Baudelaire that the idea of the flaneur developed: that is, the person who strolls aimlessly through the streets of the big cities in studied contrast with the hurried, purposeful activity of the crowd. It was the flaneur, Baudelaire thought, who would morph into the writer of the future. “Who among