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| WPA/Illinois Art Project, Chicago Artist: Unknown Library of Congress |
It's February in 1940s New York. During a spell of strangely warm weather, the city is hit by a mysterious tropical fever.
Instead of making people sick, it makes them happy. Men and women leave their spouses. The average bored employee walks off his or her job, to hop on a boat or go to the movies (the theaters show them free). Bartenders serve free drinks to customers they like and ignore everyone else. Housewives are seen "staggering home under Himalayan burdens of free food and liquor."
Hundreds of thousands are already infected, the epidemic is spreading, and no one knows how it will end. McHugh's narrator, Jim Rowan, is named Acting City Commissioner and placed in charge of coordinating the city's response. After the work day's emergency planning sessions, he travels Manhattan and the buroughs, surveying the extent of what police, fire, and other civic services might face—
We stopped for a free beer on Main Street in Flushing. It looked very much like a small-town Main Street anywhere, except it had the electric feel of the city. The street was packed with families carting home bridge lamps, bed sections, mattresses, toys, and God knows what else. ... One merchant, true to the competitive tradition, had big stickers in his windows offering one free article with each free article taken. The storekeepers who didn't want to give things away had closed up, as they did in other parts of town.After a stop at the bank—it's giving away money, someone in the crowd has just tipped them off—Rowan's scouting party heads to Brownsville. Before taking in a spontaneous Moroccan street festival, Jim watches—
Crowds around the pushcarts on Belmont Avenue, trading vigorously, though everything was free. Bargaining could be a passion, I thought... It was get-together and schmoozing and making sure you got what your labor was worth in exchange. Racketeering too, but less and less of that. It got monstrous only when it perverted the human relation into omething huge and abstract. This way, without money, it was a purely social as dancing.Late that night, they drive past a section of Brooklyn that seems quiet, except for—
...a small electric-fixtures plant in Greenpoint ...a picket line was snake-dancing. The owner had just given them the plant.Among the cultural turnabouts the fever causes: the streets are full of women pursuing men. It's not long before Rowan responds, catching the fever himself. Like others who become infected but love their work, Jim stays on the job, caught up in the race by city administrators and scientists to stop the epidemic's advance.
In the midst of the novel's giddy events, Rowan is also trying to locate his actress wife, Niobe, who caught the fever and went missing at the beginning of the epidemic. Just as Jim works tirelessly at trying to manage the crisis, Niobe is busy with a grand project of her own: to make the whole city her stage. Showing up in all sorts of unexpected places, impersonating women of different ages and classes, Niobe pursues the acting chance of a lifetime—often under her husband's nose, as he realizes a moment after she's made her exit. Niobe evades Jim's pursuit, and counter to the City's efforts to contain the epidemic, she creates her own organization: the Society for the Preservation of Happiness.
In his Introduction to the Yarrow reprint, The New Yorker's Mark Singer writes of McHugh's—
...grasp of the imaginative potential in the conjunction of sexual fantasy and urban planning. ... McHugh fell head-over-heels for the entire New York City five-borough hurly-burly, of which there was plenty not to love but not enough to dampen his rapture. In 1943, when he published I Am Thinking of My Darling... "infrastructure" was decades away from entering common parlance. Nevertheless, McHugh clearly was enthralled by the whole business: tunnels, bridges, subways, public utilities, emergency services, harbor management, health care delivery—also sex.Singer's biographical notes include some interesting 1930s and '40s background to McHugh's work. There is—
... the remarkable work he did as a writer, editor, and administrator in New York City for the Federal Writers' Project, the New Deal bratty brainchild. No sooner had he gone to work on the Project, in late 1936, than he was given responsibility for the New York City Guide, which at that point totaled an amorphous eight million words. By 1939 he had shaped the manuscript into two publishable volumes and had contributed an introductory essay to one of them ...
What came through in that essay ... was McHugh's highly specific familiarity with the city—its waterways and the vessels that traveled them, its neighborhoods and their occupants, its buildings and their underpinnings. New York was "a state fair grown to magnificence, a Main Street translated into the imperial splendor of Fifth Avenue. ... the place which is not wilderness, the place of light and warmth and the envelopment of the human swarm, the place is which everyone is awake and laughing at three in the morning. These things are not altogether true, of course—but magic does not need to be true."
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| [Book cover in Library of Congress collection - image found here; large view here.] |
Failing to find a commercial publisher, McHugh later used his research to create Darling—
His technological fluency translated nicely from one literary form to the next; in its embryonic stage, the novel lacked only sex (plus the characters to engage in it).It's a reflection of where we are now that the Writers' Project censorship of Under New York today sounds as absurd as it does familiar. What's less familiar, after decades of right-wing attacks on government, is the likelihood of civic officials being the heroes of a story.
The narrative raises some philosophical questions, on the meaning of happiness and on social order versus rights. During a meeting, a political rival attacks the commissioners' plans as weak. Rowan muses—
We could feel the weight of opinion behind him, in that room and outside. All the people who believed that order was a stamp press, a mold, an Iron Maiden, a double file of troops you were commanded to walk between. The people who couldn't get it through their heads, by God, that order was a ball game ... It was the chance people had to find a way to do the things they wanted to do in common. Not holding down. Bringing out.Of course, the New Deal was a time of great optimism about civic life—long before the right-wing mind control factories churned out adequate propaganda to make people on Medicare and VA benefits take to the streets against "government-run health care"
McHugh's novel is very much of its era's belief in the value of civic life. That ethos is seen constantly in WPA art, but a jaunty 1936 poster series—History of Civic Services in the City of New York—is particularly in the spirit of McHugh's work. Among the designs in Library of Congress collection, Vera Bock depicts the progression, from the first public well in 1658—
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To the 1936 water system—
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From the founding of a fire department in 1656—
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In the midst of the novel's fantastic events, some real people appear, either in cameos, or represented by their work. Leading the small army of medical researchers tackling the epidemic, a college friend of Rowan's gives a lyric recitation of names of the many scientists whose past breakthroughs may hold the clue needed now.
Jim reminisces about his youth as a jazz clarinettist who had chances to play with Bix and some of the greats. During his travels through the city, he ends up at a club in Harlem, where he jams with luminaries like James P. Johnson.
An appreciator of all the arts, Rowan notes some contemporary visual artists and two New Yorker cartoonists. McHugh worked at the magazine in the '40s, and he has fun inventing its response to the subject of spouses catching fever and leaving home—
The New Yorker, lone defender of temperance ... [published] an editorial intimating that polygyny (or polyandry) might be a little cloying if you weren't used to it, which was true, and a cartoon by Alan Dunn showing a man sitting glumly at dinner with his wife. The legend was: "I'm sure some people will stay together, Wilfred."Gary Cooper arrives at LaGuardia, to be
... buried under a pile of what the Sun called "absolutely shameless cooing women."..."They twisted my ankle," he said. One of the women ... said they'd only been trying to hold him down. "If he hadn't struggled he wouldn't have been hurt"...I was interested by the passage where Jim finds a clue to Niobe's next public performance. It's a French phrase that he puzzles over, until the meaning hits him—
..."Blind Milton dictating Paradise Lost to his daughters." I seemed to remember that it was a picture.Previously, I had come across the name in biographies of Walker Evans and Joseph Cornell, who had done research in the Picture Library and become friends of Javitz's.
...I ... called Romana Javitz in the print room at the Forty-Second Street library. She knew everything. All the young artists and cartoonists went to her when they were stuck for ideas.
"That isn't very hard," she said. "The picture is here in the library." She told me just where.
There's an interesting article here. Javitz initially studied art, then had a distinguished career in developing the New York Public Library Picture Collection. Among other activities, she encouraged Arturo Schomburg in developing archives that became the basis of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Javitz was very active in New Deal arts projects, becoming the driving force behind creation of the Index of American Design, as well as being involved with Farm Security Administration photography and its preservation.
Yarrow reprinted McHugh's novel in 1991. McHugh had died in 1983, as Mark Singer writes—
... about the time a mysterious and malignant virus, the absolute opposite of the one he had concocted more than forty years ealier inside his brain, began to ravage thousands of lives in New York and San Francisco and beyond. ... In Darling, one of his characters says direly, "This is a mass epidemic of good feeling. Joy. Happiness. Whatever you like. Potentially it's as dangerous as a riot or panic or an other disturbance." Today, in the world outside fiction, beyond the dark edge of sexual fantasy, we would weep tears of thanksgiving for peril so benign.True that only in fiction could a plague be made whimsical. But at the Reagan-era outbreak of AIDs, we didn't exactly have a civic-minded Executive Branch to respond to the crisis. And there was willingness to see the first victims as Other, thus politically useful as objects of fear and hatred.
We also have a modern plague that's an intellectual one, considering the right's grip on public information.
McHugh's novel is an enjoyable piece of time travel. As Lawrence Ferlinghetti's cover blurb has it, "a little like having a 1940s New York City taxicab in your living room, filled with early 1940s characters."
As with most Depression-era reading at this point, I feel the enormous loss in how much the country has been driven in the direction opposite of building "infrastructure"—or doing pretty much anything for the civic good.
Outlandish as McHugh's plot is, it seems that the WPA art programs harnessed some enthusiasm akin to his imaginative flights of urban fantasy.
A couple more items from the Library of Congress WPA collection—posters for organized civic events that seem in the spirit of McHugh's improvisational Manhattan.
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| Artist: Charles Verschuuren |
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| Artist: Unknown |
