Down and Out in New York: the fact and fiction of Stephen Crane 1893-4

                                    

 Better known for his war stories, Stephen Crane (1871-1900) also wrote powerfully about the experiences of New York’s poorest citizens. His early short stories resonate with the sorrows of humanity, of dark figures huddled up on cellar stairs, on cold park benches and down filthy alleyways. His chosen locations reflect an urban brutality, the harshness of poverty and the futility of individual attempts to exercise free will. Many of his characters display a mute incomprehension at their misfortune or marginalisation, as the march of progress leaves them behind. They are anonymous and abandoned, too down-trodden to exercise any form of solidarity or resistance.

Crane had first-hand experience of the New York slums. Whilst visiting the city in 1891-2, he slept in the cheapest Bowery shelters and observed the dehumanising struggle for survival on the streets. In a 1909 study, social commentator Ignatz Nascher described the cheapest accommodation available to the destitute, from the ten cents per night dormitories where men slept on wooden planks, one row above the other, softened by straw; to the five cents “stalls” divided off a corridor, or suspended bunk-like strips of canvas. Worst of all were the flophouses at the rear of tenements, or the Municipal Lodging houses, where the poorest had to strip and hand over their clothing before being allocated a bed in a crowded room. Their garments were returned damp, crumpled and “disinfected” in the morning. Nascher found people asleep in the public toilets and the photographs of his contemporary, Jacob Riis, expose the regular use of corners, cellars, bridges, police cells, corridors, parks and saloon floors as places of rest. By Riis’ calculation, in 1890, more than half New York’s lodging houses were in the Bowery, sheltering three quarters of the homeless. These rapidly became breeding grounds “for more beggary and crime” where young men in “nine cases out of ten …turn out a thief, or a burglar…if not…a murderer.”

"Happy Jack's Canvas Palace-" a cheap doss house photographed by Jacob Riis 1890s

Central New York at the time was a city of paradoxes: in the Jamesian brownstone mansions of Fifth Avenue and north to Central Park, the rich lived in privilege only a few blocks away from the crippling poverty of the immigrant tenements. One of Crane’s protagonists catches a glimpse of prosperous New York society, which puts his life firmly into context. Contrasting his “old garments” with those of well-dressed passers-by, he identifies the “infinite distance” between them and the impossibility of attaining the “unconquerable kingdoms” of “social comfort” and “the pleasures of living;” neither can he understand their “confusion of strange tongues.”

The 1900 census listed nearly three and a half million people living in the Manhattan district, in an era when the city was approaching the “apogee of its self-confidence,” a vibrant cultural mix enhanced by expansion outwards and upwards. Between 1880 and 1920, two million Jews from Russia, Poland, Austria-Hungary and the Balkans established their own ghettoes in the tenements on the lower East side. These slums were among the poorest districts in the city, unhealthy, overcrowded and unsafe, although efforts were being made to bring the plight of their inhabitants to public attention: legislation in 1879, 1887 and 1895 had attempted to improve standards but the ever increasing population, coupled with inflation and low wages meant more and more people were crammed into unsanitary conditions. Manhattan’s 42,000 tenement blocks listed in 1900, housed over a million and a half people. Yet even below this, there existed an underclass, a huge mass of disenfranchised men and women, eking out an existence on the streets.

                A crowded Lower East Side tenement, home to immigrant workers 1890s

 Two of Crane’s stories of 1894; “An Experiment in Misery” and “The Men in the Storm;” transform his experiences into hellish metaphors where the city and even the weather are enemies of the dispossessed. Their lowly status makes them a target for the malice of wind and rain, one among the dumb, oppressed animals, flowing like “rivers” of “aimless men like chickens in a storm.” The elevated railway squats over the street like a pre-Kafkaesque “monstrous kind of crab” and the protagonist is “swallowed” by a saloon. In some ways, the city itself seems equally, if not more alive than the anonymous crowds, in a relationship of mutual harm.

 The men in the storm, in the story of the same title, huddle in a homogenous mass in the rain while they await the opening of a shelter. The snow is a malignant force, as if the crowd’s lowly status makes it a justifiable target; it “seeks out men’s meagre hiding places,” and “skilfully beats in among them,” making their faces “tingle and burn” as if attacked by “a thousand needle-prickings.” In the belief that they deserve their fate, the men are “silent” and “impassive” in the blizzard, like “statues of patience” or the animalistic “sheep in a winter’s gale,” protected by each others’ bodies. They are spectators, marginalised by the city, blaming themselves, although Crane is clear that their failure lies outside themselves; they cannot “perceive where they had failed, what they lacked to be thus vanquished in the race;” a race that is markedly contrasting with their current statue-like patience. Until the shelter opens, these men are literally and metaphorically going nowhere.

                                      "Night in Gotham Court," 1894, Riis.

In his 1893 novella “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets,” Crane presents a young woman whose frail charms were destroyed by forces beyond her control. Maggie had many real life precedents but Crane many have drawn upon two specific girls whose stories had become urban legend. In the 1850s, Missionary workers in the Five Points district encountered Maggie Carson, disfigured by smallpox and the “sweet,” “lady-like,” “flaxen haired” Maggie Ryan, both of whom were taken off the streets and found “positions” with “good” families. Their tales were blended by the New York Tribune into that of “wild Maggie,” to underline the effects of environment upon the development of character, a theme picked up by other philanthropic writers of the time.

Cruel treatment causes Crane’s young Maggie; “a small ragged girl;” to retreat; her “side glances” betray a “fear of interruption” while she eats like a “pursued tigress,” her features “haggard from weeping,” her eyes “gleaming with fear.” Her tenement home is a hellish vision: a “dark region” of a “careening” building containing “gruesome doorways.” Odours of cooking assault the senses and overcrowding contributes to the sense of a constant audience and precarious existence: the building “quivered and creaked from the weight of humanity stamping about in its bowels.”

Sexual temptation proves to be her downfall.  The cheap Bowery beer hall and theatre create the illusion of splendour and a fictional ideal of values. She is seduced by a cheap simulacra of Parisian culture: an orchestra of women in yellow silk, boys in “costumes of French chefs,” chandeliers and “fancy cakes,” losing herself in calculation of the “cost of the silks and laces.” Her seduction is easily accomplished, followed by her descent into prostitution and death. Maggie’s suicide is associated with the “gloomy” darkness of the river. The reader’s last glimpse of her is gliding Ophelia-like among “wet wanderers in attitudes of chronic dejection,” towards “tall black factories” lit only by the occasional beam of light. Prostitution has cast her into the lowest echelons of society, among men with “blotched features,” “shifting bloodshot eyes and grimy hands.”

                                           "A Little Mother" c1890, Riis 

Grim as these details are, Crane’s intention was to provoke social change. In contrast with the jolly rags-to-riches tales by uplifting authors like Horatio Alger, he did not shy away from delving into the lowest depths of the city to explore exactly how terrible life had become for those on the margins of society. The “ghoulishness” some of his privileged readers accused him of, was actually bravery. The timelessness of his world-wearied, neglected characters serves as an unpleasant reminder of the inequalities of today’s society. Modern parallels of his stories can be found living in equally appalling conditions on the streets of our cities.

Crane’s life was regrettably short. He produced the novel which made his name, “The Red Badge of Courage” at the age of twenty four and succumbed to tuberculosis four years later. In that short space of time, he worked as a war correspondent during the Spanish-American conflict and lived with a brothel-keeper in Sussex, befriending Conrad and H.G.Wells. He worked feverishly, was frequently ill and poverty-stricken. His death at the age of twenty-eight curtailed the flowering of a major literary genius and potential social reformer.

Victorian Girls on the Loose in Paris.

An Adventure in the art capital of Europe.

                                         A class at the Ecole des Beaux Arts

The significance of artistic Paris in the last decade of the nineteenth century is difficult to overestimate. Writers and painters flocked there from all over Europe in search of greater freedom and opportunity; the launch of the Salon de Refusés and proliferation of dealers and smaller galleries offered a tantalising glimpse of avant-garde success unthinkable at home.

The 1880s and 90s had seen the star of Impressionism eclipsed by the likes of Gauguin, Van Gogh and Cezanne; new techniques were being explored by Symbolists, Synthetists, Primitivists and Expressionists. Anything seemed possible in artistic terms. The exciting experiments of the Fauves and Cubists lay in the future. Others were drawn by depictions of Bohemian life by popular authors such as George Du Maurier, Eugene Sue and Emile Zola as well as the comparatively low prices of studios, alcohol and café meals. This was the absinthe era. A spell in one of the Parisian art schools was seen as the way to develop skills in paint and colour and learn from the masters long before Roger Fry’s 1910 “Manet and the Post-Impressionists” exhibition at the Grafton Galleries brought them to the attention of a broader section of English society.

 The lure of fin-de-siecle Paris for young English women, was that of employment, love and artistic experience in a city where they could escape the strictures of the parental home. Three such girls who went off in search of adventure were recent Slade school graduates, Ida Nettleship, Gwen John and Gwen Salmond. Yet in 1898, they were the lucky ones. While Ida’s parents were supportive of her artistic endeavours and Gwen Salmond’s financial support eased the passage for them all, Gwen John had to fight to join her friends, falling out with her father in the process. Many women with Parisian ambitions met with initial resistance as their Victorian parents saw the trip as little more than an opportunity to misbehave. Kathleen Bruce, a sculptor who visited the city in 1901, wrote “…to say that a lass perhaps not out of her teens had gone prancing off to Paris to study art was to say that she had gone irretrievably to hell” and the undeniable freedoms encouraged by the relaxed atmosphere of late café hours was equally as attractive as the opportunity to study at one of the academies. There were understandable fears that the great masters might corrupt their students, leading at best to heartbreak in the case of Gwen John and Auguste Rodin; and at the worst, ruin.

                      Female arts students drawing from life at the Slade, London

First, they took rooms in a cheap hotel while they searched for lodgings but quickly moved on to rooms on the outskirts of the Latin Quarter at 226 Boulevard Raspail, which Ida wrote to reassure her mother was “a very old lady style of pension…looking down on a boulevard with rather brown rustling plane trees and cafes” on the “delightful” side of the river. However, they then found what they were looking for on the fifth floor of 12 rue Froidvaux; a wide leafy avenue in the cheaper Montparnasse district, which they mis-spelt as Froidveau and mis-translated as “cold beef”. The ground floor was a café but a separate side door gave them a degree of privacy and quiet, the balcony with “good views” overlooked the cemetery and the toilet was of the old variety, which required water being thrown down it. The elderly female concierge was “very high in character” and strict about visitors; “les dames, oui, mais les monsieurs? Non ! Jamais,” information which Ida was keen to pass on again to her mother: “all this is rather amusing but it will show you it is a respectable place.” It cost 900 francs, but Ida worked out their combined finances, planned for basic living expenses and decided they could afford it for three months. What finally swung them in its favour was its proximity to the Louvre and Julian’s Academy.

Their studio was basic and had clearly seen better days but the girls had great plans; “half the wall is covered with brown paper, and when we have spare time and energy we are going to cover the other half,” Ida wrote, but spare time was lacking amid their busy schedule of gallery visits, sketches and exploring the narrow streets for shops selling art supplies. They ate at an anarchists’ restaurant, from which some of the waitresses became their models; at breakfast they read Shakespeare’s history plays and out in the street, kept an eye on Parisian fashions; evenings often became dressmaking sessions, based on what they had seen in the department stores. Gwen John produced an “Interior with Figures” which shows Ida in an historically-inspired creations, wrapped in a heavy pink shawl and full, ruffled skirt. When her father Edwin John visited, he took exception to a dress of Gwen’s, modelled on a picture by Manet, which he claimed made her look like a prostitute.

Gwen John's Interior with figures, showing Ida in the pink dress

Next, they had to enrol in an art school. The nearby Julian’s run by Benjamin Constant, was the girls’ first choice but it was very expensive and with thirty pounds remaining in her budget for fees, Ida considered the cheaper Académies Colarossi or Delécluse. However, she soon heard of the new Académie Carmen, which had opened up near the Luxembourg gardens at 6, passage Stanislas. It was run by Carmen Rossi, a model of Whistler, who would be undertaking some of the teaching: originally Rossi charged the female students twice the amount as the men, but Whistler soon discovered this and put a stop to it. At first, only Gwen Salmond with her sixty pounds for fees, could afford to enrol but she generously paid for Gwen John to attend as an afternoon student, while Ida enrolled under Laurent at Colarossi’s. Writing a pamphlet on the lure of the city in 1902, Clive Holland reflected the popularity of their choices; “a year or two at Julian’s, the Beaux-Arts or Colarossi’s is worth a cycle of South Kensington with its ‘correctness;’" by 1900, one in three students of the Beaux-Arts was a foreigner.

Perhaps the artistic highlight of the girls’ Paris sojourn was their contact with Whistler. He was coming to the end of a distinguished career (he died in 1903) and his reputation was sufficient to cause a stir among the students when the new Académie Carmen opened the autumn of 1898. The school rules were strict, even more than those of the Slade; the sexes were segregated into different studios, there was to be no drawing on the walls, no smoking, no singing, even no talking, which made it very unpopular with male students who soon rebelled against what they considered an unnecessarily draconian stance. A head student, the massier or massiere, was appointed to handle student matters and maintain the list of rules pinned to the wall: during part of 1899, this post was held by an English girl, Inez Bate who had achieved favour by painting exactly as Whistler taught. Taking orders from a young woman only irritated some of the male students further though and the class became predominantly female. Largely, the girls were happy to be presided over as part of a dedicated band; Gwen Salmond explained “Whistler is worth living for,” a “first rate master who knows how to teach,” “very beautiful and just right” and even Ida rushed to his defence, rebutting attacks on his teaching as “stupid and unkind.” In his later autobiography, her husband reminded Whistler of Ida when the two men met again in London; “I mentioned Ida Nettleship, who had been his pupil in Paris, had posed for him and was now my wife. Mr Whistler spoke of her with much sympathy, asking me to make her his compliments. Influenced by Whistler, Paris and a new found freedom, that autumn was a “most promising time,” full of inspiration and hope; in her letters home, Ida describes them as almost intoxicated with the possibilities of art; “we all go suddenly daft with lovely pictures we can see or imagine and want to do."

Whistler at work

Yet the fees were expensive and the girls were not making any money. All too soon, the dream had to come to an end. Reality beckoned. The Parisian interlude was never meant to be permanent, rather a glorious finishing process before the real business of life began. Returning to England, Ida was forced to confront the question of her future. Within the year, she would marry the flamboyant Augustus John, yet the marriage would be a troubled one. Paris would remain, for her, as an image of a better time, to which she longed to return. When she did go back and try to make a life for herself, a few years later, it was not with her husband, but with his other mistress and their combined brood of children.

No place for the Innocent.

"The Great Gatsby" and F.Scott Fitzgerald’s New York.

Published in 1925, the decadent romance of The Great Gatsby remains as alluring and elusive as ever. It is a tale of lost illusions, almost hagiographical, as narrator Nick Carraway deifies his dead friend in a way that speaks volumes about his devotion and causes some critics to question his sexuality. By the novel’s end, adultery, accidental death, betrayal and murder leave the naïve Carraway longing to return to the simpler, family-oriented life he had previously struggled to escape. The louche sophistication of New York, with its casual liaisons and broken promises cuts to the heart of the American Dream, of which Carraway is made a victim by his fundamental sense of fair play and loyalty. As Gatsby’s disciples fade away, only he is left, to organise the funeral and meet the dead millionaire’s father: it is a bitter lesson for a young man.

In a moment of poignant realisation, Carraway concludes his story with a lament for an idealised pre-Lapsian American landscape; an old, innocent life of fresh air and nature. Adopting the perspective of the Seventeenth Century Dutch settlers for whom the old island “flowered,” with a “fresh green breast,” stilling them in an “enchanted moment” of “aesthetic contemplation,” he regrets the country’s metaphoric lost purity and his own more recent awakening. This nostalgia for the vision of a clean, bright motherland offers a bittersweet message at the end of the novel: he sees the national impetus for self and social betterment, the belief that “tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further…” as self-defeating. The American Dream is an elusive grail, its capture elliptically suggested “one fine morning” but never realised, making the Platonic quests of “modern” (1920s) Americans as futile as “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”  It is upon this flawed, irretrievable vision that Carraway pins the failure of Gatsby’s vision; his warning “you can’t repeat the past” cannot correct his friend’s blindness to the dark side of his dream: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.” Ironically the greenness of the light inviting Gatsby to pursue his dream is a false, man-made version of the true verdant landscape of the country’s innocence.

But perhaps there is more to Carraway’s yearnings. As a Mid-West American, he is an outsider, a social migrant and his ruminations are underlined by the experiences of migrants and immigrants of all nationalities, whose presence swelled the districts of central New York in the decades either side of the turn of the last century: by 1900, six out of every ten children in the city were not native born. They flocked to the city to escape poverty and persecution, dreaming of a better life where a nobody could rise to become president. Anything was considered possible in the socially-mobile new world, a dream voiced by Carraway as Gatsby’s car passes over the Queensboro’ bridge, but his “anything could happen” springs from the seemingly magical possibilities that wealth and privilege can bring, inspired by the “wild promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world” of the “sugar lump…city seen for the first time.”  At the other end of the social scale, vast crowds flocked to take advantage of an economy that was years ahead of Europe, sometimes to find the reality was just as harsh as that they had left behind, complicated by the territorial warfare of over-crowded tenement districts, such as those photographed so powerfully by social reformer Jacob Riis.

 Fitzgerald’s view of the city is elitist and selective; a distorted fantasy of opportunity which contradicts some evocations of New York at the time, such as Henry Roth’s “Call it Sleep,” and the short stories of Anzia Yezierska, whilst later works like E.L.Doctrow’s “Ragtime” attempt to unite these seemingly disparate halves. Using a similar narrative of awakening, Doctrow fiercely undermines his child narrator’s innocence, following “there were no negroes. There were no immigrants,” a page later with; “apparently there were negroes. There were Immigrants.” A certain tense inversion of expectations is sensed as Gatsby’s car travels over the Queensboro’ bridge, passed by a limousine driven by a white chauffeur “in which sat three modish negroes…the yolks of their eyeballs rolled towards us in haughty rivalry” but this only causes Nick amusement, as do Tom Buchanan’s pronouncements about the threat to the “Nordic race.” Carraway’s and Fitzgerald’s concerns do not lie with the immigrants; it is simply a struggle that pits them against each other and Nick’s lack of solidarity with them is part of his essential detachment. He has come to the city in search of excitement, on the flimsy pretext of a dull job and the marriage of his cousin Daisy. Secretive and reticent, he serves as the foil to Gatsby’s ebullience: the rest of New York can take care of itself.

                                Robert Redford as Gatsby in the 1974 film

There is a tone of jaded sophistication in the fey Daisy Buchanan’s early inertia and existential wondering; “what’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon…and the day after that, and the next thirty years.” Even though the Great War was physically and emotionally removed from the characters of East and West Egg, there is a sense of Americans having come through differing periods of personal crisis. Carraway looks back with nostalgia to the regimented simplicity of conflict; “I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever;” Gatsby’s uniform allowed him to access a social set that he was usually denied, with cataclysmic results and even Daisy stresses recent suffering; “I’ve had a very bad time…and I’m pretty cynical about everything.” These blithe hints at traumas, real or imagined, partly explain the exhaustive hedonism of the era but do not excuse its excesses, as this pain is never fully developed for the reader and subsequently appears less real than the pain of love, or social disillusionment. The pangs of the rich are in stark relief to the real suffering of those struggling to make ends meet in the hinterland between New York and the mansions of West Egg.

Fitzgreald creates a similar no-mans land in the T.S.Eliot inspired wasteland lying between the playgrounds of the rich in “The Great Gatsby”. The location of the valley of ashes stresses not only the economic dependence of the Wilsons but the equally real practical dependence of figures like Gatsby and the Buchanans upon this silent, grey underclass of mechanics, butlers and servants who facilitate their world. To travel from West Egg to New York, the motorist has no choice but to pass through this powerful memento-mori landscape, hurrying as if it could infect them; even travellers by train cannot escape it; “the motor road hastily joins the railroad…so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land.” The valley of ashes has an active malevolent force, a compulsive power that could pull travellers off their path, to be absorbed in the quagmire of greyness; its terror lies in the fact that death appears to be its life force, it flourishes on death, self-regenerating, Greek-myth style, with an army of ashes “growing” like wheat into a landscape of the “grotesque,” a colourless mockery of the real, vibrant life Fitzgerald contrasts through Gatsby’s identification with the colour yellow. In this barren inert world, life itself requires “a transcendent effort.” Its inhabitants are “ash-grey men,” even Wilson, showing the “faintly handsome” traces of former health has become “spiritless and anaemic.” He is enveloped by a symbolic “white dust,” which also veils “everything in the vicinity” and blends him into the “cement colour of the walls.” Tom Buchanan’s arrival brings the possibility of life, measured by the transference of colour; “a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes,” but the only other glimmers of pigment; the billboard eyes; are “dimmed” by weather and “paintless days.” The incongruity of Myrtle Wilson’s presence is made apparent through opposites; she is colourful, “smouldering” and “sensuous” in comparison with the “ghost” of a husband she walks through. Her physical vitality and her association with Tom make her immune to the all pervasive “white dust” but this is deceptive, for in drawing away from what she perceives to be death, she propels herself towards her own violent demise. Both Myrtle and Gatsby are classic over-reachers whose hectic efforts to live life to the full result in their own inevitable destruction.

This “solemn dumping ground” acts like a cancer or tumour on the healthy surrounding world. Its efforts are all feeble and sickly; it is its own graveyard; “occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest.” This bathetic reminder of death as the necessary result of life, essential for regeneration, shows the reader how the colourful charismatic lifestyle of West Egg is brought full circle; the valley of ashes provides the cars and fuel and reclaims them after use; a powerful metaphor for the human life cycle, attributing the garage and the billboard eyes with a higher sense of the purpose and ultimate end of all life. It is the valley of ashes, which reminds us that death is the great leveller, regardless of morals and wealth. The drawbridge over the “small foul river” forces the passing cars to sit and wait in enforced contemplation of the “dismal scene” for up to half an hour. The very randomness of this descending trap itself echoes the unpredictable call of death and the ever-present sense of doom that permeates the entire landscape of the novel. Fitzgerald’s emphasis on the lack of control the motorists have over their period of waiting clarifies how the innocent are equally as likely to become trapped as the guilty.

Nick Carraway finds the bleakness of the valley of ashes almost impossible to accept. He romanticises what he finds distasteful until reality later shatters his illusions; “this shadow of a garage must be a blind…sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead.” Carraway’s belief in the treasure trove, the secret wealth hidden away from the grim reality is based on stories of gangsters and luxury in New York, a romance that quickly fractures when it breaks through Gatsby’s fragile idyll. A similar dishonesty oozes from the furnishings and artefacts of Tom and Myrtle’s New York apartment. Myrtle’s indulgences, paid for by Tom; gossip magazines, a puppy, cold cream and perfume; indicate her ultimate goals of luxury, to which Tom is her passport. In possession of these, having twice changed her clothes and arriving at her “long white cake” of an apartment, she casts off her previous role as easily as an actress, “throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighbourhood.” Inside the flat, the “tapestried furniture” covered with Fragonard-style swing images echo a lost grandeur and social aspiration that belies the adulterous and brutal reality of their relationship. Myrtle’s furnishings smack of the desperate hopes of fabricating herself a new identity. Her uneasy social status is reflected in the ambiguity of other details; the photograph that tricks the eye, the dog biscuit “decomposing apathetically:” it is among these trophies of refinement that Tom breaks her nose. Even Carraway’s deteriorating perceptions mirror this subjectivity; “either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn’t make any sense to me.” His seemingly innocent pseudo-religious read; “Simon called Peter,” was in reality a contemporary work of soft pornography. The surreal, elliptical break down of narrative at the end of this chapter, propelling him from the bedside to the four o’clock morning train, reminds the reader of the fluid nature of the city and the existence of pockets of resistance to the general climate.

Carraway’s relationship with New York, is that of observer rather than real participator: in Myrtle and Tom’s flat, his impulse is to “get out and walk Eastwards towards the park through the soft twilight” and imagines himself “within and without,” looking up from the “darkening streets,” his “enchanted” attraction and “repulsion” echoing the dual nature of the city. New York is more alive for Nick than it is for Gatsby: location has a more powerful pull than people; he leaves behind his family for adventure in the West and fails to make any real personal connections, save that with Gatsby which only gains real significance as a result of Gatsby’s death, elevating him to the status of biographer. He drifts in and out of a half union with the morally ambiguous Jordan, while other incidental cast members remain unnamed; the “friend,” “other clerks,” and “girl who loved in New Jersey” are far less real than the “racy adventurous” city, with its bittersweet polarity of crowded “enchanted metropolitan twilight” and “haunting loneliness.” One of a crowd of dislocated, drifting “young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life,” Carraway feels the voyeuristic thrill of the observer and the “sinking heart” of the outsider. His New York is a glamorous composite of hotels, parties, restaurants, bright lights and the bustle of crowded streets and theatre goers, where people “hurry towards gaiety,” a grown up playground where the dark side can be sensed by not visualised.

Even though Nick Carraway recognises the city as “superior” to the “sprawling swollen towns beyond the Ohio,” he eventually decides to return home to the West, possessing some deficiency that made him “subtly unadaptable” to Eastern life. In retrospect, the city becomes “haunted,” “distorted beyond (his) eyes’ power of correction,” “a scene by El Greco,” both “conventional and grotesque,” devoid of lustre. One of his final images is the highly symbolic scene of men in dark suits carrying home a jewelled woman in white; no one knows the address “and no one cares.” For Carraway, the city is rotten at the core, infected by the disease of inertia and callous irresponsibility that has pervaded the glittering exterior.  The urban landscapes of “The Great Gatsby” are vibrant and complex in character, sustaining layered moral networks of goodness and innocence alongside vice and villainy. They are also highly subjective, shifting environments, constantly being reassessed and redefined with varying degrees of success by those who experience them from within and without. Their identities and distinct characteristics, influenced by global and local affairs are shown by the disillusioned narrator as able to permeate life in a more profound and lasting way than many human relations can. As Nick discovers, it is no place for the innocent.

The Real Star of "The Third Man:" Harry Lime's Vienna.

From the moment of its conception, the 1949 box office hit “The Third Man,” was always going to be far more than a simple masterpiece of film noir. With the impressive triumvirate of Alexander Korda, Carol Reed and Graham Greene collaborating on the screen play and direction, Selznick’s production, Karas’ music and the unforgettable performances of Orson Wells, Alida Valli and Joseph Cotten, set against the complex and entropic landscape of the bombed-shattered Vienna, the film’s powerful mis-en-scene becomes the vehicle for a tale of moral corruption, disillusionment and the stasis of an ancient and noble city awaiting its rebirth.

It was Korda’s idea to base a film in occupied Vienna, where Greene was sent to adapt an existing screen play early in 1948. He was shocked by the physical destruction and brutal segregation of the city into zones under four ruling powers but even more so by the determined emergence of life, robustly and persistently from among the ashes. Vienna had suffered a decade of terror and privation: occupied by the Germans in 1938 and relieved by the Red Army in April 1945, the remaining population had endured four months of lawlessness before Western troops arrived late that August. The English film’s introduction, voiced by Carol Reed, reminded the audience of the city’s recent glory, defined by “its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm;” a nostalgic, pre-lapsian idyll that had almost become a guilty secret to be harboured among the ruins. For the indigenous Viennese characters, it is a real and recent bereavement, of baroque architecture and statues pock-marked by bullets and bombs; centuries of grandeur lie at their feet, while their minds are preoccupied with the need to survive, largely by black-market trading. The American narration, however, delivered by Joseph Cotten, heightened the level of threat in the city and the dangers inevitable in this thriving underworld, adding “they could get anything if people wanted it enough…” and including the warning that amateurs “don’t last long, not really.” English audiences never saw the image of a dead body floating among ice floes down the Danube, as it was considered too shocking.

Perhaps more so than its innocent citizens, Vienna itself is the film’s main casualty of war. Views of deserted streets, ruins and piles of uncleared rubble are heightened by chiaroscuro, expressionistic shots and the tilted wide-angled camera lens of a world thrown off-kilter. Even its reputation of “easy charm” had become “bogus,” lost among “undignified ruins;” a hostile, difficult landscape, its topography deceptively hidden under “great glaciers of snow and ice.” The famous blue Danube, with all its waltzing conotations has become “a grey flat muddy river,” the old pleasure park “smashed and desolate and full of weeds.” In the darkness, new arrival Holly Martins passes the wrecked symbols of civilisation and religion; the “half-destroyed Diana baths” and “enormous wounded spire” of the Cathedral. With its cultural and historical identity shattered almost beyond recognition, it comes as little surprise to the audience that the city is also morally fractured; the familiar is twisted and dislocated; friends are not to be trusted and appearances are frequently deceptive.

 The city’s austerity is all too evident; besides the ruins, the continual cold is emphasised; Martins complains of the Josefstadt Theatre being “even cold to a man in a heavy overcoat” and pictures actors going home to “coffee without sugar” and a “roll without butter:” Actress Anna Schmidt explains how the Americans sometimes throw tea instead of flowers, after a performance: Martins can’t buy a drink with his military money; a landlady is wrapped in a duvet and gratefully accepts the gift of a few cigarettes. The racketeer Dr Winkel’s waiting room reminds Martins of an antique shop; in Greene’s later novella, it reads like a reliquary of the old Imperial city: the ancient crucifixes, cardinals’ chairs, saints’ relics, statuettes and golden casket containing a shard of the “true cross” suggest an alternative preserved Vienna to that of the introductory montage and subsequent mis-en-scene. Another facet of the city emerges, part of a concealed culture that parallels Winkel’s dishonesty.

 Incidental locations reinforce the pervasive malady of the urban landscape: ruins, dark rooms, alleys, abandoned cars, cemeteries and sewers frame anti-hero Harry Lime’s supposed and real death. Greene uses the Central cemetery as a reminder of the futility of life and the endurance of death; in the city, transient and difficult existence is only a prelude for the real life, echoing composer Gustav Mahler’s statement that you have to be dead in Vienna before they’ll let you live. Modern transport parodies a captive audience; for a mile, the trams run beside “an apparently endless chain of gravestones waiting for owners and wreaths waiting for mourners.” It is difficult for Martins to locate Lime’s grave, due to the snow’s “grotesque comedy” and the division of land by the four powers. As his search progresses, the area becomes more menacing; “graves lay like wolves under the trees,” the graveyard stretches through a forest, giving the feeling that beyond the misleading city lights, an ever-present darkness lies in wait. During the hunt for Lime, Major Calloway ironically reminds novelist Martins “death’s at the bottom of everything” and warns him to “leave it to the professionals.”

Lime’s supposed funeral is the film’s first indication of his existence below ground. His affiliation with sewers and catacombs, identifies him as a product of the city’s darkness: since his childhood association with Martins, he has undergone a rebirth and is as much part of the fabric of the changed landscape as the crumbling architecture. His adoption of the city’s wrecked topography is opportunistic; he rejects the shattered streets for subterranean access, appears in outline against the ruined skyline above the cafe like a baroque statue and haunts the urban margins like a ghost. Lime is “silent and motionless in the dark street,” which Martins almost believes to be “an illusion caused by shadow,” barely human. Perhaps the film’s most iconic images are Lime’s first and last: the chiaroscuro effects of his face lit from an opposite window and the poignant fingers curling up through the grate in their death-throes.

The film’s tense sequences in the sewers, absent of music, magnifies the sounds of running feet, barking dogs and rushing water, to nightmarish proportions. Sinister shadows rise up against the walls, the tilted camera lens and the mocking mouth-like tunnels create an expressionistic surreal world, a physical and moral labyrinth in which Lime has trapped himself. Angles and expectations are challenged; the maze has become complex and multi-dimensional, echoing the audiences’ mixed feelings towards the charismatic Lime but the outcome is inevitable. Martins’ final disillusionment identifies Lime intimately with his location; he is an “animal who creeps into the dark to die,” “he wants to die at home and the darkness is never home to us.” Yet Martins still offers a glimpse of humanity, attempting to include Lime in the “us,” but his death in the sewer, unable to reach the light and possible salvation, sets him apart from Holly and the Major and also from his victim, the valiant Sergeant Paine, whose unnecessary death finally turns the audience’s remaining sympathies.

Lime’s motivation is complex, almost Faustian. It is significant that his reunion with Martins takes place among the ruins of the funfair; a child’s game gone wrong, with its “bones sticking crudely through the snow.” The altered perspective, above the city rooftops appears initially to lend Lime a sense of superiority, a metaphor for his own conceit as he dismisses the “toy landscape” below. He is intimately connected with, altered by and part of, his adopted city.  Equally, Holly Martins’ noble, if misled, quest for the truth about Lime’s faked death and his chivalric protection of Anna Schmidt, are juxtaposed against the seamy underside of Viennese life. He can entertain the seeming opposites of pure-minded naïve idealism and a taste for the visceral, his mind always turns “towards women…after two drinks,” and fuelled by memories of “girls” he has known in Amsterdam and Paris, is drawn to Anna as “the only girl he knew in Vienna.” Later, at Maxim’s, where scenes of scantily-clad dancers were cut from the final film, Martins is musing on a girl he’d known in Dublin, his mind revolving “in circles – from sentiment to lust and back again from belief to cynicism.” Calloway’s narrative is full of Martins’ drunken exploits, established early, when he attempts to punch the Major but the policeman’s contempt of the “smoky” clubs behind “sham Eastern facades”, hung with “semi-nude photos” is offset by a grudging retrospective sympathy. Although Martins is a nuisance, Calloway’s gently patronising tone allows the audience to tolerate his naïve hopes, even pity him like Anna; “if you are in love yourself, it never occurs to you that the girl doesn’t know.” With youthful enthusiasm, Martins tries to experience all the corruption Vienna can offer but his drinking and womanising appears tame when set alongside the penicillin racket and murders committed by Lime. Martins is always on the outside; he sees the veneer of the city and dabbles his toes in it before he makes his escape.

The concluding cemetery scene has an absolute finality and cinematic neatness that echoes the film’s opening; Martins is now completely alone; Anna disinterested, Lime really dead and Calloway’s job done. Greene and producer Carol Reed disagreed over the ending; the novella allows Martins to walk away with Anna and begin a new “story” but the bleak, cynical conclusion of the film leans more towards the interpretation of Martins as self-delusional hypocrite rather than loyal friend and romantic lead: it is more convincing and satisfying when Anna stays loyal to her image of Lime, despite his villainy, rather than accept the compromise of his second-rate friend. Martins’ drawn-out wait as she approaches through the avenue of trees is impressively sustained and leads the audience to expect Martins’ future to lie away from Vienna, not within it.