Ahead of his upcoming Roundtable course on the literary history of the Upper East Side beginning Friday, July 17 — featuring inspired, insightful readings of Edith Wharton’s New York stories, John O’Hara’s BUtterfield 8, Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, J. D. Salinger’s Nine Stories and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, Sarah Schulman’s The Cosmopolitans, and others — we talked to New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik about the literary legacy of the neighborhood, his home of 25 years; his admiration for Edith Wharton; and maintaining humane values in a world that doesn’t always welcome them; and much more.
The courses that you’ve taught for 92NY and Roundtable range widely. You’ve covered American musical lyrics, the Marx Brothers, The New Yorker, where you are a staff writer, and more. What made you want to teach your upcoming course on the classic literature of NYC?
It particularly focuses on the literature of the Upper East Side. I’ve lived in what I call, to my wife’s despair, this farkakte neighborhood for almost 25 years now — you have to be under 7 or over 70 to live here [laughs]. It’s a place of great wealth, not a place of great lore. But there is an incredibly rich literature devoted to this neighborhood where I have lived for a quarter of a century and where 92NY has flourished for 150 years. The idea of place is incredibly important when we’re thinking about writing. I want to treat the Upper East Side not as a catch-all for the affluent, but as a neighborhood with a history and a literature specific to itself. I wanted to think about writing as varied as John O’Hara’s BUtterfield 8 — about the life of a “call girl,” as they were called in the 1940s — to Edith Wharton, who wrote about the upper class on Fifth Avenue before anyone else did. I want to show what 100 years of writing tells us about how a neighborhood changes, and how that might mirror the transformations of New York.
How has the Upper East Side changed?
When I first lived here in the 1980s, for three years, in the tiny 9’x11’ basement apartment that I celebrated in At the Strangers’ Gate, the Upper East Side was more divided. West of Park Avenue was wealthy, and east of Park Avenue were the middle- and working-class neighborhoods of Yorkville and East Harlem. 86th Street was still lined with German, Austrian, and Jewish restaurants. It’s become much more homogenized, sadly, in the 40 years since, which mirrors what has happened all over Manhattan. The culture has changed — the neighborhood is very child-centric now, more so than at any point in its history. In Edith Wharton’s books children are born and they exist, but they are hardly the focus of their parents’ existence. That’s very different from the world we live in now. I also want to talk about the role of the Jewish community up here, of which 92NY is the living nucleus.
New York is a global, cosmopolitan city — in a certain light it mirrors the ranging complexity of the US, but in another it is anomalous and alien to many Americans outside the five boroughs, unlike any other city in the world. Why does it continue to captivate us?
I wrote in my book Through the Children’s Gate that New York has three values: density, verticality, and plurality. Density: we live side by side with our neighbors, we fight over noise, we become entangled with one another. Verticality: the skyline is always transforming, becoming ever taller — I joke that all the strange, narrow buildings that have gone up near Central Park to house the new rich should be called the oligarch’s erections [laughs]. And finally, plurality: more varieties of people flourish here than in any city I can think of since classical Alexandria. It would hardly be possible to enumerate all of them here. Though we don’t always get along in perfect pluralist coexistence, we do to a remarkable degree. Clashes do happen — the draft riots in the Civil War, the violence between the Jewish and Black communities in Crown Heights in the 1990s — but given just how dense this pluralistic city is, it’s been a kind of miracle of coexistence for a long time. I think that makes New York a beacon to the world.
As a literary and cultural critic for The New Yorker, you write about everything from silent film to New York baseball culture to the current, fraught state of American liberalism. Is there a common thread between the subjects that interest you?
Everything I’ve ever written is about the struggle to maintain humane values in a world that doesn’t welcome them. My book on Paris [Paris to the Moon] was comic and joyful — it was a memento of a very happy time in my life, and of a time in the 1990s when there was a general sense of hope and optimism in the world. But nonetheless that book was also about how France was struggling to maintain its civilization, with all its formality and manners, in the face of postmodernism and the forces of globalization. Now, as I write about the tragedies of American politics, it’s the same question — how can we sustain the values of liberal humanism in an extremely hostile world? That extends to my writing about literature. My heroes — Camus, Diderot, William Dean Howells — are all authors who are struggling with that same question. That is the continuity of my work. It inflects every corner of it.
What do you hope participants in Classic Literature of NYC take with them after the course is over?
First, I want to delight them — they should have a terrifically good time and enjoy the process of reading. People sometimes refer to folks like me as public intellectuals — I don’t like that term. I see myself as a private reader, and the first principle of great writing for me is delight. Every sentence should stir you. I love to share my pleasure in writing with other readers. Second, I want them to come away with appreciation for some underappreciated writers, like John O’Hara, who I think we underestimate a bit now, and to see the enduring virtue in a classic writer like Edith Wharton, whose body of work seems to get better every day. And finally, I hope we can paint a portrait of the Upper East Side as a distinct place with real character and history.
Adam Gopnik’s Classic NYC Literature begins Fri, Jul 17.