Reading New York

by John Tytell

Examines how the author's life reflected the history of New York City and the publications that shaped him, describing the eye problem that confined him to a dark room at a young age, his family's flight from Antwerp after the Nazi invasion, and his personal relationship with key works of literature. 15,000 first printing.

Genres: New York

352 pages, Hardcover

First published August 26, 2003

About the author

Born in Antwerp, Belgium, John Tytell is an American writer and academic. He has been a professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York since 1977. He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano (1987), which is also his best known book along with Naked Angels, an early history of the Beats.

Reviews

[James Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A reread. Tytell's family fled Amsterdam and arrived in New York City during the war. His memoir is a kind of paean to the city which has nurtured him. He tells of his own coming of age and young academic life through the lives of other writers closely associated with the city, weaving his own story and his fondness for it through the lives of Melville, Whitman, Henry Miller, and the circle of Beats around Ginsberg and Kerouac.

[Will Byrnes · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author is a CCNY grad, the son of Dutch/Belgian immigrants in the diamond trade. He tells bits of his personal story, a life influenced by a host of great writers, particularly writers having something to do with New York. Melville stands out. Others include Poe, Henry Miller, Whitman. I quite enjoyed much of it, especially the Melville. I guess I felt that if as great a writer as Melville could have failed as a commercial artist, there is no shame in it. I was taken by an image of him working in his crappy job while harboring his dreams of might. Tytell quotes a novel in which Melville is depicted

P 48
Busch evokes, better than any historian, the pathos of Melville’s fortitude. Behind him is a wall of charts and schedules, stacks of printed forms on shelves, and before him is a small worktable with a box of pencils and a ruled notebook” “I thought of the sailor to Polynesia, the librarian of whales, inscribing poems no one might read in a government-issued notebook with the pencils given him for writing down the provenance of foodstuffs, the ownership of hides in stinking piles in the cargo holds of ships.

P 43
The Munsee Indians of New Jersey originally called the island whose land he coveted Manahactaniek, or place of general inebriation. – [This strikes me as a wonderful title for a short work]

P 122
After his first visit to New York, Charles Dickens accused the press of “Pimping and pandering for all degrees of vicious taste, and gorging with coined lies the most voracious maw.” In American Notes, Dickens compares journalists to vultures, “the vilest vermin and the worst birds of prey,” who would frighten off any good “Samaritan of clear conscience.”

P 187
Beatrice [Henry Miller’s wife] began criticizing Miller as an idler. At a time when work was plentiful, he found a variety of menial jobs that lasted for brief intervals.: garbage collector, bellhop, bartender, typist, file clerk. In Capricorn, he could claim that he chose these jobs because they “left my mind free.”