_Fifth Avenue in Fiction_
Fifth Avenue in Fiction--Pages of Romance--The Henry James Heroes and
Heroines--George William Curtiss's "Prue and I"--Edgar Fawcett and Edgar
Saltus--The "Big Four" of Archibald Clavering Gunter--The Home of Dr.
Sloper--O. Henry and Arthur Train--Bunner and Washington
Square--"Predestined"--The De Rham House and Van Bibber's
Burglar--Delmonico's--The "Amen Corner"--Union and Madison Squares--The
Coming of Potash and Perlmutter--Up the Avenue.
To Macaulay's New Zealander, contemplating from London Bridge the ruins
of St. Paul's, and the miles upon miles of silent stones stretching to
north and west and east, there would undoubtedly have come the desire to
reconstruct a mental picture of the vast, dead city in certain of the
various periods in which it had been teeming and throbbing with human
life. Had the wish become the task, formal history would have played its
part. Informal history would have proved more fruitful, and bygone days
would have taken shape in the study of old prints, letters, and diaries.
But for the full flavour of the town that once was and now had become
crumbling dust he would have turned to pages that had been professedly
pages of romance.
Suppose Elizabethan London had been his especial interest. That he
would have seen through the eyes of Sir John Falstaff and his riotous,
dissolute cronies of the Boar's Head Tavern. Georgian London? What
better companion could he have had in his scheme of investigation than
Mr. Thomas Jones, recently come up from the West Country? For a vision
of Corinthian London could he have done better than take up Conan
Doyle's "Rodney Stone," with its vivid pictures of the stilted
eccentrics who hovered about the Prince-Regent, the coffee-houses
thronged with England's warriors of the land and sea, and the haunts of
the hard-faced men of the Prize Ring?
The Artful Dodger, guiding the innocent Oliver to the den of Fagin the
Jew, would have introduced that last New Zealander to the sordid section
of London about Great Saffron Hill and Little Saffron Hill that existed
before the construction of the Holborn Viaduct. In the pages of
Thackeray and George Meredith he would have studied the West-End of
Victorian days. Certain seamy aspects of London life of the last years
of the nineteenth century would have been revealed in the novels of
George Gissing; and the books of a score of scribes, whose permanent
place in letters is still a matter of conjecture, would have flashed
glimpses of the city's streets, foibles, manners, and emotions in the
early years of the twentieth century.
Our literature has, as yet, given us no figure analogous to that Last
New Zealander of Macaulay. But in the bustling New York of fifty or one
hundred years hence the dreamer or the student wishing to feel how the
inhabitants of Manhattan lived three or four score years ago, or how we
are living today, will not disdain to turn over pages originally
designed to lighten the tedium of idle hours.
Now and again, in the novels of the fifties and sixties, there are
glimpses of the stretch from Washington Square to Fourteenth Street, but
the greater Fifth Avenue, as a factor in fiction, dates from about the
time when Daisy Miller became a type. To those who really understand
them, every one of the great, vital streets of the world has a soul as
well as a body. The social invader from the West, the merchant whose
establishment still found profit in Grand Street, the banker from Broad
Street, or the ship's chandler from South, the club awakening to the
fact that its quarters on Broadway or in one of the side streets near
Irving Place was too far downtown, or in size inadequate to its growing
membership--those were the agencies that wrought the Avenue's material
development. But it was the American travelling in Europe in the days
when we first found Henry James's heroine on the shores of Lake Geneva
and later in Rome, when transatlantic voyagers were not so commonplace
as they became later, whose pangs of homesickness in his _pension_ in
the Rue de Clichy in Paris, or his hotel in Sorrento, first invested
Fifth Avenue with a spirit. It was different perhaps when he returned
home with a slight pose of foreign manners, to bask for a brief moment
in the sunny flood of distinction that was due him as a kind of later
Sir John Franklin. But over there what were cathedral naves and spires,
or art galleries, or purple Mediterranean waves, or laboriously acquired
French verbs, to the jutting brown-stone stoops and the maples breaking
into blossom?
There was a kind of writing, not fish or flesh or good red herring, but
just the same altogether charming in its day, inspiring of dreams, and a
vehicle for pleasant fancy. It belonged to what, from our grave old
point of view, was the youth of the world, and the spirit of youth, its
ingenuousness, and its ardour, were needed to appreciate it. Ik Marvel's
"Reveries of a Bachelor" was of that _genre_--and how the hearth logs
blazed and the fair faces flickered in the flames in those pages of Mr.
Donald G. Mitchell!--and George William Curtiss's "Prue and I"; and the
latter book was one of the first in which was to be found the flavour
of the old Fifth Avenue. Then there were the forgotten novelists of the
seventies and early eighties, and some who are not quite forgotten, such
as the two Edgars, Fawcett and Saltus, and the days when every visiting
Englishman, no matter what he might have done in real life, in fiction
had to stay, while in New York, at the Brevoort House. All sorts of
inconsequential novels flit through the mind in recalling that bygone
period. There was a gentleman whose atrociously written, but
marvellously constructed "thrillers" were to be found in every deck
chair at the noon hour on transatlantic steamers of thirty years ago.
That was the late Archibald Clavering Gunter. The present generation
knows him and his works not at all; but how a past generation used to
read and reread "Mr. Barnes of New York," and "Mr. Potter of Texas," and
"Miss Nobody of Nowhere," and "That Frenchman," which should have been
called "M. De Vernay of Paris." Those were the earliest and the "big
four." The list of successors is a long one, but that certain something,
that indefinable quality, which had made the first books great trash was
irrevocably gone. Of all the flamboyant characters of the tales Mr.
Barnes was deservedly the most popular, and at such times as he was not
winning international rifle matches at Monte Carlo, or racing about
Europe in respectable pursuit of desirable young ladies, he inhabited a
dwelling on lower Fifth Avenue. Practically all Fifth Avenue were the
scenes of "Miss Nobody of Nowhere," with its charming heroine and her
adopted parents, its wicked English nobleman, and its comical little
Anglo-maniac dude. Under some name or other a "Gussie Van Beekman" was a
necessary ingredient of every Gunter novel.
It is a far cry from Gunter to Henry James, though each wrought
according to his lights, and served his purpose in his time. It was when
the Avenue was in its infancy that Dr. Sloper, of James's "Washington
Square," went to live in the brick house with white stone trimmings,
that, practically unchanged, may be seen today, diagonally across the
street from the Arch. The novelist wrote of the locality as having "a
kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other
quarters of the long, shrill city"; and ascribed to it, "a richer, riper
look than any of the upper ramifications of the great longitudinal
thoroughfare--the look of having had something of a social history."
That "richer, riper look," that suggestion of a past, is there to-day,
and is likely to be there tomorrow. The particular Sloper house is quite
easy of identification. It is the third from the corner as one goes
westward from the Avenue. In 1835, when Dr. Sloper first took
possession, moving uptown from the neighbourhood of the City Hall, which
had seen its best days socially, the Square, then the ideal of quiet and
genteel retirement, was enclosed by a wooden paling. The edifice in
which the Slopers lived and its neighbours were then thought to embody
the last results of architectural science. It actually dates to 1831.
Among the merchants who built in that year were Thomas Suffern, Saul
Allen, John Johnston, George Griswold, James Boorman, and William C.
Rhinelander. It was their type of house that was accepted for the
neighbourhood as the first streets began to open to the right and left
of Fifth Avenue. That northern stretch of the Square, first invaded in
fiction by Henry James, has ever been a favourite background of the
story-spinners, who never tire of contrasting its tone of well-bred
aristocracy with the squalor, half-Bohemian and half-proletarian, that
faces it from across the Park. In fiction one does not necessarily have
to be of an old New York family in order to inhabit one of those
north-side dwellings. Robert Walmsley, of O. Henry's "The Defeat of the
City," lived there, and the boyhood to which he looked back was one
spent on an up-state farm; while another erstwhile tenant in the
exclusive row was the devious Artemas Quibble, of Mr. Arthur Train's
narrative, who began life humbly somewhere in grey New England, and
ended it, so far as the reader was informed, in Sing Sing Prison. Then
there was the home of Mrs. Martin, the "Duchess of Washington Square" of
Brander Matthews's "The Last Meeting," and that of Miss Grandish, of
Julian Ralph's "People We Pass," and the house of Mrs. Delaney, of Edgar
Fawcett's "Rutherford," and the structure which inspired one-half of
Edward W. Townsend's "Just Across the Square," and the five-room
apartment "at the top of a house with dormer windows on the north side"
where Sanford lived according to F. Hopkinson Smith's "Caleb West," and
where his guests, looking out, could see the "night life of the Park,
miniature figures strolling about under the trees, flashing in brilliant
light or swallowed up in dense shadow as they passed in the glare of
many lamps scattered among the budding foliage." Also over the Square,
regarded in the light of fiction, is the friendly shadow of Bunner, who
liked it at any time, but liked it best of all at night, with the great
dim branches swaying and breaking in the breeze, the gas lamps
flickering and blinking, when the tumults and the shoutings of the day
were gone and "only a tramp or something worse in woman's shape was
hurrying across the bleak space, along the winding asphalt, walking over
the Potter's Field of the past on the way to the Potter's Field to be."
[Illustration: "AT THE NORTHWEST CORNER OF FIFTY-FOURTH STREET IS THE
UNIVERSITY CLUB, TO THE MIND OF ARNOLD BENNETT ('YOUR UNITED STATES'),
THE FINEST OF ALL THE FINE STRUCTURES THAT LINE THE AVENUE"]
But to turn into the Avenue proper, and to follow the trail of the
novelists northward. At the very point of departure we are on the site
of the imaginary structure that gave the title to Leroy Scott's "No. 13
Washington Square," for the reason that there is no such number at all,
and that the house in question must have occupied the space between Nos.
12 and 14, respectively, on the east and west corners facing Waverly
Place. Before the next street is reached we have passed the home of the
Huntingdons of Edgar Fawcett's "A Hopeless Case," and at the southwest
corner of the Avenue and Eighth Street, facing the Brevoort, is No. 68
Clinton Place, which was not only the setting, but also the _raison
d'être_ of Thomas A. Janvier's "A Temporary Deadlock." Almost diagonally
across the street is an old brick house, with Ionic pillars of marble
and a fanlight at the arched entrance--one of those houses that, to use
the novelist's words, "preserve unobtrusively, in the midst of a city
that is being constantly rebuilt, the pure beauty of Colonial
dwellings." It was the home of the Ferrols of Stephen French Whitman's
"Predestined," one of the books of real power that appear from time to
time, to be strangely neglected, and through that neglect to tempt the
discriminating reader to contempt for the literary judgment of his age.
At the northwest corner of Ninth Street there is a brownish-green
building erected in the long, long ago to serve as a domicile of the
Brevoort family, which had once exercised pastoral sway over so many
acres of this region. Later it became the home of the De Rhams. But to
Richard Harding Davis, then a reporter on the "Evening Sun," it had
nothing of the flavour of the Patroons. It was simply the house where
young Cortlandt Van Bibber, returning from Jersey City where he had
witnessed the "go" between "Dutchy" Mack and a coloured person
professionally known as the Black Diamond, found his burglar. There is
no mistaking the house, which "faced the avenue," nor the stone wall
that ran back to the brown stable which opened on the side street, nor
the door in the wall, that, opening cautiously, showed Van Bibber the
head of his quarry. "The house was tightly closed, as if some one was
lying inside dead," was a line of Mr. Davis's description. Many years
after the writing of "Van Bibber's Burglar," another maker of fiction
associated with New York was standing before the Ninth Street house, of
the history of which he knew nothing. "Grim tragedy lives there, or
should live there," said Owen Johnson, "I never pass here without the
feeling that there is some one lying dead inside."
Van Bibber's presence in the neighbourhood was in no wise surprising,
for it was one of his favourite haunts when he was not engaged farther
up the Avenue, in his daily labour, which was, as he explained to the
chance acquaintance met at the ball in Lyric Hall described in
"Cinderella," "mixing cocktails at the Knickerbocker Club." Only a few
doors distant from the Ninth Street house there is an apartment hotel
known as the Berkeley, and it was to a Berkeley apartment that Van
Bibber, as related in "Her First Appearance," took the child that he had
practically kidnapped to restore her to her father and to be rewarded
for his intrusion by being sensibly called a well-meaning fool. But
there is another apartment house at the south-west corner of the Avenue
and Twenty-eighth Street which better fits the description, which tells
how Van Bibber, from the windows, could see the many gas lamps of
Broadway where it crossed the Avenue a few blocks away, and the bunches
of light on Madison Square Garden.
Edgar Fawcett was hardly of the generation of the Flora McFlimseys. As a
matter of fact he was a small boy in knickerbockers when the famous
William Allen Butler poem, "Nothing to Wear," first appeared in the
pages of "Harper's Weekly." But Miss McFlimsey was an enduring young
lady, who, for many years was accepted as symbolizing the foibles of
Madison Square, and she was in a measure in Fawcett's mind when he
wrote, in "A Gentleman of Leisure," that vigorous description
contrasting socially the stretch of the Avenue below Fourteenth Street
with the later development a dozen blocks to the north. In another
Fawcett novel, "Olivia Delaplaine," we find the home of the heroine's
husband in Tenth Street, just off the Avenue; and, reverting to "A
Gentleman of Leisure," Clinton Wainwright, the gentleman in question,
lived, like a "visiting Englishman," at the Brevoort.
There have been many Delmonicos. But for the purposes of fiction there
has never been one just like the establishment that occupied a corner at
the junction of the Avenue and Fourteenth Street. It was a more limited
town in those days. The novelist wishing to depict his hero doing the
right thing in the right way by his heroine did not have the variety of
choice he has now. Two squares away, the Academy of Music was,
theatrically and operatically, the social centre, so to carry on the
narrative with a proper regard for the conventions, the preceding dinner
or the following supper was necessarily at the old Delmonico's. They
were good trenchermen and trencherwomen, those heroes and heroines of
yesterday! Many oyster-beds were depleted, and bins of rare vintage
emptied to satisfy the healthy appetites of the inked pages. Somehow the
mouth waters with the memory. When Delmonico's moved on to Twenty-sixth
Street, and from its terraced tables its patrons could look up at
graceful Diana, there were many famous dinners of fiction, such as the
one, for example, consumed by the otherwise faultless Walters, for a
brief period in the service of Mr. Van Bibber--the menu selected:
"Little Neck clams first, with chablis, and pea-soup, and caviare on
toast, before the oyster crabs, with Johannisberger Cabinet; then an
_entrée_ of calves' brains and rice; then no roast, but a bird, cold
asparagus with French dressing, Camembert cheese, and Turkish coffee,"
may be accepted as indicating the gastronomical taste of the author in
the days when youth meant good digestion--but with the departure from
the old Fourteenth Street corner something of the flavour of the name
passed forever.
If New York has never had another restaurant that meant to the novelist
just what the traditional Delmonico's meant, there has also never been
another hotel like the old Fifth Avenue. In actual life the so-called
"Ladies' Parlour" on the second floor, reached, if I remember rightly,
by means of an entrance on the Twenty-third Street side, was dreary
enough; but turn to the pages of the romance of the sixties and
seventies and eighties, and on the heavily upholstered sofas enamoured
couples sat in furtive meeting, and words of endearment were whispered,
and all the stock intrigue of fiction was set in motion. Then, on the
ground floor, was the Amen Corner, without which no tale of political
life was complete, and the various rooms for more formal gatherings,
such as the one in which took place "The Great Secretary of State
Interview," as narrated by Jesse Lynch Williams many years ago.
But for the full flavour of the romance of this section of Fifth Avenue
it is not necessary to go back to the leisurely novelists of the
eighties and before. Recall the work of a man who, a short ten years
ago, was turning out from week to week the mirth-provoking,
amazement-provoking tales dealing with the life of what he termed his
"Little Old Bagdad on-the-Subway," his "Noisyville on-the-Hudson," his
"City of Chameleon Changes." For the Avenue as the expression of the
city's wealth and magnificence and aristocracy the late O. Henry had
little love. The glitter and pomp and pageantry were not for "the likes
of him." He preferred the more plebeian trails, the department-store
infested thoroughfare to the west, with the clattering "El" road
overhead; or Fourth Avenue to the east, beginning at the statue of
"George the Veracious," running between the silent and terrible
mountains, finally, with a shriek and a crash, to dive headlong into the
tunnel at Thirty-fourth Street, and never to be seen again; or even
some purlieu of the great East Side, where he could sit listening at
ease in the humble shop of Fitbad the Tailor.
There was, however, one portion of land belonging to the Avenue where he
felt himself thoroughly at home. When, of a summer's evening, darkness
had fallen, and the leaves were fluttering in the warm breeze, and high
overhead Diana's light was twinkling, and the derelicts were gathered on
the Park benches, the world was full of delightful mystery and magic.
Close to the curb, at one corner of the Square, a low grey motor-car
with engine silent. Then whimsical fancy and a haunting memory of Robert
Louis Stevenson's "New Arabian Nights" builded up the story "While the
Auto Waits." Or perhaps the sight of a car swiftly moving with its
emergency tire dangerously loose, and to that fertile brain were flashed
the ingredients of "The Fifth Wheel." "There is an aristocracy of the
public parks and even of the vagabonds who use them for their private
apartments," wrote Sidney Porter in "The Shocks of Doom." Vallance of
the story felt rather than knew this, but when he stepped down out of
his world into chaos his feet brought him directly to Madison Square.
Probably Sherard Plumer, the down-and-out artist, was another to
recognize its quality even before he fell in with Carson Chalmers, as
outlined in "A Madison Square Arabian Night"; and also Marcus Clayton of
Roanoke County, Virginia, and Eva Bedford, of Bedford County of the same
State; and the disreputable Soapy, of "The Cop and the Anthem," when he
sought a park bench on which to ponder over just what violation of the
law would insure his deportation to Blackwell's Island, which was his
Palm Beach and Riviera for the winter months. Here, to O. Henry, was the
common ground of all, the happy and the unfortunate, the just and the
unjust, the Caliph and the cad; and far above, against the sky, was the
dainty goddess who presided over the destinies of all, Miss Diana, who,
according to the opinion expressed by Mrs. Liberty in "The Lady Higher
Up," has the best job for a statue in the whole town, with the Cat-Show,
and the Horse-Show, and the military tournaments where the privates
"look grand as generals, and the generals try to look grand as
floorwalkers," and the Sportsman's Show, and above all, the French Ball,
"where the original Cohens and the Robert Emmet-Sangerbund Society dance
the Highland fling with one another."
Other figures of fiction, in fancy, flit across the Square, or throng
the near-by streets. In that dense, pushing, alien-tongued multitude
that at the noon hour congests the sidewalks of the Avenue to the south
of Twenty-third Street, one may catch a glimpse of Mr. Montague Glass's
Abe Potash and Morris Perlmutter, long since moved uptown from their
original loft in Division Street in the stories, and in Leonard Street
in fact. The crowd is thickest at the Twenty-first Street corner, where,
in the novels of other days, the mature burghers used to watch the
passing ladies from the windows of the Union Club. But there is little
inclination to tarry long there. The environment of the Square is a
pleasanter environment. When Delmonico's was at the Twenty-sixth Street
corner, the hero of one of Brander Matthews's "Vignettes of Manhattan"
pointed out of one of its windows and confessed that, failure in life as
he was, he would die out of sight of the tower of the Madison Square
Garden. A reminiscent sign or two is all that is left of the old Hotel
Brunswick, which, among the hostelries of other days, yielded precedence
only to the Fifth Avenue and the Brevoort as a factor in fiction.
Reverting to Mr. Davis, the Tower was one of the staple subjects of
conversation of his heroes and heroines when they happened to be in the
Congo, or Morocco, or looking longingly from the decks of steamers in
South American waters; and the shadowy personage--very probably Van
Bibber--who took "A Walk up the Avenue" started on his journey from the
Square. Van Bibber! Of course it was Van Bibber. It must have been Van
Bibber. For when he reached Thirty-second Street a half-dozen men nodded
to him in that casual manner in which men nod to a passing club-mate.
The particular club has since moved some thirty blocks uptown, but to
the old building you will find frequent references not only in the Davis
stories, but also in the novels of Robert W. Chambers, who was in the
habit of indicating it as the Patroon.
Beyond Madison Square the novelists of earlier generations seldom went.
It is to the men of today, above all to those who have been specializing
in what may be called the New York "_novel à la mode_" that we must turn
in order to follow farther the trail. Here is the stately street as
portrayed in Mr. Chambers's "The Danger Mark," or "The Firing Line," or
"The Younger Set," or in any one of a dozen swiftly moving serials of
the hour, whether the author be Mr. Rupert Hughes, or Mr. Owen Johnson,
or Mr. Gouverneur Morris, or Mr. Rex Beach. The novel may serve its
light purpose today and tomorrow be forgotten. But the current of human
life up and down the Avenue is ever running more swiftly.