10th anniversary post: I Still Believe in the City

Vivian Gornick (b. 1935)

Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 173 pp.

He strikes a match and holds it to his cigarette.

 "I'm not the right person for this life," I say.

"Who is?" he says, exhaling in my direction. (36) 

(11/14/2025) Ten years ago this month, I reflected on the defeat of a local referendum to raise the library tax, and read Vivian Gornick's celebration of life in New York City, while the world around me was showing gun violence, terror attacks, and anti-Muslim sentiment. This month, Cedar Rapids voted down bonds that would have funded public school capital projects ("Cedar Rapids Schools Thank" 2025), and a white nationalist cadre is fueling the Trump administration's tear-gas attacks on American cities and their terror campaign against immigrants (cf. Schulze 2025, Carrasquillo 2025). Seemed about time I revisited Vivian Gornick.

Ready to read, at Brewhemia in New Bohemia

On second reading, her segmented essay proved to contain so much more than I'd caught the first time through. She indeed celebrates the life around her in her long-time hometown, but out of need more than pleasure. Like Thomas Merton, her days have included both dark nights and promising dawns. Parker Palmer (2011: 36-38) would describe hers as a "heart broken open," with love born from pain. 

As I reread The Odd Woman and the City, I found myself underlining and circling, marking passages with abandon. It's worth noting that I almost never do this. Some people do. U.S. President John Adams engaged in a running dialogue with whatever he was reading, at least once scrawling "Fool! Fool!!" at some work that displeased him. I wasn't arguing with her, though, just trying to keep up with the numerous dimensions in her reflections, as she jumped around in time, and roped in exemplars from street people to other writers. There is so much I wanted to show you in this book that I didn't discuss in 2015. It would probably be easier on you, me, and Gornick, though, if you just read it.

"The City" is, after all, only part of the title. "The Odd Woman" is Gornick herself, which she announces early (p. 4), but without telling us why or how. In time she tells us that, growing up in the Bronx, she and her friends were already walkers, and what she saw as she walked up and down the streets of Manhattan showed her what she anticipated would be her life (p. 11, p. 51). But it was not to be, despite advanced degrees, relationships, and jobs. She simply could not--would not?--fit in anywhere. Her longtime friend Leonard tells her:

"Fifty years ago you entered a closet marked 'marriage.' In the closet was a double set of clothes, so stiff they could stand up by themselves. A woman stepped into a dress called 'wife' and the man stepped into a suit called 'husband.' And that was it. They disappeared inside the clothes. Today, we don't pass. We're standing here naked. That's all." (36)

Freedom from traditional roles had become freedom from any role, intolerable because "no one wanted freedom" (p. 121), an insight she attributes to Henry James. She identifies with Mary Barfoot, the main character in George Gissing's novel The Odd Woman; Rose, the mother in the musical Gypsy; and John Dylan, an actor whose stroke left him with a speech impediment that he used to disturbing effect in a public reading of a work by Samuel Beckett.

Gornick's oddness, and her "inability to make peace with" herself (p. 19), is survivable only in the city. Walking becomes a sort of therapy once "nothing turned out as expected" (p. 14), but it is even more than that. It is her connection to people: Leonard, with whom she converses so intently that time becomes unreal (p. 17); the active residents of Manhattan's West Side, which she prefers to the "calmer, cleaner, more spacious" East Side (p. 94); and even the men in line at a soup kitchen, who remind her of journalist's line about "ruined faces worthy of Michelangelo" (p. 152). "It's the voices I can't do without" (p. 173), like the three she samples in rapid succession on pp. 37-38, but she is also comforted by all the nearby presences as she goes to bed at night (p. 21).

Frank O'Hara (1926-1966)

Along the way we meet her mother, ex-lovers, other friends, and any number of writers on these themes, including the poet Charles Reznikoff (p. 38), the novelist Isabel Bolton (p. 79; see also Bloom 2016), and Frank O'Hara, who wrote: I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people don't totally regret life (p. 42). Once you allow for the possibility of oddness, it's everywhere.

Gornick is still with us at 90; she turned 80 the year The Odd Woman and the City was published. In old age, she seems satisfied she's figured out what her problem is. But it continues to be the people of her city who make the "odd" life satisfying. She concludes:

I am home, having dinner at my table, looking out at the city. My mind flashes on all who crossed my path today. I hear their voices, I see their gestures, I start filling in lives for them. Soon they are company, great company. I think to myself, I'd rather be here with you tonight than with anyone else I know. Well, almost anyone else I know. I look up at the great clock on my wall, the one that gives the date as well as the hour. It's time to call Leonard. (175)

SEE ALSO: 

Sam Adams, "Why a 26-Year-Old John Prine Song is Suddenly Everywhere," Slate, 7 November 2025

Parker J. Palmer, Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit (Jossey-Bass, 2011)

I still believe in The City

At the Paix pour Paris vigil, Cedar Rapids

I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.

--DOROTHY DAY

Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 173 pp.

I've just finished Vivian Gornick's short, elegant The Odd Woman and the City. A cross between memoir and segmented essay, it describes her life in and relationship to New York City--Bronx in her youth, Manhattan as an adult. Her most soaring passages celebrate life in the city:

Each day when I leave the house, I tell myself I'm going to walk up the East Side of town because the East Side is calmer, cleaner, more spacious. Yet I seem always to find myself on the crowded, filthy, volatile West Side. On the West Side life feels positively thematic. All that intelligence trapped inside all those smarts. It reminds me of why I walk. Why everyone walks. (pp. 94-95) 

It's an evening in June and I am taking a turn through Washington Square. As I stroll, I see in the air before me, like an image behind a scrim, the square as it looked when I was young, standing right behind the square that I'm actually looking at.... With the street at my back and everything I know etched on my face, I look through the scrim directly into those old memories and I see that they no longer have authority over me. I see the square as it is--black, brown, young; swarming with drifters and junkies and lousy guitar players--and I feel myself as I am, the city as it is. I have lived out my conflicts not my fantasies, and so has New York. We are at one. (pp. 169-170)

It's her life, of course, and it's her city, but at a general level it's the Life in the City that is the fondest promise of the urbanists. Not that she is by any means Pollyannish or sanguine about it--there appear frequently in her stories the jostling of crowds, the noise of construction equipment and amplified music, the danger of crime, and the frequent encounters with fragile people that can make city life less than pleasant. But the energy and promise of the city and its people--all of its people--more than make up for the annoyances. She identifies across three centuries with the British writer Samuel Johnson:

For Johnson the city was always the means of coming up from down under, the place that received his profound discomfort, his monumental unease. The street pulled him out of morose isolation, reunited him with humanity, revived in him his native generosity, gave him back the warmth of his own intellect. On the street Johnson made his enduring observations; here he found his wisdom. Late at night, when he went prowling for tavern conversation, he experienced the relief of seeing his own need mirrored in the company he found: those who drank and talked of Man and God till the light broke because none of them wanted to go home either. (p. 10)

It's a good thing, too, that cities have attractive qualities, because for innumerable environmental and financial reasons urban areas are going to need to contract and get denser in the coming century. We're going to have to get closer to each other. Urbanism can help with that, by promoting the design features that undo a lot of the damage we've done in the post-WW2 boom.

But design will get you only so far. There has to be a readiness of a large part of the American people to live with a large and diverse population close by, and to accept that the threat of crime that comes with concentrated population is not worse than the threats that come with dispersed population. We simply cannot build enough roads and infrastructure to get everyone as far away from everyone else as they might wish to be. The only viable path is to learn to live together.

I thought about this after a spate of gun violence in our town last summer. Then, suddenly, the past few days have seen a series of terror attacks around the world: in Beirut, Paris, Baghdad and just now Lagos. All are attributed to ISIS, the rogue band of Islamists that seems intent on provoking a worldwide religious war. The West has responded with a mix of fear, anger and courage. At our best we are the Parisians of the 11th arrondissement, sitting proudly and defiantly at outdoor cafes (Alderman). At our worst we are the Republican governors and presidential candidates--including Iowa governor Terry Branstad, after an early cautious response--who have opted to stoke the public fear by declaring their states off limits to refugees from the Syrian implosion (Healy and Bosman; compare to Inskeep). Or make overtly anti-Muslim statements (LoBianco). It must be hellishly awkward to be or look Arabic in France right now (Nossiter and Alderman).

Fear and anger are direct threats to our ability to live together. They are certainly understandable responses, natural under the circumstances. But they cannot be our only responses. Putting up walls and bellicose threats can't get us to the good life, or even a particularly secure life. The truly good life can only come collectively, which requires constructive solutions to the problems of our society--and even then, security can never be complete in this world. To try and live otherwise wastes money and corrupts our souls, and we miss out on all the fun different people can be. We can only live together, together.

SOURCES

Liz Alderman, "French Crowd Cafes to Defy Terror With a Sip of Wine," New York Times, 18 November 2015, A12
Patrick Healy and Julie Bosman, "G.O.P. Governors Vow to Close Doors To Syrian Refugees," New York Times, 17 November 2015, A1, A10
Steve Inskeep, "Washington State Governor Says He Welcomes Syrian Refugees," The Two-Way: Breaking News from NPR, 18 November 2015, http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/11/18/456483078/washington-state-governor-says-he-welcomes-syrian-refugees
Tom LoBianco, "Kasich: Create Agency to Promote Judeo-Christian Values," CNN, 17 November 2015, http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/17/politics/john-kasich-judeo-christian-agency/index.html
Adam Nossiter and Liz Alderman, "Distrust, Even Fear, As Secular France Dims on Muslims," New York Times, 17 November 2015, A1, A8