The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick Page B

first said, “Sir, you didn’t pay your fare.” I looked around at my fellow travelers and saw that each had quickly rearranged his or her face behind its compulsory mask of neutrality. It was as though, for them, nothing had ever happened. But even then I knew better.
    *   *   *
    In the early 1950s, a New York journalist named Seymour Krim yearned to be a maker of dissident literature at the same time that he wished to enjoy national celebrity—and on both scores felt himself a failure. Out of that sense of failure, Krim found a voice and a subject that spoke to the times. His persona was that of a manic-depressive, alternately ambitious, neurotic, self-mocking, and it spilled rivers of ink delivering an ongoing account of its breakdowns, its hungers, its shocking envy of those who had achieved the success that was both despised and longed for. That voice was also urban to the core. No place on earth other than New York City could have produced a Seymour Krim.
    Making provocative use of a mad, inventive, somewhat stream-of-consciousness sentence structure, Krim developed a hipster prose style that allowed him, in spirit, to join a generation of emerging rebels for whom thought, feeling, and action were about to become one. For Krim, achieving such unity would mean bringing his own inner chaos under sufficient control that he’d be able to write the great work he knew he had it in him to write.
    Fantasy was his middle name. He was forever fantasizing a future in which all would be magically pulled together and—of this he was certain—his own big-time promise would blossom into major accomplishment. The fantasizing saturated nearly every piece he ever wrote. A nervous braggadocio beneath the surface of the prose made his narrator sound as though he imagined himself the protagonist in a Broadway musical, calling out to the audience, “Just you wait and see! I’m gonna come out of this bigger, better, more important than ALL OF YOU PUT TOGETHER.”
    But consolidation of thought and action remained beyond Krim’s grasp. All he could do was document the disability that tore him up every day that he awakened in the cold-water flat on the Lower East Side that he lived in until he died. At the height of his powers, Krim’s gift was to speak for all those like him who were also unable to convert fantasy into reality. Through the simple expedient of using this defiantly daydreaming self as an instrument of illumination, Krim sought to make a metaphor of the American inability to grow up and get down to work.
    Too often Krim’s anxiety swamped the metaphor, and when it did the writing was reduced to a disheveled rant, tiresome and pathetic. In 1973, however, he wrote “For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business,” a remarkable essay in which he at long last did pull together the subject he had spent years making his own. Here, he was able to capture brilliantly the American obsession with failure itself—the taste of it, the fear of it, the forever being haunted by it—and when he did, his message was delivered in language that made prodigious use of the New York vernacular:
    â€œAt 51,” he wrote,
    believe it or not, or believe it and pity me if you are young and swift, I still don’t know truly “what I want to be.”… In that profuse upstairs delicatessen of mine I’m as open to every wild possibility as I was at 13 …
    Thousands upon thousands of people who I believe are like me are those who have never found the professional skin to fit the riot in their souls. Many never will … This isn’t presumption so much as a voice of scars and stars talking. I’ve lived it and will probably go on living it until they take away my hotdog …
    But if you are a proud, searching “failure” in this society and we can take ironic comfort in the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of us,