Inventing the Truth by William Zinsser

Author:William Zinsser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

ALFRED KAZIN: The Past Breaks Out

A Walker in the City, published in 1951 as a sensory memory of boyhood in the Brownsville district of Brooklyn, began as something else. When the war, Hitler’s war, was over, I returned from wartime reporting in England to find that there was no room for me in New York except in a ramshackle painter’s studio on Pineapple Street in Brooklyn Heights, indifferently left to me when the painter moved on to big money in commercial art. He even left me his old paintings, which consisted of violently colored images, a whole series of concentration camp prisoners standing with clenched fists behind barbed wire.

The house itself had seen better days. The greasy, spattered front steps, just off the Chinese hand laundry in the basement, led into what must have been the vestibule of a traditionally stately Brooklyn Heights mansion. Despite the metal shields holding up the battered front door, you could see that it had once been a beautiful door, like the many beautiful doors of grand old brownstones still lining Columbia Heights, Hicks Street and the other streets veering toward the harbor and Brooklyn Bridge.

Pineapple Street, just off Fulton, was in a poor way just then, and so was I. Across the street, just above the garbage cans put out by the local coffeeshop, hung the lopsided bronze plaque put up by the Authors League commemorating the exact site where in 1851 Walt Whitman himself helped put Leaves of Grass into type. Whenever I went up to my top floor studio I could smell the remains of some ancient smoke. There had once been a fire. The building still smelled of fire. My two rooms on the top floor had obviously been cut out of something larger, and despite the makeshift wall between the Puerto Rican carpenter next door and myself, he woke me every morning when Pineapple Street was still dark just by the racket he made on the other side of the wall getting himself ready to leave for work.

I would lie in bed listening to tugs hooting three blocks away; the harbor was all around me, and, when it rained, my painter’s great north windows were awash with foggy sea light. The floors went every which way, but there was a skylight; the place was full of light. The evenings were lonely and even a little terrible as I lay on a couch in the other room staring at the violently colored concentration camp prisoners, grim behind barbed wire. I had no respect for these paintings, but would not take them down.

Much as I had always loved the neighboring streets and walking the promenade below Columbia Heights, with its full view of the bridge of bridges and the port of New York, I was unsure of everything else. A moment had come into my life, as can happen to men after thirty, when only the opening of Dante’s Inferno spoke to my condition: “In the middle of our life, I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost.

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