The 40s: The Story of a Decade (32 page)

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To a steady McSorley customer, most other New York saloons seem feminine and fit only for college boys and women; the atmosphere in them is so tense and disquieting that he has to drink himself into a coma in order to stand it. In McSorley’s, the customers are self-sufficient; they never try to impress each other. Also, they are not competitive. In other saloons if a man tells a story, good or bad, the man next to him laughs perfunctorily and immediately tries to tell a better one. It is possible to
relax in McSorley’s. For one thing, it is dark and gloomy, and repose comes easy in a gloomy place. Also, there is a thick, musty smell that acts as a balm to jerky nerves; it is really a rich compound of the smells of pine sawdust, tap drippings, pipe tobacco, coal smoke, and onions. A Bellevue interne once said that for many mental disturbances the smell in McSorley’s is more beneficial than psychoanalysis. It is an utterly democratic place. A mechanic in greasy overalls gets as much attention as an executive from Wanamaker’s. The only customer the bartenders brag about is Police Inspector Matthew J. McGrath, who was a shot- and hammer-thrower in four Olympics and is called Mighty Matt.

At midday, McSorley’s is crowded. The afternoon is quiet. At six, it fills up with men who work in the neighborhood. Most nights there are a few curiosity-seekers in the place. If they behave themselves and don’t ask too many questions, they are tolerated. The majority of them have learned about the saloon through John Sloan’s paintings. Between 1912 and 1930, Sloan did five paintings, filled with detail, of the saloon—
McSorley’s Bar
, which shows Bill presiding majestically over the tap and which hangs in the Detroit Institute of Arts;
McSorley’s Back Room
, a painting of an old workingman sitting at the window at dusk with his hands in his lap, his pewter mug on the table;
McSorley’s at Home
, which shows a group of argumentative old-timers around the stove;
McSorley’s Cats
, in which Bill is preparing to feed his drove of cats; and
McSorley’s, Saturday Night
, which was painted during prohibition and shows Bill passing out mugs to a crowd of rollicking customers. Every time one of these appears in an exhibition or in a newspaper or magazine, there is a rush of strangers to the saloon.
McSorley’s Bar
was reproduced in Thomas Craven’s
A Treasury of Art Masterpieces
, which came out last winter, and there have been many strangers in the saloon since. Last November there was a retrospective exhibition of Sloan’s work in Wanamaker’s art department, and a number of McSorley patrons attended it in a body. One asked a clerk for the price of
McSorley’s Cats.
“Three thousand dollars,” he was told. He believed the clerk was kidding him and is still indignant. Kelly likes the Sloan paintings but prefers a golden, corpulent nude which Old John hung in the back room many years ago, right beside Peter Cooper’s portrait. To a stranger, attracted to the saloon by a Sloan painting, Kelly will say, “Hey, Mac, if you want to see some real art, go look at the naked lady in the back room.” The nude is stretched out on a couch and is playing with a parrot; the painting is a copy, probably done
by a Cooper Union student, of Gustave Courbet’s
La Femme au Perroquet.
Kelly always translates this for strangers. “It’s French,” he says learnedly. “It means ‘Duh Goil and duh Polly.’ ”

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McSorley’s bar is short, accommodating approximately ten elbows, and is shored up with iron pipes. It is to the right as you enter. To the left is a row of armchairs with their stiff backs against the wainscoting. The chairs are rickety; when a fat man is sitting in one, it squeaks like new shoes every time he takes a breath. The customers believe in sitting down; if there are vacant chairs, no one ever stands at the bar. Down the middle of the room is a row of battered tables. Their tops are always sticky with spilled ale. In the centre of the room stands the belly stove, which has an isinglass door and is exactly like the stoves in Elevated stations. All winter Kelly keeps it red hot. “Warmer you get, drunker you get,” he says. Some customers prefer mulled ale. They keep their mugs on the hob until the ale gets hot as coffee. A sluggish cat named Minnie sleeps in a scuttle beside the stove. The floor boards are warped, and here and there a hole has been patched with a flattened-out soup can. The back room looks out on a blind tenement court. In this room are three big, round dining-room tables. The kitchen is in one corner of the room; Mike keeps a folding boudoir screen around the gas range, and pots, pans, and paper bags of groceries are stored on the mantelpiece. While he peels potatoes, he sits with early customers at a table out front, holding a dishpan in his lap and talking as he peels. The fare in McSorley’s is plain, cheap, and well cooked. Mike’s specialties are goulash, frankfurters and sauerkraut, and hamburgers blanketed with fried onions. He scribbles his menu in chalk on a slate which hangs in the barroom and consistently misspells four dishes out of five. There is no waiter. During the lunch hour, if Mike is too busy to wait on the customers, they grab plates and help themselves out of the pots on the range. They eat with their hats on and they use toothpicks. Mike refers to food as “she.” For example, if a customer complains that the goulash is not as good as it was last Wednesday, he says, “No matter how not as good she is, she’s good enough for you.”

The saloon opens at eight. Mike gives the floor a lick and a promise and throws on clean sawdust. He replenishes the free-lunch platters with cheese and onions and fills a bowl with cold, hard-boiled eggs, five cents each. Kelly shows up. The ale truck makes its delivery. Then, in the
middle of the morning, the old men begin shuffling in. Kelly calls them “the steadies.” The majority are retired laborers and small businessmen. They prefer McSorley’s to their homes. A few live in the neighborhood, but many come from a distance. One, a retired operator of a chain of Bowery flop-houses, comes in from Sheepshead Bay practically every day. On the day of his retirement, this man said, “If my savings hold out, I’ll never draw another sober breath.” He says he drinks in order to forget the misery he saw in his flop-houses; he undoubtedly saw a lot of it, because he often drinks twenty-five mugs a day, and McSorley’s ale is by no means weak. Kelly brings the old men their drinks. To save him a trip, they usually order two mugs at a time. Most of them are quiet and dignified; a few are eccentrics. About twelve years ago one had to leap out of the path of a speeding automobile on Third Avenue; he is still furious. He mutters to himself constantly. Once, asked what he was muttering about, he said, “Going to buy a shotgun and stand on Third Avenue and shoot at automobiles.” “Are you going to aim at the tires?” he was asked. “Why, hell no!” he said. “At the drivers. Figure I could kill four or five before they arrested me. Might kill more if I could reload fast enough.”

Only a few of the old men have enough interest in the present to read newspapers. These patrons sit up front, to get the light that comes through the grimy street windows. When they grow tired of reading, they stare for hours into the street. There is always something worth looking at on Seventh Street. It is one of those East Side streets completely under the domination of kids. While playing stickball, they keep great packing-box fires going in the gutter; sometimes they roast mickies in the gutter fires. Drunks reel over from the Bowery and go to sleep in doorways, and the kids give them hotfoots with kitchen matches. In McSorley’s the free-lunch platters are kept at the end of the bar nearer the street door, and several times every afternoon kids sidle in, snatch handfuls of cheese and slices of onion, and dash out, slamming the door. This never fails to amuse the old men.

The stove overheats the place and some of the old men are able to sleep in their chairs for long periods. Occasionally one will snore, and Kelly will rouse him, saying, “You making enough racket to wake the dead.” Once Kelly got interested in a sleeper and clocked him. Two hours and forty minutes after the man dozed off, Kelly became uneasy—“Maybe he died,” he said—and shook him awake. “How long did I sleep?” the man asked. “Since the parade,” Kelly said. The man rubbed his eyes and asked, “Which parade?” “The Paddy’s Day parade, two
years ago,” Kelly said scornfully. “Jeez!” the man said. Then he yawned and went back to sleep. Kelly makes jokes about the regularity of the old men. “Hey, Eddie,” he said one morning, “old man Ryan must be dead!” “Why?” Mullins asked. “Well,” Kelly said, “he ain’t been in all week.” In summer they sit in the back room, which is as cool as a cellar. In winter they grab the chairs nearest the stove and sit in them, as motionless as barnacles, until around six, when they yawn, stretch, and start for home, insulated with ale against the dreadful loneliness of the old. “God be wit’ yez,” Kelly says as they go out the door.

JUNE 14, 1947 (ON A LYNCHING TRIAL)

T
he note of Greenville, South Carolina, is rhetorical. Among the stores and offices on Main Street there is a vacant lot that suddenly pretends to be a mountain glade, with a stream purling over a neatly assembled rockfall; and in the foreground there is staked a plaque bearing the words “Greenville City Water Works. 1939. The water supply of Greenville, South Carolina, pure, sparkling, life’s most vital element, flows by gravity from an uncontaminated mountain watershed of nine thousand acres, delivered through duplicated pipe lines, fourteen million gallons capacity, a perfect water for domestic and industrial uses.” Not in such exuberant terms would the existence of a town water supply be celebrated in the North or in my native England, and no deduction can be drawn from this that is damaging to the South. The exuberance of the inscription is actually a sober allusion to reality. Here one remembers that water is a vital element, as it is not in the North or in England. One is always thinking about water, for one is always wanting to have a drink or take a shower or get some clothes washed. The heat of the South is an astonishment to the stranger. When the lynching trial in Greenville came to its end, late in May, it was full summer there, and the huge, pale bush roses that grow around the porches were a little dusty. Greenville was as hot as the cities that lie on the Spanish plains, as Seville and Córdoba. But in those cities the people do not live a modern life, they do not work too grimly, and they sleep in the afternoons; here they keep the same commercial hours as in New York, and practice the hard efficiency that is the price this age asks for money. In fact, the
lynching for which thirty-one men were being tried in the Court House was committed not, as might be imagined by an interested person who was trying to size the matter up by looking at a map and gazetter, in a backward small town, but in a large, modern city.

To sustain the life of a large, modern city in this cloying, clinging heat is an amazing achievement. It is no wonder that the white men and women in Greenville walk with a slow, dragging pride, as if they had taken up a challenge and intended to defy it without end. These people would deny that it is the climate that has challenged them. They speak of the coolness of the nights almost before the stranger has mentioned the heat of the day. When they name the antagonist against whom they have to pit themselves, they simply and passionately and frequently name the North, with the same hatred, the profounder because it is insolently unrequited, that the Irish feel for the English. But the stranger will obstinately continue to admire them for living and working in this land over which the sun seems to be bending low, and for doing more than live and work: for luxuriating in rhetoric, and topping rhetoric with opera.

Near the center of Greenville there stands an old white church, with a delicate spire and handsome steps leading down from a colonnade—the kind of building that makes an illusion of space around itself. This is the First Baptist Church. In there, on Sunday evenings, there is opera. The lovely girls with their rich hair curling around their shoulders and their flowered dresses showing their finely molded throats and arms sit beside the tall young men, whose pale shirts show the squareness of their shoulders and the slimness of their waists, and they join in coloratura hymns with their parents and their grandparents, who sing, like their children, with hope and vehemence, having learned to take things calmly no more than the older characters in opera. As they sing, the women’s dresses become crumpled wraps, the men’s shirts cling to them, although the service does not begin till eight o’clock at night. But, undistracted by the heat, they listen, still and yet soaring, to the anthems sung by an ecstatic choir and to a sermon that is like a bass recitative, ending in an aria of faith, mounting to cadenzas of adoration. In no other place are Baptists likely to remind a stranger of Verdi.