“Your fare entitles you to ride the bus,” I reply. “It does not entitle you to hold the passengers hostage.”
“Why, you bitch,” the man cries.
I leave my seat and go up to the driver. “Did you hear what that man just said to me?”
“Yes, lady,” the driver says wearily. “I heard him.”
“Are you going to do anything about it?” I demand.
“What do you want me to do? Call the police?”
“You bitch, you white bitch,” the man on the cell phone howls.
“Yes,” I say, “call the police.”
The bus grinds to a halt.
“Everybody off the bus,” the driver calls out.
A woman in the back wails, “I’m late for my therapist!”
When the cops show up, they laugh at me.
I go home, write up the incident, and e-mail it to the Times.
Two days later, my phone rings and a man from the paper says, “You want us to publish this?”
* * *
She was born Mary Britton Miller in New London, Connecticut, in 1883, into a wealthy Protestant family and grew up to become one of the Odd Women. Who can say why. Her childhood was marked by humdrum melodrama — by the age of three she’d been orphaned, at fourteen her twin sister drowned, by eighteen (it’s been speculated) she might have borne an illegitimate baby. What, however, can actually account for a sensibility destined to be shaped by one set of experiences rather than another; or, for that matter, explain why one set of events rather than another becomes experience. What is certain, however, is that inevitably one ends up deeply surprised—“This is not what I had in mind!”—at how it has all turned out; and just as inevitably, the surprise becomes one’s raw material.
Whatever the truth of her inner circumstance, in 1911, at the age of twenty-eight, Mary Miller settled in New York City, where she worked and lived, quite alone, for the rest of her long life. When she died in 1975, it was in the Greenwich Village apartment she had occupied for more than forty years. She was never married, and she seems not to have had a lover anyone ever knew. What she did have was friends, some of whom described her as witty and mean, entertainingly haughty, and impressively self-educated.
For years, Mary B. Miller wrote conventional poems and stories that got published but went unnoticed. Then, between 1946 and 1952, between the ages of sixty-three and sixty-nine, under the name of Isabel Bolton, she produced three short modernist novels that, at the time of publication, earned her a significant amount of literary attention. Edmund Wilson praised her work in The New Yorker, as did Diana Trilling in The Nation. Both critics thought they had discovered a major new talent.
These novels are all voice, hardly any plot at all. The reader is inside the mind of a woman — essentially it’s the same woman in all the books — going through a day (or a few days) in New York, musing, thinking, reminiscing, trying to puzzle out her life in prose that mimics interiority: free, flashing, reverie-bound. The action is always at a remove; it is the reverie that counts. In the first novel the year is 1939, the woman is in her forties, and she’s named Millicent. In the second it’s 1945, she’s in her fifties and named Hilly. In the third it’s 1950, she’s in her eighties, and she’s Margaret. A life dotted with smart, knowing New Yorkers is sketched in, characters are scattered about, and always there is a young man to whom the protagonist is oddly attached; but really she is alone, and has been alone forever. In each story, however, the woman is able to cut a deal with life because she has the city to love. And how she loves it:
What a strange, what a fantastic city … there was something here that one experienced nowhere else on earth. Something one loved intensely. What was it? Crossing the streets — standing on the street corners with the crowds: what was it that induced this special climate of the nerves … a peculiar sense of intimacy, friendliness, being here with all these people and in this strange place … They touched your heart with tenderness and you felt yourself a part of the real flight and flutter — searching their faces, speculating about their dooms and destinies.
This relation between the self and the city is Bolton’s true subject, the modernist part of her enterprise:
You ran about in motor cars, you boarded ocean liners, crossed the continent in Chiefs and Super Chiefs … the present moment so filled with terror and tenderness, and experiencing every day such a queer intensity. Wondering so often who you were and what you were and who it might be necessary for you to be the next moment … and the heart so hungry for heaven knew just what, so unassuaged, so void … [But then] almost anything might happen to you in New York … the fabulous city like a great Christmas tree, so brilliantly lighted, with so many glittering gifts perpetually being handed out … You wouldn’t call it the natural climate of your soul … Longing as you were for some display of natural warmth and friendliness [that seemed] to have dissolved in gossip, analysis — sophistication … There was hunger, there was immense curiosity, there was solitude … Yet there were these sudden, these unaccountable moments — being overtaken by love — everywhere — on top of buses, in crowded concert halls — sometimes on winter evenings with the skyscrapers floating, flickering above you … merging with the crowds, examining the faces. This sense of brotherhood. You buried your loneliness in it.
This was the loneliness that told Bolton she was “the most solitary … individual that ever at any moment in the march of mad events had trod upon the earth.”
Then the paradox of her situation hits her: “Christ, how we loved our own aloneness … We were incapable of giving because there was so much within our reach to grab and snatch and gather for our own, our solitary souls.”
Bolton was nearly seventy when she wrote these words. She had lived long enough to see that modern life, with its unspeakable freedoms mirrored in the gorgeous disconnect of the crowded city, has revealed us to ourselves as has the culture of no other age. She sees what Freud saw — that our loneliness is anguishing and yet, inexplicably, we are loath to give it up. At no period in psychological time are we free of the contradiction: it is the conflict of conflicts. This was Bolton’s wisdom, her only wisdom. When she wrote it in the late 1940s it sounded profound to her most literate readers.
* * *
The two greatest writers of the urban crowd in the nineteenth century were Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo. Each, in his own way, had grasped whole the meaning of these metropolitan masses rapidly developing in London and in Paris. Dickens especially understood its significance. To see a swiftly moving man or woman out of the side of your eye — to feel his or her presence at an angle of vision that allowed one to register only half a face, part of an expression, a piece of a gesture; and then to have to decide quickly how to react to this flood of human partialness — this was creating a radical change in social history.
Victor Hugo, along with many other nineteenth-century writers, saw the same thing and understood, as Walter Benjamin put it, that there was no subject more entitled to his attention than the crowd. It was Hugo’s shrewdness, Benjamin wrote, that made him see the crowd “was getting ready to take shape as a public … who had acquired facility in reading” and was becoming the kind of purchaser of books that “wished to find itself portrayed in the contemporary novel, as the patrons did in the paintings of the Middle Ages.”
These remarks of Benjamin’s on Victor Hugo occur in a famous essay he wrote on Baudelaire, the writer who meant the most to him. It was in Baudelaire that the idea of the flaneur developed: that is, the person who strolls aimlessly through the streets of the big cities in studied contrast with the hurried, purposeful activity of the crowd. It was the flaneur, Baudelaire thought, who would morph into the writer of the future. “Who among us,” he wrote, “has not dreamt, in his ambitious days, of the miracle of a poetic prose … [that would] adapt itself to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the wave motions of dreaming, the shocks of consciousness. This ideal … will grip especially those who are at home in the giant cities and the web of their numberless interconnecting relationships.” This crowd, Benjamin wrote, of whose existence Baudelaire is always aware, “has not served as the model for any of his works, but it is imprinted on his creativity as a hidden figure.”