NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN Read Free Page A

dearly for his solitary attempt to rescue his wife from the dreariness of her domestic routine. The cost to him is a future of guilt and recrimination. Their story is sad and chilling.
    “Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn” also presents young people striving to ameliorate their lot in a difficult world, but it takes a far broader and more optimistic (albeit cynical) view of its impoverished group of protagonists. It is a brilliant and stirring novella which might well have served as the progenitor for his long novel,
Standing Fast
, published in 1970. The product of five years of work, the novel chronicles in painstaking detail the history of the American left between 1939 and 1963.
    “Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn,” much like the later novel, examines people from a variety of social, political, and economic backgrounds whose lives intertwine. Their early ideals will inevitably and even brutally be compromised with the passage of time. The story will seem all the more touching and timely to a new generation of readers whose lives bridged the gap between the turbulent and idealistic sixties and the radically different—and markedly un-radical—eighties. Little has changed in our entry into the rat race; only the price has gone up. One of the most beautiful of all New York stories, “Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn” remains a perfectly compressed portrait not only of the generation of young people struggling to find their way immediately following World War II, but also of what is arguably the world’s most exciting city, so joyously described in the opening sentence as “my mother, my mistress, my Mecca.”
    Manhattan also serves as the setting for “The Dancer,” a pioneering story whose finale was found, in the early fifties, to be so daring and controversial that no literary magazine would accept it for publication; its eventual inclusion in
discovery
, a paperback collection of new and often experimental fiction, earned it something of a cult status. An extraordinary, hallucinogenic tale that veers off in surprising and unexpected directions, it is filled with a series of bizarre, feverishly surreal images. The point of view is that of twenty-one-year-old Peter Chifley, who leaves his hometown of Elyria, Ohio, to pursue his dream of becoming a dancer. What happens to him upon his arrival in New York provides a truly horrifying portrait of innocence lost, and if Peter seems to be too good to be true, this may say more about the age in which we live than it does about our perceptions of him—an artist destroyed by a shattered dream.
    It is no accident that there are more than a proportionate number of stories here about artists. My father’s predilections were hardly limited to literature; his passion for music was particularly acute, and he surrounded himself by the sound of it all day. Highly disciplined, he rarely deviated from his routine of wakingeach morning at seven and getting to his typewriter by eight, even on weekends or holidays. At the same time, it was equally rare for him to work past five. He often relaxed with a late-afternoon Scotch and an attempt to stumble through a prelude or two on the piano. He was better at the flute. The frequent harp-and-flute duets my sister, Felice, played with him—which sometimes turned into trios if by good fortune my brother, Marco, joined them at the piano—brought out the best in my father. They are some of the loveliest (and frequently most hilarious) memories of my childhood.
    Just as those ensembles were inspired by a musical give-and-take, so the crescendos and diminuendos of my father’s people echo throughout the stories in this collection. We find those echoes in “The Man in the Toolhouse,” when Harry the violinist is wooing Rita the harpist; in “A Glance in the Mirror,” when rueful bandleader Roy Farrow finally gathers the courage to redress the grievances of his daughter, Kate, an aspiring cellist; in the friends and lovers of