The Brooklynite: Flappers Were the Original Hipsters
Beyond the references to general life in Brooklyn—the whole babies, phone installation, subway etiquette stuff—and foreshadowing the ascension of Adolph HItler, The Brooklynite has a lot to say about what it was like to be a writer in Brooklyn in the 20s. And, I must say, it doesn’t sound all that different. For example, there is a love poem to beer. Entitled, aptly, “Beer,” this poem could have been written by just about any member of the Brooklyn Magazine/L Magazine editorial staff after a long meeting at Superfine.
Oft at night before I sleep
I turn my thoughts to you my sweet,
Comes there then into my frame
That fierce longing once again.
Oh! Why must I suffer thus?
Nothing in this world is just.
Must we pay everyway
for the sins of yesterday?
I upon my pillow weep
Till at last I fall asleep,
And in all my dreams I hear,
“For Sale-Whiskey, Wines and Beer”
Ok. So actually, I don’t know that any of us could have been writers back then, because PROHIBITION. I can’t even imagine. I won’t even try.
And then there are the tortured references to the difficulties of love which are injected into pieces that have nothing to do with love at all. In a small blurb about Brooklyn street name origins, the writer considers that, “There certainly must be some significance in calling that street in the Heights ‘Love Lane.’ For is it not short, torturously winding; and does it not end abruptly in a stone wall?” If I found out tomorrow that Henry Stewart traveled back through time to write that, I wouldn’t be at all surprised. There are also pieces deriding “yellow journalists” for using sex too much to grab readers’ attention and enough references to flappers that I can’t help but think of them as the original hipsters and listicles about what the editorial staff hates and loves about Brooklyn (hates: “the L train,” loves: “the Vale of Cashmere at dawn”) and broke writers who need to pawn their watches because they “owe it to the arts” and whenever something was written about Bay Ridge, it was always shunted to the back of the magazine.
Also, and perhaps most significantly, The Brooklynite reviewed Ernest Hemingway’s “Men Without Women,” a short story collection that includes one of Hemingway’s most famous works, “The Killers.” The Brooklynite was not impressed. Oh, it liked “The Killers” well enough, but also it said that Hemingway was “uninteresting” and that “when you’ve read one book by him, you’ve read them all,” and, most damningly, that he makes for “effortless reading.” Which, wow. It’s kind of great to know that Hemingway was always looked down at by critical, Brooklyn lit-types.