A South Street Literature

South Street has attracted urban intellectuals in a variety of disciplines. Social scientists, especially those affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania just across the Schuylkill, have been drawn to South Street by the area's complex social landscape, in which a variety of races, ethnic groups, social classes, and neighborhood types can be found in a close but segmented mix. If there is no "Philadelphia School" of sociology with the hegemonic status enjoyed by the Chicago School in the early twentieth century, Penn, Temple, and other Philadelphia institutions have produced a distinguished body of urban social science.^[3] Part of that work has been the social scientific mapping of the neighborhoods around South, producing studies of black urbanism—beginning with W. E. B. Du Bois's distinguished early work, The Philadelphia Negro, and including Roger Abrahams's studies of urban folklore initiated in Deep Down in the Jungle —and white-ethnic neighborhood formations.^[4] City planners serving progrowth forces, whose thwarted schemes to turn South Street into an expressway were crucial to the postwar history of the area, have produced innumerable representations of South Street as it was and as they wanted it to be. Residents, business owners, lawyers, professors, and others who opposed the city planners have produced their own counterliterature of studies, polemics, and alternative plans. Together, these nonliterary representations add up to an account of the social, economic, political, and cultural forces that shape the inner city and are shaped by it.

I will draw upon this account later in this chapter in assembling a historical portrait of postwar South Street, but my task in this section is to introduce the account of South Street composed by the literary intellectuals who command my primary attention. Since World War II, the South Street area has inspired novelists, especially first-time novelists. Some were homegrown: Jack Dunphy grew up between the wars in the Irish urban villages of South Philly, William Gardner Smith in black South Philadelphia during the 1930s and 1940s. Some writers were attracted from elsewhere: David Bradley came to the University of

Pennsylvania from a small Pennsylvania town in the 1960s and found his way to South Street when college life proved disappointing; Pete Dexter, raised in South Dakota, found the material for his first novel in South Philadelphia when he worked as a reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News. Diane McKinney-Whetstone was both homegrown and an outsider: she was still very young when her parents left South Philadelphia in the 1950s and moved to West Philadelphia, where she grew up, but she returned to South Philadelphia in her first novel. Four of the five South Street novels are first novels—and the exception, Smith's South Street (his third), was published when its precocious author was all of twenty-seven years old—which suggests that the South Street milieu has convinced young writers (and publishers) looking for good material that they have found the makings of stories worth telling.

Together, they have rendered those stories—that story, in aggregate—in a body of work that explores the literary implications of the inner city's postwar transformation. The South Street writers confronted South Philadelphia and Center City—and, most important, the contact zone where the two regions meet—as a place from which literature can be made. Their response to it is also a response to the problems that faced Nelson Algren at midcentury: how and who to write about the changing inner city.

How to write about South Street? The answer has come in the form of novels—more precisely, "neighborhood novels"—shaped formally and thematically by showing how the conditions of a particular historical period or moment throw urban communities into crisis. The notion of neighborhood is essential to these novels and to the ways they hang together as a group. "Neighborhood," like genre, is a fluid term: it suggests both a quality of civic life and a bounded area larger than a household but smaller than a district. The term is also at least slightly inflected with positive content: especially for city people surrounded by strangers, to think of someone as a neighbor acknowledges an obligation or regard not necessarily extended to everyone they encounter. I will, then, provisionally define a neighborhood as an urban place occupied by a community of people who regard themselves as a community, who share clear ideas of the place's boundaries, who regard the people in the surrounding areas as members of separate communities, and who might plausibly encounter one another in the course of the weekly round. The people of a neighborhood maintain the quality of neighborhood via these shared assumptions and activities. A neighborhood can be as small as a block, although it is rare that an individual block becomes distinctive or insular enough to discourage its residents from regarding people on any of the adjoining blocks as neighbors, and a neighborhood can be very large—if (as is the case with Hyde Park in Chicago or Park Slope in Brooklyn) the contrast with the surrounding areas is relatively great and the general sense within the neighborhood of living in an indivisible geographic and social unit is relatively great. Neighborhood, then, is a quality as much as

it is an artifact, and it is mutable and slippery. Growing up in Chicago, I would never have thought of the people on the other side of Jeffery Boulevard as my neighbors, but I would today if I ran into one of them next week in Ulan Bator or at a scholarly conference. Let us sum up this struggle with a greased concept by concluding that neighborhood is the first geographic and conceptual level of urban community beyond the household, embracing both loved ones and strangers, and as such it is a basic unit of urban community.

Neighborhood novels concern themselves with the local conjunction of people and place that makes up a lived urban order, attached to a particular piece of urban terrain. The problem of neighborhood, of defining and sustaining a particular way of life on that terrain, becomes an organizing logic for these novels, leading them to consider how a particular equation of people and place can over time be made, broken, contested, shifted. Neighborhood crises take place in space: problems of boundary and incursion arise at the neighborhood's borders, the fit between local and metropolitan orders shapes the neighborhood in relation to the city around it. The crises take place, as well, in time: dramas of succession, rise, and decline lead to narratives about change over time; crises of reproduction, in which the neighborhood succeeds or fails in perpetuating itself into the next generation, lead to narratives about the precarious persistence of orders. The urban intellectuals who move through the South Street novels as characters also consider parallel crises in the writing of the neighborhood, dramas of reproduction and representation in the literary sense. The irruption and resolution (or lack of resolution) of these various social and literary crises help to organize these novels generically, to make them "neighborhood novels" devoting significant, patterned energies to depicting and accounting for the human orders that infuse a particular urban space with meanings, thereby turning it into a place.

Each South Street novel concerns itself with describing and accounting for the status of a neighborhood within the social landscape it constructs and imagines two sets of reasons for change: the local neighborhood order's internal logic and city-structuring metropolitan forces typically operating beyond the characters' (and sometimes the novel's) horizons of perception. Each novel's ability to imagine and figure these forces tells us something about the historical moment of its writing. Dunphy's John Fury and Smith's South Street map the late industrial neighborhood order at midcentury. John Fury, like Algren's Man with the Golden Arm, bends a 1930s-vintage account of the neighborhood order's erosive internal contradictions into a midcentury narrative of that order's decline, told in the novel as the passing of the "horse-and-wagon" Philadelphia built by Irish immigrants. Smith's South Street neighborhood must resolve divisive internal disputes in order to confront a complex of external pressures typical of the early 1950s: tension between a rapidly growing black population and white ethnics, increasing agitation by blacks for equal civil rights, the redraw-

ing of racial and political boundaries in the changing inner city. Bradley's South Street and Dexter's God's Pocket, written in the 1970s and 1980s in the aftermath of the urban crisis that was brewing at midcentury, provide epilogues to Dunphy and Smith. Bradley's black South Streeters sustain the vestiges of community against a background of urban renewal and redevelopment, a powerful transformative impetus operating at a scale that dwarfs the neighborhood. The people of Dexter's God's Pocket, an anachronistic survival of the white-ethnic urban village tucked between South Street and Center City, respond with violence and bewilderment to incursions from "outside" that point up the neighborhood's increasingly ghostly presence in the postindustrial city. McKinney-Whetstone's Tumbling returns in the form of historical romance to Smith's social terrain, the black neighborhoods bracketing South Street during the 1940s and 1950s, imagining (as did Smith) a vital community that heals its internal wounds, this time by resisting the external threats of urban renewal and gentrification.

The neighborhood novel does not, of course, confine itself to the formal problem of representing neighborhood and the thematic problems of neighborhood raised by crises in the local order. As it frames and works through these problems of neighborhood, the neighborhood novel erects a flexible structure that can encompass corollary matters ranging across the variety of subjects intersecting with urbanism. (If it sometimes seems that post-urban crisis American culture tends to restrict that range of subjects to one—race—it bears noting that the mapping of racial conflict on the inner city has become a way to discuss freedom and moral order, market forces and social good, individual rights and responsibility to a community, and other large, vexed questions traditionally associated with city life.) Typically, neighborhood novels assemble a local context from a set of exemplary characters, families, pieces of urban terrain, and so on, generalizing outward from this context of neighborhood to broader notions of place, peoplehood, politics, history, and so on. Neighborhood thus provides a manageable vocabulary and scale with which to condense a city, a region, a people, a set of principles into an expressive setting and a system of individual characters.

The South Street literature, continuing the project of the Chicago neighborhood novel into the postwar era, uses the frame of neighborhood to consider the postindustrial inner city. In the 1930s and 1940s, Farrell, Wright, and Algren took up the genre of neighborhood novel developed in the nineteenth century by European and American realists and gave it powerfully influential form. In their hands, the American neighborhood novel came definitively to be about industrial urbanism as it was lived at street level in the urban village and Black Metropolis. The South Street novels share much with the Chicago neighborhood novels: an interest in those people who have the least protection from the effects of urban process; an emphasis on the disjuncture between urban process

at the grand scale and the circumscribed horizons of neighborhood types; a tendency to argue (especially, in the South Street novels, via the successes and failures of writer-characters) for a literature of observation on the sociological model. John Fury, written before Algren's Golden Arm and in the long shadow of Farrell's influence on representations of the urban Irish, follows most closely on the Chicago model, proposing a modest formal extension of the genre with its exaggeratedly spare prose style. Smith's South Street, written at midcentury by a young writer uncomfortable with Wright's equally powerful influence over representations of urban blacks, begins to push the neighborhood novel toward representation of postwar urban transformations. (One can group Smith's book, in this regard, with Anne Petry's The Street [1946] and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man [1952], a picaresque novel that collapses into an apocalyptic neighborhood novel.) The rest of the South Street novels develop subtexts in Dunphy and Smith as they push the neighborhood novel into its postindustrial phase, engaging with the revised inner city that succeeded the Chicago tradition's congeries of industrial villages.

The striking recurrence in the South Street literature of particular formal and thematic strategies reinforces one's sense that the novels form a collective engagement with a changing city, a single composite story spread among several texts. Although the South Street novelists do not seem to have read and influenced one another, the answer to the question of how to write the inner city is remarkably consistent as one reads through the half-century of prose spanning John Fury and Tumbling.^[5]

The South Street novels are structured around family narratives and their problems of community and reproduction. These novels make families the building blocks of neighborhoods—families occupy the rowhouses, build the city, produce the next generation—and family crises become clear figures of neighborhood crises (as in Golden Arm, in which Vi's two families encapsulate the urban village's generational decline). In every novel, marriages are collapsing, barren, sexless, cursed with bad feeling or ill health or poor luck. Bad offspring pervade the literature, threatening to bring a family, a neighborhood, an urban people to ruin as they fritter away their inheritance. The only sons of steady-working men will not work (John Fury, God's Pocket ), marking the terminus of working-class traditions rooted in the industrial village. Upwardly mobile daughters grow away from parents (John Fury, Tumbling ), threatening to bring down the neighborhood with them: this is most clearly dramatized in Tumbling, in which one independent-minded daughter's pathological plastereating habit, not to mention her plan to sell her rowhouse to the city so it can build a highway, literally undermines the structure of the neighborhood. In Smith's South Street, three brothers aspire to sustain and lead a black community through perilous midcentury transitions, but their position of leadership is deeply undercut by their inability to form or sustain families. Bradley's South

Street, the only novel in which marriage dramas are not central, is also the novel with the least traditional notion of neighborhood, and part of its project is precisely to depict a vital community, surviving in the aftermath of two decades of neighborhood-breaking urban renewal, that does not conform to traditional notions of community. Yet even Bradley deploys the marriage strategy in important, conventional ways: his portrait of a childless community robbed of past and future rests significantly on two marriages in crisis (a preacher's and an ex-prostitute's); his account of an urban intellectual's engagement with the inner city takes the form of a poet's shuttling between two opposed domestic arrangements.

The South Street novels also share (again with Golden Arm) a habit of constructing expressive cityscapes that fit the travails of a few characters into larger accounts of urban peoples caught up in the sweep of history. The cities constructed in these novels are signifying forms, and in each of them one can read the history of a people and a place. The rowhouses of South Philadelphia, small and packed end to end in block-long fronts, consistently serve as a figure of an urbanism rooted in the industrial neighborhood order. A stock narrative line is compressed into the rowhouse form: migration (from Europe or the American South), skilled manual work, family formation, saving, commitment to traditional neighborhood institutions (church, tavern, school), an expectation of upward social mobility, and a countervailing expectation that neighborhood is a crucial value that must be preserved not only against outside influence but also against interior forces of dissolution like upward social mobility and generational drift. This is the baseline map of urbanism on which all the South Street novels build their stories of postindustrial transformation. All of them map the rowhouse world and its churches and taverns (Bradley, again, foregrounds the churches and taverns but removes the rowhouses to show the extent of the social damage caused by renewal); all of them use expressive cityscapes—scenes of demolition, collapse, construction—to show how rowhouse urbanism weathers the shocks of urban process. Some of the novels (especially God's Pocket and Bradley's South Street ) also extend their signifying landscapes beyond the neighborhood to sketch greater Philadelphia's postwar history: high-rise housing projects tell the second ghetto's story of migration, conflict, and containment; the groomed precincts of Rittenhouse Square and Society Hill impress the principles of age-old social distance and postwar gentrification upon interlopers from South Philly; Center City's brooding City Hall and towering skyscrapers are the seats of metropolitan power from which anonymous managers, hidden from view, guide the city's transformation.

Always, the encounter of individual characters with the cityscape connects the novel's plot lines to the larger web of histories readable in that cityscape. This tendency is dramatized in a kind of scene repeated throughout the South Street literature: the "runaway," in which a character is borne against his or her

will through a familiar landscape made strange until fetching up against some kind of limit. Whether it be a runaway horse and wagon tearing through South Philly until it reaches the railroad tracks (John Fury, Smith's South Street ), a bus ride through a ruinous landscape that ends at the Schuylkill Expressway (Bradley's South Street ), or a chase on foot after a refrigerator truck until it collides spectacularly with a city bus (God's Pocket ), each runaway sums up the relationship between a character's individual will exercised at the local scale and infinitely more powerful, impersonal processes operating at the metropolitan scale—processes that shape the fates of characters and the neighborhoods and urbanisms they stand for. (Tumbling, the lone exception, helps to prove the runaway rule. The closest it comes to a runaway is a traumatic memory of a brutal abduction and gang rape in rural Florida rather than an urban scene, but the novel is unique in the South Street literature for explicitly imagining the exercise of personal will as securing the neighborhood against the effects of impersonal processes like redevelopment. The lingering trauma of the rape, like the lingering threat of the planned highway, is expunged as the neighborhood heals itself.)

The runaway gathers together the formal strategies and themes that unite the South Street literature. It typically marks a crisis in family narrative: John Fury has a vision of a runaway wagon at his first wife's deathbed; the runaway wagon in Smith's South Street goes out of control when Slim, a neighborhood hero, passes the reins to his young nephew. The runaway takes the reader through a landscape that links characters to larger historical narratives: Bradley's protagonist surveys the results of urban renewal from his bus window; the chase after the truck in God's Pocket surveys a long stretch of South Philly before ending in a crash that raises echoes of the Majcineks' wreck. In each runaway scene, a character confronts the neighborhood, the metropolis, and the relationship between them that forms the South Street literature's main theme. This clash or fusion of scales, local and metropolitan, imparts a dreamlike quality to the runaway, the sense of a familiar place rendered strange in a moment of vertiginous insight.

These moments of insight—of reading urban form and grasping the big picture—are significant departures for the characters involved, episodes in which a coal wagon driver (Fury), numbers writer (Slim), or mob-connected truck driver (Mickey Scarpato in God's Pocket ) does the kind of work that urban intellectuals do. For other characters in the literature, though, reading and writing the city of fact is a full-time job: the South Street literature devotes significant energies to imagining what kinds of urban intellectuals are made or broken by the South Street milieu. The South Street novels' answers to this question of "who writes the inner city?" fashion a composite portrait of the urban intellectual's relationship to the inner city during the postwar era of transformation and crisis. The presence of writer-characters in three of the novels—

both South Streets and God's Pocket— is another repeated element binding together the South Street novels into a larger whole.

Writer-characters move through the literature, confronting urban change with the same sense of bewilderment and crisis evidenced by other characters trying to comprehend the disturbances in their familiar worlds. These writer-characters' dramas of reproduction and representation raise a set of literary-historical problems for them that also faced American urban intellectuals after World War II: who are the urban intellectuals equipped to take up the task of representing the transformed inner city, what should they write, and what constitutes their training and authority to do that work? Both South Streets plot on their neighborhood maps a story in which the postwar social landscape produces an urban intellectual suited to the task of representing it. Smith's protagonist Claude Bowers struggles to make sense of the inner city at midcentury, to decide on the right course and lead his neighborhood (and, by extension, urban blacks in general), to understand and write about black Americans in a time of migration and growing political awareness. Bradley's poet-hero Adlai Stevenson Brown, buffeted by forces of redevelopment and urban crisis that gutted South Street in the 1960s, struggles against sociological dogma and his own middle-class social trajectory to stay on South Street at all, to sustain access to the neighborhood characters, rats, roaches, and garbage that constitute the subject matter of his post-apocalyptic poetry. Dexter's God's Pocket provides a gloss on the story of Nelson Algren's literary exhaustion by plotting the failure of an urban intellectual, a burnt-out shell of a newspaper columnist named Richard Shellburn, to understand the relationship between enclaved survivals of the industrial city and the postindustrial city that contains them.

The stakes in the struggle to represent the South Street milieu are high: writer-characters in the South Street literature tend to succeed or die. Claude Bowers and Adlai Brown fight their way to productive vantage points on the inner city, but Claude's brother Philip, an aspiring novelist, is killed by an aggrieved young man with a rock, and Shellburn is beaten to death by a mob incensed by his phrasing of a decline narrative. The violence visited upon writers in the South Street literature conveys a sense of the upheaval and drama associated with the act of observing and writing about a city in constant, feverish motion. As powerful forces mold the changing social landscape around South Street—eroding older forms of urbanism and enabling new ones, raising the stakes on neighborhoods and individuals—the characters who aspire to make sense of the complex relations among people, place, and process run the risk of writing the wrong thing or failing to write anything at all. Violent little parables of literary life, in which urban intellectuals confront their subject in the streets, identify the South Street literature as caught up in the same urban processes—the same networks of interest and contest—that shaped the South Street of fact.

Writers are not the only victims of violence in the South Street novels, which are awash in beatings, punchouts, knifings, rape, gang fights, riots, and all manner of domestic violence. This pervasive violence does more than mark the South Street literature as conventionally urban and American, it also constitutes a pervasive metaphor of the violence of urban process: family members war against one another as conflicts sweep through the household and the neighborhood it represents in microcosm; neighborhoods war against one another as the social landscape shifts beneath them; social classes and class fractions struggle over land on the edge of Center City; temperatures rise and tempers grow short as older and newer urbanisms crowd against one another. Much, but not all, of this violence is inflected by racial difference, as any reading of postwar urban history would lead one to expect.^[6] From workplace fights (John Fury, God's Pocket ) to gang wars and full-scale riots (Smith's South Street ), a pattern of violence marks the contact between black and white Philadelphia in the novels.

That pattern of violence marks racial division in the South Street literature's city of feeling and refers to such division in the Philadelphia of fact, but it helps to unite the "black" and "white" South Street novels into a single literature. Scenes of racial violence, and the very assumption of strict separation that underlies them, are part of the stitchery that binds together the South Street literature's patchwork of white-ethnic declines and narratives of black community into the larger story of postindustrial transformation. The pattern of racial violence shared by the novels—like the shared patterns of family narratives, expressive cityscapes, runaway scenes, writer-characters, and local-metropolitan tensions—is another measure of literary likeness. This does not render the South Street literature as some kind of postracial utopia; for the most part, in fact, the white South Street authors write about white characters, black authors write about blacks, and each novel stays in its own generic neighborhood. But the South Street literature demonstrates how "black" and "white" genres of urban literature, like black and white neighborhoods in the social landscape, can be parts of a greater whole—even if the people who police their borders do not want them to be.

The violence of the South Street literature also reflects the conflict and dislocation running through South Street's postwar history. The South Street writers have been inspired by observation of a social landscape in dramatic, even violent, motion.