The Question of Pleasure and "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn"

The "Bookends" page of the "New York Times" Sunday Book Review section has become one of my favorite reads.  The format is always the same: two guest contributors horse over a particular topic or question. On April 5, it was "When it comes to reading, is pleasure suspect?"

Here we need to pause for a moment and consider the question. Why might the concept of pleasure (happiness, delight, joy, satisfaction, gratification, contentment, amusement, etc.) be considered suspect at all? What does this say about our society? 
 

"Plenty of serious minded individuals who value difficulty as a badge of honor consider pleasure as a triviality or at best as a distraction," says Anna Holmes, one of the contributors. While somewhat cautiously defending pleasure (what if it derives from something horrific?), she ultimately worries that it can all too easily become life's "default mode" and that we may be amusing ourselves to death. A life of struggle and pain is presumably a worthier existence and a life better lived – a path to sainthood, perhaps. Pleasure should presumably be rationed judiciously.

"Pleasure is not what we associate with many useful educational exercises," says Benjamin Moser, the other contributor. But it can be useful if it serves to keep us interested in more weighty matters that might otherwise be rather stultifying.

 "… even those who believe that conveying moral messages is the task of literature cannot believe that their points are best scored through jargon," he says. A little bit of sugar helps the medicine go down.

Reading this exchange was, well, rather more painful than pleasurable, but it got me thinking – about why I like Thomas Wolfe's short story "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn" so much. This totally charming piece, published in "The New Yorker" in 1935, always leaves me with a smile on my face and a feeling of warmth inside. Do I feel guilty, unworthy, on the slippery slope of death-by- pleasure as a result? Not at all.

While some have puzzled over what the story means – it has no plot, just an encounter of strangers – it seems clear to me. Wolfe, a North Carolina native, is making gentle fun of himself as an innocent in a foreign land. Probably as a writer's challenge, he chooses to depict the situation not from his own perspective, but from that of one of the "natives" – and one who speaks and thinks in a rather extreme (although perhaps then-common) form of Brooklynese. It's a significant challenge and part of the delight in reading the story is experiencing how well Wolfe rises to the task.

How do we know this? Well, the innocent is identified as the "dis big guy" (Wolfe was about six feet, six inches tall) and he lived in Brooklyn Heights for a number of years while teaching at New York University. One can easily imagine him deciding to explore the still somewhat challenging Brooklyn terrain with the aid of a map and bumping into any number of colorful characters in the process of doing so.

Not just the devil, but the delight is often in the details: conversations we've all experienced that veer off in odd directions. Wolfe (the big guy) has been to Red Hook – then a notoriously rough dockland portion of Brooklyn (now an icon of gentrification) – and when the incredulous narrator asks him what he was doing there, Wolfe talks of this and that and eventually, of seeing ships being loaded. That gets him thinking about water and the fact he can't swim – Wolfe was from Ashville, far from the Carolina coast – and with that thought in his head, asks the ever-more astonished narrator whether he can. Off goes the conversation into a sort of Neverland, leaving the narrator wondering how he ever got into this and how much weirder can it get. He bails out, leaving Wolfe muttering to himself – about drowning and apparently, where it might be likely to happen in Brooklyn.

There's also that earlier incident, where when the narrator attempts to give Wolfe directions, another guy buts in with a different answer and an altercation nearly ensues.

We've all had the experience of giving directions, only to have someone else jump in to correct us, or try to.  The challenge for Wolfe was how to convincing depict the manner in which such a situation  might play out in this foreign land. Saved by the subway.

I first read this story in high school, around 1960, and never forgot it. Then, just recently I came across it again in an anthology entitled "50 Great ShortStories." This time around, the pleasure of reading it was even greater. As fiction goes, it is a jewel.