`The City is a Machine'

After our first meal in Portland, Ore. -- cheeseburgers, chicken and fries al fresco -- we took a train to the Japanese garden, which we couldn’t find, and another to Powell’s, “The City of Books.” Like most cities, the bookstore is crowded, expensive and filled with wonders. The kids chose “graphic novels” -- that is, overpriced comic books. My wife found a novel and a guide to Baja California, where we’ll be spending a week in February. I’m happy too: The Brooklyn Novels of Daniel Fuchs, recently reissued by Black Sparrow Books, and the Dalkey Archive edition of Nothing by Henry Green. Let’s give thanks for small presses: Fuchs and Green, among my favorite novelists, are back in print.

Another gem: Caught, also by Henry Green, originally published in 1943, but I found a Berkley Medallion paperback from 1960. The brown pages smell reassuringly musty but the real prize is the cover: A sultry, disheveled blonde, apparently unclothed, lies under the covers, arms crossed behind her head. She looks stage left, yearningly. Superimposed over her image and the entire front cover is a fishing net. Get it? Caught? The cover is pure pulp and so is the accompanying tagline: “A Novel of People Enmeshed in the Passions of Wartime London.” I hope Green got to see it. By 1960 he had already published his last novel, but would live another 13 unhappy years. The cover price is 50 cents. I paid seven times that and would gladly have paid more.

My wife has taken the kids down to the over-chlorinated hotel pool. Then we’ll walk a few blocks to Portland’s Chinatown for dinner. This is the first any of us has set foot in Oregon. Based on a cursory walk and two train rides, a lot of people are still smoking cigarettes in Portland. The good news is that many of the city’s older building remain intact -- brick work, pressed tin, cast iron. Our hotel opened in 1912. We saw street musicians playing trumpet, amplified blues harp, guitar and banjo. It feels like a compact city densely filled with sensory pleasures. L.E. Sissman included an essay titled “Lost Cities” in his nonfiction collection Innocent Bystander. A native of Detroit and longtime resident of New York City and Boston, he seems to know Portland:

“The fact is, of course, that the city is a machine for compressing both people and experience, for multiplying and heightening sensations (in both senses), for speeding and amplifying the impact of life on the individual. Since flesh and blood can withstand only so many stimuli, threats, and shocks without losing their coherence, the city-as-happening has, with the advance of both tension and technology, become simply too much for us: too much life, too much death to imagine or deal with, day after day.”