'Being But a Dream'

In “Cockaigne: A Dream,” published in The New Yorker on January 21, 1974, L.E. Sissman describes the mental city he composed of pieces borrowed from the real cities he had known: 

“Coming around the corner of the dream

City I’ve lived in nights since I was ten –

Amalgamated of a lost New York,

A dead Detroit, a trussed and mummified

Skylineless Boston with a hint thrown in

Of Philadelphia and London in

An early age, all folded into a

Receipt (or a lost pawn slip) for a place

That tasted of a human sweetness, laced

With grandeur and improbability –”

 

As a suburban kid, my imaginary city was composed largely of the New York City I knew from television and movies, compounded of Abstract Expressionism, gangsters and tenements, very hip and foreign, where men wore hats and went to Yankees’ game. It was an ethnic place, a stew of languages and races. Later, I would find echoes of it in A.J. Liebling’s journalism and Henry Roth’s novel Call It Sleep.

 

Starting at age twelve I could ride the bus by myself to downtown Cleveland, getting off at Public Square and hitting all the bookstores. With a friend I once went to a magic shop high up in one of the office buildings. I would eat lunch in a diner on Prospect Avenue across from Kay’s Books where I got a job a few years later. One December I stood at the corner of East Ninth Street and Euclid Avenue and watched the Christmas parade. Across the street was a Bond’s men’s clothing store and on the roof was a billboard for a brand of coffee – Chock Full o’ Nuts? – with a giant, steaming coffee mug. I haven’t lived in Cleveland since 1977, so these memories remain precious but, I’m sure, heavily edited by time, as are the places themselves. They feel like those artificial New York City impressions I manufactured more than sixty years ago.

 

Max Beerbohm had lived in Rapallo, Italy, since 1910, until he and his wife returned to England before the start of World War II. The first radio broadcast he made for the BBC, on December 29, 1935, is titled “London Revisited”:

 

“London has been cosmopolitanised, democratised, commercialised, mechanised, standardised, vulgarised, so extensively that one’s pride in showing it to a foreigner is changed to a wholesome humility. One feels rather as Virgil may have felt in showing Hell to Dante.”

 

When Beerbohm collected for publication his BBC broadcasts he asked, “What civilized person in these days [1946] (unless he has a passion for such things as science or sociology), isn’t nostalgic?” Nostalgia for what no longer exists, uncomplicated by disappointment or bitterness, is always a temptation. I can reduce my nostalgia-tinged distaste for what has happened to Cleveland to a single fact: Higbee’s department store, downtown on Public Square, where I was taken each December to visit Santa Claus and his local sidekick, Mr. Jing-a-Ling, is now home to the Jack Cleveland Casino. “It is a bright, cheerful, salubrious Hell, certainly,” Beerbohm writes of latter-day London. “But still—to my mind—Hell. In some ways a better place, I readily concede, than it was in my day, and in days before mine.” Sissman closes his dream-poem with these lines:

 

“And I awaken at twelve-fifty-five

A.M., according to the bedside clock,

On February 14^th of this year,

Elated, desolate it could not spell

Me any longer, being but a dream,

Its only evidence being my tears

Of joy or of the other, I can’t tell.”

 

[The Sissman poem is included in Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L.E. Sissman (1978). A transcript of Beerbohm’s London broadcast is collected in Mainly on the Air (1946; rev. 1957).]