Eyes on the Street

by Robert Kanigel

  I realize I have been inflicting myself with the straitjacket magazine editors used to inflict on me when I had to write captions of so many lines, so many characters per line—and all because I have been arbitrarily thinking in chapters that over-compress some things and over-inflate others, the genesis of that being an original outline which was not really suitable and which I have been measly adapting instead of overturning.

  In any case, she hoped to deliver the promised book the following year. She didn’t.

  A year and a half later, Jane wrote brother John and his wife,

  I write a little way, and then I rewrite and rewrite, then write a little way and rewrite and rewrite, achieving a snail’s pace with a quantity of paper that would do credit to an elephant, if elephants ate paper. Anyhow, in this inefficient way I am making progress (I guess).

  Love from all,

  Jane

  CHAPTER 21

  FLUMMOXED

  FAMILY AND FRIENDS saw the trouble Jane was having but were, of course, powerless to help her. In July 1976, Jane’s nephew Decker came to stay with Jane and Bob while doing his residency at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, remaining until June 1978. Later, in the early 1980s, he stayed with them again. During both periods he got to see close-up Jane’s problems with the book. “She was so flummoxed and frustrated.”

  All the while, of course, she had Jason Epstein to account to. For how long could he be so patient? In August 1976, Jane wrote to him, “When you ask about my book, you must feel somewhat as if you are making inquiries about an idiot child. I sometimes feel that way about it myself.” She’d not written to him recently, she explained, first, because she didn’t have much manuscript to show him, and second, because she came away from each day’s work “too damn tired, and when tomorrow comes I get drawn into the book again as if it were some irresistible magnet.”

  This was not a pretty picture.

  “I always hit some point when I am really discouraged,” Jane would tell an interviewer later. A point where she’d realize, “I would never have gotten into this if I knew what I was getting into. And I am tempted, really seriously…to put all my research and all my awful writing I can’t bear to read myself at this stage into a big green garbage bag and put it out and be done with it.”

  Jim Jacobs would recall his mother’s “huge impatience” with her slow progress. What made it worse was that, since Death and Life, she’d come to define herself as a writer of books almost exclusively—yet now seemed unable to write one. “I’ve forgotten how to write,” she’d say on a bad day. “I’m remembering how to write,” she’d say on a good one. She had her tricks. “You’ve done this before,” she’d tell herself. Jim recalls her trying to all but sweet-talk her way into writerly optimism. Or, she’d dismiss herself as “silly for having this despairing pathology.” But for too long now, all the tricks and sweet talk weren’t working. Her frustrations gnawed at her. “One of her other remedies,” admits Jim, “was getting into bed and pulling the covers over her head. She did that, too.”

  At one point a little later, Riley Henderson, niece Jane Butzner’s husband, noticed that the ivy growing up the back wall of the house on Albany Avenue obstructed Jane’s window, blocking the light. Too little natural light, he’d heard, could play on the emotions, and he suggested they cut back the ivy. Jane went along with the suggestion, reporting back that yes, well, it did seem to have some effect.

  Early in 1977, Jane sent Epstein about fifty pages. “I feel strongly that you’re off to a good start this time,” Epstein wrote back. “The material is full of good, strong ideas and the only real problem is your tendency to state your conclusion before you demonstrate it concretely.” He followed up with four pages of suggestions and pointed questions: “Why is Palermo impotent and what happened to make it so?”

  “You should begin with the example of Uruguay rather than with the generalization about supply regions.”

  “What are Bardou’s people doing after 1870?” he asked in reference to a French town whose tribulations Jane had described.

  “Why is Soviet productivity low?”

  “It would be good to know more about Ethiopia. How and why did it collapse economically?”

  In the end, Jane’s book was finished. She would dedicate it to Epstein, “who has waited so long for it with good humor and good counsel.” It was a 232-page book perhaps better appreciated as 500 or 600 paragraphs, each long and intricate, densely argued, richly textured, thick with fact—and a struggle to get it right. It took her more than a dozen years, a period shot through with her adjustment to Canada, the distractions she faced from her unaccustomed perch close to power in Toronto, the growing-up of her children, their travels and adventures, and the death of her mother in 1981. Much of that time, she was mired in an intellectual and emotional swamp, muddled as to just what she wanted to say or how she wanted to say it.

  Which, in varying degree, in fact, is how she was with all her books.

  —

  Depending on how you count, Cities and the Wealth of Nations was Jane’s third, fourth, or fifth book. It was her third major work conceived afresh. But it was her fourth, if you included her compilation, Constitutional Chaff, from back in 1940. Or her fifth, if you included a short book, The Question of Separatism, that grew out of lectures Jane delivered in 1979 and was published the following year. After the separatism book, and then Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jane wrote a deeply serious book titled Systems of Survival, which took the form of conversations among friends; in it she developed the idea of two distinct moral systems working in tandem to keep civilization civilized. Next, Jane took her great-aunt Hannah’s manuscript from a half century before, about her adventures in Alaska, and brought it back to life, with reworked text and added commentary, as A Schoolteacher in Old Alaska. In The Nature of Economies, she returned to the dialogue form to explore nature as a source of principles for economic development. In Dark Age Ahead, published two years before her death, Jane warned of some of the malignant directions in which modern society was headed. Along the way, she also wrote a slip of a children’s book, The Girl on the Hat, a collection of stories adapted from ones she’d told her own children years earlier.

  None of these books left the lasting mark or enjoyed the commercial success of Death and Life, with which, inevitably, they’d be compared and in whose shadow they stood. But mostly, they sold well enough, got respectful attention, earned good reviews, are still in print, and sometimes won literary prizes. Cities and the Wealth of Nations won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Dark Age Ahead proved a best seller in Canada. Just as some Jane Austen fans champion Emma, say, or Mansfield Park, over Pride and Prejudice, each of Jane Jacobs’s books had its adherents. “There is a fight to be had,” reports Mary Rowe, a friend of Jane’s from later in her life, over “which of her volumes is the most important.” One of Rowe’s colleagues picked “Dark Age Ahead, hands down.” Rowe’s own favorite was Systems of Survival. Each book had its own history, its own role in Jane’s intellectual development. And as she came to be recognized for books that weren’t pop sociology, weren’t academic treatises, weren’t in every way “literary,” but were, indisputably, like no one else’s, she was sometimes asked to reflect on just how she made them and how, more broadly, she worked.

  In the beginning (in the beginning, that is, after much reading, observing, and thinking) came the idea, in all its temporarily delicious clarity. Then, immediately, came a questioning of it. Jane once offered this example: “Islands seem to be wonderful places for building great cities.” Think New York or Hong Kong. But “then you think of all the islands that don’t have great cities and then you think of all the great cities that aren’t on islands and then you say, ‘Wait a minute.’ ” As soon as she’d hit on an idea, confusion and doubt followed.

  Progress normally came only with fitful slowness. Death and Life might seem the exception—less than three years from start to finish. Except that the start didn�
��t really come in 1958, when she got the Rockefeller grant, but in 1954 or 1955, when she began to harbor doubts about urban renewal in Philadelphia and East Harlem; or else in 1952, when she was first thrust into the professional world of buildings and cities as an editor at Architectural Forum; or maybe in 1949, when she first wrote about city planning for Amerika; or perhaps in 1935, when the New York cityscape first swung under her microscope in those four articles for Vogue.

  Even with Death and Life, then, it all came slowly, so much needing to marinate and stew. And yet to listen to her over the years, Jane never quite accepted this; it seemed always to bother her how long it took. “I’m very slow and full of trial and error and plodding and I wish I knew some faster, more efficient way to work but experience hasn’t taught me any.”

  She was forever taking on ambitious subjects from new directions, marching imperturbably into all she didn’t know. She’d never understand, she told an interviewer once, how other authors could “stand the boredom of just writing down everything [they] already knew.” But she paid the price for indulging her insatiable curiosity. With each new book, she would tell Bob’s niece Lucia Jacobs, “I always get scared to death.” Caught up in complexities of a new field not at first fully apparent, “I realize it’s too deep for me, but I have to keep on with it.” Until she gets it.

  The same went for getting the words right. In 1965, a letter from Jane to a New York poet, Ned O’Gorman, included this assertion: The new architecture and planning were “tightly imprisoned in the old paternalistic visions, and at the bottom of them is a simple-minded notion of people as passive domestic animals, who will flourish like well-kept domestic animals if their environment is well kept.” A little more than a year later, she returned from a trip to Europe to find that O’Gorman planned to publish part of her letter. She was incensed. When she’d earlier written to him, she wrote him now, she’d given no thought to it being published. She “would not have written as I did, if I had,” and did not wish to see it published now. She’d just thrown out an idea, one perhaps useful to him as he worked on his own book, but that was all. “It is badly written. It makes assertions that I would never make for publication without attempting to support them and to explain them.” She went on: “I do not like to lay myself open gratuitously to being misunderstood, and I would take it very hard if that letter…saw print.” Actually, you can see why O’Gorman wanted to use her plucky letter. But still, who would want one’s half-cocked ideas made public? Jane certainly didn’t. As much as anyone, she knew the difference. Much of her working life was spent refining or eliminating language that, in early form, was awkward, crude, silly, or just plain wrong.

  As it is, examples of clumsy language did sometimes make it into print under Jane’s name. As much as Death and Life was lauded for its literary virtues, it had its lapses, plenty of them, the reader sometimes caught up in thick undergrowths of abstraction. One snarky online review of an audio edition of the book made fun of sentences “all around 200 words or more comprising a multitude of phrases and clauses, remarking on several feelings, digressing, couching her terms, and presenting ‘on the other hand’ arguments…always adding exceptions and exceptions to the exceptions.” Laughing at Jane at her worst (exacerbated in the spoken word), he wasn’t being entirely fair. But he wasn’t entirely wrong, either. Working on Death and Life, Jane was no longer moored by the restraining hand of a good magazine editor, normally more tightfisted with editorial space than a book editor and more bent on eliminating windy excess.

  How could a mind like Jane’s, known for delivering rhetorical flourishes that lingered in the mind—cities-before-agriculture, eyes-on-the-street—spew out so much that was fuzzy or embarrassingly awkward? Well, she could. “Oh, I’m so chaotic,” she’d tell one interviewer, regarding her writing process. “I just scramble as best I can.” Her mind might recognize a departure from clarity, yet actually achieve clarity only with enormous effort. As a boy and later, Jim Jacobs remembers hearing his mother work, periods of silence punctuated by rat-a-tat machine-gun bursts from her manual typewriter. But those bursts, as propulsive as they sounded, didn’t always produce great prose. They were part of Jane’s process of writing. They expressed an almost physical need to utter. But that didn’t mean they expressed her point—even if, just then, she knew what her point was. Given Jane’s reports of how much paper, in an age before word processors, she crumpled up in the course of writing, it’s safe to conclude that much of it wasn’t very good. Before the pungency and clarity readers admired came the muddle.

  Muddle borne not alone in the errant vagaries of her brain but in all the perplexities and confusions of the world. If there was a common denominator to her books it was, How does the world work? How do cities or successful economies work? What explained why greengrocers and Mafia dons, say, held to such wildly different values? When she looked out at the world, the evidence often seemed contradictory, threatening to overturn any fragmentary idea she might hold. Yet she sought such evidence compulsively. She looked, she observed, she listened, she read voluminously, she took in popular articles and scholarly ones. In the Jacobs Papers at Boston College stand folder upon folder, stuffed with yellowed clippings, all labeled with the distinctly unromantic heading “material used,” giving evidence for the case histories she developed, the stories she told, the conclusions she reached.

  In Death and Life and The Economy of Cities, Jane included no notes, no bibliography, no scholarly apparatus—maybe an occasional lonely footnote. But in the early 1970s, Jim Jacobs recalls, she came upon a book with notes in the back but nothing about them in the body of the book to undercut reading pleasure or involvement. She liked that. Perhaps by now more mindful of her role as public intellectual, in Cities and the Wealth of Nations she included such a section, as she would in her subsequent books. And from them, we can draw insights into what Jane read, to whom she listened, the broad gamut of those influences-of-fact upon which she relied.

  She read The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, Natural History, The New York Times, The Globe and Mail. But these and other such mainstream publications were just the overlay atop her deep reading and fact gathering. She read Shinohata: A Portrait of a Japanese Village, by Ronald P. Dore, published in 1978. A memoir of Catherine the Great. Henri Pirenne’s book, from her student days at Columbia, Medieval Cities. Stories of pirated software supplied by a visiting scientist at a conference. A New York City agency’s list of white-collar crimes. A book about chivalry. The Code of Hammurabi. Jane read of James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, of biomimicry, the efficiency expert Frederick Winslow Taylor, viruses, cybernetics, fractals, and the obsolescence of recording technology. As she’d one day describe herself, she was like “a caterpillar munching, munching, munching, munching away in a forest, digesting all kinds of leaves, and in the process being informed of what’s there.”

  Her family could be counted on for stray, intriguing bits of information, too. For Cities and the Wealth of Nations, her niece Carol, Betty’s daughter, drew her attention to an Arabic-language book, The Muqaddimah, dating to 1381. To confirm her recollections of Higgins, the remote mountain town where she’d lived in 1934, she turned to brother Jim, then living with his wife in North Carolina. In April 1974, she wrote brother John about what she suspected was a well-known quotation she just couldn’t lay her hands on. It was from the turn of the century and was

  in the form of a funeral description summarizing the economic paradox of the South at that time. The corpse, the speaker says, was buried in cotton land but his shroud was woven in New England, near a pine forest, but his coffin was made somewhere else in the north—this is the gist—and so on and so on.

  Could John help?

  Ten years later, there it was on page 36 of Cities and the Wealth of Nations, exactly on point to her theme—how poor regions, bereft of vital cities, were reduced to importing most of what they needed: “The grave was dug through solid marble, but the marble headstone came from Ver
mont,” said Henry Grady of Pickens County, Georgia. “It was in a pine wilderness but the pine coffin came from Cincinnati. An iron mountain over-shadowed it but the coffin nails and the screws and the shovel came from Pittsburgh.”

  Jane’s personal experience figured in her book research as well: A tour of the jade market in Hong Kong. An old boss at Iron Age who’d dismissed the prospects for plastics. A pet store in San Francisco founded by a distant relative. Making it into one of her books was, of all things, Bob’s trouble extracting from the clergyman who performed their wedding just how much he was owed. All this supplied grist for developing her ideas or even inspiring them in the first place. “People say, ‘You use such wonderful examples to illustrate what you’re saying—how do you find them?’ It’s just the opposite. The examples come first. I think from the concrete. I can’t think from the abstract.”

  In 1985, Richard Carroll Keeley lured Jane to a conference at Boston College built around her work. In the conference’s published proceedings, he wrote of his attempt to characterize her “method.” He started from her assertion near the end of Death and Life that understanding best came from working inductively, from particulars to the general, not vice versa; in particular, one sought “ ‘unaverage’ clues involving very small quantities, which reveal the way larger and more ‘average’ quantities are operating.”

  What, pray tell, was an “unaverage” clue?

  In a 1994 letter to Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, Jane would observe that the usual division between “solid statistical evidence,” on the one hand, and “random, highly suspect anecdotal evidence,” on the other, was too wide and too crude. Left out was a third species of evidence, “systematically illuminating cases” that shed especially revealing light on a topic. Death and Life was littered with them. But how, Keeley wondered now, did she find the clues that would ultimately come to seem so illuminating? “I am left with an admiring puzzlement: How did she do that?”