New York Times, NY
Sept 13 2008
Writing the Myth of Moses
ARTHUR NERSESIAN, a 49-year-old playwright, poet and novelist whose
wavy gray hair gives him the look of a 1960s English professor,
rummaged through the black messenger bag lying next to him in a booth
at the Moonstruck Diner in the East Village. Then he gleefully pulled
out what appeared to be three coverless, battered paperbacks and slid
them across the table.
Closer analysis revealed these volumes to be, in fact, three parts of
one eviscerated book, taped together and covered with handwritten
notes. Stacked one on top of the other, they formed a substantial
brick whose spines, in bold red capitals, collectively revealed the
title, `The Power Broker,’ Robert Caro’s 1,100-plus-page 1974
biography of Robert Moses, New York’s master builder.
In their boldness, Mr. Nersesian’s cuts seemed the equal of any of the
highways or housing projects created by the book’s formidable subject.
`When I read the book, I just tore into it,’ Mr. Nersesian recalled
happily. `I ripped it up so I could deal with each piece like an
individual novel. It was a heat wave, and I went to the beach about 30
times that summer, and this was my sole companion.
`I wouldn’t even go with anyone,’ he added. `I was just having an
affair with this book.’
The progeny to date of the love affair that began in 2006 are two
novels in a projected five-volume series titled `The Five Books of
Moses.’ They present a fictionalized account of Moses and his impact
on New York, and are being published by Akashic Books, a small New
York press that specializes in adventurous urban writing often
overlooked by more mainstream houses.
The first novel, `The Swing Voter of Staten Island,’ was published
last year and has sold 5,000 to 7,000 copies in hardback, according to
Akashic. The second, `The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx,’
which deals in part with the building of the Cross Bronx Expressway in
the 1950s, will appear next month.
Remarkably, given the man’s vast impact on New York, the novels appear
to be the first fictionalized portrayals of Moses to be published, and
among a notably short list of artistic works in any medium about him.
In 1990, the visual artist Theodora Skipitares created `The Radiant
City,’ an Off Broadway play in which singing and dancing puppets
delivered a harsh and surreal critique of Moses and his legacy. In
2005, the theatrical group Les Freres Corbusier tackled Moses’ legacy
in another Off Broadway production, a multimedia revue titled `Boozy:
The Life, Death and Subsequent Vilification of Le Corbusier and, More
Importantly, Robert Moses.’ But other than that, the creative arts
have oddly remained silent in the face of such a Titanic figure.
Mr. Nersesian (pronounced nur-SEHZ-ee-un) thinks this scarcity has as
much to do with the daunting stature of Mr. Caro’s Pulitzer
Prize-winning work as with the scale of Moses’ achievements. Despite
growing revisionism about the ultimately negative conclusions reached
by Mr. Caro, `The Power Broker’ remains very much a holy text among
nonfiction books about New York’s infrastructure, a feeling
Mr. Nersesian ardently shares.
`It’s just an amazing book, and it can almost be read like a novel,’
he said that day at the diner, gently stroking Mr. Caro’s
deconstructed oeuvre. `I mean, how can you ever hope to get around
that? It was one of those things that I really did not get into too
quickly and I really had to stay away from until I was ready.’
Trauma and Stability
New York, in one form or another, has always been Mr. Nersesian’s
subject. Born and raised in the city, one of three sons of an
Armenian-American father and a fifth-generation Irish-American mother,
he lived in a succession of neighborhoods ‘ first Midtown and Brooklyn
Heights with his family, then Times Square, Chelsea and the Upper West
Side on his own ‘ with each move being the result of an eviction. (The
author’s biography for Mr. Nersesian’s 2002 novel, `Suicide Casanova,’
consists simply of a list of these evictions.)
In 1982, he found stability of sorts in a one-bedroom apartment in the
East Village, where he has lived ever since. Unsurprisingly, though,
the protagonists of all his works, which include four plays and six
novels apart from the Moses books, are invariably harassed New
Yorkers, fending off an all-encompassing city that constantly
threatens to devour them.
Although Mr. Nersesian’s parents were both professionals ‘ his father
was a public school English teacher and his mother a social worker ‘
his early years were precarious. The family’s move from their Midtown
apartment when Mr. Nersesian was just 10 was the result of an eviction
to make way for an office tower, something he described as `incredibly
traumatic.’ The following year, his parents separated.
Upon his father’s death in 1977, the son, then 18, found himself
alone. After graduating from Midwood High School in Brooklyn,
Mr. Nersesian held a number of temporary jobs, including selling books
on West Fourth Street and working as an usher and manager in a series
of East Village movie theaters, where, using his portable typewriter,
he wrote in the theaters’ offices during screenings.
Not unexpectedly, a tenuous quality fills the plays and novels about
downtown life that Mr. Nersesian began to publish in the early 1990s,
a sense that his down-at-heel characters were the victims of
mysterious forces ‘ personal, political and social ‘ they could not
comprehend. Reviewing Mr. Nersesian’s 2000 novel, `Manhattan
Loverboy,’ the literary journal Rain Taxi summed up what might be said
of all Mr. Nersesian’s work: `This book is full of lies, and the
author makes deception seem like the subtext of modern life, or at
least America’s real pastime.’
In his 1992 play `Rent Control,’ Mr. Nersesian incorporated an
experience he had when he returned to the office tower that had
replaced his childhood apartment.
`I tried to go to the exact same space,’ he recalled, `and it turned
out to be the romance division of Random House or something. I walked
in and the secretary said, `Can I help you?’ And I think I tried to
convey to her that this was where I lived for the first 10 years of my
life; this space here was where I was bathed in the sink. And she
looked at me like I was a nut.’
Beginning in the mid-1980s, Mr. Nersesian found an unusual place to
write: the Empire State Building. Three of his uncles had a law office
there, first on the third floor and then on the 18th. Mr. Nersesian
discovered that its anodyne, gray-carpeted environment was the ideal
place to hatch his fevered stories of downtown life. He also took
advantage of the computers and the limitless supplies of paper, unable
to afford either himself.
Working in the famous building since 1984 has had a definite, if
intangible, effect on his writing.
`Writing there gave me a kind of historical awareness, as well as an
added awareness of being a New Yorker,’ he said. `I was dating a woman
who was also a writer, and we would meet up at the office around 6 and
just stay there till 5 or 6 in the morning. Sometimes we’d eat in the
office and take intermittent naps on the sofa. Then we’d go and have
breakfast at Kiev.’
One sweltering summer night, he stripped down to his underwear and,
deep in his work, lost track of time until the presence of a startled
secretary at his side brought him to his senses. Nor would this be the
first time the forces of the straight world were surprised by the
Bohemian throwback in their midst.
On weekends, Mr. Nersesian often held auditions for his plays in the
building, and once even staged a full rehearsal there.
`We put ads in Backstage and I actually had a producer and a director
in there,’ he recalled with relish. `We had a really big hallway, and
we rehearsed in the hallway until a phalanx of security guards came
out, seeing these strange goings-on, and threw everybody out.’
Mr. Nersesian’s older brother, Burke, a software programmer who lives
in Brooklyn Heights, acknowledged that his brother might be viewed as
eccentric, but saw him through the prism of close attachment. `The
thing you have to understand is we were not a normal family,’ he
said. `And I’d say Arthur was no more different than the rest of
us. We’d be watching commercials in the ’60s for things like Pepsi and
we’d go, `We don’t look like any of those families.’ ‘
Poets and Prostitutes
Unlike many New Yorkers who inhabited the East Village of the 1980s,
Mr. Nersesian seemed to remember every aspect of that gritty and often
dangerous time with fondness. Even as he described the endless parade
of prostitutes down East 12th Street or the bonfires set by the
homeless in Tompkins Square Park, there was a palpable tenderness to
his voice.
`There was a sense of community there,’ Mr. Nersesian said. `I
couldn’t walk down the street without saying hello to someone. You’d
see Allen Ginsberg all over the place, and you’d see the other Beats.
`I wasn’t the biggest fan of the Beats, but there was an exemplary
quality to the artist as citizen. You think about artists today in our
society, and they’re kind of removed. You don’t really know them. When
Ginsberg died, a definitive quality from the East Village ‘ at least
from my East Village ‘ was gone.’
Perhaps inevitably, the East Village of today, with its fashionable
bars and restaurants and its gleaming glass towers, fills him with
despair.
`Oh, God, we’re living in a hell that I can’t even begin to describe!’
Mr. Nersesian said mournfully that day at the diner. `It’s amazing how
memory really does become a kind of curse. If I was just coming to the
city today, I’d probably think, `Oh, this is a really interesting
place,’ but it’s trying to tell people, `You know, there was a war
fought here, a strange economic, cultural battle that went on, and I
saw so many wonderful people lost among the casualties.’ ‘
Brother Against Brother
At least on one level, the Moses books seem to be Mr. Nersesian’s way
of dealing with such wholesale loss of memory and the ensuing cultural
changes.
While his previous novels were urban picaresques following the
travails of an individual, the Moses books envision an entire,
alternate New York in which Mr. Nersesian has felt free to take great
liberties with history, geography and politics.
In the first Moses book, `The Swing Voter of Staten Island,’ `old’ New
York has been destroyed by a dirty bomb and an ersatz imitation has
been built by the government in the middle of the Nevada desert, where
social and political undesirables have been dumped. The second book
reveals this destruction to have been the result of a bitter feud
between Robert Moses and his brother, Paul, a real historical
figure. Mr. Caro devotes an entire chapter of `The Power Broker’ to
the tortured relationship between the two.
In Mr. Caro’s account, Paul Moses, an idealistic electrical engineer
as brilliant as his brother, was cut out of his parents’ will and
prevented from obtaining employment in New York by Robert Moses. Paul
Moses died penniless at the age of 80 in a decrepit walk-up apartment
at a time when his brother held sway over tens of thousands of newly
built city apartments.
To all these details Mr. Nersesian has remained faithful, while
filling in the blanks to suit his fictional purposes; in the author’s
account, a young Paul Moses becomes a guerrilla fighter during the
Mexican Civil War and later lives in East Tremont in the Bronx as his
brother’s Cross Bronx Expressway bulldozes its way toward his
apartment.
Mr. Caro, reached by phone at his summer house in East Hampton, where
he was working on the fourth and final volume of his biography of
President Lyndon Johnson, expressed both amusement and concern at some
of Mr. Nersesian’s embroidering of his work.
`The story of Robert and Paul Moses is so real and so true, and such a
terrible thing to happen to a human being, that I hate the thought of
someone making up a part of it, of fictionalizing it,’ Mr. Caro
said. `Fictional things should be things viewed as fictional. It’s
using real people.’
But was he surprised by Mr. Nersesian’s choice of subject matter?
`No, not at all,’ Mr. Caro replied. `When I was writing `The Power
Broker,’ I was told over and over again that no one would want to read
about Robert Moses. But I always felt he was so integral to the
history of the city that if I pursued it fully, people would want to
read it.’
¢
One day a few weeks ago, Mr. Nersesian, wearing shorts and a frayed
T-shirt, took a stroll down Fourth Avenue in the East Village and
tried to define his complicated relationship with the man who has
obsessed him for so long.
`My poor girlfriend has had to suffer so much because of Robert
Moses,’ he said. `We’ll travel around the city and I’ll say, `Robert
Moses built that,’ `Robert Moses built this,’ and it’ll reach the
point where I’m about to speak and she’ll say, `Don’t say it!’
`She honestly thinks I love Robert Moses, and I honestly don’t,’ he
added. `But credit where credit’s due. You can’t just deny all the
things he did.’
The girlfriend in question, a 34-year-old poet and translator named
Margarita Shalina, was born in Leningrad in the former Soviet Union
and was, he said, `far more sensitive to the bully nature of it all,
where there were Robert Moseses everywhere.’
At the entrance to St. Mark’s Bookshop on Third Avenue, where
Ms. Shalina works as the store’s small-press buyer, Mr. Nersesian
pushed his way in.
Ms. Shalina, wearing denim overalls and glasses, greeted him with a
kiss, but rolled her eyes when she discovered the topic of
conversation. As they stood in front of the store’s New York section,
Mr. Caro’s book conspicuously on display between them, the two batted
their arguments back and forth for a while. Ms. Shalina opposes grand
development schemes imposed from above, and favors smaller projects
determined by individual neighborhoods.
Finally, Mr. Nersesian laughed and ran his hand through his wavy
hair. `On the one hand, I see the great phallic master builder and
she’s like, `No, it’s all about Jane Jacobs, the low-scale community
builder,’ ‘ he said. `Maybe it really is a boy-girl thing. I don’t
know.’
Ben Gibberd is the author of `New York Waters: Profiles From the
Edge,’ with the photographer Randy Duchaine.