The Person Alone

In Edward Albee’s two-character play, The Zoo Story, the publisher asks the young man who accosts him in Central Park if he lives in the Village. The boy, who eventually forces the publisher to kill him in a desperate attempt to experience some human contact, replies that he lives in a rooming house on the Upper West Side. He describes the dreariness of his home and tells how he tried first to make a friend of the janitor’s mangey dog, and when that didn’t succeed, at least an enemy. Anything, anything, is his mute cry, just to be among the living. For Albee it is a shabby West Side rooming house; for Saul Bellow, in his somber Seize the Day, it is a run-down West Side hotel.

The West Side is not only the familiar sandwich with a hard crust on the Park and River sides of semifashionable large apartment houses, the homes of the wealthy Jewish middle-class of an older generation, and the soft in-between of slum avenues and side streets crowded with Irish and newly arrived Puerto Ricans. It is also a subtle composite including residents of no particular ethnic or economic group. The most notable recent change during the last decade has been the invasion of the neighborhood by actors, TV people and young couples who can no longer afford the Village (witness the tremendous success of the Reform Democrats here). But what is least apparent is that all along the West Side—from the fifties up to Morningside Heights, which is the home of students and professors, in the endless brownstones, whitestones, small tenements and once-upona-time well kept hotels of World War One vintage—lives, almost unnoticed, the anonymous wanderer, the single person hopelessly lost in the city. In canvassing the neighborhood during an election one expects to meet, all in their proper habitat, the Puerto Ricans, the Irish, the Jews, and now, the young marrieds. As you climb up the last flight of stairs of some battered five-story brownstone you recognize the peculiar stale odor that emanates from the rooms of old people; the underweared, housecoated recluses who have a bit of a job or a tiny pension, some at the bottle, some fussing over eggs at the stove, some reading and rereading yesterday’s newspaper. Then there are the countless times you knock at a door, and this comes as a real shock, you are confronted over and over again by a neatly dressed young man or woman immobilized in a small clean room. Their expression is a strange mixture of expectancy and resignation—almost as though they are waiting for the world to come in and find them. Despite the vast numbers of young people living alone in this broad area there is little in the neighborhood that indicates their silent presence. You don’t see many of them on the street, there is maybe one genuine cafe in a sixty block radius and hardly any bookstores.