Growing Up Bank Street

Growing Up Bank Street: A Greenwich Village Memoir
Donna Florio
NYU Press (March 9, 2021), 239 pages
Kindle edition $14.72, Amazon hardcover $16.99

This book appeared as a full-page advertisement in The New York Times Book Review and I thought that it would be exactly the sort of thing I would enjoy reading. I was correct.

Donna Florio grew up in an apartment at 63 Bank Street in Greenwich Village. Her parents worked in the world of opera, so between that and the location of her home she had quite the eclectic upbringing. As an adult she returned to that building and lived in a different apartment, so she has had a lifelong familiarity with the building and the neighborhood.

She writes both about the people in her own building and about the people in the larger Bank Street district of Greenwich Village. Her own building housed people in show business, the mentally unbalanced, and even for a time a major figure in the United States Communist party. As an adult, one of her upstairs neighbors loved cooking gourmet meals for the tenants.

Bank Street residents in other buildings included CBS newsman Charles Kuralt, Episcopal Bishop Paul Moore, the novelist John Dos Passos, and Marion Tanner, the woman on whom Auntie Mame was allegedly based, Tanner’s nephew having written the original novel. He both assisted her financially with income from the book, the play, and the musical, and at the same time denied that she was the inspiration for Auntie Mame.

Florio writes:

Archeologists, movie stars, trust-fund babies, and college professors did indeed live next to secretaries and sanitation workers.

Bank Street was a fascinating place filled with fascinating people and Florio brings it to life.

A Thousand Ships

A Thousand Ships
Natalie Haynes
Harper (January 26, 2021), 368 pages
Amazon hardcover $19.28, Kindle edition $10.99

There have been some excellent retellings of classical mythology by women published in the last couple of years. Madeline Miller wrote both Circe and The Song of Achilles. Now Natalie Haynes has released A Thousand Ships, which tells of the events (mostly) after the Trojan War through the perspective of women. It was originally published in the United Kingdom in 2019, but Harper just published it in the United States this year. Terry got to the book before I did, buying it at Barnes and Noble, so in this instance I read the hardcover rather than the Kindle edition.

Haynes opens the novel with the sack of Troy by the Greeks after the Trojans brought the famous wooden horse inside the city walls. This is interesting because the Iliad does not mention the Trojan Horse at all. The Odyssey mentions a “hollow horse” three times in passing, in such a way that Homer must have assumed that his audience knew the story. It is only later sources that provide us with any sort of full account.

Nonetheless, this approach works because Haynes tells the story mostly from the Trojan perspective, from the viewpoint of the losing side, and in particular by the women of the losing side. She does not, as you might guess, portray the Greeks in a positive light.

We encounter a lot of women in the book. Some women we meet only in a single chapter, and others intermittently throughout the book. Then there are the Trojan women as a group, drawn from the chorus in the Euripides play by that name, who sit on the seashore awaiting their fate by the conquering Greeks. We see them several times.

Helen, the cause of all the fuss, has no chapters of her own and plays a very small role in the novel. In Haynes’s world Helen had willingly headed off to Troy with the Trojan Paris, though the mythology we have is ambiguous as to whether she really was infatuated with Paris or whether he took her to Troy against her will.

The one Greek woman Haynes features prominently is Penelope, wife of Odysseus, waiting for him at home in Ithaca. She becomes increasingly snarky as she writes him letters after hearing the stories from the bards of his long, circuitous journey home. She is neither understanding nor patient.

Also impatient is the muse Calliope, who wants the poet to pay more attention to the women and less to the men and the fighting. What Homer doesn’t do Haynes fulfills.

We are all the better for that.