"Skyscraper National Park" is an essay first published in the November 1987 edition of Architectural Digest. The piece was later summarized in Fates Worse Than Death in 1991. Vonnegut had originally intended that article would make up the bulk of chapter 13 of that work, but said he found that it was so badly written that he was "surprised they printed it". He believed his perpetual fantasy that he could be happy in a traditional folk society caused him to "garble it so". Instead, the early part of the chapter "has filets cut from the published essay" integrated with additional commentary.[1]
Summary[]
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Midtown Manhattan, 2019
Vonnegut studied anthropology at the University of Chicago under Dr. Robert Redfield, who argued that all societies went through a period he termed "The Folk Society". An isolated group inhabited land they considered sacred, united by kinship, with shared behavioral norms and "general agreement as to what life was all about". At that time, most of the students were rootless wanderers after the Great Depression and the Second World War. To many of them, The Folk Society sounded exactly like what had been lost and needed to be regained to relieve their sense of loneliness. This state of mind still seems widespread and may account for why so many people accept "bizarre ideas about religion or biology or politics or economics": simply to have fellowship. Dr. Redfield, who had lived among organizations similar to Folk Societies, said they were in fact horrible "for anybody with lively imagination, curiosity, inventiveness or a sense of the ridiculous".
Now Vonnegut lives in Manhattan, which he once referred to in a novel as "Skyscraper National Park". Unlike other metropolitan areas, or even Barnstable on Cape Cod, where he raised a family for 22 years, Manhattan cannot exclude him. This is because, "[s]piritually speaking", everyone and no one owns it, despite the attempts of many to place their names on building and parks. After showing the Turkish novelist Yashar Kemal around the island, he said to Vonnegut that he came to realize "[t]he city belonged to [him] as much as to anybody as long as [he] was there!" Manahattan is in fact "a stupendous, ongoing event to which the entire planet is contributing", a concentrated center of global wealth. The skyscrapers that spring up as a result—like "a giant crystal at the intersection of the canyons known as Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street"—can no more be owned than a natural wonder. Old sites are constantly built over and the distant cemeteries may as well be junkyards. Only the living inhabit Manhattan.
Rootless people will try to produce a Folk Society with whatever is available, such as the Moonies or "the catastrophically isolated White House occupants of recent times". In the past, people with certain valued skills came together as guilds. Manhattan is a land of guilds, and Vonnegut's own, made up of writers, is based there. Doctors, lawyers, and teachers can find guilds in many places, but dancers, painters, stage designers, and others are headquartered in Manhattan. When Vonnegut lived in Cape Cod, he always cheered up when he visited Manhattan, just as did Yashar Kemal, who has been jailed in his native Turkey for his writings. In Manhattan, where there were writers, editors, publishers, and critics who honored him, he must have felt like part of a family.[2]
See Also[]
- "New York: Who Needs It?", in which Vonnegut mentions the ability to "shoptalk" in New York City