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Manhattan Transfer ▾
contents
  1. Section I
  2. I Ferryslip Three gulls wheel above the broken boxes, orangerinds, spoiled cabbage heads that heave between the splintered plank walls, the green waves spume under the round bow as the ferry, skidding on the tide, crashes, gulps the broken water, slides, settles slowly into the slip. Handwinches whirl with jingle of chains. Gates fold upwards, feet step out across the crack, men and women press through the manuresmelling wooden tunnel of the ferryhouse, crushed and jostling like apples fed down a chute into a press.
  3. II Metropolis There were Babylon and Nineveh; they were built of brick. Athens was gold marble columns. Rome was held up on broad arches of rubble. In Constantinople the minarets flame like great candles round the Golden Horn … Steel, glass, tile, concrete will be the materials of the skyscrapers. Crammed on the narrow island the millionwindowed buildings will jut glittering, pyramid on pyramid like the white cloudhead above a thunderstorm.
  4. III Dollars All along the rails there were faces; in the portholes there were faces. Leeward a stale smell came from the tubby steamer that rode at anchor listed a little to one side with the yellow quarantine flag drooping at the foremast. “I’d give a million dollars,” said the old man resting on his oars, “to know what they come for.” “Just for that pop,” said the young man who sat in the stern. “Aint it the land of opportoonity?” “One thing I do know,” said the old man. “When I was a boy it was wild Irish came in the spring with the first run of shad. … Now there aint no more shad, an them folks, Lord knows where they come from.” “It’s the land of opportoonity.”
  5. IV Tracks The rumpetybump rumpetybump spaced out, slackened; bumpers banged all down the train. The man dropped off the rods. He couldnt move for stiffness. It was pitchblack. Very slowly he crawled out, hoisted himself to his knees, to his feet until he leaned panting against the freightcar. His body was not his own; his muscles were smashed wood, his bones were twisted rods. A lantern burst his eyes. “Get outa here quick yous. Company detectives is beatin through de yards.” “Say feller, is this New York?” “You’re goddam right it is. Juss foller my lantern; you kin git out along de waterfront.” His feet could barely stumble through the long gleaming v’s and crisscrossed lines of tracks, he tripped and fell over a bundle of signal rods. At last he was sitting on the edge of a wharf with his head in his hands. The water made a soothing noise against the piles like the lapping of a dog. He took a newspaper out of his pocket and unwrapped a hunk of bread and a slice of gristly meat. He ate them dry, chewing and chewing before he could get any moisture in his mouth. Then he got unsteadily to his feet, brushed the crumbs off his knees, and looked about him. Southward beyond the tracks the murky sky was drenched with orange glow. “The Gay White Way,” he said aloud in a croaking voice. “The Gay White Way.”
  6. V Steamroller Dusk gently smooths crispangled streets. Dark presses tight the steaming asphalt city, crushes the fretwork of windows and lettered signs and chimneys and watertanks and ventilators and fireescapes and moldings and patterns and corrugations and eyes and hands and neckties into blue chunks, into black enormous blocks. Under the rolling heavier heavier pressure windows blurt light. Night crushes bright milk out of arclights, squeezes the sullen blocks until they drip red, yellow, green into streets resounding with feet. All the asphalt oozes light. Light spurts from lettering on roofs, mills dizzily among wheels, stains rolling tons of sky.
  7. Section II
  8. I Great Lady on a White Horse Morning clatters with the first L train down Allen Street. Daylight rattles through the windows, shaking the old brick houses, splatters the girders of the L structure with bright confetti. The cats are leaving the garbage cans, the chinches are going back into the walls, leaving sweaty limbs, leaving the grimetender necks of little children asleep. Men and women stir under blankets and bedquilts on mattresses in the corners of rooms, clots of kids begin to untangle to scream and kick. At the corner of Riverton the old man with the hempen beard who sleeps where nobody knows is putting out his picklestand. Tubs of gherkins, pimentos, melonrind, piccalilli give out twining vines and cold tendrils of dank pepperyfragrance that grow like a marshgarden out of the musky bedsmells and the rancid clangor of the cobbled awakening street. The old man with the hempen beard who sleeps where nobody knows sits in the midst of it like Jonah under his gourd.
  9. II Longlegged Jack of the Isthmus Noon on Union Square. Selling out. Must vacate. We have made a terrible mistake. Kneeling on the dusty asphalt little boys shine shoes lowshoes tans buttonshoes oxfords. The sun shines like a dandelion on the toe of each new-shined shoe. Right this way buddy, mister miss maam at the back of the store our new line of fancy tweeds highest value lowest price … Gents, misses, ladies, cutrate … We have made a terrible mistake. Must vacate. Noon sunlight spirals dimly into the chopsuey joint. Muted music spirals Hindustan. He eats fooyong, she eats chowmein. They dance with their mouths full, slim blue jumper squeezed to black slick suit, peroxide curls against black slick hair. Down Fourteenth Street, Glory Glory comes the Army, striding lasses, Glory Glory four abreast, the rotund shining, navy blue, Salvation Army band. Highest value, lowest price. Must vacate. We have made a terrible mistake. Must vacate.
  10. III Nine Days’ Wonder The sun’s moved to Jersey, the sun’s behind Hoboken. Covers are clicking on typewriters, rolltop desks are closing; elevators go up empty, come down jammed. It’s ebbtide in the downtown district, flood in Flatbush, Woodlawn, Dyckman Street, Sheepshead Bay, New Lots Avenue, Canarsie. Pink sheets, green sheets, gray sheets, Full Market Reports, Finals on Havre de Grace. Print squirms among the shopworn officeworn sagging faces, sore fingertips, aching insteps, strongarm men cram into subway expresses. Senators 8, Giants 2, Diva Recovers Pearls, $800,000 Robbery. It’s ebbtide on Wall Street, floodtide in the Bronx. The sun’s gone down in Jersey.
  11. IV Fire Engine Such afternoons the buses are crowded into line like elephants in a circusparade. Morningside Heights to Washington Square, Penn Station to Grant’s Tomb. Parlorsnakes and flappers joggle hugging downtown uptown, hug joggling gray square after gray square, until they see the new moon giggling over Weehawken and feel the gusty wind of a dead Sunday blowing dust in their faces, dust of a typsy twilight.
  12. V Went to the Animals’ Fair Red light. Bell. A block deep four ranks of cars wait at the grade crossing, fenders in taillights, mudguards scraping mudguards, motors purring hot, exhausts reeking, cars from Babylon and Jamaica, cars from Montauk, Port Jefferson, Patchogue, limousines from Long Beach, Far Rockaway, roadsters from Great Neck … cars full of asters and wet bathingsuits, sunsinged necks, mouths sticky from sodas and hotdawgs … cars dusted with pollen of ragweed and goldenrod. Green light. Motors race, gears screech into first. The cars space out, flow in a long ribbon along the ghostly cement road, between blackwindowed blocks of concrete factories, between bright slabbed colors of signboards towards the glow over the city that stands up incredibly into the night sky like the glow of a great lit tent, like the yellow tall bulk of a tentshow.
  13. VI Five Statutory Questions They pair off hurriedly. Standing Up in Cars Strictly Forbidden. The climbing chain grates, grips the cogs; jerkily the car climbs the incline out of the whirring lights, out of the smell of crowds and steamed corn and peanuts, up jerkily grating up through the tall night of September meteors. Sea, marshsmell, the lights of an Iron Steamboat leaving the dock. Across wide violet indigo a lighthouse blinks. Then the swoop. The sea does a flipflop, the lights soar. Her hair in his mouth, his hand in her ribs, thighs grind together. The wind of their falling has snatched their yells, they jerk rattling upwards through the tangled girderstructure. Swoop. Soar. Bubbling lights in a sandwich of darkness and sea. Swoop. Keep Your Seats for the Next Ride.
  14. VII Rollercoaster The leaden twilight weighs on the dry limbs of an old man walking towards Broadway. Round the Nedick’s stand at the corner something clicks in his eyes. Broken doll in the ranks of varnished articulated dolls he plods up with drooping head into the seethe and throb into the furnace of beaded lettercut light. “I remember when it was all meadows,” he grumbles to the little boy.
  15. VIII One More River to Jordan A man is shouting from a soapbox at Second Avenue and Houston in front of the Cosmopolitan Café: “… these fellers, men … wageslaves like I was … are sittin on your chest … they’re takin the food outen your mouths. Where’s all the pretty girls I used to see walkin up and down the bullevard? Look for em in the uptown cabarets. … They squeeze us dry friends … feller workers, slaves I’d oughter say … they take our work and our ideers and our women. … They build their Plaza Hotels and their millionaire’s clubs and their million dollar theayters and their battleships and what do they leave us? … They leave us shopsickness an the rickets and a lot of dirty streets full of garbage cans. … You look pale you fellers. … You need blood. … Why dont you get some blood in your veins? … Back in Russia the poor people … not so much poorer’n we are … believe in wampires, things come suck your blood at night. … That’s what Capitalism is, a wampire that sucks your blood … day … and … night.” It is beginning to snow. The flakes are giltedged where they pass the streetlamp. Through the plate glass the Cosmopolitan Café full of blue and green opal rifts of smoke looks like a muddy aquarium; faces blob whitely round the tables like illassorted fishes. Umbrellas begin to bob in clusters up the snowmottled street. The orator turns up his collar and walks briskly east along Houston, holding the muddy soapbox away from his trousers.
  16. Section III
  17. I Rejoicing City That Dwelt Carelessly There are flags on all the flagpoles up Fifth Avenue. In the shrill wind of history the great flags flap and tug at their lashings on the creaking goldknobbed poles up Fifth Avenue. The stars jiggle sedately against the slate sky, the red and white stripes writhe against the clouds. In the gale of brassbands and trampling horses and rumbling clatter of cannon, shadows like the shadows of claws grasp at the taut flags, the flags are hungry tongues licking twisting curling. Oh it’s a long way to Tipperary … Over there! Over there! The harbor is packed with zebrastriped skunkstriped piebald steamboats, the Narrows are choked with bullion, they’re piling gold sovereigns up to the ceilings in the Subtreasury. Dollars whine on the radio, all the cables tap out dollars. There’s a long long trail awinding … Over there! Over there! In the subway their eyes pop as they spell out Apocalypse, typhus, cholera, shrapnel, insurrection, death in fire, death in water, death in hunger, death in mud. Oh it’s a long way to Madymosell from Armenteers, over there! The Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming. Down Fifth Avenue the bands blare for the Liberty Loan drive, for the Red Cross drive. Hospital ships sneak up the harbor and unload furtively at night in old docks in Jersey. Up Fifth Avenue the flags of the seventeen nations are flaring curling in the shrill hungry wind. O the oak and the ash and the weeping willow tree And green grows the grass in God’s country. The great flags flap and tug at their lashings on the creaking goldknobbed poles up Fifth Avenue.
  18. II Nickelodeon A nickel before midnight buys tomorrow … holdup headlines, a cup of coffee in the automat, a ride to Woodlawn, Fort Lee, Flatbush. … A nickel in the slot buys chewing gum. “Somebody Loves Me,” “Baby Divine,” “You’re in Kentucky Juss Shu’ As You’re Born” … bruised notes of foxtrots go limping out of doors, blues, waltzes (“We’d Danced the Whole Night Through”) trail gyrating tinsel memories. … On Sixth Avenue on Fourteenth there are still flyspecked stereopticons where for a nickel you can peep at yellowed yesterdays. Beside the peppering shooting gallery you stoop into the flicker A Hot Time, The Bachelor’s Surprise, The Stolen Garter … wastebasket of tornup daydreams. … A nickel before midnight buys our yesterdays.
  19. III Revolving Doors Glowworm trains shuttle in the gloaming through the foggy looms of spiderweb bridges, elevators soar and drop in their shafts, harbor lights wink. Like sap at the first frost at five o’clock men and women begin to drain gradually out of the tall buildings downtown, grayfaced throngs flood subways and tubes, vanish underground. All night the great buildings stand quiet and empty, their million windows dark. Drooling light the ferries chew tracks across the lacquered harbor. At midnight the fourfunneled express steamers slide into the dark out of their glary berths. Bankers blearyeyed from secret conferences hear the hooting of the tugs as they are let out of side doors by lightningbug watchmen; they settle grunting into the back seats of limousines, and are whisked uptown into the Forties, clinking streets of ginwhite whiskey-yellow ciderfizzling lights.
  20. IV Skyscraper The young man without legs has stopped still in the middle of the south sidewalk of Fourteenth Street. He wears a blue knitted sweater and a blue stocking cap. His eyes staring up widen until they fill the paperwhite face. Drifts across the sky a dirigible, bright tinfoil cigar misted with height, gently prodding the rainwashed sky and the soft clouds. The young man without legs stops still propped on his arms in the middle of the south sidewalk of Fourteenth Street. Among striding legs, lean legs, waddling legs, legs in skirts and pants and knickerbockers, he stops perfectly still, propped on his arms, looking up at the dirigible.
  21. V The Burden of Nineveh Seeping in red twilight out of the Gulf Stream fog, throbbing brassthroat that howls through the stiff-fingered streets, prying open glazed eyes of skyscrapers, splashing red lead on the girdered thighs of the five bridges, teasing caterwauling tugboats into heat under the toppling smoketrees of the harbor. Spring puckering our mouths, spring giving us gooseflesh grows gigantic out of the droning of sirens, crashes with enormous scaring din through the halted traffic, between attentive frozen tiptoe blocks.
English ▾

Manhattan Transfer

John Dos Passos

free · 130,027 words · 14 h 1 m audiobook, read by volunteers for LibriVox · first published 1925

text from Standard Ebooks

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Section I

I

Ferryslip

Three gulls wheel above the broken boxes, orangerinds, spoiled cabbage heads that heave between the splintered plank walls, the green waves spume under the round bow as the ferry, skidding on the tide, crashes, gulps the broken water, slides, settles slowly into the slip. Handwinches whirl with jingle of chains. Gates fold upwards, feet step out across the crack, men and women press through the manuresmelling wooden tunnel of the ferryhouse, crushed and jostling like apples fed down a chute into a press.

The nurse, holding the basket at arm’s length as if it were a bedpan, opened the door to a big dry hot room with greenish distempered walls where in the air tinctured with smells of alcohol and iodoform hung writhing a faint sourish squalling from other baskets along the wall. As she set her basket down she glanced into it with pursed-up lips. The newborn baby squirmed in the cottonwool feebly like a knot of earthworms.

On the ferry there was an old man playing the violin. He had a monkey’s face puckered up in one corner and kept time with the toe of a cracked patent-leather shoe. Bud Korpenning sat on the rail watching him, his back to the river. The breeze made the hair stir round the tight line of his cap and dried the sweat on his temples. His feet were blistered, he was leadentired, but when the ferry moved out of the slip, bucking the little slapping scalloped waves of the river he felt something warm and tingling shoot suddenly through all his veins. “Say, friend, how fur is it into the city from where this ferry lands?” he asked a young man in a straw hat wearing a blue and white striped necktie who stood beside him.

The young man’s glance moved up from Bud’s road-swelled shoes to the red wrist that stuck out from the frayed sleeves of his coat, past the skinny turkey’s throat and slid up cockily into the intent eyes under the broken-visored cap.

“That depends where you want to get to.”

“How do I get to Broadway? … I want to get to the center of things.”

“Walk east a block and turn down Broadway and you’ll find the center of things if you walk far enough.”

“Thank you sir. I’ll do that.”

The violinist was going through the crowd with his hat held out, the wind ruffling the wisps of gray hair on his shabby bald head. Bud found the face tilted up at him, the crushed eyes like two black pins looking into his. “Nothin,” he said gruffly and turned away to look at the expanse of river bright as knifeblades. The plank walls of the slip closed in, cracked as the ferry lurched against them; there was rattling of chains, and Bud was pushed forward among the crowd through the ferryhouse. He walked between two coal wagons and out over a dusty expanse of street towards yellow streetcars. A trembling took hold of his knees. He thrust his hands deep in his pockets.

Eat on a lunchwagon halfway down the block. He slid stiffly onto a revolving stool and looked for a long while at the pricelist.

“Fried eggs and a cup o coffee.”

“Want ’em turned over?” asked the redhaired man behind the counter who was wiping off his beefy freckled forearms with his apron. Bud Korpenning sat up with a start.

“What?”

“The eggs? Want em turned over or sunny side up?”

“Oh sure, turn ’em over.” Bud slouched over the counter again with his head between his hands.

“You look all in, feller,” the man said as he broke the eggs into the sizzling grease of the frying pan.

“Came down from upstate. I walked fifteen miles this mornin.”

The man made a whistling sound through his eyeteeth. “Comin to the big city to look for a job, eh?”

Bud nodded. The man flopped the eggs sizzling and netted with brown out onto the plate and pushed it towards Bud with some bread and butter on the edge of it. “I’m goin to slip you a bit of advice, feller, and it won’t cost you nutten. You go an git a shave and a haircut and brush the hayseeds out o yer suit a bit before you start lookin. You’ll be more likely to git somethin. It’s looks that count in this city.”

“I kin work all right. I’m a good worker,” growled Bud with his mouth full.

“I’m tellin yez, that’s all,” said the redhaired man and turned back to his stove.

When Ed Thatcher climbed the marble steps of the wide hospital entry he was trembling. The smell of drugs caught at his throat. A woman with a starched face was looking at him over the top of a desk. He tried to steady his voice.

“Can you tell me how Mrs. Thatcher is?”

“Yes, you can go up.”

“But please, miss, is everything all right?”

“The nurse on the floor will know anything about the case. Stairs to the left, third floor, maternity ward.”

Ed Thatcher held a bunch of flowers wrapped in green waxed paper. The broad stairs swayed as he stumbled up, his toes kicking against the brass rods that held the fiber matting down. The closing of a door cut off a strangled shriek. He stopped a nurse.

“I want to see Mrs. Thatcher, please.”

“Go right ahead if you know where she is.”

“But they’ve moved her.”

“You’ll have to ask at the desk at the end of the hall.”

restoring your place…

fetching the rest…

More by John Dos Passos

  • Nineteen Nineteen
    You’ll like the way the war’s aftermath comes through as lives being quietly rearranged, from Charley Anderson’s restless ambition to Eveline Hutchins’s emotional drift. The clipped “Newsreel” headlines and wandering “Camera Eye” passages make it deliberately fractured, but that collage gives the book its nervous, crowded sense of America changing.
  • The Big Money
    You get a bracing, sometimes chilly panorama of American ambition, with newsreel headlines and biographical sketches cutting through the lives of Charley Anderson and Mary French. It takes patience, but the collage makes money, politics, and private compromise feel like forces shaping everyone in the room.

genres

  • Psychological

appears in

  • Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century
  • Modernists

—

thank you for reading

Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos. The text is in the US public domain, from the Standard Ebooks edition. Served from our own copy; read on their site for the full edition with images and typography.

Narrated by Gpolum, Ariphron, Patrick McHaffie, LesWilLang, Donald Warren, docdlmartin, Chris Pyle, and bilwelvox for LibriVox, also public domain.

First published in 1925.

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