Electric Review

BOOKS: Godfather to The Godfather
Herbert Asbury's Gangs of New York

I owe my purchase of Gangs of New York to the collusion of two chance factors: firstly, I spent a weekend enduring a seemingly endless series of train journeys between various combinations of Cardiff, London and Nottingham. Secondly, I was fortunate enough to tumble into the station bookstore at Cardiff Central, as I had fifteen minutes to spare before my train. Monument to globalisation that they are, WHSmith were running a local-bookstore-bankrupting "two for ten pounds" paperback offer, and on a whim I purchased Gangs Of New York by Herbert Asbury and Stupid White Men by Michael Moore.

I whizzed through the latter in two hours; it was mildly entertaining in the way that only morally-outraged left-wingers can be — there is nothing like a self-righteous Trot to bring a wry smile to the Fox physiognomy. Stupid White Men is nothing more than whiny, complaining pamphleteering, and may be dismissed out of hand as a sparingly entertaining, if nonsensically illogical and repetitively tiresome piece of literary fluff (and that in spite of the praise heaped upon it by the fawning liberal press). The same goes for Moore's bafflingly Oscar-winning "documentary" Bowling For Columbine, by the way; in all cases, take with a pinch of salt, then discard from memory altogether.

Gangs of New York, however, is an entirely different prospect to Mr. Moore's seemingly endless ranting. First published in 1928, the book has been long out of print; indeed, it owes its various re-prints since 2002 entirely to Martin Scorsese’s film 'treatment' of the book that was released last year. The film bears the same relation to the book that last year's Planet Of The Apes film bears to the Charlton Heston original; loosely based upon it, and not half as good.

A brief biography of the author and his rise to fame is worth recounting. Born in Farmington, Missouri in 1889, Herbert Asbury was newspaperman and author of some notoriety. After a devout Methodist upbringing (and saddled with an ancestry including several generations of Methodist preachers), Asbury left his church at the age of fourteen and actively endeavoured to outrage the good citizens of Farmington; he smoked, gambled, womanised whenever the opportunity arose and drank wherever he could find a compliant bartender.

Asbury came to nation-wide notoriety and consequent infamy upon the publication of a fictional short story in H. L. Menken's American Mercury magazine in 1926. The story, called "Hatrack", concerned a Farmington prostitute who took her Protestant customers to the local Roman Catholic cemetery, and vice versa. With a wish to lead a better life, the prostitute appeals to the local Methodist church, and is spurned as 'beyond redemption'. The story naturally caused a nation-wide furore; as the American Mercury was banned from sale in Boston, H. L. Menken promptly went there, sold copies of his magazine on Boston Common, and was arrested. The arrest created instant celebrities of Menken and Asbury both, and magazine sales boomed. One can only guess what the good people of 1926 Boston would have made of Michael Moore.

That said, on the basis of comparison between Stupid White Men and Gangs of New York, Herbert Asbury had more literary prowess than Michael Moore could ever dream of. Gangs of New York essentially does exactly what it says on the cover (which on the re-print I bought reproduced, by the way, a rather off-putting promotional poster for the film, with Leonardo Di Caprio glaring in a laughably unthreatening way at the camera). It is a recounting of the gang-dominated early days of New York, from 1829 through to the demise of street-gang control in 1927.

The book charts the various power struggles between gangs, the political factors underpinning their domination, the key gang leaders and notable
characters, and their eventual demise in a historically linear fashion; the patterns of political corruption, police ineffectiveness and bloody murder that emerge as the struggle for criminal domination of the city unfolds are bloodily mesmeric, yet to the modern reader instantly recognisable from gangster films such as The Godfather or Goodfellas. Indeed, Asbury’s recounting suggests that the demise of the street gangs created a vacuum that groups like the Mafia were eventually to fill.

Asbury does not glory in this violence or deify these gangsters, however, in the way to which Hollywood is so prone. His written style is minimalist and terse; his journalistic background is self-evident — Asbury recounts the events and facts and leaves the reader to draw his own conclusions about the characters Asbury portrays. His writing brings to mind old paper; dry, and apparently plain, but on closer inspection, of now uncommon texture. This is never more evident than in the wry, tongue-in-cheek turn of phrase he employs.Take, for example, his description of (literally) legendary gangster "Mose":

Mose was at least eight feet tall and broad in proportion, and his colossal bulk was crowned by a great shock a flaming ginger-colored hair, on which he wore a beaver hat measuring more than two feet from crown to brim ... Woe and desolation came upon the gangsters of the Five Points when the great Mose leaped into their midst and began to kick and stamp; they fled in despair and hid themselves in the innermost depths of the rookeries of Paradise Square.

The laconic humour he employs in recounting such early urban legends makes a diverting juxtaposition to the vicious violence and bloody murder of other chapters:

No quarter was asked or given by the early gangsters; when a man fell wounded his enemies leaped joyfully upon him and kicked or stamped him to death.

This is merely one example picked from potentially hundreds; the book is filled with such tales. Asbury, however, does not confine his tale to the violence and gangs themselves; he also examines the extreme squalor and poverty, and police and political corruption that gave rise to the gangs and their subsequent violence. He provides a list of his sources in a bibliography, and in combination with his clean, undramatic written style, there is little reason to doubt the authority with which he writes. Furthermore, he often provides quotation from police files or contemporary recollections; these are frequently illustrated by sketches and photographs of the gangsters themselves. It is worth noting that this book was written only two years after Asbury considers the "gangster period" to have come to an end, and he is able to relate the activities of former gangsters at the time of writing; some were minor celebrities, others had "dropped from sight", and one was an estate agent. This contemporaneity is startling given the viciousness of the acts recounted; it is hard to believe that some of events in the book took place a mere eighty years ago; harder still is it to credit the fact that some of these events were more recent than the silent footage of, say, the Battle of the Somme. It is difficult to relate the strictly-regimented warfare of World War One to the same time period as the concurrent random violence of gang warfare in New York.

As such, however, the book is rather dated; it is as hard for the modern reader to imagine the overwhelming poverty of the rookeries of early New York as it is to conjure up a mental picture of the Victorian slums detailed by Dickens. Asbury nonetheless does a fine job of portraying the reasons behind the desperation and lack of morality of the gangsters, and these are no one-dimensional characters. Furthermore, it is possible that the reader may find the acridity of the writing to be a little uninspiring; the lists of gang and gangster names are hardly riveting stuff. The book improves from start to finish, however, as Asbury is able to make use of an increased number of sources in recounting the more recent events. Gangs of New York provides an incisive glimpse into a place and time that, although relatively recent, is seemingly as distant to the modern world as the sack of Carthage or fall of the Roman Empire. It strikes me as unlikely that readers in seventy years time will look back on Stupid White Men in the same way.

Andy Fox, June 23, 2003 12:19 AM