The blurb on the back of the paperback edition of Verlyn Klinkenborg’s The Last Fine Time (1991) says it is a “tour de force of lyrical style.” That’s the way it struck me when I read the New Yorker version of it, called “George & Eddie’s,” when it appeared in the magazine’s December 24, 1990 issue. “George & Eddie’s” is a recreation of Buffalo’s East Side, circa 1947, right down to “the milk-glass bulbs of the street lamps, mounted on shapely iron posts.” My favorite passage is the part about the insurance atlases. Klinkenborg ingeniously uses insurance atlases of the period – “immense bound volumes that plot the distribution of indemnity and risk” – to introduce us to 722 Sycamore Street, home of the Wenzek family and location of the Thomas Wenzek Restaurant, soon to become George & Eddie’s bar. Klinkenborg says, “For the East Side of Buffalo in 1947, such atlases seem to have whole chapters of two-and-a-half-story frame buildings, all rendered in outline from a serial aerial view.” The insurance atlases help Klinkenborg call up the past by sparking his imagination, not by what’s in them, but by what is absent. Klinkenborg says:
But the atlases do not record the presence of large, graceful elms in East Buffalo, or the way the streets were edged with square stone curbs, whose cutting and laying were the fiefdom of a potent Italian union. They do not mention the bricks that ran between the streetcar tracks, or the rumble the bricks caused when trucks crossed them, or the slithering roar of the streetcars themselves. They say nothing about the markets and the parks and the dusty shopfronts. From the records it is impossible to learn that the acres of two-and-a-half-story frame houses on Buffalo’s East Side had long since cohered into a Polish neighborhood, where each house was bound to the houses around it by an incalculable number of associations – associations that in many cases reached back past the Atlantic voyage, past the crowded North Sea docks, and into the partitioned Old Country itself.
How wonderful those details about the “rumble of the bricks” and the “slithering roar of the streetcars.” It is the achievement of this lovely piece to bring the insurance atlases to life. Klinkenborg makes the Wenzek’s lives specific, bringing us close to their lived experience, thereby rescuing them from oblivion. He has a profound sense of life’s transience. At one point, he says, “Though no one sees the change coming, it surrounds them, in small ways as yet.” Interestingly, The Last Fine Time contains a different version of the above-quoted “insurance atlases” passage. Here is the passage as set out in the book:
Insurance atlases of the period do not record the presence of large, graceful trees in East Buffalo, or the way the streets were edged with square stone curbs, whose cutting and laying were the fiefdom of a potent Italian union. They do not mention the bricks that ran between the streetcar tracks or the rumble they caused when trucks turned across them or the slithering roar of the streetcars themselves. They say nothing about the markets and the parks and the dusty shopfronts. Nowhere do you find it written that this was part of town where a woman’s hands smelled different every day of the week – lye soap one morning, the next morning flour. From their commentary it is impossible to learn how the acres of two-and-a-half-story wood frame houses that rose up like a climax forest years ago had long since cohered into a Polish neighborhood, where each house was bound to the houses around it by an incalculable, and undelineable, number of associations – associations that in many cases reached past the Atlantic voyage, past the crowded North Sea docks and their rail connections, and into the absorbent landscape of the partitioned Old Country itself. According to insurance maps, the only thing the houses of the East side could communicate was flame.
The Last Fine Time is a filled-out version of “George & Eddie’s.” It’s as if “George & Eddie’s” was a preliminary sketch for the later book. Did Klinkenborg carve it out of The Last Fine Time manuscript? Or was it a preliminary draft on which he based the later book? My guess is that the book came first. I say this because of such indicators as the changing of “trees” and “turned across” in the book to “elms” and “crossed” in the magazine, and the deletion of “that rose up like a climax forest years ago,” “undelineable,” “and their rail connections,” “the absorbent landscape,” and the whole sentence about a woman’s hands smelling "different every day of the week" from the magazine version. To my mind, the tighter, crisper New Yorker version is preferable, although the more luxuriant book version better conveys Klinkenborg’s lyrical intensity. And in the book (but not in the magazine) there’s a paragraph that precedes the one above-quoted that contains the following additional beautiful description of the insurance atlases, a description that also works as a statement of Klinkenborg’s artistic purpose:
Here, from some supernal height, is visible the universal grid of urban living, as delicate a tracery as the lace on a christening gown. The tiniest squares are houses, every house an invisible suite of rooms through which daylight crawls and the smells of cooking percolate like moods. The feeling they stir comes from knowing that private life is a grave of incident – once lived, soon forgotten – and from trying to imagine the incidents of so many private lives without submitting to generalities. It is a feeling like compassion, but it also resembles the faith that existence is too varied, too ample, to be contained.
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