by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
The Soup Kitchen as a Work of Art
Today’s lovely front-page Times piece about the soup kitchen where gifted musicians play standards on the piano while the food is being served is just the latest entry in the ample literature of the soup kitchen.
The church in the piece is the Church of the Holy Apostles, an Episcopal church on Ninth Avenue. Ian Frazier, long of The New Yorker, started a writing workshop there in 1994, and he wrote a vivid piece aout the place. Here’s what happened when he invited one lunch guest to join:
“Uh-uh, no,” he said. “I ain’t doin’ no writers’ workshop. I done that shit before.”
“Really? You were in a writers’ workshop before?”
“Hell yes I was. And my teacher was a better writer than you.”
“Oh? What writer was that?”
“John Cheever.”
Apparently, the guy had been in a workshop that Cheever taught at the prison in Ossining, back in the seventies. I had met Cheever once, and the guy and I talked about him for a while. I asked the guy what he had learned from the workshop with Cheever, and he said, “Cheever, you understan’, he was a brilliant writer. When he wrote something, he always had two things going on at a time. He told us, when you writin’, you got this surface thing, you understan’, goin’ on up here”—he moved his left hand in a circle with his fingers spread apart, as if rubbing a flat surface—“an’ then once you get that goin’ on, now you got to come under it”—he brought his right hand under his left, as if throwing an uppercut—“come under this thing here that’s goin’ on up here, you understan’. That was how John Cheever said you write.”
A few blocks away, at the Church of St. Francis Xavier on Sixteenth Street near Sixth, the novelist James Wilcox volunteered for years at the soup kitchen. That’s where The New Yorker found him, and that’s the point of the piece, by his friend James Stewart: Wilcox, an acclaimed novelist, was so far from prosperous that he might as well have been on the soup line himself:
His best year was 1988, when he had a gross income of $48,600 before agent commissions (of ten per cent) and expenses. He now remembers that year as an aberration—a time when he could eat out occasionally, and even take a cab. And since that time, as the market for tradepaperback fiction has shrunk and authors’ advances have declined, his income has dropped accordingly. In 1992, he earned twenty-five thousand dollars. Last year, it was fourteen thousand dollars …
When I visited him recently, he had just finished the last of three meals he’d extracted from eighteen pieces of chicken he bought at Key Food for three dollars and forty cents.
That was 1994. Twenty years later Wilcox, though still far from prosperous as a novelist, is a distinguished professor at LSU.
In other ways little has changed. Twenty years later, those two soup kitchens are still there, and in substantially the same form. Why is this? It may be that as a society we don’t apply our tremendous resources for innovation and organization and resource-allocating and problem-solving to old-school problems like hunger. Or it may be that – as Ian Frazier suggests – the soup kitchen is unimproveable:
There are so many hungers out there; the soup kitchen deals, efficiently and satisfyingly, with the most basic kind. I consider it, in its own fashion, a work of art.
