The Empire City

The Empire City
First edition
Author	Paul Goodman
Published	1959 (Bobbs-Merrill)
Pages	621

The Empire City is a 1959 epic novel by Paul Goodman.

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# The (Secret) City of London -- Part 1 The Great City of London, known for its historical landmarks, modern skyscrapers, ancient markets and famous bridges. It's arguably the financial capital of the world and home to over eleven *thousand* people. Wait, what? Eleven... thousand? That's right: but the City of London is a different place from London -- though London is also known for its historical landmarks, modern skyscrapers, ancient markets, famous bridges and is home to the government, royal family and seven million people. But, if you look map of London crafted by a careful cartographer that map will have a one-square mile hole near the middle -- it's here where the City of London lives inside of the city named London. Despite these confusingly close names the two Londons have separate city halls and elect separate mayors, who collect separate taxes to fund separate police who enforce separate laws. The Mayor of the City of London has a fancy title 'The Right Honourable the Lord Mayor of London' to match his fancy outfit. He also gets to ride in a golden carriage and work in a Guildhall while the mayor of London has to wear a suit, ride a bike and work in an office building. The City of London also has its own flag and its own crest which is awesome and makes London's lack of either twice as sad. To top it off the City of London gets to act more like one of the countries in the UK than just an oddly located city -- for uniquely the corporation that runs the city of London is older than the United Kingdom by several hundred years. So how did the UK end up with two Londons, one inside of the other? Because: Romans. 2,000 years ago they came to Great Britain, killed a bunch of druids, and founded a trading post on the River Thames and named it Londonimium. Being Romans they got to work doing what Romans do: enforcing laws, increasing trade, building temples, public baths, roads, bridges and a wall to defend their work. And it's this wall which is why the current City of London exists -- for though the Romans came and the Romans went and kingdoms rose and kingdoms fell, the wall endured protecting the city within. And The City, governing itself and trading with the world, grew rich. A thousand years after the Romans (yet still a thousand years ago) when William the Conqueror came to Great Britain to conqueror everything and begin modern british history he found the City of London, with its sturdy walls more challenging to defeat than farmers on open fields. So he agreed to recognize the rights and privileges City of Londoners were used to in return for the them recognizing him as the new King. Though after the negotiation, William quickly built towers around the City of London which were just as much about protecting William from the locals within as defending against the Vikings from without. This started a thousand-year long tradition whereby Monarchs always reconfirmed that 'yes' the City of London is a special, unique place best left to its own business, while simultaneously distrusting it. Many a monarch thought the City of London was too powerful and rich. And one even built a new Capital city nearby, named Westminster, to compete with the City of London and hopefully, suck power and wealth away from it. This was the start of the second London. As the centuries passed, Westminster grew and merged with nearby towns eventually surrounding the walled-in, and still separate City of London. But, people began to call the whole urban collection 'London' and the name became official when Parliament joined towns together under a single municipal government with a mayor. But, the mayor of London still doesn't have power over the tiny City of London which has rules and traditions like nowhere else in the country and possibly the world. For example, the ruling monarch doesn't just enter the City of London on a whim, but instead asks for permission from the Lord Mayor at a ceremony. While it's not required by law, the ceremony is, unusual to say the least. The City of London also has a representative in Parliament, The Remembrancer, whose job it is to protects the City's special rights. Because of this, laws passed by Parliament sometimes don't apply to the City of London: most notably voting reforms, which we'll discuss next time. But if you're curious, unlike anywhere else in the UK elections in the City of London involve Medieval Guilds and modern companies. Finally, the City of London also owns and operates land and buildings far outside its border, making it quite wealthy. Once you start looking for The City's Crest you'll find it in lots of places, but most notably on Tower Bridge which, while being in London is operated by City of London, These crests everywhere when combined with the City of London's age and wealth and quazi-independent status make it an irresistible temptation for conspiracy nuts. Add in the oldest Masonic temple and it's not long before the crazy part of the Internet yelling about secret societies controlling the world via the finance industry from inside the City-state of London. (And don't forget the reptilian alien Queen who's really behind it all.) But conspiracy theories aside, the City of London is not an independent nation like the Vatican is, no matter how much you might read it on the Internet, rather it's a unique place in the United Kingdom with a long and complicated history. The wall that began all this 2,000 years ago is now mostly gone -- so the border between London and its secret inner city isn't so obvious. Though, next time you're in London, if you come across a small dragon on the street, he still guards the entrance to the city in a city in a country in a country.

Publication

Goodman wrote The Empire City over the course of almost 20 years.^[1] He began work on his epic, The Empire City, upon returning to New York City in 1939 from his graduate work at the University of Chicago. Throughout his studies and prior to graduate school, Goodman had written poems, plays, and stories, but with a grant in hand to write his dissertation and some monthly money from his mother-in-law, Goodman once again afforded himself a few years to pursue his art before his scholarship. Having been homesick for his native town, the task of his novel was a kind of homecoming.^[2] The Grand Piano, which would become the first volume of The Empire City, was published by Colt Press in 1942.^[3]

The second volume, The State of Nature, was published by Vanguard Press in 1946. The press had published a book of Goodman's stories the year prior and would publish Goodman's book on Kafka in 1947, but they each sold progressively worse.^[4] Withered by World War II and his self-confidence shaken, Goodman began a self-analysis in the style of Freud that culminated in a separate, self-analytic novel.^[5] Goodman, who felt most comfortable as an artist, used self-reflexive fiction as a vehicle for self-analysis throughout his life.^[6] After finishing the self-analytic novel, Goodman completed the next book of his epic, The Dead of Spring, but publishers (including Vanguard) were uninterested in both, even as Goodman considered The Dead of Spring his best work. Goodman self-published the third volume on David Dellinger's New Jersey pacifist commune press in 1950 after soliciting subscriptions from 200 friends via postcards.^[7] He was distraught by the lack of wider interest in his work and bereft of purpose in how his writing could serve either his desire for external validation or his desire to impact change in his fellow man.^[8] The Dead of Spring articulated Goodman's great personal dilemma: "If we conformed to the mad society, we became mad; but if we did not conform to the only society that there is, we became mad."^[9]

This theme of questioning how to integrate one's self into society recurs throughout Goodman's fourth volume, The Holy Terror, which he wrote in 1952 and 1953.^[9] By this time, Goodman was embedded in the nascent world of Gestalt therapy, having co-written its seminal text for publication in 1951.^[10] Goodman's characters and their desires reflect the type of relationships the author was exploring as a new therapist.^[9] Unlike the prior books, in which Horatio detached himself from the absurd society, in The Holy Terror, Horatio attempts, with mixed success, to integrate into the larger society.^[11]

In a later interview, Goodman explained that he would have continued the novel, but the next action for Horatio for which he was looking became Goodman's epochal 1960 work, Growing Up Absurd.

The novel was issued in paperback by Bobbs-Merrill in 1964, at the height of Goodman's fame as a social critic, and later re-issued, posthumously, in 1977, by Vintage, the main publisher of Goodman's political and social works of the sixties; this edition contains an editorial note (concerning the editing of the end of the novel) by one of Goodman's literary executors, Taylor Stoehr, and an illuminating five-page Preface by Goodman's good friend, the critic Harold Rosenberg, who, comparing it to Melville's Mardi, writes that "however one judges 'The Empire City' as a novel, there is no doubt that it is a great book" (Rosenberg xi), noting (and quoting from the book) that "Goodman has the humor, high and low, of a never-failing contradictory intelligence, plus the exuberance of one who has been visited by the animal faith [...] that there are weapons 'that do not weigh one down' and that the lover of life has also on his side 'the force that is in the heart of matter, that, as if stubbornly, makes things exist rather be mere dreams or wishes'" (Rosenberg xi-xii). The book was again later re-issued by Black Sparrow Press, with a long introduction by Stoehr, in 2000.

Reception

Richard Kostelanetz described The Empire City as Goodman's most impressive fiction, mainly in its conception and not its execution.^[12]

Academic Theodore Roszak wrote in 1967 that, among Goodman's works, The Empire City was the most likely to endure.^[13] He described the book as a social-philosophical existential sociology of American society that combines elements of novel, pamphlet, treatise, and reportage as Goodman's "running commentary on the steep American ascent to Empire as seen from the vantage point of a tiny communitarian circle surviving by its wits and the public welfare in megapolitan New York".^[14]

The Encyclopedia of Gay Histories and Cultures described it as a "neglected masterpiece of experimental fiction" and "a key link between surrealist and postmodern writing".^[15]

Volumes

The Grand Piano or, The Almanac of Alienation (1942, Colt Press)^[3]
The State of Nature (1946, Vanguard Press)^[3]
The Dead of Spring (1950, Libertarian Press)^[3]
The Holy Terror (together published as The Empire City, 1959, Bobbs-Merrill)^[16]

References

^ Roszak 1969, p. 181.
^ Stoehr 1994, p. 29.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Stoehr 1994, p. 323.
^ Stoehr 1994, pp. 31, 323.
^ Stoehr 1994, pp. 32, 34–35.
^ Stoehr 1994, p. 35.
^ Stoehr 1994, pp. 36, 323.
^ Stoehr 1994, pp. 36–37.
^ ^a ^b ^c Stoehr 1994, p. 214.
^ Stoehr 1994, pp. 136–137.
^ Stoehr 1994, pp. 214–216.
^ Kostelanetz, Richard (1969). "Paul Goodman: Persistence and Prevalence". Master Minds: Portraits of Contemporary American Artists and Intellectuals. New York: Macmillan. p. 285. OCLC 23458.
^ Roszak 1969, p. 180.
^ Roszak 1969, pp. 180–181.
^ Caserio, Robert L. (2000). "Goodman, Paul (1911–1972)". In Haggerty, George E. (ed.). Gay Histories and Cultures: An Encyclopedia. New York: Garland. p. 412. ISBN 978-0-8153-1880-4.
^ Stoehr 1994, p. 324.