HER NAME IN FLASHING LIGHTS
A fictional documentary gives a fresh take on the real-life salty sweetheart of the Bowery in 1930s New York
There was a real-life Mazie Phillips, the titular heroine in Jamie Attenberg’s new novel Saint Mazie, who — like her fictitious counterpart — lived and was young in New York City around the turn of the century. The real Mazie was first immortalized in print in The New Yorker in 1940, by the magazine’s legendary writer Joseph Mitchell. She was, like so many of Mitchell’s subjects, a flesh-and-blood stand in for New York City itself. Bawdy and brassy, she was the proprietress of The Venice, a seedy theatre on the Lower East Side, as compassionate toward and active in her assistance of the homeless as she was, Mitchell wrote, “profoundly uninterested in moving pictures.” Enigmatic, contradictory, tough as nails but with a core of solid gold: That’s our Mazie, and that’s our New York.
Attenberg fictionalizes Mitchell’s charming subject mostly through excerpts of Mazie’s own recovered diary. The result is a compelling slice of historical fiction; a character study stretching from 1907 when we first meet Mazie Phillips, aged 10, to 1939, by which time the young woman is well along the path of indomitability that leads to immortalization as an icon of New York City. That it’s mostly told in her own words conveys the paradox and humility of her quiet heroism: Mazie doesn’t strive for greatness so much as she can’t stop helping people, and she can’t stop helping people because she’s unbreakable and they’re not, and there’s not much that can be done about it either way.
When we first meet Attenberg’s Mazie, she has only just come to live with her elder sister, Rosie, and Rosie’s husband, Louis, in Manhattan, swept there with baby sister Jeanie overnight to escape the tyranny of their abusive father. Not quite an orphan but without a traditional family, Mazie early on discovers that her true love is freedom; specifically, the freedom to walk the streets of New York City. But that doesn’t work for Rosie, and just as Jeanie has honed her skills as a dancer enough to hit the road with a travelling show, Mazie is hired by Louis to work the ticket booth at The Venice, a movie theatre on the Lower East Side, effectively confining the party-loving good-time girl to, as she frequently calls it, “her cage.”
Soon enough, Mazie finds herself connecting with the denizens of her ticket line more than she ever could have in barrooms and basements (though she continues to frequent those, and speakeasies, too, once we hit Prohibition). Motivated by her unlikely friendship with Sister Tee, a Catholic nun (Mazie remains staunchly and obstinately secular), the theatre worker begins donating her earnings and, after she eventually assumes control of The Venice, her proceeds to charity and charity cases alike.
Attenberg doesn’t just use diary excerpts to tell Mazie’s story, but also first-person remembrances of the fiery Phillips girl from (fictional, it bears mentioning) former neighbours, the descendants of former lovers and New York City historians, professionals and amateurs alike, compelled to share their knowledge of the legendary Miss Mazie. The interchanging narrative devices employed by Attenberg give Saint Mazie a documentary feel, effective enough to make Mazie’s entire life story feel completely real and entirely plausible, even if it’s only partly so.
Attenberg herself is a deft storyteller, tapping on historical touchstones with enough pressure to give Saint Mazie a sense of legitimacy but never straying far from each event’s significance to Mazie herself. The Wall Street Bombing of 1920 takes place weeks after Mazie rides the thirdever train into Manhattan from Coney Island; she hears the blast and runs a mile up Wall Street, tying the hem of her skirt into a tourniquet for an injured man along the way. I couldn’t help but note that the bombing itself is described in such a way that only the presence of a horse’s head and its geographic location distinguishes it from a scene in Manhattan in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 — jarring, but a testament to Attenberg’s canny ability to capture and convey a sense of the universal despite the novel’s historical constraints.
“It was working stiffs, just like me,” Mazie protests when Louis instructs her to stay out of trouble two days later, during a drive into the city. “Those are the people standing in my line.”
If Mazie is the beating heart of Attenberg’s latest novel, New York City is its soul: The book’s heroine doesn’t seem to want to do right by anyone but the city whose streets give her the only sense of freedom, and the only enduring love, she’s ever known. It takes millions of Mazies to build one great city, and that means millions of remarkable stories left untold. It’s a shame Attenberg can’t tell them all.
It takes millions of great stories to build one great city