Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (62 page)

Early in 1999, Jason Epstein, now past seventy, invited a younger colleague, David Ebershoff, to become involved in Jane’s latest book project. Just twenty-nine at the time, he was still “pretty green,” he says today. At that point, he’d not yet even read Jane’s
Systems of Survival
, nor much of Plato—both confessions of a sort because for the new book Jane had reprised her Platonic dialogue technique from
Systems of Survival:
Armbruster and the rest of the gang were back for new bouts of intellectual repartee.

Ebershoff didn’t at this point become Jane’s new editor. But that’s how it worked out. “Read this,” Epstein said to him one day, referring to a draft of Jane’s new book, “and tell me what you think.” What he thought was, “I kind of loved it. Because it was so original to me.” It was hard to write about ideas, and Jane did that so well. But he wasn’t won over by the “characters” she had brought over from the earlier book. “They weren’t like five characters you’d see in a novel.” On the other hand, in how ideas were volleyed back and forth among them, amended, revised, and polished smooth, it was a book that “literally embodied the writing process.” That in itself made it a coup of sorts. “I knew I’d never seen anything like that coming across my desk.”

Said Epstein: “Let’s go to Toronto and meet Jane.”

   CHAPTER 25   

CIVILIZATION’S CHILD

E
PSTEIN AND EBERSHOFF
flew up to Toronto and met Jane at Canoe, a restaurant on the fifty-fourth floor of a downtown tower with fine views of the city, patronized by bankers, businesspeople, and others comfortably well off. In came Jane wearing her customary shapeless poncho and carrying a papier-mâché ear trumpet Burgin had made to help her hear better. “Almost every head in the restaurant turned as she made her way to the table,” Ebershoff recalls; the last time he’d seen that was with Norman Mailer.

It was June 9, 1999. Jane’s manuscript was all but done; they had it there in front of them. Ebershoff told her how much he liked it. They talked about the publishing schedule, went over the dust jacket design. Any anxiety he might have felt about meeting Jane fell away. They ate. They spent a couple of pleasant hours together. Then, the same day, the two men flew back to New York.

At lunch they’d brought up no misgivings with Jane’s dialogue technique. “The form was really Jane being herself,” says Ebershoff; they weren’t going to mess with it at this point. As for Jane’s “characters,” they’d evolved little since
Systems of Survival
, their speech patterns grown no more distinctive. On the other hand, if you gave them their head, as Jane had, they had plenty to say. One of them, the sole newcomer to the group, Hiram, an ecologist, declares that his personal project “
is to learn economics from nature.” Indeed, the whole book bears just this stamp. “
I’m convinced,” Hiram says a little later, “that economic life is ruled by processes and principles we didn’t invent and can’t transcend whether we like that or not.”

Take, say, embryonic development, where you could see up close what Jane took as a cardinal principle, “differentiation emerging from generality.” A fertilized egg divides, “forming
a blob of multiplied generality”; that is, the cells, though more numerous, are still identical. But then, depending on their locations in the blob, they differentiate into distinct
types
of cells. Those differences morph further into the animal’s tissues—intestines, heart muscle, fur, and so on. Jane argued that the branching rivulets of a river delta or the proliferating clauses and subclauses of a legal code exhibit the same overarching principle. So do many facets of economic life. “
Our remote ancestors,” says Hiram, “started developing tools and weapons with nothing that was of their own making”; the sticks, stones, and bones they found around them became spears, scrapers, pokers, and hammers. And across the long tide of human history, each became a new “generality” that could potentially—and usually did—differentiate further into hammers, say, of a hundred different kinds, each expressing human ingenuity and economic drive.

This, broadly, was Jane’s strategy—through her conversations among Armbruster, Hiram, and their friends, to venture back and forth across the divide separating nature from economic life, learning from thermodynamics, control theory, fractal geometry, evolution, and other sciences. And always, at the root, the book’s central premise—that “
human beings exist wholly within nature as part of a natural order.”

The book didn’t work for everybody, just as
Systems of Survival
didn’t, and for kindred reasons; the dialogue technique, however satisfying it was for Jane to write, left some readers cold, or bothered. One critic was annoyed enough to aim a full, hilarious broadside at the book. “
Those insufferable yuppies Armbruster, Hortense, and Kate are back: slicing kumquats into their Perrier as they pretentiously discourse about bifurcation, feedback controls, and bonobo chimpanzees,” Mike Davis began a review in
The Village Voice
in 2000.

No, this is not a
Saturday Night Live
skit or a new Doug Coupland novel. It is Jane Jacobs—the Mother Teresa of neighborhoods—writing about the ecology of wealth…Jacobs, as usual, is intent on intellectual heavy lifting and obviously thinks [the dialogue technique] lightens the load for her readers. I wonder. Staggering through the pompous dinner conversations (in which the women, as in real life, seldom get a word in edgewise) that make up
The Nature of Economies
, I kept hoping that someone would toss hemlock with Armbruster’s radicchio.

Others, less distracted by Jane’s technique than warmed or exhilarated, praised the book as, for example, “
fresh and provocative.” A British champion of Jane’s work, Peter J. Taylor, guessed it would “
come to be seen as her most important work.” Another observed that, beyond having so much to say, Jane’s characters embodied an almost forgotten standard of civilized discourse. They actually
listened
to one another.

—

She was sorry to be so slow to respond to his letter, Jane wrote one correspondent in February 2000, but she’d suffered a serious accident. She’d caught her foot in a telephone cord, slipped, broken her hip, and ever since had been “
learning to walk again.” More than ever now, she resorted to language like
must reluctantly decline.
Her life, fuller of doctors, was more constrained, more dependent on others, pulled this way and that by the vicissitudes of age. “
I’m taking the glucosamine,” she wrote a friend who’d recommended an arthritis book, “and while I’m not yet in shape for skateboarding (the book does say to be optimistic) I have a distinct feeling that it is making the joint and leg stronger.” She would soon see a specialist to determine whether some muscle or blood vessel “has fallen down on the job.”

The following month, Jane managed to make an appearance at the New York Public Library.
“You were as poised as a queen when the auditorium gave you several minutes of applause when you came on stage,” Margot Gayle, one of her West Village friends, wrote her. She added, “It was good to see your son looking after you so well.”

A year later and it was Jane’s knee that was the problem. She could walk well enough with the help of “a
nice wheeled walker on the level, and a cane and railing on stairs.” She was in no pain when standing or sitting still. But while no worse recently, she was no better, either. She’d been advised against surgery: “This would be very chancy and could leave matters worse.”

Jane needed help to travel, make public appearances, just get around. She often had dinner with Jim and Pat, at their house a few doors down Albany Avenue, Caitlin sometimes delegated to walk her grandmother back home. Or else Jim and Pat would go over to Jane’s, bearing a cooked meal; “Meals on Feet,” Jane liked to call it. During these years, too, neighbors would drive her around parts of Toronto she’d not much seen; Jane dedicated her last book to two of them—“
merry leading-edge explorers”
who bore her on “discovery jaunts” to such exotic locales as Toronto’s industrial suburbs or the Hong Kong–flavored malls on the edge of the city.

—

On November 26, 2003, Jane wrote David Ebershoff to say she’d sent the corrected page proofs for her latest book,
Dark Age Ahead
, about troubling symptoms of cultural collapse, to the Random House production editor. She’d “
worked day and night” to meet her deadline, in part so “I could have the luxury of thinking for a few days about the next book.” At age eighty-seven, the
next
book. Indeed, she was including a preliminary table of contents for it, which she proposed to call
A Brief Biography of the Human Race.
Of course, she couldn’t get to it right away. There was the book tour for
Dark Age Ahead
, a Toronto civic battle in which she was embroiled, and “the speech for City College which has been a great trouble because I confused my book-writing mode with my speech-writing mode.” City College was City College of New York, and the speech was the Lewis Mumford Lecture she’d agreed to give in May 2004, four days after her eighty-eighth birthday.

That was the second paragraph of her letter to Ebershoff. The third began, “Now (don’t scream!) I am also seeing my way to the next book after
A Brief Biography
…a sort of self-anthology” of her economics writings, “with some added introductory and interstitial material. This,” she added brightly, “ought to be quick and easy!”

Jane seems to have been entirely serious about these plans.
Dark Age Ahead
, though not Jane at her best, showed glimmers of the Jane who was. “
Crisp, entertaining, scholarly, scary,” one early review called it. And when the book came out in May 2004, she was game for the
promotional tour on its behalf. It wasn’t quite Jane’s last hurrah, but it was getting there: New York for a couple of days, including the Mumford Lecture. Back to Toronto for three days of interviews and photo shoots with
Time
,
The Globe and Mail
, and
Maclean’s
at her home. Taped interviews with CBC at their broadcast center. Then off to San Francisco and Vancouver with Ned; and Powell’s Bookstore in Portland, Oregon, with Alana Probst. Roberta Gratz picked her up in Portland to bring her back to Toronto. At a college in Portland, Gratz recalls, they entered a campus building, Jane in flowing scarf, hobbling along with her walker down the corridor and into a crowded room where Roberta heard someone whisper, “Oh, it’s
Jane Jacobs. This is better than a rock star!” When Jane gave a talk at UC Berkeley, niece Lucia Jacobs visited her in her hotel room. A chance
Whaddya think about this…?
and they were lost in what Lucia recalls as “another marathon discussion” like those she remembered from Albany Avenue years before.

As for the new books Jane had in mind, according to Anne Collins, her Random House Canada editor, she meant the title,
A Brief Biography of the Human Race
, without the slightest irony. “It was dead straight. A title very descriptive as opposed to a joke.” In the Mumford lecture she delivered on May 8 before a packed auditorium at City College, and in a
New York Times
essay based on her talk a week later, she offered a preview: humankind had lived through, and needed to transcend, what she called its long Plantation Age, with its “
serfs, feudal tenants, indentured servants, outright slaves, or sharecroppers shackled by discrimination and debt,” along with bankrupt notions of industrial, spatial, and political order. What, after all, were modern American suburbs but “
grotesque parodies of plantations. Look at them: Monocultural residential tracts on ever-larger scales, like so many endless fields of cabbages. Standardized shopping centers, multiplying like so many flocks of identically pedigreed sheep.”

While in New York, a talk with Adam Gopnik for a piece in
The New Yorker
gave Jane the opportunity to tell a favorite story. New York, she said, still had its old pizzazz, for it changed every day—unlike neatly designed New Urbanist communities, everything built in from the get-go. It reminded her of the preacher who warned children that in Hell there would be much “wailing and weeping and gnashing of teeth.” But what if, as a child wonders, you have no teeth? Then teeth, too, would be provided: No way out. Everything thought out from the beginning.
This
, said Jane, was the overdesigned city—all done, just so, with none of a vital city’s inner messiness.

As for Jane’s
other
new book, the economics anthology, she was perfectly serious about it, too. By late 2004, she’d sent Ebershoff in New York and Collins in Toronto a chunk of it that promised “
the first theoretical explanation for normal expansion of economic life”—in particular, those sudden, sporadic growth spurts she saw as the essential marker of great cities everywhere. The book had started out more modestly, Jim Jacobs recalls, as a kind of best-of anthology. Once she began going through it, however, she was “appalled. Some of her explanations missed so much.
How,” she lamented, “was anyone to understand them?” Now, in full cry, she’d remedy those old lapses, advance new ideas.

Did she figure to just go on and on?

She was old now and had medical problems too numerous to count. But it is hard to discern in her plans, ideas, and proposals any doubt about completing them. And why not? Her mother had lived to 101. If you were the least bit susceptible to magical thinking, you could read her correspondence, survey the evidence of this time in her life, and doubt death would
ever
take her. Indeed, Anne Collins had chosen to act as if this were almost literally so; call it a gesture, but it was a gesture in lawyerly black and white—
formal contracts drawn up for the two books, submission dates extending three years into the future that would leave Jane pounding away at her typewriter well into her ninety-first year. Says Collins, “
I thought she would be with us forever.”