The End of the Line in “Pennsylvania Station”

Abstract

Faulkner Journal Gene M. Moore The End of the Line in “Pennsylvania Station” F or anyone entering NewYork Cityby train from the South, Pennsylvania Station is the end of the line. Built in 1910 by the architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White, the massive neoclassical structure, covering some nine acres between Seventh and Eighth Avenues from 31st to 33rd Street, was a Beaux-Arts masterpiece, and the largest monument ever erected for rail travel: it was a temple of transportation. Its facade was adorned with eighty-four massive columns ofpink Milford granite, with two carriage portals modeled upon the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. The main hall in Faulkner’s day was 277 feet long, with a ceiling as high as the nave of St. Peter’s Basilica, and the general design was inspired by the Roman Baths of Caracalla. As is often the case with New York structures, its glory was brief: it barely outlived Faulkner, and was demolished in 1963. Pennsylvania Station now has only a subterranean existence as the basement of Madison Square Garden, serving as an underground terminal for Amtrak and various branch and subway lines.1 Of the once great temple of transportation all that remains is a crypt where curious visitors can take guided tours to be shown a few surviving archaeologi­ cal fragments of the original structure—a bit of brass stair railing, some glass bricks in the floor, a few faded and pointless directional signs. But the temple of transportation was still standing when William Faulkner passed through it, and he used its tomblike atmosphere to good effect in the short story that bears its name, one of the bleakest and most funereal of all Faulkner’s tales. Joseph Blotner has speculated that the earliest drafts of the story, then called “Bench for Two,” may date from as early as the autumn of 1921, when Faulkner worked in New York at Doubleday’s bookstore (1: 595). If the account Faulkner gave to Marshall J. Smith ten years later can be trusted, and he in fact arrived with only forty dollars in his pocket and no place to stay until his host Stark Young returned home a week later (LG 14), the “Bench for Two” may owe its origin to a lonely bench for one homeless and cold twentyfour -year-old poet from Mississippi. “Bench for Two” was not ready for submission until 1928; after numerous rejections and further revisions, “Pennsylvania Station” was finally published in the American Mercury in February 1934 and later included in the Collected 'Plans are under way to resurrect Pennsylvania Station as the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Station, to be rebuilt from the James A. Farley General Post Office, another McKim, Mead, and White monument on Eighth Avenue. The renovations are currently scheduled for completion in 2010, the centennial of the origi­ nal Penn Station. 27 Gene M. Moore The End ofthe Line in “Pennsylvania Station Pennsylvania Station, New York City, c. 1910. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-68677. The Arcade, c. 1911. From NYC-Architecture.com. The FaulknerJournal Fall 2007 29 Stories. It has received a mixed reception from critics. Blotner describes it as “an exercise in understatement in the portrayal of filial treachery and the capacity for human misery and stoic suffering” (1: 595); but most critics have been less kind, complaining not of understatement but of Faulkner’s overly indirect technique. The old man who narrates the story is unable to admit that his nephew is a heartless hoodlum; he can only admit to being “confused” (“Pennsylvania” 610, 615, 617), and his confusion undermines his author­ ity as a narrator. Faulkner places the conversation between the two on the bench against a somber and symbolic background, but so much stage deco­ ration seems wasted on a pathologically naive speaker who is unable to pass judgment on his villainous nephew Danny, instead resorting to evasions and repetitions that make his story difficult for readers to grasp. “Pennsylvania Station” has been dismissed by James Ferguson as “the story of a small-time hoodlum and his stupidly devoted mother and uncle—a dull and turgid text” (32); James B. Carothers complains that the characters are...