The Princess of 72nd Street is a historical novel, first published in 1979 and very much of its time, which I remember as a period of open confusion. What followed may not have been much of an improvement for many people, but it was relatively straightforward, and things have only gotten more straightforward since; today, alas, no one admits to confusion. We are simply polarized.
The Princess of 72nd Street is also a historical novel in that its manic narrator, who has been hospitalized/incarcerated six times and is trying to avert a seventh captivity, never once mentions the term “bi-polar.”
She calls her manic episodes “radiances,” and attaches a number to it. In this state, she is transformed from an artistic Upper West Side woman called Ellen into “Princess Esmeralda,” the fairy godmother of the crosstown thoroughfare named in the title, which runs from Central Park to the Hudson River and is barely recognizable today as the narrator’s rather grungy domain. Although she claims to “take [her] responsibilities very seriously,” they don’t appear to amount to much more than watching over the locals and wearing inappropriate outfits. In the spirit of willed disinhibition that was perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of the Seventies in metropolitan parts of the United States, the princess also grants casual audiences, so to speak, in her flat, to men whom she does not know very well and who persistently fail to recognize her regal status, leading to blisters and bruises. It doesn’t help that, since her second radiance, she has learned not to discuss being a princess.
What’s it like to be a princess? Esmeralda is eager to tell us, us, if only because she hopes that chaining herself to her typewriter will keep her out of trouble. Perspective is everything.
During my 4th or 5th radiance, I floated happily, laughingly into one of my grocery stores. Every one was smiling, although they tried not to show it, because their princess had entered. It’s not polite to stare at royalty. (21)
This exultation does not last, however, because as a result of accepting their generous gifts, she is arrested for shoplifting. Even without the intervention of police and doctors, the consequences of being a princess are woeful.
Too clearly I see the debris of Radiance 7 like the garbage remaining after any fète or spectacular event. For example, I notice two rotting soggy watermelons smelling sickly sweet. They are invaded by roaches who rush inside and then out and over the crushed tinfoil crown lying nearby. They make a tapping sound on the silver. My bed is ripped apart. The mattress is half off and a rusty spring protrudes. The sheets are stained with thick brownish blood. There is no beauty here — everything is chaotic, displaced, old, worn, and tired. I am. I feel like one of those cheap, sequined scarves that lies sadly on the floor. Everything has been disturbed and mutilated. It is wrong. (81)
The grimness of mania fills the pages of this novel, despite the pretense that most of it has been written in a state of euphoria.
Mania, however, is not an object of scrutiny in Graf’s novel; it is more like a decorative motif. The substance of The Princess of 72nd Street is its slightly burlesque gallery of unsatisfactory boyfriends, some worse than others. The worst, whom Ellen calls “the Alien,” is a sadistic doctor whose presence suggests that the heroine has masochistic issues. Then again, it may have been impossible to be a heterosexual woman in that time and place without a penchant for suffering. The nicer boyfriends, one of whom is too much of a nutcase really to be nice, feed Ellen with apologies that go something like this: Give me another chance, I know I’ve hurt you but I’m better now, I count on you, I deserve forgiveness, I thought you were a better person, [Click]. The elegant inevitability of this male self-pity, not unlike that of a nautilus shell, made me giggle. The nutcase, by the way, is involved with a therapist who is an even bigger nutcase, concerning whom Graf’s writing becomes so broad that it would be fatal to the book if we saw more of him.
The Princess of 72nd Street, short at 130 pages, put me so much in mind of another novel of its time, Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters, that I would shelve the books together despite their not having much in common, beyond the imaginable possibility of Ellen’s being a minor character in Fox’s tale of urban dislocation. Almost everything in both books has the air of being disturbed and mutilated. However wry and even clever, neither novel is at all good-humored. Readers are cautioned against mistaking Princess Esmeralda’s elation for the mood of this rediscovered curio.