Rules of Civility

by Amor Towles

On the night of October 4th, 1966, Val and I, both in late middle age, attended the opening of Many Are Called at the Museum of Modern Art—the first exhibit of the portraits taken by Walker Evans in the late 1930s on the New York City subways with a hidden camera.

Walker Evans and the Subway Photos: While I began writing RULES OF CIVILITYin 2006, the genesis of the book dates back to the early 1990s when I happened upon a copy of Many Are Called – the collection of portraits that Walker Evans took on the New York City subways in the late 1930s with a hidden camera. At the time, I primarily knew of Evans’s iconic Depression-era photographs of rural America, such as those that appear in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: the tilting clapboard houses, weathered signs, stalwart women in summer dresses… But this was the first I’d seen of his urban work. The subway photos weren’t shown publicly until the 1960s, and, as I flipped through the pages, I had the fanciful notion of someone at the exhibit’s opening recognizing the same person in two of the portraits. In the manner of such things, I wrote the idea on a matchbook cover and threw it in a box. Twenty years later, I pulled the matchbook back out of the box and set about writing this tale. One of the reasons I’ve remained interested in the Evans portraits all these years is that they are fundamentally haunting. In part, this is because the photos are artifacts of the Depression. But in part, I think they haunt because they evoke the public/private paradox of the subway ride. The men and women in these photographs are being captured in an extremely public environment – a crowded subway car in one of the largest, most racially diverse cities in the world. But the anonymity secured by this chance gathering of strangers, by the relative brevity of the ride, and by that start-of-day/end-of-day weariness, all seem to prompt the riders (or allow them) to drop their guard. We, as viewers, thus seem to get a glimpse not simply of social class and ethnicity, but of the individual histories, sentiments, and dreams that lie just beneath the surface. On a personal note, the Christmas after RULES OF CIVILITY was published, both my wife and my father gave me one of the Walker Evans subway portraits. They continue to be haunting and are two of my most prized possessions.