A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories (17 page)

I think it is the only great city with all the importance and activity and amusement of city life, which nevertheless appeals to the imagination like wild country. Its charm depends on the weather, the light and dark, and the time of day, and the momentary emotion of the beholder. If we stop to consider it without emotion, or if we look too close, it is a disappointment; it is not at all according to human aestheticism or idealism. Like the wondrous works of God in nature, the other wondrous works of God in nature—glacier, jungle, flood, floor of the ocean—it is disorderly and unattractive in detail.

But we never care, having in mind a certain mirage to add to the reality; a visionary composite picture of it as a whole which makes us indifferent to any poor minor matter we may not like. The fact for us is continually mixed with what we have expected of it, and still expect. As one says promised land, it is promised city. It is as if we had journeyed to it from some other place—which indeed a good many of us have done—and come upon it suddenly and stood gazing starry-eyed, at some little distance, outside it looking in; and in a sense we have stayed outside. We still generally look at it as we did the first time, half in imagination, preferring our hope to our experience. An odd way to feel about a crowded, soiled, commercialized, mechanized cityscape.

The discoverers of this country when they first came must have had this kind of imagination about landscape, beginning with the sight of the coastline arising out of the abstract sea—blank beaches upon which there had been no footprints until they set foot, lonely beckoning rivers which had had no boats on them big enough to count until they sailed up—and the colonizers and gold-rushers had it, I suppose, wending their way with pack animals and folded camp up the long valleys toward palatial, perhaps golden foothills; and the pioneers had it, I know (because my grandparents told me), when deep amid the skyscraping primeval timber through the foliage they caught the first shimmer of some natural clearing. It was a daydream and it was their passion; and naturally they suffered a deep dread of disappointment, but they imagined that it offered them the greatest opportunity in the world; and they realized what that opportunity was going to do to them: it was going to take their all, whether or not it gave its all. Because it was their passion, they were willing. Which, I think, is the spirit of many New Yorkers about New York. For some of those forerunners of ours, and for some of us, who happen to have no deep amorous attachment, it takes the place of that in a sense. Also it bears a certain similarity to religion. They thought and spoke explicitly, and also sang about the religious aspect of their way of life and lifework, and we do not; but perhaps that does not make a great difference. A subconscious sentiment, passion, or superstition may have as much effect on one’s conduct as any regular creed; nowadays, as a rule, it has much more effect.

New York, they say, is all things to all men; and as I give it so definite a character, perhaps I should specify and locate my part of it. A number of its parts, and provincial cities, grow close around it, attached to it, and each has some peculiarity and takes knowing: talented and feckless Harlem, the mysterious Bronx, combative Brooklyn, the salt-marsh cities of New Jersey, prepotent Astoria. I do not really love all those parts, I scarcely know them. The New York I mean is the center of town, mid-Manhattan, the important part. If anyone wanted to alter this country at one fell swoop, let us say by bombing, this would be the place to swoop. It is not large: an area of a square mile or so, the fifties between Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue, and a bit more. The true New Yorker cannot ever walk there without having to say how-do-you-do to people, as in a village; that in fact is how he knows that he is a true New Yorker. And he may fancy that he has nothing in common with his fellow how-do-you-doers except this habit of walking in certain blocks. What they have in common, really, is a lifework: the management, the promotion, the education, the re-creation, and the fashion of the place, by which the adjacent and provincial places are governed; and naturally their influence extends to the rest of the country as well, and now—as in convulsive history the planet shrinks—it has begun to be extended everywhere. The rest of the country could get on without them, of course, but then it would be, as you might say, automatic.

My own role is not historic; I am not one of the managerial class. All I can contribute to the great work and destiny of the metropolis is my contemplation of it and rejoicing in it, and when called upon, a certain testimony. And it is not always a joyous contemplation. In fact I think the bitterest sentiments I have ever had to endure have been various disappointments in New York. If I did not love it, I should hate it. I remember the day of my worst bitterness, a day in late December; and that same afternoon, walking in the street, between one errand and another, an odd thing happened to me. It was a sort of mystic experience.

Now mystic, I know, is a big word, too much in use and as a rule misused, and I suppose one ought not to write it any more without defining it. But it requires a long hard definition; if I cite one or two famous cases of it you will know what I mean. For example, John Bunyan, author of
The Pilgrim’s Progress.
One day a voice came darting in his ear to tell him that he could not have both his fun and his salvation. “Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to heaven,” it asked, “or have thy sins and go to hell?” He often heard supernatural sayings after that, the poor hysterical man of genius; he made a habit of it, and in his second-best book,
Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners,
wrote all about it.

Pascal, the great French mathematician and theologian, was in a carriage crossing a bridge; the horses reared over the parapet, but for a wonder the carriage with him in it stopped on the brink; and ever afterward he had an illusion of a precipice of death and an abyss of eternity gaping at his feet wherever he went, and therefore grew more and more religious, which kept him from going mad. Now I am no such man as that. My experience was not very exalted and not at all tragic. Only psychologically speaking, in its small way, it was of the same character and classification as those famous examples. I do not mean to be pretentious about them; or if I pretend a little, it is only to tell my story more clearly.

I was walking down Madison Avenue, below Fifty-ninth Street on the west sidewalk. I can recall the exact spot: just south of the haberdashery of John Gordon where I buy bargain shirts, just north of the deluxe newsstand of the suave Gottfried brothers where I buy English periodicals. I was about to go into Gottfrieds’ to see if they had received any recent issues of
Horizon
and the
New Statesman and Nation.
I was in one of those moods as recurrent as malaria in New Yorkers, when the longing to go abroad makes us ache and sweat. We long to go abroad even when we are most enthusiastic about New York; and anyway, as I have said, I was all out of enthusiasm.

The day before, a widowed friend of mine had consulted me about the education of her fine small boy, and I had looked into two or three of our public schools, and there were half again as many school children as they had room for, crowded in shadowy and evil-smelling rooms like little livestock in a stockyard, and the teachers that I saw were unhappy half-educated political appointees, left over from some period of municipal mismanagement. The night before, someone had taken me to the opera, and our opera is a poor obsolescent institution. That morning, I had visited our museum of old art, which is a melancholy pretentious place; a collection of quantity rather than quality, arranged more or less in the way of a great auction room. If I were a musician or a painter perhaps I should think these time-honored establishments better than nothing. Nothing at all is done for literature. I had spent the luncheon hour and an hour or two after luncheon pleading with an influential friend for the endowment of a new literary magazine; pleading with insufficient eloquence or insufficient patience, at any rate in vain.

The more I thought of all these things, as I came away from my friend’s apartment down the street, the worse I felt about them. New York, I said to myself, is a futile and disillusioning and boring place.

Then it happened. Suddenly a voice said to me, or said in me, softly but sternly, “It’s all there is, there isn’t any more.” It was a familiar, noble, husky, not exactly sober tone of voice, with a manner of fanatical fondness pulsing in it, and as a matter of fact I knew at once what long ago memory of mine it derived from. It was Miss Barrymore’s voice, when she was young and I was very young, and for a season or two I was infatuated with her; Miss Barrymore’s voice in a play by Zoe Akins; a deathbed speech, the dissolute lady of title whom she was portraying having been run over by a taxicab. New York is all there is, the voice admonished, there isn’t any more.

That sound recollected from my boyhood, and the meaning of the banal words—in the context of what I had in mind, in connection with the way life went on there in New York in my middle age— moved me and dismayed me. The damp, dulling, shrinking afternoon light, late afternoon in late December, suddenly turned to vision, and the sidewalk was a world and the gutter was an abyss. For a minute I stood there giddy, weak in the knees and short of breath.

For it is a fact that New York is the only city on earth today that is not out of luck, not in a state of siege, not in the clutch of evil invaders, not in tragic travail and shortage and exhaustion fighting for its life! The only very great metropolis left in a position to have everything that you expect of a great metropolis, unless it is Rio de Janeiro which I do not know … We have talent enough, money enough, liberty enough. No other city has; it is up to us.

We cannot look to the cities of Europe for our civilization any longer. London will have to be rebuilt before anything else can be expected of it; and Paris and Rome are in the hands of the infidel, the crusade to retake them has just begun. And mere retaking will not really solve their problems. There will be little peace of mind for them in their peace, no luxury or power, for years to come. So now it is our turn. In good fortune, in opportunity, in responsibility, we are unique, which is a frightening thing to be.

There I stood in Madison Avenue. I forgot about
Horizon
and the
New Statesman and Nation
. I remember staring at the newspapers on Gottfrieds’ stand beside the door, unable to concentrate on what the headlines said. Then I went on down the street, walking (as the saying is) on air, like a sleepwalker, not bumping into anyone but not seeing anyone either, and when I came to a street corner, crossing without reference to the stop lights. I vaguely remember a traffic policeman’s shouting at me at one point. I was so absorbed in my vision of New York—with the rival cities of Europe all out of the running for the time being, disabled by history—that New York itself in fact might have been a thousand miles away. I met two of my friends but I did not notice them, I cut them; they complained of it next day.

I wandered on past one of my favorite shops, namely, the Allerton Fruit Shop: a room which is the size of a good clothes closet packed neatly from top to bottom with rarities to eat, such as saffron and poppy seed, Astrakhan caviar, rum truffles made by refugees, Oriental licorice, et cetera. There is just room enough in the midst of the foodstuffs for the shopkeeper to bow as he tells you that in spite of the war he has whatever you have asked for, and to make change. He is a courteous, reticent, pale man, with a love of the programs of WQXR, especially string quartets. As I reached his door it opened and let out a few bars of Beethoven’s opus 131, which added something to my afternoon’s emotion. New York is a lovable city.

I loitered around the corner and turned south again on Fifth Avenue. Some errand somewhere along there needed doing, but by the time I reached the place I had forgotten what it was; and I got almost to Thirty-fourth Street, now thinking hard, now walking thoughtlessly, before it occurred to me that I should be late for dinner if I did not turn back toward my own address.

On the far side of Fifth Avenue I saw a little crowd in front of Kress’s great cheap store, and over their heads, through the plate glass, amid the usual countless items of merchandise, I could half make out a large color reproduction of a work of art. In the idlest curiosity I crossed over to see what it was. It was not a color reproduction but, as attested by a label alongside it, the world-famous original, “The Adoration of the Shepherds,” by Giorgione: elegant shepherds and pearl-faced Virgin and mystic passive stepfather, and the baby Redeemer like a naked lamb on the ground in a pale gray glow. It had been one of the chief masterpieces in the private collection of the proprietor of the store, and he had lately made a gift of it to the nation, as the label also attested. Characteristic of our good cultivated old merchant princes, I thought: with the one hand using culture as a lure to get the crowd in and take their pennies, and with the other hand giving them back a million dollars’ worth of old art.

I paused in front of another shop with, not a crowd, only two or three young women, who did not seem amused by it as I was. It was a small place which specialized in attire for women, under-attire, corsetry, and such; and it too had made an effort in its window for the Christmas season. There was a holy family in the pretty commercialized style of Munich, and an ox and an ass, and the three wise men, all in tinted plaster and gimcrack and cellophane. The shepherds had been left out, which, I suppose in the strict order of the festivals of the church, made it Epiphany rather than Christmas. All the upper part and the back of the window were decorated in the semblance of a glorious sky, bright blue, and astronomy of gold foil; and there flew the funniest host of angels you ever heard of, consisting of a selection of the shop’s deluxe corsets outfitted with paper wings and suspended in aerial attitudes by means of threads attached to the Lastex and plastic garters and the rayon shoulder straps. The two or three young women, who were pretty, gazed at the upper-left angel with some solemnity, but whether they were considering it as an angel or as something they might be well-advised to buy for their own use I could not tell. Say what you will of Paris, London, Rome, they do not provide for a sense of humor as generously as our town.