A Writer's World (36 page)

More than any other place I know, to do business in New York you must understand your colleagues’ circumstances. They often need worrying out. There are some tell-tale signs indeed, like tribal tattoos – short hair for Brian and Edgar, for example, droopy moustaches and canvas shoes for aspirant literary men, rasping voices and nasal intonations for girls who hope to get into television, hands in trouser pockets for Ivy League executives. But you should take no chances. The tangles of Manhattan marital and emotional life, which provide inexhaustible hours of instruction to the social observer, set the tone of this place far more than torts, share prices or bills of lading.

There is hardly a citizen of Manhattan, of any race, creed or social class, who does not have some fascinating emotional imbroglio to relate – and hardly a citizen, either, who fails to relate it. Nitter-natter, chit-chat,
you
would hardly believe it, so I said never, so she said absolutely
– sibilantly across this city of gossip, from Wall Street clubs to bars of Harlem, one seems to hear the tide of confession and confidence, unremitting as the flood of the traffic, rattly as the clang of the subway trains which now and then emerges from grilles beneath one’s feet.

Is this inbreeding? Certainly there is something perceptibly incestuous about Manhattan, now that the diversifying flow of immigration has abated. This is no longer the lusty stud of the world. Ellis Island, through whose lugubrious halls so many millions of newcomers passed into the land of fertility, is only a museum now, and ethnically Manhattan has lost its virile momentum. You feel the migratory thrust far more vividly in Toronto, and most of New York’s contemporary immigrants are hardly immigrants at all, in the old risk-all kind, but are Puerto Ricans joining their relatives, or Colombians co-operatively financed by the drug-rings of Jackson Heights.

They are seldom inspired, as their predecessors were, by any flaming spirit of release or dedication, and they very soon fall into the Manhattan mode. ‘Well it’s like I say, see, I got this lady I used to know back in Bogotá. She says to me, “Leon,” she says, “I wantya to know, I’m fond of you, truly I am, but there’s this problem of Juan’s baby, see?” “To hell with Juan’s baby,” I says, “what’s Juan’s baby to me?” And she says, “Leon honey,” she says, “listen to me … ”’

‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free …’ An occasional Russian dissident appears in New York these days, to endure his statutory press conference before being whisked away to CIA debriefing or associate professorship somewhere. But the loss of the grand old purpose, so stoutly declaimed by the Lady of Liberty out there in the bay, means that Manhattan is recognizably past its prime. Every city has its heyday, the moment when its purpose is fulfilled and its spirit bursts into full flower, and Manhattan’s occurred I think in the years between the Great Depression, when the indigents squatted in Central Park, and the end of the Second World War, when the GIs returned in splendour as the saviours of liberty. In those magnificent years this small island, no more than a fantastic dream to most of the peoples of the world, stood everywhere for the fresh start and the soaring conception. Manhattan was Fred
Astaire and the sun-topped Chrysler Building! Manhattan was the Jeep and Robert Benchley! Manhattan was rags-to-riches, free speech, Mayor La Guardia and the Rockettes!

No wonder nostalgia booms on Broadway. Those were the days of the American innocence, before responsibility set in, and every dry and racy old song of the period, every new Art Deco furniture boutique, is an expression of regret. European Powers pine for their lost glories with bearskin parades or jangling cavalry: New York looks back with
Ain’t
Misbehavin’
, or the refurbishing, just as it was, of that prodigy of Manhattan gusto, Radio City Music Hall (whose designer reportedly had ozone driven through its ventilator shafts, to keep its audiences festive, and toyed with the idea of laughing gas too …). Fortunately the old days come quickly in a city that is not yet 300 years old, and the authentic bitter-sweetness is relatively easy to achieve. I was touched myself by the furnishing of a restaurant equipped entirely with the fittings of one of the old Atlantic liners, those dowagers of the Manhattan piers, until I discovered that the ship concerned was the
Caronia
, whose launching I remember as clear as yesterday.

The memories of that time are legendary already, and moving fast into myth. Nothing in travel stirs me more than the dream of that old Manhattan, the Titan City of my childhood, when the flamboyant skyscrapers soared one after the other into empyrean, when John D. Rockefeller, Jr, pored over the plans for his Center like a modern Midas, when the great liners stalked through the bay with their complements of celebrities and shipboard reporters, and the irrepressible immigrants toiled and clawed their way up the line of Manhattan, from Ellis Island to the Lower East Side to the Midtown affluence of their aspirations. Its monuments are mostly there to see still, newly fashionable as the buildings of the day before yesterday are apt to become, and sometimes even now you may stumble across one of its success stories: the waiter proudly boasting that, since arriving penniless and friendless from Poland, he has never been out of work for a day – the famous publisher, in the penthouse suite of his own skyscraper, whose mother landed in Manhattan with a placard around her neck, announcing her name, trade and language.

Rockefeller Center is the theatre of this mood. Raymond Hood, the creator of its central structure, the RCA Building, was reminded one day that he had come to Manhattan in the first place with the declared intention of becoming the greatest architect in New York. ‘So I did,’ he responded, looking out of the window at that stupendous thing, jagged
and commanding high above, ‘and by God, so I am!’ The magnificent brag, the revelatory vision, the ruthless opportunism, the limitless resource – these were the attributes of Rockefeller Center, as of Manhattan, in the heady years of its construction: and when at winter time they turn the sunken café into an ice rink, then in the easy delight of the skaters under the floodlights, some so hilariously inept, some so showily skilful, with the indulgent crowd leaning over the railings to watch, and the waltz music only half drowned by the city’s rumble – then I sometimes seem to be, even now, back in those boundless years of certainty.

If the conviction is lost, the abilities remain. This is the most gifted of all the human settlements of the earth, and there are moments in Manhattan when the sheer talent of the place much moves me. I happened to be in the Pan Am Building recently when an orchestra of young people was giving a lunch-time concert in the central concourse. This is a common enough event in Manhattan, a place of inescapable music, but somehow it seized my imagination and twisted my emotions. No other city, I swear, could provide an interlude so consoling. The brilliant young players were so full of exuberance. The audience listened to their Brahms and Vivaldi with such sweet attention. The music sounded wonderfully tender in the heart of all that stone and steel, and seemed to float like a tempering agent down the escalators, through the bland air-conditioned offices, of that great tower of materialism. (‘How beautifully they play,’ I remarked in my delight to a man listening beside me, but in the Manhattan manner he brought me harshly down to earth. ‘They gotta play beautifully,’ he replied. ‘Think of the competition.’)

The cities of Europe have mostly lost their artists’ quarters, swallowed up now in housing estates or ripped apart by ring roads. In Manhattan, Bohemia flourishes still, in many an eager alcove. This is a city of the streets and cafés, where human contact, carnal or platonic, is still easy to arrange, where no young artist need feel alone or benighted for long, and where no ambition is too extravagant. Manhattan probably has more than its fair share of artistic phonies, and SoHo, currently the most popular painters’ quarter, certainly exhibits an adequate proportion of junkyard collages or knobs of inadequately sandpapered walnut labelled ‘Significant Others 3’. But tucked away in the attics, cheap hotels, apartment blocks and converted brownstones of this island myriad genuine artists and craftsmen are at work, impervious to trend and disdainful of sham.

I like to spend Sunday mornings watching the alfresco circus down at Washington Square, the gateway to Greenwich Village, where wandering musicians and amateur jugglers compete for the attention of the sightseers with virtuoso Frisbee throwers, classical in their skills and gestures, impromptu demagogues, chess players, itinerant idiots and Rastafari bravos. Often and again then, when I am sitting on my park bench watching this colourful world go by, I spot a fellow practitioner of my craft, alone on his bench with his notebook, and as our eyes meet I wonder if I ought to feel compassion for him, as the struggling artist from his austere garret somewhere, or envy, as the author of tomorrow’s runaway best-seller.

Contrary to the world’s conceptions, New York is rich in people of integrity. In a city of such attainments it has to be so. This is a city of dedicated poets, earnest actors and endlessly rehearsing musicians. Draft after draft its writers are rejecting, and there are more good pianists playing in New York every evening than in the whole of Europe – smouldering jazz pianists in the downtown clubs, crazy punk pianists on Bleecker Street, stuffed-shirt romantic pianists in the Midtown tourist spots (‘Would you mind lowering your voice to a whisper, please, during Mr Maloney’s renditioning?’), smashing student pianists practising for next year’s Tchaikovsky competition, jolly young pianists accompanying off-Broadway musicals, drop-out pianists, drunk ruined pianists, mendicant pianists with instruments on trolley wheels, Steinway pianists flown by Concorde that afternoon for their concerti at Lincoln Center.

So I am never really deluded by the charlatan inanities of New York. I disregard the fatuous interviewers and repellent respondents of what we are gruesomely encouraged to think of as NBC’s Today Family. I sneer not at the sellers of Instant Ginseng. I am not deceived by the coarse-grained editors, hag-ridden by their own accountants, or the ghastly company of celebrities. ‘Creativity’ is so degraded a word in Manhattan that I hesitate to use it, loathing its translation into salesmen’s acuity or publicity gimmick. But creative this place truly is: not in the old audacious style perhaps, but in the quieter, introspective, muddled but honest way that is more the Manhattan manner now.

It would seem inconceivable to Hood or John D., Jr, let alone Commodore Vanderbilt or Pierpont Morgan, but actually in 1979 Manhattan feels a little old-fashioned. The Titan City has come to terms, and recognizes that everything is
not
possible after all. They build more thrilling buildings in Chicago now. They do more astonishing things in
Houston. There are more aggressive entrepreneurs in Tokyo or Frankfurt. It is no good coming to Manhattan for the shape of things to come: Singapore or São Paulo might be more reliable guides. In the days of the Great Vision the New Yorkers built an airship mast on the top of the Empire State Building almost as a matter of course, sure that the latest and greatest dirigibles would head straight for Manhattan: it was years, though, before New York was reluctantly persuaded, in our own time, to allow supersonic aircraft to land at JFK.

Manhattan is no longer the fastest, the most daring or even I dare say the richest. For a symbol of its civic energies now, I recommend an inspection of the abandoned West Side Highway, the victim of seven years’ municipal indecision, which staggers crumbling on its struts above a wilderness of empty lots, truck parks and shattered warehouses, the only signs of enterprise being the cyclists who cheerfully trundle along the top of it, and the railway coaches of the Ringling Bros, Barnum and Bailey Circus which park themselves habitually underneath.

The falter came, I believe, in the fifties and sixties, when Manhattan began to see laissez faire, perhaps, as a less than absolute ideology. Doubts crept in. The pace slowed a bit. The sense of movement lagged. All the great ships no longer came in their grandeur to the Manhattan piers; the New York airports were far from the island; today even the helicopters, which were for a couple of decades the lively familiars of Manhattan, are banned from their wayward and fanciful antics around the skyscrapers. Bauhaus frowned down upon Radio City Music Hall, in those after-the-glory years, and most of Manhattan’s mid-century architecture was, by Hood’s standards, timid and banal. The truly original buildings were few, and worse still for my taste, the swagger-buildings were not built at all.

The fashionable philosophy of smallness has strongly appealed to New Yorkers, in their new mood of restraint, and nowadays when citizens want to show you some innovation they are proud of, they generally take you to a dainty little kerbside park with waterfalls, or Roosevelt Island, an itsy-bitsy enclave of sociological good taste. Suavity, discretion and even modesty are the architectural qualities admired in Manhattan now, and the colossal is no longer welcomed.

And believe it or not,
quaintness
approaches. Mr Philip Johnson’s latest building is to be crowned with a decorative device like the back of a Chesterfield sofa: so does old age creep up, all but unsuspected, upon even the most dynamic organisms – Time’s A-Train, hurrying near! Manhattan
is no longer critical in the atomic sense: ‘No Nukes’ is a proper slogan for this gently decelerating powerhouse.

It is not a sad spectacle. I find it endearing. If New York has lost the power to amaze, it is gaining the power to charm. It happened that when I was in Manhattan, Bonwit Teller, for generations one of the smartest stores on Fifth Avenue, closed its doors to make way for a building development. I went along there on the last day, and what a sentimental journey that was! Tears came to saleswomen’s eyes, as they pottered for the last time among the atrocious hats, unsellable ceramics, belts and bent coat hangers which were all that remained of their once-delectable stock: and an elderly customer I was buttonholed by in the elevators seemed almost distraught – something beautiful was going out of her life, she said, ‘a bit of New York, a little bit of me’.