New York
Seeing Manhattan rising in the distance is always a treat. I am not sure it’s possible for anyone brought up around these parts to appreciate entirely what New York, the idea of New York, meant to us who came from the old continent. I was 11 years old and had seen only war and devastation. Dead, stinking bodies in the city parks, bullet-scarred buildings, people starving on the sidewalks, too weak to die in the privacy of their hovels. Then I was suddenly whisked from home and into a TWA first-class ‘stratocruiser’ stopping in Rome, Paris, London, Shannon, Gander, Boston and, finally, New York. I had a bed and had fallen madly in love with the stewardess but quickly forgot all about her upon seeing the sights: the Empire State building, the Chrysler building, Grand Central Station, Fifth and Madison Avenue, High Fashion on Park, Money on Wall Street, this was no mere city but a romantic notion, a dream come true.
Still to this day, when seeing the place from afar, the frisson is there. Unlike Paris, New York has not emerged on canvas. Edward Hopper is the only man to capture the city’s moods and shadows, its loneliness and loveliness, its red-brick housing lined up like soldiers on parade, the fire escapes standing out like rifles. Paintings of the city are depictions of the real place, and no one except Hopper has come close. That’s because New York is a novel and a movie, not a painting. New York is Henry James and Edith Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald, an imaginary mystical place rather than an Impressionist painting like the City of Light.
New York the movie is a black-and-white film. People rush about in a hurry. Time is money. Newspaper editors talk fast and out of the side of their mouths. They bark orders and hacks wear hats and smoke. Women are beautiful and play up to the men. Mothers are worried and fathers are angry. Priests are nice and understanding, soldiers are honourable, cops are kind, hookers kind-hearted. Everyone is always in love in New York, especially those college kids under the clock. Under the big clock in the Biltmore hotel lobby next to Grand Central Station was the meeting place for college kids from 1900 onwards, until some real estate shark knocked the place down during the late Sixties, and with it went a great city tradition.
Joe College would breeze into the Big City and head for the Biltmore. The first time I tried it I was still Joe Prep, wearing a Harris tweed jacket, grey flannels and striped tie around a blue button-down shirt. This was the uniform, the passport to acceptance by one’s peers, the password to the campus queen. Preppies from the right prep school were tolerated by college boys and girls. Just about. There was more snobbery under the clock than there is in any Wharton or James novels. One had to be in the right fraternity and play the right sport and wear the right thing, and produce the right vowels — or one simply did not get the right girl.
The snobbery was American, not English, Hemingway, not Waugh. It had to do with what an individual made of himself or herself, not what their parents had done with theirs. Hemingway admired toughies but also surrounded himself with the old guard like Winston and Raymond Guest and Billy Hitchcock. Waugh was a homosexual who fell in love with people’s backgrounds until he married into society. There lies the difference. I wonder what he would have been like under the clock at the Biltmore. His looks alone and lack of sporting prowess would have worked against him. Still, one never knows.
New York is still restless and dynamic, ideal for the constantly moving images that make a movie. It’s certainly a place of action but in contrast to a film like Taxi Driver, where Technicolor accentuated the grubbiness of the city in the Seventies, the old black-and-white classics were poetry in motion. The city is still well paced but my worry is for how long? No one talks any more, except to a contraption. Obama’s people have made sure that New York City and the United States will become a new people, people from Africa, Mexico and the Far East. The gates to mass immigration are open and will stay open for another four years once Obama is re-elected. Coming through immigration, I was welcomed in Greek and I was wished a happy Easter. The officer was the only white man in the booths, a burly Greek of southern appearance.
Last week I went over to Michael Mailer’s house in Brooklyn Heights. The driver was East European but polite. For a moment I was back watching Manhattan Melodrama, or Manhattan or, better yet, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Pickup on South Street, Miracle on 34th Street, Slaughter on Tenth Avenue. As I said, Noo Yawk is a movie, and Brooklyn still has some parts of that black-and white movie that made the city larger than life and a place that defines glamour, danger, adventure and romance. More than 60 years after I first laid eyes on the place, I am still in awe, but of the past, not of the present. Remember the Biltmore is my rallying cry.
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