Up close and personal

My apologies to the young, attractive couple in Perry Street in Greenwich Village, whose love-making I’ve been keeping a close eye on over the last year and a half. I can’t really help it. My eighth-floor flat is on exactly the same level as theirs, and their window is only 20 yards from mine across a tiny strip of garden. If it’s any consolation to the young couple, I haven’t seen much — they always drop down on the sofa out of my line of sight before the good bits. That’s the thing about New York — it’s a cheek-by-jowl place, and you can’t help getting a close-up on a lot of jowls and cheeks, upper and lower.

This is the New York Alfred Hitchcock caught in Rear Window, filmed only a few streets from my flat. And it’s the seedy sardine tin of a city caught by the veteran cartoonist, Will Eisner, who died two years ago, aged 87.

Eisner wrote the first successful graphic novel in 1978 with A Contract with God. And now here’s a compendium of four of his works: New York: The Big City (1981), The Building (1987), City People Notebook (1989) and Invisible People (2000). These four books are less graphic novels than a series of city vignettes, and how true to life they are.

Eisner, born in Brooklyn in 1917 to a poor Jewish family, does not paper over the extreme nastiness that inevitably exists in such an overcrowded place full of different types of people who often plain hate each other.

Black cleaning ladies get abused by preppy white mistresses. White-collar commuters studiously walk past a man suffering from a heart attack, only stopping to have a good gawp when he’s dead and beyond causing disruption to their routine.