More offence is caused by praise than blame. The Spaniards hate being called romantic by the French, the Irish hate being called fanciful, the British hate being called solid, the French hate being called volatile, the Italians hate being called clever, and the Portuguese dislike being praised for anything at all and quickly tell you how all “your” things are better than theirs. What really offends is the destruction of a myth. I remember Alberto Moravia saying that a young Neapolitan saves up enough money to buy a Vespa in order to dash across Europe to Scandinavia, where (he has been told) passionate, aristocratic girls of surpassing intelligence and beauty are dedicated to free love; while at the same moment, young love-starved Scandinavians are dashing south to Naples, where (they understand) the dark beauties of the South will come out of palaces into their arms. Both parties would clearly be happier in puritan London, where—Billy Graham tells us—the parks are one vast bedroom. It is hard to decide here who are the offended parties. The best thing to do is to declare all parties undersexed. That causes enormous offence. Northern Italians have been saying this successfully of Southern Italians for generations. There are other myths: that Americans talk of nothing but dollars, that the British are strangled by their class system, that the Germans don’t laugh, that every Frenchman keeps a mistress, that the South Americans are always shooting each other.
Being an offender, I am myself easily offended. Where is my weak spot? There is no single place. I am a weak spot all over. I just dislike being looked at. As the coachload of tourists passes me with their cameras in my own country, I feel myself swelling into one fevered wound. Has it come to this, I say, as their cameras click, that I have degenerated into a native, a local character daubed with racial characteristics, liable to remind people of what they have read, interesting for my folk customs, my peculiar diet, my curious clothes? Am I being taken for a Dickensian porter, a lord, Mrs. Grundy’s husband, a slippery pickpocket, a town crier, a folk dancer, a decayed Empire builder? Or much worse, the supreme insult in fact: am I being studied as an example of the typical? Is someone going home to write about my habits and deduce from them the unlucky attributes of my nation? If you catch me, I am tempted to say, I shall have my revenge. I shall do as I have been done by in many, many countries. I shall be a most misleading guide.
(1964)
FROM
New York Proclaimed
ONE
One comes as a fortune hunter with looting eyes, the latest innocent of a greedy procession. It began with Hudson, the English captain who sold himself to the Dutch. A cosmopolite, foreign to his crew, his loyalty questioned, he was attacked by mutineers two years later and left to freeze to death in the Arctic: it is the standard story of the Age of Discovery. His kind of foreignness was basic to the city from the beginning. It has never really changed. New York is the metropolis of the United States because it is the most European city in the country; that is to say, it reproduces in miniature the fundamental foreignness of Europe, where we are all foreign to one another. That lonely Statue of Liberty, standing in the bay with tourists clambering round it, is French, La France in person.
These are a stranger’s sensations; but even in the handful of New Yorkers who have been native for generations, they must still have some echo. A raw arriving ancestor must once have felt them and handed down some memory of panic—and the cure for it: activity, harshness, drama, change. New York is not the only Atlantic city to convey this. One hears it in the aggressive voice of Buenos Aires and the soft voice of Rio. On the Pacific Coast, another three thousand miles on, one catches what the inhabitants call “the Pacific sadness.” New York has none of that; it is never sad. It has hardened the human shell. It offers that dramatic, rhapsodic self-consciousness which sets the American tone. It instills the spirit of the tallest of the tall stories. For generations the American landscape was seen (and perhaps still is) as a backdrop against which it is inevitable for a man to turn actor and, again and again, in his talk to adopt the historic present. The show is always going on.
The chart has been read: 40°42′ North, 74°01′ West. About thirteen thousand vessels a year come in to this seaport, placed well inside its enormous bay. They say, as they always say of things, that it is the world’s largest. This time they are right. They say that there are fifteen hundred square miles of land and water—exuberantly reckoning the port to extend to a twenty-five-mile radius of the city—and that a ship goes through the Narrows every twenty minutes. Greedy and innocent, one waits—if one comes by ship—for the curtain of sea haze to go up and reveal the stage. Vessels unseen for days now slant towards a harbor as yet out of sight. The bell buoy clangs along the Ambrose channel. The foghorns grunt and breathe out their profoundly mortal moans. And then the curtain rises on a shore that is mildly hilled and wooded, which in summer looks steamy, tropical, and ill-used and which presently rises to the rock Palisades of the Hudson. And there in the middle of the scene, Manhattan stands tall and narrow, even more like a ship than a city, a structure of tiered decks, glassed in like a liner’s, growing taller and taller until, if one were anchored, the thing looks as though it would run one down. Life in a city like that, we guess, will be ship life, confined, briskly run to order and signals. Somewhere among those millions of windows will be one’s cabin. Small, it will be buzzing with noises overhead. There will be long journeys down corridors. There will be depths of solid machinery and wire. And here the fortune hunter, caught by his inability to grasp it all, finds his mind awash with metaphors. We have called Manhattan a ship and we shall think of a hundred more likenesses before we have done. This city has situation, as London and Paris have not; as Rio de Janeiro and Istanbul have, but Buenos Aires has not. Whatever happens, New York will always have that.
In a couple of pages of his The American Scene, written at the time when Manhattan was at the beginning of building high, Henry James was soon splashing about in metaphor as extravagantly as all who have followed him. The sight from the Battery to Twenty-third Street is compared to a pincushion already overplanted with extravagant pins; it turns immediately into a “loose nosegay of architectural flowers,” the flower being the “American beauty, the rose of interminable stem,” a non-lasting blossom, for it has “confessedly” risen to be nipped off by the shears “as soon as ‘science’ applied to gain has put upon the table [we are now in some gaming saloon] from far up its sleeve, some more winning card.” We move to music. The skyscrapers become “the most piercing notes in that concert of the expensively provisional into which your supreme sense of New York resolves itself.” Exhausted, we fade “into the consciousness of the finite, the menaced, the essentially invented state.” The last phrase tells; “invented”—we shall never hit upon a word as exact and pregnant; but the Master has given us a license for intoxication in a city which is clearly celebrating.
And one also that invites conquest—but this Dick Whittington complex, I fancy, is far stronger in the Americans coming in ambitiously from other states. Thomas Wolfe, of course, felt it; when was he not feeling “the beat … of the pulse of Tamerlaine … riding in triumph through Persepolis”? He looked down over the city from the roof of the Hotel St. George in Brooklyn and, as he wrote in Of Time and the River:
… for the first time his vision phrased it as it had never done before. It was a cruel city, but it was a lively one, a savage city, yet it had such tenderness; a bitter, harsh and violent catacomb of stone and steel and tunneled rock, slashed savagely with light, and roaring, fighting a constant ceaseless warfare of men and of machinery; and yet it was so sweetly and so delicately pulsed, as full of warmth, of passion and of love as it was as full of hate.…
That describes nothing, but Wolfe, too, has his license.
We foreigners also have our moods. In some of these daytime arrivals, in summer and in winter, I have been struck by the stereoscopic hardness, the unblending, hazeless, hostile separateness of the skyscrapers. Their columns of windows have not suggested a closer connection with hum
an life than one sees in the columns of other people’s bank accounts. These buildings are, one feels, only computable. The first signs of a familiar New York madness come on: one starts counting and reckoning windows and, later indeed, one will meet taxi drivers who know only numbers and not places. One gets madder: one realizes that this supposedly vertical city is dominated by horizontal lines. At other times of day, if the sky is hard and clear, one is surrounded by tall fungi which by tomorrow will be replaced by growths that have the look of things that know their own mortality. The vision of a petrified forest thousands of years old comes to mind, the now invincible newness of the buildings looks like the rigid newness of death. Yet, suddenly, this gives way to sensations of decorous gaiety, as the boat steams up. These buildings are beings, and they move. The Chrysler glides northward and the Empire State moves graciously south; soon all are changing places in a millionaire’s waltz, slow and silent, male and female, exchanging the light in their eyes, the touch of roof and penthouse like the touch of passing hands. All cities move, but none so strangely as the steel figures of the New York ball. You had noticed that few of the buildings in themselves are beautiful, but that most are amazing. They are plain, ugly, and useful in a way that makes one wonder at the city’s dramatic sense of use; their real beauty lies in the movements of their grouping, their continually changing juxtapositions, and—when you and they are still—above all in the movements of light upon them. The hours of the day are never dead and play upon Manhattan like changing thought.
But it is at the Battery that the New York ship raises its bows at you. The fortune hunter arriving by freighter at Brooklyn has a finer sight of the city than you get by taking the head-on punch and entering the Hudson. The time to take that punch is at night, when the downtown buildings are blocked by darkness into a sentineled medieval keep of enormous height and unscalable defense. The blackness of the whole hulk is all the more sinister for the few lights that occasionally signal from it. Dead kings, not recent bankers, might then inhabit it. The dull Babylonian clatter with its appalling overtone of what Henry James called “the vocabulary of thrift” is gone. Downtown, even Wall Street, can look mysterious and noble and timeless.
Island cities that are built up close from shore to shore are explicit. In no way does Manhattan hide. To the eye the varying heights of the high and the middling high are as diverting as the human mixture, the long, the short, and the tall. James was depressed by the commerce, but in fact the mercantile spirit makes for variety; there are big fortunes and small. In this aspect the sight of Manhattan is a comment on the giddiness of the market: the shapes that have been cut out of the sky are jumbled, for if there are a lot of glass cases, fake cathedrals, and brick packing cases, there are also many smaller, zoned buildings that look like little stepladders, ambitious to climb, but having run short of financial breath architecturally. One is looking at the sharp rectangles, often aborted, of a flat abstract painting—where else has one seen them? On the Greek islands; in Byzantium.
The beauty of your arrival in Manhattan is that your ship can dock in deep water right inside the city. Your liner is moored amidships against the greatest liner of all. That is, as sensations go, superb. It keys you up, you are in tune with the place at once. Even before the city built high and when it was, in fact, a slightly humped plain, peppered all over by the spires of its innumerable churches, the Irish immigrant could tumble straight off the quay into his lodgings, his tavern, and, above all, his church. He needed to walk with his boxes no more than a hundred yards and by that time had probably been able to sell his vote. This arrival amidships has other charms. You are discharged, it is true, in confusion upon cobbles and you may, if you are not careful, be re-exported at once in a consignment of packing cases going off in the ship next door. But, for the inhabitants, the advantage is that they hear the blast of the sirens all over the island, detonating in Fifth Avenue, shaking the place at night, ripping the heart out, arousing a general pride in the contact with places across the sea. And where there is blasting, there are echoes. This place, dedicated far more to the demigod Activity, even more than to Thrift and Mammon, echoes all day and all night. The blast ricochets from building to building like speech, so that one might say that the buildings are shouting at one another with the sort of authority that repeated messages have and yet with that touch of snap and folly which is also in the genius of the place.
One has had the pleasure of being borne up the splendid Hudson. The idle eye has been diverted by the classical, embossed green columns and ironwork of the shabby dock sheds. I hope someone will save these façades when they are torn down and put a stretch or two in some pleasant spot, for they are one of the minor heirlooms of the place. If I could afford to start a waterside theater or dance hall, I would buy a Manhattan dock on the Hudson side. But the midtown arrival is nothing compared to the arrival at Brooklyn, and I put it above the sight—except at night—from Hoboken, too. The view of downtown and midtown New York from Brooklyn Heights beats all. The air is better here. I have no objection to poisoned cities: I live in one. But it is striking, in a salt-water island with the ocean close to its windows, that you do not smell the sea till you disembark at Brooklyn and stand on the Heights. Across water which was usually blue, if filthy, when I was there, you felt you had only to stretch out your hands across the East River to put your fingers into the tills of the Chase Manhattan Bank, so clear was the dry air. Across the water downtown cliffs spread and display themselves in separate pieces. The shapes are still abstract art but here one appreciates the subtle variety of colors. New Yorkers exaggerate nearly everything; but nothing so much as the dirt of their city. No doubt it is dirty, and dirtier than it was—before the motorcar its stone must have been almost in a state of primeval chastity—and we know that Americans have an odd fear of dirt. But how is it that these buildings preserve their whites, their cool grays, their fair yellows and their ochers, their crimsons, their dark grays, and their browns? How freshly the slim-seeming red building at the end of Wall Street stares. From this vantage point Manhattan does not huddle, nor would I have said that it menaced, except as those columns in the account book menace; it displays itself serenely, and Brooklyn Bridge with its stone arches and its harp of steel wire makes the view orderly and momentous. Brooklyn Bridge tethers an island to reality, an island which otherwise has the terrible explicitness of a phantom. Or perhaps, because in the United States one is always thinking of elsewhere, one should say that it tethers reality to a phantom. Hart Crane’s line says this: “Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still,” and he, too, sees the bridge as a harp:
O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet’s pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover’s cry …
For all the bridges in America—and architecturally it is the bridges rather than the buildings or even the way of life that are the supreme American achievement—that second line is the forgotten tribute.
The Pritchett Century Page 23
