New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left. I left, in April of 1957, a floor-through apartment on West Thirteenth Street, and return, when I do, to midtown hotels and the Upper East Side apartments of obliging friends. The Village, with its bookstores and framer’s shops, its bricked-in literary memories and lingering bohemian redolence, is off the track of a professional visit—an elevator—propelled whirl in and out of high-rise offices and prix fixe restaurants. Nevertheless, I feel confident in saying that disadvantages of New York life which led me to leave have intensified rather than abated, and that the city which Le Corbusier described as a magnificent disaster is less and less magnificent.
Always, as one arrives, there is the old acceleration of the pulse—the mountainous gray skyline glimpsed from the Triborough Bridge, the cheerful games of basketball and handball being played on the recreational asphalt beside the FDR Drive, the startling, steamy, rain-splotched intimacy of the side streets where one’s taxi slows to a crawl, the careless flung beauty of the pedestrians clumped at the street corners. So many faces, costumes, packages, errands! So many preoccupations, hopes, passions, lives in progress! So much human stuff, clustering and streaming with a languid colorful impatience like the mass maneuvers of bees!
But soon the faces with their individual expressions merge and vanish under a dulling insistent pressure, the thrum and push of congestion. As ever more office buildings are heaped upon the East Fifties—the hugest of them, the slant-topped white Citicorp building, clearly about to fall off its stilts onto your head—and ever greater numbers of impromptu merchants spread their dubiously legal wares on the sidewalks, even pedestrian traffic jams. One is tripped, hassled, detoured. Buskers and beggars cram every niche. The sidewalks and subway platforms, generously designed in the last century, have been overwhelmed by 1980s greed, on both the minor and major entrepreneurial scales. The Manhattan grid, that fine old machine for living, now sticks and grinds at every intersection, and the discreet brownstones of the side streets look down upon a clogged nightmare of perpetual reconstruction and insolent double parking. Even a sunny day feels like a tornado of confusion one is hurrying to get out of, into the sanctum of the hotel room, the office, the friendly apartment. New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space—only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster. While popular journalism focuses on the possible collapse of Los Angeles and San Francisco into the chasms opened by earthquakes, on the opposite coast, on its oblong of solid granite, the country’s greatest city is sinking into the chasm of itself.
Hardened New Yorkers will sniff, What else is new? Their metropolis has been a kind of vigorous hell since the days of the Five Points and the immigrant-packed Lower East Side. Its vitality and glamour are ironically rooted in merciless skirmish and inconvenient teeming; a leering familiarity with crowdedness and menace is the local badge of its citizenship, and the city’s constant moral instruction features just this piquant proximity of rich and poor—the Park Avenue matron deftly dodging the wino on his grate, the high-skirted hooker being solicited from the black—windowed limousine. In a city that rises higher and digs deeper than any other, unchecked ascents and descents rocket side by side, exhilaratingly. In the noonday throng of Fifth Avenue near Forty-second Street, I once saw a nearly naked man, shirtless and barefoot and sooty from his place of subterranean rest, scuttle along in a pair of split overalls that exposed his buttocks, and everyone’s eyes but mine were expertly averted. Mr. Sammler reflects, in Saul Bellow’s late-sixties novel of Manhattan, “You opened a jeweled door into degradation, from hypercivilized Byzantine luxury straight into the state of nature, the barbarous world of color erupting from beneath.” But so, perhaps, it is and has been with all great cities—Dickens’s London, Robespierre’s Paris, Nero’s Rome.
My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not that it plays host to extremes of the human condition: There is grandeur in that, and necessity. For the Korean grocer and Ukranian taxi driver, the apparent turmoil holds out opportunity and hope. The chaos is not quite complete; food is trucked in through the tunnels and purveyed in epic daily amounts, Bloomingdale’s brightly peddles kitchen wares to young couples who have somehow found an apartment they can afford, the museums continue to expand, Central Park still offers a patch of grass for a sunbath and doze in the bosom of humanity. But the price of those delights, in the three decades of my exile, has gone from steep to exorbitant. Archibald MacLeish, toward the end of his long life, told me, “New York used to be a giving place, a place that gave more than it took. Now it takes more than it gives.” Even those with access to the right side of the jeweled door, the city teeters on the edge of dysfunction. Something as simple and, elsewhere, as comfortable as a rainy day tips it over the edge.
I heard the rain beginning at my back as I sat at one of those late dinner parties (we sat down at ten) with which the Manhattan rich prove their fortitude. The rain made a lyrical sound, ticking off the fire escapes and deepening the swish of cars on the street far below and forming a soothing undercurrent to the name-dropping and scarcely veiled financial bragging and media exegesis. (I am struck by how seriously—religiously, indeed—New Yorkers watch television. In other parts of the country, television is taken as an escape from reality; in New York, all things being relative, it is considered a window into reality, and no doubt its phantoms do have more substance than the doormen downstairs, and the neighbors behind the apartment wall, and the mugger waiting around the corner.) Rain in New York seems to arrive from so great a distance, picking its way through so many intervening obstacles, as to be a friend bearing a precious message. But the next day, having allowed plenty of time to reach my appointment, I found my host’s doorman overwhelmed with taxi requests on an avenue of cabs already taken, hurrying heedlessly past with their doused FOR HIRE lights. In the meantime, I and several other mature citizens who had miles to go and promises to keep tiptoed among the rivers that ran under the canopy and watched the minutes pour by. As frequently (but not inevitably) happens, a few empty cabs did at last wink into view, and, as grateful as elderly Eskimos who at the last minute were not abandoned to starve in the snowfields, we were damply bundled off to our destinations, shedding tips like dandruff.
But at the end of my day, spent an anachronistic ceremony held at a site, on West 155th Street, where no taxi driver believes you want to go if you’re white, the rain had intensified, and the taxi dearth was complete, and I found myself up to my ankles in a babbling gutter, waving at phantoms and thinking that my best option might be painlessly to drown. As luck would have it, in this town of hairbreadth rescues, a limousine at loose ends offered me a ride to the airport for (the driver was very clear) “thirty-five dollars—cash.” Beggars can’t be choosers, and drowning exiles can’t be thrifty, and so off we went, weaving jubilantly, only to bog down in a solid hour of stop-and-go traffic on 125th Street and another hour of trying to nudge our way onto the Triborough Bridge. The escape routes from the city were all but impenetrably jammed, and in my eventual relief at my own escape, at an airport where planes not uncommonly sit on the runway for six hours waiting for their turn to fly, I tipped my driver, who had become my comrade in misery, five dollars. In his agitation at wasting so much of his day on me, he had cracked a taillight of another auto, whose protesting driver, a young Hispanic, he silenced by offering to trade insurance company names. He knew, he explained to me, that his victim’s car would be illegally uninsured. The little incident, one no doubt of a thousand bits of preemptory maneuver in that hour of urban squeeze, saddened me, but instead of standing up for justice I sat back for comfort, in the only transportation the rain-soaked jungle seemed likely to provide.
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The emergency atmosphere of this most recent visit is typical, and by no means as bad as it can get: I have not yet been mugged, knocked down by a bicycling messenger, crushed by a falling construction crane or poisoned by a handcart hot dog. The few friends of mine still sticking it out in the city assure me that such inconveniences scarcely threaten residents, who have their cozy digs, their settled ways, their familiar routes and haunts, their terms of accommodation with the state of nature. Of course I remember how one does, over the weeks and months, pull a kind of friendly village—grocery store, newsstand, flower shop, laundry, dentist—out of New York’s ghastly plentitude, its inexhaustible and endlessly repeated urban muchness. But the friendliness lies more in our wishing it to be so than in any confirming reality; returning only a little later, one finds the shops have changed names, the chummy clerks are gone and one’s name has been removed from the computer.
Toward the end of each of my by now countless trips to New York, I must still fight a rising panic that I won’t be able to get out. New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere. As in the Soviet Union, nothing is easy: There are lines at the bank and the post office, there is nowhere to park, everything is an exhausting walk away, the restaurant has no tables, the theater has no seats, and carbon monoxide ubiquitously offers an invitation to succumb. Time has only strengthened my impelling perception of thirty years ago: Being in New York takes so much energy as to leave none for any other kind of being.
