A Writer's World (35 page)

All crammed in like this, it is no wonder that the inhabitants of Manhattan sway to and fro, as though with minds linked, to the shifting tunes of fashion. No city in the world, I think, is so subject to the diktats of critics, snobs and arbiters of taste. Manhattan feeds upon itself – intravenously, perhaps. A very public elite dominates its gossip columns and decors, the same faces over and over, seen at the same currently fashionable clubs and restaurants, Stork Club in one generation, Studio 54 another, drinking the statutory drinks,
kir
yesterday, Perrier today, using the same ephemeral ‘in’ words – when I was here last, for example: ‘schlep’, ‘supportive’, ‘copacetic’, ‘significant others’.

I was taken one evening, at my own request, to the saloon currently the trendiest in town, Elaine’s on Second Avenue. Everyone knows Elaine’s. Secretaries hang about its bar, in the hope of being adopted by wild celebrities, young executives talk about it the morning after, and even the most intelligent of public people, it seems, literate directors and scholarly critics, unaccountably think it worth while to be seen there. No such phenomenon exists in Europe, for Elaine’s is neither very expensive nor exactly exclusive – anyone can go and prop up the bar. I detested it, though: the noise, the jam-packed tables, the showing-off, the gush, the unwritten protocol which gives the best-known faces the most prominent tables, and banishes unknowns to the room next door. The beautiful people looked less than beautiful shouting their heads off in the din. The waiter resisted my attempts to have scampi without garlic (not liking garlic is infra dig in Manhattan).

I felt fascinated and appalled, both at the same time: but more surprising, I felt a bit patronizing – for all of a sudden, as I observed those bobbing
faces there, wreathed in display or goggled in sycophancy, fresh as I was from my little village on the north-west coast of Wales, I felt myself to be among provincials.

Not a sensation I often get in New York. More often, when I am at large in this incomparable city, I feel myself to be among ultimates.
How’re they
gonna get me back on the farm
? This is, after all, The City of our times, as Rome was in classical days, as Constantinople was through centuries of Mediterranean history. This is everyone’s metropolis, for there is no nation that has not contributed something to Manhattan, if only a turn of phrase or a category of bun. I went one day to the street festival which is held each May on Ninth Avenue, one of the most vividly cosmopolitan thoroughfares on the island, and realized almost too piquantly what it means to be a city of all peoples: smell clashing with smell, from a mile of sidewalk food stalls, sesame oil at odds with curry powder, Arabic drifting into Ukrainian among the almost impenetrable crowds, Yiddish colliding with Portuguese, and all the way down the avenue the discordant blending of folk-music, be it from Polish flageolet, Mexican harmonica or balalaika from Sofia.

Nothing provincial there! And if over the past 300 years the clambering upon this huge raft of refugees, adventurers, idealists and crooks from every land has given Manhattan always a quality of paradigm or fulcrum, so when it comes to the end of the world, I think, most people can most easily imagine the cataclysm in the context of this island. The great towers crumpling and sagging into themselves, the fires raging up the ravaged boulevards, the panicked rush of the people, like rats or lemmings, desperately into the boiling water – these are twentieth-century man’s standard images of Doomsday: and in my own view, if God is truly going to sit one day in judgement upon the doings of mankind, he is likely to set up court on the corner of Broadway and 42nd Street, where he can deal first (and leniently I am sure) with the purveyors of Sextacular Acts Live on Stage.

We live in baleful times, and it is a pity that Manhattan, that temple of human hope and ingenuity, should be obliged to fill this particular role of parable. There is no denying, though, that there often passes across the face of this city, like a shudder, a sense of ominous portent. I read one morning in the
Times
that a woman, walking the previous day down a street near City Hall, had been attacked by a pack of rats ‘as big as rabbits’. I leapt into a cab at once, but Manhattan had beaten me to it: already a small crowd was peering with evident satisfaction into the festering
abandoned lot from which the rodents had sprung. Already one of your archetypal New Yorkers had appointed himself resident expert, and was pointing out to enthralled office workers one of your actual rats,
almost
as big as a rabbit, which was sitting morosely in a wire trap among the piled rubbish. What became of the original victim? I asked. ‘I guess she was some kind of screwball. She just drove off screaming …’

I would have driven off screaming too, if those rabbit-rats had attached themselves to me, but around the corner, almost within excretion distance of the rat pit, business was brisk as ever at the neighbourhood takeout food store. New Yorkers are hardened to horror, I suppose, and perhaps it is this acclimatization that gives their island its sense of fated obliteration. It might be designed for nemesis, and suggests to me sometimes an amphitheatre of pagan times, in which ladies and rats, like gladiators and wild beasts, are pitted against each other for the rude entertainment of the gods.

Everything comes on to the island: nothing much goes off, even by evaporation. Once it was a gateway to a New World, now it is a portal chiefly to itself. Manhattan long ago abandoned its melting-pot function. Nobody even tries to Americanize the Lebanese or the Lithuanians now, and indeed the ethnic enclaves of the island seem to me to become more potently ethnic each time I visit the place. Nothing could be much more Italian than the Festival of St Anthony of Padua down on Mulberry Street, when the families of Little Italy stroll here and there through their estate, pausing often to greet volatile contemporaries and sometimes munching the soft-shelled crabs which, spread-eagled on slices of bread like zoological specimens, are offered loudly for sale by street vendors. Harlem has become almost a private city in itself, no longer to be slummed through by whities after dinner, while Manhattan’s Chinatown is as good a place as anywhere in the world to test your skill at that universal challenge, trying to make a Chinese waiter smile.

So the lights blaze down fiercely upon a tumultuous arena: but its millions of gladiators (and wild beasts) are not in the least disconcerted by the glare of it, or daunted by the symbolic battles in which they are engaged, but are concerned chiefly to have swords of the fashionable length, and to be seen to advantage from the more expensive seats.

Back to the park. At the centre of the world’s present preoccupation with Manhattan, for one reason and another, stands Central Park. ‘Don’t go walking in that Park,’ they will warn you from China to Peru, or ‘Tell me frankly,’ they ask, ‘is it true what they say about Central Park?’

The Park is the centre of the island too, no man’s land amid the surrounding conflict of masonry – on the postal map it forms a big oblong blank, the only portion of Manhattan without a zip code. To the north is Harlem, to the south is Rockefeller Center, on one flank is the opulence of the Upper East Side, to the west are the newly burgeoning streets that sprout, teeming with artists, agents, Polish grocers and music students, right and left off Columbus Avenue. It is like a big rectangular scoop in the city, shovelled out and stacked with green. It covers eighty-four acres, and it is almost everything, to my mind, that a park should not be.

This is a heretical view. Central Park is enormously admired by specialists in planning and urban design. The architectural critic of the
New
York
Times
calls it the city’s greatest single work of architecture. It was laid out in 1856 by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, and ever since everybody has been saying how marvellous it is. ‘One of the most beautiful parks in the world,’ thought Baedeker, 1904. ‘This great work of art,’ says the
AIA Guide to New York City, 1978
.

Not me. With its gloomy hillocks obstructing the view, with its threadbare and desolate prairies, with its consciously contrived variety of landscapes, with its baleful lake and brownish foliage, with the sickly carillon which, hourly from the gates of its appalling zoo, reminds me horribly of the memorial chimes at Hiroshima, Central Park seems to me the very antithesis of the fresh and natural open space, the slice of countryside, that a city park should ideally be.

Nevertheless the world is right when, invited to think of Manhattan, it is likely to think first these days of Central Park. If I deny its ethereal beauty, I do not for a moment dispute its interest. It is one of the most interesting places on earth. ‘It is inadvisable,’ warns the Michelin guide, 1968, ‘to wander alone through the more deserted parts of the park’: but wandering alone nevertheless through this extraordinary retreat, dominated on all sides by the towering cliffs of Manhattan, is to enjoy one of the greatest of all human shows, in perpetual performance from dawn through midnight.

You want tradition? There go the lumbering barouches, their horse smells hanging pungent in the air long after they have left their stands outside the Plaza, their Dutch trade delegates, their Urological Association conventioneers, or even their honeymooners from Iowa, somewhat self-consciously sunk in their cushions, and their coachmen leaning back, as they have leant for a century or more, whip in hand to ask their customers where they’re from.

You want irony? Consider the layabouts encouched apparently permanently on their bundles along the East Side, beyond the open-air bookstalls, prickly and raggedy, bony and malodorous, camped there almost in the shadow of the sumptuous Fifth Avenue apartment houses, and more tellingly still perhaps, actually within earshot of the feebly growling lions, the cackling birds and funereal carillon of the zoo.

You want vaudeville? Try the joggers on their daily exercise. Dogged they lope in their hundreds around the ring road, generally cleared of traffic on their behalf, like migrating animals homed in upon some inexplicable instinct, or numbed survivors from some catastrophe out of sight. Some are worn lean as rakes by their addiction, some drop the sweat of repentant obesity. Some flap with huge ungainly breasts. Some tread with a predatory menace, wolflike in the half-hour before they must present that memo about ongoing supportive expenditures to Mr Cawkwell at the office. Sometimes you may hear snatches of very Manhattan conversations, as the enthusiasts labour by –
So you’re saying
(gasp)
that since 1951
(pant)
there’s been no meaningful change whatever
(puff)
in our society
? Sometimes you may observe a jogger who has taken his dog with him on a leash, and who, obliged to pause while the animal defecates behind a bush, compromises by maintaining a standing run, on the spot, looking consequently for all the world as though he is dying for a pee himself.

But no, it is the sinister you want, isn’t it?
‘It is inadvisable to wander
alone, despite the frequent police patrols on horseback or by car …’
That is what Central Park is most famous for these days, and it is not hard to find. I have never been mugged in Central Park, never seen anyone else harmed either, but I have had my chill moments all the same. More than once, even as the joggers pad around their circuit, I have noticed perched distantly on the rocky outcrops which protrude among the dusty trees, groups of three or four youths, silently and thoughtfully watching. They wear dark glasses, as likely as not, and big floppy hats, and they recline upon their rock in attitudes of mocking but stealthy grace, motionless, as though they are fingering their flick-knives. I waved to one such group of watchers once, as I walked nervously by: but they responded only by looking at each other in a bewildered way, and shifting their long legs a trifle uneasily upon the stone.

All around the city roars. Well, no, not roars – buzzes, perhaps. The energy of Manhattan is less leonine than waspish, and its concerns are, for so tremendous a metropolis, wonderfully individual and idiosyncratic. Despite appearances, Manhattan is an especially human city, where
personal aspirations, for better or for worse, unexpectedly take priority. Perhaps this is because, unlike either of the other global cities (for in my view there are only two, Paris and London) – unlike its peers, New York is not a capital. True, the headquarters of the United Nations is down by the East River, but architecturally it is the perfect reflection of its lacklustre political self, and one hardly notices it. True too that the municipal affairs of this city, being on so momentous a scale, are equivalent I suppose to the entire political goings-on of many lesser republics. But it is not really a political city. Affairs of state and patriotism rarely intrude. Even the state capital is far away in Albany, and Manhattan conversations do not often turn to infighting within the Democratic Party, or the prospects of Salt III.

There is not much industry on the island, either, in any sociological or aesthetic sense: few blue-collared workers making for home with their lunch boxes, few manufacturing plants to belch their smoke into the Manhattan sky. This is a city of more intricate concerns, a city of speculators and advisers, agents and middlemen and sorters-out and go-betweens. Many of the world’s most potent corporations have their headquarters here, but their labour forces are mostly conveniently far away. Fortunes are made here, and reputations, not steel ingots or automobiles.

The pace of New York is legendary, but nowadays in my opinion illusory. Businessmen work no harder, no faster, than in most other great cities. But New Yorkers spend so much time contemplating their personal affairs, analysing themselves, examining their own reactions, that the time left for business is necessarily rushed. Do not suppose, when the Vice-President of Automated Commercial leaves his office in such a hurry, that he is meeting the Overseas Sales Director of Toyuki Industries: good gracious no, he is leaving early because he simply must have it out face to face with Brian about his disgraceful behaviour with that Edgar person in the disco last night.