The Memory Chalet (18 page)

Why should I not close my office door or take a student to a play? If I hesitate, have I not internalized the worst sort of communitarian self-censorship—anticipating my own guilt long before I am accused and setting a pusillanimous example for others? Yes: and if only for these reasons I see nothing wrong in my behavior. But were it not for the mandarin self-assurance of my Oxbridge years, I too might lack the courage of my convictions—though I readily concede that the volatile mix of intellectual arrogance and generational exceptionalism can ignite delusions of invulnerability.

Indeed, it is just such a sense of boundless entitlement—taken to extremes—that helps explain Bill Clinton’s self-destructive transgressions or Tony Blair’s insistence that he was right to lie his way into a war whose necessity he alone could assess. But note that for all their brazen philandering and posturing, Clinton and Blair—no less than Bush, Gore, Brown, and so many others of my generation—are still married to their first serious date. I cannot claim as much—I was divorced in 1977 and again in 1986—but in other respects the curious ’60s blend of radical attitudes and domestic convention ensnared me too. So how did I elude the harassment police, who surely were on my tail as I surreptitiously dated my bright-eyed ballerina?

Reader: I married her.

1

Authors, respectively, of
The Dialectic of Sex
,
Sexual Politics
,
Against Our Will
and
Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
.

2

“Comment faire pour enrichir le pays?

Mettez la pillule en vente dans les Monoprix.”
Elucubrations
, 1966.

XXII

New York, New York

I
came to New York University in 1987 on a whim. The Thatcherite assault on British higher education was just beginning and even in Oxford the prospects were grim. NYU appealed to me: by no means a recent foundation—it was established in 1831—it is nevertheless the junior of New York City’s great universities. Less of a “city on a hill,” it is more open to new directions: in contrast to the cloistered collegiate worlds of Oxbridge, it brazenly advertises itself as a “global” university at the heart of a world city.

But just what is a “world city”? Mexico City, at eighteen million people, or São Paolo at one million less, are unmanageable urban sprawls; but they are not “world cities.” Conversely, Paris—whose central districts have never exceeded two million inhabitants—was “the capital of the nineteenth century.” Is it a function of the number of visitors? In that case, Orlando (Florida) would be a great metropolis. Being the capital of a country guarantees nothing: think of Madrid or Washington, DC (the Brasilia of its time). It may not even be a matter of wealth: within the foreseeable future Shanghai (fourteen million people) and Singapore (five million people) will surely be among the richest places on earth. Will they be “world cities”?

I have lived in four such cities. London was the commercial and financial center of the world from the defeat of Napoleon until the rise of Hitler; Paris—its perennial competitor—was an international cultural magnet from the building of Versailles through the death of Albert Camus. Vienna’s apogee was perhaps the shortest: its rise and fall coincided with the last years of the Habsburg Empire, though in intensity it outshone them all. And then came New York.

It has been my mixed fortune to experience these cities at twilight. In their prime they were arrogant and self-assured. In decline, their minor virtues come into focus: people spend less time telling you how fortunate you are to be there. Even at the height of “Swinging London” there was something brittle about the city’s self-promotion, as though it knew this was but an Indian summer.

Today, the British capital is doubtless geographically central—its awful bling-bloated airport the world’s busiest. And the city can boast the best theatre and a multicolored cosmopolitanism sadly lacking in years past. But it all rests precariously upon an unsustainable heap of other peoples’ money: the capital of capital.

By the time I got to Paris, most people in the world had stopped speaking French (something the French have been slow to acknowledge). Who now would deliberately reconstruct their city—as the Romanians did in the late nineteenth century—in order to become “the Paris of the East,” complete with
grands boulevards
like the Calea Victoria? The French have a word for the disposition to look insecurely inwards, to be preoccupied with self-interrogation:
nombrilisme
—“navel-gazing.” They have been doing it for over a century.

I arrived in New York just in time to experience the bittersweet taste of loss. In the arts the city led the world from 1945 through the 1970s. If you wanted to see modern painting, experience music, or dance, you came to the New York of Clement Greenberg, Leonard Bernstein, and George Balanchine. Culture was more than an object of consumption: people thronged to New York to produce it too. Manhattan in those decades was the crossroads where interesting and original minds lingered—drawing others in their wake. Nothing else came close.

Jewish New York too is past its peak. Who now cares what
Dissent
or (particularly)
Commentary
say to the world or one another? In 1979 Woody Allen could count on a wide audience for a joke about the two of them merging and forming “Dissentary” (see
Annie Hall
). Today? A disproportionate amount of the energy invested in these and certain other small journals goes to the “Israel” question: perhaps the closest that Americans get to
nombrilisme
.

The intellectual gangs of New York have folded their knives and gone home to the suburbs—or else they fight it out in academic departments to the utter indifference of the rest of humanity. The same, of course, is true of the self-referential squabbles of the cultural elites of Russia or Argentina. But that is one reason why neither Moscow nor Buenos Aires matters on the world stage. New York intellectuals once did, but most of them have gone the way of Viennese café society: they have become a parody of themselves, their institutions and controversies of predominantly local concern.

And yet New York
remains
a world city. It is not the great American city—that will always be Chicago. New York sits at the edge: like Istanbul or Mumbai, its distinctive appeal lies precisely in its cantankerous relationship to the metropolitan territory beyond. It looks
outward
, and is thus attractive to people who would not feel comfortable further inland. It has never been American in the way that Paris is French: New York has always been about something else as well.

Shortly after arriving here, I wandered into a local tailor’s shop to get something altered. After measuring me, the elderly owner glanced up: “Ver you tek your laundry?” “Well,” I responded, “to the Chinese laundry at the corner.” He rose and gave me a long, hard look, peeling away layers of Paris, Cambridge, south London, Antwerp, and points east: “Vy you teking the laundry to the Chinaman?”

Today I drop my cleaning off with Joseph the tailor and we exchange Yiddishisms and reminiscences (his) of Jewish Russia. Two blocks south I lunch at Bar Pitti, whose Florentine owner disdains credit cards and prepares the best Tuscan food in New York. In a hurry, I can opt instead for a falafel from the Israelis on the next block; I might do even better with the sizzling lamb from the Arab at the corner.

Fifty meters away are my barbers: Giuseppe, Franco, and Salvatore, all from Sicily—their “English” echoing Chico Marx. They have been in Greenwich Village forever but never really settled: how should they? They shout at one another all day in Sicilian dialect, drowning out their main source of entertainment and information: a twenty-four hour Italian-language radio station. On my way home, I enjoy a
millefeuilles
from Claude: a surly Breton
pâtissier
who has put his daughter through the London School of Economics, one exquisite éclair at a time.

All this within two square blocks of my apartment—and I am neglecting the Sikh newsstand, the Hungarian bakery, and the Greek diner (actually Albanian but we pretend otherwise). Three streets east and I have Little Habsburgia: Ukrainian restaurant, Uniate church, Polish grocery, and, of course, the long-established Jewish deli—serving East European staples under kosher labels. All that is missing is a Viennese café—for this, symptomatically, you must go uptown to the wealthy quarters of the city.

Such variety is doubtless available in London. But the cultures of contemporary London are balkanized by district and income—Canary Wharf, the financial hub, keeps its distance from the ethnic enclaves at the center. Contrast Wall Street, within easy walking distance of my neighborhood. As for Paris, it has its sequestered quarters where the grandchildren of Algerian guest workers rub shoulders with Senegalese street vendors; Amsterdam its Surinamese and Indonesian districts: but these are the backwash of empire, what Europeans now refer to as the “immigrant question.”

One must not romanticize. I am sure most of my neighborhood traders and artisans have never met and would have little to say to one another: at night they return home to Queens or New Jersey. If I told Joseph or Sal they had the good fortune to live in a “world city,” they would probably snort. But they do—just as the barrow boys of early twentieth-century Hoxton were citizens of the same cosmopolitan London that Keynes memorialized in
The Economic Consequences of the Peace
, even though they would have had no idea what he was talking about.

At a dinner party here in NYC, I was once asked what I thought were America’s three strongest assets. I replied without hesitation: “Thomas Jefferson, Chuck Berry, and the
New York Review of Books
.” To avoid being forced to rank them, I also invoked the glories of the Fifth Amendment. I was not joking. Thomas Jefferson requires no explanation (though in the current atmosphere of textbook censorship, he could use some defense). Chuck Berry requires no apology. But the city’s enduring international influence is perfectly encapsulated in the
NYRB
: perhaps the last survivor (founded in 1963) of New York’s halcyon era.

It is no accident that today we have a London Review of Books, a Budapest Review of Books, an Athens Review of Books, a proposal for a European Review of Books, and even a Jewish Review of Books: each in its way a nod to the influence of the homonymic model. And yet they fall short. Why? The London Review of Books is exemplary in its way (though I should recuse myself here as an occasional contributor); but it is distinctly a
London
product, reflecting a metropolitan leftism that is unmistakably English if not Oxbridge. The others are overtly partisan and parochial. In Budapest, my commissioned essay on the Hungarian writer György Konrád was spiked for
lèse-majesté
; attempts to found a “Paris Review of Books” have foundered on the local assumption that it must serve as a platform for publishers’ puffs and the exchange of literary favors.

What distinguishes the
New York Review
¹
is precisely that it is not about New York—nor is it written primarily by New Yorkers: like the city itself, it is tangential to its point of origin. If this is a world city, it is not thanks to the Ukrainian restaurants on 2nd Avenue, nor even the Ukrainians who have colonized Brighton Beach: they can be found in many other places from Cleveland to Chicago. It is that cultivated Ukrainians in
Kiev
read New York’s best-known periodical.

We are experiencing the decline of the American age. But how does national or imperial decay influence the life cycle of a world city? Modern-day Berlin is a cultural metropolis on the make, despite being the capital of a medium-sized and rather self-absorbed nation. As for Paris, we have seen that it retained its allure for nearly two centuries after the onset of French national decline.

New York—a city more at home in the world than in its home country—may do better still. As a European, I feel more myself in New York than in the EU’s semi-detached British satellite: and I have Brazilian and Arab friends here who share the sentiment. To be sure, we all have our complaints. And while there is no other city where I could imagine living, there are many places that, for different purposes, I would rather be. But this too is a very New York sentiment. Chance made me an American, but I chose to be a New Yorker. I probably always was.

1

Full disclosure: I occasionally publish there.

XXIII

Edge People

I
dentity” is a dangerous word. It has no respectable contemporary uses. In Britain, the mandarins of New Labour—not satisfied with installing more closed-circuit surveillance cameras than any other democracy—have sought (so far unsuccessfully) to invoke the “war on terror” as an occasion to introduce mandatory identity cards. In France and the Netherlands, artificially stimulated “national debates” on identity are a flimsy cover for political exploitation of anti-immigrant sentiment—and a blatant ploy to deflect economic anxiety onto minority targets. In Italy, the politics of identity were reduced in December 2009 to house-to-house searches in the Brescia region for unwanted dark faces as the municipality shamelessly promised a “white Christmas.”

In academic life, the word has comparably mischievous uses. Undergraduates today can select from a swathe of identity studies: “gender studies,” “women’s studies,” “Asian-Pacific-American studies,” and dozens of others. The shortcoming of all these para-academic programs is not that they concentrate on a given ethnic or geographical minority; it is that they encourage members of that minority to study
themselves
—thereby simultaneously negating the goals of a liberal education and reinforcing the sectarian and ghetto mentalities they purport to undermine. All too frequently, such programs are job-creation schemes for their incumbents, and outside interest is actively discouraged. Blacks study blacks, gays study gays, and so forth.