The city, of course, was New York — the city of Whitman and Crane — that fabled context for the creation myth of the young man of genius arriving in the world capital, as in a secular tableau of annunciation, with the city waiting for him and him alone to cross the bridge, stride the boulevard, climb to the top of the tallest building, where he will at last be recognized for the heroic figure he knows himself to be.
Not my city at all. Mine is the city of the melancholy Brits — Dickens, Gissing, Johnson, especially Johnson — the one in which we are none of us going anywhere, we’re there already, we, the eternal groundlings who wander these mean and marvelous streets in search of a self reflected back in the eye of the stranger.
In the 1740s, Samuel Johnson walked the streets of London to cure himself of chronic depression. The London that Johnson walked was a city of pestilence: open sewers, disease, poverty; destitution; lit by smoking torches; men cutting each other’s throats in deserted alleys at midnight. It was of this city that Johnson said, “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.”
For Johnson the city was always the means of coming up from down under, the place that received his profound discomfort, his monumental unease. The street pulled him out of morose isolation, reunited him with humanity, revived in him his native generosity, gave him back the warmth of his own intellect. On the street Johnson made his enduring observations; here he found his wisdom. Late at night, when he went prowling for tavern conversation, he experienced the relief of seeing his own need mirrored in the company he found: those who drank and talked of Man and God till the light broke because none of them wanted to go home either.
Johnson hated and feared village life. The closed, silent streets threw him into despair. In the village his reflected presence was missing. Loneliness became unbearable. The meaning of the city was that it made the loneliness bearable.
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I have always lived in New York, but a good part of my life I longed for the city the way someone in a small town would, yearning to arrive at the capital. Growing up in the Bronx was like growing up in a village. From earliest adolescence I knew there was a center-of-the-world, and that I was far from it. At the same time, I also knew it was only a subway ride away, downtown in Manhattan. Manhattan was Araby.
At fourteen I began taking that subway ride, walking the length and breadth of the island late in winter, deep in summer. The only difference between me and someone like me from Kansas was that in Kansas one makes the immigrant’s lonely leap once and forever, whereas I made many small trips into the city, going home repeatedly for comfort and reassurance, dullness and delay, before attempting the main chance. Down Broadway, up Lexington, across Fifty-Seventh Street, from river to river, through Greenwich Village, Chelsea, the Lower East Side, plunging down to Wall Street, climbing up to Columbia. I walked these streets for years, excited and expectant, going home each night to the Bronx, where I waited for life to begin.
The way I saw it, the West Side was one long rectangle of apartment houses filled with artists and intellectuals; this richness, mirrored on the East Side by money and social standing, made the city glamorous, and painfully exciting. I could taste in my mouth world, sheer world. All I had to do was get old enough and New York would be mine.
As children, my friends and I would roam the streets of the neighborhood, advancing out as we got older, section by section, until we were little girls trekking across the Bronx as though on a mission to the interior. We used the streets the way children growing up in the country use fields and rivers, mountains and caves: to place ourselves on the map of our world. We walked by the hour. By the time we were twelve we knew instantly when the speech or appearance of anyone coming toward us was the slightest bit off. If a man approached and said, “How ya doin’, girls? You girls live around here?” we knew. If a woman wasn’t walking purposefully toward the shopping street, we knew. We knew also that it excited us to know. When something odd happened — and it didn’t take much for us to consider something odd, our sense of the norm was strict — we analyzed it for hours afterward.
A high school friend introduced me to the streets of upper Manhattan. Here, so many languages and such striking peculiarities in appearance — men in beards, women in black and silver. These were people I could see weren’t working-class, but what class were they? And then there was the hawking in the street! In the Bronx a lone fruit and vegetable man might call out, “Missus! Fresh tomatoes today!” But here, people on the sidewalk were selling watches, radios, books, jewelry — in loud, insistent voices. Not only that, but the men and women passing by got into it with them: “How long’ll that watch work? Till I get to the end of the block?” “I know the guy who wrote that book, it isn’t worth a dollar.” “Where’d ya get that radio? The cops’ll be at my door in the morning, right?” So much stir and animation! People who were strangers talking at one another, making one another laugh, cry out, crinkle up with pleasure, flash with anger. It was the boldness of gesture and expression everywhere that so captivated us: the stylish flirtation, the savvy exchange, people sparking witty, exuberant responses in one another, in themselves.
In college, another friend walked me down West End Avenue. I’d never seen a street as wide and stately as this one, with doormen standing in front of apartment houses of imposing height that lined the avenue for a mile and a half. My friend told me that in these great stone buildings lived musicians and writers, scientists and émigrés, dancers and philosophers. Very soon no trip downtown was complete without a walk on West End from 107th Street to Seventy-Second. For me, the avenue became emblematic. To live here would mean I had arrived. I was a bit confused about whether I’d be the resident artist/intellectual or be married to him — I couldn’t actually see myself signing the lease — but no matter; one way or another, I’d be in the apartment.
In summer we went to the concerts at Lewisohn Stadium, the great amphitheater on the City College campus. It was here that I heard Mozart and Beethoven and Brahms for the first time. These concerts came to an end in the mid-sixties, but in the late fifties, sitting on those stone bleacher seats July after July, August after August, I knew, I just knew, that the men and women all around me lived on West End Avenue. As the orchestra tuned up and the lights dimmed in the soft, starry night, I could feel the whole intelligent audience moving forward as one, yearning toward the music, toward themselves in the music: as though the concert were an open-air extension of the context of their lives. And I, just as intelligently I hoped, leaned forward, too, but I knew that I was only mimicking the movement. I’d not yet earned the right to love the music as they did. Within a few years I began to see it was entirely possible that I never would.
As I saw myself moving ever farther toward the social margin, nothing healed me of a sore and angry heart like a walk through the city. To see in the street the fifty different ways people struggle to remain human — the variety and inventiveness of survival techniques — was to feel the pressure relieved, the overflow draining off. I felt in my nerve endings the common refusal to go under. That refusal became company. I was never less alone than alone in the crowded street. Here, I found, I could imagine myself. Here, I thought, I am buying time. What a notion: buying time. It was one I shared with Leonard for years.
I grew up and moved downtown but sure enough, nothing turned out as expected. I went to school but the degree did not get me an office in midtown. I married an artist but we lived on the Lower East Side. I began to write but nobody read me above Fourteenth Street. For me, the doors to the golden company did not open. The glittering enterprise remained at a distance.