We are in New York for a short, post Christmas visit, and once again the great city casts its magical spells. My wife, in her typical display of brilliance, bought me a copy of E. B. White’s “Here is New York.” Now I know E.B. White mainly from studying the indispensable Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style,” a book that should still be considered required reading for all writers and speakers of our language (not that I consider myself in any way a paragon of either practice!). His “Here is New York” is a wonderful essay on the nature and character of New York City written during the sweltering summer of 1948. Whites prose is elegant and graceful and a joy to read, and while virtually none of the landmarks he discusses still exist it still felt to me like White touched the very heartbeat of America’s great city.
White writes about that great urban paradox of being alone in the crowd; “New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation; better then the most dense communities it succeeds in insulating the individual (if he wants it, and almost everybody wants or needs it) against all the enormous and violent and wonderful events that are taking place every minute.” He also elucidates New York’s greatest gift to its admirers, the gift of possibility; “although New York often imparts a feeling of great forlornness and forsakenness, it seldom seems dead or unresourceful; and you always feel that either by shifting your location 10 blocks or by reducing your fortune 5 dollars you can experience rejuvenation. Many people who have no real independence of spirit depend on the city’s tremendous variety and sources of excitement for spiritual sustenance and maintenance of moral. In the country there are a few chances of sudden rejuvenation – a shift in weather, perhaps, or something arriving in the mail. But in New York the chances are endless.”
White discusses the 3 types of New Yorkers, the natives, the commuters and third, the person “who was born somewhere else and came to New York in a quest for something.” He writes that it is “this third city that accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements.”
Vivian Leigh said that when she got a script she looked for the key line of dialogue for her character, she felt that in a good script there would be a line that encapsulated the essence of her part, a line that best illuminated the character she was being asked to play. If New York City was a character my line will always be that great room in the Metropolitan Museum that is full of Rembrandt paintings. This large room says to me everything about NYC, if any other major museum has 2 or 3 Rembrandts, New York City is going to have a room full, wanna see Robert DeNiro do live theatre or Dustin Hoffman in “Death of a Salesman” or Kevin Spacey do Eugene O’Neill you gotta come to New York. In a way that is part of the character of New York City; bigger, better, best. When I first took my wife to New York we visited the MOMA, she was staggered to see one landmark painting after another, in room after room - art that she had seen a million times in books all in one place, that is New York City.
As we walked around New York City these few days I often thought of E.B. White’s New York; when I saw the slim young man standing in the subway engrossed in his reading of Tennessee Williams “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” or when we ran into the fine actress Jennifer Carpenter (who plays Deb on the TV show “Dexter”) on a subway platform at midnight in Times Square. When I had a wonderful corned beef and pastrami sandwich at 10pm, during a blizzard at Juniors deli in Brooklyn. When we took a much needed lunch break (and escaped the insane crouds on 7th Ave.) at the elegant Warwick hotel in Manhattan. When we left the theatre (after seeing Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth in the delightful musical “The Addams Family”) at around 11PM and found ourselves enveloped in the massive flow of people out and about in Times Square.
E. B. White wrote “A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, this heightening it meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life; all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without any doubt, the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residences but whose full meaning will always remain elusive. At the feet of the tallest and plushiest offices lie the crummiest slums. The genteel mysteries housed in the Riverside Church are only a few blocks from the voodoo charms of Harlem. The merchant princes, riding to Wall Street in their limousines down the east River Drive, pass within a few hundred yards of the gypsy kings; but the princes do not know they are passing kings….”
Thank you New York, my life would be far less then it is if had not been touched by your greatness, grace and passion.
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