Here is New York - White, E.B_ [1]
Modest and effortless, White’s prose almost effaces the brisk efficiency of his plan—a whole city (well, it’s mostly Manhattan) delivered in seventy-five hundred words—and the elegance of his beginning and closing lines. That final sentence, about a tree in an East Side garden, has stayed clear in my mind for half a century, just as it has for many thousands of other readers, I imagine, perhaps because of the power of its reversed verb, “not to look upon,” within the murmured thought. Only when I read the book again, just recently, did I realize how much of it is written from the point of view of an exile. The Whites—E. B. (“Andy” to his family and friends) and my mother Katharine (and their son Joel) had become year-round Maine residents in the late 1930s, but then came briefly back to the city to lend a hand at the short-handed wartime New Yorker, where they both worked. Now they were back in North Brooklin for good, and White’s piece, one can see, became a chance for him to revisit himself as a younger man: a would-be writer just starting out in New York in the 1920s, alone but burning “with a low steady fever” of excitement at being on the same island with Heywood Broun and Robert Benchley and Ring Lardner. He says this himself, but the piece also resounds everywhere with loneliness and isolation and the romance of what has been lost: the great old newspapers, the young intellectual and his lady love whispering together in a restaurant booth, the memory of speakeasies and “so many good little dinners in good little illegal places.” Even as he looked at the great city, he was missing what it had been.
I’m not sure that New York in 1999 can offer “the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy,” the way it did in the book. It’s hard to feel private in the surging daily crowds at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, say, or lonely on a side street packed solid with gridlocked traffic. The lunch lines at the little midtown restaurants have grown so long that lunching out itself is in danger of oblivion; more and more offices feature their own cafeterias, so that their workers need not experience the city at all during their workday. New York is still made up of small neighborhoods, as White was at pains to describe, but they have grown self-conscious about it and tend toward self-destruction. In no time, the little run of blocks has a chic name—“NoHo” or “Carnegie Hill”—and the local plumber and liquor store have been driven out by the impossible rents and replaced by a luxury deli, an art dealer, or another Parisian infant-wear boutique. The couple who put their little all into an apartment here because it was cheap and felt fresh now hold on to it because it has turned into an investment. “Remember when—?” they say to each other. “Wasn’t this where—?”
Another loss, perhaps a greater one, is of the combined sense of separation and connection that New Yorkers once felt with their resident or just-arrived celebrities—“this link with Oz,” as White puts it. Thanks to television—the biggest altering force of our century—the traveler from Little Rock or Spokane now checks into his Broadway or Gramercy Park hotel and, within a click, finds the same stars and faces waiting for him that he left at home: Oprah and Jay Leno, Homer Simpson and Michael Jordan. The old New York street encounter—Garbo under that big hat, Vladimir Horowitz with a silk bow tie, Paul Newman squeezing a melon at the next counter—has almost gone by the boards, anyway, thanks to street loonies and the paparazzi. Most celebrities are dead or in the Hamptons.
If Andy White could visit New York once again (he died in 1985), I think he would want to rush back home to Maine the same afternoon, appalled by its crime and violence, dismayed by the worsening conditions in the inner city and the enormous, widening distance between the city’s impoverished minorities and grossly rich Upper East Siders, and turned off by a sharp diminishment in