Writings from the New Yorker 1925-1976 (18 page)

 

Possessions breed like mice. A man forgets what a raft of irrelevant junk he has collected about him till he tries to move it. We found ourself one afternoon smothered at the bottom of a pile of ghastly miscellany: envelopes engraved with the wrong address, snapshots that had never been pasted up, a mahogany chip belonging to a broken chair, some high-school examination papers, a can of ski wax, several programs of the Millrose games,
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a sneaker for the left foot, a build-it-yourself airplane that had never been built, some samples of curtain material, a catcher's mitt, and a red-and-silver ashtray made from the head of a piston. These objects suddenly seemed to be the possessor, ourself the possessed. An hour later we were wandering dully in the streets seeking lodging in a hotel and passed a little old fellow with all his worldly goods slung on his back in a burlap sack. In his face was written a strange peace.

THE LOOK OF A NATIVE

1/4/36

“
HOW,
” writes a man from Atlanta (who perhaps has in mind coming to the Fair), “can a stranger in New York make himself
look
like a stranger, so that other strangers won't stop him on the street and ask a lot of questions about New York he can't answer?” That's an unusual question, and we doubt that it is an honest one. Actually, strangers ache to give the appearance of natives. The average New Yorker can spot a stranger in town easily. Strangers are extremely careful not to look up at tall buildings, for fear they will be spotted. They are unable to board a Fifth Avenue bus except after fearful experimentation. They overtip and are under the impression that the only places that sell theatre tickets are agencies.

Our own problem is to make ourself look like a New Yorker. Somehow, in spite of our fine clothes and worldly ways, nobody ever takes us for a native. Beggars, street photographers, men who have just located a nice fur piece, all spot us instantly as fair game. We are the perfect stranger. Probably it's because, although we have lived in New York all our life, the place never seems anything but slightly incredible, and we go along with our mouth open and our face unbuttoned.

WALKING TO WORK

2/13/37

FROM OUR HOME
in the cinder belt to this Forty-third Street pent-up house where we work is a distance of some nine blocks—in a southwesterly direction. It has sometimes occurred to us that we take an unconscionably long time walking it, the time ranging from fifteen minutes to two hours and a half. Three-quarters of an hour is about par. This morning, arriving at work at eleven-thirty, after being on the road for more than an hour, we felt that perhaps we should attempt to reconstruct the journey to see what the hell went on when we were supposed to be covering ground. There were dim memories of many uninspired shop windows, including an imaginary decision involving a pair of madras pajamas, as between the gray with the narrow stripes and the deep blue. There was a pleasant ten minutes standing quietly with others of our ilk, watching a taxi that had hooked onto a limousine, watching the lady in the limousine pretending she had not been hooked onto by the middle classes. There was the slow, steady perusal of a small bag of humus in front of a flower shop (ten cents) and the weighing of the question whether to buy it now—which would mean lugging it both to and from work—or to buy it on the way home, with the strong chance that we'd forget to. There was the pause in front of the art shop's nude-of-the-day, in company with the gray little group of men (art lovers all), each of us trying to look as though we were interested in gum erasers and Ô squares. There was the slowing of pace in front of Charles & Ernest's, to see who was getting his hair cut today. There was the pastry shop, with its fascinating handling of yet undigested material. There was Abercrombie's, effeteness blended with woodcraft; the side trip into the bookshop to examine new titles; the side trip to Radio City to see how the ice looked; the pause while two cats stared each other down in a parking lot. (And, incidentally, why will men stop and watch cats carrying on; women never? Is it be-cause a torn is an unmistakable rake?)

Our reconstructed journey was not encouraging. The wonder is we arrived at all.

THE LURE OF NEW YORK

7/3/37

THE INQUIRING PHOTOGRAPHER
of the
Daily News
stopped six people the other day and asked them why they loved New York. He got six different answers. One lady said she loved New York because it was vibrant. One man said he loved it because business was good here. These replies made us think of the fine, clear answer which a friend of ours, a Greek shoe-black, once gave to the same question. This gentleman had got sick of New York, had wearied of his little shoe-and-hat parlor with its smell of polish and gasoline, and had gone back to his native island of Keos, where, he told us, he would just swim and fish and lie in the grass while beautiful girls fed him fruit. He was back in town in about four months. We asked him what there was about this city, what mysterious property, that had lured him back from the heaven that was Keos. He thought for a minute. Then he said, “In New York you can buy things so late at night.”

NEW YORK SOIL

9/30/50

AS WE GO TO PRESS
we discover that the Friends of the Land are about to hold their harvest-home supper right here in town, in the Statler, across from the depot. Louis Bromfield, the dirt farmer, and Dr. Hugh Bennett, chief of the Soil Conservation Service, are scheduled to speak. We don't know what the soil is like down there near the Statler but it is probably a heavy clay with a lot of Consolidated Edison roots that haven't rotted up yet, and it undoubtedly needs top dressing to bring it back. This is a good month to top-dress, and there is no better man on a manure spreader than Bromfield.

If the Friends of the Land weren't so numerous, we would invite them to our apartment and take them to our bedroom, so they could look out the window by our desk and study a most inspiring example of Nature's soil-building. Just outside the window there is a stone coping that forms the top of a high wall. Three years ago an ailanthus seed came to rest on this bare ledge twenty feet above the ground. Encouraged by light rains and heavy sootfall, it germinated. Its root immediately struck solid rock, turned quickly, and found two dead vine leaves, a cigarette butt, and a paper clip. Here were perfect conditions for ailanthus growth. The little tree sprang toward heaven. Through a long, dry summer, watered by occasional fogs from the East River, nourished by mop dust and the slow drift of falling vine leaves, the sapling took hold. Today it stands a stalwart forest giant, as big around as our thumb, lively as a grig, covering its roots a living soil rich in those minerals and organic substances that only the fairest city in the world can scrape together to take care of its own.

NEW YORK'S COCKTAIL

1/30/54

THIS IS A DAY
of fog and smoke in equal parts—a city cocktail familiar to all, the pure ingredient contributed by nature, the poisonous one contributed by Man, the mixture served slightly chilled, with a twist of irony. On our way to the office we heard complaints on every hand: the barber, the bus driver, the store-keeper, the elevator operator, all of them clearing their throats nervously, each indignant that pure air was denied him. One of them said, “Nobody does anything. Maybe you write a letter to the paper and it gets printed—so what happens? Nothing.” The city has a debased feeling on its smog days, ill temper and foul air combining to form an unwholesomeness. Buildings fade out in their upper reaches, escarpments grow soft in the yellow haze. Chimneys discharge sable smoke in luscious folds, as when the rich intestines of an animal are exposed by the slaughterer's knife, and the sulphurous smoke, curling upward, quickly feels the control of the ceiling, turns, and drifts down instead, filling streets, alleys, areaways, parks, sifting through windows and doors, entering the rooms and the offices, even invading the oxygen tents where patients struggle for breath. Being in the city on such a day is like waiting, condemned, in a lethal chamber for the release that has not yet come. Certainly no other animal fouls its nest so cheerfully and persistently as Man, or acts so surprised and sore about it afterward. Everywhere common sense and general welfare await the indulgence of the special business and the particular chimney.

COPING WITH SOOTFALL

9/11/54

A PLAN TO BUILD
an outdoor dining terrace at the headquarters of the United Nations, in Turtle Bay, has been abandoned because of “atmospheric conditions”—which is a diplomatic term for sootfall. We happen to be a student of atmospheric conditions in Turtle Bay, having dwelt there happily for many years, and we can testify that sootfall does not preclude terrace life if you have any guts. Our own terrace—a small, decadent structure a few blocks from the U. N.—is a howling success as far as we are concerned, and we are in a good position to give the U. N. a few helpful hints on terrace living under heavy sootfall. First of all, you have to get an awning. The awning is not to ward off soot but merely to give the terrace dweller a cozy feeling. It soon catches fire from cigarettes tossed out of upper windows, but the fire is a clubby affair and you get to know your neighbors (a valuable experience for the United Nations, if you ask us). Next, you've got to have a glass-top table and some iron chairs with little thin detachable cushions that fade. Every time you come indoors from the terrace, even if only for a moment, you pick up your cushion and heave it ahead of you through the open door into the living room. If you leave a drink standing on the table to go inside and answer the phone, you simply drape your handkerchief over the glass, and when you come back you dump the soot out of the handkerchief and resume drinking. If the drinks are properly mixed, the soot can lie roundabout, deep and crisp and even, and nobody will mind. Soot is the topsoil of New York, giving plants a foothold, or soothold, on ramparts far above street level. We have a five-year-old ailanthus, a lovely tree, rooted in soot, and we are shocked and discouraged at the capitulation of the United Nations in the face of this mild threat—an organization created to bring peace to the world yet scared to death that some tiny foreign particle is going to fall into its drink.

THE RAMBLE

7/30/55

JUST SOUTH OF
the Seventy-ninth Street transverse in the Park, and lying between the East Drive and the West Drive, there is a tract of wild land called the Ramble. Like most urban jungles, it has a somewhat shabby appearance. It is thickly wooded and rocky, and in the middle of it there is a miniature swamp. Paths twist and turn back upon themselves and peter out in dirt trails leading down to the shores of the Seventy-second Street Lake. Except for one peculiarity, the Ramble is no different from dozens of fairly green mansions inside the city limits. What distinguishes it is the fact that, in the magical moments of migration, birds descend into the place in great numbers and in almost unbelievable variety. They ignore other attractive areas in the Park and drop straight into the Ramble. The reason is simple. The place offers good cover and it has water, the two requisites for the peace of mind of small songsters. Because of its phenomenal popularity among transient birds, the Ramble is known to ornithologists and nature students all over the world. They, too, dive straight into it when they come to New York.

On a hot, airless afternoon recently, we went up to the Park to take what may be our last look at the Ramble. The place has been marked for “improvement” by the Commissioner of Parks,
*
who plans to unscramble the Ramble, comb its hair, and build a recreation center there for old people—shuffleboard, croquet, television, lawns, umbrella tables, horse-shoe pitching, the works. This strikes us as an unnecessary blunder. Almost any place in Central Park would lend itself to shuffleboard, but the Ramble has lent itself to more than two hundred species of travelling birds. It is truly a fabulous little coppice. On a still summer's day, it is nothing to write home about; we found it populated by grackles, house sparrows, rats, gray squirrels, lovers, and one gnarled old editorial writer creeping sadly about. But on a morning in May the Ramble is alive with bright song and shy singers. (Soon it will ring with early TV commercials and the click of quoits.)

The conversion of the Ramble from a wild place to a civilized place, from an amazingly successful bird cover in the heart of the city to a gaming court, raises a fundamental question in Park administration. City parks are queer places at best; they must provide a green escape from stone and steel, and they must also provide amusement for the escapees—everything from zoos to swings, from ball fields to band shells. The original design of Central Park emphasized nature. The temptation has been to encroach more and more on the jungle. And the temptation grows stronger as more and more citizens die and leave money for memorial structures. It seems to us that if it's not too late, Mr. Moses should reconsider the matter of the Ramble and find another site for oldsters and their fun-making.

Robert Cushman Murphy, birdman emeritus of the American Museum of Natural History, wrote a letter to the
Times
not long ago on this subject. Mr. Murphy made the following statement: “There is probably no equal area of open countryside that can match the urban-bounded Ramble with respect to the concentration of birds that funnels down from the sky just before daybreaks of spring.” Think of it! This minuscule Manhattan wildwood taking first place in the daybreaks of spring! It is no trick to outfit a public park for our winter mornings, our fall afternoons, our summer evenings. But the daybreaks of spring—what will substitute for the Ramble when that happy circumstance is tossed away?

TUMBLEWEED