Writings from the New Yorker 1925-1976 (19 page)

2/23/57

IN A HALF-DESERTED STREET
, on a day of high wind, a discarded Christmas tree came bearing down on us, rolling rapidly. “Tumbleweed!” we muttered, dodging to one side, and were suddenly transported to the Western plains and experienced again, after so many years, the excitement of our first meeting with the weed. New York seems able to reproduce almost any natural phenomenon if it's in the mood.

NEW YORK

6/11/55

THE TWO MOMENTS
when New York seems most desirable, when the splendor falls all round about and the city looks like a girl with leaves in her hair, are just as you are leaving and must say goodbye, and just as you return and can say hello. We had one such moment of infatuation not long ago on a warm, airless evening in town, before taking leave of these shores to try another city and another country for a while. There seemed to be a green tree overhanging our head as we sat in exhaustion. All day the fans had sung in offices, the air-conditioners had blown their clammy breath into the rooms, and the brutal sounds of demolition had stung the ear—from buildings that were being knocked down by the destroyers who have no sense of the past. Above our tree, dimly visible in squares of light, the city rose in air. From an open window above us, a whiff of perfume or bath powder drifted down startlingly in the heavy night, somebody having taken a tub to escape the heat. On the tips of some of the branches, a few semiprecious stars settled themselves to rest. There was nothing about the occasion that distinguished it from many another city evening, nothing in particular that we can point to to corroborate our emotion. Yet we somehow tasted New York on our tongue in a great, over-powering draught, and felt that to sail away from so intoxicating a place would be unbearable, even for a brief spell.

14

Whims

CERTAINTIES

1/9/37

SEATED BETWEEN TWO INTELLECTUAL
giants after dinner, we were borne lightly along on conversation's wave, from country to country, dipping into problems of empire, the rise and fall of dynasties, the loves and hates of kings, the warrings in Spain, the trends in Russia, strikes, revolutions, diplomacies, the dissolution of peoples; and without a pause heard everything under the sun made plain. We have the deepest envy for anyone who can feel at home with great matters, and who, armed cap-a-pie with information, can see into the motives of rulers and the hearts of subjects, and can answer Yes to this, No to that. Our envy was so strong that when we returned home at midnight and our wife asked us whether, in our opinion, our dog had worms, we answered with a bold Yes, in a moment of vainglory pretending that here was a thing on which we spoke knowingly—though such was far from the case, as we both secretly knew.

SEPARATIONS

6/13/31

IN THE SHORT SPACE
of half a block, coming home from lunch, one encounters enough human dismay to keep one from getting any work done all the rest of the afternoon. In a building that had two entrances we happened to see, in one entrance, a girl waiting with apparent impatience and disappointment for somebody we suspected was a man, and in the other entrance a man waiting with just as great disappointment for somebody we didn't doubt was a girl. Whether to go up to one of them and whisper: “Go to the other entrance”—that was a problem for a noonday pedestrian who worries, as we do, about life's haphazards. Further along the block, another incident—this time we happened to encounter a kiss. Not a snippy, wornout kiss, but an important emotional kiss of longing or promise. It was meant to be a kiss in parting, but the trouble was that in attempting to part, the two got held up by crosstown traffic, and had to stand right where they were in a silly fashion, waiting for the cars to pass before they could go their separate and significant ways. This spoiled the kiss and the occasion.

SALUTATIONS

9/19/31

STRANGE AS IT MAY SEEM
, we continue to receive letters from people interested in the problem—broached by us last June—of the correct salutation to use in a letter to a girls' school. (Whether to begin “Dear Ladies,” or “My Dears,” or what.) First there is a communication from Thomas O. Mabbott, Ph.D., assistant professor at Hunter College, who says that the head of his department writes “Dear Colleagues.” Appeals for contributions, he says, are likely to employ the feminine pronoun in the body of the text. An etiquette writer in the
World-Telegram,
propounding the same problem, by a funny coincidence, advises the use of the French “Mesdames,” followed, the writer goes on, “by the customary dash.” A man in Baltimore writes that the Governor of the Virgin Islands once wrote a letter to Goucher College beginning: “To the director of one group of virgins from another,” which we neither believe nor think funny. A doctor's secretary writes that she was once faced with a similar problem answering a letter from a divine who had signed himself “Your brother in Christ.” She saw no way out except to begin: “Dear Buddy.” Our liveliest communication, however, was from a School and Camp Specialist—a lady who not only claimed that she could tell, by glancing at her files, the sex of every school principal, matron, dean, or trustee in the country, but that furthermore her office was situated right across the street from ours and that if ever we were really stuck for a salutation, we might write the name of the school on a large piece of cardboard, hold it at the window, and she would gladly flash back the sex of the principal. There, we felt, was help.

LINDBERGH'S GLORY

5/28/27

THE LONELY MB. LINDBEBGH
made the hop without a cup of coffee. This fact alone startled fifty million Americans who have never been able to get through a working day without one. Furthermore, the flyer came down in France without saying that he did it for the kiddies—un-American and unusual. We loved him immediately.

 

We noted that the
Spirit of St. Louis
had not left the ground ten minutes before it was joined by the Spirit of Me Too. A certain oil was lubricating the engine, a certain brand of tires was the cause of the safe take-off. When the flyer landed in Paris every newspaper was “first to have a correspondent at the plane.” This was a heartening manifestation of that kinship that is among man's greatest exaltations. It was beautifully and tenderly expressed by the cable Ambassador Herrick sent the boy's patient mother: “Your incomparable son has done me the honor to be my guest.” We liked that; and for twenty-four hours the world seemed pretty human. At the end of that time we were made uneasy by the volume of vaudeville contracts, testimonial writing and other offers, made by the alchemists who transmute glory into gold. We settled down to the hope that the youthful hero will capitalize himself for only as much money as he reasonably needs.

DISILLUSION

2/16/29

AS WE GROW OLDER
, we find ourself groping toward things that give us a sense of security. Grimly we hang to anything firm, immutable. For that reason we've always set great store by clocks in telegraph offices—other clocks could say what they pleased; to us a clock in a telegraph office was in tune with the planets, was Time Itself. So when we happened to pass a Postal Telegraph office the other morning and saw a great palpable lie written across the face of its clock, life seemed to slip away treacherously from under our feet, and the Naval Observatory (to us a vast marble hall set in concrete on a mountain) slowly crumbled before our eyes, a wet and dripping ruin in a bog of quicksand.

HIPPODROME

2/9/29

THERE IS SOMETHING
ineffably melancholy about the senescence of the Hippodrome—that once gorgeous place. Lately it has catered to the Sixth Avenue trade with such gray trifles as movies, sword swallowers, and pieces of the Wright Whirlwind motors on display in the lobby. Although we know by reading the papers that Sarah Bernhardt, Billy Sunday, and Captain George Fried have trod the Hippodrome's boards, we happen to belong to the generation to whom the Hippodrome means only one thing—the place where, in the long ago, marvellously beautiful maidens used to walk down a flight of stairs into the water, remain for several minutes, and later appear dripping and nymphlike from the unthinkable depths. Incidentally, it is the mansion where we lost, forever, our childlike faith in our father's all-embracing knowledge; for when we asked him point-blank what happened to the ladies while they were under the water, his answer was so vague, so evasive, so palpably out of accord with even the simplest laws of physics, that even our child mind sensed its imbecility, and we went our way thereafter alone in the world, seeking for truth.

OLD COAT

10/24/31

“IT IS NOT EVERY MAN,”
our tailor writes, “that can afford to wear a shabby coat.” He hit home; for a shabby coat is our one extravagance, the one luxury we have been able to affect. Four winters, now, we have crept about the streets in the cold un-kempt security of a battered Burberry—a thin, inadequate garment, pneumonia written in every seam, a disreputable coat, the despair of friends, the byword of enemies, a coat grown so gossamerlike in texture that merely to catch sight of it hanging in the closet is to feel the chill in one's marrows. What its peculiar charm is we don't quite know—whether it is a sop to inelegance, a faint bid for a lost virility, or the simple gesture of the compleat snob. Whatever its hold on us, it has gradually acquired the authentic gentility of an old lady's limousine, but without any of the limousine's protection against draughts. All we know is that every icy blast that grips our blue abdomen, every breeze that climbs the shin, feeds the dying fires of our once great spirit; and that as we shrink deeper into the shabbiness of this appalling garment, we find a certain contentment that no tailor could possibly afford us, for all his engraved announcements.

COLONIZATION

5/23/36

AMONG THE UNACCEPTED INVITATIONS
that have been kicking around our desk for a couple of weeks is one asking us if we would like to become a member of an island colony—a place “where eugenic considerations would always be central.” The letter seems to be from a Mr. Elmer Pendell, of DuBois, Pa., who points out that the typical community in America has now become atrophied and it is high time for us to colonize another land. He is not without his reasonable doubts as to the success of any such venture, for he candidly poses certain questions. “Would we,” he asks us, “need to make arrangements to supply tobacco, coffee, tea, wine, beer, salt, pepper, other spices—or could these or some of them be left out?” It is the kind of challenge that keeps us pacing around our room when we should be at our work—pacing, pacing, wondering whether we could be eugenic without mace, whether we could pioneer sans paprika.

FRONTIER

8/26/39

A NOTE HAS ARRIVED
from the Department of the Interior regarding the Great Smokies, last frontier of the East. Secretary Ickes,
*
it appears, has decided that the characteristics and habits of the mountain folk must be preserved, along with other natural features of the region—birds, trees, animals. A student of linguistics is at work collecting songs and ballads, and there is a definite movement afoot to encourage the Great Smoky people to continue speaking and acting in a distinctly Early American manner.

Our government, with its youthful hopes and fears, is some-times hard to follow. Mr. Roosevelt has dwelt at length on the plight of the underprivileged third—ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished. But this note from Ickes describes a toothless old grandmother who, though she sleeps on a cornhusk bed and wears no shoes, is apparently the Ideal Woman of the Interior Department. They want to preserve her just as she is—her speech, her homespun garments, her bare feet, her primitive customs, even her rebellious nature (she doesn't like the North). Well, who's right? If business is to revive, this old lady has got to buy our American products; she's got to spruce up her person and her home. She's got to have an electric orange-squeezer and a suitable tray for serving canapés. She's got to quit grinding her own meal and buy herself a bag of Gold Medal. She's got to trade the ox for a Pontiac, and she certainly must quit talking like a hick and get herself a radio, so that she can hear the pure accents of the American merchandiser. Yet if she does, the Great Smokies will be spoiled for Ickes and presumably for the rest of us. What quaint mountains will we drive to, in our restless sedans? What hillbilly program will we tune in on, with our insatiable radios? Truly, a nation in search of a frontier is in the devil of a fine fix.

BARRYMORE'S IDEAL

8/26/39

WE WERE GLAD TO LEARN
in the
Mirror
that John Barrymore has never been in love in his life but is still in search of the Ideal Woman. This incurable romantic streak in Mr. Barrymore, which enables him to be both discourteous to the four women of his ex-choice and idealistic toward the yet unattained she, is a challenge to all males. Furthermore, Mr. Barrymore gave the reporter who interviewed him a description of his ideal, a description which enriches and enlarges the field of American love. He said her aura of glamour would trump the noonday sun, her oomph would be a symphony of tuba horns. With this definition from a member of the Royal Family, Love emerges from old moon-haunted glades and comes out into the broiling sun, where it belongs, among mad dogs and Englishmen. Hark, Chloë, is that the sound of distant tubas?

BOAT SHOWS

1/19/52

THE HEAVIEST CONCENTRATION
of New York's dream life is almost certainly to be found under the roof at the annual Boat Show. Here is where more men can gaze at what they are never going to possess than in any other gathering. A man who is born boat-happy dies boat-happy, and the intervening years are a voyage that may never take him afloat but that keeps him alive. Much of the time, he is in exquisite torture from unfulfilled desire, and spends his hours reading books about the sea. The boating world contains, of course, tiny coracles that are cheap enough to be within the means of practically anybody. But it also contains, as many a man knows, the dream ship that is always just out of sight over the horizon. The second-hand market is not much help. A good boat, strongly built and well maintained, doesn't depreciate greatly in value, as a car does, and a man may wait thirty years to realize his dream, only to find that by the time he is wealthy enough to buy the boat, he has become too emaciated to hoist sail and get the anchor. A man feels about a boat entirely differently from the way he feels about a car: he falls in love with it, often from afar, and the affair is a secret one—comparable to that of a young girl who sleeps with an actor's photograph under her pillow. Many an otherwise normal man falls in love with a boat at the age of fourteen, guards his secret well, and dies with it; and the boat is just as beautiful, her profile as lovely, her sheer line as tantalizing, at the time of his death as at the beginning of the affair. When you encounter this poor fellow in Grand Central Palace, poking around among the booths and twiddling with the sheaves of blocks, you would never suspect him of being the Great Lover that he is. He looks just like the next man—which isn't surprising, for the next man is suffering too.

LEISURE CLASS

8/8/53

WE RAN ACROSS
the phrase “leisure class” the other day and it stopped us cold, so quaint did it sound, so fragrant with the spice of yesteryear. You used to read a good deal about the leisure class, but something seems to have happened to it. One thing that may have happened to it is that too many people joined it and the point went out of it. In the big cities, every-body quits work now on Friday, climbs into a car, and beats it. That much is sure. Where these elusive people go we aren't quite sure, but they do go away, and presumably on the wings of leisure. A switchboard operator disappears from the switch-board on a Friday, and the next time you see her a lot of water has gone over the dam and she is unrecognizable because of leisure and exposure to the sun, which serves all classes equally. If your refrigerator quits making ice cubes on a Saturday after-noon (as ours did recently) or if you lose a gall bladder on Times Square after the Saturday-evening show, you might just as well walk over to the river, tie a rock to your foot, and jump in. Your repairman and your doctor are in the Catskills, probably fishing from the same boat. The few glimpses we have had lately of highways, beaches, and mountain-house porches have not been reassuring; these are the classic habitats of the leisure class, but the scenes have been confused and incredibly scrambled, like an infield during a bunt. Leisure used to have a direct relation-ship to wealth, but even that seems to have changed. A lot of people who are independently wealthy cannot properly claim to belong to the leisure class anymore: they are too nerved up to be leisurely and too heavily taxed to be completely relieved of the vulgar burden of finding a livelihood. They, too, swarm out of town on Friday, along with their switchboard operator, and they show up again a few days later, burned and exhausted, ready for another short, feverish period of steady gain, at desk, at dictaphone, at wit's end.