by Michael Sims
As he had been in Mount Vernon and Maine, in Ithaca and out West, Andy remained preoccupied with nature. He could not step outdoors without noticing and identifying the birds calling and fluttering around him—the raucous jay in the sidewalk-trapped lindens, a kinglet on a hedge, the brown thrasher and white-throated sparrow on the lawn. Nor did he stop responding emotionally to changes in the weather. Walking along in a remarkably peaceful snowfall one February day, he happily admired the way that the world grew still and quiet. The cabs’ usual roar was muted to a whisper, and the elevated subway seemed like a ghost train in the white sky. Then snowplows began roaring and scraping to keep the streets clean—a sudden intrusion into his childlike fancy that Andy found annoying. In early spring he wrote an ode to the humble city garden, “its skinny ailanthus tree, its vagrant cat, its indomitable privet hedge.”
One balmy April day he explored Bronx Park, not just the botanical garden and zoo but the wandering paths along the river. Two miles of the Bronx River fell within park boundaries. For a quarter of a mile, beginning on the footpath near the rose garden, where tall, sunlit hemlocks stood almost in the water’s edge, Andy was gloriously alone—a state difficult to achieve in New York City. The city seemed impossibly far away; even the sound of a train was too distant to be real. A duck honked overhead. A couple stood on a bridge, leaning against the railing, staring down at sunshine sparkling on the rushing water. The man was talking and the woman crying. At this point Andy fled the suddenly tense scene and soon found himself on the subway, already composing a casual about an idyllic glimpse of nature and its off note of soured romance.
February 1928 found him braving the crowds flocking to see the newly opened Reptile and Amphibian Hall at the American Museum of Natural History. Overhead were double rows of chandeliers, and on each side large windows rose up to the ceiling. Looking into display cases past these many reflected lights, Andy peered at stuffed specimens and at dioramas of habitats. He especially admired a nine-foot-long monster nicknamed the “dragon lizard,” which had been brought back, during a museum expedition the year before, from Indonesian islands such as Komodo. It looked no less dinosaur-like for also seeming fat and lazy, its wrinkled, loose skin looking as impenetrable as a medieval coat of mail. Andy enjoyed learning the natural history behind Kipling’s story “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” and about the Russell’s viper, a dramatically patterned Indian snake thought to have inspired the Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.” The fat, green-and-black-patterned heads of the Brazilian horned frogs made him think of Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and one lizard reminded him instantly of the actor William Boyd as he had looked in the finale of the recent play What Price Glory. As usual when he dropped in at the museum, Andy also revisited favorite exhibits. He was always impressed by the stuffed, oversize black-and-white “raccoon bear” that had been captured in China in 1916 by the German zoologist Hugo Weigold. It looked like a giant version of a child’s teddy bear. Although the museum’s display stated that Weigold had seen the animals live and had even purchased a cub (which didn’t live long), every time Andy saw the stuffed exhibit of this creature he speculated whimsically that perhaps it was merely a masterpiece of taxidermy.
MOST OF THESE rambles and flights of fancy made it into The New Yorker. Its pages offered a nourishing environment for Andy’s kind of thinking, for lushly textured observations and playing with language, for his ability to recount a passing experience and overlay it with both thoughtful irony and a kind of uncluttered clear-sightedness. He noticed more than nature, of course. In his first years, he commented on everything from a Shriners convention to the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, from an orchid show to the pauper cemetery on an island in Long Island Sound. In one casual he might complain about the hubbub of lunch hour in the city, but later in the same issue he would be off to a larger view of the world. “A lot has been done by novelists and playwrights to discredit war,” he observed, “but occasionally it becomes clear that most men seem to like it quite well: middle-aged veterans who get drunk and recall old glories, young men who stay sober and hear drums four thousand miles away.” In August 1928 he ironically surveyed the newspaper reports of Coolidge’s secretary of state, Frank B. Kellogg, who the month before—with Aristide Briand, the French minister of foreign affairs—had led the signing of the General Treaty for the Renunciation of War. Nicknamed the Kellogg-Briand Pact, it claimed (with numerous caveats) to prohibit aggressive war for any purpose other than self-defense. Signatories included Germany, Japan, France, and Britain. “While the pacific ink was still fresh on the peace treaty,” Andy wrote with skeptically raised eyebrows, Kellogg boarded a warship and made a cannon-bristling tour of France, Ireland, and elsewhere, always surrounded by a demonstration of military power, usually America’s.
The next month, Andy was back to writing about nature, in his usual oblique way. In a newspaper he ran across a long article about the mysterious chemistry that goes on inside a living cell. As he read, he thought for a moment that perhaps scientists were really going to decipher some golden secret of life. Shortly after finishing the article, however, he bent down to peer into his goldfish tank. Frisky, the solitary snail he had placed in the tank, had been preoccupied with its own chemistry. Andy was surprised to find a baby snail creeping wetly along the lower glass of the tank wall, turning its cartoon head this way and that, extending and retracting its knobby antennae. This glimpse—a reminder of the secret lives around him—seemed to ensure mysteries enough to keep him and all of science occupied for the immediate future, he decided, as he threw out the paper with the article.
He observed that New Yorkers, as they step up to a curb, instinctively know which way the traffic is coming from, no matter how many one-way streets they’ve just crossed. “They glance in the right direction,” he wrote, “as naturally as a deer sniffs upwind.” He speculated that Ziegfeld Follies maintained a field corps of “Follies girls,” because they seemed to show up anywhere a newspaper photographer happened to be—including when an injured wild duck landed to rest on the roof of a new hotel. One sunny mid-October he pointed out that autumn’s colorful chemistry was not lost even on the citybound:
Down in the Village the people whose houses look out on the garden between Sullivan and MacDougal have seen autumn in the visitation of the brown thrasher and the veery. One drifting yellow leaf on a windowsill can be a city dweller’s fall, pungent and melancholy as any hillside in New England.
He was still plagued by wild anxieties and indefinable nostalgia. “As we grow older,” he wrote in one casual in early 1929, “we find ourself groping toward things that give us a sense of security.” He was twenty-nine. He worried constantly, for example, when riding the subway and commuter trains. Even on the familiar Sixth Avenue el, swaying with one hand in a monkey grip on the strap, he feared that the train’s momentum alongside too close buildings and above too busy streets was reckless. Andy invented a new name for this fear. Freud had used the term locomotor phobia, which was sometimes written as locomotophobia, for agoraphobia, but Andy casually revised Freud. He redefined locomotophobia as “fear that the engineer is dead,” and that as a consequence any moment now you will die in a train wreck.
To counter his anxiety, Andy looked for rhythms and unity everywhere. Now and then he peered into the cosmic paradoxes of Einstein’s theories. He enjoyed the dizzying revelations of astronomy and found that they cleared his mind and enlarged his perspective on everyday life in a visceral rather than an abstract way. At times the Einsteinian cosmos seemed to Andy as varied but sporadically comprehensible as New York City, which appeared to alter with every change in lighting or vantage point, every evocative glimpse up a side street. Such a universe inspired “the moods of an open-and-shut day,” he wrote, using a Northeastern term for a day of alternating clouds and sun. In early 1931, The New Yorker published Andy’s ode to Einstein’s cosmic visions, which included his remark, “We trot along with Einstein from one cosmology to another, holdi
ng tight to his trousers-leg like a child.” As Andy wrote this piece, the surreal ironies of relativity called to mind Lewis Carroll, so he suggested that perhaps Einstein had been reading Carroll more than he had been looking through telescopes. A particular image occurred to him and he flipped through a copy of Through the Looking-Glass until he found it. It was from the scene in chapter 5, “Wool and Water,” in which, after Alice helps the White Queen brush her hair and in return gets offered a job as maid (“Twopence a week and jam every other day”), the Queen explains to Alice the paradoxes of living backward. Andy added the passage to his casual about Einstein:
“It’s a poor sort of memory that works only backwards,” the Queen remarked.
“What sort of things do you remember best?” Alice ventured to ask.
“Oh, things that happened the week after next,” the Queen replied in a careless tone.
Then Andy went back to describing more mundane topics, such as the police officer who accosted him outside the public library. Andy was sitting on a step, leaning back and basking in the early June sunshine, lulled by the arterial flow of cars down Fifth Avenue, the rush of people on the sidewalks, the strutting pigeons that clustered and cooed in their primordial social dance.
Suddenly a cop interrupted his sunlit daydream by walking up and snapping, “No sitting, standing, or lounging on the stoop.”
Andy was offended. He replied that the steps were there for people to sit on in the sun—and besides, he argued, sitting in the sun was really all there was to life anyway.
The cop wasn’t interested in a philosophical discussion. “Well, it was pretty bad here, when we let ’em sit on the steps. Women used to loll here and fellers would parade around in front of them.”
Andy pointed out that in this respect people were much like pigeons.
HE ENJOYED THE company of other street birds as well and thought of them as interesting neighbors. Naturally he noticed the countless English sparrows that flocked around every scrap on the sidewalks and clustered under park benches, with their bright dark eyes watching every move around them. The male was an elegant brown, black, and gray, with russet temples and a dramatic black bib, but the female so drab by comparison as to be invisibly street-colored. Actually neither a sparrow nor particularly English, but a weaver finch that occurs naturally in Europe and Asia, this bird had been deliberately introduced into the United States—fifty pairs released in Brooklyn in the mid-nineteenth century. They had multiplied wildly and adapted to almost every kind of habitat, especially urban.
One day shortly after joining The New Yorker, Andy wrote a piece about how the birds seemed to experience early nesting urges before either spring or their own hormones were quite ready. He noticed one particular bird in Madison Square, where Broadway and Fifth Avenue met at Twenty-third Street. The sparrow picked up a straw and carried it in its beak with an air of importance and impending decision, as it hopped along near the restless traffic. By then the traffic hubbub featured mostly automobiles. Few horses were in sight, and those mostly in the parks—a long way from the trolley cars and horse-drawn wagons that had filled these streets during Andy’s childhood. An admirer of many aspects of both nature and civilization, Andy cast an experienced eye on the many honking cars jostling down Manhattan’s streets—Chevrolet’s Series F Superior and other recent competition, but still mostly Fords, even the old Model T’s, from the apparently ageless roadster of his childhood to boxy black Tudor sedans with red wheel spokes, from wooden-bedded pickups to the buslike Woody wagon. Despite only a couple of decades of experience, the street birds navigated these perils with ease. The straw-carrying sparrow he was watching peered around and up—perhaps at the towering wedge of the Flatiron Building nearby—and industriously hopped about for a moment, tilting the straw this way and that. Then it suddenly dropped the straw, as if postponing its nest dreams until later.
In this piece Andy imagined interviewing the bird about a topic that often preoccupied the writer himself: the relative merits of rural and urban living. Why, he asks the bird, forage in the city when the countryside offers more easily available food? The sparrow indicates a nearby park bench and the candy wrappers and other trash beneath it, mentioning the sizable percentage of peanuts that fall to ground uneaten, the nutrient value of Runkel’s chocolate wrappers, the spillage of Cracker Jacks, the amount of oats that trickle out of the park horses’ feed bags and fall like manna. “Here in town,” the bird adds, “I can get everything that the country offers, plus the drama, books, the museums, the stimulus of interesting contacts. I took space on a ledge of the Metropolitan two years ago; it afforded an extraordinary outlook on Greek statuary, and influenced my viewpoint.”
Naturally Andy saw various aspects of himself in these avian street urchins. “At this season,” he wrote, “the sparrows are particularly conspicuous because they are in love—and love addles any creature and makes him noisy.” The bird explains that any night he wants to he can fly over to Bryant Park and join the hundreds of birds that roost in the tree overlooking the newsstand. “It is a rowdy bunch (characteristic of Sixth Avenue) but no questions are asked and the next morning I tell my wife I was unavoidably locked in a loft where I had been looking for bits of plaster. Males need to get out of themselves once in a while.”
Chapter 8
CRAZY
The whole scheme of my existence is based on concealment.
IN ADULTHOOD AS in high school and college, romance was not Andy’s strong suit. In 1926, the year he became a staff writer for The New Yorker, he began occasionally seeing a young woman named Mary Osborn, but the poems he wrote during this time indicate a typically halting and unrealized relationship. In a sonnet entitled “To the Bronze Bust of Holley in Washington Square,” he apologized for his awkwardness during a romantic moment and explained why he failed to kiss her:
I could not then unbend to claim my prize
Simply because you would not close your eyes!
In a later poem he made the odd claim that he had “Too small a heart, too large a pen.” But he was candid about his anxious response to the stirrings of his own yearning for love:
And if I have not said it well,
Or even loud enough to hear it,
That is because I cannot tell
How much I like, how much I fear it.
By 1927 Mary was gone and Andy was flirting with a nineteen-year-old named Rosanne Magdol, who had recently come to work at The New Yorker as a secretary. She had deliberately chosen the hip new magazine as a road that would lead her out of what she considered the suffocating culture of her family, who were recent Jewish immigrants from Russia. Rosanne was petite, attractive, lively, and—by Andy’s standards, anyway—distractingly uninhibited. Unlike him, she simply was not shy. Once she caused a stir during a staff beer party by walking up to Gene Tunney, who was awkwardly standing by himself and looking self-conscious, and casually engaging him in conversation. At thirty, Tunney was a two-time world heavyweight boxing champion, having pummeled Jack Dempsey both this year and last; he towered over Rosanne and smiled down at her. Andy watched from across the room.
Rosanne’s relationship with Andy never progressed to an actual three-dimensional romance. As usual, rather than taking a woman out on a date, he invited Rosanne for long walks, during which he tried to amuse her with stories such as the adventures of his pet canary, Baby. Once Rosanne invited him to a lecture on yoga, an occasion he soon mocked in a casual; he also parodied in writing her desire to, as she said, “rub shoulders with the famous.” Once he showed up at her apartment at night, unannounced, only to find a man there—an older friend who, she explained, needed a sofa to sleep on for a couple of nights. Despite having never actually expressed his feelings to Rosanne, Andy was upset.
Eventually he described himself—safely costumed in third person—in a self-conscious sonnet called “Portrait.” It was as self-aggrandizing as a Romantic poet striding across the Lake District a century earlier, but candid about his
crippling second-guessing and his melancholy bent.
He goes his way with a too cautious stride
That checks him safe just short of every goal;
Seeks not conclusions lest they try his pride,
Claims not fair booty lest it glut his soul.
If it be love, he finds it unrequited,
And seasons it with sadness to the taste;
If it be fame, he finds his name is slighted,
And turns his luck aside in conscious haste.
Frustration tickles his most plaintive strings
And satisfies his bent for somber living;
He daubs with mystery the obvious things,
And holds fulfillment off—always contriving
From life (held very gingerly) to press
The fine musk odor of unhappiness.
About the time he wrote up his interview with the sparrow, during the spring of 1927, Andy used a different bird as mouthpiece for his worries. While working at The New Yorker and agonizing as usual over the conflict between his romantic attraction to women and his deep-seated fear that he might lose himself if he committed to love and marriage, Andy wrote up the dilemma as a conversation between himself and the canary Baby, whose exploits he had recounted to Mary. This male caged bird, Andy claimed, thought of himself as an artist. Like the sparrow in Madison Square that Andy had written about, the canary exhibited signs of a nesting urge that made Andy uneasy. One spring night, Andy claimed with Don Marquis chutzpah, he was reading the recently published Journal of Katherine Mansfield aloud to Baby, who now and then sang along with the words. But then Andy read an evocative phrase from Mansfield, “the warm soft wind of spring, searching out the heart,” the kind of expression of vague longing that he often found moving. Suddenly the bird stopped singing and began fidgeting with a piece of string, finally trying to wrap it around himself and sit down in it.