Sunrise with Seamonsters

by Paul Theroux

4:26—"Which way to the Flushing Line?"

  4:29—"How do I transfer here?"

  4:30—"Is this the way to 23rd street?"

  4:37—"Donde es Quins Plaza?"

  4:43—"Where is the 'A' train?"

  As Officer Burgois answers this question, a group of people gather around him. There are four more requests for directions. It occurs to me that, as all maps have been vandalized, the lost souls need very detailed directions.

  4:59—Radio Call: There is an injured passenger at a certain token booth—a gash on her ankle. Officer Burgois lets another cop attend to it.

  5:02—"Where ees the Shuffle?" asks a boy carrying an open can of beer. "Over there," Officer Burgois says, "And dispose of that can. I'm watching you."

  5:10—Radio Call: A man whose wallet has been stolen is at the Transit Police Cubicle on the Times Square concourse. Officer Burgois steps in to observe.

  Man: What am I going to do? Officer: The Officer-in-charge will take down the information.

  Man: Are you going to catch him? Officer: We'll prosecute if you can identify him.

  Man: I only saw his back. Officer: That's too bad.

  Man: He was tall, thin, and black. I had twenty-two dollars in that wallet.

  Officer: You can kiss your money goodbye. Even if we caught him he'd say, 'This is my money.'

  Man: This is the first time anything like this has ever happened to me.

  5:17—Seeing Officer Burgois, a member of the public says, "There's two kids on the train downstairs snatching bags—go get them!" Officer Burgois runs and finds the boys hanging over the gate between the trains, the favorite spot for snatching bags from passengers on the platform. Officer Burgois apprehends them. The boys, named Troy and Sam, are from the Bronx. They can't remember when they were born; they seem to be about fourteen or fifteen. They deny they were snatching bags. Each boy has about $35 in his pocket. They are sullen but not at all afraid. Officer Burgois gives them a Y.D. form and says, "If I catch you again, your mother's going to pick you up from the station..."

  5:28—"Hey, officer, how do I get to...?"

  At this point I stopped writing. I could see that it would be repetitious—and so it was, dreary questions, petty crime and obstinate sneaks. But no one bit Officer Burgois. He has been doing this every hour of every working day for twelve and a half years, and will go on doing it, or something very much like it, for the rest of his working life.

  It costs $25 or more to go by taxi from Midtown to Kennedy Airport. For $5 it is possible to go by subway, on "The JFK Express" and the forty minutes is the same or less than a taxi. But it is rumored that this service will soon be withdrawn, because so few people use it. If that happens, there is another option—the express on the "A" line to Howard Beach, which takes under an hour and costs seventy-five cents.

  There are ducks at Howard Beach, and herons farther on at Jamaica Bay, and odd watery vistas all the way from Broad Channel to Far Rockaway. The train travels on a causeway past sleepy fishing villages and woodframe houses, and it's all ducks and geese until the train reaches the far side of the bay, where the dingier bungalows and the housing projects begin. Then, roughly at Frank Avenue station, the Atlantic Ocean pounds past jetties of black rocks, not far from the tracks; and at Mott Avenue is the sprawling two-storey town of Far Rockaway, with its main street and its slap-happy architecture and its ruins. It looks like its sister-cities in Ohio and Rhode Island, with just enough trees to hide its dullness, and though part of it is in a state of decay it looks small enough to save.

  That was a pleasant afternoon, when I took the train to the Rockaways. I spent this freezing week in December doing little else except riding the subway. Each morning I decided on a general direction, and then I set off, sometimes sprinting to the end of the line and making my way back slowly; or else stopping along the way and varying my route back. I went from Midtown to Jamaica Estates in Queens, and returned via Coney Island. There are white Beluga whales at the Aquarium at Coney Island, and Amazonian electric eels that produce six hundred and fifty volts (the Congo River electric catfish is punier at three hundred and fifty volts), and the African lungfish which drowns if held underwater but can live four years out of water. There are drunks and transvestites and troglodytes in the rest of out-of-season Coney, and the whole place looks as if it has been insured and burned. Though it is on Rockaway Inlet, it is a world away from Rockaway Park. It is also the terminus for six lines.

  Never mind the dirt, ignore the graffiti—you can get anywhere you want in New York this way. There are two hundred and thirty route miles on the system—twice as many as the Paris Metro. The trains run all night—in London they shut down at quarter to midnight. New York's one-price token-system is the fairest and most sensible in the world; London's multi-fare structure is clumsy, ridiculous and a wasteful sop to the unions; Japan's, while just as complicated, is run by computers which spit tickets at you and then belch out your change. The Moscow Metro has grandiose chandeliers to light some stations, but the New York subway has hopeful signs, like the one at 96th and 7th Ave: "New Tunnel lighting is being installed at this area as part of a Major Rehabilitation Program. Completion is expected in the summer of 1980." They were over a year later in finishing, but at least they recognized the problem. In most of the world's subway trains, the driver's cab occupies the whole of the front of the first car. But on the New York system you can stand at the front of the train and watch the rats hurrying aside as the train careers towards the black tilting tunnel and the gleaming tracks.

  The trains are always the same, but the stations differ, usually reflecting what is above-ground: Spring Street is raffish, Forest Hills smacks of refinement, Livonia Avenue on the LL looks bombed. People aspire to Bay Ridge and say they wouldn't be caught dead in East Harlem—though others are. Fort Hamilton turns into the amazing Verrazano Bridge and the "One" into a ferry landing. By the time I had reached 241st Street on the "2" I thought I had gotten to somewhere near Buffalo, but returning on the "5" and dropping slowly through the Bronx to Lexington Avenue and then to Lower Manhattan and across on the "4" to Flatbush, I had a sense of unrelieved desolation.

  No one speaks on the subway except to the person on his immediate right or left, and only then if they are very old friends or else married. Avoiding the stranger's gaze is what the subway passenger does best: there is not much eye-contact below-ground. Most passengers sit bolt upright, with fixed expressions, ready for anything. A look of alertness prevails. As a New York City subway passenger you are J. Alfred Prufrock—you "prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet." Few people look relaxed or off-guard. Those new to the subway have the strangest expressions, like my English friend, who told me there was only one way to survive the subway: "You have to look as if you're the one with the meat cleaver. You have to go in with your eyes flashing."

  In order to appear inconspicuous on the subway, many people read. Usually they read the Daily News— and a few read Nowy Dziennik which is the same thing; the Times is less popular, because it takes two hands to read it. But the Bible is very popular, along with religious tracts and the Holy Koran and Spanish copies of The Watchtower; lots of boys study for their Bar-Mitzvah on the "F" line in Queens. I saw The Bragg Toxicless Diet on the "B" and La Pratique du Français Parlé on the "RR". All over the system, riders read lawbooks— The Interpretation of Contracts, The Law of Torts, Maritime Law. The study of law is a subway preoccupation, and it is especially odd to see all these lawbooks in this lawless atmosphere—the law student sitting on the vandalized train. The police officers on the vandalized train create the same impression of incongruity. When I first saw the police they looked mournful to me, but after I got to know them I realized that most of them are not mournful at all, just dead-tired and overworked and doing a thankless job.

  Not long ago, the Daily News ran a series about the subway called "The Doomsday Express". It was about all the spectacular catastrophes that are possible on the New York system—crashes and nucl
ear disasters and floods with heavy casualties. "Doomsday" has a curious appeal to a proud and vaguely religious ego. One of the conceits of modern man is his thinking that the world will end with a big bang. It is a kind of hopeful boast, really, the idea that it will take destruction on a vast scale for us to be wiped out.

  It is easy to frighten people with catastrophes—much harder to convince them that decay and trivial-seeming deterioration can be inexorable. The New York subway system is wearing out, and parts of it are worn out; all of it looks threadbare. No city can survive without people to run it, and the class divisions which have distinct geographical centers in New York make the subway all the more necessary.

  There is a strong political commitment to the subway, particularly among down-market Democrats. But only money can save it. To this end there is a plan afoot called "The Five-Year Capital Program" of $7.2 billion. It is the largest amount of money ever spent in a non-federal program and will involve fixing cars and buses, retiling and cleaning and lighting stations, restoring maps, windows and signs, repairing tracks and bridges—all the day-to-day things which, because they have been ignored, have given the subway a bad case of arteriosclerosis. It remains to be seen whether this program is instituted. If it isn't, New York will come even closer to looking like dear old Calcutta. There will be no big bang.

  Anyway, I am a supporter of the Whimper Theory—the more so after my experience of the subway. "I pity you," people said when I told them what I was going to do. But I ended up admiring the handiwork of the system and hating the people who misused it, the way you hate kids who tear the branches off saplings. Most people who live in New York act as if they own it—it makes some people respectful and others it turns into slobs; and that is how they treat the subway.

  The subway is buried and unspectacular-looking. Its worst aspects are not its crime or its dangers, but the cloudy fears it inspires, and its dirt and delay. It ought to be fixed, and very soon, because its slow death has made New York uglier and more inconvenient, and if it is not restored to health the future will be much nastier for us all.

  Easy Money—Patronage

  [1981]

  When I was asked to speak at the Library of Congress, I was told that my "honorarium" would come from the Gertrude Clarke Whittal Fund. At once, I knew what my subject must be.

  In some of my short stories, and in several novels— The Family Arsenal and Picture Palace, in particular—I dealt directly with patrons and recipients. The idea of patronage has always fascinated me, perhaps the more because I have never received a grant or won a fellowship. (I realize that in saying this I risk sounding patronizing about patronage.) Of course, I have benefited from other kinds of patronage—it would be hard to find anyone on earth who can claim that he has not been touched in some way by the busy attentions of a philanthropoid. Were you going to except the farmers in rural Mozambique? But they owe their political independence to the Frelimo guerrilla movement, which was aided by the Mozambique Institute, which was partially funded by the Ford Foundation. This is to say nothing of the poor peasants of Puno in Peru, patronized by the Frente Departmental de Campesinos de Puno, whose bank balance was entirely the generosity of the International Development Foundation, the Rabb Charitable Foundation and, ultimately, those inexhaustible patrons, the gentlemen of the Central Intelligence Agency, whose inscribed motto (it is on the building in Langley, Virginia) states, "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (St John, 8:32).

  (Biblical quotations are commonplace among patrons and their critics. Professor Robert Merton of Columbia University described what he called "The Matthew Syndrome" in philanthropy. His text was Matthew, 25:29—"For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that he hath." If I had to choose a text from the Bible, I would choose Amos 3:3—"Can two walk together except they be agreed?")

  Art and money, artist and patron, are wonderfully seen, hand in hand, in the story about Charles Sackville, the Sixth Earl of Dorset. Sackville was a great patron, a great host at his house, Knole, and a friend of Dryden, Pope, Prior, and even our own William Penn. He was in other ways a typically rakish figure of the Restoration court of Charles II, which is to say another lover of Nell Gwyn. He was very rich. Lord Rochester said that Sackville could get away with anything—and that was praise indeed, since we have no record of Rochester having been caught with his pants down, and as his biographer mentions in surpassing detail, they were often down.

  Alexander Pope wrote Sackville's epitaph:

  Dorset, the grace of courts, the Muse's pride,

  Patron of the arts, and judge of Nature, died.

  The scourge of pride, though sanctified or great,

  Of fops in learning, and of knaves in state, etc.

  One evening, Sackville was with a group of illustrious friends at Knole House. To entertain them in front of the fire, Sackville suggested that they all write "impromptus"—a few brilliant lines apiece—and that John Dryden, who had probably ceased to be Poet Laureate at this point, should act as judge. The guests took pens and paper and put their minds to the task, each hoping to win with his own piece. The papers were collected and given to Dryden, who carefully examined each entry. He then announced Sackville as the winner. This was not so surprising—Sackville, as well as being a patron, was also a considerable poet.

  Dryden read out Sackville's winning impromptu. It was not a poem. It went as follows: "I promise to pay Mr John Dryden five hundred pounds on demand. Signed, Dorset."

  Patrons usually have the last word. Is there a better example of this than Washington D.C.? The visible art and sculpture in the city are almost completely the result of patronage. The patronage from the beginning was intended to create culture. We were sensitive about being a new nation, and Europe was not kind to our feelings. In 1820, the Edinburgh Review commented, "In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue?" That quotation is given in Lillian Miller's Patrons and Patriotism; The Encouragement of the Fine Arts in the United States, 1790–1860. Prof. Miller describes how our economic nationalists were often at the same time cultural nationalists—we had a country, and money, and commerce, but no art. So nationalism, and money, produced patrons. Of course, art had its detractors. John Adams held the view that "the arts had been from the dawn of history the product of despotism and superstition and so should be avoided in the new republic". And Ben Franklin wrote that all things had their season: "To America, one schoolmaster is worth a dozen poets, and the invention of a machine or the improvement of an implement is of more importance than a masterpiece of Raphael."

  Within thirty years of his saying that, Franklin's portrait was painted for all to see, by Constantino Brumidi, an exiled Italian artist who received patronage for twenty-five years in Washington, and whose fat cherubs were ridiculed by the downright tastes of Washingtonians from the moment the paint was dry. Franklin was enshrined by Brumidi with Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci and William Brewster, as representing "The Four Forces of Civilization". Franklin was History. Brewster, the Pilgrim Father, was Religion. These are in the President's Room of the Capitol Extension. Brumidi received $8 a day for his painting in the 1850's and towards the end of the decade this was raised to $10.

  His patron was the United States government, but the man responsible for hiring him was Captain Montgomery C. Meigs, a professional soldier and engineer. Meigs was pleased with Brumidi's work. Prof. Miller wrote, "As an investment, the captain believed it was in the long run a cheaper substitute for wallpaper or whitewash." But Brumidi had many critics, notably the America artists who had been overlooked when the Italian was hired. And was this Italianate farrago of garlands and flying cherubs really American art? That it was the result of patronage there is no doubt.

  Thomas Crawford's fresco on the Senate Pediment of the Capitol Building was similarly contentious. He was American—he also had
been hired by Meigs, as a free-lance sculptor. His fresco was Grecian, and ponderously—and even racially—symbolic. It represented (this was his commission, the patron's order) "The advancement of the white race and the decadence of the Indians." It was later retitled as "The Progress of American Civilization". Now, I suppose, it is simply, "That pediment up there." Crawford had been asked to submit designs and to avoid any obscure symbolism—the prerogative of the patron. In the center of the group is "a majestic goddess," America; on her left is "the march of civilization" from the Indian to the pioneer; on the right are figures symbolizing activities of successful Americans ("the triumphant white race," Prof. Miller says)—mechanic, merchant, soldier, and so forth.

  Crawford's work was generally unpopular. It was seen as unrealistic, offensive to the Indian character, it falsified history; and Senator Sam Houston ridiculed it as stiff, badly observed and untruthful. The figure of Liberty on the Capitol Dome was also ridiculed by Crawford's patrons, who hated the un-Indian shoes and the Liberty Cap. Houston was a senator. He could do no more than make his fellow senators laugh as he jeered. But Jefferson Davis was Secretary of War, one of the higher patrons. He actually redesigned the headgear and gave Liberty (or "Armed Freedom" as it was first called) a plumed helmet. Crawford obeyed his patrons' command.

  Like Hiram Powers, who did the statues of Jefferson and Franklin, Thomas Crawford was already at the time of his commission an accomplished sculptor. His work may have been news to Sam Houston, but his reputation was established. The most withering critic of patronage, Samuel Johnson, would not have been surprised by Washington's treatment of her hired artists. As Johnson wrote to the Earl of Chesterfield, "Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help?" (In his Dictionary he defined patron thus: "Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence and is repaid with flattery.")