by Wendy Lesser
And then later, when I began to have literary business to transact, I would come to New York at least once or twice every year. By this time my friends had become richer and more famous, and I had nicer places to stay. Also, I had more of a reason for being in the city: a book critics’ meeting to attend, a Threepenny reading to host, a PEN conference to drop in on. I was not an insider to the world of New York’s literary life, but I was no longer a complete outsider.
It wasn’t that my New York life was all forward movement. There were plenty of setbacks. I remember one December when I was occupying a borrowed apartment on Barrow Street, and my first book had just come out to virtually no reviews, and I felt a bit of a fraud and a bit of a failure, and every taxi I took seemed to be driven by an aspiring novelist or an aspiring musician, to the point where New York seemed bursting at the seams with aspiring types like me: we were all aspiration, with nothing much to show for it. And I remember another visit, summer this time, when I was grumpily steaming down Fifth Avenue (no doubt having failed to interest any publishers in advertising in The Threepenny Review, or any bookstores in stocking it), and a street vendor shoved an “I ♥ NY” button in my face, causing me to snarl, “I don’t love New York! I hate New York!”
But these occasions were relatively few. Mostly what I remember is wonderful October evenings—sometimes unseasonably warm, sometimes with a slight chill in the air—when I would venture out from a friend’s Upper West Side apartment into that glorious New York twilight, with the lights just coming on inside people’s rooms and the convivial sidewalk tables clustered together on Broadway or Columbus, and it would seem that everything was possible.
Years passed. Many things happened to me: a husband, a child, a brief brush with a rather frightening form of skin cancer, the acquisition of a house I loved. I became, willy-nilly, increasingly attached to my life in the form it had taken, ever more firmly embedded in a particular place. I skipped a couple of trips to New York; we went, that year, to London instead, and I transferred some of my imaginings to that older (but, to me, also newer) metropolis.
And then, just a few months ago, I was back in New York for a weeklong stay. I had a lot of time on my hands, and I spent it visiting with friends: lunch in the Village, dinner in Gramercy Park, breakfast at the Algonquin, cocktails near Lincoln Center. One evening I went to have a drink with a friend on the Upper West Side, the woman with whom I had often stayed in earlier years. As I was leaving her apartment, I suddenly had one of those moments of clarity, those rare moments in which you become aware of the extent to which you are no longer the person you once were.
It had been a beautiful, sunny day in May, and the light was golden at that hour, as it always was in my memories of the best New York days. I was going to meet another friend for dinner a few blocks away, and as I swung down Columbus I expected to have a recurrence of that old the-world-was-all-before-me feeling. But I didn’t. What I had instead was the sense that a life which had once been all possibility had now congealed, to a large extent, into actuality. It was not a bad life—in fact, it was a very good life, one that I wouldn’t have changed for anything. But that was part of the problem, part of the awareness. Once change had represented promise. Now it was merely threat. I had made my choices, and I was pleased with how they had turned out, but the best I could hope for, it seemed to me at that moment, was to hold on to what I already had. The world was not all before me; at least half of it was now behind.
I suppose you would call this a sense of mortality, of impending death. But I did not feel it that way. Death, after all, is a change (“the last new experience,” as Arnold Bennett has eloquently called it), whereas what I had suddenly become aware of was stasis. I was not, after all, going to have a New York life. I had become pretty much the person I had planned to be, but without ever moving to New York. Apparently the New York self was not as essential a part of me as I had once imagined. She had somehow been jettisoned by circumstances along the way, and it was only when I turned around to find her, there on Columbus Avenue, that I found out she was gone.
Copyright © 1999 by Wendy Lesser
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1999.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Photo of Tamara Toumanova by George Platt Lynes.
Copyright © Estate of Russell Lynes. Courtesy of Paul Kopeikin Gallery.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Lesser, Wendy
The amateur: an independent life of letters / Wendy Lesser.
p. cm.
1. Lesser, Wendy. 2. Periodical editors — United States—Biography. 3. Critics—United States—Biography. 4. Book reviewing—United States. I.
Title.
PN4874.L3785A3 1999
810.9—dc21
[B] 98-26157
eISBN: 978-0-307-87420-7
www.vintagebooks.com
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