Allegorizings
Page 9
This was music to my ears, and I relaxed as we bumped erratically out of the airport. Matthew Arnold once wrote of an infinitesimal pair of English villages that “in the two Hinkseys nothing keeps the same.” I have always believed precisely the opposite of Manhattan, the ultimate world city.
So “Fine,” said I, “thanks a million.” For I felt that I had known that agreeable fellow all my life, that he had always come from some generic Ruthenia, that down the years he never had heard me the first time, that traffic in the Midtown Tunnel had been lousy every day at least since Idlewild became JFK, and that in Manhattan indeed nothing really does change.
THIS OF COURSE is a wild generalization. It is my Manhattan that has kept the same—yours and anyone else’s may well change as often as the two Hinkseys. It’s all in my mind, my emotions, and perhaps my jet lag!
It is true, though, that with the possible exception of Venice, Manhattan retains its physical character more tenaciously than any other great city of the Western world—partly because it is an island, I suppose. It comes as a genuine shock here when some familiar landmark disappears—not just the usual pang of nostalgia for the past, but a true sense of personal loss.
Stores, restaurants, hotels come and go, of course, but very often Manhattan locations, however drastically they adapt to changing needs or opportunities, keep their personalties anyway. Grand Central Terminal has been revivified, but remains a terrific new version of its beloved old self. The Plaza Hotel is transformed, but thanks to strength of public opinion will apparently remain, like the collapsed campanile at Venice after its rebuilding, com’era, dov’era—as it was, where it was. Even Columbus Circle, which has been sensationally rebuilt, still somehow looks to me much as it always did, only more so.
For my Manhattan is a sentimental old body at heart, deeply fond of itself, and thus in many ways doggedly preservative. Out-of-town Americans still think it the very epitome of racy modernity, but to me it has for many years seemed a bit old-fashioned. I went to tea one day in an apartment infinitely more traditional, I swear, than anything in London—where the Earl Grey tea came with scones and cucumber sandwiches, where every inch of occasional table held its exquisite collection of trinketry, amd where the little dachsund who sat with us was visiting, all alone, from the flat next door.
And when, as part of my demi-centennial celebration, I gave a performance at the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, my! how like old times it was, how incongruously simple the reception they gave me in that palatial house of learning, the laughter almost rural in its innocence, the welcome so unfeigned—there in the heart of the mighty metropolis, where the yellow cabs streamed by in their hundreds and the fire trucks screamed!
MUCH MORE IMPORTANT than the physical condition of a city, anyway, is its temperamental condition. Now as always, Manhattan is in intermittent frenzy. I have known it in political frenzies, social frenzies, frenzies about soap operas, or baseball games, or sex scandals, or the state of the stock exchange, or the state of the Union. One transient excitement or another dominates conversations in this city as it dominates the news bulletins, and sometimes of course there are several excitements at the same time.
During my celebratory visit these were some of the matters that seem to have preoccupied my acquaintances in Manhattan: soccer (soccer?), traffic congestion, gun violence (oh my God!), Iraq (oh my God again!), electoral chances, climate change, racism and rappers, George Bush and Tony Blair and Harry Potter. Give or take a name or two, or an anxiety, they could be the preoccupations of my acquaintances here several decades ago. For ecological threat read nuclear war, for Baghdad read Saigon, for Potter substitute Holden Caulfield, call back Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher, and Marilyn Monroe, and Billy Graham, and Spiro Agnew—in manner and commitment the conversations were much the same, except that in older times they were often conducted over long merry sessions of dry martinis.
In my experience, martinis or no martinis, the discussions have often been passionate, but not often vicious. I have always thought that if I had to have a heart attack somewhere, I would prefer to suffer it somewhere in midtown Manhattan. For all its reputation of cynical glamour, this is a kind city. I did fall over once—down in the Financial District, too—and was touched by the generic sympathy of Wall Street as I was helped to my feet, dusted down, and sent on my way with a clutch of clean tissues.
“Take care,” said that Ruthenian cabbie as we parted, “mind how you go,” and he meant it. Often and again, all down the years, I have been struck by the sincerity that so often informs the clichés of New York social intercourse—the mantra “Have a good day,” for instance, which is so often scoffed at in England, is frequently spoken in Manhattan with real meaning. When a doorman at a Borders bookshop said “Enjoy your evening,” as I left the store at closing time, it did not sound like a mere throw-away slogan, but a genuine pleasantry between passing acquaintances.
I must not, of course, relapse into sentimentality. The insults and accusations that fly around Manhattan are equally sincere, as any resident will be quick to expostulate. But I write as an outsider, and in my view there are few great cities more courteous to its guests.
BUT SOMETHING TELLS me, all the same—remember, this is all in the mind!—that there has been some subtle change to the nature of Manhattan since I first knew it. People tell me the city has never been quite the same since the tragedy of 9/11, and I do seem to sense some sort of coarsening in the air, a loss of composure, perhaps.
The first thing that greeted strangers like me when we sailed into Pier 92 half a century ago, was the romantic waterfront skyline, dominated then by skyscrapers of the 1930s, but irrevocably altered when the twin towers of the World Trade Center went up. I was never keen on those enormous blank obelisks. They seemed to me even then an insensitive bloating of the Manhattan style.
For the island city that had emerged from World War II seemed to me essentially a city of grace, its inevitable urban squalor redeemed for the stranger by a wonderfully civilized civic architecture. Whether they were Art Deco masterpieces like the Chrysler Building, or elegant internationalist examples like Lever House, or even post-modernist exuberances adorned with squiggles and fancy plinths, in those decades the iconic constructions of Manhattan seemed to get on well together. They struck me, in my anthropomorphic naïvety, as a tolerant lot of structures, respectful of their neighbours and fastidious of attitude. They were doubtless built out of greed, but they did not seem greedy. They spoke of tradition as well as innovation, and one could think generically of them as true emblems of humanism.
Plonk, as if they had fallen out of space, in the 1970s came the twin towers, taller and bulkier than anything else, oblivious of their surroundings, impossible to categorize except in terms of sheer bulk. They seemed to me essentially selfish. They heralded the virtuoso arrogance of fashionable twenty-first-century architecture, with its tactics of shock and surprise and its disregard of neighbourhood. They represented ethos rather than art, and their attitude has since swept the world, and is, in my perception, insidiously pervasive in contemporary Manhattan.
For example I stand at my eighty-first-floor hotel window above Central Park, in perfect air-conditioned silence, thinking. I am an impressionist, not an analyst, and at first I cannot make out what is different about the view out there, since I first marvelled at it in my youth. The park is still gloriously green, and the same familiar carriages trundle around it. The grand old buildings that line it retain their scale and discretion, and their windows glitter, and their flags fly as splendidly as ever.
But gradually, as my mental focus clarifies, I seem to discern there a suggestion of ideological change. In the new century buildings have sprouted everywhere among and behind those friends of my lifelong prospect, filling every nook and interstice, elbowing their own space, and they bring to the scene a new sense of jostle. Is it just capitalism in its feral fruition? Or does it really represent some profounder metamorphosis of the city spirit? Arc
hitecturally many of them are handsome: allegorically they disturb me rather.
“They disturb you!” scoffs the New Yorker who joins me at my window. “They disturb you allegorically! What a load of figurative garbage.”
BUT LATER WE had lunch together in a room which, beyond all others, represents for me that old truce-like serenity of Manhattan, from the 1960s and 1970s perhaps, when the harmony of its structures seemed to me representative of decency among its people, and buildings and citizenry seemed equally ready to give me a hand if I collapsed on 42nd Street.
The room was the Four Seasons restaurant, within Mies van der Rohe’s bronze-and-glass Seagram Building, his masterpiece of 1958. The building itself is the supreme temple of my Manhattan, expressing most exactly what I most admire about the island city, and the restaurant was designed by the great Philip Johnson to be a cool sanctuary at the core of it. I think of it as the gentle concord of two masterly creative minds, at the apex of a civilization. The Four Seasons is frightfully expensive, but to hell with the cost (to my mind purely figurative, as I told my friend when he paid the bill).
There is a pool in the middle of the lovely room, and the tables are generously spaced. It was all dappled sunshine that day. My companion was a delight, I ate soft-shelled crab, a waiter I knew told me about his recent illness and pointed to The Man Upstairs as the source of his recovery. Altogether I felt, once again, under the influence of the Manhattan genius (plus the crab), that the heart of the old place really did not change, whether in the fact, the fancy or just the sweet desire.
But my host, being a true New Yorker not given to saccharine, reminded me that Philip Johnson and Mies van der Rohe had acrimoniously parted company after their master-work was done. “Allegorical, don’t you think?” he snidely suggested.
Travels with an Old Dog
HALF-WAY THROUGH A protracted meander through Europe in 2004, I fell in love with a big black dog. He was very big, very black, very hairy, extremely old, and he slouched among the stalls of a city market, head and tail drooping, with an air of exhausted aristocracy. He looked world-weary, monstrous, immensely experienced, tolerant and faintly amused by life.
At first I did not recognize this marvellous animal, but in retrospect I realized who he was. He was Leonardo da Vinci. He was Lampedusa’s Leopard. He was Bismarck’s uncle, Philip II in old age, Churchill’s after-ego. He was, in short, Old Europe, and if he seemed to be picking his way through the market crowds with fastidious aloofness, that was because the market-place that day was such a jostling muddle.
There was no pretending that Europe at that particular moment of its history felt logically ordered. Much of it considered itself a union, but my wanderings through its north-west corner took me over five frontiers of decidedly varied character. There was a tunnel under the sea. There was a bridge across an estuary. There was a ferryboat. There was a ship. There were several apparently deserted old customs posts, and the most abandoned of them appeared to be at the frontier of the European Union itself, taking me into Norway, which is not within the union and uses its own currency, out of Sweden, which is within the union but does not use the euro.
No wonder that grand old dog shuffled bemused through the market, and through all the impressions of my stay!
THE FALTERING OF Europe then was a disappointment for those who dreamed of a super-continent to restore the balance of the world, a triumph for those who still believed in the glory of the Nation-State, and a bit of each for those of us (like me) who wanted a confederation of peoples devoted to their own ways and languages, but ready to sacrifice to Caesar those dullard matters of war, finance and foreign affairs that properly belong to emperors.
So for myself I was happy to find national characteristics, if not national sovereignties, still unmistakable. The moment I drove off the Euroshuttle train under the Channel, confident in the miracle of satellite navigation to declare my route for me, I found that road-works in the Pas-de-Calais had disoriented everything. “Never mind,” said my companion, “we’re in France now—trust the French”: and sure enough, simple, clear and highly intelligent Deviation signs guided us around the diggers and rollers, over temporary bridges, under slip roads, to set us safely on the way to Antwerp and the north. As Sterne discovered all those years ago, they order these matters better in France.
It was the same when we got into Holland, and settled for a night at Zutphen. How exceedingly Dutch it was still! With what maidenly grace the young Dutch ladies rode their very upright bicycles around the town, like so many students at a finishing school! And when, behind the cathedral, we found that a modern commemorative statue of a lion had been recently decapitated by vandals, how wonderfully Netherlandish was the response of the passing citizen who explained the spectacle to us. She was out for an evening stroll, she was as exquisitely made up as if she were off to a wedding, and her attitude was serenely apologetic. “It happens everywhere,” she said, surveying the mutilated beast before us, which had various bits gouged out of it, and a regretful bunch of flowers at its base, “but I’m afraid nothing happens quite like it happens in Holland.”
In Germany the national characteristics I noticed were my own. We found ourselves spending a night in a prosperous suburb of a decidedly prosperous industrial town, so prosperous that a police car discreetly patrolled its leafy lanes, and hardly a villa was without its double garage, its lawn and its rockery. Nobody I met in this place was in the least disagreeable, but I found myself shamefully resentful of everything I saw. The parked cars looked obscenely rich, the gardens ostentatiously well-tended. There was something baleful to the padded and cushioned calm of it all, as there was to the patrol car swishing gently by, and the most benign of the villas reminded me only of that house beside the Wannsee at Berlin where they drew up their plans for the Final Solution. I was ashamed of these totally unreasoned reactions, but there we are, I am a child of my times; and as a matter of fact, when I later confessed them to a German ambassador, he said he quite understood.
I had been rashly invited to stop in Sweden to speak at an extremely intellectual seminar about imperialism, and found myself all unexpectedly in a vortex of Swedish capitalism. I had never heard of my patrons before, but they turned out to be sponsors of a foundation behind which there stood, I gradually discerned, a gigantic conglomeration of mercantile and financial enterprise—scores of associated companies, related by family inheritance, with interests in shipping and construction and all kinds of consumerism. My principal hostess bore herself like a queen, and I realized that as one of the most powerful women in all Scandinavia she was used to being treated like one: but this being Sweden, the whole vast concern expressed itself with infinite grace and courtesy, and I was put up in a lovely room in an exquisite old country house, and handsomely fed, and given a book about the conglomerate, and so bluffed my way with impunity through all social and cerebral challenges.
And how’s this for a taste of Norway? From the coast south of Oslo the Telemark Canal runs for a hundred miles deep into the mountainous heart of the country, and two antique steamers (the Victoria [1882] and the Henrik Ibsen [1907]) carry tourists from one end to the other. The voyage takes eleven hours, including the passage of eighteen locks, and passengers disembark at one of Europe’s most delightfully weird hotels, in an isolated hamlet at the head of a lake. The building is made of wood, and is turreted and balconied, bobbled and fretted, lace-curtained and stained-glassed, decorated with dragons’ heads, equipped with croquet mallets and a Ladies’ Lounge. A pianist ornaments the evening hours with Grieg and Cole Porter, and at 8:30 next morning the more indefatigable of the excursionists troop down to the landing-stage for their eleven-hour journey back again, to a toot of the steam-whistle from Ibsen or Victoria.
IN MY FANCY the dog was present at all these venues. He was first off the Henrik Ibsen, looking understandably relieved after those eighteen locks; he was perfectly at home at the seminar; he growled slightly, as in a dream, at the German suburban po
lice car; he sniffed sadly around the plinth of the decapitated Dutch lion; he never for a moment doubted the Deviation signs in the Pas-de-Calais.
But in my mind he really came into his own, assuming an almost heraldic bearing, when in the course of the journey we discovered symptoms of a European presence beyond the wrangles of constitutionalists. For instance he was proud when, entangled mile after mile in a ceaseless progression of trucks around the power centres of Antwerp, Rotterdam and Hamburg, we crossed the Rhine to find that the vast energy of the continent was not only thundering around us on the highway, but was pounding below us too, in the mighty stream of barges making for the sea.
He was pleased by the spectacle of the old Soviet submarine U359, high and dry on the quayside of Nakskov, in Denmark, in reassurance that at least one threat to the meaning of Europe had lost its sinister power. He smiled with approval to find that four empty beer cans, neatly lined up on a sidewalk, were all the rubbish left behind by a rowdy Swedish disco party. He basked in the general sense of shared values, common kindnesses, that gave all these peoples a sense of relationship. He was thrilled by a moment of fulfilment when, beneath a brilliant blue sky, above a waterway speckled with white sails, we soared over the celestial new bridge that connects Danish Copenhagen and Swedish Malmo, cocking an exhilarating snook at the very notion of frontiers between societies.
And yes, in a condescending way (for he is evidently rather old-fashioned in his views) that conceptual dog of Old Europe actually wagged his tail when, having crossed the North Sea on a Norwegian ship, we were greeted in drizzly South Shields with a traditional English welcome. Two burly officials in yellow raincoats stood unsmiling beside the immigration booths, evidently ready for the worst, but when I showed our passports to the man at the desk he simply said: “That’s OK, pet. On you go. Sorry about the weather.”