“Dude, you’re going to New York?” said the great magazine editor I saw and approached in Heathrow. “Dude, there's a party in New York.” Dudes, there are parties in New York. I love New York. All the NYRB contributor page has met me. All the NYRB contributor page has now ignored me to try and flirt with my girlfriend. A large group of Americans clapped when I identified the English cathedral in a small painting across several acres of the Met gallery. A waitress asked “Sparkling, flat, or New York tap?”
New York tap. Just tap water, but also just not. If you are inclined to be cynical at that, consider one of the best reviews of all time, art critic John Berger in the New Statesman in 1954: ‘Why Picasso?’ Berger takes on cynics who say, You only think that’s good because it’s by Picasso. He answers, It is good because it’s by Picasso. The point is the sheer irrepressibility of his spirit. “What makes him great are not his individual works but his existence, his personality.”
It’s like that with New York. Friends reply to pictures: “like a movie”. You see the drains and scaffolding and think: “those are the New York drains and scaffolding.” You sense that everyone here one a twice a day thinks “I’m in New York!”, and that that thought affects their behaviour.
Obviously there are ironies of self-consciousness and performance at work there. It would be easy to be cynical about them. But thinking the innocent are the naive who have never thought about themselves or anything bad is foolish and leaves you trying to learn how to help people from dogs and babies.
Almost everyone in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot has no self-consciousness. It’s not just bad of the nasty ones who force chaos. It’s also quite bad of the saintly naïf: he is impotent to order the chaos, or anything else.
Today on my last day here I will go, after my diner breakfast and ‘lox’ cream cheese bagel lunch and sunset, out onto the Queensboro Bridge in order to know this line, one of the most beautiful ever, from Gatsby:
“The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”
That sentiment is made tense – and glorious and noble and lifting – by the contradiction of ‘first’ and ‘always’. It says that wonder asks conscious effort. We like Gatsby because he makes the commitment of hope. Joan Didion called New York a “shining and perishable dream”, and it can only shine if it might perish. To me it feels no bad thing that people are trying to live up to life. The city is sort of a heroic act of self-consciousness. New York is good because it is New York. As Berger said of Picasso it is “never disappointing”, “intensely memorable”, and “disproportionately compelling” because “it is the present existence of this spirit that we celebrate”.
GM
Afterbirth
I’m in the new issue of the Literary Review here, on a book I didn’t much like.
I’m in the Saturday Read here, at the bottom.
The mention of John Berger took me back to the days when he had an arts programme on the BBC. He would have on the screen some picture or other and would give his opinion of it and why he thought it a great work of art. All this on black and white TV but somehow it didn't matter,his enthusiasm and knowledge would bring it alive colours and all.
As you have mentioned 'Gatsby ' several times recently I decided to get down my copy,dust it off and read it again in the hope that perhaps my opinion of it might change.
Alas, I still find the characters unappealing. Nick Carraway is perhaps the most sympathetic character but really too good to be true. The Buchanans,horrible people. The US equivalent of a Hooray Henry and a Sloane Ranger, to be avoided like the plague. Gatsby I can have some sympathy for having once experienced that kind of overwhelming passion but nevertheless less than admirable in the way he made his fortune by defrauding others although I'll give him a free pass on the Bootlegging which can be see as a service to the public.
All in all as you can see it is not a story for which I have much time but oh, how I wish I could write like Fitzgerald.
I clicked on PL 10. I would love to help you with your novels but as someone whose first novel is still at the outline stage and has been for the last sixty years I doubt that I could be a great deal of help.