Gotham Diary:
What’s So Special?
7 May 2015
When I tell people what I’m reading, and it turns out to be something that they haven’t read, the responses fall into two classes. The first, and better, response is a silent, sage nod. Even if you don’t know anything about the book, even if you can’t imagine why anyone would want to read it, the sage nod suggests that you are filing the information away, and your graciousness has not made your interlocutor feel like a weirdo.
The other response is to ask what the book is about. This question is regrettable. If the book is really worth reading, there are only two answers. One is to restate the contents of the book — literally unthinkable. The other is to say that the book is about its author, a reply that most people who ask what books are about are likely to find offensive.
I have found it very agreeable to write about things here and there in a book that give me pleasure, without attempting the comprehensive, judgmental summaries that are perhaps more satisfactory, because they convey the illusion of having read the book yourself. I don’t want to convey that illusion. I’d much rather tempt, tease, or just plain annoy my reader into giving the book a try. The case of The Long-Winded Lady has been different, however, because I find myself driven to come up with a good answer to the question: What is this book about?
Yes, it’s about Maeve Brennan (the author). I’ll get back to her.
The Long-Winded Lady is a collection of anecdotes about city life in the 1950s and 1960s. Is it, though, is it about life in New York City? Well, obviously, yes, in the simple sense: all the anecdotes are set in rather small patches of Manhattan. But are they specific to New York? Could they have arisen elsewhere? This is the real question. It’s very easily overlooked, because all the Long-Winded Lady pieces originally appeared in the Talk of the Town section of The New Yorker. But the point of these pieces, as of those by writers like Joseph Mitchell and James Thurber, was to remind the magazine’s readers of the ordinary people who make up the bulk of New York’s population, and who are just as provincial as people anywhere else. Although many people here take advantage of the city’s grand concentration of “cultural” opportunities (what I, following Hannah Arendt, call its worldliness), most do not. Most people here go to work in the morning and come home at night, just like people anywhere else. Most spend their weekends doing things that you could do anywhere. It’s tourists who fill the museums and the Broadway theatres, not New Yorkers.
Maeve Brennan’s anecdotes steer clear of the “cultural.” When she goes to the theatre, she tells us how, running late in the rain, she tried to give a woman selling pencils a dollar bill, only to have the bill returned to her for being “too much.” Brennan doesn’t tell us anything about the play; she doesn’t even name it. She likes not naming things; it’s a game that I enjoy playing as well. Anyone with a comprehensive knowledge of the movies would know that the film Julie Andrews was shooting at the Algonquin was Star!, a biopic about Gertrude Lawrence and something of a flop, but Brennan cunningly elides this bit of information by calling Andrews a “Star,” complete with capital S. We all know that you can make movies anywhere, or, rather, that you can make movies about anywhere in Hollywood, on a sound stage. (Or, for a while there, Toronto.) The on-location aspect of Star! that concerns Brennan is not the flutter of sighted celebrities but the awkward nuisance of on-location film-making — a muddle in which the Star herself is caught. It may be very gratifying for New Yorkers to glimpse familiar neighborhoods in the movies, but can anyone else be expected to care?
Is what makes New York unlike other American cities the fact that so many young people come here to give the place a try, only to leave after a few years and contribute to the seeding of America with bittersweet memories of Gotham? Young people are attracted to cities generally; I remember meeting many people in Houston who came from much smaller places and who thought that they were now leading metropolitan lives. Is New York different because it attracts so many “creatives”? In any case, where is the evidence, in the pages of The Long-Winded Lady, that New York is in any way special or unusual?
On the whole, the Long-Winded Lady takes a tragic view of this city.
It is in daily life, looking around for restaurants and shops and for a place to live, that we find our way about the city. And it is necessary to find one’s own way in New York. New York is not hospitable. She is very big and she has no heart. She is not charming. She is not sympathetic. She is rushed and noisy and unkempt, a hard, ambitious, irresolute place, not very lively, and never gay. When she glitters she is very, very bright, and when she does not glitter she is dirty. New York does nothing for those of us who are inclined to love her except implant in our hearts a homesickness that baffles us until we go away from her, and then we realize why we are restless. At home or away, we are homesick for New York not because New York used to be better and not because she used to be worse but because the city holds us and we don’t know why. (142)
And that’s the only answer that I can come up with. What makes New York special is that it held Maeve Brennan, even if she never figured out why. You know you belong in New York when you feel relief in your bones that you are living in the only place on earth where nobody is wondering what’s going on in New York. New York is simply out there, beyond the door to your apartment (or, in Brennan’s case, to her hotel room — she seems to have lived in dozens of them, a fact of silent volubility). To buy a bottle of milk, you have to go out into New York, even if only to cross the street. You may not see anything special, but you’d know in a heartbeat if you were someplace else.
It’s easy to read The Long-Winded Lady as a series of character sketches, capturing the odd people who wash up on this island. In the end, though — and not unlike the photographs of Diane Arbus — it is a portrait of the artist herself, a portrait veiled in misdirections worthy of the greatest magicians. Brennan used these pieces to tell us what she thought about herself, and few novels can boast heroines as grippingly beset by unseen menace.