![]() |
Joan Didion |
New York. You
love it or you hate it. Recently,
New York and I have been a bit at odds.
All this traveling and being away from here has made my return full of
rejuvenated vigor but it also reminds me that the world is big and that NYC is
not all there is. We tend to
forget this, we New Yorkers. We
forget we are not the center of the universe. We are, but we aren’t.
I am not the only one who feels estranged by this city from time to time
(gawd if only I could afford a country home). There have been slews and slews of great, good and just
below average writers that have essayed, blogged and merely complained about
this place, this city. I am not at
the breaking point they describe, far from it, but I have to say, all this
busy-business here makes me suspicious.
Possibly (probably) this business is just one living life but perhaps it
is also a symptom of something else.
I love New York, I think New York loves me still and until
we get sick of the sounds of each other's voices, the way we flick our hair, the way we
laugh, the way we can see the magic in each other then I fear(love) that I am
here until death do us part.
Below is a fantastic essay by the one and only Joan Didion
on New York and her leaving it.
It’s pretty famous so most of you have probably read it but if not you
are in for a reading treat. It is
from 1967, seems far but really that’s just a speck of time. There are things remarked on and way of
saying things that just hits things so squarely on the head. For those who have been here for nearly
ten years or more (like moi), it will strike you like a chord.
Goodbye To All That, Joan Didion, 1967
How many miles to Babylon?
Three score miles and and ten—
Can I get there by candlelight?
Yes, and back again—
If your feet are nimble and light
You can get there by candlelight.
Three score miles and and ten—
Can I get there by candlelight?
Yes, and back again—
If your feet are nimble and light
You can get there by candlelight.
It
is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can
remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck
constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the
moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and
broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer
as optimistic as she once was. When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it
was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in
a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart
already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled
of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and
all the songs I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never
be quite the same again. In fact it never was. Some time later there was a song
in the jukeboxes on the Upper East Side that went “but where is the schoolgirl
who used to be me,” and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that. I
know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and
no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being
twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like
this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone
before.
Of
course it might have been some other city, had circumstances been different and
the time been different and had I been different, might have been Paris or
Chicago or even San Francisco, but because I am talking about myself I am
talking here about New York. That first night I opened my window on the bus
into town and watched for the skyline, but all I could see were the wastes of
Queens and big signs that said MIDTOWN TUNNEL THIS LANE and then a flood of
summer rain (even that seemed remarkable and exotic, for I had come out of the
West where there was no summer rain), and for the next three days I sat wrapped
in blankets in a hotel room air conditioned to 35 degrees and tried to get over
a cold and a high fever. It did not occur to me to call a doctor, because I
knew none, and although it did occur to me to call the desk and ask that the
air conditioner be turned off, I never called, because I did not know how much
to tip whoever might come—was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that
someone was. All I could do during those years was talk long-distance to the boy
I already knew I would never marry in the spring. I would stay in New York, I
told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window.
As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years.
In
retrospect it seems to me that those days before I knew the names of all the
bridges were happier than the ones that came later, but perhaps you will see
that as we go along. Part of what I want to tell you is what it is like to be
young in New York, how six months can become eight years with the deceptive
ease of a film dissolve, for that is how those years appear to me now, in a
long sequence of sentimental dissolves and old-fashioned trick shots—the
Seagram Building fountains dissolve into snowflakes, I enter a revolving door
at twenty and come out a good deal older, and on a different street. But most
particularly I want to explain to you, and in the process perhaps to myself,
why I no longer live in New York. It is often said that New York is a city for
only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is
also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city only
for the very young.
I
remember once, one cold bright December evening in New York, suggesting a
friend who complained of having been around too long that he come with me to a
party where there would be, I assured him with the bright resourcefulness of
twenty-three, “new faces.” He laughed literally until he choked, and I had to
roll down the taxi window and hit him on the back. “New faces,” he said
finally, “don’t tell me about new faces.” It seemed that the last time he had
gone to a party where he had been promised “new faces,” there had been fifteen
people in the room, and he had already spelt with five of the women and owed
money to all but two of the men. I laughed with him, but the first snow had
just begun to fall and the big Christmas trees glittered yellow and white as
far as I could see up Park Avenue and I had a new dress and it would be a long
while before I would come to understand the particular moral of the story.
It
would be a long while because, quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do
not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city,
the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love
anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one
twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a
while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought
a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out of the
West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air
blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and
expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or
later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are
twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high
emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in
possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that
something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month. I was
making only $65 or $70 then a week then (“Put yourself in Hattie Carnegie’s
hands,” I was advised without the slightest trace of irony by an editor of the
magazine for which I worked), so little money that some weeks I had to charge
food at Bloomingdale’s gourmet shop in order to eat, a fact which went
unmentioned in the letters I wrote to California. I never told my father that I
needed money because then he would have sent it, and I would never know if I
could do it by myself. At that time making a living seemed a game to me, with
arbitrary but quite inflexible rules. And except on a certain kind of winter
evening—six-thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and bitter with a wind
off the river, when I would be walking very fast toward a bus and would look in
the bright windows of brownstones and see cooks working in clean kitchens and
imagine women lighting candles on the floor above and beautiful children being
bathed on the floor above that—except on nights like those, I never felt poor;
I had the feeling that if I needed money I could always get it. I could write a
syndicated column for teenagers under the name “Debbi Lynn” or I could smuggle
gold into India or I could become a $100 call girl, and none of would matter.
Nothing
was irrevocable; everything was within reach. Just around every corner lay
something curious and interesting, something I had never before seen or done or
known about. I could go to a party and meet someone who called himself Mr.
Emotional Appeal and ran The Emotional Appeal Institute or Tina Onassis
Blandford or a Florida cracker who was then a regular on what the called “the
Big C,” the Southampton-El Morocco circuit (“I’m well connected on the Big C,
honey,” he would tell me over collard greens on his vast borrowed terrace), or
the widow of the celery king of the Harlem market or a piano salesman from
Bonne Terre, Missouri, or someone who had already made and list two fortunes in
Midland, Texas. I could make promises to myself and to other people and there
would be all the time in the world to keep them. I could stay up all night and
make mistakes, and none of them would count.
You
see I was in a curious position in New York: it never occurred to me that I was
living a real life there. In my imagination I was always there for just another
few months, just until Christmas or Easter or the first warm day in May. For
that reason I was most comfortable with the company of Southerners. They seemed
to be in New York as I was, on some indefinitely extended leave from wherever
they belonged, disciplined to consider the future, temporary exiles who always knew
when the flights left for New Orleans or Memphis or Richmond or, in my case,
California. Someone who lives with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a
slightly different calendar. Christmas, for example, was a difficult season.
Other people could take it in stride, going to Stowe or going abroad or going
for the day to their mothers’ places in Connecticut; those of us who believed
that we lived somewhere else would spend it making and canceling airline
reservations, waiting for weather bound flights as if for the last plane out of
Lisbon in 1940, and finally comforting one another, those of us who were left,
with oranges and mementos and smoked-oyster stuffings of childhood, gathering
close, colonials in a far country.
Which
is precisely what we were. I am not sure that it is possible for anyone brought
up in the East to appreciate entirely what New York, the idea of New York,
means to those of us who came out of the West and the South. To an Eastern
child, particularly a child who has always has an uncle on Wall Street and who
has spent several hundred Saturdays first at F.A.O. Schwarz and being fitted
for shoes at Best’s and then waiting under the Biltmore clock and dancing to
Lester Lanin, New York is just a city, albeit the city, a plausible place for
people to live, But to those of us who came from places where no one had heard
of Lester Lanin and Grand Central Station was a Saturday radio program, where
Wall Street and Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not places at all but
abstractions (“Money,” and “High Fashion,” and “The Hucksters”), New York was
no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious
nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.
To think of “living” there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one
does not “live” at Xanadu.
In
fact it was difficult in the extreme for me to understand those young women for
whom New York was not simply an ephemeral Estoril but a real place, girls who
bought toasters and installed new cabinets in their apartments and committed
themselves to some reasonable furniture. I never bought any furniture in New
York. For a year or so I lived in other people’s apartments; after that I lived
in the Nineties in an apartment furnished entirely with things taken from
storage by a friend whose wife had moved away. And when I left the apartment in
the Nineties (that was when I was leaving everything, when it was all breaking
up) I left everything in it, even my winter clothes and the map of Sacramento
County I had hung on the bedroom wall to remind me who I was, and I moved into
a monastic four-room floor-through on Seventy-fifth Street. “Monastic” is
perhaps misleading here, implying some chic severity; until after I was married
and my husband moved some furniture in, there was nothing at all in those four
rooms except a cheap double mattress and box springs, ordered by telephone the
day I decided to move, and two French garden chairs lent me by a friend who
imported them. (It strikes me now that the people I knew in New York all had
curious and self-defeating sidelines. They imported garden chairs which did not
sell very well at Hammacher Schlemmer or they tried to market hair
straighteners in Harlem or they ghosted exposés of Murder Incorporated for Sunday
supplements. I think that perhaps none of us was very serious, engaged only
about our most private lives.)
All
I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk
across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would
make me feel better, but I did not bother to weight the curtains correctly and
all that summer the long panels of transparent golden silk would blow out
the windows and get tangled and drenched in afternoon thunderstorms. That was
the year, my twenty-eight, when I was discovering that not all of the promises
would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted
after all, every evasion and ever procrastination, every word, all of it.
That
is what it was all about, wasn’t it? Promises? Now when New York comes back to
me it comes in hallucinatory flashes, so clinically detailed that I sometimes
wish that memory would effect the distortion with which it is commonly
credited. For a lot of the time I was in New York I used a perfume called
Fleurs de Rocaille, and then L’Air du Temps, and now the slightest trace of
either can short-circuit my connections for the rest of the day. Nor can I
smell Henri Bendel jasmine soap without falling back into the past, or the particular
mixture of spices used for boiling crabs. There were barrels of crab boil in a
Czech place in the Eighties where I once shopped. Smells, of course, are
notorious memory stimuli, but there are other things which affect me the same
way. Blue-and-white striped sheets. Vermouth cassis. Some faded nightgowns
which were new in 1959 or 1960, and some chiffon scarves I bought about the
same time.
I
suppose that a lot of us who have been very young in New York have the same
scenes in our home screens. I remember sitting in a lot of apartments with a
slight headache about five o’clock in the morning. I had a friend who could not
sleep, and he knew a few other people who had the same trouble, and we would
watch the sky lighten and have a last drink with no ice and then go home in the
early morning, when the streets were clean and wet (had it rained in the night?
we never knew) and the few cruising taxis still had their headlights on and the
only color was the red and green of traffic signals. The White Rose bars opened
very early in the morning; I recall waiting in one of them to watch an
astronaut go into space, waiting so long that at the moment it actually
happened I had my eyes not on the television screen but on a cockroach on the
tile floor. I liked the bleak branches above Washington Square at dawn, and the
monochromatic flatness of Second Avenue, the fire escapes and the grilled
storefronts peculiar and empty in their perspective.
It
is relatively hard to fight at six-thirty or seven in the morning, without any
sleep, which was perhaps one reason why we stayed up all night, and it seemed
to me a pleasant time of day. The windows were shuttered in that apartment in
the Nineties and I could sleep for a few hours and then go to work. I could
work the on two or three hours’ sleep and a container of coffee from Chock Full
O’ Nuts. I liked going to work, liked the soothing and satisfactory rhythm of
getting out a magazine, liked the orderly progression of four-color closings
and two-color closings and black-and-white closings and then The Product, no
abstraction but something which looked effortlessly glossy and could be picked
up on a newsstand and weighed in the hand. I liked all the minutiae of proofs
and layouts, liked working late on the nights the magazines went to press,
sitting and reading Variety and waiting for the copy desk to call. From my
office, I could look across town to the weather signal on the Mutual of New
York Building and the lights that alternately spelled TIME and LIFE above
Rockeffeler Plaza; that pleased me obscurely, and so did walking uptown in the
mauve eight o’clocks of early summer evenings and looking at things, Lowestoft
tureens in Fifty-seventh Street windows, people in evening clothes trying to
get taxis, the trees just coming into full leaf, the lambent air, all the sweet
promises of money and summer.
Some
years passed, but I still did not lose that sense of wonder about New York. I
began to cherish the loneliness of it, the sense that at any given time no one
need know where I was or what I was doing. I liked walking, from the East River
over to the Hudson and back on brisk days, down around the Village on warm
days. A friend would leave me the key to her apartment in the West Village when
she was out of town, and sometimes I would just move down there, because by
that time the telephone was beginning to bother me (the canker, you see, was
already in the rose) and not many people had that number. I remember one day
when someone who did have the West Village number came to pick me up for lunch
there, and we both had hangovers, and I cut my finger opening him a beer and
burst into tears, and we walked to a Spanish restaurant and drank bloody Marys
and gazpacho until we felt better. I was not then guilt-ridden about spending
afternoons that way, because I still had all the afternoons in the world.
And
even that late in the game I still liked going to parties, all parties, bad
parties, Saturday-afternoon parties given by recently married couples who lived
in Stuyvesant Town, West Side parties given by unpublished or failed writers
who served cheap red wine and talked about going to Guatalajara, Village
parties where all the guests worked for advertising agencies and voted for
Reform Democrats, press parties at Sardi’s, the worst kind of parties. You will
have perceived by now that I was not one to profit by the experience of others,
that it was a very long time indeed before I stopped believing in new faces and
began to understand the lesson in that story, which was that it is distinctly
possible to stay too long at the Fair.
I
could not tell you when I began to understand that. All I know is that it was
very bad when I was twenty-eight. Everything that was said to me I seemed to
have heard before, and I could no longer listen. I could no longer sit in
little bars near Grand Central and listen to someone complaining of his wife’s
inability to cope with the help while he missed another train to Connecticut. I
no longer had any interest in hearing about the advances other people had received
from their publishers, about plays which were having second-act trouble in
Philadelphia, or about people I would like very much if only I would come out
and meet them. I had already met them, always. There were certain parts of the
city which I had to avoid. I could not bear upper Madison Avenue on weekday
mornings (this was a particularly inconvenient aversion, since I then lived
just fifty or sixty feet east of Madison), because I would see women walking
Yorkshire terriers and shopping at Gristede’s, and some Veblenesque gorge would
rise in my throat. I could not go to Times Square in the afternoon, or to the
New York Public Library for any reason whatsoever. One day I could not go into
a Schrafft’s; the next it would be the Bonwit Teller.
I
hurt the people I cared about, and insulted those I did not. I cut myself off
from the one person who was closer to me than any other. I cried until I was
not even aware when I was crying and when I was not, I cried in elevators and
in taxis and in Chinese laundries, and when I went to the doctor, he said only
that I seemed to be depressed, and that I should see a “specialist.” He wrote
down a psychiatrist’s name and address for me, but I did not go.
Instead
I got married, which as it turned out was a very good thing to do but badly
timed, since I still could not walk on upper Madison Avenue in the mornings and
still could not talk to people and still cried in Chinese laundries. I had
never before understood what “despair” meant, and I am not sure that I understand
now, but I understood that year. Of course I could not work. I could not even
get dinner with any degree of certainty, and I would sit in the apartment on
Seventy-fifth Street paralyzed until my husband would call from his office and
say gently that I did not have to get dinner, that I could meet him at
Michael’s Pub or at Toots Shor’s or at Sardi’s East. And then one morning in
April (we had been married in January) he called and told me that he wanted to
get out of New York for a while, that he would take a six-month leave of
absence, that we would go somewhere.
It
was three years ago he told me that, and we have lived in Los Angeles since.
Many of the people we knew in New York think this a curious aberration, and in
fact tell us so. There is no possible, no adequate answer to that, and so we
give certain stock answers, the answers everyone gives. I talk about how
difficult it would be for us to “afford” to live in New York right now, about
how much “space” we need, All I mean is that I was very young in New York, and
that at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young
anymore. The last time I was in New York was in a cold January, and everyone
was ill and tired. Many of the people I used to know there had moved to Dallas
or had gone on Antabuse or had bought a farm in New Hampshire. We stayed ten
days, and then we took an afternoon flight back to Los Angeles, and on the way
home from the airport that night I could see the moon on the Pacific and smell
jasmine all around and we both knew that there was no longer any point in
keeping the apartment we still kept in New York. There were years when I called
Los Angeles “the Coast,” but they seem a long time ago.