Happy Aspects of New York
MELLOW, JAMES R.
Happy Aspects of New York New york proclaimed By V S. Pritchett Photographs by Evelyn Hofer Harcourt, Brace & World. 116 pp. $15. Reviewed by james r. mellow Some men are born New Yorkers: Of...
...The wheels of our psyche should run smoothly: The New Yorker spends a lot of time inspecting them...
...secretaries and stenographers, working and living in the city (with Mother tucked safely away in the suburbs) waiting out husbands...
...Pritchett's tack was the unique activity of the city...
...V S. Pritchett, the latest of the English commentators on our native habits and principal habitat, is the literary mainstay of the New Statesman...
...Some men achieve New- York: artists, writers, editors, actors the ambitious in nearly every profession...
...He has noted down, too, the New Yorker's prediction for the analyst's couch, and he has come up with a reasonable explanation: The New Yorker has an affair with the Machine...
...One may hate machines," Pritchett observes, "and thousands of New Yorkers will inveigh against them...
...yet when presented with reasonable opportunities elsewhere, we invariably back down...
...but it is a love-hate...
...What does one do with a city of 7,781,984 inhabitants...
...He has reflected on its groggy mornings, its rain-slick, lonely nights...
...Reviewed by james r. mellow Some men are born New Yorkers: Of them there is little to say one meets them occasionally at parties and behind the wheel of one's taxi...
...There is little in Pritchett's book about that violence which lies just under the surface of the city's life...
...With this view, it is but a short step to a further truth: "The high regard for psychiatry indicates that the psyche, the soul, the affective areas of our nature are thought of in terms of adjustable mechanisms...
...Indispensable, that is, to the American reader...
...His regular coverage of literary men and literary matters is one of the sustained delights of that indispensable British weekly...
...Miss Hofer's photographs look as if they were all taken early on very sunny Sunday mornings...
...They do constitute an aspect of the city a happier aspect, when the air is spotless and the inhabitants are all dolled up to have their pictures taken...
...There are amused and amusing observations, critical observations even, but never a harsh judgment...
...Pritchett, a stout Englishman, takes the long view...
...Miss Hofer's photographs for the book are superb in their pristine clarity: The Bowery bum, by some trick of the camera eye, contrives to look as scrubbed as the Park Avenue socialite lounging in her expensive parlor...
...Some men have New York thrust upon them: sharp young insurance executives and salesmen, tapped for the home office, missionaries, too old for the field, consigned to the National Board and paperwork...
...In Manhattan alone," Pritchett informs us, "they are stacked, shelved, slotted to a density of 75,000 to the square mile...
...The New Yorker, unlike the European, does not live within a sense of fate...
...Pritchett is a seasoned traveler, but he is most at home in the English novel...
...It is the bitter immediacy of New York, however, that one misses in Pritchett's book...
...During his sojourns, he has caught the pace of the city, its brisk energy, its electric air...
...After such knowledge, there is too much forgiveness...
...The frightening riots, in the midst of a sweltering summer, have already taken on the muffled sound of distant historical events...
...The city itself is a huge money-making machine, with its inhabitants pushed forward through underground tubes, conveyed upwards on escalators and elevators, poured "like cash, into the buildings...
...There is nothing about that exasperated ambition that nags most of our lives...
...Pritchett's book, it must be said straightaway, is a very politic performance...
...Half the pleasure is in being, mind, heart, and body, part of that extraordinary machine...
...A photographer on the order of Cartier-Bresson might have caught that special ambience...
...If Pritchett has observed the blatant opportunism operating at any cocktail party, he has graciously passed it by...
...like the old safecrackers, we have sand papered our fingertips in order to detect that exact combination which will open the magic door...
...Underneath the cynicism and all the complaints, there is an abiding optimism that something can and should be done about every problem...
...The pull of the city is centripetal...
...Englishmen are inclined to take a benign and tolerant view of Americans addicted to New Statesmanship...
...and lastly, that small army of psychologists, psychiatrists, and lay analysts, forced to labor in the city by the chronic malaise of its inhabitants...
...There is nothing about the savagery and bad temper that suddenly erupt in a crowded subway car during the rush hour...
...Even his jaunts to Harlem have the air of a trip to a different country with interesting customs...
...He views us with an eye that has taken the true measure of Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson...
...But never mind, their very politeness pinpoints the main failing of the book, which, if not definitive New York, is still first-rate Pritchett...
...We rightly know that New York is not a decent place to live...
...I think he has us there...
Vol. 48 • May 1965 • No. 11
