The Pain In E.B. White’s Here is New York

I finally got around to reading E.B. White’s famous essay about New York. He wrote it in 1949 for Holiday. This was a travel magazine for a generation that had just embraced both a post-war boom and the rise of commercial airlines. White wasn’t a traveler, so the magazine asked him to leave Maine for a couple of days to cover Manhattan, the city where he once used to live.

When the essay became a book, the hotel where White resided at the time of writing already disappeared. ‘Despite the mention’, White wrote in the book’s foreword. But he didn’t mind:

“To bring New York down to date, a man would have to be published with the speed of light [..]. I feel that it is the reader’s, not the author’s, duty to bring New York down to date; and I trust it will prove less a duty than a pleasure.”

Ok Mr. White, I’m trained at doing this. Like everyone who has ever lived in New York, I have gotten used to the – sometimes painful – changes to the city.

An example comes to mind. An example that White might also have described in his essay. Because we’re both talking about an ex-speak easy around East 53rd street.

When I lived in New York in 2007, my roommate – a then 42-year old actress-turned-piano-teacher – often took me to bars she had frequented for decades. One of them was Bill Gay’s Nineties, a former speak easy where on Friday nights an Irish ‘piano man’ entertained the crowd. I met someone there I had dreamed of meeting for most of my teenage movie-watching years. Someone who had known The Old Italian New York. Then 83-year old Aldo Leone, greeter of the bar. We became friends for two nights (as I had to move back to Amsterdam soon after my first brawl at Bill’s Gay Nineties).

Every time I returned to New York, I visited Mr. Leone’s bar.

Until, in September 2012, only a faded sign proved that the building on 54rd street once hosted Bill’s Gay Nineties. The joint had disappeared. The bar’s website blamed the landlord. So did The New York Times. There’s no mercy in New York. A bar like that would be a monument in Amsterdam. But in New York, decades of history disappeared because a landlord wanted it that way.

New York comes with pain. With being uncomfortable. White writes how New York offers its visitors and inhabitants two gifts: loneliness and privacy. Then he says:

“The city makes up for its hazards and its deficiencies by supplying its citizens with massive doses of a supplementary vitamin – the sense of belonging to something unique, cosmopolitan, mighty and unparalleled.”

And this pain comes with advantage too.

“I believe it has a positive effect on the creative capacities of New Yorkers – for creation is in part merely the business of forgoing the great and small distractions.”

I’ve never had as many lonely evenings as I had during my stint in New York. But it was also during those months that I started blogging seriously. I interviewed for example, all Dutch correspondents in New York about their trade. By doing this, I laid the foundation for the career I’m so enjoying today.

White ends his book with impending doom. A fleet of bombers (a somewhat new phenomenon at the time) could wipe New York of the earth. But a couple of sentences later, he links it to a hopeful alternative: the construction of the United Nations building.

“The city at last perfectly illustrates both the universal dilemma and the general solution, this riddle in steel and stone is at once the perfect target and the perfect demonstration of nonviolence, of racial brotherhood, this lofty target scraping the skies and meeting the destroying planes halfway, home of all people and all nations, capital of everything, housing the deliberations by which the planes are to be stayed and their errand forestalled.”

I’m going back to New York in February. Ready to embrace the delightful suffering White so elegantly described four years before my father was born.

E.B. White – Here is New York (1949)