In Which It Is The Only Thing That Matters More Than Beauty

Manhattan in Middle Age

by ELIZABETH GUMPORT

New York is a city that looks better from a distance. The gap can be temporal – the poverty of youth becomes, in time, one’s golden freedom – or spatial. A friend from Chicago complained that Manhattan lacked alleyways: in the summer, our garbage stunk and burned on the sidewalks. On the Brooklyn Bridge, the smell disappears, and all you can see are buildings massed at the edge of the island, the offices crowned with lights, glowing like bottles in a dark bar. The boundaries of other cities blur – at what point do the sprawling lights become suburb? – but Manhattan is an island, cut cleanly against the night. As pure image, New York is flawless: tidy, discrete, simple to hold in your mind, and for this reason particularly easy to romanticize. Emblem, icon, colophon: its skyline stands for a story.

It is this fantasy that makes the reality bearable. “There is really only one city for everyone, just as there is one major love” the novelist Dawn Powell wrote in 1953. “New York is my city because I have an investment I can always draw on – a bottomless investment of twenty-one years (I count the day I was born) of building up an idea of New York – so no matters what happens here I have the rock of my dreams of it that nothing can destroy.”
 
Born in Mount Gilead, Ohio, Powell arrived in New York in 1918. The city was the largest in the Western Hemisphere: 2.3 million people lived in Manhattan alone. Her life sounds like the life of many new arrivals: she moved frequently, first renting on West 85th Street, and then West End Avenue, and finally a series of apartments in Greenwich Village. For a time she worked as a typist; once she appeared as an extra in a film. Before she became a novelist, she freelanced: American Agriculturalist, Southern Ruralist, Oil and Gas Journal, a piece on “Pekinese poodles” for Dogdom. She went through a phase of screaming in her sleep.

In 1920, Powell and Joseph Gousha took the ferry to Staten Island for their first date. That November, after addressing a brief letter to her aunt – "please come and give me away next Saturday" – she married Gousha at the Church of Transfiguration, known as the Little Church Around the Corner, on East 29th Street. In the following years, Powell would give birth to an autistic son, who once beat her so hard she had to be hospitalized. Powell drank a lot, Gousha drank more, and they were almost always broke or near-broke.

In Powell’s New York novels, scenes and images accumulate; parties propel, or stand in for, plot. Restaurants and cafes figure prominently in many of her novels; Café Julien, which serves as the hub of The Wicked Pavilion, was inspired by Powell’s beloved Hotel Lafayette, on Washington Square between University Place and Ninth Street. The hotel was demolished in 1950 and replaced with apartments.

Powell’s novels feature artists and editors, writers and failed writers, the "quartette of midnight friends (male) who would not know each other by day but view everybody’s business (particularly their catastrophes) with a philosophic pleasure" and the "completely New York people" who "only remember you when you’ve gone into your fourth printing." Her subject is the man who believes, or once believed, that "New York loved him as it loved no other young man."

“… spangled skyscrapers piled up softly against the darkness, tinseled parks were neatly boxed and ribboned with gold like Christmas presents waiting to be opened. Sounds of traffic dissolved in distance, all clangor sifted through space into a whispering silence, it held a secret, and when letters flamed triumphantly in the sky you felt, ah, that was the secret, this at last was it, this special telegram to God — Sunshine Biscuits. On and off it went, Eat Sunshine Biscuits, the message of the city.”
 
In many ways Powell’s life was what one imagines the life of an author to be, at once glamorous and sordid: drinks and debts, famous acquaintances (Edmund Wilson was one, Hemingway another), pithy asides ("I don’t make beds," Powell said. "I break them."), and perpetual professional dissatisfaction. Over the years, she bounced from publisher to publisher. For a time she worked with Maxwell Perkins, after whom she named her cat.
 
Powell saw herself as a descendent of Edith Wharton, and her novels as Menippean satires, but believed their subject matter caused critics to dismiss them as frivolous. “This is obviously an age that can’t take it,” Powell complained. "When someone wishes to write of this age — as I do and have done — critics shy off — the public shies off." No subject is in itself serious or unserious: whether something is drama and comedy depends not on the events of the plot but the attitude of the author.

“Thirty is really the most important age for women. . . They have to be started towards fame or a family by that time, and if they’re not, they’re done for. So you see it’s very necessary that I should crowd the next few years.” Powell often lied about her age.

People think New York changes, but it never does. It doesn’t matter whether the year is 1919 or 2009: the city has always been too expensive and too vicious. A letter Powell wrote to a college friend shortly after her arrival in New York touched on what would become the central themes of her novels. “Beauty,” she stated, “is after all the only thing in the world that matters — not mental or spiritual beauty or any of that lying rot, but splendid physical beauty. . . Let us not mention money — it is so obvious that it is money that makes beauty possible, so that very likely money is the only thing that matters more than beauty.”

What is true is not always nice, and it is true that happiness begets happiness. People who luck into money or beauty find more of it, and more; its early absence only makes its later arrival more unlikely. Money burns, youth melts away, and the failure of one person makes possible the success of another: in Turn, Magic Wheel, a young author uses his friend’s failed marriage to a Hemingway-like figure as fodder for his novel. To survive here, you must protect yourself: "I will be absolutely free," Powell wrote when a long-term affair ended. "No affections can touch me.” The city demands a novel as hard as itself: "Nothing will cut New York but a diamond."

Powell’s novels are like New York parties, where familiar faces – ravaged by alcohol, the hour good for going home having long past them by – appear again and again. A number of characters who figure or are mentioned in Turn, Magic Wheel return for A Time To Be Born, set in the early days of World War II.

“Drink,” muses one, “seemed the only protection against the lacerations of his mind, now that he was back in New York, his foot rocking away once more on the touted ladder of success. At this time the famous ladder was propped against nothing and led nowhere, and anyone foolish enough to make the world his oyster was courting ptomaine; yet the ladder tradition was still observed, and until the flames reached them young people were still found going through the motions of climbing.” Later, he tells another character, "Youth is all I demand of a woman."

A title Powell considered but never used: Promiscuity Recollected In Senility

The city that unduly privileges youth also extends it. Powell called Manhattan “the town for middle age. Elsewhere, middle age is surrounded by its grandchildren or young and chaperoned into discretion.” We become addicted to our endless childhoods. Trying to leave proves futile: if New York is bad, everywhere else is worse.

On a trip home to Ohio, Powell found in Cleveland “private homes as big as our public libraries, the beautiful country clubs, the glorification of material conveniences, the vast invincible Magazine Public that in New York we can thank God forget. . . I caught the language again quickly and the familiar combination of open hearts and closed minds that represents so much of the country except New York, where we have closed hearts first, and minds so open that carrier pigeons can fly straight through without leaving a message.”

While working at the MacDowell Colony, Powell learned Edward MacDowell had gone mad on the estate, and wondered if his wife “started this place after his death to see how many other artists would be driven nuts by it, too.” Once you get out of the game, it’s hard to get back in, and for some people this is reason not to play at all. Even those like Powell, who love the hustle, or are addicted to it, know a world exists across the river. Powell always retained an image of herself as outsider.

In the autobiographical short story “What Are You Doing In My Dreams?” she envisioned a split self, half of which lived by day in New York and “the other half by night with the dead in long-ago Ohio.” Edmund Wilson described Powell’s real theme as “the provincial in New York who has come on from the Middle West and acclimatized himself (or herself) to the city and made himself a permanent place there, without ever, however, losing his fascinated sense of an alien and anarchic society.”

Located to the north of the Bronx in Long Island Sound, Hart Island – accessible, like Staten Island, only by ferry – has served since 1869 the home of New York Cemetery, the largest tax-funded cemetery in the world. New York Cemetery is a potter’s field, and each year inmates from Riker’s Island inter over a thousand bodies in its mass graves. When the executor of her estate declined to claim her remains, Powell was buried on Hart Island.

She was lucky: those of us raised in New York have no other half, no dream-island to fall back on when the real city disappoints. We are all New York, and it is the rest of the world that seems unreal. Failure here means failure in full; a life lived elsewhere would be less than a life. In the end, of course, it hardly matters. Nobody wins the game: youth is all anybody demands of a woman, and we are not so long young. The best we can hope for is to die and be buried in New York.

Elizabeth Gumport is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. You can find her website here. She twitters here.

"Love After War" - Robin Thicke (mp3)

"For You (live on Radio K)" - Sharon Van Etten (mp3)

"Rolling in the Deep" - John Legend (mp3)

In Which The World Is Burning Somewhere Else

Doing This Again

by BARBARA GALLETLY

As a little one I loved school. It was normal. It always helps to be good at it and to have a nice teacher. My parents went away every day, and when they traveled and I felt particularly lonely my first grade teacher asked me if I would like to call her at night just for a familiar voice. I did. And then I was given a hardcover copy of an interesting book called Annie Bananie, My Best Friend. Evidently, we were moving on. To Texas. I didn’t even know I was "from" any place at all until then, but afterwards this "from" concept would be a problem.

It was August, there was tumbleweed, and as my father drove us "home" from the airport my sister and I wept. It was really hot, and by that I mean awful. The first day of school I found out I had missed last year’s introduction to cursive. Horrifying. Behind. I also learned a new word, so common that the other second graders used it in cursive in their little journals we kept to practice writing. "Yawl" or "ya’ll" or "yall" or even correctly, "y’all." But this was simply too much. I remember sobbing that night, a seven-year-old cutie from the preppiest town on Long Island, describing these barbarians (yes, my name is Barbara) to my parents. I can't imagine how they dealt with me, or what they felt when they found out they had a snob on their hands.

In spite of this seemingly innate bitchiness, the children of Dallas were kind to me and became my friends. I caught up in cursive and slipped into y’allsing every now and then. Soon I was from Dallas, I became a normal, average teenager. I wasn’t too good or too bad, and I wanted to be Winona Ryder in Reality Bites (that’s actually Houston) so just before ninth grade began I cut off my hair. I had cool friends even if I wasn’t awesome, and no one even made fun of my boy hair because the point of a girls' high school was not to start hot and stay hot, but to start a kid and end up a woman. So. Then we were moving again.

In Houston being from Dallas was like being from the moon. And a leper colony. I had no friends for the first six weeks of school and from August to October I went to the phone booth at lunchtime, to cry instead of having to sit alone in the cafeteria. Great attitude. Where the hell was Tavi Gevinson then? Probably not born yet.

Part of the problem was that little snob inside, who thankfully found acceptance at college and occasionally snuck out of hiding while I lived in New York, where she had been born, where my family lived and where mild snobbery is neither exceptional nor such a bad thing: "Home."

Then I decided to move. It was in tiny part about loving or wanting someone who had left for California before me, but it’s mostly a cruel streak of habit and a desire to challenge whatever I think of as my identity. Whether it’s true or not, I believe that once you start moving around, it does not get any easier to adjust to new places, it’s just awfully hard to terminate the pattern. My mother, who has moved at least 25 times, says you can make a home for yourself anywhere. And I have taken this statement as a dare. Who are you when the things you do and the people you know and the places and certainties change abruptly, for you, and you can’t get back home because you’ve just forsaken it? Anyone you want to be?

It helped that I could convince my best friend to drive with me, and it was awesome. Well, I was kind of a mess, but I was also so excited to go and explore and see what I was worth to other people. My friends in Los Angeles were amazing despite obnoxious complaints about traffic, pollution, strangeness, erratic public transportation, occasional rain, etc., so I thought "I can do this again!"

I came back to Texas, this time to Austin, ready to embrace August this time, to go back to school again. I knew summer here was not really a great way to kick things off. I didn’t suppose it would be this bad. The drought here has been exacerbated by temperatures in excess of anything seen before. God is clearly punishing Rick Perry or me, or all of us Texans and our plants and animals and water. Driving through the western half of the state from California I passed scorched corridors that wildfires had recently decimated, groves of thirsty live oaks alternatively charred and spared, all of us equals under the wide greedy heavens.

My first evening in Texas there was a burst of lightning and rain splattered Marfa, kicking up dirt before evaporating. That’s the last time I saw this enormous blue sky do something so kind as obscure itself in the daytime. Austin’s summer has finally ended, the hottest on record, and just this week daily highs dipped below 100˚ for the first time in two and a half months. Given the circumstances, the outbreak of wildfires around Austin was unsurprising but dramatic and scary. The sunset reminded me of Los Angeles, colorful through all that smoke. Meanwhile my old apartment in Greenpoint was in a Flood Zone B, two blocks from the East River, and had just days before escaped Irene/Borene. Everywhere a natural disaster zone.

Graduate school is like a mix between high school and college, so far, as we’re all shy aliens of different ages, doing different things, and it is hard to be the right amount of friendly to absolute strangers. On the first day I dressed myself as Scandinavian, with clogs and a Marimekko tunic and everything, and it really did not matter because adults are less likely to really notice what other people are wearing, and no one else seemed to have dressed "special" for the occasion.

I brought all of this with me, ideas about who to think about and how to act and where to say I'm from, and I got my sister to come and make sure it’s really true, that I arrived and that I still exist. All of the people who love me, who I love, I think about them all the time that I am not worrying about sunscreen or my reading for Tuesday or new wrinkles. I do not love a single soul in Austin yet and I think that is the strange thing, why it feels very weird to be here, to live here. Not so weird as it feels to be cool in my air-conditioned house when the world around me is burning or to find delightful fruits and lettuces inside grocery stores when I can’t keep a sage plant alive in my backyard.

Wherever you are, be somewhere else. But no matter how hard you resist, you will also be exactly where you are. So thank Tim Berner-Lee for the www, and please send us your rain.

Barbara Galletly is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Austin. She twitters here and tumbls here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

Photographs by the author.

"Crack in the Paint" - The Concretes (mp3)

"Good Evening" - The Concretes (mp3)

"Oh My Love" - The Concretes (mp3)

In Which We Earn The Right To Hurt Someone Else

In Love With

by LUCY MORRIS

Dear C,

I am back in New York but without a bed. I sleep on the couch but I do have a cabinet that holds some clothes and offers a surface on which to stack the books I continue to buy wildly, compulsively, like words are the solution to every problem I have and an appropriate celebration for every small, daily achievement. With the books accumulating and a picture of you propped against the stacks, it is starting to feel like home here.

Can you tell from the photo I sent you how hot it is in my room? Of course you can’t. New York got hot and it’s the kind of hot that alternately makes you want to do nothing at all and do something terribly drastic. I spend all day while I work thinking of drastic things to do, but the good thing about work is that it keeps me from doing them for at least eight hours.

The events of past summers are coming back to me very vividly in a way that makes me want a strong drink, but it’s also comforting to have seasonal context restored: summer makes you do crazy things, of course. It makes you want to cheat on your boyfriend or else marry him. It makes you want to go macrobiotic or else order a personalized sheet cake just for fun. It makes the pursuit of immediate pleasure seem very important and everything else, like the niceness of having someone to say goodnight to every day or the security of putting part of your paycheck into savings or the long term health benefits of good posture while you work — it all starts to seem secondary to sleeping around and spending and slouching.

I think I’ll start taking my life advice from rap music again, or maybe I’ll eschew words entirely for classical. What do you think that would to do my mind, which spends all day processing words from one language into another, and all evening trying to quiet itself down enough to sleep? Meanwhile, when I open my window at night the air smells like bars, like nightlife, like people out on the prowl for pleasure, and I appreciate being able to take part in that without even leaving my apartment. The proximity alone is comforting; it squelches my eternal fear of missing out. Also, here in the construction zone that is my apartment, my comb is coated in dust daily, just like yours is in the perpetually transforming city of Beijing.

love,

L 

Dear C,

Just about a year ago, I went home to see a boy I had decided I was in love with. I wonder when I’ll be able to forget the coolness of the early summer cement in Wisconsin that weekend, or the scratchy dry grass I laid in while I tried to work up the courage to be real. A love that takes as long to blossom as that one did, even — or especially — if it’s fostered mostly in your imagination is crazy dangerous. 

A month later, he came to visit me in New York.  I bought new sunglasses on St. Marks Place for the occasion and took him to the Met because he considered himself something of an artist. He said the most impressive thing there was a velvet rope cordoning off some sculptures, which should have been a sign but was not. There were a lot of signs; there always are, with almost anyone, but in the variegated, cataclysmic history of good times, has anyone ever chosen not to ignore them?

A love like the one I had then is only possible in summer. You can spend late July nights saying insane things to each other, like that you’ll move to Bahrain and build a house together, and then you can end it before it’s cold enough that you have to sleep in clothes again. In some ways this is harder than you think it will be, and in some ways it’s not hard at all, because autumn changes everything. But when summer comes back around, the vestiges of that last love – an anthem from that season, a meal you ate together often – will return to you in a terrible, almost paralyzing way. It will make you cry to your new boyfriend, and you will know this is wrong but you feel that because someone else hurt you, you now have the right to hurt someone else.

Something I was just then starting to realize, not on late night small town barstools but in the clarity of the early morning bus rides that followed, is that sometimes you might think a person is crazy for you but really they are just crazy. Another thing is that maybe when you devote yourself to loving someone intensely, you are just trying to balance out a negative elsewhere in your life. You think having someone’s hand in yours makes you invincible and capable of ignoring your shitty job or decrepit apartment or the guidance counselor nightmare that is an utter lack of direction. It can, but only for a while.

It took me another year to learn that it is possible to be an okay person who loves someone who is not good. You can cope with that by doing destructive things to convince yourself you’re not that good either: you can drink a lot and resent other people when you are with them. Then, when you are alone, you can try to be good enough to compensate for your companion’s poison, perhaps by studying for the LSATS or running loops around your neighborhood, as though you can actually chase down the person you want to be, or the person you truly want to be with.

I got very in shape doing that, and it made me write more than I had been, but that’s about it.

love,

L 

Dear C, 

When I send you my frenzied late night e-mails, library computer terminal e-mails, typed-beneath-the-table restaurant e-mails, all begging you to come home, often what I am trying to convey is how much I miss having someone with whom to traverse all my troubled topographies: a bus stop where I cried out of job search despair or the first date restaurant of my last relationship. If you were here, at each stop on the landmark tour of my minor daily tragedies, you would say, “Don’t be ridiculous,” but the glimmer in your green eyes and the grin emerging at the corners of your mouth would tell me that you were sympathetic to the miles of difficult memories I’ve created here, that you, too, know that the past does not always stay where it should but can in fact sneak up behind and overwhelm you if you’re not careful. 

Joan Didion says that we keep notebooks in order to remember “what it was to be me.” These letters to you are records of a certain time, a sometimes self-conscious and sometimes totally uninhibited portrait of who I am – or at least that is how it will seem years from now. You know better than anyone that I am always on a dual quest to forget everything that happens to me and to record it all for eternity. I am furious when I cannot forget things fast enough, when memories stick to my ribcage and eventually gang up on my insides, flooding my lungs and making it hard to breathe. But I’m so afraid, too, of losing memories, of losing what I knew in a neighborhood, in a man, in a dress I once wore or a song I once heard.

Despite my best efforts to adopt a new model of experience, the past informs everything I say and do; who will I be next if I don’t know who I was before? I am forever hoping that recording things will make them easier to forget, that if I can file them away in a digital card catalogue, I’ll free my mind up for new acquisitions. I wonder if this process is what makes a person a writer more than any classes or strict writing routines do. I also wonder if this is the most efficient way of making yourself miserable on a day-to-day basis. 

Every day, I used to write my little urban experiences down in my phone, and a lot of times I sent them to this boy, but sometimes I didn’t, sometimes I kept them just for myself. When my phone was stolen last fall, I was disproportionately devastated for all those lost mementos, those fast-captured paragraphs recounting the moments when I was twenty-one and twenty-two and learning a lot about things, although not fast enough to suit either of us. I am sorry for all the things it took me so long to learn from you, and that I did such a terrible job of following the advice I so often doled out.

It took me a while to see that it is not a good idea to spend time with men who make you dislike other women, or make you forget your own plans, whether it’s the train you meant to catch or the career you want to have. I learned that sometimes being nervous around someone is thrilling but sometimes it keeps you from being your full, best self, the way you are in the company of friends. I also realized that break-ups are the kind of mistake it’s okay to cop to, that my dad was right when he told me that heartbreak is a disease 99.999 percent of people survive, except for in Tolstoy. 

Do you remember the time in Washington Square Park last spring when a man came up and asked us, “Are you looking for love tonight?” And we said, simultaneously, “I’m good.” It is my recollection that we were good – in the sense of satisfied but also morally – because we were together. But you would say there were so many more factors to that moment, the way there are to every one, that things don’t just hinge on a single person or event: that the temperature then was one of hopeful May and not oppressive August, that we had just seen two men somewhat absurdly, comically carrying a piano right through the park, that we had, as usual, eaten too much for dinner and gotten cookies and ice cream for desert anyway, and that you were going back uptown and I was going home to Brooklyn, and we each had so much then to look forward to. 

The walls in my apartment are all painted now, so I hung up some pictures of us. There’s one of us in a candy store in California a handful of summers ago. We appear accidentally identical: dark brown hair swooping in front of our faces, navy blue sweatshirts with DIY thumbholes on the sleeves, sunburnt cheeks wrought large as we bite into candy apples at the same moment, in the flash’s glare. We are nineteen years old but in our uninhibited delight and with our unselfconscious appetites, we look like we could be much younger. When I see this, I sometimes panic about time passed or wasted and think, “Will we ever be that young again?” On other days, though, I look at it with relief, because I know we never will be, and that is the proper order of things, forward moving, and for the best. Right?

love,

L 

Lucy Morris is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about the break-up. You can find an archive of her work on This Recording here.

"Some Other Time" - Jill Scott (mp3)

"Quick" - Jill Scott (mp3)

"Making You Wait" - Jill Scott (mp3)

The new album from Jill Scott, The Light of the Sun, was released on June 21th.