Writer Polly Devlin reflects on the vagaries of life in New York, where she is currently teaching at Columbia University
I am teaching at Barnard College at Columbia University, and am now a professor, so a bit of respect there at the back of the class, please. I live on the 26th floor of a huge building on the west side, by Columbus Circle and Broadway, looking out over an archetypal view of Manhattan.
A recent day was celestially beautiful, with a high enough temperature to go out without a jacket and not a cloud in the sky, and then whoosh, just like that, a spectacular 66cms (26ins) of snow had risen to our swaddled middles. I rose in the night, woken by the sudden muffled silence - no fire engines or police sirens - and watched the big blizzard blanket New York from my high windows. Snow: thick, white, like God's pillow being shaken out, just as I'd always been told as a child. Everything pure and pristine for a few hours, and I watched it for a long time, remembering Louis MacNeice and his snow: "The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was/ Spawning snow and pink roses against it/ Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:/ World is suddener than we fancy it." Not that there were any great bay windows or huge roses, but apart from that, yes, the world was suddenly rich and crazily white and at a standstill.
On a clear day you can see, bang in the middle of my view, conspicuous and low in the soaring line of skyscrapers, a most surprising and felicitous edifice bearing carved Pharaonic figures and mini-pyramids and cartouches along its skyline. I strolled round to West 70th Street to see it from the ground and found it even more charming, with a glittering green and gold façade that looks like a set from a Cecil B de Mille movie. It's the Pythian Temple, now an apartment block, built in 1926 by the architect Thomas W Lamb. It is one of the few remaining buildings erected by clubs such as the Freemasons, the Elks, the Knights of Pythias, in the flush of idealistic affluent speculative brotherly love in the 1920s.
The Pythians were named after Pythias, a first-century bloke sentenced to death by Dionysius of Syracuse. He obtained permission from the tyrant to return home and arrange his affairs before his death, on condition that his best mate Damon gave himself up as bail against his return. Which he did, in the nick of time, and both survived, like this building.
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I had a surprising and felicitous meeting with an old friend at a sublime exhibition of the paintings of Fra Angelico in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was that lovely little picture by him, from the National Gallery in London called The Attempted Martyrdom of Saints Cosmas and Damian Escaping from the Fire, which, like its subjects, stood its ground well. The paintings truly look as though they were painted by an angel. There is a tiny one of the Annunciation that made me laugh, although it radiated piety. No matter how often he painted it, you can see that Fra Angelico adored what he was doing. Here, the dove of the Holy Ghost is scudding along on a beam of light - accelerating, whoosh, helter-skelter, wings pinned back by the G-force, going hell for leather towards his destination, the Virgin, sitting in her room a few inches away. She, with no idea of what is going to hit her in a nanosecond, looks bored out of her mind. The world is about to be electrocuted. Looking at her, sitting on a red velvet cushion squishing out of its cover, you could faint with pleasure.
All the same, a visit to any museum seems more and more to me to reveal the sheer scale of theft and looting that went on all over the world and over centuries. Most colonisers, curators and museum staff insist on the absolute morality of guardianship - well, they would, wouldn't they. So it was a surprise to read this week that the director of the Metropolitan Museum, the legendary Philippe de Montebello, is (albeit grudgingly) returning to Italy a collection of looted antiquities, including the Euphronios Krater, a huge Greek vase which has been a centrepiece of the museum holdings since the 1970s. To quote de Montebello: "The piece came to us in a completely improper way; through machinations, lies, clandestine night digging." Whoops.
I went to Egypt not long ago - one of the things you have to do before you die, or more likely before it becomes too dangerous to travel there - and while at the Met I went to look at its collection of ancient Egyptian Art to see what had been plundered from there. There are approximately 36,000 objects of artistic, historical, and cultural importance from Egypt, and I stood beside two young men sucking their teeth over some of them. Finally, one said impatiently to the other. "This is all damaged shit."
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I live two lives here, one on the upper east side and the other on the west, areas as divided by Central Park as Here There Be Tygers marked the known medieval world from the unknown. The west side has traditionally been cheaper and more bohemian than the east, although everywhere is now prohibitively expensive. The boom in Manhattan property means that apartments in fashionable areas change hands for up to $20 million. A triplex penthouse sold for $70 million, and in the newish Time Warner Center, a financier paid $42.25 million for an apartment in 2003.
To the anger of many New Yorkers, and visitors, even the famous Plaza Hotel is being converted into apartments, though some of its public rooms - the Palm Court, the Oak Room, the Grand Ballroom - have had preservation orders slapped on them. But the west side still has the feeling of a community. There are dilapidations and eccentricities, discount stores, hardware shops, key cutters, tiny restaurants, boutiques, and shops selling berets and all the small imponderables that make a city enjoyable and turn an area into a quartier. In the parallel world on the upper east side all is immaculate, heartless, expensive and seductive.
There is no street in the world like Madison Avenue, and I don't know any woman who walks along it who doesn't, for a moment at least, long to be rich. On the west side, as I walk up towards Columbia, I never meet anyone who by the look of them cares one way or the other; though of course we would like to have more money. Professors and teachers are abysmally badly paid. So what's new?
The reason I have two lives is that because of a lucky break in life when I was young, I lived - stand back there till I tell you - in a brownstone just off Fifth Avenue. I'll divert here for a minute to say that I was working for American Vogue and Diana Vreeland was its editor. She was legendary then and is legendary now: the subject of a Broadway play, many books and supposedly the model for the movie Funny Face. She could find style anywhere. "I suppose there is an Irish style?" she once asked me. "Maybe in the music and of course the po-et-reee? The Irish open their mouths and poetry comes out."
Naturally enough I never opened mine, except the once, to tell her that there was no word for no in the Irish language and a thousand ways of saying yes. She was so enchanted that I never had to speak again. Anyway, while with her, I met Truman Capote, by that time an iconic eastsider. His books Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood had turned him from writer to celebrity. Not genetically blessed in the physical sense - he could look like a small pink pug - he seemed to me simply a thing of wonder and chutzpah. Now he has been brought to life in the brilliant film Capote in an astonishing performance by Philip Seymour. It is him to the life. See this film.
Anyway, going back to the east side, as I did the other night to a party in its cold exquisite heart; nearly every woman there pertained to the geographical physical ideal and so was thin, to the point of being pitiful, all in black, gaunt-eyed, bones sticking out. I think it's a class thing now, not to have a wrinkle, and since every woman over 30 (and some of the men) has had plasticsurgery or Botox, their faces were expressionless.
They are predicated on looking youthful and instead look ageless, which is another thing entirely. The older ones with multiple lifts soon will not have a face left, as the skin gets thinner and more stretched and the skull beneath the bone emerges in a perpetual and ghastly grin. If you want to be fashionable, you must have the palimpsest of your face wiped clean. The whole culture has had a toxic effect on the idea of the beauty of age and the value of marks of wisdom.
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One nice coincidence. I saw that some of my students were reading Chronicles by Bob Dylan and I insinuated myself into their good graces by telling them that I had been the first person to interview Bob Dylan when he had come to England (I didn't mention that it was a lifetime ago). Then I read the book. The opening words describe visiting the pocket-sized recording studio where Bill Haley and the Comets had recorded Rock around the Clock. The studio was in the Pythian Temple on West 70th Street. So now I can go back and worship. u