Here Is New York. By E.B. White. The Little Bookroom. 56pp, £10 in UK New York in the Sixties. Edited by George Perry. Pavilion. 128pp, £16.99 in UK
Let's face it, when we casual visitors speak of New York, it's Manhattan that we mean. No doubt Queens has its royal charms, and the Bronx deserves a cheer, but when we want to conjure up an image of the modern megalopolis at its best and worst, our imaginations turn at once to that tongue-shaped, gridded, and frequently gridlocked, island bought from the Indians for - what was it, $10? - and now one of the most expensive tracts of real estate in the world. San Francisco is beautiful, Chicago brutally handsome, Los Angeles has the money, but Manhattan is where the style is.
New York, says E.B. White, "is the concentrate of art and commerce and sport and religion and entertainment and finance, bringing to a single compact arena the gladiator, the evangelist, the promoter, the actor, the trader and the merchant". White, a true thoroughbred in that famous stable of New Yorker writers that included James Thurber, Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker, wrote these words in the torrid summer of 1948, in a room in the Algonquin Hotel. He was living at the time in Maine, and had come down to the city at the invitation of Holiday, the editor of which, Ted Patrick, had thought White might "have fun" writing about New York for the magazine. White replied icily that "writing is never `fun' ", but he accepted the commission anyway. Here Is New York is a reissue of White's 7,500-word Holiday essay, with a new introduction by his stepson, Roger Angell, a writer and editor at - yes, you guessed it - the New Yorker, where his mother, White's wife, Katharine Angell, was the first fiction editor. This is a charming little edition, nicely printed and bound, with a couple of evocative photographs of White, whose most famous piece of writing is the children's book Charlotte's Web (White's friend Elizabeth Bishop to Marianne Moore, April 11th, 1953: "So I ordered the book but, Marianne, it is so AWFUL"), though he is at his inimitable best in works such as The Elements of Style and the splendid Hemingway parody, "Across the Street and into the Grill".
The 1940s was the age of the magazine, the only worthwhile survivor of which is - yes, you guessed it again - the New Yorker. In those days, Holiday was one of the most successful publications of its kind; its fat fees and lavish expense accounts, Roger Angell tells us, attracted some of the finest talent around, including Saul Bellow, Frank O'Connor, William Faulkner, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa. Although E.B. ("Andy") White seems New York Man in quintessence, he had long since fled the city to his farm in North Brookline and did not lightly venture south. The result, as his stepson remarks, is that much of the New York essay is written from the point of view of an exile. The tone is dulcetly elegiac, as the author in his hot hotel room conjures up the great city that "carries on its lapel the unexpungeable odor of the long past, so that no matter where you sit in New York you feel the vibrations of great times and tall deeds, of queer people and events and undertakings".
It takes a writer of White's delicacy and perceptiveness to recognise that what marks off New York from other American cities is the quality of melancholy that is always there behind the rush and the roar, that "feeling of great forlornness or forsakenness" that informs even its gayest excesses, and that is as palpable today as it was in 1948. We tend to think of New York in terms of energy, speed, avarice, violent movement, limitless hungers; White, however, looks down those deep canyons filled with the blond sunlight of summer and sees that the essence of the place is poetry:
A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive.
He is not blind, however, to the darker urban aspects. "At the feet of the tallest and plushiest offices," he wryly observes, "lie the crummiest slums." But even at its crummiest, New York retains a strong strain of original hope, that determined optimism that allowed the Founding Fathers to believe their task was to build a shining city on a hill the light of which would reach back all the way to rotting old Europe and give it one in the eye. In its skyward expansion, New York "is to the nation what the white church spire is to the village - the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying that the way is up".
Fanciful? A little, perhaps. But White's fancy is the fancy of a true poet at work in prose. At the close of the essay, White, shivering a little under the threat of nuclear annihilation - 1948 was a jittery year - contemplates, and celebrates, an emblem of continuity and rootedness:
A block or two west of the new City of Man in Turtle Bay there is an old willow tree that presides over an interior garden. It is a battered tree, long suffering and much climbed, held together by strands of wire but beloved of those who know it. In a way it symbolizes the city: life under difficulties, growth against odds, sap-rise in the midst of concrete, and the steady reaching for the sun. Whenever I look at it nowadays, and feel the cold shadow of the [bomb-bearing] planes, I think: "This must be saved, this particular thing, this very tree." If it were to go, all would go - this city, this mischievous and marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death.
It is something of a shock to pass from White's 1940s to George Perry's 1960s. His book of photographs, New York in the Sixties, shows just how tawdry was so much of that decade of flower power and drugs, of self-realisation and self-fulfilment, not to mention a plethora of assassinations and an extremely dirty foreign war. Here they all are, in mostly black-and-white images: the pop stars and the models, the stone-faced politicos, the black equal rights campaigners in their pork-pie straw hats and horn-rimmed glasses, the spaced-out girls, the young men grinning in sheer disbelief of all that free sex that has suddenly become available - all the blessed, the foolish and the doomed.
Contemplating these pictures of a raw and changing time, one cannot help wondering about that tree in Turtle Bay, and asking tremulously, with the Shakespeare of the sonnets, "How, with this rage, shall beauty hold a plea/Whose action is no stronger than a flower?"
John Banville is Chief Literary Critic and Associate Literary Editor of The Irish Times