Hello, All That!
by Daniel D’Addario
Moving to New York used to be a choice-a creative one, despite its eternal popularity-for people so devoted to nurturing their creativity that they were willing to overlook the strains of actually, you know, living there. I speak not from experience, really, but from my reading. Edith Wharton’s writing career only truly began after Henry James advised her, “Use the American subject! Do New York! There it is round you.” New York forces its resident to serve as constant interpreter-laying out the whole of “the American subject” in the petty triumphs and real inequities one finds. I always, when I was a student and lived in New York, found this quote inspiring, or at least believed this quote was “inspirational.” Never mind that Wharton was an heiress whose New York could be “done” without struggle-New York was where it was all happening, for all of its residents willing to pay attention. Something universal, my generation’s Age of Innocence would come again out of this disparity that was our New York.
In a Lynn Hirschberg backlist marathon this week-no longer in the city, I find ways to fill my time-I found the 2003 profile of Sofia Coppola, another heiress of sorts whose experience of New York is dramatically different, I assume, from most. Still, she sounds just like millions of other New York artists, or just enraptured young people, when she says she chose New York over Los Angeles, at least to edit her movie: “I wanted to see people on the street, to walk to work.” Isn’t that at least the promise of New York-the feeling that in one’s walk to work something unusual or exciting might happen, that inspiration might strike? That you might suddenly find your subject. Or that the discovery wouldn’t be sudden at all but learned bit by bit with each new New York adventure?
When I decided to go to college in New York, I was in the midst of a deep fascination with Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table; I thought that the entire city was a “smart set” fueling one another’s creativity and productivity. I didn’t see Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle until the end of my sophomore year, at which point I realized that, when not putting out a magazine, these people sat around and drank all day and bitched at one another.
The Algonquin sorts are the Brorothy Parkers to the recent Observer-coined “BroBos,” who, in Leon Neyfakh’s article, “enjoy a utopian-seeming existence marked by strolls down tree-lined streets, carefully chosen foods and leisurely weekends spent in coffee bars and parks. An existence only occasionally marred by the realization that this is not the hopped-up New York they came to conquer.” Well, no. The New York they came to conquer is governed by ideas and actions. The New York they found is governed by an entrenched system of wealth and power near-impossible to surmount. So they decamped to what Neyfakh portrays as a state of permanent leisure. It’s like Florida for the young.
Oddly, this state is sort of enviable, denying maturation (both personal and-for artistic sorts-artistic). One can play Frisbee anywhere, but there’s a frisson of rebellion to doing it in New York, the hint of conscious dropping-out. It radiates out of the streets in Brooklyn, the sense of territory reclaimed for the young folks. Brooklyn’s appeal became real, for a moment, when I heard about a “BK job fair” at my college and immediately wanted to take part, despite myself. No matter, anyhow: it turns out Columbia was actually advertising positions at Burger King’s new Whopper Bar.
If these are the only ways that young people can live in New York-by carving out their own ethnographically unique borough in which grown-up concerns cannot penetrate, or by slinging Whoppers to pay an inflated rent-then maybe New York is not a narrative with an endpoint but an endless dialectic, a conversation already so loud that the young can’t even be heard.
I don’t have a compelling story to back up my assertions. I’m no Joan Didion or Jessica Roy. Nothing bad happened to me in New York; in fact, people were really kind to me! And I’m not going to need a plane to go to Brooklyn if I want to hang out with the Brooklynites I know. I’m moving to an apartment in the Westchester suburbs. Despite its nearness to New York, at a publishing party before my graduation, a friend and his very nice boyfriend thought that sounded terrible. “Stay where everything is happening,” the boyfriend urged.
I lamely protested that I wanted to save a bit of rent money. “Everyone lives without money. You make it work,” the boyfriend insisted. Maybe I’m not tough or smart enough to take part in that tradition, I thought! But when my friend, to whom I’d turned for advice in the past, told me to “maintain my momentum,” I wondered towards what destination momentum was meant to carry me.
I had to edit the previous sentence down from the inadvertently plagiaristic “I couldn’t help but wonder”-the topnote of Bradshaw overwhelmed my palate. In New York, I was constantly aware of (and just outside New York, have already begun to forget) the New York narratives overlaying my experience. No chance meeting had the sparkling dialogue of Michael Caine and Barbara Hershey in Hannah and Her Sisters, no walk inspired me to do the work of Wharton or Coppola; no internship was as good as Whitney Port’s. As the latest revitalizations of the Carrie Bradshaw myth (on film as experienced doyenne and in print as a young girl dreaming of Manhattan) indicate, no city is as fraught with narratives as is New York. It’s easy to fade into a torpor. Your narrative will most likely never be that interesting, and after some time in New York, it disperses altogether, leaving the desire to make sense of it all unfulfilled and also a bit ridiculous. At that same publishing party, a semi-famous young woman with a fluffy white dog and a quilted pink purse cut in front of me in the line to get a book signed. The momentum seemed to be lodging me in that queue; a row of characters waiting their turn for a plot.
What we-and by we, I very loosely mean people under thirty with liberal arts degrees or interests-need is a new narrative. I don’t know if it exists! It would valorize young energy on a staging-ground determined by young people. The examples of Carrie Diaries Carrie and of Whitney Port are constructed in fashions that bow to old and tottering industries and value systems that have nothing to do with how anyone I know lives. That staging ground is unclear to me, though I know it cannot be the seductive schoolyard that is Brooklyn. Maybe there should be a diaspora, where everyone takes their work to Portland and Baltimore and Tampa and Phoenix, and we all meet back here on the internet to see what was done. The Tweet life aside, one really can access the internet from anywhere-but one can only divorce oneself from the aimless, strenuous feeling of wanting more and wanting out in equal parts when outside New York.
Daniel D’Addario has written about college for The Daily Beast and IvyGate and about movies for Newsweek.