Paul Bowles on New York City
Long before the song New York, I Love You, but You’re Bringing Me Down, the city has been inspiring mixed feelings in us, its inhabitants. Paul Bowles lived or visited there a number of times, not surprisingly since much of his early career was devoted to classical music. But he didn’t always like it.
In the spring I lived in West Fifty-fifth Street, next door to a factory where they pressed Decca records. The machines were attached to the wall next to the bedroom, and they functioned twenty-four hours a day. My windows gave onto a courtyard which was an epitome of New York: a scene of noise, grime, and gloom. I tried to drown my melancholy in work, but I was obsessed by memories of the air and light of North Africa.
Yet a few years after this, during World War II, he had a very different reaction.
I was well aware that New York was the most extraordinary city of them all and, from a distance or from the air, a surprisingly beautiful one. Now I discovered that even from the inside it was often breathtaking. Since I was covering concerts every night of the week—sometimes in the afternoon as well—and used most of what hours were left for writing music, I felt the need of getting outdoors now and then. My solution was to buy a light British bicycle and pedal around the streets of Manhattan. I started my jaunts for exercise and continued them for the sheer delight they gave me. The streets and avenues were empty of traffic, and at night the city was blacked out. If there was a moon, any ride through lower Manhattan became a trip out of a dream. Silence and darkness in the gorges, and moonlight reflected from the cliffs shining far above. I developed a variety of circuits adapted to the length of time I could devote to pedaling.
The euphoria was not to last. A few pages later he recounts a visit to Canada. “Absurdly,” he writes, “when I returned to New York the city seemed a little less sinister and virulent, because I knew that Quebec was nearby.”
Sinister and Virulent. Maybe that should replace Empire State on the license plates, at least for people who live in the five boroughs.
