New Yorkers: A City And Its People In Our Time
Craig Taylor John Murray £25
In 1950, Dylan Thomas wrote a letter from New York to his parents back in Wales. ‘There seems at first sight to be no reality at all in the life here: it is all an enormous façade of speed and efficiency and power behind which millions of little individuals are wrestling, in vain, with their own anxieties.’
Seventy years on, has anything changed? Craig Taylor spent six years interviewing all kinds of New Yorkers about their city, filling 71 notebooks and 400 hours of tape with their tales, their opinions, their dreams and, yes, their anxieties.
‘New York meant more of everything,’ he writes in the introduction to this amazing book. ‘More joy, more sorrow, more pleasure, more pain… I loved the concentrate; I loved the proximity to strangers, how every day you were inches from weirdness, greatness, and everything in between.’
Trying to present a portrait of any big city is fraught with peril. No canvas is big enough to contain the lives and thoughts of all those millions of city-dwellers
He wanted, he says, ‘to create a kind of oral portrait of the city grounded in the flow of New Yorkers’ speech’.
He chatted to a bewildering variety of New Yorkers, among them a window cleaner, a dog-walker, a personal injury lawyer, a security guard at the Statue of Liberty, a subway conductor, a sommelier, a marathon runner and a woman whose job is to rid children’s hair of lice.
Trying to present a portrait of any big city is fraught with peril. No canvas is big enough to contain the lives and thoughts of all those millions of city-dwellers. Readers may be in search of a snappy overall truth, but any generalisation will always be undermined by reality.
Some people are thriving, while others are being crushed. For every happy person there is someone sad; for everyone wanting to stay, there is someone else yearning to leave.
This is why second-rate travel writers are so often driven to conclude with that great, meaningless cliche: ‘X is a city of contradictions.’
Dylan Thomas’s (above) vision of New York as a maelstrom of anxieties remains true today. Towards the end, Craig Taylor admits that even he was finally overwhelmed by it
Taylor’s interviewees certainly contradict one another. For some, it’s a city full of warm-hearted people, for others, it’s teeming with psychos. A veteran subway conductor somehow manages to reconcile these two opposing points of view.
‘New Yorkers in time of crisis are usually very, very good,’ he says. ‘If somebody gets hurt, has a heart attack. IF they see it. But if it’s on the train in front of them. “Can’t they just take the guy off the train? I’m late for work”.’
He says that New Yorkers are ‘very, very impatient’, and most of his fellow interviewees seem to agree. ‘When you think of a New Yorker, you think of someone who’s angry all the time,’ says a doctor, and a New York city policeman also notes, ‘A lot of anger… In New York it’s condensed because there’s so many people. It’s magnified in New York because everything is so close and so tight.’
One of Craig Taylor’s many skills as an interviewer lies in his eye for the vivid detail that captures a larger abstraction. A dentist tells him that ‘in New York you get a lot of grinding’.
At the time of the financial crash in 2007, ‘that was huge, huge, people grinding their teeth, just clenching and grinding their teeth. You were seeing cracked teeth. You were seeing ground-down teeth.’
The high cost of living in New York induces excessive ambition, which means that day-to-day existence is a perpetual struggle, even among those who are making a fortune.
‘When I first started,’ continues the dentist, ‘I had a patient who was a phenomenally successful finance guy. He was in his 20s and was probably worth a couple hundred million dollars already at that point. I think he was a bond trader. This guy’s teeth were ground to like pegs. I said, “You’ve got to learn how to relax.” He said to me, “You don’t get as successful as I am if you relax.”’
Might this not also be true of other bond traders, in other cities? A therapist has noticed that her clients regularly cite New York as their oppressor. ‘Trust me, the city is involved in almost every session I have. It’s constantly in the room in a way that I’m not sure any other city would be, certainly not in the United States. And always talk of moving, moving, moving. All of my clients bring it up at one point or another. You know, “What if I could get the hell out of here, where else could I go?” They want to feel some sense of relief from this and that is a very viable, relieving fantasy to have.’
So Dylan Thomas’s vision of New York as a maelstrom of anxieties remains true today. Towards the end of this remarkable book, Taylor admits, in one of a handful of touching autobiographical interludes, that even he was finally overwhelmed by it.
‘I wanted to admit to this place that I knew nothing of it. I wanted quiet. I wanted to get away from those who lined up their cars along Willett, anxious to get to Grand, anxious to get to Clinton, anxious to get on the Williamsburg Bridge, always anxious.’
Taylor’s interviews with various servants of the super-rich suggest that the pursuit of perfection is a wearying, soul-destroying business. A nanny talks of the sense of entitlement of wealthy children, some of whom have their own private chefs, and the depression that follows in its wake.
‘If you are nine and cavalier about having your own private jet, nothing is ever going to be exciting to you.’
Wealthy parents are, she says, currently obsessed with having cool babies. ‘And so how interesting your baby is like, “Is your baby taking ukulele lessons? Is your baby living in a yurt in the backyard? Is your kid named after an object?” The names: some of these names are ridiculous. Noble. Whistler. Atlas. Midas… What this says basically to the world is that this child will never work.’
A private tutor speaks of the pressures of privilege on these children. ‘One of my students talked about how he locks himself in the bathroom because it’s the only place where there are no housekeepers, parents, tutors, drivers. He said sometimes I just go in there and lock myself in for ten minutes and sit on the floor. He’s like, “I want to be alone.”’
New York, he says, is unlike anywhere else. ‘I have had parents who’ve taken the class list for their high school child and have put all the kids into a spreadsheet. Then they’ve put their parents into a spreadsheet and then Googled them and done due diligence for every single one.’
But, along the way, Taylor also manages to convey the zest and ebullience of New Yorkers, captured in the punchiness of their speech patterns. In his introduction he writes of how ‘I encountered the opposite of reticence: assertion, self-possession, volume… I’d marvel at the velocity with which people spoke, the mere speck of time it took for interviewees to get into the personal.’
In one extraordinary monologue an attorney talks to him of almost dying of Covid, and ranting at the virus as though it were a thug. ‘I said, All right, get over here, f***-o. Who the f*** do you think you are? You’re going to come and do this? You don’t want to take me down, bro. Move on. You got off on the wrong station. I’ve got all that swagger, I feel like De Niro for a second. You know, like in Goodfellas. This is who we are. That’s part of being a New Yorker… We’re all characters, we’re fast talkers, we’re hustlers…’