E New York
ver since I first came here in 1965, I have loved this city. On my first visit since last September, it now strikes me that what happened then explains obliquely just why I do. This isn't only a matchlessly open and free society, but also the most kaleidoscopically various. That's what exhilarates a European visitor, and that was the significance of 11 September. Thousands of people of every possible ethnic origin in the most cosmopolitan city on earth were brutally murdered by a gang of mad fanatics who personified what Shelley called 'bloody faith, the foulest birth of time'. Was it really so hard for our own bien-pensant chatterers to see that?
Talking about Tony Blair's Texan visit on a radio discussion programme. I had to bite my tongue. I've just enough residual patriotism that I wouldn't wish to denounce any British prime minister in front of American listeners, but you are quickly reminded that Mr Blair is a national hero here. I contented myself with pointing out gently that one of his chief characteristics is a tendency to tell any given audience what it wants to hear. This has been his political strength, and it may be his undoing. There are questions — in the Middle East, plenty of them — that can't be answered with soundbites about the hand of history, or by saying, 'I'm a pretty straight sort of guy.'
If the world's literary and theatrical capital (which means New York) has a weakness, it's what Robert Hughes has called the Culture of Complaint. Elaine Strich at Liberty promises to be the old trouper belting out Broadway melodies, but turns out to be a long litany of complaint, about her life and hard times, about her drinking problem, and about colleagues who took the said problem amiss when it interfered with her work and theirs. Never censorious on that particular subject, I couldn't help feeling that the colleagues might have had a point. Never mind. 'Strichie' brings the house down by telling us that she's still here, and asking us to feel her pain.
Someone else who continues adroitly to work the Culture of Complaint is Gerry Adams, who was in town not long ago. As it was he and the IRA who pioneered the 'big-city spectacular'. you might think that Adams would have kept away from New York since bin Laden laid on the spectacular to end them all, hut he still draws on deep wells of ethnic self-pity, albeit in a way that casts a curious light on 'America's war on terrorism'. The New York Times is in
splendid form at present, and has just deservedly won a clutch of Pulitzers for its coverage of the disaster, including a very touching record of those who died on 11 September, famous or obscure. There are many Irish names among the hundreds of firemen and policemen who died bravely doing their duty at the World Trade Center. It seems statistically certain that some of them had previously given money to IRA fronts, which was then used for terrorist murder in Belfast. London or Omagh. I was going to call that ironical, but it would be an inadequate word.
This has always been my favourite Jewish city, but there are few places now where what Primo Levi asked us not to call the Holocaust casts such long shadows, with some very unhappy effects. Just over five years ago, I was here when, to my great pride and pleasure, my book on Zionism won a National Jewish Book Award. One of the other recipients that evening was a thin, gaunt, rather scary man called 'Benjamin Wilkomirski' who had written a memoir about his time as a small child in Auschwitz. To cut short a story that is well told in Blake Eskin's new book A Life in Pieces, he turned out to he an impostor, and his book a fantasy; a very disturbing and distressing one, for what it said about deceived as much as deceiver. But then, as the Yiddish proverb succinctly has it, what comes after is worse. An exhibition at the Jewish Museum called Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery was described by the veteran art critic Hilton Kramer as 'vile crap'. I might have thought his words exaggerated if I hadn't been to see it myself. Ostensibly provocative and 'transgressive', the show is a loathsome mixture of pornography-of-violence, plain pornography and witlessly repulsive kitsch. One piece of what we have to call installation art is labelled `Giftgas Giftset': three canisters of poisongas (Giftgas in German) chemicals wrapped in fancy paper from Hermes, Chanel and Tiffany. So we have passed from Holocaust obsession to Holocaust industry to Holocaust chic to Holocaust trash, intellectual and moral. Could there be something worse coming after this?
Aan antidote, across Central Park at the Natural History Museum is a really wonderful exhibition, Baseball as America. As it happens, my pretext for being in America at all is to give a lecture on the place of sport in English history at the University of Texas, and I lapped up this show by way of comparative studies. Then I joined several dozen other multinational lunatics in Clancy's bar on Second Avenue at 7.45 last Saturday morning to watch the France v. Ireland match over a merry breakfast. Everyone quotes Orwell's saying that sport is an unfailing cause of ill-will among men; in Marx's profound words (Groucho, not Karl), the reverse is also true.
How ya doin'?' is now the universal New York greeting, and I remind myself that it's objectively no sillier than 'How goes it to them?' or 'How does she stand?' (Wie geht's Ihnen?' , 'Come sta?') or, for that matter, 'How d'you do?', and that it's anyway a genuine case of American courtesy. Such phrases are grating merely when unfamiliar. In 1984, I tagged along with the Royal Opera when they played in Los Angeles, giving Peter Grimes as well as two other operas. For all the generous hospitality, one phrase then new to us got on operatic nerves, until one of the second violins reworded the end of Britten's opera. You will remember that Grimes is a tragic outcast rejected by society (ahem, do we detect a metaphor?) until disaster overwhelms him, and his friend Balstrode recognises that there is only one way out. In the Californian version, Balstrode's last words to Grimes went. 'Take the boat and sail out until you've lost sight of the Moot Hall. Then sink her, d'you hear me? Sink the boat! Goodbye, Peter — and have a nice day!'
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