Up close and personal
Harry Mount
NEW YORK: LIFE IN THE BIG CITY by Will Eisner Norton, £19.99, pp. 423, ISBN 039306106X ✆ £15.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 My apologies to the young, attractive couple in Perry Street in Greenwich Village, whose love-making I’ve been keeping a close eye on over the last year and a half. I can’t really help it. My eighthfloor flat is on exactly the same level as theirs, and their window is only 20 yards from mine across a tiny strip of garden. If it’s any consolation to the young couple, I haven’t seen much — they always drop down on the sofa out of my line of sight before the good bits. That’s the thing about New York — it’s a cheek-by-jowl place, and you can’t help getting a close-up on a lot of jowls and cheeks, upper and lower.
This is the New York Alfred Hitchcock caught in Rear Window, filmed only a few streets from my flat. And it’s the seedy sardine tin of a city caught by the veteran cartoonist, Will Eisner, who died two years ago, aged 87.
Eisner wrote the first successful graphic novel in 1978 with A Contract with God. And now here’s a compendium of four of his works: New York: The Big City (1981), The Building (1987), City People Notebook (1989) and Invisible People (2000). These four books are less graphic novels than a series of city vignettes, and how true to life they are.
Eisner, born in Brooklyn in 1917 to a poor Jewish family, does not paper over the extreme nastiness that inevitably exists in such an overcrowded place full of different types of people who often plain hate each other.
Black cleaning ladies get abused by preppy white mistresses. White-collar commuters studiously walk past a man suffering from a heart attack, only stopping to have a good gawp when he’s dead and beyond causing disruption to their routine.
But Eisner’s far from politically correct: Jews get called kikes; mugging is the speciality of blacks and Hispanics, as it remains even in post-Giuliani New York. The rubbish outside rich Upper West Side houses is neatly packed away in tiny, gleaming dumpsters. The rubbish in the poor Lower East Side spills out of teetering mountains of bin bags and battered garbage cans.
There’s something engagingly jarring about using a comic book style — normally the basis for comedy — and applying it to tragedy and nastiness. Because the tragedy is done in cartoons, the bleakness is lighter and more digestible than it would be in a 400page novel about grim urban life. Eisner’s picture of New York is broader and deeper, too, than the one you see in Sex and the City or The Devil Wears Prada. Yes, there are a few ultra-groomed, starved professionals knocking about the city, but only a few.
New Yorkers for the most part are a pretty badly dressed, sorry-looking bunch, their skin torched in summer, wind-blasted in winter. Eisner gets this unhealthy look. His men are bald and dress in vests. The buttocks, stomachs and breasts of his women are large and untitillating, straining the seams of their cheap dresses.
Eisner draws in a monochrome, faintly oldfashioned Marvel Comics style. While his humans tend to the grotesque, his old New York architecture is recorded with affection. You can feel Eisner’s distaste when a classical, heavily corniced corner tower block, clearly based on New York’s Flatiron Building, is replaced by a horrid pile of glass and steel cubes.
The broad stoops and swaggering doorways of New York’s Greek Revival and Federal brownstones are stained but stately, their architectural details blurred from decades of repainting. The Gotham Gothick quarters of the city where Batman hung out are dark and looming but splendid.
What horrors go on in these grand premises, though. Widowers drink themselves into a stupor with boilermakers, depth charges of blended whisky dropped into pints of beer. Desperate secretaries get stood up by their one chance of happiness.
Just when you think you’ve met your first nice, well-groomed, attractive couple, it turns out that the polite young man is demanding deviant sexual practices of his girlfriend. Perhaps that’s the sort of thing my neighbours get up to when they dip below the window-sill.
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