LIDIA VIANU

Poets' New York

EVA SALZMAN

Interviews with Eva Salzman
Published in LIDIA VIANU, Desperado Essay-Interviews, Editura Universitatii din Bucuresti, 2006

© Lidia Vianu
 

LIDIA VIANU: Were you born in New York? When? What was it like when you were a child?

EVA SALZMAN: I was born in an uptown Manhattan hospital on the East River, but grew up in Brooklyn Heights. My composer father, then writing for the Times, devised a birth announcement styled as a mock-up news feature reviewing our twin musical debuts (I’m the elder by eight minutes). We were ‘sopranos of considerable proportions…(who) presented mainly atonal music with little subtlety but plenty of vigour.’ So, no change there.

To survive each day in this exhausting, competitive city felt like a major achievement. Out-of-towners, immediately recognizable to seasoned New Yorkers, are advised to avoid muggings by trying to look like they belong, like they own the place. NYC often strikes me as oddly Third-World. You fly into the shoddy JFK, our international airport, and get sucked into a disorganized, pell-mell city, which is also a place of immense wealth and power. My childhood memories include driving over pot-holed highways, forever being repaired. Finally, the penny dropped; the repairs were never meant to be completed. This way the jobs kept going. Maybe it’s to do with the mob. I don’t know. New Yorkers are arrogant, but also brimming with life, energy… and opinions. We award ourselves top marks in the Street-Cred department. People describe Americans as lacking the Irony gene, but New Yorkers are famed for their sarcastic, sharp wit. One visit home, I was struck by the sight of a pot-bellied guy swaggering, Adonis-like, along Brighton Beach. This guy was going to inhabit his space, no matter what. I miss that un-English unashamed physicality, the Mediterranean gesticulating. I walk faster than anyone I know, even if I’m going nowhere.

The subway system is hot as Hades, the trains at that time not air-conditioned and deafeningly loud. Standing on a platform as a train rumbled in, you could yell at the top of your lungs into your companion’s ear and s/he wouldn’t hear you. Giuliani, our first Republican mayor in ages, cleaned everything up. Don’t know what he did with the homeless, maybe dumped them in New Jersey. Now I’m nostalgic about a dirty, dangerous NYC, although I never actually thought of it as dangerous really. When Giuliani tried to clean up our artwork too, objecting to an exhibition featuring the artist Chris Offili, who uses elephant dung in his paintings, New Yorkers put their collective foot down. NYC dropped right down on the Murder Capital chart. Apparently, most murders happen between about 2 and 5 AM, when good citizens are in their beds (though not this good citizen teenager, it has to be said!) and are either drug-related, or Domestics gone wrong. Why throw a frying-pan when you can shoot a gun?

During the 2004 Republican Convention, we were overrun by stars-and-stripes, ten-gallon hat Texans and polyester-suited mid-westerners, taking buses to go just a few blocks. Why don’t they take the subway like us, I asked a cop. He said the Delegates’ folks were calling the police from all over the country, nervous about their relatives’ safety in our liberal hands. We were affronted to be hosting this convention at all.


LV. Is childhood in New York any different from childhood in a smaller town or in the country?

ES. I had an unusual degree of freedom, thanks to hippie-ish parents but NYC kids are mostly precocious as hell. My country yokel friends were barred from visiting us city slickers in Sodom, as their parents thought of the place I lived. Nowadays, the Sodom idea doesn’t seem far-fetched, though NYC is nothing like Bush’s America. People forget: it’s a big country! Nationalism is abhorrent to me, but I do feel ‘patriotic’ about NYC, identifying with the place profoundly. In my heart of hearts, it feels like the centre of the world.


LV. What did your house look like?

ES. 29 Middagh Street, still my parents’ house, is a four-story clapboard house, with marble fireplaces and wide floorboards. Although my parents are naturalists – my father is an expert on Long Island birds – we’re no good with gardens. Ours, called the ‘yard’, is overrun with weeds. One summer, I made the effort with my first husband; a photo commemorates another summer when we sublet to talented gardeners. Old homes need constant repairs; we’ve always rented out the upstairs duplex, needing the cash. My grandparents’ house, now sold, was also an early Federal building just around the corner on Cranberry Street, where, Walt Whitman’s poem ‘Leaves of Grass’ was first published.

7 Middagh Street’s various tenants included W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Brittain, Salvatore Dali and the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. In my as-yet unwritten screenplay, she rehearses her new striptease acts for a slightly bored, though perceptive and analytical Auden. (Actually, the Irish poet Paul Muldoon sort of got there first, with his poem ‘7 Middagh Street’.) The neighbourhood has many literary associations; Norman Mailer’s house overlooks the Promenade, from where the Manhattan skyline’s more famous views are taken, including the one of burning Twin Towers. That was like seeing my past crumbling before my eyes. We didn’t know anyone, but everyone knew someone who knew someone. My husband’s artwork was in one tower, a smaller loss than the collection of Rodin, this loss itself dwarfed by the enormous loss of life.


LV. Was it typical of New York architecture? What is, in your opinion, typical of New York architecture? Do New Yorkers love their housing comfort?

ES. The Promenade was our consolation prize for the building of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, an example of the famous Robert Moses’s zeal for civic development as exemplified by road building, which in this case cut through the Heights ruthlessly, knocking down the historic 7 Middagh Street, among other things. An underground slave ‘railway’ is meant to run under the Heights, with hiding places and escape routes. Or maybe I’ve made that up, or someone else made it up. It happens to places already packed with history. After years of local petitioning, something with which my parents were involved, the Heights was designated an historic neighbourhood, to protect what was left, including the area’s later turn-of-the-century brownstones, for which NYC is famous and which are more typical of the kinds of homes all over the city. Originally built as a suburb for wealthy shipping magnates, wishing to overlook their docks, the Brooklyn Heights fell on hard times after World War II. People couldn’t afford the heat or servants needed for large houses, many of which were divided into apartments, or boarding houses, like Number 7. This is why my grandparents, lucky to be working throughout the Depression, could afford to buy in a neighbourhood, now expensive and desirable again. Even here, few buildings date back to 1829, the year our house was built. Many New Yorkers live in co-ops, with more affordable housing found mainly outside of Manhattan, in the further reaches of the boroughs: Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island, or over the Hudson river in New Jersey.


LV. Could you feel as a child that New York was a multicultural city? Did you fit in easily or did you feel an outsider?

ES. Having attended multicultural public (free) schools for many years, I had friends from many backgrounds, classes and ethnic groups: black (African origin, as opposed to the Caribbean slant in the UK), Chinese, Egyptian, Puerto Rican and American Indian. What is a New Yorker but someone from somewhere else? Still, feeling the ‘outsider’ is the writer’s habitual condition! I hung out with neighbourhood kids on the stoop, which is the Dutch word for the steps out front. (Middagh, also a Dutch word, means ‘midday’.)


LV. As a teenager in New York, what was your cultural life? TV? Theatres? Movies?

ES. Unlike the clichéd American family, we had no dishwasher, no TV, but this movie fanatic got her paws on the latter, when I was old enough to get away with it. I’d stay up watching the Late Show, Late, Late Show and, finally, the Late Late Late Show, which educated me in (mainly Hollywood) cinema history. Well, that’s my excuse.

Because I trained in dance and choreography for many years, my fairy grandmother – the one with the talent for buying houses – bought me tickets to see the great ballet companies. There I was, this lone teenager, sitting right up front, practically getting sprayed by Mikhail Baryshnikov’s sweat. (Once, during his big entrance in ‘Giselle’, he tripped on this sword!) I saw them all: the New York City and Joffrey Ballet companies, American Ballet Theatre and the Dance Theatre of Harlem, which was ground-breaking in its training and presenting of black dancers in historically white ballet classics. Alvin Ailey Company, a favourite, was known for its multicultural make-up: mainly black, but also Puerto Rican, Oriental and the odd white. I cherish the memory of Natalaya Makorova’s perfect 32 fouettes in ‘Swan Lake’, and Rudolf Nureyev partnering Margo Fonteyn, to name a few Greats I was privileged to see in their prime.

Contemporary dance was really more my thing: the Martha Graham, Paul Taylor and Merce Cunningham troupes. Because my father wrote music-theatre, I was exposed to work on the cutting edge: the avant-garde, the experimental. My father’s multi-media piece, ‘The Nude Paper Sermon’, featured a text by the poet John Ashbery and the actor Stacy Keach, who later went to Hollywood (and to jail, but that’s another story…). This piece’s finale afforded me my first if fleeting glimpse, of the naked male form. Like I said, we’re precocious. My father knew and worked with well-known composers, musicians and conductors including Pierre Boulez, William Bolcolm, Joshua Rifkin and Charles Rosen. His mother (same grandmother!) also wrote music-theatre, and was a child vaudeville actress, touring with her parents, who earned their living in this business.


LV. As a student and later, what magazines did you like to read?

ES. We had various political, current affairs and environmental journals around the house. My mother, an environmentalist, was a campaigner against the dangers of nuclear power before this became a fashionable cause. We also subscribed to satirical publications such as Mad Magazine and National Lampoon, and got the New York Times daily, this being the only broadsheet paper widely available, aside from the Washington Post, which you’d have to go a little further to find. (Most US media is narrow, superficial, biased, utter garbage.) I’d steal my grandparents’ New Yorker magazine, which I loved, at first mainly for its famous cartoons and covers. Alongside the English and American 19th century novels I devoured, I read Cosmopolitan, movie magazines, comic books and Ripley’s Believe It or Not, being indiscriminate and haphazard in my reading. Still am.


LV. When did you become interested in New York’s literary life and what places did you go to, what New York reviews did you read?

ES. I never got especially ‘interested’ in literary life, just as I never thought to ‘become’ a writer; I just wrote and loved books. I had the immense good fortune to have access to my grandmother’s astounding library of 20,000-ish books, crammed on shelves or piled up in towering, toppling piles, on the third floor of before-mentioned Cranberry Street house. It was like having a private library at one’s disposal, except she’d give me the books. What treasures! Literature was my escape, my passion. The Irish writer Frank McCourt was my teacher at Manhattan’s Stuyvesant High School. His idea of teaching English was to tell us stories about the Irish, so I thought English was nothing but stories. And so it is. As it turned out, he was rehearsing on us his bestseller Angela’s Ashes. Every Friday the class was asked to present their teenage angst-ridden literary scribblings, and I always strained at the leash to bore everybody with mine. Most of the other students, brilliant in the math and science – the school’s specialty – took McCourt’s class because it was an easy ride. He gave everyone 96%, and there were no tests.


LV. Was it uncomfortable at all to live in a place which was a melting pot of all nationalities? Did you ever feel uncomfortably different from anyone?

ES. Back to the writer’s ‘pathology’! Aren’t writers all uncomfortable in some way? NYC had nothing to do with it. I like ‘difference’, in fact am often drawn to black sheep. When I lived in Paris at the age of four, the kids threw rocks at me in the school-yard. The south of England, was homogenous in such an alien way to me. One day, driving into Tunbridge Wells, I nearly crashed the car, after spotting a perfectly ordinary man crossing the road. It took me a moment to understand why I’d done this double-take: I hadn’t seen a black man in three months, and hadn’t even realized it until that moment.


LV. Could you describe the social classes in New York? Have they changed since your were a child? Which do you belong to?

ES. Class in the US doesn’t exist in the same way as it does in the UK, despite what people say. Money is certainly more connected to notions of class. Although there’s a certain ‘Brahmin’ caste of old US families, the classes aren’t so rigidly defined. I guess I’m educated middle-class, privileged in am artsy bohemian way. My grandparents were poor immigrants, the first generation to achieve financial security but only after years of working hard, scrimping and saving. The houses they managed to buy went up in value later. My grandfather had seven brothers and sisters; all of their earnings went into a common pot, to pay for the youngest brother’s education; later, he worked his own way through university. He modernized his house himself, putting in the plumbing, electricity and a kitchen, doing all the repairs at our house too. When he died, everything fell apart.


LV. Why did you leave New York?

ES. The old story. A man. An Englishman. First, he came to the US, while I finished my BA degree, and then got my MFA at Columbia University, after which we moved to the UK… and got divorced. Since then I’ve tried a Scotsman and an Irishman, but am now married to an American from Long Island, not far from NYC! Life is strange.


LV. Was it an easy decision?

ES. One of the hardest I’ve ever made. I’d never have left New York City otherwise, not in a million years. I think I left precisely because I knew this, and wanted to experience another place and people. Many things about America disturbed me but I really truly didn’t think I’d stay in the UK so long. Even now, I’m in denial that I live in England.


LV. If you were to decide to come and live in London again, would you still do it?

ES. Knowing what I now know? No point in going down that road. How do I know if I’d have done the things I’ve done, if things had been different. It’s impossible to undo one thing without undoing the rest. Writing is often about trying out the lives one didn’t lead.


LV. What was the impact of London on you? How old were you when you came to London?

ES. I was 18 when I first visited London, but didn’t move to England until I was 24, living first in Kent, then Brighton before moving to London. My intellect is urban, but my spirit floats around in the country somewhere.


LV. Who were your literary friends in New York and who are now your literary friends in London?

ES. The poetry world is tiny, everyone knowing everyone. My friends include writers of all kinds, but I’d be bored having only literary friends. There are many false friends in the literary world, despite our supposedly lofty pursuits. I’ve never been clever – or devious – enough to pretend I like people, just because they might help my ‘career’. Despite my inborn cynicism, I’m continually amazed by people’s duplicity and shallowness.


LV. Where do you feel more at home, London or New York?

ES. After many years, I’d still say NYC. When I go home, it’s like I’ve been holding my breath all this time. Suddenly I can heave a sigh of relief and be a loud-mouthed extrovert – just like everyone else.


LV. Does your poetry have traces of New York imagery? What is the emblematic feature of New York in your soul?

ES. The traffic hum of the Brooklyn Bridge was the background score of my childhood, and a I wrote a sonnet about it, in order to re-possess what I felt to be mine. For a while anyway. Rather than give a nod to Crane’s famous poem on the subject (Walt Whitman too wrote about it) I decided to brazenly rip off his lines, comparing the suspension cables to a harp. The completion of the bridge was overseen by Emily Roebling, from the top floor of her and her invalid husband’s house, in Brooklyn Heights.


June 2005