LIDIA VIANU

Poets' New York

ANDREI CODRESCU

Interviews with Andrei Codrescu
Published in LIDIA VIANU, Desperado Essay-Interviews, Editura Universitatii din Bucuresti, 2006

© Lidia Vianu
 

LIDIA VIANU: When did you first see New York?

ANDREI CODRESCU: From the chartered airplane taking fresh immigrants to America in 1966; the plane was full of Yugoslavs who started singing ‘America the beautiful!’ when they saw the Statue of Liberty.


LV. Was it as a fresh emigrant or later?

AC. We changed planes in New York then and went on to Detroit, my first American home.


LV. What struck you first?

AC. The verticality: it was like Europe with an erection.


LV. Are New Yorkers different from other people? Are they more or less than human? Or brighter?

AC. They are different because they are of so many backgrounds and ethnicities; figuring out how to get along sometimes took generations, but eventually there emerged a quick, witty, generous but not stupid breed of citizen called a New Yorker.


LV. Why must everyone love the Big Apple?

AC. A lot of people hate it because it’s too fast. I used to love it because sorry, destitute humanity rubbed shoulders with billionaires (at least in theory), like in Walt Whitman’s poems, but now it’s clean and safe like Minneapolis. I think they even put mayonnaise on the sidewalk in case you drop your Wonder Bread. Manhattan, at least, is for the rich now. The artists and the poor can still live in Brooklyn and Queens.


LV. Have you ever lived in New York for a longer period of time?

AC. Yes, two years, 1968-1970, and every year for at least a month.


LV. Why are New York houses the envy of the planet when I have seen tiny apartments and cupboard kitchens there with my own eyes? Is New York a myth?

AC. New York has energy and spunk. Your apartment is your refuge: you conduct the rest of your life in the agora, or working, with the people. If you invite someone to your apartment it’s a great sign of friendship; the rest of your meetings are conducted in restaurants, bars, luncheonettes, etc
 

LV. Does New York have a cultural life for real? There are so many museums and theatres and reviews, but do they actually use all those things? Or is it for the use of foreigners passing by?

AC. Those things are very real and they constitute the social fabric of the city through their wealthy patrons. New Yorkers use their culture, but like all things, it comes and goes in cycles. In the 60s New York was where painting and poetry were, in the 70s the art and music scene, in the 80s institutional revamping and architecture, in the 90s the exodus of the poor from Manhattan, in the beginning of the 21st century, human intimacy and care born of the terror attacks on 9/11.


LV. If you could choose to live in your dream town anywhere on this planet, would it be New York?

AC. Yes, with a summer place in the country.


LV. Is New York a melting pot? Have you ever felt an alien there because you were not born in the States? Once, in 1991, when I was a Fulbright professor in New York State and my ten-year-old daughter went to school for a year there, a boy her age showed her the globe and said: ‘Where is your Romania? Why don’t you just go back there?’ And the next day she asked him: ‘Were you born in the States?’ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Were your parents born there?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘ And your grandparents?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And your great-grandparents?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Everyone in your family ever?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Then you are a red Indian’. And he did not like that. Have you ever had to fight for your status like that?

AC. Yes, but, like your kid, I put them quickly in their place. That’s normal in a place of immigrants: the Dutch of 1700 thought all immigrants were trash, the Irish fought the Italians, the Jews fought them all, the Hispanics had to claw their way up after that. ‘The Gangs of New York’ had it operatically right. The town toughens you up, it doesn’t mollycoddle.


LV. What does it feel like to be published and sold in all big bookstores in New York (and not only)?

AC. Great. I used to steal my own books because I couldn’t afford them, but now I buy them to give to people I meet.


LV. Does the radio represent your personality? Americans, lots of them, know you that way. I was told so by a professor of French at NY State University. He listened to your broadcasts with delight and said he had never heard anyone talk so well and wittily and with such a great sense of humour.

AC. My best work is in my books, but most people listen to the radio. I have no idea what ‘representing my personality’ means. I intend no such thing. I just want to amuse, shock, and horrify people and make a living at it.

LV. Was exile a liberation, a trauma, an outlet? Is America your house in your dreams? Do you ever dream of Romania these days?

AC. For me at age 19, fresh from the quiet hells of Ceausescu, it was certainly a liberation. I loved my generation in America, which had the same feeling about whatever hells they’d escaped from. (Even if it was just a nice, clean suburb of Chicago). I had nostalgia for Sibiu, my hometown, but since 1989, when I covered the so-called ‘revolution’, I have returned many times and I feel quite at home in Romania now. It’s a recondite pleasure to feel at home in two worlds.


June 2005