Thoughts for our times: Carr, Carlyle, Cortés and Cleopatra’s Nose

 

I have been reading E. H. Carr’s What is History, originally a series of lectures given in Cambridge in 1961, and published by my old employer Macmillan. Carr writes, or rather speaks, with the fluid elegance of a great scholar who has thought deeply about questions which he explains with a light easy-to-read touch. He also has the scholar’s barbed wit when writing about his opponents, especially those at the University of Oxford. One of his themes is the relevance of history to the present and future.

 

Some of the passages in Carr’s book set me thinking about our times. Here are the passages and my thoughts, for what they are worth.

 

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), History of the French Revolution:

 

Referring to the terror: “Horrible, in lands that had known equal justice – not so unnatural in lands that had never known it.”

“It is unfortunate, though very natural, that the history of this period has so generally been written in hysterics. Exaggeration abounds, execration, wailing; and on the whole darkness.”

 

Protest (e.g. Black Lives Matter, protests in Mexico against “Femicide”) can be messy, disruptive, infuriating, destructive. It can provoke resentment. Protest cannot be entirely unlimited, but the causes should be understood and addressed. The destruction of property that has occurred in some Black Lives Matter protests in the USA is illegal. However, heavy-handed policing to score political points in an election is equally reprehensible and provocative. Still more provocative, and profoundly wrong, is to encourage armed, self-appointed enforcers of the laws that they choose to enforce (while ignoring laws that prohibit their actions) to oppose the protests. The question that has not been asked as a result is whether the destruction of property is more wrong than the failure to have taken, over a period of years, effective actions to prevent the deaths of black women and men at the hands of law enforcement, and armed white men who claim to enforce the law?

 

In Mexico City a group of women recently protested the murder of women (“femicide” is a term invented in Mexico because of the frequency with which women are murdered, frequently by their male partners) and the impunity of those who murder them because police rarely investigate the crimes effectively. Some of the women occupied the offices of the National Commission on Human Rights. A slogan was written on a portrait of Francisco  Madero, who led the Mexican Revolution of 1910 against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, was elected President, but then assassinated by the military. He is known in Mexico by the sobriquet the “Apostle of Democracy”. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) has elevated Madero to a status near to sainthood. In his world view AMLO battles constantly against neoliberal conservatives. He therefore dismissed the protesters as conservatives. He has ignored femicide and therefore no action has been taken to address the problem.

 

The responses of presidents Trump and AMLO confirm that we surely live in an era of abundant exaggeration and execration, which sanctions behaviour in the public sphere that would previously have been unthinkable.

 

Karl Popper (1902-1994), The Open Society:

 

“Wherever the freedom of thought, and of the communication of thought, is effectively protected by legal institutions and institutions ensure the publicity of discussion, there will be scientific progress.”

 

When Mr Trump was elected I tried to reassure my dismayed American friends that the robust institutions of the USA would constrain the new president’s ability to subvert freedoms. Unfortunately, Mr Trump has proved to be exceptionally skilled in using freedom of expression to attack and undermine freedom for any except those who share his views. My optimism has proved sadly  unfounded.

 

For example, Secretary of State Pompeo recently published a draft report of the US Commission on Unalienable Rights. The commission proposes to base US human rights law on the rights enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. Any additional rights will be classified either as “worth defending” or as “not worth defending”. In Mr Pompeo’s vocabulary rights come in two kinds: unalienable and ad hoc.

 

Rights worth defending include freedom of assembly, freedom to own property, freedom of religion. However, the commission declared, after examining the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that some of the rights contained therein are more important than others, and therefore that some are unalienable, others are ad hoc.

 

Now, the report states that “foremost among the unalienable rights that government is established to secure, from the founders’ point of view, are property rights and religious liberty.” These rights are inherently superior to civil and political rights such as freedom of speech and assembly and the right to vote. Other rights, such as reproductive rights and LGBTQ protections are classified as “divisive social and political controversies”. The creation of a hierarchy of superior and inferior rights in itself challenges a fundamental principle of international human rights law that has previously been unquestioned – that all rights are universal and equal.

 

We need not worry, says Mr Pompeo, because “America is special. America is good. America does good all around the world.”

 

A similar approach to human rights has been suggested by the UK government. The intention is to remove from UK law adherence to the European Convention on Human Rights (which the UK was instrumental in drafting) so that the UK can decide its own approach to human rights. Like the approach taken by the Trump administration, this undermines the concept of the universality of rights. Americans might have rights which UK citizens are denied, or vice versa. If an autocratic regime should deny to its citizens a right as fundamental as freedom of expression, the UK and the USA would lack moral authority to criticize such a denial of human rights since our governments would have declared that rights are a matter for national governments.

 

The current UK government is as fond of appealing to UK exceptionalism to justify itself as Mr Pompeo is of extolling the unique virtues of the USA, whether the purported exceptionalism is relevant to the question at hand or not. The Prime Minister was recently asked in Parliament whether the increase in rates of COVID-19 infections could be attributed to the inadequacies of the UK’s national testing  and tracing system, run by companies with no experience or qualifications in public health or epidemiology. The questioner observed that in Germany testing and tracing managed by experienced local government departments has proved to be far superior. The Prime Minister reached into his notes to find  the “bombastic answer à propos of nothing that turns a charlatan into a patriot”:                                                                                                                                                 “And actually, there is an important difference between our country and many other countries around the world, and that is our country is a freedom-loving country. And if you look at the history of this country over the last 300 years, virtually every advance from free speech to democracy has come from this country and it is very difficult to ask the British population uniformly to obey … guidelines in a way that it is necessary.”

I imagine that Mr. Pompeo’s founding fathers may have been surprised by this statement.

 

E H Carr (1892-1982): What is History?

 

Commenting on the nature of science, emphasizing that science does not claim to predict with certainty what will happen in a particular context, nor can it ever do so. Rather:

 

“Modern physical theories … deal only with the probabilities of events taking place.”

“If two or three children in a school develop measles, you will conclude that the epidemic will spread; and this prediction, if you care to call it such, is based on a generalization from past experience and is a valid and useful guide to action. But you cannot make the specific prediction that Charles or Mary will catch measles.”

 

In the UK we have heard government ministers state repeatedly that “we follow the science” as if there is one immutable, indivisible, incontrovertible and single scientific truth, and therefore all government decisions are beyond criticism. One frustrated minister declared in May that “If the science was wrong, advice at the time was wrong. I’m not surprised if people will then think we then made a wrong decision.” Ministers either fail to understand how science works and the very nature of scientific advice on which they claim to rely, or they use it as a convenient shield to avoid responsibility for their decisions.

 

There is a famous road sign in the UK that reads “Hatfield and the North” (so famous was the sign in the 1970s that a rock band adopted it as their name). Now, if you follow that sign up the M1 you will certainly end up in the north of England, but most people will have a more specific destination in mind, perhaps Barnard Castle, County Durham. Perhaps along the way you are hungry. You see a sign for Loughborough and leave the M1 in search of lunch. Later you decide that some sea air would do you good. You see a sign for Scarborough and leave the M1 again for a gentle stroll on the beach. You ask a fellow beach stroller for the best way to Barnard Castle, only to discover that it’s more than 80 miles away and you are due to meet your guest for dinner in one hour. When you arrive at the restaurant, your disgruntled guest is eating her dessert. You explain that you followed official geographical advice, but unaccountably the journey took much longer than you had expected. You hope that your guest accepts your explanation.

 

Your journey is quite a good metaphor for the government’s management of the pandemic. A politician is given advice by scientists concerning the general course that the pandemic is likely to take and steps that are likely to reduce the rate of infection. The politician then makes a range of policy decisions to implement the advice. However, the politician later decides that the pandemic is sufficiently under control to change some of the measures taking into account a variety of factors. If the result is that the rate of infection increases, that is a consequence of a policy decision (no doubt taken in good faith) not of the science. The scientists are responsible for giving the best advice possible in a climate of anxiety, the politician for deciding the best policies to implement the advice

 

Commenting on morality in history:

 

“History is a process of struggle, in which results, whether we judge them good or bad, are achieved by some group directly or indirectly … at the expense of others. The losers pay. Suffering is indigenous in history. Every great period of history has its casualties as well as its victories. This is an exceedingly complicated question, because we have no measure which enables us to balance the greater good of some against the sacrifices of others”

“modern India is the child of British rule; and modern China is the product of nineteenth-century western imperialism, crossed with the influence of the Russian revolution. Unfortunately it was not the Chinese workers who laboured in the western-owned factories in treaty ports … who have survived to enjoy whatever glory or profit may have accrued from the Chinese revolution. Those who pay are rarely those who reap the benefits.”

 

Black Lives Matter has made the judgement of figures from the past a topic of heated debate. This is a question with no easy answer. However, it is clear that the choice of figures to be judged and the verdict reached says as much about the preoccupations of our contemporary society as it does about the actions of figures in the past.

 

Let us take as an example Hernán Cortés, who led the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Cortés has always been harshly judged in the popular understanding of Mexican history, for he destroyed an Indigenous civilization of ancient Mexico, the Aztecs, and several others for good measure. You will be hard pressed to find a modern Mexican who has a good word to say about Cortés. However, Mexicans have not had to debate the issue of statues of Cortés, as Americans have debated (perhaps rather shouted at one another about)  statues of Confederate generals, for there are no statues to Cortés in Mexico. Nor are any streets, towns, buildings or institutions named after him. In the 21^st-century public sphere he is non-existent, except when he serves the rhetorical interests of AMLO.

 

In AMLO’s view of Mexican history Cortés is the arch villain, a precursor Neoliberal Conservative. AMLO has criticized Cortés, for example, for being the first to hold a fraudulent election in Mexico by appointing to the council of the newly-founded city of La Vera Cruz (The True Cross). It is perfectly true that the procedure was thoroughly undemocratic, but it is equally true that Cortés acted as the representative of an absolute monarch, so democracy was not an option that was open to him, or any other European come to that. Nor were the regimes of ancient Mexico democracies. All rulers were absolute, and none too gentle in the manner of their autocracy.

 

From the point of view of a 21^st century judge, there are plenty of charges that could be levelled against Cortés. Let’s consider just a few:

·      Mass killings: thousands of Aztecs, and Indians from some other groups who encountered the Spaniards on their march to the Valley of Mexico, died at the hands of Cortés and his forces. However, it is also true that Cortés was enthusiastically assisted by large numbers of Indians from other groups who had suffered at the hands of the Aztecs and thirsted for revenge. Many Aztecs were killed by fellow Indians. A crafty lawyer for the defence might argue that Cortés was liberating Indians from Aztec tyranny, or at least was no worse than the Aztecs.

·      Slavery: Cortés owned large numbers of Indians, enslaved for resisting (from a Spanish point of view) the lawful representatives of the King of Spain and of the Pope himself. Cortés’ lawyer might plead in mitigation that the Aztecs themselves practised a form of slavery, although it seems that their slaves were not considered to be the personal property of an owner as was the case of Spanish slavery, and it was possible for Aztec slaves to gain their freedom. Cortés’ slaves could never be given their freedom.

·      Religious intolerance and cultural vandalism: the Pope had given the Americas to the King of Spain on condition that he evangelize the Indians and treat them according to his Christian conscience. Cortés’ band was therefore diligent in destroying temples, sculptures (“idols”) and other cultural artefacts, which would now be considered the priceless heritage of the Mexican people. Our judge might dismiss Cortés’ lawyer’s defence that he was acting on the authority of the Pope to suppress heresy, as a cynical attempt to evade responsibility. However, Cortés could probably plead in mitigation that he was sincerely horrified by the ample evidence of human sacrifice in the temples, especially by the priests wore the flayed skins of their sacrificial victims.

 

We can safely predict that the judge will find Cortés guilty, but that leaves open two questions:

·      The Mexican nation is the direct result of Cortés’ actions in the 16th century. It was he who determined the location of the country’s capital. Biologically, the people themselves are a complicated mix of Indian and Spanish, with a good dash of African (more slaves) and Asian (some slaves, some not), added to in subsequent centuries by assorted Europeans and North Americans who decided to stage a little invasion of Mexico on some pretext or other. This does not excuse Cortés, but if we focus only on actions that are reprehensible by our standards we miss his foundational contribution to modern Mexico.

·      Should we ignore his other qualities, which contributed to his victory in 1521? Cortés was a supreme politician. He outwitted his superior in Cuba. He managed an unruly band of cutthroats with supreme skill. He understood the “politics” of Indigenous Mexico and allied himself with the Aztecs most powerful enemies. As a military leader he was decisive, resolute, undaunted by appalling setbacks, strategically and tactically acute. He also seems to have been a sharp businessman whom Mr Trump may well admire.

All of this makes Cortés an enormously important historical figure, however we judge him as a person. We can recognize his ugly deeds, we can if we wish condemn them, but can we therefore ignore his significance?

 

On causality:

 

Carr bats easily to one side the argument that Cleopatra’s nose proves the importance of chance in history. The idea is that if Cleopatra’s nose had been less attractive, perhaps an enormously ugly schnozzle, Marc Anthony would not have been besotted with her and the course of Roman history would have changed.

 

Carr goes on to examine a case study, which I have adapted here. Mr Jones gets in his car and drives a few miles to meet a friend in a pub. He intends to drink only a half pint, but the conversation flows and by the time he gets in his car to drive home he has had more beer than is wise or legal. His car had been serviced the previous day by a mechanic new to the job who had failed to check the brakes, which were faulty. As Jones rounds a bend near home, a little faster than is wise, Mr Robinson is crossing the street to the convenience store because he has run out of cigarettes. Jones’ car hits Robinson who breathes his last.

 

The question is who or what caused the death of Robinson. Was it Mr Jones excessive consumption of alcohol? Was it the negligent mechanic who had not noticed that the brakes were faulty? Was it the highway engineer who perhaps made the bend too tight? One possibility is that Robinson caused his own death since, if he had not been a smoker, or had ordered his cigarettes online, he would not be dead. If that defence were accepted by the court, perhaps all smokers who die in traffic accidents in future can be held responsible for their own deaths.

 

This set me thinking about Mr Trump’s grasp of causality in the context of the West Coast wild fires. The argument might go something like this. It was unusually hot, and has been unusually hot often lately. There were unusually strong winds, also an increasingly frequent occurrence. Lightning struck dry vegetation. A fire started. There was a good deal of dry matter on the forest floor (dead trees, fallen branches etc.) which burned fiercely. Now, there could have been no fire without lightning. The only plausible cause for the lightning is the unusually hot weather. The wind did not cause the fire, but was a contributory factor that spread the blaze over a wide area. The dry matter on the forest floor was similarly a contributory factor, but it was not ignited by spontaneous combustion. Mr Trump, however, keen to attribute the fires to something other than climate change, ruled that bad forest management was the only cause.  Whatever one’s stance concerning climate change, Mr Trump’s argument is simply illogical. Tinder alone cannot cause a fire. A spark is also needed. I suspect that if he were the judge in the case of Mr Robinson President Trump would have found him responsible for his own death, and liable for the damage he caused to Mr Jones’ car.

 

Carr’s fundamental argument is that we live in history. History shapes us, we shape history, and history says as much about us as it does about people of the past.

I’d rather be a lamppost in New York …

I have been reading Jan Morris’ masterly Manhattan ’45, a spellbinding evocation of the city (in 1945) where I spent a large part of my professional life, and for which I have an enduring affection. “Gentleman Jim” Walker, mayor of New York 1926-1932 once quipped, Morris tells us, that he’d rather be a lamppost in New York than mayor of Chicago. That’s rather harsh on another great American city, but it speaks to a municipal pride that is very much New York’s. Gentleman Jim’s lax standards of probity were exposed by New York’s preeminent  mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, who was capable of his own bon mots, such as “When I make a mistake it’s a beaut”.

 

Fiorello La Guardia

Morris’ book is full of fascinating insights and facts that bring to life the New York of 75 years ago. One that caught my eye was the fact that, when the Waldorf Astoria was built, a siding from a railway line to Grand Central Station was laid so that the ultimate wealthy guest could arrive in his own train, disembark beneath the hotel and be escorted to his suite.

 

In 1996 I met, in a Macdonald’s just off the campus of Idaho State University Pocatello, a gentleman named Wendell (probably a Mormon, since many locals were) who mistook me for a lawyer because I was wearing my trademark suit and tie, which made me stand out on campus. Wendell had started work in 1952 driving trucks full of cheese from northern Utah to New York City, this a journey of some 2,200 miles before the days of Interstate Highways. Wendell would have seen, probably with disapproving Mormon eyes, but perhaps with amazement, the great city on the Hudson, which was so different from the small towns of Utah and Idaho. My own first encounter with New York would have to wait until 1974, when little did I dream that I would spend a large part of my working life in the Big Apple. Morris’ wonderful book has brought flooding back many memories that give a flavour of the New York in which I worked for so many years. I hope they will not bore you.

 

My memories can be conveniently categorized by the names of three hotels where I spent the majority of my nights in the city: in the first phase, The Algonquin, on West 44^th Street (late 1970s/1980s), then the Doral Tuscany on West 34^th (late 1980s/1990s), and finally the Kitano on Park Avenue (late 1990s-2016).

 

The Algonquin Hotel

The Algonquin’s attractions lay not in its rather small rooms, nor in the dreadful food that its restaurant was capable of serving, but in its literary past. It was here that the Algonquin Round Table of writers and wits would gather, from 1919 onwards. Those present might include Dorothy Parker, a critic and poet famous for her sharp wit; Irving Berlin, composer and lyricist; George Kaufman, a playwright and director, who wrote musicals for the Marx Brothers; Harpo Marx; or the actress Tallulah Bankhead. This literary past made the hotel popular with visiting publishers.

 

Waiting to meet someone in the lobby, one might spot a prominent politician such as Ed Koch, Mayor of the city 1975-1989, a TV or movie star, or perhaps in November 1980 yours truly escorting Harold Macmillan to an interview. The Algonquin was also famous for its bar, a small, and oak-wood-panelled space decorated with framed James Thurber cartoons. After a day’s work one could sit at the bar and, in traditional style, discuss the issues of the day or one’s personal troubles with a barman who would lend a sympathetic ear. He would frequently be the stereotypical writer waiting for a publisher to take his first novel. Alas, the bar no longer exists. When the resident owner of the Algonquin sold the hotel, its new Japanese owners decided that the bar would make a nice office.

 

The Algonquin was in one of those frontier areas that made New York so distinctive. A few steps to the west was the Avenue of the Americas, so named by Mayor LaGuardia, but sill identified by its original and more helpful name, 6^th Avenue. A left and a right take you to 42^nd Street and Times Square, now sanitized, but in the 70s and 80s a dingy area of peep shows (“beautiful girls in private booths”), cinemas converted to, at best, strip joints, but more often “live sex shows”. All this was next door to the Port Authority Bus Terminal where passengers would arrive from all over the USA to be welcomed by the seediest side of New York.

 

When my parents-in-law visited us in 1981 Jan’s father said he wanted to visit New York because he was secretary of the United Nations Association in Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire, and wished to tour the UN building on the East River. He was a Quaker and lived in modest style, so his budget, $50 a night,  for hotel rooms was quite a challenge for a man who was introducing a newly acquired mother-in-law to the city. I decided I had better check candidate hotels out in person. One, between the Algonquin and Times Square, had seedy-looking characters sitting on its doorstep and a reception desk protected by bullet-proof-glass. This was certainly not mother-in-law friendly. Fortunately, the Royalton, across the street from the Algonquin, just about retained a sufficient air of faded gentility that it required no protection against bullets. The hotel has since been renovated with a design by Philippe Starck and is now far beyond my father-in-law’s price range, and would have been far too flashy for his tastes.

 

Times Square too has been cleaned up by Mayor Giuliani who found a crafty legal ruse and abolished all the peep shows and sex joints. He passed a zoning ordinance that prohibited a business in which at least 40% of floor area was devoted to “adult use” from operating within 500 feet of a day care centre, school, or house of worship. In crowded Manhattan, this left very few places, if any, where an adult business could operate. 

 

The Harvard Club

The Irish were a significant immigrant group in New York, and a few doors east of the Algonquin was an Irish bar. I stopped here occasionally, but not in 1981 when the portraits of IRA hunger strikers appeared in the windows. I decided that my accent would make me unwelcome. A little further East was the Harvard Club, founded in 1865, its building designed by the celebrated New York architect Charles F. McKim in 1892. New York is club land. Yale’s club founded in 1897, was once at 30 West 44^th where the University of Pennsylvania now has its much younger equivalent (the Penn Club). Yale’s is now housed in a Neoclassical building on Vanderbilt Avenue, adjacent to Grand Central Station. Princeton’s club is a block south of Harvard and Penn, on West 43^rd. Princeton’s is the oldest of the Ivy League clubs, founded in 1866, but only at its present location since 1963.

 

In the same block of West 43^rd stands the Palazzo style building, designed by McKim, Meade and White, of the Century Association, which describes itself as a club for “over two thousand authors, artists, and amateurs of letters and fine arts.” This is New York’s publishers’ club. I first entered its hallowed halls in November 1980 for a celebratory dinner hosted by Tom McCormack, the President of Macmillan’s New York subsidiary St Martin’s Press (named after the old Macmillan HQ in St Martin’s Lane in London), to celebrate the publication the next day of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. The guest of honour was Harold Macmillan. Over dinner Macmillan asked a question that would determine how I would spend more than a decade of my life, from 1985-1996. Pleased that the success of The New Grove was guaranteed, Macmillan asked “Want next?”. Somebody suggested “A dictionary of art”, which I would publish in 36 volumes in 1996, after Macmillan’s death, and after spending quite a few millions of his family’s dollars.

 

The Century Association building

One of the quirks of the Century Club is that pens, pencils and paper are not allowed in the dining room. Lunch and dinner are for stimulating conversation, not business. Mobile phones are not allowed in the club for the same reason. I was once stopped on my way to lunch because my glasses case was mistaken for a phone. The club is an active acquirer of art, mostly paintings. My colleague Peter Warner, President of Thames & Hudson Inc, with whom I worked for a number of years, was a member of the club’s art committee.

 

The University Club is on the corner of West 54^th Street and 5^th Avenue, across the street from the Museum of Modern Art. The glory of this club is its library room, as I discovered when my friend Milan Hughston, the librarian of MOMA, invited me to lunch there. By tradition, the MOMA librarian becomes an honorary member of the Club and, in return, sits on the library committee. I don’t know how many clubs there are in New York, but it surely is the most clubby of all the large American cities. It may even outnumber London’s clubs.

 

Most New York clubs were founded as all male institutions. The Harvard Club, for instance, condescendingly added a Ladies’ Entrance in 1940, which allowed members’ wives and alumni of Radcliffe College, a women’s college affiliated to Harvard, access to separate quarters in the club. Women were not admitted as real members until 1973. Many clubs still retain, despite admitting women, the aura, rules and dress codes of a gentleman’s club.

 

New York’s clubs represent a certain sense of propriety, tinged with aristocratic pretensions, that is characteristic of aspects of high society in New York. In the 1990s the social lives of the wives of wealthy businessmen created a very New York phenomenon. At a book event I met the design director of Tiffany, the jeweller. He was an elegant, urbane and accomplished man with whom conversation was a pleasure. These traits, combined with being gay, defined the walker. The next day my companion of the previous evening was mentioned in an article about the phenomenon as one of New Yorker’s most esteemed walkers. You see, those high society ladies had a busy social calendar but their husbands were too busy making money to escort them. This problem created the demand for a companion who could charm the lady, impress her guests, but could never generate a whiff of scandal because he was known to be gay. Hence the walker. The club and the walker are but two examples of the politer end of New York society, but this is a city with many rough edges to offset the wealthy and refined.

 

The closure of its intimate bar drove me out of the Algonquin and I settled on the Doral Tuscany as my New York home. The Doral had large rooms and an Irish bell boy (who of course was no boy) called Jimmy who ensured that guests received a cheery welcome as he took care of their bags. One day as my taxi turned onto Lexington Avenue to reach 34^th Street, to my astonishment a uniformed man shot across the avenue in the face of on-rushing traffic. As I watched the man dragged a dishevelled character out of the doorway of a building and exclaimed “I’ve told you before not to piss in my doorway”. Here was one of New York’s rough edges.

 

If you work for long enough in New York you begin to wonder how a city that teeters on the edge of chaos manages to function and create. Over breakfast one morning I read in the New York Times that the city had finally linked its taxi license records to its driving license records, only to discover that many licensed cab drivers did not have a driving license. As I settled into a taxi to take me to my first appointment I mentioned this to the driver. “Do you have a driver’s license?” I asked. “Yes, of course”, he replied, “we share it. We’re all called Mohammed.”

 

Madison Square Park. Our office was to the left. Bottom right is the Flatiron Building, an early skyscraper

My office at the time was on Madison Square Park, on East 26^th Street between 5^th and Madison Avenues. The Park was itself another of the city’s rough edges, a haunt of dubious characters and drug dealers, not a nice place to be at night. We employed a number of telephone sales people, many of them out of work actors, who abound in New York. The tellesellers were themselves emblematic of New York’s rough edges. New York’s finest arrived at our office one day looking for a teleseller who had got into a fight on the subway and was charged with assault. Our star (female) salesperson was an eccentric obsessive, who would only work if supplied with green ballpoint pens. One Saturday she was alone in the office. The air conditioning was faulty and emitted a loud noise that disturbed a recording session in a studio on the floor above. A young man was sent down to request that the unit be turned off. He knocked on the door. Alarmed, our sales person seized a large knife in the mail room, flung the door open and promised the young man he was be mutilated if he did not walk ahead of her to be delivered to the doorman on the ground floor.

 

The H W Wilson building (left) with the lighthouse on the roof

New York, of course, had neighbourhoods where the edges became so rough that they are best avoided. One such is the neighbourhood of the Bronx close to Yankee baseball stadium. One of the great tourist attractions of New York is the Circle Line, a boat that sails round Manhattan with a commentary to point out notable and historic buildings. Shortly after the boat leaves the East River and sails up the Harlem River a large brick building on the waterfront stands out for having on its roof a small lighthouse. This is the building of the H W Wilson publishing company, founded in 1898. The original Mr Wilson believed in education as a means to bring the light of learning into the lives of the people. Hence the lighthouse. My New York colleague, Janice Kuta, had mentioned to me the possibility of a partnership with H W Wilson. She insisted that she would not risk walking from the subway station to the Wilson office, so we took a car service. Alas, the driver got hopelessly lost, so in the end we had to get out in the middle of the Bronx and walk – nervously –  to the lighthouse. Our host, Michael, assured us that our nerves were not without justification. For a number of years the light atop the building had to be switched off because it was used for target practice. One day the staff had arrived for work to find a dead body on the doorstep. At the end of every visit Michael insisted on walking me to the subway station at the baseball stadium. He was a gentle, civilized soul, so I have no idea what he would have done if we had encountered a gunman, but his was a kind gesture.

 

Yankee Stadium and the Bronx behind

A city that combines the exclusivity of high society with poverty and living on the brink of chaos, ought not to function at all, but for all its contradictions New York functions, even in the teeth of crime, floods, and terrorist attacks. The city is held together by a host of deeply-embedded practices. One salesman had made a sale worth several thousand dollars to a library in the City. A new regulation required that the library could buy only from an approved vendor. Until a lengthy form had been filled in and our trusted status approved by a committee the sale could not be concluded. One question was whether our company did any business in (Apartheid-era) South Africa. Our ultimate owner, Macmillan, most certainly did do business there, but we were incorporated in Delaware and had never made a sale anywhere in Africa. The application was scheduled for a meeting, but the committee failed to meet its quorum more than once. The frustrated salesman, hungry for his commission had to learn patience with the way the city was managed. Official New York is most certainly bureaucracy.

 

Unions are powerful in many sectors of the city, despite its being the capital of free enterprise where, as my lawyer told me, employees are hired at will and can be fired because the boss does not like the colour of their tie. For example, I have often exhibited my books at trade shows in the New York Hilton. I once travelled with a display made of metal poles and plastic  panels. I learned to put it up in 15 minutes at most. In New York, this operation required two union carpenters hired for a minimum of an hour. My two union carpenters duly appeared, took the display out of its case and scratched their heads wondering how to assemble it. I offered to fix it while they watched. This would take less time and they would still be paid. Not allowed. I offered to give them instructions. Not allowed: supervising a union carpenter is a union job. So, I watched my friendly carpenters wrestle with my display, eventually with success. At which point I was free finally to head for the bar.

 

Another inescapable New York institution is the tip. It is not unusual, even in superior kinds of restaurants, for a waiter/ress to approach a table at which a diner has not yet finished eating, to announce that her/his shift is about to end and present the bill. This ensures the server gets the tip, not the person on the next shift. I was once waiting for a taxi at the entrance of the Hotel Pennsylvania. The Westminster Dog Show in Madison Square Garden had just finished and most of my fellow guests in the queue were Westminster exhibitors with their pooches. I had made sure that I tipped not only the bell boy who brought my bags to the street, but the doorman who hailed taxis and ushered guests into their cabs. One (no doubt out of town) dog show lady had not tipped the doorman. She looked puzzled as guests in the queue behind her were showed to their taxi while she waited, unable to attract the attention of the doorman who was all powerful when it came to transport.

 

A colleague once invited me to join him at a dinner with an author couple at their favourite upper East Side restaurant. When we arrived my friend was dismayed to be made to wait because the restaurant had given our reserved table to other guests. Eventually we were seated. Another guest that evening, by the way was Rod Stewart, accompanied by a glamorous blonde lady. I suspect that Rod’s role that evening was not that of the urbane and very safe walker. He may also have been in need of an eye examination, since the waiter asked if he could borrow our table’s candles, for Rod who was having difficulty reading the menu in the subdued lighting. When we had finished dinner, the authors and I went ahead to the street to hail a taxi while my friend paid the (sizeable) bill. At my call of “Taxi”,  a yellow cab stopped a short distance up the street. We strolled over and got in, asking the driver to wait for our friend. At the sound of loud voices we looked back to see my colleague running at speed from the restaurant pursued by two or three angry-looking waiters. He leaped into the taxi and slammed the door. As we moved off a waiter threw at the taxi a handful of small change – the derisory tip my friend had left in protest at our wait for a table.

 

I left the Doral because it closed to be renovated and converted into a W hotel, far too trendy for my tastes. Also, poor Jimmy died of Lou Gehrig’s disease, a neurone disorder named after a famous baseball player for the New York Yankees (Stephen Hawking also suffered from it). I had been traveling to Japan to set up arrangements for sales of The Dictionary of Art, and had acquired a taste for Japanese food and attentive service. Around the corner on Park Avenue was a new Japanese-owned hotel, the Kitano, so I moved there.

 

Hotel Kitano lobby. The sculpture, Dog, is by Fernando Botero

My work on The Dictionary of Art involved meeting a lot of people in the art world – in universities, museums, galleries, auction houses, and, of course, artists themselves. New York is the capital of the USA’s art world. It is also the home of a majority of the nation’s musical organizations, and host to a great number of top flight higher education institutions of all kinds (universities that teach and research all the disciplines, specialist art or design schools, music conservatories, seminaries etc.). The city also has world-class libraries, of which the granddaddy is the New York Public research library, a great Neoclassical structure, on 5^th Avenue between 42nd and 43^rd streets.

 

New York Public Library, 5th Avenue and 42nd Street, Rose Main Reading Room

New York has the great luck to be the place where some of the nation’s great fortunes were made and continue to be made. Even the robber barons, who made their fortunes in rough and tough industries (railways, steel and the like), and whose conduct was rough and tough, not to say corrupt, liked to put their money into the best when it came to ensuring that their names lived on. And the best often meant Culture with a capital C. For example, Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919) made his money in steel and railways. At the time, old master paintings, European sculpture and decorative arts were available at prices that were very affordable for a man of Frick’s wealth. His collection is now housed in the mansion that Frick built late in his life at 5^th Avenue and 70^th Street. Next to the house is the Frick Art Reference Library, an important research centre. The Frick was a favourite way to while away an hour or so between appointments. I was once looking at a Gainsborough portrait of Richard Paul Jodrell. Two ladies standing next to me misread the label to mean that Gainsborough was the subject of the portrait. Their opinion of the portrait: “Gee. That Gainsborough was an ugly guy.”

 

Thomas Gainsborough, Richard Paul Jodrell, c.1774

New York’s art museum world is extraordinarily diverse. The Metropolitan Museum is the largest and grandest (it also has a wonderful research library), although the Brooklyn Museum across the East River gives the Met a good run for its money. For medieval European art take a bus to the very northern tip of Manhattan for The Cloisters. For modern art there is MOMA. For changing exhibitions in a Frank Lloyd Wright building it’s the Guggenheim. If old master prints and drawings and antiquarian books are your bag, the genteel, quiet and uncrowded Pierpont Morgan Library ( Wall Street banker contemporary of Frick) is the place. If Velázquez, Goya or paintings of colonial Mexico enthuse you then go to the Hispanic Society of America Museum and Library, founded by the son of one of the great railroad builders of the 19^th century. If you want to introduce yourself to the big and not-so-big names of colonial and 19^th century American art the New York Historical Society Museum and Library, founded 1804 is New York’s oldest museum (opened 70 years before the Met). And so on and on.

 

The Cloisters, 1938, looking north. To the left is the Hudson River and the New Jersey Palisades. John D Rockefeller, who donated the land to the Met, bought the Palisades (now a state park) so that no buildings should spoil the view from the Cloisters

When Jackson Pollock and his fellow Abstract Expressionists, was splashing paint around, New York was the art capital of the world. It is still home to some very major artists. My last employer, Thames & Hudson, paid me to meet and talk to some of them. I first met Audrey Flack when she was looking for a publisher for her memoirs. Audrey is a feminist pioneer of Photorealism, perhaps best known for her painting Marilyn, a tribute to Marilyn Monroe. She once almost achieved the distinction of making the largest statue ever made by a  female artist, of Catherine of Braganza, commissioned in the 1990s by the Borough of Queens, which is named after Queen Catherine. She would have stood as tall as a nine-storey building, but when it emerged that she had become wealthy from the transatlantic slave trade, the commission was cancelled (a Black Lives Matter statue controversy avant Black Lives Matter). My friend Chris Contillo and I once met Audrey at her Chelsea dealer’s gallery to see a show of her work before it opened.  Audrey loves to talk, so invited us to join her for a Chinese takeaway on the roof of the building (rather to the annoyance of her dealer who was paying for lunch). Audrey was born in 1931, but age has not hindered her making art, nor performing with her History of Art band (she plays the banjo).

 

Audrey Flack, Marilyn, oil on acrylic on canvas, 1977

I once interviewed Spencer Tunick, famous for his nude photos of massed ranks of naked people in various locations. Spencer explained that he started out photographing individual nude people on the streets of New York. He learned the importance of explaining to New York’s finest that he was not up to no good taking photos of a naked person in public. Demand grew, so he took group photos on the street. He told me that his Caracas photo required 1,000 soldiers to guard the nudes and their clothing. Spencer ended the interview by describing his dinner party package. He joins a dinner party in a person’s home. After desert the guests strip off and Spencer takes their photograph. Jan told me quite firmly that we were not going to ask Spencer to one of our dinner parties.

 

New York, of course, equals money and in the art world money talks big time. The city is the capital of the American auction house and art gallery business. Sotheby’s and Christies are headquartered there as are most of the fanciest dealers. One of the big events of the year is the Armory Show, held for many years at the 69^th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue. For a few years The Dictionary of Art was a sponsor of the show. We displayed our 36 volumes at the entrance to the fair. My colleague Karin Agosta had the pleasure of chatting with Harrison Ford and shaking his hand! I recall standing in one dealer’s space looking at a large Goya portrait of a Spanish lady, dressed all in black. As I admired the painting, I heard the dealer’s conversation with a possible buyer. “How much is the Goya?” “A million dollars.” “No, for a million bucks I’ll have something I like.” That’s a very New York conversation.

 

Sarge's Monster sandwich

New York is surely the biggest eating out city in the Americas. Diners and restaurants abound. Sarge’s Deli on 3^rd Avenue is open 24 hours. If you’ve been out very late and have an appetite, Sarge’s is the place to go for “THE MONSTER: “Home to New York’s biggest sandwich. Served on thick sliced rye bread, with corned beef, pastrami, roast beef, fresh turkey, salami, sliced tomato, lettuce, cole slaw & Russian dressin [sic]”. TAKE THE CHALLENGE …….49.95. Sandwich and T-shirt ……. 63.95.”

 

If power dining is your thing, and you like fish, the place to go is Le Bernardin, on West 51^st Street, where the basic tasting menu with wine pairing is a mere $293. The Chef’s Tasting is a touch more: $373. I have dined there twice. The first occasion involved the sales person who marched the young man to the doorman at knife point. She had sold so many book that my boss instructed me to take her to the restaurant of her choice, no matter the cost. She chose Le Bernardin and asked me to invite two colleagues. I no longer recall the size of the bill (plus tip of course), but I do remember that the biggest restaurant bill I ever saw was at Nobu New York. I had a dinner date with a friend with whom I had a book deal and his wife. Before dinner we had to call in to The Tribeca Screening Room (owned by Robert De Niro). Cathy is a film maker and a friend of a famous  movie star whose new film was being screened to friends and family. As we left for dinner the star suggested that we join her, her husband and daughter at Nobu. As we took our seats, Muhammad Ali was eating dinner behind us, assisted by two carers (he had severe Parkinson’s disease). Before we had ordered, the daughter became unhappy and left with her father, so I found myself the companion of a very famous person by chance. Dinner was quite delicious. We so enjoyed a course of soft shell crab that we ordered seconds. Before we finished dinner, the movie star left to join her husband and daughter. When the bill came, I realized that the famous diner who had invited me had left me to share the bill with my friends. We split if 50/50. With tip it came to $1,000 each.

 

The Tavern on the Green, Crystal Room

On the subject of extravagant New York dining, I was once invited to lunch by a delinquent author. She was determined to give me a real New York experience. She chose a traditional steak house, but not just any steak house. This was the restaurant where a mafia boss had only recently been gunned down. She was at pains to show me the very spot. However, the extravagance was not my steak lunch. I later spotted my host in the social pages of The New York Times. She had hired the entire Tavern on the Green in Central Park for her dog’s birthday and his doggy friends. The Tavern on the Green was built in 1934 by the great New York city planner Robert Moses, on the site of an 1880s sheep fold capable of holding 700 sheep. My author’s dog must have had an awful lot of friends.

 

Dinner for a retiring publisher at Patsy's February 2016

My last dining experience in New York, my retirement dinner with colleagues from W W Norton and Thames & Hudson, was at Patsy’s, a family-owned Italian restaurant on West 5^th Street, founded in 1944 by Pasquale “Patsy” Scognamillo. Patsy’s boast is that since then it has had only three chefs. The restaurant’s web site tells us that it was made famous by Frank Sinatra, but it adds a long list of famous diners: movie stars (Al Pacino), opera singers (Placido Domingo), authors (Alec Baldwin), designers (Calvin Klein), politicians (John F Kennedy Jr). Patsy’s serves an excellent martini and homely Italian dishes: spaghetti and meatballs, stuffed calamari (my retirement dish: $38), stuffed veal chop. The wine list is extremely simple: House (red, white, sparkling , rosé) or one special. And it costs nothing like Le Bernardin or Nobu.

 

New York is the publishing capital of the English-speaking world. This is a city with a literary ecosystem, which perhaps only London could aspire to match. A few years before I retired, a colleague invited me to a party at a grand apartment on Lexington Avenue. Will Balliett’s father was the jazz critic for the New Yorker. The party was very much a New Yorker affair to mark the publication of a book. Present were novelists and non-fiction writers. I met a man who was working on a photographic history of trees. There were two young men working as journalists for the Huffington Post while they tried to make it as novelists. There were professors of English from universities, one of whom spoke about the book being marked that evening. Will’s wife teaches theatre and entertained us with a selection of Broadway songs, accompanied by two young musicians, one a student of musical theatre from Iceland. All in a large wood-panelled room about the size of the ground floor of my house. The wine and conversation flowed freely and urbanely.

 

And speaking of Broadway, New York is also theatre land, full of out-of-work actors waiting on tables, or teleselling for me people like me. One of our telesellers sent me an invitation to her one-woman show in a space that normally hosted pilates or yoga classes. She had been adopted at birth and the comedy musical was the tale of her search for her birth mother. It cannot be easy to make en entertaining show about the impenetrable bureaucratic impediments that hinder the  search for one’s parents, but this was a funny, deeply moving performance. She explained that her adoptive parents (hard-drinking, hard-cursing Jews in Oklahoma) had no interest in singing and dancing which had been her passion since childhood. This puzzled her, so she set out to find her roots. The show seemed to end in failure: all efforts to find her parents had failed. We all felt profound sympathy as she began her last number. Then a member of the audience stood up to join in the song – and joined her daughter on stage. Her birth mother, it turned out had been looking for her and had found her just as she had abandoned her search. Her mother was a Jewish singer-dancer and her father a Mexican immigrant. So our teleseller's passion for performance was genetic. We applauded with great gusto.

 

New York, then, is a city of cabs, cocktails, clubs, carousing, clip joints, culture, creativity, catch-phrases, commuters, crime, cops, corruption, contradictions, commerce, cupidity, cash-talks capitalism, cosa nostra, chaos. It’s cocky but irrepressible and indomitable. When the 9/11 attacks happened, my office was in a building on Park Avenue South. Around the corner was another 69^th Regiment Armory where people went to search for missing family members. In desperation they pasted the front of the building with photos – hundreds of them – of missing loved ones. For a time we had to allow colleagues who found the photos too upsetting to walk past to take time off work. But they and the city recovered. So it did too from the floods in 2012. New York is quite a place. Read Jan Morris book and you will find out why.