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 Let the weekend begin
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| Looking towards Riverside Blvd from the West 70th Street Pier. 10:15 PM. Photo: JH. |
September 3, 2009. Yesterday was another most beautiful day in New York. Bright and sunny in the mid-70s.
I went over to the Met to meet Michael Thomas for lunch in the Trustees' Dining Room. I don’t know what the rules of eligibility are for that particular dining room but I suppose it is club-like and requires some sort of membership.
You read about Michael on the NYSD several weeks ago when I went to his book party for his new novel “Love & Money” over in DUMBO. I think this is his sixth novel, which from these eyes look like he’s climbed Mount Everest six times. I haven’t read it yet but Michael Korda gave it a really good review on Tina Brown’s Daily Beast.
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| Michael Thomas at a book party last month for his latest novel, Love and Money. |
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Most New Yorkers know Michael from his musings and criticisms of society and culture in New York. He’s a New York boy. His father Joe Thomas was, for years, the head of Lehman Brothers. But that was a long time ago in terms of these times. There were still a lot of actual Lehmans (and their cousins) who still had big pieces of the firm. And they did not engage in the same sort of “financial activity” that came to characterize Lehman Brothers at the time of its Great Fall.
In fact, after Joe Thomas’ managing directorship, Lehman had gone through many changes (as had the industry) and been kicked around quite a bit. The Lehman family members had long before taken their chips, or most of them, and gone to the bank.
Meanwhile, The Met. At some point early in his adult life when he’d finished Yale, Michael Thomas worked at Lehman Brothers, and also at another interval, at the Met as an assistant curator. He retains a curator’s interest, with an investment banker’s eye, and a novelist’s curiosity and a journalist’s curiosity about all of it. There’s always a lot to discuss.
He’d just come back from visiting some friends in Southwest Harbor, Maine. If you don’t know, that part of Maine – the Harbors, Northeast, Southwest, Bar, Seal, Dark Harbors is still a haven for what used to be called Old Money. Michael said the reason it hadn’t become flashy for New Yorkers is that it’s too far away.
Its residents come from all over and especially Boston and Philadelphia (Brooke Astor summered there, as we now all know). It’s WASP-y, a kind of holdout, and as Michael pointed out, a nine hour drive from Manhattan. Thank you, no.
I made that drive a number of times in the 90s, however, visiting friends from Philadelphia who’d been going there god knows when. My hostess, an heiress to one of the American automobile fortunes, grew up in grand circumstances but hated having help in the house. It intruded on her sense of privacy. So she took on a lot of the work for herself, hired catering staff for her dinner parties (which were never fancy anyway), and had a young housekeeper come in six days a week at 6 a.m. and be out at noon.
Back to the Met. I was telling Michael that I’d finished Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth the other night and it left me very depressed. It kind of sucked me in to the point where by the end, I felt like I was in the family. And not a happy ending. Michael pointed out that Wharton was one of the few American writers who had a “hard nose” for the reality of society and people.
Nevertheless I loved the book. Published a little more than a century ago (1905), Wharton’s subject is the same as Trollope’s except American. Wharton’s New York rich were Trollope’s “new money.” And just about everybody was after it. And not a few didn’t get it. Leading to very dramatic conclusions often having to do with death.
Why all this? Because New York is going through another change right now. How it will play itself out is beyond my ken, but we are in it right now. Most of us do not recognize it and none of us can quite see it because change can only be seen clearly from a distance of years.
The Great Depression, for example, was never considered The Great Depression at the time. It was Hard Times for many, yes; but also Hot Times for some. The Old Guard of society in the 1960s first got their gilded toes wet in the depths of the 1930s. Live, Love, Laugh and Be Happy. Happy Days Are Here Again. Or, hadn’t you noticed.
Then came the War. After that it was an entirely different world and a half century of what has been called prosperity. I took this picture tonight from Riverdale Boulevard and 66th Street, on the far West Side where I was visiting an old friend who lives in this riverside/West Side Highway enclave that Donald Trump developed in the 1990s. They have a great view and great sunsets over there.
I took the picture, however, because of the moon which looks full although Full Moon is tomorrow, Friday. I took this picture because it represents, to me, the romance of New York, the bigness, the grandness, the power of this place. And the change. The tallest building as well as the buildings to the right and left of where I was standing are new. New to me, although to a lot of new New Yorkers in their 20s or 30s, a lot of whom are living in this area, it’s just here as if it always were. Change. Quite glorious under an early September moon.
Back at the Met. Enthusing as I was with Michael Thomas about these books I’d just read, he suggested I read William Dean Howell’s A Hazard of New Fortunes, published in 1890. I’d never read Howells who was regarded in his lifetime as “the dean of American letters” -- a novelist, a journalist, a critic and what’s more, an autodidact. Mark Twain, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Homes, Henry Adams were among his admirers. Alfred Kazin called him “The first great domestic novelist of American Life.”
After our lunch. It’s quite a distance from the Trustees’ Dining Room on whatever floor, to the main entrance of the Met and not direct. So I made my way slowly in order to not get lost although the exhibitions and displays displays of our civilizations treasures are so dauntingly awesome, I almost feel like I was wasting precious time by not stopping to look.
I was reminded again that in all the years that I’ve lived in New York in various periods since the 1960s, and always, as it happened, not far from the Met, I’ve gone there so infrequently. Michael Thomas told me that when he was working there in 1959, a crowd of 10,000 on a Sunday was big numbers. Today the halls are visited by many more thousands every day. It’s a treasure trove.
Here in New York the long grand holiday is beginning. People left town last night (Wednesday) and by Friday the streets will be quiet, comparatively, although filled with tourists I presume. If the weather holds up, we’ll have a piece of the treasure that will feel like that picture under the September moon. |
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| The front room at Swifty's. |
| Last night I went down to Swifty’s with my friend and neighbor Charlie Scheips. Charlie is a member of the Art World. He writes about it, he curates, he works as a dealer and is one of those characters who is a gadfly on the international art scene. It’s a fascinating world and full of very smart, very clever, sometimes very witty people full of knowledge. I always learn and it’s all food for thought and for the NYSD. |
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| The back room. That's me in the right hand corner (Charlie in the light jacket). |
Swifty’s was its very cozy, clubby-feeling (although it’s not clubby). Hannah Pakula was dining with Joan Didion. Watching those two best-selling authors in conversation made me wish I could hear the discussion. They’re both very smart women and have had interesting lives both here and in Hollywood.
Have a grand and glorious Labor Day weekend. Here at the NYSD we’re gonna try to take a few moments to relax too. |
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