New York missive no 48 - Call it Sleep, Great Gatsby

Café frequenters coming and going like ghosts. Some chew on pencil ends, some leaf through pages, some alternate typed sentences with spoonfuls of granola. Look up from your book and the person across the room has gone. Am in Doma, the epitome of a West Village café for people writing, reading, chatting quietly, any upbeat tune followed by a classical one or something peaceful, out of respect for customers trying to think.

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New York might have a reputation for ceaseless progress but I’ve been struck by how many people have nostalgia disease. An affection for things past. Not pride in the past, in the way European city inhabitants are proud of their historic monuments, those solid stepping stones of progress (here there’s no need, the evidence of progress is now, everywhere, and it doesn’t always look good). More an anti-progress sense of past. A resistance to the “achievement” that’s meant to define this city. Hence the mourning of markets that make way for high-priced apartment blocks. Hence the fond capture of surviving eccentricities through words, photos and recounted stories, keeping them alive a little bit longer.

Two recently-read New York books are filtering into my days at the moment: Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep and Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby (don’t really need to preface Great Gatsby with “Fitzgerald’s”, but did so to be fair). Call it Sleep is infused with light – light in the form of “bright brass faucets”, the flame of a “shadowy lamplighter”, the hypnotic brilliance of a shaft of sunlight on East River, light that’s analogous to language and that the child narrator David uses to navigate his experience growing up on the Lower East Side at the turn of last century. So I’ve been noticing lights about the place more than usual. Light trickling along subway tracks before a train emerges from a tunnel. Plates of silver light lying on wet pavements after rain. Gold light catching on thousands of windows at sunset.

And then Great Gatsby for various reasons, including its playfully relentless life’s a dream message (echoing so many other life’s-a-dream-messages gone by, “que toda la vida es sueño / y los sueños, sueños son”). For example saw B for the first time in ages last Sunday. I was amused to realise that much of what I’d been feeling was the result of an over-active imagination. The dreams themselves are real though, even if transient. And even if the dreams are transient, the fiction that captures them (in Fitzgerald’s case not mine!) endures.

Mmm, well a little cynical perhaps. There are real things too!