But who will write me the book about New York that I desire? The more
I think about it, the more astonished I am that no one attempts it. I
don’t mean a novel. I would not admit any plot or woven tissue of story
to come between the reader and my royal heroine, the City herself. Not
to be a coward, should I try to write it myself? It is my secret dream;
but, better, it should be written by some sturdy rogue of a bachelor,
footfree, living in the very heart of the uproar. Some fellow with a
taste and nuance for the vulgar and vivid; a consort of both parsons
and bootleggers; a _Beggar’s Opera_ kind of rascal. I can think of
three men in this city who have magnificent powers for such a book; but
they are getting perhaps a little elderly--yes, they are over forty!
Ginger must be very hot in the mouth of my imagined author. He must be
young (dashed if I don’t think about 32 is the ideal age to write such
a book), but not one of the Extremely Brilliant Young Men. They are too
clever; and they are not lonely enough. For this is a lonely job. It’s
got to be done _solus_, slowly, with an eye only upon the subject. It
has got to show the very tremble and savour of life itself.
The man who will write this book will not necessarily enjoy it. To get
into the secret of Herself he has got to have a peculiar feeling about
her. For years he must have wrestled with her almost as a personal
antagonist. He must have vowed, since he first saw her imperial skyline
serrated on blue, to make her his own; a mistress worthy of him, and
yet he himself her master. But he must know, in his inward, that in the
end she triumphs, she tramples down mind and heart and nerve. Loveliest
enemy in the world, implacable victor over reason and peace and all the
quieter sanities of the spirit, her mad, intolerable beauty crazes or
silences the sensitive mind that woos her. If you think this is only
fine writing and romantic tall-talk, then you know her only with the
eye, not with the imagination. With good reason, perhaps, her poets
have, for the most part, kept mum. Enough for them to see and cherish
in imagination her little sudden glimpses. A girl, slender, gayly
unconscious of admiration, poises on one foot at the edge of the subway
platform, leaning over to see if the train is coming. That gallant
figure is perhaps something of a symbol of the city’s own soul.
There must be many who feel about Herself as I do--and, more wisely,
are tacit. There are many whose minds have trembled on the steep sills
of truth, have felt that golden tremble of reality almost within touch,
and rather than mar the half-apprehended fable, have turned troubled
away. But there is such poetry in her, and such fine, glorious animal
gusto--why is there not some determined attempt to set it down, not
with “rhetoricating floscules,” but as it is? Day after day one comes
to the attack; and returning, as the sloping sunlight and fresh country
air flood the dusty red plush of the homeward smoking-car, readmits the
expected defeat. Here is a target for you, O generation of snipers. Let
us have done with pribbles and prabbles. Who is the man who will write
me the book I crave--that vulgar, jocund, carnal, beautiful, rueful
book!
[Illustration: _Pepys’ House at Brampton_]