At one time or another, we all think we were born in the wrong era, perhaps twenty years or twenty centuries too late. At the very least, most of have particular places, now vanished, that we would very much like to have seen. For me, there are two: ancient Rome (although a quick trip there would do just fine. Don’t need to stay long, just a glimpse) and mid-century New York City.
Oh. You mean there’s no guarantee I would run into Gene Kelly in a sailor suit on leave if I went back in time?
But there is really something irresistable about such tales of gals and guys in Manhattan in those days, something snappy and brisk and stylish and – oh, just say it – plucky? Sure it’s a fantasy, but so, so appealing,
Not a fantasy is the marvelous book Manhattan, When I Was Young by Mary Cantwell, a magazine and newspaper writer and editor who died in 2000. It was recommended on a discussion board devoted to AMC’s show Mad Men. The show, if you recall, is about a NYC advertising agency in 1960. The memoir is of the same period, of Cantwell’s arrival in New York in the early 50’s and then work in magazines (as well as her personal life) through the late 60’s.
It’s simply beautifully written, evocative and often painfully honest. (Cantwell struggled with post-partum depression – well, psychosis, really – and her marriage collapsed). So many memorable small points, building up to a memorable whole: the cultural background noise of the Rosenberg trial when she arrived in New York. The vivid personalities of the staff members of Mademoiselle and Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Her own, constant yearning for her father, who had died when she was 20. The ever present reality of not having much, but making do and more:
When I came to New York, on the same train that had taken me from Providence to New London for four years, I had $80 and the Smith-Corona my father had given me for my high school graduation. Allie, who had come up from her home in Maryland, had a bit more cash and a sterling silver brush, comb and mirror given her by a great-aunt. Between us, we thought, we had enough. The funny thing is, we were right. I can’t believe it now, that the city opened before us like some field of dreams, but it did.
All is not elegy, though. As I said, Cantwell is honest about her difficulties and mistakes, most notably an attachment to a man, her future husband, who dominated her intellectually and emotionally (and eventually cheated on her).
And yes, there is a Catholic angle to all of this, a leaching away of faith that begins, she discerns, in a choice, the choice to use a diaphragm and sleep with her boyfriend (future husband, “B”) But, she writes, “To give it up would be to give up B., and to do that would be like losing my father again,” and a bit later she writes that in losing her virginity, she gave up her freedom, and at some point, was convinced she had passed the point of no return.
Interestingly enough, James Hitchock wrote a column on Cantwell’s book, picking up another Catholic thread, in which she later twice attempts to go to confession and is essentially told by both priests, to not worry about anything and just be okay with herself, with one apologizing that the Church had made her so neurotic. Even if she came to agree with them, she is clear-eyed enough to see the inadequacy – even the implicit insult – of their responses to her.
There are two other books in this trilogy – one describing her childhood in Providence and the other her later life, mostly her travels (and relationship with a writer who is not identified in her book but was later understood to be James Dickey). I’ll put them on the list – at least the first one, which garnered much praise.
The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down…
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