I visited New York twice in the noughties, as we called them, each time for only a few days. The two trips could not have been more different: one a very happy family holiday, the other, a painful lonely experience.
In 2005, Flic and I went with our two teenage boys to the United States for a very short family holiday: six days in New York and four days driving from New Haven to Cape Cod and back. It was great.
On the first morning in the city we walked out from our accommodation on West 96th Street into Central Park. It was a sunny spring day and we were excited to be in this mythical city. We spoke to various dog walkers and wandered southwards until we reached a large reservoir and could see a marvellous view of the skyscrapers beyond. Then we walked out of the park and took a bus to a spot from which we could walk to the Empire State building. The queues went around the block so we jumped into a yellow taxi and drove down to Battery Park, the southernmost point of Manhattan Island. It was cool and clear and we took our time wandering around, looking out at the ships and ferries in the harbour, at Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty in the distance. We bought food from a deli and sat outside to eat. We walked up to Ground Zero and looked at the damaged buildings around. The city was foreign enough to be exciting and yet we also felt very much at home there. I can’t convey the excitement of being there in that city. I loved it particularly but I know that Flic, Kit and Peter did too.
On other days we hung out in MoMA and the Guggenheim; we walked across Brooklyn Bridge; we listened to a jazz band in the Natural History Museum; we took a ferry ride in the harbour; and we went boating in Central Park.
One evening we were walking back along the edge of the park and heard a strange noise in the trees. We went to investigate and saw racoons clinging to the branches.
We came across the Chelsea Hotel by chance. I knew the place had lots of literary associations (Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road there, Arthur Miller lived there for years, Dylan Thomas stayed there, so did Mark Twain, yes, the hotel is that old, loads more writers...) and, of course, famous musicians too (Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen), I could go on all day but I won’t. Flic was brought up to go into hotels and ask for tea. We did. They don’t serve tea in places like that but said we could buy some next door and bring it in. We talked to a man who lived there – a louche, slightly creepy, possibly gay, name-dropping, middle-aged guy who had once invited I don’t know how many dogs to his pet’s birthday party in the lobby. He took us up to the tenth floor in the lift and we walked back down looking at all the modern art.
Flic hadn’t really wanted to go to New York but when she let slip something about being in love with the city I got the impression that the trip was a success for her too. She particularly enjoyed ice skating in the park at night. I still remember it as a very special family time.
I also remember a particular concern I had before the trip. It was that year that a friend pointed out to me that I was walking with a slight limp. How strange that she could see it but I had not been aware of it. And then, just days before we set off for America, I started limping badly. I was walking in the woods above the village one morning and really not enjoying it and I began to think that it would ruin our trip. At a particularly negative moment I wondered if I was going to lose the pleasure of this simple interaction with the world. I couldn’t have guessed that I was at the start of such a terrible illness, a sort of intermittent creeping paralysis. And I would not have imagined that in the next few years I would walk, and enjoy walking, so very much, in places so very far away from home.
In 2006 I was writing a book called The Garden Project. A big part of the story was concerned with a particular type of outdoor theatre performance and I had to do some research. I read about something called Gorilla Theatre that took place in the public parks of New York in the summer. Then a letter came through my door offering the possibility of a writer’s travel grant. I really wanted to go to New York again and this was an opportunity too good to miss. I applied, they gave me some money and off I went. Here’s part of something I wrote on my return:
It’s a hot and humid Saturday afternoon in July and I’m standing in Fulton Ferry Park watching Boomerang Theatre Company get ready to perform. The park is small but spectacularly situated on the Brooklyn side of the East River, between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges. Big suspension bridges, they arch high above the water, framing a view of Manhattan skyscrapers. But now the view gets obscured by a freighter moving slowly upstream. I write her name in my notebook, Alice Oldendopf, and one word of description, ginormous. I hear big city sounds: the ship’s engines; two bridges worth of traffic noise; one bridge worth of clattering commuter train noise (Manhattan Bridge is a double-decker – cars on top and trains underneath); tourist helicopters flying around the skyscrapers; jet aircraft higher up; a rock band practising in the warehouse behind me. I wonder how I’m going to hear the play.
Boomerang don’t seem to be too stressed out and I’m able to speak to them. I explain to the director that I’m writing a novel set in a landscape garden in which a lot of outdoor theatre is performed. Five plays are embedded in the text, interacting with the outer story in all sorts of ways, with the boundary between the play and the world outside the play gradually breaking down. I tell him that I’m here in New York City to see some outdoor theatre, meet up with people involved in it, ask some questions. I suggest that he must have had some experience of times when outside events intrude on the play, the audience gets too involved, two worlds interpenetrate...
“No,” he says. “Not really. I can’t think of anything like that. The audience is always the audience and we do the play.” A train clatters over Manhattan Bridge. “Of course, there is some extraneous noise to deal with. That’s about it.”
Now it’s getting closer to two o’clock and kick-off time. I sit on the grass in what I hope will be the front row. A grey-haired man comes and sits next to me, arranges a take-out lunch on the ground in front of him, takes a paperback copy of this afternoon’s play (King Lear) from his pocket and reads from where he last left off. When he looks up I have a chance to speak to him. I explain about my novel, the breaking down of the boundary between the play and the world outside... He’s an aficionado – he’s seen, he says, literally hundreds of outdoor performances in the city over the years. He must have some stories about the sort of thing I’m interested in.
“No,” he says. “I can’t say I’ve seen anything like that.”
Oh dear. It seems that my imagination exceeds what can really happen. That’s good in a way, it’s how a writer should be. But I wonder about my trip here, to New York City, to see outdoor theatre and meet up with people involved with it. It’s been very difficult to plan: theatre companies’ programmes always TBA (to be announced); other companies disappearing without trace; unanswered letters and emails; people who would be delighted to meet me but are unable to make it; the first play I go to see cancelled. And I’m not quite sure what it is that I’m searching for here. Maybe something that doesn’t exist.
New York the second time was an experience but not a happy one. The first night was strange; I was exhausted from a very early morning start and jetlag, but I couldn’t sleep. I got undressed, lay on the bed, got up and turned the air conditioning off, lay down, got up and turned it on again, tried to read, paced up and down, went for a crap, tried to read, went for a shower, tried to read, got up and shaved, packed my bag, read a sentence, wrote in my journal, went for shower, and so on. Really, something like that until 7am when I slept for an hour. I was lonely and homesick to an extraordinary degree.
On the flight out a big Hasidic Jewish man sat by my side with his back turned to me (as much as is possible on a plane) the whole way; I was staying in a cheap hotel with no public spaces for meeting and talking with other people; and the nearest outdoor space was a pier on the Hudson river, a gay pick-up place where I didn’t feel I could talk to people without giving the wrong message. I was lonely and more than that; I was really frightened for my mental health. I was going to stay, I can’t remember, maybe ten days. It seemed too much and I booked an early flight home.
Meanwhile I cycled around Manhattan Island in my now limping and sideways leaning style (perhaps it wasn’t the hat, then). I took a ride on the Staten Island Ferry without wanting to visit Staten Island. I looked down from the Brooklyn Bridge on the neighbourhood Arthur Miller wrote about in The View from the Bridge. I dropped off a copy of my first novel in the bookshop that Michael Cunningham regularly visited for them to give to him, should he drop by. I saw fireflies as darkness fell in Riverside Park. And I saw three plays. Here’s the description I wrote of the second one:
Now I’m at Shakespeare in the Parking Lot – The Tempest. I’m very early and have a chance to speak to the director, “I’m writing a novel in which...” The same question and the same answer, “No. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that.” There’s an hour to go before the play so I walk to the nearest park to eat my picnic supper. The park is incredibly crowded and with lots of activity, different sports and games overlapping each other, one game a strange New York thing that involves hitting a ball against a wall with bare hands – like squash without a racket. And I’m the only person there who isn’t Chinese.
Back to the parking lot. It’s a square space between low (for New York) buildings: many windows and fire escapes on one side; a bare windowless wall on another; bricked in windows on the third; a mishmash of signs (some in Chinese) on the fourth. No traffic right here but lots of not too distant background traffic noise plus the inevitable sound of police sirens. People are taking short cuts through the parking lot and through the set. I’m disappointed to see that there are plastic garden chairs set out for the audience and a distinct them-and-us organisation of space; I want to see site-specific promenade theatre where the play moves around, the audience follows, and the two get mixed up sometimes.
Half an hour to go. A more than half-naked and much pierced black man is on the ‘stage’ applying face and body paint (he later turns out to be Ariel). A group of actors behind some cars in the corner are chanting something. Other actors, or at least outgoing theatrical types, are in among the audience talking to friends. And a man close by is identifiable as a performer because of his visible pre-play nerves. Twenty minutes to go. A percussionist (bongos, drum-kit, all manner of cymbals and chimes, a vacuum machine hose that he whirls around his head to make a whining noise) has set up and is practising. As he warms up he gradually turns to face the audience and is now performing. Two sexy black girls start to dance. Are they in the play? No, I think they’re part of the audience. I begin to like my plastic garden chair and I’m glad I’m not standing up; this thing ends at ten o’clock and that’s three a.m. for this jet-lagged Englishman. Ten minutes to go. The sun is lower now and lights up only the top of the buildings. I’m still confused about some of the audience – are they really part of the play? They are certainly exotically dressed. A man wants to move his car and half of us must get up and move with our chairs. Then things are quieter as we get close to the start. I’ve been observing a mildly chaotic scene where reality is somewhat challenged. And I’ve seen a gradual transformation of a group of ordinary people into characters in a play.
The play: well, it’s not brilliantly acted. Prospero is continually upstaged by Ariel and Ariel is upstaged by a woman passing through telling off her child in a loud voice. The audience grows larger as the play continues and there are people here now who would no way deliberately go out to see Shakespeare. Some of them are drunk and are as loud as the performers. They laugh in the right places, and in the wrong places as well. In fact they’re doing it on purpose – they’re performing too. There’s a youth on a bicycle endlessly circling the parking lot, always turning his head to see the performance, not aware that he has become part of the audience and, for me at least, part of the show. I notice that there’s a man watching from the driving seat of his car – drive-in Shakespeare? When the action slows I look around at the setting, at the big sign in the middle that says 4 hour parking limit, 25c per 15 minutes. There’s an incongruity between the play and its setting but it adds something. The Tempest will never look the same to me again.
Why did I find the loneliness of New York so unbearable? Perhaps it was the as yet undiagnosed neurological illness that was making me crazy. I didn’t use much of my experience in New York in the writing of The Garden Project but the few days that I spent in New York gave me some other ideas. Later that year I was in Morriston Hospital, outside Swansea, awaiting various tests including a brain scan and I started making notes for a novel that incorporated some of my New York thoughts. It was published in a small way a couple of years later under the title The Quality of Light. One of the central characters had just come out of hospital where he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.