Flights Of Fancy: A Posthumous Letter To John Updike

Dear Mr. Updike,

Please allow me to introduce myself: I'm Clover Lalehzar, a native New Yorker, born and raised in the West Village. I am writing you today because I just read your wonderful essay: "Is New York City Inhabitable?"
In full disclosure, Mr. Updike, I too, am having some trouble with the city, a lot of trouble, and I would like to refer to your grievances - delightfully and poignantly described - as you can only describe them - in your essay.

I started out adoring every nook and cranny of this "magnificent disaster," as Le Corbusier aptly coined it, but lately, especially, in the last two years, I have found that this city, which was always prone to its own set of faults, and imperfections, has now managed to morph into a feral outpost of blind busyness, negligent ne'er-do-wells, habitual silent hysteria and unhappiness that fills every subway car, cross-walk and grocery store. Here, you might say, dear Clover, this has always been the case, this IS the New York persona. Lucky you, who have been spared the city rearing its ugly monstrous head in your direction. But alas, Mr. Updike, I've noticed a steady decline in the integrity of the place itself, and of course, in some of the people who inhabit this crammed-up island. "There are so many faces, costumes, packages, errands - preoccupations, hopes, passions, lives in progress" on these city streets, yes, these "lives in progress" make-up the machinery that keep this island afloat. Sometimes though, these lives are not progressing, but stagnating. The woman on the corner you gaze at quickly from the window of your cab is full of hopes and dreams, "h's" and "d's" that precariously hang-on the ever-shifting whims of people in charge.

I do agree with you, that the "country's greatest city is sinking into a chasm of itself," not because we don't have the potential to lift ourselves out of the mire, neatly and hero-like, but because the foundation on which we walk is fast eroding, and us New Yorkers are complacent - to fight would take too much energy. Why not dine out instead, go to the theatre, the opera, the ballet, hear some Jazz, drown out the continual drone of the demons that live below - in the vastness of the city's guts, and intestines. Gotham's underbelly can be bribed, can be fed, can be silenced for a time, until it starts in again, in its continual and unremitting effort to blackmail all its citizens.

"Even a sunny day feels like a tornado of confusion one is hurrying to get out of, into the sanctum of the hotel room, office, friendly apartment." These days, for the past two years, I can only avoid the scuffle outside, by retiring to the warm environs of a friendly apartment - music, smell of stew simmering, but, I long to have a second bunker in the form of an office, an office where I can produce good work, where the work is regarded well, and I am compensated decently and fairly for that work. Does this sound outlandish Mr. Updike? Does this sound unreasonable for a native to be enabled to work in her native land? What would you propose I do? What would you propose I do that I'm not doing? Move out? Move away? Far, far away? After all, you left your floor-through apartment on West 13th Street in 1957; something had to be untenable for you to leave a floor-through on West 13th Street in 1957.

The city's "vitality and glamour is ironically rooted in merciless skirmish and inconvenient teeming; familiarity with crowdedness and menace is the local badge of citizenship and the city's constant moral instruction features the piquant proximity of rich and poor." I am guilty of this collective complacency. I have averted my eyes on the subway, on the street, in the park when someone in need has asked me for money, for eye-contact, for food. It saddened me, made me feel ashamed, and cold-hearted, "but instead of standing up for greater justice I sat back for greater ease." I am a New Yorker, capable of a cold shoulder, an understanding of high-culture, and a brisk walk. It's just that in the last two years, as others' have averted their eyes, I am more sensitive to the hush-hush decline of the city's values. You see Mr. Updike, you're quite correct when you write that "...the friendliness lies in our wishing it to be so than in any confirming reality; returning only later, one finds the shops have changed, the chummy clerks are gone, and one's name has been erased from the computer." My name has been erased from the computer, Mr. Updike. How do I get it reinstated? Do I want it reinstated? After all, I too "fight the rising panic that I won't be able to get out" of this city, "being in New York takes so much energy as to leave none for any other kind of being." Now, exactly where in Massachusetts did you move? I could benefit from some flights of fancy.

Sincerely,

Clover Lalehzar