I was hardly the only poet in the city who worked like this, of course. Manhattan was full of lunchtime poets in those days, and stayed that way for many years thereafter. In the sixties, long after I had been forgotten, a clever young man even published a well-regarded book by that title—Lunch Poems—and although I wanted to resent him for jumping my claim, I could not; his lines were too full of the real sounds of people’s voices and the vitality of the street. Even that seems long ago now. I wonder where today’s lunch poets are, and whether I would know them by sight.
On that November day, however, I strolled in youthful, cheerful ignorance of the tradition in which I had been participating. This particular walk was like an early Christmas present to myself: the street beneath the IRT Sixth Avenue Line. The Sixth Avenue Elevated. Chow mein restaurants and diners with names like The Griddle. Cinders and ash and noise sifting down, shaking the ground, rattling the buildings. Above me, the commuters getting disgorged at one of the overhead stops dislodged a deposit of pigeons like a plume of smoke. I would not want to live there, but the walk was magnificent.
Do not think that I romanticized every moment of my life in the city. I cherished my work, but I worked so hard. Each day there’d come a moment when I’d be tired to death. Practically out of breath from exhaustion. A dull pencil, a dull mind, in need of a sharpener, in need of a drink, or at least an unthinking wandering down the hall among the other copywriters on the thirteenth floor. Outside crocuses flaunting their carefree colors, me inside and sunk with care.
The walks—morning, lunch, and home at night—revived me.
I thought at times that poetry might be an elegant way of screaming. Oh, that I could be a local swan in the park. Or the sparrow loafing on the window ledge.
But I never quite grew tired of being reliable. Even once I had money to burn—and it didn’t take me long to have it—I still had to work. I wanted there to be something to do in life besides mate and reproduce and die, and advertising was that, or it was for a long while.
When I wasn’t walking, I had a window and a rubber plant in the sun on a radiator. If I craned my neck, I could see a brief but valiant silver sliver of the Hudson River. I could make myself find window washers as serene as buttercups.
Irksome pedestrian behavior, I knew, but if I turned and looked behind me, I could see the Empire State Building, just completed. So I turned and looked behind me.
They’d cut the ribbon a few months back, in May. It had practically been a national holiday.
My mother would not let me forget that although the World’s Tallest Building was in New York, President Hoover had pushed the button to turn on its lights remotely from my old hometown of Washington, D.C. She always wanted me to come back to stay, but I never would. One might be able to control the electricity of the World’s Tallest Building from the nation’s capital, but there one could not work, as I did, at the World’s Largest Store.
I hurried on, among all the other workers out on their lunch breaks. The skyscraper was already being called the Empty State Building because of its lack of renters. And they couldn’t land dirigibles there as they’d planned because of the updrafts caused by the building’s very height. But I thought that its beauty outweighed its folly, and that a little grandiosity in the Depression wasn’t actively harming anyone, even if it wasn’t necessarily helping, either.
In truth, I suppose I identified myself with that skyscraper, and my fortunes with its own, rising while others foundered and fell. Each new triumph that I achieved became at once more dear and more private every time I descended from my snug apartment or my bustling office to step into the desperate street, where a dog whistle of raw panic seemed to quiver increasingly in the air. The creeping disaster that had started on Wall Street—part sickness, part madness, like a peril from Poe—had come finally to infect the whole country. People lost jobs and stopped buying. Prices plunged. Those lucky enough to still be working hoarded their pay, reluctant to buy today what they knew would be cheaper tomorrow, until the contagion took their jobs, too, and they joined the crowds wondering where this year’s Thanksgiving dinner would come from. Among many other things, the Depression changed how I felt about crowds: When I first came to the city, a line of people often helped me discover an exciting premiere or a big sale; in 1931, such queues more often ended at soup kitchens or collapsing banks.
The lines of automobiles on Sixth Avenue, however, still struck me as merry. It was pleasing to be alongside the stream of cars as they rushed uptown and down—or tried to rush. I have always been comforted by vehicle traffic, by being near but not in it. Taxis kept honking, trying to see if I wanted a lift, but I kept waving them away. What I wanted was that walk: slate and windy, the sky overcast but not threatening rain.
I enjoyed walking outside even in bad weather. I took my lunchly strolls even when the snow was hard and sharp—little ice pellets flying at one’s face like fingernail clippings—as it had been that first year here, back in 1926.