A New York Life: Of Friends and Others

Rating:
Summary: Conceptually, this book . . .
Review: Conceptually, this book is ingenious. It is simultaneously a collection of forty-one portraits of New York City friends and "others" known to Gill during his tenure for over five decades, beginning in the mid-1930s, as a staff writer at The New Yorker, and a fragmentary portrait of the artist made visible only as the book progresses. It is when the reader finally stumbles upon Gill's disclosure of his birth year near the end that every other scrap of personal revelation, scattered here and there throughout previous pages, coalesces into a composite portrait.

Most if not all of Gill's subjects share three traits: they are enigmatic; they circumvent the onset of old age by youthful exhuberance; and they are rich - if not financially, spiritually, and usually both. (Gill, like his idol F. Scott Fitzgerald, was deeply intrigued by monetary wealth and its effect on the character of those who possess it). And what emerges about about his subjects was probably equally true about Gill. I suspect that he too was a colorful, enigmatic and, even into his 80s, youthful, friend himself.

Gill was a suberb writer, witty and eloquent, never afraid to articulate criticism where criticism was due. He could also turn a phrase. His description, for example, of the playwright Philip Barry's intense blue eyes as seeming to "gather up brightness like a burning glass" is unforgetable. Gill possessed an exceptional vocabulary which, at times, can be trying and can, after a while, appear to serve no purpose other than as a display of virtuosity. For example, is the preposterously obscure adjective "eleemosynary" to describe a public-interest organization really necessary when "charitable" will do?

Gill's pedigogical acrobatics aside, this lively book vividly captures remarkable personages - including Gill - now gone, who literally bubbled with enthusiam throughout their many years and who cannot, with the exception of the unflappable Harry Mali, be accused of having lived the unexamined life.