The taking of hostages must be one of the oldest political devices known to man, but recent events in Africa suggest that as a technique it has yet to be exhausted. The era of the simple swap is over. In today’s world of complex alliances, interdependencies, and invisible power structures, all nations are linked, and the fact that Guinea held the United States Ambassador, Mr. Robinson McIlvaine, in answer to Ghana’s seizure of nineteen Guineans on their way to a conference on African unity should not surprise anybody. Traditional analyses of the situation seem to us to miss the point. Rationalizations of the choice of Mr. McIlvaine as a hostage or his precise relevance to the Guinea-Ghana dispute tend to obscure the rationale of modern hostage-taking by small nations; that is, in any given dispute any hostage can be taken from any powerful country, and the problem of working out how the kidnappee is to be exchanged for the unrelated goal of the kidnapper can be left to the diplomatic technicians, who are presumably experts at operating in the dark. The danger of this technique is obvious. Hostage-taking might spread like wildfire throughout the civilized world, with everyone seizing everyone else. On the other hand, it may be that Guinea is on to something. As an alternative to war, the taking of hostages is attractive. Soldiers all over the world could put down their arms and begin patrolling the borders with long butterfly nets. Nobody would die, since the only good hostage is a live hostage.
Our friend the long-winded lady recently sent us another communication. She wrote: “The view from the University Restaurant, on West Eighth Street, has changed and changed and changed again since the beginning of July, when they began tearing down three small gray apartment houses across the street. One afternoon, I walked toward the restaurant from Fifth Avenue and did not notice the houses; they had always been there, and were so familiar as to be invisible. The next afternoon, they were completely visible, because workmen were taking out the windows and had already laid a ramp of doors across the sidewalk. The three houses came down quite fast, considering how solid they looked, and how settled and comfortable in their place—next to the Whitney Museum, that lovely house that is now a youth center. As her doomed neighbors came tumbling down—no dignity, all secrets exposed—the Whitney huddled more and more into herself, like a poor old woman pulling her shawl around her shoulders in wintertime. ‘I may not be what I used to be,’ the Whitney seemed to be saying, ‘but I don’t want to go just yet.’ The three gray houses did not want to go, either, but they went anyway, with their thick walls and their good floors and their strong staircases and their many-colored rooms and all their windows—the ordinary square ones and the high-up skylights. Everything ended up down on the ground and was carted off, and what was left was what must have been there originally—a clear view of the backs of the tiny houses on the north side of Macdougal Alley. Mr. Gregory, the proprietor of the University Restaurant, watched the destruction, day by day, with a sort of unemotional disgust. ‘We had a lot of customers from those apartments,’ he said. ‘A lot of teachers lived there. But the Whitney—that was a wonderful house! A lot of people from the Whitney used to come here when it was a gallery—a lot of the visitors, and a lot of the people who worked there.’ For Mr. Gregory, the abandonment of the Whitney house as a museum was the worst, and it is from that event that he dates the decline of West Eighth Street from a Pleasant Place into a Wild Place.
“For me, the worst was the day Mr. Joseph Kling packed up his International Book & Art Shop, four doors east of the restaurant, and moved two blocks or so west, to Greenwich Avenue, because he couldn’t afford the new, high Eighth Street rents. Mr. Kling’s shop was below street level, directly across from the three houses that have just come down. When a customer entered, Mr. Kling used to emerge from the gloomy recesses at the far end of his shop wearing a green eyeshade and an expression that was sometimes menacing and sometimes merely distrustful. The shop was long and narrow, with simple shelves that went on and on to the far end, where a jumble and a clutter suddenly occurred, as though the leftover books had had to scramble for their places and were hanging on to the wall for dear life. All down the center of the room, plain wooden tables held maps and prints and photographs and more books. It was a dingy, stubborn, interesting place, and when Mr. Kling walked into view from his lair at the back, the shop took on the haunted air that all true secondhand bookshops have, all over the world. He knew his books, and the books showed that he knew them—there was not a foot of shelf in that shop where the eye would slide along and away without finding something to look at. You could spend hours there without wasting a minute. Even if you bought nothing, you came out much better off than you were when you went in. One night in the winter of 1944, I walked in there quite late in the evening—about nine o’clock. It was terribly cold. That was my fourth winter in New York City, and I still could not get used to the freezing winds that tore along the streets and never seemed to stop blowing. I thought the towering concrete canyons of the middle of Manhattan, where I was working, served to funnel and strengthen the fury of the winds, but even in the Village, where at that time the majority of the buildings were still low, the winds seemed to proceed from a hard ferocity that had nothing in common with ordinary weather or with ordinary times. It was too cold. I was living in one enormous room at the top of a beautiful house on East Tenth Street, just off Fifth Avenue, a few steps from the Grosvenor Hotel. I was six flights up, and my front wall was all windows—a solid row of casement windows looking south. At that time, as I said, the Village was still mostly not built up, and I had a long view of rooftops and chimney pots that even the most critical Parisian would have to admire—rooftops, roof gardens, terraces, studios, and a huge and always changing sweep of sky. But that winter the friendly expanse of rooftops turned into a flat and heartless plain across which the winds raced toward my casement windows; my casement windows had wooden frames and were very old, cracked, and warped, and offered little more protection than a canvas tent. And something had happened to the furnace in the house. For weeks, we had no heat and no hot water. Finally, one night, I put on two coats and went out to walk about. There were very few people on the streets. Around nine o’clock, I walked into the International Book & Art Shop. It wasn’t warm there, but it was warmer than my rooftop apartment. Mr. Kling peered out from his corner at the back but did not come forward, and I made my way peacefully down the shop until I got to where he sat talking with a friend. They stopped talking and looked at me, and I imagined there was a question in the air. ‘My apartment is so cold I couldn’t stay there,’ I said. ‘I had to come out. Even the streets seem warmer than the house I am living in.’ The friend said, ‘It is the kind of weather that makes people get married.’ Mr. Kling said nothing for a minute, and then he laughed grimly and said, ‘Berlin, 1923.’
“Berlin, 1923. New York City, 1944. And now it is New York City in the autumn of 1966. We are having Indian summer, and a sunny haze hangs over the trees in Washington Square. Tall, frail-looking, boxy new apartment houses confront each other flatly across lower Fifth Avenue, but the shape of the Avenue—the marvellous sweep from Washington Square Arch straight uptown and into the far distance—remains unchanged. Over on Greenwich Avenue, Mr. Kling is still in business, still wearing his green eyeshade and his two expressions. The Grosvenor Hotel has been turned into a student residence, and the Brevoort and the Lafayette and the Holley are gone, but the small Hotel Earle, shabby and elegant, still holds the place it has held for more than sixty years at the corner of Waverly Place and Macdougal Street, and the Albert looks romantic and foreign at night when the lights go on in the dining room and in the bar and over the sidewalk café. The Albert is on University Place between Tenth and Eleventh Streets, and Thomas Wolfe used to live there. This is a very autumnal Indian summer, and in the cool sunlight the side streets off Fifth and the winding Village streets to the west and south are filled with dreams and shadows, and there seems to be room for everyone. I am sitting by the street window of the University Restaurant, looking out at the dark-blue wooden paling that hides the empty place where those gray apartment houses were. Mr. Gregory, at his desk, seems to be intoning a litany in his gravelly voice, but he is only dictating the menus for tomorrow’s lunch and tomorrow’s dinner to his printer over the telephone. ‘Russian shashlik,’ Mr. Gregory says, and then he says, ‘Ham steak.’ It was in July, 1941, when I was a visitor to New York, that I first walked into this restaurant, and ordered a dinner of lamb chops. Now, in the hazy afternoon, I eat broiled bluefish and mashed potatoes, and I look across the street at the dark-blue paling and at the shuddering spectre of the long-gone Whitney Museum, and I think: What next? What next?” ♦
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