After almost six months in New York City I made it to see 662 Driggs Ave., Brooklyn, the house where Henry Miller spent the first nine years of his life. It was sunny and hot last Sunday and I was one of many flocking to Williamsburg. Even though I’ve been there and seen the house, I have a difficult time reconciling Miller’s 14th Ward, Brooklyn, with what I know of Williamsburg, which doesn’t amount to much: through housing searches I’ve learned that Williamsburg is trendy and priced exorbitantly. What I know of Miller’s 14th Ward inspires my imagination much more compared to the current Williamsburg that partakes in a sterile sameness that represents the hip of this city.

I went to the house after reading Miller’s essay “Remember to Remember,” where he writes about his reasons for wanting to write about the great time he had in France. He grapples with his nostalgia for Europe and his dislike for the American way.

Often I have thought of the vulgar glare which illumines the American scene is the effect of our refusal to accept anything but a day-time world. Our countenances are fixed with the stare of the hypnotic obeying the dictates of an invisible presence.

In the 125 years since Miller lived in the house on 662 Driggs Ave., the area has changed considerably. Even in the 30 years that the current owners have lived in the house, the area has changed and shifted. It is impossible to imagine old areas of Paris or Rome changing that much in the same amount of time. This kind of change and ability to shed the old for the new is, I think, part of what Miller was getting at with his calling the States a “day-time world.” It is money and ambition before all else, especially here in New York. In this essay particularly, though also in other writings, Miller declares that the States is not a place for an artist. And why he thinks this is for a similar reason to why many artists find it difficult to live in New York currently: the exorbitant prices.

Dollars do not inspire artists, nor do they sustain them. It takes something more, something infinitely better, something which quite obviously we are not able to offer. What that something is you feel every minute of the day in Europe.

This is partly just a rant of Miller’s who was always ready to condemn anything American. Artists have thrived in New York City, and still continue to. Perhaps it is E.B. White who was the most eloquent on the subject:

No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.

Perhaps that was part of why I took the train over to Brooklyn last Sunday, not to increase my chances of being lucky directly, but to stand and look at a house where a writer I admire began his life in rather average circumstances but who built his luck as he went through life.

Moving back to the time zone and four-season weather that I grew up in has had its ups and downs. Some downs are winter in its entirety and the lack of a variety of fresh food—instead, food comes in a variety of packaging. Some ups have been the daffodil, tulip and iris bulbs blooming in spring, the scent of lilac bushes (briefly) and rhubarb. Both my grandmas made rhubarb, in crisps, in pies and boiled as a side to dinner, and so did my parents, my mom when we were kids, and my dad now. I associate rhubarb with the promise of summer and the spring lushness of green grass under blue skies traversed by fluffy white clouds.

The rhubarb I ate most often as a kid grew alongside the old garage. Its long stalks and large leaves returned among the weeds year after year though no one had ever planted it. Perhaps Milan and Treeva had put it there, the couple who lived in our farmhouse before we did. And so I also associate rhubarb with untended tradition and dependability. As a kid, rhubarb was never my favorite thing to eat, but I liked it, especially when the crisp came out of the oven and was served still warm with a round of vanilla ice cream that quickly melted and mixed with the pink juice of the fruit (or is it a vegetable?). As an adult, I came across it once at my corner market in Celio, in Rome, and bought two stalks. It was pale and tasted okay, imported from northern Europe probably, but nothing like I remember.

And so I was pleased to find bundles of rhubarb stacked at my local NYC farmer’s market with the pink ends pointing to the sidewalk and all the green ends facing the street. It appeared at the market on the weekend after I finished my final exams, which actually made attempting to cook with it possible. Since then I have made rhubarb crisp after rhubarb crisp, eating it for breakfast and after lunch and dinner. It has returned my hope that fresh, good food exists in New York City, food that does not involve an air-conditioned supermarket or layers of plastic (though it does involve quite a bit of cash). It has also helped me to appreciate this overwhelming city I am living in. This city too is made up of the familiar rhythms: soon, almost like that, the season will be over and something else will take the rhubarb’s place.

Here’s how I make rhubarb crisp (recipe from my dad):

• 1 cup oats
• 1 cup flour
• 1 cup light brown sugar
• 1/2 cup butter, room temperature

Mix together (I like to use my hands). Overturn it on top of the chopped rhubarb (in a 9×9 dish), put some tin foil over it, and bake for about 30 to 35 minutes at 350 to 370 F.

“Here Is New York” in Rome.

In my search for New York writing, I soon discovered that E.B. White’s essay “Here Is New York” trails slightly before or behind mention of Joan Didion’s essay ‘Goodbye to All That.’ Luckily my library in Rome has a copy of this essay also, in a tight little purple book all to itself printed by Harper & Brothers in 1949.

E.B. White wrote the essay one year before it was published, as he says in his preface that also apologizes, in a way, for the things he has written about that have since passed. It is an odd preface for anyone reading the essay 70 years after its publication because so much more has (most likely) changed about New York City than the boom breaking and the Lafayette Hotel being torn down. Perhaps E.B. White was anticipating his readers 70 years hence and was unsure of his timeless descriptions—though how could he have been when his prose is so swift and solid?

[New York] carries on its lapel the unexpungeable odor of the long past, so that no matter where you sit in New York you feel the vibrations of great times and tall deeds, of queer people and events and undertakings.

He writes about the people who move to New York City, “who have pulled up stakes somewhere and come to town, seeking sanctuary or fulfillment or some greater or lesser grail.” And what is New York today but a conglomerate of strangers, a place where people go to get lost in the crowd and to be equally found? White writes about the anonymity of the huge city, where large events happen without notice, events that would be enormous in smaller cities that residents would naturally be a part of. He writes about New York with the ease and elegance of a long familiarity.

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain illusive.

Unlike Didion’s New York City, White’s New York does not lose its charm and is unable to lose it. His words are saturated with his fascination and his enjoyment drips from them. It is a pleasure to read “Here Is New York” and to anticipate whatever New York City I will find come January.