Leon Wieseltier was born in Brooklyn in 1952 and studied at Columbia College, Balliol College, Oxford, and Harvard University. He is the literary editor of The New Republic. His book, Nuclear War, Nuclear Peace, was published in 1983. He lives in Washington.
New York “for several decades . . . the artistic capital of the Western world?” When, exactly? The “Western world” is a big place. Moreover, I’m not sure that art has a capital, or needs a capital; nor that places (or decades) are terribly useful categories for the understanding of why the interior life of certain men and women develops as it does, and turns outward into expression. A writer may be influenced decisively by ideas, and a painter by images, far away in space and time. And writers and artists will always want to protect themselves from their surroundings, to resist their interferences and impositions (which may also take the form of “high culture”). Perhaps the most that a place can offer the writer and the artist is a decent isolation.
Alas, the isolation that New York now offers is indecent. A young man or woman who chose to become a poet or a painter or a composer or a dancer or a translator always needed courage; but never the quantity of courage this city now demands. For a start, there is the vast material injustice of the city, the cost of its cost of living. A decent poverty, too, is now impossible. South of, say,
