In the personal essays that make up her new book, “An Enlarged Heart,†Cynthia Zarin writes about the changing face of New York City, the pleasures of a good coat, and her life as a poet and journalist, including her time at The New Yorker magazine. In a recent e-mail interview, Ms. Zarin discussed these subjects and more. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation:
On the first page of the book, you call yourself “the most provincial person in the world.†But in these essays you recall traveling to Rome and Venice and working for The New Yorker. What makes you provincial
Well, I live only a few blocks from where I was born, and my children were born in the same hospital, Mt. Sinai, asI was â€" that’s unusual, I think, these days. I’ve done some fairly ordinary traveling, and in the periods when I was writing for The New Yorker I traveled a bit on assignment, but compared to many people I’ve stayed fixed, and I tend to like to return to places I’ve been: blocks, restaurants, cities.
Later you write that your “ear for languages,†including English at times, is “almost nonexistent.†You’ve written several books of poetry. Are you a poet because of, or in spite of, this problematic ear
I am terrible at languages. At school I was relieved of the language requirement because I was hopeless. Right now I am trying to learn Italian, with my youngest daughter. She is streets ahead of me. I think for me language often takes the form of words spoken or sung just out of earshot, and I found early on that it was important to me to try to hear what was being said, by me or by others, and try to get it right. B! ut precision often yields to mystery. I find language elusive.
The book’s title essay, about trying to diagnose a frightening bout of illness your daughter suffered when she was young, reads differently than the other pieces; less ruminative and more headlong, for obvious reasons. Was the process of writing it different than the others
“An Enlarged Heart†was written only a few weeks after a terrible time in the life of my family. I wrote it almost all at once, on an old Selectric typewriter on a desk in my bedroom when we returned to New York. The piece was a way of finding language to describe something that, to me, was so shocking and had so changed how I thought about things. In order to know what I felt, I had to write it down. It’s not an elliptical piece.
Coats and shoes and curtains, among ther things, serve as strong prompts to your memory throughout the book. What is it about clothes and decor that capture your imagination as a writer
I think that the things we love and that we choose often find us â€" or that in finding them, or keeping them, we reveal a little bit of our dream life. When I was about 13 or 14, my mother declared she would not go shopping with me anymore, because I was looking for something that was in my head, rather than on the racks of Bonwit Teller in 1974; a Platonic Closet, rather than a Platonic Cave! I was reading in Grace Coddington’s memoir the other day that Alexander McQueen sewed talismans into his clothes â€" an impulse I understand.
In a few essays, particularly in “! Restauran! ts,†there’s an elegiac sense of what disappears from New York over time. Having lived here a long time, is there a particular closed-up place you miss the most
The other day I was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and I found myself thinking about the pool in the cafeteria. It was made of green marble, I think, and when I was a child we used to throw pennies into it â€" that’s a real loss; it was magic: a lagoon in the center of the museum! And the Éclair Bakery on West 86th Street; in my twenties, when I was feeling blue, I used to walk over there and eat â€" what else â€" eclairs. Isaac Bashevis Singer lived down the block and I often saw him there. And Zito’s on Bleecker Street â€" I was there on the day they closed and I asked if I could have the bread board and Zito said, “what do you want that for,†and I have it in my kitchen. And Café des Artistes, and the old movie theaters, the Thalia and The New Yorker, which was like walking down into a nautilusâ€
Sara Barrett Cynthia ZarinThe last and longest piece in the book is about your time working at The New Yorker, as an assistant to its legendary editor William Shawn and later as a writer. You refer to it as “the magazine†until three pages into the essay, and you also write about E. B. White without ever naming him. Is this a coyness meant to mirror that of the magazine
That’s interesting. I think I was writing internally: that is, it was always spoken of simply as “the magazine,†so that is the locution that comes naturally to me. There are many people in the book who are not named â€" some of th! ese were ! editorial decisions, and decisions to protect privacy. With E. B. White, the decision was that any reader who cared who it was would know who it was, as you did, and if they didn’t know, it wouldn’t matter very much. And I’m not sure I’d describe the magazine as coy: I think there was a fierceness about privacy, and about the importance of inference, which is a kind of respect for the reader.
You write that after Shawn’s tenure ended and you left the offices, “it took a long time for me to know how to think again.†What do you mean by that
William Shawn created an atmosphere, by legerdemain, on purpose, by default, what have you, in which writers, even ones who were virtually untried, as I was, were given a kind of quiet nod in which space and sometimes huge swaths of time were granted for writing and thinking. For me, and for others, that was formative. It ended abruptly, with a kind of violence, and it doesn’t exist anymor.. When I left the magazine I felt that without it I didn’t know how to put two sentences together. It was a kind of aphasia. I grew up and out of that â€" one does â€" but it took a while, and longer than I might like to admit.
There have been many book-length memoirs about working at the magazine. Were you ever tempted to write one yourself, or does this essay represent all you want to say about it
This essay was a surprise: that is, I had in the back of my mind that I wanted to write something about Mary McCarthy’s Regency chest, which by a series of events had come into my possession â€" and I thought the essay would be generally about furniture, and specifically about Mary McCarthy, who is part of the furniture, one might say, of my reading and writing life. But when I began it quickly turned into something else â€" a meditation! , really,! about Mr. Shawn and The New Yorker, and the life of the magazine and what it meant to me and to people I came to love. Allen Shawn had written a memoir in which he discussed his familyâ€"without that, I do not think I would have felt comfortable doing so. In any case, I hadn’t planned to say anything about the magazine publicly, really. Whether it is the last word or not, I have learned not to predict what I am going to say about anything, but at the moment, this is it.
