Writer Matthew White is the author of Italy of My Dreams, The Story of an American Designer’s Real-life Passion for Italian Style. He is a noted interior designer, antiquarian, and preservationist, and a former ballet dancer. His new book is New York Minute, Public Clocks That Make the City Tick, just out from Abbeville Press. Listen in and read along as we discuss how to write about the things that change us, and so much more.

 

 

 

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Marion: Welcome, Matthew.

Matthew: Thank you.

Marion: I’m so glad that you’re here today. And New York Minute: Public Clocks that Make The City Tick is a beautiful book. So we’re going to talk about it and how you got there. And I want to start with this idea of being a flâneur. It’s a French term for someone who strolls, walks, wanders the city to observe. Traditionally male, the flâneur takes in what he sees, always with an eye to deeper meaning, a more cultural deep dive. And they’re never tourists. They’re kind of like tasters and someone who sees and thinks. We know about Charles Baudelaire and we know Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker, who was said to have walked every block of Manhattan and written about most of them. And of course, women are flâneurs too. Vivian Gornick is technically a flâneuse, because she was a walker of our favorite great city. And we love the books that these people produce, I think in part because it gives us permission to do the same, to walk and look, and think about place and our place in a city. So let’s start by talking generally about walking and looking.

I think it’s greatly underrated, and I think it’s kind of in danger of being lost. And then comes along your book to remind us, to compel us to walk and look. So what do you think a good city walk delivers?

Matthew: For me, I call it time travel because in the city of New York, where it’s so layered with every era from, you know, the 18th century on, I get a sense of the place based on a building or a detail of the building, or even people on the street who look like they’re from a different era. And, by the way, I’ve never heard that term before, that French term you just mentioned. That’s really a beautiful way of saying it, as the French always do.

Marion: They do do a nice job with language, don’t they?

Matthew: Yes, they do.

Marion: And food.

Matthew: Yes. But for me, that’s what I love about it, is kind of transporting myself to oddly somewhere else or a different time in the same place.

Marion: I think that’s lovely. My dad grew up in New York City. He was a lot older than my mom. He was born in 1907. And when walking the streets with him was to walk the streets with someone who still saw what was gone. And I think that’s one of the many reasons I love this book. You take us into what is still here. And also… what’s gone, but you do so by getting us on the magic carpet of your own life with you.

So, I want to set this up for people. You were born in the late 1950s. You were a gay kid in a Texas town, where the sense of time bore down on you, and in your introduction to this lovely book, you describe yourself as a “domestic refugee” who escaped to New York from a place, as you write, “that held no place” for you. And in a very short number of paragraphs, you convey to the reader your intimate relationship with time. This includes weaving together the slowness of Texas time with a deeply vulnerable tale in which you reveal that as a freshman in high school, you were unable to tell time.

And I would argue that only through real vulnerability are we able to write good memoir. And this book is shot through with beautiful memoir. But I wonder about you. My audience is writers, and they want to know how to do this. What would you say about vulnerability and its role in conveying self to a reader?

Matthew: Well, you know, I think when we see other people, accomplished people, or people we admire, you just assume that they didn’t have roadblocks or, you know, that they’re kind of perfect and things are easy for them. But, you know, every human is vulnerable and we all have these weak points. And that one that you just mentioned is one that I was really kind of uncomfortable about putting in the book. But my husband said, “Oh, you literally have to put that in the book.”And I knew that. I knew that. But if you get on somebody’s side or they share a piece of their vulnerability, you go on the trip with them. I mean, we all do that with artists we know. And I guess that’s what I was trying to do.

Marion: Yeah, you go on the trip with them. That’s lovely. And that’s what I felt like. I felt like you kind of pulled up on your magic carpet and said, “Want to hop on?” I was like, “Yeah, I do.” But I didn’t expect to cry in a book with clocks. And I did a couple of times. And I felt that… It deepened for me my understanding of what place can allow for us in our lives. And it’s not just, “Oh, I’m going to go to New York and make it big. It’s going to be more about, I’m going to go to New York and find a place in that place for me.” And I got it.

So, clocks and time and you and the city and escape are laid out before the reader as the pieces of this story, and they come together as we walk New York with you, looking at the public clocks, both existing and historic. And it all makes perfect sense.

But writers have ideas all the time for stories, essays, opinion pieces, and books, and they frequently talk themselves out of them. or the person nearest and dearest to them talks them out of it, or some editor or agent. I mean, family is murder on good ideas.

Matthew: Yes, it is.

Marion: Actually, I think we should get that on a pillow, Matthew, and get it embroidered. What do you think?

Matthew: That sounds good.

Marion: Yeah, so it’s hard to pitch someone a story that blends New York’s architectural history, your own personal history, and the public clocks of a great city. So talk to me about this idea in its infancy, as an inkling. My audience is writers, and I want them to turn from this interview at the end and ask themselves what they have on them in such a grand combination of forces and interests and personal history that they might like to give themselves permission to explore. So when and how did this idea first come to you?

Matthew: First of all, I personally, in myself, don’t really consider myself a writer. I’m a visual person. Words are difficult for me. I’ve failed… freshman English twice. It’s just I’m very intimidated by people who use words so eloquently and write so beautifully. And so, you know, that’s just my view of myself. I’m a visual person.

And so, I guess when I do write, I try to write from a visual perspective. And, of course, this book is a visual book. I mean, the images are a very big part of it. And it’s very easy for me to talk about pictures. The idea of the book, almost 20 years ago in my design firm, we did a design blog and would send out these quarterly newsletters about things that excited us visually or in the design world, or whatever. And I wrote an article about the clocks of New York and I called the article “New York Minutes.” You know, it was just a brief article, with maybe five clocks that I photographed and thought were interesting, and then looked up the history and so wrote this piece.

And I thought in that moment, this would make a wonderful book. And toward the end of the pandemic, maybe three and a half years ago, I woke up one morning at six o’clock as I always do. And I thought, write that book now. You know, you’re not getting any younger. And it was, and I literally in that moment, I started researching. I went through my old files of what I wrote years ago and just made lists. And I took all the photos in the book too. So I started making a map of neighborhoods where I would go photograph the clocks, and start with the visual, and then start writing about it. And it was so much fun, first of all, put into words this thing that I kind of was stewing in my head for almost 20 years. So it was remarkably easy. And by easy, I mean joyful. It was so much fun and so delightful to re-explore the city from this perspective, and on a deeper level. And so that’s how the book was born.

Marion: Did you say to your husband, “I’m doing this book, that thing I wrote about for my design firm newsletter.” Did you pitch it to anybody? Did you get any feedback on the topic? And you say your husband said you have to put this high school not being able to tell time story in it. So also, did you pitch the personal? “I’m also going to put myself in it.” Just how did you pitch it and what kind of feedback did you get from it?

Matthew: First of all, I know a lot about architectural history and that sort of stuff, but I’m not a scholar, and I don’t want to pretend to be. And I didn’t want to write a book that approached the topic from a very dry, horological, architectural, historic, even though I love all those things, and that’s a big part of the book. A lot of research went into it, but I don’t want to pretend that I’m an architectural historian with these clocks, you know. So I couldn’t not write about my experience of coming to New York at 18, leaving Texas and discovering a place that literally changed my life. That just had to be in it. While the book is not about that, that’s sort of how the time travel, if you will, is framed. And so it’s laced throughout the book, but that’s just a way into my vision of these walks.

Marion: Yeah, I don’t think that I would be as interested. I think I would expect to see a nice Harry Abrams book or Abbeville Press book, on New York’s clocks. And I would look at it and think, Oh, that’s pretty. But this is delivered in this personal way. And I think that that’s what makes the book so appealing.

Matthew: Yes. And I think I can’t. If I had started this book 20 years ago when I had this idea, it would have been a very different, less interesting, less personal, certainly, because I didn’t have the perspective of what the city meant to me. And I’ve learned so much more, obviously, in the last 20 years about on every level, from design and history and preservation and history. So, the book I pictured 18 years ago would have been a typical coffee table book, you know, with my name on it. And this, I think, is more than that.

Marion: It is.

Matthew: That was the intention anyway.

But, you know, let me just say in my first book, and I don’t mean to get off topic about this book, but I started that book, which is about Italian style and my passion for Italian art and architecture. But it opens with a story about my mother who, putting us kids in the car, little kids, and leaving the trailer park that we grew up in and going to the fancy part of town and looking at the beautiful houses. I wrote an article about that, and it was published in Southern Living Magazine. This was 18 years ago or so. And The response was overwhelming. The letters I got. And so that kind of made me think, Oh, well, I can write a short story, you know. And that’s when I started writing. And again, I’m not a writer where it’s my career, it’s all I do. But that encouraged me to move forward, I suppose.

Marion: Yeah, I think that that’s the advice I give to people all the time is, I don’t know how I feel about anything until I write it down. And I don’t really understand how else to tell a story. If I need you to know something, I need to put a face on it. And frequently it’s my own. I write memoir, I teach memoir. And, as I said, you give us a beautiful, beautiful series of stories from your own self that allow us to understand how time has been a major theme in your life. Of course, it’s a theme in all of our lives, but we don’t think about it. And when we do think about it, that we’re out of place, we’re out of step, we’re out of the time in the place that we’re born in, and what are we gonna do about it? And it allows for this book to have such a life to be told with your tale. I just love it.

So let’s talk clocks. New York’s public timepieces each have a story to tell. And you’ve organized this book beautifully like a grand tour as we move from chapter to chapter by category, like one might move through the city from workday to weekend. And of course, we start at Grand Central Station, where lovers and friends and strangers have been meeting under the largest concentration of recognizable clocks in the city. And I love that. I mean, I can’t remember how many wonderful moments I’ve had in that place under those clocks. And as the book ends, you take us to what you group as “phantom clocks” that only live in memory. And along the way, we visit sidewalk clocks, tower impediment clocks, projecting in corner clocks, skyscraper clocks, overdoor clocks, dome clocks, lobby and interior clocks, church clocks, door clocks, and automaton clocks. And I just was in wonder.

But for me, it was when it got really personal that I found myself almost dropping to my knees. And I share with you a place of peace in New York that I go to collect myself, the Rose Main Reading Room in the New York Public Library building on Fifth Avenue. And that clock that we’ve all used there, my goodness, I remember being there writing the hardest term paper of my college career and watching the hours go by. And it was there I went with the galleys from my most recent published book after picking them up from my publisher, holding them literally against my heart as I walked the few blocks, knowing I could only read it in that room until I got to that room to read them for the first time and sat there under that clock weeping for the hours it took to get through that book.

So… I get it about that room, that clock, and I’ve now told you my intimate history with that room. So tell me about you and the Rose Main Reading Room and its clock and its meaning for you, why you go there.

Matthew: Well, it’s so layered, but first of all, the building is magnificent beyond. And, you know, at the bottom of the stairs, I think of the left-hand staircase engraved in the wall, it says, this building, and I’m paraphrasing, this building will be for all people of New York, you know, forever and ever. So it’s such an egalitarian space. While it’s so grand and palatial and magnificent, like the palaces of Europe, you know. But no matter who you are, you can walk in there and take it in because it belongs to you too. And that I love.

But the Rose Reading Room is so huge and the ceiling is celestial and the gilding, and all that stuff, and rows and rows of desks. And every walk of life, it’s sort of like riding the subway, which I also talk about in the book, where every person is represented in that one subway car. And the same is true in that reading room. And I find that mix of people so beautiful, whether they’re studying or researching or reading, you know, as you just described. I just find it a very contemplative place. A very quiet, hushed place as libraries usually are. But in a city that’s so noisy and blustery, you know, it’s kind of sacred. And that’s what I love. I love the quietude, the thinking, the pondering, you know, that everybody is doing in their own way together, but separate. You know, it’s kind of, that’s what I love about it.

Marion: When we go to the theater, the Greeks talk about catharsis, that we process our emotions in a way with all these people looking at the same play and we’re all sitting there with these strangers. And I agree, that’s true. I’ve certainly had that experience in the theater, but I’ve had that experience there. And I don’t know what everybody else is reading, but I know that some people are just sitting there reading the Daily News and some people are sitting there reading the kind of philosophy that would make my eyes roll back in my head. And some of them are doing their college papers, and some of them are sleeping and some of them, it’s just, and it’s the history, all the hands on all those tables, but that clock has seen it all.

Matthew: Yeah, yeah. And you’re in a building devoted to books, you know, which is already magical, you know. The big thrill, just recently I went. I go through there all the time because they have great exhibits and, you know, all that stuff. And it’s all free. But in their shop downstairs, they have my book. So I asked the manager if I would be allowed to sign them and they were thrilled. And I mean, I almost just burst into tears the fact that my book was in the shop of the New York Public Library.

Marion: I don’t know how you didn’t. I just don’t know how you didn’t.

Matthew: I was very emotional. And everybody was so lovely. Anyway, but they know that I talk about their clock in the book. Yeah.

Marion: Isn’t that lovely? I think that for all writers, that’s the moment, right? That was why I took my galleys there, was because I’ve been going to the library. My earliest memory is my mother opening the card catalog at the Little Neck Public Library. And that big card catalog just pulling out and her showing me my dad’s name in it. And from that moment in my life, you know, some girls wanted to be Rockettes. I wanted my own place in the Dewey Decimal System. It was like, this is my destiny. And to go to that library with a book that I’d written, yeah, I get it. And I’m so proud of you that you asked to sign them. Many of us would have just stood there looking at our…

Matthew: I was so nervous. I mean, I thought… Who am I to walk in here and like bother these busy people? But they, you know, they were so lovely and thrilled and they put little stickers.

Marion: Oh, you got stickers?

Matthew: Yes. Yeah, I mean, I was just, it was overwhelming. And in a big full circle moment, considered I wrote a good bit of that upstairs in the Rose Reading Room.

Marion: There you go. And that’s just it. And I just think about the millions of experiences. I know people get married there and I mean, all these things, but there’s just millions of stories in that building. And to be part of that is wonderful. And so it’s a kind of coming home. It’s a kind of order. And in the afterward of this lovely book, you write that you have always sought to find order and put things and yourself precisely where they belong. And I love that. There’s a whole lot of self-awareness in that short sentence. But it is also the promise that we can do the same if we give some consideration. And I think that’s what I love most about New York Minute is that it’s literally about taking time in a different way and saying, where is your place in it? And what did you come here to do? You know, look up and look around. So you are the definition of a true creative, a former ballet dancer, an interior designer, a writer, an illustrator. Talk to those listening about how creativity allows for putting ourselves where we are meant to be.

Matthew: Well, I think, fundamentally, creative people are able to visualize what does not exist, right?

Marion: Ah, yes.

Matthew: And my mother, all roads lead to my mother.

Marion: Well, I think that that’s unfortunately true for us all, yes.

Matthew: For better or worse. But my mother gave me so many gifts that allowed me to have the space to be a creative person. And she did this by, she would picture something she wanted, whether it was a bookcase or something in the house, and she would figure out how to build it herself, not ask my dad to do it because… he would have screwed it up, and it would have been a mess, and he didn’t care about details, but she carried about all the details. So I get all that detail-oriented stuff from her.

But what I witnessed with her is that she had an idea, and she pictured something that didn’t exist and figured out to make it three-dimensional as she wanted it. And that has followed through for me in every endeavor, creative, you know. The first time I went to the ballet and said, Oh my God, that’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life. How do you do that? And… And on and on and on. So she also bought me my first interior design book when I was probably 15 in Amarillo, Texas. And I don’t even know where she got it. And it was the best interior design book, and still considered one of the best ever written. And the fact that she got me the best and opened up that world for me. So did I answer your question? I’m not sure.

Marion: Well, we talked about your mother, for sure.

Matthew: Sorry about that.

Marion: No, no, no. No, no. That absolutely is at the core of it. So what you’re saying, what I was trying to get at, and what you are getting at is what the life of a creative really is. And how does being creative allow us to live exactly as we’re supposed to be in the place we’re supposed to be? You open up this question at the beginning of the book saying, I wasn’t in the right place. Time wasn’t traveling the way I wanted it to. But the life of a creative seems to have placed you correctly in the environment in which you’re supposed to be. I think you’re saying to us, creativity allows us to make things that have never been there before, and in that we exist as we should. It sounds like that’s the argument of your life and that your mama absolutely lit that pilot light.

Matthew: Right. But as you said earlier, you don’t really understand something until you write about it. Or that’s paraphrasing what you said, but I learned so much, obviously, about the topic of clocks and New York history, and all that, which is part of the research. But I learned on such a deeper level about my place in the world and how important this place was to me, and the gifts I was given by being there, and starting my creative life in New York City. And obviously, people’s creative life can begin anywhere, but writing about it made me so much more profoundly aware of… I just learned a lot. I learned a lot about myself. I learned a lot about how I view my life at this time in my life. I’m older now, and it was just a really wonderful journey.

Marion: I think that answers the question. That’s just it. People talk about the zone when they’re writing, and they talk about the place that they get to. But for me it’s that integration. It’s that annotating all the things that I have on me and integrating into one single sentence or in a single book.

And there’s another aspect of this book that we haven’t talked about, which I found absolutely fascinating. The end papers of this book are drawings of clocks, each sketched by you. Giving this a graphic edge and signaling to the reader, looking, really looking at things has an impact. And you must have had an extraordinary integration, just producing this number of drawings. So tell me about that process. What about drawing the clocks further informed you about time and you, and the great city of New York and its clocks? What did the actual drawing do for you in this process?

Matthew: I was shocked by what I got out of drawing those clocks. You know, again, I’m an artist like I’m a writer. I mean, I don’t consider myself either of those things. I’m kind of good at both in different ways, but I’m not an artist, but I could always draw and I could always express myself with pencil and paper. And I wanted the personal, I wanted illustrations of all the clocks that I featured. And I photographed them, but I wanted drawings so people could see the details. But what I got out of drawing the clocks was, okay, first of all, I’m a designer. And as a designer, I’ve designed furniture and chandeliers and gardens, and they all start with a sketch and then better drawings. And so that’s the process of designing something like my mom did with a bookcase. You draw it, you got the dimensions, you work it out, the details, and then you’re able to make it or have somebody make it.

But in drawing the clocks that have already been designed and are already there, I felt this sort of, again, kind of a time travel where I was communicating with the original designers of the clocks. Because when you see them from the street, you know, it might be on a skyscraper and you can’t really see the details that well. So I had to really zoom in and understand the details before I could draw the details. So in a sense, I was doing the opposite of what the designer did because they had to create all those details in order to build the clock.

So I felt like I understood the clocks and communed with the actual designers, whether they were architects or artists or stone carvers, or the clocks that are cast in bronze or, you know, carved out of wood, like the one in the Rose Reading Room. All of these started as drawings and became clocks, and I did the reverse, and it gave me a real understanding and appreciation for the labor of not just the designers, original designers, but the craftspeople who made them. And that was really such a beautiful experience. And they’re also beautiful anyway. So I admire beauty. And I think if you look at the end papers and the illustrations throughout the book, you’ll say, “Oh, that’s a beautiful clock or a nice drawing of a clock.”

Marion: Lovely, they’re so lovely. And when I look at them, I thought of them as being very meditative. I kept picturing you really getting there, getting to this new place via the drawing. So as we start to wrap this up, I want to talk about, I mean, I’m going to get back to what we started with, with traveling over time with you in this book. And I constantly thought about that 18-year-old who was out of step with his time in his Texas town, who travels to New York and who concludes this book at a sundial near Central Park’s 72nd Street entrance. And I know the sundial and it’s lovely.

And we feel, when we get to the end of this book, I have to tell you, as the way memoir should, we feel that you are perfectly placed there. We feel as though we’ve swept like a good second hand on a watch right around the circle and watched you find your spot. So why did you end with this sundial? I mean, I know, because I’ve read it, but for those listening, why did you end with this sundial and what is it that you realized about yourself as you sat there?

Matthew: Well, it’s such a magnificent example of a timepiece. And it didn’t fit into the categories that I created. You know, there’s 12 chapters and they’re all sort of architectural categories. And there were not enough sundials in the city, or ones that I had thought were beautiful enough to include, but I couldn’t not include it. So I call it sort of an outsider clock. Yes. And in a city full of outsiders.

Marion: Yes.

Matthew: Which is the beauty of New York, because I think no matter who you are, you find your family, you can find your tribe there. And as I was sitting there, Marlo Thomas walked past in a jogging suit. This is in Central Park.

Marion: Of all people.

Matthew: Of all people. You know, she probably lives in the neighborhood and works out, you know, goes walking or something. But of course, Marlo Thomas from That Girl. And she was a young girl, a young single girl, in a sitcom that was completely adorable. But more profoundly, she was not there to get married. She was a career girl in a 1960s sitcom. Yeah. You know, which sounds silly and fun today, but it was such an iconic thing.

Marion: It was profound.

Matthew: Yeah, for outsiders. And I didn’t realize until I was on the taxi on the way home after that photo shoot that, oh my gosh, It’s through that sitcom with that girl that I first was introduced to New York City as a place. And she was telling us constantly through the comedy of that sitcom that she was an independent person. She wasn’t there to do what her father wanted her to do. She wasn’t there to find a husband. She was there to create her life. And as a single woman, which was unheard of, she was a first in television history. And so I really connected with that person, as I did when I was an eight-year-old, nine-year-old boy watching her in that 1960s sitcom.

Marion: It’s beautiful. I love that. I just love that so much. And I thought of her, and I thought of all the lessons that I learned from her. But it presents for you and for this grateful reader a wonderful, wonderful ending to a beautiful book. Thank you so much, Matthew, for bringing this book to life and for coming today to talk with me and with all these listeners about this lovely, lovely book.

Matthew: Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Marion: You’re welcome. The author is Matthew White. The book is New York Minute, Public Clocks That Make the City Tick, just out from Abbeville Press. Get it wherever books are sold and give it to everyone you know who needs to remember to look up and see the wonders of New York. I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to Qwerty. Qwerty is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overit studios dot com. Our producer is Jacquelin Mignot. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach dot com, the home of The Memoir Project, where writers get their needs met through online classes and how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow Qwerty wherever you get your podcasts and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.

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