New York on $5 a Day

New York on $5 a Day, the last book by the novelist Ardyth Kennelly (1912-2005), is a brief but charming account of her two-year sojourn in New York City (1963-64), where she had gone to try to revive her writing career after the death of her husband a year earlier. Written in 2001, the memoir is a chatty and engaging reminiscence about the unusual people she met in New York, including the English witch and writer Sybil Leek, whom Ardyth asked to cast a spell so she could be a successful writer again (and whose CBS TV appearance Ardyth inadvertently almost spoiled); the aged writer Anzia Yezierska, blind and nearly forgotten but still lively and demanding; the minor poet Sanders Russell, with whom Ardyth explored the city and the World's Fair; the blinded Spanish Civil War veteran Robert Raven, her landlord on West 16th Street; and Raymond Duncan, brother of the famed dancer Isadora Duncan.

Ardyth also writes perceptively and vividly about the city as she herself--a well-read but not terribly worldly woman from the West--experienced it. This sparkling center of literary life was a surprising and exciting place for a writer from a relatively unsophisticated town like Portland, Oregon. We learn from Ardyth's letters to her literary friend Freddy Jacobson (included in an appendix) that she reveled in the rich variety of readings, plays, movies, and sightings of famous people--and she loved that you could read the book reviews on Sunday and walk right into Brentano's on Monday and get the books, without having to wait two weeks while they were sent away for.

In New York Ardyth had an apartment in Greenwich Village, a tall and handsome Austrian beau, a "Beatle haircut" editor (John Pope), and a dream of living in the famous Dakota apartments. But late in 1964, having had no further success in publishing her books--and feeling that the "alien corn" had at last grown a little too high--she ended her New York idyll and took a bus home to Portland.