The Mourning Paper
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For the past seventeen years, I have had an apartment in New York, just a few hundred yards from the United Nations. I spend a night or two each week there, and in the months after September 11, I required an alarm clock as I never had before. The noise of truck traffic always used to get me up, but it was gone after the Trade Center attacks. With the U.N. a possible terrorist target, my block was barricaded at either end by sand trucks, concrete dividers, and out-of-town policemen who had come to Manhattan to help out. The sudden silence on this cosmopolitan, international street was eerie and suburban: its residents were now living on a pedestrian mall.
Throughout the fall, I myself closed off a street, a personal one, down which I might have proceeded in response to this calamity. I decided not, except in my diary, to write anything about the attacks. When a couple of publications asked me to comment upon what the writer’s role ought to be in such a time, I found myself saying that more writers might consider silence on this subject. That choice seemed to me more eloquent than some of the hasty, self-regarding pieces by cultural commentators and novelists that I was seeing in so many magazines. There were, of course, exceptions, but I found that I was keener to read the work of tabloid journalists—who at least did some reporting, retrieved information, told a story—than the abstract musings of literary mandarins upon a place (the Trade Center) and a population (the ordinary white-collar denizens of the financial world) that had rarely interested them before last September.
Like most New Yorkers, I had never been to the Trade Center except with out-of-town visitors who wanted to see the city from the observation deck on the 107th floor of the South Tower. Sure enough, in a long-ago volume of my diary, I can find the account of one such touristic ascent. Up on the deck, I noted, “acrophobia is completely done away with: one is so high up that one feels there would be plenty of time to pick and choose where one wanted to land should one fall.” This visit occurred on June 8, 1977, during New York’s period of bankruptcy, arson, and panic—the Taxi Driver era. The diary says that my friend and I took note of some burnt-out buildings—up in the South Bronx, I imagine—even though “taken as a whole” the city appeared “as neat as a Monopoly board.” The current irony of this observation—our looking at a part of the city that would be largely rebuilt by the time the Trade Center was destroyed—is so surefire, so easy, that it can only be deemed cheap, unworthy of the event that finally produced it. And that is how most literary writing about September 11 struck me.
The city’s publishing world, like most other components of New York, resumed its routine only gradually, and with a certain nervousness, as last fall wore on. The season of book parties always starts right after Labor Day, like the school year, but the first such gathering I remember going to after the attacks came on November 8. I was there at Elaine’s, a decades-old venue for such affairs, because I’d written a short introduction to the book being celebrated: an anthology of obituaries by the New York Times’s Robert McG. Thomas, a gentle master of the art who had himself died, at the age of sixty, the year before. Thomas’s offbeat subjects—the inventor of Kitty Litter; the minister who had to conduct Lee Harvey Oswald’s funeral; “Toots Barger,” the legendary champion of duckpin bowling—had prompted me to call him “a lover of the far-fetched and the overlooked” and to quote an observation, from his Times colleague Michael T. Kaufman, that Thomas had “singlehandedly humanized the paper.”