Long shadows
The mood of all New Yorkers just now, as Elena put it, is of a huge self-help group – cooperative, communitarian, even socialistic. But on November 7, in the paper, there was an informal interview with a civic-minded activist who every morning for eight weeks had stood on a corner nearby (with a score of others) bearing a sign that said SANITATION ROCKS.
‘We were there to cheer the sanitation trucks as they passed by,’ he told the reporter. ‘But yesterday the truck passed by and when we cheered the driver gave us the finger. So I guess everything’s slowly getting back to normal.’
And normal New York was still tumultuous. A true-blue Monday afternoon, and I stood on Sixth Avenue looking for a cab to take me to LaGuardia; under a lowered sun the long-shadowed moneymen and moneywomen of Manhattan streamed by, getting and spending in a spirit of sharp-elbowed devotion to gain. This was the Village, I knew, and not the South Bronx, but still: no fighting, no biting, and never mind the great gamut of castes and colours and alphabets. All the passions and hatreds of the multitude – all the bitter furies of complexity – were delegated to the metal beasts of the road: barbarously impatient, subhumanly short-fused, squirming and jostling to find their place in the Gold Rush.
Saul won’t be like Iris, I was telling myself. Iris was slightly nuts in the first place (as was John Bayley).*9 Saul wouldn’t be reduced to saying ‘Where is?’ and ‘Must do go’. But why couldn’t Saul absorb September 11? ‘The history of the world’, he used to say, not solemnly but not unseriously, ‘is the history of anti-Semitism.’ And there was plenty of anti-Semitism intertwined with September 11.*10 It was just ‘too big’: it was the size of the event that made it unwieldy, when Saul tried to contain it. That was what I kept telling myself.
I stared at the red traffic light to my left on 11th Street. It looked to me like a Time magazine illustration of some newsworthy virus or bacterium, faceted like an insect’s eye, black-studded, and slightly hairy at the edges…
Repeatedly turning my head south, towards downtown (where the cabs were meant to be coming from), I saw that insistent void where the Twin Towers used to be. You wanted to avert your eyes from the helpless nudity of the air. Skyscrapers would never look the same, and planes would never look the same, and even the oceanic Manhattan blue, so intensely charged, would never look the same.
∗
In the end I was driven to the airport, at appalling speed, by a certain Boris Vronski. Fitfully I read, but kept looking up and out…
What exactly did ‘political Islam’ have in mind? World hegemony and a planet-wide caliphate. Attained how? Necessarily by defeating all the infidel armies, the British, the French, the Indian, the Japanese, the Chinese, the North Korean, the Russian, and the American – the infidel armies, with their aircraft carriers and their trillion-dollar budgets. The restored Caliphate: God willing. Yes, God would need to be willing. And able. That which political Islam had in mind made no sense at all without the weaponry of God.
I was coming to the end of my book, Norman Cohn’s Warrant for Genocide (1967), a study of the Tsarist concoction The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (in the Middle East an evergreen bestseller, along with Mein Kampf). Now I turned to the foreword (added in 1995) and read:
There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics [notably the lower clergy] for the benefit of the ignorant and the superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures, and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people, who thereupon take leave of sanity and responsibility. And it occasionally happens that this underworld becomes a political power and changes the course of history.*11
At Delta Shuttle I climbed out, confirmed that the Trump Shuttle was no more, and bought a ticket for the forty-minute flight to Logan.
*1 Christopher told me there was a WMD scare in Washington: it got around that a rogue nuclear weapon was poised to vaporise the capital. Some friends were urging the Hitchenses to leave town – urging in vain.
*2 For instance, I was secretly spending a lot of time with Philip Larkin: the Collected Poems, the Selected Letters, and Andrew Motion’s authorised Life. Although I knew these books well (I had written about them at great length in 1993), two main themes came at me with all the force of discovery…First, Philip’s father. Not many pages ago I called Sydney Larkin a fascist. That word was often used loosely in my time (parking wardens were called fascists), so it might help to be more specific. Sydney wasn’t a fascist, or only secondarily. He was something much more advanced. What he was was a Nazi. This remains a startling – and startlingly underexamined – truth: Philip had been raised and mentored by an adherent of Adolf Hitler…But what I kept thinking about, what I kept returning to, was the destitution – the irreducible church-mouse penury – of Philip’s lovelife.
*3 Inez was two; so in her infinite book of secrecy only a little could I read. Maybe she seemed vague in distinguishing the falling towers from the US Open (or maybe she thought ‘tennis’ meant ‘television’), but she certainly registered the new atmosphere, the sudden congealing of mood in everyone around her…Eliza, almost five, was more
transparent (see above): the plane, hauntingly, looks more like a Stealth Bomber (or a flying saucer) than a 767; and notice how the black smoke is leniently attributed to the WTC’s chimneys. That flower is all her own (with perhaps a nod to ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’)…When they spoke of the event, Bobbie, Nat, and Gus, all three of them respectful students of history, lowered their voices and their
