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The World Trade Center - then and now

Colum McCann's new book walks tightrope between 1974 and 9/11

By
CAHIR O'DOHERTY
,
Irish Voice Staff Writer

Published Thursday, July 9, 2009, 8:42 AM
Updated Thursday, July 23, 2009, 6:12 PM

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The World Trade Center - then and now | Entertainment in Ireland and Around the World | IrishCentral




Read more: Colum McCann, Phillipe Petit, Dublin, Books and Literature, Media, Dave Eggers, Oprah Winfrey, Hunter College, Iraq, Random House Inc.
August 7, 1974, New York, New York, USA: Philippe Petit, a young frenchman, gave the most spectacular high-wire performance of all time by transversing the span between Towers I and II of the WTC eight times in one hour. Mr. Petit and his team had illegally rigged their cable under the cover of night and he was arrested by the Port Authorities and charged with "attempt(ing) to cause public inconvenience," and trespassing.. Credit: Jean-Louis Blondeau / Polaris
Photo by Polaris

ON August 7, 1974 a man stepped out on a thin high wire tied between Manhattan’s famous Twin Towers. Phillipe Petit, a skinny French tightrope walker, cast a rope between the two buildings of the World Trade Center with a bow and arrow in the night, and his illegal, crazy but ultimately successful walk between the two iconic buildings would eventually come to be called the art crime of the century.

For Dublin-born writer Colum McCann, 44, Petit’s daring 1974 tightrope walk was a jumping off point, irony intended, a way to talk about New York, the Twin Towers and the people of the city and what they mean to him, without instantly conjuring up images of sirens and dust and devastation.

Petit’s tightrope walk was all the remove that McCann -- who started out as a journalist for Dublin’s Irish Press in 1985 -- needed, the critical distance that gave him the objectivity to write about our own time, our own city, and our own Twin Towers.

In "Let the Great World Spin" (Random House), McCann writes about Petit’s 1974 high wire walk so vividly that at times he produces a sense of looming vertigo -- not only are we astonished at Petit’s courage, we also know, behind it all, that the towers themselves will eventually fall.

So reading McCann’s book is like looking at a double exposure. You can see the past and the present intermixed, but so deftly that its becomes hard to tell one from the other.

“I have vertigo and I can’t walk more than one or two feet in the air,” McCann, who now teaches creative writing at New York’s Hunter College, says.

“So the idea of standing on a rope a quarter of a mile up in the sky was quite extraordinary to me. Just the weather alone, the wind that’s created up there, and the fact that the buildings themselves swayed in the breeze.

“If they swung in the wrong direction or if the wire contracted at any time Petit could have bounced up into the air. He had to get the tension in the ropes right. It’s kind of a miracle that everything came together at once and he managed to go from one side to the other. He did it eight times. He even lay down on the wire at one point, which is extraordinary.”

Thinking about the very real possibility of Petit falling reminds us of how much our minds are guided by those people who did fall on 9/11. Even though there were 27 years between the two events, the images linger indelibly. So McCann’s new book addresses 9/11 by looking at it askance, from another era.

“That’s the perfect way to put it. Many novels, films, poems, screenplays will go to the heart of the matter. Shortly after 9/11 it struck me that meaning was already being structured, it was coming down in a certain way,” he says.

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