Tom Luddy and Bill Pence, the curators of the Telluride Film Festival, each year invited a third guest curator to join them, and in 2001 it was his turn. He had selected a short roster of “personal” films to show, including Satyajit Ray’s The Golden Fortress, about a boy who dreamed of an earlier life in a golden fortress filled with jewels; Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, about a planet that was a single mind so powerful that it could bring men’s deepest desires to life; and Fritz Lang’s silent-era masterwork Metropolis, a dark poem about tyranny and freedom, man and machine, restored and rescued at last from Giorgio Moroder’s electronica sound track.
It was Labor Day weekend, his last free time before Fury’s American publication. He met Padma in Los Angeles and they flew to Colorado, to spend her thirty-first birthday, which fell on September 1, watching movies in the mountains and walking the informal streets of the town where Butch and Sundance had robbed their first bank, having a coffee with Werner Herzog here, a chat with Faye Dunaway there. At Telluride nobody was hustling or selling and everyone was approachable. The movie polymaths Leonard Maltin and Roger Ebert, the documentary filmmaker Ken Burns and other well-informed movie folk were on hand, imparting wisdom and cracking wise. The agreed position of everyone at Telluride was that Tom Luddy knew everyone on earth. The great Luddy, Lord of Misrule and master of ceremonies, took it all in good part. Telluride was a jokey place. To ride the ski lift up the mountain to the Chuck Jones theater you had to make a Wabbit Weservation.
They saw the hit French movie Amélie with its slightly-too-sweet elements of fantasy and the Croatian No Man’s Land, directed by Danis Tanovic, which was like Waiting for Godot in a trench under fire, and Agnieszka Holland’s workmanlike, HBO-financed Shot in the Heart, an adaptation of Mikal Gilmore’s book about his murderer brother Gary. They saw three movies a day, fell asleep in some of them, and in between and after the screenings there were parties. They came down from the mountain on September 3 and eight days later it would be impossible not to remember that Edenic moment as a paradise from which not just they, but the whole world had been expelled.
The official U.S. publication date of Fury was September 11, 2001. On that date a novel intended as an ultracontemporary, satirical portrait of New York was transformed by events into a historical novel about a city that was no longer the one he had written about, whose golden age had ended in the most abruptly appalling way; a novel that, when read by those who remembered the city as it had been, inspired an emotion that was not part of its author’s plan: nostalgia. In Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury comic strip one of the characters said, sadly, “You know, I really miss September 10th.” That was what had happened to his novel, he understood. The events of September 11 had turned it into a portrait of the day before. The golden fortress full of jewels was now only a dream of an earlier, lost life.
On September 10, 2001, he was not in New York but in Houston, Texas. He had read at Barnes & Noble in Union Square on the fifth, then flown to Boston on book tour and was there on the sixth and seventh. On the morning of September 8 he flew out of Logan Airport just three days before the fatal planes, and was in Chicago for two days. Then on the night of the tenth there was a full house at the Alley Theatre, Houston—nine hundred people in the theater, two hundred turned away, he was told by Rich Levy of the reading series Inprint, his hosts for the night—and a surprise outside: a small Islamic demonstration against his presence, perhaps two hundred strong. That felt like a visitation from the past. The next morning he remembered the bearded placard carriers and wondered if they regretted identifying themselves as extremists on, of all the days they could have chosen to reveal their bigotry, that particular day.
He had only just woken up when a radio journalist called his hotel room. He had agreed to talk to the station before catching his flight to Minneapolis, but it was still too early for that. “I’m sorry,” said the voice in his ear, “but we’re going to have to cancel. Because of what’s happened in New York we’re dumping into the coverage of that.” He had never acquired the American habit of turning on the TV first thing in the morning. “What’s happening in New York?” he asked. There was a pause and then the voice said, “Turn on your TV now.” He reached for the remote, and less than a minute later he saw the second plane.
He couldn’t sit down. It didn’t seem right to sit. He stood in front of the TV with the remote in his hand and the number fifty thousand kept repeating in his brain. Fifty thousand people worked in the Twin Towers. He couldn’t imagine the numbers of the dead. He thought about his first night in New York City, his visit to the Windows on the World. He remembered Paul Auster telling him about Philippe Petit’s high-wire walk between the two towers. But mostly he just stood there and watched the buildings burn and then in agonized disbelief cried out, at the same time as thousands of others around the world, “It’s not there! It’s not there anymore!” as the South Tower fell.
Birds were screaming in the sky.
He didn’t know what to do so he set out for the airport but when they were halfway there the radio told them to turn back because of the nationwide ground stop. Back at the Four Seasons he didn’t have a room anymore and the lobby was crowded with other people in the same situation. He found an armchair in a corner and started making calls. Rich Levy of Inprint came to the rescue. He spoke to the poet Ed Hirsch and his wife, Janet, who were stranded in D.C., and they offered him their house near the Menil Collection in the Museum District if he agreed to feed their dog. It was comforting that day to be in a writer’s house, alone among books, in the world of the mind while mindlessness ruled the world.
Nobody he knew was dead but thousands were. Peter Carey’s wife, Alison Summers, had been at the ATM at the foot of the North Tower when the first plane hit but she had lived. Caryl Phillips on Hudson Street saw it happen and so did Robert Hughes on Prince. Young Sophie Auster, on her first day at high school and alone on a subway train for the first time in her life, passed under the Twin Towers as the atrocity was happening above. September 12 was a second day of horror and sadness. Look at our beautiful broken city, he thought, weeping, and realized how deeply he was attached to it already. He walked down the street from the Hirsches’ home to the Rothko Chapel. Even for a godless man it felt like a good place to be. There were others there; not many people, just a grave few. Nobody spoke to anyone else. There was nothing to say. Everyone was alone with his or her sorrow.
Obviously his book tour was canceled. Nobody was interested in books. The only books that sold in the following weeks were the Bible, the Qur’an, and books about al-Qaeda and the Taliban. A psychologist on the TV was saying that New Yorkers who had been away from their families on 9/11 should go and show themselves to their loved ones to prove they were okay. It wasn’t enough to phone them. They would need the evidence of their own eyes. Yes, he thought, I should go to London. But it wasn’t possible yet. The ground stop was lifted and airports had begun to reopen. Houston reopened, and then LAX but the New York airports remained closed and international travel, too, was at a standstill. He would have to wait a few more days.
He called Padma in Los Angeles to say he was coming to see her. She said she was doing a lingerie shoot.
Ten days after the attacks, on his last night in L.A. before he flew to London, he had dinner at the home of Eric and Tania Idle with Steve Martin, Garry Shandling, and others. At least three of the funniest men in America were around the table but comedy was hard to find. Finally Garry Shandling said, his voice and body full of bloodhound lugubriousness, “Such an awful thing. Seems like everyone lost someone, or knows someone who lost someone.… Actually, I knew several of the terrorists.…” It was the blackest of black comedy, the first 9/11 joke, and laughter released some of the grief everyone was feeling, but he somehow doubted that Shandling would be using the gag in his routine anytime soon.
Robert Hughes, Time magazine’s art critic, told him on the phone that after he saw the planes flying over SoHo he had walked around in shock.
On his way home he had stopped by a bakery and found the shelves cleaned out. Not a loaf remained, not a bagel, and the old baker standing amid the emptiness spread his arms and said, “Should happen every day.”
In London, his marital problems seemed trivial now. Elizabeth briefly relented and allowed Milan to stay at Pembridge Mews. He picked his son up from school, fed him, washed his hair, put him to bed, and stood over him for an hour and watched him sleep. Milan had hugged him long and hard when he returned, and Zafar, too, had been more physically demonstrative than was his wont. The psychologist had been right. Even though they had both known, with the “knowing” part of their brains, that he hadn’t even been in New York City, so he was obviously safe, they had needed the evidence of their own eyes.
In Le Nouvel Observateur in France and The Guardian in London his novel was being called prescient, even prophetic. He wasn’t a prophet, he told one journalist. He had had some trouble with prophets in his time and he wasn’t interested in applying for the job. But he wondered why the book had felt so urgent, why it insisted on being written at once, and where did they come from, those Furies hovering over New York and within his character’s heart?
He was being asked to write something—the news agenda had certainly come around to him now—but he didn’t do so for two weeks after the attacks. Many of the first think pieces felt redundant to him. Everyone had seen the horror and didn’t need to be told how to feel about it. Then slowly his thoughts coalesced. “The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings,” he wrote. “Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women’s rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex.… The fundamentalist believes that we believe in nothing. In his worldview, he has his absolute certainties, while we are sunk in sybaritic indulgences. To prove him wrong, we must first know that he is wrong. We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world’s resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love. These will be our weapons. Not by making war, but by the unafraid way we choose to live shall we defeat them. How to defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized. Don’t let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared.”
(While he was writing this, a story about his being banned from American carriers by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration broke in the press. British Airways and the Europeans remained calm but in America the general panic created a travel problem for him all over again. “I see,” he thought, not without some bitterness, “first you let all the terrorists onto the planes, and now you want to ground the antiterrorist novelists, and that’s your plan for keeping America safe.” When things calmed down the FAA calmed down too and lifted their restrictions; his problems immediately eased, though two American carriers refused to carry him for a further ten years.)
He went to France for the publication of Furie, which in the new world that had just come into being was received far better than it had been in the English language, in the old world that had ceased to exist. When he got back to London he went to a dinner at a friend’s apartment and another guest, a Mr. Proudie, launched into the already common “America asked for this/America deserved it” argument. He objected strongly, saying it was no time for this kind of British anti-Americanism, which disrespected and criminalized the innocent dead. Mr. Proudie responded, with extreme aggression, “We protected you, didn’t we?” As if that proved his point. In the argument that followed they almost came to blows.
He wrote a second article, which concluded, “If terrorism is to be defeated, the world of Islam must take on board the secularist-humanist principles on which the modern is based, and without which their countries’ freedom will remain a distant dream.” At the time this was thought by many to be a pipe dream at best, and, at worst, a liberal’s foolish refusal to accept the resilience of the Islamic worldview. A decade later the young people of the Arab world, in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria and elsewhere, tried to transform their societies according to exactly these principles. They wanted jobs and liberty, not religion. It was not clear that they would get what they wanted, but they left the world in no doubt that they wanted it.
It was a beautiful fall in New York but the city was not itself. He walked the streets and saw the same spooked look in every eye. Loud noises were harbingers of revenant doom. Every conversation was an act of mourning, every gathering felt like a wake. Then slowly the spirit returned. There was a day when the Brooklyn Bridge was closed because of a reported threat against it, and instead of being scared, people were angry about the disruption to their journeys. That was the I’m-walking-here New York he loved. It was getting its groove back. The restrictions on travel below Fourteenth Street were still there, but they were lessening. The Statue of Liberty was still closed to visitors, but it would reopen. The dreadful hole in the ground, and the equally melancholy hole in the sky above, were still there, and fires still burned belowground, but even that agony could be borne. Life would vanquish death. It would not be the same as before, but it would be all right. He spent Thanksgiving that year at the home of Paul, Siri and Sophie Auster, and Peter Carey and Alison Summers were there too, and they gave thanks for the survival of Sophie and Alison, and for what was good in the world, which needed, more than ever, to be cherished.
The story of his little battle, too, was coming to an end. The prologue was past and now the world was grappling with the main event. It would have been easy, after everything that had happened to him, and after the enormity of the crime against this city, to succumb to hatred of the religion in whose name these things were done and of its adherents too. Anyone who looked even vaguely Arab experienced some of that backlash in those weeks and months of aftermath. Young men wore T-shirts reading DON’T BLAME ME, I’M HINDU. Drivers of yellow cabs, many of whom had Muslim names, decked out their taxis with flags and patriotic decals to ward off their passengers’ rage. But in this matter of wrath, too, the city, on the whole, showed restraint. The many were not held guilty of the crimes of the few. And he too refused anger. Rage made you the creature of those who enraged you, it gave them too much power. Rage killed the mind, and now more than ever the mind needed to live, to find a way of rising above the mindlessness.
He chose to believe in human nature, and in the universality of its rights and ethics and freedoms, and to stand against the fallacies of relativism that were at the heart of the invective of the armies of the religious (we hate you because we aren’t like you) and of their fellow travelers in the West, too, many of whom, disappointingly, were on the left. If the art of the novel revealed anything, it was that human nature was the great constant, in any culture, in any place, in any time, and that, as Heraclitus had said two thousand years earlier, a man’s ethos, his way of being in the world, was his daimon, the guiding principle that shaped his life—or, in the pithier, more familiar formulation of the idea, that character was destiny. It was hard to hold on to that idea while the smoke of death stood in the sky over Ground Zero and the murders of thousands of men and women whose characters had not determined their fates were on everyone’s mind, it hadn’t mattered if they were hard workers or generous friends or loving parents or great romantics, the planes hadn’t cared about their ethos; and yes, now terrorism could be destiny, war could be destiny, our lives were no longer wholly ours to control; but still our sovereign natures needed to be insisted on, perhaps more than ever amid the horror, it was important to speak up for individual human responsibility, to say that the murderers were morally responsible for their crimes, and neither their faith nor their rage at America was any excuse; it was important, at a time of gargantuan, inflated ideologies, not to forget the human scale, to continue to insist on our essential humanity, to go on making love, so to speak, in a combat zone.
In the pages of a novel it was clear that the human self was heterogeneous not homogeneous, not one thing but many, multiple, fractured and contradictory. The person you were for your parents was not the person you were with your children, your working self was other than your self as a lover, and depending on the time of day and your mood you might think of yourself as tall or skinny or unwell or a sports fan or conservative or fearful or hot. All writers and readers knew that human beings had broad identities, not narrow ones, and it was the breadth of human nature that allowed readers to find common ground and points of identification with Madame Bovary, Leopold Bloom, Colonel Aureliano Buendía, Raskolnikov, Gandalf the Gray, Oskar Matzerath, the Makioka Sisters, the Continental Op, the Earl of Emsworth, Miss Marple, the Baron in the Trees, and Salo the mechanical messenger from the planet Tralfamadore in Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan. Readers and writers could take that knowledge of broad-based identity out into the world beyond the pages of books, and use the knowledge to find common ground with their fellow human beings. You could support different football teams but vote the same way. You could vote for different parties but agree about the best way to raise your children. You could disagree about child rearing but share a fear of the dark. You could be afraid of different things but love the same music. You could detest each other’s musical taste but worship the same God. You could differ strongly on the question of religion but support the same football team.
This was what literature knew, had always known. Literature tried to open the universe, to increase, even if only slightly, the sum total of what it was possible for human beings to perceive, understand, and so, finally, to be. Great literature went to the edges of the known and pushed against the boundaries of language, form, and possibility, to make the world feel larger, wider, than before. Yet this was an age in which men and women were being pushed toward ever-narrower definitions of themselves, encouraged to call themselves just one thing, Serb or Croat or Israeli or Palestinian or Hindu or Muslim or Christian or Baha’i or Jew, and the narrower their identities became, the greater was the likelihood of conflict between them. Literature’s view of human nature encouraged understanding, sympathy, and identification with people not like oneself, but the world was pushing everyone in the opposite direction, toward narrowness, bigotry, tribalism, cultism and war. There were plenty of people who didn’t want the universe opened, who would, in fact, prefer it to be shut down quite a bit, and so when artists went to the frontier and pushed they often found powerful forces pushing back. And yet they did what they had to do, even at the price of their own ease, and, sometimes, of their lives.