Gay Talese in the New Yorker

This week's issue of the New Yorker is an excellent reminder of why it is the best magazine in the world. Who else would commission the great Michael Sowa to do a Thanksgiving cover illustration? (Talking of the cover, I have a rare early-print-run copy of the magazine which is missing the "The" in "The New Yorker" on the cover. Make me an offer and buy this collectible now, while you have the opportunity!)

Anyway, where but the New Yorker would this wonderful piece by Gay Talese ever appear?

Talese has revisited the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the most elegant suspension bridge in New York, 40-odd years after it was built. He covered the original construction of the bridge, and now, in his trademark style, has gone back to find the same people he talked to back then. Not all are still alive, of course, but one of them was still working on the bridge as recently as 1991. Here's Talese, with his limpid prose style:

Despite his advanced age and his occupational ailments, Edward Iannielli had drawn one of the most difficult assignments on the renovation project—that of removing rust from the highest points of the towers... After arriving at the top of the tower—a journey that took twenty minutes—he leaned out into the sky and went to work with wire brushes and scrapers to remove rust, and then, wearing rubber gloves, to smear a rust-resistant paste onto whatever corrosion existed along the flat surface and bolts of the tower. As he did this, he envisaged himself thirty years earlier, inserting these same bolts into the same steel, and once more he felt a sense of identity with the great structure. Tears came to his eyes, and, dipping his gloved left hand into a bucket of reddish paste, he reached out to touch an untarnished plate of steel which was secured by a row of bolts and, with his bent middle finger, he wrote as clearly as he could, in block letters, "Catherine"—the name of his wife of thirty years, who had recently died of cancer.

"Leaned out into the sky" – I love that. And Talese's a master of the comma: there are eight in that last sentence, but he uses an em-dash where 95% of people would use a comma. Most powerfully, there isn't a comma or any punctuation at all after "bolts", where the big break in the sentence occurs. It might be reading "bolts and braces" but in fact it's "bolts and now I'm on to something completely different". I've noticed this in a lot of writers, especially Updike; I don't know whether it's got a name. But I'm sure, again, that the vast majority of people would simply end the sentence at "bolts" and then begin a new one.

There's no real story to Talese's piece: it's episodic, moving from character to character, stopping along the way to remember how things were 40 years ago, and to compare how things are today. The attack on the World Trade Center features prominently, of course, this time viewed from a fresh perspective – that of the people who worked on its construction. (Naturally enough, there was a large overlap between the Verrazano-Narrows workers and those who built the twin towers.)

At one point the towers are described as "ninety-five per cent air". In that one phrase is encapsulated a whole world of difference – between the old world and the new, and between the blue-collar world and the white-collar world. Skyscrapers which predate the World Trade Center are big, solid buildings – think the Empire State. And people like Edward Iannielli, who worked on 50-odd skyscrapers in and around New York, like them that way. But things are different now: property developers want buildings to be as airy as possible, since that makes them more desirable to tenants and maximises rentable floor space. Even classicist architects, who might put columns or stone cladding on a new building rather than the standard modernist curtain wall, will still use modern construction techniques to keep the inside as column-free and airy as possible.

I think (and this is only a hunch) that people like – and classicist architects use – columns and their ilk in contemporary architecture precisely because they give the impression of support and solidity, even when they're purely decorative. While the architectural world continues to use state-of-the-art technology to create bigger and bigger open spaces, a lot of people still like to feel that they can see the way in which their building is being held up. In the World Trade Center, they couldn't: the interior columns were thrust out to the walls, and read to the eye simply as window-frames. What modernists considered genius made the likes of Iannielli very uncomfortable. But the modernists have won this war, and "flimsy", to use his word, is here to stay.

Posted by Felix at 17:46 EST

Comments

This is an interesting gloss on great piece of writing, but I feel that you err when you state, in the paragraph that follows the block quotation, that a natural break occurs in the sentence after the word "bolts." It doesn't, any more than a natural break occurs after the word "sky" in "he leaned out into the sky and went to work." In the "bolts" sentence, too, Talese wants us to feel the continuity of action in the reaching out to the steel plate to the writing of the name. One way he does this is to omit the comma after "bolts."

Posted by: Rob Kohlmeier at 12:24 EST, September 25, 2003