Ed Caesar on Nick Paumgarten’s “Up and Then Down”
The shortest magazine pitch of Nick Paumgarten’s life took place in an elevator, which the writer shared with an elevator-phobic editor, and consisted of a single word: “Elevators!” » The article that followed, published in April 2008, is entitled “Up and Then Down”. It’s the story of a man named Nicholas White, who was stuck in an elevator in the McGraw-Hill building in midtown Manhattan for forty-one hours, and also a study of “the elevator,” a delightful word for the design discipline of vertical transportation.
A long article about elevators can seem a bit dry, even for a magazine that published a forty-thousand-word article about oranges. (“What’s there to say except that it goes up and down?” Paumgarten asks coquettishly.) But, as Gerard Manley Hopkins almost said, up there lives the dearest freshness of things. Paumgarten’s story is not just a parade of fascinating facts: there are, or were, fifty-eight thousand elevators in New York; Taipei 101 Tower’s high-speed elevators are pressurized to prevent ear damage; All elevator door close buttons built after the early 1990s are designed not to work, but they also have indelible comparisons. In time-lapse CCTV footage of White trapped in the elevator car, he looks “like a bug in a box.” At thirty-two hundred feet, a lifting cable will break “like a stream of spittle down a stairwell.”
In one passage, Paumgarten notes that passengers “instinctively know how to organize themselves in an elevator. Two strangers will gravitate toward the rear corners, a third will stand near the door, at an isosceles distance, until a fourth enters, at which point passengers three and four will disperse toward the front corners, leaving room, in the center, for a fifth, and so on, like the dots on a die.” Since Paumgarten’s article appeared, I haven’t shared an elevator without remembering the points on a die and feeling a surge of pleasure.
“The elevator, underestimated and neglected, is to the city what paper is to reading and gunpowder to war,” writes Paumgarten. (Pretty good, that.) When I first read these words, I was twenty-eight years old and living in London. With the exception of two copses of skyscrapers through which our financiers – and our finances – rise and fall, London remains a fairly horizontal city. It’s easy to spend a busy week there without taking the elevator. In Paumgarten, elevators were apparently mundane; to me they seemed exotic.
Its narrative structure also contains a pulling force. The reader is introduced to White’s entrapment, then, just as White contemplates his own death, he is diverted to learn about the elevator before returning to his story, and so on. The subject rises and falls; the story breathes in and out (with just the right amount of anxiety). I am neither the first nor the last writer to have borrowed Paumgarten’s model.
Behind the vertical pleasure lies tragedy, which gives the play an unexpected power. “Up and Then Down” evokes September 11: we learn that some two hundred people were killed in elevators that day. But, in a broader sense, the article is about the fear of being trapped at height. People who work in skyscrapers have always found it psychologically necessary to forget the physicality of the towers. 9/11 was a horrifying reminder of what a great building is; in its own playful way, “Up and Then Down” does too. It’s striking that “Man on Wire,” the stunning, dizzying documentary about Philippe Petit’s walk between the Twin Towers in 1974, was touring film festivals when Paumgarten’s work was released.
When I’m in New York, I often feel like the pig from “Babe: Pig in the City.” I’m continually baffled by American tipping protocol; I take an express when I need a place. So imagine my gratitude to Paumgarten, during my first visit The New Yorker current offices at One World Trade Center. Elevators feature “destination dispatch” which, according to “Rise Up and Then Down,” assigns “passengers to an elevator based on the floor they are headed to.” I had never traveled on a destination dispatch before. A new opportunity for humiliation awaited. But thanks to Paumgarten’s sideways instruction manual, I knew what to do. ♦
Late on a Friday night, Nicholas White found himself stuck in an elevator in a nearly empty office building.
