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‘Not once did I think he might fall’: Paul Auster on the genius of high-wire walker Philippe Petit
In 1982, Paul Auster wrote this account of a spectacle he would never forget: Philippe Petit walking the high wire
I first crossed paths with Philippe Petit in 1971. I was in Paris, walking down the boulevard Montparnasse, when I came upon a large circle of people standing silently on the sidewalk. It seemed clear that something was happening inside that circle, and I wanted to know what it was. I elbowed my way past several onlookers, stood on my toes, and caught sight of a smallish young man in the centre. Everything he wore was black: his shoes, his pants, his shirt, even the battered silk top hat he wore on his head. The hair jutting out from under the hat was a light red-blond, and the face below it was so pale, so devoid of colour, that at first I thought he was in whiteface.
The young man juggled, rode a unicycle, performed little magic tricks. He juggled rubber balls, wooden clubs, and burning torches, both standing on the ground and sitting on his one-wheeler, moving from one thing to the next without interruption. To my surprise, he did all this in silence. A chalk circle had been drawn on the sidewalk, and scrupulously keeping any of the spectators from entering that space – with a persuasive mime’s gesture – he went through his performance with such ferocity and intelligence that it was impossible to stop watching.
Unlike other street performers, he did not play to the crowd. Rather, it was as if he had allowed the audience to share in the workings of his thoughts, had made us privy to some deep, inarticulate obsession within him. His juggling was precise and self-involved, like some conversation he was holding with himself. He elaborated the most complex combinations, intricate mathematical patterns, arabesques of nonsensical beauty, while at the same time keeping his gestures as simple as possible. Through it all, he managed to radiate a hypnotic charm, oscillating somewhere between demon and clown. No one said a word. It was as though his silence were a command for others to be silent as well. The crowd watched, and after the performance was over, everyone put money in the hat. I realised that I had never seen anything like it before.
The next time I crossed paths with Philippe Petit was several weeks later. It was late at night – perhaps one or two in the morning – and I was walking along a quai of the Seine not far from Notre-Dame. Suddenly, across the street, I spotted several young people moving quickly through the darkness. They were carrying ropes, cables, tools, and heavy satchels. Curious as ever, I kept pace with them from my side of the street and recognised one of them as the juggler from the boulevard Montparnasse. I knew immediately that something was going to happen. But I could not begin to imagine what it was.
The next day, on the front page of the International Herald Tribune, I got my answer. A young man had strung a wire between the towers of Notre-Dame Cathedral and walked and juggled and danced on it for three hours, astounding the crowds below. No one knew how he had rigged up his wire or how he had managed to elude the attention of the authorities. Upon returning to the ground, he had been arrested, charged with disturbing the peace and sundry other offences. It was in this article that I first learned his name: Philippe Petit. There was not the slightest doubt in my mind that he and the juggler were the same person.
This Notre-Dame escapade made a deep impression on me, and I continued to think about it over the years that followed. It is, of course, an extraordinary thing to walk on a wire so high off the ground. To see someone do this triggers an almost palpable excitement in us. In fact, given the necessary courage and skill, there are probably few people who would not want to do it themselves. Working under the greatest possible constraints, on a stage no more than an inch wide, the high-wire walker’s job is to create a sensation of limitless freedom. Juggler, dancer, acrobat, he performs in the sky what other men are content to perform on the ground. The desire is at once far-fetched and perfectly natural, and the appeal of it, finally, is its utter uselessness.
After living in France for four years, I returned to New York in July 1974. For a long time I had heard nothing about Philippe Petit, but the memory of what had happened in Paris was still fresh, a permanent part of my inner mythology. Then, just one month after my return, Philippe was in the news again – this time in New York, with his now-famous walk between the towers of the World Trade Center. New York is a more generous city than Paris, and the people here responded enthusiastically to what he had done. As with the aftermath of the Notre-Dame adventure, however, Philippe kept faith with his vision. He did not try to cash in on his new celebrity; he managed to resist the honky-tonk temptations America is all too willing to offer. No books were published, no films were made, no entrepreneur took hold of him for packaging. The fact that the World Trade Center did not make him rich was almost as remarkable as the event itself. But the proof of this was there for all New Yorkers to see: Philippe continued to make his living by juggling on the street.
The streets were his first theatre. Born into a middle-class French family in 1949, he taught himself magic at the age of six, juggling at the age of 12, and high-wire walking a few years later. In the meantime, while immersing himself in such varied activities as horseback riding, rock climbing, art and carpentry, he managed to get himself expelled from nine schools. At 16, he began a period of incessant travel all over the world, performing as a street juggler in Western Europe, Russia, India, Australia and the United States. “I learned to live by my wits,” he has said of those years. “I offered juggling shows everywhere, for everyone – travelling around like a troubadour with my old leather sack. I learned to escape the police on my unicycle. I got hungry like a wolf; I learned how to control my life.”
But it is on the high wire that Philippe has concentrated his most important ambitions. In 1973, two years after the Notre-Dame walk, he did another renegade performance in Sydney, Australia: stretching his wire between the northern pylons of the Harbour Bridge, the largest steel arch bridge in the world. Following the World Trade Center walk in 1974, he crossed the Great Falls of Paterson, New Jersey; appeared on television for a walk between the spires of the cathedral in Laon, France; and also crossed the Superdome in New Orleans before 80,000 people. This last performance took place just nine months after a 40ft fall from an inclined wire, from which he suffered several broken ribs, a collapsed lung, a shattered hip and a smashed pancreas.
Until two months ago, I had never seen Philippe perform on the high wire outdoors. I finally got my chance during the inauguration ceremony at the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York. After a hiatus of several decades, construction was about to begin again on the cathedral’s tower. As a kind of homage to the wire walkers of the Middle Ages – the joglar from the period of the great French cathedrals – Philippe had conceived the idea of stretching a steel cable from the top of a tall apartment building on Amsterdam Avenue to the top of the cathedral across the street – an inclined walk of several hundred yards. He would go from one end to the other and then present the bishop of New York with a silver trowel, which would be used to lay the symbolic first stone of the tower.
The preliminary speeches lasted a long time. One after the other, dignitaries got up and spoke about the cathedral and the historic moment that was about to take place. Clergymen, city officials, former secretary of state Cyrus Vance – all of them made speeches. A large crowd had gathered in the street, mostly schoolchildren and neighbourhood people, and it was clear that the majority of them had come to see Philippe. As the speeches droned on, there was a good deal of talking and restlessness in the crowd. The late September weather was threatening: a raw, pale grey sky; the wind beginning to rise; rain clouds gathering in the distance.
Fortunately, the weather held, and at last Philippe’s turn came. The area below the cable had to be cleared of people, which meant that those who a moment before had held centre stage were now pushed to the side with the rest of us. The democracy of it pleased me. By chance, I found myself standing shoulder to shoulder with Cyrus Vance on the steps of the cathedral. I, in my beat-up leather jacket, and he in his impeccable blue suit. But that didn’t seem to matter. He was just as excited as I was. We talked about the high wire and the dangers Philippe would have to face. He seemed to be genuinely in awe of the whole thing and kept looking up at the wire – as I did, as did the hundreds of children around us. It was then that I understood the most important aspect of the high wire: it reduces us all to our common humanity. A secretary of state, a poet, a child: we became equal in one another’s eyes, and therefore a part of one another.
A brass band played a Renaissance fanfare from some invisible place behind the cathedral façade, and Philippe emerged from the roof of the building on the other side of the street. He was dressed in a white satin medieval costume, the silver trowel hanging from a sash at his side. He saluted the crowd with a graceful, bravura gesture, took hold of his balancing pole firmly in his two hands, and began his slow ascent along the wire. Step by step, I felt myself walking up there with him, and gradually those heights seemed to become habitable, human, filled with happiness. He slid down to one knee and acknowledged the crowd again; he balanced on one foot; he moved deliberately and majestically, exuding confidence. Then, suddenly, he came to a spot on the wire far enough away from his starting point that my eyes lost contact with all surrounding references: the apartment building, the street, the other people. He was almost directly overhead now, and as I leaned backward to take in the spectacle, I could see no more than the wire, Philippe, and the sky. There was nothing else. A white body against a nearly white sky, as if free. The purity of that image burned itself into my mind and is still there today, wholly present.
From beginning to end, not once did I think he might fall. Risk, fear of death, catastrophe: these were not part of the performance. Philippe had assumed full responsibility for what he was doing, and I sensed that nothing could possibly shake that resolve. High-wire walking is not an art of death but an art of life – and life lived to the very extreme of life. Which is to say, life that does not hide from death but stares it directly in the face. Each time he sets foot on the wire, Philippe takes hold of that life and lives it in all its exhilarating immediacy, in all its heroic, high-stepping joy.
May he live to be 100.
This is an edited extract from Paul Auster’s 1982 introduction to On the High Wire by Philippe Petit, reissued this month by W&N at £9.99. Petit celebrated his 70th birthday in August