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Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance
From the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of BEWILDERMENT
Richard Powers
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eBook - ePub
Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance
From the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of BEWILDERMENT
Richard Powers
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About This Book
BY THE AUTHOR OF THE BOOKER PRIZE-SHORTLISTED BEWILDERMENT AND THE OVERSTORY
_____________________ Rosenthal Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters
Special Citation, PEN Hemingway Award
_____________________ In the spring of 1914, renowned German photographer August Sander takes a photograph of three young men on their way to a country dance. This haunting image, capturing the last moments of innocence on the brink of World War I, provides the central focus of Richard Powers' brilliant and compelling first novel. As the fate of the three farmers is chronicled, two contemporary stories unfold. In one, a chance museum-goer becomes obsessed with the photo; and in the other, a young technical writer in Boston discovers he has a personal connection to it. The three stories connect in an entirely surprising way, describing nothing less than the history of a century of brutality and progress. 'Nothing less than brilliant' John Updike
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Chapter One
I Outfit Myself for a Trip to Saint Ives
Cats, kits, sacks, wives: how many were going to St. Ives?
FOR A THIRD of a century, I got by nicely without Detroit. First off, I donât do well in cars and have never owned one. The smell of anything faintly resembling car seats gives me motion sickness. That alone had always ranked Motor City a solid third from bottom of American Cities Iâd Like to See. I always rely on scenery to deaden the inconvenience of travel, and âDetroit sceneryâ seemed as self-contradictory as âmovie actress,â âbenign cancer,â âgentlemen of the press,â or âAmerican Diplomacy.â For my entire conscious life Iâd successfully ignored the city. But one day two years ago, Detroit ambushed me before I could get out of its way.
The Early Riser out of Chicago dropped me off alongside Grand Trunk Station, a magnificent building baptized in marble but now lying buried in plywood. I lugged my bag-and-a-half into the terminal, a public semidarkness stinking of urine and history. Subpoenaed relatives met their arriving parties under the glow of a loudspeaker that issued familiar, reassuring tunes.
One hundred years ago, the Grand Trunk must have quickened pulses. Pillars of American Municipal balanced a fifty-foot vault on elaborate Corinthian capitals: America copying England copying France copying Rome copying the Greeks. A copper dome with ceramic floral trim bore the obligatory inscriptions from Cicero and Bill Taft. Now the stationâs opulence left it a mausoleum, empty except for the Early Riser executives who threaded the rotunda in single file.
I fell automatically into line, sensing the stationâs layout. The soaring ceiling seemed out of proportion to the size of the hall. When my eyes adjusted to Detroitâs industrial-grade light, I received a shock, the same shock I had felt as a child when, at a public swimming pool, I saw an old vet unstrap and remove his leg before taking a dip. The antique terminal had been similarly amputated: the corridor I walked down was not the stationâs length but only its width. The Grand Trunk had been sent packing: plywood sheets boarded off palatial wings and multiple gates, leaving only this reduced chicken run between a lone arrival platform and the main exit.
Transferring trains in Detroit was the cheapest if not the most expedient way of getting from Chicago to Boston. Drastically cut fares promoted a new route, the Technoliner, for the first month of its run. The line subsequently folded, the technolinees long ago forsaking Detroit for Houston and northern California, and even longer ago forsaking trains for planes. Another case of our railway being behind schedule. Nevertheless, I sank as low as Toledo to take advantage of the reduced fare.
When Iâm in money, I can leave half-eaten meals in restaurants along with the best. Iâve worked hard at overcoming a natural stinginess. But when Iâm out of moneyâa cyclical occurrence paralleling Americaâs boom/bust economy of the last centuryâI easily fall back on old habits. This trip found me once again short, having just spent a year in the Illinois backwoods on a small business project that did not pan out. âPan outâ comes, I assume, from the prospectorsâ days. Flash in the pan. I spent my early thirties in isolation, chasing flashes in the pan.
With my technical background, I knew that I could find work in Boston providing I could put down a security deposit on an efficiency and still have enough cash left over to dryclean my interview suit. My money margin, marginalia in this case, did not worry me so much as the immediate problem of how to spend the six hours between the Early Riser and the Technoliner in a city I had, until then, celebrated by avoiding. It was me against motion sickness in the city autos built.
But as sometimes happens when killing time, I would come across something in my brief Detroit layover that would kill not just six hours but the next year and more before I came to terms with it. Sifting the downtown for novelties that might deaden ten minutes, I did not imagine that the next ten months would find me obsessed with everything I could learn about Motor City and the fifth-grade farmer who put it on the map.
When I made my stopover, Detroit had already been undergoing a manufactured and heavily publicized rebirth for some time. The emblem of this new era, the Renaissance Center, may be the single most ambitious building project of recent times. Its five black towers outscale the rest of the city the way Chartres Cathedral dwarfs its surrounding town. Four cylinders flank a central, massive pillar, each hanging black glass over girders in disguised International Style.
But if the city were not already dead, would it need a rebirth? The name âRenaissance Centerâ resembles an ad campaign declaring Sudso âAll the cleaner youâll ever need,â or a restaurant assuring, âWhat we serve is really a meal.â And just as when telling an old widower that he looks well we mean he ought not to push his luck, the leading citizens of Detroit, in naming the Renaissance Center, implied that they would be pleased if the city could, at this point, break even.
The size and opulence of the center meant to attract tourists and conventioneers into double-A, self-contained luxury. The palace executed its purpose too well. It drew people (read money) up and away from the surrounding businesses, and because the towers were so self-sufficient a village, the people never came back out. The area surrounding the Renaissance Center showed the signs of a hasty evacuation and rout. Gravitating toward the towers, I passed row on row of brick, triple-decked residences standing vacant, their windows and doors broken open to reveal nothing inside.
I figured that the Renaissance Center (dubbed the Ren Cen by those who make a living truncating all words into monosyllables) would be good for a half hour. The inside was a contemporary version of the Grand Trunkâthe multileveled, involuted architecture that had delighted me as a boy of six, when I still believed in Tom Swift and urban renewal. I ordered a meal, reading the menu right to left, in a disk-shaped restaurant floating on a moat in the central tower, spinning, gradually but perceptibly, driven no doubt by a thousand Asian coolies chained to a mill-track on a hidden lower level.
My training in physics made the huge spinning plate seem an unintentional homage to the last, great empirical experiment of the nineteenth century. In 1887, the physicists Michelson and Morley set out to measure the absolute velocity of the earth through the ether field. The two scientists floated a gigantic slab on a sea of mercury, on the same scale and setup as the slab I now rode. They shone a beam of light through a prism in the center and back to mirrors on the perimeter, reasoning that light flowing in the direction of the ether stream would travel faster than light flowing upriver. But Michelson and Morley found no difference in light speeds, regardless of orientation. An international calamity followed in 1905, when Einstein, a Bern patent clerk with no reputation to lose, suggested preserving the velocity of light at the expense of the concept of absolute measure. The century was off to a quick jump out of the gate.
I came across an account of this experiment again much later, after pursuing the Henry Ford hoax through the infant century. But at the time, I drew the comparison casually. I waited until the disk completed one full rotation before disembarking. Since I donât smoke or drink and swear unconvincingly, symmetry is my only vice. Escaping from the Ren Cen, I walked counterclockwise for a few blocks to reverse my dizziness. I sat down on the nearest set of steps. A bum approached from across the piazza and requested a quarter for some suntan oil. I explained that I needed it to dryclean my interview suit and he left me in peace.
Nearby, a vintage fifties statue depicted a green, cupreous titan hefting a petite, state-of-the-art, Waspish couple in one hand and either a globe or an automobileâI canât remember whichâin the other: Spirit of Detroit. Two lawyers fist-fought over a parking space. A woman sold clods of earth out of a shoe box. A man with a ventriloquistâs dummy explained to an indifferent crowd that the present secretary of state was the Antichrist. A prominent clock harped on the fact that I was doing a rotten job marking time. If I was going to make it to the Technoliner intact, Iâd need better diversion.
I bused to the Detroit Institute of Arts. Now the finest of this centuryâs paintings will never make up for our concurrent botch of everything else. Art can only hope to be an anaesthetic, a placebo. The best artists know that patients always fake their symptoms and must be tricked into diagnosis before treatment can take place. The last thing I expected to find at the Institute was a mystery, a work of art demanding to be tracked down, a trail unfolding indefinitely, approximately, the way memory tries ârecoil,â or ârecommend,â or ârecord,â coming as close as ârecoup,â but never alighting on its real object, ârecover.â
The foyer of the Detroit museum opens onto yet another Grand Hall, a high-vaulted, Euro-sick, stone rectangle entirely unfit for displaying works of art. Rococo satyrs and curlicues alternate with heat-duct grills in a confused architectural legacy. In 1931, in the depths of the Depression, the Instituteâs Arts Commission, backed by Edsel Ford, asked the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera to use the room for a fresco commemorating the greatness of Detroit.
It was an odd marriage: Edsel Ford, whose father was the first among capitalists, in cahoots with Rivera, the notorious revolutionary who secured Trotskyâs political asylum in Mexico. Rivera, the Third World champion, praising the city whose chief icon is an enormous electric sign tallying new autos as they come off the assembly ramp. Diego, who once incorporated a wall fuse box into a mural, working in a room the gaudy copy of Bourbon splendor. But Detroit and Diego shared something critical: both were in love with machines.
The Institute put up ten thousand dollars of Edselâs cash, embarrassed to offer âthe only man now living who adequately represents the world we live inâwars, tumult, struggling peoplesâ such a meager sum. They suggested he limit his work to fifty square yards on each of the two larger walls, one hundred dollars per square yard, by some esoteric formula, considered fair for a man of Diegoâs stature. Thus the Fords, standing in for Michelangeloâs papal patrons, might have suggested the fellow not do the whole ceiling, but just a little bit above the altar. Rivera grew increasingly ambitious in guilty compensation for the gringosâ liberality. Edsel, finding out that Diego meant to cover all four walls, upped the ante to twenty-five thousand.
The Institute told Diego that they âwould be pleased if [he] could possibly find something out of the history of Detroit, or some motive suggesting the development of industry in this town.â They did not suspect that the huge man would cart his bulk through all the factories of Detroit, holing up for over three months at Fordâs, Chryslerâs, and Edisonâs plants, sketching thousands of preliminaries. Rather than appease the roomâs rococo anachronisms, he blitzed them with a vision swept up off the factory floor. And in the final work, the curlicues and satyrs go unnoticed, lost in Diegoâs mechanical vision.
Rivera worked behind a screen for two years, an hourly laborer painting sometimes sixteen hours a day, in a room whose glass roof created greenhouse temperatures of over 100 degrees. Journalists, glimpsing the work in progress, declared that the murals, far from praising the city, would âknock Detroitâs head off.â The unveiling provided plenty for all those who secretly love a thunderstorm. The crowd stood baffled by the revealed work, seeing no historical allusions or civic allegories, no lineup of leading Detroit power brokers. The public flocked all the way out to the museum to see what they were forced to see every other day of the week: ordinary, characterless people chained to endless, sensual machines.
Diego had committed the principal subversive act: he painted the spirit of Detroit in all its unretouched particulars. Strings of interchangeable human forms stroked the assembly lineâa sinuous, almost functional machineâstamping, welding, and finally producing the finished productâan auto engine. Men in asbestos suits and goggled gas masks metamorphosed into green insects. Languorous allegorical nudes mimicked the conveyor. The frescoed room showed the spirit of Detroit from a much closer distance than the comfortable, corporate copper titan I had passed on the street outside. Viewers at the unveiling found themselves inside Detroit, just as the mural-men crawled in, around, and over their creation, striking a mutually parasitic relationship with metal. Diego had painted a chapel to the ultimate social accomplishment, the assembly line, a self-reproducing work of art, precise, brilliant, and hard as steel.
Bishops and businessmen instantly mobilized to destroy the frescoes. It is not hard to read subversion and heresy into the average work of a personâs hands. The task becomes easier when the work is ambitious, joyful, and revolutionary. Riveraâs was a duck shoot. Even those who had not yet visited the museum found a garden variety of blasphemies in the work. People saw a ridiculous Saint Anthony tempted away from his foremanâs plans by an allegory nudeâs legs. Depression-sensitive capitalists saw in the figures communist-inspired proto-humans. A panel showing the inoculation of a child burlesqued the Nativity.
Diegoâs complimentâthat Detroit reveled in the vitality of the machine ageâbecame, in the mouths of its interpreters, an insult. Edsel, the people declared, had been taken in by a piece of dangerously populist propaganda. An organized outcry of radio broadcasts and written petitions culminated in the...