Odd Jobs (17 page)

Heat expansion also figured in the construction of the Statue of Liberty nearly a century before. The outside of the one-hundred-fifty-one-foot-high statue consists of copper sheets three-thirty-seconds of an inch thick—a hair thicker than a penny—beaten into shape over wooden forms; its interior structure was designed by the great French engineer Gustave Eiffel. Eiffel concocted a gridwork of iron bars shaped to follow the convolutions of Frédéric Bartholdi’s statue; the armature bars were not directly attached to the copper skin but were fitted loosely into U-shaped saddles riveted to it, thus enabling the great sheets of shaped copper to expand and contract in the weather. In preparation for the renovation of the Statue in the 1980s, a team discovered that all 1,705 of these bars were frozen into place by corrosion; the replacement of 1,699 of them was one of the most painstaking and crucial, though unspectacular, aspects of the renovation, whose most prominent improvement was the de-electrification of the torch and a return to Bartholdi’s original concept of a gilded, reflective flame. The entire renovation, in passing, generated another monumental “most”: the scaffolding at no point touched the statue and was therefore the largest freestanding scaffolding ever built.

News stories about the heavily publicized restoration spoke of the pride and
esprit de corps
among the workmen. The quixotic actualization of these enormous symbols does seem to inspire the work crews. Our monuments generally have good safety records: the construction of the St. Louis Arch, calculated to cost the lives of thirteen workmen, in fact proved fatality-free, and the Mount Rushmore sculptures, though carved at a perilous height amid a number of mishaps, caused injuries but no deaths in their fourteen years of creation, from 1927 to 1941. Not the least accomplishment of Gutzon Borglum, the headstrong creator of the gigantic sculptures, was his uniting of a crew of mostly local South Dakota mine workers and roughnecks into an artistic instrument that, with dynamite and jackhammers, sensitively translated his vision to a granite mountaintop. One of the crew, Red Anderson, said shortly before his death thirty-six years after work stopped, “I think now that Rushmore has been ninety percent of my life.” Borglum himself devised the sling-seats that held the men secure as they drilled at the cliff-face. And Borglum,
who had previously worked on Stone Mountain near Atlanta and there used a photo-projector for his aborted bas-relief, invented for Mount Rushmore a boom-and-plumb-bob arrangement whereby points could be transferred, at the enlargement of an inch to a foot, from his three-dimensional models to the rugged volumes of the mountain. Studying photographs of the plaster models, one is struck by how much more aesthetically successful the actual full-scaled heads are, emerging in their giant sunstruck simplicity from the natural mass of white granite. The monument, because of Borglum’s death and the advent of World War II, was left uncompleted; Borglum’s last model calls for the four Presidents to be carved down to the hems of their coats, with Lincoln’s hand clutching his lapel. A comic effect of crowding might have been produced among the mountainous half-giants, where the bodiless but finished heads have a surreal dignity in their close placement and abstract union with the natural rock.

A happy providence, it may be, has watched over our foremost national monuments, stopping them short at a grand simplicity. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, we are surprised to learn, was first designed by Maya Lin with a row of toppling stone dominoes in front of the wall of names—an obstructing pun her Yale classmates persuaded her to eliminate. We are moved, often, by effects that can scarcely have been planned—the sheer loneliness, for example, of the Washington Monument on its bare knoll and the slight tilt of the round plaza of the United States Navy Memorial on Pennsylvania Avenue, a tilt that makes us feel we are on the deck of a ship with the statue, just a bit greater than life size, of the Lone Sailor and his duffle bag. This plaza, a map of the world carried out in two tones of granite, embodies a new breakthrough in stone cutting, a method of cutting an irregular line with a high-powered, computer-directed jet of water and silica slurry. Without this technique, which can slice two-inch granite a half-inch per minute on intricately curved cuts, the tightly fitting coastlines of the map could not have been carved. Advanced stoneworking techniques contributed as well to the emotional impact of the black granite tablets—imported from India, since all American granite was streaked with gray—that make up the Vietnam Veterans Memorial; the mirroring polish was imparted, in the final stage, by a felt buffer covered with tin oxide, which is finer than talc. The beauty and legibility of the lettering were finely calibrated; they are precisely thirty-eight thousandths of an inch deep, and were
grit-blasted from the front, giving a central valley that minimizes shadow, with a fine aluminum oxide.

The newest major American monument, the planned Astronauts’ Memorial in Florida, also employs highly polished granite—a mirror-finished sheet, fifty feet wide and forty high, which will reflect the sky while angled mirrors behind it shine sunlight through the dead astronauts’ names, which are perforated in the stone and filled with glass or a light-diffusing epoxy. The names—twelve men and two women have died so far in the space program—will thus appear to float in a reflected sky; the slab is mounted and motorized to track the sun through the day, and at night electric light will shine through the names. The emotional effect of this apparatus must wait upon its construction; in its depictions the memorial seems possibly too glitzy and tricky. Its designers claim that a technological venture warrants a technological memorial; but technology can outrace our aesthetic sense and trivialize perduring matter. We expect our monuments to be simple and still—emblems of permanence to which we bring the living, changing flowers of homage.

We expect monuments, too, to be low-maintenance and relatively immune to the erosions of time. In fact, nothing material is totally immune; even the giant faces of Mount Rushmore are constantly inspected for fissures and repaired. Rust and corrosion attack metal, frost and spalling attack stone, and vandalism and acid rain are on the rise. Frequent repairs of the Saratoga Battle Monument, a Gothicized obelisk erected over a century ago along the Hudson, cannot keep pace with the “structural distress” wrought by climatic dampness and cold. New York City, embarrassed by its plethora of ill-maintained monuments, has enlisted the private sector in an “Adopt a Monument” program. And there is a danger, even in our spacious capital city, of too many monuments; the long delay in building the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, though its funds have been already voted by Congress, shows a traditional American reluctance to monumentalize individuals. The severely simple horizontal monolith that Roosevelt himself designed to mark his grave at Hyde Park perhaps is already a perfect sufficiency. A monument needs space around it, and time as well. A clutter and proliferation of sacred symbols and sites is a sign of decadence in religion, including the secular religion of patriotism. A monument should be singular. It should be somewhat blank, like a battlefield long afterwards. Fate and happenstance have endowed this democracy with a constellation of remarkably
varied and aesthetically impressive representations of our national adventure, and this endowment should be enlarged with care.

W
ELL
, when the importance of something has to be proclaimed, it can’t be all that important. And certainly most of the people in the United States get along without reading fiction, and more and more magazines get along without printing it. Even
Esquire
, which used to run short stories as automatically as he-men smoked unfiltered cigarettes, has to whip itself up and cheer itself on to give us an issue like this one [its August 1984 Special Fiction Issue].

The old throwbacks still producing fiction should be grateful, and we are. It’s hard to believe that this fragile business ever had any muscle, but it did. In Gutenberg’s Gymnasium, Dickens and Balzac worked out on the high rings and the Brontë sisters did the backward flip in unison on the balance beam and Harriet Beecher Stowe bench-pressed more kilos than Herman Melville, while Flaubert and Mark Twain were just a double blur on the parallel bars and the bourgeoisie in the bleachers went wild. Even in the days of network radio, fiction put hair on Hemingway’s chest and gin in Fitzgerald’s glass and that far-off starry look in Faulkner’s eye, those days when the mules weren’t running. But after Hitler’s coonskin was nailed to the barn door and the boys came back to make babies and put on gray flannel suits, something went out of fiction. Those good folks who sat around in the kitchen near the wood stove reading about Mr. Tutt and Perry Mason in the
Saturday Evening Post
had slipped out the back door and bought oil burners and television sets, and the aura of the party being over was so pervasive that Norman Mailer tried to be a party all by himself. Saul Bellow kept winning the prizes but there was something effete and professorial about his appeal, compared with the way Sinclair Lewis and John Steinbeck had reached down and given Main Street a shake, and the way those two-dollar books of theirs had stood on the windowsills of every small-town piano teacher’s front parlor.

The Sixties were when the demise of fiction became something to crow about. Philip Roth told us that life in America had become so barbaric
and bizarre that no fiction could hold a candle to the grotesque truth. Truman Capote allowed as how he had invented a new kind of narrative treat, the non-fiction novel, that made the un-non kind as obsolete as hand-churned ice cream. Tom Wolfe (the younger) let us ineluctably know that his new journalism was zippier, grabbier, funnier, wilder, and truer-to-life than any old wistful bit of fiction published by, say, those tiny giants over at
The New Yorker
. Even in
The New Yorker
, as the old two-column departments died off and were replaced by learned specialists whose exhaustive poop overflowed the narrow columns like freshly singed popcorn, there was less space for fiction than there had been in the days of Bob Benchley or even the days of Nat Benchley. The revolution had little use for fiction: fiction was sublimation, it was Leavis and Trilling, it was graduate school; it was civilization and its discontents, it was the lonely crowd. Fiction was how you consoled yourself in the dark ages before love beads and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. A revolution sings songs and trashes chainstore windows; it does things in a bunch, and nothing is more antisocial and non-tribal than one individual sitting in a quiet room coding make-believe for another individual to decipher in a quiet room maybe tens of years and thousands of miles away.

Accordingly, the revolution left us rock music and co-ed dormitories but not much in the way of fiction. Who now remembers Marge Piercy’s
Dance the Eagle to Sleep
and Gurney Norman’s
Divine Right’s Trip
? I do, because I reviewed them. Otherwise, there were Pynchon and Kesey, who have subsequently tended to imitate the sound of one hand clapping. The post-revolutionary anticlimax, though, has not lacked for bards, beginning with Ann Beattie, who found the right filtered tone to let the lack of sunshine in, and who, young as she is, has played dearth mother to a vast fresh bevy of tender/tough female talents, such as Mary Robison, Laurie Colwin, Elizabeth Tallent, T. Gertler, Andrea Lee, Deborah Eisenberg, to name but a few. The young males aren’t quite so vivid, since, having made their entry splash, they tend to sink into full-time extra-literary employment or to sidestroke toward Hollywood, like John Sayles. But, however the generations take them, fiction’s magnificent opportunities, as demonstrated in the classics, abide.

Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet. Psychology and X-rays bring up some portentous shadows, and demographics and stroboscopic photography do some fine breakdowns, but for the full
parfum
and effluvia
of being human, for feathery ambiguity and rank facticity, for the air and iron, fire and spit of our daily mortal adventure there is nothing like fiction: it makes sociology look priggish, history problematical, the cinema two-dimensional, and
The National Enquirer
as silly as last week’s cereal box.

In fiction, everything that searchers for the important tend to leave out is left in, and what they would have in is left out. Stendhal had served devotedly under Napoleon and was one of the most lucid thinkers in Europe, but what Fabrizio, in
The Charterhouse of Parma
, makes of Waterloo is sheer confusion, highlighted by a running conversation with a
cantinière
steering her cartful of brandy through the thick of the battle. For Tolstoy, Napoleon was an excuse for the Moscow aristocrats to gossip and to push on with their spiritual searches; for Jane Austen, Napoleon was the reason the English countryside was so sparsely equipped with prospective husbands. Thus a vast historical presence refracts down into little lives which are precious only because they resemble our own. Kutuzov, Tolstoy’s splendidly fictionalized version of an actual Russian general, reads French romances while the steppes around him tremble at the approach of the superman, the master strategist, the general of supreme genius. Romances safeguard the importance of our sentiments amid the uncontrollable large-scale surges that constitute history; the inner lives of the obscure, as Erich Auerbach points out in his
Mimesis
, have been, from the New Testament on, the peculiar and precious burden of the Western narrative imagination.

The fiction writer is the ombudsman who argues our humble, dubious case in the halls of eternal record. Are defacation, tipsy bar babble, days of accumulating small defeats, and tired, compromised, smelly connubial love part of our existence? Then put them into literature alongside of Homer, says
Ulysses
. Has a life been ill-spent in snobbery, inaction, neurasthenia, and heartache? Then make that life into a verbal cathedral, says
Remembrance of Things Past
. Do pathetic and senseless-seeming murders appear daily in the newspapers? Then show the humble aspirations and good intentions and small missteps that inexorably lead to such ruin, say
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
and
An American Tragedy
. Feeling nervous, and as though things don’t quite add up? Then write like Virginia Woolf, and give us actuality in its sliding, luminous increments. Feeling worse than nervous, and certain that the world is a mess? Then write like Céline, and wake up the French language. Want a taste of Latin American backcountry blues? Try Graham Greene or Gabriel
García Márquez. Want to know what goes on in those tacky developments across the highway? Let Raymond Carver or Bobbie Ann Mason tell you. Curious about the condo life in the new, homogenized Deep South? Here comes Frederick Barthelme. No soul or locale is too humble to be the site of entertaining and instructive fiction. Indeed, all other things being equal, the rich and glamorous are
less
fertile ground than the poor and plain, and the dusty corners of the world of more real interest than its glittering, already sufficiently publicized centers.