The Lying Stones of Marrakech (39 page)

“What I don't understand,” he said, “is why you ask where I've gone. I just did a Mr. Coffee commercial, I'm a spokesman for the Bowery Savings Bank and I haven't gone anywhere.”

W
HEN
M
EL
A
LLEN
, “V
OICE OF THE
Y
ANKEES,” DIED LAST
week,
*
I lost the man who ranked second only to my father for sheer volume of attention during my childhood. (My dad, by the way, was a Dodger fan and a Red Barber devotee.) As I considered the surprising depth of my sadness, I realized that I was mourning the extinction of a philosophy as much as the loss of a dear man—and I felt that most of the warm press commentary had missed the essence of Mel Allen's strength. The eulogies focused on his three signature phrases: his invariable opening line, “Hello there, everybody”; his perennial exclamation of astonishment, “How about that”; and his inevitable home run mantra, “It's going … going … gone.”

But I would characterize his immense appeal by two singular statements, one-off comments that I heard in passing moments during a distant childhood. These comments have stayed with me all my life, for integrity in one case, and for antic humor in the other.

One exemplifies the high road, the other an abyss, however charming. The comments could not be more different, but they embody, when taken together, something precious, something fragile, and something sadly lost when institutions become so large that the generic blandness of commercial immensity chokes off both spontaneity and originality. This phenomenon of modern life, by the way, is entirely general and not confined to broadcasting. In my own academic world, textbooks have become longer, duller, and entirely interchangeable for the same reason. Idiosyncratic works cannot sell sufficiendy, for curricula have been standardized (partly by the sameness of conventional textbooks)—and originality guarantees oblivion. Authors have become cogs in an expensive venture that includes, among others, the photo researcher, the slide maker, the teacher's guide preparer, and the publicist. The great texts of the past defined fields for generations because they promulgated the distinctive views of brilliant authors—Lyell's geology, or Marshall's economics—but modern writers are faceless servants of a commercial machine that shuns anything unique.

One day in 1952, as Mickey Mantle struggled in center field the year after Joe DiMaggio's retirement, many fans began to boo after Mickey struck out for the second time in a row. In the midst of his play-by-play broadcast, an infuriated Mel Allen leaned out of the press box and shouted at a particularly raucous fan: “Why are you booing him?” The fan shot back: “Because he's not as good as DiMaggio.” And Mel Allen busted a gut, delivering a ferocious dressing-down to the fan for his indecency in razzing an enormously talented but unformed twenty-year-old kid just because he could not yet replace the greatest player of the age.

Ballantine beer and White Owl cigars sponsored the Yankees in those years—and Mel never lost an opportunity for additional endorsement. Home runs, for example, became “Ballantine Blasts” or “White Owl Wallops,” depending on the sponsor of the inning. When a potential home run passed just to the wrong side of the foul pole, Allen would exclaim, “Why that ball was just foul by a bottle of Ballantine beer.” One day Mickey Mantle hit one that seemed destined for success, and Allen began his mantra: “It's going … going …” And then he stopped short as the ball went foul by no more than an inch or two. An astonished Allen exclaimed: “Why, I've never seen one miss by so litde. That ball was foul by no more than a botde of Bal—” And then he paused in. mid phrase, thought for a fraction of a moment, and exclaimed: “No, that ball was foul by the ash on a White Owl cigar!”

A man of grace and integrity; a shameless huckster of charming originality. But above all, a man who could only be his wonderful cornball self—Mel Allen, the singular, inimitable, human Voice of the Yankees. So take my two stories, titrate them to the optimal distinctness of lost individuality, and let us celebrate Shakespeare's judgment in
Julius Caesar:
“The elements so mix'd in him that Nature might stand up and say to the world, ‘This was a man!'”

*
This piece originally appeared in the
New York Times
on June 26, 1996.

C
HRISTOPHER
W
REN, THE LEADING ARCHITECT OF
L
ONDON'S
reconstruction after the great fire of 1666, lies buried beneath the floor of his most famous building, St. Paul's cathedral. No elaborate sarcophagus adorns the site. Instead, we find only the famous epitaph written by his son and now inscribed into the floor:
“si monu-mentum requiris, circumspice”
—if you are searching for his monument, look around. A tad grandiose perhaps, but I have never read a finer testimony to the central importance—one might even say sacred-ness—of actual places, rather than replicas, symbols, or other forms of vicarious resemblance.

An odd coincidence of professional life turned my thoughts to this most celebrated epitaph when, for the second time, I received an office in a spot laden with history, a place still redolent of ghosts of past events both central to our common culture and especially meaningful for my own life and choices.

In 1971, I spent an academic term as a visiting researcher at
Oxford University. I received a cranny of office space on the upper floor of the University Museum. As I set up my books, fossil snails, and microscope, I noticed a metal plaque affixed to the wall, informing me that this reconfigured space of shelves and cubicles had been, originally, the site of the most famous public confrontation in the early history of Darwinism. On this very spot, in 1860, just a few months after Darwin published
The Origin of Species
, T. H. Huxley had drawn his rhetorical sword, and soundly skewered the slick but superficial champion of creationism, Bishop “Soapy Sam” Wilberforce.

(As with most legends, the official version ranks as mere cardboard before a much more complicated and multifaceted truth. Wilberforce and Huxley did put on a splendid, and largely spontaneous, show—but no clear victor emerged from the scuffle, and Joseph Hooker, Darwin's other champion, made a much more effective reply to the bishop, however forgotten by history. See my essay on this debate, entileed “Knight Takes Bishop?” and published in an earlier volume of this series,
Bully for Brontosaurus.)

I can't claim that the lingering presence of these Victorian giants increased my resolve or improved my work, but I loved the sense of continuity vouchsafed to me by this happy circumstance. I even treasured the etymology—for
circumstance
means “standing around” (as Wren's
circumspice
means “looking around”), and here I stood, perhaps in the very spot where Huxley had said, at least according to legend, that he preferred an honest ape for an ancestor to a bishop who would distort a known truth for rhetorical advantage.

Not so long ago, I received a part-time appointment as visiting research professor of biology at New York University. I was given an office on the tenth floor of the Brown building on Washington Place, a nondescript early-twentieth-century structure now filled with laboratories and other academic spaces. As the dean took me on a casual tour of my new digs, he made a passing remark, intended as little more than “tour-guide patter,” but producing an electric effect upon his new tenant. Did I know, he asked, that this building had been the site of the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911, and that my office occupied a corner location on one of the affected floors—in fact, as I later discovered, right near the escape route used by many workers to safety on the roof above. The dean also told me that, each year on the March 25 anniversary of the fire, the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union still holds a ceremony at the site and lays wreaths to memorialize the 146 workers killed in the blaze.

If the debate between Huxley and Wilberforce defines a primary legend of my chosen profession, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire occupies an even more central
place in my larger view of life. I grew up in a family of Jewish immigrant garment workers, and this holocaust (in the literal meaning of a thorough sacrifice by burning) had set their views and helped to define their futures.

The shirtwaist—a collared blouse designed on the model of a man's shirt and worn above a separate skirt—had become the fashionable symbol of more independent women. The Triangle Shirtwaist Company, New York City's largest manufacturer of shirtwaists, occupied three floors (eighth through tenth) of the Asch Building (later bought by New York University and rechristened Brown, partly to blot out the infamy of association with the fire). The company employed some five hundred workers, nearly all young women who had recendy arrived either as Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe or as Catholics from Italy. Exits from the building, in addition to elevators, included only two small stairways and one absurdly inadequate fire escape. But the owners had violated no codes, both because general standards of regulation were then so weak, and because the structure was supposedly fireproof—as the framework proved to be (for the building, with my office, still stands), though inflammable walls and ceilings could not prevent an internal blaze on floors crammed full of garments and cuttings. The Triangle company was, in fact, a deathtrap—for fire hoses of the day could not pump above the sixth floor, while nets and blankets could not sustain the force of a human body jumping from greater heights.

The fire broke out at quitting time. Most workers managed to escape by the elevators, down one staircase (we shall come to the other staircase later), or by running up to the roof. But the flames trapped 146 employees, nearly all young women. About fifty workers met a hideous, if dramatic, end by jumping in terror from the ninth-floor windows, as a wall of fire advanced from behind. Firemen and bystanders begged them not to jump, and then tried to hold improvised nets of sheets and blankets. But these professionals and good Samaritans could not hold the nets against the force of fall, and many bodies plunged right through the flimsy fabrics onto the pavement below, or even through the “hollow sidewalks” made of opaque glass circles designed to transmit daylight to basements below, and still a major (and attractive) feature of my SoHo neighborhood. (These sidewalks carry prominent signs warning delivery trucks not to back in.) Not a single jumper survived, and the memory of these forced leaps to death remains the most searing image of America's prototypical sweatshop tragedy.

All defining events of history develop simplified legends as official versions—primarily, I suppose, because we commandeer such events for shorthand
moral instruction, and the complex messiness of actual truth always blurs the clarity of a pithy epigram. Thus, Huxley, representing the righteousness of scientific objectivity, must slay the dragon of ancient and unthinking dogma. The equally oversimplified legend of the Triangle fire holds that workers became trapped because management had locked all the exit doors to prevent pilfering, unscheduled breaks, or access to union organizers—leaving only the fire escape as a mode of exit. All five of my guidebooks to New York architecture tell this “official” version. My favorite book, for example, states: “Although the building was equipped with fire exits, the terrified workers discovered to their horror that the ninth-floor doors had been locked by supervisors. A single fire-escape was wholly inadequate for the crush of panic-stricken employees.”

These traditional (indeed, virtually “official”) legends may exaggerate for moral punch, but such interpretations emerge from a factual basis of greater ambiguity—and this reality, as we shall see in the Triangle case, often embodies a deeper and more important lesson. Huxley did argue with Wilberforce, after all, even if he secured no decisive victory, and Huxley did represent the side of the angels—the true angels of light and justice. And although many Triangle workers escaped by elevators and one staircase, another staircase (that might have saved nearly everyone else) was almost surely locked.

If Wilberforce and his minions had won, I might be a laborer, a linguist, or a lawyer today. But the Triangle fire might have blotted me out entirely. My grandmother arrived in America in 1910. On that fatal March day in 1911, she was working as a sixteen-year-old seamstress in a sweatshop—but, thank God, not for the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. My grandfather, at the same moment, was cutting cloth in yet another nearby factory.

These two utterly disparate stories—half a century and an ocean apart, and with maximal contrast between an industrial tragedy and an academic debate— might seem to embody the most unrelatable of items: the apples and oranges, or chalk and cheese (the British version), of our mottoes. Yet I feel that an intimate bond ties these two stories together in illustrating opposite poles of a central issue in the history of evolutionary theory: the application of Darwinian thought to the life and times of our own troubled species. I claim nothing beyond personal meaning—and certainly no rationale for boring anyone else— in the accidental location of my two offices in such sacred spots of history. But the emotion of a personal prod often dislodges a general theme well worth sharing.

The application of evolutionary theory to
Homo sapiens
has always troubled Western culture deeply—not for any reason that might be called scientific (for
humans are biological objects, and must therefore take their place with all other living creatures on the genealogical tree of life), but only as a consequence of ancient prejudices about human distinctiveness and unbridgeable superiority. Even Darwin tiptoed lightly across this subject when he wrote
The Origin of Species
in 1859 (though he plunged in later, in 1871, by publishing
The Descent of Man)
. The first edition of the
Origin
says little about
Homo sapiens
beyond a cryptic promise that “light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.” (Darwin became a bit bolder in later editions and ventured the following emendation: “Much light will be thrown …”)