Genoa (27 page)

Later, walking down the corridor, I heard the hollering and shrieking of the inmates as the hoses were turned on them—and I recognized, above the others, the vast, bellowing tones of Carl, urging out of his lungs, in defiance of the water streams, hollow vowels . . .

EIGHT

There was talk, in Carl’s case, of performing a frontal lobotomy—cutting into the frontothalamic fibers (the
white
matter) of the frontal lobes of the brain . . . but, in correspondence with the doctors, I was able to discourage it . . .

Instead, he was given different forms of convulsion therapy—electroshock when either violent or calm, and metrazol, when in deep melancholy . . .

I thought of Moby-Dick, and Pierre . . . of a man sinking, pulling down and over him his family, his parents and ancestors—the mutations of all evolution—

struggling convulsively, even in drowning, to re-form himself, to grow or discover a new center . . .

as an epileptic, or in syncope: to fight out of the wrong center and into the right,

or to the left of it . . .

and I thought of the doctors, with electronics and drugs—one remove from his own, self-determined spasms of epilepsy—trying to force Carl

to create a new source and origin of motion . . .

NINE

Right after the First World War, when Carl and I were both small children, my father, encouraged by the Federal Farm Loan Act of 1916, added heavily to his holdings, paying exorbitant figures, assuming large mortgages, for adjacent farm land. We already had more than we could manage . . . but he wouldn’t be stopped. In 1921, the bubble burst . . . our land dropped in value to less than half what we had paid for it, what we were committed to in mortgages. The prosperous Twenties, enjoyed by the rest of the nation, never existed for the farmer . . .

We were forced to sell—or, we thought at the time that we had sold. Father, in a state of despair and confusion, turned the affairs over to Mother, and she somehow managed, without telling the rest of us, to hang onto the house and enough of the land to be rented (the income to be applied against mortgages and debts) . . .

                                        
(clinging to the land, as Columbus struggled, and failed, to hold the Indes . . .

. . . so that today, after the years of poverty, I and my family may enjoy once again the old house—a rural island, all but swallowed into the city . . .

We left Indianapolis, moved to Terre Haute—“high ground”—center of the Indiana coal mines,

birthplace of Theodore Dreiser, and Eugene V. Debs . . .

Down payment was put on a mean, one-story house, in a crowded part of the city. Failing to scrape a living out of the earth as a farmer, Father wanted to dig under the surface: he took a job in the mines . . .

Work was part-time at first . . . we skimped, saved, and mended. In 1922, just when he went on full shift and the job became steady, the miners were called out on strike: Father was idle for nine bitter months . . .

Theodore Dreiser: born, Terre Haute, 1871, twenty years before Melville died, and a thousand miles deeper in the land . . . so that he was full grown by the time Melville put down his pen . . .

The house on Ninth Street in Terre Haute, where Paul and Sarah Dreiser lived, was infested with spirits and night-striders. On the night of Theodore’s birth, “Three maidens, brightly garbed, with flowers in their hair, danced into Sarah’s room and out again, to disappear seemingly into the air; and when afterward the boy himself proved perilously puny and sickly, inimical forces seemed to be in command.”

The family was poor . . . Theodore was sent home from school one winter, because it was too cold to be without shoes. He was ashamed to be seen carrying the laundry his mother took in, or stealing coal, lump by lump, from between the railroad tracks. When an old watchman died—a man he had known and who had been kind to him—he went to stare at the remains, saw the two coins on the eyelids, and reached for them . . .

and there was the father, Paul Dreiser: a transient, a failure, moving from house to house, one jump ahead of the mortgage . . .

I recall my own father: he had become interested in Socialism, talked about the life and work of Eugene Debs:

born, Terre Haute, 1855, when the ripples had scarcely ceased lapping, or the water become smooth, over the sinking of the Pequod . . . organized first industrial union (1893), led the Pullman strike (’94) . . . helped organize, 1900, the Socialist Party, polled nearly a million votes for President (1920), campaigning from prison against Harding, and, at the time of the coal strike—1922—was still living . . .

I recall Father, during the strike, sitting at the kitchen table (in different kitchens, of different houses, each meaner than the one before), his face bland, naive, confident—no longer the man who had worked twelve, fourteen hours a day on the farm, who, with his own main strength, had held the house together during a tornado—replying, now, to most any question with a remark about Debs: he had faith in Gene, old Gene would help us, would take care of us . . . while Mother got a meal for a family of four out of a loaf of stale bread (sold, for a few pennies, at the back door of the bakery), and a jar of the precious, guarded, hoarded tomatoes—treasured above all other possessions—that she had put up years back, on the farm . . .

young Dreiser, taking refuge from his troubles, would get up early in the morning, walk into the country with his dog, to study the spider webs and morning glories, the wrens and swallows . . .

                                        
(as, in the Gulf of Paria, Columbus observed the tiny oysters clinging to the mangrove roots: the oyster shells open, to catch from the leaves above, dewdrops that engender pearls . . .

The strike finally over, Father went back to work, his confidence in some measure restored. Mother had somehow managed to hold the family together . . .

and Dreiser, his mother dead, his father become impossible to live with, moved—1891, the year of Melville’s death—to Chicago, to the slums: the smell of sour beer, sewer gas, and uric acid . . .

took to writing, produced a novel: S
ISTER
C
ARRIE
, written during the years 1899 and 1900, and standing therefore at the entrance, the beginning of the 20th Century . . .

Theodore Dreiser: gate-keeper, janitor to the century, presiding over the entrance upon and beginning of things,

                                        
(and Debs, 1900, formed the Socialist

                                        
Party . . .

Dreiser had his troubles getting the thing published: signed a contract with a publisher—but the publisher’s wife objected strenuously (Carrie was not moral), and they pulled a fast one: published, according to contract (minimum edition)—and stored the books in the basement . . .

P
IERRE
, dealing with incest, was produced without question—but that was earlier, the pioneer days . . . by now—1900—Progress had become Serious Business: adulterous C
ARRIE
was stuffed in the cellar . . .

and in both books we have the spectacle of a man sacrificing and ruining himself . . . Pierre and Isabel, in the classic tragedy, end as suicides, whereas, in Dreiser’s work, Hurstwood vanishes a derelict, and Carrie is left idle, floating into the new century:

          
“In your rocking-chair, by your window, shall you dream such happiness as you may never feel.”

As the failure of M
OBY
-D
ICK
and P
IERRE
broke Melville’s health, so C
ARRIE
’s failure broke Dreiser’s. Living in New York, bankrupt, alone, he suffered hallucinations, his eyes itched and stung, his left eye became weaker, lost its power of accommodation . . . sitting or standing, he found himself compelled to turn around, to go in a circle, to bring himself into alignment with something . . . he nearly jumped into the East River . . .

                                        
(when he had first come to New York, first approached the ocean, he felt small and trivial . . .

                                        
(the vast ocean, into which Hart Crane leaped . . .

                                        
(where Melville had been so much at home . . .

          
S
ISTER
C
ARRIE
:
“She also marvelled at the whistles of the hundreds of vessels in the harbor—the long, low cries of the Sound
steamers and ferryboats when fog was on. The mere fact that these things spoke from the sea made them wonderful. She looked much at what she could see of the Hudson from her west windows and of the great city building up rapidly on either hand. It was much to ponder over . . .”

From Terre Haute, Father and Mother, Carl and I moved to Sullivan, where the job in the mines was steady, and the pay better . . .

                                        
(this being another of the towns where Dreiser had lived, as a child . . .

and my hand reaches across the desk for the clipping, yellowed with age, from the 1925 newspaper: Mother saved and passed it on to me, and I cannot bring myself to dispose of it:

FIFTY-ONE ARE

KILLED IN BIG

MINE EXPLOSION

Greatest Disaster in History

of Indiana

Coal Fields.

ALL TRAPPED ARE

BELIEVED KILLED

More Than Hundred Men

in Mine at the Time

of Blast.

(
BY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
)

SULLIVAN
, Ind., Feb. 20—Fifty-one men are believed to have been killed almost instantly today in an explosion of gas in the City Coal Company mine on the outskirts of the city, that wrought the greatest mine disaster in the history of the Indiana Coal Fields.

There were 121 miners in the mine at the time of the explosion which occurred in the third and fourth entries North where most of the men killed were at work.

                                        
(Melville, in the cave of Sybil: “What in God’s name were such places made for, & why? Surely man is a strange animal. Diving into the bowels of the earth rather than building up towards the sky. How clear an indication that he sought darkness . . .”