Time Lord (31 page)

As we already know, however, European railway history did not favor the larger, slower, American cars. But suddenly, a part of Europe opened up that was strangely like North America: the Balkan region was extensive, rugged, and relatively underpopulated.
Land was cheap, so there was no need to engineer the shortest and straightest route, which, given the mountainous terrain and its recalcitrant inhabitants, would have been prohibitively expensive. When a pair of return tickets between Paris and Istanbul cost the equivalent of a six months’ lease on a Mayfair house, and many of the passengers were bankers, arms dealers, casino habitués, and their consorts, so long as the champagne and caviar held out, what was the rush? American and European styles of speed and luxury, separate for fifty years, had merged. Europe now had American design and technology. They had adapted it, however, to a class system at perhaps its height of decay.

The Orient Express banished all notions of time and space. The languages of its staff changed with each new border crossing. Turkish effendi roamed the corridors, adept in every language, addressing the desires of every treasured passenger. The result of luxury wedded to speed on both continents was a new form of time reversal. Outside, it might be the wild prairie a thousand miles from civilization, or a Turkish-dominated Europe seething with rebellion, but inside it was a Chicago saloon or a five-star Paris hotel. After 1881 in America, Pullman cars boasted electric lights (still a rarity in most homes), cold champagne, and WCs with flushing toilets. After 1887 on both continents, the cars were totally electrified. The air was seasonally adjusted and kept circulating. Travelers could move across the continents under the same, or superior, conditions than those at home, bringing only the more benign forms of nature indoors. Just about the only thing that had not been interiorized was time itself.

THE VANDERBILT
of southeastern Europe, the major financier of eastward railway expansion, was one of those fabulous visionaries of the nineteenth century who casts a long shadow into the present era, the banker and philanthropist Baron Maurice de
Hirsch (or Moritz von Hirsch). One of de Hirsch’s undertakings of lasting significance to history was his scheme for Jewish resettlement, bringing entire shtetls from Russia and the Turkish provinces to the recently opened new lands in Saskatchewan, Argentina, and Brazil (opened as a result of universal railroad expansion). In bringing Western Europe to the East, and relieving intolerable conditions in the East with the freedom of the west, de Hirsch weighed profit against philanthropy much in the way of other mighty barons of industry, the Fords, Rockefellers, and Carnegies.

The baron was driven by a vision of continental unity even before the Russian and Turkish lands were thought of as being connected to Europe at all. He realized that railway expansion had to play the central role in any kind of unification. The negotiations between Turkey and Russia, France and England, Germany and Austria—as well as the attendant dangers posed by outlaws and revolutionaries across that tortured region—stretched on for twenty years, pushed and prodded by de Hirsch, with long recesses for wars and treaty negotiations.

The fifty-year process of moral rationalization from 1860 to 1910, the often flawed attempts to right some of the “natural” wrongs of history, as in the antislavery battle in the United States, the lifting of anti-Semitic restrictions in Central Europe, the national unifications of Germany and Italy, the breakup of Austria’s and Turkey’s Central European and Balkan provinces, are some of the political accompaniments to the long process of temporal standardization. Speed burst the imperfect welds of history. Unstable identities, as Schama has noted, were preyed upon by history. Except on the African continent and in parts of Asia, the rights of minority populations to express their cultural identities and to assert their political wills were at last recognized.

For the first time in two thousand years, thanks largely to a visionary banker who hailed from the fringes of accepted European society, and to an American industrialist whose labor practices
have earned him permanent disgrace (Pullman), a dream that had survived since the Romans, Alexander the Great, and the Holy Roman Empire had finally come to pass. By 1891,
wagons-lits
cars on regular trains, some on the baron’s lines, were available all the way from Lisbon, Madrid, and London to Moscow and St. Petersburg, by way of Paris and Vienna. Berlin remained suspicious of Russian penetration of its territory and did not participate until 1896. In 1898 luxury service was available as far east as Tomsk, in mid-Siberia. Railways had gradually unified the continent. Europe, ever so briefly, and ever so perilously, was one.

In sixty years, a generous human lifespan in the nineteenth century, locomotive technology evolved from Stephenson’s “Rocket” (1828), on which a passenger might be treated as tenderly as the lump of coal that propelled him, to the super-trains of the Orient Express. The fully evolved
wagons-lits
resembled nothing so much as Fleming’s 1863 vision of “floating hotels crossing the Atlantic,” like evenly spaced nodules pulled along a single track.

THERE IS FAR
more to the railroad revolution than technology or diplomacy. There is the question of morals—particularly, of sexuality. The combination of speed and luxury, with its resulting mobile society, inevitably calls to question the traditional proprieties. The mountebanks and reprobates on the Orient Express were legendary even in their own time; we’d recognize them today—they are not the story. The real story lies in the making of a new morality. Think of a short-haul, mid-American day train. No Pullman luxury. No one rich and famous, just those sturdy American archetypes, the traveling salesman and a farmer’s daughter.

In August 1889 a “bright, timid” eighteen-year-old, smalltown Wisconsin girl by the name of Caroline Meeber kissed her family goodbye, shed a tear, and boarded the afternoon train for
Chicago, where she intended to live with her married sister while seeking work in the city. It is one of the oldest American stories, one of endless
becoming
, leaving the closed-in town for the city, seeing a bit of life, finding a job, and probably a husband, where the opportunities were broader. Most of those stories, however, start (and often end) in that stifling small town, or in the dark and dangerous city. Very few pick up on the transition zone between town and city, the way Theodore Dreiser did in
Sister Carrie
, published in 1900.

Even before reaching Chicago, Carrie meets a glib-tongued traveling salesman, a “drummer,” by the name of Charlie Drouet. He gains her trust (trust being the only thing she has to give, having trusted everyone for eighteen years), and wheedles her sister’s Chicago address. Carrie works honorably for a few weeks as a seamstress, her eyes straining in the poor light, her back and legs aching. Her sister’s husband cleans cattle cars down at the stockyards, with predictable effects on his disposition and domestic behavior. She learns quickly enough that there is no honor in honest labor, and that women so employed yearn to be delivered from a life of brutal exploitation, even at the loss of their virtue. When Drouet reenters her life, she’s seen enough of her sister’s condition and is ready to leave. She becomes a kept woman, passes from man to man, rising each time ever higher on the social ladder, and eventually finding the niche that nineteenth-century society provided for canny and attractive young women. Her story was a scandal that had to be censored in its day.

By their lights, authorities were right to ban it, and the publisher did the decent thing by withdrawing it. Dreiser had taken a familiar backstreet story, easily dismissed as vulgar and distasteful, added a new ingredient, and made it relevant to every living room in the country. The ingredient he had added was
speed
. Just as Sherlock Holmes had identified possible suspects as “one of us,” so had Dreiser created a fallen young woman who looked,
sounded, and acted precisely like us, a healthy and confident girl from the edenic heartland, with supportive friends and family. She was no tubercular wraith from the slums of the city, as Stephen Crane had written in
Maggie
, her appetites had not been corrupted by bad genes, poverty, alcohol, or abuse. Carrie’s sin was knowing what she wanted, and what she had to bargain with, and how quickly she acted upon it. Her fall and subsequent rise, the surrender of virtue after the injustice of underpaid labor, came with a passive rapidity that was shocking.

Carrie is irresistible, not in the way of an attractive young woman, but irresistible as a force, like a locomotive at full throttle. Dreiser’s conviction that female sexuality is no different from male sexuality was an idea whose time had not yet come in America. But sex is only the lure. Where the critics have under-served him is in emphasizing Carrie’s sexuality, not Dreiser’s radical analysis of social instability that had come about as a result of speed, a change in the pace of change.

The avant-garde doesn’t always look shockingly new. Sometimes it lumbers around in earnest, sober, institutional prose. The new century in America was greeted by a revolutionary work that looked like, and sounded like (its critics charged), a lame, Midwestern imitation of Zola, or Thomas Hardy, slightly less didactic than Frank Norris or Upton Sinclair, nowhere as lyrical as Jack London or Stephen Crane.

In Dreiser’s naturalistic universe, two moral codes (like two velocities) cannot coexist. The stronger, however one defines it—the cruder, the hungrier, the more sexually satisfying or more life-affirming, or, in terms of this book, the more energetic, the faster—must always triumph. Much later in his career, in
An American Tragedy
, he opened on an even more explicit image of the same conflict: on a cold city street, a family of evangelicals peddle their piety in music and pamphlets, posing a moral challenge to indifferent urban values. One of those child-evangelists
grows up to murder his pregnant girlfriend.
It’s all about time
, about the clash between rationality and the natural world.

THEY’D ALWAYS
been out there in dirty jokes, but it had taken a train to bring the traveling salesman and the farmer’s daughter together in a serious novel. For Drouet, train time was frame time, part of a performance. His whole existence was defined on the move, in self-presentation. For Carrie, new perceptions of reality altered old perceptions of self. She was a different person the moment she stepped aboard, her upbringing now irrelevant, and the brimstone certainty of retribution as well. Even an eighteen-year-old farm girl could buy a train ticket to the nearest city, labor a few weeks, reach a decision (however instinctive) about personal behavior and conventional morality, and set out on a life of endless self-discovery.

What Dreiser perceived in 1900 was a fact of life that society did not (and American society still does not) want to face. It is the jolt from the friction and collisions of the daily energy flux, the speedup between cause and effect, the expectation of instant gratification and the technology to deliver it that brings on panic and social change. The ingredient that Dreiser had added to the novel was moral velocity, and a character with the instinctive ability to understand it and profit from it. It is ironic, but predictable, that a culture like America’s, so devoted to innovation, so proud of its impatience, so easily bored, is horrified to find that its core values (the remnants of the “natural” world) are continually under assault.
You can have speed, or you can have tradition, but you can’t have both
. Or, as Werner Heisenberg phrased it in the uncertainty principle, you can know position, or velocity, but you cannot know both.

For some, like Carrie, speed defined the new authority and undermined old inhibitions. To keep on top of events when the events themselves are whirling faster than the human mind can
comprehend required more work, more effort, more time, and less attention to tradition, or even to family, than ever before. What can tradition teach us, when everything is new? What respect is owed to outmoded thinking? The old ways of behaving, the proprieties that built the country, no longer applied. It’s easy to salute, in a business-school model, the energetic few who broke the bonds of class structure and rose to wealth and power by shrewd instinct and ruthless self-discipline, but we’re likely to underestimate the phenomenal balance it required, keeping atop the waves that swamped so many others. To be formed in such an era, and to survive it, even prosper under it, required a protean, assimilative nature, like Carrie’s.

It’s not that Carrie is nobler or coarser, or more or less intelligent, compassionate, generous, or inhibited than anyone else. She did not desert her parents or her sister; she simply moved away from them, at greater velocity. In her bland, unaffected way, she had mastered the change in the rate of change. The shocking thing about
Sister Carrie
is that our little sister started out more innocent and backward than any of the men who thought they possessed her, but somehow catapulted above and beyond them. They remained baffled by the changes in her, and in the collapse of their own fortunes. After all, they had given Carrie her start, they’d seen her first, and had laid their bets down on her. They felt somehow betrayed. And they didn’t even realize that she had not changed at all.

What Carrie discovered in herself is the worst news that middle-class American society could have imagined. In Dreiser’s words, she was a “pleasure-seeker.” Innocent eighteen-year-old farm girls from Wisconsin could be pleasure-seekers. By comparison, the men in her life, especially those from the consumer class, like Hurstwood, a saloon manager who gives up everything to possess her, are “comfort-seekers.” Society, as Freud sketched it, muffled the unruly libido, the pleasure principle, while elevating the reasonable, marketable, self-protective ego, precisely in
order to protect its Hurstwoods from its Carries. But speed upset the balance, brought the pleasure-taking and pleasure-giving predators out of the shadows into contact with the placid herds of polite society.