Authors: Clark Blaise
Time Lord (32 page)
Speed eroded traditional morality. (No wonder we call such women “fast.”) It’s hard to follow somebody who lags behind, whose values no longer apply. In Dreiser’s naturalistic universe, ruled by the swifter, the more powerful, the keener appetites, pleasure trumps comfort every time. That same awareness had been dramatized half a century earlier in a number of near-contemporaneous works, such as
Madame Bovary
(1857) and
The Scarlet Letter
(1850), and in the work of a host of English and American naturalists, memorably in Hardy, and almost hysterically in D. H. Lawrence. Female sexuality is present as an unwelcome guest in the later Henry James, and
The Waste Land
is a recoil from it and its associated shredding of culture, (“O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag— / It’s so elegant / So intelligent”). Eliot’s proud conversion (or retreat) to classicism, royalism, and Anglo-Catholicism was a renunciation of any place in a “rational” world, a search for refuge in something resembling the sentimental shreds of the “natural.”
THE GHOST OF SANDFORD FLEMING
Time goes, you say? Ah, no, alas, time stays; we go!
—
AUSTIN DOBSON
on Lorado Taft’s sculpture
The Fountain of Time
, Chicago
HERE IS MY OWN
eerie little time story.
In 1997, according to United Airlines, I circled the globe the equivalent of five times. I was fifty-seven years old, and director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Author recruitment, fund-raising, and literary festivals kept my bags packed and visas up to date. My wife, also a world-traveler, was a professor at Berkeley, two thousand miles away. She was born and raised in India, where we keep annual commitments. I was working on a second volume of autobiography. The first had concerned my father’s dark, “natural” turn-of-the-century rural Quebec. One summer night, I was thinking about my mother’s relatively sunny “rational” Manitoba childhood, her art-school years in England and pre-Nazi Germany, and her return to prewar Montreal, where she’d met and married my father. A classic natural/rational matchup of contemporary worlds, I might say today.
My memory focused on a day in 1947, in central Florida, soon
after our moving there. My father and I were standing on the art deco Main Street of Leesburg, next to our prewar Packard. He was dressed in his bright, Harry Truman-style Hawaiian shirt and high-waisted gabardines, stuffing pennies into a parking meter. I asked, “How can they be renting time?” And he’d answered, “They’re renting space. It just comes out time.”
A little later, the Ku Klux Klan staged its annual unmasked parade, leading to a baseball game. It must have been Confederate Memorial Day or Jeff Davis’s birthday, one of those muscular displays of white supremacy the so-called New South lately tries to repress. That summer night in Iowa in 1997, as I watched a televised baseball game and read over the day’s writing, two words, “time zones,” started flashing on the page, as though a cursor had stopped in front of them and frozen. “Our lives are time zones,” I’d written, “permitting the same things to be true and not-true, the same things to be here, and not-here.” And I wondered, idly, why do those words suddenly seem strange, where did a term like “time zone” originate? The encyclopedia informed me that time zones were born with the Prime Meridian Conference of 1884, in which standard time for the world was decided. The leader of the movement was a fifty-seven-year-old(!) Canadian (bingo!) named Sandford Fleming.
Time zone seemed a brilliant portmanteau. Time doesn’t have zones, I reasoned, but once we create them, all things are possible. Because 1997 was the fiftieth anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s breaking of baseball’s color bar, every baseball telecast that summer was full of Robinson footage, his steals of home, the clubhouse champagne, and the bright smiles of baseball’s first black player. And every time I saw them, I thought back jealously to
my
Jackie, the times I’d watched him play in Pittsburgh in the fifties, when he’d torn up the basepaths, shredding the Pirates, and then back to my first baseball game in Montreal, in 1946, a year before his major-league debut, when Jackie had played for Brooklyn’s top farm club, the Montreal Royals, and my father
had taken me out to old Delormier Downs to see him. And there was a third Jack, this time in 1963, when we’d actually touched and said a word or two. Just after Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, he was walking down the sidewalk, waving at well-wishers and shaking hands, a slow (Jackie, slow!), hunch-shouldered, white-haired Republican on the Democrats’ big day. I told him I’d seen his
real
debut, and in that hard, tinny voice of his he said, “Montreal. Nice town. I enjoyed playing there.”
Jack and me. I was, in one mystical moment that night in Iowa City, fifty-seven, six, seven, a teenager, and twenty-three. And now I was the only survivor. I abandoned the book I’d been writing, quit my job, and moved out to California to join my wife.
I HAVE PROFITED
from readings in the Fleming holdings of the National Archives of Canada, and newspaper files from the Decade of Time. The works of Eviatar Zerubavel, for anyone interested in the pervasiveness of time (and the perversity of its measurements), are highly recommended. Fleming, a meticulous archivist himself, kept copies of the proceedings of various international conferences, including those of the American Metrological Association and, in particular, the Prime Meridian Conference of 1884. It was with great reluctance that I pulled myself away from those boxes of files at the close of each long archival day in the spring and summer of 1998 in Ottawa. I profited as well from the generosity of Kathleen Ryan Hall of Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, for permission to study the notes of the late Professor Mario Creet.
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