Carnegie’s top steelmen were share-owning partners—forty of them—most of whom had worked their way up from the blast furnaces, smelters, and rolling mills. When J. P. Morgan bought the company he called U.S. Steel, these forty split the rest of the take, and became instant millionaires. One went to a barber on Penn Avenue for his first shampoo; the barber reported that the washing “brought out two ounces of fine Mesabi ore and a scattering of slag and cinders.”
Carnegie gave over $40 million to build 2,509 libraries. All the early libraries had graven over their doors: LET THERE BE LIGHT.
But a steelworker, speaking for many, told an interviewer, “We didn’t want him to build a library for us, we would rather have had higher wages.” At that time steelworkers worked twelve-hour shifts on floors so hot they had to nail wooden platforms under their shoes. Every two weeks they toiled an inhuman twenty-four-hour shift, and then they got their sole day off. The best housing they could afford was crowded and filthy. Most died in their forties or earlier, from accidents or disease. Workers’ lives were almost unbearable in Düsseldorf then, too, and in Lisle, and Birmingham, and Ghent. It was the Gilded Age.
While Carnegie was visiting Scotland in 1892, his man Henry Clay Frick had loosed three hundred hired guns—Pinkertons—on unarmed strikers and their families at the Homestead plant up the river, strikers who subsequently beat the daylights out of Pinkertons with their fists. Frick then called in the entire state militia, eight thousand strong, whose armed occupation of the Homestead plant not only broke the strike but also killed all unions in the steel industry nationwide until 1936.
Pittsburgh’s astounding wealth came from iron and steel, and also from aluminum, glass, coke, electricity, copper, natural gas—and the banking and transportation industries that put up the money and moved the goods. Some of the oldest Scotch-Irish and German families in Pittsburgh did well, too, like the sons of Scotch-Irish Judge Mellon. Andrew Mellon, a banker, invested in aluminum when the industry consisted of a twenty-two-year-old Oberlin College graduate who made it in his family’s woodshed. He also invested in coke, iron, steel, and oil. When he was named Secretary of the Treasury, quiet Andrew Mellon was one of three Americans who had ever amassed a billion dollars. (Carnegie’s strategy was different; he followed the immortal dictum: “Put all your eggs in the one basket and—watch that basket.”)
By the turn of the century, Pittsburgh had the highest death rate in the United States. That was the year before Carnegie sold his steel company. Typhoid fever epidemics recurred, because Pittsburgh’s council members wouldn’t filter the drinking water; they disliked public spending. Besides, a water system would mean a dam, and a dam would yield cheap hydroelectric power, so the power companies would buy less coal; coal-company owners and their bankers didn’t want any dams. Pittsburgh epidemics were so bad that boatmen on the Ohio River wouldn’t handle Pittsburgh money, for fear of contagion.
While Carnegie was unburdening himself publicly of his millions, many people were moved, understandably, to write him letters. His friend Mark Twain wrote him one such: “You seem to be in prosperity. Could you lend an admirer a dollar & a half to buy a hymn book with? God will bless you. I feel it. I know it…. P.S. Don’t send the hymn-book, send the money.”
Among Andrew Carnegie’s benefactions was Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute, with its school (Carnegie Tech), library, museum of natural history, music hall, and art gallery. “This is my monument,” he said. By the time he died, it occupied twenty-five acres.
It was a great town to grow up in, Pittsburgh. With one thousand other Pittsburgh schoolchildren, I attended free art classes in Carnegie Music Hall every Saturday morning for four years. Every week, seven or eight chosen kids reproduced their last week’s drawings in thick chalks at enormous easels on stage in front of the thousand other kids. After class, everyone scattered; I roamed the enormous building.
Under one roof were the music hall, library, art museum, and natural history museum. Late in the afternoon, after the other kids were all gone, I liked to draw hours-long pencil studies of the chilly marble sculptures in the great hall of classical sculpture. I sat on one man’s plinth and drew the next man over—until, during the course of one winter, I had worked my way around the great hall. From these sculptures I learned a great deal about the human leg and not much about the neck, which I could hardly see. I ate a basement-cafeteria lunch and wandered the fabulous building. The natural history museum dominated it.
I felt I was most myself here, here in the churchlike dark lighted by painted dioramas in which tiny shaggy buffalo grazed as far as the eye could see on an enormous prairie I could span with my arms. I could lose myself here, here in the cavernous vault with the shadow of a tyrannosaurus skeleton spread looming all over the domed ceiling, the skeleton shadow enlarged the size of the Milky Way, each bone a dark star.
There was a Van de Graaff generator; you could make a bright crack of lightning strike it from a rod. From a vaulted ceiling hung a cracked wooden skiff—the soul boat of Sesostris III, which Carnegie had picked up in Egypt. Upstairs there were stuffed songbirds in drawers, and empty, faded birdskins in drawers, drab as old handkerchiefs. There were the world’s insects on pins and needles; their legs hung down, utterly dead. There were big glass cases you could walk around, in which various motionless American Indians made baskets, started fires, embroidered moccasins, painted pots, chipped spearheads, carried papooses, smoked pipes, drew bows, and skinned rabbits, all of them wearing soft and pale doeskin clothing. The Indians looked stern, even the children, and had bright-red skin. I never thought to draw them; they weren’t sculptures.
Sometimes I climbed the broad marble stairs to the art gallery. Carnegie’s plans for the art gallery had gone somewhat awry—gang agley—because its first curator was a Scotch-Irish Pittsburgher whose rearing had made it painful for him to spend money. He rarely acquired anything that cost over twenty-five dollars, and liked to buy wee drawings, almost any drawings, in bargain batches, “2 for $10” “3 for $20.” By my day, things had improved enormously, and the gallery would buy even large Abstract Expressionist canvases if the artists were guaranteed famous enough. Our school hauled us off to the art gallery once a year for the International Exhibition, but I rarely visited it on my Saturdays in the building, except when Man Walking was there.
Carnegie set up the International Exhibition in 1896 to bring contemporary art from all over the world each year to the art museum. Artists competed for a prize, and the museum’s curators could buy what they liked, if they felt they could afford it, or if they liked any of it. In 1961, Giacometti’s sculpture Man Walking won the International. I was sixteen. Everything I knew outside the museum was alien to me, then and for the next few years until I left home.
I saw the sculpture: a wiry, thin person, long legs in full stride, thrust his small, mute head forward into the empty air. Six feet tall, bronze. I read about the sculpture every time I opened the paper; I saw its picture; I climbed the marble stairs alone to look at it again and again. To see Man Walking, I walked past abstract canvases by Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Adolph Gottlieb…. I stopped and looked at their paintings. At school I began to draw abstract forms in rectangles and squares. But more often, then and for many years, I drew what I thought of as the perfect person, whose form matched his inner life, and whose name was, Indian style, Man Walking.
I saw a stilled figure in a swirl of invisible motion. I saw a touchy man moving through a still void. Here was the thinker in the world—but there was no world, only the abyss through which he walked. Man Walking was pure consciousness made poignant: a soul without a culture, absolutely alone, without even a time, without people, speech, books, tools, work, or even clothes. He knew he was walking, here. He knew he was feeling himself walk; he knew he was walking fast and thinking slowly, not forming conclusions, not looking for anything. He himself was barely there. He was in spirit and in form a dissected nerve. He looked freshly made of clay by God, visib
ly pinched by sure fingertips. He looked like Adam depressed, as if there were no world. He looked like Ahasuerus, condemned to wander without hope. His blind gaze faced the vanishing point.
Man Walking was so skinny his inner life was his outer life; it had nowhere else to go. The point where his head met his spine was the point where spirit met matter. The sculptor’s soul floated to his fingertips; I met him there, on Man Walking’s skin.
I drew Man Walking in his normal stalking pose and, later, dancing with his arms in the air. What if I fell in love with a man, and he took off his shirt, and I saw he was Man Walking, made of bronze, with Giacometti’s thumbprints on him? Well then, I would love him more, for I knew him well; I would hold, if he let me, his twisty head.
Week after week, year after year, after art class I walked the vast museum, and lost myself in the arts, or the sciences. Scientists, it seemed to me as I read the labels on display cases (bivalves, univalves; ungulates, lagomorphs), were collectors and sorters, as I had been. They noticed the things that engaged the curious mind: the way the world develops and divides, colony and polyp, population and tissue, ridge and crystal. Artists, for their part, noticed the things that engaged the mind’s private and idiosyncratic interior, that area where the life of the senses mingles with the life of the spirit: the shattering of light into color, and the way it shades off round a bend. The humble attention painters gave to the shadow of a stalk, or the reflected sheen under a chin, or the lapping layers of strong strokes, included and extended the scientists’ vision of each least thing as unendingly interesting. But artists laid down the vision in the form of beauty bare—Man Walking—radiant and fierce, inexplicable, and without the math.
It all got noticed: the horse’s shoulders pumping; sunlight warping the air over a hot field; the way leaves turn color, brightly, cell by cell; and even the splitting, half-resigned and half-astonished feeling you have when you notice you are walking on earth for a while now—set down for a spell—in this particular time for no particular reason, here.
AS A CHILD I READ HOPING TO LEARN everything, so I could be like my father. I hoped to combine my father’s grasp of information and reasoning with my mother’s will and vitality. But the books were leading me away. They would propel me right out of Pittsburgh altogether, so I could fashion a life among books somewhere else. So the Midwest nourishes us (Pittsburgh is the Midwest’s eastern edge) and presents us with the spectacle of a land and a people completed and certain. And so we run to our bedrooms and read in a fever, and love the big hardwood trees outside the windows, and the terrible Midwest summers, and the terrible Midwest winters, and the forested river valleys with the blue Appalachian Mountains to the east of us and the broad great plains to the west. And so we leave it sorrowfully, having grown strong and restless by opposing with all our will and mind and muscle its simple, loving, single will for us: that we stay, that we stay and find a place among its familiar possibilities. Mother knew we would go; she encouraged us.
I had awakened again, awakened from my drawing and reading, from my exhilarating game playing, from my intense collecting and experimenting, and my cheerful friendships, to see on every side of me a furious procession of which I had been entirely unaware. A procession of fast-talking, keen-eyed, high-stepping, well-dressed men and women of all ages had apparently hoisted me, or shanghaied me, some time ago, and were bearing me breathless along I knew not where. This was the startling world in which I found that I had been living all along. Packed into the procession, I pedaled to keep up, but my feet only rarely hit the ground.
The pace of school life quickened, its bounds tightened, and a new kind of girl emerged from the old. The old-style girl was obedient and tidy. The new-style girl was witty and casual. It was a small school, twenty in a class. We all knew who mattered, not only in our class but in the whole school. The teachers knew, too.
In summer we girls commonly greeted each other, after a perfunctory hello, by extending our forearms side by side to compare tans. We were blond, we were tan, our teeth were white and straightened, our legs were brown and depilated, our blue eyes glittered pale in our dark faces; we laughed; we shuffled the cards fast and dealt four hands. It was not for me. I hated it so passionately I thought my shoulders and arms, swinging at the world, would split off from my body like loose spinning blades, and fly wild and slice everyone up. With all my heart, sometimes, I longed for the fabled Lower East Side of Manhattan, for Brooklyn, for the Bronx, where the thoughtful and feeling people in books grew up on porch stoops among seamstress intellectuals. There I belonged if anywhere, there where the book people were—recent Jewish immigrants, everybody deep every livelong minute. I could just see them, sitting there feeling deeply. Here, instead, I saw polished fingernails clicking, rings flashing, gold bangle bracelets banging and ringing together as sixteen-year-old girls like me pushed their cuticles back, as they ran combs through their just-washed, just-cut, just-set hair, as they lighted Marlboros with hard snaps of heavy lighters, and talked about other girls or hair. It never crossed my mind that you can’t guess people’s lives from their chatter.
This was the known world. Women volunteered, organized the households, and reared the kids; they kept the traditions, and taught by example a dozen kinds of love. Mother polished the brass, wiped the ashtrays, stood barefoot on the couch to hang a picture. Margaret Butler washed the windows, which seemed to yelp. Mother dusted and polished the big philodendrons, tenderly, leaf by leaf, as if she were washing babies’ faces. Margaret came sighing down the stairs with an armful of laundry or wastebaskets. Mother inspected the linens for a party; she fetched from a closet the folding felted boards she laid over the table. Margaret turned on the vacuum cleaner again. Mother and Margaret changed the sheets and pillowcases.
Then Margaret left. I had taken by then to following her from room to room, trying to get her to spill the beans about being black; she kept moving. Nothing changed. Mother wiped the stove; she ran the household with her back to it. You heard a staccato in her voice, and saw the firm force of her elbow, as she pressed hard on a dried tan dot of bean soup, and finally took a fingernail to it, while quizzing Amy about a car pool to dancing school, and me about a ride back from a game. No page of any book described housework, and no one mentioned it; it didn’t exist. There was no such thing.
A woman at our country club, a prominent figure at our church, whose daughters went to Ellis, never washed her face all summer, to preserve her tan. We rarely saw the pale men at all; they were off pulling down the money on which the whole scene floated. Most men came home exhausted in their gray suits to scantily clad women smelling of Bain de Soleil, and do-nothing tanned kids in Madras shorts.
There was real beauty to the old idea of living and dying where you were born. You could hold a place in a kind of eternity. Your grandparents took you out to dinner Sunday nights at the country club, and you could take your own grandchildren there when that time came: more little towheads, as squint-eyed and bony-legged and Scotch-Irish as hillbillies. And those grandchildren, like figures in a reel endlessly unreeling, would partake of the same timeless, hushed, muffled sensations.
They would join the buffet line on Sunday nights in winter at the country club. I remember: the club lounges before dinner dimly lighted and opulent like the church; the wool rugs absorbing footsteps; the lined damask curtains lapping thickly across tall, leaded-glass windows. The adults drank old-fashioneds. The fresh-haired children subsisted on bourbon-soaked maraschino cherries, orange slices, and ice cubes. They roved the long club corridors in slippery shoes; they opened closet doors, tried to get outside, laughed so hard they spit their ice cubes, and made sufficient commotion to rouse the adults to dinner. In the big dining room, layers of fine old unstarched linen draped the tables as thickly as hospital beds. Heavy-bottomed glasses sank into the table-cloths soundlessly.
And sempiternal too were the summer dinners at the country club, the sun-shocked people somnambulistic as angels. The children’s g
randchildren could see it. Space and light multiplied the club rooms; the damask curtains were heaved back; the French doors now gave out onto a flagstone terrace overlooking the swimming pool, near the sixth hole. On the terrace, men and women drank frozen daiquiris, or the unvarying Scotch, and their crystal glasses clicked on the glass tabletops, and then stuck in pools of condensation as if held magnetically, so they had to skid the glasses across the screeching tabletops to the edges in order to raise them at all. The cast-iron chair legs, painted white, marked and chipped the old flagstones, and dug up the interstitial grass.
The dressed children on the terrace looked with longing down on the tanned and hilarious children below. The children below wouldn’t leave the pool, although it was seven-thirty; they knew no parent would actually shout at them from the flagstone terrace above. When these poolside children jumped in the water, the children on the terrace above could see their shimmering gray bodies against the blue pool. The water knit a fabric of light over their lively torsos and limbs, a loose gold chain mail. They looked like fish swimming in wide gold nets.
The children above were sunburnt, and their cotton dresses scraped their shoulders. The outsides of their skins felt hot, and the insides felt cold, and they tried to warm one arm with another. In summer, no one drank old-fashioneds, so there was nothing for children to eat till dinner.
This was the world we knew best—this, and Oma’s. Oma’s world was no likely alternative to ours; Oma had a chauffeur and her chauffeur had to drink from his own glass.
American Childhood Page 20
