by Clark Blaise
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 phras
ed 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.
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.”
Afterword
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.
Bibliography
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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