Titans Rout Steelers, Second Time in Three Years, But Practice Scrimmage Leaves Titan Offense Injured

The late 19th century was not a good time to live and work in Pittsburgh. If you worked for Carnegie Steel, you were paid a pittance and the dangers on your job were literally playing with white-hot, molten, hellish fire. Unless you were Andrew Carnegie or his partner Henry Clay Frick.

In Meet You in Hell, Les Standiford has recreated the rise to wealth of these two titans of the steel industry, showing their business acumen and their lavish lifestyle and philanthropy starkly against the meager existence of their laborers.

Here is another story that illustrates that it is not just place, but more importantly time, that indelibly marks the main characters, providing an alignment of fate and opportunity. Their lives coincided with the rise of Industrialism. They were fortuitous to live in a region of the country, recovering from the Civil War, where raw materials, river and rail transportation, and burgeoning ranks of East European immigrants came together to make Pittsburgh the engine of growth.

Both were essentially self-taught and self-made men, the remnant of the Puritan hard work ethic with its corollary of entitlement to relish its rewards. While both espoused a philosophy of rags to riches achievement, neither created a climate to encourage or mentor others. To them, it was survival of the fittest and the weaker be exploited.

This theme is expressed through three events: first, the Johnstown flood of 1889. I never realized this flood was anything other than a natural disaster. Standiford clearly outlined the contribution of a private hunting club used by both Carnegie and Frick and other elites and their lack of maintenance and upkeep on the dam holding back an aged reservoir. None of these owners were ever found liable. The second, the strike in 1892 at the Homestead mill predated the worst of America's labor unrest. Both Carnegie and Frick intended to burst the union, and succeeded after a lock-out of almost 150 days, during which both armed Pinkerton guards and the Pennsylvania State militia were called in to intervene. The last incident is when Carnegie turned on Frick to force him out of Carnegie Steel and Frick Coke, its subsidiary supplier of fuel for the furnaces. The titans of industry lost only when they attacked each other. But the payout for selling the company to J. P. Morgan to create U. S. Steel out of the ashes of this fiery feud gave them both phoenix-like reincarnations as benefactors of culture, art and higher education.

I got more of a sense of time from Meet You in Hell than a feeling for Western Pennsylvania. I sensed more clearly the journey through the fifty states is time travel as well as a trip over blue highways. The book did not attempt to show the monstrosity of the mills, their effects on the environment or health of the population. It did not portray scenery or community other than as an extension of the furnace -- as a place to recoup briefly before returning for another twelve hour shift. Missing is the alchemy of making a life instead of a legacy, aspiring to an eternal flame. The only fires left around Pittsburgh are not producing steel but are the inextinguishable consumption of abandoned coal mines below the decimated small surrounding towns.

Archeology: Digging Underneath Ohio Cities

Now that I've finished reading the collection of vignettes that is Winesburg, Ohio, I can better see its faint connection to Knockemstiff. And it is a connection of place.

Sherwood Anderson wrote Winesburg in 1919, and he finds his personal expression in the character George Willard, the man-child newspaper reporter in a village so small it could fit on a mantel as Christmas decorations.

Three things struck me, literary-wise, in the small volume I read that was issued in 1958 as part of the Viking Portable Library series. First, a book that offers a map of the area in which the story takes place does the reader's imagination a disservice. When the face-to-face book club read Song Yet Sung this winter, several members thought the story would have been easier to follow if the author had included a map. At the time, I thought so as well. Thinking back now, the undeveloped primitive flood plains of the Maryland shore convey as sense of fluidity and danger that echoes the flux of the society in which the characters struggle. In the case of Winesburg, the place comes across small and rigid when the characters walk the grid of the town and all townsfolk have an assigned task without duplication: one grocer, druggist, doctor, banker, minister. Winesburg is self-contained and comfortable with a daily rhythm of the train schedule and a yearly cycle wholly agarian. The map states the obvious: you can't get lost in Winesburg as long as you know where you belong in it.

Second, a bad introduction is worse than a bad review. Here someone named Malcolm Cowley writes as though he is conducting a comparative literature lecture in mid-American novels. He points out all of Anderson's flaws, from shifts in verb tenses, to personality quirks ending in the breakup of friendships and mentoring advice with several contemporary authors. (It would be like an introduction to the Wright stories emphasizing how below code the wiring and heating systems were.) He faults Anderson's writing as lacking structure and development, saying his stories are set in the moment, like "a flash of lightning that revealed a life without changing it." But then goes on to say this is exactly what works for Winesburg, redeeming itself with the incorporation of the reflective three final chapters.

Finally, Anderson himself introduced the stories with a chapter called "the Book of the Grotesque." (Little could he imagine the scary people in Knockemstiff.) Nevertheless, he protests too much. The townsfolk are not dangerous, deformed, spiteful or in trouble with the law. Their fantasies and motives, when disclosed, are the stuff of human foibles not deviant mental health or perversions. If Anderson recalls the people from his hometown (Clyde, Ohio) as specters in his dreams, they are ghostly, not fleshed out fully, and silent.

And so, Winesburg itself is a phantom, another ghost town, not caused by chronic rust-belt unemployment like Knockemstiff with its citizen-zombies zonked out of their mind with illegal drugs, but simply by the passage of time and the inevitable need of a new American generation to transplant itself when it has become root-bound. The book is nostalgic, a perfect discourse by someone who still wonders was it is upbringing that made him the way he grew up to be.

Just a Better Story Teller -- Wisconsin Take Two

The Women is T. C. Boyle's latest novel and it is a variation on the story that the Slackers selected for Wisconsin, Loving Frank, about Frank Lloyd Wright and his mistress Mamah Cheney, for whom he built Taliesin. That novel, as my review of May 4 noted, is more a delving into the motivation, anxiety and self-articulation of Mamah than it is a portrait of an architect and his influence on what parts of America came to look like and value.

Boyle's rendition is more dimensionalized. Kitty, the first wife, and Anna, his mother, are portrayed similarly as in Horan's book. New perspectives are introduced that emphasize other angles of Wright's personality: Miriam, the poseur and morphine addict, who seduced him with solace after Mamah's death, and Olga, his last wife, who finally makes his house more of a home.

After reading the second novel, Wright's architectural style became clearer to me, yet more symbolic, representing an articulation of his personal traits and needs. He wanted to create comfort, a retreat -- but he wanted to work there as well. He wanted light to stream in through windows without shades -- but he wanted no outsider to look inside. He wanted buildings to grow out of the earth organically -- but he also wanted them to float, unbounded.

It is this last tension that lends itself to a comparison with Wright's moral and ethical decisions. He has to be free to attract adoring women who are ornamental; however, he not only introduces them as his household staff, but actually expects they will cook for his construction crews and apprentices. He manages to dress his women in his own designs, given any occasion, and decorate them and each room of Taliesin to his exacting taste; yet, he leaves them with the responsibility and embarrassent of having to deal with mountains of unpaid bills for such ornaments and luxuries. He continues his extramarital affairs, publically flaunting community values, only to repeatedly become a fugitive until he and his current lover are found yet again by the press or angry spouses.

Boyle employs more literay devices to make the story captivating. Using a Japanese apprentice as the narrator allows both Frank and his women to be examined at more arm's lenght, whereas the Horan novel is more simpatico to Mamah. Oddly enough, it is Boyle's persona of Tadashi as Wright's contemporary that makes the novel read less romantically, less nostalgically. The interpretive footnotes not only help to cross reference the flashback plot, but also permit Boyle himself to intrude at his comic and erudite best.

Because Boyle involves more characters in the novel, its themes of heritage vs. alienation, of homeland vs. the allure of the foreign, of image vs practicality, of the nagging daily details of life vs personal destiny, and of the quest for fame vs. its manipulated publicity, are more evident as they find expression from every quarter, in all characters.

The Women closes out my trip to Wisconsin, but Boyle himself detours me to The Road to Wellville to Battlecreek, Michigan and cornflake king Kellogg and from there back to California, to the Riven Rock estate near Montecito, to meet the son of Cyrus McCormick, he of reaper fame.

Where's the GPS? Wrong Turn in Ohio

It's the word, holler, that gets to me. You can still hear it around here to describe the ramshackle houses under the Normanskill bridge or other self-contained clans further down the Hudson River. You tell your children not to go there; you wonder if the town's school bus picks up any of them and takes them to classes rather than BOCES. These are places where sexual offender lists are interchangeable with the telephone directory, where census agents never appear.

Such is Knockemstiff, Ohio, as referenced in one review of the stories as "an alternative universe to the American dream." Yes, bloggers, the place creates the people who inhabit it. Even when characters, in their drugged out cravings, head off to California, they never make it outside of the county. Each story tells of fights, unemployment, every imaginable variation of illegal substances and illicit sexual encounters. The populace is marginalized and not trapped in poverty and ignorance, but completely acclimated to it.

This is author Donald Ray Pollock's first novel. It is his home town and he worked in both its hog slaughtering plant and paper mill, now both long gone. He must have known, first hand, of events and families such as these. I cannot say this book was a good pick for our 50 states. The Plains Dealer called it "a great read about a bad place." I would say it is rather an exercise that shows an author can write well about the most sordid aspects of life. But then I don't read de Sade. Somewhere else I saw a reference that Knockemstiff could trace its roots to Winesburg, Ohio. If that is the case, it must be kudzu. I suggest we add Winesburg as a more acceptable alternative town to visit; go to Knockemstiff only if you fancy a detour into Hieronymous Bosch.

Loving Frank, but Loving Mamah More: Wisconsin

Loving Frank is the story of Mamah Borthwick Cheney and her life from 1903 to 1914, from when she first met Frank Lloyd Wright, until the end of their affair. I selected this book for Wisconsin because I believed that being an architect is all about interpreting place and space, and Wright, most notably, is American in his perspective, creating homes for his clients to live locally-informed lives. I was expecting the book would confirm my bias --- that it was by his works that I would come to know Wright and Wisconsin.

However, Loving Frank is more about Mamah's struggle with her place in society as a married woman, albeit, one actively advocating the expansion of women's voting rights and employment opportunities, somewhat beyond the pale of the regimented upper class social circle that her breeding, education adn marriage to Edwin Cheney had made for her. Wright, as well, is married to a conventional wife, Catherine, who occasionally socialized with Mamah and Frank when they fell in love.

Mamah's attraction to Frank is a complete free fall. Her struggle and the story's tension focus on how to carry on an affair, a juggle that is significantly eased for her by a spinster sister ready to watch over her children and cover her assignations, and by another friend from college who takes her into her home in Boulder when she finally breaks away from her family, before heading off to Germany with Wright. Their behavior becomes a front page scandal. Families are tremendously hurt. Spouses dig in their heels, but with public statements of forgiveness and longed for reconcilation.

Trained as a German scholar, Mamah serendipitously meets Ellen Key, a Swedist feminist, in Berlin, on whom she projects her redemption, if not her justification for abandoning her children, only to realize that Key's premise is that while marriage and the support of a husband are no longer required in her world, to fulfill a woman, her being is best articulated through motherhood. Mamah's rationalization continues unabated.

Nancy Horan, a native of Oak Park, surrounded by Wright houses and intrigued by a society that unfavorably judged his unconventional behavior and iconoclastic style, composes a novel that is, while romantically alluring, ultimately aloof. Mamah is not Frank's muse, more his anchor, as conventional a role for an early 20th Century woman as those of her counterparts with marriage parchments.

Taliesin does align with our blog's goal to acknowledge the centrality of setting to story: it is their refuge, the source of his family's roots, the physical manifestation of his credo -- that a building must come out of its location and must be constructed to ease the lives of its residents. Taliesin does that, but it also the place where the lives Mamah and Frank built come to a distastrous end.

Despite everything that I liked about Horan's rendition of Mamah and Frank, I am seduced to read T.C. Boyle's version of Wright's life and loves, his latest novel, The Women. As I write this review, I am only 50 pages or so into Boyle's book. I prefer it. There is a rhythm to his writing that both moves the story along more quickly and immediately captures attention. His device to tell the story through a "translation from the Japanese" is clever, but apt, given the influence of that culture on Wright's designs. Boyle writes with many more layers of literary allusions. So far, a much richer read. I will add more after finishing it, but suggest to the Slackers that they might want to go with Boyle over Horan for Wisconsin