The Very Best of F & SF v1 (45 page)

Stop me, Caroline,
if you’ve heard this story before.

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“Buffalo” first
saw publication in
F&SF
, but the
story was originally written for an anthology of short stories about hometowns.
That book was edited by Anne Jordan, who had been the managing editor of
F&SF
and it was commissioned by yours
truly, so it might as well have been written for our magazine. (In fact, one of
the reviews of the book said, “It reads like a top-notch issue of
F&SF”
which always struck me as high
praise.) The story is a dazzling, virtuoso performance, one of many such
literary gems that Mr. Kessel has produced.

In
May
1934 H. G. Wells made a trip to the United
States, where he visited Washington, D.C., and met with President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt. Wells, sixty-eight years old, hoped the New Deal might herald
a revolutionary change in the U.S. economy, a step forward in an “Open
Conspiracy” of rational thinkers that would culminate in a world socialist
state. For forty years he’d subordinated every scrap of his artistic ambition
to promoting this vision. But by 1934 Wells’s optimism, along with his energy
for saving the world, was waning.

While in
Washington he requested to see something of the new social welfare agencies,
and Harold Ickes, Roosevelt’s Interior Secretary, arranged for Wells to visit a
Civilian Conservation Corps camp at Fort Hunt, Virginia.

It happens that
at that time my father was a CCC member at that camp. From his boyhood he had
been a reader of adventure stories; he was a big fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs,
and of H. G. Wells. This is the story of their encounter, which never took
place.

In Buffalo it’s
cold, but here the trees are in bloom, the mockingbirds sing in the mornings,
and the sweat the men work up clearing brush, planting dogwoods and cutting
roads is wafted away by warm breeze. Two hundred of them live in the Fort Hunt
barracks high on the bluff above the Virginia side of the Potomac. They wear
surplus army uniforms. In the morning, after a breakfast of grits, Sgt. Sauter
musters them up in the parade yard, they climb onto trucks and are driven by
forest service men out to wherever they’re to work that day.

For several
weeks Kessel’s squad has been working along the river road, clearing rest stops
and turnarounds. The tall pines have shallow root systems, and spring rain has
softened the earth to the point where wind is forever knocking trees across the
road. While most of the men work on the ground, a couple are sent up to cut off
the tops of the pines adjoining the road, so if they do fall, they won’t block
it. Most of the men claim to be afraid of heights. Kessel isn’t. A year or two
ago back in Michigan he worked in a logging camp. It’s hard work, but he is
used to hard work. And at least he’s out of Buffalo.

The truck
rumbles and jounces out the river road, that’s going to be the George
Washington Memorial Parkway in our time, once the WPA project that will build
it gets started. The humid air is cool now, but it will be hot again today, in
the 80s. A couple of the guys get into a debate about whether the feds will
ever catch Dillinger. Some others talk women. They’re planning to go into
Washington on the weekend and check out the dance halls. Kessel likes to dance;
he’s a good dancer. The fox trot, the lindy hop. When he gets drunk he likes to
sing, and has a ready wit. He talks a lot more, kids the girls.

When they get to
the site the foreman sets most of the men to work clearing the roadside for a scenic
overlook. Kessel straps on a climbing belt, takes an axe and climbs his first
tree. The first twenty feet are limbless, then climbing gets trickier. He looks
down only enough to estimate when he’s gotten high enough. He sets himself,
cleats biting into the shoulder of a lower limb, and chops away at the road
side of the trunk. There’s a trick to cutting the top so that it falls the
right way. When he’s got it ready to go he calls down to warn the men below.
Then a few quick bites of the axe on the opposite side of the cut, a shove, a
crack and the top starts to go. He braces his legs, ducks his head and grips
the trunk.

The treetop
skids off and the bole of the pine waves ponderously back and forth, with
Kessel swinging at its end like an ant on a metronome. After the pine stops
swinging he shinnies down and climbs the next tree.

He’s good at
this work, efficient, careful. He’s not a particularly strong man—slender, not
burly—but even in his youth he shows the attention to detail that, as a boy, I
remember seeing when he built our house.

The squad works
through the morning, then breaks for lunch from the mess truck. The men are
always complaining about the food, and how there isn’t enough of it, but until
recently a lot of them were living in Hoovervilles and eating nothing at all.
As they’re eating, a couple of the guys rag Kessel for working too fast. “What
do you expect from a Yankee?” one of the southern boys says.

“He ain’t a
Yankee. He’s a polack.”

Kessel tries to
ignore them.

“Whyn’t you lay
off him, Turkel?” says Cole, one of Kessel’s buddies.

Turkel is a big
blond guy from Chicago. Some say he joined the CCCS to duck an armed robbery
rap. “He works too hard,” Turkel says. “He makes us look bad.”

“Don’t have to
work much to make you look bad, Lou,” Cole says. The others laugh, and Kessel
appreciates it. “Give Jack some credit. At least he had enough sense to come
down out of Buffalo.” More laughter.

“There’s nothing
wrong with Buffalo,” Kessel says.

“Except fifty
thousand out-of-work polacks,” Turkel says.

“I guess you got
no out-of-work people in Chicago,” Kessel says. “You just joined for the
exercise.”

“Except he’s not
getting any exercise, if he can help it!” Cole says.

The foreman
comes by and tells them to get back to work. Kessel climbs another tree, stung
by Turkel’s charge. What kind of man complains if someone else works hard? But
it’s nothing new. He’s seen it before, back in Buffalo.

Buffalo, New
York, is the symbolic home of this story. In the years preceding the First
World War it grew into one of the great industrial metropolises of the United
States. Located where Lake Erie flows into the Niagara River, strategically
close to cheap electricity from Niagara Falls and cheap transportation by
lakeboat from the Midwest, it was a center of steel, automobiles, chemicals,
grain milling and brewing. Its major employers—Bethlehem Steel, Ford, Pierce
Arrow, Gold Medal Flour, the National Biscuit Company, Ralston Purina, Quaker
Oats, National Aniline—drew thousands of immigrants like Kessel’s family. Along
Delaware Avenue stood the imperious and stylized mansions of the city’s old
money, ersatz-Renaissance homes designed by Stanford White, huge Protestant
churches, and a Byzantine synagogue. The city boasted the first modern
skyscraper, designed by Louis Sullivan in the 1890s. From its productive
factories to its polyglot work force to its class system and its boosterism,
Buffalo was a monument to modern industrial capitalism. It is the place Kessel
has come from—almost an expression of his personality itself—and the place he,
at times, fears he can never escape. A cold, grimy city dominated by church and
family, blinkered and cramped, forever playing second fiddle to Chicago, New
York and Boston. It offers the immigrant the opportunity to find steady work in
some factory or mill, but, though Kessel could not have put it into these
words, it also puts a lid on his opportunities. It stands for all disappointed
expectations, human limitations, tawdry compromises, for the inevitable choice
of the expedient over the beautiful, for an American economic system that turns
all things into commodities and measures men by their bank accounts. It is the
home of the industrial proletariat.

It’s not unique.
It could be Youngstown, Akron, Detroit. It’s the place my father, and I, grew
up.

The afternoon
turns hot and still; during a work break Kessel strips to the waist. About two
o’clock a big black De Soto comes up the road and pulls off onto the shoulder.
A couple of men in suits get out of the back, and one of them talks to the
Forest Service foreman, who nods deferentially. The foreman calls over to the men.

“Boys, this here’s
Mr. Pike from the Interior Department. He’s got a guest here to see how we
work, a writer, Mr. H. G. Wells from England.”

Most of the men
couldn’t care less, but the name strikes a spark in Kessel. He looks over at
the little, pot-bellied man in the dark suit. The man is sweating; he brushes
his mustache.

The foreman
sends Kessel up to show them how they’re topping the trees. He points out to
the visitors where the others with rakes and shovels are leveling the ground
for the overlook. Several other men are building a log rail fence from the
treetops. From way above, Kessel can hear their voices between the thunks of
his axe. H. G. Wells. He remembers reading
The
War of the Worlds
in
Amazing Stories.
He’s read
The Outline of History
, too.
The stories, the history, are so large, it seems impossible that the man who
wrote them could be standing not thirty feet below him. He tries to concentrate
on the axe, the tree.

Time for this
one to go. He calls down. The men below look up. Wells takes off his hat and
shields his eyes with his hand. He’s balding, and looks even smaller from up
here. Strange that such big ideas could come from such a small man. It’s kind
of disappointing. Wells leans over to Pike and says something. The treetop
falls away. The pine sways like a bucking bronco, and Kessel holds on for dear
life.

He comes down
with the intention of saying something to Wells, telling him how much he
admires him, but when he gets down the sight of the two men in suits and his
awareness of his own sweaty chest make him timid. He heads down to the next
tree. After another ten minutes the men get back in the car, drive away. Kessel
curses himself for the opportunity lost.

That evening at
the New Willard hotel, Wells dines with his old friends Clarence Darrow and
Charles Russell. Darrow and Russell are in Washington to testify before a
congressional committee on a report they have just submitted to the
administration concerning the monopolistic effects of the National Recovery
Act. The right wing is trying to eviscerate Roosevelt’s program for large scale
industrial management, and the Darrow Report is playing right into their hands.
Wells tries, with little success, to convince Darrow of the short-sightedness
of his position.

“Roosevelt is
willing to sacrifice the small man to the huge corporations,” Darrow insists,
his eyes bright.

“The small man?
Your small man is a romantic fantasy,” Wells says. “It’s not the New Deal that’s
doing him in—it’s the process of industrial progress. It’s the twentieth
century. You can’t legislate yourself back into 1870.”

“What about the
individual?” Russell asks.

Wells snorts. “Walk
out into the streets. The individual is out on the streetcorner selling apples.
The only thing that’s going to save him is some coordinated effort, by
intelligent, selfless men. Not your free market.”

Darrow puffs on
his cigar, exhales, smiles. “Don’t get exasperated, H. G. We’re not working for
Standard Oil. But if I have to choose between the bureaucrat and the man
pumping gas at the filling station, I’ll take the pump jockey.”

Wells sees he’s
got no chance against the American mythology of the common man. “Your pump
jockey works for Standard Oil. And the last I checked, the free market hasn’t
expended much energy looking out for his interests.”

“Have some more
wine,” Russell says.

Russell refills
their glasses with the excellent bordeaux. It’s been a first-rate meal. Wells
finds the debate stimulating even when he can’t prevail; at one time that would
have been enough, but as the years go on the need to prevail grows stronger in
him. The times are out of joint, and when he looks around he sees desperation
growing. A new world order is necessary—it’s so clear that even a fool ought to
see it—but if he can’t even convince radicals like Darrow, what hope is there
of gaining the acquiescence of the shareholders in the utility trusts?

The answer is
that the changes will have to be made over their objections. As Roosevelt seems
prepared to do. Wells’s dinner with the President has heartened him in a way
that this debate cannot negate.

Wells brings up
an item he read in the Washington
Post.
A lecturer for the communist party—a young Negro—was barred from
speaking at the University of Virginia. Wells’s question is, was the man barred
because he was a communist or because he was Negro?

“Either
condition,” Darrow says sardonically, “is fatal in Virginia.”

“But students
point out the University has allowed communists to speak on campus before, and
has allowed Negroes to perform music there.”

“They can
perform, but they can’t speak,” Russell says. “This isn’t unusual. Go down to
the Paradise Ballroom, not a mile from here. There’s a Negro orchestra playing
there, but no Negroes are allowed inside to listen.”