The Great Eastern

by Howard Rodman

  It lay idle until the late 1820s when it was rented by one William West, an artist. West installed, atop the tower, telescopes, that were used by artists of the Bristol School to observe and then draw the Avon gorge and, on the river’s other bank, the Leigh Woods.

  In addition to the telescopes, West built a camera obscura—a dark room in which, once one’s eyes become adjusted, one can see the projected images of the world outside. The earliest camerae obscurae allowed light to pass through a pinhole, casting—inverted and upside-down—the image of the world outside upon the opposite wall. West’s camera obscura made use of a more sophisticated mechanism, but one still that used the most basic of optics: a convex lens and a mirror.

  The lens that West placed on top of the tower was a small one, five inches in diameter, pointed outward. Behind it he put a canted mirror to direct the light downward into the darkened room below. The entire lens-and-mirror structure was mounted on a gimbal, connected via gears to the room below, so that with the turn of a crank the observer in the darkened room might choose the direction he or she wished to view. (It is, in this, not unlike the omni-scope of a submarine vessel.) The light is thrown downward onto a five-foot table, circular and concave. The image there is neither inverted nor distorted, so that in gazing upon it one feels one is gazing upon a world.

  Because one is in this darkened room, removed from all, the silent and liquid image seems like a dream, albeit a dream dense with movement and detail. There is none of the remove one now feels when watching a film or a video—no grain, no artificial “clarity.” Just the world as it is—smaller and more quiet—in lovely focus on the table in front of you.

  On a fine June day in 1871—scarcely a fortnight after the dismal and murderous events of la semaine sanglante in Paris—a visitor makes his way up the winding tower stairs to the darkened room. He moves slowly and with deliberation. He stands with his arms at his side for perhaps ten minutes, his one good eye adjusting to the absence of light (save what comes in via lens and mirror). Then he walks to the table, walks round it. Stares into it. For the longest time. Now—with the apprehension of someone touching a lover’s body for the first time—he puts his hand to the crank, turning the view until it displays in full the bridge, the Clifton Suspension Bridge, spanning the Avon Gorge.

  The bridge is suspended from wrought-iron chains, chains draped over two tall towers on either side of the gorge. The towers are symmetrical, or nearly so: the Clifton-side tower has cutouts, the Leigh-side tower has more acutely pointed arches. When the bridge was designed in 1831, by the noted British civil engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, he’d planned a sphinx atop each tower in keeping with the towers’ Egyptian style (though perhaps more influenced by the popular imagination of “Egypt” than by the Khedivate’s architecture itself). The towers when they were built were flat at the top, the sphinxes neither carved nor put in place. What we know of those sphinxes we know only from sketches, ink on foolscap, in Brunel’s meticulous hand.

  Due to the Bristol riots, and various financial difficulties that need not be discussed here, the construction, begun in June of 1831, was halted time and again. The postponements spanned decades. Brunel himself died in 1859—broken, it is said, by the terrible stress of building and attempting to launch the Great Eastern—before the bridge had been completed.

  The picture our visitor stares at—though picture is hardly the right word, for he is seeing in real time a panorama of life itself—is by any standards magnificent. One can see the trees on the near bank, dense with foliage and in full bloom; the near tower, jutting tall and majestic from the cliffside; the bridge with its long lengths of massive chain suspended in an elegant arc above the river; the bridge’s taut deck suspended from some eighty-one tapered vertical rods; the denser foliage on the Leigh side, climbing the far tower; and down to the river itself.

  He takes in the full panorama, then works the crank counter-clock until the center of the bridge is in the center of the circular table before him. He takes a bit of time to consider the bridge’s wrought-iron chains from which all else depends.

  He knows those chains. They were taken from the Hungerford Bridge, another Brunel construction. The Hungerford was a pedestrian bridge that crossed the Thames—midway, more or less, between Waterloo and Westminster. It derived its name from the Hungerford Market on the north side of the Thames, connected by that bridge to South Bank, allowing those who lived below the Thames easily to buy the goods for sale above it. They’d walk across each morning, down to up, enter Charles Fowler’s large Italianate building through one of its seven grand arches, leave their coins, return with produce. The very model of what a bridge is for.

  In 1859, shortly after Brunel’s death-by-stroke, the Hungerford Bridge was bought by a railway company that wished to extend the South Eastern Railway into the newly opened Charing Cross. Though Brunel’s brick-pile buttresses were maintained the chains were taken down, replaced by wrought-iron latticework. The chains were not melted down but rather put into storage for reasons lost to history. We do now know who decided—either in homage to Brunel, or out of frugality—to repurpose the Hungerford chains for the Bristol bridge. It says much, though, for the persistence of Brunel: that his design was built, essentially unaltered, even after his death; and that the metalwork from one Brunel project, lost to the advance of commerce and capital, found its home in another of Brunel’s creations.

  There are other things to see here: West dug a tunnel from the floor of the Observatory down to Ghyston’s Cave, opening onto St. Vincent’s Rocks on the cliff face. The tunnel is 2,000 feet long, and is something of an attraction for the tourists.

  But in this tunnel our visitor takes no interest. When he has had his fill of the haunting panorama inside this darkened room he walks down the tower steps. He walks with great deliberation, as if he had all the time in the world.

  Outside it is very bright and it takes a few moments to accommodate to the sunlight: everything seems glaringly white, near-painful. He blinks—he has one good eye, the other is covered by black patch, pirate-style—and walks away from the river, behind the Observatory, on the path that doubles around to the Clifton-side tower, to the tunnels where the massive chains are anchored.

  The tunnels are tapered, some eighty feet long, and plugged with Staffordshire blue brick to prevent the chains from being pulled out of the narrower tunnel mouth. The tunnels were engineered by Brunel to anchor the cables even in the fiercest wind, to withstand centuries of stress.

  The visitor spends fully as much time gazing at the tunnel mouth as he did in the panorama. In every aspect they seem to have been built to Brunel’s specifications. This seems to please him. He stands beside the epic strands of chain-linked iron, as if recalling another day, another time. Each link is taller than his head, thicker than his thigh.

  Our visitor he now walks slowly onto the bridge itself. He passes a cast-metal plaque dedicating the bridge to Brunel’s memory but pays it little mind. He wants to tread on the bridge’s wooden planks. He wants to cross to the other side and look back at it. He wants to inspect the Leigh Woods end of the Hungerford chains, where they’re anchored into the far-side tunnel. But more than that: he wants to know what it feels like, to walk across. To stroll from here to there and perhaps back again, something that was ne’er possible until imagined in the mind of Brunel, and then—this is, of course, the hard part—designed, engineered, the thousands of small problems and hundreds of large ones solved, and in the most elegant manner possible.

  He walks now. The view from the center of the bridge is fully magnificent. Above, the cables at their lowest approach, arcing upward in catenary curves toward each tall tower. (He wonders what they’d have looked like, had the twin sphinxes been commissioned, carved, lifted into place.) To either side: the city of Bristol, the woods of Leigh, each of them showing as nicely as they ever had, ever would.

  Can our visitor be Brunel? To even the most percipient among us, these matters are beyond the
ken. Brunel is dead. And yet our visitor cannot be other than Brunel: by whatever white-shrouded miracle, expelled by the sea— As a half-sovereign might be coughed up from a windpipe.

  Each death is evasive. A surmise. Provisional ‘til proven. And every once in the rarest of whiles: to die is to live.

  The visitor continues his slow walk. Takes a cheroot from a battered leather case strapped cross his chest, strikes a match, maintains the flame in his cupped hands long enough to set the cheroot alight. His hands are shaking. His right palm bears a faint white scar, a wound imparted in battle, healed yet leaving its trace. Below him the River Avon, spring’s high currents having abated, flowing quietly, out past Shirehampton and Pill, out Avonmouth, around Portishead, past Clevdon and Weston-super-Mare, past Watchet and Minehead and Linton on the south, Llantwit Major then Swansea on the north, out the Bristol Channel, into the Celtic Sea.

  * * *

  —

  IT IS NOT possible for us to know anything of his life since last we left sight of him. But there are things we might infer. That wherever he has been for the past five years he has chosen now to visit Bristol to inspect the work that he had imagined, but had not, at the time of his departure, seen realized. From the lack of ceremony surrounding his visit, and the fact that the historical record does not reflect a resurrection, we can assume that he is living under a different name than that which he’d at birth been given. From his demeanor, his dress, his cheroot case, we may infer a man not fully, or even at all, in the grips of amnesia.

  Why did he choose not to reunite with his family? Why did he choose not to resume his former career, reclaim his former standing?

  This we know not. It is safe to say that what he had seen, since his body was laid down in Kensal Green, encouraged in him a tendency toward walking solitary on this earth, rather than engaging with the varieties of bond and commerce this world offers up. And it might be supposed, though with no real certainty, that his solitude was a chosen one, his wanderings those of a penitent.

  In smashing the electrical ampoule our visitor he did put full-stop to the sub-marine vessel—and in doing so, sealed the fates of all aboard. Two dozen good men on the bottom of the ocean fore’er entombed. Did their deaths yet weigh upon him? With what force, what pressure? How does one measure the column of mercury in any heart’s manometer?

  We would have one last question. Did he ever reencounter, in the course of his time at sea, or in the years following, the woman he’d as a young man seen on the quai de l’Horloge? Was it possible that in his terrestrial afterlife he found her? That they had joined hands and hearts?

  Profoundly unlikely. But so many elements of the life that he had lived, the places in which he’d found himself, were equally improbable. Given the context, the possibility—however small, however dubious—cannot be ruled out. Call it a château d’Espagne. (For what of value in this world, large or small, has ever been deemed “likely”?) There was a Hawkins book in his pocket with many white pages remaining.

  Twelve years previous—twelve years with the length of twelve long decades—a man in a bottle-green smoking jacket had promised him a lifetime of adventure. From what we know, we can say that the man in the bottle-green jacket did on that promise deliver.

  But what of our visitor? Did he, on a beautiful day standing on a bridge of his own devise, look back upon those years as ones of upheaval, ruin, unspeakable disaster? Or with time’s retrospect, did he see those years as ones of exploit, escapade, venture, deed, experience?

  Our visitor is now closer to Leigh than to Clifton. He is the only person on the bridge this afternoon, a short, contemplative man in his mid-sixties, what was once black hair now gone all white, stark white, with a hat seemingly half his height, a hat that any solitary gust of onshore wind could take, just like that, from atop his head—seize it, lift it, blow it out, between any two of the eighty-one uprights, down to the Avon, or even better, up into the sky.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  MY DEBTS TO M. Verne and Mr. Melville are too extensive to repay, or even adequately to acknowledge. Reading their works has made me the writer—and the person—I am today. My theft of their creations is not something I will here try to justify. To put it simply: the worlds that they created have become our worlds. I owe an equal debt of gratitude to so many of the authors whose books formed my library and my universe as I was writing this one. A fuller elaboration of this gratitude can be found at http://howardrodman.com/book/the-great-eastern/.

  The staffs of the Brunel Museum in Rotherhithe and the Musée Jules Verne in Nantes were generous and patient when I paid visits to their respective institutions, opening their doors to an American stranger; and on Cape Cod, the staffs of the French Cable Station Museum in Orleans and the Chatham Marconi Maritime Center in North Chatham were no less welcoming. I am greatly indebted to the late Michel Roethel, in whose Paris bookshop dedicated to the work of Jules Verne I spent many fine lost hours, and whose hospitality and conversation were far more inspirational than he would have any way of knowing.

  Many provided practical advice; research assistance; editorial suggestions. Others provided small words of encouragement when I needed them the most. I am particularly grateful to Peter Agree, Betsy Amster, Mary Bailey, Antonin Baudry, Rick Berg, Sonja Bolle, Lou Boxer, Leo Braudy, Theodore Braun, Ken Brecher, Jay Cantor, Jenne Casarotto, Michael Chabon, Julie Cline, Anthony Tirado Chase, Micheal Donaldson, Allison Engels, Janet Fitch, Terry Curtis Fox, Peter Gethers, Michael Goldenberg, Brent Green, Maggie Hanbury, Dante Harper, Peter Herman, Doug Headline, Melanie Jackson, Ricky Jay, Erik Jendresen, Henry Jenkins, Tom Kalin, Steve Katz, Nick Kazan, David King, Dione King, David Kipen, Tim Kittleson, Ken Kwapis, Dan Lansner, Jonathan Lethem, Gloria Loomis, Tom Lutz, Scott McGehee, Maureen McHugh, Walter Mosley, Mimi Munson, Geoff Nicholson, Nicholas Meyer, Dennis Palumbo, Robert Polito, Jon Raymond, Eddie Redmayne, Rebecca Rickman, Adam Rodman, James Schamus, Joan Schenkar, David Siegel, Marisa Silver, John Galbraith Simmons, Dan Simon, Zach Sklar, Tiahna Skye, Steven Soderbergh, Louise Steinman, Robin Swicord, Frank Wuliger, Barry Yourgrau, Wendy Zomparelli.

  The support of Steve Erickson has meant everything: Steve was the first person to read any of this manuscript, and he excerpted a chapter for publication in Black Clock, in issue no. 10, and again in issue no. 13. He gave me faith to continue this project when I thought that I just can’t go on.

  The kind guidance of Sandy Dijkstra and Elise Capron of the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency was as generous as it was invaluable.

  A critical set of revisions was made possible only via the extraordinary hospitality of the Swicord/Kazans, who let me escape to their house on Vashon for two weeks when I needed to be away from the world’s other concerns.

  The app “Freedom,” which suspends one’s access to the internet for a specified period of time, was a godsend. The website http://750words.com was deeply useful as goad and incentive. I also, when in need of inspiration, would often consult “Oblique Strategies, or Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas,” the deck created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, 1975 edition. It is one of my most treasured objects.

  Without Anne Friedberg, Tristan Rodman, Mary Beth Heffernan: quite simply, no book. Their love, generosity of spirit, and faith as I wrote this manuscript knew no bounds. Their support throughout was in wild excess of what can be acknowledged or repaid. And anyone who knows me knows that the work of the last several years would simply not have been possible without Mary Beth’s dogged and literate optimism, which every day continues to inspire.

 

 

 
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