So I circled back to Sander only gradually, with fake patience. Delaying the inevitable, I found myself reading a biography of Bernhardt. The story of the world’s most famous actress matched most of Mrs. Schreck’s details. Before I finished, I’d slipped back into the biographical fallacy—the addiction to eavesdropping on notable people’s lives. I began and left unfinished a volume on the Kaiser, one on Max Planck, and a third called Key Figures at the Battle of the Marne. Soon I was back to the old books on Henry Ford, just to see what I had missed.
I had missed everything, seen nothing. I had missed the conspicuous link to the photo, to what had first caught my imagination in the museum that day in Detroit. The details that I had committed to memory then had already, in and of themselves, contained all the clues necessary to decode the urgent message of recognition in the picture, the plea for help from those three young men looking over their right shoulders at a photographer no longer present.
Ford’s biography spelled out the connection between me and those three boys, only I was too careless or willful to see it on first reading. On going back for a second look, I was startled to find, in the story of this Yankee industrialist, evidence of an explicit subplot involving the three young men walking down a muddy road at late afternoon. (They walk leisurely. One sings: “Carrots and onions and potatoes. Such thin fare!”) All the books agreed that Ford had been, however briefly, in Europe on his ill-fated mission to end the Great War by will alone. That, I now decided, was when he must have met my, or more properly, Mrs. Schreck’s three farmers.
BIOGRAPHIES ASK THE question “How do the details of this particular life demonstrate the spirit of its times?” Making the life conform to the times sometimes involves editing the first, sometimes reinterpreting the second. In both cases, biography always involves much footwork to keep the biographer’s footwork hidden. In showing the link between special case and collective times, the biography must be nonpartisan. But it is already partisan to assume that the link between personal and collective indeed exists.
All lives are messy aggregates: Ford the farmer, Ford the illiterate, Ford the mechanical genius, the progressive, the reactionary, the anti-Semite, the philanthropist. Modern times are, by definition, a few billion times messier. Linking one aggregate to the other requires a good dose of editing, and thereby temperament. When biographers say, “Here is what makes my subject great, a representative figure,” as soon as they explain why they’ve wasted years in tracking down the subject, they begin to implicate themselves, their own temperaments, and, paradoxically, the outlook of their times.
No biographer has clean hands. Biographers differ from novelists only in the direction of their proof: a biographer starts from particular details of character and attempts to deduce the life’s general, historical context. A novelist assumes the historical terrain and induces representative details of character. Both muddy their work with intention and temperament. Biographer and sitter tangle and interdefine. Biographers can demonstrate no objective link between a life and its times free of the biographical interpretation. Yet in a final vicious circle, that limiting interpretation must be, in part, a product of the biographers’ own relation to their times. Even my own phrasing of this impasse is colored by the climate of the 1980s.
The paradox of the self-attacking observer is this century’s hallmark, reached simultaneously in countless disciplines. Psychologists now know there is no test so subtle that it won’t alter the tested behavior. Economic tracts suggest that Model A would be inviolably true if enough people realized its inviolability. Political polls create the outcome they predict. Even in the objective sciences, physicists, in describing the very small, have had to conclude that they can’t talk about a closed box, but that opening the box invariably disturbs the contents.
These are the recognizable bywords and clichés of our times. Casual talk abounds with the knowledge that there is no understanding a system without interfering with it. This much I knew well. What did not occur to me until the second time through the Ford biographies is that this position is itself tangled. Generalized, it attacks itself: “All observations are a product of their own times. Even this one.”
This recursion is critical, not because it places a limit on knowing, but because it shows the impossibility of knowing where knowledge leaves off and involvement begins. If there is no independent vantage point, if the sitter’s life is not separable from the biographer’s interfering observation, then each of the sitter’s actions must similarly be tied to biographical impulse. The two are inextricably tangled. Describing and altering are two inseparable parts of the same process, fusing into a murky totality.
Now the zoologist on expedition to Africa to study the great apes is not freed by this paradox of the observer to make up figures or indulge in poetic whimsy. The scientist is obliged, however, to acknowledge that the presence of a field team and film cameras tells the apes as much about human motives as it tells humans about apes’ behavior in the wild.
With every action, we write our own biographies. I make each decision not just for its own sake but also to suggest to myself and others just what choices a fellow like me is likely to make. And when I look back on all my past decisions and experiences, I constantly attempt to form them into some biographical whole, inventing for myself a theme and a continuity. The continuity I invent in turn influences my new decisions, and each new action rearranges the old continuity. Creating oneself and explaining oneself proceed side by side, inseparably. Temperament is the act of commenting on itself.
Hypothesis—“This action defines me”—fuses with experiment—“What would I be if I did this?” And just as this hybrid of action and comment defines the individual, so each life both theorizes on and works out the spirit of its epoch. Each discrete life examines and explains everything it touches in a constant exchange of mutual defining and reshaping. By living, we become our times’ biographer.
Some misunderstand the hybrid by emphasizing commentary at the expense of action. Too aware of the signs of the times, too adept at pointing out the precedent of inherited situations, these people forget their own ability to alter their inheritance through action. To the enormous class of well-informed fatalists, the Great War began in 1871 with the German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, and followed autonomously and unstoppably all the way through Versailles and the Second War.
Equally and oppositely wrong, others overemphasize action. They would change history by passing out pamphlets on street corners. Enthralled with their own consequence, they ignore the inherited context that binds and defines all possible outcomes. They are the camp who feel the Great War was not inevitable until it broke out. Yet, if on a muddy road in May they were allowed a glimpse of August, what could all their individual action come to?
No; the Great War broke out as a hybrid of legacy and acceptance, a combination of precedent and consensus. Everyone alive at that time acted as both claimant and executor of events. Subsequently, my uncle Robert died in World War II—permanently changing my father’s and, as a result, my own life—because of the way a majority of Europe interpreted the armistice that Marshal Foch made Matthias Erzberger sign in 1918 in Louis Napoleon’s boxcar. So much depends on the inability to separate empiric fact from personal necessity. They create each other, as making and understanding create each other.
Just as a legislator follows strict legal protocol to change legality, so my every act changes both who I am and how I see myself. Concluding that the act of living—building up a personal biography and sense of continuity—does not differ qualitatively from the historian’s view of how one time passes into another, I began to search for the inevitable honesty clause. Because there can be no interpretation without participation, the biographer has to be accountable to some third party that is neither commentator nor subject, independent of the system under observation. If no such independent accountability existed, each judgment would stall in an infinite regress of self-judging. Although we cannot hope to pin
down a view of our subject undisturbed by our observation, we can test if we have reached an optimal fit between the two.
One such test is unsponsored recognition. Each day as I sift through my many new experiences, I find a few that I recognize without having any memory or experience of them. I do not mean mystical déja vu; I mean the practical moment artists call epiphany and scientists call the instant of aha.
At this moment of recognition I temporarily stop taking part in the thing at hand and jump a level in the hierarchy of awareness, no longer looking at the object from my vantage point, but at myself from the vantage point of the object. This shift of awareness away from the looked-at to the act of looking creates the illusion of familiarity, since this moment of standing outside the observed system is common to all other such moments.
I am on a passenger train late at night, speeding through Pennsylvania. The conductor walks through briskly, swinging a ticket punch by its metal chain. “Next stop Linton,” he says. “Linton will be our next stop.” I suddenly fill with a warm pulse. I recognize the name of the town, though I am equally sure I have never heard it before: “Oh yes, Linton.” I settle a little deeper in my seat, wrapped in goodwill for the miserly-looking fellow in the seat across from me, since he too must suffer through another revisit of a place neither of us has ever been. He notices my change in attitude. Catching my eye, he peels back his lips. I am not at all surprised to recognize a gap between his first bicuspid and canine.
What I am experiencing is neither precognition nor submersion in mystical vision. It is a by-product of the way consciousness is structured, the consequence of our unusual ability to make one level of our terraced awareness double back and appraise another. At the moment when the stuff holding our attention dissolves and gives way to an awareness of awareness itself we recognize a community with all the other similar moments we have gone through—a concord, or close fit, between hypothesis and measured result.
We are accountable to these moments. In them, we feel the logical fit of two interdependent activities—looking and knowing. By slightly changing our angle of observation, a copse of seemingly random trees reveals itself as an orchard. This specific angle of observation, then, has an independent validity, revealing an order not of the viewer’s making. Such a surprise visit of the orchard effect is always pleasurable—filled with the delight of recognition, a sense of the community of all explorers who also touch base at this common spot.
I continually write my own biography by my actions, mixing involvement with knowledge, accountable to those moments when both drop away to reveal the act of mixing—something a priori recognizable. This process does not differ measurably from the way I come to understand others, my time, or past times. Memory, then, is not only a backward retrieval of a vanished event, but also a posting forward, at the remembered instant, to all other future moments of corresponding circumstance.
We remember forward; we telegraph ourselves to our future selves and to others: “Rescue this; recognize this, or not this, but the recognizing.” If we constantly re-form the continuity of our past with each new experience, then each message posted out of an obscure or as yet unexperienced past represents a challenge to re-form the future. No action unchanged by observation. No observation without incriminating action. Every moment of unsponsored recognition calls me to return to the uninspired world, to continue the daily routine of invention and observation, to dirty my hands in whatever work my hands can do.
I HAD COMPLETELY overlooked these possibilities in trying to recover the memory of my critical day in Detroit. On that day, I was busy writing my own biography, answering the questions “How did I get here? What am I after? How does this day fit smoothly into the sum of days that make up my past?” Then, without deliberation, I walked into Rivera’s imagined factory, instantly more recognizable than any of the factories I myself had worked in.
To compound the instant of aha, I rounded the corner smack into the three farmers, more familiar to me than my own parents, though I knew beyond doubt that I had never seen them or their photo before. For the next several months I would be obsessed with finding the exact message the image meant to send me, mistakenly looking for it in names, dates, and places.
I had to learn that none of that had any real importance, did not in fact exist without active interference from me. The black-and-white print was less a document for archiving than it was a call to action. I was to understand that better on rendezvous with another memory I had posted forward the same day. This third memory would produce a moment of recognition equal to that brought about by Mrs. Schreck’s farmers.
For on my way out of the museum, repeating to myself, “Zander, Austrian, Zander, Austrian,” I passed a display case remarkable only in that it contained one of the least display-worthy, most common objects in the world: half a dozen copper pennies.
I did not stop to examine them, but the oddity—everyday objects put forward as museum pieces—made me take notice. I waited until the second time through the Ford biographies to read that note. A half hour from at last being able to unearth the photo, I stalled, going over the old material that had once seemed my only lead but had led nowhere. I read again—with all that Mrs. Schreck had told me about the farmers and the photographer never far from my mind—the passage, already familiar to me, describing how at the height of the First War the philanthropist Ford made plans to mint his own money. Once again, I read the story of how he had stamped several hundred coins, virtually indistinguishable from the Lincoln copper cent, except that Henry’s profile replaced Abe’s and the motto changed from “In God We Trust” to “Help the Other Fellow.”
That was what the museum case must have held: the mundane transformed. But I did not know what I looked at until I came across the story a second time. Nor had the biographical detail seemed particularly relevant until I remembered my direct experience. The two combined to show Ford’s stunt for what it was: a biographical act of incredible hubris and humor, a self-explanation as well as the posting forward of a memory to some future, as yet undisclosed other fellow. An act of commentary and involvement, an industrialist literally making his own pile, replacing the elected official with a self-appointed one, trusting not in God but in the active partner.
This time, I noticed that when America entered the war, Ford cancelled production after minting only a few of the intended run. Copper had a new importance by then, calling for a new minting of biography, a new relation of self to the century. Ford the mottoist became Ford the armorer. So it was that the armorer grew slowly and, in retrospect, continuously out of the fellow who, a mere eighteen months before, had been Ford the launcher of the Peace Ship.
The Peace Ship took on an entirely new character. The venture was another attempt to mint his own currency, to write his own biography and his times’ history. Historians might agree that the adventure was tainted from the start by the ludicrous notion that a small band of celebrities could rewrite the largest mandate for violence in history. Yet these same historians still did not calculate for me the size of the celebrity band that started the war in the first place. Hidden in the furor over the ship was the old debate between the efficacious and the well-meaning.
And hidden in Ford’s response, his creation of the first-ever “missile for peace,” lay the love of a clean solution that would in a year turn him into a warrior, his factories into munitions lines. It was clear now that hidden in my historians’ response to the Peace Ship was the same ambivalence, the same love of simplicity that dismissed the whole project with a perpetuating violence.
Also clear to me on a second reading was that Ford’s action, however culpable or laudable, followed in a long tradition of Ships of Fools—the metaphor of humanity as a mixed, unseaworthy lot adrift on the ocean with no rudder or compass and only a dim idea as destination. He had done nothing less than rewrite the metaphor for his own time, and in rewriting the biography of Henry Ford—“Help the Other Fellow,” “No such thing as No Chance”—he mere
ly pointed out that there is no abdicating to another captain. We can only chart the situation, and sail. If he had been somewhat light in the charting, he managed, barring everything else, to show me that I’d been somewhat light in the sailing.
I had looked for my farmers in the wrong place. I had spent months hunting down the photographer: who was it that disturbed these boys on their way dancewards? What was this observer’s intention? Why so unobtrusive when the boys are so obviously shocked and awed by what they see behind the lens? It was time I admitted that I had looked too long at the boys to discover what had happened that day. I had already interfered, and it only remained for me to follow that interference to its logical conclusion: mint my own coinage, sail my own Ship of Fools to the place where their amazement lay. I knew now that half their startled attention focused beyond the lens, beyond the photographer, even beyond the frame, on me.
Between jobs, between trains, in a strange city, busy with revising the way I presented myself to myself, the act of explaining and defining my times, I was moved by another’s explanation. Rivera had looked about, seen, and acted. Reaching back to the stuff of religious frescoes and forward to a vision of mass production, he forever changed my concept of both with his devotional piece to the machine, his act of biography. Rivera’s work meant to fuse the world Rivera hoped for and the one he saw.
In the corner of that mural sat the biographical stamp of Ford: crabbed face in front of enormous dynamo, Ford, whose friend Burroughs writes: “Mr. Ford has expressed himself through his car and tractor engine—they typify him.” They are him, the act of autobiography linking him to his times. But with the engines finished, Ford’s act of biographical revision had to continue, moved by that elusive and never quite definable quantity, the other fellow.
Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance Page 23