Shove It Up Your Nose

WHEN A FRIEND told me about On High Steel last week he said it was a book about iron-workers and that it was good. I asked him what it was. He asked me what I meant. I said, come on--is it a novel, or non-fiction, or what? No, he said, waving an arm impatiently--it's just a book, you know, a book.

I guess that's true. The Coop had it in the Architecture section, but maybe it should have been in a "book" section somewhere, a section founded on the assumption that everybody has a story to tell or a home to tell about. Mike Cherry's home is among the ironworkers, and his story is of his trade--ironworking. He says he wants to make it come alive by putting it all in a book. Putting it in a book, though, is why he fails--which I think he knows by the end. Whether he knows it or not, he winds up telling us that so-called "working-class literature" in this society may be a contradiction in terms.

But first, like Mike Cherry did first, I should say quickly who the ironworkers are: Ironworkers are the men who ride the tops of tall buildings as the buildings go up, fitting together beams and columns (the "iron," which is really steel) and climbing higher as they build to build more. They wear yellow hardhats, drink too much, and have a strong sense of their elite status in construction work. There are 175,000 of them and they belong to a union called The International Brotherhood of Bridge, Structural, and Ornamental Ironworkers. The most prestigious among them are the "connectors," who actually lay the iron. They get paid the most, and they take the most risks. One out of every fifteen ironworkers is killed during his first ten years on the job. Their life insurance premiums are as high as the skyscrapers they clamber across. Things like tools drop from the heights, too--Mike Cherry's children are taught never to walk on the same side of the street as a construction site.

The ironworkers make a very tight subculture. They stay among their own kind, do bars and movies and sports, and they don't write books. Obviously not many walk around with Ph.D.'s, but Mike Cherry says there are other reasons:

Most of us scarcely use words at all, tending to make our needs known to each other through inflection, gesture, and yelling. At work we signal each other with arm and hand motions, with bells, and by banging on the iron with wrenches, because the noisiness of a construction site precludes ordinary speech, and most of us, after spending a few years alongside air compressors, jack hammers, unmuffled donkey engines, and welding machines, are deaf anyway.

Language, he says, is not "Language as Word:"

Most of us simply don't know a lot of words. It doesn't really matter: I have a Newfie friend (from Newfoundland) who can say "Laird sufferin' Jesus" in so many ways that it provides specific judgment on everything from a collapsing derrick to a pretty girl at lunchtime. And I stayed on top of the Knights of Columbus building one afternoon after the work day was over, watching the tankers on New Haven Harbor turn slowly into black bugs as the sun went down behind Fisher's Island, while the man beside me, previously known to me only as a loquacious idiot, stood for half an hour stock-still with his mouth shut.

SO IRONWORKERS don't write books. Everyone is very eager for workers to do so, of course. Upper-middle-class writers take "sabbaticals" to soil their hands and find out what it's really like; reporters loiter nervously in bars in Queens waiting for something to be said so they can sneak outside and put it in their notebooks; sociologists write about it from the outside. But except for verbal records like those collected by Studs Terkel, or stuff like Nate Shaw's All God's Dangers, you just can't get no genuine working-class lit in the U.S.A.

Through a freakish set of circumstances, though, Mike Cherry found himself in a position to try. He began in the middle class, and wound up an ironworker for seven years, going through the ranks and becoming a part of the trade, devoted to it, so that he's still ironworking and will apparently never quit. He became an ironworker, but even that worked against the book in the end. Anyway, he started as a schoolteacher, for nine years. Then something happened:

When my wife divorced me I went up to Elmira, because I didn't know anyone there, and rented a room. July and half of August passed without my noticing them. I took out a library card, using it a couple of times a week to check out great heaps of garbage: science fiction, mysteries, fantasy. There was a pizza shop two blocks from my room, and I stopped there periodically, buying three or four whole pies at once. They were stacked in my room and eaten over several days, washed down with warm quarts of beer. I had no refrigerator, nor cared whether the beer was warm or the pizza cold.

It's a person taking himself completely apart, cutting himself off from the conditions that bred him. He runs out of money, and is forced to go out on the street. He takes a factory job in Elmira, and becomes a regular at a bar, still in limbo. At the pool table he gets to know one of the fellows who struts in every day with a group of loud and dirt-streaked worked wearing hardhats and carrying toolbelts. They are ironworkers. After some time they take him to see "Jack."

"Are you a drunk?" he asked.

"No."

"Show up regular?"

"You know anything about the work?"

"No, but I learn..."He waved me off.

"You can follow orders?"

"Yes."

"Keep yourself safe?"

"Sure."

"Sure? Don't hand me any of that 'sure' shit. Safe is a matter of working at it all the time...Be at the Nicholson shanty at the Frederick Building at 7:30 Tuesday."

Keep Yourself Safe. This is the watchword for all ironworkers. Cherry has seen friends fall off beams from dozens of floors up: all through the book there are quick noises and men vanishing instantly into the wind and silence below. They pay the widow and children a full day's pay, and another connector takes the dead man's place. There's another risk: unemployment. Ironworking is dependent upon the amount of building going on, and many ironworkers are lucky to work most of the year. When a job is finished, they look for more work, wait in line. When a building's almost done, and construction is light in the area, they start to say to each other, "Tuck your money in the bank, boys," and try to cheer each other up by saying, "Hey, what of it? I was lookin' for a job when I found this one, right?"

But for Mike Cherry ironworking held a third uncertainty. He was already in his thirties, starting at the bottom of a very hierarchical trade, and very afraid that he wouldn't "make it." That he wouldn't learn fast enough, that the other workers, contemptuous of inexperience, wouldn't accept him. This is a continuing apprehension throughout the book. The day that he becomes a connector is practically an epiphany.

He's too anxious to "become" an ironworker. It's as though the wreckage of his life was so complete that he had to rebuild it like a skyscraper, and to Keep Himself Safe. He tries so hard to become an ironworker that part of him becomes a super-ironworker; the other foot twists uncomfortably in the writer's camp, so that when it comes to setting this down he has as much trouble defining his "book" as the Coop did.

CHERRY LIKES the work more than the other men do (he's in a position where, even though he has no choice, he must decide whether he likes it), so he never follows up the ironworkers' constant bitching, the potential agitation that always gets channelled off someplace, at the bar or at the bank. He's so into the job that he never really answers any important questions about ironworkers. If we want to find out what the men are like, or even what their jobs make them like, we miss out. Cherry's narrative is always at the workplace--when he moves to the gin mills the talk is usually of the work. We get page after page, with diagrams, of how a derrick is set up and how a Chicago boom operates. This might be something a worker has to think about on his job, but it says little about, say, how he relates to the machine.

Cherry's book can never quite realize that a job's essence is its relationship to society at large. What do ironworkers think about? How does their community work? Whenever Cherry fears his subjects are getting too much like automatons with accents he reverts to a "fun" incident--the workers playing a joke on an apprentice named Peter the Putrid Punk, or collecting on a girder to watch the hookers go by on Sixth Avenue. But the games are usually just buddies horsing around--not iron-workers--and they seem artificially imposed, stuck in to jazz up the plodding descriptions of the work.

The trouble is that there is a special feeling about being an ironworker, a special life, special requirements and frustrations. And Cherry gives enough glimpses of them that we feel what's missing. But he can't bear to write it down. The book's tragic figure is Timmy, an alcoholic connector who's on the "drunk gang" (unimportant projects--usually wrecking) and pours out his life story one night in a bar. He is someone who was created by ironworking--it defines him--and when he recurs throughout the book he is powerful. But it leads Cherry nowhere: when Timmy falls off the 44th floor--just as he is kicking booze and becoming a competent ironworker again--Cherry can only start apologetically to philosophize about What Is An Accident, then give a kind of literary "what the hell." But you know he cares about the fear--they all do. Yet every time he starts to put his finger on it he gives up.

ALL OF THIS stuff he knows, and he knows it is important. But he's reticent--the reticence of a trade that keeps to itself, suspicious of anyone who doesn't know what it's really like, belligerent. And he's afraid--he's too much an ironworker to spill everything out at once, thinking of his pals reading the book: the revelations come in spurts and cut themselves short. He's bored: the job has made him feel that it just doesn't matter to write it all down because his readers are bigwigs and wouldn't understand anyway and hell, he could fall off the iron tomorrow.

Maybe you just can't find the right crazy accident, to put someone who thinks in the written word into a life that communicates with its hands and mouths. He's liable to get confused--to get sunk in the job, so that writing it down would be betraying it--and then say what the hell, shove it up your nose.

Cherry finishes his book saying that he'd like to tell more:

But there are still buildings to put up, and still gin mills to tell stories in, and if you should join us in one of them some night, we'll tell you the rest of it. It's easier to tell stories than to write them, anyway.