BROWDERBOOKS
A story of the strangest friendship that ever was: a dapper young bank thief and the detective hired by the banks to apprehend him. The latest review:
"Well written, flowing with a feeling for the time and the characters." -- Reader review by Bernt Nesje.
For two more reviews, both five stars, go here and scroll down.
This is the fourth title in my Metropolis series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York. Three more, and then the big one; stick around.
My latest nonfiction work, Fascinating New Yorkers, has been reviewed by The US Review of Books. Reviewer Gabriella Tutino says, "There's something for everyone here in this collection of profiles, and it serves as a source of inspiration for readers who love NYC." For the whole review, click on US Review.
For more about my other books, go here.
Fire
It was an ordinary evening at the Co-Existence Bagel
Shop in North Beach, San Francisco, in the spring of 1960, with the usual
complement of Beatniks, poets and writers of undiscovered talent, bohemian
hangers-on, tourists, and a few unclassifieds like myself. A fugitive from Academia, I was living in the
Golden Eagle Hotel on Broadway at $5.00 a week, scribbling poetry, and heating
coffee in the morning and cooking potatoes in the evening on an electric frying
pan borrowed from a friend. At the Co-Existence
Bagel Shop I was and wasn’t of the scene, neither square nor “in,” an observer
from the sidelines who almost, but didn’t quite, fit in. The usual babble prevailed, when John, a
regular in a crumpled jacket and tieless, sat at the piano and started
playing. He often played; at first, no
one paid attention. But as he played,
something began to happen. A spirit
seized him, he played on with increasing intensity, sweat on his forehead, his
fingers pounding the keys frenziedly, until slowly the babble subsided, and
everyone gathered round. So it went for
about ten minutes, the music wild and inspired, until at last he stopped and
slumped down on the piano bench, exhausted, while the crowd cheered and
applauded wildly. What had
happened? As he played, the fire was in
him.
Once, at a concert at Ravinia, the outdoor concert hall in
the wooded outlands of Chicago, I was privileged to hear the young American
pianist William Kapell, who had undertaken to play Rachmaninoff’s second or
third piano concert -- I forget which –
with the blessing of the composer’s widow, who had heard him play it. It was a much anticipated performance; one
sensed the audience’s excitement. Then,
when he finished, Kapell sprang up from the piano and rushed to shake the hand of
the exhilarated conductor, while the audience applauded wildly. The obvious excitement of performer and
conductor showed that they knew they had brought off something spectacular,
something unforgettable. The fire was in
them. Memorable. Sadly, Kapell died in a plane crash in 1953;
he was only 31.
 |
| William Kapell, 1948. The fire was in him. |
I recall once seeing a play by a new young playwright who
had learned the tricks of playwriting and produced a technically flawless
script. But the play never quite took
off. Never did a character come wildly,
savagely alive and overwhelm the audience.
The writer had learned his craft, but the fire wasn’t in him. And when I was in my first playwriting class,
the instructor told me at the end that just two of the students, me and
another, showed promise. All the others
were learning the craft, but the fire wasn’t in them.
Obviously, in these instances I am using the word “fire” to
express that fierce inner urge, that blind need to do, that drives creative people.
Without it, nothing happens – nothing of value. With it, things do happen, even though they
may be clumsy, misshapen, unfocused, in dire need of discipline and direction.
But “fire” has many meanings, many contexts. In the city one hears only too often the
screaming sirens of fire engines rushing to a fire, for in congested urban
neighborhoods fire is a constant threat, countered by the ability of fire
trucks to get to the scene of a fire within minutes. On the two occasions when there was a fire in
my building, the firemen were there almost before I knew there was a fire. It’s the people living quietly and
comfortably in rural areas who are most at risk. Their ears are not ravaged by the daily
scream of sirens, but it may take twenty or thirty minutes for the firemen to
reach them – time enough for a house to be engulfed in flames. Used in the literal sense, “fire” can suggest
danger, provoke alarm. Shouted, it
causes panic.
 |
| A fire in New York City, August 2008. H.L.I.T. |
Back in nineteenth-century New York, when older buildings
were often built of wood, and electricity had yet to replace candles and
candelabras for illumination, the risk of fire was great. Theaters needed much illumination at night
and were therefore especially vulnerable.
Few of them lasted more than ten or fifteen years. The famous Bowery
Theater burned down four times in 17 years, and was destroyed once and for all
by fire in 1929.
My childhood experience of fire involved no risk or
alarm. When my father bought a house in
the suburbs because I was on the way, he also bought a load of oak wagon hubs
and spokes. The hubs were solid brown
cylinders with a hole in the middle and slits or openings on the sides where
spoke were inserted that stretched out to the rim of the wheel. These hubs were stored outside in a dark open
space under our ground-floor summer porch, and when my brother and I were
older, he had us fetch in a few from time to time, so there would always be
some dry ones in the basement. Then, on
special days like Thanksgiving or Christmas or whenever we had guests for
dinner in the winter, he would put a hub in the living-room fireplace, put
kindling under it, and light it. The oak
hub would burn for hours while we socialized in the living room, and would
still be burning when we returned there after dinner. When little, I would sit on the oriental rug,
or on a low hassock, and watch, hypnotized by the flickering flames, the
crackle and smell of wood burning, and the sparks that would fly out and hit
the screen that kept the hub and its fire from rolling out on the hearth. To my eye the hub became a burning medieval
castle, with flames flickering out the slits that looked like windows where
archers could shoot arrows at besiegers.
But this castle was doomed.
Finally, its guts consumed, the hub would split open and crumble in
fragments emitting orange flames. At the
very end, those fragments became orange embers that slowly turned black, and
the hub, reduced to black and gray ash, would fade into the darkness of the
cooling hearth.
 |
| A wagon hub with an axle in in it, and wheel spokes. Our hubs had the axle and wheel spokes removed. inkknife_2000 |
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| But our fireplace burned hubs, not logs. |
Once I saw a real castle, in fact a whole walled city, seemingly
engulfed in flames. While traveling
about France by rail, with occasional forays hitchhiking, I found myself in the
great walled city of Carcassonne on Bastille Day, July 14, 1952. Climaxing the holiday celebration was a
spectacular display of fireworks set off that night from behind the ramparts of
the city. Standing with a crowd of
onlookers outside the city walls, I saw sky-splitting bursts and streaks of
fire giving the impression that the whole city was under siege and in
flames. Not a castle, then, but a whole
fortified city, enhancing and magnifying my childhood impression of a burning
castle. No fireworks that I have ever
seen since could match the display that night.
 |
| Imagine all this at night, engulfed in bursts of fire. Harry |
In ancient times in the West, fire was long viewed as one of
the four elements, the others being earth, water, and air. By its very nature it is active, imbued with
energy. It gives light and warmth and
comfort. It is life, as opposed to
death, which is dark, inert, and cold.
And if fire also causes destruction, that destruction is not necessarily
final. Fire changes things, transforms
them, regenerates. Fire in a forest cleans
out fallen trees and brush, and helps the forest regenerate itself and
grow. Fire is masculine and akin to the
sun. Long ago I saw a film showing the
surface of the sun constantly throwing out torrents of fire: an unforgettable
display of the sun’s intense energy, on which the earth depends. In Greek myth Prometheus defies the gods by
stealing fire from the sun and giving it to humans, thus making progress and civilization
possible. For this he is punished by
Zeus. Immortal, he is chained to a rock
where, each day, an eagle comes to devour his liver, which then grows back and
is again devoured. So it might have gone
forever, had not husky Hercules, a born meddler and obtrusive do-gooder, come
along and freed him. If fire isn’t a
gift from the gods – as some might have it – it is at least a gift from a
daring trickster who sacrifices himself for our good.
 |
| Prometheus stealing fire from the sun. Jan Cossiers, painting, 1637. |
Fire is at the core of the earth, as smoking volcanoes
remind us, until their eruptions disgorge flows of lava that devour everything
in their path. Think of those running fugitives
embalmed in volcanic ash at Pompeii, caught and smothered while in the very act
of fleeing. People in the vicinity of
seemingly dormant volcanoes live in fear.
Long ago I saw a film showing villagers in Indonesia taking bound goats
and other creatures up to the edge of a crater, where they cast the sacrifices
into its smoking depths. This, they
hoped, would pacify the god of the mountain, capricious, demanding, and
violent, a god of fire not to be ignored, but to be constantly fed and
appeased.
You don’t have to live near a volcano to be scared of
fire. In recent years people living in
regions ravaged by drought and then by fire have described their shock and
terror upon seeing a wall of fire suddenly racing toward them to engulf their
home. Some survive by flight, others by
jumping in a pond or swimming pool; the unlucky ones succumb to smoke and
fire. A wall of moving fire, a spectacle
so totally overwhelming as to suggest the face and power of God, some
all-embracing and all-devouring force beyond our comprehension. Yes, fire terrifies.
 |
| Mount Etna, September 1989. |
And fascinates. Mount
Etna in Sicily, the highest active volcano in Europe, still erupts
periodically, sending plumes of smoke and ash high into the air. When conditions are deemed safe, tourists can
visit it today, and always have. Many
years ago – just when, I don’t recall – visitors could, with good timing, go up
to the crater and peer into it. Local
guides who knew the volcano’s patterns timed the visits to occur in the
intervals between explosions. Led by
them, visitors rushed up to the crater, looked over the edge into the face of
fire, and were quickly hurried away to a safe distance, before the next explosion. And even today, though travel agencies prefer
not to mention it, there is danger. In
March 2017 a sudden explosion of Etna hurled molten rocks and steam down upon
visitors, injuring ten; luckily, unlike in many past explosions, no one died. Photos of the eruption show a stunning burst
of yellow and red in the night sky. The
visual beauty of such incidents, and the danger, continue to bring tourists to
the mountain.
 |
| Molten lava, Hawaii, 1998. |
Yes, there is beauty. In the summer of 1960 I went with my friend Bill to see the Ciudad Universitaria on the southern
edge of Mexico City. Adjacent to the campus we discovered
a landscape such as we had never seen before and have never seen since. Known as the Pedregal, was all jagged and black,
with pockets here and there of green, where bits of soil had been deposited
that supported life. This tormented black
surface was the hardened lava from a volcanic eruption of 5000 BCE. Weirdly beautiful, it was slowly and
grudgingly permitting inroads of vegetation to reclaim it. The real threat to this lunar landscape was
not tourism – we were the only visitors there – but urban development. Back then it was beginning already, though
with attempts to blend development with the landscape, not destroy it. Since then, development in the area has since
run amuck, providing ostentatious residences to Mexico’s wealthy. But my first Pedregal impression remains
intact: lava = frozen fire.
%5D)
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Fir0002/Flagstaffotos
|
When lightning suddenly streaked through the sky, followed by claps of thunder, prehistoric humans must have been terrified. If they worshiped a god of fire and sought to
placate him (it was usually, though not always, a him), who could blame
them? But fire could also be a friend
and ally. They learned to tame it and
cook with it, and in their caves at night, a fire at the entrance offered
protection from the terrors of darkness, and the wild animals prowling in the
night.
Inevitably, fire is linked to eros. We refer to a former girl- or boyfriend as
“an old flame,” and in French a sudden infatuation, or love at first sight, is
termed a coup de foudre, a bolt of
lightning. Years later, the girl I once
went steady with in high school (yes, honestly, I really did) said to me, “I
don’t ever want to get burned like that again.”
We had been infatuated; the flame was mutual, though in time it
flickered out. When a girl in France
wanted to flirt with me (yes, that happened too), she made what her sister
called une déclaration enflammée; I
was flattered. A torch song (no, this isn’t a plug for
Harvey Fierstein) is a song where the singer laments an unrequited or lost
love; the beloved is unaware of the lover, or indifferent. The song usually oozes
self-pity, but you can’t help sympathizing with the poor sap still in love.
But “fire” has other meanings, too. Why do we say “I got fired,” meaning, “I lost
my job”? Some cite the Donald’s “firing”
contestants in the reality TV show The
Apprentice in 2004, but come on, the phrase was in use long before that;
I’ve heard it all my life. (Trump
allegedly even tried to patent the phrase “You’re fired!”) A more convincing explanation goes back to
the 1910s and the National Cash Register Company. NCR’s founder, John H. Patterson, was a
quirky genius. To deflate an employee's ego, he would fire him for some trivial reason, then hire him back. On
one occasion he sent an executive out to visit a customer. When the executive came back to the company
headquarters, he found his desk thrown out on the lawn and in flames; he was
“fired.”
This incident leads to a consideration of fire as a
purifying agent, and death by fire as a kind of purification. I once told of a mother who, upon learning
that her college-age son was gay, in his absence assembled all his belongings
in the back yard and, in the presence of all the family, burned them. From that day forth until the day she died,
she had nothing to do with him, never contacted him once. Whether she thought of it that way or not,
burning his belongings was, for her, a kind of purification, an elimination of
someone who she thought had brought shame on the family.
Why witches and heretics were burned alive, rather than
suffering some other form of death, escapes me.
Online sources give the history of burning at the stake, but to my
knowledge don’t explain the why of
it, except, in the case of witches, perhaps to eliminate any witchcraft that even
their remains might commit. For the
heretics, it may have provided one last chance to repent, which a severed or
strangled head might have trouble expressing. Accused of heresy and condemned to the stake
by the Spanish Inquisition, at least one victim, Francisco de Espinosa, made
the requisite confession and was spared.
Instead, he served three years in prison, and for the rest of his life
had to wear a penitential garment meant to mark and humiliate the
condemned. Better than fire, he decided. The mere threat of it served to purify Christendom
of the poison of heresy and render its spiritual body clean and healthy.
 |
| Giving him his very last chance, the Church is there to the end. Engraving by Pieter van Gunst, after Ottmar Elliger (1633-1679). Wellcome Images |
Fire is profoundly ambiguous. We need it and we dread it. It soothes, it terrifies. It is a blessing and a curse. Like it or not, we cannot do without it.
 |
| Midsummer festival bonfire, Finland, 2003. Janne Karaste |
Coming soon: Madonna: She Overwhelms Me, She Cuts Me to the Quick.
© 2019 Clifford Browder
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