Centenary now
Modernism, James Michener and the crisis of the endless 1970s
1. The Commission
Only another Substacker, someone who had poured their heart out into a good post that got five hundred pageviews, could appreciate the thrill of receiving an email inviting me to a video chat with CEO Chris Best.
“You wrote that blog about Yellowstone, didn’t you?” said Best eagerly once we were on the call. “And the one about, what was it, El Dorado or rock painting or something? You haven’t posted in a while. What gives?”
“Well, I guess I just haven’t found the time,” I said hesitantly. “And I think my posts are a little more complicated than —”
“Yeah, yeah — have you ever considered writing about the suffocating illiberal orthodoxies of the successor ideology?” Best asked questioningly. “Or how a minor personnel dispute at a small liberal arts college in New England makes it okay to become a fascist? Or how cancel culture has made everyone afraid to even just ask questions about vaccine safety?” He paused, and a grave look came over his face. “Wait, Chase — have you stopped posting because you’ve been silenced by the woke mob?”
“I think I’m just looking for the right idea,” I replied. “I still want to do a big long thing on Edward Abbey, or maybe Ivan Doig. And I’m interested in interrogating the whole concept of the post-Western, some people call it the anti-Western, or the revisionist Western —”
“Listen, we probably need to hurry to the section break before people stop reading,” Best said quickly. “What do you think about a post on Centennial?”
“By God!” I yelled shoutily. “The thousand-page airport novel? The middlebrow doorstop they made into an unwatchable 20-hour miniseries? No one’s ever actually read that, have they? Not reading it is the point. It’s like Infinite Jest for high school gym teachers.”
“We can pay you nothing,” Best said.
“I’ll start today,” I replied.
2. The Author
On a warm Friday night in Doylestown, Pennsylvania in June 1910, a company of firemen raced towards the north side of town, where there were reports of a barn on fire. Only when they’d arrived and run out their hoses did the firefighters discover, in the words of the Doylestown Daily Intelligencer, that “the alarm was a fake”; the blaze was in fact a bonfire that industrialist Henry Chapman Mercer “had made on top of his concrete mansion,” a 44-room structure known to locals as Fonthill Castle. For Mercer, the fire was at once a birthday celebration and a thumbing of his nose at all those around town who’d disdained his use of what was then a newfangled construction method, in which concrete was poured into place and reinforced with iron bars. The journal Cement Age, which had already profiled Mercer and his castle the year before, declared it “the sort of story that is causing the insurance man to sit up and take notice, and likewise the citizen who wants an indestructible house.”
Among the Doylestown mothers who struggled in those years to keep their children from adventuring into the sites where Mercer built Fonthill and other reinforced-concrete landmarks was one Mabel Michener, whose son James was known for tramping about and bothering townsfolk at the courthouse or the train station…
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