An Excerpt from the novel, DEVLIN,
About a Year from Publication
JAMES R. FISHER, JR., PH.D.
© AUGUST 8, 2017
REFERENCE:
JRF
Since DEVLIN has been gestating over four
decades and I am leisurely reading through this book now (reduced from 861 to
currently 517 pages), waiting for BB to resume her editing/correcting (she is
half way through the book), I can see Devlin is more European than American,
and that is continental Europe, not Great Britain, and that his interest in
science is like someone interested in crossword puzzles for relaxation while
his natural propensity is for philosophy and theosophy. Like Camus, Sartre
and Beckett, he has an eye for the absurd meaning he is not handicapped by his
academic training but manages to survive by thinking and feeling beyond it.
This is a small sample of Devlin the Absurd as observer:
THE OFFICE
Devlin read the
current issue of South Africa Today,” and highlighted the
assessment of author Alistair Spark: “In South Africa as nowhere else,
Africans are being pitch forked into the twentieth century. In the
teeming satellite townships outside the cities the drama of one of history’s
great social upheavals is taking place. It is an African renaissance,
full of new vistas, new energy. There is an upsurge of vitality, ambition
– and security. There is creativity and crime.”
It was in this
sense that he considered the physical and demographic landscape of his
assignment as he reflected on his office space.
The offices of
Polychem’s subsidiary were housed in an old dilapidated building on the
industrial district rim of Johannesburg, a place held together with paint,
putty, cement, rotting wood and prayer. A small sign on the second floor
facing the street announced to the world that these were the corporate offices
of ADM, Subsidiary of Polychem, International, Ltd.
The drab
structure was a converted industrial warehouse in what previously was the
industrial district. Bulldozers were flattening peripheral industrial
enterprises and other warehouses to make way for the spiraling glass and steel
high-rise office buildings and hotels as sprawling metropolitan Johannesburg
was forcing the industrial district outward toward the suburbs.
Everything about
the structure marked it as temporary. The windows were painted in soot,
which defied window cleaners. The gray paint of the building was peeling
despite desperate attempts to hide its age with constant repainting.
Where the semi-trucks once moved down a cement ramp to the covered docks to
pick up and deliver goods, now there was a makeshift underground parking garage
with stenciled slots for executives, office staff, laboratory personnel, and
visiting customers, contributing to its makeshift status.
Walking up the
cement steps to the dock level, and then into the facility, had the feeling of
entering an ancient ruin. A rusting and creaking freight elevator took passengers
only to the second floor where the executive offices were located. The
chemical labs were on the third floor with administrative support, sales and
marketing on the fourth floor with the only access to these operations via a
cement stairwell. This was an inverse arrangement of corporate staffing
in the States where the higher the flyer the more rarefied the air.
Polychem’s corporate offices were on the top floor overlooking downtown Chicago
from Michigan Avenue.
When Devlin got
there early, he could see forty or so Bantu workers waiting for daily
assignments. These assignments ranged from cleaning to maintenance. They
could be seen doing plumbing and electrical work, painting, tearing down and
rebuilding office and lab partitions, running errands, and landscaping.
It was as if they were invisible as no one paid them much attention.
A half-hearted
attempt had been made to beautify the building with small trees and shrubs on a
pencil sized lawn along a cement promenade with a fountain facing the
street. Notwithstanding these efforts of worker diligence, it could not
mask the warehouse origin of the building. It sent shivers up Devlin’s
spine the first time he came upon the place, feeling the address must surely be
a mistake despite the prominence of the ADM sign to the contrary.
The floor of the
executive offices had a strange vitality in that the large wide industrial
timbers had been given a vigorous alkali cleaning of oil and stains, then
grounded to a smooth surface with varnish applied to a gleaming polish that
made the floor seem primordially alive. Devlin likened the hard clipping
sound made by his heels as he walked to his office to be like the happy feet of
a tap dancer on stage. It put him in mind of the times his da would toss
the throw rugs aside in the living room and do his Fred Astair routine dancing
to that famous dancer’s staccato. He remembered taking off his own shoes
as a boy and gliding across its surface with exhilarating joy.
He could see the
magnificent Carlton Hotel now under construction just down the street from the
managing director’s window. His office, although next-door, faced the
collapsing industrial district to the west. He mused that it was just as
well. Otherwise, he’d get nothing done. He was a born sidewalk
superintendent of the most obsessive kind.
There was
something magical in all the chaos of construction and activity around
him. A similar kind of chaos resided within him; only he was a builder of
ideas, not of things. The building of things was a manifestation of man’s
quest for control. Out of the chaos rose pristine structures that signaled
man’s genius to create out of material destruction. A builder of ideas
lacks the signatory zeitgeist of physical construction.
With an
architect’s blueprint, you could envision the building materializing precisely
as designed, not so with an idea. An idea is vague in the mind with many
collapsing shadows before it breaks through to a thought with some clarity, but
the idea once conceived has a longer life.
He was trained
as an engineer of things but was more comfortable in the wilderness of ideas
where he could see how things worked on the soul. It was his secret and
the force behind his iconic material success. He escaped into this world
every chance he got. It was where he felt more authentic and at
home. Still, it was daunting to bring his function off with perfect pitch
given this obsession. Ideas were however key to his success and not the
dogma of his credentials. Ideas built an edifice of the soul
plank-by-plank, nail-by-nail, girder-by-girder, brick by brick in the symphony
of the hammer of the will until, voila, it was finished. People thought
him lucky flying by the seat of his pants, but this was how he worked.
Would it work here?
The Carlton
Hotel was advertised to be the most majestic hotel in all of Africa, and it was
being constructed on his watch.
The Polychem
executive offices were modest but spacious compared to those in the United
States. Devlin’s office was easily as big as the 900 square foot house in
which he grew up. The second floor housed the managing director, the
comptroller, and Devlin’s office, along with offices for three
secretaries. There was also an executive conference room, and a waiting
room for clients, who must come in from the street, walk up two flights of
cement steps against a corridor of gray walls, to arrive in these
offices. Clearly, the facility was not brochure material.
Martin Mathews,
as managing director, had the corner office with large floor to ceiling windows
taking in the Johannesburg skyline. These windows were washed twice daily
and from the street, shined with brilliance against their soot-encrusted
neighbors that appeared above like bushy eyebrows. Cleaning was not a
matter of economics but manpower. The executive windows were surrounded
by scores of tiny steel framed smutty windows, reminding passersby of the
building’s original function. To maintain all these windows, with the
care of the executive windows, would require the entire Bantu staff doing
little else. In any case, that was the reasoning presented to Devlin for
the selective attention.
Devlin’s office
next door faced the collapsing industrial district behind. The view
resembled a war zone after a blitzkrieg bombing. Skeletal frames of
falling down buildings, long ago gutted of any utilitarian content with
hundreds if not thousands of windows of shattered glass. Penciled across
the abandoned railroad tracks were weed infested vacant lots, bridged by
mountains of trash and rats as big as cats. Men as dark as the shadows
they clung to could be felt more than seen. He suspected this death trap
provided vagrants, the homeless and the lawless with filthy cover. Part
of him hated to look out the window for what he might see. Another part
of him held demonic fascination for the theatre of the absurd that it
provided.
The giant rats
seemed unperturbed when the black truancy police climbed through the rubble and
into the buildings looking for people. So far the law had always failed,
causing his heart to race as if his side had won. He knew these shadow
people were there somewhere by the smoldering remains of a fire, or empty
liquor bottles and open cans that weren’t there the day before, and yet not
once had he seen anyone. It was as if these shadow people were invisible
and a continuing frustration to their pursuers. It reminded him of a film
of the Keystone Cops climbing through the piles of rubble, breaking through
doors and running into each other. Only this was real.
* * *
DEVLIN is a sojourn through the mind of a man in a most traumatic time (1968), being the benefactor of the victorious Great War (WWII), but not at home in its benediction.
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