SOURCE: Coles, Nicholas. “Mantraps: Men at Work in Pietro di Donato's Christ in Concrete and Thomas Bell's Out of This Furnace.” MELUS 14, nos. 3-4 (autumn-winter 1987): 23-32.

[In the following essay, Coles discusses the representation of immigrant life in all its contradictions in Pietro di Donato's Christ in Concrete and Thomas Bell's Out of This Furnace.]

Whether we want it there or not, for most of us work squats at the center of life. It consumes our time and energy and to a large extent determines our experience in every other activity of living. When we are out of work, the lack of it and the search for it takes its place as the dominant condition. One of the continuing uses of literature has been to counteract that dominance, to provide a form of imaginative vacation to other lives and other places governed not by work but by love, perhaps, or mystery, or nature. Yet there has also been a strand of literature which centrally engages the subject of work in order to explore the effects of its centrality in our lives. This perspective is particularly clear in the literature of those people, including poor European immigrants to industrial America, for whom the job was especially long and hard and never enough to quite support a family—for whom, in other words, work was inescapable, a palpable force to be wrestled with every day. They sought in their writing to understand the meaning of this force: what they got out of work, what it took out of them; how the relations of work got this way, how they might be different.

Mariolina Salvatori, in a 1982 MELUS article, has studied the meaning and status of women's work in novels of immigrant life.¹ In particular, she finds a tendency in certain novels for the “public sphere” of men's work to eclipse the private and domestic labor of women which, she argues, was equally important to the family's survival. Salvatori movingly describes the psychic and emotional cost of performing essential and exhausting labor without its being recognized as such. I want here to offer a complement to her study by examining men's relationships to their “public sphere” work, in two of the novels she discusses. For while it is clear from these novels that men's commitment to work and the breadwinner role is oppressive to women and marginalizes their labor, the effect of that commitment can be seen as scarcely less destructive to the men themselves.

Pietro Di Donato's Christ in Concrete, published in 1939, is an autobiographical novel about a community of Italian immigrants working as bricklayers and construction workers in some unnamed Eastern city.² The narrative follows one family's struggle to survive after the father's death in a construction accident. The second novel, Out of This Furnace (1941) by Thomas Bell, tells the story of three generations of Slovak immigrants to the milltowns of western Pennsylvania.³ It combines a personal family saga based largely on autobiographical material with a history of the steel industry and attempts to unionize it, told from the workers' point of view. Both novels were written by men who grew up and worked in the world they write about, and like many novels of the Thirties, both enact a second- or third-generation immigrant's coming to political consciousness about his economic and cultural position. But there is nothing politically programmatic about either novel. In fact, it is the richness and honesty of their representation of immigrant life in all its contraries—the harshness of the working environment in part counteracted by the solidarity of the ethnic home and neighborhood, the feasting, funerals and spirituality amid the endless struggles of poverty—that allow Bell and Di Donato to render so well the complex feelings toward their work of male characters who, in Marx's terms, have nothing to sell or live by but their labor power. Both novels demonstrate a profound and often destructive ambivalence in these men's relation to the work they spend most of their time doing: on the one hand, labor power—that is, their capacity to do hard work well—is something to have and to be proud of; on the other hand, when labor power is all they possess that the economy of the dominant culture values, they are relatively powerless over the forces controlling their lives. The source of their male pride is also the source of their humiliation.

In Christ in Concrete, for example, Geremio, master bricklayer and leader of the crew of paesano laborers, expresses his pride as he looks back at the day's work: “Hand to hand I have locked dumb stones in place and the great building rises. I have earned a bit of bread for me and mine” (7). The affirmation is typical in its celebration of physical strength and the skill that gives eloquent form to dumb materials, producing something tangible and lasting—something which, moreover, can be seen in a larger perspective as an immigrant's contribution to America. Geremio and his crew are the “nation-builders”: “twenty years he had helped to mold the New World” (7). But the bedrock of Geremio's sense of self lies in fulfilling the mission of breadwinner to his family, whose ever-increasing size is a further confirmation of his virility. However, these satisfactions are constantly threatened by Geremio's awareness that these are not his materials he works with, this is not his building, there is no guarantee that he will have work to earn bread by. The threat materializes in the form of the building's owner whose arrival on the site disrupts the relationship of men and material, and of the men among themselves as brothers in toil. The owner overrules Geremio's urgent request for more concrete to secure the building's underpinning, and throws in an ethnic insult. Fear chokes Geremio's angry response:

The new home, the coming baby, and his whole background, kept the fire from Geremio's mouth and bowed his head. “Annunziata speaks of scouring the ashcans for the children's bread in case I didn't want to work on a job where. … But am I not a man, to feed my own with these hands?”

(11)

For Geremio, the ideal of man as provider, and also as prolific father of mouths to feed, is one of the strands that binds him to his exploitation. A “man” would fight back, or at least talk back, but a “man” must also provide for his family; unprotected and expendable as he is, Geremio cannot do both. And the cost of this inevitable failure is loss of manhood. By having to back down to the boss, he becomes, we are told, “no longer Geremio, but a machine-like entity”; “the men were transformed into single, silent beasts” (11). That same day, the building collapses on Geremio and his crew:

Walls, floors, beams became whirling, solid, splintering waves crashing with detonations that ground man and material in bonds of death. The strongly shaped body that slept with Annunziata nights and was perfect in all the limitless physical quantities thudded as a worthless sack amongst the giant debris that crushed fragile flesh and bone with centrifugal intensity.

(17)

Symbolically, Geremio is skewered through the groin by a steel bar. It is one of the many industrial “accidents” which punctuate these novels, asserting in the most palpable way that, whatever his ideal vision of himself, in the face of his work a man is finally a matter of so much blood, muscle and bone.

With the death of the paterfamilias, the responsibility of supporting Annunziata and her seven—soon to be eight—children falls primarily on the shoulders of the eldest son, fourteen-year-old Paul. It is through Paul's initiation into the male world of Job that we experience intimately its meaning for the men who inhabit it. (I am calling it simply “Job” because that is how Di Donato renders it: with no article and a capital “J”—like God.) Paul's initiation begins with a ritual adoption of his father's tools. Early on the morning when he will first search for work as a bricklayer, Paul reverently examines the contents of Geremio's canvas work-bag:

[T]hough he recognized [the tools] they seemed different and heavy in his thin hands. The trowel had a long smooth wooden handle, high shank; the ten inch blade of tough thin steel had a broad heel and tapered to a sharp point. Around the shank and heel there was a close hard layer of dried mortar, and cut in on the upper face toward the shank was H. L. DISTON. He revolved it in his hand, made scooping motions, and took the match box and imagined it a brick which he laid along the edge of the table over and over, tapping it and eyeing it. He contemplated the tools for a few minutes and then picked up the trowel and stuck it in his belt over his hip. … The trowel on his hip felt a shield, a sword, and as he walked uptown to where the jobs lay he felt bigger.

(79)

Paul will need this talisman of his father's power for, in one strand of the novel's imagery, Job is a form of warfare: “It was war for living, and Paul was a soldier. … [I]t was man's siege against a hunger that travelled swiftly, against an enemy inherited” (109).

But if work is a proving ground of manhood in this martial sense of the battle for survival, there is also a sexual dimension to the relationship of men and work. There is a sense in which the bricklayers are bonded not only to one another in the syncopated rhythms of their common labor, but also to the materials of Job: “Now then!” yells the crew leader, “make love to it! Push into it, my children, for this is the money wall!” As the wall rises, its “gray of stony joint and red of clayey brick” merge with and take in “men's gray bones and wet red flesh” (108). Paul is thrilled by his own physical movement, by his power to create and to be a part of what he creates: “this is the sense of red and gray, and our bodies are no longer meat and bone of our parents, but substance of Job” (180). This incorporation of men into their work has two sides to it, however, two contradictory kinds of effects on them. On the one hand it gives dignity and strength—an almost mystical potency:

Men of Job were Nature, and health's exuberance was their joy. In the sun Paul tanned deeply, and his breast muscles showed rounder. Day's richness surged him with feel of trowel brick and mortar along wall, and he gloried in his body's labor. Building took his effort but gave reality. Building possessed his mind, but gave Divinity. He played the instrument of his growing power. Quick! up goes this corner! Fast! in goes this arch! Up! up reaches this wall! There was a motion to living, a dazzling nourishing rainbow of earth and man's bone and flesh … a fusion within of strength into a propelling beautiful new desire.

(215)

But in another simultaneous perspective this healthy satisfaction in fusion with Job becomes perpetual frustration. For the building exhausts and consumes its lovers; bonding becomes bondage, and love-making a losing battle, an endless giving away of energy:

With the beginning of each job men … wed themselves to Job with the same new ceremony, the same new energy and fear, the same fierce silence and loss of consciousness, and the perpetual sense of their wrongness … struggling to fulfill a destiny of never-ending debt. These men … were the bodies to whom [Paul] would be joined in bondage to Job. Job would be a brick labyrinth that would suck him in deeper and deeper, and there would be no going back. Life would never be a dear music, a festival, a gift of Nature. Life would be the torque of Wall's battle that distorted straight limbs beneath weight in heat and rain and cold.

The latter part of Christ in Concrete recounts Paul's painful awakening to the fact of exploitation, the theft of the proud power he has nurtured as a direct inheritance of his father: “Papa's life has been used against me. … My toil has been used against me” (295). This awareness dawns when, having won a hotly contested company award for the best bricklayer on the job, Paul is robbed of his triumph by the knowledge that his mastery as a craftsman is itself mastered by those who own his skill: after the award ceremony, Paul “marvelled at the memory of the dainty pink-cheeked perfumed dolls of men who gave out the awards and spoke tired high-class talk. Could he ever forget that these hot-houselia owned great Job!” (232)

In the same way Thomas Bell in Out of This Furnace pits the possible meaning of work to the men who perform it against the cancellation of that meaning by the relations of ownership. Bell's central characters are the steelworkers of Braddock and Homestead, and if steelmaking lacks the close manual knowledge of materials of the bricklayers' craft, it has instead a graphic and dangerous quality—a sense of immensely powerful forces barely contained by bands of men dwarfed by the machines they tend. It makes for a particularly dramatic vision of the nobility of labor. “Listen to it,” Mike Dobrejcak says of the mill at night:

When I remember that men built that it makes me proud I'm a man. If they'd let me I could love that mill like something of my own. It's a terrible and beautiful thing to make iron. It's honest work, too, work the world needs. They should honor us, Stefan. Sometimes when the bosses bring their friends through the mill they watch us make a cast and when the iron pours out of the furnace, you know how wonderful it is, especially at night, I feel big and strong with pride. I hope the visitors get afraid, I hope they're admiring us. I know when I saw my first cast, I was only a boy, the men working with that burning iron seemed heroes to me.

(195-6)

What prevents Mike from loving his work and taking pride in it is, of course, that the mill his fellow-workers built is not “something of [his] own”—as with Geremio's building, Mike's relationship to the mill can be interrupted and broken at any time. We get hints of what the relationship of worker and machine could be like: “The furnace purred as he ate at midnight, facing the cast-house, his back against the shanty … Mike chewed food and stared contentedly at the furnace. They knew how to handle her” (165).⁴ Mike prefers nights, when these moments of precarious peace are possible, in part because there are fewer bosses looking over him. Bell comments:

[The bosses'] presence disturbed the rhythm, the relationship, between worker and job. With his appearance the furnace and the men became separate. It was now his furnace and they its servants, and his; for its well-being they were responsible now not to the furnace and to themselves, their pride in knowing how to handle her, but to him. He took it away from them. They ceased to be men of skill and knowledge, iron-makers, and were degraded to the status of employees who did what they were told for a wage, whose feelings didn't matter, not even their feelings for the tools, the machines, they worked with, or for the work they did.

(166)⁵

The furthest extension of this dehumanization is reached, in steelmaking as in construction, when the worker is himself converted into raw material for production, literally giving his life to it as Mike Dobrejcak himself does in one of the recurring accidents which come to stand as defining metaphors of this work-world. In another Steel Valley novel of the same era, William Attaway's Blood on the Forge (1941), when a man falls into a ladle of molten metal, his workmates make watch-fobs out of the steel he is mixed with and wear them in his memory. Bell sees these deaths not as accidents but as a logical extension of the exploitation of resources. He comments on a blast furnace explosion which killed fourteen men:

Officially it was put down as an accident, impossible to foresee or prevent. … In a larger sense it was the result of greed, and part of the education of the American steel industry … [which] for all its boasting, was still crude and wasteful in its methods; and part of the cost of its education was the lives and bodies of thousands of its workers.

(54, 47)

If Di Donato excels in his portraits of these accidents—and no writer I know can render so well the physical materiality of death and maiming—Bell's greatest strength lies in conveying the ordinary, daily sense of exploitation as the slow erosion of a man's physical energy and, worse than that perhaps, of his spirit of hopefulness. When Mike Dobrejcak and Mary Kracha get engaged, they promise themselves the better life which America seems to hold out to those who are willing to work hard and save their money. But of course, these are promises that life will never let them keep, as Tillie Olsen puts it in Yonnondio (107). In particular the business cycle which, as if by act of God, brings periodic unemployment, short time or wage cuts, continually frustrates their modest version of the American Dream: “I'll tell you what's bothering me,” Mike says to Mary. “I'll be thirty years old in a few months—and I have no more money in the bank than I had ten years ago. … I want things I can't have—a house with a front porch and a garden instead of this dirty alley—a good job—more money in my pocket—more time for myself, time to live.” (147-8). But already Mike is growing old. He comes home from one of seven weekly twelve-hour shifts and “just sits …, his very hands weary.” He loses touch with his children: “Joking with them, he discovered, was an unsatisfactory business, curiously like a boss in the mill condescending to joke with one of his men. … [A]gainst his own inclination …, he found himself cast in the role of ‘Papa,’ solemn, preoccupied and not to be lightly bothered” (168). Mike's paternal role is further threatened, as is his sexuality, by the need for he and Mary to curtail the physical intimacy which has distinguished their love: more children would be not only an economic disaster, but physically dangerous for Mary, permanently exhausted as she is from the work of keeping boarders to supplement Mike's meager pay during short time in the mills. Work, it seems, unmans him in every way. When his hours are cut again, he wonders, “What good is all my work if they won't pay me enough to keep my family? What in God's name must a man do to make living in this world?” (184)

The trap Mike finds himself in is, of course, much larger than the impossibility of realizing his masculine ideal of himself as worker and provider. The permanent insecurity and frustration he feels reflect his actual economic situation; his sense of his own inadequacy and wrongness represents not only hurt male pride, but more generally the injuries of class and the betrayal of the American Dream. Mike is the victim also of the company-sponsored discrimination which denies him a better paying job in the mill because he is a “Hunky”; and he is politically disenfranchised by the company's requirement that he vote as it directs. Mike's solitary struggle against the segregations and disqualifications which define his social position is as much an assertion of human dignity as of violated masculinity. Yet it seems to me that the damage to body and mind is magnified and made more poignant by the fact of these men's having founded so much of their identity, and specifically their gender identity, on working and providing. The masculine ideal becomes for them a perpetual and necessary impossibility.

Bell is however, writing a novel and he takes the novelist's privilege of providing a fictional resolution to the social problem. It remains for Mike's son Dobie to answer his father's question: “What … must a man do to make a living in this world?” He does so as an activist in the Steelworkers Organizing Committee which, with the guidance and inspiration of the CIO, brings a militant, industry-wide union to the steel towns. Bell reflects the euphoric hopefulness of that victory in 1936 as Dobie conjures a vision of limitless future possibilities: the Union could find a remedy for fluctuations in the business cycle; it could go into politics to represent the interests of working people; it could start its own newspaper, tackle the problem of technological unemployment, repair the steel mills' destruction of the environment, find “a satisfactory substitute for bosses and bossism,” and finally, “do something about work itself. At its best, work was fun” (409). He is dreaming of a thorough socialist transformation which would abolish exploitation, discrimination, and the alienation of labor. But the Union's victory also represents a vindication of thwarted manhood, as Bell makes clear in the incident which most dramatically enacts the changed relations between masters and men. Dobie's angry confrontation with mill Superintendent Flack is a classically male face-off: he stands toe-to-toe with the boss who has threatened to fire him for his union activity and who persists in calling him a “dumb Hunky sonofabitch.” Through Dobie's superior physical strength combined with the legal protection of the union, Flack is forced to back down and the company is obliged to accept the men's right to organize.

Bell ends his novel on this high note as Dobie and his union-brothers appear to have fought free from the double bind of work which robbed them of the identity they needed to find in it. Through the power of solidarity, they have gained some control, dignity and security in their work relations. Looking back, however, from the vantage-point of nearly half a century's betrayal of the promises of 1936, one inevitably notices the historical ironies in Bell's vision of a world made over by working men. But Dobie's victory also offers a more subtle irony in the way it affects his wife Julie and his relationship with her. Its implications for their marriage are suggested in the narrative device whereby Dobie utters his vision of the future in a long interior monologue, staring from his bedroom window at the mill below, while Julie sleeps on undisturbed. She is nine months pregnant with their first baby, and Dobie, in fact, addresses the novel's final words of hope to his unborn child, who he of course assumes will be a boy. What seems to have happened to Julie is that whereas her man now feels fulfilled and self-confident and their economic future looks brighter, she herself has become a strangely isolated figure in the process. While Dobie, caught up in the communal spirit of the movement, spends his evenings at meetings and travels to Washington to testify to Senate committees, Julie is firmly stuck at home in a house which, in accordance with their improved circumstances, is somewhat removed, up a hillside and away from the crowded streets and alleys of the valley bottom. She has no friends of her own, but waits and prepares herself and her house for her husband's homecoming—almost a prototype of the “total woman” (though it must be said that Bell presents her as quite happy with her position).

By contrast, Mike and Mary Dobrejcak, whose life was appallingly hard, at least shared its hardships with one another, and with a large community of friends and relations who were always in and out of each other's houses. Furthermore, through their labor in keeping boarders, the women of Mary's generation shared the financial burden of providing for their families. Inevitably, such economic and cultural participation by women presented two aspects: some women, like Dorta Dubik, thrived on their work and their central social role; Mary Dobrejcak, however, whose health was broken by that labor, longed for exactly the near-suburban privacy—not to mention the convenience of a washing-machine and refrigerator—enjoyed by Julie. The gains and losses of upward mobility and Americanization came, it seems, together and confounded in the same forms: Julie's privacy is also her isolation; her labor-saving devices confine her to the house. What has changed, over the generations, is that as Dobie becomes what his father could never be, a man among men, proud of his work and the strength it affords him, his wife becomes what Dorta and Mary never quite were, a man's woman, an attractive figure, no doubt, to Bell and to male readers—playful, sexy and houseproud—but nevertheless a figure drained of any significant role in the mill-town community, or in the new society that Dobie, his son and their union will be building. The larger point suggested by this outcome is perhaps that, even when it is satisfied, men's need to found their identity on their work is limiting and damaging both to themselves and to those who live with them. For the price of Dobie's success is the loss of any real partnership with the woman he loves; the men's public sphere of work and the women's private space of home seem further apart than ever.

Notes

1. “Women's Work in Novels of Immigrant Life,” MELUS, 9.4 (Winter 1982): 39-58. See also, for the meaning of work to Slovak immigrants, Patricia Ondek Laurence, “The Garden in the Mill: The Slovak Immigrant's View of Work,” MELUS, 10.2 (Summer 1983): 57-68.

2. Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1939. Subsequent references are to this edition.

3. Boston: Little, Brown, 1941. Reprinted by the U of Pittsburgh P, 1976. Subsequent references are to this reprint edition.

4. I think this typical feminization of machines—and the blast furnaces all had women's nicknames—indicates not only the traditional sexist ethic of domination, but also, in this case, the sense of the reputed contrariness and changeability of machines, and the men's feeling of having the knack of how to tame them.

5. Patricia Ondek Laurence also quotes this passage as an example of how “‘the boss’ [could] destroy the relationship between a worker and his job,” a relationship which she sees reflected in “the imagery of nature and the garden which is used to describe work and the rootedness and connectedness of work and the worker” (66, 58). What is most striking to me about Bell's portrayal of this relationship, however—and Laurence's quotations from the novel bear this out—is the absence of such imagery as applied to work in a steel mill. The “garden” operates in Out of This Furnace more as a metaphor for a necessary vision of an alternative to the actual barrenness of work—the dream of “a little farm back in the hills somewhere” which sustains a man like Joe Dubik whose work “gave him no time to live” (33, 56).

Works Cited

Attaway, William. Blood on the Forge. 1941. Chicago: Chatham Bookseller, 1969.

Bell, Thomas. Out of This Furnace. 1941. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1976.

Di Donato, Pietro. Christ in Concrete. Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1939.

Laurence, Patricia Ondek. “The Garden in the Mill: The Slovak Immigrant's View of Work.” MELUS, 10.2 (Summer 1983): 57-68.

Olsen, Tillie. Yonnondio. New York: Dell, 1972.

Salvatori, Mariolina. “Women's Work in Novels of Immigrant Life.” MELUS, 9.4 (Winter II 1982): 39-58.