The Iron Tower

Abstract

The Iron Tower Hugh Coyle (bio) Paris, France March 1889 Every morning for well over a year, burly laborers in blue serge work clothes had trundled along Rue Malakoff past Alfred’s house toward the Champs de Mars, soon to be the fairgrounds of France’s Exposition Universelle. The clatter of wooden clogs on cobblestones punctuated their conversations like so many misplaced commas, while the clip-clop of horses pulling delivery wagons laden with pig iron added its own percussion to the chaos of human chatter. Then, soon after they had reached the end of the avenue and crossed the Seine, the distant pounding of the blacksmiths’ and riveters’ hammers would ricochet among the buildings and disrupt Alfred’s concentration even more, triggering migraines that persisted no matter how much waxed cotton he stuffed in his ears. As if the constant racket weren’t enough, Alfred was distracted further by the controversial centerpiece of the exposition: Gustave Eiffel’s Tour en Fer de Trois Cents Mètres. Not to be outdone by the Americans and their Washington Monument, the exposition’s planning committee had approved Eiffel’s plans for a thousand-foot-high iron tower to serve as a physical gateway to the fairgrounds and a symbol of French ingenuity and achievement. After spending most days in his laboratory in the Parisian suburbs, Alfred would return home for dinner with Sofie, his Viennese mistress, and then enjoy a short walk alone to the Seine to look over at the exposition grounds and measure the tower’s upward climb. At first, the inward slant of its four legs had seemed a mistake, an affront to the perpendicular lines and right angles of classical architecture. The twisted iron and blocks of concrete suggested only the skeleton of a structure. Where was the muscle? Where was the skin? What sort of architect would only sketch a crude building against the same French blue sky that had inspired so many sumptuous paintings? No wonder hundreds of artists had published articles in the city’s newspapers protesting the tower’s construction, deriding it as useless and monstrous, giddy and ridiculous, a ghastly and nightmarish smokestack whose hateful shadow would seep like a blot of ink across the many beautiful new parks and gardens created throughout the city. Alfred felt a spiteful glee on reading these letters and editorials aloud to Sofie over meals, translating from French to her native German as he went along. Eiffel’s dream of building the tallest and most ostentatious structure in the [End Page 74] world, complete with mechanical lifts and revolving beacons at its apex, seemed a desperate attempt to displace the pyramids as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. It was one thing for critics to have mistakenly cast Alfred, the pragmatic inventor of dynamite, as some wicked Prometheus bringing fire back to the world. It was far more accurate for them to describe a pompous architect like Eiffel as Narcissus, climbing high into the Parisian sky with the sole intent of admiring his own reflection in the Seine down below. Despite Alfred’s denouncements, Sofie’s interest in the tower and the exposition grew day by day. Such was the way of it. What pleased her irked him. What made her laugh made him cringe. The gentle touches that she mistook for sexual intimacy made him feel, now more than ever, ashamed of and repulsed by his own desires for human contact. The colder and darker workdays of winter had led to inevitable slowdowns on the tower’s completion. Recent rains and heavy fogs often obscured the workers’ progress, bolstering Alfred’s suspicion, verging on hope, that construction might not be finished in time for the exposition’s grand opening in May. When news of strikes and walk outs had appeared in recent papers, Eiffel responded by placating his workers with higher wages and hot wine served whenever hoarfrost laced the ironwork. Alfred pounded the table after translating the article for Sofie. “Imagine my workers, drunk and distractable when they should be closely monitoring subtle shifts in the color and temperature of volatile solutions!” There was no need to imagine it. There had been...