Bel Air: The Automobile As An Art Object

On one of those high, dry October days when the sunlight spills warmly into your field of vision and the icy tang of winter clings to the edge of consciousness. I found myself driving over the bad farm roads of east central Illinois. The countryside was geometrically neat and planar: corn and bean fields fell in regular intervals like squares on graph paper or the blue lines of a surveyor's notebook. I was heading toward the Indian line, and even now the land was no longer as flat as a tabletop but began to undulate and dip into ravines, hills, and little sandstone cliffs. The roads turned serpentine and narrow, enclosing an apple orchard here or a herd of fat Holstein there. Everywhere the sunlight was falling big, manageable chunks, illuminating the farmhouses as formal as postage stamps and the sharp-edged red barns that must have been cut out with scissors and pasted to the horizon.

Everyone feels rich at harvest time, and perhaps that is why these farm folk who raise the corn and apples delighted in horse-trading, auctioneering, flea markets, barn sales, and open-air swap sessions. I had already passed two auctions in progress, and I would have passed up the next one except for an especially
severe glint, a blister of light that emanated from the heavily chromed snout of a 1936 Packard. I half expected FDR to be sitting on the back seat. This sedan stood tall and stately and the farmers approached it with a certain air of hesitation and respect. A 1929 Model A seemed more democratic and inviting, even though it did have traces of rust on the rear fenders. But the showpiece was a 1950 powder-blue Ford Tudor, "slick as a bar of soap and smooth as a sewing machine," according to the old farmer who owned it. Clearly, this was no ordinary flea market; serious collectors were sprinkled among the farmers in overalls, plaid shirts, and John Deere caps. Although the sermons were better, the prices were too steep for my professorial salary.

"Tell you what I'm gonna do," said the owner of the blue Ford.

"Feller up the road, friend o'mine, has a Chivvy fer sale," he explained, as he pointed toward a hill some two or three miles distant.

"You jog left at the crossroad and follow the hard road up the hill. You can't miss it."

The crudely lettered sign, Car for Sale was planted in the front yard of a white frame house that might have served as an archetype of the region. No one seemedto be around, so I ambled into the inviting red barn, with its rich texture of smells: timothy, alfalfa, manure, and mud. The cracks between the old barn boards were thinner than knife blades, allowing the cool October light to squeeze through line thin sheets of glass. Dust motes hovered everywhere. There was just enough light to discern the strawcovered outlines of an automobile resting in the corner like some found object. Here was no Victrola or tacky butter churn: here was a piece of pure Americana, a 1958 Chevrolet Bel Air sitting glumly on tires that were squashed flat and useless. A bale of hay had fallen on the roof. A rusty-colored chicken sat pensively on the back seat. Yet the sheet metal, lacquered in alternating bands of metallic blue and creamy white, still glowed impressively. This old sedan arched its metallic eyebrows over the four intact headlamps, and the front bumpers were puckered open and spread wide like a shark's jaw filled with numberless teeth. I was drawn especially to the turquoise blue interior, the dashboard and instrument panel composed in sweeping parabolic curves punctuated by conical knobs and switches in a style that was pure Buck Rogers. A shape reminiscent of the fabled V-2 rocket had provided a decorative motif that was repeated on the upholstery of the doors and seats.

This Bel Air was Everyman's Space Ship for 1958, an artifact from a happier and dreamier time when space ships and their telltale fins had charmed thenational imagination. In the year before this Bel Air left the assembly line in Detroit. Sputnik was launched. Eisenhower was ensconced safely in the White House, Elvis was king, and the Cold War was turning icy-hot, as suggested by the Civil Defense "Conelrad" logo on the radio dial. Somehow this car had cheated the inexorable march of time, like the strange, captured moments of a prized photograph. But unlike the photograph, the Bel Air was not a ghostly image but a three-dimensional presence, enticing and seductive in its pure physicality. I dimly understood that by possessing this car I was retrieving part of my past and-through a kind of Proustian logic-expanding my present. The good hard money of the 1950s still be spent; the music persisted; not merely the music of lovers' lanes and hamburger heavens but the deeper strains of a past recaptured. Rock and roll pounded in my temples; the hiked-up bass lines of electric guitars ricocheted in the close, cabinlame suit intoned pleadingly into a microphone; the rhythms grew stronger and stronger, overwhelming in their intensity. Like somany before me, I found my virtue and good sense powerless before this onslaught. And I bought that car.

Some days later a tow truck deposited the Bel Air in the driveway of my house on Faculty Row, adjoining the grounds of the starchy liberal arts college where I taught literature and writing. Something was dreadfully out of place. The car was older than most of the students. Surely the Prof was off his rocker for buying such an old junker! A neighbor and colleague, indignant and peeved, demanded that I remove that "relic" from the driveway. Property values were going to suffer, he insisted. As if the exacerbate my feelings of guilt and squeamishness, the local Chevrolet dealer refused to touch the car. The service manager, in fact,broke into peals of laughter when I timidly admitted that the car was a '58. Apparently, Mr. Goodwrench was as phony as any other character on television. No independent garage wanted the work, either. Even a so-called "custom" shop saw no profit in the undertaking. I now owned a piece of collectible kitsch,something to frame and elevate as an art object in the manner of Joseph Cornell, the artist who spent a lifetime making glass-framed boxes which he filled with
various objects.

But if the automotive establishment wasn't interested in a disabled 1958 sedan, many other people obviously were. The doorbell began to ring daily, and inevitably a stranger appeared, asking about The Car. Was it for sale? How had I found one in such excellent condition? Was it a straight six or a small-block eight? Did I plan to exhibit? The most interesting visitors were those who, like the rural antique dealers, wanted to swap stories. One fellow recounted in vivid detail a trip that he and his family had taken to the Yukon in a 1958 Bel Air. Others rehearsed first dates, proms, traffic tickets, and other small moments of family and personal history. Although the stories, for the most part, amounted to trivial and corny tales, the act of nostalgie recollection and the process of retelling were genuinely impressive. Jan American paradox was parked in the driveway, an assemblage of insensate rubber, steel, and glass parts that somehow triggered poignant human feelings. A college dean, who usually spoke in terms of "cost benefit analysis" and "management by objective," arrived one morning, asking to inspect the ancient oil-bath air filter. He then gave me an impromptu sermon on the virtues of this 250-cubic-inch straight six engine, closing with the colloquial observation that "these here motors will run forever. You could hit 'em broadside with a bazooka, and they'd still keep running." I had never heardthose tones in the official memoranda he sent through campus mail. By this time, I suspected that I had fulfilled every anthropologist's secret dream: the discovery of an authentic tribal totem. When these visitors spoke of the Bel Air, their tones shifted, and their voices fairly rose in song. One man produced a billfold in which, next to snapshots of his wife and kids, were pictures of the three '58 Chevies he had owned, including an Impala convertible, black and shiny asa hearse. The Bel Air had provided an entree for each of my visitors, and something indisputably human in their own past had suddenly become larger and moreaccessible. Like the car itself, memories were being towed out of some red barn and made ready for restoration.

Buck and Larry appeared on the doorstep like all the other strangers who had come to see The Car, but from the very first moment I sensed that our association would be different. For one thing, in dress and manner they resembled dropouts from some Tantric California commune of the late Sixties. Larry was a vegetarian who sported a red beard down to his chest, and he generally spoke about the beauty of "natural and organic' ways-when he spoke at all. Buck was a dark and loquacious fellow with old-fashioned wire-rim glasses that bobbed up and down on his nose as he laughed nervously and launched into frequent jokes or sarcastic anecdotes. Although they tried to pass themselves off as young innocents, I later learned that Buck had a degree in anthropology and that Larry had completed everything but the dissertation for a Ph.D. in biology. During the time I knew them, they asked me more pertinent questions about philosophy, literature, and world affairs than did most of my students-or even my colleagues, for that matter. They read voraciously, and they fixed old cars. Lesson number one: a book is a tool.

They sized up the car with a cool, professional savvy, checking tie-rods, A-frames, wheel bearings, gear lube, and throttle linkage while petting the metallicflanks of the old Bel Air as if it were a pony about to receive its first saddle. At first I thought these automotive guardian angels fit into some convenient sociological niche, like "hippie hot-rodder" or "blue-collar car buff" or "nostalgic collector." Actually, they belonged to a more original category that I dubbed homo mobilis, self-reliant, Emersonian types who believed that "less was more" and that maintenance was a way of life. Keep it running, keep it running, and above it all, do it yourself. Since the age of twelve or thirteen, Buck and Larry had torn down and reassembled every kind of engine they could get their hands on:motorcycles, lawn mowers, outboard motors, even garden tillers. They had learned to trust the palpable reality of the well-tuned motor as much as they learned to distrust and despise automotive dealerships with their sinister wiles and shoddy business practices. Well, I had started off in the right direction, they assured me, by buying the car from another individual (never from a dealer, new or used) and by buying a used vehicle that was potentially road-worthy. At this point, I had my doubts. The thing hadn't run in years. Belts were loose, gaskets were brittle, valves and rocker arms were painfully out of adjustment. The carburetor sprayed gasoline in fan-shaped spumes over the entire engine compartment. Could this lethal, incendiary weapon be transformed into a civilized sedan, after all? As if to answer my question, Larry shuffled over to his pickup and returned with a tube of industrial-grade sealant and a small crescent wrench. After a few minutes of tinkering and a boost from the truck's oversized battery, the old Chevy fired up, coughed throatily, and began to turn over in a rough but regular rhythm. "Needs work," observed Larry.

That laconic utterance translated into six weeks of intense physical and intellectual exertion of a kind and combination I had never experienced before. We all had jobs, but every afternoon, Larry and Buck appeared faithfully with whatever tools, jacks, torches, lights, and meters were dictated by the task at hand. In the end, we stripped the car down to its bare bones, piece by piece, even the maddening watch-like interiors of the carburetor, speedometer, and clock. When we finished, some six weeks later, at a time when the first snow was beginning to dust the ground, the car mechanically perfect and aesthetically pleasing, with one small exception. The electric clock proved intransigent to the very end; Buck concluded that it would always gain five minutes per week, that it was probably a design defect. I never learned if that was a face-saving rationalization on his part, but it was the only time Buck or Larry ever offered an excuse. In their own view, everything on a car behaved according to the problem. Unlike the world of men and ideas, where reality was surrounded by a nimbus of confusion and doubt, the systems of the automobile obeyed laws of a Platonic and Newtonian kind.

I began to appreciate the subtle meshing of one part with another and the larger coherence of whole systems of parts (engine, drive, train, brakes). Precise articulation was the goal here as in the teaching of rhetoric. If the front wheels were out of alignment, then the tires would wear unevenly and commence to wobbling at high speeds. This vibration, in turn, would weaken the tie rods, and eventually grind down the rubber bushings until the car would be next to impossible to steer. On the other hand, if one had the precise point of alignment for every system, the whole car began to behave with a braking-and in the knowledge that these small parts of the universe hummed perfectly. Hence, the ignition points must be separated by a gap of exactly thirty-five thousandths of an inch for reasons of engineering as well as aesthetics. So too, the timing was adjusted exactly five degrees from "top dead center." I never heard Buck rhapsodize about the special beauty of the automobile, but one splendid afternoon when the western sky was flaring and we had finally returned the last pieces of chrome trimming to their proper places, Buck caught me staring at the finished product. For once, he was speechless. His face crumpled into something like a smirk or a wink before he loaded the last of his tools on the bed of the truck. He and Larry drove away, looking for all the world like the Robin Hoods of the automotive kingdom.

Although Larry and Buck might have earned hundreds of dollars apiece for the work they performed, I knew better than to offer them money-despite the fact that the Bel Air had quadrupled in market value. Our exchange had been more educational than mercantile. Buck and Larry would have never used the word, but they surely taught me that an automobile, first, in its operating parts and, second, in its repair and maintenance, amounts to a kind of logos, a self-contained system of causes and effects, a wholeness of truth and reason. Automobiles, which had heretofore baffled me with their perverse and irrational breakdowns, now seemed tractable and sane. Furthermore, working on an automobile provided one with a sense of control that carried into every department of human life. No one would want to be guided by the strictures of Chilton's Repair Manual, but how refreshing it would be if our scholarly and political discourse approached the clarity of the manual. Words like knurled, tapered, and pitted were semantically pure in a way that terms such as liberal, symbolic, and axiomatic rarely were. One night after reading chapters on gears and ratios in Chilton, I picked up a recent issue of the Publications of the Modern Language Association and found myself translating the critical jargon into something like plain English. Other tilts occurred, also. Even though I punished my hands and arms with special soaps and brushes, ultimately I could not conceal my secret life as a devotee of oil and pistons. Immovable sludge from the heart of the old engine lodged permanently under my fingernails and cuticles. Ground-in blackness darkened the whorls of my fingerprints and the tiny crosshatchings of my knuckles.

Was it sacrilege to teach Shakespeare and Keats with hands in such a state? Perhaps. But in ways that daily surprised me, I was becoming more and more sensitive to the struts and supporting members of literary creations. Any poem is infinitely more complex than any engine, but going from one to another in the intimate way I was doing proved instructive and enlightening. One did not need to lapse into the breezy generalizations of Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Whether one called it zen, logos, or ratio, the inherent discipline of repair work sharpened the hands, the eyes, and the mind leaving one with a self-sustaining sense of liberation. Once I grasped that fact, my apprenticeship was over, the rite de passage was accomplished, and Larry and Buck disappeared forever, leaving me with a car that stayed out of doors during the worst winter in one hundred years. It never failed to start on the first turn of the key.

The experience with Larry and Buck released a whole complex of memories which I had conveniently tucked away or repressed once I entered the rarefied atmosphere of academe. In those sacred precincts, automobiles were not a propre subject of discourse, except perhaps as counters in a game of fiscal or economic analysis. And one learned quickly to drive the right kind of automobile, namely, a foreign one. Preferences varied from one ivory tower to another, but certain makes were always in favor. For the economy-minded, a used Hillman Minx or Morris Minor might be ideal. An MG, old or new, was always popular, as was the Mercedes, particularly the diesel-powered models. But the ultimate in academic chic was the Volvo, sold in advertisements as the thinking man's car. And I believed that I shared vicariously in that cool Swedish rationality as long as I owned my Volvo 145 station wagon, despite the fact that the SU carburetors were untunable, that the points wore out every 2,000 miles, or that the camshaft collapsed after 50,000 miles (for which the factory did partially reimburse me). I needn't cite the thrown piston rod from my new Mercedes or the VW Square Back that greeted the front passenger with a cascading waterfall (via the glove compartment) every time it rained. And while my two MG's were delightful to drive, both leaked notoriously, and the electric systems were abysmally inefficient. And I did drive three hundred miles (in a borrowed Plymouth) to buy a fuel pump for the last MG. I had been duped with advertising techniques long since documented by Vance Packard in The Hidden Persuaders. When the Volvo left me on a snow-packed road in the middle of January. I vowed to find an American car that most resembled the one I had almost forgotten: my father's pride, a 1950 Chevrolet De Luxe.

That Chevy had been my father's first new car, and I knew it as our family car, as well as the car on which I learned to drive. My first lesson on the correct operation of clutch and brake pedals ended with the destruction of our wooden garage doors and a few flecks of white paint permanently embedded in the front bumper of the Chevy. The car cost $1,800 new in 1950, and except for tires, batteries, brake linings, belts, and hoses never cost another penny. We performed all the work on it right in the driveway, with a few simple tools and the jack as provided by the factory. The car came with a service manual, no radio, and a "lap robe" for chilly evenings. I don't recall ever thinking of it as anything but transportation or work since I held the wrenches, pumped the pedals, or cleaned up the mess while my Father did the interesting jobs. Once a month we checked every fluid, bulb, and belt, changed the oil and greased everything. No one ever touched the car except me or my father. When I inherited it, that old Chevy had 99,000 miles on the odometer. When I sold it five years later, the total was up to 133,000-and I sold it to a service station owner who used it to haul wrecks and boost batteries on cold winter mornings.

The luminous days with Larry and Buck may have allowed me to relive these days from the past, and perhaps the restoration of the '58 Bel Air was a strange way of reclaiming the lost '50 De Luxe. Sometimes I would be driving late at night across the prairie during the dead of winter. The world had turned glacial, time and distance melted into one another. The radio cracked and fizzed as station signals faded in and out from all over the country: WABC (New York) . . . WSM (Nashville) . . . WLS (Chicago) . . . WWL (New Orleans). The wheel vibrated ever so slightly through my thick gloves, and for an instant this car was every car I had ever owned. I thought of grandfather's Model A, bought new in 1929 and kept running for twenty-five years. The thing rocked and pitched like a buckboard through the cotton fields. The roof was kept tight with yearly applications of tar. I came to be a part of him, like a horse or mule. I half expect to find it one of these days, waiting at the edge of a green pasture, where he left it over twenty-five years ago.

All this telescoping of time and distance seems especially ironic since the American automobile is the supreme example of planned obsolescence in the world's largest consumer economy. What had been designed as a piece of ephemera, something to be forgotten as soon as the annual models appeared, became instead a preserver of the past and the trigger mechanism for a whole cluster of nostalgic feelings and associations. Automobile travel became a species of time travel: we found ourselves going backward in time while moving forward in space.

Aristotle was deprived of the opportunity to define the exact nature of the automobile, but I suspect that with his keen concern for causation and movement in the machine age. In The Poetics Aristotle described the plot or mainspring of action in a play with the Greek word dunamos (English "dynamic"). Perhaps we have thought of automotive dynamics in rather narrow and unimaginative ways. The term "dynamics" is a staple in the critical vocabulary of disciplines as diverse as engineering, psychology, and aesthetics. In ways not yet fully understood, the automobile belongs in all three areas of inquiry. As such, it represents a nexus of many human skills and undertakings.

Precisely because the automobile can be viewed from so many different perspectives, it possesses an unusually high visibility within American culture. Automobiles are probably the most recognizable and identifiable artifacts shared by most Americans. Literary critics might call this charismatic power "resonance," while an anthropologist might see the auto as our source of mana. But the copywriters seized upon and enhanced this mythic potency almost from the outset. Here is a representative sample from a 1951 Ford Advertisement.

Today the American Road has no end: The road that went nowhere now goes everywhere . . . . The wheels move endlessly, always moving, always forward-and always lengthening the American Road. On that road the nation is steadily traveling beyond the troubles of this century, constantly heading toward finer tomorrows. The American Road is paved with hope.

It isn't the Ford as such that is being sold here but a sort of Whitmanesque dream of the future. In an analogous way, the central importance of the automobile today is suggested by a recent Chevrolet Chevelle spread in which a gallery of American types (hardhats, housewives, and professionals) are grouped around the car which is parked conveniently in front of the neighborhood Roxy. The marquee proudly announces "A Fresh New Slice of Apple Pie." Even though the photograph is clearly staged, the overall advertisement is clever and convincing because we all recognize ourselves in it. The movie is over; the car is parked at the curb, waiting for its driver. Any member of the crowd might hop in and drive away. That intoxicating promise of power, that irreducible pleasure in moving from here to there is what the automobile finally means.

There isn't a Roxy in my town, but there is an architectural clone called The Cinema, and nearby lives an old gentleman who owns two 1965 Chevrolet Corvairs. One is "Sea Green," the other "Fathom Blue." If the old fellow has heard of Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed, he won't admit it-at least not to me. I've been eyeing the blue one, always discreetly and with no apparent haste. In matters like these timing counts for everything, so I'm waiting for another one of those high-domed October days. When the conversation hits a lull and the light softens on the contours of the old Corvair. I'll incline my head gently toward the car and make him an offer he can't refuse.

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