Pittsburgh, PA

I love Pittsburgh! This is a jaunty city with a past. It sits on an amazing chunk of American real estate and exudes American history. Two rivers, (the Allegheny and the Monongahela (The Mon) come together at Point Park in downtown Pittsburgh to form the Ohio River. The view of this first order confluence from Mt. Washington is almost mystical in its beauty. This vision is a perfect marriage of natural contours and modern architecture. There is no doubt that this spot is the center of life in Pittsburgh. Many cities have become amorphous collections of dispersed centers, not Pittsburgh. You are clearly at the vortex when you approach downtown and “The Point.” From the lighted fountain at the very tip of downtown to the towering PPG and Alcoa buildings to the thousands and thousands of lights which line all sides of the rivers- at night, this is almost a fantasy vision- elegant yet real, gritty yet dreamlike. Pittsburgh is like a big small town. People are friendly and helpful, and they are fierce and constant sports enthusiasts. High school football is every bit as much a religion here as it is in any small town in Texas. Both the Pirates and the Steelers have new stadiums right where the rivers meet emphasizing the central importance that these teams have for ‘burghers. Ben R is a god here, and the great number of neighborhood bars and new “sports grills” alike rock with cheers and Iron City that flow profusely during games.

Pittsburgh’s reputation as a steel , coal and heavy industry center still colors most people’s opinion of it. Yet the rivers, once lined with steel mills and other large brick industrial monoliths, now sport condos and “Waterfront” shopping meccas with Filene’s and Dave and Busters and palacelike cinema centres. There are still many neighborhoods and river towns that have yet to find the resources to revitalize, but there is a crispness and wonder to this “down-home” tough and tender city which inspires great loyalty and a distinct culture that has produced both Andy Warhol and Joe Namath.

It may be shocking that I actually had a reason – two of them really- to visit Pittsburgh. Two of my authors Robinson Jeffers and Willa Cather spent important years in this metropolis, and, of course, I wanted to see if there were any physical remnants of the places where they lived. Robinson Jeffers, the poet of nature and the California coast, was born right here in Pittsburgh. His birthplace is gone, probably sitting under PNC Park or an adjacent parking lot, but the house where he lived, off and on, from 1889 until 1903 is still in use in Sewickley, an upscale suburb a couple of miles down the Ohio River. Jeffers’ mother was from Sewickley. His father was a professor at Western Theological Seminary which probably explains “Robin’s” great interest in the classics. This was a second marriage for William Hamilton Jeffers. He was a widower and 47 years old while his new wife Annie was only 25. With the help of Annie’s parents, they built the house at 44 Thorn St in Sewickley. The house is large and quite beautiful. It sits in the middle of Sewickley, just one block from Sewickley Academy. This would have been a comfortable existence for the Jeffers. They often traveled to Europe, and Robin spent time at boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland. He was always an interested and engaged student and was considered a bit of a prodigy, learning Greek and Latin as part of his early childhood education. His father retired in 1903, and the family soon relocated to California. They still maintained many family ties in Pittsburgh.

Willa Cather’s connection with Pittsburgh is quite different. She came to take a job as editor for Home Monthly in 1896. Pittsburgh at this time was an industrial center. Pollution was an ever-present problem and the smoke from the mills and factories could obliterate the sun. Cather came to the East to advance her writing career. She worked for awhile as an editor, then she taught at two high schools in Pittsburgh, and eventually after ten years, left to work for McClure’s Magazine in New York. She stayed in New York for the rest of her life.

After spending her first year or so living in boarding houses and cramped apartments,Willa moved in with her lifelong friend, Isabelle McClung and her family at 1180 Murray Hill Ave. in Pittsburgh’s tony East End. This house, on a vertical cobblestone street next to the Woodland Ave historic district and Chatham College is imposing and still towers over the rest of Shadyside, one of Pittsburgh’s best neighborhoods. Andrew Mellon built a home one block away in 1896. Willa lived with the McClungs for 5 years. Her room was on the third floor of the house, and she refers to having time to write without being disturbed. It is probable that many of her early stories were written here, especially her widely anthologized story, “Paul’s Case” and her breakthrough story, The Troll Garden.” “Paul’s Case” is set in Pittsburgh and deals with the disenchantment and dissolution of a teenage boy, who finds his middle class life so stifling of his creativity that he steals money and has a “last” embracing of beauty in New York. Willa seems to have had real ambivalence about Pittsburgh and the strong orthodoxy that she saw around her. In this story, Paul catches the trolley only a block away (Negley St.) from the house that Willa shared with the McClungs. She was always divided by the love she felt for the towns and cities that she knew provided the form and substance which give our lives meaning and yet she disdained the way that they also thwarted and sometimes killed the creative instincts of the artist.

Do artists need to leave home? Do the restrictions of home-grown society limit access to the muse and leave the artist to be a stranger in his own land among her own people? With Jeffers, his time as a poet was yet to manifest itself when his family left Pittsburgh to travel to Europe and ultimately relocate in Southern California. As for Cather, Pittsburgh seemed to nurture her and help her form her art. This was a far cry from Gore, Va. or Red Cloud , NE or even Lincoln, NE, and it provided access to ideas and a different culture than she had ever experienced. She was certainly ready after her ten years to take the next step and find her place in the literary world of New York.

And, now the journey goes ever westward. I am on to eastern Ohio and Cleveland to explore the haunts of Hart Crane, the mystical poet and Sherwood Anderson, the fiction writer who William Faulkner (they met in New Orleans) called “the father of my generation of American writers and the tradition of American writing which our successors will carry on.” We carry on.