Turning the Blues Coral

Edward Leedskalnin's Unrequited Love

By Rebecca Ryder Neipris

Click to see full size
Illustration by Author
Image

The bitch broke his heart the day before the wedding. "Too old and too poor," she said. Edward Leedskalnin, having received the jilt from his Sweet Sixteen, Agnes Scuffs, packed up and left Latvia. Tubercular, diminutive, driven mad by heartbreak, Leedskalnin spent a quarter of a century building Scuffs a coral loveshack in the Sunshine State. Hewn from desiccated once-alives, the home enacts its erector's bizarre, anachronistic, and optimistic inner workings.

In 1918, the 31-year-old Leedskalnin moved to Florida City after itinerance in Canada, California, and Texas. There he began constructing Coral Castle (originally Rock Gate Park). Sans machinery, formal training, and even the light of day (Ed, a recluse, worked only at night and only alone), he crafted the absent Aggie a home. All told, 1,100 tons of coral rock were used in the Castle's construction. That alone is myth-worthy, but dig this: Ed was five foot nil and weighed only 100 pounds. His ability to excavate all that rock from his own personal quarry and manipulate the 4,000-foot-thick material is an object of much speculation. Levitation, UFO's, secrets of deities, and magnets have all been cited as the source of Ed's accomplishment. The Castle's erection remains a mystery—a baffling stunt of Stonehengian proportions.

In '36, Ed moved the Castle to a 10-acre plot in Homestead, 25 miles south of Miami, where it remains today. It took him three years to move the structure 10 miles. He didn't have a car; according to Coral Castle's official website, he used "the chassis of an old Republic truck" to move it all, piece by piece, along the Dixie Highway by lantern light.

Roadside Attraction

Denied romantic partnership, Leedskalnin painstakingly and obsessively constructed a utopian world physically in Coral Castle and philosophically in several self-published treatises. His 'scientific' postulations are mostly predicated upon electromagnetics, which offered truths and companionship Ed could not find in social relations: "Those surplus magnets, they are real life. Magnets in general are indestructible. .You can destroy the body, but you cannot destroy magnets that held together the body." For a bachelor concerned with legacy, without possibility of continuing on in the world through biological offspring, the magnet theory offered a vehicle for transcending mortality.

The collapse of all existence into magnets may just indicate the tangle of a love-rent mind, but the confusion is also beautiful and optimistic. Take Ed's version of how plants convert light into energy: "The water in plants catches the running sunlight that is coming from the sun and the North and South pole magnets wrap themselves around the caught particles of sunlight and as soon as the particles of sunlight which are wrapped around by the North and South pole magnets are coming in the suitable part of the plant then they join the plant and become a part of it. The North and South pole magnets are going in and out of the earth all the time, everywhere and their numbers are limitless." Such conviction in the harmony of life—"I believe that water, sunlight, and North and South pole magnets are making the plants grow"—attests to Leedskalnin's deep-rooted romanticism. Perhaps electromagnetics were a substitute for love; similarly mysterious, but more amenable to mastery.

Leedskalnin fancied himself a theorist. Just as Coral Castle was built as a dream-world for spectators (Ed never actually intended to live there with Agnes), A Book in Every Home, published by the author in 1936, was another way he communicated his fantasies to the world. It parades Ed's private life through his biases as autobiographically as a hermit can get. The first section, "Ed's Sweet Sixteen," is a chronicle of Ed's ardor for Agnes. It is also an expression of Leedskalnin's funky gender politics. "Now, I will tell you why I did not get the girl," Ed begins. "The trouble was that I did not have the money and didn't make enough." This initial accurate-but-brusque treatment of his love, in which Ed blames his financial situation for Agnes' ditch, dissembles the latent bitterness that surfaces later. It belies the occasional resentment Ed must have had; it implies that Scuffs was morally bankrupt and 'second-hand,' impure, and thus to blame for their fizzled relationship.

With a modern reader's inescapable bemusedness, the first section of the book can be forgiven the touches of misogyny. Leedskalnin flirts with the puritanical and the vulgar. He sets up at the altar of a strictly virginal Sweet Sixteen: one who has never associated with another boy. Two culprits are to blame for a girl becoming experienced: her "mamma," and insidious church- and school-sponsored picnics. Leedskalnin suggests that a girl's purity can be maintained if only the mother "herself could pose as an experimental station for that fresh boy to practice on and so save the girl."

This Sodom and Gomorrah land of picnicking transforms the innocents into heathens: curiosity most certainly kills Ed's cat. The girls become "cheapened," as they are "coupled.with the fresh boys—and then they [are sent] out to the woods, parks, beaches and other places so that they can practice in first degree love making." First degree love making? "The first degree love making is when the fresh boy begins to soil the girl by patting, rubbing, and squeezing her. They start it in that way but soon it begins to get dull and there is no kick in it, so they have to start in on the second degree and keep on." Escalating up the sex ladder kills the girl, such that "when the right man comes along and when he touches the girl, then he touches her like dead flesh." Sounds like someone needs a heart-to-heart with Dr. Ruth, stat. Or maybe a little patting, rubbing, and squeezing of his own.

Though he casts it positively, Ed's high standards, conservativism, and disdain for curiosity in a time of 'looseness' resulted in solitude: "I want one hundred per cent good or none. That is why I was so successful in resisting the natural urge for love making." One infers that Agnes, experience having sucked some of the sweetness out of her, did not deserve him¸ despite the author's earlier assertion that his financial situation (and thus he) was to blame for the breakup. Leedskalnin's references to "humiliation," "sour feelings," and "soiling" expose the still-raw hurtings of a love despot ever-settling a one-sided score. He resents Agnes for disillusioning him: "With every love making affair, their hearts get bruised and by the time they grow up, their hearts are so badly bruised that they are no more good." In contrast to his scientific writings, Ed's social philosophies are melancholic and pessimistic: "Boys and girls start out as friends and finish as disappointed lovers, now let me tell you," he opines.

Down With The Weaklings

A Book in Every Home includes two other sections: "Domestic" and "Political Views." "Domestic" is a dissertation condensable to two points: blame mom, and always appear physically well-composed (don't smile too wide, only look straight ahead, walk evenly). "Political Views" establishes what is apparent in later writings, like "Animal Life": that Leedskalnin is interested in enduring truths and nature-based harmony.

Leedskalnin uncharacteristically moves into meanie mode late in the section, reiterating his jadedness, this time resulting in paranoia, here at the government's hands. "Nobody wants your life but everybody wants your property," he writes, foam-lathered, and continues, tongue lolling, "Now you see, nobody wants you, they want your property so really the property is the one that needs the protection and not you. You are the protector yourself." It's a shock he offered tours of Coral Castle at all, and didn't just sit behind the nine-ton turnstile with a loaded shotgun. As he turns his gaze toward the plebs, his hermetic, egotistical disdain for others resurfaces: "It is not sound to allow the weaklings to vote." (Weaklings!) He easily condemns to death the dependent and unmotivated: "if you want the things to eat you will have to produce them yourself and if you are too weak, too lazy, lack machinery and good management to produce them, you should perish and that is all there is to it." The document ends there.

Entering The Kitschy Canon

But actions speak louder than words; Ed's betray his dogging optimism. Bitter semantics only bark. Coral Castle, and the structures within, are the products of persistent hopefulness. The State of Florida Table enacts Ed's utopian aspirations for government, undermining the curmudgeonly lashing-outs of his political writings. Carved in exact replica of the state, Leedskalnin offered an administrative space in which the Governor and all the senators and representatives would make decisions. Most contrary to Ed's asserted sour grapes, however, is the Feast of Love Table. (Ripley's Believe It Or Not listed this the World's Largest Valentine.) It is heart-shaped, with a built-in bouquet (an Ixora bush planted in the center) and benches surrounding.

Ed got sick in December 1951. He put a sign on the Castle door that said "Going to the Hospital" and died at Miami's Jackson Memorial at age 64. A nephew inherited Ed's belongings: the Castle and 35 $100 bills—Leedskalnin's life savings. Coral Castle has since entered into the (however kitschy) canon of monuments to unrequited love: from Forestiere's Underground Gardens in Fresno to Boldt Castle in New York to the biggest and baddest, the Taj Mahal.

In 1980, Agnes Scuffs was still alive. She was 86. A formal invitation to see the Castle was extended her; she declined. "I wasn't interested then, and I'm not interested now." She's dead now. What remains is a toothed tower pinkly gnashing the Florida sky, unrequited.

REBECCA RYDER NEIPRIS B'06.5 could cast a wooly mammoth in bronze on a dark Helsinki night.

Back to Top

the college hill independent

http://www.theindy.com