Chicago and the Making of American Modernism: Cather, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald in Conflict 9781350018037, 9781350018051, 9781350018402

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Chicago and the Making of American Modernism

Historicizing Modernism Series Editors

Matthew Feldman, Professor of Contemporary History, Teesside University, UK; and Erik Tonning, Professor of British Literature and Culture, University of Bergen, Norway Assistant Editor: David Tucker, Associate Lecturer, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK

Editorial Board Professor Chris Ackerley, Department of English, University of Otago, New Zealand; Professor Ron Bush, St. John’s College, University of Oxford, UK; Dr Finn Fordham, Department of English, Royal Holloway, UK; Professor Steven Matthews, Department of English, University of Reading, UK; Dr Mark Nixon, Department of English, University of Reading, UK; Professor Shane Weller, Reader in Comparative Literature, University of Kent, UK; and Professor Janet Wilson, University of Northampton, UK. Historicizing Modernism challenges traditional literary interpretations by taking an empirical approach to modernist writing: a direct response to new documentary sources made available over the last decade. Informed by archival research, and working beyond the usual European/ American avant-garde 1900–45 parameters, this series reassesses established readings of modernist writers by developing fresh views of intellectual contexts and working methods.

Series Titles Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India, Laetitia Zecchini British Literature and Classical Music, David Deutsch Broadcasting in the Modernist Era, Matthew Feldman, Henry Mead and Erik Tonning Charles Henri Ford, Alexander Howard Christian Modernism in an Age of Totalitarianism, Jonas Kurlberg Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos, David Ten Eyck Ezra Pound’s Eriugena, Mark Byron Great War Modernisms and The New Age Magazine, Paul Jackson

James Joyce and Absolute Music, Michelle Witen James Joyce and Catholicism, Chrissie van Mierlo John Kasper and Ezra Pound, Alec Marsh Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism, Edited by Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber and Susan Reid Late Modernism and the English Intelligencer, Alex Latter The Life and Work of Thomas MacGreevy, Susan Schreibman Literary Impressionism, Rebecca Bowler Modern Manuscripts, Dirk Van Hulle Modernism at the Microphone, Melissa Dinsman Modernist Lives, Claire Battershill The Politics of 1930s British Literature, Natasha Periyan Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies, Sandeep Parmar Reframing Yeats, Charles Ivan Armstrong Samuel Beckett and Arnold Geulincx, David Tucker Samuel Beckett and the Bible, Iain Bailey Samuel Beckett and Cinema, Anthony Paraskeva Samuel Beckett and Experimental Psychology, Joshua Powell Samuel Beckett’s “More Pricks than Kicks,” John Pilling Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937, Mark Nixon T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism, Henry Mead Virginia Woolf ’s Late Cultural Criticism, Alice Wood Upcoming Titles Samuel Beckett and Science, Chris Ackerley Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937, Mark Nixon

Chicago and the Making of American Modernism Cather, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald in Conflict Michelle E. Moore

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Michelle E. Moore, 2019 Michelle E. Moore has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by Eleanor Rose All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Moore, Michelle E., author. Title: Chicago and the making of American modernism: Cather, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald in conflict/Michelle E. Moore. Description: London; New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. | Series: Historicizing modernism | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018023582 (print) | LCCN 2018024832 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350018044 (ePub) | ISBN 9781350018402 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781350018037 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Modernism (Literature)–United States. | Literature and society–Illinois–Chicago. | Chicago (Ill.)–In literature. | Chicago (Ill.)–Intellectual life. Classification: LCC PS228.M63 (ebook) | LCC PS228.M63 M66 2019 (print) | DDC 810.9/112–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018023582 ISBN:

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Contents Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations

ix

Introduction

1

xi

Part One  The Fire, the Columbian Exhibition, and the Boosters

11

1

Henry Blake Fuller and Chicago

13

2

Harriet Monroe and Chicago

29



The Columbian Exhibition, the “Columbian Ode,” and copyright

30



Worker’s Rights and Arts and Crafts: The lawsuit and verdict in context

45

3

Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, and Chicago

55



Edgar Lee Masters’s critique of Chicago

56



Sherwood Anderson, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Craftsman ideal

62

Part Two  Making Modernism Out of Chicago

69

4

Willa Cather and Chicago

71



Elia Peattie and Willa Cather’s embrace of the modern

72



Willa Cather’s critique of Chicago: The Song of the Lark

76



Fanny Butcher and the crass commercialism of the book market

93

5

Ernest Hemingway and Chicago

99



Oak Park, Chicago, and the idea of the “good businessman”

100



The business of making good, honest modernism

107



Making good modernism out of bad business

118



The bad business of patronage

125

6

William Faulkner and Chicago

133

The Mosquitoes, double dealers, and confidence men

136

Sanctuary, gangsters, and Ulysses

148

Contents

viii

Wild Palms and the historical exchange between Chicago and the South

156

7

F. Scott Fitzgerald and Chicago

165



Ginevra King: True to type

167



The Medills and the McCormicks: “The Camel’s Back”

173



Eleanor “Cissy” and Joseph Patterson: “May Day”

177



Chicago plots: Among the Ash Heaps and the Millionaires

187

Notes Works Cited Index

193 222 236

Acknowledgments I would like to thank David Avital and Clara Herberg at Bloomsbury for their support and work. I would particularly like to thank the series editors, Erik Tonning and Matthew Feldman, for realizing that I was, in fact, historicizing modernism and including this book in their series. I am additionally indebted to the anonymous peer reviewers whose questions strengthened this work immeasurably. Thank you to Catherine Masters, Kathleen George, and John Masters for granting permission to quote from their grandfather Edgar Lee Masters’s letters and Giny Chandler for her permission to quote from her grandmother Ginevra King’s letters. I am grateful to all who donated extensive collections to museums and libraries. Without you, there would be no book. I am grateful to Kirk Curnutt for taking the time and helping with Hemingway permissions, Ashley Olson at the Cather Foundation for help ascertaining the shifting state of Cather permissions, and Leif Miliken for help with Cather Studies permissions. Thank you to the University of Nebraska Press and the Board of Regents at the University of Nebraska for allowing me to reproduce part of Chapter 4, “Willa Cather and Chicago,” from Cather Studies, Volume 9: Willa Cather and Modern Cultures, edited by Melissa J. Homestead and Guy J. Reynolds. I wish to thank Alison Hinderliter, Manuscripts and Archives Librarian in the Roger and Julie Baskes Department of Special Collections at the Newberry Library, for her help years ago for granting me access to the then uncataloged records of the Attic Club and the Cliff Dwellers Club. Thank you to Don C. Skemer, Curator of Manuscripts at the Manuscripts Division and Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, for answering all of my many questions about Ginevra King and Fitzgerald. I also wish to thank the Chicago Historical Society for granting me access to the official catalog of the Cliff Dwellers exhibit at the Columbian Exhibition. Thank you to the entire staff at the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library, the Special Collections Research Center at the University of Chicago library, the

x

Acknowledgments

Department of Special Collections at the Newberry Library, the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Princeton University Library, and Special Collections at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Thanks are in order to the Cather Foundation and the wonderfully supportive community of Cather scholars, especially John Swift, Ann Romines, Michael Schueth, Melissa Homestead, and Guy Reynolds, for their positive encouragement and suggestions to revise the seed chapter for the book. Thanks, too, for the entire Hemingway Society. You welcomed this work enthusiastically five years ago and your seminars and panels provided enthusiastic support and advice for the chapters on Hemingway, Anderson, and Masters. My colleagues and friends at the College of Dupage have offered tremendous support through conversation, enthusiasm, distraction, and helping me find the time to write: Karin Evans, Bob Hazard, Jackie McGrath, Bob DixonKohler, Brian Brems, Bob Georgalas, and Tuckie Pillar. Thank you. I am also enormously grateful to Bev Reed, Mark Collins, and Sandra Martins for providing funding for research, encouraging me to pursue publication, and creating schedules that have allowed me to do so. I wish to thank Veronica Guadalupe for putting me back in alignment every week, and David Riddle for extra energy and grounding. I must acknowledge Rachel Marks who supports me always in everything I do, especially this project. I am grateful to my family for understanding what it means to write a book and allowing the space, time, and quiet to do so: Linda Moore, Bill Moore, Jane Palmer, Dolly and Gordon Bentson, Jerry and Sarah Weissburg, Zoë Bradford, and Natalie Weissburg. This book would not be without the love and support of Mark Weissburg. Words cannot begin to express my gratitude for having you in my life.

List of Abbreviations JFK

John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. Boston, MA.

NL

Roger and Julie Baskes Department of Special Collections. Newberry Library. Chicago, IL.

PL

Manuscripts Division. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Princeton University Library.

UC

Special Collections Research Center. University of Chicago Library.

Introduction

Work must be studied in relation to the time in which it presented its contrasts, insisted upon its virtues and got itself into human view. Frank Lloyd Wright “Louis Sullivan: His Work” (1924) I came back from the New York Tristan and advertising campaigns with a number of good advertisements, but Chicago firms refused to contribute their quota. Marshall Field and Company was obdurate because it saw no reason to support an art magazine which didn’t send it thousands of customers. Margaret C. Anderson My Thirty Years’ War: An Autobiography (1930)

A great deal of scholarship has been written about Cather and Nebraska, Cather and Pittsburgh, Hemingway and Paris, Fitzgerald and Paris, and Faulkner and New Orleans. But none of these writers have been fully considered within the context of Chicago. Cather circumvented Chicago to go to Pittsburgh, but remained in contact with the city for most of her life because of her childhood friend from Red Cloud, Irene Miner Weisz, who married a Chicago businessman. Her early work shows her deep knowledge of the Chicago literary scene. Although Hemingway lived in Chicago only briefly from 1920 to 1921, he grew up only ten miles away and the city exerted a profound and far-reaching influence on him. He met the new literary celebrity Sherwood Anderson while living on North Dearborn Street, who proved to be an impressive and important contact for introductions in Paris and in the publishing world. Also, during this time, Hemingway wrote short sketches of Chicago for the Toronto Star that demonstrate his extensive knowledge of

2

Chicago and the Making of American Modernism

Chicago turn-of-the-century literary urban realism from which he borrows his form. In Hemingway’s later works, there are often brief references to Chicago, which may be read as a critique of the Chicago literary scene, as well as an acknowledgment of his own history with the city. Faulkner, too, sought out Anderson, in New York and New Orleans, and makes sly references to Chicago in his early columns for The Mississippian and in later works that may be read as an extended conversation about Chicago’s literary scene and Anderson. Fitzgerald knew Anderson in New York by 1922 and visited the Chicago area twice, in June 1915 and in August 1916, to possibly see Ginevra King, with whom he had fallen in love. Fitzgerald was also friends with the Chicagoan Gordon McCormick at Princeton and would be inspired by his extended family, the Medills and the Pattersons, to write stories about fragile and wild rich girls who marry rich boys. Chicago and the Making of American Modernism demonstrates how commercial fare, for Cather, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, will be associated with the worst tendencies of the Chicago realists and the advertising man, Anderson, who played the artistic market. Each writer’s references to Chicago in their major works can be read as signposts that reveal each writer’s struggle over style: whether to write the easily published and profitable Chicago realism that would make writing useful and utilitarian, or the less profitable, but European, high modernist symbolism. The book rectifies the omissions in existing scholarship by examining the place and uses of Chicago in the fiction of four American modernist writers— Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In doing so, the book highlights American modernist writers’ engagement with the Chicago art scene and the ways in which these writers sought to define their writing and American modernism by writing against the temperament and constrictions of the art scene in Chicago. The establishment in Chicago that the modernists were resisting is quite simply the entire establishment in small-town Chicago: the businessmen boosters and their wives who rebuilt Chicago from the ashes, the turn-of-the-century evangelical movements, and the Chicago literary realists. The Chicago Club began in the late nineteenth century and continues to the present as the place where business deals happen. The most elite businessmen belonged to this club and so the Club represents the Chicago business establishment, those men who can afford to fund art projects and create

Introduction

3

buildings for symphonies, operas, and art: Potter Palmer, Marshall Field, Oscar Meyer, Louis Armour, George Pullman, William McCormick Blair, Robert R. McCormick, John R. Lindgren, and others. After the Chicago Fire of 1871 destroyed most of the city, including the Chicago Club’s first clubhouse, members quickly contacted connections to the East Coast and Europe to help them rebuild. They brought in architects and promised that the city would be ready to host the World’s Columbian Exhibition in 1893. They wished to “boost” the city to a higher level in order to “boost” business. Their brand of optimistic cheerleading for Chicago became quickly known as “boosterism.” All discussion of Chicago, whether in art, criticism, or to the newspapers, needed to uplift the city’s stature. The city would get its art museum, symphony, and opera, but only because it would help uplift the stature of the city and ultimately increase sales, expand industry, and generate profit. The Chicago Tribune’s art critics, ultimately answering to their owner Robert McCormick, did not understand the modern art and so skewered it publicly. If art must be seen as uplifting in Chicago, modern art, itself a self-reflecting and critical form, will fail at this task. Modernists, like Margaret C. Anderson, could not get funding for their projects easily because the shepherding and publishing of avant-garde literature served no purpose in increasing business for the Chicago commercial establishment. In 1857, Robert W. Patterson founded Lake Forest College as a deeply committed Presbyterian alternative to Methodist Northwestern University. In 1860, abolitionists founded Wheaton College twenty-five miles west of Chicago to educate “in the evangelical Protestant tradition.” In early 1886, D. L. Moody established the Chicago Evangelization Society for the “education and training of Christian workers, including teachers, ministers, missionaries, and musicians who may completely and effectively proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ.” By the late nineteenth century, Chicago had a large number of evangelical churches and believers in the uplifting power of Jesus Christ. The core of nineteenth-century evangelicalism was the experience of conversion. It was not simply something that people believed in faithfully, but something that happened to them completely. The transformation left them with a fundamentally altered sense of self, an identity as a new kind of Christian who must now tell others of their conversion experience in order to save souls. The evangelical movement in Chicago formed a religious establishment that worked alongside the businesses to uplift the city. For

4

Chicago and the Making of American Modernism

the evangelicals, the idea of uplift had specifically spiritual meanings and art, therefore, needed to help the process of conversion. Henry Blake Fuller, Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald all mention and write against the way in which Chicago blends business, religion, and art. Modernist writers writing against Chicago are writing against this tendency, rather than any single religious figure. By the first decades of the twentieth century, a Chicago literary establishment had emerged. Although many of the writers would despise the way in which their art was used by the Chicago boosters to boost the profile of the city, each achieved literary fame because of the booster’s involvement. Carl Sandburg and Upton Sinclair wrote gritty works that exposed the dark recesses of Chicago business and were heralded by the Chicago socialists and unions for using art as a tool to help uplift the worker. Edgar Lee Masters and Sherwood Anderson exposed the realistic underside of the American small town, inadvertently championing the new urbanism represented by Chicago by the boosters. Henry Blake Fuller, Hamlin Garland, and Sherwood Anderson mapped the late nineteenth-century landscapes of America, providing a road map for the speculators who wished to make money from small-town tourism and train travel. Cather, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald would see these writers and their work as emblematic of the worst tendencies of Chicago art: realism, use-value, and commercial boosterism. There have been multiple books that consider Chicago modernism, but none addresses the difficult question why so many artists and writers left Chicago. Sue Ann Prince’s edited collection Old Guard and the Avant-Garde: Modernism in Chicago, 1910–1940 comes the closest to considering Chicago with a similar lens as my book. Prince organized the essays in order to address the “bitter struggle between an old guard and an avant-garde for at least three decades” in Chicago.1 The essays in the collection consider visual art, particularly painting, and taken together argue that modernism as a progressive form of European art was not accepted by a Chicago art establishment that was more concerned with Francophile art. Various essays show how clubs and guilds developed in response to the onslaught of European art, best seen in the organized responses to the Armory Show of 1913. Taken together, the essays in the collection lay the groundwork for the view of Chicago’s art scene that Chicago and the Making

Introduction

5

of American Modernism argues was hostile to the literary forms of interest to Cather, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. The collection Chicago Modern 1893–1945: Pursuit of the New, edited by Elizabeth Kennedy, surveys early modernism as it was done by Chicago artists, and argues that Chicago art pursued the individuation of the artist, who, in living apart from the art centers of New York or Paris, could be free of regimentation. In the introduction, Kennedy acknowledges the provincialism of Chicago, but claims that this fact exerted no more sway over the city’s artists than the great art schools of the East’s major cities did in their push toward an artistic conformity. The entire collection continues the vision first expressed by Chicago art critic C. J. Bulliet who declared in 1935 that the city celebrated “individualism as opposed to regimentation.”2 Chicago and the Making of American Modernism shows how American writers had to think about Chicago, its literature and its industry, in order to construct a new American modernism that speaks to the new European avant-garde while remembering the recent struggles of establishing an American literature apart from Europe. My book emerged from three simple questions: If Chicago was so free and avant-garde, why did so many significant writers and artists leave as quickly as they could? More importantly, why did they write such scathing critiques of Chicago in their work once they were firmly ensconced in the art scenes of New York or Europe? Last, why are the relationships between the Chicago business world and the art scene not understood and explored in literary histories? Part One, “The Fire, the Columbian Exhibition, and the Boosters,” draws a picture of the artistic climate in Chicago in the decades after the fire and presents the people, salons, and publications that attempted to fight this climate. Its purpose is twofold: to give the reader a history of Chicago and to explain the myriad of literary and artistic responses to the increasingly patronizing climate. Chapter 1, “Henry Blake Fuller and Chicago,” shows how Fuller understood that it was possible to have towns, cities, and countries that supported the arts rather than suppressing them and degrading their importance. He saw Chicago as choosing the latter route and he would spend his life writing and living in opposition to the implied and stated values of what he saw as the vulgar commercialism of Chicago. He was a prominent and active member of

6

Chicago and the Making of American Modernism

the Little Room, an arts club that began in 1898 and met regularly on Friday evenings in Chicago’s Fine Arts Building. The chapter shows how the club designed its purpose as providing solace and protection for artists against the harsh forces of the Chicago business world. The club fell apart when Garland drew the male members away to form his all–male club, The Cliff Dwellers, that had an opposite purpose: to link together Chicago’s art and business. Fuller would always be drawn to those artists who lived in opposition to the stated values of Chicago and they to him. He would never leave Chicago permanently, but lived surrounded by those who saw in him a beacon of hope for the artists of Chicago. Chapter 2 reads Harriet Monroe’s life as a poet and as an early supporter of the “new” in art against her life as a Chicagoan. It traces her involvement with the Columbian Exhibition, from her first commissioning to write the “Columbian Ode,” through her negotiations with the committee for ownership rights and control, to her copyright lawsuit with the New York World that changed copyright laws and granted ownership of unpublished work to artists. Her adept management of the committee and legal action when her inherent rights were violated show her to be both a savvy businesswoman and an artist interested in original and new forms, whatever they may be. It then places her victory for artists’ rights within the context of her involvement with the Chicago Workers’ Rights Movement and Arts and Crafts movement, and the Little Room’s pushback against the Chicago business world. Ultimately, the chapter argues that she won respect from the Chicago business world and its artists because of her lawsuit to protect her copyright and deep concerns about the treatment of artists. She stayed in Chicago and started Poetry magazine, because she considered herself and the magazine as a kind of beacon for the artists of the city, a Jane Addams for the artists. She feared that if she left, the hope of the Little Room would be completely extinguished. Chapter 3 considers Edgar Lee Masters and Sherwood Anderson and draws from their collections at the Newberry Library in Chicago to show the ways in which each writer wrote about Chicago privately, despite their contradictory public statements. Masters named the close association between the Chicago business and art scene as detrimental to artists, especially with regard to the way in which art critics manipulated the scene for the newspapers. Although Sherwood Anderson extolled the virtues of Chicago publicly, he writes repeatedly in private letters dated 1915 through the 1920s about the distaste

Introduction

7

he has for Chicago’s inhabitants and its art scene steeped in utilitarian social realism and patronage. The chapter argues that Anderson became a modern craftsman after working for Frank Lloyd Wright in 1915 as a way to combat the commercial art scene in Chicago. Both writers left Chicago, despite being permanently linked to the city they would come to despise. Part Two, “Making Modernism Out of Chicago,” reveals Cather’s, Faulkner’s, Hemingway’s, and Fitzgerald’s critique of the Chicago scene and illuminates how each writer engaged both the scene and each other to develop a new American modernism. Chapter 4, “Willa Cather and Chicago,” illustrates the writer’s long relationship to the city and her necessary and ongoing engagement with its art scene and critics. The first section chronicles Cather’s relationship to Elia Peattie, the Chicago journalist, which begins in Omaha, Nebraska, and continues after the Peatties moved to Chicago and became a central part of the literary and arts scene. The second section gives an extended reading of Cather’s novel Song of the Lark (1914) and argues that the novel is an extended critique of the Chicago scene that expects art to be useful (whether as social realism or to raise the city’s higher life), treats art as business, and destroys artists by using them. The novel should be read as Cather’s explanation for why she can never move to or settle in Chicago, despite the friends she has and keeps there. The last section shows Cather’s professional relationship to the Chicago Tribune’s art critic Fanny Butcher. Butcher loved and had a sophisticated understanding of the commercial aspect of writing, and she helped Cather sell books in Chicago and across the county, but Cather’s letters to and about Butcher reveal her continued exhaustion with Butcher’s Chicago methods and ideas that made art into a business. Chapter 5, “Hemingway and Chicago,” shows how Hemingway internalized the particularly Chicagoan idea about being a “Good Businessman” and doing good at business while growing up in Oak Park. It considers his Chicago influences and argues that Henry Blake Fuller and Edwin Balmer were instrumental in Hemingway’s formation as a young writer. The chapter then shows how he fuses Fuller’s realist critique of Chicago businessmen and Balmer’s realistic genre fiction about lie detection with the poetics of Edgar Lee Masters and Sherwood Anderson in order to create a new method of writing about bad business. The final section of the chapter shows how once in Paris, Hemingway will continue to write about business and embody the

8

Chicago and the Making of American Modernism

businessman he grew up thinking about as a model for masculinity. The chapter ultimately argues that Hemingway writes about Chicago in order to directly address the contradictions inherent in his upbringing and art scene: the city that is hostile to modern art and those writers who help Hemingway form his craft and help him make money. His rebellion against Chicago helped develop the art that would make him famous as he rethought the Chicago realist and literary tradition in an attempt to create the new, modern American novel. Chapter 6, “Faulkner and Chicago,” demonstrates that Faulkner was fully aware of the popular Chicago literary scene, and after meeting Anderson became aware that Anderson played the Chicago scene publicly and complained bitterly about the scene privately. His connection to Anderson personalized Faulkner’s internal debate about what the new American modernism would look like. The chapter’s first section examines Faulkner’s critique of the Chicago artist in his early novel The Mosquitoes (1927). He constructs the novel as an allusion to Herman Melville’s Confidence Man (1857) and, in doing so, transforms his initial criticisms of Anderson and the Chicago scene from a straight parody to darker, more unsettled ideas about fake artistry and the business of writing for profit and reputation. The Mosquitoes maps Faulkner’s young struggle with what he sees as the best-selling, yet sentimental and propagandistic, art coming from Chicago’s artists. The second section considers Faulkner’s often-repeated statement that the South imports its models from the North and that this action results in the simultaneous importation of corruption and violence. It argues that Sanctuary, like Hemingway’s early stories, relies heavily on popular Chicago characters and ideas, particularly the gangster and the Little Review’s publication of Ulysses, in order to draw a sly critique of the ways in which Chicago’s marriage of art and commerce has infected all of American literature. The chapter’s last section considers Wild Palms, Faulkner’s only novel that takes place partially in Chicago and shows that the novel is his final, most blatant, and serious attempt to explain the relationship between his modern Southern writing and Chicago, its writers, and its history. The final chapter, “F. Scott Fitzgerald and Chicago,” traces the histories of the four Chicago families Fitzgerald knew—the Kings, the Medills, the McCormicks, and the Pattersons—in order to show who Fitzgerald drew from when writing about Chicago men and women in his fiction. The chapter offers

Introduction

9

new material as to where he found ideas for major characters, such as The Great Gatsby’s Daisy Buchanan. These Chicago families represent a specific kind of wealth built by grandparents who built their businesses in the mid- to late nineteenth-century period of wildly unregulated capitalism. Fitzgerald is most interested in those Chicagoans who now live, work, and vacation together in a closed and clannish society of the extremely rich. His work uses these types, mash-ups of real people he met briefly or knew deeply throughout his life in order to show the ways in which his fictional drawing of a type is more realistic than Hemingway’s or Cather’s careful renderings of real individuals in fictional guise. Fitzgerald’s work argues that the habits, fashions, and ideologies of the very rich Chicago families have had a destructive impact on Americans, because their ideologies became the ideologies of the intellectual elite and the middle to lower classes who imitate them. The chapter’s final section reads across Fitzgerald’s Chicago plots and suggests that his novels are his attempt to work out the relationship of art to business in American writing. The book balances Chicago’s history, literary biography, and literary criticism while foregrounding new archival documents and letters to produce new readings of much-read texts. This book relies heavily on archival material to demonstrate each individual writer’s relationship to Chicago, their personal feelings about Chicago and its art scene, and their use of Chicago in literature. The result is a strong picture of how Chicago and the idea of Chicago influenced, for better and for worse, American literary modernism.

Part One

The Fire, the Columbian Exhibition, and the Boosters

1

Henry Blake Fuller and Chicago

Fifteen-year-old Henry Blake Fuller witnessed the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and he lived on the edges of the ashes listening to the pushcart drivers, factory owners, and businessmen call out to dust off, raise money, and rebuild. His father and grandfather were among those considered “the old settlers” and most substantial and important families in Chicago. The Fullers came over on the Mayflower, a fact no one would much care about in Chicago, and had spent generations interwoven with the intellectual and business establishment in New England. His grandfather, Judge Henry Fuller, began to move westward in 1830, eventually becoming a county judge in St. Joseph, Michigan. He moved to Chicago in 1848 and created a fortune developing the Rock Island and West Chicago City Railway systems and the Chicago water system. His son and Henry’s father, George Wood Fuller, worked as secretary at the Southside Railway Company. He had inherited his father’s New England temperament of conservative austerity, and he made use of it for conserving his father’s fortune, rather than expanding it.1 Henry Blake grew up hearing about the superiority of New England and New Englanders to Chicago from his grandfather, and he imagined it as a place that supported culture and the arts and that had a sense of tradition, particularly an intellectual one emanating from Boston. He viewed Chicago through the lens of his family’s vision of genteel New England and saw a rough, vulgar town that seemed to wallow in its own love of money and increasing commercialism.2 After his grandfather died in 1879, Henry Blake Fuller traveled to Italy and found the elegant, beautiful, and art-loving culture he imagined New England to be. Because Italy existed, Fuller understood that it was possible to have towns, cities, and countries that supported the arts rather than suppressed them while degrading their importance. He saw Chicago as choosing the latter route, and he would spend his life writing and living in opposition to the implied and stated values of what he saw as the vulgar

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Chicago and the Making of American Modernism

commercialism of Chicago. Fuller would always be drawn to those artists who lived in opposition to the stated values of Chicago and they to him. He would never leave Chicago permanently, but lived surrounded by those who saw in him a beacon of hope for the artists of Chicago. Fuller took over the family estate in 1883 when his father died, but there wasn’t much left from his grandfather’s fortune because George Fuller had a series of financial mishaps over the four intervening years. Fuller would never speak about his early life to his friends and the overall impression among his friends is that he was freed of the oppressive natures of his parents and their expectations for a bachelor son of a good family.3 Fuller far preferred the company of men, which was well-known among those he considered his good friends. In the early 1890s, Henry Blake Fuller lived among a group of bachelors on the North Shore of Chicago in Kenilworth, where they had set up housekeeping together. The circle consisted of “Edgar A. Bancroft—later Minister Plenipotentiary to China, Alexander A. McCormick, Parmalee J. McFadden, Philip Sidney Post, all of whom were literary. Being particularly intimate friends of Henry’s they were fond of relating anecdotes about him.”4 Anna Morgan, Fuller’s great friend and teacher of the dramatic arts, remembered that “those possessed of certain mental attitudes and predilections, have been and still are migrating to the North Shore in search of an intellectual nouveau.” She remembered of Fuller’s group that “they dispersed a rare and lively hospitality.”5 He would find among these men a physical, emotional, and mental buffer from the harshness of Chicago and its single-minded vision of making money. It was while living on the North Shore and participating in this loosely formed literary group that Fuller wrote his first two novels. The first book appeared in 1890, The Chevalier de Pensiere-Vani, written under the pseudonym of Stanton Page, but it was his second novel, The Chatelaine of La Trinite (1892), that won him recognition outside of Chicago as not just the “best stylist” in Chicago but among all writers who were currently writing in English. Both novels established Fuller’s penchant for elegant stories about the gracefully wealthy in Europe. His novels dovetailed nicely with the new American tourist culture developed and promoted by train and steamship lines. The novels with their intriguing French titles seemed to be travel narratives for those who dreamed of the continent but would never get to go or guidebooks to the manners and habits of the more sophisticated Europeans for those Americans who may be

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the first generation to have a European tour, like Henry James’s Daisy Miller. Fuller’s novels imitated James’s with their plots about wealthy women, the landscapes of continental Europe, and courtship among class divisions, but he wrote as a Chicagoan without access to the elegance he writes about and so he never indulges in the ambiguity of perspectives that leads James’s more perceptive readers to critique the more European habits and spaces they had just been admiring. Fuller’s penchant for elegant subjects caught the eye of many midnineteenth-century writers who were surprised that a Chicagoan could be producing such highly refined writing about Europe. Fuller’s recognition by both the East Coast and the European literary world for writing what was seen as civilized novels, in tone and content, made him one of a handful of artists who—according to the Chicago elite who were in the early stages of developing the Fair—would raise Chicago’s literary and cultural importance on the national stage. Chicago’s art and literary scene has been linked to Chicago’s business since the turn of the nineteenth century. In the 1890s, in large cities across America, spiritual, political, and civic leaders began voicing concerns about “the higher life.” What they meant was the need to raise the quality of a city through the presence of social projects; social and art clubs; education and intellectual institutions; and moral clubs, institutions, and instruction. Jane Allen Shikoh explains how the idea of the higher life emerged from the fusion of the Evangelical Church’s spiritual project of raising all souls to a higher plane, with Darwinian-based ideas about social evolution.6 Concern for “the higher life” of the cities was a concern for the spiritual, physical, intellectual, cultural, and artistic evolution of America’s cities as almost sentient beings. Shikoh sets Chicago apart from the other large cities in the United States writing that “during the 1890s, Chicago was more self-conscious about its ‘higher life.’”7 She notes: “Journalists, ministers and others in speaking of Chicago, often mentioned that although in the past the city had been preoccupied with its material growth, it was finally arriving at a ‘higher and maturer stage of civic existence.’”8 The Great Fire of 1871 had only recently destroyed Chicago. By the early 1890s, Chicago’s boosters announced that the city had successfully rebuilt itself from the ashes with the newest technology available. Before a great deal of the reconstruction had been completed, civic

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engagement meant bringing wealth to the city, through building and promoting the city as the site for the World’s Columbian Exhibition of 1893. Now that the boosters had rebuilt the city, at least according to the promotional rhetoric, Chicagoans could shift their sights from physical construction to promoting and raising the cultural wealth of the city. Chicago’s elite, who provided the economic wealth of the city, was most interested in promoting the kind of art that would raise Chicago’s higher life. Fuller’s work was seen as exactly the right kind of art to promote. On June 12, 1893, he received an invitation from the Author’s Congress of the World’s Congress Auxiliary of the World’s Columbian Exposition “to read a paper of the time-limit of twenty minutes … upon some appropriate topic of your own selection.”9 The Official Directory of the World’s Fair does not list Fuller as having read a piece or participated in an exhibition. His reply to the committee has been lost and so it is unknown whether he turned down the prestigious invitation completely or backed out when subjected to numerous demands for revisions by the committee. The invitation is curious because the Fair had already begun a month before the invitation and the invitation may be the committee’s final attempt to get Fuller to participate in the Fair. He was busy finishing his third novel The Cliff-Dwellers, which would be a realist critique of those promoting and funding the upward lift of Chicago. Fuller had clearly had enough of the Chicago business world and the years of hearing art used as promotional material for the business of the Columbian Exhibition. Fuller’s ideas about the negative aspects of Chicago’s push for the higher life play out in The Cliff-Dwellers (1893). The novel describes the inhabitants of the fictitious Clifton Building who struggle with business and domestic failures as they attempt to raise themselves up against Chicago’s oppressive and hostile atmosphere. Ann Massa points out: Fuller acknowledged the connection between his novel and the World’s Fair in an unpublished essay on his early books. He recalled that it had developed from “Between the Millstones,” a novelette that, because of its pessimism, had not found favor with publishers. Set in Chicago, it charted the business and domestic failures and the eventual suicide of its protagonist, events ascribed in substantial part to the hostile urban environment. It was the Fair, Fuller stated, which encouraged him to try once more to secure a hearing for what he disingenuously described as “less … mournful materials.”10

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Massa has shown that “the presence at the Fair of a Cliff Dweller exhibit, and the exposure it gave to that culture’s problematisation of issues of evolution and progress, convinced Fuller of the aptness of the Cliff Dweller analogy to express his reservations about the modern cliff dwellers.”11 She concludes that “Fuller was less interested in the Cliff Dwellers per se than in the critical light they allowed him to shed on what Chicago and America had achieved by 1893.”12 Fuller’s novel used the cliff dwellers as a metaphor for the elite Chicagoans who occupied skyscrapers and worked high above the city’s immigrant hordes. He may have derived the metaphor from earlier versions of the ideas about the Anasazi Indians contained in the catalog put out by the H. J. Smith Exploring Company to accompany the cliff dweller exhibits at the World’s Fair of 1893. The catalog describes the cliff dwellers as “by far the most highly civilized representatives of the ‘stone age,’ antedating the Aztecs and the Toltecs, and exhibiting almost as high a degree of civilization … They are a mythical race, exhibiting in the relics found, rare powers and refined tastes at variance with the common idea of aborigines.”13 The legend continues, “They were not a warlike people—their fighting was simply done in defense. Arrows of reed, … were their chief implements of war, and the small number of these found is indicative of their naturally quiet and peaceable natures, which only rose up to defend themselves against the attacks of their foes.”14 The catalog concludes with an interpretation of part of the exhibit that repeats the ideas of its first pages: “Several fine specimens of feather-cloth and buckskin garments denote their fondness for ease and comfort, and the rare stone axes, bows, arrows, and slingshots found give additional proof to their peaceful pursuits and may also give a clue to the mysterious disappearance of this once great nation, which was possibly annihilated by more warlike tribes surrounding it.”15 The catalog draws the Anasazi Indian’s position on the high cliff as a reminder of the cliff dwellers’ cultural superiority to the surrounding, newer tribes bent on attacking the more peaceful, artistic civilization. The catalog transcribes the cliff dweller’s physical location into a cultural position: they took up a defensive position to protect their culture not just physically but culturally. The legend of the cliff dwellers, then, demonstrated to Chicagoans that climbing upward serves as a form of cultural self-protection. Fuller’s cliff dwellers are those Chicagoans who can trace their lineage to the Europeans who had settled America and now inhabit the city’s first skyscrapers. Because

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the cliff dwellers had become extinct, their memory served as a warning to the citizens of Chicago, who may also become extinct if they are unable to resist the modern changes that threaten them. Guy Szuberia has observed, “Like many of his contemporaries, Henry Blake Fuller frequently paired his ideas and fears of the ‘new immigrant’ with the spectre of a declining or dispossessed ‘native American stock.’”16 He argues that Fuller’s novel expresses his grave concerns that if the cliff dwellers uplifted too many immigrants to join the ranks of the elite members of cultural circles, their numbers would overwhelm and eventually deplete those who raised them in the first place.17 The cliff dwelling conceit in the novel also serves as a warning to the elite citizens of Chicago, who may also become extinct like the Anasazi, if they continue participating in the futile project of using art to uplift others to their position. Fuller’s novel attracted attention from Chicago writers and from the literary establishment in the East. Hamlin Garland, a prolific Chicago writer who had just begun publishing in 1891 and quickly received recognition for his stories about Midwestern farmers, wrote to Fuller on January 17, 1894, for the first time. He praises his novel: “I have just read your ‘Cliff-Dwellers.’ It interests me profoundly to see you doing such a book. It has great power. It is a brave thing to grapple with the life of a great city like Chicago.” However, Garland has difficulty with Fuller’s critique of the city and speaks as a booster for the city: And while I’m not entirely satisfied with your point of view—which is essentially unsympathetic—I recognize it as a fine … out-put. I hope when I come to Chicago we may meet and find common ground. …. I want to close my letter as I began with praise. It looks as though in you Chicago has found her first indigenous novelist.18

H. H. Boyeson, whose novels—The Mammon of Unrighteousness (1891) and The Golden Calf (1892)—helped to create the new urban realism that Fuller now fully participates in with The Cliff-Dwellers, writes to Fuller that “in spite of your very critical attitude towards Chicago … you seemed destined to be her completest chronicler.” He writes that the “‘Cliffdwellers’ is the first book which strongly grasps the situation”19 and hopes to meet him for the first time in February of that year. William Dean Howells’s review of The Cliff-Dwellers, published in the 1893 Atlantic Monthly, helped solidify Howells’s reputation along with the

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novel’s and Fuller’s. Howells was also a Midwesterner, born in Ohio in 1837, twenty years before Fuller. He settled in Boston, where he became a Christian socialist. His own literary work and taste would show this particular religious bent, as he probed the intricate relationship between individual liberty and Christianity, particularly as the two conflicted in American business and in the lives of American businessmen. He was particularly disgusted by the excesses he saw around him in late nineteenth-century America and his work spoke back to this sin which he saw at the heart of American business.20 Howells stops short of developing a full Marxist critique of American capitalism, but his literary voice tries to be fully authentic and truthful in its rendering of America. Henry James would name Howells’s work “in the highest degree documentary.”21 Howells promoted only that work which did the same. He names Fuller’s attention to detail “scrupulous” and the whole thing “bitten in with a corrosive truthfulness.”22 Fuller followed The Cliff-Dwellers with With the Procession (1895), which Hobart Chatfield-Taylor, the Chicago writer of the farcical novels—With Edge Tools (1891) and An American Peeress (1893)—praised. He writes a glowing portrait of Fuller’s novel and acknowledges that he renders certain circles of Chicago life perfectly. He writes: I like the story much better than the “Cliff Dwellers,” which is saying much, as I have long been an ardent admirer and champion of the former book. You certainly understand Chicago life, through and through. You get right at the heart of it and present a perfect picture of the peculiar social construction of the city. Perhaps you are too faithful to win the approbation of the typical Chicagoan … I have never dared to write of Chicago as I see it and sense my experience with “With Edge Tools.” I have contented myself with skirting around it in the suburbs and bringing foreign types into a Chicago atmosphere. After reading “With the Procession” my feeling is of despair. I could never hope to print as true and faithful a picture as you have given us. So I have about made up my mind to abandon Chicago altogether and seek other fields.23

Fuller’s vision of Chicago’s mixing of art and business and his rendering of the blind climbing of its upper classes would gnaw at the artists of Chicago who would, over the next generation, begin to leave the city for exactly these reasons, citing Fuller’s book as true. Harriet Monroe, the young poet who had written and delivered the “Ode” at the Columbian Exhibition and with whom

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Fuller had become friends writes to Fuller simply: “We have all been reading the book and think it is great.”24 Fuller’s novels demonstrate his fascination with Chicago’s focus on the higher life and its treatment of artists and art, and their reception by Chicago artists indicates that his vision is accurate. He writes directly about the treatment of artists and art by Chicagoans in the “The Upward Movement in Chicago” published in the 1897 Atlantic Monthly. His essay begins with an ambivalence that contradicts the optimism of Chicago politicians and boosters: “The civic shortcomings of Chicago are so widely notorious abroad and so deeply deplored at home that there is little need to linger upon them, even for the purpose of throwing into relief the worthier and more attractive features of the local life.”25 He clarifies the plight of the Chicagoan who cares about art a column later: “We are obliged to fight—determinedly, unremittingly—for those desirable, those indispensible things that older, more fortunate, more practiced communities possess and enjoy as a matter of course.”26 For Fuller, Chicago doesn’t know how to create this higher life that seems to come so easily to older, more established cities. The city’s artists must fight for recognition against the naïve and unsophisticated sentiments of the Chicago patrons of the arts, whose conception of culture was overwhelmingly utilitarian. He then offers a bit hope for artists in Chicago, “As a community, we are a school; we are trying to solve for ourselves the problem of living together. All the best and most strenuous endeavors of Chicago, whether practical or aesthetic. Whether directed toward individual improvement or toward an increase in the associated well-being, may be broadly directed as educational. Everything to be said about the higher and more hopeful life of the place must be said with the learner’s bench distinctly in view.”27 Fuller indirectly warned that Chicago’s temperament and attitudes toward art and culture would result in the cultural destruction of the city. He wrote The Cliff-Dwellers while a member of a loose group of artists who met around the activities of the Columbian Exhibition. The group began in 1893, loosely formed at the suggestion of Lucy Monroe, Harriet’s sister and art critic for the Chicago Tribune.28 The group would become a formal club and a support for artists, especially Fuller, whose association with the club would go on long past those of most other members. After the Michigan Avenue Repository was remodeled into the Fine Arts Building, from 1897 to 1898, most members of

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the club, including Fuller, took studios in the newly renovated building. The “Studios Club” met officially in Lorado Taft’s protégé Bessie Potter’s top-floor studios in the Fine Arts Building, next to the Chicago Club, the Auditorium Building, and across from where the Art Institute would be when it moved out of the Chicago Club. The club formalized around the name the “Little Room,” which derives from a short story Madeline Wynne published in Harper’s Magazine in 1895 about a magical room in which a room magically disappears and reappears. The story is about the magical creation of new spaces where there seems to be no room for them, especially for women. The adoption of Wynne’s story title by the club members indicates that they saw the club in similar terms. It would be a new space for artists in a city that had no room or proper support for them. The name of the group also repeats the idea of the cliff dwellers, because the club met in a studio perched at the top of a large building, in a “little room” like those belonging to the original Anasazi. But where Fuller’s novel uses the conceit to describe those at the top of the business world of Chicago who feel threatened by immigration and social change, the club of artists who promote social change use the idea of the “Little Room” to describe how they feel threatened by the business world and Chicago’s commercialism. Fuller must have enjoyed the play on his novel because he allowed it and perhaps even suggested it to the group. Fuller writes a letter to Allen B. Pond that the club has fully formed by February 25, 1898. He was in Charleston, South Carolina, for part of the winter and so missed the chance to attend the earliest “official” meetings. He writes to Allen B. Pond, the architect who, with his brother Irving, founded Pond and Pond, a Chicago architecture firm that built new modern buildings from an Arts and Crafts perspective: Dear A.B., I hear roundaboutly from Mary Jameson Judah and Hamlin Garland that the Little Room is “Rooming,” and this reminds me that I have been slow in acknowledging the graceful handbill that bade me attend its sessions. It is to you that I make my acknowledgements, because I think I perceived some traces of your style in the document. If I remember rightly, the schedule is arranged to run to March 1st; so I send my benediction on the final meeting for this season.29

The Little Room brought together the artists of Chicago in a membership that included Elia Peattie; reformer Jane Addams; sculptor Lorado Taft; Allen B.

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and Irving K. Pond, who designed Hull House; Anna Morgan; painter Ralph Clarkson; illustrator and publisher Ralph Fletcher Seymour; and writers George Ade, Harriet Monroe, and Edith Wyatt, in addition to Garland and Fuller.30 Bertha Palmer, the wealthy Impressionist art collector and wife of industrialist Potter Palmer, although never directly mentioned in conjunction with the Little Room, did occasionally attend. She and Fuller were friends and he based, in part, the character of Susan Bates in With the Procession on her.31 They would gather for afternoon teas and after midnight dramas, bringing a much-needed sense of community to the artists and supporting a shared vision of an artistic culture within Chicago. The first entry in the Club Record of the Little Room Book is dated Summer of 1902: At the meeting of members of the “Little Room” held in Miss Morgan’s studio in the early summer of 1902, it was voted that the board of directors should consist of nine members, holding office for the term of three years then to be retired annually and their successors to be elected by members of the Board of Directors whose term of office has not expired. It was further voted that no one should be admitted to membership in the “Little Room” until his candidacy has been discussed with representatives of his own profession or craft. It was further voted that the election of a new member by the Board of Directors must be unanimous; that when the candidate has been unanimously chosen by the board of directors his name shall be posted for two weeks in the room in which the meetings of the “Little Room” are held, and that three negative votes addressed in writing to the secretary shall defeat the election.32

The Little Room should not be seen as a frivolous gathering of artists, but rather an important and mannered club that took as its business supporting art and artists. Members crafted the club’s rules in 1902 to impart seriousness to all of the club’s activities, and they made their rules and regulations similar to those of other important and influential nineteenth-century clubs in Chicago. The second entry of the Club Record, dated Fall 1902, records the meeting held in Mr. Clarkson’s Studio. In this meeting, the membership voted that there would be three sets of elected directors who would have varying length terms.33 In 1904, the club elected Miss Anna Morgan, Ralph Clarkson, and Allen B. Pond for one year; Mrs. M. Y. Wynne, George B. McCutcheon, and Allen Spencer for two; Mr. Franklin Head, Mr. Hobart Chatfield Taylor, and

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Mrs. Elia Peattie for three. Allen B. Pond was the secretary. Franklin H. Head was the treasurer, George B. McCutcheon, chairman of the entertainment committee, and Miss Anna Morgan, chairman of the house committee.34 When there was a reelection, the nine people above reshuffled themselves, suggesting an assumed hierarchy within the club.35 By 1905, members, too, would be elected.36 Active members to the group could propose names and then elections were held.37 Fuller was a member of the committee in 1906– 190738 and in 1907–1908 too.39 His name appears frequently in the club’s pages as a member, member of the committee, and organizer of activities. The frequency of his communication with the Little Room and the Little Roomers, even while out of town, as well as his active involvement, demonstrates the importance of the club to him. During the summer, the Little Room members met at the Eagle’s Nest Camp, a semi-commune with multiple individual and shared dwellings.40 The name of the camp represents the club’s stated belief that “association and conversation had largely to do with inspiration.”41 Lorado Taft, sculptor and professor at the Art Institute, and his friends set up a small camp in Oregon, Illinois, during the summer of 1898. They had been traveling to Bass Lake in Indiana, until the summer before an outbreak of malaria at the camp scared them into finding a new retreat.42 Taft’s love of natural beauty, the central idea of most of the essays he brought to the Little Room group, found its expression at the natural camp. By 1901, the central cabins and many smaller cabins had been erected. Fuller leaves the group formally at exactly this point, writing cryptically to Mr. Oliver Bennett Grover, the secretary of the Eagle’s Nest Association from Chicago on January 11, 1901, that he’s unable to take part in a meeting and also regrets that he no longer can take an active part in the association. He writes: “In view of this fact I am quite clear that my wiser choice is to withdraw from the association … Wishing the Association continued and increased prosperity.”43 The construction of additional cabins allowed more members to bring their families to the camp and the atmosphere became family oriented. Fuller most likely did not like the new atmosphere and preferred the company of men and his friends, away from the demands of wives, children, and domestic responsibilities in which he had no interest or part. In 1907, Garland started a formal men-only club that would deliberately drain away the male members of the Little Room. Garland made extensive

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lists of professional, intellectual, and artistic men whom he wished to join his club. One list is exclusively a list of the male members of the “Little Room” and this list suggests that he did so deliberately and systematically. He then made it new club business to “tender an invitation to join the new club” to all Little Room male members. 44 The “Provisional Committee of the Attic Club” was held at the City Club Rooms on Tuesday July 30, 1907. Present were “Mr. Garland, Mr. Taft, Mr. Hutchinson, Mr. I. K. Pond, Mr. A. B. Pond, Ira Nelson Morris, Arthur Addis, Chatfield-Taylor,” and notes mention that they are in negotiation with a space in the Harvester Building, suggesting connections with the wealthy McCormicks.45 In the letter sent out, but undated, Hamlin Garland writes: On behalf of the Committee of which I am Chairman I hereby invite you to become a member of a club which is meant to be a union of the artists, art lovers, and literary men of Chicago, somewhat like the Players Club of New York City. It is in effect widening the scope of the Little Room of which you are a member. We plan to now have a home of our own near the Fine Arts Building, (possibly on the top of some building) with our own kitchen and grill room and with unique and tasteful furnishings.

He continues: The number of resident members will be fixed at about two hundred, and will take in most of the well-known men in painting, sculpture, music, architecture, landscape gardening, arts and crafts, illustration, fiction, poetry, essay, and the drama. In addition, as you will observe from the enclosed list, the Committee is inviting to membership distinguished men of science, law, business, and other professions who are sympathetic with purposes of the organization, so that the club will be a union of the aesthetic elements of Chicago and the West, very much as The Century Club of New York has brought together the most distinguished personalities of New York and the East.46

Garland’s club would bring together artists and businessmen with artistic tastes in a union that made formal the alliance that characterized Chicago’s art scene to Fuller’s displeasure. Because it was perched at the top floors of the newly constructed Orchestra Hall, the members called the new club the Attic Club. The group would decide on the name the Cliff Dwellers Club two years later. As the members of the Attic Club anticipated, Fuller declined to join the Cliff Dwellers Club. The minutes of the June 27, 1907, meeting reveal: “Henry

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B. Fuller asked to serve as temporary secretary. Mr. A. B. Pond to act in case of the refusal of Mr. Fuller to serve.” Fuller scholarship has made much of Fuller’s refusal to join the club that bore the name of his most popular novel. Most recently, Massa argues that Garland’s arrogance and insensitivity caused Fuller to “boycott” the club.47 Her interpretation is highly plausible, given Garland’s deliberate destruction of Fuller’s club and his later boasting that he, not Fuller, was a founding member. The Attic Club minutes also show that Fuller’s attitude toward the club and presumably its founder was well-known even before the Attic Club changed its name to the Cliff Dwellers Club. However, Fuller does appear on a typed list of dinner acceptances for the club’s First Annual Dinner, January 17, 1908.48 The Cliff Dwellers’ Dinner may have been Garland’s last attempt to recruit Fuller into his club and he never succeeds in doing so. Fuller never became a member and his name never appears in the minutes or notes. In his letters he will only refer to the camp in passing, much as he does with the Eagle’s Nest Camp: “The campers are gradually getting down to camp. Garland has finally got the Cliffdwellers ‘papers’ signed and the new move is going ahead with the help of Robert Granger and Shaw.”49 Histories of the Chicago literary renaissance tend to use Garland’s creation of the Cliff Dwellers Club as the end date for the Little Room, but the Little Room did continue into the 1920s, with Fuller as an active member. Memberships in these last years were often delinquent among less-successful members and it became harder to collect money for the club.50 Allen B. Pond notes on April 28, 1910, in a letter to the treasurer, F. H. Head, that he “used thirty-three 2 ct. stamps” to send out delinquency notices.51 On October 20, 1924, a letter went out to all “Little Roomers” from H. B. Fuller, A. B. Pond, I. K. Pond, Lorado Taft, and several other original members of the club including Nellie V. Walker. In it, they write: “Those of us who are writing and signing this letter have felt for many years that the Little Room was not only unique but the center of our most charming hours in Chicago.” They say they don’t want to end the club, but dues need to be raised to five dollars. They ask, “Will you kindly use the enclosed return envelope to say whether you desire the Little Room to continue; whether you will make an effort to attend; and whether you are willing to pay the necessary increase in the annual dues?”52 Fewer people were attending regularly and there had to be an increase in dues.53 There are letters from Clara Louise Burnham, dated October 22, 1924, and Arthur M. Burton, dated October 24, 1924, saying how useful the club has

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been to them and how much they would miss it. Burton writes how he would “decidedly wish it to continue.”54 Notes poured in at the end, including from Harriet Monroe, that everyone would do all that they can to help the Little Room continue. The decline of the Little Room certainly occurred because of Garland’s vicious and deliberate reforming of the club into the Attic Club, but the club did little to welcome the newest members of the Chicago art scene, preferring to remain entrenched around its founding during the Fair, twenty years before. On December 12, 1913, several new artists were passed over for membership in the Little Room, including Maurice Browne, who, along with Ellen Van Volkenburg, founded the Little Theater in the Fine Arts Building.55 Perhaps his attitudes about uplift and need for art to be useful chafed against the legacies of too many founding members, especially Jane Addams. He would tell the Chicago Record-Herald the next year: “I am free to say I wouldn’t go anywhere myself where people aimed to uplift me, and I don’t blame anyone for staying away from the Little Theater if he thinks its prime effort is to uplift.” Even the paper sniped back, responding that he was “speaking more frankly and downrightly than might have been expected of one whose godparents were named Art and Scholarship.”56 His language of the new avant-garde, which ironically repeats Fuller’s, will have no place in Chicago, even among its artists. Harriet Monroe wrote a response to the Little Room’s plea to members in October of 1924 that criticizes the Little Room for being too closed off. She writes: I confess I have somewhat lost interest since the committee turned down a perfectly good and fitting candidate whom I had proposed, the husband of a valued member, who of course thereupon resigned. I have felt that if this was the policy of the committees if they wished to keep the longstanding membership and not admit a liberal supply of new and younger members, this club had ceased to fulfill any reasonable function and might as well cease. As almost no new members have appeared during a number of years, this policy seems to have been followed, with the result that few of the younger crowd know anything about the society or would now care to join.57

She does enclose her dues to keep the club going, even if she will no longer attend. The Little Room’s autograph book ends on January 31, 1931, suggesting that this is as near an end date for the club as it is possible to delineate. It has

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all of the old signatures in it and no one new, not even Margaret Anderson or Jane Heap of the Little Review, Sherwood Anderson, or Edgar Lee Masters. The group seems to have closed itself off in its ongoing mission to protect itself and its members from those outside who may threaten the art scene as only they defined it.58 Fuller was still spending a great deal of time on the North Shore. Anna Morgan reminisces that “at his home ‘Fairlawn’ they frequently sat out by the lake and discussed hours at a time, literature of all lands, cognating relative merits of each. At that period, about 1908, 'The Little Playhouse' founded by Mrs. Arthur Aldis in her grounds at Lake Forest was in vogue. There she produced many clever plays, several of them from her own pen. Dramatics being one of Henry’s many interests he became a frequent visitor and councilor. There he frequently met the Noble Judah’s and the Howard Shahs’s, the John T. McCutcheon’s in whose houses he was a frequent and welcome visitor.”59 He had contact with almost everyone who had country homes north of Chicago, including I. K. Friedman, the novelist, whose success was due in part to Fuller’s helpful advice, and Edwin Fechter, whose aunt was Harriet Monroe. Anna Morgan too had a home in Ravinia, and he was often there along with Jen Jenson, who was a landscape gardener, and Clifford Raymond of literary fame.60 Fuller did continue trying to publish, but his name would appear in publications more often as a respectful homage by a younger writer or publisher than attached to a new piece of writing from Fuller. Vachel Lindsay, a younger poet who wrote what he called “Singing Poetry,” had been published to great acclaim in Monroe’s new Poetry magazine. He wrote to Fuller a note of admiration and praise later that year: You are in my opinion a very good man. I used to read your art student stories with all kinds of thrills when I was an arts student in the Institute. I will count it as a great honor to know you and besides I think a heap of you because you fit my theory of the New Socialism. You have located in Chicago—and sing your song about it—in noble numbers as it were.61

He clearly regards Fuller as important, but also past and while Lindsay appreciates his work and generosity, Fuller fits his theory, not the other way around. His friend, Carl Van Vechten, sent him the copy of an article he wrote praising Fuller that appeared in the June 1922 issue of John McClure’s small

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New Orleans journal The Double Dealer.62 The article appears alongside a poem by William Faulkner of Oxford Mississippi, “a young Southern Poet of unusual promise,” and a small poem by Ernest Hemingway. Van Vechten’s new book, Peter Whiffle, had just been issued the previous month by Knopf and went into its second printing and Sherwood Anderson’s name is on the cover to promote his new book Many Marriages.63 Fuller’s importance to the American literary canon had never been more assured than it was during this period, but he couldn’t get published anymore because his kind of realism no longer had a place among the newer, younger, and fully modern writers. The editors he submits to are polite and encouraging, but rejecting. Horace B. Liveright writes on March 12, 1921, to thank him for his “kindness in pointing out a number of typographical errors in ‘The Great Modern Short Stories.’” He goes on: “I have heard some rumors about a new novel by you. If it hasn’t already been arranged for, I’d like very much to have the privilege of considering it.”64 On April 21, 1924, George Jean Nathan, coeditor of The American Mercury with H. L. Mencken, wrote a rejection note to Fuller without saying for what he was rejected. He does say, “It would give me great pleasure to have you in the Mercury. Have you anything else that you think might be available?”65 He received another note, presumably of the same year on December 30, from Nathan rejecting him again. “I am sorry indeed that I can’t take this, but I think it lies outside the field of the American Mercury. I surely hope you have something else on the stocks in mind. It would be a great pleasure to see you in the magazine.”66 Fuller never recaptures the success of his early years, but his legacy beginning a radical critique of Chicago’s business scene will be imitated, borrowed, and repeated by the young modernists who believe they have moved beyond his older vision begun in the days of the Columbian Exhibition. His literary and personal legacy will inspire Fuller’s good friend Louis Bromfield to write, nearly eighteen months after Fuller’s death in July of 1929: When I read in the Paris Herald that Henry Fuller was dead I had the feeling that something definite had gone from my life which I could never replace. He was that rarest and finest of things—a gentleman and I think he understood what few of us in our generation understands—that being a gentleman is the most important thing of all. He had taste, intelligence, cultivation, now what more could one ask in a friend? He was the most civilized American I have known.67

2

Harriet Monroe and Chicago

Harriet Monroe’s autobiography, A Poet’s Life: Seventy Years in a Changing World (1938), was published two years after her death, of a cerebral hemorrhage from the altitude at Machu Picchu. Robert Morse Lovett reviewed the book for Monroe’s beloved Poetry magazine and split Monroe into two women. He claims: “Harriet Monroe has written two lives, one properly entitled A Poet’s Life, one less distinguished but equally interesting, the life of a citizen of Chicago and of the world.”1 Scholarship that even considers Monroe still insists on a split between her professional and personal lives. Recent studies on Monroe place her among the other modernist little magazine editors of her time and, in doing so, separate her from the unique context of Chicago that allowed her to create the only little magazine still in print. Her creation of the magazine was both an embrace of Chicago’s values and a pushback against its cold climate for artists. This chapter will read Harriet Monroe’s life as an artist and as an early supporter of the “new” in art against her life as a Chicagoan. The chapter’s first section will trace her involvement with the Columbian Exhibition, from her first commission to write the “Columbian Ode”, through her negotiations with the committee for ownership rights and control, to her copyright lawsuit with the New York World that changed copyright laws and granted ownership of unpublished work to artists. Her adept management of the committee and legal action when her inherent rights were violated show her to be both a savvy businesswoman who could have become an attorney like her father, had the possibility existed for a woman in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and an artist interested in original and new forms, whatever they may be. The chapter’s second section places her victory for artists’ rights within the context of her involvement with the Chicago Workers’ Rights Movement and Arts and

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Crafts movement, and the Little Room’s pushback against the Chicago business world. Ultimately, the chapter argues that she won respect from the Chicago business world and its artists because of her lawsuit and deep concerns for art. She stayed in Chicago and started Poetry magazine, because she considered herself and the magazine as a kind of beacon for the artists of the city, a Jane Addams for the artists. She feared that if she left, the hope of the Little Room would be completely extinguished.

The Columbian Exhibition, the “Columbian Ode,” and copyright Harriet Monroe’s five-chapter description of her childhood contains long passages about her attorney father’s connections to the upper echelons of the Chicago business and social world and how his success allowed her to create her own connections. Henry Stanton Monroe often invited Stephen A. Douglas, the American politician who was a member of the house, the senate, and the Democratic Party presidential nominee in 1860 who lost to Abraham Lincoln, but became best known for his debating prowess against Lincoln in a series of debates in 1858. Bob Ingersoll, who had served as attorney general and was good friends with Walt Whitman, was also around a great deal.2 Her father and mother, Martha Mitchell, believed in the arts and education and supported their daughters in their reading from Monroe’s “book-lined study.” Her father spent money on fine editions of the classics and “enjoyed competition with his rivals.”3 She mentions the names of the classical writers she read, including “Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley, with Dickens and Thackeray,” the plays she loved, and the music she played, just as she names her actual friends and acquaintances, which shows that she thought of them as friends and acquaintances too, just as her father did. Monroe’s parents believed in educating women and they sent her to the same boarding school outside of Washington, DC as Mrs. Potter Palmer and Mrs. Frederick Grant, who married the son of Ulysses S. Grant, the American Civil War general and president of the United States.4 While in the capital, she met the famous Civil War generals Ulysses S. Grant, who she said gave her a “thrill,” William Tecumseh Sherman, and Philip Sheridan.5 Her parents sent her sister, Dora, to the prestigious Miss

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Porter’s School, and Monroe writes that she returned “a full fledged ‘young lady fresh from Farmington’ who would ‘reform the family manners.’”6 No one was surprised when Dora began to date and eventually married the architect John Wellborn Root in 1882. Henry Monroe was good friends and colleagues with Daniel H. Burnham, with whom Root joined in 1873 to form Burnham and Root. The firm developed a system of floating underground steel beams for the Montauk Building commission in 1882. The beams prevented tall, vertical buildings from sinking into Chicago’s marshy soil. The system worked so well it formed the basis for creating steel-framed vertical load-bearing walls, allowing future commissioned buildings, like the Phenix Building built from 1886 to 1887. Chicagoans watched the skyscrapers being built and witnessed the creation of the first urban skyline, and Harriet would have heard stories from her sister and brother-in-law about the entire business of architecture and new urban development. She also heard about the need for a new architectural guild, because Chicago’s architects were being ignored and felt slighted by the East Coast architects of the American Institute of Architects. She witnessed the creation of the Western Association of Architects, by Root, Burnham, Louis Sullivan, and Dankmar Adler. Chicago was being built literally upward by her friends and family and she could only imagine her own exciting place in resurrecting the phoenix of Chicago from the flames. Harriet Monroe published her first poem in New York’s The Century Magazine in 1888. She spent that winter in New York with her parents and sister Lucy, working at a correspondence job on the Tribune because her friend, Margaret Sullivan, who was then arts editor at the Tribune, arranged it. Eight months later, despite the fun of the opera and symphonic season in New York, the Monroes were glad to return home. She writes of their return: “Fortunately the Manhattan lure did not take complete possession of me. I was content to return to Chicago, and to accept, after a few precarious months, a position as art critic on the Tribune’s staff.”7 She will return to New York often with her sister who becomes an editor at Stone and Kimball, but she will never consider moving there again. She felt that she could experience New York, but felt at home in Chicago. In the later years of the 1880s, the Palmers; the McCormicks of the International Harvesting Company; department store magnate Marshall

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Field; Chicago meatpacking titans Philip Armour, Gustavus Swift, and Nelson Morris; railroad tycoon George Pullman; and the others, who saw themselves at the wealthy pinnacle of the Chicago business world, joined forces to try and bring the Columbian Exposition World’s Fair to Chicago. The Fair would commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America and Chicago’s business world saw it as an excellent opportunity to establish Chicago as “the Metropolis of the West” and raise its image to those back East and internationally. Chicago had been in a long contest with St. Louis for the title and those owners of Chicago-based industry wanted to ensure that Chicago would win. They were willing to pull all strings and sell Chicago’s image as a vital, dynamic, and above all modern city, despite all indications to the contrary, to become the Metropolis of the West and boost their businesses to stratospheric success.8 Supporting Chicago meant supporting its businesses and to do that, one needed to enthusiastically boost, boost, boost the city out of the swamp. The strategy worked and Chicago was named the site to host the Fair in 1890. John Root was named as coordinator of the event and he decided that the Fair should be run by a series of committees and that no one architect or group would be the sole builder or creator of the Fair. When he died suddenly of pneumonia in 1891, Burnham took over his role. Monroe watched the city boost, prepare, and build for the Fair. She writes that in the Spring of 1892 she decided: “The Dedication would be incomplete without a poem, and I wanted to write it—indeed, I seemed to be the only available person in the city.”9 She realized the Committee on Ceremonies had already been formed and that their “family friend Edward F. Lawrence” was the chairman. The entire eight-person committee consisted of Chicago’s great art collectors whom she knew through her job at the Tribune writing art reviews. She went straight to the art collector Yerkes’s office in March 1891 with her “plea”: “Would the Committee on Ceremonies recognize the neglected art of poetry by decreeing a poem for the Dedication, and would they ask me to write it?” According to Monroe, he replied that he would want it, but the committee may decide otherwise. A short time later, she reports, they answered in the affirmative.10 The letters dating from the period tell a different story than the one she tells in her autobiography. On March 6, 1891, E. C. Culp, the secretary of the “Committee on Ceremonies” did write her a letter that requested “a poem, to

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be delivered at some time during the dedicatory exercises of the exposition, the same to be submitted to this committee for approval, or otherwise.”11 But, there are several prior letters that indicate that the invitation to read the poem happened because of a series of connections completely different than the ones she describes in her autobiography. Burnham sent a dictated note to “My Dear Miss Harriet,” on February 28, 1891 with the simple message that the “enclosed letter will explain itself. The matter seems to be going as you desire.”12 He encloses a letter dated two days before his letter to Monroe and sent to him by Cyrus H. McCormick Jr., the current president of the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company and a member of the exclusive Millionaires club on Jekyll Island.13 Burnham, who was constructing the fairgrounds, gave Monroe’s plea to write the poem to the highest-ranking industrialist he knew and the one he chose had almost unlimited power in Chicago because of the staggering size of his fortune and his work in bringing the Fair to Chicago. McCormick writes: In reply to your note of the 14th, I am glad to have your recommendation of Miss Harriet Monroe as one who is competent to undertake the writing of a poem in connection with the opening ceremonies of the World’s Fair. At the next meeting of the Committee on Ceremonies I will bring your suggestion before the committee.14

Monroe called on her friend, the partner of her now deceased brother-in-law, who was named Director of Works for the Columbian Exhibition in his place and asked him to give her name to the Committee on Ceremonies as the one to write an Ode to the city and commemorating the Fair. Monroe may have changed the story for her autobiography to better highlight her own business acumen and tenacity in pulling the right strings to get the Ode on the schedule. The real version, where her brother-in-law pulls strings for her, doesn’t have the same pluck and vigor and Horatio Alger style self-uplift as the one she tells in her autobiography. She writes as the powerful and successful editor of Poetry and so elides or misremembers the truth about her first, well-aided success. Despite her connections, the committee exerts its heavy control over the project almost immediately. On March 6, 1891, E. C. Culp writes to Monroe on official Office of the Secretary, World Columbian Commission, letterhead: In complying with the request of the Committee, I beg leave, on my own account, to suggest that among other features which will probably be adopted, there will be a Commemoration Ode, set to music, and sung

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by a grand chorus,–also a Cantata, arranged expressly for the occasion. I offer the suggestion thinking you might possibly prefer to write something which would have associated with it, a new musical composition, if I have expressed it properly.15

Monroe, who suggested the project to the committee, must have been irritated that the committee already saw fit to add new “features” to her idea for the Ode. Her work progresses slowly and according to her biography, she falls ill, which worries the committee as to whether she will complete the poem on time. The fickle committee informs her on July 24, 1891, that the cantata has been cut out, leaving only the Commemoration Ode to be set to music.16 On October 31, 1891, she is directed to submit to the Committee on Ceremonies “at the earliest possible moment” the Commemoration Ode for the Dedication ceremonies.17 She sends the manuscript and on November 3, 1891, Culp acknowledges that he received manuscripts and has distributed it to the committee.18 One week later, on November 10, 1891, she receives notice that the poem was “unanimously adopted by the committee.”19 Monroe didn’t usually keep her own letters and so the ones she kept she must have deemed as having unusual significance. She kept a draft of her response to the committee sent the next day, November 11th. She writes in pencil: “I am informed by Mr. Theodore Thomas that the time is now extremely short for composing the music, printing, … etc.” and adds: “I therefore ask that, at the approaching meeting of your committee Mr. Thomas may be empowered to select and secure an American composer who will undertake the work, and that such a composer be authorized to consult personally with Mr. Thomas and myself.” Then she goes back and adds herself into the text with a caret mark so the text now reads: “Mr. Thomas and myself be empowered” and crosses out the “may” in the phrase “may be empowered.” Her last revision is to cross out “Mr. Thomas and myself ” and add in the word “us.” Her changes show Monroe is conscious of how her response constructs her, a female poet, in a relation to the all-male committee of businessmen, from which she wants respect and autonomy. She takes out words that deflate her position, like “may,” and by using the word “us,” she positions herself next to the Boston Symphony conductor, Theodore Thomas, instead of hiding behind his impressive name and stature.20 Remarkably, the committee responds immediately on November 12, 1891, that the committee

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granted her permission to act already at the meeting of October 26, except in the case of “the expenditure of money.”21 Monroe now had two large issues to negotiate with the committee until the Ode would be fully accepted on September 23, 1892. The first was the difficulties of setting her complicated poem to music, which was never Monroe’s idea in the first place. She knew that she needed to control whoever they picked to compose the music and have final say, alongside Theodore Thomas, over what the musical Ode would look and sound like. The second involves the committee’s increasingly clear feelings that the poem needed revision and that they were the ones who should dictate the final form of the Ode. Both difficulties reveal Monroe struggling to keep control of her work before the Ode is even published. The committee of industrialists and art collectors try to exert their control over Monroe and the poem as if they are adjusting the controls on a factory floor to create a better product. Despite the committee’s earlier written acceptance of Monroe’s and Thomas’s control over the composer, she receives a letter on December 23, 1891, that announces that Mr. E. A. McDowell of Boston has been made the composer of music for the Commemoration Ode. The committee secretary tells her: “I have given your address to Mr. McDowell and asked him to communicate with you.” The letter must have been a surprise and McDowell not her choice, because if she had chosen him, she would already be in contact with the composer. She completes the Ode in its entirety by early February, 1892.22 The committee summons her immediately by letter on February 12, 1892, to read the work before the committee that day at 2:30 p.m.23 The meeting went well, because on February 24, she receives a letter that they “heartily endorse and approve of the poem submitted and read before the Joint committee by Miss Monroe, and recommend the acceptance of the same.”24 The letters suggest that she is expected to react to the whims of the committee, who aren’t recognizing that she may have been working closely with Theodore Thomas. She receives on February 26 an official letter from F. H. Wilson on letterhead for the Department of Liberal Arts, World’s Columbian Exhibition, that announces: I found Mr. MacDonald so insecure as to his ability to complete the ode in time, and so temperamentally opposed to “writing under orders” that seemed to me very unwise to use him. Mr. G.W. Chadwick, who has had

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more experience in writing for chorus than Mr. MacDowell and who has been Mr. Thomas’ choice with Mr. MacDowell, has read your lines and is eager to compose music to them. He has been commissioned to set the ode to music.25

Wilson’s quoting of MacDonald’s complaint, of “writing under orders,” suggests that Wilson may have heard about this problem repeatedly before dismissing the composer. It also gives a name to the working conditions and treatment of Monroe by the committee. The letters suggest that Monroe, who is in Chicago and a young woman, was seen by the committee as more available to serve at their whims and could be treated far worse than the composer. Monroe sends out letters to her good friends, including George Armour, asking to meet for lunch or tea. She was most likely telling her powerful and connected friends the treatment she and her poem had been receiving.26 Massa points out that Monroe leaves out of her autobiography that the committee had reserved the right of final judgment over the Ode. She assumes that Monroe never expected that right to be exercised, but there is little evidence to support her assumption.27 Monroe grew up in Chicago and understood that those men at the upper echelons of its business world who were putting together the Fair made all of the important decisions regarding the city’s and their futures personally. It would be expected that she would have to work with the committee as an artist in their service. Art served business, not the opposite, but she didn’t have to sacrifice her poem and self-worth entirely to the committee. On March 23, Culp notified her that the committee had authorized an expert’s review of the Ode.28 Many of the suggestions most likely came from the expert, The Dial’s Francis F. Browne, but many were also from the committee members. On March 23, 1892, James H. Elsworth sends a four-page list of suggestions for the Ode. The notes are extensive, overreaching, anonymous, and presumptive. Some question word choices and make suggestions for changes: “Page 1, Line 4, In rapture thrills.” “Query as to this? Responsive thrills is suggested.” “Page 2, Line 51. Ought not ‘Alone’ be repeated three times? ‘Alone, Alone, Alone!’” “Page 7, Line 188, ‘hew swords of flint’ An obvious oversight. ‘Blades’ or ‘barbs’ might be substituted for ‘swords.’” Other comments point to places where the committee saw failed attempts at lyricism: “Page 2, Line 43 ‘Know that though,’ etc. The collocation of the first four lines is hardly

Harriet Monroe and Chicago

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euphonious.” “Page 5, Line 124, ‘Unbound’ and ‘brown’ ought not occur in the same line. They resemble each other too much in sound.” “Page 9, Lines 218–219, ‘A Knight more brave,’ etc. These two lines are hardly melodious.” The remainder question her meaning, suggesting large edits and clarification of the meaning of various lines: “Page 3. Is there not an apparent contradiction between lines?” “Page 8, Lines 194–215 inclusive. The condensing of this passage is recommended.” “Page 9 and 10, Lines 245, 46, ‘Who knew loves agony’ etc. these lines are ambiguous.” One of the last suggestions simply announces: “Page 11, Lines 280–297, ‘Earth is cold’ etc. This lyric falls below the high standard of the main poem.”29 The final version of the poem, distributed at the Fair and published by Monroe, makes a few of the smaller suggested changes. A letter from Prof. G. W. Chadwick sent on May 12, 1892, indicates that what she does change is a result of lyrical collaboration with the composer and not as a result of the committee’s suggestions.30 The committee then begins to ask questions that spur Monroe to act legally to secure her ownership of the poem. On April 20, 1892, Culp writes that “Prof. G. W. Chadwick asks if she gives him the right to print the words which I have used for music?” Culp tells Monroe that “this is done for the publishers satisfaction and I presume is done for the purpose of not interfering with any copyright you may have.” He sees no objection to saying yes as it is only a small amount.31 On April 27, 1892, the choral director writes to Monroe to be sure he can print the Ode if he is not extracting royalties. He says not much will be made on it because of the large scale of the piece, and so not many copies will be bought anyway.32 Her answer to both letters on May 18, 1892,33 is blistering and she saved a copy for herself. She writes a letter to Edward F. Laurence Esquire, the chairman of the Joint Committee of the Columbian Exhibition, a letter in which she “most respectfully requests” three things. Her language is legal and straightforward and lays out four conditions for the ownership and circulation of her poem. She wants first, “proper remuneration” of “one thousand dollars in addition to copyright”; second, that she can “prepare in attractive form a pamphlet edition of the poem, the same to be offered for sale October 12 and thereafter at a reasonable price”; third, “full control over publication and sale” and “wants the committee to offer no competing pamphlets for sale, beyond that of newspapers printing it in their columns.”

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Her last condition is that a committee be formed with herself a member of it, to appoint a suitable person to read the part of the poem that had not been used at the exhibition. The committee grants her request on the 19th and she is informed on May 23.34 A few months before, Monroe filed for copyright and she finally receives it on May 25.35 Her strong letters to the committee over the last three months indicate that the copyright was not an afterthought, but a way of keeping control of her Ode in light of increasing difficulties with the committee. Monroe then contacted the committee about preparing the piece to sell on the fairgrounds after filing for copyright. They granted her permission while maintaining 25 percent of sales and allowed her to keep full copyright.36 She spent the latter part of that summer developing the “deluxe printing” of the Ode with the New York publisher Theo L. DeVinne and Company. The Souvenir Booklet of the Ode, available for purchase at the exhibition, featured her name prominently, printed in red in a large readable font at the bottom of the booklet. The remainder of the cover is taken up by a line drawing of the gold statue, “The Statue of the Republic,” that marked the entrance of the Fair. Monroe’s name is the only author on the Ode, and the composer and singers are given no credit on the outside. The inside repeats her name as the Ode’s author and gives the work’s copyright. The design would have been chosen early that summer in preparation for the opening of the Fair, and so the editorial choice to stamp Monroe’s name prominently and list the copyright in the brochure speaks to how highly the copyright was prized by Monroe and recognized as important by the committee. On July 6, Culp inquires on behalf of the committee as to “whether or not the suggestions made by the committee appointed upon the revision of the commemoration ode have been considered by yourself and incorporated into the original manuscript.”37 Once again, she kept a copy of the letter for herself, because she deemed it possibly significant if a legal battle should erupt. She writes back to him on July 11, 1892, that she’s been making revisions to the poem. She writes: I deeply regret to observe that the committee has been subjected to criticism in certain quarters because of its choice of myself for this important commission, although such criticism has come from persons avowedly unfamiliar with my work. I hope that the confidence in my ability as generously shown by the committee’s request that I should write the poem

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will be maintained until its choice is justified, as it will be, by the voice of criticism next October. I have submitted the Ode to some of the most distinguished critics in the country, who have invariably approved it. Such suggestions as they have made while they have differed widely from each other, will receive my earnest attention and in so far as I can agree with them, will be embodied in the poem.38

The draft letter shows that she crossed out the much stronger line: “If I can not agree with them it goes without saying that I can not follow them.”39 On September 17, the committee officially certified that the Ode is complete, and that the Ode should be published in the official history.40 The committee then debated about whether Monroe owned the Ode and Monroe launched another covert attack on the committee. Her stands against the committee should be seen as her standing up for art in a city that considered art and artists to be in service to its larger business interests. Her friends saw it as a stand for women in particular. Margaret F. Sullivan wrote a scathing letter to the committee on September 21, 1892, praising Monroe and admonishing the committee for not giving her her due.41 Bertha Palmer, now the only lady manager of the Fair, read the poem to the president of the Fair.42 Monroe pushed on Burnham, who in turn may have asked for another favor from McCormick. At this point, the committee would have to acquiesce, because while they were in charge of the preparations for the Fair, McCormick and Palmer were putting up the money. Monroe showed at this early point that she understood the business of publishing art and understood that power lay with the money, not the management and committees. Her methods, once again, worked. Ferdinand W. Beck, vice-president of the committee wrote on September 22: I have your communication. I entirely agree with the position you take and will do everything in my power to aid you in the matter. I felt from the beginning that your abilities and talent entitled you to great consideration at the hands of the committee, and therefore urged that you be asked to prepare the Ode, and also that it be accepted when presented. You are quite right in thinking that the matter is of far greater importance to you than the direct payment of the dollars involved. I consider that the Exposition is honorably bound to have your Ode produced at the ceremonies, and that consistency on the part of the Exposition—which has published its program broadcast—and justice to yourself demand that this be done.43

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She receives a letter from Burnham the next day, relaying that at the committee meeting, “Your battle was easily won.”44 When Monroe signed on to write and submit the poem, the committee did not mention compensation. On September 23, she received the $1000 she asked for earlier, and the receipt clarified the copyright: “It is understood and agreed that said Exposition Company should have the right to furnish copies for publication to the newspaper press of the world and copies for free distribution if desired, and also may publish same in the official history of the dedicatory ceremonies, and subject to the concession herein made, the author expressively reserves her copyright therein.”45 The next day she receives a note from the committee that they “recognize the propriety of the suggestion in your note dated the 23rd and will respect your wish that your ‘Commemoration Ode’ be not published until it shall have been copyrighted.”46 At this point, the New York and Chicago papers were doing whatever they could to be the first to publish anything that was at all connected with the program. Multiple copies of the Ode had been given to the Committee on Ceremonies and pressure was being put on the members individually to release the poem ahead of time, surreptitiously to the papers. Monroe, the committee, and Culp were doing everything they could to prevent the Ode from being released, including copyrighting the poem.47 Culp sends her another letter that covers a longer letter from Francis F. Browne, editor of The Dial, who was consulted for the literary committee and who writes of himself as a “sponsor” of the Ode. Browne had just revived The Dial in Chicago twelve years before and considered his new version as the true heir of the original Dial, edited by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller. In his letter to Monroe, he flatters her, while at the same time writing at length of the errors in the poem and bemoans the possibilities of even more if a newspaper were to publish a snippet of the poem.48 He presents the only solution to Monroe’s situation as publishing the poem in The Dial and offers to do so. He most likely saw that publishing the poem would help lift his journal to a more national prominence, a level he had not yet obtained. He mentions no remuneration for Monroe. The poem never appeared in The Dial. Instead, Monroe began a letter-writing campaign to extract promises that none of the newspapers would publish her poem without permission.49 On that same day, September 24, Margaret Sullivan learned that a New York paper

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had obtained the Ode and she released the news of Monroe’s copyright over the newswire to prevent the Ode’s publication.50 Over the next few days, the responses to Monroe’s letter and Sullivan’s wire of the copyright began to pour in from Chicago and New York editors. The editors of The Chicago Mail, the Chicago Journal and the Chicago Tribune all honored her request. Bertha Palmer also writes to Monroe, conveying her concerns and letting her know that she will do anything she can to help and prevent the release of the Ode without Monroe’s permission.51 The fact that Monroe copyrighted the poem so early reveals her thinking as a businesswoman about the importance of her work and art and her attorney father advising her how to keep control of her art. She would have been raised understanding the logic of the law and the importance of mitigating risk before anything happens. The New York World published the Ode on September 25, 1892. That morning, a reporter from the World knocked on her door, informed Monroe of the publication, handed her two telegrams sent between the editor and reporter at the World, and asked for an interview.52 Harriet Monroe sued the New York World for breach of contract and damages, which came to trial two years later on December 19, 1894. She wrote A Poet’s Life without access to her files, so the chapter on the trial itself is the shortest in the book, only six pages. In it, she credits her father solely for bringing the case and downplays her own involvement in the lawsuit. She writes: Looking back on that amusing comedy, I marvel at my own audacity—a young woman demanding punitive damages from a great metropolitan newspaper for the unauthorized publication of a poem. Common sense, voiced especially by my sister Mrs. Root, was emphatic in advising my father to drop the suit, and even I, armed as I was with youthful courage, was skeptical about the result.53

However, her end-of-life dismissal of her role in bringing the court case forward is contradicted by the earlier series of letters that detail her fight for control over her poem against the committee as well as her push to get the copyright at such an early stage. Her actions show her as deeply committed to maintaining ownership over the poem and as someone who was being sure to do everything in her power to maintain it. The court papers reveal additional information that Monroe leaves out of her autobiography, including her own continual role in protecting her

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copyright and the Ode. Mr. Chamberlain, editor of the New York World, told the court record how he got the Ode: I first heard of that Ode, in connection with any proposed publication of it in the New York World, in a telegram from Mr. Fay, our Chicago correspondent, that telegram was received at the World office here. He said it was offered him for sale, and he asked if we wanted it the Friday night before the publication. I replied that he was sure it was the correct Ode … He said it was offered to him by the man in charge of the World’s Fair department for the Chicago Herald.54

Margaret Sullivan was tipped off internally at the Herald and that was how she found out about the breach. It’s unknown whether she knew of the Herald’s involvement in tipping off the New York World. Chamberlain explains further: “The ode, I knew, belonged to the World’s Fair. I did not inquire of the World’s Fair Committee whether I had any right to buy it or not. Under some circumstances, I believe I have the right as an editor to publish the manuscript of a person without that person’s consent.”55 Monroe’s father, acting along with his friend Mr. McCarthy as her attorneys, frames what happened very differently in his brief.56 He argues that the theft of her work shows three different concerns. First, it’s a moral outrage and therefore indicative of corruption: “Absolute lack of all moral principle in the methods pursued by the managers of this great journal in the procurement and use of such property of others as, in their opinion, will add to the profile, prestige and reputation of their paper.” Second, the theft infringes on private ownership rights: “It puts journalistic exigencies above private rights of both property and reputation and boldly justifies the worst kind of literary brigandage and piracy by claiming the right, under some circumstances to publish ‘the manuscript of a person without that person’s consent.’” Third, “It champions a crime which ought to entail severe legal punishment, by glorying in the so-called enterprise of the World managers, and showing evident pride in their theft of the ode and in the way it was used to advance the interests of their paper.” His conclusion declares: “This court cannot but consider the position of this witness most astounding, and wonder that a man of his education and experience could become so blind, so callous, and so morally degraded.”57 Monroe saved what she must have considered the most interesting newspaper clippings of the trial. On October 17, 1894, the Tribune ran a

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small column on the trial. In it, they report: “Miss Monroe alleges that the copyright of the poem was violated; that the poem, as printed, was garbled and full of errors, and that the publication caused comments in other newspapers than ‘the World’ which injured her reputation as a poetess.” According to the clipping, “Miss Monroe went on the witness-stand and read the jury the poem as it was read at the World’s Fair dedication. After reading the poem the plaintiff read many extracts from the newspapers printed all over the county in which her personality and her home life were described. The descriptions were inspired by ‘The World’s’ publication she said, and they were not favorable to her.” A literary critic, Edmund Stedman, was called to the witness stand to “testify that the ode struck him by its rhythmical qualities.” “It is dignified and sonorous,” he said, “and in many passages, elevated.”58 The language of the actual Ode was shown as completely corrupted by the newspaper abstracts and the verdict stated that “Mr. McCarthy for the complainant, declared that The World; had deeply injured Miss Monroe’s reputation.” They quote him as asking rhetorically, “How was this paper’s boasted circulation built up?” He then answered: “I say its circulation has been built up largely in disregarding the rights of others as it has disregarded my client’s rights.” The article ends stating: “The jury was out for fifteen minutes and returned with a verdict of $5000 damages against ‘The World.’ Miss Monroe and her father and mother left the courtroom highly delighted.”59 The importance of Monroe’s copyrighting of her work and the successful case protecting the copyright against a predatory New York newspaper has been minimized in what little scholarship has been done about Harriet Monroe, the Chicago artistic scene, and Poetry magazine. Her own posthumously published autobiography minimizes the court case by giving it only one small chapter in an otherwise expansive account of her life. The records of the lawsuit, saved by Monroe, have not been copied or published and exist in the back of the very dense archived collection of her letters and papers. Without the context of Chicago, it would seem that a court case about a poem read at the Columbian Exhibition could not have much significance. However, the lawsuit showed the Chicago businessmen, who raised the money to have the exhibition, and who formed the committees that ran the exhibition, that art had value and was owned by its creator as a created commodity. The committee men who ran the exhibition would have respected this because art was important to them only

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insofar as it was useful to lifting up Chicago and its businesses. Because it had value, not for its own sake, but to make money, they would have understood Monroe’s rush to protect her work and her place as rightful creator. Suing the paper for stealing her work would have further demonstrated that Monroe was not “just” another artist who didn’t understand business. The New York World kept appealing the case all the way to the Supreme Court. The case prevailed in the October term of 1896. The case was not, as those scholars who write about Monroe assume, a statutory copyright case, because Monroe at the time of the theft had copyrighted the title and potential of the poem. The poem had not yet been published. The Supreme Court wrote, “The right was not complete and on the 24th day of September, 1892, did not exist.”60 It was that day that the paper obtained the copy. The court found that “the exclusive owner or proprietor of an unpublished manuscript has the exclusive right to its possession and to direct and control its use—the same right which the owner of any article of personal property has to its ownership and use. The trespasser upon that right is liable for damages.”61 The Supreme Court declared that the lower court ruling should hold since the manuscript was unpublished when it was stolen and published, with errors, common law applied rather than the Copyright Act of 1790, which would apply only to a published work. They then agreed with Monroe that her rights had been violated. Monroe’s case is still binding precedent in the United States and it establishes the right of the modern writer to assume full ownership over their original work. Her fight to control her own unpublished work can be seen throughout her battles with the committee: first for the selection of composers, then through the editing process, and finally, for compensation and copyright. Her belief in her right to her own work and expression is inherently Romantic and Lockean and this kind of language frames her father’s lawsuit in the circuit court on her behalf. The court case is not something that randomly happened to her, but rather was the result of her standing up for her inherent beliefs about art and her understanding of the business of making of art. The protection of ownership extended over the unpublished work grants the art an inherent worth unto itself. Monroe, then, understood the mechanizations of the legal and business world and managed to convince the Exhibition committee, her father, and the courts of the importance of language and of the art of using words well. Her chapter heading, “Poet in the Courts,” speaks to this dual meaning and the inherent usefulness of using words well.

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Monroe struck a blow for artists, showing that they still had rights to their unpublished works and that these rights needed to be respected. The extreme steps she took to keep the manuscript secret indicate the climate of fear among artists for their unpublished works and the hanging question of whether they had any rights if those works were stolen and published. Harriet Monroe writes simply at the end of her life: “So my little lawsuit, being without precedent, established its own precedence and became a textbook case, defining the rights of authors to control their unpublished works.”62 Monroe would have meant more by the word “control” than simply ownership. Because she fought so hard to retain the right to revise her work and be recognized as its sole owner, she would have certainly seen the lawsuit as one that emphasized the rights of the worker.

Worker’s Rights and Arts and Crafts: The lawsuit and verdict in context Chicago is considered the birthplace of the modern labor movement. By 1894, Chicago had a well-deserved international reputation for brutal clashes between labor and industrialists. At a meeting held in October 1884, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Union set May 1, 1886, as the official date the eight-hour workday would become standard. For two years, unions prepared their members for the strike and on that day, tens of thousands of workers all over the United States went on strike for the eight-hour workday without a cut in pay. On May 3, striking workers in Chicago met near Haymarket Square, right next to the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company plant. The company had locked out union workers since February, and hired Pinkerton guards to accost workers who were protesting. Tensions had been escalating between the McCormick Company and its workers and by the time of the 1886 general strike, there had been so much written about the “union thuggery” in the Joseph Medill owned Tribune that strikebreakers entering the McCormick plant were under protection by Chicago police. The workers were protesting against the lockout and the ways in which the McCormick plant treated labor, and were demanding an eight-hour workday. On May 4, 1886, a rally continuing the protest and in reaction to the killings of several workers the day before turned violent. A bomb was thrown at police and at least eight people

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died in the riots that day. The legal proceedings were published internationally and eight radical labor activists, named as “anarchists” by the newspapers, were convicted of conspiracy. In court, the defense presented evidence that one of the defendants may have built the bomb, but no one present in the court room had thrown it. All but one were sentenced to death. The Illinois Governor Richard J. Oglesby commuted the death sentences of two of the prisoners to life in prison. The four “anarchists” were hanged on November 11, 1887.63 The international press reported at length on the Haymarket Affair and the subsequent legal proceedings. In the wake of the extended negative publicity about the factories in Chicago, the capitalists of Chicago, especially the Medills and the McCormicks, campaigned hard to bring the Columbian Exhibition to Chicago. It was a chance to recast national and international attention on Chicago away from the labor unrest and the stories being churned out about the working conditions in their factories and plants. Margaret A. Sullivan sent out the alarm that a New York paper planned to publish Monroe’s Ode in September of 1892, five years after the Haymarket Affair and one month before Monroe’s Ode would be revealed at the Fair. Monroe’s subsequent letterwriting campaign to the newspaper editors of Chicago gave the editors, who had supported the industrialists in portraying the striking workers as “thugs” and running editorials against unions, a chance to appear as if they now supported workers’ rights. The editors of the Chicago newspapers, including the Tribune’s Robert W. Patterson, all gave their support to Monroe because by doing so, they were continuing to support the capitalists who commissioned the poem for the Fair.64 Monroe’s protection of her copyright provided an excellent opportunity to uplift the image of Chicago in the international papers and she would find herself well supported by the men who ran the city. On May 11, 1894, more than 4,000 employees of the Pullman Company went on strike to protest the company’s reduction of their wages and the recent layoffs of many of their workers. Pullman invented the company town, where his workers lived in Pullman, on the Southside of Chicago, and paid their wages back to the company in rents and at the company stores that serviced the area. The strike occurred, in part, when the company would not lower rents or prices on goods in stores despite reducing their workers’ wages. The American Railway Workers Union had been organizing the factory over the last year and Pullman refused to negotiate with or even recognize the union. The strike

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spread and workers refused to pull any train with an attached Pullman car, shutting down rail lines through the entire Midwestern and Western United States. The US attorney general, still on retainer from his previous position as a railroad attorney, asked the federal courts for an injunction barring federal workers from supporting the strike. The court granted the request quickly and when the union refused to back down, the federal government brought in troops, town by town, to enforce the court order. Riots and violence broke out, prompting bad press from New York and abroad about Chicago. Conservative Chicago leaders supported the federal government, decreeing a breakdown of rules and order, but younger reformist ministers supported the striking workers.65 Harriet Monroe had her first court date for the lawsuit on December 1894, with the newspapers, politicians, and ministers still making pronouncements about the significance of the Pullman strike. Monroe would have understood her fight as a workers’ rights case because she was leading a solitary charge to reinforce the right of artists to own and control the products of their own work and to negotiate for and receive proper payment for their work. The lawsuit frames the case exactly this way and the appellate court cites Wheaton v. Peters 8 Peter 655, which states: “That an author, at common law, has a property in his manuscript, and may obtain redress against any one who deprives him of it, or, by improperly obtaining a copy, endeavors to realize a profit by its publication, cannot be doubted.”66 The Supreme Court repeated its position two years later, arguing that “a literary man is as much entitled to the product of his labor as any other member of society cannot be controverted.”67 The Court used Wheaton v. Peters to reaffirm that a creative work is a product of labor and in doing so affirmed that workers and artists in the 1890s felt stripped of rights already granted. Monroe’s lawsuit made it safe for artists to produce work for the wealthy without fear of having that work stolen or misappropriated by them. Monroe did not hesitate to call on her friends, the capitalists who could help her when she had difficulty with the Fair’s committee, but the lawsuit and her fight to maintain her ownership and power over the Ode, and to make money from the fruits of her own artistic labor, show her firm understanding that as an artist, she is a worker for the wealthy. In the years after the Fair, the Arts and Crafts movement took root in Chicago deeply because there it found a group of artists, intellectuals, and

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architects, like Harriet Monroe, who had become increasingly concerned about mass industrialization and the loss of artists’ rights. The movement was based in large part on John Ruskin’s idea that a healthy and moral society needed workers and artists who designed and controlled the objects they made and the labor with which they made it. William Morris, a British designer, became the main influence on the American movement because of his ideas about aesthetics and social reform. He believed that design and manufacture should be linked together, as they had been in the Middle Ages, and controlled by the artist, who he called a craftsman. Craftsmen had control over their product from conception to finish and worked ideally by hand. Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement would fix the excesses of modern industrialization, particularly the violence done to the worker and to aesthetics by restoring the proper relationship between the artist and his creation.68 Instead of massproduced trash made by labor treated as slaves, people could buy fewer pieces of well-made products made ethically by a craftsman. The first American Arts and Crafts show took place in Boston on April 5, 1897. In Chicago, Jane Addams’s Hull House began offering classes and exhibitions of the arts and crafts produced in the classes only a few months later. The Arts and Crafts vision of Ruskin and Morris matched Addams’s, who believed very strongly in reforming society through the process of upward lift and Hull House became the center of the movement in Chicago. On October 22, 1897, the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society was founded at Hull House. Their constitution, adopted on October 31, described seven purposes of the society, including cultivating “in its members, and through them in others, a just sense of beauty,” “influencing the designs of ornamental work,” “recognizing and encouraging handicraft among all the members,” considering “the present state of the factories and the workmen therein,” holding “exhibitions,” and “to found and maintain centers where the various crafts may be carried on and developed on lines suggested by the society.”69 There were 137 founding members, including Jane Addams, Harriet Monroe’s sister Lucy Monroe, Irving K. and Allen Pond, Madeline Yale Wynne, and Frank Wright, the young architect who started his own firm in Oak Park in 1893 after working for Adler and Sullivan for five years.70 Monroe would have been drawn to the Arts and Crafts ideal expressed by her good friend Addams, her sister, and her friends the Ponds. She supported

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enthusiastically the reform work of Addams and the Settlement Movement of which Hull House was part and had a great interest in women’s and workers’ rights. Her lawsuit allowed the courts to articulate that an artist has the right to control their own work and the new Arts and Crafts community in Chicago would have seen her as the champion of their foundational premises. Monroe was not a member of the Arts and Crafts society, but she was a very early member of the Little Room, along with the Ponds, Henry Blake Fuller, and Madeline Yale Wynne. The club’s name derived from a short story by Wynne that appeared in Harper’s Monthly in 1895. Wynne moved to Chicago in 1893, right after the Columbian Exhibition because she had been recently widowed. She came from an artistic family and studied painting at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Art Students’ League in New York, and trained in Europe. Her brother, Julian Yale, moved to Chicago earlier that year because of business, and Madeline and her mother soon followed.71 Fuller writes: “They established themselves in a pleasant house at No. 9 Ritchie Place, which for many years was a Mecca for true lovers of art and literature. Here it was that Mrs. Yale and Mrs. Wynne collaborated to form a salon of real intellectual interest; here too, Madeline and her brother wrought together in the unique and fascinating workshop.”72 The Wynnes had distinguished themselves as metal workers in the East and Madeline’s silver jewelry designs, featuring original and unique designs and hammer marks, had received national recognition. She spent her summers in Massachusetts, where she revived Deerfield Crafts and stoked enthusiasm for Chicago Arts and Crafts. It was during this time she wrote “The Little Room,” and her house and workshop provided the meeting place for the group of artists who would form the club.73 Monroe, as a member of Wynne’s salon and founding member of the Little Room, would have been a part of the crafting of the club’s name. Wynne remained a member of the Little Room until she left Chicago permanently and Monroe remained in contact with her until Wynne died on January 4, 1918, at the Langman Hotel in Nashville of cerebral hemorrhage.74 The fact that the group of artists named their club after Wynne’s story indicates that the club wished to name Wynne’s salon as the origin for the club. Because Wynne was such a visible and vocal member of the Arts and Crafts movement, naming the club after her story serves to announce that the Little Room believed in

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the principle of the Arts and Crafts movements. The Little Room’s name indicates that the club was more than a privileged place to discuss the social and aesthetic issues of the day. Instead, the club saw itself as a craft guild or a union of artists, where they could protect and support each other against the harshness of Chicago’s business world, which sought to separate the artist from his or her labor. Monroe’s lawsuit would be remembered for beginning the fight for the individual craftsman. When the Little Room moved to the top floor studios in the newly converted Arts Building, it made sense because the club occupied the best floor of the new building which would provide a home to justice and reform movements, artists, craftsmen, theater groups, and their clubs because the groups all involved the same members and friends. Anna Morgan writes about the early days in the building in her memoir My Chicago (1918): In the beginning years of the Fine Arts Building there was a blending of the social with the artistic life in the studios that was truly delightful. We are all prosperous, with plenty of work to do, yet somehow there was time to exchange visits with our co-workers and to take an active interest in the work which each was doing.75

She names the Fine Arts Building’s purpose as providing a place to bring together those artists who had formed a loose colony in Chicago. Hobart Chatfield-Taylor, a friend of Morgan, Monroe, and Fuller and original member of the Little Room, provides context for Morgan’s book and the enthusiasms of the early days of the Fine Arts Building. He writes: “In the midst of Chicago’s turmoil, there has been for a number of years a colony of painters, writers and lovers of the Fine Arts which has been striving with might and main to create within our material city a spirit of idealism.”76 However, he adds a concern that the artists too easily shut themselves off from the industry that fueled Chicago. He first sounds like Fuller: “The city’s uncouthness, however, has been a thorn in the side of this aesthetic colony; and, living aloof as they have from the material world about them.” But then, he pivots sharply by announcing that the artists have separated too far from the industry of Chicago: “Its members have been tempted, I fear, to brush aside unfeelingly the achievements of her captains of industry, while magnifying unduly their own endeavors.”77 Chatfield-Taylor wants to protect Chicago industry and sees no reason why the arts and business communities should remain so separate

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from each other. His language echoes that of Hamlin Garland who started a formal men’s only club that would deliberately drain away the male members of the Little Room, including Chatfield-Taylor, who joined immediately. He claimed it was because many of the original Little Room members had deserted Chicago, but he never explained his decision to issue only men invitations.78 According to Henry Regnery, a Cliff Dwellers Club member, who published the club’s history in 1990, at the first gathering of: interested and like-minded men, including most of the male members of the Little Room, he laid out the plan: “This club will bring together men of artistic and literary tastes who are now widely scattered among the various social and business organizations of Chicago and unite them with artists, writers, architects, and musicians of the city in a club whose purposes are distinctly and primarily aesthetic, taking hints from the Players, the National Arts, and the Century Association of NY.”79

Garland’s club would formally bring together artists and businessmen with artistic tastes in order to protect the interests of Chicago. The group would decide on the name the Cliff Dwellers Club two years later. Garland and Chatfield-Taylor’s concerns need to be understood against the increasing interest in modern, European, and avant-garde art on the part of Chicago’s artists, patrons, curators, and gallery owners. The establishment’s and mainstream Chicago’s reaction and utter disdain for international modernism became strikingly clear when from March 24 to April 16, 1913, the Art Institute of Chicago hosted the International Exposition of Modern Art—the famous “Armory Show.” The show arrived in Chicago following its month-long showing in New York. Prior to the show’s arrival in Chicago, the Chicago Tribune had sent their art critic Harriet Monroe to New York to cover the exhibition. Despite her glowing review of the show and despite a series of exhibitions of works by Arthur Dove, Jerome Blum, and B. J. O. Nordfeldt, in 1912 at the W. Scott Thurber gallery, the Armory Show came as a shock to Chicago’s sensibilities. Business leaders mocked the exhibit through the presses, religious leaders morally postured against the exhibit, and Hamlin Garland even staged a protest outside with members of The Cliff Dwellers club.80 Andrew Martinez has shown that Monroe’s “review of the exhibition, while appearing under the headlines ‘Art Show Open to Freaks’ and ‘American

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Exhibition in New York Teems with the Bizarre,’ was more favorable than most.”81 She writes: “Even the cubists seem to be playing interesting games with kaleidoscopic polygons of color.” She writes excitedly: “Most American exhibitions are dominated by the conservatives. Not so this one; the radicals are in control, and there are new voices in the chorus.”82 Her positive review often surprises scholars who make the mistake of seeing Monroe as a voice left over from an earlier generation, a view created and perpetuated by Ezra Pound to allow him to appear more powerful and have more control of Poetry than he really had. Monroe’s voice in the review is the same as the one who fought for control of her work and who worked tirelessly alongside Jane Addams for reform. She sees the new modern art and the sponsoring of new art as leading the way to that reform for workers’ and artists’ rights and a more egalitarian society. She is even prompted that year to begin educational work for women because of her Tribune writing. On September 12, 1913, Minna C. Denton writes from the Lewis Institute in Chicago: “I have, from time to time, noticed your comments upon current art and architecture, in the Chicago Tribune. I wonder if you are at all interested in doing educational work. We very much need, in our course called ‘The House,’ just such lectures as I should be glad to get from you. May I ask whether you would consider the matter?”83 She begins lecturing that very year, something she will continue to do nationally for the rest of her life. Her review of the Armory Show also expresses her own embrace of the possibilities for new modern art. She explains her embrace of the new, the modern, in the inaugural issue of Poetry the year before, by using terms that stem directly from her lawsuit and the Workers’ Rights and Arts and Crafts movements that she took part in years ago. She explains her “Motive of the Magazine”: In the huge democracy of our age no interest is too slight to have an organ. Every sport, every little industry requires its own corner, its own voice, that it may find its friends, greet them, welcome them. The arts especially have need of each an entrenched place, a voice of power, if they are to do their work and be heard.84

The magazine will pay it writers and provide a place for the workers to speak, no matter how slight. In the second issue, she explains that the magazine will have an “Open Door Policy” as the assurance that all artist’s voices will be

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heard and published. Poetry promises to be free of “entangling alliances with any single class or school.” Instead, she will “print the best English verse which is being written today, regardless of where, by whom, or under what theory of art it is written.”85 When Monroe reviewed the Armory Show exhibit in New York, she had already started Poetry magazine in 1912 with her long list of industrialists and patrons of the arts as backers. Accounts of the founding of Poetry have loosely mentioned the lawsuit as the source of the journal’s funding money, ignoring the facts as written by Monroe as well as the twenty years between Monroe’s receipt of the verdict and the official founding of the magazine. Monroe writes, “When the World’s check arrived, and Mr. McCarthy’s fee and the payment of certain overdue medical bills had absorbed about two-fifth’s of it, I decided to follow the usually American vacation trend towards Europe and spent half of my little fortune on foreign travel.”86 Her receipt of verdict and bill from her attorney, George Yeaman, indicates that Monroe remembers the amounts correctly.87 She still needed a community of backers and friends to publish the magazine and she courted the business world much as she campaigned twenty years ago to write the Ode for the Fair. In October of 1915, she, along with Chatfield-Taylor’s wife, joined a networking club for women. The Cordon Club met in the Fine Arts Building and the club was presented as “the feminine counterpart to the Cliff Dwellers.” The club papers said the club is to be for purely social purposes and consisted largely of women with some profession or definite calling in life. It was said to be “about evenly divided between women who ‘do something’ and those who lead merely domestic and social lives.” Harriet Monroe and Anna Morgan were members, as were Elia Peattie and the wives of Ogden Armour and Cyrus H. McCormick. The club was prestigious and filled with Monroe’s old friends from the days of the Fair.88 The respect she won from the Chicago business world and its artists because of her lawsuit allowed her to create a magazine that supported the new, modern art. Both the business world and artists trusted deeply that her new project would continue to uplift the city and its artists as all of her past projects, including the lawsuit, had done. Edgar Lee Masters will consider her decision to stay permanently in Chicago in a letter in June of 1925. He writes: “In the case of Harriet Monroe who loves Chicago, because she has always

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known it, and because she has a gifted eye for its charms and possibilities, what has been her fate but the most arduous endeavor to hold up the torch and not starve while doing it?”89 Monroe never left Chicago permanently because she considered herself and the magazine as a kind of beacon for the artists of the city, and herself, a Jane Addams for the artists. She feared that if she left, the hope of the Little Room would be completely extinguished.

3

Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, and Chicago

An unknown person cut out a poem from the newspaper and pasted it into what appears to be the inside of the front cover of an old journal. The journal itself is gone and only the cover is left with the yellowed newspaper clipping inside. The poem is titled “The Little Room” and is signed “M. Stranger,” which is most likely a pseudonym. The poem begins with the instruction that it is a song to be sung to, “I Want to Be an Angel.” The poem relates the hopes and wishes of the writer who dreams of being a writer who can join the Little Room. The members are very clannish, she says, and the writer hopes to be asked to join if she can keep up the pretense of indifference and not look too eager. The writer calls the members the “Hoi Polloi” and says she will soon be “Too Aged” to join the Little Room. She ends by asking and wants to know “What can I do that’s worthy/The Goal—‘The Little Room.’”1 The poem is undated and was kept as part of the Little Room’s papers. It’s tempting to ascribe the poem to Harriet Monroe after she fell away from the group, upset that they seemed to have closed their doors to young writers, one of which she had nominated and had been rejected.2 There’s no evidence that she wrote the poem, but her difficulties with the group had just started and the poem most likely dates sometime after 1910. The poem calls out the club for being clannish and snobbish, which Monroe had difficulties with too. The “angels” of the “Little Room” meet in the best rooms on the top floor of the Fine Arts Building and so the poem suggests that they think of themselves as rather close to God at the top of the artistic hierarchy of Chicago and almost religious in their adherence to a certain kind of aesthetics. The darkest moment happens in the last lines, when the writer expresses that they are aging and would do anything to become a permanent angel in the club: immortal, stagnant, and dead.

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When Edgar Lee Masters and Sherwood Anderson each arrived in Chicago, neither had the money nor the prestige to join the few groups that took literature and arts seriously. Masters and Anderson, along with Floyd Dell and Carl Sandburg, formed the core of what would be considered the new school of Chicago writing. The new generation of writers formed a new, modern, and collective response to the older regionalism and realism, so championed by Howells and published by the established magazines. The new Chicago writers and artists would be published by the new and modern little magazines, including Monroe’s Poetry and Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap’s The Little Review, and reviewed by the Chicago papers which would boost anything that could raise Chicago’s position in the artistic and literary markets. Anderson and Masters became literary celebrities and had to sell the idea of the new Chicago Renaissance along with their books. This chapter draws from Edgar Lee Masters’s and Sherwood Anderson’s collections at the Newberry Library in Chicago in order to show the ways in which each writer wrote about Chicago privately, despite their contradictory public statements. The chapter’s first section shows how Edgar Lee Masters, after leaving Chicago, named the close association between the Chicago business and art scene as detrimental to artists, especially with regard to the way in which art critics manipulated the scene for the newspapers. The second section argues that Sherwood Anderson became a modern craftsman after working for Frank Lloyd Wright in 1915 as a way to combat the commercial art scene in Chicago. The chapter then reveals that although Sherwood Anderson extolled the virtues of Chicago publicly, he writes repeatedly in private letters dated 1915 through the 1920s about the distaste he has for Chicago’s inhabitants and its art scene steeped in utilitarian social realism and patronage. Both writers left Chicago, despite being permanently linked to the city they would come to despise.

Edgar Lee Masters’s critique of Chicago Masters moved to Chicago in 1892 during the Columbian Exhibition and found a job collecting bills for the Edison Company. He was trained by his father as an attorney and eventually built a successful law practice in Chicago. He became partners with labor attorney Clarence Darrow for eight years, who

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had become well-known for defending the Haymarket Anarchists. Darrow was responsible for petitioning the governor to grant clemency for the three imprisoned labor leaders and his appeal worked. Newly elected Governor Altgeld granted the clemency, stating that their trial had been unfair and was a miscarriage of justice. Darrow and Masters had similar dramatic and bombastic styles in the courtroom stemming from their love of the arts, literature, and theater. They each wrote books and poetry when they had time and enjoyed the company of the fellow attorney and lover of the arts Henry S. Monroe, Harriet’s father. The partnership ended when Darrow left to defend John and James McNamara in California in mid-1911. The relationship had been a contentious one, with each accusing the other at the end of various acts of impropriety. The relationship became so bitter that Darrow became Masters’s wife’s attorney during their divorce.3 Masters’s work as an attorney took up so much time, he lamented that he didn’t have more time for artistic pursuits. By the time he received some attention for his poetry, the old art scene that formed around the World’s Fair had closed itself off from new members and many of the younger members were looking to leave to greener pastures in New York and Europe. On November 22, 1914, the Chicago Tribune ran a small column announcing “Edgar Lee Masters, who has practiced law in Chicago for more than twenty years, is the author of the Spoon River Anthology, a group of poems in free verse which has been printed serially in ‘Reedy’s Mirror’ under the pseudonym of Webster Ford.” Masters had been concerned that his poetry, if well-known, could hurt his law practice because of its tone and new way of presenting the small town. The paper then announced: “Macmillan will publish the anthology when it has been completed.”4 On May 15, 1915, the Chicago Tribune announced its review of Spoon River Anthology with a drawn head shot of Masters and the gushing text: “Chicago has unawares been harboring a poet of unusual merit in the person of Edgar Lee Masters, an attorney of this city, whose book, Spoon River Anthology has challenged the acrious consideration of the literary world. In form and content there has been nothing like this published before.”5 Elia W. Peattie’s glowing review of the “odd, new” poet ends with the simple declaration, “Once possessing the book, one is unwilling to part with it. It is too notable a piece of literature to omit from one’s library.”6 Robert B. Peattie in the July 11, 1915, Tribune placed Spoon River Anthology next to Vachel Lindsay’s Congo and Other Poems and asked “Is This the Beginning of an Illinois School

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of Poetry?” He argues that both books of poetry “have made a new departure in verse and created a definite style and technic which may be the nucleus of a new school of poetry in Illinois destined to have an important bearing upon the development of English poetry.”7 Journalists and writers in Chicago considered Masters’s book of poetry a remarkable achievement and one that brought attention to a new kind of poetry and writing that had sprung up in the city. Masters’s work separated itself aesthetically and through its narrative from the work of Chicago writers Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair, who had published popular and well-reviewed novels just the decade before. Both Dreiser and Sinclair wrote “critical realism,” a “type of fiction which reports truthfully warped social relationships so men may study and improve them.”8 Vernon Louis Parrington named William Dean Howells the “prophet” of realism in 1930 for his championing of art that tells the truth about the new modern and industrial urban spaces of America.9 Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and Sinclair’s muckraking exposé of the meatpacking industry, The Jungle (1906), do just that. The plots of the novels are simple, in order to give both writers ample space to catalog, in painstaking detail, the realities of gritty urban life and the unfeeling wealthy who inflict countless daily indignities on the lower classes. Masters’s poetry is light, terse, and in free verse, the exact opposite of the excessive language in the realistic novels. His poetry uncovers the failed promises and scandalous secrets of the small town in America so exalted by Howells and the realistic writers of the previous generation. Howells’s review of Spoon River Anthology identifies Masters’s work as possibly being like Whitman’s. He declares: “Freak for freak we prefer compressed verse to shredded prose, but because both of these are freak things we will not decide whether Uncle Walt will be more enduring than Mr. Masters.”10 His use of the word “freak” associates Masters’s work with the numerous negative reviews of the Armory Show the previous year, and the idea of “shredded prose” recalls imagistically the cubism of the exhibit. Howells sees in Masters something new and indisputably modern. Howells praises Masters despite his absolute dislike of his form and the new modernism in general. He allows: It is when the strong thinking of Mr. Masters makes us forget the formlessness of his shredded prose that we realize the extraordinary worth of his work. It is really something extraordinary, that truth about themselves which his

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dead folk speak from their village graveyard; for it is the truth about the human nature of us, if not the whole truth about our respective lives.

Howells praises the verity of Masters’s work, which is the highest praise he offers because he believes verity should be central to a work of art. But, then he declares: “It will not last.”11 Despite Howells’s review, Chicago continued to praise the new and exciting poetry collection. By November of 1916, Masters and his entire family had achieved celebrity status in Chicago. The Tribune published a picture of Edgar Lee Masters’s wife and daughters on the society pages, directly beneath a large picture of British royalty at a charity sports event and next to a picture announcing the divorce of an heir to the Standard Oil fortune.12 That same year, Sherwood Anderson published Windy McPherson’s Son, the story of how Sam McPherson, the son of a drunkard in small town Ohio, moves to Chicago and climbs through the ranks of the business world to become a wealthy success. The more professional success he has, the more his personal life falls apart and the more immoral he becomes. Anderson spent the year writing the short-story cycle Winesburg, Ohio, and when it finally came out in 1919, the influence Masters had on Anderson was obvious. Burton Roscoe’s June 7, 1919, review of Winesburg, Ohio, begins with the statement that “comparison” with “the Spoon River Anthology is rather inevitable, possibly so inevitable that it may be questioned whether the analogy is totally legitimate.”13 David Minter sees this period as an especially fertile time for Chicago artists and writers. He reports Ford Maddox Ford announcing from Paris that the “Midwest was seething with impulse.”14 He sees all of the young writers as having “wanted to contribute the creation of a distinctly ‘American’ culture.”15 Masters was one of the poets who, along with T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Carl Sandburg, everyone read, in part, because Monroe published them in Poetry. Walt Whitman, as even Howells noticed, was experiencing a revival and his message of revolution and freedom spoke to the young, radical poets.16 Everything was up for renovation and doing so followed the charge of the earlier reformers and the Settlement House movement at Hull House. However, Poetry magazine, the Little Room circle, and the young group of Chicago writers did not critique the idea of cultural uplift that was so much a part of the Chicago way of doing the business of art. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz

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has shown that there was only a “rephrasing of it,” and they remained aligned and loyal to the institutions of Chicago.17 Lisa Woolley has noticed that “Spoon River Anthology makes little attempt to represent Midwestern speech,” which distinguishes Masters from the other Chicago Renaissance writers and their regionalist predecessors. She sees the lack of dialect in the collection as stemming from his interest in the idea of “literariness,” and his training as an attorney.18 The lack of dialect suggests that he understood that if the book contained dialect, it would be quickly declared a Chicago book and perhaps criticized for its lack of uplifting content. The language also indicates that Masters had a vision that was larger than Chicago and wrote for an audience outside the limits of the Tribune. Woolley points out that his “inclusion of representatives from all parts of the social spectrum links Spoon River to other writing from this period.”19 He was, after all, a defense attorney and his vision for art must be understood, in part, through his work with Clarence Darrow whose ideas for social justice served a community larger than Chicago. Edgar Lee Masters names the close association between the Chicago business and art scene as detrimental to artists, especially with regard to the way in which art critics manipulated the scene for the newspapers. After leaving Chicago, he wrote a series of letters to Harriet Monroe about his divorce and how badly it was proceeding. He mixes the news about his divorce with an ongoing discussion about Chicago. He complains that Fanny Butcher, the literary critic at the Tribune has misrepresented him. He writes: I too wish to return to Chicago. In the flush days of my fame I was importuned to come to New York, and offered things to do so. But I refused; and while I am on this subject I want to say to you that those things that Fanny Butcher printed, and that are still printed in the News about my loving New York and disliking Chicago, and that Chicago is not a literary center, are as grossly untrue as they are deeply malicious. I was unwise enough to be interviewed, first by a woman at the New York Tribune who has a grudge against Chicago because of some newspaper experience there, and she asked me for example, if I liked this or the other feature of Chicago. I said I didn’t as to some of things, but I said in all instances that the very things I disliked about Chicago were good for me and stimulated my writing. What she printed was pure perversion, and Fanny Butcher took it up to make enemies for me. This is a nice world. The same thing is true about the literary center matter.20

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He is deeply concerned he has been misrepresented in the Chicago press, which paradoxically needed his celebrity to sell itself and Chicago. His concern is that the commercial literature business of Chicago will work against him, even more than it already has. In a letter to Agnes Lee Freer, dated September 9, 1924, he writes: “Chicago will have a literature in spite of the Tribune and the News but never without their aid. For Chicgoa [sic] is really full of cliques; and it has not risen out of its provincial intimacies and leagues.” He returns to his “theme” as he calls it in a postscript to the same letter, where he identifies the Chicago art world’s cliquishness as emerging out of Chicago boosterism: “So you remember that the boom of Spoon River really carried several books into prominence, even Frost’s? It created the swell upon which several boats came into port, the interst [sic] that projected itself to poetry at large. Since then a lot of local boosters have fancied that the ascension of their favorites could be brought about by my declension, and they have attacked and praised accordingly.”21 He complains in that same letter about how “it’s funny how people who make apolitical faith out of the equal distribution of wealth, are indifferent to the faith after they are filled themselves; and it is this kind of people who are indifferent to the equal distribution of honors all the time.” The cliquishness of Chicago extended beyond that of the clubs, because it became extremely difficult to obtain any awards or acknowledgment by the papers without the right “Bohemian” connections. His disgust at the critics reveals the business of writing and how the newspapers perpetuate it. On September 9, 1924, he points out that the newspapers don’t even back their critics. He writes: Do not think that the proprietors of those papers do not stand for their critics. They do, and by that token they stand for against the writers criticized or ignored. You remember when Burton Rascoe was let out of the Tribune for something he said about a Christian Science book. That would not do, you see. It hurt advertising, and when advertising is hurt editors and owners can’t live so high.22

He’s particularly annoyed with Fanny Butcher’s reviews through the twenties, of himself and others. By June 28, 1925, Masters decided he’s never returning to Chicago. He writes to Mrs. Freer:

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You have asked me more than once if I shall ever return to Chicago, and I wonder if the same question is asked the numberless others who have divorced themselves from the city that Wells described a lapse from civilization. Every writing artist or other artist who has been able to leave Chicago has done so; and the city has failed to recruit itself from the ranks of those who originated near it, and for the matter of proximity might have chosen it as an abiding place.

Masters then lists every writer who had left Chicago, including Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, Upton Sinclair, Hamlin Garland who “tried his best,” and Carl Sandburg. He points out the list would go on for pages if he named everyone who left to be free and associate among like-minded people. He reiterates that Chicago is a “clique” with a “village mind.” The village has been completely dominated by “influence as corrupt and arrogant as the Pattersons and McCormicks, who are the Hapsburgs of Illinois. It is these selfish and envious spirits that engender the vermin that run the literary pages of the News and the Tribune, and who have lost to Chicago valuable men like Burton Rascoe, Floyd Dell, Lucian Cary, and Francis Hackett, all of whom left the field to be occupied by the parasites of the McCormicks, the Lawsons and the Schaefers.”23 On December 19, 1931, he launches into his final overarching complaint about Illinois and the Midwest in general: And it had Chicago, a city out of the swamps in 60 years. This is what I mean. Meanwhile in New York and New England if you want to make people vomit just mention Illinois to them. They don’t know its history; they don’t want to know it; what they do know about it fills them with contempt for it, with patronization for it.24

Masters’s letters reveal his scathing public critique of Chicago’s linkage of the art and business worlds through patronage. He had nothing but contempt for the city that had, in his estimation, reduced the American novel to a predictable and profitable formula.

Sherwood Anderson, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Craftsman ideal The Fine Arts Building became an advertisement for Chicago’s art scene in 1911. The Studebaker Corporation produced a thirty-one page pamphlet, written by

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Elia W. Peattie, that advertised the building as the center of Chicago’s cultural and artistic life. Each page has multiple photographs, showing Lorado Taft’s and Anna Morgan’s studios, Francis Fisher Browne’s bookshop remodeled by Frank Lloyd Wright, and countless other delights. Peattie usurps Fuller’s book title, Under the Skylights, to uncritically describe the meeting place of the Little Room. She even promises that a lucky tourist might catch a glimpse of “a Bohemian.” The building had become a tourist attraction and its mere presence demonstrated, like the Art Institute and Symphony before it, that Chicago had uplifted itself to as lofty a perch as those other, older cities in New England and Europe. The artists did their part by participating in the commercialization of their studio spaces. The building now appeared as a department store for wealthy buyers of art, where potential clients could move easily from studio to studio.25 When Sherwood Anderson moved to Chicago the second time, in 1912, he avoided the building entirely, and found his way to the 57th Street Artists’ Colony through Floyd Dell whom his brother, Karl Anderson, knew. Dell encouraged him to associate with the colony and soon after, he introduced Margaret Anderson to the colony too. Sherwood Anderson joined the loose group that had set up in old storefronts used for the Columbian Exhibition along 57th Street and Stoney Island Avenue. Maurice Browne and Ellen Van Volkenburg lived there, and all of the other significant artists working in Chicago at the time visited frequently: Harriet Monroe, Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, and Tennessee Mitchell, who would become Anderson’s second wife.26 The colony lasted only a brief time and was born out of financial necessity. By that time, the rents were much cheaper on 57th Street than at the Fine Arts Buildings and many young artists, such as Margaret Anderson, could afford to live there. He also attended the Dill Pickle Club, an art gallery, coffee shop, and speakeasy, right off of Bughouse Square in the Gold Coast. Like the 57th Street colony, the Club was merely a place to meet and be entertained, rather than a formal club like that of Garland’s The Cliff Dwellers or the Little Room.27 Anderson had just had a “nervous breakdown,” in Elyria, Ohio, on November 28, 1912. That day, he walked out of his successful Elyria paint business and left his wife Cornelia and children. He would file for divorce from Chicago. The story would become well-known among the Chicago Renaissance writers and artists because it speaks of one artist’s resistance to the shackles of the business world. Anderson left Ohio and went to Chicago

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after walking out on his wife and business and the story would serve as an excellent metaphorical warning about artists not taking on the shackles of a middle-class existence. He would rewrite the story of his breakdown several times, including in his 1942 memoir, and in doing so shift the story’s meaning from a warning about what could happen if a young, male writer attempted to have a bourgeois, domestic existence while being a writer to a parable about a writer choosing to walk away from unbearable constraints. Anderson’s antipathy toward Chicago begins in earnest after doing advertising work for Frank Lloyd Wright. Anderson took a job at the Chicago advertising firm, Taylor-Critchford, and in mid-November of 1916, he found himself assigned to do the copy and campaign for Frank Lloyd Wright’s American System-Built Homes. Wright had just suffered a series of personal tragedies and was a very changed man from the young architect he used to be before public opinion drove him out of Chicago to Wisconsin. In 1909, Wright and Martha "Mamah" Borthwick Cheney, the wife of one of Wright’s clients, met, fell in love, and in 1909 left their families and spouses to meet in Europe. The scandal hit the Chicago Tribune, where the two were tried for their immorality because of their openness and because his wife Catherine refused to divorce. The pair returned and found Chicago extremely hostile. He remodeled his Oak Park studio into a home and rental property for Catherine and the children, and the scandalous couple settled at the newly built Taliesin “love bungalow” in Wisconsin. On August 15, 1914, Wright was back in Chicago attending to an important commission: the construction of Midway Gardens. He received a cryptic wire that said simply: “Taliesin destroyed by fire.” Wright returned home to discover that their servant, Julian Carlton, had attacked Mamah, her children, and several workmen, pouring gasoline under the door and setting the home ablaze. Some of the victims tried to escape by breaking windows and Carlton attacked them from outside with a hatchet. In the end, eight people died—seven victims and the murderer himself. Police never found a motive for the attack.28 Wright, quite understandably, never recovered. Robert McCarter points out that “Wright’s personal tragedy at Taliesen, occurring almost exactly at the moment the war began, acted to change his world view, marking the beginning of his slow but steady withdrawal from urban society, and his increasingly negative attitudes about the economic forces that controlled and shaped it.”29 Wright’s scandals will haunt Anderson,

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in part, because he met him right after the murders at Taliesin that permanently changed Wright and because Anderson will identify with the tragedy that Wright suffered as a result of romantic scandal. Anderson will also begin to regard himself a craftsman who fights against middle-class ordinariness. Anderson designed a six-page folder and promotional letter for Wright’s system-built homes, a community of affordable and yet beautiful housing. The houses would not be precut, ready-made housing, but rather beautifully made homes by a craftsman who planned out every detail.30 They would be affordable because of the absence of ornamentation and beautiful because of the horizontal lines and design Wright had already become well-known for as a member of the American Arts and Crafts Society. Most important, the house would be completely American. The language of the pamphlet repeats much of the language and phrasing from Wright’s earlier lectures and essays: “The Art and Craft of the Machine”31 delivered to the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society at Hull House in 1901 and “In the Cause of Architecture,” which was published in the March 1908 Architectural Record.32 Anderson most likely was furnished with the earlier essays and this, in turn, provided him with the opportunity to study Wright’s manifesto of design. Anderson was in the middle of composing Winesburg, Ohio, when he did the promotional material for Wright and Wright’s ideas about composition, line, and form helped Anderson develop a new American literary modernism. Wright’s Arts and Crafts ideals would also have appealed to Anderson, because he needed a method to fight against the system of linking business with art in Chicago that he so despised. Although Sherwood Anderson extolled the virtues of Chicago publicly, he writes repeatedly about the distaste he has for Chicago’s inhabitants and its dwindling art scene steeped in utilitarian social realism and patronage. In a letter to his friend Marietta D. Finley, dated November 27, 1916, he writes: Chicago is horrible. The living impulses that drive the men I meet day to day are materialistic. They want to preserve the respectability of their homes and keep alive the institution of prostitution … They are weakly sentimental, occasionally coarse beyond your comprehension and for the most part there is no life in them. At times there comes over me a terrible conviction that I am living in the city of the dead. In the office dead voices discuss dead ideas.

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He continues to complain about the things he has to do to make money, including writing “imagist poems for the early Spring market,” because he is “sharp and smart like the Chicago advertising man.” The letter ends with the point that he thinks “we will have an American Art unlike any other art in the world when men, like my friend who makes fences, become artists.” He realizes that “the little professional artist will be quite furious in the face of it.”33 Anderson finds the professional artists who create art just as infuriating as the businessmen and the advertising men who attempt to tie art and business together. He attacks imagism directly and by doing so attacks Poetry magazine, that bastion of professionally sanctioned art by Harriet Monroe. He thinks art should be made by outsiders and he adopts the craftsman language and ethos to describe this antidote to the industrial scene he hates in Chicago. In a letter to Upton Sinclair on December 12, 1916, he sees “something terrible to me in the thought of the art of writing being bent and twisted to serve the end of propaganda.” He asks Sinclair, “Why should we as writers be primarily socialists or conservationists, or anarchists, or anything else?”34 For the remainder of the letter, Anderson condemns Sinclair’s muchcelebrated social realism. He ends by telling him, “I so want to see writers quit this drawing themselves apart, becoming socialists, or conservatives, or whatnot.”35 Anderson’s animosity toward Chicago’s patronage systems, like Fuller’s, emerges from his belief that those who stand at the highest levels in the Chicago art and business scene cannot raise themselves to a higher cultural level because they expect their art to be useful in some way, whether as social realism or to raise the city’s higher life. However, Anderson’s published works demonstrate that he understood that in order to be published and reviewed well in the Chicago papers, he needed to at least publicly boost the image of the city and contribute to its higher life in some way. He wrote to Lucille Blum, the wife of the Chicago painter and author Jerome Blum on July 1, 1923, about why he can’t stand Chicago and won’t be moving back or even visiting any time soon. He declares: “I’m pretty much going to stay away from Chicago and New York … the eternal grubbing about the purposes of art, its drift, … gets on my nerves.”36 He never does return for any length of time. In 1925, Anderson vacationed in Virginia and was so taken by the landscape he purchased farm property by the small town of Troutdale in Grayson County.37 He lived in a small cabin on the property while his friend William Spratling from New Orleans built his house. Spratling

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had been a professor at Tulane University in New Orleans, and the two men became friends during Anderson’s visits and stays in that city. Spratling had, in recent years, become an internationally renowned silversmith and jewelry maker, and he organized the Mexican silver workers into craft guilds for power in the market. Anderson hired a craftsman to build his house and he lived permanently after 1927 in the modern log cabin structure he named Ripshin.38 The house shows the influence Frank Lloyd Wright had on Anderson because, while it doesn’t resemble one of Wright’s more radical designs, the floor plan and aesthetics of the house show respect for Wright’s design principles. Wright was still very much on Anderson’s mind. He mentions Wright in a letter to his friends Ferdinand and Clara Schevill around October 6, 1930. He had just attended an exhibit of Wright’s architectural designs that was held at the Art Institute of Chicago from September 25 to October 12, 1930, and so was thinking deeply about the architect who had so much influence on him while in Chicago.39 He writes: “I have been thinking a good deal about Wright. I’ll write a story about him some day.” He thinks that there “is something pitiful there,” and that contemplating Wright and his life should draw out our sympathies. Anderson believes that Wright, by himself, has “humble, hurt moments” because he understands in those moments that “he has himself killed the chance for a life of beautiful building.” Anderson connects with Wright because he thinks that he’s done similar things and destroyed the better things in himself too.40 In 1936, Anderson will decide to write his memoir and he procrastinates on the project until 1939, when he finally decides to really do it. One of the reasons it takes so long to begin is that he wants to do the book in some kind of non-standard way and so he makes a lot of lists of people and ideas. His last list is a list of “suggestions” of people and topics that have been important in his life. Frank Lloyd Wright appears two-thirds of the way down the list, right after “Gertrude Stein, Roger Sergel and Lewis Galantiere.” Reading the list, it’s possible to see his mind working backward in time from Paris to Chicago. Under Wright are the influences from his time in Chicago: “Joyce, Ezra Pound,” “Hemingway,” “Mike Carr and group at 57th street Chicago.”41 Anderson will continue to identify with Wright as a creator, an artist, and most of all, as a craftsman who has destroyed himself pushing back against provincial and industrial Chicago. The memoir will be his last large project and it’s published posthumously in 1942.

Part Two

Making Modernism Out of Chicago

4

Willa Cather and Chicago

In July 1896, Willa Cather wrote to her friend Mariel Gere from Pittsburgh: “I have only been a few hours in this City of Dreadful Dirt, so you must not take my first impressions seriously I feel like being funny. I began to feel good as soon as I got east of Chicago. When I got to where there were some hills and clear streams and trees.”1 Chicago, for Cather, was a place in between the plains of Nebraska and New York. Instead of joining the artists, critics, and writers who were consciously thinking about American literature and Chicago’s place in it, she passed through Chicago, moving further east, first to Pittsburgh and then to New York. She would stop in Chicago sometimes as many as four times a year to change trains, visit dear friends, and sell books. Her perceptions of the city came from reading voraciously about the city, staying in it, and from friends who were at the center of the Chicago arts scene: the Tribune journalists and then literary editors Elia Peattie and Fanny Butcher and Irene Miner Weisz from back home in Red Cloud. The friendships with Peattie and Butcher began as professional relationships that evolved into friendships with two very different women who held the same job at different times. Miner Weisz was not part of the literary world in Chicago and Cather treasured their friendship, happy to have one connection that was completely outside the world of commerce and from home. This chapter’s first section will chronicle Cather’s relationship with Elia Peattie, which began in Omaha, Nebraska, and continued after the Peatties moved to Chicago and became a central part of the literary and arts scene. The second section gives an extended reading of Cather’s novel The Song of the Lark (1914) and argues that the novel is an extended critique of the Chicago scene that expects art to be useful (whether as social realism or to raise the city’s higher life), treats art as business, and destroys artists by using them. The novel should be read as Cather’s explanation for why she can never move

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to or settle in Chicago, despite the friends she has and keeps there. The last section shows Cather’s professional relationship to the Chicago Tribune’s art critic Fanny Butcher. Butcher loved and had a sophisticated understanding of the commercial aspect of writing and she helped Cather sell books in Chicago and across the county, but Cather’s letters to and about Butcher reveal her continued exhaustion with Butcher’s Chicago methods and ideas that made art into a business.

Elia Peattie and Willa Cather’s embrace of the modern Willa Cather met Elia Peattie when she worked at the Omaha World-Herald in Nebraska. Peattie had moved to Omaha in 1888 from Chicago, with her husband Robert, who was also a reporter. Her family moved to Chicago from Michigan in 1876, when she was fourteen and she became the Tribune’s first “girl reporter” in 1885. She married Robert in 1883 and when they moved to Omaha, her writing took a profound turn toward fictional and realistic renderings of the frontier with a particular emphasis on those issues pertinent to women: suffrage, domestic troubles, and the plight of children. She also wrote long, uplifting pieces on the beauty of the United States. In 1889, she wrote a pamphlet for the Northern Pacific Wonderland series touting the amazing splendor of Alaska for women travelers and wrote the 700-page The Story of America that same year. She published regularly in popular magazines like Lippincott’s and Cosmopolitan. Her writing began to win her prizes and she took advantage of her popularity by earning extra money on the side lecturing on literary topics that would elevate the listener.2 She met Cather in 1895 after giving a lecture on Sidney Lanier, the Southern essayist and poet. Cather had just graduated from the University of Nebraska that June and she quickly took to Peattie. In 1895, Peattie had just written a history of Nebraska women journalists, for the Nebraska Press Association, which would appeal to Cather and she praised Cather’s literary criticism as “clever, original, and generally just.” In a column later that year, she predicted Cather’s literary success, naming her opinions as “original, often dogmatic.” Cather would write to her friend Kate Cleary in 1905 that no one had been so consistently kind to her in her career and that Peattie had a very large influence on Cather’s own writing.3 Peattie inspired Cather, in part, because she was a

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successful woman in the masculine-identified profession of journalism, a field Cather took up briefly. In 1896, the Peatties moved back to Chicago and became part of the artistic club scene as members of the newly formed Little Room. M. Catherine Downs has claimed that Peattie had to leave Nebraska “to escape her colleagues’ jealousy,” and the collegial support of Henry Blake Fuller, Harriet Monroe, and Hamlin Garland must have been a relief for her.4 Cather visited Peattie in Chicago almost immediately. She wrote to Mariel Gere around September 19, 1897: “Mrs. [Elia] Peattie entertained me delightfully in Chicago, and there are a lot of nice things to tell you, but I’m not in the mood for that tonight.”5 She continued to visit the Peatties in Chicago over the next few years while she lived in Pittsburgh. She enjoyed the trips to Chicago so much that she wrote home to Dorothy Canfield on October 10, 1899: Say, do you know it isn’t half bad to be back. I had a good trip and spent a most delightful day with the Peatties in Chicago … Mrs. Peattie has at last arrived, so to speak, for her story “The Man at the Edge of Things” in the September Atlantic is literature, as good as most modern French things and as elusive and artistic. She wants me to go to Chicago in the spring, and I think I shall. Dooley says there is no woman doing newspaper work there now that I need be afraid of. I guess he and the Peatties will make the venture safe.6

Flush with the excitement from her good trip, Cather was considering a move to Chicago to be a journalist because the Peatties were encouraging her to do so and could give her a friendly introduction into its literary scene. She never moved and never again brought up the possibility of moving to the city in her letters or journal entries. In 1901, Peattie became the literary editor of the Tribune and she could have changed the trajectory of Cather’s career. Cather, however, stayed away from Chicago, and by 1903 Cather would associate Chicago with the draining commercial work that pulled her away from her literary efforts. On March 28, 1903, she writes to Canfield: I don’t know when I have been so beaten out with mental effort and so sick with disappointment. … You see, Dorothy, those wretched tales went back on me. When I got my Chicago mag. work off my hands and came to the pruning and fixing of that set of short stories I just fainted by the wayside. There is weeks of work to be done on them.7

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Cather will continue to associate Chicago with commercial work and its draining effects on artists. On June 4, 1911, she writes to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant about a kind of moral furor that she associates with Chicago, one that’s equally as draining as the commercial work that she complained about to Dorothy Canfield: One of the Hull House women came to the office yesterday. She said that Miss Wyatt has given herself over wholly to the cause of the White Slave; that she never talks or thinks about anything else, and feels pretty bitterly toward those of us here who didn’t sympathize with her. I’m sorry. I’ve seldom been more disappointed than I was when I found that we had no possible point of contact. She seems to me to be maddened by having lived too long in the company of a horrible idea—like Electra. She used to frighten me.8

Peattie, with her connections to Hull House, becomes associated with this kind of Chicago moral furor for Cather. It would have been distasteful to the writer who wrote sympathetically of men and women who drank too much and had what Chicagoans would have considered moral failings. Cather loses touch with Peattie over the next decade. By the time she begins to conceive of The Song of the Lark, she writes about her as someone she used to know. She tells her friend, the journalist Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, on June 15, 1912: “I’m so glad to hear of Mrs. [Elia] Peattie’s daughter, and trust she is happy. Her mother was so kind to me long ago.”9 The final mention of Peattie by Cather in the archived letters is in a letter sent to her good friend Irene Miner Weisz in 1913. “Willie” sends a short note: “Needless to say I’m not responsible for this! It’s rather wild, but it may amuse you.” She enclosed a copy of Peattie’s review of her new book, O Pioneers (1913), from the Tribune.10 The review praises the book effusively, declaring: “A new story has appeared which has a right to be ranged upon the shelf with the best of those written upon the subject of the western plains and the people.” She claims that the book contains “the essence of life itself.” And that “it is the power to instill this quality in her work that forces the critic to accord Miss Cather something which can be described as no other word save genius.”11 However, the last paragraph identifies the difference between Cather’s work and that of the earlier generation of realists that Peattie so admires. Peattie declares:

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Yet, frankly, the book stops short of greatness. It scintillates with implications of power, but the genuine consummation is not there. The book glitters with ore, but the big pay streak does not appear. Is it that the characters, though so interesting, are not strong enough? Should there have been more struggle? Would it have been better if Miss Cather had stepped out of her story now and then and turned upon the scene and the characters the eye of the commentator and the philosopher?12

It seems that Peattie wants Cather to be more like those Chicago writers, such as Garland and Fuller, who William Dean Howells praised for their keen eyes and voices that cut through the description on the page. Peattie’s criticism of Cather needs to be read within the context of the censorship of the Scandinavian Exhibit held at the Art Institute in 1913 and the general reaction to the Armory Show held three months later. The Art Institute removed the painting “Summer Days,” by the Norwegian Bernhard Folkestad, for “moral reasons,” and the Tribune reported mixed reactions to the censorship while focusing on the embarrassed and scandalized women who viewed the painting.13 The Armory Show introduced Chicago to modernism, and Chicago press thought the exhibit fun but having no intrinsic or real artistic merit.14 Elia Peattie’s review of O Pioneers serves to announce her own hostility to the new modernism and the elements she dislikes about Cather’s work most illustrate Cather’s move into this new art movement. Five years after Peattie publishes her review of O Pioneers, she can no longer get published. Joan Stevenson Falcone points out that the primary reason is that she could not adjust her conservative/genteel ideologies to accommodate the new morals of the changing times. When the second wave of the Chicago Renaissance replaced the “genteel tradition,” the populace lost interest in her writings. While early in her career her works had been “too radical” they were now considered “nauseatingly virtuous” in comparison to Theodore Dreiser and others.15

Her writing took not just a strong stance against the new modernism, but a solid stance on sex in literature. She lost favor with the new male critics who saw her as a provincial and strident Chicago writer and bluestocking from an earlier generation.16 She even comes to despise Garland, who shares her dislike of naked women and sex in literature. She sees him as selling out to the “juvenile taste of America,” and, in order to sell his works, had abandoned the “austere and tragic qualities of Main Traveled Roads” producing an “innocuous sort

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of material” that had wasted his “vigorous and heroic talent.”17 Cather drifts away from Peattie just as she begins to experiment with modernist themes and techniques in her own writing. Cather’s next novel, The Song of the Lark, is a sharp and cutting critique of Chicago’s provincialism and anti-modernist stance, which Cather would have thought was most apparent in its citizens’, artists’, and journalists’ responses to the Armory Show of 1913.

Willa Cather’s critique of Chicago: The Song of the Lark When Cather wrote The Song of the Lark (1915), she wrote a well-informed critique of the Chicago she came to know well through her friends and visits to the city. The novel serves as an explanation for why she never settles in Chicago and reveals her attitudes toward the city’s artists, who she knew and with whom she corresponded, but never joined. On February 4, 1937, she sent a letter to her friend, the Tribune’s literary critic Fanny Butcher, commiserating about a painful illness she had while writing the novel. She writes of her experience with a “pernicious carbuncle on the back of her head” and reveals: I put off the operation because I was red hot into the Chicago part of The Song of the Lark and simply would not go into a hospital. All the best part of that book (about the singing lesions [sic], etc.) was written when I was taking codeine all day and all night, and was stimulated by the pain that I kept telling myself I could surely climb up the side of the Flatiron Building.18

For Cather, the Chicago section is the best part of the book and her own experience with feverish pain informs the frenzy with which Thea approaches the city to make her career. Cather throws Thea, the heroine of The Song of the Lark, into the cauldron of social, economic, cultural, and artistic forces bubbling in 1890s Chicago. When Thea needs to recuperate from the exhaustion and illness caused by working in Chicago, she spends time at the Anasazi Indian cliff dwellings in Arizona. Her physical movement from Chicago to the cliff dwellings connects the novel’s Chicago chapters and the Panther Canyon chapters and suggests that the two sections inform each other historically and metaphorically.

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Henry Blake Fuller’s novel used the cliff dwellers as a metaphor for the elite Chicagoans who occupied skyscrapers and worked high above the city’s immigrant hordes.19 The cliff-dwelling conceit in the novel also serves as a warning to the elite citizens of Chicago, who, like the Anasazi, may become extinct if they continue to participate in the futile project of using art to uplift others to their position. Chicago’s ongoing struggle with and self-conscious examination of the “higher life” explains why Chicago patrons, artists, and the art going public embraced The Eight, a group of New York urban realists known derisively in the New York art scene as the Ashcan painters. First shown at the Macbeth Gallery in New York in 1908, their paintings portray immigrant city street life, rendered in broad, spontaneous brushstrokes and vivid colors intended to give a vivacious and celebratory cast to the gritty scene. Patrons of the New York art scene considered the paintings’ subject and presentation too crude and inappropriate, but in Chicago, the Art Institute, the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, and the Arts Club of Chicago all held regular exhibits of the group.20 George Bellows, a student of the original Eight, painted the Cliff Dwellers (1913) using bright colors to illuminate immigrant tenements and life on New York’s Lower East Side. The painting succeeds in transforming the cliff dwellers from Fuller’s Europeans perched at the top of Chicago’s downtown buildings into immigrants hanging out of windows in the Bowery. Susan S. Weininger asserts: “After 1910 George Bellows exerted the strongest direct influence of any contemporary American artist on Chicago’s progressive painters.”21 By 1919, he was made a temporary professor at the Art Institute, and in 1922 he was offered a permanent position, which he kept until his death in 1925.22 The Cliff Dwellers, as a statement about immigrants in urban populations, spoke directly to a Chicago, rather than a New York, sensibility, because it employed the metaphor of cliff dwelling in a way already legible to Chicagoans. Cather, too, uses the metaphor of cliff dwelling in a way that would have been legible to turn-of-the-century Chicagoans, as a way of informing Thea’s upward trajectory in The Song of the Lark. Initially, Cather uses the idea of uplift to demonstrate how exposure to art will better Thea and ultimately allow her to escape the provincial world of Moonstone. Before giving a piano lesson, Wunsch “conducted her at once to the piano in Mrs. Kohler’s sitting-room. He twirled the stool to the proper height, pointed to it, and sat down in a wooden

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chair beside Thea.”23 He elevates her seat so that she will sit at the proper height during her exposure to European classical music, in turn suggesting the heightening effect of the music on this little girl. His conducting connects him to two other important conductors in her life: Ray Kennedy and Theodore Thomas. Ray’s money allows her to travel to Chicago, and she sees Thomas conduct at a crucial moment in her artistic development in Chicago. Both men will help raise her to greater heights as well by allowing invisible currents to conduct through them. However, Wunsch and Ray do not want anything from Thea in return and do not believe her singing talents will raise the profile of Moonstone, separating Moonstone’s ideas about raising artists from Chicago’s idea about using them to achieve the higher life. When Thea moves to Chicago, Mr. Harsanyi makes an important discovery: Thea should train to be an opera singer. The discovery changes Thea’s relationship to Chicago’s creation of its higher life and allows the novel’s critique of the Chicago art world to begin. Loretta Wasserman notes: “After finishing The Song of the Lark, Cather had more to say about opera singers. What fascinated her was the difference between performing artists, who must please and charm the public, and artists such as herself—writers or painters—who work in private or even anonymously.”24 Uplift does not apply to solitary pursuits such as writing or painting, but only to those activities that may elevate a considerable portion of the population. Thea thinks her fate is hers alone, but when she becomes a performer, an opera singer, she has the potential to lift up large audiences who hear her, in turn, raising others around her to a higher plane. The Song of the Lark does not echo the anxiety expressed by Fuller, who is unable to assess whether the immigrants who are lifted up through introduction to European culture are a good thing for Chicago’s art and culture or if their uplift will destroy the very culture that did the heavy lifting. The novel addresses Fuller’s issue with one line: “She had often heard Mrs. Kronborg say that she ‘believed in immigration,’ and so did Thea believe in it.”25 Instead, the novel turns the concern inward onto its artist and asks whether the particularly Chicagoan model of uplift is good for its artists, a question that also troubled Fuller. Cather uses the metaphor of cliff dwelling, in the post-fair Chicagoan’s sense, to examine the ways in which cultural uplift threatened an artist’s spirit and in turn predicted extinction for the artist.

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The cliff dwellers make their first appearance in the novel imagistically. Ray, who will be the first to tell Thea about the Anasazi Indian cities, takes her family out to the desert where she sees heifers. The young cows “were magnified to a preposterous height and looked like mammoths, prehistoric beasts standing solitary in the waters that for many thousands of years actually washed over that desert;—the mirage itself may be the ghost of that longvanished sea.”26 Thea sees for the first time how the females of a species can be raised up to heights larger than the role into which they are cast because of their gender. The passage invokes the “prehistoric” Anasazi Indians, who “vanished” because of their upward movement according to Chicago lore. Thea’s observation casts an ominous gloom over the novel’s discussion of her upward trajectory and artistic growth. The passage warns against reaching “preposterous heights” that will result in extinction for those who reach them. Thea later declares she only wants “impossible things,” a signal that the heights to which she will be lifted will guarantee her destruction.27 When Thea moves to Chicago, her metamorphosis into an uplifted Chicago artist begins and the novel continues to employ and expand the metaphor of cliff dwelling to indicate the complexity of her transformation. One night, she leaves the Auditorium Theater and a man accosts her. The Chicago wind racing off of Lake Michigan balloons up her cape and almost lifts her into the sky.28 The strong wind, a uniquely Chicago phenomenon, forces Thea upward violently and against her will, as if she is meant to glide upward onto the tops of the skyscrapers that surround her as she stands on lower Michigan Avenue. If she ascends, she may develop into, in one sense, one of Fuller’s cliff dwellers, the uplifted immigrant who has become a resident of Chicago’s skyscrapers. At the same time, she wants to hold on to what she has learned and gained from hearing the symphony, and directs her anger at those who want to steal the new knowledge from her. She “glared round her at the crowds” and thinks: All these things and people were no longer remote and negligible; they had to be met, they were lined up against her, they were there to take something from her. Very well; they should never have it. … As long as she lived that ecstasy was going to be hers. She would live for it, work for it, die for it; but she was going to have it, time after time, height after height.29

In her anger, Thea employs the same metaphors used by the H. J. Smith Exploring Company catalog produced for the Columbian Exhibition to

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describe the Anasazis’ defensive position. She has learned that she must ascend the heights in order to defensively guard against those other, less civilized people who want to destroy what she has now found: the higher culture she obtained at the symphony. Thea seems to embrace the idea of the higher life that Chicago’s art patrons believe will elevate its immigrants. Thea’s metaphorical uplift transpires because she just heard one of Theodore Thomas’s “heavily symphonic programs.”30 The conductor of the Chicago Symphony believed fervently in the project of uplift and participated by bringing classical European music to Chicago. Donald L. Miller writes: “As Rose Fay wrote of him on the occasion of his death in 1905: ‘He not only disciplined his musicians, but he disciplined the public, educating it sometimes perhaps against its will.’”31 Thea’s uplift also takes place because on the next page, Harsanyi asks Thomas who Thea’s next teacher should be for voice training.32 By juxtaposing Thea’s experience outside the Auditorium Theater with Harsanyi’s request to Thomas inside the same building, the novel skillfully ties together the idea of Thea’s cultural uplift with the Chicago businessmen’s manipulation of the art world through contacts and money. Thea’s angry reaction to being accosted by the man and the upward thrust of wind can be read as her reaction to being uplifted by Theodore Thomas’s baton against her will. It is at this point that the novel begins to articulate the damage done to an artist when she must defend herself against those who want to use her, including Chicago’s art patrons who will mold her for the purpose of uplifting others. The novel’s paradox emerges here. Thea has benefited from being exposed to Western art and to those engaged in the project of uplifting her, but she suffers from those same contacts that construct her talents as useful and her art as engaging in public service. When Thea meets Fred Ottenburg, he continues to manipulate the Chicago business scene for her artistic career. Through her involvement with Fred, Thea becomes introduced to the cliff dwellers and their dwellings: the Anasazi Indians and Fuller’s cultural elite of Chicago. While Fred and Thea are “waiting for their tea at a restaurant in the Pullman Building, overlooking the lake,”33 he tells her that his family owns “a whole canyon of cliff dweller ruins.”34 The conversation draws attention to their perch at the top of the Pullman building, one of the earliest steel-framed skyscrapers in what was called the business canyon of Chicago. Thea and Fred are now Chicago cliff dwellers, in the sense used in Fuller’s novel.

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Mark A. Robison observes that from the high altitude, Thea gazes at the Art Institute and at “a lumber boat, with two very tall masts … emerging black and gaunt out of the fog.”35 Her gaze links the Art Institute with a symbol of Chicago commerce, the lumber boat, and Robison declares: “In one perceptive moment, Thea’s urban present and rural past merge with her artistic future.”36 The trajectory promised by her gaze from the heights contains the seed of her own downfall, the merging of art and commerce. The appearance of the boat foreshadows Thea’s dreadful appearance to Dr. Archie at the end of the novel, dressed in black, “deeply lined,” and looking “forty years old.”37 The novel suggests that Thea’s angry, defensive posture against the attacking hordes will crumble as it does for forty-year-old Madame Necker, whom Thea replaces on the stage: “Her voice was failing just when her powers were at their height. Every fresh young voice was an enemy, and this one was accompanied by gifts which she could not fail to recognize.”38 The future threatens extinction for the artists who reach the top, just as it did for the Anasazi cliff dwellers and Fuller’s skyscraper inhabitants who climbed up the high cliffs to ward off their enemies. Ann W. Fisher-Wirth notes: “Cather’s writing has always betrayed a keen sense of loss. At the center of her fiction … is the story of the Garden and the Fall. The lives of most of the major characters enact a recurrent tragic pattern, a sense of dispossession, exile and longing.”39 In The Song of the Lark, the cliff dweller metaphor deepens the sense of loss by showing how the artist gains and loses simultaneously, which causes the tragic pattern Fisher-Wirth identifies playing out in Cather’s later novels. In The Song of the Lark, Thea will lose because she learns how to be an artist and receives her fundamental training in Chicago. The novel suggests that those who stand at the highest levels in the Chicago art and business scene cannot raise themselves to a higher cultural level because they expect their art to be useful in some way, whether as social realism or to raise the city’s higher life. The novel draws this ambivalence about Chicago from Fuller’s novel and replicates his doubts about whether Chicagoans can achieve the higher life. The cliff dweller conceit operates as a double-sided metaphor that at once allows the wealthy and cultured citizens of Chicago to stand above the masses, as Thea does at the top of the Pullman building, and simultaneously allows for the wrongheadedness of their ideals to use art to accomplish the business of raising Chicago.

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In order to accomplish its critique of the Chicago art scene, The Song of the Lark relies on an intrinsic understanding of the 1890s Chicago club scene and the knowledge that The Cliff Dwellers was also a men’s club, started in 1907 by Hamlin Garland. In 1890s Chicago, two kinds of clubs existed: the men’s clubs, at which businesses were built, bought, and sold, and the women’s clubs, which were interested in the project of social uplift. The contacts and power provided by the men’s clubs allow Thea to continue her work and her ascent. The novel shows her commodification beginning in earnest at the Chicago Club, the most prominent of all the Chicago men’s clubs. Fred reveals that he belongs to the club, as befits his status and wealth, when he takes Bowers there to discuss Thea. She overhears “the young brewer ask Bowers to dine with him at his club that evening, and she saw that he looked forward to the dinner with pleasure.”40 Thea, oblivious to the machinations of the Chicago art scene, wonders: “If he’s such a grand business man, how does he have time to run around listening to singing-lessons?”41 For her, art stands apart from business, so her question highlights her ignorance as to the relationship between art and business in Chicago. Bower’s boasting and excitement over Fred’s invitation makes it evident that the invitation is to the Chicago Club and that Thea is a worthy topic of business. The invitation also underscores that Bowers does not have his own membership to the club, further illustrating his place in Chicago’s business world. Fred’s place is indicated by the fact he does not sit at the millionaire’s table with Potter Palmer, George Pullman, and Marshall Field, but does belong to the same club. It was said that all business done in Chicago happened at this table, and perhaps Fred’s friendship with the extraordinary Nathanmeyers has allowed Thea to be brought to this table. The millionaire’s table had an established interest in the business of art. The club first housed the Art Institute, before it moved across the street into the building designed after the Columbian Exhibition. They brought Theodore Thomas to Chicago to conduct the music program at the Fair, and then brought him permanently to Chicago with the prospect of his own symphony and the construction of Orchestra Hall. Business discussion at the club traditionally happens in the dining room, over a meal, just as Fred invites Bowers to discuss Thea. When Thea thinks about the men later that night, “She looked up from her grammar to wonder what Bowers and Ottenburg were having to eat. At that moment they were talking of her.”42 Melissa Homestead has demonstrated

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that “the language of finance and investment permeates the thoughts and speech of both Dr. Archie and Fred Ottenburg,”43 and the passage implies that their topic, Thea, will be consumed right along with their food. The novel condemns the way Chicago’s men’s clubs treat art as business and artists as a commodity to be chewed up and swallowed. Fuller’s cliff dweller conceit warns that Chicago’s temperament and attitudes toward art would result in the cultural destruction of the city. He wrote The Cliff-Dwellers while a member of the loose group of artists who first met in Bessie Potter’s top-floor studios in the Fine Arts Building, next to the Chicago Club, the Auditorium Building, and across from where the Art Institute would be when it moved out of the Chicago Club. He designed his club to be like a salon, a place that sheltered artists against the harshness of the Chicago business world. The club formalized around the name “Little Room” and derived their name from a short story by Madeline Wynne that appeared in Harper’s Monthly in 1895. Membership included Jane Addams, Lorado Taft, Allen B. and Irving K. Pond, Anna Morgan, Ralph Clarkson, Hamlin Garland, Elia Peattie, and others interested in creating a literary and artistic club in Chicago. When Thea tells her teacher, Bowers, “I have to hunt a new boarding place,” and Bowers asks, “What’s the matter with the Studio Club? Been fighting with them again?,” she reveals her temporary stay in the Fine Arts Building.44 Even Fuller’s club causes Thea to become angry and demoralized as she fights with the other members of the club, who, it turns out, buy into the Chicago belief that art has a use-value to raise the artistic standards of Chicago. She answers, “The Club’s all right for people who like to live that way. I don’t.” When Bowers asks, “Why so tempery?,”45 her reply provides further evidence that she may be staying with members of this uniquely mixed-gendered club: “I can’t work with a lot of girls around. They’re too familiar.”46 In 1907, Garland started a formal men-only club that would deliberately drain away the male members of the Little Room. He made it new club business to “tender an invitation to join the new club” to all Little Room male members.47 Garland’s club would bring together artists and businessmen with artistic tastes in a union that made formal the alliance that characterized Chicago’s art scene to Fuller’s and Cather’s displeasure. Because it was perched at the top floors of the newly constructed Orchestra Hall, the members called

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the new club the Attic Club. The group would decide on the name The Cliff Dwellers Club two years later.48 Cather, who disliked Garland and was “irritated” by his work, was probably not surprised by his utter disregard for Fuller in taking the name of his novel for his club. In the January 26, 1896, Nebraska State Journal, she wrote a review of James Lane Allen’s “The Butterflies” that turns into one of many attacks she made on Garland: “It is just the sort of thing that poor Hamlin Garland is always trying and failing to do. And the reason thereof is that Mr. Allen has just two things that Mr. Garland has not, imagination and style. … Art is temperament and Hamlin Garland has no more temperament than a prairie dog.”49 When Cather wrote The Song of the Lark, Garland’s The Cliff Dwellers Club was well-established, and Chicago readers, hearing that the novel made use of the cliff dweller conceit, would think immediately of Garland’s club. Because Garland was the founder of The Cliff Dwellers Club, he would have represented Chicago’s worst sins regarding art for Cather: social realism, the blending of art and business, the commodification of the artist. Cather seems to be writing specifically against Garland each time the novel suggests that the Chicago cliff dwellers have worn Thea out with their consumption of her art. The names of the clubs—Little Room, Attic Club, and The Cliff Dwellers — correlate with the significant rooms that Thea moves through in the novel. She “was allowed to use the money—her pupils paid her twenty-five cents a lesson— to fit up a little room for herself upstairs in the half-story.”50 She moves from her little room or attic room through a series of very unsatisfactory rooms, until she has the opportunity to also fit up the Cliff Dwellers room. Sharon O’Brien notes, “In her attic retreat Thea begins to discover the voice or self that is her own,” and she traces the discovery in a line that culminates in Thea’s epiphany in Panther Canyon.51 But Homestead points out: “Even Thea’s nonproductive months alone in Panther Canyon are entangled in Fred’s finances. The canyon is part of a ranch owned by his father, so proceeds from the family beer empire underwrite her artistic awakening.”52 If the rooms Thea moves through as she discovers her own voice are metaphorically Chicago businessmen’s clubrooms, then the novel shows the art and business worlds woven together so tightly that the entire trajectory of her spiritual awakening has also been underwritten by the Chicago business world.

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In Chicago, Fred manages to introduce Thea to the one character who wishes Thea to hone her own voice: Mrs. Nathanmeyer. He tells Thea, “You’ll be all right with her so long as you do not try to be anything that you are not.”53 Cather based Mrs. Nathanmeyer on Bertha Palmer, who, with her husband, Potter Palmer, was “so rich and great that even” someone like Thea would have “heard of them.”54 The Palmers built a road to the northern section of Chicago, which would become Lake Shore Drive, and built “The Castle” at its end. The Palmer House, the largest and most modern hotel in Chicago, was her husband’s wedding present to her. She was the only lady manager at the World’s Fair, was known for her Parisian tastes in art and clothing, and with her husband she acquired a magnificent art collection through annual trips abroad. In Paris she met Mary Cassatt, who introduced her to Manet and the other impressionist painters in his group.55 Fred stops Thea to admire the “Rousseaus and Corots” hanging on the Nathanmeyers’ walls, and in the hall he stops her “before a painting of a woman eating grapes out of a paper bag, and had told her gravely that there was the most beautiful Manet in the world.”56 Although Polly P. Duryea has identified the painting Fred points out as Manet’s Street Singer (1862),57 which Bertha Palmer never owned,58 Palmer was a friend of Manet’s and was known for her large collection of his work. A reading public that knows 1890s Chicago society would easily recognize Mrs. Nathanmeyer as a version of Mrs. Palmer, the only woman in Chicago who owned Corots, and who could own Manets too, if she chose. Mrs. Nathanmeyer’s “standards … that have nothing to do with Chicago” are also those of Bertha Palmer, whom Fred seems to be describing.59 She “would not confine herself to established standards, but rather visited artists’ studios and current exhibitions, consulted with experts and subscribed to the major magazines in order to explore recent developments.”60 Her standards, as well as her strong feminist ideas, led Palmer to create salons for young artists, particularly female artists who did not fit into the more realistic and gritty Chicago art scene. It is at one of these salons that Thea first meets her, “and this seemed a remarkable opportunity.”61 It certainly is, because Mrs. Nathanmeyer/Palmer has the status and connections to orchestrate Thea’s training and career in New York and abroad, as well as her disgust with the Chicago way of coupling business and art together.

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While at the canyon, Fred recalls Mrs. Nathanmeyer, to whom he had introduced Thea in Chicago,62 and on the next page “an eagle, tawny and of great size,” flies directly over the canyon and inspires Thea to rise to her feet with the realization that the Anasazi Indians, though a “vanished race,” have left behind “fragments of their desire”: their art.63 The novel uses eagles as a signal of inspiration in the earlier “Friends of Childhood” section. While on “a great adventure” with her father at a “reunion of old frontiersmen” they went up to the hills where “every little while eagles flew over.”64 For Thea, the trip was significant because “she told herself she would never, never forget it. The spirit of human courage seemed to live up there with the eagles.”65 She recollects this moment while listening to Dvorak in Chicago, her first symphony: “Strange how, as the first movement went on, it brought back to her that high tableland above Laramie; the grass-grown wagon trails, the far-away peaks of the snowy range, the wind and the eagles, that old man and the first telegraph message.”66 The eagle’s presence indicates that, symbolically, Mrs. Nathanmeyer watches Thea from behind the scenes and is most likely pulling strings at that moment to allow her to rise to even greater heights in the art world far beyond the limited vision of those businessmen who control the art scene in Chicago. This is the second time Mrs. Nathanmeyer has caused Thea to rise up, inspired, and not angry or feeling used from being raised into Chicago higher life. The first was when she supplied her with a low dress for singing. Thea “laughed and drew herself up out of her corsets, threw her shoulders high and let them drop again.”67 The gift allows Thea to breathe deeply in while singing, providing inspiration, giving life to her spirit, and releasing her from the drudgery of corsets. If the novel ends, as it does in its first version, after Thea’s experience in Panther Canyon, Mrs. Nathanmeyer’s presence as the eagle might be a sign that Thea will escape the clutches of the male, Chicago business art scene. The fact that it is an eagle that Cather uses to represent inspiration provides additional evidence that Thea may escape. Cather’s audience of Chicago artists and creative supporters would surely see the eagle as a subtle nod to the Eagle’s Nest Art Colony that was founded in 1898 by Chicago sculptor Lorado Taft. The colony, located on the east bank of the Rock River overlooking Oregon, Illinois, provided a respite from the Chicago heat for the Chicago artists and writers. Many of the visitors were also members of the Little Room, including Harriet Monroe, Hamlin Garland, and Henry Fuller. Cather would have

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certainly known of the colony because her friend Peattie and her husband were founding members. The name of the camp also comes indirectly from Margaret Fuller’s poem “Ganymede to His Eagle” that she wrote while sitting beneath Eagle’s Nest Tree during her visit to Oregon, Illinois, in the summer of 1843. Eagle’s Nest Camp overlooks Margaret Fuller Island, named in honor of the poet and her poem. Ganymede’s Spring, named by Fuller, provided water to the colony first by horse and wagon and then in 1902 by pump. Lorado Taft’s Blackhawk statue, a 48-foot concrete statue of the Sauk warrior considered to be the second largest monolithic concrete structure in the world, overlooks the river and stands prominently on Eagle’s Nest Bluff. The statue was dedicated in 1911, giving the colony larger name recognition among the reading public who read of the ceremony in the Chicago papers. Cather most likely had the summer retreat in mind, when she sent the eagle over Thea’s head for inspiration during her reclusive summer retreat in Panther Canyon. The layout of Panther Canyon, with an actual eagle’s nest overlooking the river and Thea’s feelings that she is being watched over by the native Americans who formerly inhabited the canyon, resembles the lay of the land around the camp. The club name is a direct reference to the club’s stated belief that “association and conversation had largely to do with inspiration.”68 The eagle, then, is a sign that Thea should be seeking association with like-minded artists, rather than isolation. Fred’s recollection makes even more explicit the link between the eagle and Mrs. Nathanmeyer, the “heavy, powerful old Jewess, with … an eagle nose, and sharp, glittering eyes.”69 While Mrs. Nathanmeyer’s eagle nose is an anti-Semitic caricature, the image of the eagle soaring far above the canyon replicates her position in relation to the cliff dwellers perched at the top of Chicago’s skyscrapers. She soars far above them with superior standards “that have nothing to do with Chicago.”70 Cather’s representation of this Jewish character is deeply marked by an ambivalence that Susan Meyer has shown as being at work in the representation of Louie in The Professor’s House. The Palmers were not Jewish, so Cather made a deliberate choice in making Mrs. Nathanmeyer Jewish. Many scholars, most recently Loretta Wasserman, have cited the character as an example of anti-Semitism in Cather’s writing. However, Wasserman claims that the Nathanmeyers “are not significant in Thea’s fate”71 and concludes her longer reading of “The Diamond Mine” by

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suggesting that the Jewish characters in that narrative are present because Cather “needed an image to convey the dangers of human commodification, and she chose that cartoon figure.”72 The novel frames Mrs. Nathanmeyer in a repulsive stereotype because her power comes from her relationship to her husband’s money and the Chicago businessmen’s dealings in the art world. However, in The Song of the Lark, Fred’s description of Mrs. Nathanmeyer’s standards makes them sound like Cather’s own: that art was a “search for something for which there is no market demand … where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.”73 Cather constructs the character through her salons, attitudes, connection to Bertha Palmer, and metaphorical appearance in the canyon as a positive force in Thea’s career. The novel’s ambivalence toward the character of Mrs. Nathanmeyer sharpens the critique of the relationship between art and commerce in Chicago by containing the tension in one character. Mrs. Nathanmeyer’s name may also be a reference to another patron of the arts, the young Mrs. Florence Mayer who was married to one of the owners of the largest department store in Chicago in the decades before the twentieth century, Schlesinger and Mayer. The firm was so profitable that they hired Louis Sullivan to build a new department store building for the firm, at the corner of Madison and State streets in 1902. The building would eventually be leased to Carson, Pirie, Scott, and Company, whose name is still associated with it. Mayer was a student of Sarah Robinson Duff, a well-known voice teacher in Chicago. In a city already known to produce well-trained operatic voices, Duff had a particularly promising student: sixteen-year-old Mary Garden. Garden’s family had financed the move to Chicago for her training, but Duff felt that it was time for her promising pupil to begin training in Paris, something her family could not afford. Duff asked the Mayers to finance Garden’s training abroad. They agreed.74 Cather based characters on Mary Garden in two stories set in New York that were published in the later collection Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920): “Coming, Aphrodite,” and “Scandal.” Despite Cather’s later references to Garden, her training in Chicago, and the closeness of Mrs. Nathanmeyer’s and Mrs. Mayer’s names, only James Woodress has suggested that Mary Garden may be one of the singers whose life Cather drew upon while constructing Thea.75 Most scholarship misses this connection because Thea is more generally read as a version of Olive Fremstad, whom Cather knew and adored as an artist.

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This oversight has prevented an understanding of the darker implications of Thea’s Chicago connections and the ways in which she must negotiate the complexities of patronage stemming from these connections. The relationship between Florence Mayer and her protégé was very complicated. Once abroad, Garden flitted between multiple personas: genteel lady whose manners matched those of her sponsor’s class, bohemian who wished only for liberty, and illmannered boor whose manners reflected badly on the Mayers. At this point, Garden’s talents clearly surpassed those of Mayer’s and Mayer’s realization that she would be nothing more than an amateur singer whose voice was aging just as Garden’s star was ascending surely produced tension.76 Susan Rutherford suspects that “eventually, the relationship between Garden and the Mayers snapped under the strain of clashing expectations and supposed duties.”77 Someone sent letters anonymously to Florence Mayer that suggested that Garden had a baby out of wedlock. An international scandal developed, where some thought Mayer was trying to destroy Garden’s career and others thought Garden was trying to destroy the Mayer’s reputation. Mayer even spoke to the Tribune to set the record straight that she did not start the rumor, nor did Garden have a baby. Cather drew on this struggle in her later stories about Garden. The novel draws Thea’s participation in patronage and her use of her Chicago connections and patrons as conflicted and even suggests it is vampiric. Thea lusts after fame and fortune and this causes her to be associated imagistically with the other female gold diggers in the novel. Fred Ottenburg’s mother declares his first wife Edith a “savage” when she does not divorce her son.78 Her word choice echoes an epigraph often connected to Thea in earlier chapters. Thea has “that unfortunate squint; it gives her that vacant Swede look, like an animal,”79 and is repeatedly called that “savage blonde” and “a fine young savage.”80 However, Thea inverts the connotations of the word savage when she smiles “with the natural contempt of strength for weakness, with the sense of physical security which makes the savage merciless.”81 Bram Dijkstra has shown that “by 1900 the vampire had come to represent woman as the personification of everything negative that linked sex, ownership and money.”82 It was the unnatural woman, the barren and childless woman, who lusted after gold and man’s essence and became identified with the vampire. The vampiric similarities between Thea and the other women foreshadow her own emergence as a metaphorical vampire in the novel’s last chapter. Perhaps, she, too, has been feeding off of Fred and Dr. Archie. Her last name,

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Kronborg, rings with sounds of money and wealth, as does the name of her future husband Frank. She spends the majority of the novel lambasting cheap things and cheap people, declaring, “To do any of the things one wants to do, one has to have lots and lots of money.”83 Stated to Dr. Archie, this elicits an immediate response from the Doctor who asks if she needs any. Thea may be read here and during other similar conversations as a gold digger, exactly like Edith and perhaps Belle Archie as well. The eruption of the gothic vampire into Cather’s realist novel causes what Judith Halberstam labels, “the disintegration in form and content” and should be seen as, therefore, a very modern device.84 Vampires do not seemingly have a place in a realistic novel and their presence calls every moment that appears realistic into question. In the last part of the novel, we must ask questions about Thea’s growth and artistic designs and whether it had been perverted by her access to Chicago’s club scene and the patrons she met there. In the last section, the third-person narrator bluntly informs us: The next time Dr. Archie came to Moonstone, he came to be a pallbearer at Mrs. Kronborg’s funeral. When he last looked at her, she was so serene and queenly that he went back to Denver feeling almost as if he had helped to bury Thea Kronborg herself. The handsome head in the coffin seemed to him much more really Thea than did the radiant young woman in the picture, looking about at the Gothic vaultings and greeting the Hall of Song.85

Here, we are shown the ideal late-Victorian woman: serene, queenly, and dead. But, Dr. Archie’s premonition implies that Thea doesn’t survive the novel either. Her head replaces her mother’s and so the vision of the new woman or new female artist, who is about to appear before us, is cloaked in an image of death. The substitution of the female artist for her dead mother reveals Dr. Archie’s own difficulties with Thea’s revision of a proper woman’s place. She is quite alive and unmarried; but, the familiar Thea has been killed off and replaced by the haughty Diva Kronborg. The last section begins with this paradox because Dr. Archie must wrestle with the uncanny Kronborg for the remainder of the narrative. In case Dr. Archie’s premonition is overlooked, Cather sprinkles additional references to the new state of things for Kronborg/Thea. Her new name suggests both age and time and identifies her as a witchy Crone. She draws near to Kristeva’s descriptions of the female body as representing disorder and

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the taboo by being irregular, aged, and most of all grotesque.86 When she finally appears in front of Dr. Archie, it is unsettling: “She was standing in the middle of the room, in a white silk shirtwaist and a short black velvet skirt, which somehow suggested that they had ‘cut off her petticoats all round about.’ She looked distinctly clipped and plucked.”87 Dr. Archie considers, “She seemed to him inappropriately young and inappropriately old, shorn of her long tresses at one end and of her long robes at the other.”88 The doctor uses the metaphor again when he tells Fred Ottenburg her friend and suitor, at the dinner table, “I was thinking how tired she looked, plucked of all her fine feathers.”89 Thea, the songbird and lark of the title, looks distinctly like a bird, plucked and shorn and ready to be cooked for dinner. The movement of the last section connects these images together rather tightly. Dr. Archie spends his time waiting for and trying to meet the Diva, commenting on her appearance, hearing her sing, and eating a succession of meals with and without her. He has become part of her audience, pushing her to perform and so he has developed an appetite for her. In a frenzy caused by a last-minute bid to fill in for a sick performer, Thea rushes around the room and curses the heavy meal she ate with Dr. Archie and Frank: “If only you hadn’t made me eat—Damn that duck!”90 With the two men, she consumes her own kind, a bird, and drives home the metaphor of vampiric feasting that has been building throughout the last chapters of the novel. Fred consoles her, “You need strength” and seems to insinuate that Thea will gain strength by killing and eating other birds, metaphorically the other singers trying to claw their way to the top of the pecking order.91 However, Thea does give signs that Dr. Archie, Frank, and her audience are metaphorically consuming her. Upon returning to her apartment following a grand performance, her words reveal her thorough consumption. She simply states, “Consider me dead until Saturday, Dr. Archie.”92 On that chosen day, she will rise for her performance, the walking dead who has been clipped and plucked. Then she announces, “Doctor Archie, I invite you both to dine with me on Saturday night, the night after ‘Rheingold.’”93 If she derives strength from eating others like herself, then like a vampire she rises to feast with and on the two men who have financially and emotionally supported her through the long years of training. Yet, performing does make her “dead,” and the two men dine as heavily on birds as she does.

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For Freud, doubling initially acts as preservation against extinction. Thea must become Kronborg, similar to her old self and yet entirely different as well, to stave off the dissolution of the self that threatens her as a female artist. On a structural level, the female artist is under threat because of the long tradition of killing or marrying off female protagonists at the end of novels. On a narrative level, she fights against bad patrons and destructive audiences. It seems that wherever Thea turns, she is threatened with sure death. In part, Thea’s backers back her as a kind of insurance for their own immortality. They will ride on her coattails, reaping the immortal success of the truly talented and attempting to prevent their own deaths. However, because they and Thea are able to see themselves replicated in another, they must recognize their own mortality. They become as fleeting and insubstantial as copies. What was once an “assurance of immortality” becomes “the ghostly harbinger of death.”94 The aspect of the double changes and it becomes the opposite of itself. Doubling, for Freud, is what happens in the face of abjection. To see one’s double is to be exposed to one’s own mortality and death. The bird imagery and description of Thea’s dead mother function in just this way. The premonition threatens Dr. Archie and Thea herself is under threat by the mere existence of so many other birds or opera singers. At the same time, the mere existence of the other wives, and opera singers, reminds Thea of her own association with feminine abjection. Even the eagle in Panther Canyon must struggle against the boys who try to snare it in nets. Thea sees “a watch-tower upon which the young men used to entice eagles and snare them with nets. Sometimes for a whole morning Thea could see the coppery breast and shoulders of an Indian youth there against the sky; see him throw the net, and watch the struggle with the eagle.”95 Because the novel does not end with Thea’s stay in Panther Canyon, her time spent there is not an escape from the Chicago clubs and patrons. Instead, it serves as a reminder of just how fully enmeshed her awakening is with her participation in the business of constructing a higher life for Chicago. At the novel’s end, Dr. Archie notices that Thea has successfully become a cliff dweller. He gazes at her top-floor apartment in New York: “The fourteen stories of the apartment hotel rose above him like a perpendicular cliff.”96 He also notices in the next paragraph that inside the Metropolitan Opera House “the height of the audience room, the rich color, and the sweep of the balconies were not without their effect upon him.”97 Even though Thea makes her debut

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in New York and has been trained in Europe, the particularly Chicagoan use of the metaphor of cliff dwelling cloaks her success and indicates that she has succeeded because of the Chicago business world: Theodore Thomas, the Nathanmeyers, the Chicago Club, and Fred, who had the entry into Chicago’s club scene to orchestrate it all. The metaphor also promises that Thea, like Madame Necker and the Anasazi Indians, will eventually disappear. It is unclear whether Thea recognizes the significance of the Chicago phase of her training and whether she even understands the multiple connotations of the phrase “cliff dweller” in Chicago. But for Cather, the multiple meanings of the phrase allow her to construct a subtle yet biting critique of the Chicago art scene. She pushes back against their belief that art and artists are commodities to be bought, sold, and traded. In doing so, Cather examines the threat of extinction for the artist contained in the notion of cultural uplift.

Fanny Butcher and the crass commercialism of the book market Cather became friends with Fanny Butcher in the years following the publication of The Song of the Lark. Butcher had been working full time at the Tribune since 1913. She got the job by joining the Illinois Woman’s Press Association. Mary O’Donnell, who was a women’s editor at the Chicago Tribune and also a member, asked her to write a column for women. Butcher branched out into almost every department at the paper, but she wanted to eventually land a book column. Elia Peattie followed by Burton Roscoe were the head literary critics of the Tribune’s Saturday book page and Butcher suggested to the Sunday editor, Mary King, that she could write a tabloid book column. Her column would be quite unlike the cerebral discussions of books in Peattie’s and Roscoe’s Saturday columns and would instead focus on bestsellers and discussions with writers about the publishing world. King agreed and Butcher was now well set up to write about the newest books, become known to the literary world, and get her name out to a reading public.98 She would become a good friend to Cather who would draw on her help in navigating the literary world. In February of 1916, Cather tells Butcher she was so glad to hear she was going into the book business and that “I’d be proud to have my picture in your shop” and “If I can get a few hours in Chicago I will go to your shop.”99 Fanny

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Butcher’s Chicago Book Shop opened its doors that year and they stayed open until 1927, when the conflict between her position at the Tribune and the bookshop became too apparent. The bookstore became a salon for visiting writers, including Cather, and she would visit Butcher whenever she was in town or had something to promote. She writes on March 9 of that same year that she hopes Butcher will like the book. She hoped: “It will make friends in Chicago and in the West,” and she declares: “The Western audience is the only one I care much about.”100 She handles Butcher as she would a publisher or an editor, enthusiastically promoting her next manuscript or book. In 1922, when Burton Roscoe was fired, Butcher became the Saturday literary critic. She would remain at the Tribune for the rest of her career, spending almost fifty years there.101 The connection between Butcher and Cather was at first professional, following the lines of the other contemporaneous writers, like Sherwood Anderson, and Sinclair Lewis, who wrote her extensive thank you notes for her good reviews.102 Butcher was involved twofold in the project of uplift, constructing alongside the critic H. L. Mencken an American literature rooted in the work of Chicago writers and commercially helping those writers by reviewing their books, opening a bookstore to sell their literature, and giving advice on the book trade to writers who thought of their work as art that existed apart from the crass commercialism of the book business. The modernist writers knew she needed to be courted because her reviews mattered and produced bestsellers, even if they sometimes disagreed with them vehemently. She was a favorite of the Tribune’s publisher, Colonel Robert R. McCormick, and he featured her in advertisements. Whenever she appeared in an advertisement, book sales would skyrocket and Carl Sandburg anointed her “Lady Midwest.”103 Cather often visited with Butcher on her way through Chicago, although she never stayed with her as she did with her old and good friend, Irene Miner Weisz. On March 4, 1920, she wrote a letter to Weisz telling her to “Please go to Fanny Butcher’s shop …. Tell her that Antonia is based on you and Carrie and see how nice she is to you! I want Fanny Butcher to know one of my friends from home.”104 Six years later, on March 18, 1926, Butcher wrote, “Your friend, Mrs Carrie Miner … was in the other day and we proudly looked at the dedication of ‘My Antonia’ together. She said that it always amazed them to find that after all of the ‘wonderful people she must meet and see, she still

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seems to like her old friends best.’”105 This distinction is an important one because her letters to Weisz during the period after The Song of the Lark are filled with mentions of seeing Butcher and stopping by bookstores at her behest to sell books. On November 14, 1922, Cather writes to Weisz that she will be in Chicago Monday morning, the 27th, because she wants to spend Monday night with Weisz. She said, “I have one or two errands at bookstores, the rest of the time I can be with you.”106 Presumably, one of those bookstore “errands” was at Butcher’s bookstore, which is not the language of great friendship. She writes to Weisz on November 10, 1929, “My two days in Chicago were almost as crowded as those in Omaha. After speaking at the College Club I went to a dinner given for me by several old University classmates whom I was delighted to see again. Next day Fanny Butcher made me go to call upon the heads of all the big book businesses in Chicago—awfully exhausting, but very good policy.”107 Her complaint about how exhausting the rounds are in Chicago recalls Thea’s exhaustion in the same place. Cather never liked the commercial business of art and though she admits to Butcher having good judgment in these matters, she rebels against the Chicago method of mixing art and business. She complains to Butcher from the train on November 5, 1921: I’m never going to let you shed your life-blood in my charge. Again—damn this trade, I surely won’t kill my friends for it. I had a perfectly delightful stay in Chicago … Are you aware that I got only about thirty minutes of you, alone and undismayed? You must do better than that by me next time please.108

And on February 7, 1924, she begs off her duties in Chicago, suggesting that it is Butcher in Chicago who wears her out tirelessly selling the commercial aspects of her art. She writes to Miner Weisz: “I expect to go West in April— but don’t tell anybody—as I don’t want to make any engagements in Chicago except one to meet you and a few other old friends. I am more determined than ever to shunt the social duties of authorship, even if Mr. Knopf and all the book sellers suffer from my behavior.”109 Butcher clearly pushed Cather to sell her novels and do the rounds in the bookstores that would allow her to sell even more. Cather would come to rely on Butcher for advice about publishers and all things involved in the buying and selling of her art. She writes on December 2 as to whether a certain Mr. Lhona is straight in business affairs.110 And on April 8, 1921, she acknowledges Butcher’s role in her successful publications of The Bright Medusa. She writes

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to Butcher: “I’m hoping to see you in Chicago when I go there this summer. The Bright Medusa has done very well, hasn’t it? Largely to you and a few more good friends, I suspect.”111 The money that Cather earned from writing allowed her to continue writing and so like Thea, the publicity she had to do was a bitter pill that allowed her to produce more art. Despite Cather’s acknowledgment that Butcher was right in her advice and pushing in the commercial aspects of selling her novels, Cather would still loathe the commercial aspects of art and would find them exhausting. Butcher would be associated with these aspects and the relationship between the two women was complicated at this stage in Cather’s career. The difficulty in naming Cather’s latest novel in 1921 also demonstrates the complexity of Cather and Butcher’s relationship and how Cather would continue to associate Chicago as a commercial hub that married art and business together in a way that she found distasteful. In August of that year, Cather stopped in Chicago and while there discussed with Butcher the title of her latest book, which she wanted to name Claude. Butcher remembers the meeting in her 1972 memoir and writes that Cather’s novels had titles “that puzzled rather than allured.”112 She recalls, But Willa was adamant about them, and she always had her way until it came to a novel about a Nebraska boy who went to war. His name was Claude and she called the book Claude. Her publishers and the members of the sales conference all told her it wouldn’t do. She said it was the book’s title and she wouldn’t change it. They argued with her, they pleaded.113

She continues, The argument over Claude went on for some time between Willa Cather and her publishers, both growing more and more stubborn. Finally, she said she was going to Nebraska; on the way she would see me in Chicago, and let me settle the dispute. I was then a bookseller as well as a reviewer, so I had a double-barreled gun with which to do the settling. I told her without hesitation that Claude wouldn’t do. She had a list of titles she had considered. Not one of them seemed to me to give that little nudge to curiosity which a good selling title does.

She goes on: Of the many titles she had thought of, I felt the best was One of Ours, for the book was about a young Midwesterner who became one of our fighting

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men. I persuaded her to relinquish Claude, which she did reluctantly, and happily One of Ours received that year’s Pulitzer award.114

Cather writes of the meeting differently and relates her version to her publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, on September 1, 1921: O.K. to every thing in your letter. I had a long talk with Fanny Butcher about the title, and am again shaken—not as to the rightness of Claude, but as to the wisdom of using it. She begs and implores me not to! Now, I will be quite satisfied with “One of Ours” [then printed out] “One of Ours,” if you like it. It has merits; it has plenty of “O”s, is euphonious and mystifying—and it is “easy to say.” Please let me hear from you.115

Changing the name leaves her “shaken” and not happy about the change brought about from her conversation in Chicago with Butcher as is demonstrated by the fact she continues to call the book Claude ignoring its commercial title. She writes to Elsie Cather around September 16, 1922, “Poor Claude seems to have kicked up the devil of a row.”116 The next month, on October 26, she writes to Irene Miner Weisz, “Claude is having such a splendid success that the temptations of the world glitter more than usual,– though I haven’t really been well enough to be really gay.”117 On January 24, 1923, she writes again to Miner Weisz, “‘Claude’ goes on selling merrily, and letters keep coming in about him, lovely enough to break your heart.”118 She did not want to relinquish the title. Despite the conversation and Butcher’s relating of her part in Cather’s success with the novel in 1972, she had no problems at the time giving it a terrible review, lamenting its distance from the heartfelt promises she believed were made by O Pioneers and My Antonia. Cather writes to Elsie Cather about the reviews of her Claude, most likely on September 16, 1922: He is not regarded as a story at all, but as an argument, as everything he is not. Lots of my old best-friends don’t like it; Mencken thinks it a failure, Fanny Butcher wails forth her disappointment. They all expected it “would be just like Antonia” they say! It’s hard to part with old friends, but one can’t be a trick-dog and go on repeating even to please one’s friends. It’s a parting of the ways, I’m afraid, and here I lose friends I’m sick to lose. They insist that I could not resist the temptation to be a big bow-bow about the War. “The other books were personal, this is external” they say!! Of course the people who are for it are just as hot, but they are rather a new crowd, not the old friends I liked to please. I always hate to lose old friends. Well, we

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never get anything for nothing, in life or in art. I gained a great deal in mere technique in that book—and I lose my friends. Please take the enclosed.119

Cather fully expected her relationships with Butcher and Mencken to change as a result of their resistance to the novel and this fact indicates the purely commercial reasons, in Cather’s mind, for their friendships at the time. Her relationship with Butcher didn’t end, despite Cather’s prediction, most likely because One of Ours won a Pulitzer, despite Butcher’s review. Cather didn’t need to rely on Butcher anymore for commercial success and so over the next several decades, their letters record a friendship blooming with their letters containing many more personal inquiries, concern, and heartfelt signatures. Cather inquires after Butcher on December 18, 1936, “I am very upset and concerned, my dear Fanny, to hear that you have been ill. What in the world knocked you out? Have you been working too hard, or seeing too many people? When I get knocked out I can always trace it back to ‘social excesses’— to seeing and being interested in too many people.”120 Her earlier letters, from fifteen years before, complained of her own health and exhaustion as a result of Butcher’s urging of her to do professional socializing in Chicago. Now she expresses concern about Butcher for the same reasons. But even as the relationship changed, Cather still tried to keep a clear line between the friendship and the professional relationship, writing in the same December 18, 1936, letter: “I asked you not to use a quotation from my letter simply because I do not like to seem to be ‘selling’ an article by means of private correspondence: ‘bragging it up’ to the reviewer, as the little boys would say.”121 Perhaps this is why, after Cather’s death, Butcher was so upset with the publication of Willa Cather: On Writing. She felt that it was a posthumous work that clearly violated Cather’s wishes to not have any unfinished or posthumous work published after her death. Edith Lewis, Cather’s partner, editor, and executor, wrote back to her on October 8, 1949, to try to assuage her concerns and show that the work was mostly reprinted work that couldn’t be rightly considered posthumous. Butcher was not convinced and her action should be read as the overzealous protection for her good friend, Willa Cather.

5

Ernest Hemingway and Chicago

When Hemingway moved to Chicago in 1920, he wrote letters to his family, despite being only ten miles away from them in Oak Park and despite their near constant requests for a visit. His regular correspondence suggests that he wished to maintain those relationships, but at a distance that would increase physically but not psychologically over the rest of his life. In Chicago, he found himself at the tail end of the Chicago Renaissance: Sherwood Anderson was recently back from Paris, where he had met Gertrude Stein and Sylvia Beach and whose literary scene confirmed what Anderson had suspected— Chicago was dead. Chicago was also the place where Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap had begun The Little Review, which would first publish stories that would become part of In Our Time. But, at the time he was in Chicago, they had left for New York and then Paris, in the wake of the outcry against their publishing of Joyce’s Ulysses. Harriet Monroe plugged along with Poetry magazine, aided by the finds of her foreign correspondent Ezra Pound. Hemingway wanted to be seen in exile from the banal Midwest and unencumbered by family, business, and money concerns, the same bourgeois trappings that Sherwood Anderson said he walked away from the morning of November 29, 1912. Anderson’s lost four days would haunt Hemingway and he will mention them in letters when under stress from trying to create the appearance of a modernist writer living free and apart from his family and upbringing in the shadow of Chicago. The first part of this chapter will show how Hemingway internalized the particularly Chicagoan idea about being a “Good Businessman” and doing good at business while growing up in Oak Park. The second part considers his Chicago influences and argues that Henry Blake Fuller and Edwin Balmer should be seen as instrumental in Hemingway’s formation as a young writer. He will fuse Fuller’s realist critique of Chicago businessmen and Balmer’s

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realistic genre fiction about lie detection with the poetics of Edgar Lee Masters and Sherwood Anderson in order to create a new method of writing about bad business. The final sections of the chapter show how once in Paris, he will continue to write about business and embody the businessman he grew up thinking about as a model for masculinity. In his work, there are often brief references to Chicago, which may be read as a critique of the Chicago literary scene, as well as an acknowledgment of his own history with the city. Ultimately, the chapter argues that Hemingway writes about Chicago in order to address the city that is hostile to modern art and simultaneously and paradoxically considers those writers who helped him form his craft and make money. His rebellion against Chicago helped develop the art that would make him famous as he rethought the Chicago realist and literary tradition in an attempt to create the new, modern American novel.

Oak Park, Chicago, and the idea of the “good businessman” In 1972, Mary Welsh Hemingway, Hemingway’s widow, generously donated his entire book collection to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. Most of what he owned can be easily predicted by anyone familiar with Hemingway’s presentation of himself in public: copies of his own and friends’ novels; handbooks and histories that now serve to further document his voracious interest in hunting, travel, and sailing; and histories of Spain, Cuba, and Key West. But one unexpected small hardback volume suggests the origin for Hemingway’s extraordinary success in promoting himself and navigating the publishing game. He kept his personal copy of his Uncle Tyler’s How to Make Good or Winning Your Largest Success: A Business Man’s Talks on Personal Proficiency and Commercial Character Building—the Only Success Insurance (1915). The inscription reads: “Ernest Miller Hemingway. From Alfred T. Hemingway (Uncle Tyler) Kansas City, Mo. June-1917.”1 Hemingway graduated from Oak Park-River Forest High School in June of 1917 and the book must have been his graduation present from his uncle. Hemingway kept it his entire life, which is remarkable considering the size of his book collection, the number of times he moved, and the sheer number of books from friends and publishers, which passed through his hands and library that he didn’t

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keep. The book is also remarkable because of its deeply worn binding. The book wasn’t just a childhood treasure, more symbolic than read. He read it repeatedly and most likely read and consulted its advice through the early years of his career. How to Make Good or Winning Your Largest Success: A Business Man’s Talks on Personal Proficiency and Commercial Character Building—the Only Success Insurance is a manual for becoming proficient in business and obtaining financial success, a fitting present for the recent graduate. The book situates itself as a preparatory guide, much like the popular camp books at the time for young men that teach the fundamentals of wilderness preparedness. Its purpose is to alert its readers to the dangers of not preparing oneself with the needed skills before entering the modern business world. Uncle Tyler Hemingway declares: “Too many of our young men have the fixed idea that opportunity must be thrust upon them and at the same time do nothing to prepare themselves.”2 The title page admonishes the reader to “Read with purpose” and tells a story of a young man who rose from rags to riches, which presents his advice as the new bootstraps that will allow the younger generation to achieve the success that was obtained in the previous, nineteenth-century generations.3 In the most revealing passage, Alfred Hemingway declares: “The game of business, like life itself, is a great game. The maximum of pleasure in playing the game naturally comes to the man who is constantly making himself more fit to win, who is studying the conditions of success and trying to meet them.”4 Alfred Hemingway’s book reinforces the idea that good business practices need to be sold alongside whatever product needs to be produced. He didn’t introduce the idea, but this kind of business practice became particularly associated with Chicago and the surrounding Midwest area. The ideas touted in Alfred Hemingway’s book would have been very familiar to Hemingway, because they describe the traits and methods associated with Chicago businessmen, whose work, product, and salesmanship must always be uplifting. Chicago’s business owners and those associated with them created and sold the idea of the Chicago businessman who works hard at success because they had to build up the city literally and its reputation figuratively after the fire. In Chicago and the Great Conflagration (1872), Elias Colbert and Everett Chamberlin make one of the earliest references to the figure. They declare:

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The genius that built up Chicago could not be reduced to ashes; that remained—stimulated to renewed activity by the calamity that had befallen the scene of so much effort in the past. The kind of Chicago material of which Chicago men were made was well typified in the motto of a shingle stuck up amid the ruins long before they had cooled, ‘All gone but the wife, children, and energy.’5

He doesn’t complain but moves forward optimistically: “Himself undoubtedly a victim of the conflagration, he was a true specimen of the Chicago business man—ready to do business on no capital if none is at hand, and prompt to organize victory out of defeat; to ‘mount,’ as the poet says, ‘on stepping stones of our dead selves.’”6 The Chicago businessman will fight and struggle against the harsh environment as his pioneer ancestors did. The post-fire businessman will create and sell this image to win the Columbian Exhibition and to brand its businesses and those who run them as inherently good and straightforward. The more corrupt the image of Chicago became in popular culture over the next two decades, the louder the praises of the Chicago businessmen were sung. The strategy was to repeat the idea as much as possible in Midwestern and national trade publications. In 1911, the “Western News Section” of the Printing Trade News reports that Charles W. Smith speaks very highly of doing business in the city and the type of businessmen who live there. Smith says that Chicago “is absolutely one of the finest towns on the map. Chicago people combine all of the cordiality and friendliness of the South with the enthusiasm and energy of the North. It is certainly a pleasure and privilege to be associated with business men of this type.”7 The Journal of the Chicago Association of Commerce and Industry promoted him as an interchangeable “composite” in its 1912 volume. The journal states: “The composite Chicago business man believes in giving as full worth one hundred cents worth of honestly made merchandise for one dollar.” It continues building the image: The composite Chicago business man does not believe that scientific business methods warrant a proposition where is offered to the trade seventy-five cents worth of pyrotechnic display on the side for a dollar. The dealer—I do not care where he is located—who is attracted by that sort of an offer is not a scientific business man, and Chicago is not looking for his trade.

It goes on to declare: “You will find that the hearts that beat under the coats of the business men of Chicago are as warm as the hearts of any men on earth,

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but the composite Chicago business man believes that business is business.”8 The businessman boosts business and the image of Chicago for his own sake, but also for the larger project of lifting the city to a higher life and status. The creation of the fictitious Chicago businessman allowed the city’s boosters to combat the national narrative that the city had a crime problem, was corrupt, and filled with white slavers and their dens of inequity. They answered advertising with more advertising and pushed the idea that the city was filled with moral and religious men who did not do things the more popular and corrupt Chicago way. The ideal Chicago businessman, as advertised, is a religious man, who believes that his business should be completely Christian. He has a Calvinist belief that ties together disciplined business success with disciplined proper behavior, a theme repeated in How to Make Good. The book would not have been the first time young Hemingway heard these ideas about the connection between proper business practices and religion from his family and community. The entire Hemingway family participated in the sport and business of moral uplift and their parents and grandparents schooled them in it from a young age. Hemingway’s paternal grandfather and grandmother both attended Wheaton College, the religious college where they met one county over from Oak Park. Upon graduation in 1867, the president wrote Anson Hemingway a glowing recommendation that praises the young man for his “good ability, industry, morals, and Christian character.”9 These qualities were considered by most of his peers and descendants as the reason he would own a prosperous realty firm in Oak Park. He used his money righteously to become an ardent backer and believer in Dwight L. Moody’s vision for Christian and urban reform. Moody would not be the first Chicagoan to link business practice and spirituality, but he was the first to use pragmatic business language and methods to reform and boost up his church and vision. Moody’s life story, as he would frequently tell it, rivals Horatio Alger’s novels for its thorough demonstration of the possibilities available to a determined young American boy who wishes to rise up into social, economic, and political prominence. Moody was born in Boston to a non-Christian mother and left school in fifth grade to go to work. At 17, he left home and sold shoes in his uncle’s store. He joined the YMCA and took several Sunday school classes, eventually becoming a Christian at

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eighteen. He moved to Chicago and continued to work as a salesman with the goal to earn $100,000 as quickly as he could. Eventually, his goals began to shift from trying to merely accumulate money for himself to a more Christian mission of helping others through Sunday school teaching and growing a church for the poor. His work became part of the new evangelical network in Chicago that made the “urban crisis” the focus of their new Christian work. Instead of preaching, one worked for the poor, speaking in plain language to combat the menaces of urban poverty and the crime and alcohol abuses that stemmed from and contributed to the crisis.10 He used his business skills in order to raise money for religious projects and even went so far as selling stock in a building to business leaders who could turn a good profit on his endeavor. His unorthodox methods would fuse together the business world of Chicago with evangelical spiritual projects by providing the actual projects that could support the manufactured idea of being a good, Christian, businessman. His good business practices and projects quickly drew the attention of those interested in the idea of the higher life and elevating the spiritual status of Chicago while earning a great deal of money, like Hemingway’s grandfather who supported the building of the new YMCA headquarters in September of 1867 along with Cyrus and Nettie McCormick, department store owner Robert Scott, and many other members of Chicago’s business elite.11 Moody was enormously successful and would build up a grand network of churches, a college, and large, wealthy congregation before he died in 1899, the same year Hemingway was born. Dr. William E. Barton, who had just taken over as rector at the First Congregational Church where all of the best families in Oak Park including the Hemingways belonged, baptized Hemingway. While not an adherent of Moody, he belonged to the next generation of pragmatic theologians who preached a gospel readymade for the businessman of Oak Park. Michael S. Reynolds has called him “a business man’s minister,” on a “crusade for ‘clean money.’” Reynolds explains Barton’s favorite conceit further: Filthy money, he said, was not only a menace to health but had its influence on the character of those who used it, while clean money, like clean clothes and cleanliness of person, tended to tone up one’s morals and self-respect, He could get something of an index of the character of the young man he had married not by the size of the fee but by the quality of the money in which it was paid, its newness and cleanliness.12

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Hemingway would spend his childhood listening to Barton preach this gospel of clean money, which would reinforce the idea of good business handed to him by his grandfather, father, and Uncle Tyler. Good business was clean business, morally upright, and financially profitable. Bad business could also be quite profitable, but filthy and degenerate and too risky to engage in for the sake of one’s eternal soul. When Hemingway responds to a recruitment effort by the Red Cross and signs on to be an ambulance driver, he most likely was influenced by the fact that Barton’s sister Clara founded the Red Cross. His work there would appear to his family and especially his grandparents as “good business” in the “bad business” of the war. On May 10, 1918, they echo the title of their son Alfred’s book and translate their grandson’s military service into business and pragmatically spiritual terms: It’s the joy of our lives to think of you starting on this big job. You’ve made good and far more, in your last undertaking and we are absolutely certain that you will bring much glory and honor to the name of Hemingway—I’m overjoyed that you’re first to hear the banner.13

They enclose ten dollars for their grandson, which they enclosed as proof of the profitability of doing good business.14 His grandparents continue to write and keep repeating how proud of him they are, especially after acknowledging receipt of the telegram that he had been shot. Hemingway’s father used the same business language a month earlier to express his pride in his newspaper work in St. Louis and the fact he joined the Red Cross. He writes to his son on April 17, 1918: I am proud of you and your success and the fact you have in seven months got a profession that you can take anywhere in the world and earn a living. Mother and I love you devotedly and have always prayed for and believed you would succeed—We both agree your judgement at this time is good.15

His family even helps boost his career by giving out his letters for publication in the newspapers, which Hemingway seems annoyed at in a letter to his sister on November 23, 1918.16 Over the next decade, Hemingway’s father continues to offer advice to his son about doing good business, which is identical to that in Alfred’s book on How to Make Good. He sends a letter to Hemingway on February 4, 1920:

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I hope you are still enjoying your work and can get in some real active work on a Toronto paper. It surely is a good arrangement you have with Mr. Connable. I congratulate you both. I am sure the arrangement is a great character builder and will give you a chance to see things with a new responsibility that had never actually occurred to you before. Get acquainted with as many nice people as you can. They are the very real asset in life’s bank as the years go on. Your big sister left Tuesday morning for the big doings at Williamstown, Mass. I certainly trust she will get all she anticipates and will see others who are her equal and are a true inspiration to Character.17

His father’s words reflect his belief that a man’s and a woman’s character is a direct reflection of who he or she chose to associate with and to which community he or she belonged. He draws the idea directly from Barton’s church services that present the church as a place where businessmen can gather and renew their spirit through interacting with a community. Over the next decade, he will also enclose printed bulletins and copies of Barton’s sermons in letters to Hemingway. His brother Alfred’s book should, therefore, be seen as the sincerely written credo of the entire Hemingway branch of Ernest’s family, who believed that those who played the business game well could control their fates and the final destinies of their fortunes, work, and souls. Hemingway will take the advice, although by 1917 it was most likely completely ingrained in him from hearing his father and observing his very social family’s behavior during the entirety of his childhood. He would maintain his family’s deep belief that nice people help build one’s character and work contacts simultaneously while providing a much needed “asset” both psychologically and literally as time goes on. He will make use of this advice by joining clubs in high school, seeking out other Chicago and Oak Park writers, finding Sherwood Anderson and the remaining members of the artistic crowd in Chicago, and joining the small artistic community in Paris. The pragmatism with which Hemingway developed his business, social, and artistic contacts comes directly from his Oak Park and Chicago upbringing, by a family who believed in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century business rhetoric of Chicago. When Hemingway decides to become a writer, he had read quite a bit of Horatio Alger, and Reynolds declares that he was “operating in a familiar Alger mode: pluck and luck.”18 Hemingway will later see writing as simple hard work and later claim that “anyone could become a writer if he worked at it hard

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enough.”19 He will go at it as the Hemingways go at any kind of business: as a good Chicago businessman.

The business of making good, honest modernism Hemingway was not just placating his family and pretending to be interested in being a good businessman while growing up in Oak Park. He took a personal interest in the literary representations of Chicago business and it shows in his reading as a young man trying to “make good” as a writer. On July 3, 1956, he writes a short list of writers he likes to Harvey Brett: “Outside of Jim Joyce and an old writer in Chicago named Henry B. Fuller (the Cliff Dwellers, etc.) and a man named Edwin Balmer who wrote pot boilers and helped me as a kid.”20 His comment is notable for two reasons. First, Fuller and Balmer are both Chicago writers who used their writing, as an essayist and a journalist and then as fiction writers, to interrogate the corrupt business cultures in Chicago. Fuller found after the Columbian Exhibition that “too much work of a public character has been derived with haste and incompetence and executed with haste and dishonesty.”21 Balmer wrote crime stories that revealed new ways to expose lies. Both writers were particularly interested in reforming dishonest and bad business practices, something that would have struck young Hemingway as correct. Second, he would have read Fuller and Balmer as a young writer and so his remembrance of them both at fifty-six speaks volumes about how well he considered them as writers. The fact that he mentions them together with James Joyce indicates that he considers Fuller and Balmer as important an influence as Joyce to his development as a modern writer. Hemingway’s comment then reveals that his old interests in Chicago business feed into his development as a modern writer. He would employ himself, as young Horatio Alger, in the business of making good modernism. Hemingway most likely read The Cliff-Dwellers (1893) as side reading while at Oak Park-River Forest High School, because the school emphasized a classical curriculum, or right after returning from the war to further recuperate at home. Any novel that was about Chicago and written by a Chicagoan would have been enthusiastically promoted as particularly excellent reading by an English teacher or a librarian at the Oak Park public library, although the novel shocked its readers when it came out. It was redeemed, at least among

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the literary and art worlds, when William Dean Howells reviewed the novel well in Harper’s Bazaar and gave the novel its coveted place of honor as a fine example of the kind of American realism he sponsored and promoted. He names Fuller’s attention to detail “scrupulous” and the whole thing “bitten in with a corrosive truthfulness.”22 By the time Hemingway read The Cliff-Dwellers around 1918, its bite and corrosiveness would have been softened by the reformist ideas now preached by the powerful evangelical movement begun by Moody and Rev. Barton. Hemingway would have been quite familiar with the kind of corruption revealed by the novel and labeled “bad business” at the church, by his family, and in the newspapers. Fuller’s novel would be seen as uplifting the very idea he critiques heavily, because he uses art to spur reform and, in doing so, practically applies spirituality to art. A new generation of journalists had patterned themselves after the earlier realists and used the reformist novel as a springboard for hard-hitting stories that revealed the dirty underside of the dream promised by the old promoters of the Columbian Exhibition and despised by Fuller. Hemingway, already doubting the sincerity of Rev. Barton, would have been attracted to this kind of unsparing realism that reveals corruption in the business world through pithy action and extended conceits. He would have also appreciated that Fuller was attempting to tell the truth about those who still held the highest places in the Chicago business world. Edwin Balmer, the other great early influence Hemingway mentions in his letter to Harvey Brett, worked briefly as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune uncovering corruption in the wake of Fuller’s recent literary expose and critique. He began to publish genre fiction coauthored with his fellow Tribune reporter and brother-in-law William MacHarg, including the short story “Man in the Room” (1909) starring the scientific detective Luther Trant. Hampton’s Magazine took it because its themes of police corruption matched the interests of the magazine known for publishing realistic portraits of the excesses of capitalism. The next year, Balmer and MacHarg would publish what would become their best-known story collection: The Achievements of Luther Trant (1910). The story collection continues the work begun by Fuller with The Cliff-Dwellers of exposing the truth about the bad business in Chicago. But where Fuller’s work reveals and critiques the terrible business, the Trant stories explain and promote a scientific method for reforming the

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terrible corruption: the “lie detector.” The stories demonstrate how the “lie detector” could potentially reform Chicago’s corrupt and morally bankrupt police interrogation methods by stopping the violence of the notorious third degree.23 Through the employment of the lie detector, the bad business of extracting confessions could be transformed into a good business that was clean, organized and principled, and the very essence of Taylorian efficiency. Trant’s “lie detector” relies on applied psychology and scientific instruments to observe and measure the physical reactions that occur when a person tells the truth or a lie. The character explains that he has been showing daily at a university, “that which—applied in courts and jails—would conclusively prove a man innocent in five minutes, or condemn him as a criminal on the evidence of his own uncontrollable reactions.”24 The lie detector, human or machine, records the actions of the witness, suspect, or victim while they speak. If a small, unconscious physical reaction occurs while the witness speaks, it indicates that what was said may be a lie. The lie detector shifts the focus of the examination room completely; where police had been violently beating the body of the witness to force a confession, now they look for small bodily clues the victim may be lying. What had been a physical focus on the body of a potential liar to beat the lie out of it becomes an intense intellectual focus on the body of the potential liar to spot the unconscious signs of a lie. The lie detector transforms the vulgar physical beatings of a corrupt police force into an intellectually vigorous exercise in modern detection and like all good reform ideas in Chicago, the focus shifts from condemning the sinner to seeing the traces left by the structures of the sin itself. The Achievements of Luther Trant helped popularize Hugo Münsterberg’s groundbreaking theories of applied psychology that had been published in magazines over the last decade. Münsterberg’s On the Witness Stand: Essays on Psychology and Crime (1908) compiled the articles into one volume. The volume emerges from the studies he did at Harvard, where in 1892, William James invited him to be the chair of the Harvard Psychological Laboratory, where he remained for over a decade. At the start of his term, Gertrude Stein came to the lab through William James and Münsterberg called her his ideal student.25 Münsterberg’s work is grounded in the premise that all physical bodily processes had parallel brain processes behind them. The study of automatic writing would eventually be developed into On the Witness

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Stand, where he will argue that “the hidden feeling betrays itself.”26 Physical reactions indicate that the subject tries to hold back something in his mind but cannot. He will argue that because all memories are formed through association, eyewitness testimony is completely unreliable because the witness’ perceptions become clouded through these associations. The Trant stories use Münsterberg’s theories to develop and promote the idea of lie detection by relying on the idea that lies can be ferreted out by watching for the physical reactions that betray them. Balmer had long had an interest in applied psychology. His father developed methods of applying psychology to business and after studying with Walter Dill Scott at Northwestern, Balmer collaborated with his father on a book while writing the Trant series, The Science of Advertising: The Force of Advertising as a Business Influence, Its Place in the National Development, and the Public Result of its Practical Operation (1910). In the introduction, he relates a story about observing the purchases of a young housewife and being astounded because everything she bought had been heavily advertised over the last few months. He writes, “I had just been going at it backwards, letting the things bought direct me to the advertisements. She had gone at it and shown a fine, clear characteristic example of advertising in operation—having the advertisements direct her to the article bought and with a wonderful unconsciousness and naturalness upon her part which was astoundingly significant.”27 For Balmer, Münsterberg’s main principle, that hidden associations direct physical actions, can be used as easily in advertising as in lie detection. The book shows how easily good advertising can manipulate a consumer through unconscious associations and in doing so applies William James’s and Münsterberg’s ideas about parallel processes to the business of advertising. Balmer’s book itself demonstrates its own methods to sell and promote itself because it takes its style from the business guides, like Arthur Hemingway’s, and so manipulates the reader through their previous associations, into seeing the book as another book about doing “good business.” Its language, the Luther Trant stories, and Hemingway’s uncle’s book all employ what would have been named as “hard boiled” language in 1910, the year all three books came out. The phrase comes straight out of advertising and indicates a lack of sentiment or emotion, and in the advertising world of the late nineteenth century, the use of facts highlighted a masculine business-like appeal, over a soft and

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sentimental feminine advertisement. Printers Ink, the first American national trade magazine of the advertising industry, was the first to use the phrase: “Hard-boiled facts—convincing selling arguments, rid of prosaicness—that’s what we put into our ten ads.”28 When Balmer and Arthur Hemingway write in this style, they do so to associate with doing good business. But, by 1914, the phrase had come to be associated with a kind of businessman who cared nothing about doing “good business.” C. N. Williamson’s Shop Girl in Munsey’s Magazine used the phrase “A hard-boiled man of business who’ll do anything to succeed.”29 When Hemingway begins to write seriously, he chooses the most clichéd examples of bad businessmen he read and heard about from his family and from Rev. Barton in Oak Park as his subject: Chicago gangsters and alcoholics. Balmer and MacHarg’s lie detector stories would have interested Hemingway in writing about this tired subject because it provided new insights and new methods of depicting corruption and lying. In the near constant Tribune columns that exposed the corruption of the Chicago police, the suspect, involved in business gone wrong or simply conducting illegal business, would lie to cover up what he had done. The Chicago police would add to the bad business by subjecting the suspect to the third degree, in an attempt to get at the truth. The Trant stories and Münsterberg’s theories show that the violence only renders the truth even more elusive and impossible to get. Instead, Luther Trant shows that lying can be exposed through the noticing and recording of the smallest gesture by an observer. If an observer can notice these gestures, they have or are a good lie detector. Hemingway will spend the rest of his life believing that’s the very best thing to have as a writer, in business, and as a man. He tells The Paris Review interviewer in 1958 that to avoid generalizations, “the most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.”30 He develops his ability to shit detect and write about shit detection by reading Balmer and he imitates and first plays with the idea from 1919 to 1920 in his Chicago stories: “The Woppian Way,” “The Ash Heel’s Tendon—A Story,” and “The Mercenaries.” Reynolds describes his narrative technique in these stories by connecting the writing to Kipling’s, which Edmund Wilson did first in The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature. Reynolds notes that Hemingway was “trying to sound like an experienced observer of low life, here is the young Hemingway doing Kipling in south-side Chicago.

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He is using that slightly condescending but knowledgeable31 narrator that Kipling used about every third story, a narrator detached from the natives and to whom it is given to witness strange or comic events.”32 But Hemingway writes as an Oak Parker with a long connection to Chicago who writes about the corruption in order to expose it to the light. He doesn’t write as an observer among the primitives, but rather a police detective administering the lie detector to extract the truth. The stance is removed and detached so that the smallest gesture can be noticed and recorded. He will continue to develop this method throughout the 1920s, and the result will be complicated novels and stories filled with liars and lie detection that place even the reader in the position of having to notice the smallest gesture in order to reveal the complete psychological process behind it. When Hemingway meets Balmer by chance in Petoskey, Michigan, in the Fall of 1919, he wants to know all about the writing business and how to make a saleable story or novel that sells itself. On October 28, 1919, after one of their many discussions about writing, Hemingway writes to his father: This afternoon I worked out the new front part of the “Woppian Way” that Balmer wanted me to do and will have it in shape to start on its travels as soon as I am settled in Petoskey. I typed off the new part this afternoon. It was snowing a little this evening and the only amusement offered is an evangelical revival. There is some doubt as to whether I will attend.33

Balmer convinces Hemingway to change the title of “The Woppian Way” to “The Passing of Pickles McCarthy” because it will sell better. Hemingway listens to him, which indicates that he wants to learn whatever he can teach him about the business of writing “pot boilers” that will sell. Hemingway will continue to respect Balmer, calling him a “genius” for his ability to “write crap” in 1925.34 When in 1934, Arnold Gingrich, editor of Esquire, competes with Balmer, who is by then editor of Redbook, for a Hemingway short story, he apologizes profusely to Hemingway for doing so and causing confusion. He writes to Hemingway on August 29, 1934, that he wouldn’t have done it, “If I could have guessed, somehow, but how could I? About your feeling for Balmer and his for you.” He tells Hemingway the feeling is mutual between the two men: “Balmer answered with a damn swell letter about you.”35 Balmer holds a unique and very private position in Hemingway’s life as the mentor he held in permanent good esteem and whom he never turned against. It is likely that

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this is because Hemingway sees him as doing “good business” like his uncle and so knows that Balmer won’t turn against him. Balmer is the only one who understands Hemingway’s upbringing in Chicago and Michigan and who always respected what Hemingway tries to do fusing business success with making good writing. Balmer’s personal and literary influence on Hemingway cannot be overstated because when Hemingway and Bill Horne move to Chicago in the Fall of 1920, the plan is to find jobs in advertising while the economy is booming and write on the side, just like Balmer.36 While Hemingway is not the first young man to want to do this in 1920, Balmer, his only contact in the business, must have provided fuel for the idea if not the idea itself and contacts for jobs among the businessmen he knew. Peter Griffin calls their model the “artist-advertising man,” who “could make a lot of money and write his novel on the side.”37 Griffin overstates the idea by making it generic, rather than seeing Hemingway as a product of Oak Park and Chicago already. He describes the artistic creations of the “artist-advertising man” as incorporating “the smooth machinations of the commercial ad” into “the new realism of Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Vachel Lindsay, and Carl Sandburg.”38 What Griffin describes is Hemingway’s own creation and fusion of Balmer’s ideas about lie detecting and hard-boiled advertising language with Chicago’s ideas about doing good business. He wants to be successful at the business of writing and continues to learn from Balmer’s unique fusion of advertising and realism. Michael Reynolds notes that by the time Hemingway arrived in Chicago in October of 1920, it “was the afterglow of the renaissance” because all of the major artistic figures, Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, Upton Sinclair, Hamlin Garland, Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, and Burton Roscoe, had been lured East. Only Sherwood Anderson who would shortly leave for Paris and then New Orleans, Henry Blake Fuller, and Harriet Monroe who trudged on holding the mantle at Poetry remained in Chicago.39 However, Reynolds, like other chroniclers of Hemingway’s brief time in Chicago, misses the fact that by November of 1916, Masters and his entire family had achieved celebrity status in Chicago, suggesting that he knew the business quite well because he obtained a popular reputation on a book of poetry, an amazing feat at any time. Hemingway, who read the papers in Oak Park would have known of him before even moving to State Street. Masters often returned to

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Chicago, where he was still a literary celebrity from the East, where he had moved. On October 23, 1920, the month Hemingway arrived in Chicago, the Tribune publicized a large, week-long book fair at Marshall Field’s department store, where Masters “famed for his Spoon River Anthology” and Carl Sandburg were the headliners who “autographed books” for customers.40 Hemingway may have met Masters at a literary club dinner or in Sherwood Anderson’s apartment during one of Masters’s visits to Chicago that year. In Chicago, in 1921, Masters would have also been thought of as the American literary heir to Twain and Whitman. Hemingway would have been very interested in Masters’s celebrity, which was older and more solid than Anderson’s because it predated Anderson’s and was seen in Chicago as the ledge that provided a place for Anderson to climb into the business. When Hemingway begins suddenly what Reynolds calls his “literary life,”41 he imitates Masters’s not Anderson’s because he wishes to begin on the firmest and most successful and proven ledge possible, just as he did when he imitates Balmer with his Chicago gangster stories. At the end of 1920, he began to write dark romantic poetry similar in tone to Spoon River and used it to woo Hadley Richardson who would become his first wife in January 1921. The poetry writing continues over the next seven months. By July, he was sending poetry to Monroe at Poetry, who published Masters, but also to The Dial, where his new friend Sherwood Anderson published. All were rejected.42 He will get a small poem published next to an article on the Chicagoan Fuller and a small poem by an unknown writer named William Faulkner in the New Orleansbased Double Dealer in 1922.43 He will continue to draw from Masters’s work through his writing career, in order to build on his success. When Elia Peattie reviewed Spoon River for the Tribune, she begins by connecting its first line with Poe, writing that “It portrays the lives of a community, or at least that portion of it which has recovered from ‘the fever called living,’ And has emerged into the windless peace of whatever lies beyond life.” The same could be said of Hemingway’s first big literary success, The Sun Also Rises, and its terse and terrible depiction of those who had lived beyond living in a community labeled by terse epitaphs that are like those read by Masters in the graveyard. When Hemingway meets Sherwood Anderson in 1920, he meets the writer who embodies the idea of the advertising man/craftsman artist. Anderson always wore the suit of the Chicago businessman and talked about business

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to Hemingway. He had recently learned the publishing game himself and understood about editors, contracts, royalties, advances, and good prices. He knew the editors of all the small magazines because they were his friends or connected to him from the old days in Chicago: Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, Harriet Monroe, Henry Blake Fuller, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and John McClure. Hemingway would recognize him as yet another of the Chicago businessmen who would help him make good out of his own writing. Anderson connected him generously to everyone he knew, including editors, and the group he knew in Paris, many of whom had come out of Chicago. Hemingway, though, would have recognized that Balmer was a much better businessman than Anderson, in most senses, and continued to draw on his advice, while matching it against what Anderson told him. Yet, Anderson considered himself a craftsman first, another word and kind of businessman Hemingway knew well enough about from growing up in Oak Park. Anderson’s language would connect him to his old employer, that other craftsman, Frank Lloyd Wright. Hemingway was born three blocks from Wright’s home and studio into the Oak Park Avenue, 1890, Queen Anne Victorian built by his grandparents. In 1899, the studio would have been added to twice and was in full swing as one of the innovative centers of Prairie School Architecture. His mother joined the housing boom of the next few years and helped another architect who was better known for listening to clients’ many demands, Henry G. Fiddelke, build the sprawling 4200-square-foot house on Kenilworth Avenue, into which she moved her family. The new house was even closer to the studio and the family now lived only two blocks away from it and five from Wright’s newly built Unity Temple. Hemingway went to school with Wright’s younger children through high school and his entire family’s presence in Oak Park would have formed a large part of Hemingway’s childhood. Architecture combines art and commerce, in that a good architect needs to be a good businessman who can raise clients and backers in order for the art to be created, so of course it became the most prominent art form in Chicago. Wright was such a successful self-promoter that Hemingway would have learned many techniques for successfully marrying artistic vision with self-promotion by meeting, watching, and hearing about him in Oak Park. It would have only served to recommend him further to young Hemingway that his mother, Grace Hall-Hemingway, despised him.

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Wright’s wife, Catherine, known as Kitty, was an active member of the Nineteenth-Century Club, to which Grace Hall-Hemingway and Martha “Mamah” Borthwick Cheney also belonged. Mamah’s husband, Edwin Cheney, commissioned a house from Wright, perhaps in part because of their wives’ connection through the club. After Wright and Mamah left their families and spouses in 1909, the Tribune and residents of Oak Park socially attacked the couple for their immorality. Ten-year-old Hemingway would have heard all about it from his mother, from his friends at school, and from the papers. His mother made her feelings well-known when she helped raise money to establish the Oak Park Art League in 1921. The Art League found its first home among members of the Nineteenth-Century Club and in 1924, the organization moved to Frank Lloyd Wright’s first wife’s home, the renovated studio on Chicago Avenue, because she was still a member of the club. The move made it clear whom the members, of which Grace had become quite prominent, supported. Grace would have been very happy she chose Fiddelke to design her house, because Wright was seen as the epitome of the immoral and bad businessman who runs off with the client’s wife. Hemingway would have seen Anderson as similar to Wright, because Anderson, like Wright, left his wife and family to pursue a passion, which for Anderson was his writing. Hemingway would marry four times, leaving each wife and children rather abruptly as if repeating an artistic model laid out for him as a young boy and then a young man by Wright and Anderson. After Hemingway began an affair with Pauline Pfeiffer, Hadley divorced him in 1927. His family in Oak Park found out about the divorce when it was written about in the Tribune in terms similar to that of Wright’s affair.44 In Anderson, Hemingway found a writer who like Fuller and Wright spoke the ideas of the Arts and Crafts movement and positioned himself publicly as an independent artist/craftsman whose work stood against the cold, metal skyscrapers built for the businesses of Chicago. Anderson, like Wright, had to promote his work to succeed as a Chicago writer to those very patrons and clients each detested and he had, by 1920, become bitter about the whole business. Hemingway would have been intrigued by how Anderson, like Fuller, deliberately went against the model of the “good Chicago businessman” so ingrained in Hemingway and instead reworked that idea, with the help of Harriet Monroe, into becoming a good craftsman instead. Reynolds claims

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Anderson told him, “No one absolutely no one—not wife, not family, not God himself—should interfere with the writer’s work. The world of business, he told Ernest, was a trap designed to thwart the writer. Hack writing, whether advertising or journalism, could ruin the artist, who must stay simple, his life uncomplicated.”45 Ultimately, Anderson taught Hemingway that to make good in the craft of writing, one must separate themselves from the businessmen from whom Hemingway learned those models. But Hemingway understood Wright in a way much different than Anderson because he grew up in Oak Park. Hemingway knew Wright still got commissions even after the scandal and saw Masters’s and Anderson’s carefully crafted personas, and so he understood that being an artist/craftsman was a kind of business model too. Hemingway’s loosely forming ideas about how to go about the business of writing underpin the short draft of a humorous essay that will be published in the Toronto Star Weekly in August of 1921. “In Condensing the Classics,” he writes about a group of “earnest condensors” who “have been laboring for the last five years at reducing the literature of the world into palatable morsels for the tired business man’s consumption.” They could, endowed by Andrew Carnegie, cut classics to “ten pages” or in the case of Shakespeare “eight hundred words.” He announces: “It is a splendid thing to bring the classics within range of the tired or retired businessman. Even though it casts a stigma on the attempt of the colleges and universities to bring the business man within the range of classics.”46 The solution is to condense all reading literature into newspaper copy. He then demonstrates at length by reducing each of the classics into headlines and newspaper stories.47 In the short piece, Hemingway mocks that Chicago “businessman” he grew up learning about and his inability to savor great writing and art because of being so pressed for time by his business. In doing so, he succinctly highlights that the business model opposes great writing and suggests that the writer/ journalist straddles the two worlds and stands at the ready to bring them together if needed. The satire lies in seeing how great art becomes completely reduced in this meeting of the two worlds. The piece should be read as Hemingway’s satirical portrait of the Chicago art and business world where the writer/journalist or writer/advertising man is willing to compromise their art if it means understanding and funding by businessmen. He also reveals that he

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understands that he is one of them. The piece is published in a newspaper, so he is a Chicago writer/journalist and will remain one for the remainder of his career. He puns on his own name because what is he if not an “earnest condensor” who tries to use the hard-boiled language of the ad-man to retell classical stories in a new voice. The piece then reveals that Hemingway takes Anderson’s advice to watch out for the interference of business into the art world, but that he understands he will never turn his back on trying to make good.

Making good modernism out of bad business Anderson told Hemingway to leave for the more promising and vital Paris, where the avant-garde was better understood and even cultivated by the city’s denizens and artists. He furnished him with a letter to Lewis Gallietere, a Chicago publisher who was helping defend The Little Review’s publication of Ulysses. Once there, he would meet Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson, through Gallietere, and Stein. His friends were mostly from Chicago, and so his introduction to the expatriate scene abroad was through Chicagoans abroad and those, who like Hemingway, couldn’t stand to stay in Chicago one moment longer. The Chicago connection to Margaret Anderson and Heap, by way of his new friends back in Chicago and Sherwood Anderson who had left Chicago once again for New Orleans, would prove fruitful for Hemingway. He had difficulties getting published in Chicago, even with Balmer’s help and now, once in Paris, he succeeded in getting his first stories published in The Little Review and the Double Dealer in New Orleans. Stein’s favorable review of In Our Time would seal his reputation among the literary avantgarde and bring his work, along with Sherwood Anderson’s, to the attention of Edward J. O’Brien, who had started the Best Stories anthology in 1915, and critics such as Edmund Wilson. The attention allowed him to continue publishing in popular magazines and journals, make money, and made him visible to an American reading public who did not read avant-garde journals. The triangular friendship between Anderson, Hemingway, and Stein and the success it brought Hemingway allowed him to craft his persona as a member of the avant-garde, although he became increasingly frustrated with the business of publishing.

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He writes often to his old and new writer friends about his new dislike for business in general, but because doing good business is such an integral part of his identity as a Hemingway, it’s clear he can’t see the world through any other lens. He writes to Bill Horne a long letter from July 17 to 18, 1923, that declares on the last page: “Banking’s undoubtedly probably hell but then any business is hell. You see Horney, I’m cut out for Romance rather than business. The only trouble is there isn’t any living in Romance.”48 To Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas on October 11, 1923, he writes: “I have understood for the first time how men can commit suicide simply because of too many things in business piling up ahead of them that they can’t get through. It is only of doubtful value to have discovered.” He closes the letter with a story about seeing a religious man. He yells about Jesus on the cross and writes in chalk on the sidewalk with “a big crowd standing around listening.” The punch line comes next: “Business men you know.”49 Although he has moved away from Chicago and Oak Park, he still thinks about the mix of business and spirituality that informed his childhood completely and doing so reveals that he is always rethinking his own relationship to business and the place he first learned about it, back home. Hemingway’s continued interest in “Jim Joyce” alongside Chicago writers makes sense in this light, because Joyce’s writing continually reworks and rethinks the relationship between money, religion, exile, and home. Despite Hemingway’s laments about the problems of being in business, he remains busy and ambitious to continue to build his reputation as a solid producer of good writing. Hemingway expresses his ambitions to O’Brien in June 1924: “What I would like to do is bring out a big fat book in NY with some good publisher who would tout it and have In Our Time in it.”50 He gets what he wants when Boni and Liveright publish nearly all of the stories in in our time in 1925. What had been avant-garde work touted by Gertrude Stein becomes the basis of a great business deal. Leonard Leff points out: “Liveright was publishing moneymakers … the sort of books that earned authors huge returns and Hollywood offers.”51 Hemingway’s interest in Liveright suggests that Hemingway continued to look for the formula to write a literary best seller just as Balmer showed him how to do and Anderson and Masters had succeeded in doing recently. He is clearly thinking of Balmer when he writes to Bill Smith Jr., back in Chicago on January 8, 1925: “It is only the Eleventh Hour as Edwin Balmer

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would say so will screed on until the morning.”52 He pushes on and three weeks later writes to him: “IOT Accepted by Boni and Liveright.” He nods toward Oak Park’s desire to not hear about any bad business: “Wonder if it will be burnt on the steps of the Oak Park public library?”53 His publisher, however, wants to make changes in the stories and remove an entire story in order to make the entire thing more palatable to an American audience and to get it in the Oak Park Library, something Hemingway wants too. When he writes to Horace Liveright on May 22, 1925, that he revised and took out obscene images in “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot,” it reveals a writer working hard at making things presentable and working at pleasing his publisher, traits listed as important in his Uncle Tyler’s book. He writes: Now that you have cut it and I have smoothed it over again will you make quite sure from various opinion that it is not suppressible? For it would be an even worse business to be suppressed for a story after it had the dynamite cut out. Jane Heap ran it in its original form and did not get into any trouble. 54

Hemingway does what he can to appear gracious and easy to work with because he understands writing is a business, since he is from Chicago. Although Hemingway does what his publisher wished, he is still deeply concerned about the changes to which he has agreed. He writes to John Dos Passos on April 22, 1925: A Mrs. George Kauffman is here and she claims they want to cut it all cut the Indian Camp story. Cut the In Our Time Chapters. Jesus I feel all shot to hell about it. Of course they cant do it because the stuff is so tight and hard and everything hangs on everything else it would all just be shot up shit creek.55

His letter to Jane Heap also suggests that he’s rethinking his work and is unclear whether he’s actually getting good feedback. He writes to her on June 12, 1925: “Listen Jane, while I appreciate your delicacy in keeping me out of such attractive company in the magazine was it because that piece you asked me to write wasn’t good enough? Because when you think something I do is rotten, don’t hesitate to say so.”56 He writes sarcastically to Horace Liveright on June 21, 1925: Being a simple country boy from Chicago I don’t know anything about the technique of grabbing off authors. So far I’ve only gotten to the stage of grabbing off a publisher. Next I have to grab off some money so I can dress the part. Then we could have photographs taken—Hemingway—Before

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and After Being Grabbed off By Horace Liveright—Then with a sample case fitted up with these and similar exhibits I ought to be able to grab off authors as fast as I can get them tight.57

His letters indicate that he’s starting to wonder whether Liveright is being fair to artists, a concern that marks Hemingway, yet again, as a Chicagoan who knows Harriet Monroe and Frank Lloyd Wright personally and therefore understands that most businesses are completely corrupt when dealing with artists. His replacement of “Up in Michigan” with “The Battler” betrays his concerns about publication because the story recalls the earlier Chicago gangster stories that Balmer, not Anderson, helped him shape. When asked to replace the more unpublishable story, Hemingway gives Liveright a crowd pleaser that will satisfy the market. The story is remarkable because it links Hemingway’s earlier stories to the more avant-garde work he will continue to write far away from Chicago. The story begins with Nick Adams being kicked off the train line somewhere near Chicago. His connection to the city had now become tenuous and he is unclear both physically and psychologically where he is in relationship to it. There he finds that aptly named ex-boxer “Ad Francis,” whose name caricatures the advertising men of Chicago who try to marry together art and business. Ad’s downfall from being a prizefighter happens for this very reason: he marries his manager who happens to be his sister. The incestuous marriage creates a scandal and she eventually abandons Ad. The story operates as an extended metaphor about Chicago ad men who make an impossible marriage for the sake of business. Hemingway suggests that the marriage of art and business is incestuous at best and could leave the artist completely destroyed at worst. When Nick first sees Ad in the darkness, the two characters appear very much alike with bruised faces from their hard falls. Scholars have written at length debating whether Nick should be read as a young Hemingway, but in the case of “The Battler,” Hemingway’s escape from the Chicago advertising business should be considered before settling on this interpretation. Hemingway writes an alternative story for himself, where Nick looks at Ad and sees a metaphor for what Hemingway could have been if he stayed home. Because Nick has left home and left the safety of the train, he has, like Hemingway, already moved beyond the possibility of becoming an Ad Francis. The story becomes an

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expression of Hemingway’s anxiety over marrying advertising and art to sell himself and to sell books. Bugs best represents Hemingway’s position to the story, in that he helps the younger Nick and keeps him safe, much as Cather does with her opera diva Thea in The Song of the Lark. But like Hemingway, Bugs is a very contradictory character. On the one hand he is kind while caring for Ad, and on the other hand he is violent, being a former convict who was in jail for “cuttin’ a man.”58 Hemingway, too, is very polite while caring about the business side of things with his writing, the very epitome of the “good businessman,” and on the other, he writes stories about brutality in a new and modern way, by brutally cutting down his prose. Hemingway cut down his language beyond even that of his earlier short stories while writing the stories that compose the stories and vignettes in In Our Time. The pared-down style has been overly identified with the “iceberg theory,” first mentioned in Death in the Afternoon (1932) and then repeated in the same Paris Review article that he mentions his interest in “shit detecting.”59 The significance of Hemingway’s interest in “shit detecting” to describe his writing has been overlooked because of Balmer’s now obscurity and because he mentions it in the same Paris Review interview that he uses the “iceberg” to explain his style. The mention of the iceberg will turn into the “iceberg theory,” which will dominate scholarly discussions of his writing style. The “iceberg theory,” also sometimes described as the “theory of omission,” overly simplifies Hemingway’s style by reducing it to a solid structure that floats partially above the surface. Instead, his style needs to be seen as deriving from Münsterberg’s theories that Gertrude Stein too was fascinated by and transformed into prose, and Balmer’s ideas about the uses of advertising language and lie detection. His prose style comes from Chicago, something that by 1925 he tries to distance himself from to join the modern avant-garde at the helm in Paris. He writes: “If a writer stops observing he is finished. But he does not have to observe consciously nor think about how to be useful. Perhaps that would be true at the beginning. But later everything he sees goes into the great reserve of things he knows or has seen.”60 Hemingway, like the advertising man, believes in Münsterberg’s ideas about associations and that he can draw images and languages from that place to create. He strips his language down to the masculine language of the hard-boiled advertisement and in doing so forces associations from “the great reserve” in his reader just as Balmer the

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advertising man taught him was possible. Just as the housewife thinks her choices choosing products seem “natural,” so too Hemingway’s reader thinks his or her choices as to the meaning of Hemingway’s stories are “natural” and uncoerced. The process of associations itself can be revealed through observing and measuring the smallest gesture, according to Münsterberg’s idea that all psychological processes have parallel physical processes. Hemingway’s narrators, usually writers themselves, observe the bad business that goes on around them in an attempt to understand and reveal the psychological processes at work behind the physical processes of the action. All superfluous language must be eliminated in order for the narrator and the reader to see the process clearly. Hemingway’s minimalism, then, develops as a method to write about the “bad business” in a way that makes it palatable, natural, and appealing to an audience to sell books. His style packages avant-garde modernism into the familiar advertising language that the American middle class has been taught is natural, and at the same time pulls apart those impulses because the narrators and the readers must hone their shit detectors in order to make sense of the story. The Nick Adams stories show how Nick learns to observe details and develop his “shock-proof shit detector” as he faces violence, alienation, and war. The idea that he can always remain professionally cool, like his father in “Indian Camp” seems impossible, especially after possible shellshock prevents successful reintegration after the war. Jake Barnes, too, tries to be a “shockproof shit detector” and tries to remain cool while ferreting out the lies and gestures that reveal the psychological processes of those around him. He sadly reveals how hard it is to keep up the façade of the advertising man and the lie detector when he says: “It’s awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.”61 Bruce Barton, the son of William Barton, reviewed The Sun Also Rises (1926) for the Atlantic Monthly.62 Even though Bruce was thirteen years older than Hemingway, he would have known him well as the son of the minister who baptized him at First Congregational in Oak Park. The younger Barton, by 1926, had “made good” by Oak Park standards and had recently become good friends with Hemingway’s father.63 He founded one of the most significant advertising firms in America, Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborn, and wrote the best-selling The Man Nobody Knows (1925) that depicts

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Christ as a masculine executive, the world’s greatest businessman, who “picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world.”64 Barton’s book draws straight from his father’s gospel of “clean money” to legitimize big business by preaching a life of service and responsibility. Leo P. Rubuffo has shown how “in an economy of abundance” Barton argued that “corporate leaders must place service above profits, all persons must work and consume vigorously, and advertisements must promote these general values as well as specific goods and services.”65 Barton’s language recalls that of D. L. Moody and William Dean Howells, who each believed that pragmatism and muscular prose would save America from a corrupt, indulgent, and increasingly feminine culture. Spiritual pragmatism and realism promoted service and responsibility to the new ideals of an American culture and created the restrained and unemotional prose with which to write about it. Barton’s review of Hemingway’s novel was overwhelmingly positive because he saw the novel as an excellent example of how masculinity should be promoted on the page. Barton praised Hemingway’s book because he understood its language as the masculine, hard-boiled prose of the last generation of advertisers. He also understood as a Chicagoan and as a man who grew up in his father’s church in Oak Park that the book is a depiction of the classic “bad businessmen,” who drink rather than produce and who have strayed too far from spirituality. The short story “Fifty Grand” may be Hemingway’s response from afar to Barton’s best-selling book and his review of The Sun Also Rises. In it, he reworks a plot from a story about a fixed boxing match that first appeared in the Oak Park-River Forest’s literary magazine Tabula. The story is a Chicago story because as Arnold Gingrich points out in a later letter to Hemingway, a fixed boxing match was known at the time as a “Chicago decision” because of the inherent corruption involved.66 Jack Brennan, the story’s main character, may have thrown the fight because he bet against himself for the fifty grand of the title. He appears as corrupt and broken as anyone else for most of the story, but the ending suggests that he served a larger purpose and redeems himself through a kind of martyrdom. He says about throwing the fight: “It’s business” and repeats, “It’s just business.”67 The story, then, becomes a kind of parody of Barton’s book that associates “good business” with service and describes Christ as “a good businessman.” Jack, then, is a kind of “good businessman” who

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serves the greater good of the “Chicago decision” and makes excellent money doing so. Ironically, the short story appears in The Atlantic almost exactly one year after Barton’s review of The Sun Also Rises was supposed to appear. Hemingway’s letter to Louis and Mary Bromfield on March 8, 1926, indicates that although he can parody the idea of the good businessman, he still believes in the idea. He writes: I should have done the business man and tried to see what Harcourt Brace would do in opposition but I think that’s all the advance I can expect on any business basis except that they want to back me over a long period of time whether the books sell or not … and I wouldn’t have any fun writing the stuff if I did something that made me feel crooked inside.68

Hemingway’s understanding of business as a game of character and product development underpins his ability to work with his publishers in exactly the ways they need him to be. Robert W. Trogdon has tracked at length and shown the relationships between the writer and his editors and publishers at Scribner’s and the negotiations that occurred between them. He argues that Hemingway’s desire to be a “professional writer” coupled with Scribner’s creation of his literary persona and reputation catapulted Hemingway to the untouchable place he now holds in the American literary canon and imagination.69 Hemingway simply does not want his fame to be the result of a corrupt “Chicago decision” and yet, he seems unsure whether the writing business is ever good business. He begins to reveal his deep ambivalence when he writes to Maxwell Perkins three years later on December 15, 1929: “The idea that a writer can write a book then become a business man, then a writer again is all shit as we say.”70

The bad business of patronage By late 1924, Hemingway had seen enough of the avant-garde writing business to understand that one couldn’t really go at it well without a patron. Now that he received some notice for his pieces in The Little Review and those that would make up In Our Time, especially from Gertrude Stein, he became increasingly concerned about how avant-garde writing is published and who, exactly, controls the purse strings behind the little magazines and publishers.

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The whole setup looked an awful lot like the corruption from Chicago and his concerns about the whole bad business would be increasingly reflected in his letters and stories. Over the rest of that year and through the spring, he writes a series of letters to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas who, in that period, acted as his compass through the art scene. He writes to them both about his old friend Krebs Friend from Chicago, with whom he worked on the Co-Operative Commonwealth during 1920–1921. Friend married Henrietta Hobbs, a wealthy heiress, and they had just taken over the finances of The Transatlantic Review after John Quinn died in July of 1924.71 On August 9, 1924, Hemingway writes to Stein and Toklas satirizing and complaining about Friend’s new behavior with the magazine: “Now Ford’s attitude is that he is selling Krebs an excellent business proposition and that Krebs is consequently a business man and the foe of all artists of which he—Ford is the only living example and in duty bound as a representative of the dying race to grind he—Krebs, the natural Foe—into the ground.”72 On September 14, 1924, he writes again and continues the story with Ford trying to scam Friend into taking the whole thing over as a business and “running it as a business proposition, i.e. money making proposition, filling him up on fake figures to feed his own ego and kidding himself it was a money making proposition.”73 This is the first time he positions the relationship between businessmen and artists to be explicitly antagonistic, and so this is the moment Hemingway tries to separate himself from his father and grandfather, as well as all of the good businessmen of Oak Park and Chicago. He sounds like Willa Cather, who believed strongly that art should not have use-value and his story about Krebs Friend aligns him firmly with Harriet Monroe and Frank Lloyd Wright who fought for the rights of artists to construct and own their own visions without interference from the world of business. He ends the September 14 letter by explaining it’s all Krebs Friend’s fault for marrying Mrs. Krebs Friend, who now acts the part of “a business woman” who wants sums and figures, and that had Friend played her correctly he would have taken “a chance to get a patron of the arts.”74 In doing so, he separates the idea of the patron from the idea of the businesswoman, suggesting that female patrons are the worst kinds of businessman who can be easily manipulated by artists. Grace Hall, his mother, had just started the Oak Park Art League in 1921

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and, by 1924, was raising money to support shows and move the club. She had even begun showing her art in League shows and would answer Hemingway’s letters home with letters documenting her involvement and success in the club.75 His biting description of Mrs. Krebs Friend may have stemmed, in part, from a growing annoyance with his mother’s letters and descriptions of her activities as a patron/businesswoman in Oak Park. He writes to Ezra Pound on February 10, 1924, that “there is now a tremendous reaction in America against Anderson, the Broom Boys, etc. You are coming back.”76 The “tremendous reaction” happened because The Dial, published by Scofield Thayer and Dr. James Sibley Watson Jr., ran a series of critical articles between 1921 and 1923 about the editors of The Broom, Harold Loeb and Alfred Kreymborg. The attacks were mostly on Loeb because most people assumed that his wealthy and vast family connections provided the money to restart the journal. His presumably large financial backing was characterized as exceptionally elitist. The magazine attacked Anderson, too, including bad reviews of Many Marriages (1923), for his association with the magazine. Ezra Pound would have known all about it already, because he had served as The Dial’s foreign editor and advisor from 1920 to 1923.77 His problem with Sherwood Anderson stems from what Hemingway may have seen as his lack of care with associations. For Hemingway, he has become a bad businessman whose reputation has been besmirched through carelessness, and he begins a slow process of disassociation from Anderson to save his own reputation, just as his father would advise. In mid-May of the next year, he writes a letter to Stein and Toklas praising Bill Smith, his friend and companion from Michigan summers, for his business prowess. He writes: “Bill Smith is going to put McAlmon’s publishing on a business basis, accounts kept. Sales followed up and collections made so Bob will know how he stands and he is a good business man and careful and cautious so that is all to the good.” He continues: “Bob thinks it is a good chance to split away and start being business like now before Bill gets back. Its good for it to start being serious business.”78 Unlike Anderson, Hemingway labels Smith “cautious” and sees him as “a good businessman” for that. The letter indicates that Hemingway continues to think in those simple Chicago categories of good and bad businessmen, and that he’s mulling over the careful terms with regards to his own work, reputation, and contracts.

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On May 23, 1925, Hemingway writes to Anderson and apologizes for not having written for a long time. The letters mark Hemingway’s acknowledgment, at least to himself, that he has pulled back from Anderson. He promises to reread Many Marriages and give it another chance, which suggests that he didn’t like it very much the first time, which further aligns him with The Dial’s attacks on Anderson and The Broom. He blames serialization for distorting novels and tells Anderson that “all criticism is shit anyway.” He attempts to be kind to Anderson without recalling his own criticism of the novel and having to recalibrate his own “shit detector.” At this point, it’s easier for Hemingway to point to nameless critics than it is for him to be honest with Anderson about how he feels about his connection to The Broom and what he thinks about his novel.79 However, he writes to Harold Loeb in early November 1925 that he’s finished The Sun Also Rises and complains at length about how Boni and Liveright have done “nothing in Chicago where hells own amount of books are sold and which is my home town and where I would have a certain amount of sale anyway.” He’s particularly annoyed that “they are certainly putting Sherwood over big and will evidently make the boy a lot of money … The only angle to me is that I work all the time and I have to eat all the time.”80 The letter should be read as Hemingway throwing a punch at Anderson and to the editor of The Broom, who has a reputation for playing unfair with the other magazines financially. He may have written the first draft of “The Killers” in Fall of 1925, and it’s important to note that in this draft, the main character is not named “Andreson” or “Anderson” and the change in name in later drafts suggests that what happens over the next year caused the renaming.81 Hemingway had made a business decision to move over to the more wellrespected Scribner’s for his next book, The Sun Also Rises, and needed a way out of his binding contract with Boni and Liveright. The next year, Hemingway publishes Torrents of Spring (1926), a biting parody of Anderson’s recently published Dark Laughter (1925). Boni and Liveright didn’t want to publish a book that attacked their best-selling author so viciously and so let him out to publish both books with Scribner’s. Hemingway sends Anderson a letter on May 21, 1926, that uses the language of their time in Chicago to perhaps signal that he knows that he was set up to take a fall for Anderson’s celebrity. It would all be a very dirty business, according to Hemingway’s strict moral

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code. He writes about Torrents: “It is not meant to do any of the things the ad writers say it is,” and claims that it was “a joke” that has been misconstrued by the advertising men. He then identifies himself “a fellow craftsman” and says that he thinks they should be able to tell each other if something is “rotten.” His language of advertising men who misrepresent and misconstrue the words of craftsman evokes Oak Park and Chicago and he is trying to explain what he did as a Chicago artist to get out of what he saw as a bad contract. He doesn’t mention the contract, but he doesn’t need to because the construct he sets up should have explained what Hemingway felt about why he wrote Torrents. He does allow that they shouldn’t have to silence their shit detectors, a small nod to that other Chicagoan, Balmer, whom Anderson most likely knew about. He speaks Midwestern when he acknowledges the “lousy snooty letter,” but tells Anderson “the book isn’t personal,” again, evoking business.82 It’s unclear whether Hemingway is being sincerely apologetic in the letter, especially because he tells Anderson that he is being sincere, or whether he’s actually trying to manipulate Anderson and downplay the severity of what Hemingway has done, especially in light of the earlier letter to Loeb. When Anderson writes back to Hemingway on June 6, 1926, he calls him out on the entire series of letters over the last few years: “All your letters to me over the last two or three years it’s like this—damn it—man you are no friend—so patronizing. You always do speak to me like a master to a pupil. It must be Paris—the literary life. You didn’t speak like that when I knew you.” He deliberately names Hemingway’s tone as that of a patron, rather than of an artist, because he knew how much that would aggravate him. He couches the entire exchange in boxing terms, and points out that he can “pack a little wallop myself. I’ve been middle weight champion. You seem to forget that.”83 In August, he recants somewhat and writes to Hemingway: “I’m glad you’re coming back here to live. Whatever it is it’s our own mess. I rather like the whole show myself and I think you do. You’ve got a reputation already.”84 But it was too late. Hemingway was writing “Fifty Grand” and had already changed the name in the second draft of “The Killers” to Anderson. “Fifty Grand,” then, is not just a response to the best-selling Bruce Barton of Oak Park, it’s also a response to the best-selling Sherwood Anderson. He feels that Boni and Liveright boosted Anderson over himself and so the entire bad business becomes a “Chicago decision,” in Arnold Gingrich’s words.

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Hemingway was set up to take a punch by the bad businessmen at Boni and Liveright who had joined in with The Broom in promoting Sherwood Anderson over him. The story’s last line marks Hemingway’s resignation that the publishing industry is a bad business, crooked, and corrupt. Anderson tries to keep it out of their friendship and not take it personally, but Hemingway will never stray from the moral code that he grew up with from his grandfather, father, Uncle Tyler, and Chicago, which says how a man conducts business reflects his character. Judy Jo Small and Michael Reynolds have shown the 1927 “The Killers” to be a critique of that businessman/salesman, Sherwood Anderson. They examine the relationship between Anderson and Hemingway and argue that the boxing metaphors of “The Killers” betray the contentious relationship Hemingway had with Anderson. They point out that “the setting becomes another clue linking the story to Sherwood Anderson and to the ‘Chicago School of Literature’ ridiculed by The Torrents of Spring. Summit Illinois is located almost exactly between Oak Park, where Hemingway grew up, and Palos Park, where Anderson lived during the months when he and Hemingway became friends.”85 The ominous final words of “The Killers” …, “He must have got mixed up in something in Chicago,” is a statement that Hemingway sees Anderson as being mixed up in bad and corrupt business.86 He got too mixed up in the commercial art scene, which came out of Chicago, where art and business are too easily intermixed for Hemingway’s taste. “The Killers,” written in the style of Hemingway’s early Chicago stories, is a story about an artist who takes money too easily from the wrong kind of people. It is a statement about corruption, patronage, and the dangers of Chicago’s commercial art scene. By 1930, he has become bitter about the business of art. He writes to Guy Hickok on December 5, 1930, “It certainly is a filthy business for them to give the Nobel prize to Mr. Sinclair Lewis when they could have given it to Ezra, or to the author of Ulysses.”87 Leff relates Hemingway’s reaction to the galleys of Death in the Afternoon. He writes: “They were slugged ‘Hemingway’s Death,’ and the superstitious author called it ‘a hell of a damn dirty business to stare at that a thousand times.’”88 His critique of the dirty business of patronage and his understanding of its origins in the Chicago art scene appears most clearly in the “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1938). Helen says: “If you have to go away … is it absolutely necessary to kill off everything you leave behind?

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I mean do you have to take away everything? Do you have to kill your horse, and your wife and burn your saddle and your armour?” Harry answers: “Yes, … Your damned money was my armour. My Swift and my Armour.”89 Joseph Fruscione has identified this reference to Chicago and argues that Faulkner directly parodies Hemingway’s reference in The Wild Palms.90 However, the reference in Hemingway works as a pun that requires an understanding of the Chicago art scene. Her money is Harry’s shield, but also his love, which suggests that he has an inherent love of the protection that money can give to a writer, a jab at the priorities of Chicago writers. The pun also relies on the reader’s knowledge that Swift and Armour owned two of the largest meat-packing operations in Chicago and who were among the financiers and patrons of the Columbian Exhibition and arts in Chicago. Sinclair’s The Jungle targeted Swift’s practices and both Swift and Armour were known for their quick and decisive union breaking. The woman’s money is not just Harry’s shield, but also his Armour, his controlling patron of the arts who has made writing his business. He’s as indebted to her as the Chicago Symphony became to Armour, where Hemingway liked to go during his year in Chicago. The multilevel pun reveals the story’s ambiguity about the usefulness of money to a writer, and the reference to Chicago shows what Hemingway thought the result of Chicago’s marriage of the arts and business would be for a writer. Harry lies dying from gangrene, a rot, which revealed itself only when he stopped feeling the pain from his infection. Patronage, therefore, makes a writer rotten, because he no longer can feel or care about how the poisonous and infectious relationship to the patron affects him. The only way out, for Hemingway, the writer with roots in Chicago, is to “kill off everything you leave behind.”91 The original typescript shows a great deal of corrections to “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” The unpublished manuscript, titled “The Happy Ending” in pencil, contains pencil corrections that extend the above passage and further the understanding of the Chicago puns as part of a discussion about patronage. He had originally added and then crossed out after “My Swift and My Armour” the sarcastic phrase “Fleishman’s yeast and Fisherman’s vest. Vest is vest.” Middle America always thinks that West is best and the added words only serve to further emphasize that he is thinking about patronage in Chicago.92

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Three years later, in 1942, Hemingway declared he “was out of business as a writer” during his residence in Cuba.93 He now can think about Chicago apart from the whole business of growing up, the dirty business of mixing art and business, and the ideals forced on him by his businessmen family. He no longer has to play the part of the businessman, good or bad, and he becomes nostalgic for Chicago. In September of 1945, he writes at length to Mary Welsh, whom he will marry in 1946 and who visited Chicago regularly. She had lived in Chicago for years and this fact, in part, must have made her familiar and attractive to Hemingway. He doesn’t go with her. He writes: “I’d have love to come to Chicago. When you were talking about it I wouldn’t play because I knew I couldn’t and from war got bad and quickly useful habit of throwing away what you can not have.” He remembers, “The Art Institute where I first saw pictures that made you feel falsely with religion” and “the old South State Street whorehouse district where we used to go.” He mentions, “Northwestern,” “The Drake,” and “going to the theater with my Grandfather in the afternoon.” He misses the “taste of hot dogs with mustard and pickle” and reminisces about moving into “Mrs. Aldis’ apartment.”94 For the rest of his life, he will exchange pleasant Christmas cards with Fanny Butcher and give interviews where he mentions Henry Blake Fuller and Edwin Balmer in the same breath as James Joyce.95 The last time he was in Chicago, he reminds Mary, he buried his father. He tells her then that he will never go again and he never does, permanently separating himself from Oak Park and Chicago, the only places etched in his psyche as home.

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William Faulkner and Chicago

In 1959, George Garrett helped promote the idea of William Faulkner as a lone wolf who stayed away from formally joining clubs, groups, or organizations. He wrote as an introduction to his article on Faulkner’s early literary criticism: “Faulkner has had little to say in public about literature, has joined no schools, developed no critical position, and he has stated few preferences or sympathies outside the demonstrable activity of the critic implicit in the work of the artist.”1 While Faulkner cannot be seen as actively joining any schools, he used his early critical work for The Mississippian, which Garrett first brought to light, and several of his novels to work through and position himself in a changing and conflicting relationship with the popular Chicago realism written by the writers he read and knew personally. Faulkner’s earliest published thoughts about Chicago and its art scene appear in a review of Conrad Aiken’s Turns and Movies in the February 16, 1921, issue of The Mississippian.2 Faulkner lifts Aiken’s poems above all others, damning the writers of Midwestern American verse in one large gesture. He writes: “In the fog generated by the mental puberty of contemporary American versifiers while writing inferior Keats or sobbing over the middle west, appears one rift of heaven sent blue—the poems of Conrad Aiken.”3 He continues: Nothing is ever accidental with him, he has most happily escaped our national curse of filling each and every space, religious, physical, mental and moral, and beside him the British nightingales, Mr. Vachel Lindsay with his tin pan and iron spoon, Mr. Kreymborg with his lithographic water coloring, and Mr. Carl Sandburg with his sentimental Chicago propaganda are so many puppets fumbling in windy darkness.4

Faulkner sees the Chicago realists, much as Henry Blake Fuller did twenty-five years earlier, as sentimental boosters for their region who are stuck in their

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childhood memories of a great Midwestern city. Faulkner calls the Chicago artists “puppets” because he saw their art as utilitarian and serving the larger project of boosting Chicago physically, religiously, mentally, and morally. A year later, in the January 13, 1922, edition of The Mississippian, he will repeat his attack on Sandburg’s realism in his review on St. Edna Vincent Millay. He states that Sandburg and other realists like him would take a beautiful idea and then set it “in the stock yards, to be acted, of a Sunday afternoon, by the Beef Butchers’ Union.”5 By doing so, the realists have ruined the aesthetic beauty of the idea by placing it in the service of truth and politics. Phil Stone supplied him with the most prominent little magazines at the time, including the Chicago based Poetry and The Little Review, and Faulkner’s criticisms of American critics can be read as subtle, yet loud, attacks on some of these magazines, particularly, Poetry.6 In the 1925 January–February edition of The Double Dealer, Faulkner lambasts the American critic, who he argues, “Blinds, not only his audience but himself as well, to the prime essential.”7 The prime essential is determining greatness in art. Faulkner continues: “His trade becomes mental gymnastics: he becomes a reincarnation of the sideshow spell-binder of happy memory, holding the yokelry enravished, not with what he says, but how he says it.” The critic has become a showman who cares not for creating the great audiences necessary for great art as Walt Whitman envisioned. He is particularly upset with the “so-called highbrowed magazines” that “should correct our information.”8 Here, he refers to Harriet Monroe’s “open-door policy” at her magazine. Faulkner is twelve years behind the other modernists, including Ezra Pound, who expressed similar dissatisfaction that Monroe wasn’t vetting the poets enough. It’s possible that Faulkner was also expressing concern with The Little Review’s publication of Sandburg and Lindsay. His concern is that an editor should not be a showman who lifts up art only for the sake of amusement and money. Faulkner noticed that Chicago writers, with few exceptions, leave Chicago and then write endlessly about the city from other places. His unpublished introduction for the 1933 Random House edition of The Sound and the Fury suggests this when he writes: “And of Chicago too: of that rhythm not always with harmony or tune; lusty, loud voiced, always changing and always young; drawing from a river basin which is almost a continent young men and women into its living unrest and then spewing them forth again to write Chicago in

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New England and Virginia and Europe.”9 He must have been thinking of the writers who were thought of as the first generation of writers who could claim to be “American” and who put forth the tenets of American Midwestern realism and naturalism in theory and practice by writing specifically about Chicago: Henry Blake Fuller, Edgar Lee Masters, Hamlin Garland, Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, and Upton Sinclair. He also admired and competed with Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald who, he may have noticed, wrestled with a similar relationship to these same American realists. But at the front of his thoughts on Chicago must have been his mentor and by 1933 estranged friend Sherwood Anderson, who would have told him about the gossip, feuds, and cliquishness that he despised in Chicago. In contrast, Faulkner praises Aiken’s verse in the earlier review for his skillfulness and incorporation of European symbolism: Mr. Aiken has a plastic mind, he uses variation, inversion, change of rhythm and such metrical tricks with skillful effect … At times it seems that he is completing a cycle back to the Greeks, again there seem to be faint traces of the French symbolists, scattered through his poems are bits of soft sonority that Masefield might have formed; and so at last one returns to the starting point —from where did he come, and where is he going?10

His praise of Aiken’s work is interesting, because this text of Aiken’s, more than any of the others, owes a clear debt to Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology, which had just been published the previous year. Faulkner is particularly impressed that “he is never a press agent as are so many of his contemporaries. It is rather difficult to quote an example from him, as he has written with certain musical forms in mind, and any division of his work corresponding to the accepted dimensions of a poem is as a single chord to a fugue.”11 Faulkner echoes, again, the warning of the marketplace and how it threatens the integrity of the writer, something Masters and Aiken have escaped, but the sobbing Midwestern realists and their boosterish critics have not. This chapter shows that Faulkner was fully aware of the popular Chicago literary scene and after meeting Anderson became aware that Anderson played the Chicago scene publicly and complained bitterly about the scene privately. His connection to the Chicagoan Anderson allowed Faulkner’s internal debate about what the new American modernism would look like to become personal.

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This chapter’s first section examines Faulkner’s critique of the Chicago artist in his early novel Mosquitoes (1927). He constructs the novel as an allusion to Herman Melville’s Confidence Man (1857) and, in doing so, transforms his initial criticisms of Anderson and the Chicago scene from a straight parody to darker, more unsettled ideas about fake artistry and the business of writing for profit and reputation. Mosquitoes maps Faulkner’s young struggle with what he sees as the best-selling, yet sentimental and propagandistic, art coming from Chicago’s artists. The second section considers Faulkner’s often-repeated statement that the South imports its models from the North and that this action results in the simultaneous importation of corruption and violence. It argues that Sanctuary, like Hemingway’s early stories, relies heavily on popular Chicago characters and ideas, particularly the gangster and the Little Review’s publication of Ulysses, in order to draw a sly critique of the ways in which Chicago’s marriage of art and commerce has infected all of American literature. The chapter’s last section considers Wild Palms, Faulkner’s only novel that takes place partially in Chicago and shows that the novel is his final, most blatant, and serious attempt to explain the relationship between his modern Southern writing and Chicago, its writers, and its history.

The Mosquitoes, double dealers, and confidence men One morning in early 1925, while living in New Orleans, Faulkner found Anderson sitting on a bench in Jackson Square. The two men began to tell tales about Al Jackson who descended from Andrew Jackson and had a penchant for creating amazing animals and inventions in the swamp.12 Sitting on a bench and telling stories with the famous Sherwood Anderson of Chicago must have been surreal for Faulkner. He would have known about Anderson’s “breakdown” and subsequent walk out from his successful Elyria paint business on November 28, 1912, and later divorce from his wife, Cornelia. The story was already legendary because, in part, it speaks of one artist’s resistance to the shackles of the business world. Although Anderson left Ohio and returned to Chicago after walking out on his wife and business, the story would serve as an excellent metaphorical warning that speaks back loudly to those in the Chicago business and art worlds who believed that those worlds could be easily combined. Anderson would rewrite the story of his breakdown several times,

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including in his 1942 memoir, and in doing so shifted the story’s meaning from a warning about what could happen if a young, male writer attempted to have a bourgeois, domestic existence while being a writer to a parable about a writer choosing to walk away from unbearable constraints. Faulkner was attracted to a writer who displayed such bravado. The two men continued to tell the stories in letters he and Anderson wrote back and forth, and Faulkner seemed to believe that they had the beginnings of a coauthored novel. But the collaboration ended suddenly, most likely because Anderson had begun work on his more serious work, Tar: A Midwestern Childhood (1926).13 The Al Jackson stories were, for Faulkner, an apprenticeship in telling stories and making up believable lies, the essence of what Anderson considered to be good fiction and good writing. Their pleasant collaborative venture makes it all the more surprising that in mid-1925, Faulkner wrote a critical review essay on Anderson for the Dallas Morning News.14 Later that year, Faulkner published Mosquitoes in which the character of Dawson Fairchild serves as a thinly veiled caricature of Anderson. Max Putzel writes that the character of Fairchild is “an unmistakable, full-length portrait of Sherwood Anderson painted from life.”15 Faulkner gives the character of Fairchild all of the flaws he ascribes to the Chicago writers in his early articles for The Mississippian and therefore indicates that he sees Anderson as representative of the community of Chicago writers he dislikes. In Mosquitoes, Faulkner repeats his criticism of Carl Sandburg for being a sentimentalist and a propagandist, and extends it to Anderson through Fairchild’s dialogue. Fairchild champions New Orleans without hesitation. He rebukes the Semitic man for “disparaging our Latin Quarter again” and asks him, “Where’s your civic pride?” The Semitic man replies: “Corn belt … Indiana talking. You people up there are born with the booster complex aren’t you?”16 The easy and naïve boosterism infects Fairchild to such an extent that he becomes sentimental for his past and in turn begins to sentimentalize the Midwest. He admits he does this and declares: “I believe in young love in the spring, and things like that. I guess I’m a hopeless sentimentalist.”17 The line isn’t enough for Faulkner, because he then writes Fairchild’s sentimental childhood story to illustrate exactly what he considers sentimental writing to look like. The story, about “spending the summer in Indiana,” shows an unfettered, romanticized childhood among family where the Midwest landscape and summer underpin the plot.18 The story is both nostalgic and paternalistic, a

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clear mockery of Anderson’s Tar, and serves to further boost the Midwest and Anderson who came from that pure, Edenic place. The story shows Midwest literature, like Anderson’s and Sandburg’s, to be full of the clichéd promotional rhetoric of a Chicago artist, whether for the romantic vision of Anderson, or the equally real and gritty vision of Sandburg. Faulkner points out that like Sandburg, Anderson’s Midwestern writing and anti-commercial public stance for art actually serve as a large commercial for itself, which in turn sells the writing to the sentimental loving masses who have no interest in the new modernist avant-garde. This blindness and showmanship leads to Faulkner’s most biting attack on Anderson: he is not a pure artist, and by extension, neither are the Midwestern writers who think and act like Fairchild and Anderson. When Fairchild remarks: “You can’t be an artist all the time. You’ll go crazy.” The Semitic man corrects: “You couldn’t … But then, you are not an artist. There is somewhere within you a bewildered stenographer with a gift for people.”19 Anderson’s storytelling is reduced to merely recording and transcribing, as a stenographer. Because stenographers were traditionally female, Faulkner feminizes Fairchild and by extension Anderson’s art. They are mere gossipers, repeaters of tales already told, rather than original storytellers. His saving grace is the gift for people, which makes him a literary sensation, not an artist. Faulkner draws Gordon, the sculptor, as the exact opposite of Fairchild in temperament, and he serves to provide contrast as a different kind of artist. Gordon dislikes people, spends most of his time alone, and bristles with barely concealed anger at bourgeois interruptions and behavior. He appears masculine and warriorlike at once: “The manipulator of the chisel and maul ceased his labor and straightened up, flexing his arm and shoulder muscles.”20 Scholars have come to the loose consensus that Gordon is based somewhat on William Spratling, but there is little evidence to support this claim other than that he was part of Anderson’s group in New Orleans. However, Faulkner provides a very large clue as to who provided the model for Gordon that his readership in 1926 would have picked up on immediately: the description of his sculpture on display in his studio. Gordon created: “The virginal breathless torso of a girl, headless, armless, legless, in marble.” It is so arresting that “as you entered the room the thing drew your eyes: you turned sharply to the sound, expecting movement.”21 Because the sculpture is marble and classical

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in form, Gordon should be seen as either a thinly veiled depiction of the Chicago sculptor Lorado Taft or the reader can assume that he was taught by Taft at the Art Institute of Chicago and is continuing in his teacher’s wake. Lorado Taft published the first survey on American sculpture, The History of American Sculpture, in 1903 and published a new edition in 1925, the same year Faulkner wrote Mosquitoes. It would remain the standard reference on American sculpture until 1968, with the publication of Wayne Craven’s Sculpture in America. After attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Taft left Illinois for formal training in sculpture at the Ecole des Beaux-Artes from 1879 to 1886. He returned to Chicago and his reputation grew. In 1893, he was asked to be the superintendent of the sculptors at the Chicago Columbian Exposition, a prestigious position under Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who served as sculptural advisor to architect Daniel H. Burnham, the Fair’s director of works, as well as a juror for the Department of Fine Arts. His sculptures as well as those created under his supervision signified the full flowering of the classical and traditional Beaux-Arts aesthetic that was created for Chicago by architects and artists who had trained in Paris. The white marble casts of the sculpture pavilion caused the Fair to be dubbed “The White City,” and Taft became nationally recognized as an artist. Despite many opportunities to leave Chicago, he stayed and took a position at the newly opened Art Institute, where he taught wire and mesh framing and marble sculpting.22 Taft was known nationally as a champion of Classicism and for his resistance to the new modern European art. He championed his position as a classicist so strongly that one critic declared him an “Evangelist of Art,” and Faulkner would have surely seen him as a hypocrite who made not art but propaganda like Sandburg and Anderson. Taft’s complete rejection of modern art would have annoyed Faulkner, who embraced it fully with his love of Joyce’s Ulysses. In Mosquitoes, Gordon’s statue shows that he, too, like Taft and his pupils rejects the European modernism, a signal that he is not an ideal artist either. Because Faulkner places Gordon in opposition to Fairchild, he signals that Taft should be understood in opposition to Anderson. The two characters represent the shift between the first generation of Chicago artists who participated in the Fair and imported their aesthetic from Europe and the second generation of gritty realists whose inspiration was the soil of the Midwest. Faulkner is

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arguing that neither generation has it correct in rendering American Art. Taft relies too heavily on European forms and Anderson merely repeats stories. Neither group created wholly original art like the European modernists, and so neither is the appropriate form for the new twentieth-century art. Gordon does try to move forward at the end of the novel, by creating a new kind of sculpture, a realistic rendering of Mrs. Maurier, emphasizing her multiple chins. However, his work has merely shifted slightly so that now he is working, like Anderson, with grotesques and realism. Faulkner makes it clear that neither, in his opinion, is great art. In the novel, Mrs. Patricia Maurier gives the first indication that men from Chicago are very different than men from the South. She understands the difference to be one of manners, but the difference extends to that of attitudes about the new modern world. She says to Pat, “Here is an example of the chivalry of our southern men. Can you imagine a man in Chicago saying that?” The niece agrees with her, “Not hardly.”23 Mrs. Maurier knows so much about Chicago because “she is a northerner, herself.”24 The Semitic man tells a story about how she married money, and he allows that these two facts explain her completely. While the novel does not make it clear where in the North Mrs. Maurier grew up, the mention of the “butcher bill in the kitchen” as well as the hints of new wealth, of “being surrounded by objects,” suggest a Midwestern, rather than an old Eastern upbringing.25 In addition, if her niece and nephew live in Chicago, with Mrs. Maurier’s brother or sister who married Chicago money, it makes sense that she would be from there or near there as well. Her sensibilities regarding art and artists would be decidedly Midwestern and stemming from Chicago, something Faulkner wished to subtly highlight in the novel. She acts the part of the patroness and romanticizes the idea of the artist, just like Fairchild. When the artists discuss topics she doesn’t like or go off by themselves, she patronizes them in an attempt to get them to behave: “You must be good children.”26 An underdeveloped critique of the relationship between patrons of the arts, who know nothing of the arts, and the artists forms in the novel and by making Mrs. Maurier’s background Midwestern, Faulkner indicates that there is something about that fact that fuels it. She spends the duration of the trip horrified at Fairchild’s behavior that she feels is incongruent with being an artist. She thinks:

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It was that queer shabby Mr. Gordon, and she knew a sudden sharp stab of conscience, of having failed in her duty as hostess. She had barely exchanged a word with him since they came aboard. It’s that terrible Mr. Fairchild, she told herself. But who could have known that a middle-aged man, and a successful novelist, could or would conduct himself so?27

Her shock at their conversations and behavior matches that of Hamlin Garland, Taft’s brother-in-law, who considered the behavior of newer artists and their subject matter to be pornographic. Although Garland never attacked Anderson or Faulkner directly, Garland’s audience understood implicitly that Faulkner’s art was the kind of art Garland found most disturbing.28 Garland found depictions of the naked, female libertine to be particularly pornographic and he would declare those novels which depicted her to be cesspool fiction.29 In Mosquitoes, Pat, the niece, acts the part that Garland hated, which suggests that the novel, set on water, deliberately parodies Garland’s often-repeated phrase. Faulkner based Pat and her brother Gus, Mrs. Maurier’s niece and nephew, on Helen Baird who was a sculptor, had a brother Gus, and was the daughter of the wealthy widow May Lou Freeman, who owned the house next door to the Stones. Faulkner became enamored of her enough to write a series of erotic poetry and verse to her and dedicate Mosquitoes to her.30 He changed Helen Baird’s background from Nashville to Chicago, to further indicate that he was writing about Chicago artists in the novel. The change from Nashville to Chicago also reveals that Faulkner was thinking about Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which had just been published the year before. In Fitzgerald’s novel, Jordan Baker and Tom Buchanan are from Chicago and through them Fitzgerald presents his own criticisms of the city’s carelessness with art. Many more details indicate that Gatsby was an influence on Mosquitoes. For example, Mrs. Maurier’s car makes fast trips back and forth to the yacht before the trip bringing pounds of grapefruits, which subtly evokes the cars bringing mounds of oranges to Gatsby’s house before his weekend parties.31 Faulkner had just finished writing a Fitzgerald-like story “Country Mice” that was published in The Times-Picayune in 1925. The comical sketch resembles many of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, where a young middle-class outcast penetrates and then overturns the old money establishment and, in doing so, reveals their corruption. In Faulkner’s story, young country boys hijack and outmaneuver

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more sophisticated and urbane bootleggers. Joseph Blotner noticed that even the frame of the story suggests Faulkner’s borrowing from Fitzgerald, in that the less sophisticated character tells the story of the supposedly more sophisticated criminals and, in doing so, sheds a harsh and judgmental light on their actions.32 In the Mosquitoes, the characters of Jenny and Pete can be seen doing the same thing when they have a conversation about the rich that Fitzgerald could have written. Pete says, “If you were rich you’d buy lots of clothes and jewelry and an automobile. And then what would you do? Wear your clothes sitting in the automobile, huh?”33 The tone and use of Fitzgerald announce that Faulkner was doing more than attempting a light parody, but was instead engaging in social critique and demonstrating subtly how Chicago artists, from Lorado Taft to Sherwood Anderson, sell their art to make a lot of money. Faulkner’s critique emerges because he constructed the novel as an extended allusion to Melville’s Confidence Man. The allusion indicates still further that he was thinking about Gatsby at the time, Fitzgerald’s take on the con man, and he adored Melville. Faulkner’s earliest publications were in a New Orleans magazine named after a con man, The Double Dealer, and so the reference demonstrates further that Faulkner was critiquing the current state of American literature. The Confidence Man takes place on April Fools’ Day aboard the steamship, Fidele, as it meanders down the Mississippi River. The date of the boat trip suggests that a joke or game is being played in the novel. In the first chapter, a placard announces that an imposter may be aboard the ship and promises a reward if captured. The novel’s loosely connected chapters suggest the shape-shifter is aboard and that he plays a different character in each chapter. Some scholars see the mysterious confidence man as Satan and others as a Christ figure, or some amalgam of the two. Ultimately, the novel plays out as an extended allegory about trust, and each conversation told pulls apart the confidence that the passengers have in justice, religion, and politics. Melville did not invent the idea of the confidence man, but he was the first to use the figure as an extended conceit about American attitudes. The phrase “confidence man” entered into the public lexicon in 1849. An article appeared in The New York Herald detailing the arrest of a man “known as the ‘confidence man.’” He would ask “after a little conversation” if the susceptible new acquaintance would have confidence to trust him with his

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watch until tomorrow. The bewildered mark would hand over his watch and the confidence man would walk away laughing. He was the newest version of the popular late eighteenth-century aristocratic rogue figure who stole for the fun of it and because of unseen character flaws.34 The confidence man is not simply another manifestation of the ubiquitous trickster figure who appears in some form across all cultures. Gary Lindberg has shown that the confidence man “inhabits a modern, highly differentiated, literate society” who “tells us less about the universal human condition than he does about the peculiar qualities of American society that gave rise to him, like the theme of confidence itself.” He points out that unlike the unruly and clownish trickster figure, “The confidence man, on the other hand, does not provide an outlet for unruliness, nor does he disrupt the social bounds.” He represents culture rather than breaks it apart, and “his message is that the boundaries are already fluid, that there is ample space between his society’s official rules, and its actual tolerances.”35 The confidence man demonstrates play, the fluidity built into modern social structures and boundaries that already exist prior to his arrival on any scene. The idea of the confidence man was closely associated with Chicago by the end of the nineteenth century because of the city’s wide space between its rules and tolerances. Chicago appeared to the American public as filled with hustlers, those underworld men and women who made money by conning others out of their money. But while novels and film series like Fritz Lang’s serial The Spiders (1919–1920) would depict the criminal underworld as a place of fun and revelry for the criminals, the confidence man does not take part in Mikhail Bakhtin’s “carnivalesque.”36 His masquerade does bear some resemblance to the costuming associated with carnival, but the difference is that his costume does not appear to be costume. Instead, he appears merely a part of modern life that is already organized around artifice and theatricality. Some of Chicago’s legitimate businessmen and owners of corporations were swindlers in suits because they could sell their products to unsuspecting marks, through salesmanship, advertising, or just plain Chicago boosterism. Nelson Algren most famously called Chicago “The City on the Make,”37 but he was repeating Jane Addams, who referred to the city this way in her 1895 book, Democracy and Social Ethics.38 David W. Maurer wrote in his 1940 encyclopedia of confidence knowledge, tricks, and games that in “New York

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and especially in Chicago, there were hordes of short-con workers.”39 He declares without naming names that many of the fixers who set up shop in saloons in Chicago still operate and one in particular still “wields” considerable influence.40 Chicago, for Maurer, had grifting on a much larger scale than anywhere else, and he repeatedly hints that many of the extremely wealthy in Chicago began as cons and grifts and that by the turn of the century, Chicago, the center of the Midwest, easily adapted to the long con. New York may have had confidence men, but Chicago was built up after the Columbian Exhibition with a confidence game. Faulkner shows how fluid the idea of a Chicago artist is, and by extension an American artist, by suggesting that all artists onboard the Nausikaa are confidence men. In doing so, Faulkner shifts his initial criticisms of Anderson, Taft, and the Chicago scene from a straight parody to darker, more unsettled ideas about fake artistry and the business of writing for profit and reputation. Melville’s characters say one thing and then by the end of the passage insist with complete confidence that the opposite is true. The multiplicity of meanings contradict each other at best and form impenetrable paradoxes at worst. Faulkner, like Joyce in Ulysses, uses Melville’s methods to allow meaning to emerge from the reader, who is also participating in the confidence game by simply reading. His use of Melville’s slippery language games to form the plot of the ambiguous Mosquitoes anticipates the more masterful work of the same plot devices in Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Each of the characters may be a confidence man suggesting that the artist is, for Faulkner’s purposes, always going to be a confidence man or a mark, and the line between the two becomes increasingly blurry. Early in the novel, Fairchild reveals his knowledge of American con games. Major Ayres announces, “All Americans are constipated,” and tells the group, including Fairchild, about his scheme to put salts “in a tweaky phial, a phial that might look well on one’s night table: a jolly design of some sort.”41 He declares that “All Americans will buy it. Now, the population of your country is several millions, I fancy; and when you take into consideration the fact that all Americans are con—.”42 Ayres’s promotional rhetoric matches that of Fairchild’s and suggests that Americans, in general, are easy targets for such advertising. Taliaferro interrupts him before he is able to repeat the word “constipated” and the shortened word “con” stands in its place. Americans are both constipated

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and cons, simultaneously uptight and willing to game anyone out of their money. Fairchild adds an additional feature to the jar to contain the salt. He suggests as a design: “The American flag and a couple of doves holding dollar marks in their bills, and a handle that when you pull it out, it’s a corkscrew.”43 He indicates that the best way to sell to Americans is to tie together patriotism, religion, and capitalism while acknowledging that the patriots yearn for something illegal: liquor. The combination sets up all Americans as alternately con men and marks, advertisers and buyers. Faulkner provides clues that Fairchild is acting the part he plays for the benefits he gains from it. When the Semitic man points out that he is a Midwestern booster, Fairchild replies, “Oh well, we Nordics are at a disadvantage.”44 Faulkner then adds a third person observation that suggests that it may be the Semitic man who is at a disadvantage because Fairchild may be pretending to be naïve for gain. Fairchild continues to suggest that he is not smart enough to con anyone when he follows with: “We’ve got to fix our idea on a territorial place. Though we know it’s second rate, that’s the best we can do.”45 The exchange could be a very traditional con game, where the con acts the part of the rube in order to fleece the mark who has been made to feel smart and in control. Fairchild will tell one industrious story and version of his education to “the nephew” who is about to go off to Yale,46 and another one, that disparages the same, to the Semitic man, which further suggests that he is playing the part of an ill-educated Midwesterner to his advantage. Confidence men steal and to do so, they must steal other people’s forms and identities. In the novel, the artists steal from others in order to create their arts out of stolen forms, which Faulkner implies is a con game. Dawson Fairchild steals stories from those he grew up with and around him. Mrs. Maurier’s nephew Gus steals a rod from the engine room for his sculpture, stalls the yacht’s engine, and forces the yacht to run aground on a sandbar. If the yacht cannot sail, the party is no longer a sailing expedition. The nephew metaphorically steals the form of Mrs. Maurier’s party from her to complete his sculpture. Even Gordon, the sculptor, steals classical forms for his sculpture and Mrs. Maurier’s likeness for his final piece of art. American artists, then, are all cons that steal forms that will help them sell their work. Faulkner suggests that Gordon, too, is predatory in that he resembles a hawk, a predatory bird. He turns on Mr. Taliaferro with “a face like that of a heavy

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hawk, breaking his dream.”47 For a moment, “The Hawk’s face brooded above him in the dusk remotely.”48 And finally, “Gordon’s hawk face brooded above them, remote and insufferable with arrogance.”49 Pat, Mrs. Maurier’s niece, points out this dark aspect of the sculptor quite simply by telling him: “You are black.” Then, “her voice fell and he suggested Soul?” She replies quietly, “I don’t know what it is.”50 Just as Fairchild’s personality as a simple and naïve Midwestern artist should be read as posturing, a con that helps sell books, so too should Gordon’s dark aggression be read as a part played to sell sculpture. The adjectives the niece uses to describe Gordon—Black and Hawk—further connect Gordon to Taft because his Black Hawk sculpture is widely considered to be his masterpiece. Gordon is both artist and sculpture, artist and product being sold. Faulkner shows that the characters and their models, Anderson and Taft, both play at being artists and, in doing so, sell quite successfully, which, Faulkner names a con game. Faulkner had become quite interested in money since moving to New Orleans. When Faulkner moved to New Orleans, his tone about money shifts from that of the high-minded criticism in The Mississippian to glee when he writes to his mother that the notoriously underpaying Double Dealer will pay him for his work. Faulkner writes to his mother from New Orleans in early February 1925: “I am like John Rockefeller—whenever I need money I sit down and dash off ten dollars worth for them. I sold them 30.00 worth and the Double Dealer 10.00 already yet, as Mrs. Friedman would say. They know that someday I’ll be a ‘big gun’ and they are glad to get it.” The idea of receiving money makes him think of shopping and Chicago: “New Orleans is quite the place even though it isn’t as big as Chicago. The stores keep almost everything you’d need.”51 When he writes to his Mother in late March 1925 that he and Anderson made up the Al Jackson stories, the news is not that they created great art, but that “we are going to sell it and buy a boat with the proceeds.”52 He had joined the ranks of the double dealers. However, Faulkner’s depiction of Anderson as a booster for the region and sentimental seems disloyal to the new guild he had joined because of Anderson’s generosity, and this reportedly hurt Anderson deeply, especially because he had gone out of his way to help the young writer develop his craft and get published. These attacks can be seen as stemming from the fact that Faulkner was not yet successful. He would have been acutely aware of the

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wide gulf that existed between the legend of Sherwood Anderson and who he actually was: remarried and quite savvy at selling his books commercially. Neither Faulkner nor Anderson ever published the Al Jackson stories together or separately, but Faulkner did incorporate them into the Mosquitoes. To a young Faulkner who relished the opportunity to make any money off of his writing, Anderson must have seemed a rather shrewd Chicago businessman. Anderson’s advice to Faulkner, to lie and embellish, must have also seemed directly from the tales of corrupt Chicago businessmen he heard about and saw traveling through Mississippi looking for promising deals. Faulkner’s criticisms of Anderson and the Chicago art world need to be balanced against the young writer’s desire and admiration for those writers who had figured out how to make money from their writing. The Al Jackson stories they spun on the park bench would have seemed to Faulkner as a coded discussion of how to spin gold and riches out of a swamp, something that Anderson and the slightly older generation of Chicago writers figured out how to do and Faulkner wished to learn. Faulkner’s cameo appearance in the novel is as “a little kind of black man” who “was a white man and kind of shabbily dressed” and named “Faulkner.”53 He writes himself into the novel to show that he wants to be considered a confidence man too, because Melville’s confidence man is always both black and white, which signifies his inability to be fully pinned down morally by the reader. Faulkner in the novel tells the niece he “was a liar by profession,”54 just as Anderson taught him to be. T. J. Jackson Lears notices of Faulkner, “But he was no plain speaker, no icon of authenticity; in fact he was a poseur throughout his life. Faulkner epitomized the artist as confidence man, who realized how much art (and life) could be constituted through the creation of convincing narratives.”55 When Faulkner wrote “Centaur in Brass,” somewhere around 1930 or 1931, he writes of Snopes as having “neither the high vision of a confidence man nor the unwrecking courage of a brigand.”56 The line is a compliment to those visionaries, Anderson and Taft and others like them, whom he wrote about at length as confidence men in Mosquitoes. The Mosquitoes maps Faulkner’s struggle with what he sees as the bestselling, yet sentimental and propagandistic, art coming from Chicago’s artists. He wishes to sell books and admires the showmanship of artists like Lorado Taft and Sherwood Anderson who have successfully capitalized on the idea

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of creating a new American art form out of lying. On the other hand, he mocks them for embracing those same values and not standing in aesthetic opposition to the ideology of capitalism that has no place for the artist as a new, creative, and redefining force. Faulkner holds some hope by presenting stealing as a subversive activity that artists can engage in to run the ship aground. But that impulse is hastily sketched and rather inconclusive at this stage of Faulkner’s thinking because the novel ultimately ends in what many scholars have deemed an unsatisfying way. A mocking female voice speaks out from the “remote buzzing” of metaphorical mosquitoes and tells Taliaferro to “treat ‘em rough.”57

Sanctuary, gangsters, and Ulysses In late 1925 or early 1926, Faulkner wrote his first gangster story, “The Big Shot,” while simultaneously working on Mosquitoes.58 The story introduces the bootlegger Popeye who is arrested for running a stop sign while delivering a carload of whiskey to Dal Martin’s house, a political boss and contractor in Memphis. The story’s main focus is on Martin’s desire for Dr. Blount, a wealthy and important citizen, to include his daughter in the upcoming debutante ball. He bribes Blount with the promise of building an art museum in his grandfather’s honor. Blount agrees and then quickly begins to regret his decision. Martin and Giovelli, the supplier of the bootleg whiskey, pull strings to get Popeye out of the consequences of his arrest. He returns to transporting alcohol and runs over Blount’s daughter while delivering more whiskey to the Martin house. The police corruption and Martin’s promise of the art museum, reveal that there is no upper lit world and the forces of law, politics, and culture are completely intertwined with those of the underworld. Faulkner explains in the story how this level of corruption came to the South: Since the South waked up about twenty-five years ago, our cities have been aping Chicago and New York. And we’ve done it, better than we thought. But we are blind; we don’t realize that you can ape only the vices of your model, that virtue is accidental even with those who practice it. But there is still a kind a hearty clumsiness to our corruption, a kind of chaotic and exasperating innocence.59

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The South “waked up” during the reconstruction of their train lines, which had been heavily damaged by the North as a military tactic during the Civil War. Faulkner’s grandfather, William C. Falkner, was one of the investors who helped charter the Ripley Railroad Company in Spring of 1871 that would connect the small town of Ripley to Middleton, from where one could then go on to Memphis and then Chicago.60 The Illinois Central Railroad took over the Mississippi line in 1872 and further connected small towns in Mississippi with Chicago, through Memphis and to New Orleans. Illinois Central had a stop in Oxford and the line allowed people and goods to easily move between Chicago and Oxford, creating a physical link between the two cities that woke up the small town. The connection was also an artistic and intellectual one because new forms and ideas in books and people’s heads could move easily from the North to the South and the South began to import the classical forms so exalted in Chicago in the years after the Fair. Louis H. Sullivan designed the New Orleans Union Station for the Illinois Central Railroad, at the terminus of the main line from Chicago. It was designed in the ornamental Chicago School style and Frank Lloyd Wright, then Sullivan’s head draftsman, did much of the final work on the project. The building opened on June 1, 1892, a monument to the importation of Chicago to the South.61 Faulkner would have taken the train home to Oxford from this station many times and Anderson would have understood and explained the significance of the architecture to him. The rebuilt cities and built-up towns in the South modeled themselves on Chicago and New York, but were unable to stop themselves from blindly importing the Northern corruption that comes with the model. Just as the political and art institutions reworked themselves, so too did the reporters and writers who would represent their southern cities as imitations of Chicago. The Memphis newspapers had only recently declared the city the “Murder Capital” of the country, imitating Chicago’s moniker, and the lurid stories about larceny, cold-blooded murder, arson, and bootlegging sold newspapers through their subtle suggestions that the “shadow of the mob” lay behind the outbreak of violence.62 Faulkner most likely based his gangster, Popeye, on stories told about the Memphis bootlegger Neal “Popeye” Pumphrey. After a set of Memphis fires that were most likely arson, the newspapers reported: “One local whisky faction backed by Al Capone’s gang in Chicago and another

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faction backed by a New Orleans—St. Louis Outfit are struggling for control.”63 “Popeye” Pumphrey, a low-level underworld figure, stood one step below the struggle and it’s unclear with which gang he ultimately aligned himself. Faulkner repeats the same idea in Sanctuary of how the South imports its models from the North and the corrupt and violent consequences that follow. Popeye is from Chicago metaphorically because he is based on popular representations of Chicago gangsters. The popular-culture gangster figure was created in Chicago and is associated with the city still. Little Caesar, William R. Bennett’s novel analyzed at length by Peter Lurie as a source for Sanctuary, tells of small-time criminals who move to Chicago and become mixed up in the Outfit.64 Faulkner also borrows from Allan Pinkerton’s early memoirs about the exploits of the Chicago-based Pinkerton Detective Agency and acknowledges this debt when he adds that Popeye’s father, like the Pinkerton Detectives, was “a professional strike breaker” in 1900. Dashiell Hammett, who will become a good friend of Faulkner’s in the 1930s, joined the Pinkerton Detective Agency as a young man and worked for them until taking time off to go serve in the war.65 He will fuse these experiences together and create the first hard-boiled detective stories that will be published throughout the 1920s by Mencken in The Smart Set. Faulkner will borrow from Hammett’s short stories to add a veneer of literary respectability to the wide commercial appeal of his gangster Popeye, despite his claim that he wrote the “little potboiler” for purely commercial reasons. After Popeye rapes the judge’s daughter, Temple Drake, with a corncob and takes her to Memphis, he deposits her at Miss Reba’s brothel. Miss Reba tells the shocked and traumatized Temple that her profuse bleeding is “nothing” because “Doctor Quinn’ll stop it in two minutes.”66 Faulkner named Doctor Quinn after the New York attorney and wealthy patron of modern art, John Quinn, who defended The Little Review in court on charges of pornography stemming from the publication of Ulysses. It was natural that Quinn would defend The Little Review in court and establish their legal defense. Quinn began his descent into the modern art world as a collector and by the early twenties, his collection overflowed into a second large apartment, bought by Quinn solely to house his art. He was instrumental in putting together the 1913 Armory Show in New York and befriended Ezra Pound. Pound benefited from the friendship immensely because the connection aided him in becoming the

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editor/correspondent with control at several of the small magazines, including The Egoist, Poetry, and The Little Review. Faulkner’s naming of the doctor after Quinn indicates that the reader should associate what Quinn did for The Little Review with what the doctor does for Temple: clean up the mess created by the gangsters from Chicago, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap. The Little Review serialized almost half of Ulysses from Spring of 1918 to the end of 1920. Twenty-one-year-old Faulkner read the chapters as they came out in Oxford, Mississippi, because his friend and mentor Phil Stone gave him copies of The Little Review to consume along with Poetry, The Dial, and The Egoist.67 Faulkner would have been drawn to this new and aesthetically rich modernism, and it easily provided the fuel for his February 1921 attack on the realists of Chicago. He would have also been drawn to the magazines’ implicit championing of the ideas of creating art for its own sake, not for financial or personal gain. When an outraged reader wrote to the magazine to complain about Joyce’s piece—“Each month is worse than the last”—Jane Heap responded sharply: Joyce “has no concern with audiences and their demands.”68 Her words destroy Whitman’s mantra that great art produces great audiences and speak back to that founder of the idea of American literature, William Dean Howells, who spent the last decades of his career tying Chicago writing, which he saw as the center of American art, to saleable ideas and marketing. In Joyce and The Little Review, Faulkner found examples of radical new kinds of art not being made to make money or to please a publisher, but to advance the state of writing and art. The Little Review published those chapters of Ulysses alongside of Sherwood Anderson’s stories, as well as advertisements, Dadaist poetry, and editorials. The Little Review also published Vachel Lindsay and Carl Sandburg, and so the mere fact of publication in the modern magazine wasn’t enough for Faulkner to be impressed. Because Anderson’s stories were in the issues containing Joyce’s, Faulkner would have seen Anderson as more radical and anti-commercial than those other Chicago writers that he critiques harshly. It’s impossible to know whether young Faulkner had knowledge of Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, and Sherwood Anderson’s friendship in Chicago or whether Phil Stone had told Faulkner previously that the magazine had recently moved from that city to New York. When Faulkner finally met Anderson in New Orleans, he would have learned quickly of his association with the 57th Street artists’

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colony and of his friendship with Margaret Anderson. Anderson had joined the group that had set up in old storefronts used for the Columbian Exhibition along 57th Street and Stoney Island Avenue. Maurice Browne and Ellen Van Volkenburg lived there, and all of the other significant artists working in Chicago at the time visited frequently: Harriet Monroe, Edgar Lee Masters, Vashel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, and Tennessee Mitchell, who would become Anderson’s second wife. Floyd Dell encouraged him to associate with the colony and soon after, he introduced Margaret Anderson to the colony. Sherwood saw Margaret as one of the most charismatic members of the group and Floyd Dell understood immediately that she would be publishing something of great significance. Margaret Anderson first conceived of The Little Review at this colony taking up the mantle of Dell’s Literary Review and Sherwood Anderson would have witnessed its inception.69 Because Sherwood Anderson’s connection to The Little Review was personal and Faulkner was deeply impressed with Ulysses, it would have stood out for Faulkner from the vast array of connections Anderson maintained. Faulkner would see The Little Review as a Chicago magazine that defied the commercialism and propagandist uses of art that he rallied against in his early criticism. Although Anderson and Heap had moved to New York by the time of the publication, Faulkner’s exposure to Anderson’s stories about the editors of the magazine at its inception would have made the magazine a firmly Chicago publication in Faulkner’s mind. The Little Review lost its case and Margaret Anderson writes in the next issue of the magazine: “This decision establishes us as criminals.”70 The US courts consider certain kinds of scenes and ideas in writing and art to be just as corrupting as actual rape and violence to young women, and Faulkner’s discussion of the difference between art and pornography in Sanctuary hinges on understanding that idea and its implications for art. Popeye, a Chicago gangster figure, rapes and violates Temple Drake. The editors of The Little Review are now also criminal because in publishing Ulysses, they may have corrupted the young Temples of the United States. Just as Dr. Quinn is brought in to clean up Temple in the literally pornographic space of the brothel, John Quinn must be brought into the courtroom to clean up the mess created by The Little Review. Faulkner, too, has published material potentially corrupting and definitely pornographic in telling the story of Popeye’s rape of Temple. He,

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too, needs Dr. Quinn, and perhaps his attorney double in the novel, Horace Benbow, to clean up the story and make the corrupt act more palatable to the reading public.71 Peter Lurie has argued that Faulkner’s treatment of Temple reveals “two very different representational practices at play in the same text, those associated both with modernism and with commercial fare like potboilers and film.”72 Faulkner juxtaposes a high modernist critique about the treatment of Ulysses by the US government with a more popular, lurid, and sensational story about a southern girl contaminated by a Chicago gangster and brought into White Slavery. Quinn argued, in Margaret Anderson’s words, “that the offending passage of ‘Ulysses’ will revolt but not contaminate” and so the concern is that the passage will contaminate young female readers.73 Faulkner writes this idea metaphorically into the novel because Temple, as a representation of a young female reader, is corrupted by what she sees and experiences at Old Frenchman’s Bend. She is also a common figure in popular pamphlets and posters that began to circulate warning about the dangers of being seduced into white slavery. Temple is both the corrupted and the popular, commercial figure that warns about the corrupted. She is just like Popeye, in that she is an equally popular commercial representation in American Culture. Hysteria about the corruption of young girls, whipped up by popular culture stories about farm girls abducted out of Chicago railway stations, reached a head in 1909, when Representative James R. Mann of Illinois introduced the Mann Act. He did so at the request of Chicago prosecutors who claimed that girls were being forced into prostitution after being tricked, drugged, and forced to stay in a brothel. Faulkner, then, tells a story about white slavery that originates in Chicago, using two characters, one a Chicago gangster, the other, a modern girl. Lurie points out that “Faulkner’s canonical, high Modernist works reveal traces of the market, particularly of film, even when Faulkner was supposedly writing in opposition to its effects”74 Sanctuary, then, straddles the line between high modernism and popular culture by fusing together the writer’s critique of the banning of Ulysses with a desire to make money by borrowing popular culture characters guaranteed to sell books. Just as in Hemingway’s work, a tension arises for Faulkner’s reader who must negotiate between the popular culture kitsch and the parody of the critical recycling of narratives. Both writers’ work is filled with references to

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popular culture stemming from the Chicago literary scene, but at the same time, the audience informed about the Chicago scene laughs ironically at the way each writer represents these scenes in their narratives. Temple’s capture can be read as a contemporary retelling of the same old Chicago story that led to the Mann Act, with its theme of the off-screen rape of its heroine by an invisible menace. However, by parodying the desire for these stories, the novel shows the abduction plot to be a cultural artifact, and its reliance on a simple good versus evil construct ridiculous and naïve. At the same time, Faulkner shows the Chicago plot and style to be similarly ridiculous and naïve. Faulkner claimed to have never read Ulysses in his 1932 interview with Harry Nash Smith, and he gives a rather tongue-in-cheek explanation of why a reader might find multiple allusions to the novel in his work. He smiled and said: “‘Sometimes I think there must be a sort of pollen of ideas floating in the air, which fertilizes similarly minds here and there which have not had direct contact. I had heard of Joyce, of course,’ he went on. ‘Some one told me about what he was doing, and it is possible that I was influenced by what I heard.’” He then handed Smith a 1924 copy of the book.75 Nash explained away the presence of the book as a “borrowed copy.” In 1932, the book was still completely banned in the United States and so Faulkner’s statement should be understood as a statement about pornography, banned books, contraband, and illegal art production. He could not possibly have read the partially published episodes of Ulysses in Oxford, because a Southern gentleman from that small town would never admit to doing such a thing. Faulkner’s production of his 1924 copy of the novel is meant to amuse because his gesture reveals that he owns contraband and purveys illegal goods. The United States prosecuted Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap in 1920 after the publication of the “Nausikaa” episode in The Little Review, in which a character masturbates. Despite the fact that few readers would have known what was going on in the chapter or the novel, at the conclusion of the 1921 trial, Ulysses was declared obscene and banned in the Unites States. The United States Post Office burned all found copies through the 1920s. In 1922, Sylvia Beach published the novel at Shakespeare and Company in Paris. She considered it an “honor” to do so on Joyce’s fortieth birthday. Faulkner’s 1924 copy is from the fourth edition produced by Beach at Shakespeare and Company and recorded as part of his library with his signature on the first page.76

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How, exactly, Faulkner received that copy is unknown and his production of it at the 1932 interview was meant to provoke questions. Smuggled copies of Ulysses were making their way into the United States in the early twenties, and it’s possible that Anderson may have gifted him a copy, particularly after discovering Faulkner’s interest in The Little Review and his respect for the editors. Anderson was in Paris when Sylvia Beach decided to publish the novel, and he wrote in his notebook of his surety that Ulysses may be “the most important book published this generation.” He paid the fee of twelve dollars for a copy once published and gave her a list of “possible subscribers” from the United States.77 He had just met Joyce in May of 1921 and was in awe of him, in part because of Beach’s constant championing of the man and his writing. Anderson considered Joyce and in particular Ulysses to be a great influence on his prose rhythms and stream of consciousness shifts and so it’s highly unlikely that he would have given Faulkner his own prized copy of Ulysses.78 Daniel J. Singal claims that Faulkner bought a copy while in Paris.79 While he gives no evidence for his assertion, it makes sense. Faulkner’s copy is dated the year before he went to Beach’s bookstore and it would have been the easiest way to obtain a copy. Faulkner must have smuggled his own copy back to the United States. He reveals this copy of Ulysses at the 1932 interview for two timely reasons. First, he would have known that the publisher Bennett Cerf, who had just started Random House, wanted to publish Ulysses in the United States and he needed the courts to allow him to do so. Cerf had been courting Faulkner for some time alongside Joyce. In March 1932, Random House signed a contract with Joyce for Ulysses. On May 3, 1932, four months after Faulkner’s interview, Cerf had a copy of the book shipped to him and allies of Joyce and Cerf ensured that custom agents would seize it. Cerf and the attorney Morris Ernst wanted John Woolsey, a judge with a track record of liberal obscenity rulings and a lover of art and literature, to preside over the trial. After a series of serendipitous reschedulings and delays of the court date, Woolsey did preside, and after reading the novel completely himself and listening to the testimony of literary critics, he overturned the ban on December 7, 1932.80 While Faulkner could not have seen into the future, his production of the book in that interview in early 1932 was a declaration that Faulkner was on the side of Joyce and his publisher. The second reason is that Harry Nash Smith was

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completely in on the joke and gesture because he had reviewed Faulkner’s earlier salacious novels Mosquitoes, Sanctuary, and The Sound and the Fury well, unlike the majority of reviewers who were put off when encountering scenes and material that could have been part of Ulysses. Faulkner had been having a hard time publishing “Miss Zilphia Gant” because of its alleged obscenities. Both Scribner’s and The American Mercury had rejected it. Later that year, Nash purchased the story for The Southwest Review and brought out a three-hundred-copy edition of the story with his own introduction to the story. That May, Nash was fired from the English department for the publication of what John O’ Beatty, his chairman, declared “the foulest book I have ever read.”81 So when Faulkner displays his 1924 copy of Joyce’s banned book during the interview with Nash in 1932, he does so proudly and reveals that he, too, is a book smuggler, a breaker of laws, and purveyor of pornography. It also explains why, when he showed up in New Orleans in 1925, he no longer dressed as an artistic bohemian, as he did in Paris, but now donned the baggy suit of a bootlegger, often stocked with smuggled hooch from Mississippi. Seeing Faulkner playing at being a criminal bootlegger also reveals him to be embracing the new and corrupt forms from Chicago. He wants to be associated with the most daring kinds of modernism published by the Chicagoans, Anderson and Heap, and he wants his writing to be seen as equally daring and scandalous.

Wild Palms and the historical exchange between Chicago and the South During the Summer of 1933, Faulkner wrote an introduction to The Sound and the Fury. It was never published and remained hidden until it was discovered in the Rowan Oak Papers in a stairwell closet.82 In it, he returns to his earlier idea from “The Big Shot” about how the South built itself in imitation of the Northern cities. He writes: And Chicago even boasts of being young. But the South, as Chicago is the Middlewest and New York the East, is dead, killed by the Civil War. There is a thing known whimsically as the New South to be sure, but it is not the south. It is a land of Immigrants who are rebuilding the town and cities into replicas of towns and cities in Kansas and Iowa and Illinois, with skyscrapers

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and striped canvas awnings instead of wooden balconies, and teaching the young men who sell the gasoline and waitresses in the restaurants to say O yeah? And to speak with hard r’s, and hanging over the intersections of quiet and shaded streets where no one save Northern tourists in Cadillacs and Lincolns ever pass at a gait faster than a horse trots, changing red-and-green lights and savage and peremptory bells.83

He ends the piece explaining that despite the imitation, the Southern writer still writes about the land he is from and his place in it. He concludes: “Because it is himself that the Southerner is writing about, not about his environment.”84 Faulkner had already used Mosquitoes and Sanctuary to delineate his own relationship to popular commercial tastes and the Chicago realist writers, who he saw as catering to the marketplace with propagandistic novels about their city and being an American writer. Faulkner’s novels render extensive overviews of Southern history and culture, its people and places, and ultimately depict the South as it has built itself up on the models of the North. He also builds his work after the Chicago writers’ marketing ploys and the new European modernism, critiquing, archiving, and making it new simultaneously, just like Joyce. Faulkner will not write about Chicago again until he sets a novel partially in this city he has often thought about but never visited. It will be his final attempt to position himself in relation to Chicago realism and the commercial appeal of that form of writing. In 1939, Faulkner published If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem under the title Wild Palms to please his publisher at Random House. The novel consists of two, seemingly, separate stories, Wild Palms and Old Man told through an alternating sequence of five chapters each. The process of reading the novel can be frustrating to readers who approach the novel with the same expectations as they have with his earlier Yoknapatapha novels. It is debatably Faulkner’s least commercial novel, despite its same reliance on popular film and dime store novel narratives and characters as Sanctuary. The novel will be his final, most blatant, and serious attempt to situate himself and Southern writing in a relationship with Chicago, its writers, and its history. For the first time, Faulkner relies on allusions to Henry Blake Fuller’s The Cliff-Dwellers in order to create signposts that show he is critiquing Chicago’s citizens and writers. He would have been aware of Fuller and his writing. Phil Stone or Sherwood Anderson may have introduced the novels of the popular and social Chicago writer to Faulkner, but he would have certainly taken

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notice when an article by Carl Van Vechten on Henry B. Fuller appeared in The Double Dealer.85 In the June 1922 issue, Van Vechten’s article on Fuller appears alongside a poem by “William Faulkner of Oxford Mississippi” who is “a young Southern Poet of unusual promise.” In Wild Palms, Faulkner repeats Fuller’s extended conceit that describes the skyscrapers of Chicago as “canyons” cut out from the ever increasing “flood of carts, carriages, omnibuses, cabs, cars, messengers, shoppers, clerks, and capitalists, which surges with increasing violence.” The erosion happens because of the irrepressible “torrents” of people, an idea repeated by Theodore Dreiser in Sister Carrie. Both Old Man and Wild Palms describe canyons as a natural and metaphorical feature of both sets of characters’ journeys. Charlotte and Wilbourne live temporarily in a mining town and occupy a canyon that “was not wide, it was a ditch, a gutter” across from where “a half a dozen houses made mostly of sheet iron and window-deep in drifts, clung.”86 The small metal shacks clinging to the edge of the canyon are a modern incarnation of the cliff dweller houses made into a metaphor by Fuller for Chicago’s skyscrapers. The allusion indicates that the characters continue to be influenced by Chicago even while not physically in it and that its reach extends beyond its physical boundaries. In 1975, Thomas L. McHanney showed the importance of reading the novel through its blatant allusions to the writers Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway. He demonstrates how the novel could be read without this understanding, but argues that Faulkner uses the novel to separate himself from both writers. Faulkner rewrites part of Dark Laughter and A Farewell to Arms in Wild Palms and even plays with Hemingway’s name, “Hemingwaves,” at one point. The novel ends with an abortion, described as “letting air out,” just as Hemingway describes an abortion in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”87 Joseph Fruscione has shown this rewriting to be yet another example of the long rivalry that existed between Hemingway and Faulkner.88 However, the allusions to Chicago writers and the art scene go far beyond these writers whose connections to Faulkner have been well-studied. By doing so, Faulkner continues his more specific project of naming and mocking Chicago’s tendencies to render art as a product to be exchanged for money or respectability. Wilbourne points out: “It’s not avocations that erects our vocations, it’s respectability that makes chiropractors, and clerks, and bill posters and motormen of all of us.”89 The novel ties together Wild Palms and

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Old Man through the idea of exchange conveyed through oblique and dark references to how Chicago and Mississippi are tied together historically, and suggests that this connection needs to be completely broken for modern and Southern art to flourish. The entire novel moves stylistically between Faulkner’s actual “home” in the South and literary “home” in Chicago. The novel can therefore be read as moving a step beyond the double-edged criticism of Chicago writers in the Mosquitoes and the demonstration of how the South takes in images and ideas from Chicago in Sanctuary to a discussion of the interplay between the two places. In doing so, Faulkner mimics the form of Cather’s The Song of the Lark (1915), which he admired.90 The first three sections of the novel show her heroine Thea moving between her home in the plains of Colorado and Chicago for musical training. She returns to Colorado several times by train and each time, the contrast between the two locations and Thea’s relationship to them is heightened. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) also relies heavily on contrasting the Midwestern and Southern homes of the main characters with the types of people and situations found in New York and East Egg. Faulkner relies on the interplay of moments told through memory and description, much as Cather and Fitzgerald do, to develop a sense of the relationship of Mississippi to Chicago. At one point in Old Man, a convict can hear an underground stream that Faulkner describes in language that evokes Chicago’s unique engineering: There was a ditch under the bridge, a small stream, but ditch and stream were both invisible now, indicated only by rows of cypress and bramble which marked its course. Here they both saw and heard movement—the slow profound eastward and upstream (“It’s running backward,” one convict said quietly) set of the still rigid surface, from beneath which came a deep faint subaquean rumble which (though none in the truck could have made the comparison) sounded like a subway train passing far beneath the street and which inferred a terrific and secret speed.91

In 1887, the Illinois General Assembly decided to reverse the flow of the river so that it no longer ran into Lake Michigan, and instead took water from the Lake and dumped it into the Mississippi rivershed. Waste had accumulated in the fresh water drinking supply and the river had become known for its stench, in large part from the industrial and organic waste dumped into the

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river from the slaughterhouses and factories. In order to stop contamination of the drinking supply, work began in 1889 on the Chicago Sanitary District, which would replace the original canals with the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, and was completed in 1900. The Columbian Exhibition featured the engineering feat as it was in process, and it became a symbol of the businessoriented city of marvels Chicago promoted itself as. The convict sees the Mississippi, but comments on it as if it were the Chicago River which is now feeding the Mississippi and sending its waste down river. His thoughts further connect Chicago and Mississippi together because he begins to hear the sound of the State Street subway in the “subaquean rumble.” Here, Faulkner repeats his early ideas about the relationship between Chicago and the South from “The Big Shot” and Sanctuary. Faulkner argues that the South imported the corruption of the North, in particular Chicago, alongside the architecture and models they brought in as well. The convict thinks about the water flowing deliberately and not naturally down from Chicago and the sewage it brings with it as an underground, but noisy, secret. In Old Man, while escaping on a skiff down the Mississippi through a storm, the convict finds himself “abruptly surrounded by a welter of fleeing debris— the planks, small buildings, the bodies of drowned yet antic animals, entire trees leaping and diving.”92 The image of debris fleeing and bodies drowning sets up the ghostly sight that the convict sees as he passes Vicksburg: “Sometime about midnight, accompanied by a rolling cannonade of thunder and lightning like a battery going into action, as though some forty hours’ constipation of the elements, the firmament itself, were discharging in clapping and glaring salute to the ultimate acquiescence to desperate and furious motion, and still leading its charging welter of dead cows and mules and outhouses and cabins and hencoops.”93 The convict had no idea where he was or what he was seeing, and what he sees is the ghostly image of the battle of Vicksburg, the final military action in General Sherman’s Vicksburg campaign of the Civil War that lasted from May 18, 1863 to July 4, 1863. The convict’s cry a chapter later— “All in the world I want is just to surrender”—as he tries not to drown while being captured and shot at, needs to be heard as yet another echo of Sherman’s capture of Vicksburg.94 The ghostly image at Vicksburg also recalls the Vicksburg Prisoner Exchange, especially because after he is caught, the convict will be exchanged

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and will wind up back in prison at the end of the novel. The Prisoner Exchange made at Vicksburg in 1862 consisted mainly of confederate soldiers housed at Camp Douglas in Chicago. Camp Douglas, located in Bronzeville on Chicago’s far Southside, was first used for training exercises in 1861 and switched over by the next year to become the largest Union prison-of-war camp, known as the “North’s Andersonville.” It was located right next to the lake and the winter conditions for barely clothed and underfed southerners were brutal. Because of its location directly to the north of Mississippi and because of its size, confederate soldiers from Mississippi who were taken prisoner in battles and skirmishes were very likely to be housed at Camp Douglas. At least four thousand soldiers who died in the camp were buried in Potter’s Field in the city cemetery located at what was then outside the boundaries of Chicago. When the war ended, Camp Douglas was destroyed and a very successful campaign of silence began in order to rid the city of the stain of the terrible war prison. The cemetery was evacuated from 1868 to 1880, because of rising concerns about the dangers of the miasmic and unhygienic conditions and the frequent flooding from the lake that would cause bodies to float to the surface in the mud.95 When the convict is overtaken by floodwaters and mud, he is metaphorically one of the southern war convicts whose body floated up in Potter’s Field. Faulkner suggests with this image that the link between Chicago and Mississippi is deep, secret, and violent. Potter’s Field was known as part of Cemetery Park until at least 1865. After the fire of 1871, the Chicago Club saw the potential in preserving the lakefront as a part of the ongoing project of raising the status of Chicago. The rubble from the fire was used as fill to build up the area and begin to engineer paths and recreational areas. When Bertha Palmer built her “Castle” uptown, Lake Shore Drive was extended and as the park was beautified, the area just south of the park became the most exclusive area in Chicago. In Sister Carrie, George Hurstwood lives south of the park and their trip through Lincoln Park in the carriage would have been right over the old confederate graveyard. In Wild Palms, Wilbourne, too, sits all day in this section of Lincoln Park, further tying the two novels together and the two sections of the novel together simultaneously. When Hemingway lived in Chicago, he lived two blocks from the old confederate cemetery and Anderson lived between four and five blocks away. Both would have known the area extremely well and Anderson, having

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participated in the artists’ colony on the south side, would have gone by the destroyed Camp Douglas. Neither, like the majority of Chicago’s citizens then or now, would have known much if anything about the confederate cemetery or Camp Douglas. Faulkner’s novel shows that the marks and connections between the South and Chicago are still there, even when those in the present are completely unaware of them. Charlotte participates in a domestic prisoner exchange between Wilbourne and her husband, replicating the imagery that the prisoner sees while floating past Vicksburg. When she runs off to Chicago, so she can be an artist and escape domestic imprisonment, she replicates the plight of the actual convict who runs off and escapes. She imitates Sherwood Anderson and just like Anderson, once in Chicago, her artistic talent becomes a simple commodity easily exchanged for money. The connection to the convict suggests that her artistic talent is her self and that just as a convict is exchanged, so too does she exchange her very self for money. Here, Faulkner can be seen borrowing from Dreiser in that Carrie, too, works at a department store and then runs off with men who promise to save her to get her out of that life. Faulkner may be suggesting that Anderson, like the Chicago realists, has traded his art for comfort and, in doing so, has commodified his art and himself. Charlotte builds objects for display in a department store window and works in the “puppet business.”96 The phrase “puppet business” recalls Faulkner’s sneer in his early criticism, where he named Chicago writers as acting as puppets producing propaganda for the businessmen of the city to use to increase their wealth. He jabs once again at Anderson here, but also indicates that no artist can survive in Chicago without selling their artistic talents for money. The reference to puppetry also recalls Sanctuary where Temple Drake is frequently referred to using metaphors of puppets. She is “match-thin.”97 Her eyes are described as “open but unseeing” and “calm and empty as two holes” on her face that resembles a mask, just like Popeye’s.98 She appears a mechanical puppet and barely human. Her head “turned on to an excruciating degree, though no other muscle moved, like one of those papier-mâché Easter toys filled with candy.”99 Popeye, too, is described in terms that more describe a mechanical puppet than a human. His eyes are described as “two knobs of soft rubber.”100 Temple feels herself being moved by him, his “small arms light and rigid as aluminum.”101 Both characters have built themselves after

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Chicago characters, the gangster and the fast girl, who have been imported to the South. Consequently, both Temple and Popeye become Chicago’s puppets whose presence simply evokes the presence and power of that city. Charlotte and Wilbourne, too, have become part of this puppet business of Chicago. Faulkner was aware of the Little Theater movement, the actual “puppet business,” that originated in Chicago when he was in Oxford. In Fall of 1920, Ben Watson and Lucy Somerville created a drama group and asked Faulkner to join. He was currently at work on a play, The Marionettes, which became the name of the group as well as the first play they performed. The members all read Helen Haiman Joseph’s A Book of Marionettes, which provides a comprehensive history of the form.102 The book had just been published that year and it provides a thorough history of the Chicago Little Theater, which had just recently closed. Joseph raves about Maurice Browne’s and Ellen Van Volkenburg’s creations and describes their tremendous influence on spawning the Little Theater movement all through the United States.103 Faulkner would have been highly aware that his small theater group in Oxford was an offshoot of the Chicago Little Theater movement, and his ideas about experimental forms most likely came from plays and ideas written about and performed by The Chicago Little Theater. The Little Theater’s rejection of the form and content of commercialized theater, while allowing that some of those elements may be interesting or useful while creating a new, modern art, mirrors the same questions that Faulkner continually asked in his writing. Their fusion of the realistic and nonrealistic and, most important, their emphasis on innovative structures and forms clearly influenced Faulkner’s experiments in form. Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap were equally impressed with what the theater could accomplish in a short period and their attitudes toward the new and commercial. They named The Little Review after The Chicago Little Theater, and Faulkner read both the journal and Joseph’s chapter simultaneously.104 The trick, then, is to play with puppets, ideas, and realistic forms, but not join the Chicago “business” of art and become a puppet oneself. Faulkner declared that the juxtaposition of two stories was necessary to his ideas conveyed in the novel, an experimental device that W. T. Jewkes first identified as a kind of literary counterpoint.105 The counterpoint in the novel shows the historical dynamic between Chicago and Mississippi beyond that felt by Faulkner as an established writer. Old Man, like the earlier novels

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Absalom, Absalom! and Light in August, assumes that the reader has a broad understanding of US history in order to make its deepest points about the connections of the past to the present and the ways in which the present is still imbued with the past. Old Man also assumes that the reader can spot references to Chicago history in order to make clear the idea that Mississippi is deeply connected to Chicago as well its reverse. Just as Absalom, Absalom! shows the deep connections between Mississippi, New Orleans, and Haiti, Old Man and Wild Palms will draw out the history between Chicago and Mississippi, revealing that Faulkner, too, was inextricably connected to that city despite never having been there.

7

F. Scott Fitzgerald and Chicago

Matthew J. Bruccoli declared: “The dominant influences on F. Scott Fitzgerald were aspiration, literature, Princeton, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, and alcohol.”1 He left out Chicago and Chicagoans, perhaps Fitzgerald’s largest influence and the least considered by the reams of scholarship written about his life and writing. Chicago hums along in the background of many of his short stories and novels. Characters move through it in “The Four Fists,” (1920) and “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (1922). In “The Cut-Glass Bowl” (1920), Chicago appears as a destination to which Mrs. Ahearn’s husband might just up and move the family. In The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), Gloria and Anthony Patch pass through Chicago on their honeymoon, and Anthony’s cautiousness manifests as a warning to a too-fast taxi driver there. The Great Gatsby’s (1925) Nick Caraway travels back and forth to the East by train, meeting friends at his stop in Chicago and changing trains there. The repetition may be read as a merely realistic detail that shows Chicago as the main train hub to the Midwest, but the near constant repetition of the place name reveals that Chicago has a particular importance in Fitzgerald’s work and life as the place that everyone eventually has to pass through, physically, psychically, or metaphorically. Most of the significant characters and many of the minor ones in his work either come from Chicago directly or descend from Chicagoans. In This Side of Paradise (1920), Amory Blaine’s father “grew wealthy at thirty through the death of two elder brothers, successful Chicago brokers.”2 Fitzgerald identifies the story behind “The Lees of Happiness” (1922) as first belonging to the Chicago Tribune,3 and the story takes place “half an hour from Chicago.”4 In “The Camel’s Back” (1922), “Mrs. Howard Tate was a Chicago Todd before she became a Toledo Tate.”5 “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” makes mention of a “Chicago Beef Princess.”6 In The Great Gatsby, Tom Buchanan is from

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Chicago, and he “brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest.”7 In the Josephine stories, Josephine Perry lives in Chicago, having been raised there as well (1928). In Tender Is the Night (1934), Nicole Diver’s grandmother was brought up in Chicago and her parents built a house in Lake Forest, where she has spent a great deal of her life. Dr. Dohmler, too, has a connection to Chicago. He decided against going to school in Chicago because he “had read about Chicago in those days, about the great feudal families of Armour, Palmer, Field, Crane, Warren, Swift, and McCormick and many others, and since that time not a few patients had come to him from that stratum of Chicago and New York.”8 Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels refer repetitively to Chicago and when a reader notices the ongoing reference, it begins to seem like a writerly habit or tic waiting to be worked out in psychoanalysis. Fitzgerald scholars and biographers accept that “Everything F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote was a form of autobiography. His fiction is transmuted autobiography.”9 He knew the grandchildren and heirs of two important Chicago families personally: Gordon McCormick with whom he became friends at Princeton and Ginevra King, with whom he had a fast, but significant, romance. He also knew of the Medills and Pattersons, the families that ran the Tribune, lived in Lake Forest, and who had intermarried with the McCormicks. Fitzgerald shows in his work that the type of person who had this kind of wealth was interested in his own self-importance whether preaching a Midwestern moral code based on nineteenth-century Presbyterian ideas of thrift and selfcontrol or creating philanthropically minded societies and institutions with their name prominently displayed to advertise their businesses. They were, for Fitzgerald, at heart hypocritical and corrupt because despite preaching restraint and upward lift to the poor and their workers, these men increased their fortunes through violent union breaking, war profiteering, and land grabbing. His work attempts to delineate the ways in which the corrupt ideologies of the grandparents have been transmitted to their callous grandchildren, solidifying what Fitzgerald saw as the Chicago type. The first three sections of this chapter will trace the histories of these families and Fitzgerald’s relationship to them in order to establish from whom Fitzgerald drew his ideas about Chicago men and women when writing about them in his fiction. These Chicago families represent a specific kind of wealth built by grandparents who built their businesses in the mid- to late nineteenthcentury period of wildly unregulated capitalism. Fitzgerald is most interested

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in those Chicagoans who live, work, and vacation together in a closed and clannish society of the extremely rich. His work uses these types, mash-ups of real people he met briefly or knew deeply throughout his life in order to show the ways in which his fictional drawing of a type is more realistic than Hemingway’s or Cather’s careful renderings of real individuals in fictional guise. Fitzgerald’s fiction presents the complexities of the social milieu as drawn from naturalistic types coming together. Fitzgerald’s work argues that the habits, fashions, and ideologies of the very rich Chicago families have had a destructive impact on Americans, because their ideologies became the ideologies of the intellectual elite and the middle to lower classes who imitate them. The chapter’s final section shows that many of Fitzgerald’s novels are about Chicago and that they use the metaphor of marriage, as begun at the Columbian Exhibition, to work out the relationships between money, love, art, and business.

Ginevra King: True to type F. Scott Fitzgerald met sixteen-year-old Ginevra King on January 4, 1915, at a sledding party. He was home in St. Paul for winter break from Princeton, and she was visiting her friend and roommate, Marie Hersey. She noted the meeting in her diary and the next day wrote “Am absolutely gone on Scott.”10 When Fitzgerald met Ginevra King, he was not meeting just another rich soon-to-be debutante, nor was he meeting just a wealthy middle-Western girl as she has been described in Fitzgerald scholarship. He was meeting the heir to one of the largest and most elite American fortunes and meeting the granddaughter and daughter of men who made Chicago and ran Chicago, the industrial center of America. Ginevra was the daughter and granddaughter of two wealthy Chicago families: the Kings and the Fullers. Her paternal grandfather, Charles Bohan King was in the “wholesale grocery firm of Barrett, King & Co., 1864–1865, then jobber in hats, caps and furs as member of firm of King, Carhart & Co., 1865–1867, and of King Brothers 1867–1891. He had been the President and director of Commercial Safe Deposit Co. since 1855.”11 He was in business with his brother, Henry W. King, also a clothing manufacturer. In 1868, they and W. C. Browning and other associates organized the wholesale clothing house of Henry W. King & Company. After the Great Fire, the company moved to

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the wholesale clothing district around Market and Franklin streets. Henry W. King became president of Browning, King & Company, the largest wholesale clothing firm in the United States. He was also prominent in charitable work and was president of the Chicago Relief and Aid Society during the period of the Great Fire.12 He was a member of the Commercial Club of Chicago, organized in 1877, and was president in 1895. An elite group of successful Chicago businessmen, the Commercial Club promoted the economic development of the city. The club’s most active members—men like George Pullman, Marshall Field, Cyrus McCormick, George Armour, and Frederic Delano—were the same men who forged Chicago into a leading industrial and commercial center and sponsored the Fair.13 The club’s privately printed book names the members as: “The type of men whose genius has placed the United States among the great commercial powers of the world.”14 Henry W. King was also a prestigious member of the Chicago Club. Though his name is not listed as a member in the back of Edward Tyler Blair’s 1898 History of the Chicago Club, he appears in its pages lunching with one of its original one hundred members at the best table in the club: “Henry W. King and T. B. Blackstone seldom missed a noonday meal at the round table. Mr. King was a great reader and thinker for a business man, a man of many interests, uncompromising in his denunciation of all that was wrong in the community and a power for the right.”15 Ginevra’s stockbroker father, Charles Garfield King, expanded the family fortunes on both sides of the family: the King money, as well as the maternal Fuller money also made quickly during the Chicago boom years of the Civil War. Charles King established the brokerage firm King, Farnum & Co., with seats on exchanges in both Chicago and New York and he belonged to the prestigious men’s clubs of each. Ginevra’s father joined his uncle as a Chicago club member in 1897.16 She was born on November 30, 1898. There’s no way to know how much of Ginevra’s background Fitzgerald knew about, but he would have understood that she descended from the kind of men who created Chicago and how vast that made her fortune. Her friend Marie Hersey or Fitzgerald’s friend at Princeton, Gordon McCormick, most likely told him who she was, from where she came, and what it all meant. After the first meeting, Scott and Ginevra began a furious letter writing exchange, which should be seen as part of the larger fad of writing extensive letters to

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members of the opposite sex while at school. A girl’s popularity could be seen by the number of letters she received from boys, and neither Scott nor Ginevra had any delusions they were each other’s sole correspondent. Although they wrote to each other frequently, they only saw each other three times during this period. Scott visited her at Westover on February 20, 1915, where they were heavily chaperoned and watched behind glass, according to Ginevra.17 That spring, Scott invited her to the sophomore prom at Princeton, but her mother refused to let the sixteen-year-old girl go halfway across the country unchaperoned to a university dance. Ginevra’s letters bemoan the unfairness of the situation and the unreasonableness of Mrs. King.18 Scott and Ginevra managed to meet at the Ritz in New York on June 7, 1915. Two decades later, in 1935, Fitzgerald wrote in My Lost City, of the meeting: “Moreover she to whom I fatuously referred as ‘My Girl’; was a Middle Westerner, a fact that kept the warm center of the world out there, so I thought of New York as essentially cynical and heartless—save for one night when She made luminous the Ritz Roof of a brief passage through.”19 His next sentence reveals where they were in the ebb and flow of their romance: “Lately, however, I had definitely lost her and I wanted a man’s world.”20 Later that June, on the way to Montana, he visited her at her family’s new estate in Lake Forest, Illinois, where he met her parents, friends, and others in the King’s social circle. The essay’s title refers to how Fitzgerald feels lost and nostalgic about New York, but it could just as easily be a reference to Chicago, since the middle section remembers this last meeting with Ginevra. Fitzgerald’s final letter to Ginevra was his dry acknowledgment of her wedding to Billy Mitchell sent on July 21, 1918.21 Ginevra and Scott met one last time in 1938. She recalls in a letter to Dan Piper on May 12, 1947: “One of my greatest friends, Josephine Ordway, who is now dead, had kept in touch with Scott and Zelda during the years and told me of their wild nomadic life, and it was through her that he found out that I was in California in 1938.” They had lunch together and afterward went to a bar. She was “heartsick” as he had been “behaving himself.” He had a series of “double Tom Collins’” and fell off the wagon he’d been on for several months.22 King asked Fitzgerald to destroy the letters she sent to him when they stopped writing in 1917 and it’s presumed that he destroyed the originals, but only after he made a typed transcript of the letters.23 Ten years after Fitzgerald died in 1940, his daughter,

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Scottie, returned them to Ginevra.24 When Ginevra died in 1980 at 82, her family kept the letters, and in 2003, her daughter and granddaughters donated the entire binder, along with Ginevra’s diary and an unpublished short story written by her, to Princeton, where Fitzgerald’s extensive papers are archived. Her first letter to Scott is dated January 15, 1915, and the last from July 1917. They total 227 pages, and most likely he wrote at least that many back to her. James L. W. West III considers King to be Fitzgerald’s “Ur-Woman,” and his two earliest biographers, Arthur Mizener and Andrew Turnball, claim that Fitzgerald “remained devoted to Ginevra as long as she would allow him to.”25 However, the quantity and intactness of the letters and their proximity to Ginevra’s diary make it seem that Ginevra was extremely important to Fitzgerald. Nowhere else in Fitzgerald’s collection at Princeton are there such perfectly bound, typed, and dated letters, and this poses a large danger for Fitzgerald scholarship: their physical presence overstates the relationship he had with Ginevra and overshadows other relationships that are less welldocumented. The overwhelming physical presence of the letters makes Ginevra seem like the other well-documented woman in Scott’s life: Zelda. The archive makes the false comparison seem inevitable, and so scholarship and popular culture have only presented two possibilities for understanding Ginevra within the context of Fitzgerald’s life; either ignore her completely because doing otherwise disrupts the legend of Zelda’s importance in Fitzgerald’s life or place her on the pedestal next to Zelda as either Fitzgerald’s first muse or an additional muse, a kind of muse sister-wife to Zelda. Ashley Lawson has explained that Zelda Sayre has been represented “as a symbolic being … as the quintessential muse, artist’s wife, and, eventually, doomed woman—a brilliant but mercurial talent whose public persona subsumed the identity she herself attempted to create and control.”26 Ginevra, too, has become subsumed into this role, a real person who is read as a “symbolic being,” in Fitzgerald’s life. Christine Buci-Glucksmann has argued that the female body begins to “over represent” at the exact historical moment that men begin to have anxiety over late nineteenth-century shifts in the meaning of masculinity. Modern urbanization and new technologies of machine labor, as well as new kinds of femininity, gave rise to representational art that over glorifies the female body as never before.27 Mary Ann Doane names this a “compensatory gesture,” as the female body “is instantly allegorized and mythified as excess in art,

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literature, and philosophy.” The excessive figure is the femme fatale. Doane argues: “Indeed if the femme fatale over represents the body it is because she is attributed with a body which is itself given agency independent of consciousness. In a sense, she has power despite herself.”28 On January 29, 1915, Ginevra chastises Scott for calling her a vampire: “Mon Dieu but I’m glad—I’m very glad to hear that you have decided I didn’t kiss Reuben—and now I want you to apologize for calling me a vampire—Tres rude I should say—and please apologize in your next– !”29 Scholars have made Ginevra King, like Zelda before her, into a vampiric femme fatale, but in her case, it’s a misreading of archival material. The sheer volume of her letters makes her seem excessive and her language, as a sixteen-year-old girl, appears unformed and emotional. Fitzgerald’s biographers, Mizener, Dan Piper, Andrew Turnball, and West, have drawn her as a symbolic being. The body of her letters begins to over represent who she really is and who she was to Scott, making her into the femme fatale of the archive, preserved by a broken Fitzgerald for all of eternity and a singular source for all of the new women and femme fatales he wrote. Mythologizing Ginevra prevents her from being understood within the context of Chicago and Lake Forest and the families with whom she interacted. It also has prevented any possible understanding of Fitzgerald’s relationship to Chicago and the ways in which he understood the Chicago type that populated his life and his work. Ginevra understood that she was part of an elite group and she wanted Fitzgerald to understand as well. She provides this information immediately, by name-dropping Gordon McCormick in her first letter to Scott. She writes: “I can’t imagine what possessed Gordon McCormick to write me, as I didn’t know the gentleman even knew what I looked like.” She follows with a great idea: “Listen: why don’t you ask Gordon McCormick to let you visit him in Lake Forest next summer. I think that would be ‘simply swell.’”30 In subsequent letters, Ginevra reveals that she understands that Scott sees her through an unflattering lens he places over her and all the Chicagoans she knows. She writes on March 25, 1915: Isn’t it funny, when I got your letter, I was talking on the telephone and so I said “Wait a minute, I’ll open this letter, so I can read while you’re talking.” And then the first words on the page were “Even now you may be having a tete-a-tete with an ‘unknown Chicagoan’ with crisp dark hair and a glittering

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smile.” Well you’d appreciate the coincidence. You should see Deering. He’s the darkest thing I ever set eyes on and has a glittering smile. I read him that passage of the letter, as it was so appropriate.31

The idea of the “unknown Chicagoan,” from someone outside of Chicago, amuses her and at the same time reveals that Scott sees Chicago men as swarthy and dangerous, particularly to her. While he may mean it as a joke, which is how she takes it, the passage is still offensive, and she tells Scott about the other man in order to make him jealous and convey her displeasure with the joke. She calls herself a “Chicago girl” on April 26, 1915, and reveals her pride in being from the Midwestern city.32 She tells Scott outright on May 9, 1915, “I am awfully glad to say that you do not understand my real character, as you profess to, for I would not have you know for the whole world the feelings which I have held for you since January 5th.”33 She fights against the idea that Scott “knows” her in any personal way, but she may have been playing with him, and Ginevra acknowledged this possibility as an adult in a much later letter to Arthur Mizener she wrote in 1947: “My memory of those years (1914–1916), is poor due somewhat to the fact at this time I was definitely out for quantity not quality in beaux, and, although Scott was top man, I still wasn’t serious enough not to want plenty of other attention!”34 Her letter dated five days later replies to what must have been a scathing response from Scott. She writes: “Why, it said, practically, ‘I’m sick and tired of you. You have no character I idealized you at first, perhaps, but soon found out what a big mistake I made etc. etc. –!’” She continues to resist Scott’s transformation of her into an idea: “My Heavens! It wasn’t my fault that I was idealized! Goodness only knows I don’t deserve it, and that it was too absurd to last long, but there’s nothing I’d rather do than to really know you well, which considering that I have seen you only thirteen hours in all, seems sort of hard.”35 Six months later, on January 31, 1916, she is still complaining that he only sees her as a type of girl and that he won’t get to know her as an individual. She declares: “The worst of it is, that you don’t want to know me, and I do want to know you, ‘cause it’s no use having me on a pedestal if I have no business being there!”36 Scott had been telling tales about her type, though, and after seeing a show in Chicago put on by the theater troupe at Princeton, she went to lunch with

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the group who knew Scott. She writes to him immediately on January 17: “Sam Cooper said that he imagined me a peroxide blond, of the chorus-girl type— My Lord, Scott, what had you been telling him?”37 A month later she “disput[es] one of your phrases ‘The modern girl has little intellect and no education–!!’”38 She gets increasingly annoyed with his reduction of her and on August 21, 1916, she writes to him: “By the way, you said I was ‘true to type.’ For heaven sakes, what kind of type am I—It must be some type–! I’m sorry that you feel I am not natural, because I hate a person that is always acting—They seem so dull and artificial and almost always conceited.”39 She gets the idea about what Fitzgerald thinks of her and perhaps this is one reason the letters begin to drop off. Ginevra’s letters can be read as an introduction to those traits that Fitzgerald would continue to draw into his case study of a Chicago woman: brashness, masculine drive, a lack of solid intellect, and frivolity.

The Medills and the McCormicks: “The Camel’s Back” “The Camel’s Back” tells the story of Perry Parkhurst’s final wooing of the wealthy and beautiful heiress Betty Medill: She would take well in the movies. Her father gives her three hundred a month to dress on, and she has tawny eyes and hair and feather fans of five colors. I shall also introduce her father, Cyrus Medill. Though he is to all appearances flesh and blood, he is, strange to say, commonly known in Toledo as the Aluminum Man.40

Their family name, Medill, is the name of the long line of Medills who first bought and ran the Chicago Tribune. Joseph Medill and Edwin Cowles started the Leader in Cleveland, Ohio, and in 1854, Medill was asked to be the Chicago Tribune’s managing editor. The following year, he bought the Tribune and became a partner. Medill raised the paper to become one of the largest papers in Chicago and a national presence. He supported the Union cause during the Civil War and, leaving the paper’s operations for politics, became mayor of Chicago as a member of the “Fireproof Party” in 1871. The use of the Medill name indicates that these characters should be read as being tied up in the business of the Tribune, and with that the reviewing of books and creating of a national literature. Because the story is an early one, it expresses young

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Fitzgerald’s understanding of the book trade and Chicago, an idea he will return to in his later work. Medill had three daughters, all born in the 1870s: Katherine, Eleanor, and Josephine. His daughter Katherine married Robert Sanderson McCormick, son of William Sanderson McCormick and nephew of Cyrus McCormick. The McCormicks developed the mechanical reapers their father had first created on their farm, Walnut Grove, in Virginia. After moving to Chicago because of financial issues with the farm, the McCormick brothers began the family business of producing mechanical reapers, which grew into the enormously successful and profitable International Harvest Company. The marriage bonded together one of the most commercially successful families in Chicago with a very powerful publishing and political family. Fitzgerald’s Betty Medill’s father’s name, Cyrus Medill, also combines these two families. He represents the power of both the Chicago Tribune and the Cyrus McCormicks. Cyrus McCormick Jr., cousin of William Sanderson McCormick, was president of the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company from 1884 to 1902 and president of the merged International Harvesting Machine Company from 1884 to 1902. He was a member of the Commercial Club of Chicago and the Chicago Club. He had three children, Cyrus Hall McCormick III, Elizabeth McCormick who died in infancy in 1892, and Gordon McCormick who was born in 1894. Fitzgerald most likely named Betty Medill after Elizabeth McCormick, Fitzgerald’s friend Gordon’s younger sister.41 He knew Gordon McCormick at Princeton, a point acknowledged by Andrew Turnbull long after the chronicling of Fitzgerald’s Princeton days in his biography of Fitzgerald. Turnbull writes: “Running into a college classmate, Gordon McCormick, Fitzgerald said, ‘I’m trying a great experiment—I’m trying to break into Hollywood.’”42 Ginevra King’s letters suggest more of a relationship than just “a college classmate,” and she teases Scott about Gordon on January 15, 1915.43 Betty Medill and her father Cyrus’s names indicate that “The Camel’s Back” should be read as yet another Lake Forest story about the type of Chicagoans represented by the Medills, the Kings, and the McCormicks, who were all residents of Lake Forest and all members of Lake Forest’s Onwentsia Club, expanded from a six-hole golf club by Leander McCormick’s donation of farmland in 1894. The first paragraph of the story sets up the idea of a type

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in describing Perry Parkhurst: “You have met him before—in Cleveland, Portland, St. Paul, Indianapolis, Kansas City and so forth.”44 The story can be read on one level as another rewriting of Fitzgerald’s relationship with Ginevra: “This Medill girl would marry him and she wouldn’t marry him. She was having such a good time that she hated to take such a definite step. Meanwhile, their secret engagement had got so long that it seemed as if any day it might break off of its own weight.”45 On another level, the story articulates the hypocrisy and inherent difficulties in dealing with the Lake Forest people. The camel costume plays out the tension between the younger generation and the morality of the earlier generations who made their money before and after the Civil War in Chicago. Cyrus McCormick was a devout Presbyterian and valued the Calvinist traits of self-denial, morality, thriftiness, and sobriety. He saw his invention of the reaper as part of a larger religious mission, to feed the hungry and the world. He took his mission seriously, becoming a principal benefactor of the Theological Seminary of the Midwest and in 1869 donating $10,000 to Dwight L. Moody to start the Young Men’s Christian Association, alongside Hemingway’s grandfather. His son Cyrus Jr. became its first president.46 For the McCormicks, business and religion were intricately connected and business served to elevate the perceived needy to a higher religious plane. McCormick believed in prohibition. The August 1908 issue of The Western Brewer: And Journal of the Barley, Malt, and Hop Trades contains the platform of the Prohibition Party “merely as a matter of news” and the small mention that the Detroit Free Press of July 4 “published an article in which the statement is made that Mr. John D. Rockefeller, through his daughter, Mrs. McCormick of Chicago, contributes $350,000 to the work of the Anti-Saloon League.”47 It is easy to imagine that the family Rockefeller’s daughter married into persuaded her interest in sobriety and the importance of appearing to link morality and business. Mrs. Rockefeller-McCormick married Cyrus McCormick’s son in 1895. She built Villa Turicum, designed by Charles A. Platt, in Lake Forest and helped build up Lake Forest with this elaborate house and its extensive gardens. The elaborate house, sitting on the edge of Lake Michigan, was finished in 1912. Fitzgerald would have certainly seen it as one of the sights of Lake Forest during his visit in 1915, although the house stayed mostly unused until the owner’s

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divorce in 1921. The house stood as a symbol of the uniting of the two powerful families and to Edith Rockefeller’s extravagance.48 A terrible story circulated about her that during a dinner party in 1901, news arrived that Edith and Harold’s elder son, John Rockefeller McCormick, had died of scarlet fever. It was rumored that when this was whispered to her at the dinner table, she proceeded to merely nod her head and allowed the party to continue without incident. The story may have provided the seed for one of the misfortunes during “The CutGlass Bowl,” in that the little girl grows increasingly sick during a dinner party held right outside of Chicago. Edith Rockefeller was also very interested in Carl Jung and James Joyce, two writers Fitzgerald adored.49 The elaborate house, at 595–655 Circle Lane, would have loomed large in Fitzgerald’s mind as it was even larger and more imposing than the one the King’s built. Percy crashes two parties that night looking for Betty Medill. One at the Tates who are connected to Chicago directly: Mrs. Howard Tate was a Chicago Todd before she became a Toledo Tate, and the family generally affect that conscious simplicity which has begun to be the earmark of American aristocracy. The Tates have reached the stage where they talk about pigs and farms and look at you icy-eyed if you are not amused.50

The other party was down the road at the Tallyho Club. The men “traversed on foot the single block between the Tate house and the Tallyho Club.”51 That section of Lake Forest at the time did not have straight blocks as the more Western part of Lake Forest did, and so the one block would have been a winding road connecting the houses by the lake to the Onwentsia Club where the large costume ball takes place. Percy wears a camel costume for the ball because it was the only one left at the costume store and he bursts into both parties wearing it. He manages to wear the outfit that would have given the largest affront to the older generation, especially Cyrus McCormick, who prided themselves on their sobriety. Thomas Nast, cartoonist for Harper’s Weekly for the last quarter of the nineteenth century, gave the current symbols of an elephant for the Republican party and a donkey for the Democratic Party. At the same time, he chose the camel to represent the Prohibition Party because, like Prohibitionists generally, camels don’t drink very often, and, when they do drink, they drink only water. The camel is the only outfit left because presumably the morals of the town have

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changed so abruptly that none of the partygoers want to be a camel.52 Percy is stuck with the outfit, wearing the symbol of moral affront to liquor, while on a drinking binge that only gets worse over the course of the evening. Percy’s costume mocks the values that the town and its wealthy patrons cling to, while producing a younger generation that spends lavish amounts of money on excessive and vulgar parties. Even more so, Percy’s need to have the driver take up the back end of the camel demonstrates the wealthy classes’ need to have the lower classes follow their example. The story’s end is the first use of what will be an ongoing pattern in Fitzgerald’s stories: the fake marriage or the marriage that should have happened. West, in particular, reads this trope as Fitzgerald’s continued interest in and speculation about his relationship with Ginevra. The most prominent use of this story is in The Great Gatsby where Gatsby has created a life to lure back Daisy, his first and only love. However, “The Camel’s Back” introduces the Medill girl into the mix and so all women in the formulaic story represent, on some level, an entry into the prominent Tribune family. He metaphorizes his relationship to the paper and its reviewers and, by doing so, interjects a criticism into the story about the paper’s reviewers who need to be wooed with formulaic stories filled with familiar Chicago types. When Fitzgerald writes about a marriage that should have happened, he seems to be thinking about where he could be if he had a wealthy patron of the arts to support him and buy him sure success in the pages of the Tribune.

Eleanor “Cissy” and Joseph Patterson: “May Day” Eleanor “Cissy” Medill Patterson’s grandfather Joseph Medill was the editorin-chief and chief owner of the Chicago Tribune. During his two-year term and with the power he gained as mayor, he created Chicago’s first public library, enforced blue laws, and reformed the police and fire departments. Cissy Patterson, born in 1881, may have been the Medill who Fitzgerald was thinking about while writing “The Camel’s Back,” as well as informing the other depictions of rich heiresses who populate his novels. Cissy Patterson’s father’s family settled Lake Forest and Ginevra King would have known them well. Her grandfather moved his family north after the fire

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to relocate near the grounds of what he and a small group of Presbyterian men hoped to build: “an institution of learning of a high order in which Christian teaching would hold a central place.”53 They founded Lake Forest, Lake Forest College, and Lake Forest Academy. He, like Cyrus McCormick, was a fervent abolitionist and believed in his spiritual mission to reform the world. His son, Robert Patterson, got to know the Medill family from working on the Tribune as a young journalist. By 1876, he was romantically involved with Nellie Medill, the beautiful and wild daughter whose love of luxury and spending was already legendary in Chicago. Despite parental and familial objections, they married on January 18, 1878, at the Medill residence at 10 Park Row in Chicago.54 Her sister Kate had already married Robert Sanderson McCormick in June 1876 to her father’s objections because he despised the politics of the McCormick family and had used his Tribune to rail against the McCormick family’s war profiteering.55 The sisters were deeply competitive with each other, a relationship that continued through their lives. Cissy, like Harriet Monroe’s sister, was sent East in Spring of 1896, to Miss Porter’s School for Girls, to get a proper education from a woman who believed women and men should be equally educated. After Joseph Patterson’s death in 1899, Cissy’s mother bought land in Washington, DC, on Dupont circle, where Marshall Field and Bertha and Potter Palmer, all of whom her mother knew well, wintered for the social season.56 Cissy met the most prominent daughters of her mother’s friends during holidays and breaks from school. It is during one of those breaks that she became fast friends with seventeen-yearold Alice Roosevelt with whom she shared a sense of humor, or “detached malevolence, to use Alice’s phrase.”57 Both girls had a “penchant for acting out,” a wicked sense of humor, and a dislike of social conventions. Both adored money, buying new fashions, and being noticed. They had a third friend, the Countess Marguerite Cassini, who kept up with their pranks and “outrageous behavior.”58 The Washington Press quickly dubbed them “The Three Graces” in the society pages. Ginevra King’s self-dubbed debutante group, “The Big Four,” were most likely imitating the older, more infamous, “The Three Graces,” who they would have heard about from their mothers. Fitzgerald would have also been very aware of the imitation because of the sheer number of references to “The Three Graces” he would have read about in newspapers and seen in popular culture.

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At this point, her uncle Robert McCormick and her aunt had become ambassador to Russia after completing a post in Vienna, where Cissy visited. In March of 1904, she visited Russia and the American papers, including the Chicago Tribune, reported at length about the “niece of the U.S. Ambassador.” The Pattersons were nervous because Count Gizycki of Russia had become increasingly interested in Cissy and he had a reputation as a “bad egg.”59 He took Cissy to Paris and showed the city to her, all the while making her family even more nervous that he was a gold digger. They were married in Washington on April 14, 1904, despite her family’s objections. A daughter was born on September 3, 1905, and was named Felicia Leonora. Cissy went with the Count to his home, a huge feudal manor in Russian Poland. Their family life did not go well. They separated and then rejoined several times, but eventually Cissy left. She kidnapped their child, hiding her in a house near London, but the Count pursued her and took the Countess, hiding her in an Austrian convent. On January 28, 1911, Cissy sued the Count in Chicago Circuit Court for a divorce. While waiting for the divorce to go through, she went home to live in Lake Forest.60 The summer Fitzgerald visited Ginevra and Cissy’s cousin, Gordon McCormick, Cissy was away in Newport for a few months. At the time, Fitzgerald would have been aware of the scandal as well as the McCormicks simply from reading the newspapers and being aware of his friend Gordon’s family. Cissy went to Paris in 1924 and stayed at the Ritz, where she worked on her novel Glass Houses and spent time mingling among the artists in Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’s salon, including Hemingway and Hadley, Joyce, and Man Ray. The Fitzgeralds arrived in Paris early 1925, and Scott and Zelda met Cissy for the first time.61 That previous September, Fitzgerald completed the manuscript draft of The Great Gatsby and in November of 1924, he sent the draft to Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s. He made corrections the first two weeks of January 1925, while he was in Rome before moving on to Paris. Glass Houses and The Great Gatsby came out within weeks of each other. Cissy’s novel became an instant best seller, and Fanny Butcher reviewed it well, calling it “A remarkably good first novel” that is told in a “brilliant and charming manner.”62 The next week, the Tribune ran an advertisement for All the Sad Young Men directly to the right of a much larger one endorsed by Butcher: Ford Maddox Ford’s No More Parades.63

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Cissy Patterson is one of the models for Fitzgerald’s beautiful, outrageous women from Chicago and Lake Forest, as is Ginevra King, Betty McCormick, and Edith Rockefeller. Perhaps more so because Ginevra King even modeled herself while young after the older women’s self-involvement and antics, like a teenager imitating a movie star. Patterson’s reputation and bad marriage to a man considered to be violent and a brute can easily be seen as providing some of the basis for Daisy’s marriage to Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. Cissy had numerous suitors while waiting for her divorce in Lake Forest and Washington, DC, including Freddy McLaughlin who had pursued her while she was a debutante. McLaughlin, the heir to a coffee fortune, had recently divorced and, like Cissy, was a strong equestrian and foxhunter.64 He was the best polo player at Onwentsia and in the entire Midwest and had an international reputation for being a six-goal polo player.65 He had never recovered from the romance with Cissy, felt the two were perfectly matched, and couldn’t stand that she had so many other suitors. One night, Cissy and Count Johann Heinrich von Bernstaff were driving home from the night’s activities along a deserted back road in Lake Forest. McLaughlin jumped from his car and attacked von Bernstaff with his riding crop, chasing his rival away from Cissy.66 No one witnessed the attack except those involved and rumors swirled the summer before Fitzgerald visited Ginevra in Lake Forest. The story provides many of the raw elements of The Great Gatsby: the lovestruck suitor from Cissy’s debutante days, the polo player from Lake Forest, the brute with a whip, the beautiful and wild debutante, the dangerous confrontation of two entitled suitors. Fitzgerald recombines some of the story, giving the suitor, Gatsby, the gentle upper hand, and the debutante’s husband the brutish characteristics of the polo player from Lake Forest with a terrible horsewhip. He may have felt some sympathy for McLaughlin after his own experiences with Ginevra King, who married soon after their romance. Patterson published another thinly veiled novel, Fall Flight, based completely on her own life, in 1928. In it, she names her alter ego Daisy, suggesting that she too made the connection between herself and Fitzgerald’s character. Cissy Patterson’s story also provides an additional model for Fitzgerald’s Josephine stories (1928), published serially in the Saturday Evening Post. Her middle name was Josephine. He wrote the stories as he was being pressured to write a sequel to The Great Gatsby, and he returned to the

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Chicago material he drew from for that novel. Josephine runs away from her family, just as Patterson does, and she tries to join the artistic community in Chicago as a patron’s daughter, just as Fitzgerald witnessed Cissy doing in Paris. In “May Day” (1922), Edith Bradin is the beautiful and long lost, rich love, whom Gordon “hadn’t met since that one romantic night at the Harrisburg Country Club just before he went to France.”67 He describes her brother, who he occasionally sees: “He’s sort of a socialistic nut. Runs a paper or something here in New York.”68 Cissy’s brother, Joseph Patterson, worked for the Tribune as a journalist, and after having a political fight with his father who owned the paper, he resigned. He announced publicly that he was now a socialist, wrote an article for Collier’s on socialism, and began writing novels with a strong socialist perspective about social climbing and class differences. He returned to work at the Tribune by 1910 and, after his father died, took over the management of the paper. He had another dispute over how to run the paper, this time with his cousin, Robert R. McCormick. He moved to New York and founded the Daily News as a tabloid in late June, 1919. By 1925, with their dispute still in full swing, Patterson ceded full authority over the Tribune to McCormick in return for full control of the Daily News.69 When Fitzgerald published “May Day” in The Smart Set in 1920, Medill’s novels were very well-known and his first as a declared socialist, A Little Brother of the Rich (1908), was made into a popular play in 1909 and a wellreceived film in 1915. Both best-selling novel and film tell the story of a poor young man, Paul, from a small town, who goes away to college and once there works to befriend the more sophisticated rich boys. The basic outline of the plot resembles those written by Fitzgerald so closely that the influence of Patterson’s popular novel on his work becomes obvious. Paul’s wealthy friends persuade him to leave his hometown fiancé, Sylvia, for a wealthy and married woman, Muriel. Her husband divorces her and Paul and Muriel marry. Sylvia’s father dies, leaving her suddenly penniless, and she takes up acting in a stock theater. Meanwhile, over the years, his wealthy school friends become increasingly unhappy as they pursue their spoiled interests and engage in decadent behaviors. When Paul discovers Muriel’s unfaithfulness, he renews his acquaintance with Sylvia, who still loves him. Muriel dies in a sudden automobile crash and the novel ends with Paul planning to propose marriage

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to Sylvia, after he must save her by giving a sudden performance onstage to help her career.70 The August 29, 1908, Publisher’s Weekly acknowledged the initial anonymous publication of the book by confirming that the book is now “Openly accredited to Joseph Medill Patterson, a well-known millionaire socialist of the West.” They go on to review it favorably: The book is said to give truthful pictures of the life of the idle rich who draw their means from the overworked, underpaid poor. The realism of the book is said to be startling, but perhaps such drastic material is needed to make men pause and think of the consequences of the devotion to money, luxury, and materialism in the present reign of lawlessness.71

Fitzgerald’s friend and early mentor, H. L. Mencken, reviewed the novel in one of his first reviews for The Smart Set, in December of 1908. He remembers giving it a “kind word” in his memoir, after “blasting” Joseph Conrad for his tedious socialism, something he abhorred.72 Mencken’s memory is rather inaccurate and he writes favorably of Patterson’s novel at first: He is trying to tell the story of a dozen worthless men and a dozen worse women, and he does it in straightforward, ingenuous manner, without too great a stretching of probability and without too finicky a restraint. If it be urged that his people are not typical of New York society, it may be answered quite justly that he makes no such claim for them.73

Mencken, then, uses the review to write his first formulaic and extended diatribe against socialist writing and attacks Patterson right along with Conrad. He writes: Mr. Patterson’s purpose, of course, is to demonstrate the demoralizing influence of money. To this thesis two objections may be offered, the first being that it is admitted by all, and so needs no demonstration, and the second being that it is not true. In his ready acceptance of its verity lies the proof of his Socialistic tendencies, for Socialism, when all is said and done, is nothing more than the theory that the slave is always more virtuous than his master. In other words, the Socialists hold that the slave’s yearning to rise is, in some mysterious and recondite way, more pleasing to a just God than the master’s yearning to stay up, and that this superiority in yearning breeds general superiority in all other ways.74

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Mencken’s ideas will be more clearly articulated in his later 1926 Notes on Democracy and result in much later praise of Ayn Rand and a well-articulated dislike of the middle to lower classes. In the review of Patterson and Conrad, he explains why he sees the socialist’s elevation of the lower classes into virtuous creatures as romantic foolishness. Instead, Mencken prefers his art to be realistic, by which he means a reflection of how he sees the world as predetermined and rough. Because A Little Brother of the Rich suggests that societal classes may be fluid and presents the rich as amoral and decadent, he doesn’t see anything good about the point of Patterson’s novel. Mencken roots his aesthetics in his reading of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, where great tragedies are about a man’s inner morals in direct conflict with cultural morals, values, and superstitions. Mencken wants the American novel to be fully developed and for him that means portraying the tragic conflicts created and promulgated by modern society. He disparages any current literature or art, which fails at obtaining this tragic seriousness and instead, in his view, stays trapped in reinscribing the feminine melodramas of the late nineteenth century. Dreiser, for Mencken, was the best at this kind of literature. His coeditor criticized the play based on The Little Brother of the Rich novel as too indulgent and melodramatic. George Jean Nathan writes, it “was heralded as a satire on society.” Then continues, “You know what that means—idle rich, monkey dinners, ‘affairs,’ divorces and all that sort of rot” (146).75 When Mencken reviews Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in 1925, he mocks it as melodrama, in remarkably similar terms: “This clown Fitzgerald rushes to his death in nine short chapters. The other performers in the Totentons are of a like, or even worse, quality.”76 Ronald Berman argues that Fitzgerald’s “May Day,” written and published while Fitzgerald thought very much of Mencken’s writing and ideas, illustrates his rejection of Mencken’s categories of people, and that “personality was too complex to be reduced to formal categories like aristocrats, boobs, and mob.”77 Berman says that Fitzgerald “asserted the values of experience, convinced that individuals learned empirically.”78 “May Day,” Berman shows, is about the writer pulling away from his editor by moving away from fixed types into a more complicated world made up of personalities that shift and change. He states, “The rich in this story are Mencken’s plutocrats. Fitzgerald places them in exemplary situations in which money, class, and style are the evident

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issues. But the difference is everything. When we see the young and rich in this story thinking about themselves, they are more complex, and they carry more weight than either Mencken or The Saturday Evening Post wanted.”79 Fitzgerald’s characters become simply too complex for Mencken who fixes the world in small categories and boxes. “May Day” is Fitzgerald’s first attempt to incorporate the Chicago realism of Dreiser with the more European and modern symbolism that Mencken hated. The story begins with a Dreiseresque overview of the city and declares, “So during all this time there were many adventures that happened in the great city, and of these, several—or perhaps one—are here set down.”80 Peter Himmel even expresses an attempt to work out the “permeating symbolism” of the moment. The stories’ structure, with three interlocking scenes, suggests that the juxtaposition of the stories is the point. The story places the different classes next to each other and tries to make sense of how the everyday interactions of the rich can be so filled with slights, rudeness, and injustices to the lower classes, while they simultaneously claim to want to raise up the lower classes by supporting and funding Chicago’s higher life. The story also reveals that the money to fund these endeavors is made on the broken backs of those who will then be supposedly lifted up by their profits. Fitzgerald shows these fundamental contradictions in Chicagoans, suggesting that these are the traits of the Chicago upper classes, who behave as nowhere else. The story would have been legible to Chicago readers as a reworking of the McCormick/Medill/Patterson family’s past and present. The title is usually read as a reference to the uprising and riot in 1919, Toledo. But, May Day has become the International Day honoring workers because of the May 4 labor protest that came about after several months of protest by workers across Chicago. The title itself suggests that the story may have a far stronger connection to Chicago and to the McCormick family than it first appears. May Day commemorates the Haymarket protests and the later international protests in October 1884 that resulted in a standardized eight-hour workday for workers. The story, then, is on one level a remembrance of the McCormicks’s involvement in the Haymarket Affair, something that is often left out, and surely would have been ignored by Fitzgerald’s generation. The protagonist’s name, Gordon, replicates Fitzgerald’s Princeton friend, Gordon McCormick, who would have been his first introduction to the family. A cursory reading of

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the story as a Chicago story would suggest that Gordon, the artist, must have something to do with the current riots and violence in the story. However, Fitzgerald draws from the original dislike between the Pattersons and the McCormicks to cast his characters. Edith, Gordon’s lost love, visits her brother Henry at his socialist newspaper’s office. The name Edith evokes Edith Rockefeller and her relationship to her brother suggests strongly that they are based on Cissy and Joseph Medill Patterson. The three-part structure of the story reveals Fitzgerald working against the idea of a hierarchical social structure that forms the basis of Chicago realism and heralded by Mencken. The story places the story of Edith Bradin and her brother, based on Cissy and Joseph Patterson, next to the story of “the artist,” Gordon Sterritt, and the blackmailing girl, “Jewel Hudson.” The separation of the brother and sister, and later Philip Dean, from Gordon Sterritt in the narrative serves to highlight the distance between the upper classes and those of the artist classes. However, Gordon, like the main character in A Little Brother of the Rich, went to college with Philip Dean and so is a little brother, a tag-along to the rich who populate the story. Each story intermixes with the other and so the strong separations between the characters and their classes become so lost as to become almost meaningless and unintelligible, just as “The Camel’s Back” ends with the intermixing of social classes through trickery. Hemingway deeply disliked Fitzgerald’s experimental methods of writing a new American modernism based on mixture and possibilities. On May 28, 1934, Ernest Hemingway wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald a letter from his house in Key West in order to give Fitzgerald his opinion of the newly published novel Tender Is the Night. He writes: I liked it and I didn’t like it. It started off with that marvelous description of Sara and Gerald … Then you started fooling with them, making them comes [sic] from other things they didn’t come from, changing them into other people and you can’t do that Scott. If you take real people and write about them you cannot give them other parents than they have (they are made by their parents and what happens to them) you cannot make them do anything they would not do. … Invention is the finest thing but you can not invent anything that would not actually happen.81

Because Hemingway knew Zelda, Pauline, Hadley, Sara, and Gerald, and was in Paris while the five interacted, Hemingway considered himself in a unique

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position to criticize the novel. His specific complaint is about how Fitzgerald combined the backgrounds, characters, and behaviors of the people both writers knew well, to create characters who are mixtures of real people. The result, for Hemingway, is a fake and unreal novel and his shit detector was ringing loudly. Hemingway complains about Fitzgerald’s process: “Goddamn it you took liberties with peoples pasts and futures that produced not people but damned marvelously faked case histories.”82 He goes so far as to call the figures fake and indicates that the novel’s plots could not possibly happen the way Fitzgerald writes them. He tells Fitzgerald that he is “so lousy with talent” and tells him to “write and write truly no matter who or what it hurts but don’t make these silly compromises.”83 The compromises, for Hemingway, are Fitzgerald’s liberties with an honest and truthful realism that exposes the dark corners of modernism. The more Fitzgerald blends pieces of people’s histories together, the more he thinks Fitzgerald moves away from a realistic portrayal of the way people are in 1920s Paris and the more he thinks his writing is just a bad business. For Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s move away from what he sees as realism would be the greatest affront. But Fitzgerald will engage with modernism, rather than Chicago realism, and he believes that writing about the mixing of types, rather than reproducing the actual character, allows more insight into individual natures. He will never again write what Hemingway does: a pure “document novel.”84 He writes to Thomas Boyd on March 19, 1923, “I have decided to be a pure artist and experiment in form + emotion. I’m sure I can do it much better than Anderson.”85 However, Fitzgerald never gave up American realism entirely, as Hemingway fears. In This Side of Paradise (1920), Tom and Amory have a discussion about American writers that imitates a similar passage about Irish literature in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1915). Tom reads a satirical free verse poem listing current American writers, including the Chicagoans Carl Sandburg and Louis Untermeyer and the poet Eunice Tietjens who helped Harriet Monroe run Poetry magazine. The poem’s last lines skewer the writers as sentimental, maudlin, childish, and completely out-of-date: “Sinuous, mauve-colored names/in the Juvenilia/of my collected editions.”86 However, Amory thinks otherwise about a handful of American writers: “He enjoyed both Vachel Lindsay and Booth Tarkington, and admired the conscientious if slender artistry of Edgar Lee Masters.”87 Amory speaks for Fitzgerald here,

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and his tastes demonstrate that even at this early stage, Fitzgerald found things to admire in American realism. Hemingway doesn’t see this in Fitzgerald’s work and considers his work fake and unreal, the opposite of the realistic and truthful work Hemingway strives to produce. Hemingway will not recognize Fitzgerald’s methods of drawing reality from case studies. Amory complains about the kind of story Hemingway keeps telling and thinks is true: “I wish American novelists would give up trying to make business romantically interesting. Nobody wants to read about it, unless it’s crooked business.”88 Perhaps Hemingway refuses to legitimize Fitzgerald’s experiments with realism because Hemingway has patterned himself after one of those people Fitzgerald keeps writing about: the Chicago businessman. Fitzgerald’s methods, perhaps, reveal too much truth about Hemingway’s own psyche for his taste and so he must discredit the entire experiment. Chicago, then, appears in Fitzgerald’s work directly by name and in the background as a marker as to where certain characters originate from, allowing a few to be categorized immediately as a Chicago type: rich, loud, clannish, and self-centered. But more often, Fitzgerald combined the backgrounds, histories, and mannerisms of various Chicagoans he knew well and who would also be very recognizable to a Midwestern reader. These characters, created out of parts of actual Chicagoans, become representative of Chicago types. Just as Hemingway despised Fitzgerald’s blending of the Paris crowd, so too he despises Fitzgerald’s blending of the Chicago crowd, which he also recognized in Fitzgerald’s work. Because actual Chicagoans can be spotted as the models for many characters in Fitzgerald’s work, it becomes clear how much time and effort Fitzgerald spent constructing and refining the Chicago type. His work should not be read as just about rich girls and boys and their ways of interacting, creating, and destroying, but about Chicago’s rich boys and girls whose grandparents were the titans of industry.

Chicago plots: Among the Ash Heaps and the Millionaires Fitzgerald wrote “The Cut-Glass Bowl” in October of 1919 and published it in the May 1920 issue of Scribner’s. In the story, Evelyn tells Carleton Canby that she will marry Harold Piper because his prospects are much better than Carleton’s. She becomes the first of a long line of Fitzgerald female characters

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to choose the rich boy over the poor boy. Carleton replies immediately that he will give her a present that’s “as hard as you are and as beautiful and empty to see through.” A very large crystal glass bowl arrives some time later and “of course it’s beautiful.”89 The bowl turns out to haunt Evelyn because it will always be at the center of domestic calamity and misfortune throughout her life: her husband’s fortunes reverse, her daughter cuts herself on it and gets blood poisoning necessitating amputation, and it even holds the letter from the US military that contains the notice of her son’s death at war. The story ends with Evelyn’s life destroyed, even her beauty wanes and she must live with the knowledge that her wrong choice in men, choosing wealth over Carleton, resulted in all of the ruin. The story has a particularly bitter plot, even for Fitzgerald. Chicago appears at the story’s midpoint, for seemingly no plot purpose other than to mark the location of the story, and this reveals that the location is very significant in the story and for Fitzgerald.90 Evelyn’s fateful dedication of herself to Harold through marriage happens in 1892, the same year the dedication ceremonies for the World’s Columbian Exhibition were held on October 21, suggesting a metaphorical connection between her marriage and the Columbian Exhibition. The World’s Fair used the idea of marriage to describe the many unions made during the Fair across business, the arts, science, and in people’s personal lives. It was an attempt to make business romantically interesting. President Cleveland delivered the Opening Address at the Fair and concluded the speech by declaring: Let us hold fast to the meaning which underlies this ceremony, and let us not lose the impressiveness of this moment. As by a touch the machinery that gives life to this vast Exposition is now set in motion, so at the same instant let our hopes and aspirations awaken forces which in all time to come shall influence the welfare, the dignity, and the freedom of mankind.91

He then pressed a gold and ivory button, setting the machinery of the Fair in motion. His words and action suggest that the Fair is a marriage of many exciting possibilities that will bring forth unseen goodness and hopes in the years ahead. The Fair had advertised as a show of “science and progress” in Chicago and at the Fair, the electrical giants Tesla and Westinghouse announced their marriage in a gimmicky show. The top of the Fair’s newly built showstopper, the Ferris wheel, was the site of many marriage proposals.

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The story, then, is an allegory about the metaphorical marriages made at the Fair and suggests that they all, and by extension Chicago, made a terrible and doomed decision that day, just as Evelyn did. Fitzgerald begins the story with a play on the opening passages in Henry Blake Fuller’s The Cliff-Dwellers: “There was a rough stone age and a smooth stone age and a bronze age, and many years afterward a cut glass age.”92 Where Fuller begins his novel with an extended conceit that compares newly built skyscrapers of Chicago to high Southwestern canyon walls and the city’s streets to the bottom of the canyons, Fitzgerald ties the current wedding gift giving age to the older and past eras of stone and bronze. Both passages have the same effect: to place the modern industrial age against an older and more enduring age. Fitzgerald, like Fuller, uses the comparison to signal ironic decay, where a once illustrious people, the Anasazi or the upper classes, are in the process of physical and moral collapse. Fuller wrote the novel as a critical response to what he saw as the excessive boosterism of the cliff dweller class to bring the Fair to Chicago. The haunted cut-glass bowl also causes calamity and decay because of its sheer size. It sticks out too far from the sideboard, causing Evelyn’s little girl to cut her hand and her husband to over drink at an important dinner party. Fitzgerald’s allusion signals that he wishes the reader to see him taking this same position with regards to the Fair and his characters. Fitzgerald will use the popular stories of doomed romance and failed marriages to think about Chicago, the fire, and the Columbian Exhibition in most of his important work. In June of 1922, Fitzgerald wrote to his editor Max Perkins at Scribner’s about the next book he will write: “Its locale will be the middle west and New York of 1885 I think.”93 He updated the time period by the time he wrote the first drafts of what would become The Great Gatsby, but his working title and major metaphors indicate that he still thought of the novel as a Chicago novel in the years between the fire and the Columbian Exhibition. The title, Among the Ash Heaps and the Millionaires, recalls the burnt city of Chicago and the wealthy industrialist families who threw themselves and their fortunes into rebuilding Chicago into their image. The description of the valley of the ashes in the final version of the novel evokes imagistically Chicago after the fire: “This is a valley of the ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens, where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent

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effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.”94 The ashes cover the town completely, as if what was wood had turned to ash. Fitzgerald mimics Fuller’s opening conceit in The Cliff-Dwellers, again, where Fuller transposes the urban environment into a Southwest canyon. Here, the town becomes an ash heap, a metaphor for Chicago’s urban decay which forms the ideological center of The Great Gatsby and The Cliff-Dwellers. Fitzgerald borrows from Fuller again, by indicating that the four main characters with inherited money, Tom, Daisy, Jordan, and Nick, sit at the top of their perches immoral and decaying. They will be the end of their illustrious family lines that started with their great grandfathers and grandfathers who moved to Chicago and then rebuilt Chicago after the fire. The characters have to keep passing through the valley of the ashes to get to New York, demonstrating how each character must keep passing through Chicago history metaphorically to get to wherever they will end up. Each character must contend with their own histories, their family’s history in Chicago, and their own place at the end of the lineage. Fitzgerald gives many clues that these characters no longer possess the skills their grandfathers had in constructing and participating in financial, cultural, and social uplift. When Nick first encounters Daisy and Jordan, “Their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in a short flight around the house.”95 Three generations of their families lifted the young women to where they now sit and Nick only sees the results, not the flight itself. Nick notices that Gatsby learned to imitate the posture: “He was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly America—that comes, I suppose, with the absence of lifting work or rigid sitting in sporadic games.”96 He imitates the best show he knows and Nick tells him his house “looks like the world’s fair.”97 The abandonment of boosterism and a belief in the higher life allows the young upper classes a new posture that is wholly American and results in a “formless grace.”98 Julia Kristeva argues in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection that “it is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions rules. The inbetween, the ambiguous, the composite. The traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscience, the shameless rapists, the killer who claims he is a savior.”99 The abject that disturbs identity is not easily detected because a “good” liar

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or a well-intentioned criminal slips through the safety nets that have been cast to catch monstrous creatures. The truly abject does not announce it. Because Gatsby plays confidence tricks and games on the sometimes trusting and sometimes complicitous descendants of the nineteenth-century robber barons, he draws attention to the horror of how the money was really made in the first place. Fitzgerald’s novel examines the criminal who looks just like a rich Chicagoan and provides an uncanny mirror to the monstrous behavior of the very careless and very idle rich. The novel also repeats the plot Fitzgerald first uses in “The Cut-Glass Bowl” and returned to in “Winter Dreams,” where a woman made the wrong choice in marriage and dooms herself and those around her to terrible misfortune. The novel, too, is an allegory about the metaphorical marriages made at the Fair by the characters’ grandparents and Fitzgerald doesn’t waver in his belief they all, and by extension Chicago, made a terrible and doomed decision that day. Mary A. McKay has noticed that Nick highlights the female characters lack of clear “definition.” She points out that Nick “sees them as creatures blurred by the pointless round of parties and vacuous relationships. Myrtle’s sister, Catherine, has ‘a blurred air to her face’ (Gatsby 34); and all the women at Gatsby’s parties look alike.”100 The women all represent beauty and their marriages to businessmen and scientists replicate one of the major themes of the Columbian Exhibition that promised the marriage of business and art. Daisy and Tom represent the worst possible pairing of careless, indifferent beauty with all of the worst characteristics of the Chicago business world: insularity, racism, and a lack of curiosity about the world. The story then becomes a critique of the descendants of the Chicago business world that Fuller writes about and Cather describes at length in The Song of the Lark. This may be one reason why Fitzgerald sent her the first short draft of the novel because he knew she would understand his allegorization of the Chicago business and art world. In September of 1926, Hemingway teases Fitzgerald about the title of his next novel. He writes, “Have a swell hunch for a new novel. I’m calling it the World’s Fair. You’ll like the title.”101 Fitzgerald had just started working on his new novel about a Chicago girl and her psychiatrist and the intertangled love affair between the two of them. He was calling it The World’s Fair, echoing Nick’s description of Gatsby’s house in the earlier novel. The repetition shows

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that Fitzgerald was still thinking about the doomed marriage of art and business at the Fair and that the plot of Tender Is the Night reflects his ongoing concern that flashiness so easily woos beauty away from art. The plot, once again, replicates that of A Little Brother of the Rich, in that Dick Diver winds up pining for the girl he never should have left, who is now a big Hollywood star. Fitzgerald reconfigures the models, provided by Joyce, Dreiser, James, Fuller, and Howells, to map Chicago and the Midwest, but he limits his maps to only one social strata. Fitzgerald keeps telling his own version of Portrait of the Artist, again and again, to make sense of his own origin story which simply does not make sense to him against the current popular culture ideas about Chicago’s underworld or Mencken’s declarations about Chicago literature. In Joyce, the young Steven Daedalus must make sense of the corrupt world he lives in, where the church does the work of the colonizer England, and the politicians are espousing the interests of the rich and the church. Fitzgerald must make sense of Chicago, where the interests of rich boys and rich girls rule the court system and church. Fitzgerald wanted to sell books and, simultaneously, be taken seriously as a modernist. The Chicago references, then, can be read as signposts that reveal his and all modern American writers’ struggle over style: whether to write the easily published and profitable Chicago realism that would make writing useful and utilitarian, or the less profitable, but European, high modernist symbolism.

Notes Introduction 1 Sue Ann Prince, ed., “Introduction,” in Old Guard and the Avant-Garde: Modernism in Chicago, 1910–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), xxi. 2 C. J. Bulliet, “Around the Galleries: Neoterics May 15,” Chicago Daily News, May 4, 1935; Art, Antiques, and the Artists, 11.

Chapter 1 1 John Pilkington Jr., Henry Blake Fuller (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1970), 20. 2 Pilkington, Henry Blake Fuller, 21. 3 Pilkington, Henry Blake Fuller, 20–21. 4 Draft of “Henry Fuller and the North Shore” by Anna Morgan, Undated, Box 1, Folder 4, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, NL, 1. 5 Draft of “Henry Fuller and the North Shore” by Anna Morgan, Undated, Box 1, Folder 4, Henry Fuller Papers, NL, 1. 6 Jane Allen Shikoh, “The ‘Higher Life’ in the American City of the 1890’s: A Study of Its Leaders and Their Activities in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Boston, and Buffalo” (Diss., New York University, October 1972), 3–11. 7 Shikoh, “The ‘Higher Life’ in the American City of the 1890’s,” 81. 8 Shikoh, “The ‘Higher Life’ in the American City of the 1890’s,” 81. 9 Correspondence from George E. Woodbury to Henry B. Fuller, June 12, 1893, Box 6, Folder 246, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, NL. 10 Ann Massa, “Henry Blake Fuller and the Cliff Dwellers: Appropriations and Misappropriations,” Journal of American Studies 36, no. 1 (2002): 80. 11 Massa, “Henry Blake Fuller and the Cliff Dwellers,” 80. 12 Massa, “Henry Blake Fuller and the Cliff Dwellers,” 84. 13 H. J. Smith Exploring Company, “The Cliff Dwellers/The H. Jay Smith Exploring Company, World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893,” Official Catalog, Chicago Historical Society, Chicago, IL, 1.

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14 H. J. Smith Exploring Company, “The Cliff Dwellers/The H. Jay Smith Exploring Company, World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893,” Official Catalog, Chicago Historical Society, Chicago, IL, 7–9. 15 H. J. Smith Exploring Company, “The Cliff Dwellers/The H. Jay Smith Exploring Company, World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893,” Official Catalog, Chicago Historical Society, Chicago, IL, 19. 16 Guy Szuberia, “Henry Blake Fuller and the ‘New Immigrant,’” American Literature 53, no. 2 (1981): 246. 17 Szuberia, “Henry Blake Fuller and the ‘New Immigrant,’” 250–252. 18 Correspondence from Hamlin Garland to Henry Blake Fuller, January 17, 1894, Box 4, Folder 133, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, NL. 19 Correspondence from Hjalmar Hjorth Boyeson to Henry Blake Fuller, March 1894, Box 3, Folder 80, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, NL. 20 See Thomas S. Engeman, “Religion and Politics the American Way: The Exemplary William Dean Howells,” Review of Politics 63, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 107–128. 21 Henry James, The Letters of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock (New York: Scribner, 1920), 233. 22 William D. Howells, “The Cliff Dwellers,” Harper’s Bazaar 26 (October 28, 1893): 883, reprinted in Henry Blake Fuller, The Cliff-Dwellers, ed. Joseph A. Dimuro (New York: Broadview, 2010), 271–273. 23 Correspondence from Hobart Chatfield-Taylor to Henry Blake Fuller, May 14, 1895, Box 41, Folder 98, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, NL. 24 Correspondence from Harriet Monroe to Henry Blake Fuller, May 10, 1895, Box 5, Folder 174, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, NL. 25 Henry Blake Fuller, “The Upward Movement in Chicago,” Atlantic 80, no. 480 (October 1897): 534–547, reprinted in Fuller, The Cliff-Dwellers, ed. Joseph A. Dimuro, 306. 26 Fuller, “The Upward Movement in Chicago,” 306. 27 Fuller, “The Upward Movement in Chicago,” 306. 28 Pilkington, Henry Blake Fuller, 114. 29 Correspondence from Henry Blake Fuller to Allen B. Pond, February 25, 1898, Box 3, Folder 47, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, NL. 30 Pilkington, Henry Blake Fuller, 114. 31 Donald L. Miller, City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 413. 32 Little Room Executive Committee Meeting Records Book, Box 2, Folder 26, Little Room Records, NL, 7.

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33 Little Room Executive Committee Meeting Records Book, Box 2, Folder 26, Little Room Records, NL, 7–8. 34 Correspondence from Allen B. Pond to Little Room Membership, October 8, 1904, Box 1, Folder 1, Little Room Records, NL. 35 Correspondence from Allen B. Pond to Little Room Membership, October 9, 1905, Box 1, Folder 1, Little Room Records, NL. 36 Correspondence from W. L. H to Little Room Membership, April 10, 1905, Box 1, Folder 1, Little Room Records, NL. 37 Correspondence from Allen B. Pond to Herman DeVries, April 26, 1906, Box 2, Folder 2, Little Room Records, NL. 38 Little Room Executive Committee Meeting Records Book, Box 2, Folder 26, Little Room Records, NL, 23. 39 Little Room Executive Committee Meeting Records Book, Box 2, Folder 26, Little Room Records, NL, 29. 40 Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Culture and the City: Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago from the 1880s to 1917 (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1976), 170–171. 41 Horowitz, Culture and the City, 170. 42 Jan Stilson, Art and Beauty in the Heartland: The Story of the Eagle’s Nest Camp at Oregon, Illinois, 1898–1942 (Oregon, IL: AuthorHouse, 2006), 11. 43 Correspondence from Henry Blake Fuller to Oliver Bennett Grover, January 11, 1901, Box 3, Folder 24, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, NL. 44 Minutes of the Attic Club, July 3, 1907, Attic Club Records, NL. 45 The Attic Club Proposal, 1907, Box 1, Folder 12, Little Room Records, NL. 46 Correspondence from Hamlin Garland to Prospective Club Members, Undated, Box 1, Folder 12, Little Room Records, NL. 47 Massa, "Henry Blake Fuller and the Cliff Dwellers," 73–74. 48 Acceptance List for First Annual Club Dinner, January 17, 1908, Box 1, Folder 12, Little Room Records, NL. 49 Correspondence from Henry Blake Fuller to Allan B. Pond, June 23, 1908, Box 3, Folder 47, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, NL. 50 Correspondence from Allen B. Pond to Membership, September 19, 1910, and April 28, 1910, Box 1, Folder 3, Little Room Records, NL. 51 Correspondence from Allen B. Pond to F. H. Head, April 28, 1910, Box 1, Folder 4, Little Room Records, NL. 52 Correspondence from Henry Blake Fuller, Bertha E. Jaques, Clara Laughlin, A. B. Pond, I. K. Pond, Lorado Taft, and Nellie V. Walker to Little Roomer, October 20, 1924, Box 1, Folder 7, Little Room Records, NL.

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53 Correspondence from Frederick Wookin to Nellie V. Walker, October 25, 1924, Box 1, Folder 7, Little Room Records, NL. 54 Correspondence from Clara Louise Burnham to the Executive Committee of the Little Room, October 22, 1924, Box 1, Folder 5, Little Room Records, NL. Correspondence from Arthur M. Burton to the Executive Committee of the Little Room, October 24, 1924, Box 1, Folder 5, Little Room Records, NL. 55 Record of Vote of the Executive Committee, December 12, 1913, Box 2, Folder 9, Little Room Record, NL. 56 Mary O’Connor Newell, “How Success Has Come to the Little Theater,” Chicago Record-Herald 6 (February 22, 1914): 1. 57 Harriet Monroe to Little Room Committee, October 22, 1924, Box 1, Folder 5, Little Room Records, NL. 58 Little Room Autograph Book, 1898–1931, Box 2, Folder 2, Little Room Records, NL. 59 Anna Morgan, “Henry Fuller and the North Shore,” Essay Draft, 1930, Box 1, Folder 4, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, NL, 2. 60 Anna Morgan, “Henry Fuller and the North Shore,” Essay Draft, 1930, Box I, Folder 4, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, NL, 2. 61 Correspondence from Nicholas Vachel Lindsay to Henry Blake Fuller, November 29, 1913, Box 5, Folder 164, Henry Blake Fuller Papers. NL. 62 Correspondence from Carl Van Vechten to Henry Blake Fuller, June 6, 1922, Box 6, Folder 233, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, NL. 63 The Double Dealer, June 1922, Box 1, Folder 9, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, NL, 1–2. 64 Correspondence from Horace B. Liveright to Henry Blake Fuller, March 12, 1921, Box 3, Folder 78, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, NL. 65 Correspondence from George June to Henry Blake Fuller, June 21, 1924, Box 3, Folder 68, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, NL. 66 Correspondence from George June to Henry Blake Fuller, December 30, no year, Box 3, Folder 68, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, NL. 67 Draft of “Henry Fuller and the North Shore” by Anna Morgan, 1930, Box 1, Folder 4, Henry Fuller Papers, NL, 2.

Chapter 2 1 Robert Morss Lovett, “Review: A Poet’s Life: Seventy Years in a Changing World by Harriet Monroe,” Poetry 52, no. 1 (April 1938): 30. 2 Harriet Monroe, A Poet’s Life: Seventy Years in a Changing World (New York: Macmillan Company, 1938), 36.

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3 Monroe, A Poet’s Life, 37. 4 Monroe, A Poet’s Life, 50. 5 Monroe, A Poet’s Life, 193. 6 Monroe, A Poet’s Life, 36. 7 Monroe, A Poet’s Life, 98. 8 William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1991), 35–46. 9 Monroe, A Poet’s Life, 117, 151. 10 Monroe, A Poet’s Life, 117–118. 11 Correspondence from E. C. Culp to Harriet Monroe, March 6, 1891, Box 15 Folder 3, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC. 12 Correspondence from Daniel H. Burnham to Harriet Monroe, February 28, 1891, Box 15, Folder 3, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC. 13 Tyler E. Bagwell and Jekyll Island Museum, Images of America: The Jekyll Island Club (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 1998), 13. 14 Correspondence from Cyrus H. McCormick to D.H. Burnham, February 26, 1891, Box 15, Folder 3, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC. 15 Correspondence from E. C. Culp to Harriet Monroe, March 6, 1891, Box 15, Folder 3, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC. 16 Correspondence from E. C. Culp to Harriet Monroe, July 24, 1891, Box 15 Folder 3, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC. 17 Correspondence from E. C. Culp to Harriet Monroe, October 31, 1891, Box 15, Folder 3, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC. 18 Correspondence from E. C. Culp to Harriet Monroe, November 3, 1891, Box 15, Folder 3, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC. 19 Correspondence from E. C. Culp to Harriet Monroe, November 10, 1891, Box 15, Folder 3, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC. 20 Undated draft of letter sent by HM to committee November 12, 1891, Box 15, Folder 3, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC. 21 Correspondence from E. C. Culp to Harriet Monroe, November 12, 1891, Box 15, Folder 3, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC. 22 Correspondence from E. C. Culp to Harriet Monroe, February 10, 1892, Box 15, Folder 3, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC. 23 Correspondence from E. C. Culp to Harriet Monroe, February 12, 1892, Box 15, Folder 3, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC. 24 Correspondence from E. C. Culp to Harriet Monroe, February 24, 1892, Box 15, Folder 3, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC. 25 Correspondence from F. H. Wilson to Harriet Monroe, February 26, 1891, Box 15, Folder 3, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC.

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26 Correspondence from George Armour to Harriet Monroe, February 29, 1892, Box 1, Folder 1, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC. 27 Ann Massa, “‘The Columbian Ode’ and Poetry: A Magazine of Verse: Harriet Monroe’s Entrepreneurial Triumphs,” Journal of American Studies 20, no. 1 (Apr 1986): 55. 28 Correspondence from E. C. Culp to Harriet Monroe, March 23, 1892, Box 15, Folder 3, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC. 29 Correspondence from James H. Elsworth to Harriet Monroe, March 23, 1892, Box 15, Folder 3, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC. 30 Correspondence from G. W. Chadwick to Harriet Monroe, May 12, 1892, Box 15, Folder 3, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC. 31 Correspondence from E. C. Culp to Harriet Monroe, April 20, 1892, Box 15, Folder 3, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC. 32 Correspondence from Choral director of the Columbian Ode to Harriet Monroe, April 27, 1892, Box 15, Folder 3, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC. 33 Correspondence from Harriet Monroe to Edward F. Lawrence, May 18, 1892, Box 15, Folder 3, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC. 34 Correspondence from E. C. Culp to Harriet Monroe, May 23, 1892, Box 15, Folder 3, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC. 35 Notice of Copyright for “The Columbian Ode” from Library of Congress issued to Harriet Monroe, May 23, 1892, Box 15, Folder 3, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC. 36 Henry S. Monroe, Brief on Behalf of the Defendant in Error, The Press Publishing Company v. Harriet Monroe, in the US Circuit Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, October, 1895, Box 15, Folder 4, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC, 9–11. 37 Correspondence from E. C. Culp to Harriet Monroe, July 6, 1892, Box 15, Folder 3, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC. 38 Correspondence from Harriet Monroe to E.C. Culp (draft), July 11, 1892, Box 15, Folder 3, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC. 39 Correspondence from Harriet Monroe to E.C. Culp (draft), July 11, 1892, Box 15, Folder 3, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC. 40 Official Order from the Office of the Secretary, Council of Administration, September 17, 1892, Box 15, Folder 3, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC. 41 Massa, “‘The Columbian Ode’ and Poetry,” 58. 42 Massa, “‘The Columbian Ode’ and Poetry,” 58. 43 Correspondence from Ferdinand W. Beck to Harriet Monroe, September 22, 1892, Box 15, Folder 3, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC. 44 Correspondence from Daniel H. Burnham to Harriet Monroe, September 23, 1892, Box 15, Folder 3, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC.

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45 Henry S. Monroe, Brief on Behalf of the Defendant in Error, The Press Publishing Company v. Harriet Monroe, in the US Circuit Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, October, 1895, Box 15, Folder 4, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC, 9. 46 Henry S. Monroe, Brief on Behalf of the Defendant in Error, The Press Publishing Company v. Harriet Monroe, in the US Circuit Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, October, 1895, Box 15, Folder 4, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC, 9. 47 Henry S. Monroe, Brief on Behalf of the Defendant in Error, The Press Publishing Company v. Harriet Monroe, in the US Circuit Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, October, 1895, Box 15, Folder 4, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC, 2. 48 Correspondence from E. C. Culp to Harriet Monroe, September 24, 1892, Box 15, Folder 3, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC. 49 Henry S. Monroe, Brief on Behalf of the Defendant in Error, The Press Publishing Company v. Harriet Monroe, in the US Circuit Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, October, 1895, Box 15, Folder 4, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC, 3. 50 Henry S. Monroe, Brief on Behalf of the Defendant in Error, The Press Publishing Company v. Harriet Monroe, in the US Circuit Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, October, 1895, Box 15, Folder 4, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC, 3. 51 Correspondence from Bertha Palmer to Harriet Monroe, September 24, 1892, Box 15, Folder 3, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC. 52 Henry S. Monroe, Brief on Behalf of the Defendant in Error, The Press Publishing Company v. Harriet Monroe, in the US Circuit Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, October, 1895, Box 15, Folder 4, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC, 7–8. 53 Monroe, A Poet’s Life, 139. 54 Henry S. Monroe, Brief on Behalf of the Defendant in Error, The Press Publishing Company v. Harriet Monroe, in the US Circuit Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, October, 1895, Box 15, Folder 4, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC, 5. 55 Henry S. Monroe, Brief on Behalf of the Defendant in Error, The Press Publishing Company v. Harriet Monroe, in the US Circuit Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, October, 1895, Box 15, Folder 4, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC, 5. 56 Harriet Monroe refers to the co-acting attorney as Mr. McCarthy in her memoir and in the final bill for the lawsuit, Mr. McCarthy is mentioned as having a $1500 fee. The bill is from Geo. H. Yeaman’s law office and his name appears, as head of the representative firm, on her father’s Brief and the Supreme Court Abstract. 57 Henry S. Monroe, Brief on Behalf of the Defendant in Error, The Press Publishing Company v. Harriet Monroe, in the US Circuit Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, October, 1895, Box 15, Folder 4, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC, 7. 58 Newspaper clipping, Undated, Box 15, Folder 3, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC.

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59 Newspaper clipping, Tribune, October 17, 1894, Box 15, Folder 3, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC. 60 The Press Publishing Company v. Harriet Monroe 489, U.S. 2, 1896, Box 15, Folder 4, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC. 61 The Press Publishing Company v. Harriet Monroe 489, U.S. 2, 1896, Box 15, Folder 4, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC, 22. 62 Monroe, A Poet’s Life, 139. 63 Many histories of the Haymarket Affair have been written over the last century. See Carl Smith, Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States Volume 2 from the Founding of the A.F.L. to the Emergence of American Imperialism (New York: International Publishers Co, 1988). 64 Correspondence from Robert W. Patterson to Harriet Monroe, September 24, 1892, Box 15, Folder 3, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC. 65 Many retellings and histories of the Pullman strike have been written since it occurred. See Richard Schneirov, Shelton Stromquist, and Nick Salvatore, eds., The Pullman Strike and Crisis of 1890s: Essays on Labor and Politics (UrbanaChampaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999), and Troy Rondinone, “Guarding the Switch: Cultivating Nationalism during the Pullman Strike,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 8, no. 1 (2009): 83–109. 66 The Press Publishing Company v. Harriet Monroe, Box 15, Folder 4, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC, 22. 67 The Press Publishing Company v. Harriet Monroe, Box 15, Folder 4, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC, 22. 68 See Eileen Boris, Art and Labor: Ruskin, Morris, and the Craftsman Ideal in America (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1986). 69 Pamphlet, “The Chicago Arts and Crafts Society,” October 31, 1897, The Arts Institute of Chicago, accessed January 12, 2018, artic.edu/sites/default/files/ libraries/pubs/1897/AIC1897ChiArtsCraSoc_comb.pdf, 2. 70 Pamphlet, “The Chicago Arts and Crafts Society,” 120–121. 71 Pamphlet, “Memorial: Madeline Yale Wynne,” Box 1, Folder 13, Little Room Records, 1–3. 72 Pamphlet, “Memorial: Madeline Yale Wynne,” Box 1, Folder 13, Little Room Records, 7. 73 Pamphlet, “Memorial: Madeline Yale Wynne,” Box 1, Folder 13, Little Room Records, 8.

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74 Correspondence from Madeline Yale Wynne to Harriet Monroe, various dates, Box 2, Folder 13, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC. 75 Anna Morgan, My Chicago (Chicago, IL: Ralph Fletcher Seymour, 1918), 61. 76 Hobart Chatfield-Taylor, Foreword, My Chicago, Anna Morgan, 6. 77 Hobart Chatfield-Taylor, Foreword, My Chicago, Anna Morgan, 6. 78 Pilkington, Henry Blake Fuller, 114. 79 Henry Regnery, The Cliffdwellers: The History of a Chicago Cultural Institution (Evanston, IL: Chicago Historical Bookworks, 1990), 9. 80 Andrew Martinez, “A Mixed Reception for Modernism: The 1913 Armory Show at the Art Institute of Chicago,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 19, no. 1 (1993): 30–57, 102–105. 81 Martinez, “A Mixed Reception for Modernism,” 37. 82 Martinez, “A Mixed Reception for Modernism,” 38. 83 Correspondence from Minna C. Denton to Harriet Monroe, September 12, 1913, Box 1, Folder 4, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC. 84 Harriet Monroe, “The Motive of the Magazine,” Poetry 1, no. 1 (October 12, 1912): 26–28, 26. 85 Harriet Monroe, “The Open Door,” Poetry 1, no. 2 (November 1912): 62–64, 64. 86 Monroe, A Poet’s Life, 144. 87 Correspondence from George H. Yeaman to Harriet Monroe, November 27, 1895, Box 15, Folder 3, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC. 88 Mme X, Caroline Kirkland, “The Cordon Club,” Chicago Tribune, October 24, 1915: D1. 89 Correspondence from Edgar Lee Masters to Agnes Lee Freer, June 8, 1925, Box 1, Folder 2, Agnes Lee-Edgar Lee Masters Papers, NL.

Chapter 3 1 Newspaper Clipping, Undated, Box 1, Folder 19, Little Room Records, NL. 2 See Correspondence from Harriet Monroe to Little Room Committee, October 22, 1924, Box 1, Folder 5, Little Room Records, NL. 3 See Herbert K. Russell, Edgar Lee Masters: A Biography (Champaign-Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2005) and John A. Farrell, Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (New York: Vintage, 2011). 4 LAWYER DEPICTS IN HOMELY VERSE ACTORS OF LIFE: Spoon River in His Anthology is Just any Hamlet, Town or City, Chicago Daily Tribune, November 22, 1914: 8. 5 Chicago Tribune, May 15, 1915: 11.

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6 Elia W. Peattie, “Books and the People Who Write Them: Spoon River and Its Country Church Yard,” Chicago Tribune, May 15, 1915: 11. 7 Robert B. Peattie, “Is This the Beginning of a New School of Poetry?” Chicago Tribune, July 11, 1915: B13. 8 Everett Carter, “William Dean Howells’ Theory of Critical Realism,” ELH 16, no. 2 (June 1949): 151–166, 151. 9 Carter, “William Dean Howells’ Theory of Critical Realism,” 151. 10 W. D. Howells, “Editor’s Easy Chair,” Harper’s Magazine 131 (1915): 635. 11 Howells, “Editor’s Easy Chair,” 635. 12 “In the Limelight,” Chicago Tribune, November 12, 1916: I4. 13 Burton Roscoe, “Review of Winesburg, Ohio,” Chicago Tribune, June 7, 1919: 13. 14 David Minter, A Cultural History of the American Novel: Henry James to William Faulkner (New York: Cambridge UP, 1996), 47. 15 Minter, A Cultural History of the American Novel, 49. 16 Minter, A Cultural History of the American Novel, 49. 17 Horowitz, Culture and the City, 191. 18 Lisa Woolley, Chicago Voices of the Chicago Renaissance (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois UP, 2000), 6. 19 Woolley, Chicago Voices of the Chicago Renaissance, 6. 20 Correspondence from Edgar Lee Masters to Harriet Monroe, June 22, 1922, Box 1, Folder 15, Harriet Monroe Papers, UC. 21 Correspondence from Edgar Lee Masters to Agnes Lee Freer, September 9, 1924, Box 1, Folder 2, Agnes Lee-Edgar Lee Masters Papers, NL. 22 Correspondence from Edgar Lee Masters to Agnes Lee Freer, September 9, 1924, Box 1, Folder 2, Agnes Lee-Edgar Lee Masters Papers, NL. 23 Correspondence from Edgar Lee Masters to Agnes Lee Freer, June 8, 1925, Box 1, Folder 2, Agnes Lee-Edgar Lee Masters Papers, NL. 24 Correspondence from Edgar Lee Masters to Agnes Lee Freer, December 19, 1931, Box 1, Folder 4, Agnes Lee-Edgar Lee Masters Papers, NL. 25 Elia W. Peattie, The Book of the Fine Arts Building, ed. David Swan (Chicago, IL: Printed for the Building, 1911). 26 Walter B. Rideout, Sherwood Anderson: A Writer in America, Volume 1 (Madison, WI: University of Madison Press, 2006), 169–170. 27 See Dill Pickle Club Records, Box 2, Folder 31, NL. 28 See William R. Drennan, Death in a Prairie House: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Murders (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008). 29 Robert McCarter, Frank Lloyd Wright (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 101.

Notes

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30 Shirley du Fresne McArthur, Frank Lloyd Wright: American System Built Homes in Milwaukee (Milwaukee, WI: North Point Historical Society, 1985), 15–19. 31 Frank Lloyd Wright, “The Art and Craft of the Machine,” in The Essential Frank Lloyd Wright: Critical Essays on Architecture, ed. Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008), 23–33. 32 Frank Lloyd Wright, “The Cause of Architecture,” in The Essential Frank Lloyd Wright: Critical Essays on Architecture, ed. Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008), 34–51. 33 Correspondence from Sherwood Anderson to Marietta D. Finley, November 27, 1916, Box 5, Folder 212, Sherwood Anderson Papers, NL. 34 Correspondence from Sherwood Anderson to Upton Sinclair, December 12, 1916, Box 12, Folder 571, Sherwood Anderson Papers, NL. 35 Correspondence from Sherwood Anderson to Upton Sinclair, December 12, 1916, Box 12, Folder 571, Sherwood Anderson Papers, NL. 36 Correspondence from Sherwood Anderson to Lucille Blum, July 1, 1923, Box 1, Folder 46, Sherwood Anderson Papers, NL. 37 Walter B. Rideout, Sherwood Anderson: A Writer in America, Volume 2 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), xvi. 38 Emily Kane, “Ripshin,” So What If Poe Was Here: Identifying and Evaluating Virginia’s Literary Landmarks, University of Virginia American Studies Program, accessed December 10, 2017, xroads.virginia.edu/~ma04/kane/thesis/saripshin.htm 39 Sherwood Anderson, Letters of Sherwood Anderson, ed. Howard Mumford Jones in association with Walter B. Rideout (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1953), 225, footnote 2. 40 Anderson, Letters of Sherwood Anderson, 225. 41 Sherwood Anderson, Sherwood Anderson’s Memoirs: A Critical Edition, ed. Ray Lewis White (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1942, reprint 1969), xxiv–xxvi.

Chapter 4 1 Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout, eds., Selected Letters of Willa Cather (New York: Knopf, 2013), 33. 2 Susanne George Bloomfield, Elia Peattie: An Uncommon Writer, An Uncommon Woman, University of Nebraska’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, accessed October 12, 2017, plainshumanities.unl.edu/peattie/about.html

Notes

204

3 Elia Peattie, Impertinences: Selected Writings of Elia Peattie, a Journalist in the Gilded Age, ed. Susanne George Bloomfield (Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 2005), 214. 4 M. Catherine Downs, Becoming Modern: Willa Cather’s Journalism (Susquehanna, PA: Susquehanna UP, 1999), 28. 5 Jewell and Stout, Selected Letters, 46. 6 Jewell and Stout, Selected Letters, 52. 7 Jewell and Stout, Selected Letters, 69. 8 Jewell and Stout, Selected Letters, 329. 9 Jewell and Stout, Selected Letters, 161–163. 10 Correspondence from Willa Cather to Irene Miner Weisz, 1913, Box 1, Folder 21, Willa Cather—Irene Miner Weisz Papers, NL. 11 Elia W. Peattie, “Season’s Offering of New Books: Romance of Western Pioneers,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 1913, 13. 12 Peattie, “Season's Offering of New Books,” 13. 13 Martinez, “A Mixed Reception for Modernism,” 34. 14 Martinez, “A Mixed Reception for Modernism,” 49. 15 Joan Stevenson Falcone, “Introduction,” The Star Wagon: The Memoirs of Elia Wilkinson Peattie, Elia Peattie: An Uncommon Writer, An Uncommon Woman, University of Nebraska’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, accessed October 12, 2017, plainshumanities.unl.edu/peattie/about.html 16 Falcone, “Introduction.” 17 Falcone, “Introduction.” 18 Correspondence from Willa Cather to Fanny Butcher, February 4, 1937, Box 2, Folder 90, Fanny Butcher Papers, NL. 19 For more about Cather’s personal and intellectual connection to Henry Blake Fuller, see Richard C. Harris, “Willa Cather and Henry Blake Fuller: More Building Blocks for The Professor’s House,” in Cather Studies 9, ed. Melissa J. Homestead and Guy Reynolds (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 114–132. 20 Susan Weininger, “Completing the Soul of Chicago: From Urban Realism to Social Concern, 1915–1945,” in Chicago Modern 1893–1945: The Pursuit of the New, ed. Elizabeth Kennedy (Chicago, IL: The Terra Foundation for American Art, 2004), 54. 21 Weininger, "Completing the Soul of Chicago,” 54. 22 Charlotte Moser, “‘In the Highest Efficiency’: Art Training at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago,” in The Old Guard and the Avant-Garde: Modernism in Chicago, 1910–1940, ed. Sue Ann Prince (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 202.

Notes

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23 Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark, 1915, ed. Sherrill Harbison (New York: Penguin, 1999), 26. 24 Loretta Wasserman, “Cather’s Semitism,” in Cather Studies 2, ed. Susan J. Rosowski (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 9. 25 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 186. 26 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 44. 27 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 205. 28 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 171. 29 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 171–172. 30 Miller, City of the Century, 409. 31 Miller, City of the Century, 409. 32 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 173. 33 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 241. 34 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 242. 35 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 241. 36 Mark A. Robison, “Transcending the Urban-Rural Divide: Willa Cather’s Thea Kronborg Goes to Chicago,” in Regionalism and the Humanities, ed. Timothy R. Mahoney and Wendy J. Katz (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 207. 37 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 344–345. 38 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 389. 39 Ann W. Fisher-Wirth, “Dispossession and Redemption in the Novels of Willa Cather,” in Cather Studies 1, ed. Susan J. Rosowski (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 37. 40 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 228. 41 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 228. 42 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 228. 43 Melissa Homestead, “Introduction,” in The Song of the Lark, ed. Melissa Homestead (New York: Signet Classics, 2007), xi. 44 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 213. 45 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 213. 46 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 213. 47 Regenry, The Cliffdwellers: The History of a Chicago Cultural Institution, 9. 48 Regenry, The Cliffdwellers: The History of a Chicago Cultural Institution, 9. 49 Willa Cather, “The Passing Show,” Nebraska State Journal (January 26, 1896): 9, reprinted in The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather’s First Principles and Critical Statements, ed. Bernice Slote (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 330–331. 50 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 51.

Notes

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51 Sharon O’Brien, Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice (New York: Oxford UP, 1987), 85. 52 Homestead, “Introduction,” xii. 53 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 231. 54 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 230. 55 Miller, City of the Century, 414–415. 56 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 232. 57 Polly P. Duryea, “Paintings and Drawings in Willa Gather’s Prose: A Catalogue Raisonné,” Diss., University of Nebraska, 1993, 18. 58 “Street Singer Provenance,” Museum of Fine Arts Boston, accessed June 14, 2017, mfa.org/collections/object/street-singer-33971 59 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 231. 60 Stefan Germer, “Traditions and Trends: Taste Patterns in Chicago Collecting,” in The Old Guard and the Avant-Garde: Modernism in Chicago, 1910–1940, ed. Sue Ann Prince (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 177. 61 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 230. 62 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 268. 63 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 269. 64 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 50. 65 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 50. 66 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 169. 67 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 235. 68 Lefkowitz, Culture and the City, 170. 69 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 232. 70 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 231. 71 Wasserman, “Cather's Semitism,” 8. 72 Wasserman, “Cather's Semitism,” 13. 73 Willa Cather, “On the Art of Fiction,” in Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as Art (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 103. 74 Susan Rutherford, The Prima Donna and The Opera, 1815–1930 (New York: Cambridge UP, 2006), 143. 75 James Woodress, Willa Cather: A Literary Life (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 282, 315. 76 Rutherford, The Prima Donna and The Opera, 1815–1930, 144. 77 Rutherford, The Prima Donna and The Opera, 1815–1930, 146. 78 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 283. 79 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 215–216. 80 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 174. 81 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 185.

Notes 82

207

Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Cultur (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 351.

83 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 205. 84

Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 11.

85 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 339. 86

See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia UP, 1982).

87 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 345. 88 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 246. 89 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 351. 90 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 363. 91 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 363. 92 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 368. 93 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 368. 94

Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey and others, 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), XVII, 235.

95 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 253. 96 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 341. 97 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 341. 98

Adele Hast, “Bookwomen Building Chicago—the Fanny Butcher Story,” Caxton Club, accessed October 12, 2017, caxtonclub.org/reading/2002/May/ bookwomen.htm

99

Correspondence from Willa Cather to Fanny Butcher, February 16, 1916, Box 2, Folder 90, Fanny Butcher Papers, NL.

100 Correspondence from Willa Cather to Fanny Butcher, March 9, 1916, Box 2, Folder 90, Fanny Butcher Papers, NL. 101 Hast, “Bookwomen Building Chicago—the Fanny Butcher Story.” 102 Correspondence from Sinclair Lewis to Fanny Butcher, Box 5, Folder 234, and Correspondence from Sherwood Anderson to Fanny Butcher, Box 1, Folder 15, Fanny Butcher Papers, NL. 103 Celia Hilliard, “Lady Midwest: Fanny Butcher—Books,” in The Rise of the Modernist Bookshop: Books and the Commerce of Culture in the Twentieth Century, ed. Huw Osborne (New York: Routledge, 2015), 89–112. 104 Correspondence from Willa Cather to Irene Miner Weisz, November 14, 1922, Box 1, Folder 25, Willa Cather—Irene Miner Weisz Papers, NL.

Notes

208

105 Correspondence from Fanny Butcher to Willa Cather, March 18, 1926, Box 2, Folder 90, Fanny Butcher Papers, NL. 106 Correspondence from Willa Cather to Irene Miner Weisz, November 14, 1922, Box 1, Folder 30, Willa Cather—Irene Miner Weisz Papers, NL. 107 Correspondence from Willa Cather to Irene Miner Weisz, November 10, 1929, Box 1, Folder 53, Willa Cather—Irene Miner Weisz Papers, NL. 108 Correspondence from Willa Cather to Fanny Butcher, November 5, 1921, Box 2, Folder 90, Fanny Butcher Papers, NL. 109 Correspondence from Willa Cather to Fanny Butcher, February 7, 1924, Box 2, Folder 90, Fanny Butcher Papers, NL. 110 Correspondence from Willa Cather to Fanny Butcher, December 2, 1920, Box 2, Folder 90, Fanny Butcher Papers, NL. 111 Correspondence from Willa Cather to Fanny Butcher, April 8, 1921, Box 2, Folder 90, Fanny Butcher Papers, NL. 112 Fanny Butcher, Many Lives, One Love (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 363. 113 Butcher, Many Lives, One Love, 363. 114 Butcher, Many Lives, One Love, 364. 115 Jewell and Stout, Selected Letters, 305. 116 Jewell and Stout, Selected Letters, 324. 117 Correspondence from Willa Cather to Irene Miner Weisz, October 26, 1922, Box 1, Folder 28, Willa Cather—Irene Miner Weisz Papers, NL. 118 Correspondence from Willa Cather to Irene Miner Weisz, January 21, 1923, Box 1, Folder 32, Willa Cather—Irene Miner Weisz Papers, NL. 119 Jewell and Stout, Selected Letters, 324. 120 Correspondence from Willa Cather to Fanny Butcher, December 18, 1936, Fanny Butcher Papers, Box 2, Folder 90, Fanny Butcher Papers, NL. 121 Correspondence from Edith Lewis to Fanny Butcher, October 8, 1949, Box 2, Folder 92, Fanny Butcher Papers, NL.

Chapter 5 1

Alfred T. Hemingway, How to Make Good or Winning Your Largest Success: A Business Man’s Talks on Personal Proficiency and Commercial Character Building—the Only Success Insurance (Kansas City, MO: Personal Proficiency Bureau, 1915), Box BK01, JFK.

2 Hemingway, How to Make Good or Winning Your Largest Success, 5. 3 Hemingway, How to Make Good or Winning Your Largest Success, 1.

Notes

209

4 Hemingway, How to Make Good or Winning Your Largest Success, 7. 5 Elias Colbert and Everett Chamberlin, Chicago and the Great Conflagration (Chicago: J. S. Goodman and Co., 1872), 319. 6 Colbert and Chamberlin, Chicago and the Great Conflagration, 398. 7 “Printing News of the Country,” Printing Trade News 40, no. 10 (March 11, 1911): 11. 8 “Trade Extension Committee Dines Hundreds of Visiting Men at South Shore Country Club,” Journal of Chicago Commerce 8, no. 11 (July 19, 1912): 6–8, 7. 9 David Malone, “Grand Papa Hemingway,” Recollections: Retelling Stories of Gems from Special Collections, Buswell Library, recollections, accessed January 2, 2018, wheaton.edu/2008/12/grand-papa-hemingway 10 Timothy Gloege, Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute and the Making of American Evangelicalism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 25–26. 11 Gloege, Guaranteed Pure, 27. 12 Michael Reynolds, The Young Hemingway (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1998), 10–11. 13 Correspondence from Anson T. Hemingway to Ernest Hemingway, May 10, 1918, Box IC10, Folder 48, Ernest Hemingway Collection, JFK. 14 Correspondence from Anson T. Hemingway to Ernest Hemingway, May 10, 1918, Box IC10, Folder 48, Ernest Hemingway Collection, JFK. 15 Correspondence from Clarence E. Hemingway to Ernest Hemingway, April 17, 1918, Folder 2, Box IC11, Ernest Hemingway Collection, JFK. 16 Ernest Hemingway, “Letter to Marcelline Hemingway,” in The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, vol. 1, 1907–1922, ed. Sandra Spanier and Robert W. Trogden (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011), 157–158. 17 Correspondence from Clarence E. Hemingway to Ernest Hemingway, February 4, 1920, Box IC11, Folder 4, Ernest Hemingway Collection, JFK. 18 Reynolds, The Young Hemingway, 93. 19 Reynolds, The Young Hemingway, 93. 20 Ernest Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters, ed. Carlos Baker (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981), 861. 21 Joseph A. Dimuro, “Introduction,” in The Cliff-Dwellers, ed. Joseph A. Dimuro (New York: Broadview, 2010), 30. 22 Howells, “The Cliff-Dwellers,” 883, reprinted in Cliff-Dwellers, ed. Dimuro, 273. 23 Ken Alder, The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession (Washington, DC: Free Press, 2007), 102–105. 24 Edwin Balmer and William MacHarg, The Achievements of Luther Trant (Boston, MA: Maynard and Company Publishers, 1910), 3.

Notes

210

25 See Gertrude Stein, “Cultivated Motor Automatism: A Study of Character in Its Relation to Attention,” Psychological Review 5 (1898): 295–306. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in The Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Ed. Carl Van Vechten. 1962. Reprint (New York: Vintage, 1990), 73. 26 Hugo Münsterberg, On the Witness Stand: Essays in Psychology and Crime (New York: DoubleDay, Page, and Co., 1909), 134. 27 Edwin Balmer and Thomas Balmer, The Science of Advertising: The Force of Advertising as a Business Influence, Its Place in the National Development and the Public Result of Its Practical Operation (New York: Duffield and Company, 1910), 8. 28 “Hard-boiled, adj.,” OED Online, January 2018, Oxford University Press, accessed February 23, 2018, http://www.oed.com.cod.idm.oclc.org/view/Entry/84135?rske y=YqDqGN&result=2&isAdvanced=false 29 “Hard-boiled, adj.” 30 Ernest Hemingway and George Plimpton, “An Interview with Ernest Hemingway,” Paris Review 18 (Spring 1958): 85–108. Cited from The Paris Review Interviews, vol. 1 (New York: Picador, 2001), 61. 31 Reynolds, The Young Hemingway, 91. 32 Reynolds, The Young Hemingway, 92. 33 Baker, Letters, 209. 34 “To William B. Smith Jr. (January 30, 1925),” in The Letters of Ernest Hemingway vol. 2 1923–1925, ed. Sandra Spanier, Albert J. DeFazzio III, and Robert W. Trogden (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013), 237. 35 Correspondence from Arnold Gingrich to Ernest Hemingway, August 28, 1934, Box IC09, Folder 8, Ernest Hemingway Collection, JFK. 36 Peter Griffin, Along with Youth: Hemingway the Early Years (New York: Oxford UP, 1985), 243. 37 Griffin, Along with Youth, 139. 38 Griffin, Along with Youth, 139. 39 Reynolds, The Young Hemingway, 181. 40 “The Book Fair,” Chicago Tribune, October 23, 1920: 26. 41 Reynolds, The Young Hemingway, 147. 42 Reynolds, The Young Hemingway, 188. 43 Correspondence from Carl Van Vechten to Henry Blake Fuller, June 6, 1922, Box 6, Folder 233, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, NL. 44 Correspondence from Clarence E. Hemingway to Ernest Hemingway, March 6, 1927, Box IC11, Folder 6, Ernest Hemingway Collection, JFK. Correspondence from Clarence E. Hemingway to Ernest Hemingway, March 22, 1927, Box IC11, Folder 6, Ernest Hemingway Collection, JFK.

Notes

211

45 Reynolds, The Young Hemingway, 186, footnote 39. 46 Draft, Ernest Hemingway, “Condensing the Classics,” Undated, Box MS39, Folder 335, Ernest Hemingway Collection, JFK. 47 Hemingway, “Condensing the Classics.” 48 Baker, Letters, 89. 49 Baker, Letters, 94–95. 50 Baker, Letters, 117. 51 Leonard J. Leff, Hemingway and His Conspirators: Hollywood, Scribners, and the Making of American Celebrity Culture (New York: Rowan and Littlefield, 1997), 14. 52 “To William B. Smith Jr., on January 8, 1925,” in The Letters of Ernest Hemingway vol. 2 1923–1925, 204. 53 “To William B. Smith, January 30, 1925,” in The Letters of Ernest Hemingway vol. 2 1923–1925, 237. 54 Baker, Letters, 161. 55 “To Dos Passos, April 22, 1925,” in The Letters of Ernest Hemingway vol. 2 1923–1925, 322. 56 “To Jane Heap, June 12, 1925,” in The Letters of Ernest Hemingway vol. 2 1923– 1925, 349. 57 Baker, Letters, 163. 58 Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time (New York: Scribner, 1925), 61. 59 Hemingway and Plimpton, “An Interview with Ernest Hemingway,” 57, 61. 60 Hemingway and Plimpton, “An Interview with Ernest Hemingway,” 57. 61 Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (New York: Scribners, 2006 [1926]), 42. 62 Bruce Barton, Atlantic Monthly 139 (April 1927): 12–14, in Robert O. Stephens, ed., Ernest Hemingway: The Critical Reception (New York: Burt Franklin, 1977), 46. 63 Griffin, Along with Youth, 59. 64 Bruce Barton, The Man Nobody Knows: A Discovery of the Real Jesus (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 4. 65 Leo B. Ribuffo, “Jesus Christ as Business Statesman: Bruce Barton and the Selling of Corporate Capitalism,” American Quarterly 33, no. 2 (Summer, 1981): 207. 66 Correspondence from Arnold Gingrich to Ernest Hemingway, August, 4, 1933, Box IC09, Folder 7, Ernest Hemingway Collection, JFK. 67 “Fifty Grand,” in Ernest Hemingway, The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Finca Vigía Edition (New York: Scribner, 1987), 241. 68 “Letter to Louis and Mary Bromfield 8 March 1926,” in The Letters of Ernest Hemingway vol. 3 1926–1929, ed. Rena Sanderson, Sandra Spanier, and Robert W. Trogden (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015), 36.

Notes

212

69 Robert W. Trogden, The Lousy Racket: Hemingway, Scribners and the Business of Literature (Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 2007). 70 Baker, Letters, 315. 71 The Letters of Ernest Hemingway vol. 2 1923–1925, 139, footnote 1. 72 Baker, Letters, 120. 73 Baker, Letters, 125. 74 Baker, Letters, 125. 75 Correspondence from Grace Hall to Ernest Hemingway, especially letters sent on February 20, 1927; March 6, 1927; October 9, 1927; March 11, 1928; September 21, 1928; September 24, 1928, Box IC11, Folders 10–11, Ernest Hemingway Collection, JFK. 76 “To Ezra Pound, February 10, 1924,” in The Letters of Ernest Hemingway vol. 2 1923–1925, 97. 77 The Letters of Ernest Hemingway vol. 2 1923–1925, 99, footnote 9. 78 “To Gertrude Stein and Alice Mid-May 1925,” in The Letters of Ernest Hemingway vol. 2 1923–1925, 333. 79 Baker, Letters, 161. 80 “To Harold Loeb in early November 1925,” in The Letters of Ernest Hemingway vol. 2 1923–1925, 408. 81 See first two drafts of “The Killers.” Ernest Hemingway Unpublished Draft, “The Killers,” Undated, Box MS53, Folder 535, Ernest Hemingway Collection, JFK. Ernest Hemingway Unpublished Draft, “The Killers,” May 1926, Box MS53, Folder 536, Ernest Hemingway Collection, JFK. 82 Baker, Letters, 205–206. 83 Correspondence from Sherwood Anderson to Ernest Hemingway, June 6, 1926, Box IC01, Folder 31, Ernest Hemingway Collection, JFK. 84 Correspondence from Sherwood Anderson to Ernest Hemingway, August 6, 1926, Box IC01, Folder 31, Ernest Hemingway Collection, JFK. 85 Judy Jo Small and Michael Reynolds, “Hemingway v. Anderson: The Final Rounds,” Hemingway Review 14, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 6. 86 “The Killers,” in Ernest Hemingway, The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Finca Vigía Edition (New York: Scribner, 1987), 222. 87 “To Guy Hickok, December 5, 1930,” in The Letters of Ernest Hemingway vol. 4 1929–1931, ed. Sandra Spanier and Miriam B. Mandel (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2018), 426. 88 Leff, Hemingway and His Conspirators, 155. 89 “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in Ernest Hemingway, The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Finca Vigía Edition (New York: Scribner, 1987), 43.

Notes

213

90 Joseph Fruscione, Faulkner and Hemingway: Biography of a Literary Rivalry (Kent, OH: Ohio UP, 2012), 97. 91 “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” 43. 92 Draft series, Ernest Hemingway, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Undated, Box MS58, Folder 702, Ernest Hemingway Collection, JFK. 93 James R. Mellow, Hemingway: A Life without Consequences (New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1992), 552. 94 Baker, Letters, 597. 95 Correspondence from Ernest Hemingway to Fanny Butcher, 1952–1961, Box 4, Folder 236, Fanny Butcher Papers, NL.

Chapter 6 1 George Garrett, “Faulkner’s Early Literature Criticism,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 1, no. 1 (Spring, 1959): 3. 2 William Faulkner, “Books and Things: Turns and Movies by Conrad Aiken” in The Mississippian, February 16, 1921: 5, republished in William Faulkner: Early Prose and Poetry, ed. Carvel Collins (Boston, MA and Toronto: Little Brown and Company, 1962), 74–76. 3 Collins, Early Prose, 75. 4 Collins, Early Prose, 75–76. 5 William Faulkner, “Books and Things: Aria de Capo: A Play in One Act, by Edna St. Vincent Millay” in The Mississippian, January 13, 1922, republished in William Faulkner: Early Prose and Poetry, ed. Carvel Collins (Boston, MA and Toronto: Little Brown and Company, 1962), 86. 6 Daniel J. Singal, William Faulkner and the Making of a Modernist (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 44. 7 William Faulkner, “On Criticism,” The Double Dealer, January–February 1925, republished in William Faulkner: Early Prose and Poetry, ed. Carvel Collins (Boston, MA and Toronto: Little Brown and Company, 1962), 110. 8 Collins, Early Prose, 110. 9 William Faulkner, “Introduction to The Sound and the Fury, 1933,” in William Faulkner: Essays, Speeches, and Public Letters, ed. James B. Meriwether (New York: Random House, 2004), 290. 10 Collins, Early Prose, 75–76. 11 Collins, Early Prose, 75. 12 Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography (New York: Vintage, 1991), 134.

Notes

214 13 Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography, 135.

14 Singal, William Faulkner and the Making of a Modernist, 84. 15 Max Putzel, Genius of Place: William Faulkner’s Triumphant Beginnings (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State UP, 1985), 78. 16 William Faulkner, Mosquitoes (New York: Liveright, 1997), 50. 17 Faulkner, Mosquitoes, 241. 18 Faulkner, Mosquitoes, 242. 19 Faulkner, Mosquitoes, 242. 20 Faulkner, Mosquitoes, 19. 21 Faulkner, Mosquitoes, 8. 22 Allen Stuart Weller, Lorado Taft: The Chicago Years, ed. Robert G. LaFrance and Henry Adams (Champaign-Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 66–85. 23 Faulkner, Mosquitoes, 13. 24 Faulkner, Mosquitoes, 72. 25 Faulkner, Mosquitoes, 343. 26 Faulkner, Mosquitoes, 63. 27 Faulkner, Mosquitoes, 94. 28 Keith Newlin, Hamlin Garland: A Life (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 329. 29 Keith Newlin, ed., Garland in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates (Des Moines, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2013), 150–151. 30 Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography, 150–151. 31 Faulkner, Mosquitoes, 53. 32 Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography, 159. 33 Faulkner, Mosquitoes, 75. 34 “Arrest of the Confidence Man.” New-York Herald, July 8, 1849. 35 Gary Lindberg, The Confidence Man in American Literature (New York: Oxford UP, 1982), 8–9. See also Victor W. Turner, “Myth and Symbol,” in The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: The Macmillan Company and the Free Press, 1968), 576–581. 36 See Mikhail Bakhtin, “Folk Humor and Carnival Ambivalence,” trans. J. Iswolsky, The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, and Voloshinov, ed. Pam Morris (New York: Routledge, 1994), 195–206. 37 Nelson Algern, City on the Make (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 11–12. 38 Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1902). 39 David W. Maurer, The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1940), reprint (New York: Anchor Books, 1999), 10.

Notes

215

40 Maurer, The Big Con, 10. 41 Faulkner, Mosquitoes, 64. 42 Faulkner, Mosquitoes, 64. 43 Faulkner, Mosquitoes, 64. 44 Faulkner, Mosquitoes, 50. 45 Faulkner, Mosquitoes, 50. 46 Faulkner, Mosquitoes, 119. 47 Faulkner, Mosquitoes,8. 48 Faulkner, Mosquitoes, 9. 49 Faulkner, Mosquitoes, 24. 50 Faulkner, Mosquitoes, 22. 51 “To Mrs. M.C. Faulkner,” in Thinking Of Home: William Faulkner’s Letters to His Mother and Father, 1918–1925, ed. James G. Watson (New York: Norton and Company, 1992), 161. 52 Watson, Thinking of Home, 171. 53 Faulkner, Mosquitoes, 149–150. 54 Faulkner, Mosquitoes, 149. 55 T. J. Jackson Lears, “Faulkner and the World of Goods” in Faulkner and Material Culture, eds. Joseph R. Urgo and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 142–143. 56 William Faulkner, “Centaur in Brass,” in Collected Stories of William Faulkner (New York: Vintage, 1995), 153. 57 Faulkner, Mosquitoes, 368. 58 Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography, 177. 59 William Faulkner, “The Big Shot,” in The Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (New York: Vintage International, 1997), 522. 60 Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography, 4–5. 61 “The Illinois Central Railroad, Main Line of Mid-America,” American Rails.com, accessed January 4, 2018, www.american-rails.com/illinois-central.html. 62 Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography, 235. 63 Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography, 235. 64 Peter Lurie, Vision’s Immanence: Faulkner, Film, and the Popular Imagination (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2004), 34–36. 65 See Nathan Ward, Becoming Dashiell Hammett (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015). 66 William Faulkner, Sanctuary (New York: Vintage International, 1994), 145. 67 Singal, William Faulkner and the Making of a Modernist, 44. 68 Kevin Birmingham, The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (New York: Penguin, 2004), 9. 69 Rideout, Sherwood Anderson, vol. 1, 169–170.

Notes

216

70 Margaret Anderson, “Ulysses in Court,” The Little Review 7 no. 4 (January– March, 1921): 25. 71 Jay Watson’s, Forensic Fictions: The Lawyer Figure in Faulkner (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1993). 72 Lurie, Vision’s Immanence, 49. 73 Anderson, “Ulysses in Court,” 25. 74 Lurie, Vision’s Immanence, 23. 75 William Faulkner, “Interview with Harry Nash Smith,” in The Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner 1926–1962, ed. James Meriwether and Michael Millgate (New York: Random House, 1968), 30. See also Michael Zeitlin, “Versions of the Primal Scene Faulkner and Ulysses,” Mosaic 22, no. 2 (Spring, 1989): 63. 76 “Faulkner Library, July 1998,” Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia Library, accessed 8 February 2018, small. library.virginia.edu/collections/featured/the-william-faulkner-collection/ faulkner-library-july-1998 77 Rideout, Sherwood Anderson, vol. 1, 414. 78 Rideout, Sherwood Anderson, vol. 1, 597. 79 Singal, William Faulkner and the Making of a Modernist, 5. 80 Birmingham, The Most Dangerous Book 302–311. 81 Henry Nash Smith, “Introduction,” in William Faulkner, Miss Zilphia Gant (Dallas, TX: Book Club of Texas, 1932). 82 Philip Cohen and Doreen Fowler, “Faulkner’s Introduction to The Sound and the Fury,” American Literature 62, no. 2 (June 1990): 262. 83 Cohen and Fowler, “Faulkner’s Introduction to The Sound and the Fury,” 291. 84 Cohen and Fowler, “Faulkner’s Introduction to The Sound and the Fury,” 291. 85 The Double Dealer, June 1922, Box 1, Folder 9, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, NL. 86 William Faulkner, The Wild Palms (New York: Vintage International, 1995), 151. 87 Thomas L. McHaney, “Anderson, Hemingway, and Faulkner’s The Wild Palms,” PMLA 87, no. 3 (May 1972): 465–474. 88 Joseph Fruscione, Faulkner and Hemingway: Biography of a Literary Rivalry (Columbus OH: Ohio State University Press, 2012), 84–102. 89 Faulkner, Wild Palms, 114. 90 For more on the relationship between Faulkner and Cather’s work, see: Merrill Maguire Skaggs, Axes: Willa Cather and William Faulkner (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2007). 91 Faulkner, Wild Palms, 114. 92 Faulkner, Wild Palms, 133.

Notes

217

93 Faulkner, Wild Palms, 133. 94 Faulkner, Wild Palms, 146. 95

George Levy, To Die in Chicago: Confederate Prisoners at Camp Douglas (Gretna, LA: Pelican Press, 1999), 1–3. Pelican press was founded in 1926 by John McClure.

96 Faulkner, Wild Palms, 79. 97 Faulkner, Sanctuary, 41. 98 Faulkner, Sanctuary, 140, 40. 99 Faulkner, Sanctuary, 40. 100 Faulkner, Sanctuary, 1–3. 101 Faulkner, Sanctuary, 139. 102 Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography, 90. 103 Helen Haiman Joseph, A Book of Marionettes (New York: B. W. Heubsch, 1920), 174. 104 John Bell, American Puppet Modernism: Essays on the Material World in Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 58. 105 W. T. Jewkes, “Counterpoint in Faulkner’s Wild Palms,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 2, no. 1 (Winter 1961): 39.

Chapter 7 1

Matthew J. Bruccoli, “A Brief Life of Fitzgerald,” in F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters, ed. Bruccoli with the assistance of Judith S. Baughman (New York: Scribner’s, 1994), xix.

2

F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise, ed. James L. W. West III (New York: Cambridge, 1996), 11.

3

F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Table of Contents,” in Tales of the Jazz Age (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922), x.

4

F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Lees of Happiness,” in Tales of the Jazz Age (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922), 277.

5

F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Camel’s Back,” in Tales of the Jazz Age (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922), 41.

6

F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” in The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A New Collection, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Scribner, 1989), 183.

7

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, ed. Matthew Bruccoli (New York: Cambridge UP, 1991), 8.

Notes

218

8 F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night, ed. James. L. W. West III (New York: Cambridge UP, 2012), 147. 9 Bruccoli, A Life in Letters, xv. 10 James L. W. West III, The Perfect Hour: The Romance of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ginevra King, His First Love (New York: Random House, 2005), xiii, 118. 11 Albert Nelson Marquis and John William Leonard, The Book of Chicagoans: A Biographical Dictionary of Leading Living Men of the City of Chicago (Chicago, IL: A. N. Marquis, 1905), 332. West repeats the phrase “jobber in hats, caps and furs” in The Perfect Hour, 3. 12 Richard Jay Hutto, June Hall McCash, and Stillman Rockefeller, Their Gilded Cage: The Jekyll Island Club Members (Macon, GA: Henchard Press, 2005), 95. 13 John J. Glessner, The Commercial Club of Chicago: Its Beginning and Something of Its Work (Chicago, IL: Privately printed, 1910), 81, 189–198. 14 Glessner, The Commercial Club of Chicago, 199. 15 Edward Tyler Blair, History of the Chicago Club (Chicago, IL: H. S. Stone and Company, 1898), 56. 16 Blair, History of the Chicago Club, 99. 17 Correspondence from Ginevra King to F. Scott Fitzgerald, January 29, 1915, Ginevra King Collection Relating to F. Scott Fitzgerald, PL. 18 Correspondence from Ginevra King to F. Scott Fitzgerald, April 12, 1915, Ginevra King Collection Relating to F. Scott Fitzgerald, PL. 19 F. Scott Fitzgerald, My Lost City: Personal Essays 1920–1940, ed. James L. W. West III (New York: Cambridge UP, 2005), 107. 20 Fitzgerald, My Lost City, 107. 21 West, The Perfect Hour, 66. 22 Correspondence from Ginevra King to Dan Piper, May 12, 1947, Box 1, Folder 29, Arthur Mizener Collection on F. Scott Fitzgerald, PL. 23 Correspondence from Ginevra King to F. Scott Fitzgerald, July 7, 1917, Box 2, Folder 1, Ginevra King Collection Relating to F. Scott Fitzgerald, PL. 24 Fitzgerald’s biographers Arthur Mizener and Andrew Turnball may have seen the letters before Ginevra passed away, but neither refer to them explicitly nor seem to have done any work with the collection. 25 Arthur Mizener, Scott Fitzgerald and His World (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1972), 29. 26 Ashley Lawson, “Gender, Collaboration, and Appropriation in the Life and Work of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald,” F. Scott Fitzgerald Review 13 (2015): 76–77. 27 Christine Buci-Glucksmann, La raison baroque: de Baudelaire a Benjamin (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1984), 34, in Mary Anne Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1991), 2.

Notes

219

28 Doane, Femmes Fatales, 2. 29 Correspondence from Ginevra King to F. Scott Fitzgerald, January 29, 1915, Box 2, Folder 1, Ginevra King Collection Relating to F. Scott Fitzgerald, PL. 30 Correspondence from Ginevra King to F. Scott Fitzgerald, January 15, 1915, Box 2, Folder 1, Ginevra King Collection Relating to F. Scott Fitzgerald, PL. 31 Correspondence from Ginevra King to F. Scott Fitzgerald, March 25, 1915, Box 2, Folder 1, Ginevra King Collection Relating to F. Scott Fitzgerald, PL. 32 Correspondence from Ginevra King to F. Scott Fitzgerald, April 26, 1915, Box 2, Folder 1, Ginevra King Collection Relating to F. Scott Fitzgerald, PL. 33 Correspondence from Ginevra King to F. Scott Fitzgerald, May 9, 1915, Box 2, Folder 1, Ginevra King Collection Relating to F. Scott Fitzgerald, PL. 34 Correspondence from Ginevra King to Arthur Mizener, November 7, 1947, Box 1, Folder 29, Arthur Mizener Collection on F. Scott Fitzgerald, PL. 35 Correspondence from Ginevra King to F. Scott Fitzgerald, May 14, 1915, Box 2, Folder 1, Ginevra King Collection Relating to F. Scott Fitzgerald, PL. 36 Correspondence from Ginevra King to F. Scott Fitzgerald, January 31, 1916, Box 2, Folder 1, Ginevra King Collection Relating to F. Scott Fitzgerald, PL. 37 Correspondence from Ginevra King to F. Scott Fitzgerald, January 17, 1916, Box 2, Folder 1, Ginevra King Collection Relating to F. Scott Fitzgerald, PL. 38 Correspondence from Ginevra King to F. Scott Fitzgerald, February 19, 1916, Box 2, Folder 1, Ginevra King Collection Relating to F. Scott Fitzgerald, PL. 39 Correspondence from Ginevra King to F. Scott Fitzgerald, August 21, 1916, Box 2, Folder 1, Ginevra King Collection Relating to F. Scott Fitzgerald, PL. 40 Fitzgerald, “The Camel’s Back,” 27. 41 Cyrus Hall McCormick III, The Century of the Reaper (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1931). 42 Andrew Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Grove Press, 1962), 293. 43 Correspondence from Ginevra King to F. Scott Fitzgerald, January 15, 1915, Box 2, Folder 1, Ginevra King Collection Relating to F. Scott Fitzgerald, PL. 44 Fitzgerald, “The Camel’s Back,” 23. 45 Fitzgerald, “The Camel’s Back,” 33. 46 Gloege, Guaranteed Pure, 26. 47 The Western Brewer: And Journal of the Barley, Malt, and Hop Trades 33 (August 1908): 449. 48 F. A. Cushing Smith, “‘Villa Turicum’ The County Estate of Mrs. Rockefeller McCormick Lake Forest, Illinois,” The American Landscape Architect (June 1930), Villa Turicum, accessed on August 10, 2017, villaturicum.com 49 Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (New York: Vintage, 1998), 418.

Notes

220 50 Fitzgerald, “The Camel’s Back,” 44. 51 Fitzgerald, “The Camel’s Back,” 48.

52 For a contemporaneous retelling of Nast’s political drawings, see Jeremiah Whipple Jenks and Rufus Daniel Smith, We and Our Government (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922), 95. 53 Amanda Smith, Newspaper Titan: The Infamous Life and Monumental Times of Cissy Patterson (New York: Knopf, 2011), 34. 54 Smith, Newspaper Titan, 36. 55 Smith, Newspaper Titan, 37. 56 Smith, Newspaper Titan, 76. 57 Smith, Newspaper Titan, 102. 58 Smith, Newspaper Titan, 103. 59 Smith, Newspaper Titan, 108. 60 Megan McKinney, The Magnificent Medills: America’s Royal Family of Journalism during a Century of Turbulent Splendor (New York: Harper Collins, 2011), 145. 61 Ralph G. Martin, Cissy: The Extraordinary Life of Eleanor Medill Patterson (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971), 215–216. 62 Fanny Butcher, “Glass Houses Is a Good Novel with a Theme,” Chicago Daily Tribune, February 20, 1926: 13. 63 Charles Scribner’s Sons, “Scott Fitzgerald,” Chicago Tribune, February 27, 1926: 8. 64 McKinney, The Magnificent Medills, 145. 65 Smith, Newspaper Titan, 205. 66 McKinney, The Magnificent Medills, 145–146. 67 F. Scott Fitzgerald, “May Day,” in The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Matthew Bruccoli (New York: Scribners, 1998), 105. 68 Fitzgerald, “May Day,” 104. 69 Smith, Newspaper Titan, 216–229. 70 Joseph Medill Patterson, A Little Brother of the Rich (Chicago, IL: The Reilly & Britton Co, 1908). 71 “Note on A Little Brother of the Rich,” Publisher’s Weekly 74 (August 1908): 417. 72 H. L. Mencken, Life as an Author and Editor, ed. Jonathan Yardley (New York: Vintage, 1992), 14. 73 H. L. Mencken, “Oyez! Oyez! All Ye Who Read Books!,” The Smart Set 26, no. 4 (December 1908): 153. 74 Mencken, “Oyez! Oyez! All Ye Who Read Books!,” 154. 75 George Jean Nathan, “The Dramas of Fore and Aft,” The Smart Set 30, no. 3 (March 1910): 146. 76 H. L. Mencken, “Review of The Great Gatsby,” Chicago Tribune, May 3, 1925.

Notes 77

221

Ronald Berman, Fitzgerald’s Mentors: Edmund Wilson, H.L. Mencken, and Gerald Murphy (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 51.

78 Berman, Fitzgerald’s Mentors, 51–52. 79 Berman, Fitzgerald’s Mentors, 57. 80

Fitzgerald, “May Day,” 98.

81 Baker, Letters, 407. 82 Baker, Letters, 408. 83 Baker, Letters, 408. 84 Bruccoli, Correspondence, 126. 85 Bruccoli, Correspondence, 126. 86

F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (New York: Cambridge, 1996), 202–203.

87 Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise, 203. 88 Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise, 203. 89

F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Cut-Glass Bowl,” in Flappers and Philosophers (New York: Scribner’s, 1920), 126.

90

Fitzgerald, “The Cut-Glass Bowl,” 139.

91

Emile G. Beck, Memorial Volume of the Dedicatory and Opening Ceremonies of the World’s Columbian Exhibition, ed. Joint Committee on Ceremonies of the World’s Columbian Commission and the World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago, IL: Stone, Kastler, and Painter, 1893), 266.

92

Fitzgerald, “The Cut-Glass Bowl,” 124.

93 Bruccoli, A Life in Letters, 60. 94 Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 21. 95 Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 10. 96 Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 51. 97 Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 64. 98 Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 51. 99

Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia UP, 1982), 4.

100 Mary A. McCay, “Fitzgerald’s Women: Beyond Winter Dreams,” in American Novelists Revisited: Essays in Feminist Criticism, ed. Fritz Fleischman (Boston, MA: G. K. Hall and Company, 1982), 317. 101 Correspondence from Hemingway to Fitzgerald, September, 1926, Box 49, Folder 24, F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers, PL.

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Index Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner) 144, 164 Achievements of Luther Trant, The (Balmer and MacHarg) 108–9 Adams, Nick 121 Addams, Jane 48–9, 52, 54 Democracy and Social Ethics 143 and Harriet Monroe 6, 30, 52, 54 and Hull House 48 and The Little Room 21, 26, 83 and relationship to Willa Cather 83 Addis, Arthur 24 Ade, George 22 Adler, Dankmar 31, 48 advertisement 110–11, 122–3, 151, 179 Aiken, Conrad, Turns and Movies 133, 135 Aldis, Mary Reynolds 27, 132 Algren, Nelson 143 Allen, James Lane, “The Butterflies” 84 Altgeld (governor) 57 American Arts and Crafts Show 48 American Arts and Crafts Society 65 American critics, criticisms of 134 American Institute of Architects 31 American Mercury, The 28, 156 American modernism 2, 8, 9, 185 American Railway Workers Union 46 American realism 108, 135, 186, 187 Among the Ash Heaps and the Millionaires (Fitzgerald) 189 Anasazi Indians 17, 18, 21, 76, 79, 80, 86, 93 Anderson, Cornelia 63–4, 136 Anderson, Karl 63 Anderson, Margaret 2, 27, 63, 153–4 and 57th Street Artists’ Colony 152 and Chicago 3, 118 and Ernest Hemingway 115 legal issues of 27, 154 and Little Review, The 27, 56, 99, 151, 152, 154, 163 and Ulysses 154 and William Faulkner 151–2

Anderson, Sherwood 1, 2, 4, 6–7, 8, 27, 28, 55–67, 94, 99, 100, 106, 113, 114, 118, 127, 129, 130, 135–7, 142, 147, 151, 152, 157, 158, 162, 207 allusions to 158 and criticism of Chicago 4, 64–6 Dark Laughter 158 and Ernest Hemingway 1, 67, 128 and Fanny Butcher 94 and Frank Lloyd Wright 7, 56, 64–5, 67 and F. Scott Fitzgerald 2, 186 and James Joyce 155 literary style of 56 Many Marriages 28 and Margaret Anderson 63 nervous breakdown of 63–4, 136–7 Tar: A Midwestern Childhood 137 and Ulysses 155 and William Faulkner 2, 135–7, 147–8, 151–2, 158 Windy McPherson’s Son 59 Winesburg, Ohio 59 anti-Semitism 87 applied psychology 109–10 Architectural Record 65 Architecture in Chicago 52, 65, 115, 149, 160. See also Adler, Dankmar; Burnham, John; Root, John Wellborn; Sullivan, Louis Chicago School 149 White City 139 Wright, Frank Lloyd 7, 56, 63, 64–5, 67, 115–17, 149 Armory Show 150 Chicago’s Tribune’s response to 51 Harriet Monroe’s support of 51, 53 public response to 51–2, 75, 76 review of 51–2, 53, 58 writer’s response to 76 Armour, George 36, 168 Armour, Louis 3 Armour, Ogden 53

Index Armour, Philip 32 art, and workers’ upliftment 4 Art Institute of Chicago 21, 23, 51, 63, 67, 75, 77, 81, 82, 139 artist-advertising man 113 artists, behavior of 140–1 artists rights 52 Arts and Crafts, rights of artisans 47 Arts and Crafts movements 6, 48–50 Arts and Culture, resistant spaces of and for 139 art scene, Chicago 5 Ashcan painters 77 “Ash Heel’s Tendon—A Story, The” (Hemingway) 111 Atlantic Monthly 20 Atlantic Monthly (newspaper) 19 Attic Club, the 24–5, 26, 84 avant-garde art 51 avant-garde literature 3–5, 26, 118–19, 121, 138 avant-garde modernism 123 Ayres, (Major) 144 Baird, Helen, Faulkner’s depiction of 141 Baker, Jordan (character) 141 Bakhtin, Mikhail 143 Balmer, Edwin 107, 108, 110, 115, 118 and advertising 110–11, 122 influences on Hemingway 7, 99, 107, 108, 112–13, 114, 119–23, 132 and lie detection 100, 122, 129 literary style of 100, 107, 108, 110, 111 Public Result of its Practical Operation 110 Science of Advertising, The (Balmer) 110 Balmer, Edwin and William MacHarg Achievements of Luther Trant, The 108–9 “Man in the Room” 108 Barnes, Jake 123 Barton, Bruce 123 Barton, William E. 104–5, 108 Beach, Sylvia 154, 155 Beautiful and the Damned, The 165 Beck, Ferdinand W. 39 Bellows, George 77 Cliff Dwellers (painting) 77 Benbow, Horace 153

237

Bennett, William R., Little Caesar 150 Berman, Ronald 183 Bernstaff, Count Johann Heinrich von 180 “Big Shot, The”, (Faulkner) 148 Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche) 183 Black Hawk sculpture 146 Blackhawk statue 87, 146 Blackstone, T. B. 168 Blaine, Amory (character) 165 Blair, Edward Tyler 168 Blotner, Joseph 142 Blum, Jerome 51, 66 Blum, Lucille 66 Book of Marionettes (Joseph) 163 boosterism 3, 4, 15, 16, 61, 137, 143, 189, 190 Boyd, Thomas 186 Boyeson, H. H. 18 Brett, Harvey 107, 108 Bromfield, Louis 28 Browne, Ellen Van Volkenurg. See Van Volkenburg, Ellen Browne, Francis F. 36, 40, 63 Browne, Maurice 26, 63 Browne’s Bookshop 63 Buchanan, Tom (character) 141, 165 Buci-Glucksmann, Christine 170 Bulliet, C. J. 5 Burnham, Clara Louise 25 Burnham, Daniel H. 31, 33, 39, 40, 139 Burton, Arthur M. 25–6 business establishment, Chicago 2 business practices 107 advice about 101 and Christianity 103–4 business sector, affect of on arts scene 60, 96 Butcher, Fanny 60, 71, 72, 76, 179 and the book market 93–8 bookstore 94, 95 and Chicago Tribune 71, 76, 93, 179 Christmas cards 132 and Edgar Lee Masters 60–1 and Elia Peattie 71 and Ernest Hemingway 132 and Harriet Monroe 60 and Lewis 94, 98 and Willa Cather 7, 71, 72, 76, 94–8 “Butterflies, The” (Allen) 84

238

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“Camel’s Back, The” (Fitzgerald) 165, 173 Canfield, Dorothy 74 Caraway, Nick (character) 165 Carlton, Julian 64 Cary, Lucian 62 Cather, Willa 7, 62, 71, 72–4, 93, 97 and the Attic Club 84 “Coming, Aphrodite” 88 criticism of Chicago 4, 76–93, 96 and Elia Peattie 72–6 and Ernest Hemingway 4, 5, 9 and Fanny Butcher 93–5 and F. Scott Fitzgerald 159 and Henry Blake Fuller 84 and Hull House 74 and Irene Miner Weisz 1, 74, 94–5, 97 One of Ours 96–7, 98 O Pioneers 74, 97 “Scandal” 88 Song of the Lark, The 71–2, 76, 77–83, 84, 88, 93 and William Faulkner 1, 2, 4, 7, 135, 159 Youth and the Bright Medusa 88, 95–6 “Centaur in Black” (Faulkner) 147 Century Magazine, The 31 Cerf, Bennett 155 Chadwick, G. W. 37 Chamberlain (Mr.) 42 Chatelaine of La Trinite, The (Fuller) 14 Chatfield-Taylor, Hobart 19, 22, 24, 50–1 Cheney, Martha “Mamah” Borthwick 64 Chevalier de Pensiere-Vani, The (Fuller) 14 Chicago arts scene in 60, 62 business scene in 102–3, 191 capitalism in 9, 19, 108, 145, 148, 166 and the Columbian Exposition of 1893 32, 188 criticism of 188 cultural institutions 17, 63 cultural movements in 15, 16, 17, 59 efforts to uplift 3, 14 engineering in architecture 159–60 evangelical movement in 3–4 exodus of writers and artists 4 fears about cultural destruction of 20, 83 and the Great Chicago Fire of 1971 3, 13, 15, 167, 189–90

Great Fire of 1871 15 and industrialists 33, 35, 45, 46, 53, 189 literary forms in 4–5 literary scene in 1, 99–100, 135, 153–4, 184 old settlers vs. new migrants in 13 as a railway hub 165 realism in 58, 139, 151, 153, 186 (see also realism) religion and education in 3, 15 writers in 2, 4–5, 7, 8, 131, 158, 162–3 Chicago art 5 Chicago Arts and Crafts Society 48, 65 Chicago art scene 2, 26, 82, 85, 93, 130, 131 allusions to 158 critique of 82–3, 83–4 Chicago boosters. See boosterism Chicago business establishment 2 Chicago businessmen 101–3 Chicago business practices, novels and 101, 103, 108–9 Chicago Club, the 2–3, 161, 168 Chicago Evangelization Society 3 Chicago Fire. See Great Chicago Fire Chicago Journal 41 Chicago literary establishment 4 Chicago literary renaissance 25, 56, 60, 99 Chicago literary scene 135, 154 and Ernest Hemingway 2 Chicago Mail, The (newspaper) 41 Chicago Modern 1893–1945 5 Chicago modernism 4, 73–6, 156. See also American modernism; modernism Chicago Puppet Theater 134, 163 Chicago realism 2, 185–7 Faulkner’s criticism of 133–4 Chicago Record-Herald (newspaper) 26 Chicago Relief and Aid Society 168 Chicago Tribune (newspaper) 20, 31, 32, 41, 45, 51, 52, 57, 59, 60, 64, 72, 73, 75, 89, 93, 108, 111, 114, 165, 173 art critics of 3, 60 and Burton Roscoe 59, 93, 94 copyright lawsuit 64 (see also copyright laws) and Elia Peattie 93, 114 and Ernest Hemingway 1, 2, 7–8, 108, 116

Index and Fanny Butcher 71, 76, 93, 94, 179 and F. Scott Fitzgerald 165, 174 and Willa Cather 4, 5, 9 Chicago World’s Fair 3, 6, 16, 28, 32, 46, 107, 108, 139, 188. See also Columbian Exhibition of 1893 Chicago writers Ernest Hemingway and 2, 4–5 Faulkner and 2, 4–5, 7, 8, 131, 158, 162–3 and F. Scott Fitzgerald 2, 4–5, 9 Christian socialist 19 Clarkson, Ralph 22 Claude (Cather), title dispute 96–7 Cleary, Kate 72 Cliff Dwellers (Bellows) 77 Cliff Dwellers, the 6, 21, 77, 92, 93 metaphors of 77–84 Cliff-Dwellers, The (Fuller) 16–18, 20, 107, 108, 189–90 review of 18–19, 108 Cliff Dwellers Club, the 24, 51, 84 Cather’s opinion of 84 creation of 25 female version of 53 and Hamlin Garland 24–5, 51, 84 and Henry B. Fuller 24–5 Columbian Exhibition of 1893. See Chicago’s World’s Fair Columbian Ode (Monroe) 29, 33–41 “Coming, Aphrodite,” (Cather) 88 Commemoration Ode (Monroe). See Columbian Ode (Monroe) commercial boosterism 4 Commercial Club of Chicago 168 confidence man 142–5, 147 Confidence Man (Melville) 8, 135, 142 Congo and Other Poems (Lindsay) 57 Copyright Act of 1790 44 copyright laws 6, 29, 41–5, 47. See also Monroe, Harriet Cordon Club 53 corruption, in the South 130, 148–9, 160 corruption and violence 136, 150 Cosmopolitan 72 Cowles, Eswin 173 Craven, Wayne 139 Sculpture in America 139 critical realism 58

239

Culp, E. C. 32, 33–4, 36, 40 cultural self-protection 17–18 “Cut-Glass Bowl, The” (Fitzgerald) 187 Daily News 181 Dallas Morning News 137 Dark Laughter (Anderson) 158 Darrow, Clarence 56–7, 60 Dawson, Fairchild (character) 137–8, 139, 144–5 Delano, Frederic 168 Dell, Floyd 56, 62, 152 and Little Review 152 and Margaret Anderson 63, 152 and Sherwood Anderson 56, 63, 162 Democracy and Social Ethics (Addams) 143 Denton, Minna C. 52 Detroit Free Press 175 Dial, The 36, 40, 151 and Monroe’s Columbian Ode 36 dialect 60 “Diamond as Big as the Ritz, The” (Fitzgerald) 165 Dijkstra, Bram 89 Dill Pickle Club 63 Diver, Nicole (character) 166 Doane, Mary Ann 170 Double Dealer, The 28, 114, 134, 142, 146, 158 Douglas, Stephen A. 30 Dove, Arthur 51 Downs, M. Catherine 73 Drake, Temple (character) 150, 152–3, 162–3 Dreiser, Theodore 58, 113 loved by Mencken 183 Sister Carrie 58, 158, 161 Duff, Sarah Robinson 88 eagles, as symbolism 86, 87, 92 Eagle’s Nest Art Colony/Tree 86, 87 Eagle’s Nest Association 23 Eagle’s Nest Camp 23, 25, 87 Egoist, The 151 Eight, The 77 Eliot, T. S. 59 Elsworth, James H. 36 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 40 engineering 159–60

240 Ernst, Morris 155 European avant-garde 5 evangelicalism 3 evangelical movements 2, 3–4, 15, 104, 108, 112 Falkner, William C. 149 Fall Flight (Patterson) 180 Fanny Butcher’s Chicago Book Shop 94 Faulkner, William 8, 28, 114, 133–6 Absalom, Absalom! 144, 164 allusions Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway 158 allusions to Herman Melville 8, 136, 142, 144, 147 “The Big Shot, The” 148 “Centaur in Black” 147 and Chicago 133–48, 157 and Confidence Man (Melville) 8, 136, 142 and Conrad Aiken 135 criticism of Carl Sandburg 134, 137 and criticism of Chicago 4, 140, 144, 157–9 and criticism of Lorado Taft 144 and criticism of Midwestern American writers 133–4 criticism of modern artistic forms 139–41, 147 criticism of Sherwood Anderson 8, 136–7, 144, 147–8, 152 criticisms of American critics 134 Dark Laughter (Anderson) 158 and Edgar Lee Masters 100, 110 gangster story of 148–50 and Harry Nash Smith 154–5 Light in August 164 literary style of 131, 135 and Lorado Taft 147–8 and The Mississippian 133 “Miss Zilphia Gant” 156 and money 146 Mosquitoes, The 136, 137, 139, 141, 144, 147, 148, 157, 159 Old Man 157–64 popular culture and 150, 153–4 and puppet theater 162–3 review of Turns and Movies 133 Sanctuary 136, 150, 157, 159

Index and Sherwood Anderson 2, 135–7, 147–8, 151–2 Sound and the Fury, The 134, 156 and Ulysses (Joyce) 139, 154–5 Wild Palms 157–64 Fechter, Edwin 27 Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Union 45 female body, glorification of 170–1 female readers, corruption of 150–3 Fiddelke, Henry G. 115 Field, Marshall 168 Fields, Marshall 3, 32 57th Street Artists’ Colony 63, 67, 151, 152 Fine Arts Building 6, 20–1, 26, 50 as a tourist attraction 62–3 Finley, Marietta D. 65 First Congregational Church 104 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 2, 8–9, 167 Beautiful and the Damned, The 165 “Camel’s Back, The” 165, 173 characters in works of 165–7 and Chicago 165 and Chicago families 166–7 criticism of artists 142 and criticism of Chicago 4 “Cut-Glass Bowl, The” 165, 187 “Diamond as Big as the Ritz, The” 165 and Edith Rockefeller 176, 180, 185 and Eleanor Patterson 174 and Ernest Hemingway 135 “Four Fists, The” 165 and Ginevra King 167–73 Great Gatsby, The 141, 165, 177, 179, 180, 189–90 influenced by Henry B. Fuller 189–91 influences on 165 and Joseph Medill Patterson 173–4, 177, 181–3, 185 Josephine stories 180–1 and Lake Forest 166, 169, 171, 175, 176, 179, 180 “Lees of Happiness, The” 165 literary style of 142, 159, 166, 177, 183, 185–6 “May Day” 181 My Lost City 169 realism of 186 Tender Is the Night 166

Index This Side of Paradise 165, 186 and Zelda Fitzgerald 165, 169, 170, 171, 179, 185 Fitzgerald, Zelda Sayre 165, 167, 170 Folkestad, Bernhard 75 Ford, Ford Maddox 59, 126, 179 “Four Fists, The” (Fitzgerald) 165 Freeman, May Lou 141 Freer, Agnes Lee 61, 201 Fremstad, Olive 88 Friedman, I. K. 27 Friend, Krebs 126, 127 Fuller, George Wood 13, 14 Fuller, Henry 13 Fuller, Henry Blake 4, 5–6, 13, 25, 66, 73, 75 and the Attic Club 84 Cliff-Dwellers, The 16–18, 20, 107, 108, 157, 189–90 and the Cliff Dwellers Club 24–5 and criticism of Chicago 4, 16–20 and Eagle’s Nest Camp 23, 25, 87 and Ernest Hemingway 99 and Hamlin Garland 18 and Harriet Monroe 19–20 influences on Cather 84 influences on Faulkner 134 influences on Fitzgerald 189–91 influences on Hemingway 107 invitation from Columbian Exposition of 1893 16 later works of 28 and the Little Room 22–3, 49, 86 praises of 27–8 Under the Skylights 63, 77 Fuller, Margaret 40, 87 Garden, Mary 88, 89 Garland, Hamlin 4, 6, 18, 22, 62, 73, 75 Cliff Dweller’s Club formation 24–5, 51 and criticism of and William Faulkner 141 and criticism of Modernist Fiction 24, 141 and criticism of Sherwood Anderson 141 and Henry Blake Fuller 84, 86 and the Little Room 86 men’s only club formation 23–4, 51, 83 protest against the Armory Show 51

241

Willa Cather and 84 and William Faulkner 141 Garrett, George 133 Gere, Mariel 71, 73 Gizycka, Countess. See Patterson, Eleanor “Cissy” Glass Houses (Patterson) 179 Golden Calf, The (Boyeson) 18 Gordon (character) 138–9, 144–6 Grant, Frederick (Mrs.) 30 Grant, Ulysses S. 30 Great Chicago Fire 3, 13, 15, 167, 189–90 Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald) 9, 165, 177, 179, 180, 189–90 review of 183 and William Faulkner 141 Griffin, Peter 113 Grover, Oliver Bennett 23 Hackett, Francis 62 Hammett, Dashiell 150 Hampton’s Magazine 108 Harper’s Bazaar 108 Harper’s Magazine 21 Harper’s Monthly 49 Harper’s Weekly 176 Harvard Psychological Laboratory 109 Haymarket Affair 46, 184 Haymarket Anarchists 57 Head, Franklin 22, 23, 25 Heap, Jane 27, 56, 99, 151, 152 legal issues of 154 Hemingway, Alfred T., How to Make Good or Winning Your Largest Success 100–1, 103, 105 Hemingway, Anson 103 Hemingway, Arthur 110 Hemingway, Chicago literary scene 1–2 Hemingway, Ernest 1–2, 7–8, 28, 99 “The Ash Heel’s Tendon—A Story” 111 and avant-garde literature 121–3 “The Battler” 121 and criticism of Chicago literary scene 2, 4 Death in the Afternoon 122 and Edgar Lee Masters 113 and Edwin Balmer 99, 107, 108 family support of 105–6 “Fifty Grand” 124

242

Index

and Frank Lloyd Wright 67, 115, 116 and F. Scott Fitzgerald 135, 185 and Henry Blake Fuller 7, 99, 113 iceberg theory of 122 influences on 99–100 interest in patronage 125–32 “The Killers” 128–30 lie detection as influence 158 literary style of 111, 122–3, 130 “Man in the Room” 108 and Margaret Anderson 99, 113, 115, 118 “The Mercenaries” 111 and Oak Park 7, 99, 100, 103, 106, 107, 111–13, 115, 119, 126–7, 129, 132 “Passing of Pickles McCarthy” 112 poetry of 114 and Sherwood Anderson 1, 67, 128 Sun Also Rises, The 124, 125 and the Toronto Star 1, 170 “Up in Michigan” 121 “Woppian Way, The” 111 and Willa Cather 135 Hemingway, Grace-Hall 115, 116, 126 Hemingway, Mary Welsh 100 Henry W. King & Company 167–8 Hersey, Marie 167, 168 higher life, the 15, 16, 77–81, 86, 92, 103, 184, 190 Himmel, Peter 184 History of American Sculpture, The (Taft) 139 History of the Chicago Club (Blair) 168 H. J. Smith Exploring Company 17, 79 Horne, Bill 113, 119 Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz 59–60 Howells, William Dean 18–19, 75, 108, 151 How to Make Good or Winning Your Largest Success (Alfred Hemingway) 100–1, 103, 105 Hull House 22, 48–9, 74 If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (Faulkner). See Wild Palms (Faulkner) Illinois Woman’s Press Association 93 immigrant, new, fear of 18 immigrants, statements about 77 immigration 18, 21 fear of 21

industrialists 33, 35, 45, 46, 53, 189 Ingersoll, Bob 30 International Exposition of Modern Art 51 protest against 51 international modernism 51 James, Henry 19 James, William 109 Jenson, Jen 27 John F. Kennedy Presidential Library 100 Joseph, Helen Haiman, Book of Marionettes 163 Josephine stories (Fitzgerald) 180–1 Journalism 73, 117 Journal of the Chicago Association of Commerce and Industry 102 Joyce, James 107 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 186 Ulysses 144, 150 Judah, Noble 27 Jungle, The (Sinclair) 58 King, Charles Bohan 167 King, Charles Garfield 168 King, Ginevra 2, 166, 167–70, 167–73, 180 King, Henry W. 167 King, Mary 93 Knopf, Alfred A. 97 Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror 190–1 labor movement 45. See also Workers’ Rights Lake Forest College 3 Lang, Fritz, Spiders, The 143 Lanier, Sidney 72 Laurence, Edward F. (Esquire) 37 Leader, The 173 Lears, T. J. Jackson 147 “Lees of Happiness, The” (Fitzgerald) 165 Lewis, Edith 98 Lewis Institute 52 Lewis, Sinclair 94, 113 lie detection 7, 100, 110 mechanism behind 114, 135 and psychology 110 stories 111, 112 lie detector, the 109–10

Index Light in August (Faulkner) 164 Lincoln, Abraham 30 Lindberg, Gary 143 Lindgren, John R. 3 Lindsay, Vachel 27, 113, 151 and 57th Street Artists’ Colony 63, 152 Congo and Other Poems 57 Lippincott’s 72 Literary Review 152 literature, and obscenity issues 152–6 Little Brother of the Rich, A (Joseph Patterson) 181, 183, 185 Little Caesar (Bennett) 150 Little Review, The 27, 56, 99, 150, 151, 152–3. See also Anderson, Margaret; Heap, Jane and Ernest Hemingway 118, 125, 136 and Sherwood Anderson 151, 152 and William Faulkner 8, 151–2 Little Room, the 6, 21, 26–7, 49–50, 73, 83 club record of 22 elected directors of 22–3 financial resources of 25 and Hamlin Garland 23–4 members of 21–5, 86 poem about 55 “Little Room, The” (Wynne) 49 Little Theater, The 26, 163 Liveright, Horace B. 28, 121 Liveright Publishers 119, 120, 128, 129–30 Lovett, Robert Morse 29 MacHarg, William 108 Mammon of Unrighteousness, The (Boyeson) 18 “Man in the Room” (Balmer and MacHarg) 108 Mann, James R. 153 Mann Act 153–4 Many Marriages (Anderson) 28 Marionettes, The (play) 163 Masters, Edgar Lee 4, 6–7, 27, 53, 99, 113 and 57th Street Artists’ Colony 63, 152 and criticism of Chicago 4 critique of Chicago 56–62 and Ernest Hemingway 114 literary style of 58 Spoon River Anthology 57, 60, 114, 135 and William Faulkner 114, 135

243

Maurer, David W. 143–4 Maurier, Patricia (character) 140, 144 “May Day” (Fitzgerald) 181 review of 183 May Day, significance of 184 Mayer, Florence 88, 89 McCarter, Robert 64 McCarthy (Mr.) 42 McCormack, Cyrus H. Jr. 33 McCormick, Cyrus H. 53, 104, 168 McCormick, Gordon 2, 166, 168 McCormick Harvesting Machine Company plant 45 McCormick, Nettie 104 McCormick, Robert 3, 94, 166, 179 McCormick, William Sanderson 174 McCutcheon, George B. 22, 23 McCutcheon, John T. 27 McDowell, E. A. 35 McHanney, Thomas L. 158 McLaughlin, Freddy 180 McNamara, James 57 McNamara, John 57 Melville, Herman, Confidence Man 8, 135, 142 Mencken, H. L. 28, 94, 98, 181–4 “Mercenaries, The” (Hemingway) 111 Mexican silver workers 67 Meyer, Oscar 3 Midwestern speech, representation of 60 Midwestern writers, criticism of 138 Millay, Edna St. Vincent 134 Mississippian, The 2, 133, 137 “Miss Zilphia Gant” (Faulkner) 156 Mitchell, Billy 169 Mitchell, Martha 30 Mitchell, Tennessee 63 and 57th Street Artists’ Colony 152 modernism 5, 75, 153 American 185 avant-garde 123 and Chicago 75 Chicago reaction to 4–5, 7, 51 industrialist’s reaction towards 33, 35 influence on American literature 2, 8, 9, 65, 185 the making of 107, 118–25 tension between Chicago and 75, 118, 135, 156–7

244

Index

tension between realism and 58, 139, 151, 153, 186 vs. realism 58, 139, 151, 153, 186 modernist writers 2–4, 28, 29, 94, 99, 134, 140, 192 Monroe, Dora 30–1 Monroe, Harriet 6, 19–20, 29–30, 51, 53, 60, 73 and 57th Street Artists’ Colony 63, 152 and Chicago Tribune (newspaper) 31, 41, 45, 51, 52 childhood 30–1 and the Columbian Exhibition of 1893 29, 32–3 Commemoration Ode 19, 29, 33–40 copyright and 6, 37–8, 40–1 copyright lawsuits 6, 29, 41–4, 47, 53 education of 30 and Edwin Fechter 27 Faulkner’s criticism of 134 and Hull House 22, 48 and the Little Room 22, 26, 30, 49, 86 and Poetry magazine 99 A Poet’s Life 29, 41 Pound’s criticism of 134 review of International Exposition and Modern Art 51–2 Sherwood Anderson and 66 support of Arts and Crafts Movement 48–9 and support of modern art 52–4 support of Worker’s Right’s Movement 29–30, 46, 47 Monroe, Henry Stanton 30, 31, 57 Monroe, Lucy 20, 48 Moody, Dwight L. 3, 103–4, 108, 175 Morgan, Anna 14, 22, 23, 27, 50, 53, 63 Morris, Ira Nelson 24, 32 Morris, William 48 Mosquitoes, The (Faulkner) 8, 136, 137, 139, 141, 144, 147, 148, 157, 159 Münsterberg, Hugo 109, 110, 111, 122, 123 On the Witness Stand 109, 110, 111, 122, 123, 210 Murphy, Gerald 185 Murphy, Sara 185 My Antonia 97

My Chicago (Morgan) 50 My Lost City (Fitzgerald) 169 Nast, Thomas 176 Nathan, George Jean 28, 183 Nebraska State Journal 84 new modern art, and workers’ and artists’ rights 52 newspapers, impact on the art and writing culture 60–1 New York art scene 77 New York Herald, The (newspaper) 142 New York World 29, 41, 42, 44 Nick Adams stories 123 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Birth of Tragedy 183 Nordfeldt, B. J. O. 51 Northwestern University 3, 110, 132 Notes on Democracy (Mencken) 183 Oak Park 104, 120, 130 and Ernest Hemingway 7, 99, 100, 103, 106, 107, 111–13, 115, 119, 126–7, 129, 132 and Frank Lloyd Wright 48, 64, 115, 116, 117 and religion 123, 124 O’ Beatty, John 156 O’Donnell, Mary 93 Oglesby, Richard J. 46 Old Man (Faulkner) 157–64 Omaha World-Herald 72 One of Ours (Cather) 96–7, 98 On the Witness Stand (Műnsterberg) 109, 110, 111, 122, 123, 210 O Pioneers (Cather) 74, 97 Palmer, Bertha 22, 30, 39, 41, 85, 161 Palmer, Potter 3, 85 Paris Review, The 111 Parrington, Vernon Louis 58 Patch, Gloria and Anthony (character) 165 patronage systems 125–32 Chicago 66 Patterson, Eleanor “Cissy” 129, 177–87 allusions to 185 Fall Flight 180 Glass Houses 179 as orgin for Daisy in The Great Gatsby 9, 180

Index Patterson, Joseph Medill 177–8, 182 allusions to 185 Little Brother of the Rich, A 181, 183, 185 Patterson, Robert W. 3, 46 Peattie, Elia 21, 23, 53, 57, 63, 71, 72, 74 and the Chicago Tribune (newspaper) 93, 114 and Harriet Monroe 22 literary style of 72, 74, 75, 114 review of O Pioneers 74–5 Story of America 72 and Willa Cather 71–6 Peattie, Robert B. 57, 72 Perry, Josephine (character) 166 Peter Whiffle (Van Vechten) 28 Pinkerton, Alan 150 Pinkerton Detective Agency 150 Poetry magazine 29, 30, 43, 52, 52–3, 59, 99, 113–14, 151, 186 attacks on 66 and new writers 56 A Poet’s Life (Monroe) 29, 41 Pond, Allen B. 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 49 Pond, Irving K. 21, 24, 25, 49 pornography, charges of 150–2 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce) 186 Potter, Bessie 21, 83 Potter’s Field 161 Pound, Ezra 52, 59, 99, 134, 150–1 Powers of Horror (Kristeva) 190–1 Printing Trade News 102 Professor’s House, The 87 Prohibition Party 176 Public Result of its Practical Operation (Balmer) 110 Pullman Company 46 Pullman, George 3, 32, 82, 168 Pullman Labor Strike 46–7 Pumphrey, Neal “Popeye” 148, 149–50, 152–3, 162–3 Putzel, Max 137 Quinn, John 126, 150–3 railways 149, 153 Southside Railway Company 13 West Chicago City Railway systems 13

245

Random House 155, 157 Rascoe, Burton 62 Raymond, Clifford 27 realism 187 as dominant literary mode in Chicago 2–4, 7, 18, 28, 56, 58, 71, 81, 108, 133, 157, 184–6 Garland and 84 as masculine 124 tension between narrative realism and modernism 56, 65–6, 113 rebuilt cities, in the South 149–50 Regnery, Henry 51 religion and education 3 religious establishment 3–4 Reynolds, Michael S. 104, 111–12, 113 Richardson, Hadley 114 Rockefeller, Edith 176, 180, 185 Rockefeller, John D. 175 Rock Island and West Chicago City Railway 13 Rock Island Railway 13 Root, John Wellborn 31 Roscoe, Burton 59, 62, 93, 94 Rowan Oak Papers 156 Ruskin, John 48 St. Edna Vincent Millay, review of 134 Saint-Gaudens, Augustus 139 Sanctuary (Faulkner) 136, 150, 153, 157, 159 Sandburg, Carl 4, 56, 59, 62, 94, 113, 114, 151 and 57th Street Artists’ Colony 63, 152 criticism of 137 works about Chicago 4 Saturday Evening Post, The 180, 184 Sayre, Zelda. See Fitzgerald, Zelda Sayre “Scandal” (Cather) 88 Scandinavian Exhibit 75 Schevill, Clara 67 Schevill, Ferdinand 67 Science of Advertising, The (Balmer) 110 Scott, Robert 104, 110 Sculpture in America (Craven) 139 Sergeant, Elizabeth Shepley 74 Settlement House movement 59 Settlement Movement 49

246

Index

sex in literature 75–6, 89, 150–2, 154 Seymour, Ralph Fletcher 22 Shahs, Howard 27 Sheridan, Philip 30 Sherman, William Tecumseh 30 Shikoh, Jane Allen 15 Sinclair, Upton 4, 58, 62, 66 Jungle, The 58 works about Chicago 4 Singal, Daniel J. 155 Singing Poetry 27 Sister Carrie (Dreiser) 58, 158, 161 Smart Set, The (Mencken) 150, 181 Smith, Charles W. 102, 154 Smith, Harry Nash 154, 155 social change, fear of 21 social classes 183–4, 187–8 social realism 84 Song of the Lark, The (Cather) 7, 71–2, 74, 76–83, 84, 87–93 Sound and the Fury, The (Faulkner) 134, 156 Southside Railway Company 13 Southwest Review, The 156 Spencer, Allen 22 Spiders, The (Lang) 143 Spoon River Anthology (Masters) 57, 60, 114, 135 review of 58–9, 114 Spratling, William 66–7, 138 steel beams, underground 31 Stein, Gertrude 67, 109, 125, 210 Stone, Phil 134, 151, 157 Story of America, The (Peattie) 72 strikes, workers 45–7 Studebaker Corporation 62 “Studios Club,” the 21 Sullivan, Louis 31, 88, 149 Sullivan, Margaret 31, 39, 40–1, 42, 46 “Summer Days” 75 Sun Also Rises, The (Hemingway) 114 Swift, Gustavus 32 system-built homes 64, 65 Szuberia, Guy 18 Taft, Lorado 21, 23, 24, 25, 63, 86, 87, 139 and William Faulkner 147–8 Taliaferro (character) 144 Taliesin 64

Tar: A Midwestern Childhood (Anderson) 137, 138 Tender Is the Night (Fitzgerald) 166, 185 Ernest Hemingway and 185–6 This Side of Paradise 165 This Side of Paradise (Fitzgerald) 165, 186 Thomas, Theodore 34–5 Tietjens, Eunice 186 Times-Picayune, The (newspaper) 141 Toronto Star, Hemingway’s writing in 1, 117 tourism and train travel 4 train lines, reconstruction of 149 Trant, Luther 111 Turns and Movies (Aiken) 133 Ulysses (Joyce) 139, 144, 150, 152–5 appeal for lifting ban on 155–6 Little Review, the 8, 99, 118, 136 pornography charges against 150–3 Under the Skylights (Fuller) 63 “Upward Movement in Chicago, The” (Fuller) 20 universities colleges, establishment of 3 vampire, and women 89–90, 91, 171 Van Vechten, Carl 27, 158 Van Volkenburg, Ellen 26, 63, 152 Villa Turicum 175–6 Walker, Nellie V. 25 Wasserman, Loretta 87 Weininger, Susan S. 77 Weisz, Irene Miner 1, 71, 74, 94–5, 97 friendship with Cather 1 West Chicago City Railway systems 13 Western Association of Architects 31 Western Brewer, The 175 West, James L. W. 170 Wheaton College 3 Wheaton v. Peters 47 Whitman, Walt 30, 59 Wild Palms (Faulkner) 8, 136, 157–64 Willa Cather: On Writing 98 Williamson, C. N. 111 Wilson, F. H. 35–6 Windy McPherson’s Son (Sherwood) 59 Winesburg, Ohio 65

Index Winesburg, Ohio (Sherwood) 59 review of 59 With the Procession (Fuller) 22 review of 19 women, networking club for 53 Woodress, James 88 Woolsey, John 155 Worker’s Right Movement 6 Workers’ Rights 45–7, 52 Wound and the Bow, The (Wilson) 111 Wright, Frank Lloyd 7, 56, 63, 64–5, 67, 115–17, 149

247

writers, new generation of 56, 108 writing business 112 avant-garde 122, 125, 138 for profit and reputation 135, 138 W. Scott Thurber gallery 51 Wyatt, Edith 22, 74 Wynne, Madeline 21, 22, 48, 49, 83 Yeaman, George 53 Youth and the Bright Medusa (Cather) 88, 95–6