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
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’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
Christian Modernism in an Age of Totalitarianism, Jonas Kurlberg
Samuel Beckett and Experimental Psychology, Joshua Powell
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
Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Part One The Fire, the Columbian Exhibition, and the Boosters
1 Henry Blake Fuller and Chicago
2 Harriet Monroe and Chicago
The Columbian Exhibition, the “Columbian Ode,” and copyright
Worker’s Rights and Arts and Crafts: The lawsuit and verdict in context
3 Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, and Chicago
Edgar Lee Masters’s critique of Chicago
Sherwood Anderson, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Craftsman ideal
Part Two Making Modernism Out of Chicago
4 Willa Cather and Chicago
Elia Peattie and Willa Cather’s embrace of the modern
Willa Cather’s critique of Chicago: The Song of the Lark
Fanny Butcher and the crass commercialism of the book market
5 Ernest Hemingway and Chicago
Oak Park, Chicago, and the idea of the “good businessman”
The business of making good, honest modernism
Making good modernism out of bad business
The bad business of patronage
6 William Faulkner and Chicago
The Mosquitoes, double dealers, and confidence men
Sanctuary, gangsters, and Ulysses
Wild Palms and the historical exchange between Chicago and the South
7 F. Scott Fitzgerald and Chicago
Ginevra King: True to type
The Medills and the McCormicks: “The Camel’s Back”
Eleanor “Cissy” and Joseph Patterson: “May Day”
Chicago plots: Among the Ash Heaps and the Millionaires
Notes
Works Cited
Index
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 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 sch
olars, 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 Dixon-Kohler, 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 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 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 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 of American Modernism argues was hostile to the literary forms of interest to Cather, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald.
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