Chicago and the Making of American Modernism

by Michelle E Moore

  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 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 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 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, in spite of 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 c
onvinced 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 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 Memorial 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 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:

  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 Jour
nal 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, 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.