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 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.
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 well-respected 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 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. 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 o
f 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, and 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? 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
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.
6
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 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 Ch
icago 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 high-browed 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.
Chicago and the Making of American Modernism Page 17
