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 His unpublished introduction for the 1933 Random House edition of The Sound and the Fury suggests this when he writes: “And of Chicago too: of that rhythm not always with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 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. 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, 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 had come to end, 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 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 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 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:
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 backgro
und 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 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.
Chicago and the Making of American Modernism Page 18
