Chicago and the Making of American Modernism

by Michelle E Moore

  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 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 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 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 business-oriented 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 pla
nks, 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 solute 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 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 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 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 t
he 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 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.