Chicago and the Making of American Modernism

by Michelle E Moore

  Most of the significant characters and many of the minor ones in his work either come from Chicago directly or descend from Chicagoans. In This Side of Paradise (1920), Amory Blaine’s father “grew wealthy at thirty through the death of two elder brothers, successful Chicago brokers.”2 Fitzgerald identifies the story behind “The Lees of Happiness” (1922) as first belonging to the Chicago Tribune,3 and the story takes place “half an hour from Chicago.”4 In “The Camel’s Back” (1922), “Mrs. Howard Tate was a Chicago Todd before she became a Toledo Tate.”5 “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” makes mention of a “Chicago Beef Princess.”6 In The Great Gatsby, Tom Buchanan is from Chicago, and he “brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest.”7 In the Josephine stories, Josephine Perry lives in Chicago, having been raised there as well (1928). In Tender Is the Night (1934), Nicole Diver’s grandmother was brought up in Chicago and her parents built a house in Lake Forest, where she has spent a great deal of her life. Dr. Dohmler, too, has a connection to Chicago. He decided against going to school in Chicago because he “had read about Chicago in those days, about the great feudal families of Armour, Palmer, Field, Crane, Warren, Swift, and McCormick and many others, and since that time not a few patients had come to him from that stratum of Chicago and New York.”8 Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels refer repetitively to Chicago and when a reader notices the ongoing reference, it begins to seem like a writerly habit or tic waiting to be worked out in psychoanalysis.

  Fitzgerald scholars and biographers accept that “Everything F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote was a form of autobiography. His fiction is transmuted autobiography.”9 He knew the grandchildren and heirs of two important Chicago families personally: Gordon McCormick with whom he became friends at Princeton and Ginevra King, with whom he had a fast, but significant, romance. He also knew of the Medills and Pattersons, the families that ran the Tribune, lived in Lake Forest, and who had intermarried with the McCormicks. Fitzgerald shows in his work that the type of person who had this kind of wealth was interested in his own self-importance whether preaching a Midwestern moral code based on nineteenth-century Presbyterian ideas of thrift and self-control or creating philanthropically minded societies and institutions with their name prominently displayed to advertise their businesses. They were, for Fitzgerald, at heart hypocritical and corrupt because despite preaching restraint and upward lift to the poor and their workers, these men increased their fortunes through violent union breaking, war profiteering, and land grabbing. His work attempts to delineate the ways in which the corrupt ideologies of the grandparents have been transmitted to their callous grandchildren, solidifying what Fitzgerald saw as the Chicago type.

  The first three sections of this chapter will trace the histories of these families and Fitzgerald’s relationship to them in order to establish from whom Fitzgerald drew his ideas about Chicago men and women when writing about them in his fiction. These Chicago families represent a specific kind of wealth built by grandparents who built their businesses in the mid- to late nineteenth-century period of wildly unregulated capitalism. Fitzgerald is most interested in those Chicagoans who live, work, and vacation together in a closed and clannish society of the extremely rich. His work uses these types, mash-ups of real people he met briefly or knew deeply throughout his life in order to show the ways in which his fictional drawing of a type is more realistic than Hemingway’s or Cather’s careful renderings of real individuals in fictional guise. Fitzgerald’s fiction presents the complexities of the social milieu as drawn from naturalistic types coming together. Fitzgerald’s work argues that the habits, fashions, and ideologies of the very rich Chicago families have had a destructive impact on Americans, because their ideologies became the ideologies of the intellectual elite and the middle to lower classes who imitate them. The chapter’s final section shows that many of Fitzgerald’s novels are about Chicago and that they use the metaphor of marriage, as begun at the Columbian Exhibition, to work out the relationships between money, love, art, and business.

  Ginevra King: True to type

  F. Scott Fitzgerald met sixteen-year-old Ginevra King on January 4, 1915, at a sledding party. He was home in St. Paul for winter break from Princeton, and she was visiting her friend and roommate, Marie Hersey. She noted the meeting in her diary and the next day wrote “Am absolutely gone on Scott.”10 When Fitzgerald met Ginevra King, he was not meeting just another rich soon-to-be debutante, nor was he meeting just a wealthy middle-Western girl as she has been described in Fitzgerald scholarship. He was meeting the heir to one of the largest and most elite American fortunes and meeting the granddaughter and daughter of men who made Chicago and ran Chicago, the industrial center of America. Ginevra was the daughter and granddaughter of two wealthy Chicago families: the Kings and the Fullers. Her paternal grandfather, Charles Bohan King was in the “wholesale grocery firm of Barrett, King & Co., 1864–1865, then jobber in hats, caps and furs as member of firm of King, Carhart & Co., 1865–1867, and of King Brothers 1867–1891. He had been the President and director of Commercial Safe Deposit Co. since 1855.”11 He was in business with his brother, Henry W. King, also a clothing manufacturer. In 1868, they and W. C. Browning and other associates organized the wholesale clothing house of Henry W. King & Company. After the Great Fire, the company moved to the wholesale clothing district around Market and Franklin streets. Henry W. King became president of Browning, King & Company, the largest wholesale clothing firm in the United States. He was also prominent in charitable work and was president of the Chicago Relief and Aid Society during the period of the Great Fire.12

  He was a member of the Commercial Club of Chicago, organized in 1877, and was president in 1895. An elite group of successful Chicago businessmen, the Commercial Club promoted the economic development of the city. The club’s most active members—men like George Pullman, Marshall Field, Cyrus McCormick, George Armour, and Frederic Delano—were the same men who forged Chicago into a leading industrial and commercial center and sponsored the Fair.13 The club’s privately printed book names the members as: “The type of men whose genius has placed the United States among the great commercial powers of the world.”14 Henry W. King was also a prestigious member of the Chicago Club. Though his name is not listed as a member in the back of Edward Tyler Blair’s 1898 History of the Chicago Club, he appears in its pages lunching with one of its original one hundred members at the best table in the club: “Henry W. King and T. B. Blackstone seldom missed a noonday meal at the round table. Mr. King was a great reader and thinker for a business man, a man of many interests, uncompromising in his denunciation of all that was wrong in the community and a power for the right.”15 Ginevra’s stockbroker father, Charles Garfield King, expanded the family fortunes on both sides of the family: the King money, as well as the maternal Fuller money also made quickly during the Chicago boom years of the Civil War. Charles King established the brokerage firm King, Farnum & Co., with seats on exchanges in both Chicago and New York and he belonged to the prestigious men’s clubs of each. Ginevra’s father joined his uncle as a Chicago club member in 1897.16 She was born on November 30, 1898.

  There’s no way to know how much of Ginevra’s background Fitzgerald knew about, but he would have understood that she descended from the kind of men who created Chicago and how vast that made her fortune. Her friend Marie Hersey or Fitzgerald’s friend at Princeton, Gordon McCormick, most likely told him who she was, from where she came, and what it all meant. After the first meeting, Scott and Ginevra began a furious letter writing exchange, which should be seen as part of the larger fad of writing extensive letters to members of the opposite sex while at school. A girl’s popularity could be seen by the number of letters she received from boys, and neither Scott nor Ginevra had any delusions they were each other’s sole correspondent. Although they wrote to each other frequently, they only saw each other three times during this period. Scott visited her at Westover on February 20, 1915, where they were heavily chaperoned and watched behind gl
ass, according to Ginevra.17 That spring, Scott invited her to the sophomore prom at Princeton, but her mother refused to let the sixteen-year-old girl go halfway across the country unchaperoned to a university dance. Ginevra’s letters bemoan the unfairness of the situation and the unreasonableness of Mrs. King.18 Scott and Ginevra managed to meet at the Ritz in New York on June 7, 1915. Two decades later, in 1935, Fitzgerald wrote in My Lost City, of the meeting: “Moreover she to whom I fatuously referred as ‘My Girl’; was a Middle Westerner, a fact that kept the warm center of the world out there, so I thought of New York as essentially cynical and heartless—save for one night when She made luminous the Ritz Roof of a brief passage through.”19 His next sentence reveals where they were in the ebb and flow of their romance: “Lately, however, I had definitely lost her and I wanted a man’s world.”20 Later that June, on the way to Montana, he visited her at her family’s new estate in Lake Forest, Illinois, where he met her parents, friends, and others in the King’s social circle. The essay’s title refers to how Fitzgerald feels lost and nostalgic about New York, but it could just as easily be a reference to Chicago, since the middle section remembers this last meeting with Ginevra.

  Fitzgerald’s final letter to Ginevra was his dry acknowledgment of her wedding to Billy Mitchell sent on July 21, 1918.21 Ginevra and Scott met one last time in 1938. She recalls in a letter to Dan Piper on May 12, 1947: “One of my greatest friends, Josephine Ordway, who is now dead, had kept in touch with Scott and Zelda during the years and told me of their wild nomadic life, and it was through her that he found out that I was in California in 1938.” They had lunch together and afterward went to a bar. She was “heartsick” as he had been “behaving himself.” He had a series of “double Tom Collins’” and fell off the wagon he’d been on for several months.22 King asked Fitzgerald to destroy the letters she sent to him when they stopped writing in 1917 and it’s presumed that he destroyed the originals, but only after he made a typed transcript of the letters.23 Ten years after Fitzgerald died in 1940, his daughter, Scottie, returned them to Ginevra.24 When Ginevra died in 1980 at 82, her family kept the letters, and in 2003, her daughter and granddaughters donated the entire binder, along with Ginevra’s diary and an unpublished short story written by her, to Princeton, where Fitzgerald’s extensive papers are archived. Her first letter to Scott is dated January 15, 1915, and the last from July 1917. They total 227 pages, and most likely he wrote at least that many back to her.

  James L. W. West III considers King to be Fitzgerald’s “Ur-Woman,” and his two earliest biographers, Arthur Mizener and Andrew Turnball, claim that Fitzgerald “remained devoted to Ginevra as long as she would allow him to.”25 However, the quantity and intactness of the letters and their proximity to Ginevra’s diary make it seem that Ginevra was extremely important to Fitzgerald. Nowhere else in Fitzgerald’s collection at Princeton are there such perfectly bound, typed, and dated letters, and this poses a large danger for Fitzgerald scholarship: their physical presence overstates the relationship he had with Ginevra and overshadows other relationships that are less well-documented. The overwhelming physical presence of the letters makes Ginevra seem like the other well-documented woman in Scott’s life: Zelda. The archive makes the false comparison seem inevitable, and so scholarship and popular culture have only presented two possibilities for understanding Ginevra within the context of Fitzgerald’s life; either ignore her completely because doing otherwise disrupts the legend of Zelda’s importance in Fitzgerald’s life or place her on the pedestal next to Zelda as either Fitzgerald’s first muse or an additional muse, a kind of muse sister-wife to Zelda. Ashley Lawson has explained that Zelda Sayre has been represented “as a symbolic being … as the quintessential muse, artist’s wife, and, eventually, doomed woman—a brilliant but mercurial talent whose public persona subsumed the identity she herself attempted to create and control.”26 Ginevra, too, has become subsumed into this role, a real person who is read as a “symbolic being,” in Fitzgerald’s life.

  Christine Buci-Glucksmann has argued that the female body begins to “over represent” at the exact historical moment that men begin to have anxiety over late nineteenth-century shifts in the meaning of masculinity. Modern urbanization and new technologies of machine labor, as well as new kinds of femininity, gave rise to representational art that over glorifies the female body as never before.27 Mary Ann Doane names this a “compensatory gesture,” as the female body “is instantly allegorized and mythified as excess in art, literature, and philosophy.” The excessive figure is the femme fatale. Doane argues: “Indeed if the femme fatale over represents the body it is because she is attributed with a body which is itself given agency independent of consciousness. In a sense, she has power despite herself.”28 On January 29, 1915, Ginevra chastises Scott for calling her a vampire: “Mon Dieu but I’m glad—I’m very glad to hear that you have decided I didn’t kiss Reuben—and now I want you to apologize for calling me a vampire—Tres rude I should say—and please apologize in your next– !”29 Scholars have made Ginevra King, like Zelda before her, into a vampiric femme fatale, but in her case, it’s a misreading of archival material. The sheer volume of her letters makes her seem excessive and her language, as a sixteen-year-old girl, appears unformed and emotional. Fitzgerald’s biographers, Mizener, Dan Piper, Andrew Turnball, and West, have drawn her as a symbolic being. The body of her letters begins to over represent who she really is and who she was to Scott, making her into the femme fatale of the archive, preserved by a broken Fitzgerald for all of eternity and a singular source for all of the new women and femme fatales he wrote.

  Mythologizing Ginevra prevents her from being understood within the context of Chicago and Lake Forest and the families with whom she interacted. It also has prevented any possible understanding of Fitzgerald’s relationship to Chicago and the ways in which he understood the Chicago type that populated his life and his work. Ginevra understood that she was part of an elite group and she wanted Fitzgerald to understand as well. She provides this information immediately, by name-dropping Gordon McCormick in her first letter to Scott. She writes: “I can’t imagine what possessed Gordon McCormick to write me, as I didn’t know the gentleman even knew what I looked like.” She follows with a great idea: “Listen: why don’t you ask Gordon McCormick to let you visit him in Lake Forest next summer. I think that would be ‘simply swell.’”30 In subsequent letters, Ginevra reveals that she understands that Scott sees her through an unflattering lens he places over her and all the Chicagoans she knows.

  She writes on March 25, 1915:

  Isn’t it funny, when I got your letter, I was talking on the telephone and so I said “Wait a minute, I’ll open this letter, so I can read while you’re talking.” And then the first words on the page were “Even now you may be having a tete-a-tete with an ‘unknown Chicagoan’ with crisp dark hair and a glittering smile.” Well you’d appreciate the coincidence. You should see Deering. He’s the darkest thing I ever set eyes on and has a glittering smile. I read him that passage of the letter, as it was so appropriate.31

  The idea of the “unknown Chicagoan,” from someone outside of Chicago, amuses her and at the same time reveals that Scott sees Chicago men as swarthy and dangerous, particularly to her. While he may mean it as a joke, which is how she takes it, the passage is still offensive, and she tells Scott about the other man in order to make him jealous and convey her displeasure with the joke. She calls herself a “Chicago girl” on April 26, 1915, and reveals her pride in being from the Midwestern city.32 She tells Scott outright on May 9, 1915, “I am awfully glad to say that you do not understand my real character, as you profess to, for I would not have you know for the whole world the feelings which I have held for you since January 5th.”33 She fights against the idea that Scott “knows” her in any personal way, but she may have been playing with him, and Ginevra acknowledged this possibility as an adult in a much later letter to Arthur Mizener she wrote in 1947: “My memory of those years (1914
–1916), is poor due somewhat to the fact at this time I was definitely out for quantity not quality in beaux, and, although Scott was top man, I still wasn’t serious enough not to want plenty of other attention!”34

  Her letter dated five days later replies to what must have been a scathing response from Scott. She writes: “Why, it said, practically, ‘I’m sick and tired of you. You have no character I idealized you at first, perhaps, but soon found out what a big mistake I made etc. etc. –!’” She continues to resist Scott’s transformation of her into an idea: “My Heavens! It wasn’t my fault that I was idealized! Goodness only knows I don’t deserve it, and that it was too absurd to last long, but there’s nothing I’d rather do than to really know you well, which considering that I have seen you only thirteen hours in all, seems sort of hard.”35 Six months later, on January 31, 1916, she is still complaining that he only sees her as a type of girl and that he won’t get to know her as an individual. She declares: “The worst of it is, that you don’t want to know me, and I do want to know you, ‘cause it’s no use having me on a pedestal if I have no business being there!”36