by Saul Bellow
For further enlightenment I turn, in the same little book, to the contribution of the famous architect Louis H. Sullivan, who worked for so many years in Chicago. What he tells us is this: “As you are, so are your buildings; and, as are your buildings, so are you. You and your architecture are the same. Each is the faithful portrait of the other. To read the one is to read the other. To interpret the one is to interpret the other.” If this is true, Mr. Sullivan has accounted in full for the proposition of Mr. Ives. The balance between ordinary life and spiritual life is manifest in what you see before your eyes. Now, I have spent most of my life in Chicago and have undoubtedly been influenced by its streets, houses, factories, office buildings, six-flats, sky-scrapers, but I can’t agree that Chicago and I are completely reflected in each other. Mr. Sullivan is here driven into polemical exaggeration. You expect this from prophets. They must exaggerate. “Take heed!” Sullivan cries, when he has reached his prophetic altitude.
Did you think Architecture a thing of books—of the past? No! Never! It was, always, of its present and its people! It, now, is of the present, and of you! This Architecture is ashamed to be natural, but it is not ashamed to lie; so, you, as a people, are ashamed to be natural but not ashamed to lie. … This Architecture is filled with hypocrisy and cant. So, likewise, are you, but you say you are not. This Architecture is neurasthenic, so have you burned the candle at both ends. Is then this Democracy? … This Architecture has no serenity—sure sign of a people out of balance. … You know not what fullness of life signifies—you are unhappy, fevered, perturbed. In these buildings the Dollar is vulgarly exalted—and the Dollar you place above Man. You adore it twenty four hours each day: it is your God! These buildings show lack of great thinkers, real men—though you now, in your extremity, are in dire need of great thinkers, real men—Yet, here and there, a building bespeaks integrity—so have you that much of integrity. All is not false. What leaven is found in your buildings—such leaven is found in you. Weight for weight, measure for measure, sign for sign—as your buildings are, so are you!
So people are scolded and, in a Sunday mood, find it refreshing and beneficial. Well, of course there’s a lot in this. Ruskin’s message was similar. And there was William Morris too, and even, if you like, Blake with his Satanic Mills and London’s chartered streets—though Blake would never have said that as our chartered streets were, so were we. You would have to be an architect to make precise counterparts of souls and houses. Still, one can easily understand what Chicago at the turn of the century must have done to a man like Sullivan as he inspected its hovels, slums, bungalows, workrooms, depots, plush hotels, flophouses, its railyards and warehouses and the mansions and tombs of the rich. Sullivan is easily identified as a man of the single-minded type. Democracy might be saved if we built not for the buck but for the occupant. Each of the Romantic friends of mankind knew exactly where the remedy was to be found. Assigned in high school to study Carlyle’s famous essay on Robert Burns, I read: “Let me write the songs of a people, and you may write its laws.” I was not surprised by this. Having grown up in Chicago, I had heard dozens of similar claims. Vegetarians argued that wars would stop if only we ceased to butcher animals. Bread cranks demanded that we check the decay of society by banning white flour. The temperance lecturers, the enemies of tobacco, saw in booze and in smoking dangers of the same dimensions that made Sullivan cry, “Take heed!” Moving into a more respectable intellectual sphere when I left high school, I learned from more refined theorists of the class struggle and the proletarian revolution, or about character neuroses of sexual origin that were destroying civilization; about the semantic chaos that made opposing interests incomprehensible to each other. One cause of misery, one remedy.
I was pleased to read some months ago what the Austrian writer Karl Kraus had said on his deathbed when he heard the news that the Japanese had gone into Manchuria: “None of this would have happened if people had only been more strict about the use of the comma.” For the poet, it is the corruption of language and good usage that starts all the trouble. But Kraus spoke like a wit, and not like a monomaniac convinced that he knew the one remedy that would bring peace and happiness to everyone. The dying Kraus seems to have remained faithful to his vocation while conceding under the full weight of death that no conviction can be wholly free from absurdities. Bad punctuation no more nails down the case than class struggle, sexual neurosis, mass-produced bread, or ugly buildings—that is how I translate Kraus’s comment.
The artist cannot avoid the disorder of contemporary reality, calling on bankers, builders, and the public to redeem democracy by building with honor or by adopting psychological, sexual, or political doctrines. He is bound, bitterly at the best of times, to the amor fati, as Nietzsche calls it, the imperative to embrace what is. Such an embrace is not a surrender; it is the necessary acceptance of a mass of complexities. To limit himself to any one of these single views would result in his segregation, would cut him off from seeing and from understanding what he sees. This mountain of complexities is the supreme datum. It is our great given. And it is ours.
Reading the journal of the Greek poet Seferis, I come upon a valuable entry. Seferis is speaking to his friend Sikelianos, who is ill. “I asked about his health. ‘Yes, I do have high blood pressure,’ he answered, ‘but it is Sikelianos’ high blood pressure!’”
Similar terms may be applied to the American writer’s relations to his country—this antipoetic country: for it has been called antipoetic even by those who, like Tocqueville, found so much of it admirable. The poet Karl Shapiro writes (in a book of essays called To Abolish Children):
It takes a good deal of courage (either that or a powerful inertia) to live in America. … Living in an antipoetic climate, in fact, is our chief form of poetic stimulation. An anthology of twentieth-century United States poetry will bear this out. Thematically, the poems are almost all of a piece: life in the land of the airconditioned nightmare. That twentieth-century poetry has been content to exploit this theme almost exclusively is one of the chief weaknesses of our poetry. … It is all related to the horrors of Progress, the puritanism of hard work, the fuilure of success, the betrayal of the social character, and so on. We are a very social minded bunch of poets, carrying a burden of historical guilt which is way out of proportion to our sins. … It is instilled in the American poet at a very early age that something is antipoetic in the state of America. Some poets pin it on the social system; some on the economic system; some on the failure of spiritual belief; some on the religion of science; but all use the Way of Life as a target.
To the airconditioned nightmare or the Way of Life try to apply the Sikelianos standard. Try it also with Louis Sullivan’s “as your buildings are, so are you.” I have the same relation to Chicago’s buildings as Sikelianos has to his high blood pressure. The dizzy spells, the fits of faintness, are his. The streets of Chicago are mine.
In one of his journal entries, Seferis writes that he thinks he has suffered the worst that could have happened to him in these times—the murderousness of Europe in the forties; exile; intimate knowledge of slaughter; the extermination camps. He says: “a flood of sensitivity makes me feel as if, stripped of protective skin, I’m wandering about with open wounds. Dust, flies, awkward gestures—all very painful. From deep down I long for the days when I could sometimes control this sensitivity with grace.”
Now, against this background, bearing in mind the hints drawn from Sullivan, Shapiro, Sikelianos, Seferis, I go about Chicago this winter, considering the city as it is and remembering what it was like more than forty years ago. There are cities where change is slow; a Florentine can dismiss a mere forty years with a shrug. But here centuries of change can be crammed into a few years, and then and now can be as far apart as Stonehenge is from a computer. A bakery I knew in the days of wood-burning ovens, when cursing, good-natured bakers worked over the vats with their fists or brought loaves from the oven with the long wooden peel, is now automated.
The workers look like research assistants. Then Petrush the watchman, the one who had lost a finger in a machine, slept drunk on the flour sacks, and the rats hopped over his feet; now there isn’t a sack in sight. Machines fill the hoppers. The rats, once unwillingly tolerated, have been wiped out. The streets surrounding the new plant are not greatly changed. The Polish bungalows and six-flats still stand. Puerto Ricans are moving in; the Polish population is under siege.
The Poles were devoted to their property. They kept their bungalows in splendid repair, the brickwork pointed up and covered with waxy red, chocolate, or green paint. Employees of Dole Valve Co. or the casket factory on Carroll Avenue, warehouse and packing plant workers, locksmiths, electricians, press operators, came home after work to paint their fences of threaded pipe after work, to prune the trees or repair the wooden steps. The housewives wore frilly white transparent caps as they tended flowers growing in old washtubs on the lawn. I remember dull summer afternoons when whole blocks crackled with the baseball broadcast and golden houseflies slept in the privet hedges. (I wonder why these hedges became fly dormitories.) I am thinking, of course, of the twenties and thirties, when Chicago was a city made up of such neighborhoods. On warm Sundays in the prohibition era, the streets smelled of home-brewed beer and homemade sauerkraut. Weddings went on for three days, with stamping and roaring, and there were fistfights in the alleys. Nor because you made your own sauerkraut and drank home-brewed piva and swore Polish or Ukrainian oaths were you necessarily a foreigner. Polish veterans of the First World War gathered on Kościuszko Day with a band playing American tunes and carried banners of the Polish National Alliance as they marched patriotically in Humboldt Park. The marchers spoke either Polish or the English-based lingua franca, American. For they were Americans. To be American was neither a territorial nor a linguistic phenomenon but a concept—a set of ideas, really. This collective effort (seldom conscious) to do what was utterly untraditional and historically anomalous had been accurately described by Abraham Lincoln in phrases like “conceived in liberty” or “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” I call your attention to words like “proposition” and “conceived.” The Americanism of immigrants was to some degree conceptual and involved mental choices. It cannot be unimportant that a most significant historical development begins in choices among abstractions. At no stage of development can human beings in the present age avoid abstract choices. Marxism, too, made an offer of concepts to the cultureless, traditionless working class, but thinking was not to continue after you had joined the revolutionary party. Now, this is dangerous stuff. The necessary critical intelligence may not be forthcoming in the U.S., but it has not been proscribed by law; it has only been discouraged by the conditions of life.
It has always been my opinion—the opinion of an amateur “urbanologist”—that the Immigration Act of 1924 entirely changed the character of the city. No more carpenters, printers, mechanics, pastry cooks, cobblers, sign painters, street musicians, and small entrepreneurs entered the country from Greece, Serbia, Pomerania, Sicily. Such trades were infra dig for the children of immigrants. They improved themselves and moved upward. The neighborhoods they left were repopulated by an internal immigration from the South and from Puerto Rico. The country people, black or white, from Kentucky or Alabama, brought with them no such urban skills and customs as the immigrants had. Assembly-line industries had no need for skilled labor.
What we have now taken to calling “ethnic neighborhoods” fell into decay long ago. The slums, as a friend of mine once observed, were ruined. He was not joking. The slums as we knew them in the twenties were, when they were still maintained by European immigrants, excellent places, attractive to artists and bohemians as well as to WASPs who longed for a touch of Europe. The major consequences of the devastation of these neighborhoods, invariably discussed on these occasions—the increase in crime, the narcotics addiction, the welfare problem, the whole inventory of urban anarchy—I will spare you. I will appease the analytical furies by mentioning only three side effects of the change: the disappearance of a genial street life from American cities; the dank and depressing odors of cultural mildew rising from the giant suburbs, which continue to grow; the shift of bohemia from the slums to the universities. But I shall stop with that.
I sometimes think of Sullivan the prophet as I go about Chicago looking at its bungalows and six-flats. Architects tell me that the three-story six-flat extends the bungalow principle to the apartment house. After fifty years, one is reconciled to these brick shapes. You get the builder’s idea. You see what sort of man he was, and you take his sometimes lamentable work to your heart. In the entry of a typical six-flat are the brass mailboxes and the bells, three to a side, and a short flight of stairs. Indiana limestone or Vermont marble, pleasingly worn, leads to the glass door that brings you to the main staircase. There are sometimes more imposing entrances. Some six-flats have a pair of Doric or Ionic columns. Some have great clumsy square cement planters on pedestals, meant for geraniums or ferns but filled invariably with hard mud and ancient litter. More pretentious buildings had a pair of carved lions in front, now reduced by erosion and the beating of the years to lamblike figures. Six open porches at the front were common in Chicago, the coarse brick laid ornamentally, looking a little out of plumb. The elms have succumbed to blight. The commonest shade trees are cottonwoods. Few streets are well paved, but there is plenty of space. Land was cheap, and the government was liberal with it. There were grass plots between the sidewalks and the curbs, cement passages between the buildings, and then there were large backyards, which faced the alley with its line of small garages. Chicago’s back porches are wooden, and the stairs are open to the weather, crudely built, trussed with planks that are hammered to the beams in long X’s. These are what you still see when you ride the elevated trains. I was taken aback on my first trip to New York in the thirties to find the tracks of the Third Avenue El so close to the parlor windows of the tenements. There was always plenty of space in Chicago; it was ugly but roomy, plenty of opportunity to see masses of things, a large view, a never entirely trustworthy vacancy, ample grayness, ample brown-ness, big clouds. The train used to make rickety speed through the violet evenings of summer over the clean steel rails (nothing else was clean) through the backyards of Chicago with their gray wooden porches, the soiled gray stairs, the clumsy lumber of the trusses, the pulley clotheslines. On the South Side you rode straight into the stockyard fumes. The frightful stink seemed to infect the sun itself, so that it was reeking as well as shining.
But I was speaking of the six-flats with their simple symmetry, like six-pack bungalows, economically built from the simple plans of hack architects, kitchen above kitchen, bathroom above bathroom, sun parlor above sun parlor, the strict regularity making the plumbing, heating, and wiring cheaper to install. In this mass production there were nevertheless trimmings, nifty touches, notes of elegance and aspiration. In each front room (no one ever called it a drawing room) was a dummy fireplace with artificial logs; an electric bulb was concealed within, and the heat of this bulb fluttered a pleated disk, which revolved and threw flickering shadows. At each end of the dud fireplace were bookcases with art nouveau glass doors. Above these, at each end of the mantelpiece, were two small hinged windows, also leaded. The fleur-de-lis was the commonest ornament. There might be a pane or two of stained glass even in the toilet. The dining room was separated from the front room by china cabinets, waist high. On top of these a pair of hollow wooden columns (serving no purpose) occasionally stood. In the dining room was a built-in buffet in the same style, often with a beveled mirror. These fixtures, turned out by the hundreds of thousands, were designed to be quickly and cheaply installed.
And this was how most of Chicago lived. You heard little through the six-flat walls. Occasionally a water pipe stuttered, jerking noisily, when a tap was turned on. It was through the ceilings that you heard your neighbors playing the piano or fox-trotting; you heard the tired
, short-tempered breadwinner raging or the comfortable murmur of kitchen conversation on a winter night; or, on the first floor, the janitor’s shovel gritting in the furnace room below. A commonplace good dullness. It was all uneventful, in the same sense that in the physical universe subatomic particles are uneventful, or the unseen explosion of stars is uneventful. Events too small or too large to be comprehended occurred, during which people sat in their parlors or on their porches.
The other day, toward the end of the short winter afternoon, I sat with one of my friends in his third-floor apartment, one of the usual six, looking out at the frost-hardened snow and the sunny smoke dragging, slow to rise when the thermometer has sunk below zero. We were having a drink in his dining room, which faces the rear of the building, the back stairs and the porches, blunt woodwork clapped together by literal-minded carpenters—the same rails, the same slats, treads, risers, floorboards, almost as familiar to a Chicagoan as his own body, seconding his physical existence. Beside all this lumber, a hibernating cottonwood, the big, sooty, soft, graceless tree in crocodile bark, just the sort of organism that would thrive in an environment like this. The cottonwood makes out, somehow, under the sidewalks and successfully transacts its botanical business with the summer murk. In April, it drops its slender sexual catkins, and the streets are fragrant for a day or two; in June, it releases its white fluff; by July, its broad spearhead leaves are as glossy as polished leather; by August, everything is fibrous and brown.
In Hyde Park, near the University of Chicago, the faculty lives peacefully enough in its six-flats, but a few blocks away in either direction are the black slums. A different sort of life, in Woodlawn and Oakwood, tears apart the six-flats and leaves them looking bombed out. They are stripped of salable metals, innards torn out, copper cable chopped to pieces and sold for scrap, windows all smashed, and finally fire and emptiness. Sometimes there is no one at all in these devastated streets—a dog, a rat or two. The grass-plot fences are torn up. True, they were inelegant, shapeless lumber, four-by-four rails set on an angle, the sharp edge upward to discourage lounging. But even these have been stolen, burned. The grass plots themselves have been stamped into solid clay.
