Chicago and the Making of American Modernism

by Michelle E Moore

  The collection Chicago Modern 1893–1945: Pursuit of the New, edited by Elizabeth Kennedy, surveys early modernism as it was done by Chicago artists, and argues that Chicago art pursued the individuation of the artist, who, in living apart from the art centers of New York or Paris, could be free of regimentation. In the introduction, Kennedy acknowledges the provincialism of Chicago, but claims that this fact exerted no more sway over the city’s artists than the great art schools of the East’s major cities did in their push toward an artistic conformity. The entire collection continues the vision first expressed by Chicago art critic C. J. Bulliet who declared in 1935 that the city celebrated “individualism as opposed to regimentation.”2

  Chicago and the Making of American Modernism shows how American writers had to think about Chicago, its literature and its industry, in order to construct a new American modernism that speaks to the new European avant-garde while remembering the recent struggles of establishing an American literature apart from Europe. My book emerged from three simple questions: If Chicago was so free and avant-garde, why did so many significant writers and artists leave as quickly as they could? More importantly, why did they write such scathing critiques of Chicago in their work once they were firmly ensconced in the art scenes of New York or Europe? Last, why are the relationships between the Chicago business world and the art scene not understood and explored in literary histories?

  Part One, “The Fire, the Columbian Exhibition, and the Boosters,” draws a picture of the artistic climate in Chicago in the decades after the fire and presents the people, salons, and publications that attempted to fight this climate. Its purpose is twofold: to give the reader a history of Chicago and to explain the myriad of literary and artistic responses to the increasingly patronizing climate.

  Chapter 1, “Henry Blake Fuller and Chicago,” shows how Fuller understood that it was possible to have towns, cities, and countries that supported the arts rather than suppressing them and degrading their importance. He saw Chicago as choosing the latter route and he would spend his life writing and living in opposition to the implied and stated values of what he saw as the vulgar commercialism of Chicago. He was a prominent and active member of the Little Room, an arts club that began in 1898 and met regularly on Friday evenings in Chicago’s Fine Arts Building. The chapter shows how the club designed its purpose as providing solace and protection for artists against the harsh forces of the Chicago business world. The club fell apart when Garland drew the male members away to form his all–male club, The Cliff Dwellers, that had an opposite purpose: to link together Chicago’s art and business. Fuller would always be drawn to those artists who lived in opposition to the stated values of Chicago and they to him. He would never leave Chicago permanently, but lived surrounded by those who saw in him a beacon of hope for the artists of Chicago.

  Chapter 2 reads Harriet Monroe’s life as a poet and as an early supporter of the “new” in art against her life as a Chicagoan. It traces her involvement with the Columbian Exhibition, from her first commissioning to write the “Columbian Ode,” through her negotiations with the committee for ownership rights and control, to her copyright lawsuit with the New York World that changed copyright laws and granted ownership of unpublished work to artists. Her adept management of the committee and legal action when her inherent rights were violated show her to be both a savvy businesswoman and an artist interested in original and new forms, whatever they may be. It then places her victory for artists’ rights within the context of her involvement with the Chicago Workers’ Rights Movement and Arts and Crafts movement, and the Little Room’s pushback against the Chicago business world. Ultimately, the chapter argues that she won respect from the Chicago business world and its artists because of her lawsuit to protect her copyright and deep concerns about the treatment of artists. She stayed in Chicago and started Poetry magazine, because she considered herself and the magazine as a kind of beacon for the artists of the city, a Jane Addams for the artists. She feared that if she left, the hope of the Little Room would be completely extinguished.

  Chapter 3 considers Edgar Lee Masters and Sherwood Anderson and draws from their collections at the Newberry Library in Chicago to show the ways in which each writer wrote about Chicago privately, despite their contradictory public statements. Masters named the close association between the Chicago business and art scene as detrimental to artists, especially with regard to the way in which art critics manipulated the scene for the newspapers. Although Sherwood Anderson extolled the virtues of Chicago publicly, he writes repeatedly in private letters dated 1915 through the 1920s about the distaste he has for Chicago’s inhabitants and its art scene steeped in utilitarian social realism and patronage. The chapter argues how Anderson became a modern craftsman after working for Frank Lloyd Wright in 1915 as a way to combat the commercial art scene in Chicago. Both writers left Chicago, despite being permanently linked to the city they would come to despise.

  Part Two, “Making Modernism Out of Chicago,” reveals Cather’s, Faulkner’s, Hemingway’s, and Fitzgerald’s critique of the Chicago scene and illuminates how each writer engaged both the scene and each other to develop a new American modernism.

  Chapter 4, “Willa Cather and Chicago,” illustrates the writer’s long relationship to the city and her necessary and ongoing engagement with its art scene and critics. The first section chronicles Cather’s relationship to Elia Peattie, the Chicago journalist, which begins in Omaha, Nebraska, and continues after the Peatties moved to Chicago and became a central part of the literary and arts scene. The second section gives an extended reading of Cather’s novel Song of the Lark (1914) and argues that the novel is an extended critique of the Chicago scene that expects art to be useful (whether as social realism or to raise the city’s higher life), treats art as business, and destroys artists by using them. The novel should be read as Cather’s explanation for why she can never move to or settle in Chicago, despite the friends she has and keeps there. The last section shows Cather’s professional relationship to the Chicago Tribune’s art critic Fanny Butcher. Butcher loved and had a sophisticated understanding of the commercial aspect of writing, and she helped Cather sell books in Chicago and across the county, but Cather’s letters to and about Butcher reveal her continued exhaustion with Butcher’s Chicago methods and ideas that made art into a business.

  Chapter 5, “Hemingway and Chicago,” shows how Hemingway internalized the particularly Chicagoan idea about being a “Good Businessman” and doing good at business while growing up in Oak Park. It considers his Chicago influences and argues that Henry Blake Fuller and Edwin Balmer were instrumental in Hemingway’s formation as a young writer. The chapter then shows how he fuses Fuller’s realist critique of Chicago businessmen and Balmer’s realistic genre fiction about lie detection with the poetics of Edgar Lee Masters and Sherwood Anderson in order to create a new method of writing about bad business. The final section of the chapter shows how once in Paris, Hemingway will continue to write about business and embody the businessman he grew up thinking about as a model for masculinity. The chapter ultimately argues that Hemingway writes about Chicago in order to directly address the contradictions inherent in his upbringing and art scene: the city that is hostile to modern art and those writers who help Hemingway form his craft and help him make money. His rebellion against Chicago helped develop the art that would make him famous as he rethought the Chicago realist and literary tradition in an attempt to create the new, modern American novel.

  Chapter 6, “Faulkner and Chicago,” demonstrates 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 Anderson personalized Faulkner’s internal debate about what the new American modernism would look like. The chapter’s first section examines Faulkner’s critique of the Chicago artist in his early novel The Mosquitoes (1927). He constructs the novel as an all
usion 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. The 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 final chapter, “F. Scott Fitzgerald and Chicago,” traces the histories of the four Chicago families Fitzgerald knew—the Kings, the Medills, the McCormicks, and the Pattersons—in order to show who Fitzgerald drew from when writing about Chicago men and women in his fiction. The chapter offers new material as to where he found ideas for major characters, such as The Great Gatsby’s Daisy Buchanan. 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 now 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 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 reads across Fitzgerald’s Chicago plots and suggests that his novels are his attempt to work out the relationship of art to business in American writing.

  The book balances Chicago’s history, literary biography, and literary criticism while foregrounding new archival documents and letters to produce new readings of much-read texts. This book relies heavily on archival material to demonstrate each individual writer’s relationship to Chicago, their personal feelings about Chicago and its art scene, and their use of Chicago in literature. The result is a strong picture of how Chicago and the idea of Chicago influenced, for better and for worse, American literary modernism.

  Part One

  The Fire, the Columbian Exhibition, and the Boosters

  1

  Henry Blake Fuller and Chicago

  Fifteen-year-old Henry Blake Fuller witnessed the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and he lived on the edges of the ashes listening to the pushcart drivers, factory owners, and businessmen call out to dust off, raise money, and rebuild. His father and grandfather were among those considered “the old settlers” and most substantial and important families in Chicago. The Fullers came over on the Mayflower, a fact no one would much care about in Chicago, and had spent generations interwoven with the intellectual and business establishment in New England. His grandfather, Judge Henry Fuller, began to move westward in 1830, eventually becoming a county judge in St. Joseph, Michigan. He moved to Chicago in 1848 and created a fortune developing the Rock Island and West Chicago City Railway systems and the Chicago water system. His son and Henry’s father, George Wood Fuller, worked as secretary at the Southside Railway Company. He had inherited his father’s New England temperament of conservative austerity, and he made use of it for conserving his father’s fortune, rather than expanding it.1 Henry Blake grew up hearing about the superiority of New England and New Englanders to Chicago from his grandfather, and he imagined it as a place that supported culture and the arts and that had a sense of tradition, particularly an intellectual one emanating from Boston. He viewed Chicago through the lens of his family’s vision of genteel New England and saw a rough, vulgar town that seemed to wallow in its own love of money and increasing commercialism.2 After his grandfather died in 1879, Henry Blake Fuller traveled to Italy and found the elegant, beautiful, and art-loving culture he imagined New England to be. Because Italy existed, Fuller understood that it was possible to have towns, cities, and countries that supported the arts rather than suppressed them while degrading their importance. He saw Chicago as choosing the latter route, and he would spend his life writing and living in opposition to the implied and stated values of what he saw as the vulgar commercialism of Chicago. Fuller would always be drawn to those artists who lived in opposition to the stated values of Chicago and they to him. He would never leave Chicago permanently, but lived surrounded by those who saw in him a beacon of hope for the artists of Chicago.

  Fuller took over the family estate in 1883 when his father died, but there wasn’t much left from his grandfather’s fortune because George Fuller had a series of financial mishaps over the four intervening years. Fuller would never speak about his early life to his friends and the overall impression among his friends is that he was freed of the oppressive natures of his parents and their expectations for a bachelor son of a good family.3 Fuller far preferred the company of men, which was well-known among those he considered his good friends. In the early 1890s, Henry Blake Fuller lived among a group of bachelors on the North Shore of Chicago in Kenilworth, where they had set up housekeeping together. The circle consisted of “Edgar A. Bancroft—later Minister Plenipotentiary to China, Alexander A. McCormick, Parmalee J. McFadden, Philip Sidney Post, all of whom were literary. Being particularly intimate friends of Henry’s they were fond of relating anecdotes about him.”4 Anna Morgan, Fuller’s great friend and teacher of the dramatic arts, remembered that “those possessed of certain mental attitudes and predilections, have been and still are migrating to the North Shore in search of an intellectual nouveau.” She remembered of Fuller’s group that “they dispersed a rare and lively hospitality.”5 He would find among these men a physical, emotional, and mental buffer from the harshness of Chicago and its single-minded vision of making money.

  It was while living on the North Shore and participating in this loosely formed literary group that Fuller wrote his first two novels. The first book appeared in 1890, The Chevalier de Pensiere-Vani, written under the pseudonym of Stanton Page, but it was his second novel, The Chatelaine of La Trinite (1892), that won him recognition outside of Chicago as not just the “best stylist” in Chicago but among all writers who were currently writing in English. Both novels established Fuller’s penchant for elegant stories about the gracefully wealthy in Europe. His novels dovetailed nicely with the new American tourist culture developed and promoted by train and steamship lines. The novels with their intriguing French titles seemed to be travel narratives for those who dreamed of the continent but would never get to go or guidebooks to the manners and habits of the more sophisticated Europeans for those Americans who may be the first generation to have a European tour, like Henry James’s Daisy Miller. Fuller’s novels imitated James’s with their plots about wealthy women, the landscapes of continental Europe, and courtship among class divisions, but he wrote as a Chicagoan without access to the elegance he writes about and so he never indulges in the ambiguity of perspectives that leads James’s more perceptive readers to critique the more European habits and spaces they had just been admiring.

  Fuller’s penchant for elegant subjects caught the eye of many mid-nineteenth-century writers who were surprised that a Chicagoan could be producing such highly refined writing about Europ
e. Fuller’s recognition by both the East Coast and the European literary world for writing what was seen as civilized novels, in tone and content, made him one of a handful of artists who—according to the Chicago elite who were in the early stages of developing the Fair—would raise Chicago’s literary and cultural importance on the national stage. Chicago’s art and literary scene has been linked to Chicago’s business since the turn of the nineteenth century. In the 1890s, in large cities across America, spiritual, political, and civic leaders began voicing concerns about “the higher life.” What they meant was the need to raise the quality of a city through the presence of social projects; social and art clubs; education and intellectual institutions; and moral clubs, institutions, and instruction. Jane Allen Shikoh explains how the idea of the higher life emerged from the fusion of the Evangelical Church’s spiritual project of raising all souls to a higher plane, with Darwinian-based ideas about social evolution.6 Concern for “the higher life” of the cities was a concern for the spiritual, physical, intellectual, cultural, and artistic evolution of America’s cities as almost sentient beings.