On December 19, 1931, he launches into his final overarching complaint about Illinois and the Midwest in general:
And it had Chicago, a city out of the swamps in 60 years. This is what I mean. Meanwhile in New York and New England if you want to make people vomit just mention Illinois to them. They don’t know its history; they don’t want to know it; what they do know about it fills them with contempt for it, with patronization for it.24
Masters’s letters reveal his scathing public critique of Chicago’s linkage of the art and business worlds through patronage. He had nothing but contempt for the city that had, in his estimation, reduced the American novel to a predictable and profitable formula.
Sherwood Anderson, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Craftsman ideal
The Fine Arts Building became an advertisement for Chicago’s art scene in 1911. The Studebaker Corporation produced a thirty-one page pamphlet, written by Elia W. Peattie, that advertised the building as the center of Chicago’s cultural and artistic life. Each page has multiple photographs, showing Lorado Taft’s and Anna Morgan’s studios, Francis Fisher Browne’s bookshop remodeled by Frank Lloyd Wright, and countless other delights. Peattie usurps Fuller’s book title, Under the Skylights to uncritically describe the meeting place of the Little Room. She even promises that a lucky tourist might catch a glimpse of “a Bohemian.” The building had become a tourist attraction and its mere presence demonstrated, like the Art Institute and Symphony before it, that Chicago had uplifted itself to as lofty a perch as those other, older cities in New England and Europe. The artists did their part by participating in the commercialization of their studio spaces. The building now appeared as a department store for wealthy buyers of art, where potential clients could move easily from studio to studio.25
When Sherwood Anderson moved to Chicago the second time, in 1912, he avoided the building entirely, and found his way to the 57th Street Artists’ Colony through Floyd Dell whom his brother, Karl Anderson, knew. Dell encouraged him to associate with the colony and soon after, he introduced Margaret Anderson to the colony too. Sherwood Anderson joined the loose group that had set up in old storefronts used for the Columbian Exhibition along 57th Street and Stoney Island Avenue. Maurice Browne and Ellen Van Volkenburg lived there, and all of the other significant artists working in Chicago at the time visited frequently: Harriet Monroe, Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, and Tennessee Mitchell, who would become Anderson’s second wife.26 The colony lasted only a brief time and was born out of financial necessity. By that time, the rents were much cheaper on 57th Street than at the Fine Arts Buildings and many young artists, such as Margaret Anderson, could afford to live there. He also attended the Dill Pickle Club, an art gallery, coffee shop, and speakeasy, right off of Bughouse Square in the Gold Coast. Like the 57th Street colony, the Club was merely a place to meet and be entertained, rather than a formal club like that of Garland’s The Cliff Dwellers or the Little Room.27
Anderson had just had a “nervous breakdown,” in Elyria, Ohio, on November 28, 1912. That day, he walked out of his successful Elyria paint business and left his wife Cornelia and children. He would file for divorce from Chicago. The story would become well-known among the Chicago Renaissance writers and artists because it speaks of one artist’s resistance to the shackles of the business world. Anderson left Ohio and went to Chicago after walking out on his wife and business and the story would serve as an excellent metaphorical warning about artists not taking on the shackles of a middle-class existence. He would rewrite the story of his breakdown several times, including in his 1942 memoir, and in doing so shifts 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.
Anderson’s antipathy toward Chicago begins in earnest after doing advertising work for Frank Lloyd Wright. Anderson took a job at the Chicago advertising firm, Taylor-Critchford, and in mid-November of 1916, he found himself assigned to do the copy and campaign for Frank Lloyd Wright’s American System-Built Homes. Wright had just suffered a series of personal tragedies and was a very changed man from the young architect he used to be before public opinion drove him out of Chicago to Wisconsin. In 1909, Wright and Martha "Mamah" Borthwick Cheney, the wife of one of Wright’s clients, met, fell in love, and in 1909 left their families and spouses to meet in Europe. The scandal hit the Chicago Tribune, where the two were tried for their immorality because of their openness and because his wife Catherine refused to divorce. The pair returned and found Chicago extremely hostile. He remodeled his Oak Park studio into a home and rental property for Catherine and the children, and the scandalous couple settled at the newly built Taliesin “love bungalow” in Wisconsin. On August 15, 1914, Wright was back in Chicago attending to an important commission: the construction of Midway Gardens. He received a cryptic wire that said simply: “Taliesin destroyed by fire.” Wright returned home to discover that their servant, Julian Carlton, had attacked Mamah, her children, and several workmen, pouring gasoline under the door and setting the home ablaze. Some of the victims tried to escape by breaking windows and Carlton attacked them from outside with a hatchet. In the end, eight people died—seven victims and the murderer himself. Police never found a motive for the attack.28 Wright, quite understandably, never recovered.
Robert McCarter points out that “Wright’s personal tragedy at Taliesen, occurring almost exactly at the moment the war began, acted to change his world view, marking the beginning of his slow but steady withdrawal from urban society, and his increasingly negative attitudes about the economic forces that controlled and shaped it.”29 Wright’s scandals will haunt Anderson, in part, because he met him right after the murders at Taliesin that permanently changed Wright and because Anderson will identify with the tragedy that Wright suffered as a result of romantic scandal. Anderson will also begin to regard himself a craftsman who fights against middle-class ordinariness.
Anderson designed a six-page folder and promotional letter for Wright’s system-built homes, a community of affordable and yet beautiful housing. The houses would not be precut, ready-made housing, but rather beautifully made homes by a craftsman who planned out every detail.30 They would be affordable because of the absence of ornamentation and beautiful because of the horizontal lines and design Wright had already become well-known for as a member of the American Arts and Crafts Society. Most important, the house would be completely American. The language of the pamphlet repeats much of the language and phrasing from Wright’s earlier lectures and essays: “The Art and Craft of the Machine”31 delivered to the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society at Hull House in 1901 and “In the Cause of Architecture,” which was published in the March 1908 Architectural Record.32 Anderson most likely was furnished with the earlier essays and this, in turn, provided him with the opportunity to study Wright’s manifesto of design.
Anderson was in the middle of composing Winesburg, Ohio, when he did the promotional material for Wright and Wright’s ideas about composition, line, and form helped Anderson develop a new American literary modernism. Wright’s Arts and Crafts ideals would also have appealed to Anderson, because he needed a method to fight against the system of linking business with art in Chicago that he so despised. Although Sherwood Anderson extolled the virtues of Chicago publicly, he writes repeatedly about the distaste he has for Chicago’s inhabitants and its dwindling art scene steeped in utilitarian social realism and patronage.
In a letter to his friend Marietta D. Finley, dated November 27, 1916, he writes:
Chicago is horrible. The living impulses that drive the men I meet day to day are materialistic. They want to preserve the respectability of their homes and keep alive the institution of prostitution … They are weakly sentimental, occasionally coarse beyond your comprehension and for the most part there is no life in them. At times there comes over me a terrible conviction that I am living
in the city of the dead. In the office dead voices discuss dead ideas.
He continues to complain about the things he has to do to make money, including writing “imagist poems for the early Spring market,” because he is “sharp and smart like the Chicago advertising man.” The letter ends with the point that he thinks “we will have an American Art unlike any other art in the world when men, like my friend who makes fences, become artists.” He realizes that “the little professional artist will be quite furious in the face of it.”33 Anderson finds the professional artists who create art just as infuriating as the businessmen and the advertising men who attempt to tie art and business together. He attacks imagism directly and by doing so attacks Poetry magazine, that bastion of professionally sanctioned art by Harriet Monroe. He thinks art should be made by outsiders and he adopts the craftsman language and ethos to describe this antidote to the industrial scene he hates in Chicago.
In a letter to Upton Sinclair on December 12, 1916, he sees “something terrible to me in the thought of the art of writing being bent and twisted to serve the end of propaganda.” He asks Sinclair, “Why should we as writers be primarily socialists or conservationists, or anarchists, or anything else?”34 For the remainder of the letter, Anderson condemns Sinclair’s much-celebrated social realism. He ends by telling him, “I so want to see writers quit this drawing themselves apart, becoming socialists, or conservatives, or whatnot.”35 Anderson’s animosity toward Chicago’s patronage systems, like Fuller’s, emerges from his belief that those who stand at the highest levels in the Chicago art and business scene cannot raise themselves to a higher cultural level because they expect their art to be useful in some way, whether as social realism or to raise the city’s higher life. However, Anderson’s published works demonstrate that he understood that in order to be published and reviewed well in the Chicago papers, he needed to at least publicly boost the image of the city and contribute to its higher life in some way.
He wrote to Lucille Blum, the wife of the Chicago painter and author Jerome Blum on July 1, 1923, about why he can’t stand Chicago and won’t be moving back or even visiting any time soon. He declares: “I’m pretty much going to stay away from Chicago and New York … the eternal grubbing about the purposes of art, its drift, … gets on my nerves.”36 He never does return for any length of time. In 1925, Anderson vacationed in Virginia and was so taken by the landscape he purchased farm property by the small town of Troutdale in Grayson County.37 He lived in a small cabin on the property while his friend William Spratling from New Orleans built his house. Spratling had been a professor at Tulane University in New Orleans, and the two men became friends during Anderson’s visits and stays in that city. Spratling had, in recent years, become an internationally renowned silversmith and jewelry maker, and he organized the Mexican silver workers into craft guilds for power in the market. Anderson hired a craftsman to build his house and he lived permanently after 1927 in the modern log cabin structure he named Ripshin.38 The house shows the influence Frank Lloyd Wright had on Anderson because, while it doesn’t resemble one of Wright’s more radical designs, the floor plan and aesthetics of the house show respect for Wright’s design principles.
Wright was still very much on Anderson’s mind. He mentions Wright in a letter to his friends Ferdinand and Clara Schevill around October 6, 1930. He had just attended an exhibit of Wright’s architectural designs that was held at the Art Institute of Chicago from September 25 to October 12, 1930, and so was thinking deeply about the architect who had so much influence on him while in Chicago.39 He writes: “I have been thinking a good deal about Wright. I’ll write a story about him some day.” He thinks that there “is something pitiful there,” and that contemplating Wright and his life should draw out our sympathies. Anderson believes that Wright, by himself, has “humble, hurt moments” because he understands in those moments that “he has himself killed the chance for a life of beautiful building.” Anderson connects with Wright because he thinks that he’s done similar things and destroyed the better things in himself too.40
In 1936, Anderson will decide to write his memoir and he procrastinates on the project until 1939, when he finally decides to really do it. One of the reasons it takes so long to begin is that he wants to do the book in some kind of non-standard way and so he makes a lot of lists of people and ideas. His last list is a list of “suggestions” of people and topics that have been important in his life. Frank Lloyd Wright appears two-thirds of the way down the list, right after “Gertrude Stein, Roger Sergel and Lewis Galantiere.” Reading the list, it’s possible to see his mind working backward in time from Paris to Chicago. Under Wright are the influences from his time in Chicago: “Joyce, Ezra Pound,” “Hemingway,” “Mike Carr and group at 57th street Chicago.”41 Anderson will continue to identify with Wright as a creator, an artist, and most of all, as a craftsman who has destroyed himself pushing back against provincial and industrial Chicago. The memoir will be his last large project and it’s published posthumously in 1942.
Part Two
Making Modernism Out of Chicago
4
Willa Cather and Chicago
In July 1896, Willa Cather wrote to her friend Mariel Gere from Pittsburgh: “I have only been a few hours in this City of Dreadful Dirt, so you must not take my first impressions seriously I feel like being funny. I began to feel good as soon as I got east of Chicago. When I got to where there were some hills and clear streams and trees.”1 Chicago, for Cather, was a place in between the plains of Nebraska and New York. Instead of joining the artists, critics, and writers who were consciously thinking about American literature and Chicago’s place in it, she passed through Chicago, moving further east, first to Pittsburgh and then to New York. She would stop in Chicago sometimes as much as four times a year to change trains, visit dear friends, and sell books. Her perceptions of the city came from reading voraciously about the city, staying in it, and from friends who were at the center of the Chicago arts scene: the Tribune journalists and then literary editors Elia Peattie and Fanny Butcher and Irene Miner Weisz from back home in Red Cloud. The friendships with Peattie and Butcher began as professional relationships that evolved into friendships with two very different women who held the same job at different times. Miner Weisz was not part of the literary world in Chicago and Cather treasured their friendship, happy to have one connection that was completely outside the world of commerce and from home.
This chapter’s first section will chronicle Cather’s relationship with Elia Peattie, which began in Omaha, Nebraska, and continued 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 The 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.
Elia Peattie and Willa Cather’s embrace of the modern
Willa Cather met Elia Peattie when she worked at the Omaha World-Herald in Nebraska. Peattie had moved to Omaha in 1888 from Chicago, with her husband Robert, who was also a reporter. Her family moved to Chicago from Michigan in 1876, when she was fourteen and she became the Tribune’s first “girl reporter” in 1885. She married Robert in 1883 and when they moved to Omaha, her writing took a profound turn toward fictional and realistic renderings of the frontier with a particular emphasis on those issues pertinent to wo
men: suffrage, domestic troubles, and the plight of children. She also wrote long, uplifting pieces on the beauty of the United States. In 1889, she wrote a pamphlet for the Northern Pacific Wonderland series touting the amazing splendor of Alaska for women travelers and wrote the 700-page The Story of America that same year. She published regularly in popular magazines like Lippincott’s and Cosmopolitan. Her writing began to win her prizes and she took advantage of her popularity by earning extra money on the side lecturing on literary topics that would elevate the listener.2
She met Cather in 1895 after giving a lecture on Sidney Lanier, the Southern essayist and poet. Cather had just graduated from the University of Nebraska that June and she quickly took to Peattie. In 1895, Peattie had just written a history of Nebraska women journalists, for the Nebraska Press Association, which would appeal to Cather and she praised Cather’s literary criticism as “clever, original, and generally just.” In a column later that year, she predicted Cather’s literary success, naming her opinions as “original, often dogmatic.” Cather would write to her friend Kate Cleary in 1905 that no one had been so consistently kind to her in her career and that Peattie had a very large influence on Cather’s own writing.3 Peattie inspired Cather, in part, because she was a successful woman in the masculine-identified profession of journalism, a field Cather took up briefly. In 1896, the Peatties moved back to Chicago and became part of the artistic club scene as members of the newly formed Little Room. M. Catherine Downs has claimed that Peattie had to leave Nebraska “to escape her colleagues’ jealousy,” and the collegial support of Henry Blake Fuller, Harriet Monroe, and Hamlin Garland must have been a relief for her.4
Chicago and the Making of American Modernism Page 9