Chicago and the Making of American Modernism

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Chicago and the Making of American Modernism Page 10

by Michelle E Moore


  Cather visited Peattie in Chicago almost immediately. She wrote to Mariel Gere around September 19, 1897: “Mrs. [Elia] Peattie entertained me delightfully in Chicago, and there are a lot of nice things to tell you, but I’m not in the mood for that tonight.”5 She continued to visit the Peatties in Chicago over the next few years while she lived in Pittsburgh. She enjoyed the trips to Chicago so much that she wrote home to Dorothy Canfield on October 10, 1899:

  Say, do you know it isn’t half bad to be back. I had a good trip and spent a most delightful day with the Peatties in Chicago … Mrs. Peattie has at last arrived, so to speak, for her story “The Man at the Edge of Things” in the September Atlantic is literature, as good as most modern French things and as elusive and artistic. She wants me to go to Chicago in the spring, and I think I shall. Dooley says there is no woman doing newspaper work there now that I need be afraid of. I guess he and the Peatties will make the venture safe.6

  Flush with the excitement from her good trip, Cather was considering a move to Chicago to be a journalist because the Peatties were encouraging her to do so and could give her a friendly introduction into its literary scene. She never moved and never again brought up the possibility of moving to the city in her letters or journal entries. In 1901, Peattie became the literary editor of the Tribune and she could have changed the trajectory of Cather’s career. Cather, however, stayed away from Chicago, and by 1903 Cather would associate Chicago with the draining commercial work that pulled her away from her literary efforts.

  On March 28, 1903, she writes to Canfield:

  I don’t know when I have been so beaten out with mental effort and so sick with disappointment. … You see, Dorothy, those wretched tales went back on me. When I got my Chicago mag. work off my hands and came to the pruning and fixing of that set of short stories I just fainted by the wayside. There is weeks of work to be done on them.7

  Cather will continue to associate Chicago with commercial work and its draining effects on artists. On June 4, 1911, she writes to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant about a kind of moral furor that she associates with Chicago, one that’s equally as draining as the commercial work that she complained about to Dorothy Canfield:

  One of the Hull House women came to the office yesterday. She said that Miss Wyatt has given herself over wholly to the cause of the White Slave; that she never talks or thinks about anything else, and feels pretty bitterly toward those of us here who didn’t sympathize with her. I’m sorry. I’ve seldom been more disappointed than I was when I found that we had no possible point of contact. She seems to me to be maddened by having lived too long in the company of a horrible idea—like Electra. She used to frighten me.8

  Peattie, with her connections to Hull House, perhaps becomes associated with this kind of Chicago moral furor, for Cather. It would have been distasteful to the writer who wrote sympathetically of men and women who drank too much and had what Chicagoans would have considered moral failings.

  Cather loses touch with Peattie over the next decade. By the time she begins to conceive of The Song of the Lark, she writes about her as someone she used to know. She tells her friend, the journalist Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, on June 15, 1912: “I’m so glad to hear of Mrs. [Elia] Peattie’s daughter, and trust she is happy. Her mother was so kind to me long ago.”9 The final mention of Peattie by Cather in the archived letters is in a letter sent to her good friend Irene Miner Weisz in 1913. “Willie” sends a short note: “Needless to say I’m not responsible for this! It’s rather wild, but it may amuse you.” She enclosed a copy of Peattie’s review of her new book, O Pioneers (1913), from the Tribune.10 The review praises the book effusively, declaring: “A new story has appeared which has a right to be ranged upon the shelf with the best of those written upon the subject of the western plains and the people.” She claims that the book contains “the essence of life itself.” And that “it is the power to instill this quality in her work that forces the critic to accord Miss Cather something which can be described as no other word save genius.”11

  However, the last paragraph identifies the difference between Cather’s work and that of the earlier generation of realists that Peattie so admires. Peattie declares:

  Yet, frankly, the book stops short of greatness. It scintillates with implications of power, but the genuine consummation is not there. The book glitters with ore, but the big pay streak does not appear. Is it that the characters, though so interesting, are not strong enough? Should there have been more struggle? Would it have been better if Miss Cather had stepped out of her story now and then and turned upon the scene and the characters the eye of the commentator and the philosopher?12

  It seems that Peattie wants Cather to be more like those Chicago writers, such as Garland and Fuller, who William Dean Howells praised for their keen eyes and voices that cut through the description on the page. Peattie’s criticism of Cather needs to be read within the context of the censorship of the Scandinavian Exhibit held at the Art Institute in 1913 and the general reaction to the Armory Show held three months later. The Art Institute removed the painting “Summer Days,” by the Norwegian Bernhard Folkestad, for “moral reasons,” and the Tribune reported mixed reactions to the censorship while focusing on the embarrassed and scandalized women who viewed the painting.13 The Armory Show introduced Chicago to modernism, and Chicago press thought the exhibit fun but having no intrinsic or real artistic merit.14 Elia Peattie’s review of O Pioneers serves to announce her own hostility to the new modernism and the elements she dislikes about Cather’s work most illustrate Cather’s move into this new art movement.

  Five years after Peattie publishes her review of O Pioneers, she can no longer get published. Joan Stevenson Falcone points out that

  the primary reason is that she could not adjust her conservative/genteel ideologies to accommodate the new morals of the changing times. When the second wave of the Chicago Renaissance replaced the “genteel tradition,” the populace lost interest in her writings. While early in her career her works had been “too radical” they were now considered “nauseatingly virtuous” in comparison to Theodore Dreiser and others.15

  Her writing took not just a strong stance against the new modernism, but a solid stance on sex in literature. She lost favor with the new male critics who saw her as a provincial and strident Chicago writer and bluestocking from an earlier generation.16 She even comes to despise Garland, who shares her dislike of naked women and sex in literature. She sees him as selling out to the “juvenile taste of America,” and, in order to sell his works, had abandoned the “austere and tragic qualities of Main Traveled Roads” producing an “innocuous sort of material” that had wasted his “vigorous and heroic talent.”17 Cather drifts away from Peattie just as she begins to experiment with modernist themes and techniques in her own writing. Cather’s next novel, The Song of the Lark, is a sharp and cutting critique of Chicago’s provincialism and anti-modernist stance, which Cather would have thought was most apparent in its citizens’, artists’, and journalists’ responses to the Armory Show of 1913.

  Willa Cather’s critique of Chicago: The Song of the Lark

  When Cather wrote The Song of the Lark (1915), she wrote a well-informed critique of the Chicago she came to know well through her friends and visits to the city. The novel serves as an explanation for why she never settles in Chicago and reveals her attitudes toward the city’s artists, who she knew and with whom she corresponded, but never joined. On February 4, 1937, she sent a letter to her friend, the Tribune’s literary critic Fanny Butcher, commiserating about a painful illness she had while writing the novel. She writes of her experience with a “pernicious carbuncle on the back of her head” and reveals:

  I put off the operation because I was red hot into the Chicago part of The Song of the Lark and simply would not go into a hospital. All the best part of that book (about the singing lesions [sic], etc.) was written when I was taking codeine all day and all night, and was stimulated by the pain that I kept telling m
yself I could surely climb up the side of the Flatiron Building.18

  For Cather, the Chicago section is the best part of the book and her own experience with feverish pain informs the frenzy with which Thea approaches the city to make her career. Cather throws Thea, the heroine of The Song of the Lark, into the cauldron of social, economic, cultural, and artistic forces bubbling in 1890s Chicago. When Thea needs to recuperate from the exhaustion and illness caused by working in Chicago, she spends time at the Anasazi Indian cliff dwellings in Arizona. Her physical movement from Chicago to the cliff dwellings connects the novel’s Chicago chapters and the Panther Canyon chapters and suggests that the two sections inform each other historically and metaphorically.

  Henry Blake Fuller’s novel used the cliff dwellers as a metaphor for the elite Chicagoans who occupied skyscrapers and worked high above the city’s immigrant hordes.19 The cliff-dwelling conceit in the novel also serves as a warning to the elite citizens of Chicago, who, like the Anasazi, may become extinct if they continue to participate in the futile project of using art to uplift others to their position. Chicago’s ongoing struggle with and self-conscious examination of the “higher life” explains why Chicago patrons, artists, and the art going public embraced The Eight, a group of New York urban realists known derisively in the New York art scene as the Ashcan painters. First shown at the Macbeth Gallery in New York in 1908, their paintings portray immigrant city street life, rendered in broad, spontaneous brushstrokes and vivid colors intended to give a vivacious and celebratory cast to the gritty scene. Patrons of the New York art scene considered the paintings’ subject and presentation too crude and inappropriate, but in Chicago, the Art Institute, the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, and the Arts Club of Chicago all held regular exhibits of the group.20 George Bellows, a student of the original Eight, painted the Cliff Dwellers (1913) using bright colors to illuminate immigrant tenements and life on New York’s Lower East Side. The painting succeeds in transforming the cliff dwellers from Fuller’s Europeans perched at the top of Chicago’s downtown buildings into immigrants hanging out of windows in the Bowery. Susan S. Weininger asserts: “After 1910 George Bellows exerted the strongest direct influence of any contemporary American artist on Chicago’s progressive painters.”21 By 1919, he was made a temporary professor at the Art Institute, and in 1922 he was offered a permanent position, which he kept until his death in 1925.22 The Cliff Dwellers, as a statement about immigrants in urban populations, spoke directly to a Chicago, rather than a New York, sensibility, because it employed the metaphor of cliff dwelling in a way already legible to Chicagoans.

  Cather, too, uses the metaphor of cliff dwelling in a way that would have been legible to turn-of-the-century Chicagoans, as a way of informing Thea’s upward trajectory in The Song of the Lark. Initially, Cather uses the idea of uplift to demonstrate how exposure to art will better Thea and ultimately allow her to escape the provincial world of Moonstone. Before giving a piano lesson, Wunsch “conducted her at once to the piano in Mrs. Kohler’s sitting-room. He twirled the stool to the proper height, pointed to it, and sat down in a wooden chair beside Thea.”23 He elevates her seat so that she will sit at the proper height during her exposure to European classical music, in turn suggesting the heightening effect of the music on this little girl. His conducting connects him to two other important conductors in her life: Ray Kennedy and Theodore Thomas. Ray’s money allows her to travel to Chicago, and she sees Thomas conduct at a crucial moment in her artistic development in Chicago. Both men will help raise her to greater heights as well by allowing invisible currents to conduct through them. However, Wunsch and Ray do not want anything from Thea in return and do not believe her singing talents will raise the profile of Moonstone, separating Moonstone’s ideas about raising artists from Chicago’s idea about using them to achieve the higher life.

  When Thea moves to Chicago, Mr. Harsanyi makes an important discovery: Thea should train to be an opera singer. The discovery changes Thea’s relationship to Chicago’s creation of its higher life and allows the novel’s critique of the Chicago art world to begin. Loretta Wasserman notes: “After finishing The Song of the Lark, Cather had more to say about opera singers. What fascinated her was the difference between performing artists, who must please and charm the public, and artists such as herself—writers or painters—who work in private or even anonymously.”24 Uplift does not apply to solitary pursuits such as writing or painting, but only to those activities that may elevate a considerable portion of the population. Thea thinks her fate is hers alone, but when she becomes a performer, an opera singer, she has the potential to lift up large audiences who hear her, in turn, raising others around her to a higher plane.

  The Song of the Lark does not echo the anxiety expressed by Fuller, who is unable to assess whether the immigrants who are lifted up through introduction to European culture are a good thing for Chicago’s art and culture or if their uplift will destroy the very culture that did the heavy lifting. The novel addresses Fuller’s issue with one line: “She had often heard Mrs. Kronborg say that she ‘believed in immigration,’ and so did Thea believe in it.”25 Instead, the novel turns the concern inward onto its artist and asks whether the particularly Chicagoan model of uplift is good for its artists, a question that also troubled Fuller. Cather uses the metaphor of cliff dwelling, in the post-fair Chicagoan’s sense, to examine the ways in which cultural uplift threatened an artist’s spirit and in turn predicted extinction for the artist.

  The cliff dwellers make their first appearance in the novel imagistically. Ray, who will be the first to tell Thea about the Anasazi Indian cities, takes her family out to the desert where she sees heifers. The young cows “were magnified to a preposterous height and looked like mammoths, prehistoric beasts standing solitary in the waters that for many thousands of years actually washed over that desert;—the mirage itself may be the ghost of that long-vanished sea.”26 Thea sees for the first time how the females of a species can be raised up to heights larger than the role into which they are cast because of their gender. The passage invokes the “prehistoric” Anasazi Indians, who “vanished” because of their upward movement according to Chicago lore. Thea’s observation casts an ominous gloom over the novel’s discussion of her upward trajectory and artistic growth. The passage warns against reaching “preposterous heights” that will result in extinction for those who reach them. Thea later declares she only wants “impossible things,” a signal that the heights to which she will be lifted will guarantee her destruction.27

  When Thea moves to Chicago, her metamorphosis into an uplifted Chicago artist begins and the novel continues to employ and expand the metaphor of cliff dwelling to indicate the complexity of her transformation. One night, she leaves the Auditorium Theater and a man accosts her. The Chicago wind racing off of Lake Michigan balloons up her cape and almost lifts her into the sky.28 The strong wind, a uniquely Chicago phenomenon, forces Thea upward violently and against her will, as if she is meant to glide upward onto the tops of the skyscrapers that surround her as she stands on lower Michigan Avenue. If she ascends, she may develop into, in one sense, one of Fuller’s cliff dwellers, the uplifted immigrant who has become a resident of Chicago’s skyscrapers.

  At the same time, she wants to hold on to what she has learned and gained from hearing the symphony, and directs her anger at those who want to steal the new knowledge from her. She “glared round her at the crowds” and thinks:

  All these things and people were no longer remote and negligible; they had to be met, they were lined up against her, they were there to take something from her. Very well; they should never have it. … As long as she lived that ecstasy was going to be hers. She would live for it, work for it, die for it; but she was going to have it, time after time, height after height.29

  In her anger, Thea employs the same metaphors used by the H. J. Smith Exploring Company catalog produced for the Columbian Exhibition to describe the Anasazis’ defensive positi
on. She has learned that she must ascend the heights in order to defensively guard against those other, less civilized people who want to destroy what she has now found: the higher culture she obtained at the symphony. Thea seems to embrace the idea of the higher life that Chicago’s art patrons believe will elevate its immigrants.

  Thea’s metaphorical uplift transpires because she just heard one of Theodore Thomas’s “heavily symphonic programs.”30 The conductor of the Chicago Symphony believed fervently in the project of uplift and participated by bringing classical European music to Chicago. Donald L. Miller writes: “As Rose Fay wrote of him on the occasion of his death in 1905: ‘He not only disciplined his musicians, but he disciplined the public, educating it sometimes perhaps against its will.’”31 Thea’s uplift also takes place because on the next page, Harsanyi asks Thomas who Thea’s next teacher should be for voice training.32 By juxtaposing Thea’s experience outside the Auditorium Theater with Harsanyi’s request to Thomas inside the same building, the novel skillfully ties together the idea of Thea’s cultural uplift with the Chicago businessmen’s manipulation of the art world through contacts and money.

  Thea’s angry reaction to being accosted by the man and the upward thrust of wind can be read as her reaction to being uplifted by Theodore Thomas’s baton against her will. It is at this point that the novel begins to articulate the damage done to an artist when she must defend herself against those who want to use her, including Chicago’s art patrons who will mold her for the purpose of uplifting others. The novel’s paradox emerges here. Thea has benefited from being exposed to Western art and to those engaged in the project of uplifting her, but she suffers from those same contacts that construct her talents as useful and her art as engaging in public service.

 

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