Chicago and the Making of American Modernism

by Michelle E Moore

  When Thea meets Fred Ottenburg, he continues to manipulate the Chicago business scene for her artistic career. Through her involvement with Fred, Thea becomes introduced to the cliff dwellers and their dwellings: the Anasazi Indians and Fuller’s cultural elite of Chicago. While Fred and Thea are “waiting for their tea at a restaurant in the Pullman Building, overlooking the lake,”33 he tells her that his family owns “a whole canyon of cliff dweller ruins.”34 The conversation draws attention to their perch at the top of the Pullman building, one of the earliest steel-framed skyscrapers in what was called the business canyon of Chicago. Thea and Fred are now Chicago cliff dwellers, in the sense used in Fuller’s novel.

  Mark A. Robison observes that from the high altitude, Thea gazes at the Art Institute and at “a lumber boat, with two very tall masts … emerging black and gaunt out of the fog.”35 Her gaze links the Art Institute with a symbol of Chicago commerce, the lumber boat, and Robison declares: “In one perceptive moment, Thea’s urban present and rural past merge with her artistic future.”36 The trajectory promised by her gaze from the heights contains the seed of her own downfall, the merging of art and commerce. The appearance of the boat foreshadows Thea’s dreadful appearance to Dr. Archie at the end of the novel, dressed in black, “deeply lined,” and looking “forty years old.”37

  The novel suggests that Thea’s angry, defensive posture against the attacking hordes will crumble as it does for forty-year-old Madame Necker, whom Thea replaces on the stage: “Her voice was failing just when her powers were at their height. Every fresh young voice was an enemy, and this one was accompanied by gifts which she could not fail to recognize.”38 The future threatens extinction for the artists who reach the top, just as it did for the Anasazi cliff dwellers and Fuller’s skyscraper inhabitants who climbed up the high cliffs to ward off their enemies. Ann W. Fisher-Wirth notes: “Cather’s writing has always betrayed a keen sense of loss. At the center of her fiction … is the story of the Garden and the Fall. The lives of most of the major characters enact a recurrent tragic pattern, a sense of dispossession, exile and longing.”39 In The Song of the Lark, the cliff dweller metaphor deepens the sense of loss by showing how the artist gains and loses simultaneously, which causes the tragic pattern Fisher-Wirth identifies playing out in Cather’s later novels.

  In The Song of the Lark, Thea will lose because she learns how to be an artist and receives her fundamental training in Chicago. The novel suggests 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. The novel draws this ambivalence about Chicago from Fuller’s novel and replicates his doubts about whether Chicagoans can achieve the higher life. The cliff dweller conceit operates as a double-sided metaphor that at once allows the wealthy and cultured citizens of Chicago to stand above the masses, as Thea does at the top of the Pullman building, and simultaneously allows for the wrongheadedness of their ideals to use art to accomplish the business of raising Chicago.

  In order to accomplish its critique of the Chicago art scene, The Song of the Lark relies on an intrinsic understanding of the 1890s Chicago club scene and the knowledge that The Cliff Dwellers was also a men’s club, started in 1907 by Hamlin Garland. In 1890s Chicago, two kinds of clubs existed: the men’s clubs, at which businesses were built, bought, and sold, and the women’s clubs, which were interested in the project of social uplift. The contacts and power provided by the men’s clubs allow Thea to continue her work and her ascent. The novel shows her commodification beginning in earnest at the Chicago Club, the most prominent of all the Chicago men’s clubs. Fred reveals that he belongs to the club, as befits his status and wealth, when he takes Bowers there to discuss Thea. She overhears “the young brewer ask Bowers to dine with him at his club that evening, and she saw that he looked forward to the dinner with pleasure.”40 Thea, oblivious to the machinations of the Chicago art scene, wonders: “If he’s such a grand business man, how does he have time to run around listening to singing-lessons?”41 For her, art stands apart from business, so her question highlights her ignorance as to the relationship between art and business in Chicago. Bower’s boasting and excitement over Fred’s invitation makes it evident that the invitation is to the Chicago Club and that Thea is a worthy topic of business. The invitation also underscores that Bowers does not have his own membership to the club, further illustrating his place in Chicago’s business world. Fred’s place is indicated by the fact he does not sit at the millionaire’s table with Potter Palmer, George Pullman, and Marshall Field, but does belong to the same club. It was said that all business done in Chicago happened at this table, and perhaps Fred’s friendship with the extraordinary Nathanmeyers has allowed Thea to be brought to this table.

  The millionaire’s table had an established interest in the business of art. The club first housed the Art Institute, before it moved across the street into the building designed after the Columbian Exhibition. They brought Theodore Thomas to Chicago to conduct the music program at the Fair, and then brought him permanently to Chicago with the prospect of his own symphony and the construction of Orchestra Hall. Business discussion at the club traditionally happens in the dining room, over a meal, just as Fred invites Bowers to discuss Thea. When Thea thinks about the men later that night, “She looked up from her grammar to wonder what Bowers and Ottenburg were having to eat. At that moment they were talking of her.”42 Melissa Homestead has demonstrated that “the language of finance and investment permeates the thoughts and speech of both Dr. Archie and Fred Ottenburg,”43 and the passage implies that their topic, Thea, will be consumed right along with their food. The novel condemns the way Chicago’s men’s clubs treat art as business and artists as a commodity to be chewed up and swallowed.

  Fuller’s cliff dweller conceit warns that Chicago’s temperament and attitudes toward art would result in the cultural destruction of the city. He wrote The Cliff-Dwellers while a member of the loose group of artists who first met in Bessie Potter’s top-floor studios in the Fine Arts Building, next to the Chicago Club, the Auditorium Building, and across from where the Art Institute would be when it moved out of the Chicago Club. He designed his club to be like a salon, a place that sheltered artists against the harshness of the Chicago business world. The club formalized around the name “Little Room” and derived their name from a short story by Madeline Wynne that appeared in Harper’s Monthly in 1895. Membership included Jane Addams, Lorado Taft, Allen B. and Irving K. Pond, Anna Morgan, Ralph Clarkson, Hamlin Garland, Elia Peattie, and others interested in creating a literary and artistic club in Chicago.

  When Thea tells her teacher, Bowers, “I have to hunt a new boarding place,” and Bowers asks, “What’s the matter with the Studio Club? Been fighting with them again?,” she reveals her temporary stay in the Fine Arts Building.44 Even Fuller’s club causes Thea to become angry and demoralized as she fights with the other members of the club, who, it turns out, buy into the Chicago belief that art has a use-value to raise the artistic standards of Chicago. She answers, “The Club’s all right for people who like to live that way. I don’t.” When Bowers asks, “Why so tempery?,”45 her reply provides further evidence that she may be staying with members of this uniquely mixed-gendered club: “I can’t work with a lot of girls around. They’re too familiar.”46

  In 1907, Garland started a formal men-only club that would deliberately drain away the male members of the Little Room. He made it new club business to “tender an invitation to join the new club” to all Little Room male members.47 Garland’s club would bring together artists and businessmen with artistic tastes in a union that made formal the alliance that characterized Chicago’s art scene to Fuller’s and Cather’s displeasure. Because it was perched at the top floors of the newly constructed Orchestra Hall, the members called the new club the Attic Club. The group would decide on the name The Cliff
Dwellers Club two years later.48

  Cather, who disliked Garland and was “irritated” by his work, was probably not surprised by his utter disregard for Fuller in taking the name of his novel for his club. In the January 26, 1896, Nebraska State Journal, she wrote a review of James Lane Allen’s “The Butterflies” that turns into one of many attacks she made on Garland: “It is just the sort of thing that poor Hamlin Garland is always trying and failing to do. And the reason thereof is that Mr. Allen has just two things that Mr. Garland has not, imagination and style. … Art is temperament and Hamlin Garland has no more temperament than a prairie dog.”49 When Cather wrote The Song of the Lark, Garland’s The Cliff Dwellers Club was well-established, and Chicago readers, hearing that the novel made use of the cliff dweller conceit, would think immediately of Garland’s club. Because Garland was the founder of The Cliff Dwellers Club, he would have represented Chicago’s worst sins regarding art for Cather: social realism, the blending of art and business, the commodification of the artist. Cather seems to be writing specifically against Garland each time the novel suggests that the Chicago cliff dwellers have worn Thea out with their consumption of her art.

  The names of the clubs—Little Room, Attic Club, and The Cliff Dwellers —correlate with the significant rooms that Thea moves through in the novel. She “was allowed to use the money—her pupils paid her twenty-five cents a lesson—to fit up a little room for herself upstairs in the half-story.”50 She moves from her little room or attic room through a series of very unsatisfactory rooms, until she has the opportunity to also fit up the Cliff Dwellers room. Sharon O’Brien notes, “In her attic retreat Thea begins to discover the voice or self that is her own,” and she traces the discovery in a line that culminates in Thea’s epiphany in Panther Canyon.51 But Homestead points out: “Even Thea’s nonproductive months alone in Panther Canyon are entangled in Fred’s finances. The canyon is part of a ranch owned by his father, so proceeds from the family beer empire underwrite her artistic awakening.”52 If the rooms Thea moves through as she discovers her own voice are metaphorically Chicago businessmen’s clubrooms, then the novel shows the art and business worlds woven together so tightly that the entire trajectory of her spiritual awakening has also been underwritten by the Chicago business world.

  In Chicago, Fred manages to introduce Thea to the one character who wishes Thea to hone her own voice: Mrs. Nathanmeyer. He tells Thea, “You’ll be all right with her so long as you do not try to be anything that you are not.”53 Cather based Mrs. Nathanmeyer on Bertha Palmer, who, with her husband, Potter Palmer, was “so rich and great that even” someone like Thea would have “heard of them.”54 The Palmers built a road to the northern section of Chicago, which would become Lake Shore Drive, and built “The Castle” at its end. The Palmer House, the largest and most modern hotel in Chicago, was her husband’s wedding present to her. She was the only lady manager at the World’s Fair, was known for her Parisian tastes in art and clothing, and with her husband she acquired a magnificent art collection through annual trips abroad. In Paris she met Mary Cassatt, who introduced her to Manet and the other impressionist painters in his group.55

  Fred stops Thea to admire the “Rousseaus and Corots” hanging on the Nathanmeyers’ walls, and in the hall he stops her “before a painting of a woman eating grapes out of a paper bag, and had told her gravely that there was the most beautiful Manet in the world.”56 Although Polly P. Duryea has identified the painting Fred points out as Manet’s Street Singer (1862),57 which Bertha Palmer never owned,58 Palmer was a friend of Manet’s and was known for her large collection of his work. A reading public that knows 1890s Chicago society would easily recognize Mrs. Nathanmeyer as a version of Mrs. Palmer, the only woman in Chicago who owned Corots, and who could own Manets too, if she chose. Mrs. Nathanmeyer’s “standards … that have nothing to do with Chicago” are also those of Bertha Palmer, whom Fred seems to be describing.59 She “would not confine herself to established standards, but rather visited artists’ studios and current exhibitions, consulted with experts and subscribed to the major magazines in order to explore recent developments.”60 Her standards, as well as her strong feminist ideas, led Palmer to create salons for young artists, particularly female artists who did not fit into the more realistic and gritty Chicago art scene. It is at one of these salons that Thea first meets her, “and this seemed a remarkable opportunity.”61 It certainly is, because Mrs. Nathanmeyer/Palmer has the status and connections to orchestrate Thea’s training and career in New York and abroad, as well as her disgust with the Chicago way of coupling business and art together.

  While at the canyon, Fred recalls Mrs. Nathanmeyer, to whom he had introduced Thea in Chicago,62 and on the next page “an eagle, tawny and of great size,” flies directly over the canyon and inspires Thea to rise to her feet with the realization that the Anasazi Indians, though a “vanished race,” have left behind “fragments of their desire”: their art.63 The novel uses eagles as a signal of inspiration in the earlier “Friends of Childhood” section. While on “a great adventure” with her father at a “reunion of old frontiersmen” they went up to the hills where “every little while eagles flew over.”64 For Thea, the trip was significant because “she told herself she would never, never forget it. The spirit of human courage seemed to live up there with the eagles.”65 She recollects this moment while listening to Dvorak in Chicago, her first symphony: “Strange how, as the first movement went on, it brought back to her that high tableland above Laramie; the grass-grown wagon trails, the far-away peaks of the snowy range, the wind and the eagles, that old man and the first telegraph message.”66

  The eagle’s presence indicates that, symbolically, Mrs. Nathanmeyer watches Thea from behind the scenes and is most likely pulling strings at that moment to allow her to rise to even greater heights in the art world far beyond the limited vision of those businessmen who control the art scene in Chicago. This is the second time Mrs. Nathanmeyer has caused Thea to rise up, inspired, and not angry or feeling used from being raised into Chicago higher life. The first was when she supplied her with a low dress for singing. Thea “laughed and drew herself up out of her corsets, threw her shoulders high and let them drop again.”67 The gift allows Thea to breathe deeply in while singing, providing inspiration, giving life to her spirit, and releasing her from the drudgery of corsets. If the novel ends, as it does in its first version, after Thea’s experience in Panther Canyon, Mrs. Nathanmeyer’s presence as the eagle might be a sign that Thea will escape the clutches of the male, Chicago business art scene.

  The fact that it is an eagle that Cather uses to represent inspiration provides additional evidence that Thea may escape. Cather’s audience of Chicago artists and creative supporters would surely see the eagle as a subtle nod to the Eagle’s Nest Art Colony that was founded in 1898 by Chicago sculptor Lorado Taft. The colony, located on the east bank of the Rock River overlooking Oregon, Illinois, provided a respite from the Chicago heat for the Chicago artists and writers. Many of the visitors were also members of the Little Room, including Harriet Monroe, Hamlin Garland, and Henry Fuller. Cather would have certainly known of the colony because her friend Peattie and her husband were founding members.

  The name of the camp also comes indirectly from Margaret Fuller’s poem “Ganymede to His Eagle” that she wrote while sitting beneath Eagle’s Nest Tree during her visit to Oregon, Illinois, in the summer of 1843. Eagle’s Nest Camp overlooks Margaret Fuller Island, named in honor of the poet and her poem. Ganymede’s Spring, named by Fuller, provided water to the colony first by horse and wagon and then in 1902 by pump. Lorado Taft’s Blackhawk statue, a 48-foot concrete statue of the Sauk warrior considered to be the second largest monolithic concrete structure in the world, overlooks the river and stands prominently on Eagle’s Nest Bluff. The statue was dedicated in 1911, giving the colony larger name recognition among the reading public who read of the ceremony in the Chicago papers. Cather most likely had the summer retreat in mind, w
hen she sent the eagle over Thea’s head for inspiration during her reclusive summer retreat in Panther Canyon. The layout of Panther Canyon, with an actual eagle’s nest overlooking the river and Thea’s feelings that she is being watched over by the native Americans who formerly inhabited the canyon, resembles the lay of the land around the camp. The club name is a direct reference to the club’s stated belief that “association and conversation had largely to do with inspiration.”68 The eagle, then, is a sign that Thea should be seeking association with like-minded artists, rather than isolation.

  Fred’s recollection makes even more explicit the link between the eagle and Mrs. Nathanmeyer, the “heavy, powerful old Jewess, with … an eagle nose, and sharp, glittering eyes.”69 While Mrs. Nathanmeyer’s eagle nose is an anti-Semitic caricature, the image of the eagle soaring far above the canyon replicates her position in relation to the cliff dwellers perched at the top of Chicago’s skyscrapers. She soars far above them with superior standards “that have nothing to do with Chicago.”70 Cather’s representation of this Jewish character is deeply marked by an ambivalence that Susan Meyer has shown as being at work in the representation of Louie in The Professor’s House.

  The Palmers were not Jewish, so Cather made a deliberate choice in making Mrs. Nathanmeyer Jewish. Many scholars, most recently Loretta Wasserman, have cited the character as an example of anti-Semitism in Cather’s writing. However, Wasserman claims that the Nathanmeyers “are not significant in Thea’s fate”71 and concludes her longer reading of “The Diamond Mine” by suggesting that the Jewish characters in that narrative are present because Cather “needed an image to convey the dangers of human commodification, and she chose that cartoon figure.”72 The novel frames Mrs. Nathanmeyer in a repulsive stereotype because her power comes from her relationship to her husband’s money and the Chicago businessmen’s dealings in the art world. However, in The Song of the Lark, Fred’s description of Mrs. Nathanmeyer’s standards makes them sound like Cather’s own: that art was a “search for something for which there is no market demand … where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.”73 Cather constructs the character through her salons, attitudes, connection to Bertha Palmer, and metaphorical appearance in the canyon as a positive force in Thea’s career. The novel’s ambivalence toward the character of Mrs. Nathanmeyer sharpens the critique of the relationship between art and commerce in Chicago by containing the tension in one character.