When Hemingway begins to write seriously, he chooses the most clichéd examples of bad businessmen he read and heard about from his family and from Rev. Barton in Oak Park as his subject: Chicago gangsters and alcoholics. Balmer and MacHarg’s lie detector stories would have interested Hemingway in writing about this tired subject because it provided new insights and new methods of depicting corruption and lying. In the near constant Tribune columns that exposed the corruption of the Chicago police, the suspect, involved in business gone wrong or simply conducting illegal business, would lie to cover up what he had done. The Chicago police would add to the bad business by subjecting the suspect to the third degree, in an attempt to get at the truth. The Trant stories and Münsterberg’s theories show that the violence only renders the truth even more elusive and impossible to get. Instead, Arthur Trant shows that lying can be exposed through the noticing and recording of the smallest gesture by an observer. If an observer can notice these gestures, they have or are a good lie detector. Hemingway will spend the rest of his life believing that’s the very best thing to have as a writer, in business, and as a man. He tells The Paris Review interviewer in 1958 that to avoid generalizations, “the most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.”30
He develops his ability to shit detect and write about shit detection by reading Balmer and he imitates and first plays with the idea from 1919 to 1920 in his Chicago stories: “The Woppian Way,” “The Ash Heel’s Tendon—A Story,” and “The Mercenaries.” Reynolds describes his narrative technique in these stories by connecting the writing to Kipling’s, which Edmund Wilson did first in The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature. Reynolds notes that Hemingway was “trying to sound like an experienced observer of low life, here is the young Hemingway doing Kipling in south-side Chicago. He is using that slightly condescending but knowledgeable31 narrator that Kipling used about every third story, a narrator detached from the natives and to whom it is given to witness strange or comic events.”32 But Hemingway writes as an Oak Parker with a long connection to Chicago who writes about the corruption in order to expose it to the light. He doesn’t write as an observer among the primitives, but rather a police detective administering the lie detector to extract the truth. The stance is removed and detached so that the smallest gesture can be noticed and recorded. He will continue to develop this method throughout the 1920s, and the result will be complicated novels and stories filled with liars and lie detection that place even the reader in the position of having to notice the smallest gesture in order to reveal the complete psychological process behind it.
When Hemingway meets Balmer by chance in Petrosky, Michigan, in the Fall of 1919, he wants to know all about the writing business and how to make a saleable story or novel that sells itself. On October 28, 1919, after one of their many discussions about writing, Hemingway writes to his father:
This afternoon I worked out the new front part of the “Woppian Way” that Balmer wanted me to do and will have it in shape to start on its travels as soon as I am settled in Petoskey. I typed off the new part this afternoon. It was snowing a little this evening and the only amusement offered is an evangelical revival. There is some doubt as to whether I will attend.33
Balmer convinces Hemingway to change the title of “The Woppian Way” to “The Passing of Pickles McCarthy” because it will sell better. Hemingway listens to him, which indicates that he wants to learn whatever he can teach him about the business of writing “pot boilers” that will sell. Hemingway will continue to respect Balmer, calling him a “genius” for his ability to “write crap” in 1925.34 When in 1934, Arnold Gingrich, editor of Esquire, competes with Balmer, who is by then editor of Redbook, for a Hemingway short story, he apologizes profusely to Hemingway for doing so and causing confusion. He writes to Hemingway on August 29, 1934, that he wouldn’t have done it, “If I could have guessed, somehow, but how could I? About your feeling for Balmer and his for you.” He tells Hemingway the feeling is mutual between the two men: “Balmer answered with a damn swell letter about you.”35 Balmer holds a unique and very private position in Hemingway’s life as the mentor he held in permanent good esteem and whom he never turned against. It is likely that this is because Hemingway sees him as doing “good business” like his uncle and so knows that Balmer won’t turn against him. Balmer is the only one who understands Hemingway’s upbringing in Chicago and Michigan and who always respected what Hemingway tries to do fusing business success with making good writing.
Balmer’s personal and literary influence on Hemingway cannot be overstated because when Hemingway and Bill Horne move to Chicago in the Fall of 1920, the plan is to find jobs in advertising while the economy is booming and write on the side, just like Balmer.36 While Hemingway is not the first young man to want to do this in 1920, Balmer, his only contact in the business, must have provided fuel for the idea if not the idea itself and contacts for jobs among the businessmen he knew. Peter Griffin calls their model the “artist-advertising man,” who “could make a lot of money and write his novel on the side.”37 Griffin overstates the idea by making it generic, rather than seeing Hemingway as a product of Oak Park and Chicago already. He describes the artistic creations of the “artist-advertising man” as incorporating “the smooth machinations of the commercial ad” into “the new realism of Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Vachel Lindsay, and Carl Sandburg.”38 What Griffin describes is Hemingway’s own creation and fusion of Balmer’s ideas about lie detecting and hard-boiled advertising language with Chicago’s ideas about doing good business. He wants to be successful at the business of writing and continues to learn from Balmer’s unique fusion of advertising and realism.
Michael Reynolds notes that by the time Hemingway arrived in Chicago in October of 1920, it “was the afterglow of the renaissance” because all of the major artistic figures, Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, Upton Sinclair, Hamlin Garland, Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, and Burton Roscoe, had been lured East. Only Sherwood Anderson who would shortly leave for Paris and then New Orleans, Henry Blake Fuller, and Harriet Monroe who trudged on holding the mantle at Poetry remained in Chicago.39 However, Reynolds, like other chroniclers of Hemingway’s brief time in Chicago, misses the fact that by November of 1916, Masters and his entire family had achieved celebrity status in Chicago, suggesting that he knew the business quite well because he obtained a popular reputation on a book of poetry, an amazing feat at any time. Hemingway, who read the papers in Oak Park would have known of him before even moving to State Street. Masters often returned to Chicago, where he was still a literary celebrity from the East, where he had moved. On October 23, 1920, the month Hemingway arrived in Chicago, the Tribune publicized a large, week-long book fair at Marshall Field’s department store, where Masters “famed for his Spoon River Anthology” and Carl Sandburg were the headliners who “autographed books” for customers.40
Hemingway may have met Masters at a literary club dinner or in Sherwood Anderson’s apartment during one of Masters’s visits to Chicago that year. In Chicago, in 1921, Masters would have also been thought of as the American literary heir to Twain and Whitman. Hemingway would have been very interested in Masters’s celebrity, which was older and more solid than Anderson’s because it predated Anderson’s and was seen in Chicago as the ledge that provided a place for Anderson to climb into the business. When Hemingway begins suddenly what Reynolds calls his “literary life,”41 he imitates Masters’s not Anderson’s because he wishes to begin on the firmest and most successful and proven ledge possible, just as he did when he imitates Balmer with his Chicago gangster stories. At the end of 1920, he began to write dark romantic poetry similar in tone to Spoon River and used it to woo Hadley Richardson who would become his first wife in January 1921. The poetry writing continues over the next seven months. By July, he was sending poetry to Monroe at Poetry, who published Masters, but also to The Dial, where his new friend Sherwood Anderson published. All were rejected.42 He will
get a small poem published next to an article on the Chicagoan Fuller and a small poem by an unknown writer named William Faulkner in the New Orleans-based Double Dealer in 1922.43 He will continue to draw from Masters’s work through his writing career, in order to build on his success. When Elia Peattie reviewed Spoon River for the Tribune, she begins by connecting its first line with Poe, writing that “It portrays the lives of a community, or at least that portion of it which has recovered from ‘the fever called living,’ And has emerged into the windless peace of whatever lies beyond life.” The same could be said of Hemingway’s first big literary success, The Sun Also Rises, and its terse and terrible depiction of those who had lived beyond living in a community labeled by terse epitaphs that are like those read by Masters in the graveyard.
When Hemingway meets Sherwood Anderson in 1920, he meets the writer who embodies the idea of the advertising man/craftsman artist. Anderson always wore the suit of the Chicago businessman and talked about business to Hemingway. He had recently learned the publishing game himself and understood about editors, contracts, royalties, advances, and good prices. He knew the editors of all the small magazines because they were his friends or connected to him from the old days in Chicago: Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, Harriet Monroe, Henry Blake Fuller, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and John McClure. Hemingway would recognize him as yet another of the Chicago businessmen who would help him make good out of his own writing. Anderson connected him generously to everyone he knew, including editors, and the group he knew in Paris, many of whom had come out of Chicago. Hemingway, though, would have recognized that Balmer was a much better businessman than Anderson, in most senses, and continued to draw on his advice, while matching it against what Anderson told him.
Yet, Anderson considered himself a craftsman first, another word and kind of businessman Hemingway knew well enough about from growing up in Oak Park. Anderson’s language would connect him to his old employer, that other craftsman, Frank Lloyd Wright. Hemingway was born three blocks from Wright’s home and studio into the Oak Park Avenue, 1890, Queen Anne Victorian built by his grandparents. In 1899, the studio would have been added to twice and was in full swing as one of the innovative centers of Prairie School Architecture. His mother joined the housing boom of the next few years and helped another architect who was better known for listening to clients’ many demands, Henry G. Fiddelke, build the sprawling 4200-square-foot house on Kenilworth Avenue, into which she moved her family. The new house was even closer to the studio and the family now lived only two blocks away from it and five from Wright’s newly built Unity Temple. Hemingway went to school with Wright’s younger children through high school and his entire family’s presence in Oak Park would have formed a large part of Hemingway’s childhood. Architecture combines art and commerce, in that a good architect needs to be a good businessman who can raise clients and backers in order for the art to be created, so of course it became the most prominent art form in Chicago. Wright was such a successful self-promoter that Hemingway would have learned many techniques for successfully marrying artistic vision with self-promotion by meeting, watching, and hearing about him in Oak Park. It would have only served to recommend him further to young Hemingway that his mother, Grace Hall-Hemingway, despised him.
Wright’s wife, Catherine, known as Kitty, was an active member of the Nineteenth-Century Club, to which Grace Hall-Hemingway and Martha “Mamah” Borthwick Cheney also belonged. Mamah’s husband, Edwin Cheney, commissioned a house from Wright, perhaps in part because of their wives’ connection through the club. After Wright and Mamah left their families and spouses in 1909, the Tribune and residents of Oak Park socially attacked the couple for their immorality. Ten-year-old Hemingway would have heard all about it from his mother, from his friends at school, and from the papers. His mother made her feelings well-known when she helped raise money to establish the Oak Park Art League in 1921. The Art League found its first home among members of the Nineteenth-Century Club and in 1924, the organization moved to Frank Lloyd Wright’s first wife’s home, the renovated studio on Chicago Avenue, because she was still a member of the club. The move made it clear whom the members, of which Grace had become quite prominent, supported. Grace would have been very happy she chose Fiddelke to design her house, because Wright was seen as the epitome of the immoral and bad businessman who runs off with the client’s wife.
Hemingway would have seen Anderson as similar to Wright, because Anderson, like Wright, left his wife and family to pursue a passion, which for Anderson was his writing. Hemingway would marry four times, leaving each wife and children rather abruptly as if repeating an artistic model laid out for him as a young boy and then a young man by Wright and Anderson. After Hemingway began an affair with Pauline Pfeiffer, Hadley divorced him in 1927. His family in Oak Park found out about the divorce when it was written about in the Tribune in terms similar to that of Wright’s affair.44 In Anderson, Hemingway found a writer who like Fuller and Wright spoke the ideas of the Arts and Crafts movement and positioned himself publicly as an independent artist/craftsman whose work stood against the cold, metal skyscrapers built for the businesses of Chicago. Anderson, like Wright, had to promote his work to succeed as a Chicago writer to those very patrons and clients each detested and he had, by 1920, become bitter about the whole business. Hemingway would have been intrigued by how Anderson, like Fuller, deliberately went against the model of the “good Chicago businessman” so ingrained in Hemingway and instead reworked that idea, with the help of Harriet Monroe, into becoming a good craftsman instead. Reynolds claims Anderson told him, “No one absolutely no one—not wife, not family, not God himself—should interfere with the writer’s work. The world of business, he told Ernest, was a trap designed to thwart the writer. Hack writing, whether advertising or journalism, could ruin the artist, who must stay simple, his life uncomplicated.”45 Ultimately, Anderson taught Hemingway that to make good in the craft of writing, one must separate themselves from the businessmen from whom Hemingway learned those models. But Hemingway understood Wright in a way much different than Anderson because he grew up in Oak Park. Hemingway knew Wright still got commissions even after the scandal and saw Masters’s and Anderson’s carefully crafted personas, and so he understood that being an artist/craftsman was a kind of business model too.
Hemingway’s loosely forming ideas about how to go about the business of writing underpin the short draft of a humorous essay that will be published in the Toronto Star Weekly in August of 1921. “In Condensing the Classics,” he writes about a group of “earnest condensors” who “have been laboring for the last five years at reducing the literature of the world into palatable morsels for the tired business man’s consumption.” They could, endowed by Andrew Carnegie, cut classics to “ten pages” or in the case of Shakespeare “eight hundred words.” He announces: “It is a splendid thing to bring the classics within range of the tired or retired businessman. Even though it casts a stigma on the attempt of the colleges and universities to bring the business man within the range of classics.”46 The solution is to condense all reading literature into newspaper copy. He then demonstrates at length by reducing each of the classics into headlines and newspaper stories.47
In the short piece, Hemingway mocks that Chicago “businessman” he grew up learning about and his inability to savor great writing and art because of being so pressed for time by his business. In doing so, he succinctly highlights that the business model opposes great writing and suggests that the writer/journalist straddles the two worlds and stands at the ready to bring them together if needed. The satire lies in seeing how great art becomes completely reduced in this meeting of the two worlds. The piece should be read as Hemingway’s satirical portrait of the Chicago art and business world where the writer/journalist or writer/advertising man is willing to compromise their art if it means understanding and funding by businessmen. He also reveals that he understands that he is one of them. The piece is published in a newspaper, so he is a Ch
icago writer/journalist and will remain one for the remainder of his career. He puns on his own name because what is he if not an “earnest condensor” who tries to use the hard-boiled language of the ad-man to retell classical stories in a new voice. The piece then reveals that Hemingway takes Anderson’s advice to watch out for the interference of business into the art world, but that he understands he will never turn his back on trying to make good.
Making good modernism out of bad business
Anderson told Hemingway to leave for the more promising and vital Paris, where the avant-garde was better understood and even cultivated by the city’s denizens and artists. He furnished him with a letter to Lewis Gallietere, a Chicago publisher who was helping defend The Little Review’s publication of Ulysses. Once there, he would meet Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson, through Gallietere, and Stein. His friends were mostly from Chicago, and so his introduction to the expatriate scene abroad was through Chicagoans abroad and those, who like Hemingway, couldn’t stand to stay in Chicago one moment longer. The Chicago connection to Margaret Anderson and Heap, by way of his new friends back in Chicago and Sherwood Anderson who had left Chicago once again for New Orleans, would prove fruitful for Hemingway. He had difficulties getting published in Chicago, even with Balmer’s help and now, once in Paris, he succeeded in getting his first stories published in The Little Review and the Double Dealer in New Orleans. Stein’s favorable review of In Our Time would seal his reputation among the literary avant-garde and bring his work, along with Sherwood Anderson’s, to the attention of Edward J. O’Brien, who had started the Best Stories anthology in 1915, and critics such as Edmund Wilson. The attention allowed him to continue publishing in popular magazines and journals, make money, and made him visible to an American reading public who did not read avant-garde journals. The triangular friendship between Anderson, Hemingway, and Stein and the success it brought Hemingway allowed him to craft his persona as a member of the avant-garde, although he became increasingly frustrated with the business of publishing.
Chicago and the Making of American Modernism Page 15