Chicago and the Making of American Modernism

by Michelle E Moore

  He writes often to his old and new writer friends about his new dislike for business in general, but because doing good business is such an integral part of his identity as a Hemingway, it’s clear he can’t see the world through any other lens. He writes to Bill Horne a long letter from July 17 to 18, 1923, that declares on the last page: “Banking’s undoubtedly probably hell but then any business is hell. You see Horney, I’m cut out for Romance rather than business. The only trouble is there isn’t any living in Romance.”48 To Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas on October 11, 1923, he writes: “I have understood for the first time how men can commit suicide simply because of too many things in business piling up ahead of them that they can’t get through. It is only of doubtful value to have discovered.” He closes the letter with a story about seeing a religious man. He yells about Jesus on the cross and writes in chalk on the sidewalk with “a big crowd standing around listening.” The punch line comes next: “Business men you know.”49 Although he has moved away from Chicago and Oak Park, he still thinks about the mix of business and spirituality that informed his childhood completely and doing so reveals that he is always rethinking his own relationship to business and the place he first learned about it, back home. Hemingway’s continued interest in “Jim Joyce” alongside Chicago writers makes sense in this light, because Joyce’s writing continually reworks and rethinks the relationship between money, religion, exile, and home.

  Despite Hemingway’s laments about the problems of being in business, he remains busy and ambitious to continue to build his reputation as a solid producer of good writing. Hemingway expresses his ambitions to O’Brien in June 1924: “What I would like to do is bring out a big fat book in NY with some good publisher who would tout it and have In Our Time in it.”50 He gets what he wants when Boni and Liveright publish nearly all of the stories in in our time in 1925. What had been avant-garde work touted by Gertrude Stein becomes the basis of a great business deal. Leonard Leff points out: “Liveright was publishing moneymakers … the sort of books that earned authors huge returns and Hollywood offers.”51 Hemingway’s interest in Liveright suggests that Hemingway continued to look for the formula to write a literary best seller just as Balmer showed him how to do and Anderson and Masters had succeeded in doing recently.

  He is clearly thinking of Balmer when he writes to Bill Smith Jr., back in Chicago on January 8, 1925: “It is only the Eleventh Hour as Edwin Balmer would say so will screed on until the morning.”52 He pushes on and three weeks later writes to him: “IOT Accepted by Boni and Liveright.” He nods toward Oak Park’s desire to not hear about any bad business: “Wonder if it will be burnt on the steps of the Oak Park public library?”53 His publisher, however, wants to make changes in the stories and remove an entire story in order to make the entire thing more palatable to an American audience and to get it in the Oak Park Library, something Hemingway wants too. When he writes to Horace Liveright on May 22, 1925, that he revised and took out obscene images in “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot,” it reveals a writer working hard at making things presentable and working at pleasing his publisher, traits listed as important in his Uncle Tyler’s book. He writes:

  Now that you have cut it and I have smoothed it over again will you make quite sure from various opinion that it is not suppressible? For it would be an even worse business to be suppressed for a story after it had the dynamite cut out. Jane Heap ran it in its original form and did not get into any trouble. 54

  Hemingway does what he can to appear gracious and easy to work with because he understands writing is a business, since he is from Chicago.

  Although Hemingway does what his publisher wished, he is still deeply concerned about the changes to which he has agreed. He writes to John Dos Passos on April 22, 1925:

  A Mrs. George Kauffman is here and she claims they want to cut it all cut the Indian Camp story. Cut the In Our Time Chapters. Jesus I feel all shot to hell about it. Of course they cant do it because the stuff is so tight and hard and everything hangs on everything else it would all just be shot up shit creek.55

  His letter to Jane Heap also suggests that he’s rethinking his work and is unclear whether he’s actually getting good feedback. He writes to her on June 12, 1925: “Listen Jane, while I appreciate your delicacy in keeping me out of such attractive company in the magazine was it because that piece you asked me to write wasn’t good enough? Because when you think something I do is rotten, don’t hesitate to say so.”56 He writes sarcastically to Horace Liveright on June 21, 1925:

  Being a simple country boy from Chicago I don’t know anything about the technique of grabbing off authors. So far I’ve only gotten to the stage of grabbing off a publisher. Next I have to grab off some money so I can dress the part. Then we could have photographs taken—Hemingway—Before and After Being Grabbed off By Horace Liveright—Then with a sample case fitted up with these and similar exhibits I ought to be able to grab off authors as fast as I can get them tight.57

  His letters indicate that he’s starting to wonder whether Liveright is being fair to artists, a concern that marks Hemingway, yet again, as a Chicagoan who knows Harriet Monroe and Frank Lloyd Wright personally and therefore understands that most businesses are completely corrupt when dealing with artists.

  His replacement of “Up in Michigan” with “The Battler” betrays his concerns about publication because the story recalls the earlier Chicago gangster stories that Balmer, not Anderson, helped him shape. When asked to replace the more unpublishable story, Hemingway gives Liveright a crowd pleaser that will satisfy the market. The story is remarkable because it links Hemingway’s earlier stories to the more avant-garde work he will continue to write far away from Chicago. The story begins with Nick Adams being kicked off the train line somewhere near Chicago. His connection to the city had now become tenuous and he is unclear both physically and psychologically where he is in relationship to it. There he finds that aptly named ex-boxer “Ad Francis,” whose name caricatures the advertising men of Chicago who try to marry together art and business. Ad’s downfall from being a prizefighter happens for this very reason: he marries his manager who happens to be his sister. The incestuous marriage creates a scandal and she eventually abandons Ad. The story operates as an extended metaphor about Chicago ad men who make an impossible marriage for the sake of business. Hemingway suggests that the marriage of art and business is incestuous at best and could leave the artist completely destroyed at worst.

  When Nick first sees Ad in the darkness, the two characters appear very much alike with bruised faces from their hard falls. Scholars have written at length debating whether Nick should be read as a young Hemingway, but in the case of “The Battler,” Hemingway’s escape from the Chicago advertising business should be considered before settling on this interpretation. Hemingway writes an alternative story for himself, where Nick looks at Ad and sees a metaphor for what Hemingway could have been if he stayed home. Because Nick has left home and left the safety of the train, he has, like Hemingway, already moved beyond the possibility of becoming an Ad Francis. The story becomes an expression of Hemingway’s anxiety over marrying advertising and art to sell himself and to sell books. Bugs best represents Hemingway’s position to the story, in that he helps the younger Nick and keeps him safe, much as Cather does with her opera diva Thea in The Song of the Lark. But like Hemingway, Bugs is a very contradictory character. On the one hand he is kind while caring for Ad, and on the other hand he is violent, being a former convict who was in jail for “cuttin’ a man.”58 Hemingway, too, is very polite while caring about the business side of things with his writing, the very epitome of the “good businessman,” and on the other, he writes stories about brutality in a new and modern way, by brutally cutting down his prose.

  Hemingway cut down his language beyond even that of his earlier short stories while writing the stories that compose the stories and vignettes in In Our Time. The pared-down style has been overly identified with the “iceberg theory,” first mentioned in
Death in the Afternoon (1932) and then repeated in the same Paris Review article that he mentions his interest in “shit detecting.”59 The significance of Hemingway’s interest in “shit detecting” to describe his writing has been overlooked because of Balmer’s now obscurity and because he mentions it in the same Paris Review interview that he uses the “iceberg” to explain his style. The mention of the iceberg will turn into the “iceberg theory,” which will dominate scholarly discussions of his writing style. The “iceberg theory,” also sometimes described as the “theory of omission,” overly simplifies Hemingway’s style by reducing it to a solid structure that floats partially above the surface. Instead, his style needs to be seen as deriving from Münsterberg’s theories that Gertrude Stein too was fascinated by and transformed into prose, and Balmer’s ideas about the uses of advertising language and lie detection. His prose style comes from Chicago, something that by 1925 he tries to distance himself from to join the modern avant-garde at the helm in Paris.

  He writes: “If a writer stops observing he is finished. But he does not have to observe consciously nor think about how to be useful. Perhaps that would be true at the beginning. But later everything he sees goes into the great reserve of things he knows or has seen.”60 Hemingway, like the advertising man, believes in Münsterberg’s ideas about associations and that he can draw images and languages from that place to create. He strips his language down to the masculine language of the hard-boiled advertisement and in doing so forces associations from “the great reserve” in his reader just as Balmer the advertising man taught him was possible. Just as the housewife thinks her choices choosing products seem “natural,” so too Hemingway’s reader thinks his or her choices as to the meaning of Hemingway’s stories are “natural” and uncoerced. The process of associations itself can be revealed through observing and measuring the smallest gesture, according to Münsterberg’s idea that all psychological processes have parallel physical processes. Hemingway’s narrators, usually writers themselves, observe the bad business that goes on around them in an attempt to understand and reveal the psychological processes at work behind the physical processes of the action. All superfluous language must be eliminated in order for the narrator and the reader to see the process clearly.

  Hemingway’s minimalism, then, develops as a method to write about the “bad business” in a way that makes it palatable, natural, and appealing to an audience to sell books. His style packages avant-garde modernism into the familiar advertising language that the American middle class has been taught is natural, and at the same time pulls apart those impulses because the narrators and the readers must hone their shit detectors in order to make sense of the story. The Nick Adams stories show how Nick learns to observe details and develop his “shock-proof shit detector” as he faces violence, alienation, and war. The idea that he can always remain professionally cool, like his father in “Indian Camp” seems impossible, especially after possible shellshock prevents successful reintegration after the war. Jake Barnes, too, tries to be a “shock-proof shit detector” and tries to remain cool while ferreting out the lies and gestures that reveal the psychological processes of those around him. He sadly reveals how hard it is to keep up the façade of the advertising man and the lie detector when he says: “It’s awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.”61

  Bruce Barton, the son of William Barton, reviewed The Sun Also Rises (1926) for the Atlantic Monthly.62 Even though Bruce was thirteen years older than Hemingway, he would have known him well as the son of the minister who baptized him at First Congregational in Oak Park. The younger Barton, by 1926, had “made good” by Oak Park standards and had recently become good friends with Hemingway’s father.63 He founded one of the most significant advertising firms in America, Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborn, and wrote the best-selling The Man Nobody Knows (1925) that depicts Christ as a masculine executive, the world’s greatest businessman, who “picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world.”64 Barton’s book draws straight from his father’s gospel of “clean money” to legitimize big business by preaching a life of service and responsibility. Leo P. Rubuffo has shown how “in an economy of abundance” Barton argued that “corporate leaders must place service above profits, all persons must work and consume vigorously, and advertisements must promote these general values as well as specific goods and services.”65 Barton’s language recalls that of D. L. Moody and William Dean Howells, who each believed that pragmatism and muscular prose would save America from a corrupt, indulgent, and increasingly feminine culture. Spiritual pragmatism and realism promoted service and responsibility to the new ideals of an American culture and created the restrained and unemotional prose with which to write about it. Barton’s review of Hemingway’s novel was overwhelmingly positive because he saw the novel as an excellent example of how masculinity should be promoted on the page.

  Barton praised Hemingway’s book because he understood its language as the masculine, hard-boiled prose of the last generation of advertisers. He also understood as a Chicagoan and as a man who grew up in his father’s church in Oak Park that the book is a depiction of the classic “bad businessmen,” who drink rather than produce and who have strayed too far from spirituality. The short story “Fifty Grand” may be Hemingway’s response from afar to Barton’s best-selling book and his review of The Sun Also Rises. In it, he reworks a plot from a story about a fixed boxing match that first appeared in the Oak Park-River Forest’s literary magazine Tabula. The story is a Chicago story because as Arnold Gingrich points out in a later letter to Hemingway, a fixed boxing match was known at the time as a “Chicago decision” because of the inherent corruption involved.66 Jack Brennan, the story’s main character, may have thrown the fight because he bet against himself for the fifty grand of the title. He appears as corrupt and broken as anyone else for most of the story, but the ending suggests that he served a larger purpose and redeems himself through a kind of martyrdom. He says about throwing the fight: “It’s business” and repeats, “It’s just business.”67 The story, then, becomes a kind of parody of Barton’s book that associates “good business” with service and describes Christ as “a good businessman.” Jack, then, is a kind of “good businessman” who serves the greater good of the “Chicago decision” and makes excellent money doing so. Ironically, the short story appears in The Atlantic almost exactly one year after Barton’s review of The Sun Also Rises was supposed to appear.

  Hemingway’s letter to Louis and Mary Bromfield on March 8, 1926, indicates that although he can parody the idea of the good businessman, he still believes in the idea. He writes:

  I should have done the business man and tried to see what Harcourt Brace would do in opposition but I think that’s all the advance I can expect on any business basis except that they want to back me over a long period of time whether the books sell or not … and I wouldn’t have any fun writing the stuff if I did something that made me feel crooked inside.68

  Hemingway’s understanding of business as a game of character and product development underpins his ability to work with his publishers in exactly the ways they need him to be. Robert W. Trogdon has tracked at length and shown the relationships between the writer and his editors and publishers at Scribner’s and the negotiations that occurred between them. He argues that Hemingway’s desire to be a “professional writer” coupled with Scribner’s creation of his literary persona and reputation catapulted Hemingway to the untouchable place he now holds in the American literary canon and imagination.69 Hemingway simply does not want his fame to be the result of a corrupt “Chicago decision” and yet, he seems unsure whether the writing business is ever good business. He begins to reveal his deep ambivalence when he writes to Maxwell Perkins three years later on December 15, 1929: “The idea that a writer can write a book then become a business man, then a writer again is all shit as we say.”70

/>   The bad business of patronage

  By late 1924, Hemingway had seen enough of the avant-garde writing business to understand that one couldn’t really go at it well without a patron. Now that he received some notice for his pieces in The Little Review and those that would make up In Our Time, especially from Gertrude Stein, he became increasingly concerned about how avant-garde writing is published and who, exactly, controls the purse strings behind the little magazines and publishers. The whole setup looked an awful lot like the corruption from Chicago and his concerns about the whole bad business would be increasingly reflected in his letters and stories.

  Over the rest of that year and through the spring, he writes a series of letters to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas who, in that period, acted as his compass through the art scene. He writes to them both about his old friend Krebs Friend from Chicago, with whom he worked on the Co-Operative Commonwealth during 1920–1921. Friend married Henrietta Hobbs, a wealthy heiress, and they had just taken over the finances of The Transatlantic Review after John Quinn died in July of 1924.71 On August 9, 1924, Hemingway writes to Stein and Toklas satirizing and complaining about Friend’s new behavior with the magazine: “Now Ford’s attitude is that he is selling Krebs an excellent business proposition and that Krebs is consequently a business man and the foe of all artists of which he—Ford is the only living example and in duty bound as a representative of the dying race to grind he—Krebs, the natural Foe—into the ground.”72 On September 14, 1924, he writes again and continues the story with Ford trying to scam Friend into taking the whole thing over as a business and “running it as a business proposition, i.e. money making proposition, filling him up on fake figures to feed his own ego and kidding himself it was a money making proposition.”73 This is the first time he positions the relationship between businessmen and artists to be explicitly antagonistic, and so this is the moment Hemingway tries to separate himself from his father and grandfather, as well as all of the good businessmen of Oak Park and Chicago. He sounds like Willa Cather, who believed strongly that art should not have use-value and his story about Krebs Friend aligns him firmly with Harriet Monroe and Frank Lloyd Wright who fought for the rights of artists to construct and own their own visions without interference from the world of business.