Chicago and the Making of American Modernism

by Michelle E Moore

  In “May Day” (1922), Edith Bradin is the beautiful and long lost, rich love, whom Gordon “hadn’t met since that one romantic night at the Harrisburg Country Club just before he went to France.”67 He describes her brother, who he occasionally sees: “He’s sort of a socialistic nut. Runs a paper or something here in New York.”68 Cissy’s brother, Joseph Patterson, worked for the Tribune as a journalist, and after having a political fight with his father who owned the paper, he resigned. He announced publicly that he was now a socialist, wrote an article for Collier’s on socialism, and began writing novels with a strong socialist perspective about social climbing and class differences. He returned to work at the Tribune by 1910 and, after his father died, took over the management of the paper. He had another dispute over how to run the paper, this time with his cousin, Robert R. McCormick. He moved to New York and founded the Daily News as a tabloid in late June, 1919. By 1925, with their dispute still in full swing, Patterson ceded full authority over the Tribune to McCormick in return for full control of the Daily News.69

  When Fitzgerald published “May Day” in The Smart Set in 1920, Medill’s novels were very well-known and his first as a declared socialist, A Little Brother of the Rich (1908), was made into a popular play in 1909 and a well-received film in 1915. Both best-selling novel and film tell the story of a poor young man, Paul, from a small town, who goes away to college and once there works to befriend the more sophisticated rich boys. The basic outline of the plot resembles those written by Fitzgerald so closely that the influence of Patterson’s popular novel on his work becomes obvious. Paul’s wealthy friends persuade him to leave his hometown fiancé, Sylvia, for a wealthy and married woman, Muriel. Her husband divorces her and Paul and Muriel marry. Sylvia’s father dies, leaving her suddenly penniless, and she takes up acting in a stock theater. Meanwhile, over the years, his wealthy school friends become increasingly unhappy as they pursue their spoiled interests and engage in decadent behaviors. When Paul discovers Muriel’s unfaithfulness, he renews his acquaintance with Sylvia, who still loves him. Muriel dies in a sudden automobile crash and the novel ends with Paul planning to propose marriage to Sylvia, after he must save her by giving a sudden performance onstage to help her career.70

  The August 29, 1908, Publisher’s Weekly acknowledged the initial anonymous publication of the book by confirming that the book is now “Openly accredited to Joseph Medill Patterson, a well-known millionaire socialist of the West.” They go on to review it favorably:

  The book is said to give truthful pictures of the life of the idle rich who draw their means from the overworked, underpaid poor. The realism of the book is said to be startling, but perhaps such drastic material is needed to make men pause and think of the consequences of the devotion to money, luxury, and materialism in the present reign of lawlessness.71

  Fitzgerald’s friend and early mentor, H. L. Mencken, reviewed the novel in one of his first reviews for The Smart Set, in December of 1908. He remembers giving it a “kind word” in his memoir, after “blasting” Joseph Conrad for his tedious socialism, something he abhorred.72

  Mencken’s memory is rather inaccurate and he writes favorably of Patterson’s novel at first:

  He is trying to tell the story of a dozen worthless men and a dozen worse women, and he does it in straightforward, ingenuous manner, without too great a stretching of probability and without too finicky a restraint. If it be urged that his people are not typical of New York society, it may be answered quite justly that he makes no such claim for them.73

  Mencken, then, uses the review to write his first formulaic and extended diatribe against socialist writing and attacks Patterson right along with Conrad. He writes:

  Mr. Patterson’s purpose, of course, is to demonstrate the demoralizing influence of money. To this thesis two objections may be offered, the first being that it is admitted by all, and so needs no demonstration, and the second being that it is not true. In his ready acceptance of its verity lies the proof of his Socialistic tendencies, for Socialism, when all is said and done, is nothing more than the theory that the slave is always more virtuous than his master. In other words, the Socialists hold that the slave’s yearning to rise is, in some mysterious and recondite way, more pleasing to a just God than the master’s yearning to stay up, and that this superiority in yearning breeds general superiority in all other ways.74

  Mencken’s ideas will be more clearly articulated in his later 1926 Notes on Democracy and result in much later praise of Ayn Rand and a well-articulated dislike of the middle to lower classes. In the review of Patterson and Conrad, he explains why he sees the socialist’s elevation of the lower classes into virtuous creatures as romantic foolishness. Instead, Mencken prefers his art to be realistic, by which he means a reflection of how he sees the world as predetermined and rough. Because A Little Brother of the Rich suggests that societal classes may be fluid and presents the rich as amoral and decadent, he doesn’t see anything good about the point of Patterson’s novel. Mencken roots his aesthetics in his reading of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, where great tragedies are about a man’s inner morals in direct conflict with the cultural morals, values, and superstitions. Mencken wants the American novel to be fully developed and for him that means portraying the tragic conflicts created and promulgated by modern society. He disparages any current literature or art, which fails at obtaining this tragic seriousness and instead, in his view, stays trapped in reinscribing the feminine melodramas of the late nineteenth century. Dreiser, for Mencken, was the best at this kind of literature. His co-editor criticized the play based on The Little Brother of the Rich novel as too indulgent and melodramatic. George Jean Nathan writes, it “was heralded as a satire on society.” Then continues, “You know what that means—idle rich, monkey dinners, ‘affairs,’ divorces and all that sort of rot” (146).75 When Mencken reviews Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in 1925, he mocks it as melodrama, in remarkably similar terms: “This clown Fitzgerald rushes to his death in nine short chapters. The other performers in the Totentons are of a like, or even worse, quality.”76

  Ronald Berman argues that Fitzgerald’s “May Day,” written and published while Fitzgerald thought very much of Mencken’s writing and ideas, illustrates his rejection of Mencken’s categories of people, and that “personality was too complex to be reduced to formal categories like aristocrats, boobs, and mob.”77 Berman says that Fitzgerald “asserted the values of experience, convinced that individuals learned empirically.”78 “May Day,” Berman shows, is about the writer pulling away from his editor by moving away from fixed types into a more complicated world made up of personalities that shift and change. He states, “The rich in this story are Mencken’s plutocrats. Fitzgerald places them in exemplary situations in which money, class, and style are the evident issues. But the difference is everything. When we see the young and rich in this story thinking about themselves, they are more complex, and they carry more weight than either Mencken or The Saturday Evening Post wanted.”79 Fitzgerald’s characters become simply too complex for Mencken who fixes the world in small categories and boxes.

  “May Day” is Fitzgerald’s first attempt to incorporate the Chicago realism of Dreiser with the more European and modern symbolism that Mencken hated. The story begins with a Dreiseresque overview of the city and declares, “So during all this time there were many adventures that happened in the great city, and of these, several—or perhaps one—are here set down.”80 Peter Himmel even expresses an attempt to work out the “permeating symbolism” of the moment. The stories’ structure, with three interlocking scenes, suggests that the juxtaposition of the stories is the point. The story places the different classes next to each other and tries to make sense of how the everyday interactions of the rich can be so filled with slights, rudeness, and injustices to the lower classes, while they simultaneously claim to want to raise up the lower classes by supporting and funding Chicago’s higher life. The story also reveals that the money to fund these end
eavors is made on the broken backs of those who will then be supposedly lifted up by their profits. Fitzgerald shows these fundamental contradictions in Chicagoans, suggesting that these are the traits of the Chicago upper classes, who behave as nowhere else.

  The story would have been legible to Chicago readers as a reworking of the McCormick/Medill/Patterson family’s past and present. The title is usually read as a reference to the uprising and riot in 1919, Toledo. But, May Day has become the International Day honoring workers because of the May 4 labor protest that came about after several months of protest by workers across Chicago. The title itself suggests that the story may have a far stronger connection to Chicago and to the McCormick family than it first appears. May Day commemorates the Haymarket protests and the later international protests in October 1884 that resulted in a standardized eight-hour workday for workers. The story, then, is on one level a remembrance of the McCormick’s involvement in the Haymarket Affair, something that is often left out, and surely would have been ignored by Fitzgerald’s generation. The protagonist’s name, Gordon, replicates Fitzgerald’s Princeton friend, Gordon McCormick, who would have been his first introduction to the family. A cursory reading of the story as a Chicago story would suggest that Gordon, the artist, must have something to do with the current riots and violence in the story. However, Fitzgerald draws from the original dislike between the Pattersons and the McCormicks to cast his characters. Edith, Gordon’s lost love, visits her brother Henry at his socialist newspaper’s office. The name Edith evokes Edith Rockefeller and her relationship to her brother suggests strongly that they are based on Cissy and Joseph Medill Patterson.

  The three-part structure of the story reveals Fitzgerald working against the idea of a hierarchical social structure that forms the basis of Chicago realism and heralded by Mencken. The story places the story of Edith Bradin and her brother, based on Cissy and Joseph Patterson, next to the story of “the artist,” Gordon Sterritt, and the blackmailing girl, “Jewel Hudson.” The separation of the brother and sister, and later Philip Dean, from Gordon Sterritt in the narrative serves to highlight the distance between the upper classes and those of the artist classes. However, Gordon, like the main character in A Little Brother of the Rich, went to college with Philip Dean and so is a little brother, a tag-along to the rich who populate the story. Each story intermixes with the other and so the strong separations between the characters and their classes become so lost as to become almost meaningless and unintelligible, just as “The Camel’s Back” ends with the intermixing of social classes through trickery.

  Hemingway deeply disliked Fitzgerald’s experimental methods of writing a new American modernism based on mixture and possibilities. On May 28, 1934, Ernest Hemingway wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald a letter from his house in Key West in order to give Fitzgerald his opinion of the newly published novel Tender Is the Night. He writes:

  I liked it and I didn’t like it. It started off with that marvelous description of Sara and Gerald … Then you started fooling with them, making them comes [sic] from other things they didn’t come from, changing them into other people and you can’t do that Scott. If you take real people and write about them you cannot give them other parents than they have (they are made by their parents and what happens to them) you cannot make them do anything they would not do. … Invention is the finest thing but you can not invent anything that would not actually happen.81

  Because Hemingway knew Zelda, Pauline, Hadley, Sara, and Gerald, and was in Paris while the five interacted, Hemingway considered himself in a unique position to criticize the novel. His specific complaint is about how Fitzgerald combined the backgrounds, characters, and behaviors of the people both writers knew well, to create characters who are mixtures of real people. The result, for Hemingway, is a fake and unreal novel and his shit detector was ringing loudly. Hemingway complains about Fitzgerald’s process: “Goddamn it you took liberties with peoples pasts and futures that produced not people but damned marvelously faked case histories.”82 He goes so far as to call the figures fake and indicates that the novel’s plots could not possibly happen the way Fitzgerald writes them.

  He tells Fitzgerald that he is “so lousy with talent” and tells him to “write and write truly no matter who or what it hurts but don’t make these silly compromises.”83 The compromises, for Hemingway, are Fitzgerald’s liberties with an honest and truthful realism that exposes the dark corners of modernism. The more Fitzgerald blends pieces of people’s histories together, the more he thinks Fitzgerald moves away from a realistic portrayal of the way people are in 1920s Paris and the more he thinks his writing is just a bad business. For Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s move away from what he sees as realism would be the greatest affront. But Fitzgerald will engage with modernism, rather than Chicago realism, and he believes that writing about the mixing of types, rather than reproducing the actual character, allows more insight into individual natures. He will never again write what Hemingway does: a pure “document novel.”84 He writes to Thomas Boyd on March 19, 1923, “I have decided to be a pure artist and experiment in form + emotion. I’m sure I can do it much better than Anderson.”85

  However, Fitzgerald never gave up American realism entirely, as Hemingway fears. In This Side of Paradise (1920), Tom and Avery have a discussion about American writers that imitates a similar passage about Irish literature in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1915). Tom reads a satirical free verse poem listing current American writers, including the Chicagoans Carl Sandburg and Louis Untermeyer and the poet Eunice Tietjens who helped Harriet Monroe run Poetry magazine. The poem’s last lines skewer the writers as sentimental, maudlin, childish, and completely out-of-date: “Sinuous, mauve-colored names/in the Juvenilia/of my collected editions.”86 However, Amory thinks otherwise about a handful of American writers: “He enjoyed both Vachel Lindsay and Booth Tarkington, and admired the conscientious if slender artistry of Edgar Lee Masters.”87 Armory speaks for Fitzgerald here, and his tastes demonstrate that even at this early stage, Fitzgerald found things to admire in American realism. Hemingway doesn’t see this in Fitzgerald’s work and considers his work fake and unreal, the opposite of the realistic and truthful work Hemingway strives to produce. Hemingway will not recognize Fitzgerald’s methods of drawing reality from case studies. Armory complains about the kind of story Hemingway keeps telling and thinks is true: “I wish American novelists would give up trying to make business romantically interesting. Nobody wants to read about it, unless it’s crooked business.”88 Perhaps Hemingway refuses to legitimize Fitzgerald’s experiments with realism because Hemingway has patterned himself after one of those people Fitzgerald keeps writing about: the Chicago businessman. Fitzgerald’s methods, perhaps, reveal too much truth about Hemingway’s own psyche for his taste and so he must discredit the entire experiment.

  Chicago, then, appears in Fitzgerald’s work directly by name and in the background as a marker as to where certain characters originate from, allowing a few to be categorized immediately as a Chicago type: rich, loud, clannish, and self-centered. But more often, Fitzgerald combined the backgrounds, histories, and mannerisms of various Chicagoans he knew well and who would also be very recognizable to a Midwestern reader. These characters, created out of parts of actual Chicagoans, become representative of Chicago types. Just as Hemingway despised Fitzgerald’s blending of the Paris crowd, so too he despises Fitzgerald’s blending of the Chicago crowd, which he also recognized in Fitzgerald’s work. Because actual Chicagoans can be spotted as the models for many characters in Fitzgerald’s work, it becomes clear how much time and effort Fitzgerald spent constructing and refining the Chicago type. His work should not be read as just about rich girls and boys and their ways of interacting, creating, and destroying, but about Chicago’s rich boys and girls whose grandparents were the titans of industry.

  Chicago plots: Among the Ash Heaps and the Millionaires

  Fitzgerald wrote “The Cut-Glass Bowl” in October
of 1919 and published it in the May 1920 issue of Scribner’s. In the story, Evelyn tells Carleton Canby that she will marry Harold Piper because his prospects are much better than Carleton’s. She becomes the first of a long line of Fitzgerald female characters to choose the rich boy over the poor boy. Carleton replies immediately that he will give her a present that’s “as hard as you are and as beautiful and empty to see through.” A very large crystal glass bowl arrives some time later and “of course it’s beautiful.”89 The bowl turns out to haunt Evelyn because it will always be at the center of domestic calamity and misfortune throughout her life: her husband’s fortunes reverse, her daughter cuts herself on it and gets blood poisoning necessitating amputation, and it even holds the letter from the US military that contains the notice of her son’s death at war. The story ends with Evelyn’s life destroyed, even her beauty wanes and she must live with the knowledge that her wrong choice in men, choosing wealth over Carleton, resulted in all of the ruin. The story has a particularly bitter plot, even for Fitzgerald.