Chicago appears at the story’s midpoint, for seemingly no plot purpose other than to mark the location of the story, and this reveals that the location is very significant in the story and for Fitzgerald.90 Evelyn’s fateful dedication of herself to Harold through marriage happens in 1892, the same year the dedication ceremonies for the World’s Columbian Exhibition were held on October 21, suggesting a metaphorical connection between her marriage and the Columbian Exhibition. The World’s Fair used the idea of marriage to describe the many unions made during the Fair across business, the arts, science, and in people’s personal lives. It was an attempt to make business romantically interesting. President Cleveland delivered the Opening Address at the Fair and concluded the speech by declaring:
Let us hold fast to the meaning which underlies this ceremony, and let us not lose the impressiveness of this moment. As by a touch the machinery that gives life to this vast Exposition is now set in motion, so at the same instant let our hopes and aspirations awaken forces which in all time to come shall influence the welfare the dignity, and the freedom of mankind.91
He then pressed a gold and ivory button, setting the machinery of the Fair in motion. His words and action suggest that the Fair is a marriage of many exciting possibilities that will bring forth unseen goodness and hopes in the years ahead. The Fair had advertised as a show of “science and progress” in Chicago and at the Fair, the electrical giants Tesla and Westinghouse announced their marriage in a gimmicky show. The top of the Fair’s newly built showstopper, the Ferris wheel, was the site of many marriage proposals. The story, then, is an allegory about the metaphorical marriages made at the Fair and suggests that they all, and by extension Chicago, made a terrible and doomed decision that day, just as Evelyn did.
Fitzgerald begins the story with a play on the opening passages in Henry Blake Fuller’s The Cliff-Dwellers: “There was a rough stone age and a smooth stone age and a bronze age, and many years afterward a cut glass age.”92 Where Fuller begins his novel with an extended conceit that compares newly built skyscrapers of Chicago to high Southwestern canyon walls and the city’s streets to the bottom of the canyons, Fitzgerald ties the current wedding gift giving age to the older and past eras of stone and bronze. Both passages have the same effect: to place the modern industrial age against an older and more enduring age. Fitzgerald, like Fuller, uses the comparison to signal ironic decay, where a once illustrious people, the Anasazi or the upper classes, are in the process of physical and moral collapse. Fuller wrote the novel as a critical response to what he saw as the excessive boosterism of the cliff dweller class to bring the Fair to Chicago. The haunted cut-glass bowl also causes calamity and decay because of its sheer size. It sticks out too far from the sideboard, causing Evelyn’s little girl to cut her hand and her husband to over drink at an important dinner party. Fitzgerald’s allusion signals that he wishes the reader to see him taking this same position with regards to the Fair and his characters.
Fitzgerald will use the popular stories of doomed romance and failed marriages to think about Chicago, the fire, and the Columbian Exhibition in most of his important work. In June of 1922, Fitzgerald wrote to his editor Max Perkins at Scribner’s about the next book he will write: “Its locale will be the middle west and New York of 1885 I think.”93 He updated the time period by the time he wrote the first drafts of what would become The Great Gatsby, but his working title and major metaphors indicate that he still thought of the novel as a Chicago novel in the years between the fire and the Columbian Exhibition. The title, Among the Ash Heaps and the Millionaires, recalls the burnt city of Chicago and the wealthy industrialist families who threw themselves and their fortunes into rebuilding Chicago into their image. The description of the valley of the ashes in the final version of the novel evokes imagistically Chicago after the fire: “This is a valley of the ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens, where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.”94 The ashes cover the town completely, as if what was wood had turned to ash. Fitzgerald mimics Fuller’s opening conceit in The Cliff-Dwellers, again, where Fuller transposes the urban environment into a Southwest canyon. Here, the town becomes an ash heap, a metaphor for Chicago’s urban decay which forms the ideological center of The Great Gatsby and The Cliff-Dwellers.
Fitzgerald borrows from Fuller again, by indicating that the four main characters with inherited money, Tom, Daisy, Jordan, and Nick, sit at the top of their perches immoral and decaying. They will be the end of their illustrious family lines that started with their great grandfathers and grandfathers who moved to Chicago and then rebuilt Chicago after the fire. The characters have to keep passing through the valley of the ashes to get to New York, demonstrating how each character must keep passing through Chicago history metaphorically to get to wherever they will end up. Each character must contend with their own histories, their family’s history in Chicago, and their own place at the end of the lineage. Fitzgerald gives many clues that these characters no longer possess the skills their grandfathers had in constructing and participating in financial, cultural, and social uplift. When Nick first encounters Daisy and Jordan, “Their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in a short flight around the house.”95 Three generations of their families lifted the young women to where they now sit and Nick only sees the results, not the flight itself. Nick notices that Gatsby learned to imitate the posture: “He was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly America—that comes, I suppose, with the absence of lifting work or rigid sitting in sporadic games.”96 He imitates the best show he knows and Nick tells him his house “looks like the world’s fair.”97 The abandonment of boosterism and a belief in the higher life allows the young upper classes a new posture that is wholly American and results in a “formless grace.”98
Julia Kristeva argues in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection that “it is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. The traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscience, the shameless rapists, the killer who claims he is a savior.”99 The abject that disturbs identity is not easily detected because a “good” liar or a well-intentioned criminal slips through the safety nets that have been cast to catch monstrous creatures. The truly abject does not announce it. Because Gatsby plays confidence tricks and games on the sometimes trusting and sometimes complicitous descendants of the nineteenth-century robber barons, he draws attention to the horror of how the money was really made in the first place. Fitzgerald’s novel examines the criminal who looks just like a rich Chicagoan and provides an uncanny mirror to the monstrous behavior of the very careless and very idle rich.
The novel also repeats the plot Fitzgerald first uses in “The Cut-Glass Bowl” and returned to in “Winter Dreams,” where a woman made the wrong choice in marriage and dooms herself and those around her to terrible misfortune. The novel, too, is an allegory about the metaphorical marriages made at the Fair by the characters’ grandparents and Fitzgerald doesn’t waver in his belief they all, and by extension Chicago, made a terrible and doomed decision that day. Mary A. McKay has noticed that Nick highlights the female characters lack of clear “definition.” She points out that Nick “sees them as creatures blurred by the pointless round of parties and vacuous relationships. Myrtle’s sister, Catherine, has ‘a blurred air to her face’ (Gatsby 34); and all the women at Gatsby’s parties look alike.”100 The women all represent beauty and their marriages to businessmen and scientists replicate one of the major themes of the Columbian Exhibition that promised the marriage of business and art. Daisy and Tom represent the worst possible pairing of careless, indifferent beauty with all of the worst characteri
stics of the Chicago business world: insularity, racism, and a lack of curiosity about the world. The story then becomes a critique of the descendants of the Chicago business world that Fuller writes about and Cather describes at length in The Song of the Lark. This may be one reason why Fitzgerald sent her the first short draft of the novel because he knew she would understand his allegorization of the Chicago business and art world.
In September of 1926, Hemingway teases Fitzgerald about the title of his next novel. He writes, “Have a swell hunch for a new novel. I’m calling it the World’s Fair. You’ll like the title.”101 Fitzgerald had just started working on his new novel about a Chicago girl and her psychiatrist and the intertangled love affair between the two of them. He was calling it The World’s Fair, echoing Nick’s description of Gatsby’s house in the earlier novel. The repetition shows that Fitzgerald was still thinking about the doomed marriage of art and business at the Fair and that the plot of Tender Is the Night reflects his ongoing concern that flashiness so easily woos beauty away from art. The plot, once again, replicates that of A Little Brother of the Rich, in that Dick Diver winds up pining for the girl he never should have left, who is now a big Hollywood star.
Fitzgerald reconfigures the models, provided by Joyce, Dreiser, James, Fuller, and Howells, to map Chicago and the Midwest, but he limits his maps to only one social strata. Fitzgerald keeps telling his own version of Portrait of the Artist, again and again, to make sense of his own origin story which simply does not make sense to him against the current popular culture ideas about Chicago’s underworld or Mencken’s declarations about Chicago literature. In Joyce, the young Steven Daedalus must make sense of the corrupt world he lives in, where the church does the work of the colonizer England, and the politicians are espousing the interests of the rich and the church. Fitzgerald must make sense of Chicago, where the interests of rich boys and rich girls rule the court system and church. Fitzgerald wanted to sell books and, simultaneously, be taken seriously as a modernist. The Chicago references, then, can be read as signposts that reveal his and all modern American writers’ struggle over style: whether to write the easily published and profitable Chicago realism that would make writing useful and utilitarian, or the less profitable, but European, high modernist symbolism.
Notes
Introduction
1 Sue Ann Prince, ed., “Introduction,” in Old Guard and the Avant-Garde: Modernism in Chicago, 1910–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), xxi.
2 C. J. Bulliet, “Around the Galleries: Neoterics May 15,” Chicago Daily News, May 4, 1935; Art, Antiques, and the Artists, 11.
Chapter 1
1 John Pilkington Jr., Henry Blake Fuller (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1970), 20.
2 Pilkington, Henry Blake Fuller, 21.
3 Pilkington, Henry Blake Fuller, 20–21.
4 Draft of “Henry Fuller and the North Shore” by Anna Morgan, Undated, Box 1, Folder 4, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, NL, 1.
5 Draft of “Henry Fuller and the North Shore” by Anna Morgan, Undated, Box 1, Folder 4, Henry Fuller Papers, NL, 1.
6 Jane Allen Shikoh, “The ‘Higher Life’ in the American City of the 1890’s: A Study of Its Leaders and Their Activities in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Boston, and Buffalo” (Diss., New York University, October 1972), 3–11.
7 Shikoh, “The ‘Higher Life’ in the American City of the 1890’s,” 81.
8 Shikoh, “The ‘Higher Life’ in the American City of the 1890’s,” 81.
9 Correspondence from George E. Woodbury to Henry B. Fuller, June 12, 1893, Box 6, Folder 246, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, NL.
10 Ann Massa, “Henry Blake Fuller and the Cliff Dwellers: Appropriations and Misappropriations,” Journal of American Studies 36, no. 1 (2002): 80.
11 Massa, “Henry Blake Fuller and the Cliff Dwellers,” 80.
12 Massa, “Henry Blake Fuller and the Cliff Dwellers,” 84.
13 H. J. Smith Exploring Company, “The Cliff Dwellers/The H. Jay Smith Exploring Company, World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893,” Official Catalog, Chicago Historical Society, Chicago, IL, 1.
14 H. J. Smith Exploring Company, “The Cliff Dwellers/The H. Jay Smith Exploring Company, World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893,” Official Catalog, Chicago Historical Society, Chicago, IL, 7–9.
15 H. J. Smith Exploring Company, “The Cliff Dwellers/The H. Jay Smith Exploring Company, World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893,” Official Catalog, Chicago Historical Society, Chicago, IL, 19.
16 Guy Szuberia, “Henry Blake Fuller and the ‘New Immigrant,’” American Literature 53, no. 2 (1981): 246.
17 Szuberia, “Henry Blake Fuller and the ‘New Immigrant,’” 250–252.
18 Correspondence from Hamlin Garland to Henry Blake Fuller, January 17, 1894, Box 4, Folder 133, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, NL.
19 Correspondence from Hjalmar Hjorth Boyeson to Henry Blake Fuller, March 1894, Box 3, Folder 80, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, NL.
20 See Thomas S. Engeman, “Religion and Politics the American Way: The Exemplary William Dean Howells,” Review of Politics 63, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 107–128.
21 Henry James, The Letters of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock (New York: Scribner, 1920), 233.
22 William D. Howells, “The Cliff Dwellers,” Harper’s Bazaar 26 (October 28, 1893): 883, reprinted in Henry Blake Fuller, The Cliff-Dwellers, ed. Joseph A. Dimuro (New York: Broadview, 2010), 271–273.
23 Correspondence from Hobart Chatfield-Taylor to Henry Blake Fuller, May 14, 1895, Box 41, Folder 98, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, NL.
24 Correspondence from Harriet Monroe to Henry Blake Fuller, May 10, 1895, Box 5, Folder 174, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, NL.
25 Henry Blake Fuller, “The Upward Movement in Chicago,” Atlantic 80, no. 480 (October 1897): 534–547, reprinted in Fuller, The Cliff-Dwellers, ed. Joseph A. Dimuro, 306.
26 Fuller, “The Upward Movement in Chicago,” 306.
27 Fuller, “The Upward Movement in Chicago,” 306.
28 Pilkington, Henry Blake Fuller, 114.
29 Correspondence from Henry Blake Fuller to Allen B. Pond, February 25, 1898, Box 3, Folder 47, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, NL.
30 Pilkington, Henry Blake Fuller, 114.
31 Donald L. Miller, City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 413.
32 Little Room Executive Committee Meeting Records Book, Box 2, Folder 26, Little Room Records, NL, 7.
33 Little Room Executive Committee Meeting Records Book, Box 2, Folder 26, Little Room Records, NL, 7–8.
34 Correspondence from Allen B. Pond to Little Room Membership, October 8, 1904, Box 1, Folder 1, Little Room Records, NL.
35 Correspondence from Allen B. Pond to Little Room Membership, October 9, 1905, Box 1, Folder 1, Little Room Records, NL.
36 Correspondence from W. L. H to Little Room Membership, April 10, 1905, Box 1, Folder 1, Little Room Records, NL.
37 Correspondence from Allen B. Pond to Herman DeVries, April 26, 1906, Box 2, Folder 2, Little Room Records, NL.
38 Little Room Executive Committee Meeting Records Book, Box 2, Folder 26, Little Room Records, NL, 23.
39 Little Room Executive Committee Meeting Records Book, Box 2, Folder 26, Little Room Records, NL, 29.
40 Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Culture and the City: Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago from the 1880s to 1917 (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1976), 170–171.
41 Horowitz, Culture and the City, 170.
42 Jan Stilson, Art and Beauty in the Heartland: The Story of the Eagle’s Nest Camp at Oregon, Illinois, 1898–1942 (Oregon, IL: AuthorHouse, 2006), 11.
43 Correspondence from Henry Blake Fuller to Oliver Bennett Grover, January 11, 1901, Box 3, Folder 24, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, NL.
44 Minutes of the Attic Club, July 3, 1907, Attic Club Records, NL.
45 The Attic Club Proposal, 1907, Box 1, Folder 12, Little Room Records, NL.
&nbs
p; 46 Correspondence from Hamlin Garland to Prospective Club Members, Undated, Box 1, Folder 12, Little Room Records, NL.
47 Massa, "Henry Blake Fuller and the Cliff Dwellers," 73–74.
48 Acceptance List for First Annual Club Dinner, January 17, 1908, Box 1, Folder 12, Little Room Records, NL.
49 Correspondence from Henry Blake Fuller to Allan B. Pond, June 23, 1908, Box 3, Folder 47, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, NL.
50 Correspondence from Allen B. Pond to Membership, September 19, 1910, and April 28, 1910, Box 1, Folder 3, Little Room Records, NL.
51 Correspondence from Allen B. Pond to F. H. Head, April 28, 1910, Box 1, Folder 4, Little Room Records, NL.
52 Correspondence from Henry Blake Fuller, Bertha E. Jaques, Clara Laughlin, A. B. Pond, I. K. Pond, Lorado Taft, and Nellie V. Walker to Little Roomer, October 20, 1924, Box 1, Folder 7, Little Room Records, NL.
53 Correspondence from Frederick Wookin to Nellie V. Walker, October 25, 1924, Box 1, Folder 7, Little Room Records, NL.
54 Correspondence from Clara Louise Burnham to the Executive Committee of the Little Room, October 22, 1924, Box 1, Folder 5, Little Room Records, NL. Correspondence from Arthur M. Burton to the Executive Committee of the Little Room, October 24, 1924, Box 1, Folder 5, Little Room Records, NL.
55 Record of Vote of the Executive Committee, December 12, 1913, Box 2, Folder 9, Little Room Record, NL.
56 Mary O’Connor Newell, “How Success Has Come to the Little Theater,” Chicago Record-Herald 6 (February 22, 1914): 1.
57 Harriet Monroe to Little Room Committee, October 22, 1924, Box 1, Folder 5, Little Room Records, NL.
58 Little Room Autograph Book, 1898–1931, Box 2, Folder 2, Little Room Records, NL.
Chicago and the Making of American Modernism Page 25