{"id":17123,"date":"2017-11-22T10:00:30","date_gmt":"2017-11-22T16:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/?p=17123"},"modified":"2026-01-16T20:19:22","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T02:19:22","slug":"say-chi-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/say-chi-city\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cSay Chi City\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you want to fall wrackingly, despairingly in love with a place, here\u2019s what you do: leave it. When I was young and wintering out my graduate years, marooned in the penitential bleakness of upstate New York, I grew fond of declaring that, once I turned 30, I was going to go ahead and start lying<\/em> whenever someone asked where I was from. \u201cI\u2019m just gonna be like, fuck it,\u201d I\u2019d insist, typically under bar light diffuse or glaring. \u201cMe? I\u2019m from Chicago.\u201d<\/p>\n

You will perhaps harbor similarly counterfactual allegiances, wherein the dull facts of biography come unstuck for the more salient truths of your heart.<\/p>\n

Chicago has been my heart\u2019s home since I was old enough to want any such thing. I arrived in 1989, left four years later, pined for it over nearly a decade of insufficiently lengthy visits: for its density and its neighborhoodiness, its unhealed fractures and its fugitive moments of precarious repair, for its cheapness, its flatness, its day games and industrial canals, its colliding southernness and midwesternity, its lakeside vistas, hot dog stands, pierogis, taproom voices\u2014its bars<\/em>, sweet Jesus, its bars!\u2014the people I loved, the people I almost loved, as the song goes. I spent the next 10 years punctuating my life with micro-moves to Chicago (a summer here, a semester there) until, at last, by the grace of some propitiated lakefront god, I got a gig there and returned, for real, for good, in 2014.<\/p>\n

But nothing is simple. And so it has been my pleasure, in these last weeks, to read and savor and dwell inside Liesl Olson\u2019s greatly rewarding Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis<\/em>. I have done so from the midst of a fellowship year here in the woods of central New Jersey, in yearning exile once again.<\/p>\n

Olson\u2019s thesis is, like the city itself, multifaceted and straightforward. It is that Chicago has a central, underappreciated place in the high canon of Anglo-American modernism, which is legible in everything from Pound\u2019s imagism and Stein\u2019s famously elliptical prose to the fictions of Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway, the new-fashioned realism of Richard Wright, the post-Sandburgian verse of Gwendolyn Brooks. Around all of these major figures and several of their major works, Olson builds a series of case studies, in each of which she traces out the impress made by Chicago, its industries, its institutions, and the persons living and working in them.
\n<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Olson\u2019s local, especially fine-grained sort of literary historicism affords her a strong purchase on her objects.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n


\nSo we are reminded that Pound\u2019s indelible \u201cIn a Station of the Metro\u201d appeared in Poetry<\/em> magazine (\u201cthe most important \u2018little magazine\u2019 of literary modernism\u201d), launched and nurtured by Chicagoan Harriet Monroe, who corresponded and wrangled and fought with Pound over many years (and who, like him, partook in what Olson calls a \u201csurge of orientalism in Chicago,\u201d in particular a fascination with Chinese aesthetic forms, if not local Chinese labor). We come to be reacquainted, too, with the story of Gertrude Stein\u2019s early 1930s visits to Chicago, where she was both celebrated by the internationally minded Arts Club and quizzed, down on the South Side, by Mortimer Adler, the professor who would establish at the University of Chicago the now-famous \u201cGreat Books\u201d curriculum. Alongside these Steinian details, we learn, too, that none other than Richard Wright would in the following decade declare himself to have been \u201cpowerfully influenced\u201d (in Olson\u2019s words) by Stein\u2019s experimentation. (\u201cAll of my life I had been only half hearing,\u201d Wright proclaimed in a 1945 review, \u201cbut Miss Stein\u2019s struggling words made the speech of the people around me vivid.\u201d) In each and all cases, and with a persuasive agility and uninsisting deftness of touch, Olson vivifies the many presences\u2014patrons, editors, visitors, authors, as well as venues, places, entire demimondes\u2014that speak through the artifacts of Chicago modernism.<\/p>\n

That Chicago became a fomenting element in modernism, that the Great Migration and the Chicago Black Renaissance were crucial to that fomentation, and that its major texts give rich testament to the intricacy and multiplicity and genuine cultural vibrancy of even this heartland city, located so far from New York and Paris: these are some of the many facets of Olson\u2019s thesis.<\/p>\n

But the truth is you don\u2019t come to Chicago Renaissance<\/em> for the thesis as much as for the rendering, in exploratory and roving and aptly selected detail, of the history of Chicago arts across a remarkable slice of time: this is the period of its astonishing transformation, when a largish windswept American prairie town metamorphosed, with a shocking rapidity, into a global metropolis and, for some, \u201cthe exemplary modern metropolis.\u201d (\u201cBetween 1870 and 1900,\u201d Olson reminds us, \u201cChicago\u2019s population quintupled from about 300,000 to more than 1.5 million.\u201d) That<\/em> story is what Olson is after here, and it is a story she tells with verve and fluency and a historian\u2019s archival acuity.<\/p>\n\n

\n\n
Related readings<\/div>\n\n
\n\n
\n
\n \"\"<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n\n
\n Reviews<\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n Chicago Law<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n \"Anna <\/a>\n \n Anna Kornbluh <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n

What thus holds the book together, carrying us between passages of close reading, are a series of meticulous cultural micro-histories: accounts of self-created venues for aesthetic dispute and disquisition, like the Dill Pickle Club, the Arts Club, the George Cleveland Hall Branch library at 48th Street, the Radical Bookstore; of especially pivotal parties and dinners (such as the one in Hyde Park on November 27, 1934, that found Stein and Adler falling into vehement disagreement); of transatlantic trips (because this is a book about modernism, people are forever<\/em> meeting up with one another in Paris) and generative meetings and oblique but consequential connections. Olson gives us, in all, a generous portrait of a world of interlinked scenes<\/em>, and this local, especially fine-grained sort of literary historicism affords her a strong purchase on her objects, and on the subject of modernism more generally.<\/p>\n

Olson\u2019s approach pays out in a range of ways. We learn a good deal, for instance, about what we might call the imperial-nostalgic brand of racism that runs like a live current through the heart of these largely monied, variegatedly bohemian scenes, visible as much in the Orientalism of Poetry<\/em> and the fixation on \u201cvanishing\u201d Native cultures among the \u201cCliff Dwellers Club\u201d as in Stein\u2019s primitivist fantasias of white renewal via black vitality in a text like \u201cMelanctha.\u201d1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Most crucially\u2014and for this reader, most compellingly\u2014Olson shows too that these scenes were made by, and sustained through, nothing so much as the labor of women. We do well, Olson argues,<\/p>\n

to recognize the people who built the cultural infrastructure for modernism in Chicago. This was a particular kind of labor, mostly unpaid, and largely underacknowledged. Much of it was done by women. They ran bookstores, organized galleries, launched periodicals, and hosted salons. These are people who saw possibility in Chicago and knew how to build an audience for modernism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And so we learn the story of the hugely influential Harriet Monroe, of Poetry<\/em> fame; of Rue Carpenter and Alice Roullier, two of the \u201cseveral women\u201d at the center of the Arts Club and \u201cresponsible for the club\u2019s vision and its remarkable success\u201d; of Fanny Butcher, the journalist and critic and former bookstore owner, a woman \u201cat once both Victorian and modern,\u201d whose arguments about audience and literary aesthetics so prickled Ernest Hemingway; and of Era Bell Thompson, author of the \u201crevelatory\u201d autobiography American Daughter <\/em>and editor at Ebony<\/em> for over 40 years.<\/p>\n

Olson\u2019s book restores these women, and their immense labors of imagination, to the center of the story of modernism in Chicago, and what emerges is a kind of composite portrait of aesthetic achievement, wherein Chicago modernism, whatever the series of names we associate with it (still mostly male, still mostly white), appears as a complexly collective<\/em> endeavor. For Olson, this is how we can best retell the story of the cultural life of a windblown middle-American city in its growth into an artistic center and global hub.<\/p>\n

This is a fine and winning sort of story of Chicago, one long in the unearthing\u2014it is a blessing to have the stories of Monroe and Butcher and Thompson and their allies so vividly told to us\u2014and ought to be received as such. But I wish to conclude by remarking that there\u2019s another story in Olson\u2019s chronicle as well, winding through the interstices of its generous and multiplicitous narrative. That story is a good deal more cautionary.
\n<\/p>\n

\n
\n

The monied patronage that helped to birth Chicago modernism is inescapably interwoven with the very forces that have done so much to hollow out the city today.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n


\nAs Olson figures it, Chicago modernism is an intensely coterie-ish sort of affair, and virtually all the members of that coterie come from, or are soon intimately linked up with, money. It is in this sense a story of the bracing work, aesthetic and civic both, done by the blessed of capital, an oligarchy of lawyers and industrialists and real estate barons and their circles, dented perhaps but not doomed by the Depression, and enjoying the comforts proper to the classes gifted with the plenty of expropriated labor.<\/p>\n

None of this is lost on Olson. \u201cIf the Armory Show tested the Art Institute\u2019s principles of democracy,\u201d she writes of the scandalous exhibition of Duchamps and C\u00e9zannes and Gaugins and van Goghs in 1913, \u201cit did so only through the most powerful men in Chicago.\u201d She registers acutely the high gentility of so many of her subjects, while keeping an eye as well on what they helped produce. \u201cCultural uplift has its good,\u201d Olson notes, and more than makes that case.<\/p>\n

But to any Chicagoan living under the Reign of Rahm, all this has an unhappy familiarity. Mayor Emanuel, former ballet dancer that he is, after all loves <\/em>the arts, and loves burnishing the golden gleam of the city\u2019s many famed cultural institutions. He also loves cops, as well as privatization, school closures in nonwhite districts, and sweetheart land deals for billionaires. He is an especially vivid version of the liberalish ethos that celebrates diversity while sanctioning the state murder of black people, champions the arts while erecting an unrivaled regime of securitization, and sings the high virtues of culture such as they are available to the smaller and smaller cadres of the \u00fcber-wealthy able actually to live<\/em> in Chicago, and so take part in its many edifications. The monied patronage that helped to birth Chicago modernism is, in its current iterations, inescapably interwoven with the very forces that have done so much to hollow out what for many of us were the greatest, most cherishable things about the city. About those \u201cforces\u201d: ride the Red Line up from Englewood and through the Disneyfied grown-up frat party that is Wrigleyville, and the idea of neoliberalism<\/em> will become for you, I promise, something other than abstract.<\/p>\n\n

\n\n
Related readings<\/div>\n\n
\n\n
\n
\n \"\"<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n\n
\n Reviews<\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n Visible Cities<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n \"\" <\/a>\n \n Laura Yoder <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n

Not that I would wish you to believe Chicago has ceased to be Chicago. If you care to bask in the afterlives of the aesthetic achievements Olson details so capably, just go read Stuart Dybek. Or watch Go Fish<\/em> again, perhaps while scrolling idly through images<\/a> of students at the University of Illinois at Chicago shutting down a Trump rally in 2016. Or listen to Kanye West\u2019s \u201cDrive Slow,\u201d or to Noname, or to Saba, or for that matter just gaze wonderstruck\u2014with the rest of the world\u2014at the righteous joyousness of Chance the Rapper, White Sox fan, child of Chatham, Chicago ambassador extraordinaire. Or maybe just go to 31st Street Beach on a warm summer Sunday. All of it will convince you of the ongoing vitality of this, our \u201cbeautiful, fucked up, unruined city,\u201d as I recently had occasion<\/a> to call it.<\/p>\n

And then, when you hear some execrable politician rolling the word Chicago<\/em> on his forked tongue, and making it a byword among racist concern trolls, I hope you will think instead\u2014as I have found myself thinking, in this un-urban New Jersey fall, quite often\u2014of a beautiful poem by Anthony Walton. It is called, simply, \u201cGwendolyn Brooks,\u201d and I think Olson would concur that we can do worse than to give it, and them, the last word:<\/p>\n

Sometimes I see in my mind\u2019s eye a four- or five-
\nyear-old boy, coatless and wandering
\na windblown and vacant lot or street in Chicago
\non the windblown South Side. He disappears
\nbut stays with me, staring and pronouncing
\nme guilty of an indifference more callous
\nthan neglect, condescension as self-pity.<\/p>\n

Then I see him again, at ten or fifteen, on the corner,
\nsay, 47th and Martin Luther King, or in a group
\nof men surrounding a burning barrel off Lawndale,
\neverything surrounding vacant or for sale.
\nSometimes I trace him on the train to Joliet
\nor Menard, such towns quickly becoming native
\nground to these boys who seem to be nobody\u2019s
\nsons, these boys who are so hard to love, so hard
\nto see, except as case studies.<\/p>\n

Poverty, pain, shame, one and a half million
\ndreams deemed fit only for the most internal
\nof exiles. That four-year-old wandering
\nthe wind tunnels of Robert Taylor, of Cabrini
\nGreen, wind chill of an as yet unplumbed degree\u2014
\na young boy she did not have to know to love.2<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

  1. Stein\u2019s story greatly moved Richard Wright, who would go on, as Olson details, to offer her prescient counsel on the matter of black speech and \u201cjive\u201d: \u201cJive is a way of talking invented in the main by urban Negroes who see to have nothing much else to do but play with words \u2026 Jive now can be heard on the lips of white boys at Yale and Harvard.\u201d \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  2. \u201cGwendolyn Brooks\u201d first appeared in the New Yorker<\/em>, December 18, 2000. \u21a9<\/a><\/li><\/ol><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    If you want to fall wrackingly, despairingly in love with a place, here\u2019s what you do: leave it. 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