Travis McGee is no fan of Chicago

In John D. MacDonald's One Fearful Yellow Eye (1966), his honorable tough guy beach bum protagonist, Travis McGee, offers an opinion of Chicago, which he's visiting in order to help out an old friend. I'm going to quote at greater length than usual, because each paragraph of McGee's reflections seems worth looking at:

I went out and walked south on Michigan Avenue. In nice weekend weather it is one of the specialties of the house. Chicago is a strange one. It is not on my list of favorite places. Insofar as restaurants and lounges and hotels are concerned it is strictly hinterland, strictly hick. And as you go down the scale it becomes more shabby and shoddy than rough. I do not know why anyone should expect anything special in that line from a place where the Hefner Empire seems to represent some sort of acme of sophistication, based as it is upon fantastic centerfold mammalians for the pimpled self-lovers, upon a chain of bunny-warrens styled to make the middle-class sales manager feel like a member of an in-group, and upon a laborious philosophical discourse which runs interminably in the ad-happy magazine and in the polysyllabic style of the pseudo-educated, carrying the deathless message that it is healthy to screw and run if everybody is terribly sincere about it.

A great university they have indeed, but if you take a train there from the center of the city, you pass through whole areas of the South Side which make the worst of Harlem look like Scarsdale. It is a gigantic shameful tinderbox everybody is trying not to notice. If you are a stranger and want to leave the university area after dark, they insist on getting you a cab.

The best of Chicago, I think, must go on quite privately, and it must be very fine indeed. Private homes and private clubs, and a lot of insulation and discretion, because as I hiked along Michigan I saw and admired what I had come to see, strolling, window-shopping flocks of women of that inimitable smartness, style, loveliness, assurance, and aroma of money which will make headwaiters and captains all over the Western world leap, beaming, to unhook their velvet ropes before they even hear the name. I feel they live in Chicago in very much the same spirit the early settlers lived in the wilderness full of Indians. They keep the big gates closed. They consort with each other, and they import those specialties their rude environment cannot supply, and when they need relief from that nerve-twanging combination of unending drabness and glittering boosterism, they take their ease at the truly smart spots of the world and, when asked where they are from, tell the truth with that mocking inverted pride of the fellow pinned to the sod with a spear who said it only hurt when he laughed.

Statistically it is probably the one city in the world where the most people have been killed in arguments over professional athletes. The middle of the city, where nine bridges cross a large sewage canal called the Chicago River, is beginning to look as if Martians had designed it. For untold years the city has limped along under what might well be the most arrogant, ruthless, and total political control in the country. In a kind of constant hysterical spasm of self-distaste, the city uglifies itself further each year by chopping away more tress and paving more areas for all those thousands of drivers who seem to have learned their art at Daytona.

Some thoughts:

1 Let's just get this one right out there: Can anyone who make his home in Florida, by choice, criticize anywhere else in America? Seriously, McGee. I know you've been to New York and 'round the world, but you do live in Ft. Lauderdale. There's a reason there's a whole Twitter account dedicated to sharing bizarre stories whose headlines begin "Florida man . . . "

2 That said, the impression I have been given by long-time residents of Chicago before my time isn't all that far off from what McGee complains about. As I was watching James Caan in Thief recently, I marveled at just how old, unsophisticated, and down-at-heel the bars and restaurants and offices he visited in 1980 Chicago were. Like a lot of American cities, Chicago spruced itself up mightily in the '90s and '00s. Also like a lot of those cities, we're really only now beginning to come to terms with the fact that a lot of that sprucing up was at the expense of neighborhoods, schools, and working people, but there's no question that along the Michigan Avenue and lounge-club-restaurant axes, we've moved beyond McGee's complaint.

3 It's no real surprise to see McGee (and, implied throughout, McDonald) take a swipe at Hugh Hefner. Whereas Playboy stood for free love, McGee always stood for love freely given, but carefully chosen, and backed up by emotions.

That said, McGee's attitude toward and relationships with women, all these decades later, seem tired and dated in a not-dissimilar way to Hefner's. McGee's approach to women is, I think, deliberately intended by MacDonald to be essentially feminist--much like, in a different way, a strain of feminism has always run through Playboy (which a book I handled publicity for a few years back, Carrie Pitzulo's Bachelors and Bunnies, does a great job of explaining). But both are tripped up by their emphasis on the relationship with men, and on the liberating potential of sex; the result, if (and I mean this seriously) well-intentioned, ends up emphasizing differences between the sexes even as it proclaims some essential sense of equality. It's hard, reading about McGee healing yet another damaged woman through a month of gentle, caring sex as they sail through the Keys, to imagine that attitude leading to a place where women are assumed to have all options equally open, all choices fully available to them. It's not wholly fair to condemn McGee (and MacDonald), for it was a different time, and I do think he was trying. But with the perspective of nearly a half century, his jab at Hefner seems like it's traveling across a much narrower divide than he thinks.

4 We still have the great university, my employer, and the South Side, though in much better shape than he's depicting, is still rough. What's interesting (and depressing) to think about is that he was writing before the destruction of the West Side, before the full effects of white flight, redlining, and the 1968 riots. Chicago's damaged and forsaken places were about to get worse, and we're still failing to acknowledge it or deal well with the consequences.

5 The line about the interior life of Chicago being the real life is I think substantially true today, if I may deliberately misinterpret it a bit. McGee is talking about the sophisticated and emotionally mature hiding out from the savages, whereas what I see speaks more to Chicago's greatest little-known virtue: you can actually live here. Jobs, and pay scales, that would in New York or San Francisco or London leave you living on the outskirts and scrambling, roommated and credit-carded, here can enable you to create a stable upper middle class life. You can have a nice apartment near good transit and a park, and you can have a kitchen, and maybe even a dining room--so, unlike those cities, you can have a social life that revolves around the home, yours and those of friends, with dinners and drinks and porch parties. It is a city that enables the domestic, and in that way McGee is right: who cares what's going on with the crowds in Grant Park so long as I have a shaker, gin, ice, and a couple of friends who can swing by on their bicycles?

6 The boosterism . . . even then that was coming up. The fact that he's right--Chicago boosterism gets really old really fast--doesn't, however, mean that Rachel Shteir's much-discussed New York Times slam of Chicago wasn't just as poorly argued and devoid of critical insight as its sharper critics said. Just as there have, it seems, always been the boosters, there have, presumably, also always been those who prefer reality.

7 As for the Chicago River: it's getting better. Still noxious, but nothing like the Gowanus Canal, say, and (in part under EPA orders) getting better. Well worth a kayak trip, if you've not tried it--just don't drink from it, for god's sake. And while the younger Daley's reign may have nearly matched his father's in all the charges McGee levels against it, the one thing you can say for Richard M. is that he loved trees. Not only did he stop chopping them down, he started planting them everywhere. He left us many legacies, most of them ticking or toxic, but the green I see all around me every day, whether the young trees starting to shade the lakefront path or the forest that is the view out into the neighborhoods from my seats at Wrigley Field, is one thing I'll always be grateful to him for.

Come back in winter, McGee. Then you'll really have something to complain about.

Partying in midcentury Chicago

{Photos by rocketlass.}

In my day job, one of the books I've been handling publicity for is Bachelors and Bunnies, a new book by Carrie Pitzulo that argues that Playboy magazine and the Playboy corporation have had a significantly more pro-feminist history and outlook throughout their history than their reputation would suggest.

So it's probably not surprising that, when the protagonist of Frederick Exley's unclassifiable masterpiece A Fan's Notes described his years living in Chicago in the mid-1950s, I found myself seeing my city as the swinging, no-hang-ups party town long ago portrayed by Hef:

There I lived in that section called the Near North Side, a paradise for the young men and women--airline hostesses with airline hostesses, rising executives with rising executives, Junior Leaguers with Junior Leaguers, voyeurs with voyeurs--who overflowed its modern town houses and converted Victorian mansions, men and women who reigned, or were, in youth's obliviousness, sure they reigned supreme there. The section had an absurd though touching notion of itself as the Greenwich Village of the Plains; but the young men I knew there seemed blatantly and refreshingly unburdened with things of the mind, and the fine, corn-bred, yellow-haired girls as succulently wholesome as cream of chicken soup.

It's far from my vision of paradise; my Chicago is much more homebound and quiet, my circle of friends almost lacking rising executives (let alone airline hostesses). But Exley does manage to imbue the Chicago of that era--not yet surpassed in size by Los Angeles, or in cool by San Francisco; still to face the slog of the '70s and the super-slick spruce-up of Daley's '90s; before Rush Street became the Viagra Triangle--with some of the hedonistic magic that was Hef's stock in trade:

If the section was not the Village, it was precisely named: the Near North Side was near to everything. In the morning we descended into the subways and were in a matter of minutes conveyed to the Loop where, after cursorily putting in our days at the altar of commerce, we fled back to Babylon. The bars--The Singapore, Larry's Lounge, Mister Kelley's, Gus' Pub--along Rush Street (Chicago's "White Way") were within five minutes' walking distance from anywhere in the area; in those saloons those genial young men, corn-bred girls, and I nightly got quite happily, quite absurdly, drunk. In the summer we sat around gallon thermoses of vodka and tonic, as tribesmen around the beneficent fire, taking the sun on the most exhilarating city lake front in the world. (I have never sen any other, so I suffer from no competing claims). Behind us rose the dizzying turrets of Chicago's skyline, pale and iridescent facades rising into the azure heavens, buildings all constructed, it seemed, for nothing save the pleasure of our eyes. At evening we wandered from one apartment to another, as from one room in a house to another, as if the entire Near North Side were but a single mansion to which we had a standing invitation.

Now, I realize that it's but a small step from those standing, drunken invitations to the alcoholic wrecks and disintegrations portrayed by, say, the Johns O'Hara and Cheever--and that's even before we say anything about the troubles of gender inequity in the perpetual party Exley portrays--but even so, those glimmers of a lost era are seductive, like the spinning of the Capitol dome as you lay the needle on a new Sinatra record. Pick up your martinis, folks, and let's start dancing.

Is there no joy in Joyland?

{Photo by rocketlass.}

I recently mentioned that I'd taken on the job of Chicago editor for Joyland, a hub for short fiction. As such, I'm responsible for publishing one or two stories each month from writers who live in or have lived in Chicago.

The first story under my editorship went up last night: "Insult," by Joseph Clayton Mills. Hope you enjoy it.

I'm still taking submissions; if you meet the criterion and have a good story, drop me a line at the e-mail address in my Blogger profile. I got a great batch of stories after my initial notice, some of which I'm sure will turn up at Joyland in the coming months, but I'm always ready to look at more.

As for the headline of this post: all but two of the stories I received after my initial call for submissions involved a suicide. Of the remaining two, one made up for that deficiency with a murder. Is this indicative of a prevailing Windy City gloom? Should I worry? Could it be possible that even Mayor Daley suffers dark nights of the soul?

Opening the Box

{Photo by rocketlass of a box by rocketlass.}

A couple of years after first my first, admittedly desultory attempt to read Harry Stephen Keeler, I've dived right into one of his biggest and strangest books, The Box from Japan (1932), a volume that even committed Keelerite Ed Park describes as "WEIRD." He's right, but through at least the first fifty pages, The Box from Japan's weirdness is charming, consisting mostly of exuberance, exclamation points, and unusual descriptions that resemble nothing so much as particularly enthusiastic advertising copy.

Like many (or all?) of Keeler's novels, The Box from Japan is set in his native Chicago, "that London of the West"--though in 1942, an eventful ten years into the future. The most striking thing so far about Keeler's past-future Chicago is not its robotic policemen or skyscraper landing strips for airplanes . . . no, sadly, it's this:

His little two-block jump, it is true, cost him a red 25-cent coupon out of his perforated book of taxi-meter "pay" tickets, but saved him perhaps some ten minutes of elbowing his way along a thoroughfare which now, in Chicago, connecting as it did the busiest stations of the venerable old State Street subway and the new Clark Street subway, was hopelessly crowded at this hour of the morning.

Oh, if only Chicago really had a Clark Street subway--hell, if only we had any serious expansion of the coverage of our subway system, or if only we weren't relying on technology nearly as old as Keeler's book. Our terrible transit system is not helping kill my current crush on New York.

But it seems wrong to leave you with a lament. Instead, I'll share the most striking non-Chicago-related line in the first fifty pages of The Box from Japan. To set it up I have to transcribe a description that precedes it. The scene is the office of the American Projectiscope Company, Inc.:

Near the door, however--and Carr Halsey smiled in spite of himself--was a movable polished wooden railing as venerable as those others like it which adorned all offices when he had been but small boy, and he knew at least that he was in the right place, for this was but one of the many relics which his uncle lovingly transported from office to office as the American Projectiscope Company every few years changed its quarters.

Keeler then describes the sentry of the inner office door:

And guarding the one opening in the antique wooden railing, moreover, sat Babson, more venerable appendage of the American Projectiscope Company than any single piece of office furniture it might own! Elderly, with rapidly thinning gray hair, he was, beyond all doubt, even more like that wooden railing than the railing itself!

"Even more like that wooden railing than the railing itself"? I know what Keeler means, but what he's actually written makes no sense! And is impossible to forget once you've read it!

I think I'm going to start using that method of comparison in my daily life. For example: in his use of exclamation points, Ed Park frequently is even more like Harry Stephen Keeler than Harry Stephen Keeler himself!

The Fabulous Clipjoint

{Photo by Gareth Kay. Used under a Creative Commons License.}

From Fredric Brown's The Fabulous Clipjoint (1947)

We walked north two blocks on the east side of Michigan Boulevard to the Allerton Hotel. We went in, and there was a special elevator. We rode up a long time, I don't know how many floors, but the Allerton is a tall building.

The top floor was a very swanky cocktail bar. The windows were open and it was cool there. Up as high as that , the breeze was a cool breeze and not something out of a blast furnace.

We took a table by a window on the south side, looking out toward the Loop. It was beautiful in the bright sunshine. The tall, narrow buildings were like fingers reaching toward the sky. It was like something out of a science-fiction story. You couldn't quite believe it, even looking at it.

"Ain't it something, kid?"

"Beautiful as hell," I said. "But it's a clipjoint."

He grinned. The little laughing wrinkles were back in the corners of his eyes.

He said, "It's fabulous clipjoint, kid. The craziest things can happen in it, and not all of them are bad."

Though the Allerton Hotel is still here and in operation, the Tip-Top-Tap is long gone, all that's left of it the false promise of the beckoning sign. It seems cruel for our skyline to offer the warm glow of that sign, a will-o-the-wisp that disappears when you enter the elevator, find no button for the Tap, and realize that the swank luxury you'd imagined is but a chimera.

Which gives me an idea: maybe the Sun-Times, in an act of manifold civic duty, should buy and refit the Tip-Top-Tap, send out free drink coupons to all manner of elected officials, and resurrect the glory days of the Mirage? For after all, the one thing we can be sure of is that our fair city remains but a fabulous clipjoint.

My kind of town . . . for murder!

From The Fabulous Clipjoint (1947), by Fredric Brown

Things like that must happen a dozen times a day in Chicago, I thought. They don't rate ink unless it's a big-shot gangster or somebody important. A drunk rolled in an alley, and the guy who slugged him was muggled up and hit too hard or didn't care how hard the hit.

It didn't rate ink. No gang angle. No love nest.

The morgue gets them by the hundred. Not all murders, of course. Bums who go to sleep on a bench in Bughouse Square and don't wake up. Guys who take ten-cent beds or two-bit partitioned rooms in flophouses and in the morning somebody shakes them to wake them up, and the guy's stiff, and the clerk quickly goes through his pockets to see if he's got two bits or four bits or a dollar left, and then he phones for the city to come and get him out. That's Chicago.

And there's the jig found carved with a shiv in an areaway on South Halsted Street and the girl who took laudanum in a cheap hotel room. And the printer who had too much to drink and had probably been followed out of the tavern because there'd been green in his wallet and yesterday was payday.

If they put things like that in the paper, people would get a bad impression of Chicago, but that wasn't the reason they didn't put them in. They left them out because there were too many of them.

It's a good thing I have to no time this weekend to do anything but stay inside and proofread! (Aside, that is, from a quick break tomorrow morning to visit the lakefront--on which trip, however, I'll be running, and therefore safe from the Criminal Element, most of whom, surveys reveal, are smokers, and thus unable to catch the fleet of foot.)

"She paints the man who gave her his all as the devil incarnate."

{The Rainbo Gardens Auditorium, Chicago, February 1925.}

The prosecutor sounded resigned:

"You can't convict a woman--a good-looking woman--of killing a man." . . . He spoke, thoughtfully:

"The promiscuous killing of men by women should be stopped--but it can't be done without the assistance of juries."

That's Cook County prosecutor Lloyd Heth speaking in the late summer of 1921 about Mrs. Cora Isabelle Orthwein, whom he'd just failed to convict of murdering her brutal drunk of a lover, Goodyear exec Herbert Ziegler. The sordid story is just one of many in Michael Lesy's Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the 1920s (2007), which I've been slowly making my way through since it was published a year ago.

Despite my enjoyment and appreciation of his work, Lesy's not a writer I can read at length: when I read more than a chapter or two at a time, his highly affected, choppy, hardboiled deadpan can begin to wear, making me less tolerant of the occasional passage where it doesn't quite work:

Sackcloth and ashes might have been a useful costume for Cora to have worn when she appeared, under guard, at Coroner Hoffman's inquest. The pleasure produced by the misfortunes of privileged people--who turn out to be as foolish, helpless, and sad as everyone else--guaranteed that whatever Cora did and didn't do, said and didn't say at the inquest would be closely watched.

But consumed in the proper dosages, Lesy's accounts of the seedy nexus of casual violence, newspaper sensationalism, and the ravages of love and liquor in a gangsters' paradise can rise above their inherent voyeurism and take on the force of tragedy. His tales are at their best when they draw most heavily on firsthand testimony; hearing the story in the voices of the time renders it both more strange and more intimate.


{The Green Mill Gardens, Chicago, 1915.}

The story of Mr. Ziegler and Mrs. Orthwein alone offers plenty of examples. The doomed philanderer, who spent the first half of the last night of his life pickling himself at the Rainbo Gardens, was said by a waiter at the nearby Green Mill to be full of extravagant nervous energy when he arrived there later, so wild that he danced without a partner:

Mr. Ziegler danced alone near his table; he danced the shimmy alone.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Orthweig was doing some drinking of her own, after fleeing Ziegler for her apartment:

I drank gin 'til I could drink no more. It fired me, inflamed me, made me crazy. I didn't know what I was doing.

And from the police report, Lesy plucks Mrs. Orthwein's first statement on being discovered near the body:

Police found Cora, sitting on the bench of her baby grand piano, eyes closed, swaying from side to side. "I shot him," she said. Her clothes were bloody. "I loved him and I killed him. It was all I could do."

Even the words of the press can be similarly evocative, as in this summation from one of the Tribune's stories:

Booze and a woman's kisses, the swift nightlife of old, persisted-in despite the law's edicts, open brawling, gin rickeys splashed in the faces of angry quarrelers . . . .

Though Lesy eschews the more clinical approach taken by William Roughead in his classic accounts of sensational Scottish murders, the effect is not dissimilar: to bring these acts of violence close to us and remind us that, regardless of how passing strange these people may still seem, ultimately the distance between their fates and ours can be as narrow as a knife blade--and that what we on a good day ascribe to personal strength and innate rectitude can sometimes, at the end of a long, lonely winter's night, feel a lot more like the sheer luck of the draw.

The Death of the Detective

On the recommendation of my former coworker, Jim, I picked up the Northwestern University Press reissue of Mark Smith's The Death of the Detective (1974) expecting a dark noir tale. And that's what I got . . . for a while.

The Death of the Detective is set in Chicago at some vague point between the late fifties and the closing of the Riverview amusement park in 1967. The postwar boom has faded and is beginning to be replaced by urban decay, white flight, racial and ethnic strife, and a creeping sense that the city is beginning an irreversible decline. It opens with a madman intent on murdering a dying Lake Forest millionaire, and we quickly meet the detective who will oppose him, Arnold Magnuson. In his fifties and essentially retired, Magnuson is famous for the detective agency he founded, which now makes most of its money supplying the ubiquitous Magnuson Men, a sort of combination of Andy Frain ushers and the Pinkertons. Called in by the millionaire, who anticipates the murderer's arrival, Magnuson finds himself deeply enmeshed in what quickly becomes a confusing web of murder and deception.

But that's just the basic plot that gets the book moving; after a while, it becomes clear that the plot is the least important part of The Death of the Detective. To have a sense of the thick, textured concoction this novel really is, you need to blend that story with Carl Sandburg's hog butcher, steep the result for a few decades in a broth of Dickens, Kafka, and Melville, and then salt it with a bit of the prose styles of James Jones, Nelson Algren, and W. M. Spackman. From Dickens, Smith takes a love of the grotesque and a fascination with the patterns of urban life: the unpenetrated neighborhoods rife with secrets, the endless hiding places to be found there, the unexpected and unsettling meetings with people one has known in other contexts. Kafka supplies the gaping horror at the fact that we can never quite do what we mean to do, perpetually distracted trying to catch up to what we should have done already--overlaid with the gnawing fear that there is no hope for any true justice because guilt is showered liberally on us all. Melville, meanwhile, provides the unstinted ambition and raging, unbridled prose: the full, complete story of every part of this brawling city can be told, and Smith is determined to make the attempt.

So he puts us perpetually, restlessly, in motion. We travel to the 31st Street Beach, a meat-packing plant, the Gold Coast, a West Loop Skid Row, Evanston, Edgebrook, Uptown, Bughouse Square, a topless bar in unincorporated Niles, Rogers Park, Bronzeville, the West Side, North Avenue Beach--the list goes on, covering every conceivable Chicagoland location. Yet somehow Smith never gives the sense that he's checking items off a list; rather, the wanderings of his characters seem to make a crazed sort of sense, like they, too, need to see the city as a whole in order to begin to understand how its corruption, decay, and sickness have damaged them--and yet how its underlying vitality has enabled them to keep up the fight.

Throughout, the characters see Chicago in its past and present incarnations simultaneously, casting dark shadows on its uncertain future:

What a change from the old days when ironmongers and rag-pickers would cruise up and down the alleys in horse and wagons or those high ancient trucks like ornate indestructible stagecoaches, each man with his own unique, recognizable, unintelligible cry; as would the trucks and wagons delivering coal and hawking whatever fruits and vegetables were in season, produce from the truck farms just to the north and west of the city and no that far from the neighborhood. And the residents themselves, man, woman, and child, would walk the alleys, preferring them to the sidewalks or the streets, using them like a secret network of footpaths and short cuts that traversed the neighborhood.

Throughout, there is a sense that the city may have in the past made sense, with everyone and everything in its place--but the future is uncertain, its categories shifting in unexpected ways. Smith spends a lot of time exploring the city's simmering racial and ethnic divisions, and his characters find themselves frequently confused both about their own identities and where those identities, if it's possible to stabilize them at all, could fit in the ever-shifting mosaic of the city. Large-scale change is on the way, and even the vague intimations of it the characters feel are unmooring them. At times, it seems all of Chicago is slowly going mad.

Smith crams the book's 600 oversized pages with description and digression, and he drags dozens of characters through multiple overlapping plots. I can't deny that The Death of the Detective could have used some editing: some portions drag, some characters never amount to much, and some scenes are repetitive. But Smith's ambition is so vast, and the tapestry he weaves so detailed and compelling, that I'm willing to forgive him the occasional lapse. I imagine that the book's length is one of the reasons it stayed out of print for so long--upon its release in 1974 it was a best seller and a National Book Award finalist, but it spent more than twenty-five years out of print. It's tough to print such a big book economically, and it can be similarly tough to convince readers to pick up such a huge book by a little-known author.

I think that neglect is also a reflection of Chicago's second-city status: had this book been set in New York, I have no doubt that it would have remained in print and would be regarded as a true American classic. But that's fine by me. Everyone knows New York's glories; us Chicagoans get to keep many of our city's treasures to ourselves, secret recompenses for living through February and August. The Death of the Detective definitely belongs on that list, Chicagoans.

[I see the writer of Neglected Books agrees with me; you can find some more information there about the book's critical reception.]