No, I wasn’t devoid of sentiments, but the sentiments were sober. But why did Paris affect me so deeply? Why did this imperial, ceremonious, ornamental mass of structures weaken my American refusal to be impressed, my Jewish skepticism and reticence; why was I such a sucker for its tones of gray, the patchy bark of its sycamores, and its bitter-medicine river under the ancient bridges? The place was, naturally, indifferent to me, a peculiar alien from Chicago. Why did it take hold of my emotions?
For the soul of a civilized, or even partly civilized, man, Paris was one of the permanent settings, a theater, if you like, where the greatest problems of existence might be represented. What future, if any, was there for this theater? It could not tell you what to represent. Could anyone in the twentieth century make use of these unusual opportunities? Americans of my generation crossed the Atlantic to size up the challenge, to look upon this human, warm, noble, beautiful, and also proud, morbid, cynical, and treacherous setting.
Paris inspires young Americans with no such longings and challenges now. The present generation of students, if it reads Diderot, Stendhal, Balzac, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Proust, does not bring to its reading the desires born of a conviction that American life impulses are thin. We do not look beyond America. It absorbs us completely. No one is stirred to the bowels by Europe of the ancient parapets. A huge force has lost its power over the imagination. This force began to weaken in the fifties, and by the sixties it was entirely gone.
Young M.B.A.’s, management school graduates, gene-splicers, and computerists, their careers well started, will fly to Paris with their wives to shop on the rue de Rivoli and dine at the Tour d’Argent. Not greatly different are the behavioral scientists and members of the learned professions who are well satisfied with what they learned of the Old World while they were getting their B.A.’s. A bit of Marx, of Freud, of Max Weber, an incorrect recollection of André Gide and his gratuitous act, and they had had as much of Europe as any educated American needed.
And I suppose that we can do without the drama of Old Europe. Europeans themselves, in considerable numbers, got tired of it some decades ago and turned from art to politics or abstract intellectual games. Foreigners no longer came to Paris to enrich their humanity with modern forms of the marvelous. There was nothing marvelous about the Marxism of Sartre and his followers. Postwar French philosophy, adapted from the German, was less than enchanting. Paris, which had been a center, still looked like a center and could not bring itself to concede that it was a center no longer. Stubborn de Gaulle, assisted by Malraux, issued his fiats to a world that badly wanted to agree with him, but when the old man died there was nothing left—nothing but old monuments, old graces. Marxism, Eurocommunism, Existentialism, Structuralism, Deconstructionism, could not restore the potency of French civilization. Sorry about that. A great change, a great loss of ground. The Giacomettis and the Stravinskys, the Brancusis, no longer come. No international art center draws the young to Paris. Arriving instead are terrorists. For them French revolutionary traditions degenerated into confused leftism, and a government that courts the third world made Paris a first-class place to plant bombs and to hold press conferences.
The world’s disorders are bound to leave their mark on Paris. Cynosures bruise easily. And why has Paris for centuries now attracted so much notice? Quite simply, because it is the heavenly city of secularists. “Wie Gott in Frankreich” was the expression used by the Jews of Eastern Europe to describe perfect happiness. I puzzled over this simile for many years, and I think I can interpret it now. God would be perfectly happy in France because he would not be troubled by prayers, observances, blessings, and demands for the interpretation of difficult dietary questions. Surrounded by unbelievers, He, too, could relax toward evening, just as thousands of Parisians do at their favorite cafés. There are few things more pleasant, more civilized, than a tranquil terrasse at dusk.
Chicago: The City That was, the City that Is
(1983)
Life, October 1983.
To be concise about Chicago is harder than you might think. The city stands for something in American life, but what that something is has never been altogether clear. Not everybody likes the place. A Chicagoan since 1924, I have come to understand that you have to develop a taste for it, and you can’t do that without living here for decades. Even after decades you can’t easily formulate the reasons for your attachment, because the city is always transforming itself, and the scale of the transformations is tremendous.
Chicago builds itself up, knocks itself down again, scrapes away the rubble, and starts over. European cities destroyed in war were painstakingly restored. Chicago does not restore; it makes something wildly different. To count on stability here is madness. A Parisian can always see the Paris that was, as it has been for centuries. A Venetian, as long as Venice is not swallowed up in mud, has before him the things his ancestors saw. But a Chicagoan as he wanders about the city feels like a man who has lost many teeth. His tongue explores the gaps—let’s see now: Here the Fifty-fifth Street car turned into Harper Avenue at the end of the trolley line; then the conductor hurried through the car, reversing the cane seats. Then he reset the trolley on the power line. On this corner stood Kootich Castle, a bohemian rooming house and hangout for graduate students, photographers, would-be painters, philosophical radicals, and lab technicians (one young woman kept white mice as pets). Harper Avenue wasn’t exactly the banks of the Seine; none of the buildings resembled Sainte-Chapelle. They were downright ugly, but they were familiar, they were ours, and the survival of what is ours gives life its continuity. It is not our destiny here to get comfort from old familiar places. We can’t, we Chicagoans, settle back sentimentally among our souvenirs.
From the west, your view of the new skyscrapers is unobstructed. The greatest of them all, the Sears Tower, shimmers among its companions, all of them armored like Eisenstein’s Teutonic knights staring over the ice of no-man’s-land at Alexander Nevsky. The plan is to advance again westward from the center of the city and fill up the vacant streets, the waste places, with apartment buildings and shopping malls. Nobody at present can say whether this is feasible, whether the great corporations and banks will have sufficient confidence in the future of a city whose old industries are stalled, whose legendary railyards are empty. Ours is the broadest band of rust in all the Rust Belt.
A fiction writer by trade, I see myself also as something of a historian. More than thirty years ago, I published The Adventures of Augie March, a novel that is in part a record of Chicago in the twenties and thirties. I see by the college catalogues that my book is studied in a considerable number of schools. It is read in Yugoslavia, too, and in Turkey and China, so that throughout the world people are forming a picture of Chicago, the setting of Augie’s adventures. But that Chicago no longer exists. It is to be found only in memory and in fiction. Like the Cicero of Al Capone, like Jack London’s Klondike, like Fenimore Cooper’s forests, like Gauguin’s Pacific paradise, like Upton Sinclair’s Jungle, it is now an imaginary place only. The thirties have been wiped out: houses in decay, vacant lots, the local characters—grocers, butchers, dentists, neighbors—gone to their reward, the survivors hidden away in nursing homes, doddering in Florida, dying of Alzheimer’s disease in Venice, California. A lively new Latin population occupies my old ward, the Twenty-sixth. Its old houses have collapsed or been burned. The school dropout rate is one of the city’s highest, the dope pushers do their deals openly. Revisiting Division Street on a winter day, examining the Spanish graffiti, the dark faces, reading strange in scriptions on shop windows, one feels as Rip Van Winkle might have felt if after his long sleep he had found, not his native village, but a barrio of San Juan, Puerto Rico. This crude, brazen city of European immigrants is now, in large part, a city of blacks and Hispanics.
The speed of the cycles of prosperity and desolation is an extraordinary challenge to historians and prophets. Chicago was founded in 1833, so it hasn’t been here long enough to attra
ct archaeologists, as Rome and Jerusalem do. Still, longtime residents may feel that they have their own monuments and ruins and that accelerated development has compacted the decades, making them comparable to centuries, has put Chicagoans through a crash program in aging. If you’ve been here long enough, you’ve seen the movement of history with your own eyes and have had a good taste of history, of eternity, perhaps.
So many risings and fallings, so much death, rebirth, metamorphosis, so many tribal migrations. To young Midwesterners at the beginning of the century, this was the electrifying regional capital. Here students from Ohio or Wisconsin studied their trades, becoming doctors, engineers, journalists, architects, singers. Here they made contact with civilization and culture. Here Armour, Insull, and Yerkes accumulated huge fortunes in pork, gas, electricity, or transit. Their immigrant employees, hundreds of thousands of them, lived in industrial villages—Back of the Yards, out by the steel mills, the Irish on “Archie Road,” the Greeks, Italians, and Jews on Halsted Street, the Poles and Ukrainians along Milwaukee Avenue.
It wasn’t so long ago in calendar years that Carl Sandburg was celebrating Chicago the youthful giant, the hog butcher of the world, the player with railroads. But the farm boys, seduced under street-lamps by prostitutes, have vanished (as have the farms from which they came). The stockyards long ago moved to Kansas and Missouri, the railyards are filling up with new “Young Executive” housing. And even Sandburg’s language is dated. It is the language of the advertising agencies of the twenties and in part recalls the slogans that came from City Hall when Big Bill Thompson was mayor. “Boost, don’t knock,” he told us. “Lay down your hammer. Get a horn.”
What would we have been boosting? Real power in the city belonged to the Insulls and other magnates, to La Salle Street, to the venal politicians. From his headquarters in Cicero and on Twenty-second Street, the anarch Al Capone and his mob of comical killers sold beer and booze, ran the rackets,. They bought cops and officials as one would buy popcorn. Big Bill was one of our fun politicians, like Bathhouse John and Hinky-Dink Kenna, politician-entertainers who kept the public laughing. I was one of hundreds of thousands of kids to whom Big Bill’s precinct captains distributed free passes to Riverview Park to ride the Bobs and make faces in fun-house mirrors, to eat cotton candy that tickled you like a beard and disintegrated instantly on your tongue. If you had a nickel to spare, you could try to win a Kewpie doll in the shooting gallery. At the age of twelve, I was one of Big Bill’s fans. Schoolchildren loved him.
The mayor liked to show himself in public, and after his retirement, in his declining years, you saw him chauffeured through the Loop in his limousine. He was solitary, glum, silent. One great paw hung through the velvet strap. Part of his youth was spent on the range, so he generally wore a cowboy hat. Under it he looked swollen and corrupted. Rouault might have liked to do a portrait of him, one of those mountainous faces he painted—this one against a background of blazing Chicago boredom.
Big Bill is as remote from us today as Sennacherib or Ashurbanipal. Only antiquarians ever think of him. But Chicago still “boosts.” Under Mayor Daley (the first) we were “The City That Works.” The developers who have remade the north end of Michigan Boulevard announced that they had created a Magnificent Mile. Nothing less. Here Neiman-Marcus, Lord & Taylor, Marshall Field’s, Gucci, and Hammacher Schlemmer have established themselves in all their pride. A thick icing of comfort and luxury has been spread over the northern end of the business district, with its boutiques, bars, health clubs, and nouvelle cuisine restaurants. The John Hancock Tower and One Magnificent Mile are the most prestigious addresses in town. From their privileged windows you look over Lake Michigan, with its pleasure boats and water pumping stations. To the south you see the refineries of Hammond and Gary, and the steel mills, or what is left of them. Turning westward you see the notorious Cabrini Green public housing blocks, one of the many projects built for a welfare population. Actually, the slums are best seen from the elevation of a ninety-five-story skytop restaurant—a wonderful opportunity for landscape lovers.
You can’t be neutral about a place where you have lived so long. You come to recognize at last how much feeling you have invested in it. It’s futile to think, like Miniver Cheevy, that you might have done better in another time, in a more civilized city. You were assigned to this one, as were your parents, brothers, cousins, classmates, your friends—most of them in the cemeteries beyond city limits. Where fires, wrecking balls, and falling masonry have done so much demolition, human attachments rise in value. So I seek out my cousin the baker, I go to see an old chum try a case in criminal court. I attend city council meetings and public hearings, I talk with Winston Moore about black politics or lunch at the Bismarck with one of the late Mayor Daley’s assistants. City politics are comic opera. Circuit judges are convicted of racketeering. One can only guess how many grand juries are hearing testimony and preparing indictments. On my rounds, feeling like an unofficial, unsalaried inspector, I check out the new apartment houses on the banks of the Chicago River, in my time an industrial wasteland. To call these expeditions sad wouldn’t be accurate. I am not heavyhearted. I am uneasy but also terribly curious, deeply intrigued. After all, I am no mere spectator, for I have invested vital substance in these surroundings, we have exchanged influences—in what proportions I can’t say.
In moments of weakness you are tempted to take seriously the opinions of those urbanologists who say that the great American cities of the North are nineteenth-century creations belonging to an earlier stage of capitalism and that they have no future. But then a Chicago Tribune article announces that two hundred national retailers, developers, and leasing agents have met at the Hilton to plan new stores outside the Loop. Do they see a dying city dominated by youth gangs who do battle in the ruined streets? They do not! Urban shopping strips are “creating vibrant inner-city communities,” we are told. Mayor Washington and “city council stalwarts” are “selling Chicago” to dozens of prospective investors.
Like other Chicagoans of my generation, I ask myself how it’s all going to come out. In the past, we watched events. We had no control over them, of course. But they were lively, they were good entertainment. The Democratic bosses—Tony Cermak, Kelly-Nash, and Richard Daley—did not take a terribly high view of human nature, nor were they abstractly concerned with justice. They ran a tight oligarchy. Politicians made profitable arrangements but governed with a fair degree of efficiency. The present administration has little interest in efficiency. The growing black and Hispanic population has made a successful bid for power. Irish, Greek, Polish, and Italian voters are vainly resisting. As conflicts widen and lawsuits multiply, property taxes go up and services diminish. Not many people mourn the disintegration of the machine, but what will replace it? Everything seems up for grabs, and everybody asks, “Will we make it?” Middle-class whites, the city’s tax base, have moved to the suburbs. For suburbanites the city is a theater. From Schaumburg, Barrington, and Winnetka they watch us on their TV screens.
Will Chicago, that dauntless tightrope walker who has never yet fallen, get a charley horse in the middle of the high wire? Those of us, like myself, who have never abandoned Chicago—the faithful—tell ourselves that he’s not going to fall. For we simply can’t imagine what America would be without its great cities. What can the boondocks offer us? We, too, would become mere onlookers, and U.S. history would turn into a TV show. To be watched like any other program: the death of the tropical rain forests, or the history of Egypt’s pyramids.
Walking on Le Moyne Street, looking for the house the Bellow family lived in half a century ago, I find only a vacant lot. Stepping over the rubble, I picture the rooms overhead. There is only emptiness around, not a sign of the old life. Nothing. But it’s just as well, perhaps, that there should be nothing physical to hang on to. It forces you inward, to look for what endures. Give Chicago half a chance, and it will turn you into a philosopher.
Vermont: The Good P
lace
(1990)
Travel Holiday, July 1990.
In 1951, while I was living in a huge brick compound in the borough of Queens, I read a book about rural New England by Odell Shepard and felt that I must go there at once. I packed my knapsack, bought a pair of hiking boots, and took the train from Grand Central to Great Barrington. Following a map copied from the book, I made my way by back roads into Connecticut. I met no other walkers. It was early October, bright and warm. The going was good at first, but the country was hilly, and I began to tire. On steep grades I was overtaken by trucks. The drivers obviously wondered what I was doing there afoot. Some of them stopped to offer me a ride. I thanked them kindly but said that I meant to hike.
“Hike? You could use a lift, couldn’t you?”
“I’m here to see the sights.”
My refusal puzzled them. A hiker? Here? The sun was still hot, I was obviously bushed. I must have had the look of a determined self-congratulatory crank, and the truckers, driving off, had every reason to be glad I hadn’t accepted. My map showed a village nearby. When I asked a telephone lineman how far it was, he only shrugged and stepped on the gas. There was no village at the bottom of the next curve, no general store where I could buy a bottle of Nehi to drink on the wooden steps; there were only sleepy hayfields. The landmarks described by Shepard—settlements, farms, taverns, stables—were gone, wiped out.
When a pickup with a horse trailer pulled up for me a few miles down the road, I was grateful to get in and ease my feet. This driver had a foreign accent; he was a Danish horse trainer. The fact that he was a foreigner helped; I might not have been able to tell an American what had brought me here. The horse trainer sympathized with my romantic pilgrimage. He had done the same thing in Denmark. He pointed out, however, that America was too vast for walking. These wide open spaces were no Arcadia. The weather may have been right for fauns and satyrs, but all the other conditions were wanting. The Yankee farmers were gone. Their sons were stockbrokers, their daughters were living in Philadelphia or New York.