On a tour of duty in Chicago newsrooms, Carl Sandburg found the voice that temporarily turned poetry into an American spectator sport.
”Sandburg was the first poet whose face was recognizable to the public,” said Penelope Niven, his latest biographer. ”Maybe that is because he saw poetry in faces of the city`s crowd.”
Niven was standing on West Madison Street watching a stream of Loop workers headed for nearby commuter stations. Sandburg often saw a similar scene, looking down from the windows of the Chicago Daily News, whose offices once were at Wells and Madison Streets. Niven said that during his years with the newspaper, Sandburg was thrown into a human landscape that haunted his poetic imagination, reappearing in lines such as these, from ”Good Morning, America,” 1928:
In the evening there is a sunset sonata comes to the city
There is a march of little armies to the dwindling of drums
If Sandburg hadn`t walked Chicago`s streets, Niven says, he might never have been hailed as the ”Poet of the People,” the title by which he was introduced at hundreds of podiums. Indeed, except for his journalistic apprenticeship, he wouldn`t have been a very good poet, argues Niven, who spent 14 years sifting through the mass of manuscripts and papers Sandburg left behind at his retirement home in Flat Rock, N.C., where he died in 1967. Preparing to write his biography, Niven laid Sandburg`s verse next to the journalistic pieces and letters he was contemporaneously writing, allowing her to trace his personal and literary development year by year, sometimes week by week. So readers of ”Carl Sandburg” (Scribners, $35) almost feel like old friends walking alongside a budding author, sharing the agonies as he struggles to express himself.
”Sandburg is a founding father of modern poetry,” Niven noted. ”But the early verse of his pre-Chicago years is pretty conventional imitations of older, established poets. It is also wildly romantic, the kind of stuff young people write when they first decide to be a poet and think all that requires is putting raw emotion down on paper.”
Sandburg arrived in Chicago in 1912, just in time to join a curious literary renaissance such as no other city has hosted, Niven said. The poets of the Italian Renaissance were supported by Florentine aristocrats. But in Chicago when Sandburg arrived, novelists and poets were drawing paychecks in the city`s newsrooms. Indeed, the city was such a magnet for talent that critic H.L. Mencken (not otherwise a booster of Middle America) noted that American literature was becoming synonymous with Chicago`s literature.
”In Chicago, Sandburg learned to write journalism as a poet and poetry as a reporter,” Niven said. ”He would go out to cover a strike or work the police beat, writing those stories up for his paper. Then he would draw on the same experiences for his poetry.”
Call him `Charlie`
Sandburg was born in 1878 in Galesburg, Ill., to parents who had recently come from Sweden. He would live to see the age of jet aircraft, when he was American Airlines` guest of honor for the first coast-to-coast passenger jet flight. But as a boy he met old men who had fought in the Civil War and known Abraham Lincoln. Their reminiscences of the martyred president inspired Sandburg to write a multivolume biography that, by its immense popularity, helped enshrine Lincoln as the quintessential American folk hero.
Of course, he undertook that project long after leaving home. But from an early age, Sandburg knew that he was fascinated by the power of words and wanted somehow to make his living by them. He also desperately wanted to be an American.
”In grade school, he asked friends and teachers to call him Charlie, Carl sounding too foreign to his ear,” Niven said. ”He was a child of immigrants, whose first language was Swedish, but he heard the voices of America`s streets more clearly than poets whose families had been here since the Mayflower.”
It took Sandburg quite a while, though, to find a way to exploit his ear for the vernacular. Leaving school after the 8th grade, he drifted from job to job. In 1898, imbibing the intoxicating patriotism that accompanied the Spanish-American War, he signed up with a regiment of Illinois volunteers and fought in Puerto Rico. Afterward, he returned to Galesburg and enrolled in Lombard College as an over-age freshman but left before getting a degree.
Approaching the age of 30, Sandburg sadly noted that he had still failed to connect ”with anything in particular, neither business nor writing.”
He did find a wife, Paula Steichen, whose brother Edward was one of the first Americans to practice photography as a serious art form. Fifty years later, Sandburg wrote the preface for Steichen`s famed photographic anthology, ”The Family of Man,” which celebrated their mutual commitment to universal brotherhood. For Sandburg and his brother-in-law:
There is only one man in the world
And his name is All Men.
It was, in fact, ideology as much as physical attraction that brought the Sandburgs together. Paula and Carl were converts to socialism, and as socialist candidates were making spirited bids for office in Milwaukee, the newlyweds settled there in 1909 and Carl got a job as a reporter. When a socialist was elected mayor, Sandburg became his secretary. Meanwhile, he sent his verse off to East Coast magazines, almost invariably receiving rejection slips.
A few years in city hall taught Sandburg that socialists are no more immune to rough-and-tumble politics than Democrats and Republicans. Disillusioned, the Sandburgs moved on again, this time to Chicago, where he went back to newspapering. Niven notes that ever since visiting Chicago as a teenager, Sandburg had suspected that his destiny was intertwined with the Windy City`s.
”I took that train ride from Galesburg to Chicago trying to feel the excitement of an 18-year-old coming here from a small town for the first time,” Niven said. ”From Union Station, I walked down to Lake Michigan, to marvel, as young Carl did, at an expanse of water `running to meet the sky,`
as he put it.”
In the early part of the century, Chicago journalists were a breed apart. It was the golden age of Yellow Journalism, an era recalled by Chicago newspapermen Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur in their play ”The Front Page.” Newspapers fought one another for scoops, giving banner headlines to gruesome murders and lurid sex scandals. Yet it was also a time when hardboiled police reporters talked books and debated literary values, Niven noted.
Once, Sandburg and Hecht were assigned by their respective editors to cover an execution in an outlying county jail. To pass the time on the train ride out there, the two reporters got into a heated discussion of how poetry ought to be written. Sandburg was already experimenting with so-called free verse, which did away with strict meter and rhyme. Hecht, though otherwise a devout iconoclast, prefered traditional poetic forms. Their argument was still going on when the warden asked the condemned man if he had any last words.
”The Lord is my shepherd,” the convict replied. ”I shall not want.”
”I win, Ben!” Sandburg gloated. ”Hear what a dying man chooses? Free verse and right out of the Bible, no less.”
The Chicago portrait
Stimulated by the city and his newfound writer friends, Sandburg`s poetry took a quantum leap. Indeed, his creative juices continued to flow even during tough times, when newspapers cut their payrolls, Niven noted. In 1913, an out- of-work Sandburg had to swallow his poet`s pride and take a job as copy editor for The American Artisan and Hardware Record. One day when things were slow in the small trade journal`s office, Sandburg penned the lines that would forever link his name with Chicago:
Hog Butcher for the World
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation`s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders.
Later, Carl and Paula bundled up a bunch of his poems and sent them off to Poetry magazine. Published in Chicago, that newly founded review self-consciously styled itself as champion of the avant-garde. T.S. Eliot`s
”The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” would shortly appear in its pages. Yet its editor, Harriet Monroe, had to swallow hard when she read that opening line of Sandburg`s ”Chicago.” Poets didn`t then write about subjects like hog butchering. Still, Monroe could see that Sandburg was indeed a poet and sent him $70, about three weeks` pay at his current salary, for the right to print nine of his poems.
Critics have always had problems with Sandburg, Niven noted. When
”Chicago” was first published, it seemed a shocking departure, even to Poetry`s supporters. Yet within a few decades of his debut in print, critics were pronouncing him passe and scorning his work as maudlin and sentimental.
Once ”Chicago” appeared, Sandburg`s career took off in all directions. He went abroad as a correspondent for a press syndicate during World War I, then rejoined the staff of the Daily News. He got back to Chicago just in time to write a series of articles on racial tensions in the city. As if to prove his prophetic powers, the South Side soon exploded in a deadly riot, prompting Harcourt, Brace and Howe to republish Sandburg`s series in book form.
”His insights into our country`s terrible racial problems reads so fresh even now,” Niven said, ”that you get the eerie feeling he is writing about today as well as 1919.”
Then he became the newspaper`s movie reviewer, the first American writer to give movies the same serious consideration that books traditionally received. Sandburg sensed that Hollywood was creating a truly popular art form, to which he himself, as spokesman for the common man, was naturally drawn. He especially praised the humor of Charlie Chaplin`s ”little tramp”
character.
”The wind is blowing a healthy lack of sentimentalism in pictures, a strong, lusty sense of humor that is one with American life,” Sandburg wrote in December 1925, reflecting on that year`s motion pictures. ”Old World heaviness of emotions and a primitive earnestness of drama have ruled motion pictures up till now.”
By the 1920s, Sandburg was established as a box-office favorite on the lecture circuit, in those pre-TV days a popular form of entertainment. Annually, he would tour the country to read his verse and sing folk songs in the nasally baritone that became his trademark as a performer.
”After his performances, people would bring him songs that had come down to them from parents and grandparents,” Niven said. ”He published those in his `American Song Bag,` which helped inspire the folk music revival of the 1960s.”
Off the streets
From that point, Niven added, Sandburg`s connection with Chicago`s streets was diminished. His lecture fees and later his book royalties allowed Sandburg to move his family out to a farm home on the shores of Lake Michigan, near New Buffalo, Mich. Often he would file half a dozen reviews over a weekend so he might have the rest of his time free to work on his books or lecture.
By the time the volumes of his Lincoln biography began appearing in the late 1920s, Sandburg was no longer Chicago`s but the nation`s poet.
Still, Niven is convinced that all of Sandburg`s subsequent accomplishments were dependent upon his Chicago apprenticeship. As his old newspapering buddy, Hecht, observed, Sandburg was first and foremost:
”Our Chicago bard, minstrel of our alleys, troubadour of the wheat patches outside our town. Homer of our sunsets and our stockyards.”
