Over the years, a journalist runs into presidents and presidential wannabes, generals and admirals, politicians, rogues and even a Mafia don or two. Thinking back on these encounters, I discover with delight that I’ve talked with a number of Chicagoans (or near-Chicagoans) whose names and reputations reach far beyond Michigan Avenue. Among them are Carl Sandburg, Ben Hecht, Frank Lloyd Wright, Saul Bellow, Bill Mauldin, Studs Terkel, Nelson Algren and Robert Cromie. I found them to be more human and often more perceptive than most of the brass hats and big shots in government.
A quick word to the American professoriate: Please don’t try to put Carl Sandburg into one of your literary boxes, don’t deconstruct his meanings and don’t call him postmodern, whatever that means. Like other pioneers of the written word in our dying century, Sandburg was sui generis.
Nowadays, many academics consider it smart to sneer at Sandburg as a poet and to deride his Lincoln biography as too sentimental. Both the poets and historians who do so are dead wrong because they have distanced themselves from their readers and the public. It’s hard to find Sandburg’s poetry included in collections put together by modern anthologists. Yet students who discover him will continue to quote his poems. Lincoln historians, including this writer, will continue to borrow from his six-volume biography. Sandburg’s poems speak for “The People, Yes”; his “Prairie Years” and “War Years” give the last full measure of the man.
Whenever I think of Carl, I think of goat’s milk. I edited a book of his letters that begin before the turn of the century, when he was a private in the Spanish-American War, and continue into the early 1960s. When I stayed with the Sandburgs at their goat farm in Flat Rock, N.C., there was always a pitcher of goat’s milk on the breakfast table.
“Have a nice healthy glass of goat milk,” Mrs. Sandburg would say. She was a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago-a brilliant woman in her own right and the sister of Edward Steichen, the pioneering photographer, who became a goat breeder to help support their family. But, dear reader, have you ever drunk goat’s milk?
Unless you’re a baby, it’s not worth being healthy for.
I spent some time in Illinois with Sandburg when I adapted his “Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years” for a television documentary film. When he was in his early 80s, we walked around Galesburg, New Salem and Springfield and visited some of the old courthouses where Lincoln practiced. Carl relaxed by throwing out two-liners:
“Have you a criminal lawyer in this burg?”
“We think so, but we haven’t been able to prove it on him yet.”
“Am I the first girl you ever kissed?”
“No, but I want you to know that I’m a lot more particular than I used to be.”
Carl used to cut his cigars in half and, where some dudes carry handkerchiefs, he saved his cigar butts. When he got to the end of the butt, he took out a pocket knife, jabbed it neatly into the tobacco, and used it as a handle for the last half inch. He called this a hobo way of “sucking the ‘nick-o-teen.’ ” Once, a cigar butt was still smoking and I could have sworn that his jacket pocket was beginning to inhale.
Carl’s father was a poor blacksmith who worked for the railroad in Galesburg. I can hear Sandburg strumming his guitar and singing one of his favorite folk songs: “Mama, mama, mama, have you heard the news?
“Daddy got killed on the C-B and Q’s.
“Shut your eyes and hold your breath.
“We’ll all draw a pension on papa’s death.”
I admired Sandburg’s system of bestowing autographs when we were in the restaurant of the Lincoln Hotel in Springfield. If a youngster came over with a napkin to sign, he would. If an adult male, he would quiz him on how many of his books he had read; if the answer was satisfactory, he would ask him to come back with one of his books to sign. If an adult female asked, her chances would increase based on her degree of pulchritude. A well-thumbed Sandburg book always helped. Waitresses, shoeshine boys and airline hostesses usually got his firm block signature but respectable-looking stuffed shirts, rarely.
All his life Carl was politically engaged, in person and in his poetry. The social contract of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal lingers between the lines of “The People, Yes.” In Springfield, we once sat around drinking his favorite, Jack Daniel’s. First we had some with soda. Then, with water. When we got close to the bottom of the bottle, I worked up my courage to ask him what he thought of his rival for the poetry mantle of the United States:
“Carl, what do you think of Robert Frost?”
“Frost is a fine poet,” he said. Then, more in sorrow and without a trace of malice, he added, “But what can you expect from him? He’s a Re-pub-lic-an!”
Carl supported himself as a lecturer and newspaperman for many years. He liked to talk about the time he was the labor reporter for the Chicago Daily News. Even in old age, he would address labor union officials as “Sir and Brother” and sign off his letters, “Fraternally yours.”
Once I asked him if he was left of center.
He thought for a moment, then wisely replied, “Where is the center?”
In his youth, Carl had been a Social-Democratic party organizer and secretary to the Socialist mayor of Milwaukee. He enjoyed saying: “I planted a lot of soapboxes in Wisconsin.” In 1906, he began campaigning for Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist candidate for president, and he was still campaigning in 1956, for Adlai E. Stevenson. Three years later, he delivered the Lincoln Day Address before a joint session of Congress, one of the few civilians ever to do so. A phrase from that address is still the best short description of Lincoln’s character. Sandburg called Lincoln “a man of velvet and steel.”
After we finished filming the documentary in Galesburg, Carl grinned, extended his hand and said, “Shake the hand that shook the hand of Elvis Presley.”
No train was fast enough for him to get out of his hometown. In his youth, he had been a hobo and heard those train whistles in the night coming through Galesburg. The trains carried ambitious young people to faraway places-especially to the towers and the newspapers overlooking Lake Michigan.
We caught a two-engine feeder plane on a one-slice-of-chewing-gum airline. Sandburg tried to settle back comfortably in the narrow seat. The small plane shook and shuddered into the sky. When the chewing gum arrived, Carl opened his eyes, reached for a slice and put it in his jacket pocket next to the cut cigar butts. He asked the blushing airline hostess to tell him her name. “You’re not what’s wrong with this airline,” he said, and settling back, he took out a bandanna, placed it across his eyes and dreamed his way to Chicago.
When I met Ben Hecht, we were on the same “20th Century” television show with Walter Cronkite. The subject was Jimmy Walker, the corrupt Tammany Hall stalwart who was known as the “Night Mayor” of New York City. Walker was forced to resign under pressure from Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, just before FDR would get the Democratic nomination for president at the Chicago convention.
After the program, Hecht and I chatted about the early Chicago newspaper days. He told me that he was a great admirer of Sandburg-imagine, a real poet in a newsroom! Their desks were next to each other. In those days, The Chicago Daily News tolerated poets and novelists in the guise of reporters. One day Hecht got Sandburg to try out a poem that he was working on called “Chicago.” The lines still resonate-and are constantly used with a twist by headline writers all over the country:
“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. . . .”
Hecht said he remembered Sandburg’s voice as the finest he had ever heard, full of undercurrents and always with a hint of anger and defiance. Being a storyteller foremost, Hecht said, Sandburg had once been sent out to cover a big American Federation of Labor convention in Milwaukee. It turned into a major story when some of the delegates began firing guns at each other. According to Hecht, Sandburg wasn’t heard from for the next three days. In the meantime, the News had to run Associated Press stories. When the angry city editor ordered Sandburg to come home, Sandburg wired back: “Dear Boss. Can’t leave now. Everything too important and exciting.”
The story made the rounds and soon became legend to prove that Sandburg was a dreamer, not a reporter. I myself heard it repeated recently by a professor at the Columbia University journalism school. But Hecht was exaggerating-at least, according to Sandburg. I looked up the Sandburg Letters book that I had edited and found that he had written:
“Ben Hecht in his book says I was sent to a labor convention and over three days sent no story back; I have clippings of those three days with my byline big as a fence post.”
So much for old Front Page newspaper memories. Anyway, with great affection, Hecht called Sandburg “our Orpheus.”
Frank Lloyd Wright. I had one encounter with the giant of American architecture and what he had to say was memorable and amusing-amusing, that is, if you were not a painter or sculptor. Chicago (as well as Wisconsin) can claim him because he worked under Louis Sullivan for five years, beginning in 1888, before going out on his own.
I had seen some of his work here and there-including a private house he designed in Great Neck, Long Island-the fictional town of West Egg in Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” The house had a wide, low roof that defied the conventional boxy structure and later was much imitated in suburbia. . . . The Beth Sholem synagogue in Philadelphia, which seemed to soar skyward from an earthbound interior. . . . The Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, which survived a violent earthquake in the 1920s and an original wing of which was preserved intact when I saw it in the mid-1960s, before heading for wartime Vietnam. . . . and, of course, the Guggenheim Museum on upper 5th Avenue in Manhattan.
When the Guggenheim was still being completed in 1958 as a great gallery for modern art, I caught up with Wright at the Plaza Hotel. His circular, inverted ziggurat design was already making people dizzy, merely at the thought of climbing around its merry-go-round walkways.
Shivering in my boots, I asked him:
“Mr. Wright, people are saying that the overpowering weight and circular look of your building clashes with the other buildings on 5th Avenue and with the greenery of Central Park . . .”
Wright replied: “I originally wanted the museum built across 5th Avenue, inside the park itself, but that wasn’t permitted. So I brought the park across the street. As for the other buildings around mine, eventually they’ll fade into the background.”
“Mr. Wright, the artists I speak to are worried that their pictures will hang crooked against the curved walls of your building.” Wright replied with contempt in his voice: “You can tell those artists that they’ve got it all wrong. Their pictures are merely mosaics within the walls. It’s my building that’s the work of art.”
I thanked him and slunk away. After a number of changes over the years, the paintings seem to be hanging straight and the sculpture always works wonders. As for the Guggenheim Museum itself, it’s hard to imagine 5th Avenue now without it.
–
The 50th anniversary edition of Bill Mauldin’s classic, “Up Front,” was published in 1995. My old Army friend, now retired in Santa Fe, lived in Chicago for many years, beginning in 1962, while serving as an editorial cartoonist for the Sun-Times. He began his career as an aspiring cartoonist just before the war, when his grandmother gave him $200 so he could study at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts.
I met him in wartime Sicily, when he was drawing for the 45th Division News, and I was the managing editor of Stars & Stripes, the Army newspaper. We began to run his cartoon-called “Up Front by Mauldin”-on our editorial page. There was something special about his bearded infantrymen, Willie and Joe. He soon joined Stars & Stripes and became the voice of the foot soldier in Italy and Europe. Together with another former Stars & Stripes colleague, I later co-wrote the screen treatment for the film based on his book, “Up Front,” using his captions as dialogue. To this day, people can still remember some of Mauldin’s brilliant captions.
Two officers look at a sunset in Southern France and one says: “Beautiful view. Is there one for the enlisted men?”
Willie and Joe study a couple of boastful, overdressed GI’s. The caption reads: “We call ’em garritroopers. They’re too far forward to wear ties an’ too far back to get shot.”
Or the bearded and wounded rifleman telling a hospital orderly: “Just gimme a couple of aspirin. I already got a Purple Heart.”
One day, shortly after the battle, Mauldin and I drove down to the Anzio beachhead from Rome. He parked his jeep on a hill formerly held by the Germans. From here, German artillery had shelled the Americans clinging for life on the beachhead below. Our visit inspired a drawing. Its caption reads: “My God! Here they wuz an’ there we wuz.”
Mauldin drew from life; and sometimes from death.
Once in a while, Mauldin would show me a drawing in the rough and ask me what I thought of his caption. I might suggest a change in a word, but, invariably, I was wrong and he was right. His hand and ear had perfect pitch for the language of the American soldier. “Up Front” still holds up.
–
Nelson Algren, Studs Terkel and I were having dinner in the back room of Riccardo’s in Chicago. Under a cloud of cigar smoke, they were matching cognacs against martinis and boasting about who had more important millionaire friends.
Studs kept going to the phone, calling up a reformed (repeat: reformed) left-wing hooker he wanted to join us at the restaurant. Amazingly, she had renamed herself after a friend of Chairman Mao; now she was counseling her fallen sisters to mend their ways. She never did show up. Later, I suspected that Studs and Nelson were putting on a hick from the First City.
Who can forget one of Nelson Algren’s aphorisms? At Riccardo’s, Algren delivered his famous lines:
“Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never play cards with a man named Doc. Never go to bed with a woman whose troubles are greater than your own.”
And he added one that you seldom hear:
“All the wisdom I acquired in nine months in the Orient can be summed up in one line: Never eat in a place with sliding doors unless you’re crazy about raw fish.”
Today, nobody seems to be writing prose poems to the City of New York. There’s no Walt Whitman around to sing the praises of what he called the island of Mannahatta. But Chicago is another matter. Both Terkel and Algren wrote books about their city, using the same title. Terkel called his, simply, “Chicago” and Algren his, “Chicago: City On The Make.” I reviewed both books for The New York Times because both put a stethoscope on the city’s heartbeat.
Studs, a closet intellectual with a rough-and-tough style that includes red socks, wrote: “If you look hard enough the next time you attend Second City, you’ll find above the entrance some of Louis Sullivan’s grace notes. Some of the stone graced the Garrick Theatre, when I wore my first pair of long pants bought at the Boston Store. Where else?”
When Studs recently summed up a lifetime of taped conversations, he said, “That human race is really something, isn’t it?” I think of Studs as the scribe of the human race. You can sense that in his book, “Coming of Age,” with its fine dedication: “To those old ones who still do battle with dragons.”
Studs Terkel is Chicago’s St. George.
We’ve both written a dozen or so books. My claim to fame is that Studs credited me in print for suggesting the title for one of his books. We were having dinner in New York and Studs said he was trying to think of a name for a book of interviews with Americans about World War II that eventually won the Pulitzer Prize. I immediately piped up, “The Good War.”
I liked Algren’s nostalgic words: “In Vachel Lindsay’s day, in Carl Sandburg’s day, in the silver-colored yesterday, in Darrow’s and Masters’ and Edna Millay’s day, writers and working stiffs alike told policemen where to go, the White Sox won the pennant with a team batting average of .228 and the town was full of light.”
I remember seeing Algren when he lived in Sag Harbor, out on Long Island. It was one of the happiest times of his life; Sag Harbor was John Steinbeck’s adopted home town in the East, too. But both Depression-era writers did their best work in their real places, Steinbeck in Cannery Row country in California, Algren lending dignity to life’s losers in Chicago.
A thunderstorm swept in over Lake Michigan when I visited Saul Bellow while he was living in a high-rise apartment somewhere between Evanston and Chicago. Even Bellow the Rain King couldn’t part those roiled waters. As we left our beach chairs on the terrace and moved inside, Bellow reassured me:
“It’s like the storm in Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony. It only lasts 20 minutes.”
We had met in New York but, unlike Mr. Sammler of Manhattan, Bellow said he didn’t get to New York very often these days. “It depresses me,” he said. “There’s such a sense of malignancy and despair.” He sounded like his character Augie March: “I am an American, Chicago born-Chicago, that somber city-and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way.”
I asked Bellow to talk about the art of writing-and reading.
“With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you’ve fallen into good hands-someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence. The business of the writer is to pass all the things he sees and knows through his own soul.”
Who did he have in mind when he wrote his books?
Bellow said that he wouldn’t dream of writing for anyone he knew, that he wrote for those he didn’t know in expectation of making some discovery with them. “If you write for people you know,” he said, “you find yourself limited. God knows, we’re limited enough without putting new limitations on ourselves.”
Bellow spoke in full paragraphs. He was as erudite as any author I have ever interviewed-including Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov. He quoted from Rousseau’s “Confessions”-“Je Sens Mon Coeur et Je Connais les Hommes”-meaning that he feels what is in his own heart and understands mankind.
Chicago and America are fortunate to claim a serious creator like Bellow. In a commercial atmosphere for writers that is so driven by the shoddy and second-rate in the marketplace (just look at the best-seller lists and judge for yourself), I cannot think of one book by Bellow that cheapens his striving for universal themes.
Finally, I’m grateful to one of my old friends, Robert Cromie, the Chicago Tribune’s former Book Review editor, now retired, who allowed me to appear in the book pages. It was Cromie who once asked me to review the latest edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica-millions of words in all 24 volumes, and to turn in my copy “next week.” I’m still thankful to him for permitting me to write an opening line remarking upon what I’ve been accused of doing for years:
“At last, a book critic can confess-he has not read the books.”
As we head into the new millennium, we can be certain of few things about the Microchip Age. Yet I do believe this: Words and creative art in every form will not be machine-tooled-in Chicago, New York or elsewhere in the United States. They will still have to be handcrafted by authors and artists-men and women who should be recognized and revered by the government and the public.
