Chicago—A Feeling

An Author's Personal Impression of the Second Largest City in America

SHERWOOD ANDERSON

FEAR. Something huge—not understandable. How can I write of Chicago without putting myself in? How can I write of anything without putting myself in? My egotism is my weakness and my strength. I was little more than a boy when I first went to Chicago. There arc streets thirty miles long— perfectly flat. Buildings and houses you dream about—distorted dreams.

You must see the background. It lies where the long tongue of the Great Lakes reaches farthest down into the land. A low black swampy place—a wind-riven land.

To the cast, reaching up, Michigan, To the west Wisconsin, Minnesota, the north west.

To the south land, flat like a billiard table— fat land. No such corn-land anywhere else in the world. Innumerable droves of fat sleek hogs, eating the corn. Cattle off the dry western lands, coming in lean and bony, gc tting fat and sleek, eating corn.

Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, Clarence Darrow.

Railroads coming—all the real rai Iroadsmills, factories.

Men, men, men!

At first when, as a boy, I went to Chicago, nothing to do but get drunk as often as I could. It was too big for me—too terrible. Could people live in such streets, in such houses?

They could and did. I could and did.

At first I was a labourer. Then the shrewder side of me came to the fore. Men have always liked me first rate when they came to know me. It may be because I like men. I began to sell men things — write advertisements, sling ink. Thousands, untold thousands, doing it.

Some getting lots of money, others not much. I never got such a lot.

Hope—hopelessness.

IF you have only seen the famous Michigan Boulevard, the North Shore, Lincoln Park, Jackson Park you do not know Chicago. Why talk?

There is the huge northwest, thcwest,thesouth. Millions of people of all nationalities packed in close, packed in among slaughter houses, factories, mills.

Long stretches of vacant lots. Five, six and eight storied apartment buildings, standing in the midst of acres of black weeds—wind-riven —a lot of them.

Brutal murders going on. Everything unfinished.

Other cities getting all puffed up with feelings of civic virtue when they think or speak of Chicago.

Leopold and Locb.

Nonsense.

I remember nights when I walked the streets of Chicago—half drunk, hopeless—swimming in a sea of ugliness.

Then suddenly—a glimpse of the Chicago River—that great sewer. A sewer nothing. You wait. The Chicago River will some day become one of the lovely rivers of the world of cities. It is unbelievably beautiful sometimes—from the bridges—the gulls soaring above, the strange, lovely cryptogramic, chrysophrase river—cries, oaths.

Something vital in Chicago. So many people in one great flat place where a real city had to be. A huge place—unformed. Not in the least like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore.

Beside it Cleveland and Detroit are villages —grown suddenly to look like cities.

Railroads everywhere, boats crowded in the narrow river, smoke, dirt—a climate so terrible in its extremes of heat and cold that only strong people can survive—to really be alive.

Chicago has been from the first—will always be, while the land lasts—a real city. It is a real city, like New York, London, Paris.

A real city does not care too much what you, a mere man, think of it. "Here I am. Go to hell."

Los Angeles, Cleveland, Seattle, such places give themselves away too much. They arc whistling in the dark.

A city has to have something back of it. Land, a lot of it. Rich land—corn, wheat, iron, rivers, mountains, hogs, cattle. Chicago has back of it the Middlewest—the empire called Mid-America. Corn, hogs, wheat, iron, coal, industrialism—a new age moving across a continent by railroads, moving unbelievable quantities of goods across a vast place, in the centre of which stands Chicago.

Through Chicago. You'll be routed that way—going most anywhere.

Chicago being what it wants to be, what it grew to be. Chicago unformed. Who can tell what it will be?

THERE is something terrible about the making of every great city and Chicago is still making. When it is made it will not be another New York, Paris, London. It will be Chicago. Here I am. Go to hell. It was the city of my own young manhood—when I first began to comprehend, faintly, what differentiates the great city from the overgrown town.

Cities arc almost as distinct, as individuals as nations, trees, hills, people.

Chicago is terrible—it is at moments beautiful in a way you only understand when you have lived there a long time.

When you have been drunken and hopeless there, when you have been sick of it to the marrow, when you have accepted Chicago, then, at last, walking hopeless, endless streets-yourself hopeless—you begin to feel its half wild beauty.

^ Then at last the city you have so dreaded and feared has done something to you that makes it—no matter where you afterward live— your city.

I was a young man in Chicago, almost a boy there. There 1 saw the first woman who rejected me — felt what men feel when they arc so rejected. There I first made ink flow, sang my first song. There after many efforts, I wrote a sentence I could bear reading the next day.

There I first heard sounds of men's voices—related ro streets, houses, cities—saw my first real actor walk upon a stage, heard music first, saw painting.

I wrote a song once, long ago. I called the song Industrialism, but what I really had in mind was Chicago.

"In the long house of hate,

in the long hours,

In the never-ending days,

Over the fields—her black hair flying—

My mistress Terrible Gigantic

Gaunt and drear

Pve got to die—you've got to die. We do not fancy your thin hands that reach and reach into the vase.

Where old things rust.

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Continued from page 53

Death to you vow.

Thin dream of beauty,

You be gone.

Our fathers, in the village streets, had flowing beards and they believed. I saw them run into the night— Crushed.

Old knowledge and all old beliefs But your hand killed—

My mistress Grim.

Awake and shake thy dusty locks. Come drive the soldiers to their toil A million men my mistress needs, to kiss And kill

For her desire,

Tonight—

Arise."

When I visit any other great city of the world I am a guest. When I am in Chicago I am at home. Something loose, unformed, undisciplined alive in Chicago is in me too. It is a little what I am. I am more than a little what Chicago is. No man can escape his city.

I am not proud of.it. Chicago will not be proud. It is a real city—my city.

Take it, or leave it.

There it is.

And, God helping me, here am I.