7

F. Scott Fitzgerald and Chicago

Matthew J. Bruccoli declared: “The dominant influences on F. Scott Fitzgerald were aspiration, literature, Princeton, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, and alcohol.”¹ He left out Chicago and Chicagoans, perhaps Fitzgerald’s largest influence and the least considered by the reams of scholarship written about his life and writing. Chicago hums along in the background of many of his short stories and novels. Characters move through it in “The Four Fists,” (1920) and “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (1922). In “The Cut-Glass Bowl” (1920), Chicago appears as a destination to which Mrs. Ahearn’s husband might just up and move the family. In The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), Gloria and Anthony Patch pass through Chicago on their honeymoon, and Anthony’s cautiousness manifests as a warning to a too-fast taxi driver there. The Great Gatsby’s (1925) Nick Caraway travels back and forth to the East by train, meeting friends at his stop in Chicago and changing trains there. The repetition may be read as a merely realistic detail that shows Chicago as the main train hub to the Midwest, but the near constant repetition of the place name reveals that Chicago has a particular importance in Fitzgerald’s work and life as the place that everyone eventually has to pass through, physically, psychically, or metaphorically.

Most of the significant characters and many of the minor ones in his work either come from Chicago directly or descend from Chicagoans. In This Side of Paradise (1920), Amory Blaine’s father “grew wealthy at thirty through the death of two elder brothers, successful Chicago brokers.”² Fitzgerald identifies the story behind “The Lees of Happiness” (1922) as first belonging to the Chicago Tribune,³ and the story takes place “half an hour from Chicago.”⁴ In “The Camel’s Back” (1922), “Mrs. Howard Tate was a Chicago Todd before she became a Toledo Tate.”⁵ “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” makes mention of a “Chicago Beef Princess.”⁶ In The Great Gatsby, Tom Buchanan is from Chicago, and he “brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest.”7 In the Josephine stories, Josephine Perry lives in Chicago, having been raised there as well (1928). In Tender Is the Night (1934), Nicole Diver’s grandmother was brought up in Chicago and her parents built a house in Lake Forest, where she has spent a great deal of her life. Dr. Dohmler, too, has a connection to Chicago. He decided against going to school in Chicago because he “had read about Chicago in those days, about the great feudal families of Armour, Palmer, Field, Crane, Warren, Swift, and McCormick and many others, and since that time not a few patients had come to him from that stratum of Chicago and New York.”⁸ Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels refer repetitively to Chicago and when a reader notices the ongoing reference, it begins to seem like a writerly habit or tic waiting to be worked out in psychoanalysis.

Fitzgerald scholars and biographers accept that “Everything F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote was a form of autobiography. His fiction is transmuted autobiography.”⁹ He knew the grandchildren and heirs of two important Chicago families personally: Gordon McCormick with whom he became friends at Princeton and Ginevra King, with whom he had a fast, but significant, romance. He also knew of the Medills and Pattersons, the families that ran the Tribune, lived in Lake Forest, and who had intermarried with the McCormicks. Fitzgerald shows in his work that the type of person who had this kind of wealth was interested in his own self-importance whether preaching a Midwestern moral code based on nineteenth-century Presbyterian ideas of thrift and self-control or creating philanthropically minded societies and institutions with their name prominently displayed to advertise their businesses. They were, for Fitzgerald, at heart hypocritical and corrupt because despite preaching restraint and upward lift to the poor and their workers, these men increased their fortunes through violent union breaking, war profiteering, and land grabbing. His work attempts to delineate the ways in which the corrupt ideologies of the grandparents have been transmitted to their callous grandchildren, solidifying what Fitzgerald saw as the Chicago type.

The first three sections of this chapter will trace the histories of these families and Fitzgerald’s relationship to them in order to establish from whom Fitzgerald drew his ideas about Chicago men and women when writing about them in his fiction. These Chicago families represent a specific kind of wealth built by grandparents who built their businesses in the mid- to late nineteenth-century period of wildly unregulated capitalism. Fitzgerald is most interested in those Chicagoans who live, work, and vacation together in a closed and clannish society of the extremely rich. His work uses these types, mash-ups of real people he met briefly or knew deeply throughout his life in order to show the ways in which his fictional drawing of a type is more realistic than Hemingway’s or Cather’s careful renderings of real individuals in fictional guise. Fitzgerald’s fiction presents the complexities of the social milieu as drawn from naturalistic types coming together. Fitzgerald’s work argues that the habits, fashions, and ideologies of the very rich Chicago families have had a destructive impact on Americans, because their ideologies became the ideologies of the intellectual elite and the middle to lower classes who imitate them. The chapter’s final section shows that many of Fitzgerald’s novels are about Chicago and that they use the metaphor of marriage, as begun at the Columbian Exhibition, to work out the relationships between money, love, art, and business.

Ginevra King: True to type

F. Scott Fitzgerald met sixteen-year-old Ginevra King on January 4, 1915, at a sledding party. He was home in St. Paul for winter break from Princeton, and she was visiting her friend and roommate, Marie Hersey. She noted the meeting in her diary and the next day wrote “Am absolutely gone on Scott.”¹⁰ When Fitzgerald met Ginevra King, he was not meeting just another rich soon-to-be debutante, nor was he meeting just a wealthy middle-Western girl as she has been described in Fitzgerald scholarship. He was meeting the heir to one of the largest and most elite American fortunes and meeting the granddaughter and daughter of men who made Chicago and ran Chicago, the industrial center of America. Ginevra was the daughter and granddaughter of two wealthy Chicago families: the Kings and the Fullers. Her paternal grandfather, Charles Bohan King was in the “wholesale grocery firm of Barrett, King & Co., 1864–1865, then jobber in hats, caps and furs as member of firm of King, Carhart & Co., 1865–1867, and of King Brothers 1867–1891. He had been the President and director of Commercial Safe Deposit Co. since 1855.”¹¹ He was in business with his brother, Henry W. King, also a clothing manufacturer. In 1868, they and W. C. Browning and other associates organized the wholesale clothing house of Henry W. King & Company. After the Great Fire, the company moved to the wholesale clothing district around Market and Franklin streets. Henry W. King became president of Browning, King & Company, the largest wholesale clothing firm in the United States. He was also prominent in charitable work and was president of the Chicago Relief and Aid Society during the period of the Great Fire.12

He was a member of the Commercial Club of Chicago, organized in 1877, and was president in 1895. An elite group of successful Chicago businessmen, the Commercial Club promoted the economic development of the city. The club’s most active members—men like George Pullman, Marshall Field, Cyrus McCormick, George Armour, and Frederic Delano—were the same men who forged Chicago into a leading industrial and commercial center and sponsored the Fair.¹³ The club’s privately printed book names the members as: “The type of men whose genius has placed the United States among the great commercial powers of the world.”¹⁴ Henry W. King was also a prestigious member of the Chicago Club. Though his name is not listed as a member in the back of Edward Tyler Blair’s 1898 History of the Chicago Club, he appears in its pages lunching with one of its original one hundred members at the best table in the club: “Henry W. King and T. B. Blackstone seldom missed a noonday meal at the round table. Mr. King was a great reader and thinker for a business man, a man of many interests, uncompromising in his denunciation of all that was wrong in the community and a power for the right.”¹⁵ Ginevra’s stockbroker father, Charles Garfield King, expanded the family fortunes on both sides of the family: the King money, as well as the maternal Fuller money also made quickly during the Chicago boom years of the Civil War. Charles King established the brokerage firm King, Farnum & Co., with seats on exchanges in both Chicago and New York and he belonged to the prestigious men’s clubs of each. Ginevra’s father joined his uncle as a Chicago club member in 1897.¹⁶ She was born on November 30, 1898.

There’s no way to know how much of Ginevra’s background Fitzgerald knew about, but he would have understood that she descended from the kind of men who created Chicago and how vast that made her fortune. Her friend Marie Hersey or Fitzgerald’s friend at Princeton, Gordon McCormick, most likely told him who she was, from where she came, and what it all meant. After the first meeting, Scott and Ginevra began a furious letter writing exchange, which should be seen as part of the larger fad of writing extensive letters to members of the opposite sex while at school. A girl’s popularity could be seen by the number of letters she received from boys, and neither Scott nor Ginevra had any delusions they were each other’s sole correspondent. Although they wrote to each other frequently, they only saw each other three times during this period. Scott visited her at Westover on February 20, 1915, where they were heavily chaperoned and watched behind glass, according to Ginevra.17 That spring, Scott invited her to the sophomore prom at Princeton, but her mother refused to let the sixteen-year-old girl go halfway across the country unchaperoned to a university dance. Ginevra’s letters bemoan the unfairness of the situation and the unreasonableness of Mrs. King.¹⁸ Scott and Ginevra managed to meet at the Ritz in New York on June 7, 1915. Two decades later, in 1935, Fitzgerald wrote in My Lost City, of the meeting: “Moreover she to whom I fatuously referred as ‘My Girl’; was a Middle Westerner, a fact that kept the warm center of the world out there, so I thought of New York as essentially cynical and heartless—save for one night when She made luminous the Ritz Roof of a brief passage through.”¹⁹ His next sentence reveals where they were in the ebb and flow of their romance: “Lately, however, I had definitely lost her and I wanted a man’s world.”²⁰ Later that June, on the way to Montana, he visited her at her family’s new estate in Lake Forest, Illinois, where he met her parents, friends, and others in the King’s social circle. The essay’s title refers to how Fitzgerald feels lost and nostalgic about New York, but it could just as easily be a reference to Chicago, since the middle section remembers this last meeting with Ginevra.

Fitzgerald’s final letter to Ginevra was his dry acknowledgment of her wedding to Billy Mitchell sent on July 21, 1918.²¹ Ginevra and Scott met one last time in 1938. She recalls in a letter to Dan Piper on May 12, 1947: “One of my greatest friends, Josephine Ordway, who is now dead, had kept in touch with Scott and Zelda during the years and told me of their wild nomadic life, and it was through her that he found out that I was in California in 1938.” They had lunch together and afterward went to a bar. She was “heartsick” as he had been “behaving himself.” He had a series of “double Tom Collins’” and fell off the wagon he’d been on for several months.²² King asked Fitzgerald to destroy the letters she sent to him when they stopped writing in 1917 and it’s presumed that he destroyed the originals, but only after he made a typed transcript of the letters.²³ Ten years after Fitzgerald died in 1940, his daughter, Scottie, returned them to Ginevra.24 When Ginevra died in 1980 at 82, her family kept the letters, and in 2003, her daughter and granddaughters donated the entire binder, along with Ginevra’s diary and an unpublished short story written by her, to Princeton, where Fitzgerald’s extensive papers are archived. Her first letter to Scott is dated January 15, 1915, and the last from July 1917. They total 227 pages, and most likely he wrote at least that many back to her.

James L. W. West III considers King to be Fitzgerald’s “Ur-Woman,” and his two earliest biographers, Arthur Mizener and Andrew Turnball, claim that Fitzgerald “remained devoted to Ginevra as long as she would allow him to.”²⁵ However, the quantity and intactness of the letters and their proximity to Ginevra’s diary make it seem that Ginevra was extremely important to Fitzgerald. Nowhere else in Fitzgerald’s collection at Princeton are there such perfectly bound, typed, and dated letters, and this poses a large danger for Fitzgerald scholarship: their physical presence overstates the relationship he had with Ginevra and overshadows other relationships that are less well-documented. The overwhelming physical presence of the letters makes Ginevra seem like the other well-documented woman in Scott’s life: Zelda. The archive makes the false comparison seem inevitable, and so scholarship and popular culture have only presented two possibilities for understanding Ginevra within the context of Fitzgerald’s life; either ignore her completely because doing otherwise disrupts the legend of Zelda’s importance in Fitzgerald’s life or place her on the pedestal next to Zelda as either Fitzgerald’s first muse or an additional muse, a kind of muse sister-wife to Zelda. Ashley Lawson has explained that Zelda Sayre has been represented “as a symbolic being … as the quintessential muse, artist’s wife, and, eventually, doomed woman—a brilliant but mercurial talent whose public persona subsumed the identity she herself attempted to create and control.”²⁶ Ginevra, too, has become subsumed into this role, a real person who is read as a “symbolic being,” in Fitzgerald’s life.

Christine Buci-Glucksmann has argued that the female body begins to “over represent” at the exact historical moment that men begin to have anxiety over late nineteenth-century shifts in the meaning of masculinity. Modern urbanization and new technologies of machine labor, as well as new kinds of femininity, gave rise to representational art that over glorifies the female body as never before.²⁷ Mary Ann Doane names this a “compensatory gesture,” as the female body “is instantly allegorized and mythified as excess in art, literature, and philosophy.” The excessive figure is the femme fatale. Doane argues: “Indeed if the femme fatale over represents the body it is because she is attributed with a body which is itself given agency independent of consciousness. In a sense, she has power despite herself.”28 On January 29, 1915, Ginevra chastises Scott for calling her a vampire: “Mon Dieu but I’m glad—I’m very glad to hear that you have decided I didn’t kiss Reuben—and now I want you to apologize for calling me a vampire—Tres rude I should say—and please apologize in your next– !”²⁹ Scholars have made Ginevra King, like Zelda before her, into a vampiric femme fatale, but in her case, it’s a misreading of archival material. The sheer volume of her letters makes her seem excessive and her language, as a sixteen-year-old girl, appears unformed and emotional. Fitzgerald’s biographers, Mizener, Dan Piper, Andrew Turnball, and West, have drawn her as a symbolic being. The body of her letters begins to over represent who she really is and who she was to Scott, making her into the femme fatale of the archive, preserved by a broken Fitzgerald for all of eternity and a singular source for all of the new women and femme fatales he wrote.

Mythologizing Ginevra prevents her from being understood within the context of Chicago and Lake Forest and the families with whom she interacted. It also has prevented any possible understanding of Fitzgerald’s relationship to Chicago and the ways in which he understood the Chicago type that populated his life and his work. Ginevra understood that she was part of an elite group and she wanted Fitzgerald to understand as well. She provides this information immediately, by name-dropping Gordon McCormick in her first letter to Scott. She writes: “I can’t imagine what possessed Gordon McCormick to write me, as I didn’t know the gentleman even knew what I looked like.” She follows with a great idea: “Listen: why don’t you ask Gordon McCormick to let you visit him in Lake Forest next summer. I think that would be ‘simply swell.’”³⁰ In subsequent letters, Ginevra reveals that she understands that Scott sees her through an unflattering lens he places over her and all the Chicagoans she knows.

She writes on March 25, 1915:

Isn’t it funny, when I got your letter, I was talking on the telephone and so I said “Wait a minute, I’ll open this letter, so I can read while you’re talking.” And then the first words on the page were “Even now you may be having a tete-a-tete with an ‘unknown Chicagoan’ with crisp dark hair and a glittering smile.” Well you’d appreciate the coincidence. You should see Deering. He’s the darkest thing I ever set eyes on and has a glittering smile. I read him that passage of the letter, as it was so appropriate.31

The idea of the “unknown Chicagoan,” from someone outside of Chicago, amuses her and at the same time reveals that Scott sees Chicago men as swarthy and dangerous, particularly to her. While he may mean it as a joke, which is how she takes it, the passage is still offensive, and she tells Scott about the other man in order to make him jealous and convey her displeasure with the joke. She calls herself a “Chicago girl” on April 26, 1915, and reveals her pride in being from the Midwestern city.³² She tells Scott outright on May 9, 1915, “I am awfully glad to say that you do not understand my real character, as you profess to, for I would not have you know for the whole world the feelings which I have held for you since January 5th.”³³ She fights against the idea that Scott “knows” her in any personal way, but she may have been playing with him, and Ginevra acknowledged this possibility as an adult in a much later letter to Arthur Mizener she wrote in 1947: “My memory of those years (1914–1916), is poor due somewhat to the fact at this time I was definitely out for quantity not quality in beaux, and, although Scott was top man, I still wasn’t serious enough not to want plenty of other attention!”³⁴

Her letter dated five days later replies to what must have been a scathing response from Scott. She writes: “Why, it said, practically, ‘I’m sick and tired of you. You have no character I idealized you at first, perhaps, but soon found out what a big mistake I made etc. etc. –!’” She continues to resist Scott’s transformation of her into an idea: “My Heavens! It wasn’t my fault that I was idealized! Goodness only knows I don’t deserve it, and that it was too absurd to last long, but there’s nothing I’d rather do than to really know you well, which considering that I have seen you only thirteen hours in all, seems sort of hard.”³⁵ Six months later, on January 31, 1916, she is still complaining that he only sees her as a type of girl and that he won’t get to know her as an individual. She declares: “The worst of it is, that you don’t want to know me, and I do want to know you, ‘cause it’s no use having me on a pedestal if I have no business being there!”³⁶

Scott had been telling tales about her type, though, and after seeing a show in Chicago put on by the theater troupe at Princeton, she went to lunch with the group who knew Scott. She writes to him immediately on January 17: “Sam Cooper said that he imagined me a peroxide blond, of the chorus-girl type—My Lord, Scott, what had you been telling him?”37 A month later she “disput[es] one of your phrases ‘The modern girl has little intellect and no education–!!’”³⁸ She gets increasingly annoyed with his reduction of her and on August 21, 1916, she writes to him: “By the way, you said I was ‘true to type.’ For heaven sakes, what kind of type am I—It must be some type–! I’m sorry that you feel I am not natural, because I hate a person that is always acting—They seem so dull and artificial and almost always conceited.”³⁹ She gets the idea about what Fitzgerald thinks of her and perhaps this is one reason the letters begin to drop off. Ginevra’s letters can be read as an introduction to those traits that Fitzgerald would continue to draw into his case study of a Chicago woman: brashness, masculine drive, a lack of solid intellect, and frivolity.

The Medills and the McCormicks: “The Camel’s Back”

“The Camel’s Back” tells the story of Perry Parkhurst’s final wooing of the wealthy and beautiful heiress Betty Medill:

She would take well in the movies. Her father gives her three hundred a month to dress on, and she has tawny eyes and hair and feather fans of five colors. I shall also introduce her father, Cyrus Medill. Though he is to all appearances flesh and blood, he is, strange to say, commonly known in Toledo as the Aluminum Man.⁴⁰

Their family name, Medill, is the name of the long line of Medills who first bought and ran the Chicago Tribune. Joseph Medill and Edwin Cowles started the Leader in Cleveland, Ohio, and in 1854, Medill was asked to be the Chicago Tribune’s managing editor. The following year, he bought the Tribune and became a partner. Medill raised the paper to become one of the largest papers in Chicago and a national presence. He supported the Union cause during the Civil War and, leaving the paper’s operations for politics, became mayor of Chicago as a member of the “Fireproof Party” in 1871. The use of the Medill name indicates that these characters should be read as being tied up in the business of the Tribune, and with that the reviewing of books and creating of a national literature. Because the story is an early one, it expresses young Fitzgerald’s understanding of the book trade and Chicago, an idea he will return to in his later work.

Medill had three daughters, all born in the 1870s: Katherine, Eleanor, and Josephine. His daughter Katherine married Robert Sanderson McCormick, son of William Sanderson McCormick and nephew of Cyrus McCormick. The McCormicks developed the mechanical reapers their father had first created on their farm, Walnut Grove, in Virginia. After moving to Chicago because of financial issues with the farm, the McCormick brothers began the family business of producing mechanical reapers, which grew into the enormously successful and profitable International Harvest Company. The marriage bonded together one of the most commercially successful families in Chicago with a very powerful publishing and political family.

Fitzgerald’s Betty Medill’s father’s name, Cyrus Medill, also combines these two families. He represents the power of both the Chicago Tribune and the Cyrus McCormicks. Cyrus McCormick Jr., cousin of William Sanderson McCormick, was president of the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company from 1884 to 1902 and president of the merged International Harvesting Machine Company from 1884 to 1902. He was a member of the Commercial Club of Chicago and the Chicago Club. He had three children, Cyrus Hall McCormick III, Elizabeth McCormick who died in infancy in 1892, and Gordon McCormick who was born in 1894. Fitzgerald most likely named Betty Medill after Elizabeth McCormick, Fitzgerald’s friend Gordon’s younger sister.41 He knew Gordon McCormick at Princeton, a point acknowledged by Andrew Turnbull long after the chronicling of Fitzgerald’s Princeton days in his biography of Fitzgerald. Turnbull writes: “Running into a college classmate, Gordon McCormick, Fitzgerald said, ‘I’m trying a great experiment—I’m trying to break into Hollywood.’”⁴² Ginevra King’s letters suggest more of a relationship than just “a college classmate,” and she teases Scott about Gordon on January 15, 1915.⁴³

Betty Medill and her father Cyrus’s names indicate that “The Camel’s Back” should be read as yet another Lake Forest story about the type of Chicagoans represented by the Medills, the Kings, and the McCormicks, who were all residents of Lake Forest and all members of Lake Forest’s Onwentsia Club, expanded from a six-hole golf club by Leander McCormick’s donation of farmland in 1894. The first paragraph of the story sets up the idea of a type in describing Perry Parkhurst: “You have met him before—in Cleveland, Portland, St. Paul, Indianapolis, Kansas City and so forth.”44

The story can be read on one level as another rewriting of Fitzgerald’s relationship with Ginevra: “This Medill girl would marry him and she wouldn’t marry him. She was having such a good time that she hated to take such a definite step. Meanwhile, their secret engagement had got so long that it seemed as if any day it might break off of its own weight.”⁴⁵ On another level, the story articulates the hypocrisy and inherent difficulties in dealing with the Lake Forest people. The camel costume plays out the tension between the younger generation and the morality of the earlier generations who made their money before and after the Civil War in Chicago.

Cyrus McCormick was a devout Presbyterian and valued the Calvinist traits of self-denial, morality, thriftiness, and sobriety. He saw his invention of the reaper as part of a larger religious mission, to feed the hungry and the world. He took his mission seriously, becoming a principal benefactor of the Theological Seminary of the Midwest and in 1869 donating $10,000 to Dwight L. Moody to start the Young Men’s Christian Association, alongside Hemingway’s grandfather. His son Cyrus Jr. became its first president.⁴⁶ For the McCormicks, business and religion were intricately connected and business served to elevate the perceived needy to a higher religious plane. McCormick believed in prohibition. The August 1908 issue of The Western Brewer: And Journal of the Barley, Malt, and Hop Trades contains the platform of the Prohibition Party “merely as a matter of news” and the small mention that the Detroit Free Press of July 4 “published an article in which the statement is made that Mr. John D. Rockefeller, through his daughter, Mrs. McCormick of Chicago, contributes $350,000 to the work of the Anti-Saloon League.”⁴⁷ It is easy to imagine that the family Rockefeller’s daughter married into persuaded her interest in sobriety and the importance of appearing to link morality and business.

Mrs. Rockefeller-McCormick married Cyrus McCormick’s son in 1895. She built Villa Turicum, designed by Charles A. Platt, in Lake Forest and helped build up Lake Forest with this elaborate house and its extensive gardens. The elaborate house, sitting on the edge of Lake Michigan, was finished in 1912. Fitzgerald would have certainly seen it as one of the sights of Lake Forest during his visit in 1915, although the house stayed mostly unused until the owner’s divorce in 1921. The house stood as a symbol of the uniting of the two powerful families and to Edith Rockefeller’s extravagance.48 A terrible story circulated about her that during a dinner party in 1901, news arrived that Edith and Harold’s elder son, John Rockefeller McCormick, had died of scarlet fever. It was rumored that when this was whispered to her at the dinner table, she proceeded to merely nod her head and allowed the party to continue without incident. The story may have provided the seed for one of the misfortunes during “The Cut-Glass Bowl,” in that the little girl grows increasingly sick during a dinner party held right outside of Chicago. Edith Rockefeller was also very interested in Carl Jung and James Joyce, two writers Fitzgerald adored.⁴⁹

The elaborate house, at 595–655 Circle Lane, would have loomed large in Fitzgerald’s mind as it was even larger and more imposing than the one the King’s built. Percy crashes two parties that night looking for Betty Medill. One at the Tates who are connected to Chicago directly:

Mrs. Howard Tate was a Chicago Todd before she became a Toledo Tate, and the family generally affect that conscious simplicity which has begun to be the earmark of American aristocracy. The Tates have reached the stage where they talk about pigs and farms and look at you icy-eyed if you are not amused.⁵⁰

The other party was down the road at the Tallyho Club. The men “traversed on foot the single block between the Tate house and the Tallyho Club.”⁵¹ That section of Lake Forest at the time did not have straight blocks as the more Western part of Lake Forest did, and so the one block would have been a winding road connecting the houses by the lake to the Onwentsia Club where the large costume ball takes place.

Percy wears a camel costume for the ball because it was the only one left at the costume store and he bursts into both parties wearing it. He manages to wear the outfit that would have given the largest affront to the older generation, especially Cyrus McCormick, who prided themselves on their sobriety. Thomas Nast, cartoonist for Harper’s Weekly for the last quarter of the nineteenth century, gave the current symbols of an elephant for the Republican party and a donkey for the Democratic Party. At the same time, he chose the camel to represent the Prohibition Party because, like Prohibitionists generally, camels don’t drink very often, and, when they do drink, they drink only water. The camel is the only outfit left because presumably the morals of the town have changed so abruptly that none of the partygoers want to be a camel.52 Percy is stuck with the outfit, wearing the symbol of moral affront to liquor, while on a drinking binge that only gets worse over the course of the evening. Percy’s costume mocks the values that the town and its wealthy patrons cling to, while producing a younger generation that spends lavish amounts of money on excessive and vulgar parties. Even more so, Percy’s need to have the driver take up the back end of the camel demonstrates the wealthy classes’ need to have the lower classes follow their example.

The story’s end is the first use of what will be an ongoing pattern in Fitzgerald’s stories: the fake marriage or the marriage that should have happened. West, in particular, reads this trope as Fitzgerald’s continued interest in and speculation about his relationship with Ginevra. The most prominent use of this story is in The Great Gatsby where Gatsby has created a life to lure back Daisy, his first and only love. However, “The Camel’s Back” introduces the Medill girl into the mix and so all women in the formulaic story represent, on some level, an entry into the prominent Tribune family. He metaphorizes his relationship to the paper and its reviewers and, by doing so, interjects a criticism into the story about the paper’s reviewers who need to be wooed with formulaic stories filled with familiar Chicago types. When Fitzgerald writes about a marriage that should have happened, he seems to be thinking about where he could be if he had a wealthy patron of the arts to support him and buy him sure success in the pages of the Tribune.

Eleanor “Cissy” and Joseph Patterson: “May Day”

Eleanor “Cissy” Medill Patterson’s grandfather Joseph Medill was the editor-in-chief and chief owner of the Chicago Tribune. During his two-year term and with the power he gained as mayor, he created Chicago’s first public library, enforced blue laws, and reformed the police and fire departments. Cissy Patterson, born in 1881, may have been the Medill who Fitzgerald was thinking about while writing “The Camel’s Back,” as well as informing the other depictions of rich heiresses who populate his novels.

Cissy Patterson’s father’s family settled Lake Forest and Ginevra King would have known them well. Her grandfather moved his family north after the fire to relocate near the grounds of what he and a small group of Presbyterian men hoped to build: “an institution of learning of a high order in which Christian teaching would hold a central place.”53 They founded Lake Forest, Lake Forest College, and Lake Forest Academy. He, like Cyrus McCormick, was a fervent abolitionist and believed in his spiritual mission to reform the world. His son, Robert Patterson, got to know the Medill family from working on the Tribune as a young journalist. By 1876, he was romantically involved with Nellie Medill, the beautiful and wild daughter whose love of luxury and spending was already legendary in Chicago. Despite parental and familial objections, they married on January 18, 1878, at the Medill residence at 10 Park Row in Chicago.⁵⁴ Her sister Kate had already married Robert Sanderson McCormick in June 1876 to her father’s objections because he despised the politics of the McCormick family and had used his Tribune to rail against the McCormick family’s war profiteering.⁵⁵ The sisters were deeply competitive with each other, a relationship that continued through their lives.

Cissy, like Harriet Monroe’s sister, was sent East in Spring of 1896, to Miss Porter’s School for Girls, to get a proper education from a woman who believed women and men should be equally educated. After Joseph Patterson’s death in 1899, Cissy’s mother bought land in Washington, DC, on Dupont circle, where Marshall Field and Bertha and Potter Palmer, all of whom her mother knew well, wintered for the social season.⁵⁶ Cissy met the most prominent daughters of her mother’s friends during holidays and breaks from school. It is during one of those breaks that she became fast friends with seventeen-year-old Alice Roosevelt with whom she shared a sense of humor, or “detached malevolence, to use Alice’s phrase.”⁵⁷ Both girls had a “penchant for acting out,” a wicked sense of humor, and a dislike of social conventions. Both adored money, buying new fashions, and being noticed. They had a third friend, the Countess Marguerite Cassini, who kept up with their pranks and “outrageous behavior.”⁵⁸ The Washington Press quickly dubbed them “The Three Graces” in the society pages. Ginevra King’s self-dubbed debutante group, “The Big Four,” were most likely imitating the older, more infamous, “The Three Graces,” who they would have heard about from their mothers. Fitzgerald would have also been very aware of the imitation because of the sheer number of references to “The Three Graces” he would have read about in newspapers and seen in popular culture.

At this point, her uncle Robert McCormick and her aunt had become ambassador to Russia after completing a post in Vienna, where Cissy visited. In March of 1904, she visited Russia and the American papers, including the Chicago Tribune, reported at length about the “niece of the U.S. Ambassador.” The Pattersons were nervous because Count Gizycki of Russia had become increasingly interested in Cissy and he had a reputation as a “bad egg.”59 He took Cissy to Paris and showed the city to her, all the while making her family even more nervous that he was a gold digger. They were married in Washington on April 14, 1904, despite her family’s objections. A daughter was born on September 3, 1905, and was named Felicia Leonora. Cissy went with the Count to his home, a huge feudal manor in Russian Poland. Their family life did not go well. They separated and then rejoined several times, but eventually Cissy left. She kidnapped their child, hiding her in a house near London, but the Count pursued her and took the Countess, hiding her in an Austrian convent. On January 28, 1911, Cissy sued the Count in Chicago Circuit Court for a divorce. While waiting for the divorce to go through, she went home to live in Lake Forest.⁶⁰ The summer Fitzgerald visited Ginevra and Cissy’s cousin, Gordon McCormick, Cissy was away in Newport for a few months. At the time, Fitzgerald would have been aware of the scandal as well as the McCormicks simply from reading the newspapers and being aware of his friend Gordon’s family.

Cissy went to Paris in 1924 and stayed at the Ritz, where she worked on her novel Glass Houses and spent time mingling among the artists in Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’s salon, including Hemingway and Hadley, Joyce, and Man Ray. The Fitzgeralds arrived in Paris early 1925, and Scott and Zelda met Cissy for the first time.⁶¹ That previous September, Fitzgerald completed the manuscript draft of The Great Gatsby and in November of 1924, he sent the draft to Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s. He made corrections the first two weeks of January 1925, while he was in Rome before moving on to Paris. Glass Houses and The Great Gatsby came out within weeks of each other. Cissy’s novel became an instant best seller, and Fanny Butcher reviewed it well, calling it “A remarkably good first novel” that is told in a “brilliant and charming manner.”⁶² The next week, the Tribune ran an advertisement for All the Sad Young Men directly to the right of a much larger one endorsed by Butcher: Ford Maddox Ford’s No More Parades.⁶³

Cissy Patterson is one of the models for Fitzgerald’s beautiful, outrageous women from Chicago and Lake Forest, as is Ginevra King, Betty McCormick, and Edith Rockefeller. Perhaps more so because Ginevra King even modeled herself while young after the older women’s self-involvement and antics, like a teenager imitating a movie star. Patterson’s reputation and bad marriage to a man considered to be violent and a brute can easily be seen as providing some of the basis for Daisy’s marriage to Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. Cissy had numerous suitors while waiting for her divorce in Lake Forest and Washington, DC, including Freddy McLaughlin who had pursued her while she was a debutante. McLaughlin, the heir to a coffee fortune, had recently divorced and, like Cissy, was a strong equestrian and foxhunter.64 He was the best polo player at Onwentsia and in the entire Midwest and had an international reputation for being a six-goal polo player.⁶⁵ He had never recovered from the romance with Cissy, felt the two were perfectly matched, and couldn’t stand that she had so many other suitors. One night, Cissy and Count Johann Heinrich von Bernstaff were driving home from the night’s activities along a deserted back road in Lake Forest. McLaughlin jumped from his car and attacked von Bernstaff with his riding crop, chasing his rival away from Cissy.⁶⁶ No one witnessed the attack except those involved and rumors swirled the summer before Fitzgerald visited Ginevra in Lake Forest.

The story provides many of the raw elements of The Great Gatsby: the lovestruck suitor from Cissy’s debutante days, the polo player from Lake Forest, the brute with a whip, the beautiful and wild debutante, the dangerous confrontation of two entitled suitors. Fitzgerald recombines some of the story, giving the suitor, Gatsby, the gentle upper hand, and the debutante’s husband the brutish characteristics of the polo player from Lake Forest with a terrible horsewhip. He may have felt some sympathy for McLaughlin after his own experiences with Ginevra King, who married soon after their romance. Patterson published another thinly veiled novel, Fall Flight, based completely on her own life, in 1928. In it, she names her alter ego Daisy, suggesting that she too made the connection between herself and Fitzgerald’s character. Cissy Patterson’s story also provides an additional model for Fitzgerald’s Josephine stories (1928), published serially in the Saturday Evening Post. Her middle name was Josephine. He wrote the stories as he was being pressured to write a sequel to The Great Gatsby, and he returned to the Chicago material he drew from for that novel. Josephine runs away from her family, just as Patterson does, and she tries to join the artistic community in Chicago as a patron’s daughter, just as Fitzgerald witnessed Cissy doing in Paris.

In “May Day” (1922), Edith Bradin is the beautiful and long lost, rich love, whom Gordon “hadn’t met since that one romantic night at the Harrisburg Country Club just before he went to France.”67 He describes her brother, who he occasionally sees: “He’s sort of a socialistic nut. Runs a paper or something here in New York.”⁶⁸ Cissy’s brother, Joseph Patterson, worked for the Tribune as a journalist, and after having a political fight with his father who owned the paper, he resigned. He announced publicly that he was now a socialist, wrote an article for Collier’s on socialism, and began writing novels with a strong socialist perspective about social climbing and class differences. He returned to work at the Tribune by 1910 and, after his father died, took over the management of the paper. He had another dispute over how to run the paper, this time with his cousin, Robert R. McCormick. He moved to New York and founded the Daily News as a tabloid in late June, 1919. By 1925, with their dispute still in full swing, Patterson ceded full authority over the Tribune to McCormick in return for full control of the Daily News.⁶⁹

When Fitzgerald published “May Day” in The Smart Set in 1920, Medill’s novels were very well-known and his first as a declared socialist, A Little Brother of the Rich (1908), was made into a popular play in 1909 and a well-received film in 1915. Both best-selling novel and film tell the story of a poor young man, Paul, from a small town, who goes away to college and once there works to befriend the more sophisticated rich boys. The basic outline of the plot resembles those written by Fitzgerald so closely that the influence of Patterson’s popular novel on his work becomes obvious. Paul’s wealthy friends persuade him to leave his hometown fiancé, Sylvia, for a wealthy and married woman, Muriel. Her husband divorces her and Paul and Muriel marry. Sylvia’s father dies, leaving her suddenly penniless, and she takes up acting in a stock theater. Meanwhile, over the years, his wealthy school friends become increasingly unhappy as they pursue their spoiled interests and engage in decadent behaviors. When Paul discovers Muriel’s unfaithfulness, he renews his acquaintance with Sylvia, who still loves him. Muriel dies in a sudden automobile crash and the novel ends with Paul planning to propose marriage to Sylvia, after he must save her by giving a sudden performance onstage to help her career.70

The August 29, 1908, Publisher’s Weekly acknowledged the initial anonymous publication of the book by confirming that the book is now “Openly accredited to Joseph Medill Patterson, a well-known millionaire socialist of the West.” They go on to review it favorably:

The book is said to give truthful pictures of the life of the idle rich who draw their means from the overworked, underpaid poor. The realism of the book is said to be startling, but perhaps such drastic material is needed to make men pause and think of the consequences of the devotion to money, luxury, and materialism in the present reign of lawlessness.⁷¹

Fitzgerald’s friend and early mentor, H. L. Mencken, reviewed the novel in one of his first reviews for The Smart Set, in December of 1908. He remembers giving it a “kind word” in his memoir, after “blasting” Joseph Conrad for his tedious socialism, something he abhorred.⁷²

Mencken’s memory is rather inaccurate and he writes favorably of Patterson’s novel at first:

He is trying to tell the story of a dozen worthless men and a dozen worse women, and he does it in straightforward, ingenuous manner, without too great a stretching of probability and without too finicky a restraint. If it be urged that his people are not typical of New York society, it may be answered quite justly that he makes no such claim for them.⁷³

Mencken, then, uses the review to write his first formulaic and extended diatribe against socialist writing and attacks Patterson right along with Conrad. He writes:

Mr. Patterson’s purpose, of course, is to demonstrate the demoralizing influence of money. To this thesis two objections may be offered, the first being that it is admitted by all, and so needs no demonstration, and the second being that it is not true. In his ready acceptance of its verity lies the proof of his Socialistic tendencies, for Socialism, when all is said and done, is nothing more than the theory that the slave is always more virtuous than his master. In other words, the Socialists hold that the slave’s yearning to rise is, in some mysterious and recondite way, more pleasing to a just God than the master’s yearning to stay up, and that this superiority in yearning breeds general superiority in all other ways.⁷⁴

Mencken’s ideas will be more clearly articulated in his later 1926 Notes on Democracy and result in much later praise of Ayn Rand and a well-articulated dislike of the middle to lower classes. In the review of Patterson and Conrad, he explains why he sees the socialist’s elevation of the lower classes into virtuous creatures as romantic foolishness. Instead, Mencken prefers his art to be realistic, by which he means a reflection of how he sees the world as predetermined and rough. Because A Little Brother of the Rich suggests that societal classes may be fluid and presents the rich as amoral and decadent, he doesn’t see anything good about the point of Patterson’s novel. Mencken roots his aesthetics in his reading of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, where great tragedies are about a man’s inner morals in direct conflict with the cultural morals, values, and superstitions. Mencken wants the American novel to be fully developed and for him that means portraying the tragic conflicts created and promulgated by modern society. He disparages any current literature or art, which fails at obtaining this tragic seriousness and instead, in his view, stays trapped in reinscribing the feminine melodramas of the late nineteenth century. Dreiser, for Mencken, was the best at this kind of literature. His co-editor criticized the play based on The Little Brother of the Rich novel as too indulgent and melodramatic. George Jean Nathan writes, it “was heralded as a satire on society.” Then continues, “You know what that means—idle rich, monkey dinners, ‘affairs,’ divorces and all that sort of rot” (146).75 When Mencken reviews Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in 1925, he mocks it as melodrama, in remarkably similar terms: “This clown Fitzgerald rushes to his death in nine short chapters. The other performers in the Totentons are of a like, or even worse, quality.”⁷⁶

Ronald Berman argues that Fitzgerald’s “May Day,” written and published while Fitzgerald thought very much of Mencken’s writing and ideas, illustrates his rejection of Mencken’s categories of people, and that “personality was too complex to be reduced to formal categories like aristocrats, boobs, and mob.”⁷⁷ Berman says that Fitzgerald “asserted the values of experience, convinced that individuals learned empirically.”⁷⁸ “May Day,” Berman shows, is about the writer pulling away from his editor by moving away from fixed types into a more complicated world made up of personalities that shift and change. He states, “The rich in this story are Mencken’s plutocrats. Fitzgerald places them in exemplary situations in which money, class, and style are the evident issues. But the difference is everything. When we see the young and rich in this story thinking about themselves, they are more complex, and they carry more weight than either Mencken or The Saturday Evening Post wanted.”79 Fitzgerald’s characters become simply too complex for Mencken who fixes the world in small categories and boxes.

“May Day” is Fitzgerald’s first attempt to incorporate the Chicago realism of Dreiser with the more European and modern symbolism that Mencken hated. The story begins with a Dreiseresque overview of the city and declares, “So during all this time there were many adventures that happened in the great city, and of these, several—or perhaps one—are here set down.”⁸⁰ Peter Himmel even expresses an attempt to work out the “permeating symbolism” of the moment. The stories’ structure, with three interlocking scenes, suggests that the juxtaposition of the stories is the point. The story places the different classes next to each other and tries to make sense of how the everyday interactions of the rich can be so filled with slights, rudeness, and injustices to the lower classes, while they simultaneously claim to want to raise up the lower classes by supporting and funding Chicago’s higher life. The story also reveals that the money to fund these endeavors is made on the broken backs of those who will then be supposedly lifted up by their profits. Fitzgerald shows these fundamental contradictions in Chicagoans, suggesting that these are the traits of the Chicago upper classes, who behave as nowhere else.

The story would have been legible to Chicago readers as a reworking of the McCormick/Medill/Patterson family’s past and present. The title is usually read as a reference to the uprising and riot in 1919, Toledo. But, May Day has become the International Day honoring workers because of the May 4 labor protest that came about after several months of protest by workers across Chicago. The title itself suggests that the story may have a far stronger connection to Chicago and to the McCormick family than it first appears. May Day commemorates the Haymarket protests and the later international protests in October 1884 that resulted in a standardized eight-hour workday for workers. The story, then, is on one level a remembrance of the McCormick’s involvement in the Haymarket Affair, something that is often left out, and surely would have been ignored by Fitzgerald’s generation. The protagonist’s name, Gordon, replicates Fitzgerald’s Princeton friend, Gordon McCormick, who would have been his first introduction to the family. A cursory reading of the story as a Chicago story would suggest that Gordon, the artist, must have something to do with the current riots and violence in the story. However, Fitzgerald draws from the original dislike between the Pattersons and the McCormicks to cast his characters. Edith, Gordon’s lost love, visits her brother Henry at his socialist newspaper’s office. The name Edith evokes Edith Rockefeller and her relationship to her brother suggests strongly that they are based on Cissy and Joseph Medill Patterson.

The three-part structure of the story reveals Fitzgerald working against the idea of a hierarchical social structure that forms the basis of Chicago realism and heralded by Mencken. The story places the story of Edith Bradin and her brother, based on Cissy and Joseph Patterson, next to the story of “the artist,” Gordon Sterritt, and the blackmailing girl, “Jewel Hudson.” The separation of the brother and sister, and later Philip Dean, from Gordon Sterritt in the narrative serves to highlight the distance between the upper classes and those of the artist classes. However, Gordon, like the main character in A Little Brother of the Rich, went to college with Philip Dean and so is a little brother, a tag-along to the rich who populate the story. Each story intermixes with the other and so the strong separations between the characters and their classes become so lost as to become almost meaningless and unintelligible, just as “The Camel’s Back” ends with the intermixing of social classes through trickery.

Hemingway deeply disliked Fitzgerald’s experimental methods of writing a new American modernism based on mixture and possibilities. On May 28, 1934, Ernest Hemingway wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald a letter from his house in Key West in order to give Fitzgerald his opinion of the newly published novel Tender Is the Night. He writes:

I liked it and I didn’t like it. It started off with that marvelous description of Sara and Gerald … Then you started fooling with them, making them comes [sic] from other things they didn’t come from, changing them into other people and you can’t do that Scott. If you take real people and write about them you cannot give them other parents than they have (they are made by their parents and what happens to them) you cannot make them do anything they would not do. … Invention is the finest thing but you can not invent anything that would not actually happen.81

Because Hemingway knew Zelda, Pauline, Hadley, Sara, and Gerald, and was in Paris while the five interacted, Hemingway considered himself in a unique position to criticize the novel. His specific complaint is about how Fitzgerald combined the backgrounds, characters, and behaviors of the people both writers knew well, to create characters who are mixtures of real people. The result, for Hemingway, is a fake and unreal novel and his shit detector was ringing loudly. Hemingway complains about Fitzgerald’s process: “Goddamn it you took liberties with peoples pasts and futures that produced not people but damned marvelously faked case histories.”82 He goes so far as to call the figures fake and indicates that the novel’s plots could not possibly happen the way Fitzgerald writes them.

He tells Fitzgerald that he is “so lousy with talent” and tells him to “write and write truly no matter who or what it hurts but don’t make these silly compromises.”⁸³ The compromises, for Hemingway, are Fitzgerald’s liberties with an honest and truthful realism that exposes the dark corners of modernism. The more Fitzgerald blends pieces of people’s histories together, the more he thinks Fitzgerald moves away from a realistic portrayal of the way people are in 1920s Paris and the more he thinks his writing is just a bad business. For Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s move away from what he sees as realism would be the greatest affront. But Fitzgerald will engage with modernism, rather than Chicago realism, and he believes that writing about the mixing of types, rather than reproducing the actual character, allows more insight into individual natures. He will never again write what Hemingway does: a pure “document novel.”⁸⁴ He writes to Thomas Boyd on March 19, 1923, “I have decided to be a pure artist and experiment in form + emotion. I’m sure I can do it much better than Anderson.”⁸⁵

However, Fitzgerald never gave up American realism entirely, as Hemingway fears. In This Side of Paradise (1920), Tom and Avery have a discussion about American writers that imitates a similar passage about Irish literature in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1915). Tom reads a satirical free verse poem listing current American writers, including the Chicagoans Carl Sandburg and Louis Untermeyer and the poet Eunice Tietjens who helped Harriet Monroe run Poetry magazine. The poem’s last lines skewer the writers as sentimental, maudlin, childish, and completely out-of-date: “Sinuous, mauve-colored names/in the Juvenilia/of my collected editions.”⁸⁶ However, Amory thinks otherwise about a handful of American writers: “He enjoyed both Vachel Lindsay and Booth Tarkington, and admired the conscientious if slender artistry of Edgar Lee Masters.”⁸⁷ Armory speaks for Fitzgerald here, and his tastes demonstrate that even at this early stage, Fitzgerald found things to admire in American realism. Hemingway doesn’t see this in Fitzgerald’s work and considers his work fake and unreal, the opposite of the realistic and truthful work Hemingway strives to produce. Hemingway will not recognize Fitzgerald’s methods of drawing reality from case studies. Armory complains about the kind of story Hemingway keeps telling and thinks is true: “I wish American novelists would give up trying to make business romantically interesting. Nobody wants to read about it, unless it’s crooked business.”88 Perhaps Hemingway refuses to legitimize Fitzgerald’s experiments with realism because Hemingway has patterned himself after one of those people Fitzgerald keeps writing about: the Chicago businessman. Fitzgerald’s methods, perhaps, reveal too much truth about Hemingway’s own psyche for his taste and so he must discredit the entire experiment.

Chicago, then, appears in Fitzgerald’s work directly by name and in the background as a marker as to where certain characters originate from, allowing a few to be categorized immediately as a Chicago type: rich, loud, clannish, and self-centered. But more often, Fitzgerald combined the backgrounds, histories, and mannerisms of various Chicagoans he knew well and who would also be very recognizable to a Midwestern reader. These characters, created out of parts of actual Chicagoans, become representative of Chicago types. Just as Hemingway despised Fitzgerald’s blending of the Paris crowd, so too he despises Fitzgerald’s blending of the Chicago crowd, which he also recognized in Fitzgerald’s work. Because actual Chicagoans can be spotted as the models for many characters in Fitzgerald’s work, it becomes clear how much time and effort Fitzgerald spent constructing and refining the Chicago type. His work should not be read as just about rich girls and boys and their ways of interacting, creating, and destroying, but about Chicago’s rich boys and girls whose grandparents were the titans of industry.

Chicago plots: Among the Ash Heaps and the Millionaires

Fitzgerald wrote “The Cut-Glass Bowl” in October of 1919 and published it in the May 1920 issue of Scribner’s. In the story, Evelyn tells Carleton Canby that she will marry Harold Piper because his prospects are much better than Carleton’s. She becomes the first of a long line of Fitzgerald female characters to choose the rich boy over the poor boy. Carleton replies immediately that he will give her a present that’s “as hard as you are and as beautiful and empty to see through.” A very large crystal glass bowl arrives some time later and “of course it’s beautiful.”89 The bowl turns out to haunt Evelyn because it will always be at the center of domestic calamity and misfortune throughout her life: her husband’s fortunes reverse, her daughter cuts herself on it and gets blood poisoning necessitating amputation, and it even holds the letter from the US military that contains the notice of her son’s death at war. The story ends with Evelyn’s life destroyed, even her beauty wanes and she must live with the knowledge that her wrong choice in men, choosing wealth over Carleton, resulted in all of the ruin. The story has a particularly bitter plot, even for Fitzgerald.

Chicago appears at the story’s midpoint, for seemingly no plot purpose other than to mark the location of the story, and this reveals that the location is very significant in the story and for Fitzgerald.⁹⁰ Evelyn’s fateful dedication of herself to Harold through marriage happens in 1892, the same year the dedication ceremonies for the World’s Columbian Exhibition were held on October 21, suggesting a metaphorical connection between her marriage and the Columbian Exhibition. The World’s Fair used the idea of marriage to describe the many unions made during the Fair across business, the arts, science, and in people’s personal lives. It was an attempt to make business romantically interesting. President Cleveland delivered the Opening Address at the Fair and concluded the speech by declaring:

Let us hold fast to the meaning which underlies this ceremony, and let us not lose the impressiveness of this moment. As by a touch the machinery that gives life to this vast Exposition is now set in motion, so at the same instant let our hopes and aspirations awaken forces which in all time to come shall influence the welfare the dignity, and the freedom of mankind.⁹¹

He then pressed a gold and ivory button, setting the machinery of the Fair in motion. His words and action suggest that the Fair is a marriage of many exciting possibilities that will bring forth unseen goodness and hopes in the years ahead. The Fair had advertised as a show of “science and progress” in Chicago and at the Fair, the electrical giants Tesla and Westinghouse announced their marriage in a gimmicky show. The top of the Fair’s newly built showstopper, the Ferris wheel, was the site of many marriage proposals. The story, then, is an allegory about the metaphorical marriages made at the Fair and suggests that they all, and by extension Chicago, made a terrible and doomed decision that day, just as Evelyn did.

Fitzgerald begins the story with a play on the opening passages in Henry Blake Fuller’s The Cliff-Dwellers: “There was a rough stone age and a smooth stone age and a bronze age, and many years afterward a cut glass age.”92 Where Fuller begins his novel with an extended conceit that compares newly built skyscrapers of Chicago to high Southwestern canyon walls and the city’s streets to the bottom of the canyons, Fitzgerald ties the current wedding gift giving age to the older and past eras of stone and bronze. Both passages have the same effect: to place the modern industrial age against an older and more enduring age. Fitzgerald, like Fuller, uses the comparison to signal ironic decay, where a once illustrious people, the Anasazi or the upper classes, are in the process of physical and moral collapse. Fuller wrote the novel as a critical response to what he saw as the excessive boosterism of the cliff dweller class to bring the Fair to Chicago. The haunted cut-glass bowl also causes calamity and decay because of its sheer size. It sticks out too far from the sideboard, causing Evelyn’s little girl to cut her hand and her husband to over drink at an important dinner party. Fitzgerald’s allusion signals that he wishes the reader to see him taking this same position with regards to the Fair and his characters.

Fitzgerald will use the popular stories of doomed romance and failed marriages to think about Chicago, the fire, and the Columbian Exhibition in most of his important work. In June of 1922, Fitzgerald wrote to his editor Max Perkins at Scribner’s about the next book he will write: “Its locale will be the middle west and New York of 1885 I think.”⁹³ He updated the time period by the time he wrote the first drafts of what would become The Great Gatsby, but his working title and major metaphors indicate that he still thought of the novel as a Chicago novel in the years between the fire and the Columbian Exhibition. The title, Among the Ash Heaps and the Millionaires, recalls the burnt city of Chicago and the wealthy industrialist families who threw themselves and their fortunes into rebuilding Chicago into their image. The description of the valley of the ashes in the final version of the novel evokes imagistically Chicago after the fire: “This is a valley of the ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens, where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.”94 The ashes cover the town completely, as if what was wood had turned to ash. Fitzgerald mimics Fuller’s opening conceit in The Cliff-Dwellers, again, where Fuller transposes the urban environment into a Southwest canyon. Here, the town becomes an ash heap, a metaphor for Chicago’s urban decay which forms the ideological center of The Great Gatsby and The Cliff-Dwellers.

Fitzgerald borrows from Fuller again, by indicating that the four main characters with inherited money, Tom, Daisy, Jordan, and Nick, sit at the top of their perches immoral and decaying. They will be the end of their illustrious family lines that started with their great grandfathers and grandfathers who moved to Chicago and then rebuilt Chicago after the fire. The characters have to keep passing through the valley of the ashes to get to New York, demonstrating how each character must keep passing through Chicago history metaphorically to get to wherever they will end up. Each character must contend with their own histories, their family’s history in Chicago, and their own place at the end of the lineage. Fitzgerald gives many clues that these characters no longer possess the skills their grandfathers had in constructing and participating in financial, cultural, and social uplift. When Nick first encounters Daisy and Jordan, “Their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in a short flight around the house.”⁹⁵ Three generations of their families lifted the young women to where they now sit and Nick only sees the results, not the flight itself. Nick notices that Gatsby learned to imitate the posture: “He was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly America—that comes, I suppose, with the absence of lifting work or rigid sitting in sporadic games.”⁹⁶ He imitates the best show he knows and Nick tells him his house “looks like the world’s fair.”⁹⁷ The abandonment of boosterism and a belief in the higher life allows the young upper classes a new posture that is wholly American and results in a “formless grace.”⁹⁸

Julia Kristeva argues in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection that “it is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. The traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscience, the shameless rapists, the killer who claims he is a savior.”⁹⁹ The abject that disturbs identity is not easily detected because a “good” liar or a well-intentioned criminal slips through the safety nets that have been cast to catch monstrous creatures. The truly abject does not announce it. Because Gatsby plays confidence tricks and games on the sometimes trusting and sometimes complicitous descendants of the nineteenth-century robber barons, he draws attention to the horror of how the money was really made in the first place. Fitzgerald’s novel examines the criminal who looks just like a rich Chicagoan and provides an uncanny mirror to the monstrous behavior of the very careless and very idle rich.

The novel also repeats the plot Fitzgerald first uses in “The Cut-Glass Bowl” and returned to in “Winter Dreams,” where a woman made the wrong choice in marriage and dooms herself and those around her to terrible misfortune. The novel, too, is an allegory about the metaphorical marriages made at the Fair by the characters’ grandparents and Fitzgerald doesn’t waver in his belief they all, and by extension Chicago, made a terrible and doomed decision that day. Mary A. McKay has noticed that Nick highlights the female characters lack of clear “definition.” She points out that Nick “sees them as creatures blurred by the pointless round of parties and vacuous relationships. Myrtle’s sister, Catherine, has ‘a blurred air to her face’ (Gatsby 34); and all the women at Gatsby’s parties look alike.”100 The women all represent beauty and their marriages to businessmen and scientists replicate one of the major themes of the Columbian Exhibition that promised the marriage of business and art. Daisy and Tom represent the worst possible pairing of careless, indifferent beauty with all of the worst characteristics of the Chicago business world: insularity, racism, and a lack of curiosity about the world. The story then becomes a critique of the descendants of the Chicago business world that Fuller writes about and Cather describes at length in The Song of the Lark. This may be one reason why Fitzgerald sent her the first short draft of the novel because he knew she would understand his allegorization of the Chicago business and art world.

In September of 1926, Hemingway teases Fitzgerald about the title of his next novel. He writes, “Have a swell hunch for a new novel. I’m calling it the World’s Fair. You’ll like the title.”¹⁰¹ Fitzgerald had just started working on his new novel about a Chicago girl and her psychiatrist and the intertangled love affair between the two of them. He was calling it The World’s Fair, echoing Nick’s description of Gatsby’s house in the earlier novel. The repetition shows that Fitzgerald was still thinking about the doomed marriage of art and business at the Fair and that the plot of Tender Is the Night reflects his ongoing concern that flashiness so easily woos beauty away from art. The plot, once again, replicates that of A Little Brother of the Rich, in that Dick Diver winds up pining for the girl he never should have left, who is now a big Hollywood star.

Fitzgerald reconfigures the models, provided by Joyce, Dreiser, James, Fuller, and Howells, to map Chicago and the Midwest, but he limits his maps to only one social strata. Fitzgerald keeps telling his own version of Portrait of the Artist, again and again, to make sense of his own origin story which simply does not make sense to him against the current popular culture ideas about Chicago’s underworld or Mencken’s declarations about Chicago literature. In Joyce, the young Steven Daedalus must make sense of the corrupt world he lives in, where the church does the work of the colonizer England, and the politicians are espousing the interests of the rich and the church. Fitzgerald must make sense of Chicago, where the interests of rich boys and rich girls rule the court system and church. Fitzgerald wanted to sell books and, simultaneously, be taken seriously as a modernist. The Chicago references, then, can be read as signposts that reveal his and all modern American writers’ struggle over style: whether to write the easily published and profitable Chicago realism that would make writing useful and utilitarian, or the less profitable, but European, high modernist symbolism.