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BOOK REVIEW By RICHARD J. SHEREIKIS Chicago in Charles Bowden and Lew Kreinberg. Street Signs Chicago, Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1981, 198 pp. $12.95 SO YOU want to know about Chicago? You want to know what it's really like, that old hog butcher, tool maker and big-shouldered player with the railroads and the nation's freight handler? Especially now, since the stockyards are dead and the factories are moving where it's warmer and the railroads are moving too, only more slowly and less often all the time. What has happened to Carl Sandburg's tall bold slugger? Well, it depends on whose word you want to take. Read the special January issue of Chicago magazine, devoted to "The Best of Chicago," and the city will seem like Babe Ruth and Henry Aaron put together, full of high fashion and cute restaurants and quaint and flourishing ethnic neighborhoods. Read a book called Street Signs Chicago by Charles Bowden and Lew Kreinberg, and you'll figure it's more like Lou Novikoff, the famous old potential slugger for the Cubs, who used to promise much but deliver little once the race began. Read Saul Bellow's latest, The Dean's December, and you'll find a bloated but diminished hero, Muhammad Ali fighting time and excess, stumbling toward self-destruction. And all of them, of course, may be true. If you make $150,000 or so a year, then the city of Chicago magazine can be yours. You can live in the condos they advertise, you can eat in the restaurants they plug, you can buy the $210 pair of Calvin Klein trousers that Saks Fifth Avenue is pushing, and you can take a weekend at the Ritz-Carlton when all those other things get stale. If you can afford it, the city is, I guess, a grand slam, and you can revel in the glittering fantasies of Chicago.
If your resources are more limited, however, you might find the Street Signs scorecard more accurate and realistic. It records a lot of strike outs, and its subtitle gives you some idea of its tone and theme: Neighborhood and other Illusions of Big-City Life. It is to the explosion of those illusions that Bowden and Kreinberg devote themselves in these feisty and salty pages. They blend anecdotes and vignettes about neighborhood life with snatches of history (from Marquette and Joliet to Jane Byrne, Aid. Ed Vrdolyak and Deep Tunnel), and spice it with some dashes of invective about how Chicago was never meant for people, only for profit. There's a kind of narrative thread in it, centered on Mike's saloon, "which hunkers down at 16th and Halsted in Pilsen." Mike and his mostly Mexican customers fade in and out of the story, helping the authors hammer home the "four things to remember" which are the nails in the coffin of illusions they construct. The first thing to remember, they tell us, is that "the city of neighborhoods is not about neighborhoods" — a rejection of Chicago's reputation as a collection of charming little cultural enclaves where exotic odors waft quaint and curious accents across the barriers of prejudice and racism. Wrong, say Bowden and Kreinberg. Sure Pilsen is Mexican now, and Mike is growing chilies, tomatoes, tomatillos, bell peppers, beans and corn on the patch of ground next to his saloon. But it used to be Bohemian (that's how it got its name, of course). And like the Polish and Greeks and Lithuanians and all the city's many ethnic groups, people like their neighborhood. As Mike Royko points out in Boss, they "stayed in their own neighborhood, loving it, enjoying it, enjoying the closeness, the friendliness, the familiarity, and trying to save enough money to move out." Which they did, so Mike the saloon keeper and his people could move in and start to save enough to move out. (There may be exceptions to these migratory patterns, but they only prove the rule, I suspect. I cannot think of anyone in my high school class in Chicago whose children have gone to the same school as their parents, for example.) This mobility and transciency, say Bowden and Kreinberg, is quite different from the notion of the stable European village, which "was a place where your ancestors were buried and where you would be buried and you; children would be buried. You lived in their house, you sat in their chairs. You died in the same bed that you were conceived in." But that isn't true in Chicago (nor in any other American industrial city, for that matter) because the real reasons for Chicago's growth were commercial, not communal: 10/May 1982/Illinois Issues Chicago is a city of factories, railroads converging on the bog, bankers counting the take, steel, gadgets, profit and loss. Neighborhoods come so jar down this list that they are off the page. Nobody came to Chicago to found a neighborhood or to save the lake shore for swell parks. Nobody came for the weather. People talk of neighborhoods because they offer a sense of personal boundaries in the miles of city. 
But the neighborhoods, the old neighborhoods, are not the tail that wags the dog. They are just located on the ass end of this dog. The choice was there from the start. Father Marquette, the priest, and Louis Joliet, the incipient developer, came together first to Chi-ca-gou, the swamp on the shore of the lake. Would it be saving souls or havesting furs? Either way, the authors tell us, Chicago was perfect, ". . .its geographic power. . .inherent whether one worshipped God or Mammon." God, inevitably, got edged at the start and Chicago became a Mecca for the tough old-timers who initiated their sons into the ways of the city: "[Chicago is] the place where things get made, not some goddam New York full of fag magazines and people that sell and never make anything at all. Chicago pounds, hammers, hacks, cuts, slaughters, forges, bangs, machines, wires, welds, gouges, stacks, shoves, ships. Makes. And if you can't make it here, you can't make it. Period."
But that, say the authors, is another illusion. The second thing to remember is, "The city that worked is losing the work." The kind of unskilled labor required to hack, hammer, cut and bang are no longer much wanted, and "the city that worked is increasingly the city that counts. The jobs which beckoned healthy animals have disappeared into machines or left town for lower taxes, cheaper wages, more sunshine." And the guys at Mike's can tell you about that, too: "The hell with the statistics tumbling into the mayor's office [compiled by economists to prove that "everybody's better off than their grandfather"]. If you are poor and dark and do not speak English, if you are ignorant and have little to offer but strength and grit, you are in trouble." We must remember that, the authors tell us. And we must remember the third thing, too: "The city with the past forgets its past." Because the people move through the neighborhoods, they have no history. The guys in Mike's know nothing about the Battle of the Viaduct that took place almost at the tavern's door. On July 25, 1877, policemen and soldiers (some of them pulled from the Indian wars) clubbed and shot strikers and their sympathizers. One dead and nine wounded in the name of keeping the peace and breaking the strike. The guys at Mike's never heard of it, and the city has forgotten, too. A redesigned Chicago And so Chicago, with no memory, no stable community, and less work, redesigns itself, building and promoting Dearborn Place and other chic developments and even threatening to gentrify Pilsen. They want to take over the abandoned Peter Schoehofen Brewing Company and turn it into a "mixed media center," which scares the hell out of Mike and his customers: "They feared that the pile of bricks would metamorphose into studios and apartments for artists. A cafe with French bread and queer cheeses might pop up next to a bodega, or, God forbid, a fern bar." Mike and the guys know that, as the authors put it, "Mixed media centers [are] not notorious for employing masses of Mexicans." So some of those Mexicans and some of the leftover Bohemians attend meetings, trying to keep out those who will drive up rents and drive out the people with the swarthy skin or funny names. All in the name of renewal or rebirth or some such thing as temporary as the last "in" neighborhood. Which leads to the last thing to remember: "The city being redesigned complements a future that is doomed." _____________________________ Father Marquette, the _____________________________ Now all is not despair in Street Signs. There's some kind of faint hope near the end, in a chapter named, imperatively, "Start," in which the authors imply that maybe we can turn it around by thinking smaller and more reasonably. You'll have to read it yourself to see what they mean. The real core of the book is compressed into this self-description rather early on: This book looks into these points [the four "things to remember"], past, present, and future. Its pages are stuffed with questions. Did Chicago ever really work for the men, women and children who lived in it? Can its growth and problems be understood without a close look at the flow of resources through its commercial arteries? In an era where cheap abundant resources decline, what lies in store for the older industrial cities as well as for the newer sunbelt boom-towns? And the answers seem to be, in order: No, No, and Little or Nothing. May 1982/Illinois Issues/11 Now if that sort of chord is too harmonious for you, you will appreciate Saul Bellow's new novel, The Dean's December. Here we have the brutal Chicago that Sandburg acknowledges ("And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again. And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger"), but revels in defiantly ("Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.") In Bellow's work the brutality is also there, but not the acceptance, and the city emerges as an exemplar of the sorry human condition over the last quarter of the 20th — and maybe the last — century. It's a bitter but powerful description of a city and a civilization that appear to be terminally ill. In some ways, this is not a "Chicago" novel at all. Most of it (all but about 24 of its 312 pages) takes place in Bucharest, Rurhania, first of all. And Bellow, serious artist, is grappling with more profound questions than whether or not Chicago works. The bigger and deeper and darker questions are paramount, of course, but the novel also gives a sense of the city that squares with the more facile analysis in Street Signs. It's told from the perspective of Albert Corde, dean of students at a Chicago college, who has come with his wife Minna to Bucharest to await his mother-in-law's death. She dies just before Christmas, and Corde must use petty bribes and deceptions just to get his wife a visit with the old lady before the end. The bureaucratic tangle of Bucharest is rendered in all its drab and demeaning dullness, a convincing portrait of process running rampant over basic human decencies. 
But Chicago appears in some guise on nearly every page. Corde is haunted by it every time he pauses from his skirmishes with spies and minor officials. He has left behind a messy murder case, for one thing, in which he helped bring to trial a black couple who are accused of killing a white student at his college. The defense lawyer is Max Detillion, a sleazy hack who is also Corde's cousin. Detillion is vindictive toward Corde over old financial dealings and does all he can to make the dean look bad in the press. Corde's nephew Mason is a spoiled, whining radical who charges his uncle with racism and threatens witnesses, including the dead man's wife. A childhood friend, Dewey Spangler, now a famous syndicated columnist, is in Bucharest to interview officials, and he meets with Corde to talk about old times. But most important, Corde is haunted by a series of articles on Chicago which he has written for Harper's magazine. They are passionate pieces, designed to bare the soul of the city he'd returned to as an academic after a career as a journalist, and excerpts and summaries of those articles are sprinkled throughout the novel, a soiled backdrop to the dreary and demoralizing European action. Corde has touched an incredible number of bases and even more nerves in his two-part Harper's series. According to the references to and passages from the articles, he's examined Deep Tunnel, County Hospital, the criminal justice system in general and several cases in particular; he's conducted extensive interviews with lawyers and old Lake View High School buddies, and he's even written some sketches of obnoxious types he encounters at his club. (Does Harper's have no length limitations, one wonders?) The city that emerges is a microcosm of American urban life, less dull and oppressive than Bucharest, but also more savage and terrifying. The courtrooms at Harrison and Kedzie tell a vivid tale of "whirling lives," without direction or meaning, the kinds of lives that don't get into Chicago magazine: Called up by the court clerk, groups of defendents and lawyers formed and dissolved all day long from endless dockets — dope pushers, gun toters (everybody had a gun), child molesters, shoplifters, smackheads, purse snatchers, muggers, rapists, arsonists, wife beaters, car thieves, pimps bailing out their whores. People were all dressed up. Their glad rags were seldom clean. . . . They won dashikis, ponchos, cloaks, African amulets, rings and beads — symbolic ornaments symbolizing nothing.... For all this gaiety of color, the gloom was very deep. No one seemed able to explain what he had done, who was. It was all: "You brought us here, you tell us who we are, and what you want with us. " Where did this gun come from? It was lying on a shelf. Where? In a burned-out abandoned house where somebody was selling liquor on a plank counter. How did you come to be there? I dunno. Another Ilium? 12/May 1982/Illinois Issues In The Dean's December, Chicago is a city of the dead and the dying, all of them seemingly damned. It's less a jungle — although it breeds La Salle Street legal predators — than a garbage heap that reeks of wasted lives and rotting hopes. "Leave Darwin out of this," says Corde. It's a place that won't fall nobly and tragically, like Troy, but will more likely sink ignominiously into the Tunnel which may in fact be eroding the foundations of its skyscrapers. The columnist Spangler is struck by this as he discusses Corde's article: "And all those tons of excrement, stunning to the imagination. It won't be the face of Helen that topples those great towers, it'll be you-know-what, and that's the difference between Chicago and Ilium." Well, there's more, too, and little of it flattering or hopeful as it relates to Chicago. Some people have answers, of course. In a conversation with a public defender, Corde has explored some parts of the legal and criminal underbelly. Corde refers to a recent article in which 50 prominent Chicagoans ("lawyers,. . .architects,. . .the owner of a ball club; also, business executives, advertising men, journalists and TV commentators, musicians, artistic directors, publishers, city planners, urbanologists, a famous linebacker, merchandising big shots, et cetera.") were asked what was needed to make the city "more exciting and dynamic" Corde summarizes the results: ___________________________________ In The Dean's December, ___________________________________ Well, now, some said we needed outdoor cafes like Paris or Venice, and others that we should have developments like Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco or Faneuil Hall in Boston. One wanted a gambling casino atop the Hancock Building; another that the banks of the Chicago River should be handsomely laid out. Or that there should be cultural meeting places; or more offbeat dining places, or discos. A twenty-four-hour deli. A better shake for the handicapped, especially those who use wheelchairs. The cosmetic cures proposed by "interior decorators," as the public defender says. And Corde despairs: "But no one mentioned the terror. About the terrible wildness and dread in this huge place — nothing. About drugs, about guns. . . ." The 'pleasure society' That's the Chicago that Corde has portrayed, full of those "whirling souls" like his own, where Great Danes get lavish birthday parties in Lake Shore condominiums and everyone looks for a "direct material cause" for problems that originate in the darkest crannies of the human soul. It's more than Chicago that Bellow explores, of course, but the city is a metaphor for the "pleasure society" of the West that stands in stark but strangely ambivalent contrast with the oppressive tangles of Bucharest. And if, as has been said, Chicago is "the most American of American cities," we all have much to learn and fear, as Bellows shows most powerfully. So there they are, recent portraits of Illinois' greatest unnatural resource. You have the picture of Mike and his Pilsen neighborhood that Bowden and Kreinberg give you in Street Signs Chicago. The guys at Mike's are evidence that the old illusions about the city simply won't hold up against the tentacles of decay and greed and cruel mismanagement that threaten to strangle the city. You have Bellow's penetrating picture of Chicago as metaphor for the decadence of the West and the darkness of the human condition. In both books, you get more of the texture of the city, its feel and sound and smell, than you could in 1,000 pages of charts and graphs and other lifeless social scientific indecencies. Bellow's, especially, demonstrates the value of the artist in comprehending the essence of a place and communicating that essence to an audience. It demonstrates once again the value of the arts in showing us some things about ourselves that we may not by ourselves identify, much less accept. And both books, too, will melt the sugar coating off the merely chic Chicago that emerges from the polished pages of glossy magazines. □ Richard J. Shereikis is associate professor of literature at Sangamon State University. He grew up on the south side of Chicago. May 1982/Illinois Issues/13 |
