Book Reviews

By JAMES HURT

Second City voodoo

Richard Lindberg. Chicago Ragtime: Another Look at Chicago, 1880-1920. South Bend. Ind.: Icarus Press, 1985, Pp. xv + 282. $17.65.

Pat Colander. Hugh Hefner's First Funeral and Other True Tales of Love and Death in Chicago. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1985. Pp. 172. $8.95.

WHY do Chicagoans take such delight in telling you what a terrible city Chicago is? They seem positively to relish telling you about the White Sox throwing the World Series in 1919, about the baroque excesses of the Daley years, about the 1968 Democratic Convention, even about John Wayne Gacy.

Pat Colander considers this question in the introduction to Hugh Hefner's First Funeral and Other True Tales of Love and Death in Chicago. She concludes that it has something to do with the "Second City voodoo"; if you can't be the best, the next best thing is to be the worst. "Maybe our forefathers," Colander writes, "knew that striving for real achievement was too painful and lengthy a process. Better to grab the berth no one wanted: the most unholy climate, the rankest charlatans, the greediest thieves, the most vicious gangsters, most blatant liars, and most amateurish culture.''

Both Hugh Hefner's First Funeral and Richard Lindberg's Chicago Ragtime continue this Chicago tradition, Both belong to the genre of Awful Tales About Chicago (to which most Chicago books belong, from William T. Stead's If Christ Came to Chicago to Saul Bellow's The Dean's December). But there the similarity ends.

Lindberg would like to recapture the quality of Chicago life at the turn of the century. People were different then, he thinks, because "Chicago was quite a different place." But when he collects material to illustrate that difference, it is to the violent, the criminals and the just plain crazy that he turns. His is "another look at Chicago," he says, because it presents the underside of "the Chicago without fault, the city that the older generation prefers to remember."

Lindberg tells at some length the stories of the Haymarket tragedy; the 1887 prosecution of the Cook County board of commissioners for corruption and William McGarigle's melodramatic escape to Canada; the career of the mass-murderer Herman Webster Mudgett, who was hanged in 1896; the history of Chicago's red-light district, the "Levee"; and the activities of the gambling czar, Mont Tennes. Inserted between these extended sections are shorter vignettes, "close-ups," which provide period atmosphere.

Chicago Ragtime is ultimately unsatisfying because Lindberg (and therefore the reader) doesn't know what the material means. The string of lurid, melodramatic stories begins to pall when it becomes clear that they aren't adding up to anything. Lindberg comes closest to a generalization about this period in his foreword. "What was Chicago then?" he asks. His answer is, "It was brawling, totally corrupt, but always wonderful." Aside from the fact that Chicago doesn't seem very wonderful in most of the incidents Lindberg recounts, this sort of fuzzy non-interpretation is not enough to give a backbone to a fairly long book.

Pat Colander's Hugh Hefner's First Funeral is another proposition altogether. Superficially it's as anecdotal and sensational as Chicago Ragtime, dealing with lurid stories of Chicago, though from the recent past rather than Lindberg's period. Beneath Colander's "true tales" lies an attitude toward her material that raises it to the level of myth and poetry. It's a desperate, gritty sort of poetry in which the slow, patient accumulation of reportorial detail eventually creates metaphor, figures of Chicago life.

The six "tales of love and death in Chicago" that make up Hugh Hefner's First Funeral began their lives as a feature stories for the Chicago Reader, where Colander once worked as a staff writer. They deal with a grisly murder case, the suicide of Hugh Hefner's executive secretary, the Tylenol poisonings, a police killing of a deeply disturbed 18-year-old boy, a Chicago criminal lawyer and the Cook County morgue.

What lifts these separate pieces into a developing unity, what makes the whole greater than the parts, is the way they spiral around the themes of extremism and madness. "I recently came to the conclusion," Colander writes, "that this psychotic need for attention, even the wrong kind of attention, which I had always associated with this town, has spread like a bad spill. And although I still understand the joke about the lazy, frustrated Chicagoan trying desperately to be the very worst he can be, I no longer think it's so funny."

Beneath Colander's 'true tales' lies
an attitude toward her material that raises it to
the level of myth and poetry

These "true tales" are not funny either. But neither are they merely lurid or meaningless. They are meant to heal. "They are stories," Colander writes, "that I think are significant because, even where there is no adequate explanation, there is shape, color, and form to the violence or eccentricity that may otherwise seem random."

Lindberg adopts the defense of trying to make Chicago's violent, crazy past amusing. Closer to home, Colander faces the violence and craziness head-on and traces out its "shape, color, and form" in her eloquent, wise and compassionate book.D

James Hurt, professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, specializes in modern literature, dramatic literature and the literature of Illinois.

June 1986/Illinois Issues/29