The October City

Algren was identified as a Chicago writer, but he had never been a civic booster. From the very beginning of his writing career, he marked out the sphere of the desperately dispossessed as his literary territory, and his body of work advanced a critique of the arrangements of power and meaning in the industrial city. The workers and drifters who populate his books always play hopeless hands against a house that stacks the political, economic, and cultural deck against them. Like the Chicago novels of Farrell and Wright, who shared with Algren the project of representing the industrial city's neighborhoods, Algren's Chicago novels and stories are overhung with a sense of the inevitable: people without access to wealth and power will be ground up by urban business as usual—the production and consumption of goods, services, and the status quo.

If Algren's postwar writing sustained the terms of critique he had developed before the war, it put them to a new purpose. Golden Arm and City on the Make, refitting the language and imagery of his earlier work and of the Chicago tradition in which he placed himself, move from the urgent contemporaneity of social critique toward the retrospective, elegiac mood of the decline narrative. Midcentury Chicago was in many ways a boom town, beginning to flower into new, postindustrial shape under pressure from suburbanization on the periphery and redevelopment in the center, but for Algren it was an aging industrial city that was rapidly exhausting both its productive vigor and its cultural importance. At midcentury, Algren looked back upon high-industrial Chicago, which had been the subject of his starkest renderings of urban modernity, as the capital of a golden age populated by outsize heroic figures: not just the working men and women who made the industrial city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but also great reformers like Jane Addams, literary icons like Carl Sandburg, larger-than-life victims like Shoeless Joe Jackson, and even the fantastically villainous industrialists, owners, and politicians who exploited and opposed them. Golden Arm and City on the Make narrate a decline from this golden age to a debased, reduced present. They do not so much advance a

critique of industrial urbanism  as imagine—and nostalgically mourn—its passing.

In Golden Arm, something has gone obscurely and finally wrong in midcentury Chicago. The novel's characters, operating within the tightly circumscribed limits of neighborhood life in the Polish urban village around Division Street and Milwaukee Avenue (see figs. 1 and 2 for locations referred to in part 1), can sense the local effects of massive change without being able to specify its dimensions or causes. The invalid Sophie Majcinek, sitting at her window in a wheelchair late at night, reads intimations of apocalypse in the crowded, lowrise landscape of walk-up apartment buildings, rooming houses, factories, churches, and elevated train tracks:

Moonlight that had once revealed so many stars now showed her only how the city was bound, from southeast to the unknown west, steel upon steel upon steel; how all its rails held the city too tightly to the thousand-girdered El.

Some nights she could barely breathe for seeing the flat and unerring line of cable and crosslight and lever, of signal tower and switch. For the endless humming of telephone wires murmuring insanely from street to street without ever really saying a single word above a whisper that a really sensible person might understand.

For the city too was somehow crippled of late. The city too seemed a little insane. Crippled and caught and done for with everyone in it. No one else was really any better off than herself, she reflected with a child's satisfaction, they had all been twisted about whether they sat in a wheelchair or not . . .

She grew tense to see how the nameless people were bound, as they went, to the streets as the streets seemed bound to the night and the night to the nameless day. And all the days to a nameless remorse.^[3]

The news is bad but incompletely articulated: the vista murmurs to Sophie of nameless remorse and an imminent but unspecified disaster. All she knows for certain is that things were better in the old days, when "some happier, some might-have-been, some used-to-be or never-was Sophie" lived in a world that had not yet "gone wrong, all wrong." If that receding golden age of the 1920s and 1930s was like spring, then at midcentury Chicago has reached October, when the year begins its steep decline into Chicago's famously brutal winter:

sultry September had come and gone and the wind was blowing the flies away. "God has forgotten us all," Sophie told herself quietly. . . . The wind was blowing the flies away. God was forgetting His own. (99)

The year's decline and fall seem to resonate with a larger, parallel decline and fall of the world she knows.

The world she knows is the industrial city, and more precisely the industrial neighborhood order, that flourished between the Chicago fire of 1871 and

World War II. Chicago was the paradigmatic American city of that period, the model of industrial modernity and the kinds of urbanism associated with it. Migrations from Chicago's various hinterlands—not only the small-town and rural Midwest and South but also Germany and Ireland, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, Mexico, the Philippines—brought people of modest means to Chicago to work in its factories and the service industries they engendered. For foreign immigrants, the urban villages that grew around factory workplaces, streetcar lines, and local institutions were staging grounds in which they came to terms with the transition between the Old Country and America. European immigrants and their descendants dominated the urban villages of industrial Chicago, which ringed the downtown core in a vast patchwork. The urban villages, and the ways of life they housed, were the heartland of the industrial city's social landscape, formed on an armature of rail lines, port facilities, factories, and other infrastructure dedicated to circulating raw materials, manufactured goods, and the people who processed and bought them. Sophie sees this world from her window—the old neighborhood bound to the rail lines, "steel upon steel upon steel"—and obscurely mourns its passing as she reviews her own hard luck and the intimations of personal disaster still to come.

Golden Arm tells the decline as neighborhood tragedy, so claustrophobically local in scope that the decline seems ungraspable, mysterious, inchoate; Algren's prose poem City on the Make, published two years after Golden Arm, extends the decline into new registers—poetry, history, cultural criticism, sociology—and to a metropolitan scale. City on the Make surveys the landscape from a more omniscient and informed remove; it commands spatial and temporal perspectives beyond the imaginative reach of Golden Arm and its characters, like Sophie, who are hemmed in by the near horizon of the El and the limits of the urban village. In City on the Make, the decline plays out on a grand scale:

Wheeling around the loop of the lake, coming at Chicago from east and south, the land by night lies under a battle-colored sky. Above the half-muffled beat of the monstrous forges between Gary and East Chicago, the ceaseless signal-fires of the great refineries wave an all-night alarm.

Until, moving with the breaking light, we touch the green pennant of the morning boulevards running the dark-blue boundary of the lake. Where the fortress-like towers of The Loop guard the welter of industrial towns that were once a prairie portage.^[4]

City on the Make reads in the metropolitan landscape a myth of creation in which factories make the city of Chicago and the way of life housed in its neighborhood order. The first paragraph is all color and sound in the darkness: the monstrous forges beating like artillery or a gigantic heart, signal fires

against the night sky. The stuff of the city is being forged, refined, destroyed, remade in bursts of heroic activity. The second paragraph maps the results, a landscape coalescing like a newly forged creation at daybreak: parks and skyscrapers along the lake, neighborhoods like "industrial towns" clustering around the Loop and stretching away across the flat prairie. The creation myth informs a familiar historical narrative in which the people who live in the industrial towns and work in the factories have, while fighting a constant battle against the people who own the factories, produced a mature industrial metropolis from the kernel of a frontier outpost in barely a century's time. This is the generic Chicago of the period between the Great Fire and the mid-twentieth century: a capital of industrial modernity, shaped by manufacturing and peopled by urban villagers.

The moment of creation passes, and the momentum built up by the initial swing from the southeast carries the reader onward in space and time, north up the lakefront as the day begins. The point of view drops down to a motorist's perspective from Lake Shore Drive as we pass Lincoln Park and eventually into the suburbs beyond, where the narrator launches into a standard, uninspired version of the midcentury critique of suburbia: "the people are stuffed with kapok," "the homes so complacent, and the churches so smug, leave an airlessness like a microscopic dust over the immaculate pews and the self-important bookshelves," and so on. This suburban landscape is a "spiritual Sahara": "the beat of the city's enormous heart, at the forge in the forest behind the towers" (26-27), cannot be heard at this remove.

The narrator finds himself, at the end of this journey up the lakefront, deeply out of place. The story of the industrial city seems to have ended in the suburbs, about which he has nothing of interest to say, and his grand aerial perspective on the cityscape seems to have collapsed into that of a cultural hobgoblin of the postwar period, the suburban commuter tooling along Lake Shore Drive. Deposited in what he regards as alien territory, the narrator ends up far from the industrial neighborhoods that form the city's heart and his principal inspiration. It is an apt figure for the historical moment City on the Make addresses: the poem's great project is to show how and why the narrator's Chicago is disappearing, to bring to a close the generic narrative of prairie portage grown into manufacturing capital. The industrial city of downtown and neighborhoods gives way to the postindustrial metropolis of inner city and suburbs, and the old neighborhood order shows signs of breaking up. The narrator finds himself growing estranged from Chicago itself, increasingly adrift even when he is within the once-familiar landscape of the neighborhood order. These changes come slowly—the monstrous forges still beat all night, and from the air the old neighborhoods look just as they did a generation before—but a final transformation appears inevitable. At midcentury, industrial Chicago has entered the late autumn of its years.

City on the Make's autumnal mood derives in part from the poem's abrupt telescoping of time: "An October sort of city even in spring. With somebody's washing always whipping, in smoky October colors off the third-floor rear by that same wind that drives the yellowing comic strips down all the gutters that lead away from home" (72). The comic strips yellow with age even as they blow down the gutters; spring collapses into October; the newly forged city of daybreak ages to a grim seediness by nightfall, when emerge "the pavement-colored thousands of the great city's nighttime streets, a separate race with no place to go and the whole night to kill" (60). In the course of the narrator's lifetime (he was still a boy in 1919), Chicago has fallen vertiginously from youthful promise to early dotage, spring prospects turning to October regrets. The martial imagery of industrial creation—the "battle-colored sky" and "signalflares"—takes on new meaning when the reader enters the streets of the pristine city seen from on high at daybreak: the narrowed, annihilating landscape of midcentury Chicago resembles a battlefield after a great defeat. In the workingclass neighborhoods, where in Algren's account all the casualties fall, laundry whips from the line off the third-floor rear like off-white flags of surrender.

That surrender indicates the end of the battle and thus the end of the myth of creation. At midcentury, industrial Chicago has reached full maturity in the final transformation of prairie into metropolis: "The pig-wallows are paved, great Diesels stroke noiselessly past the clamorous tenements of home. The Constellations move, silently and all unseen, through blowing seas above the roofs. Only the measured clatter of the empty cars, where pass the northbound and the southbound Els, comes curving down the constant boundaries of the night" (75). The "clamorous tenements" of the industrial neighborhood order frame the heartlike engines that shape the city and power its commerce. A series of limits—the iron perimeter of the El, the asphalt underfoot, and the sealike sky above the roofs, with jets moving in it like Melville's sea creatures swimming beneath the pillows of sleeping Nantucketers—define the city's form and contain the way of life lived in it. The paragraph begins with the strokes of life-giving engines and ends by arriving at a limit in both space and time: the El forms "the constant boundaries of the night" as well as of the landscape. City on the Make wants to show that the industrial city has likewise reached some limit in its development.

In the next paragraph, a ghost-haunted survey of the high-industrial era identifies midcentury Chicago's landscape as the industrial city's terminal form:

The cemetery that yet keeps the Confederate dead is bounded by the same tracks that run past Stephen A. Douglas' remains. The jail where Parsons hung is gone, and the building from which Bonfield marched is no more. Nobody remembers

the Globe on Desplaines, and only a lonely shaft remembers the four who died, no one ever fully understood why. And those who went down with the proud steamer Chicora are one with those who went down on the Eastland. And those who sang "My God, How the Money Rolls In" are one with those who sang "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" (75-76)

Like the aerial rush up the lakefront, a movement in space, this swift pass through seventy years of history spanning the Civil War and the Great Depression makes a portrait of the city in time. The train tracks provide a spine connecting the October city to echoes of its past: two great wars of the last century, one between North and South and one between labor and capital (the "four who died" were hanged after the Haymarket Square riot; Inspector Bonfield led police against them); long-ago ship disasters on Lake Michigan; echoes of songs associated with the prosperity of the 1920s and the hard times of the depression. Midcentury Chicago seems to have passed a dividing line. Even the 1920s and 1930s, easily within the lifetimes of relatively young adults at midcentury, seem to have fallen far astern: the people who sang songs of the 1920s and 1930s merge "as one" into hindsight in the same way that people drowned in different ship disasters are "as one" at the bottom of the lake.

The foundering ships reinforce the Atlantean image of the people of Chicago going down with their city. At the end of the slope of decline, still in the future but within sight (like the dead of winter from the perspective of October), lies a final collapse described in City on the Make's closing lines: "We shall leave, for remembrance, one rusty iron heart. . . . For keeps and a single day" (77). At the end of its history, industrial Chicago—the El, the monstrous forges and the diesel engines, the neighborhoods like villages and the towers of the Loop like fortresses—will stand in ruins like Atlantis or Troy.

This decline provides the main theme of City on the Make and the principal subtext of Golden Arm. Sophie Majcinek, penned within the close horizons of industrial urbanism as it is lived in the old neighborhood, senses only the vague outlines of this decline in the "rumors of evening" that filter down to her in murmurous, coded fragments. Nelson Algren, whose own windows looked out on a similar vista in the 1940s and early 1950s, could feel the change coming, too. He could not have known then that Golden Arm and City on the Make would be his last Chicago books, but one can feel his unease, like Sophie's, with the intimations of change he felt moving through the familiar landscape of the neighborhoods he lived in and wrote about. Algren's literary subject was industrial urbanism; his literary project was to represent the industrial city and infuse it with meanings, as had a number of celebrated Chicago writers before him. He understood the decline of industrial Chicago to mean the end not only of the neighborhood order he knew but also of the literary tradition in which he worked.