I walked eastward from my house. From the northwestern end of the city great hordes of men women and children had come to spend the night out of doors, by the shore of the lake. It was stifling hot there too and the air was heavy with a sense of struggle. On a few hundred acres of flat land, that had formerly been a swamp, some two million people were fighting for the peace and quiet of sleep and not getting it. Out of the half darkness, beyond the little strip of park land at the water’s edge, the huge empty houses of Chicago’s fashionable folk made a greyish-blue blot against the sky. “Thank the gods,” I thought, “there are some people who can get out of here, who can go to the mountains or the seashore or to Europe.” I stumbled in the half darkness over the legs of a woman who was lying and trying to sleep on the grass. A baby lay beside her and when she sat up it began to cry. I muttered an apology and stepped aside and as I did so my foot struck a half-filled milk bottle and I knocked it over, the milk running out on the grass. “Oh, I’m sorry. Please forgive me,” I cried. “Never mind,” the woman answered, “the milk is sour.”
He is a tall stoop-shouldered man with prematurely greyed hair and works as a copy writer in an advertising agency in Chicago—an agency where I also have sometimes been employed—and on that night in August I met him, walking with quick eager strides along the shore of the lake and past the tired petulant people. He did not see me at first and I wondered at the evidence of life in him when everyone else seemed half dead; but a street lamp hanging over a nearby roadway threw its light down upon my face and he pounced. “Here you, come up to my place,” he cried sharply. “I’ve got something to show you. I was on my way down to see you. That’s where I was going,” he lied as he hurried me along.
We went to his apartment on a street leading back from the lake and the park. German, Polish, Italian and Jewish families, equipped with soiled blankets and the ever-present half-filled bottles of milk, had come prepared to spend the night out of doors; but the American families in the crowd were giving up the struggle to find a cool spot and a little stream of them trickled along the sidewalks, going back to hot beds in the hot houses.
It was past one o’clock and my friend’s apartment was disorderly as well as hot. He explained that his wife, with their two children, had gone home to visit her mother on a farm near Springfield, Illinois.
We took off our coats and sat down. My friend’s thin cheeks were flushed and his eyes shone. “You know—well—you see,” he began and then hesitated and laughed like an embarrassed schoolboy. “Well now,” he began again, “I’ve long been wanting to write something real, something besides advertisements. I suppose I’m silly but that’s the way I am. It’s been my dream to write something stirring and big. I suppose it’s the dream of a lot of advertising writers, eh? Now look here—don’t you go laughing. I think I’ve done it.”
He explained that he had written something concerning Chicago, the capital and heart, as he said, of the whole Central West. He grew angry. “People come here from the East or from farms, or from little holes of towns like I came from and they think it smart to run Chicago into the ground,” he declared. “I thought I’d show ’em up,” he added, jumping up and walking nervously about the room.
He handed me many sheets of paper covered with hastily scrawled words, but I protested and asked him to read it aloud. He did, standing with his face turned away from me. There was a quiver in his voice. The thing he had written concerned some mythical town I had never seen. He called it Chicago, but in the same breath spoke of great streets flaming with color, ghostlike buildings flung up into night skies and a river, running down a path of gold into the boundless West. It was the city, I told myself, I and the people of my story had been trying to find earlier on that same evening, when because of the heat I went a little off my head and could not work any more. The people of the city, he had written about, were a cool-headed, brave people, marching forward to some spiritual triumph, the promise of which was inherent in the physical aspects of the town.
Now I am one who, by the careful cultivation of certain traits in my character, have succeeded in building up the more brutal side of my nature, but I cannot knock women and children down in order to get aboard Chicago street-cars, nor can I tell an author to his face that I think his work is rotten.
“You’re all right, Ed. You’re great. You’ve knocked out a regular soc-dolager of a masterpiece here. Why you sound as good as Henry Mencken writing about Chicago as the literary centre of America, and you’ve lived in Chicago and he never did. The only thing I can see you’ve missed is a little something about the stockyards, and you can put that in later,” I added and prepared to depart.