Volume 1 - Chapter 11. Coming To Chicago

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_ VOLUME I CHAPTER XI. COMING TO CHICAGO

What I have written thus far of Eugene Field has been based upon what the lawyers call hearsay or documentary evidence. It has for the most part been directly heard or confirmed from his own lips. In the early days of our acquaintance the stories of his life in Denver were rife through every newspaper office and green-room in the United States. No one who had spent any time in Colorado came East without bringing a fresh budget of tales of the pranks and pasquinades of Eugene Field, of the Denver Tribune. The clipping vogue of his Primer series had given him a newspaper reputation wide as the continent. He was far more quoted, however, for what he said and did than for anything he wrote. Had his career ended in 1883, before he came to Chicago, there would have been little or nothing left of literary value to keep his memory alive, beyond the regretful mention in the obituary columns of the western press.

And it came near ending, like the candle exposed to the gusts of March, or a bubble that has danced and glistened its brief moment in the sun. The boy who was too delicate for continued application to books in Amherst, who had outgrown his strength so that his entrance at Williams was postponed a year, whose backwardness at his books through three colleges had been excused on the plea of ill-health, had been living a pace too fast for a never strong and always rebellious stomach. He was not intemperate in eating or drinking. It was not excess in the first that ruined his digestion, nor intemperance in the other that caused him to become a total abstainer from all kinds of intoxicating beverages. He simply became a dyspeptic through a weird devotion to the pieces and pastries "like Mary French used to make," and he became a teetotaler because the doctors mistook the cause of his digestive distress.

The one thing of which Eugene Field was intemperate in Denver was of himself. He gave to that delicate machinery we call the body no rest. It was winter when he did not see the sun rise several times a week, and the hours he stole from daylight for sleep were too few and infrequent to make up for the nights he turned into day for work and frolic. Thus it came about that in the summer of 1883 Eugene Field had reached the end of his physical tether, and some change of scene was necessary to save what was left of an impaired constitution.

From what has been said, it is easy to understand how Field's abilities were diverted into a new and deeper channel in 1883. "Stricken by dyspepsia," writes Mr. Cowen, "so severely that he fell into a state of chronic depression and alarm, he eagerly accepted the timely offer of Melville E. Stone, then surrounding himself with the best talent he could procure in the West, of a virtually independent desk on the Chicago Morning News. There he quickly regained health, although he never recovered from his ailment."

How Mr. Stone came to be the "Fairy Godmother" to Field at this turning-point in his life may be briefly related, and partly in Mr. Stone's own words. He and Victor F. Lawson had made a surprising success in establishing the Chicago Daily News, in December, 1875, the first one-cent evening paper in Chicago. It is related that in the early days of their enterprise they had to import the copper coins for the use of their patrons--the nickle being up to that time the smallest coin in use in the West, as the dime, or "short bit," was until a more recent date on the Pacific coast. The Daily News was more distinguished for its enterprise in gathering news and getting it out on the street before the comparative blanket sheets of the early eighties than for its editorial views or literary features.

In January, 1881, Messrs. Lawson & Stone conceived the idea of printing a morning edition of their daily, to be called the Morning News. As it was to be sold for two cents, it was their purpose to make it better worth the price by a more exacting standard in the manner of presenting its news and by the employment of special writers for its editorial page. Just then, however, the crop of unemployed writers of demonstrated ability or reputation was unusually short, and the foundation of the Chicago Herald in May of the same year, by half a dozen energetic journalists of local note, did not tend to overstock the market with the talent sought for by Messrs. Lawson & Stone. It was the rivalry between the Morning News (afterwards the Record) and the Herald, that sent Mr. Stone so far afield as Denver for a man to assist him in realizing the idea cherished by him and his associate. An interesting story could be told of that rivalry, which has just ended by the consolidation of the two papers (March, 1901) into the Chicago Record-Herald, but only so much of it as affects the life and movements of Eugene Field concerns us here.

In the early summer of 1883 Mr. Stone, who had been watching with appreciative newspaper sense the popularity of the Tribune Primer skits, cast an acquisitive net in the direction of Denver. He had known Field in St. Louis, and describes their first meeting thus: "I entered the office of the Dispatch to see Stillson Hutchins, the then proprietor of that paper. It was in the forenoon, the busy hour for an afternoon newspaper. A number of people were there, but as to the proprietor, clerks, and customers, none was engaged in any business, for, perched on the front counter, telling in a strangely resonant voice a very funny story, sat Eugene Field. He was a striking figure, tall, gaunt, almost bald (though little more than twenty years of age), smooth shaven, and with a remarkable face, which lent itself to every variety of emotion. In five minutes after our introduction I knew him. There was no reserve about him. He was of the free, whole-souled western type--that type which invites your confidence in return for absolute and unstinted frankness."

Instead of broaching his purpose by letter, Mr. Stone slipped off to Denver for a personal interview with his intended victim, and, as I have already intimated, he arrived just in the nick of time to find Field ready for any move that would take him away from the killing kindness and exhilarating atmosphere of the Colorado capital. "The engagement," says Mr. Stone, "was in itself characteristic. Field wanted to join me. He was tired of Denver and mistrustful of the limitations upon him there. But if he was to make a change, he must be assured that it was to be for his permanent good. He was a newspaper man not from choice, but because in that field he could earn his daily bread. Behind all he was conscious of great capability--not vain or by any means self-sufficient, but certain that by study and endeavor he could take high rank in the literary world and could win a place of lasting distinction. So he stipulated that he should be given a column of his own, that he might stand or fall by the excellence of his own work. Salary was less an object than opportunity."

Mr. Stone gave the necessary assurances, both as to salary--by no means princely--and opportunity as large as Field had the genius to fill. As quickly as he could, Field closed up his Denver connections and prepared for the last move in his newspaper life. How he survived the round of farewell luncheons, dinners, and midnight suppers given for and by him was a source of mingled pride and amusement to the chief sufferer. It was with feelings of genuine regret that he turned his back on Denver and gave up the jovial and congenial association with the Tribune and its staff. Although its chief editorial writer, O.H. Rothacker, had a national reputation, Field was the star of the company that gave to the Tribune its unique reputation among the journals of the West, and all classes of citizens felt that something picturesquely characteristic of the liberty and good-fellowship of their bustling town was being taken from them. Field's departure meant the closing of the hobble-de-hoy period in the life of Denver as well as in his own. His life there had been exactly suited to his temperament, to the times, and to the environment. It is doubtful if it would have been possible to repeat such an experience in Denver five years later, and it is certain that in five years Field had developed whole leagues of character beyond its repetition.

It was in August, 1883, that Eugene Field, with his family and all his personal effects, except his father's library, moved to Chicago. That library was destined to remain safely stored in St. Louis for many years before he felt financially able to afford it shelter and quarters commensurate with its intrinsic value and wealth of associations. So far in his newspaper work Field had little time and less inclination to learn from books. All stories of his being a close and omnivorous student of books, previous to his coming to Chicago, are not consistent with the facts. He was learning all about humanity by constant attrition with mankind. He was taking in knowledge of the human passions and emotions at first hand and getting very little assistance through pouring over the printed observations of others. He was not a classical scholar in the sense of having acquired any mastery of or familiarity with the great Latin or Greek writers. Language, all languages, was a study that was easy to him, and he acquired facility in translating any foreign tongue, living or dead, with remarkable readiness by the aid of a dictionary and a nimble wit. Student in St. Louis, Kansas City, or Denver he was not, any more than at Williams, Galesburg, or Columbia. But I have no doubt that when Eugene Field left Denver he had a fixed intention, as suggested in the words of Mr. Stone, by study and endeavor to take high rank in the literary world and to "win a place of lasting distinction."

When he came to Chicago his family consisted of Mrs. Field and their four children, all, happily for him, in vigorous health, and, so far as the children were concerned, endowed with appetites and a digestion the envy and despair of their father. "Trotty," the eldest, was by this time a girl of eight, Melvin a stout sober youth of six, "Pinny" (Eugene, Jr.) a shrewd little rascal of four, and "Daisy" (Fred), his mother's boy, a large-eyed, sturdy youngster of nearly three masterful summers. The family was quickly settled in a small but convenient flat on Chicago Avenue, three blocks from the Lake, and a little more than a mile's walk from the office, a distance that never tempted Field to exercise his legs except on one occasion, when it afforded him a chance to astonish the natives of North Chicago. It occurred to him one bleak day in December that it was time the people knew there was a stranger in town. So he arrayed himself in a long linen duster, buttoned up from knees to collar, put an old straw hat on his head, and taking a shabby book under one arm and a palm-leaf fan in his hand, he marched all the way down Clark Street, past the City Hall, to the office. Everywhere along the route he was greeted with jeers or pitying words, as his appearance excited the mirth or commiseration of the passers-by. When he reached the entrance to the Daily News office he was followed by a motley crowd of noisy urchins whom he dismissed with a grimace and the cabalistic gesture with which Nicholas Koorn perplexed and repulsed Antony Van Corlear from the battlement of the fortress of Rensellaerstein. Then closing the door in their astonished faces, he mounted the two flights of stairs to the editorial rooms, where he recounted, with the glee of the boy he was in such things, the success of his joke.

Trotty was his favorite child, probably because she was the only girl, and he was very fond of little girls. Even then she favored her father in complexion and features more than any of the boys, having the same large innocent-looking blue eyes. But even she had to serve his disposition to extract humor from every situation. Before Field had been in Chicago two months he realized that he had made a serious miscalculation in impressing Mr. Stone with the thought that salary was less an object to him than opportunity. Opportunity had not sufficed to meet Field's bills in Denver, and the promised salary, that seemed temptingly sufficient at the distance of a thousand miles, proved distressingly inadequate to feed and clothe three lusty boys and one growing girl in the bracing atmosphere of Chicago. So it was not surprising that when Trotty asked her father to give her an appropriate text to recite in Sunday-school, he schooled her to rise and declaim with great effect:

"The Lord will provide, my father can't!"

The means Field took to bring the insufficiency of his salary to the attention of Mr. Stone were as ingenious as they were frequent. I don't think he would have appreciated an increase of salary that came without some exercise of his wayward fancy for making mirth out of any embarrassing financial condition.

It is more than probable that Eugene Field chose Chicago for the place of his permanent abode after deliberately weighing the advantages and limitations of its situation with reference to his literary career. He felt that it was as far east as he could make his home without coming within the influence of those social and literary conventions that have squeezed so much of genuine American flavor out of our literature. He had received many tempting offers from New York newspapers before coming to Chicago, and after our acquaintance I do not believe a year went by that Field did not decline an engagement, personally tendered by Mr. Dana, to go to the New York Sun, at a salary nearly double that he was receiving here. But, as he told Julian Ralph on one occasion, he would not live in, or write for, the East. For, as he put it, there was more liberty and fewer literary "fellers" out West, and a man had more chance to be judged on his merits and "grow up with the country."

The Chicago to which Eugene Field came in 1883 was a city of something over six hundred thousand inhabitants, and pulsing with active political and commercial life. It had been rebuilt, physically, after the fire with money borrowed from the East, and was almost too busy paying interest and principal to have much time to read books, much less make them, except in the wholly manufacturing sense. It had already become a great publishing centre, but not of the books that engage the critical intelligence of the public. The feverish devotion of its citizens to business during the day-time drove them to bed at an unseasonably early hour, or to places of amusement, from which they went so straight home after the performances that there was not a single fashionable restaurant in the city catering to supper parties after the play. Whether this condition, making theatre-going less expensive here than in other large cities, conduced to the result or not, it was a fact that in the early eighties Chicago was the best paying city on the continent for theatrical companies of all degrees of merit. The losses which the best artists and plays almost invariably reported of New York engagements were frequently recouped in Chicago.

Chicago never took kindly to grand opera, and probably for the same reason that it patronized the drama. It sought entertainment and amusement, and grand opera is a serious business. As Field said of himself, Chicago liked music "limited"; and its liking was generally limited to light or comic opera and the entertainments of the Apollo Club, until Theodore Thomas, with admirable perseverance, aided by the pocket-books of public-spirited citizens rather than by enthusiastic music-lovers, succeeded in cultivating the study and love of music up to a standard above that of any other American city, with the possible exception of Boston.

I have referred to the theatrical and musical conditions in Chicago in 1883, because it was in them that Eugene Field found his most congenial atmosphere and associations when he came hither that year. These were the chief reminders of the life he had left behind when he turned his back on Denver, and I need scarcely say that they continued to afford him the keenest pleasure and the most unalloyed recreation to the end.

Architecturally, Chicago was no more beautiful and far less impressive than it is now. It could not boast half a dozen buildings, public or private, worthy of a second glance. Its tallest skyscraper stopped at nine stories, and that towered a good two stories over its nearest rival. The bridges across the river connecting the three divisions of the city were turned slowly and laboriously by hand, and the joke was current that a Chicagoan of those days could never hear a bell ring without starting on a run to avoid being bridged. The cable-car was an experiment on one line, and all the other street-cars were operated with horses and stopped operation at 12.20 A.M., as Field often learned to his infinite disgust, for he hated walking worse than he did horses or horse-cars. In many ways Chicago reminded Field of Denver, and in no respect more than in its primitive ways, its assumed airs of importance, and its township politics. Despite its forty odd years of incorporated life, Chicago, the third city of the United States, was still a village, and Field insisted on regarding it as such.

Transplanted from the higher altitude at the foot of the Rockies to the level of Lake Michigan, I think nothing about Chicago struck him more forcibly than the harshness of its variable summer climate. Scarcely a week went by that his column did not contain some reference in paragraph or verse to its fickle alarming changes. He had not enough warm blood back of that large gray face to rejoice when the mercury dropped in an hour, as it often did, from 88 or 90 degrees to 56 or 60 degrees. Such changes, which came with the whirl of the weather vane, as the wind shifted from its long sweep over the prairies, all aquiver with the heat, to a strong blow over hundreds of miles of water whose temperature in dog days never rose above 60 degrees, provoked from him verses such as these, written in the respective months they celebrate in the year 1884:

CHICAGO IN JULY

The white-capp'd waves of Michigan break
On the beach where the jacksnipes croon--
The breeze sweeps in from the purple lake
And tempers the heat of noon:
In yonder bush, where the berries grow,
The Peewee tunefully sings,
While hither and thither the people go,
Attending to matters and things.

There is cool for all in the busy town--
For the girls in their sealskin sacques--
For the dainty dudes idling up and down,
With overcoats on their backs;
And the horse-cars lurch and the people run
And the bell at the bridgeway rings--
But never perspires a single one,
Attending to matters and things.

What though the shivering mercury wanes--
What though the air be chill?
The beauteous Chloe never complains
As she roams by the purpling rill;
And the torn-tit coos to its gentle mate,
As Chloe industriously swings
With Daphnis, her beau, on the old front gate,
Attending to matters and things.

When the moon comes up, and her cold, pale light
Coquettes with the freezing streams,
What care these twain for the wintry night,
Since Chloe is wrapt in dreams,
And Daphnis utters no plaint of woe
O'er his fair jack full on kings,
But smiles that fortune should bless him so,
Attending to matters and things.

CHICAGO IN AUGUST

When Cynthia's father homeward brought
An India mull for her to wear,
How were her handsome features fraught
With radiant smiles beyond compare!
And to her bosom Cynthia strained
Her pa with many a fond caress--
And ere another week had waned
That mull was made into a dress.

And Cynthia blooming like a rose
Which any swain might joy to cull,
Cried "How I'll paralyze the beaux
When I put on my India mull!"
Now let the heat of August day
Be what it may--I'll not complain--
I'll wear the mull, and put away
This old and faded-out delaine!

Despite her prayers the heated spell
Descended not on mead and wold--
Instead of turning hot as--well,
The weather turned severely cold,
The Lake dashed up its icy spray
And breathed its chill o'er all the plain--
Cynthia stays at home all day
And wears the faded-out delaine!

So is Chicago at this time--
She stands where icy billows roll--
She wears her beauteous head sublime,
While cooling zephyrs thrill her soul.
But were she tempted to complain,
Methinks she'd bid the zephyrs lull,
That she might doff her old delaine
And don her charming India mull!

But there was another feature of Chicago that from the day of his arrival to the day of his departure to that land where dust troubleth not and soot and filth are unknown, filled his New England soul and nostrils with ineffable disgust. He never became reconciled to a condition in which the motto in hoc signo vinces on a bar of soap had no power to inspire a ray of hope. He had not been here a month before his muse began to wield the "knotted lash of sarcasm" above the strenuous but dirty back of Chicago after this fashion:

Brown, a Chicago youth, did woo
A beauteous Detroit belle,
And for a month--or, maybe, two--
He wooed the lovely lady well.

But, oh! one day--one fatal day--
As mused the belle with naught to do,
A local paper came her way
And, drat the luck! she read it through.

She read of alleys black with mire--
A river with a putrid breath--
Streets reeking with malarial ire--
Inviting foul disease and death.

Then, with a livid snort she called
Her trembling lover to her side--
"How dare you, wretched youth," she bawled,
"Ask me to be your blushing bride?

Go back unto your filthy town,
And never by my side be seen,
Nor hope to make me Mrs. Brown,
Until you've got your city clean!"

Eugene Field made his first appearance in the column of the Morning News August 15th, 1883, in the most modest way, with a scant column of paragraphs such as he had contributed to the Denver Tribune, headed "Current Gossip" instead of "Odds and Ends." The heading was only a makeshift until a more distinctive one could be chosen in its stead. On August 31st, 1883, the title "Sharps and Flats" was hoisted to the top of Field's column, and there it remained over everything he wrote for more than a dozen years.

There have been many versions of how Field came to hit upon this title, so appropriate to what appeared under it. The most ingenious of these was that evolved by John B. Livingstone in "An Appreciation" of Eugene Field, published in the Interior shortly after his death. In what, on the whole, is probably the best analysis of Field's genius and work extant, Mr. Livingstone goes on to say:

"What Virgil was to Tennyson, Horace was to Field in one aspect at least of the Venusian's character. He could say of his affection for the protege of Maecenas, as the laureate said of his for the 'poet of the happy Tityrus,' 'I that loved thee since my day began.' It has been suggested that he owed to a clever farce-comedy of the early eighties the caption of the widely-read column of journalistic epigram and persiflage, which he filled with machine-like regularity and the versatility of the brightest French journalism for ten years. I prefer to think that he took it, or his cue for it, from a line of Dr. Phillips Francis's translation of the eighth of the first book of Horatian Satires:

Not to be tedious or repeat
How Flats and Sharps in concert meet.

"Field's knowledge of Horace and of his translators was complete, probably not equalled by that of any other member of his craft. He made a specialty of the study, a hobby of it. And it is more likely, as it is more gratifying, to believe that he caught his famous caption (Sharps and Flats) from a paraphrase of his favorite classic poet than from the play bill of a modern and ephemeral farce."

Unfortunately for this pretty bit of speculation, which Field would have enjoyed as another evidence of his skill in imposing upon the elect of criticism, it has no foundation in fact, and its premises of Field's intimate knowledge and devotion to Horace anticipates the period of his Horatian "hobby," as Mr. Livingstone so well styles it, by at least five years. It was not until the winter of 1888-89 that paraphrases of Horace began to stud his column with the first-fruits of his tardy wandering and philandering with Dr. Frank W. Reilly through the groves and meadows of the Sabine farm. But that is another story.

According to M.E. Stone, the title of the column which Field established when he came to the Chicago Morning News was borrowed from the name of a play, "Sharps and Flats," written by Clay M. Greene and myself, and played with considerable success throughout the United States by Messrs. Robson and Crane.

It may be set down here as well as elsewhere, and still quoting Mr. Stone, that not only did Field write nearly every line that ever appeared in the "Sharps and Flats" column, but that practically everything that he ever wrote, after 1883, appeared at one time or another in that column.

To which it may be added that it has been the custom of those writing of Eugene Field to surround and endow him throughout his career with the acquirement of scholarship, and pecuniary independence, which he never possessed before the last six years of his life.

Practically all Field's scholarship and mental equipment, so far as they were obtained from books, were acquired after he came to Chicago, and he was never lifted above the ragged edge of impecuniosity until he began to receive royalties from the popular edition of "A Little Book of Western Verse" and "A Little Book of Profitable Tales." His domestic life was spent in flats or rented houses until less than five months before his death. The photographs taken a few months before his death of Eugene Field's home and the beautiful library in which he wrote are ghastly travesties on the nomadic character of his domestic arrangements for many years before June, 1895--dreams for which he longed, but only lived to realize for four brief months. All the best Field wrote previous to 1890--and it includes the best he ever wrote, except "The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac"--was written in a room to which many a box stall is palatial, and his sole library was a dilapidated edition of Bartlett's "Familiar Quotations," Cruden's "Concordance of the Bible," and a well-thumbed copy of the King James version of the Bible. He detested the revised version. The genius of this man at this time did not depend on scholarship or surroundings, but on the companionship of his fellows and the unconventionality of his home life. _

Read next: Volume 1: Chapter 12. Personal Characteristics

Read previous: Volume 1: Chapter 10. Anecdotes Of Life In Denver

Table of content of Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions, Volumes 1 and 2


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