Chicago and the Making of American Modernism by Michelle E Moore

Author:Michelle E Moore [Moore, Michelle E]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350018044
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The bad business of patronage

By late 1924, Hemingway had seen enough of the avant-garde writing business to understand that one couldn’t really go at it well without a patron. Now that he received some notice for his pieces in The Little Review and those that would make up In Our Time, especially from Gertrude Stein, he became increasingly concerned about how avant-garde writing is published and who, exactly, controls the purse strings behind the little magazines and publishers. The whole setup looked an awful lot like the corruption from Chicago and his concerns about the whole bad business would be increasingly reflected in his letters and stories.

Over the rest of that year and through the spring, he writes a series of letters to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas who, in that period, acted as his compass through the art scene. He writes to them both about his old friend Krebs Friend from Chicago, with whom he worked on the Co-Operative Commonwealth during 1920–1921. Friend married Henrietta Hobbs, a wealthy heiress, and they had just taken over the finances of The Transatlantic Review after John Quinn died in July of 1924.71 On August 9, 1924, Hemingway writes to Stein and Toklas satirizing and complaining about Friend’s new behavior with the magazine: “Now Ford’s attitude is that he is selling Krebs an excellent business proposition and that Krebs is consequently a business man and the foe of all artists of which he—Ford is the only living example and in duty bound as a representative of the dying race to grind he—Krebs, the natural Foe—into the ground.”72 On September 14, 1924, he writes again and continues the story with Ford trying to scam Friend into taking the whole thing over as a business and “running it as a business proposition, i.e. money making proposition, filling him up on fake figures to feed his own ego and kidding himself it was a money making proposition.”73 This is the first time he positions the relationship between businessmen and artists to be explicitly antagonistic, and so this is the moment Hemingway tries to separate himself from his father and grandfather, as well as all of the good businessmen of Oak Park and Chicago. He sounds like Willa Cather, who believed strongly that art should not have use-value and his story about Krebs Friend aligns him firmly with Harriet Monroe and Frank Lloyd Wright who fought for the rights of artists to construct and own their own visions without interference from the world of business.

He ends the September 14 letter by explaining it’s all Krebs Friend’s fault for marrying Mrs. Krebs Friend, who now acts the part of “a business woman” who wants sums and figures, and that had Friend played her correctly he would have taken “a chance to get a patron of the arts.”74 In doing so, he separates the idea of the patron from the idea of the businesswoman, suggesting that female patrons are the worst kinds of businessman who can be easily manipulated by artists.

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