into the pew beside me and winked very piously.
I whispered to him-"What
the hell's this all about?"
"Get down lilee you're prayin'
'n we c'n talle."
I kneeled down.
"The cops raisin'
hell outside?" he asks me.
"They're tearing round the town like mad-what'd you
do?"
"I socleed the chief 'bout an hour ago."
"Why?"
"He musta'
got sore when I run him outa the meetin'
last night."
"What's that got to do with hiding in here this morning?"
"He spied me on the street while ago-jumped out and
swung at me-I swung faster. Reached for his pistol when
he hit the ground. I ran. Shot at me-missed.
Ran after
me-knew he'd have cops on all corners in five minutes
huntin'
me-decided to come here-never
think
0'
findin'
me in a joint like this."
"How long 've you been here?"
"'Bout
forty-fi'
minutes."
"Praying all the time?"
"Prayin'
hell-I've been
confessin'."
"Confessing? For the love of ...
"
"Yep. Over there in that little room."
"How come-getting religion?"
"Nope."
"Well, what?"
"Saw people gain'
in, takin'
turns-figgered I'd take a
cracle at it-pass the time away."
"What'd you tell the priest?"
"Oh-I
couldn't get started right at first. Told him I
figured my soul needed cleanin'. Knew the big shots from
the mill go to this church. I told him I'd been sleepin' with
most of the bosses' wives. He near throwed a fit."
When he told me that, I decided to get him out of there
before he got any more ideas of how to pass the time away
while the cops and firemen were scouring the town for him.
I motioned him to follow me. I went out first. The coast
was clear. The driver pulled the car up and I told him to
step on it and drop me off at Choynski's beer parlor. We got
there without being spotted, and in a few minutes, I had
Choynski put AI' down in his cellar and keep him there till
the trouble blew over.
JOHN MULLEN
A Letter from Chicago
FOR almost two decades, Chicago has been proud of itself
as a literary center. Every few weeks, a group of the old-
guard literary brahmins gather around the fireplace and
discuss the good old days: the days of Ben Hecht and Sher-
wood Anderson,
Carl 'Sandburg! and Harry Hansen;
the
days of the inception of
Poetry: A l11agazine of Verse,
the
Little Review,
and the intellectual
symposia at the justly
famous Dill Pickle Club.
Chicago, in those fiery post-War days, was a mecca for
all the young idealists who later became premature cynics
and, like Floyd Dell and Maxwell
Bodenheim,
fled to
Greenwich Village. Each morning, new knights arose to do
battle with the Philistines.
The black flag was raIsed fot
Mencken, Nathan,
and God. Even the new eastern maga-
zines of literary revolt--Seven
Arts,
the
Dial,
and the re-
PARTISAN
REVIEW
vamped
Smart Set-became
the mouthpieces of the pyrotech-
nical Chicago group.
But out of this city which promised to become the intel-
lectual hub of the Middle West, the past many years have
produced nothing but sterility and superficial sophistication.
If we wish to become acquainted with the present guard-
~ans of the Chicago literary front, we need do no more than
pick up a slim volume called So
Red the N au, or, Breath
in the Afternoon,
which is, the publishers tell us, "a col-
lection of cocktail recipes by celebrated authors." The booIe
is edited by Sterling North, book critic of the
Chicago Daily
News,
and Carl Kroch, son of the owner of the Kroch chain
of bookshops. Among the Chicago contributors we find:
Harriet
l'vlonrce, editor of
Poetry;
Mackinlay Kantor, the
novelist; Marion Strobel, the poet; Arnold Gingrich, editor
of Chicago's own
Esquire,
"the magazine for men"; Mar-
garet Ayer Barnes, the novelist; and the late Henry Justin
Smith, managing editor of the
Chicago Daily News.
"By their fruits ye shall know them." So
Red the Nose,
or, Breath in the Afternoon
has been the sole collective con-
tribution to the turbulent Chicago cultural scene, in a city
that has witnessed an ignorant and officious mayor ban
two of the year's finest plays,
Tobacco Road
and
The Child-
ren's Hour;
in a city that has passed a fascist "gag law,"
prohibiting periodicals such as the
New Masses
and the
Nation
from the newsstands; in a city that has constantly
hindered free expression of speech and opinion in America's
"liberal" university, the University of Chicago.
Some time ago, in the
Nation,
the Misses Marshall and
McCarthy,
in "Our Critics, Right or Wrong," told us how
personal friendships affect literary criticism in the
New
York Herald-Tribune
and
Saturday Review of Literature
cliques. But the New York exponents of cheek-to-cheek
criticism might apprentice themselves to the Chicago literary
back-slappers to receive instructions in the technique of
"friendly reviews."
In New York, the writer or independent critic has some
degree of freedom; he can at least, from the divers literary
groups, choose one that most appeals to him. In Chicago
there is only one literary clique, and that one is sealed and
cemented. This corset of culture stretches from the offices
of the
Daily News
to
Poetry
to
Esquire,
and thence outward
to Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.
Mr. Llewellyn Jones, who writes insipid books about in-
sipid books
(How To Read,
etc.) may give a "literary"
tea in the Blue Parrot Patio in Oak Park. The brahmins
turn out in full force: Harriet
Monroe, Eunice Tietjens,
and Jessica Nelson North, all of
Poetry;
Arnold Gingrich
or Meyer Levin, of
Esquire;
Sterling North and].
C. Bul-
liet, art critic, of the
Daily News;
Lew Sarrett, of North-
western and
Poetry;
and Thornton Wilder, elegant novelist
and pedagogue, of the University of Chicago and
Poetry.
The next evening the brahmins may attend the meeting
of the Friday Club or the Society of Midland Authors, at
either of which society folk mingle with the polite writers,
and once a year dole out a prize to some confused poet from
Iowa or Wisconsin.
In "Our Critics, Right or Wrong," the authors warn us:
"It would be pleasant to drop the matter and ignore the book
columnist of the New York daily newspaper ....
Un-
fortunately,
he is influential; his column is scanned, at least,
by millions of readers a day. It is therefore vital that we
take a look at him." What is true of the New York news-
paper critic is doubly true of the Chicago book critic.
Chicago is, except in tradition, no longer a "literary town."
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