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The Cliff-Dwellers
Rinehart editions, 155
The publication Henry Blake Fuller's The Cliff-Dwellers in 1893 marked a distinct stage in the development of realism in America. With this Chicago novel, as Larzer Ziff has observed in his study of the 1890s, "money fully enters American fiction as motive and measure."
The publication Henry Blake Fuller's The Cliff-Dwellers in 1893 marked a distinct stage in the development of realism in America. With this Chicago novel, as Larzer Ziff has observed in his study of the 1890s, "money fully enters American fiction as motive and measure."
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1893
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214 people want to read
About the author
Henry Blake Fuller
40 books8 followersHenry Blake Fuller (January 9, 1857–July 28, 1929) was a United States novelist and short story writer, born in Chicago, Illinois.
Fuller's earliest works were travel romances set in Italy that featured allegorical characters. Both The Chevalier of Pensieri–Vani (1890) and The Châtelaine of La Trinité (1892) bear some thematic resemblance to the works of Henry James, whose primary interest was in the contrast between American and European ways of life. Fuller's first two books appealed to the genteel tastes of cultivated New Englanders such as Charles Eliot Norton and James Russell Lowell, who took Fuller's work as a promising sign of a burgeoning literary culture in what was then still largely the frontier city of Chicago.
Fuller's earliest works were travel romances set in Italy that featured allegorical characters. Both The Chevalier of Pensieri–Vani (1890) and The Châtelaine of La Trinité (1892) bear some thematic resemblance to the works of Henry James, whose primary interest was in the contrast between American and European ways of life. Fuller's first two books appealed to the genteel tastes of cultivated New Englanders such as Charles Eliot Norton and James Russell Lowell, who took Fuller's work as a promising sign of a burgeoning literary culture in what was then still largely the frontier city of Chicago.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
June 8, 2018
My essay for The Paris Review: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2...
The newly established publishing arm of the Chicago Review of Books identifies itself as “a small press to republish classic Chicago literature in beautiful new editions.” But of what can a classic be said to consist? Looking at the etymology of the term, one finds that the meaning “of or belonging to the highest class; approved as a model” dates to the seventeenth century and derives from the Latin classicus, “relating to the highest classes of the Roman people”—in other words, superior. The obvious questions arise: superior to what and according to whom? Like so many highly subjective designations, the clearest definitions of classic are usually ostensive. The definer simply points to examples and says, That—that’s what we mean.
The text toward which Chicago Review of Books Press points to inaugurate their new series is Henry Blake Fuller’s The Cliff-Dwellers, which they declare to be “the first great ‘Chicago novel’ ” and cite as having been listed by Chicago magazine as number six in their 2010 list of “The Top 40 Chicago Novels.” In his introduction to the reissue, the Chicago Review of Books’s editor in chief, Adam Morgan, quotes Dr. Joseph Dimuro of UCLA as calling The Cliff-Dwellers “arguably the first important novel of the American city.”
Henry Blake Fuller was born in 1857 and died in 1929 and was, as the bio accompanying this newest edition explains, Chicago’s “first LGBTQ novelist, and the author of With the Procession, Under the Skylights and Bertram Cope’s Year, often considered the first American gay novel.” Cliff-Dwellers is Fuller’s third novel but his first to view the world through the lens of social realism. The story was “so shocking and unsparing in its depiction of the city’s crude industrialization, corrupt businessmen, and dysfunctional upper-class families, no Chicago newspapers would run it,” Morgan notes in his introduction. The novel was originally serialized chapter by chapter in the New York–based magazine Harper’s Weekly from June to August 1893, the same year as the Chicago World’s Fair. In reply to my request for a review copy, Morgan volunteered that “it’s … an interesting novel, for sure, if only for its historical perspective of that slice of Chicago society in 1893. We only hear about the fair, so I ate up all the references to other parts of town. It hasn’t aged well in other respects, so it would be fascinating to see a contemporary critic’s take on it.”
The book’s loose and intervallic structure follows the ambitious and acquisitive George Ogden, a young businessman from Massachusetts who seeks his fortune in the Windy City. The main action, however, revolves around the Clifton Building, a fictional eighteen-story structure in the Chicago Loop based on the 1891 Monadnock Building, which was and still is the tallest load-bearing brick edifice ever constructed. The book unfolds in a detached narrative voice. Fuller regards his city with a cool eye and a cold heart.
I must confess to being a Chicago enthusiast. Perhaps not as much so as Odgen’s love interest, Jessie Bradley—who “had the one infallible local trait—she would rather talk to a stranger about her own town than about any other subject”—but close. So I appreciated Morgan’s efforts to manage my expectations. Then again, he and the Chicago Review of Books staff transcribed the entire 277-page novel word for word from an old public domain scan, so there must be something in those pages worth seeing. But what? When a book from more than a century ago gets rereleased and even its rereleasers can recognize the work as important but flawed, one has cause to wonder: What literature from the depths of history is worth preserving? And what can readers receive from second-tier classics?
When I asked Morgan what the notion of “classic” in this case means to him, he said, “I think most of us are uncomfortable with the idea of an imposed literary canon these days. For this project, the term ‘classic’ signifies a book that has stood the test of time—a work that has remained valuable for one reason or another—but isn’t widely available for modern readers. We don’t intend to republish ‘the best’ Chicago books in history (many of those are still in print), just the ones we believe have been undeservedly forgotten.” He added that “instead of canon-building, I see it as Chicago-celebrating. I want more readers to realize how long and varied and interesting our literary history is.”
So titled because of its setting among the rapidly rising skyscrapers of the urban landscape and the rampant social climbing of the residents therein, The Cliff-Dwellers was hailed at the time by the novelist and critic William Dean Howells as “a work of very great power.” The book takes as its subject the corrosive and dehumanizing effects of capitalism and is unsparing in its depiction of the ruthless competitive maneuvering of the upper classes. Read from a contemporary perspective, the book manages to feel both audacious and restrained, expansive and provincial, relevant and quaint.
The book records in granular detail how the roots of many of America’s twenty-first-century challenges extend deeply into the past. A third-generation Chicagoan, Fuller’s family was descended from the Mayflower Pilgrims, and his prose wears his Waspy prejudices as conspicuously as a pair of buckled shoes. Through the eyes of his protagonist, he evinces disgust at America’s great cities becoming the proverbial melting pot. Take, for example, Odgen passing nauseated judgment on “a range of human types completely unknown to his past experience”:
During the enforced leisure of his first weeks he had gone several times to City Hall, and had ascended in the elevator to the reading room of the public library. On one of these occasions a heavy and sudden downpour had filled the room with readers and had closed all the windows. The downpour without seemed but a trifle compared with the confused cataract of conflicting nationalities within, and the fumes of incense that the united throng caused to rise upon the altar of learning stunned him with a sudden and sickening surprise—the bogs of Kilkenny, the dung-heaps of the Black Forest, the miry ways of Transylvania and Little Russia had contributed to it.
Elsewhere, Fuller has Ogden muse, “Aren’t we New England Puritans the cream of the Anglo-Saxon race? And why does the Anglo-Saxon race rule the globe except because the individual Anglo-Saxon can rule himself?” Fuller also engages in casual sexism, writing of the character Ann Wilde that “like all women, she embraced the personal element in every affair,” and of the character Mrs. Brainard’s penchant for chess, “To those who object that chess is an intellectual game, one may simply put the question: have you ever seen it take up by an elderly invalidated female who has rested content with mere learning of the moves?” And while Fuller’s impulse to criticize capitalism, consumerism, and social stratification stands as admirable, the scornful tenor of his authorial voice can make the book feel hectoring and ultimately a bit tedious.
Early on, of some visitors to an office within the Clifton, for instance, Fuller writes disdainfully: “They are often Jacks or Toms, whose fathers are social pillars in Boston and large landowners in Wyoming and Dakota, and Jack and Tom—birds of passage in Scotch cheviots and billycock hats—are given to alighting for a brief breathing spell on this lofty perch, where they reproach the slipshod dress and careless speech of their friend’s small office by the trim neatness of their own clothes and conversation.” Undoubtedly, Jack and Tom seem pompous and annoying, but so, too, does Fuller, who is consistently contemptuous toward virtually every character.
Although the book contains passages of impressive writing and warts-and-all tableaux of life in the fin de siècle metropolis that feel indelible, it is perhaps less than the sum of its parts and thus potentially of more scholarly or niche interest than some of the texts that the cultural apparatus has identified as the top-tier classics. But then again, in this current age of interrupted hierarchies, aren’t all interests in some sense niche interests?
And that may be one of the most exciting aspects of the reissuing of this particular novel: in addition to having the opportunity to revisit a lost book from America’s literary past, the 2018 edition of The Cliff-Dwellers offers readers a chance to consider different approaches to the category of classic. A press with a mission to reprint them is pulled between two poles: the evaluative versus documentarian, or perhaps the elitist versus the completist. The former might assert something like, Read this because it’s a nonpareil, a pinnacle of its tradition or flawless specimen of its type; whereas the latter might assert something along the lines of, Read this because it existed and was influential, or even if you don’t read it, know we’ve made it available because it’s historically significant.
Met with glowing reviews in its era, The Cliff-Dwellers remains largely forgotten today. As Morgan points out, it fades from view
when compared to the Chicago novels of the next two decades, like Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark (1915), and Sherwood Anderson’s Windy McPherson’s Son (1916). And yet, many of these writers (particularly Dreiser), were heavily influenced by the inward-facing social realism that Fuller pioneered, as evidenced by their own correspondence and the work of literary scholars. In fact, if Chicago literature has a single, definitive point of origin … you now hold it in your hands.
Will you want to hold it in yours? Maybe or maybe not. But thanks to Chicago Review of Books Press, you once again have the option.
The newly established publishing arm of the Chicago Review of Books identifies itself as “a small press to republish classic Chicago literature in beautiful new editions.” But of what can a classic be said to consist? Looking at the etymology of the term, one finds that the meaning “of or belonging to the highest class; approved as a model” dates to the seventeenth century and derives from the Latin classicus, “relating to the highest classes of the Roman people”—in other words, superior. The obvious questions arise: superior to what and according to whom? Like so many highly subjective designations, the clearest definitions of classic are usually ostensive. The definer simply points to examples and says, That—that’s what we mean.
The text toward which Chicago Review of Books Press points to inaugurate their new series is Henry Blake Fuller’s The Cliff-Dwellers, which they declare to be “the first great ‘Chicago novel’ ” and cite as having been listed by Chicago magazine as number six in their 2010 list of “The Top 40 Chicago Novels.” In his introduction to the reissue, the Chicago Review of Books’s editor in chief, Adam Morgan, quotes Dr. Joseph Dimuro of UCLA as calling The Cliff-Dwellers “arguably the first important novel of the American city.”
Henry Blake Fuller was born in 1857 and died in 1929 and was, as the bio accompanying this newest edition explains, Chicago’s “first LGBTQ novelist, and the author of With the Procession, Under the Skylights and Bertram Cope’s Year, often considered the first American gay novel.” Cliff-Dwellers is Fuller’s third novel but his first to view the world through the lens of social realism. The story was “so shocking and unsparing in its depiction of the city’s crude industrialization, corrupt businessmen, and dysfunctional upper-class families, no Chicago newspapers would run it,” Morgan notes in his introduction. The novel was originally serialized chapter by chapter in the New York–based magazine Harper’s Weekly from June to August 1893, the same year as the Chicago World’s Fair. In reply to my request for a review copy, Morgan volunteered that “it’s … an interesting novel, for sure, if only for its historical perspective of that slice of Chicago society in 1893. We only hear about the fair, so I ate up all the references to other parts of town. It hasn’t aged well in other respects, so it would be fascinating to see a contemporary critic’s take on it.”
The book’s loose and intervallic structure follows the ambitious and acquisitive George Ogden, a young businessman from Massachusetts who seeks his fortune in the Windy City. The main action, however, revolves around the Clifton Building, a fictional eighteen-story structure in the Chicago Loop based on the 1891 Monadnock Building, which was and still is the tallest load-bearing brick edifice ever constructed. The book unfolds in a detached narrative voice. Fuller regards his city with a cool eye and a cold heart.
I must confess to being a Chicago enthusiast. Perhaps not as much so as Odgen’s love interest, Jessie Bradley—who “had the one infallible local trait—she would rather talk to a stranger about her own town than about any other subject”—but close. So I appreciated Morgan’s efforts to manage my expectations. Then again, he and the Chicago Review of Books staff transcribed the entire 277-page novel word for word from an old public domain scan, so there must be something in those pages worth seeing. But what? When a book from more than a century ago gets rereleased and even its rereleasers can recognize the work as important but flawed, one has cause to wonder: What literature from the depths of history is worth preserving? And what can readers receive from second-tier classics?
When I asked Morgan what the notion of “classic” in this case means to him, he said, “I think most of us are uncomfortable with the idea of an imposed literary canon these days. For this project, the term ‘classic’ signifies a book that has stood the test of time—a work that has remained valuable for one reason or another—but isn’t widely available for modern readers. We don’t intend to republish ‘the best’ Chicago books in history (many of those are still in print), just the ones we believe have been undeservedly forgotten.” He added that “instead of canon-building, I see it as Chicago-celebrating. I want more readers to realize how long and varied and interesting our literary history is.”
So titled because of its setting among the rapidly rising skyscrapers of the urban landscape and the rampant social climbing of the residents therein, The Cliff-Dwellers was hailed at the time by the novelist and critic William Dean Howells as “a work of very great power.” The book takes as its subject the corrosive and dehumanizing effects of capitalism and is unsparing in its depiction of the ruthless competitive maneuvering of the upper classes. Read from a contemporary perspective, the book manages to feel both audacious and restrained, expansive and provincial, relevant and quaint.
The book records in granular detail how the roots of many of America’s twenty-first-century challenges extend deeply into the past. A third-generation Chicagoan, Fuller’s family was descended from the Mayflower Pilgrims, and his prose wears his Waspy prejudices as conspicuously as a pair of buckled shoes. Through the eyes of his protagonist, he evinces disgust at America’s great cities becoming the proverbial melting pot. Take, for example, Odgen passing nauseated judgment on “a range of human types completely unknown to his past experience”:
During the enforced leisure of his first weeks he had gone several times to City Hall, and had ascended in the elevator to the reading room of the public library. On one of these occasions a heavy and sudden downpour had filled the room with readers and had closed all the windows. The downpour without seemed but a trifle compared with the confused cataract of conflicting nationalities within, and the fumes of incense that the united throng caused to rise upon the altar of learning stunned him with a sudden and sickening surprise—the bogs of Kilkenny, the dung-heaps of the Black Forest, the miry ways of Transylvania and Little Russia had contributed to it.
Elsewhere, Fuller has Ogden muse, “Aren’t we New England Puritans the cream of the Anglo-Saxon race? And why does the Anglo-Saxon race rule the globe except because the individual Anglo-Saxon can rule himself?” Fuller also engages in casual sexism, writing of the character Ann Wilde that “like all women, she embraced the personal element in every affair,” and of the character Mrs. Brainard’s penchant for chess, “To those who object that chess is an intellectual game, one may simply put the question: have you ever seen it take up by an elderly invalidated female who has rested content with mere learning of the moves?” And while Fuller’s impulse to criticize capitalism, consumerism, and social stratification stands as admirable, the scornful tenor of his authorial voice can make the book feel hectoring and ultimately a bit tedious.
Early on, of some visitors to an office within the Clifton, for instance, Fuller writes disdainfully: “They are often Jacks or Toms, whose fathers are social pillars in Boston and large landowners in Wyoming and Dakota, and Jack and Tom—birds of passage in Scotch cheviots and billycock hats—are given to alighting for a brief breathing spell on this lofty perch, where they reproach the slipshod dress and careless speech of their friend’s small office by the trim neatness of their own clothes and conversation.” Undoubtedly, Jack and Tom seem pompous and annoying, but so, too, does Fuller, who is consistently contemptuous toward virtually every character.
Although the book contains passages of impressive writing and warts-and-all tableaux of life in the fin de siècle metropolis that feel indelible, it is perhaps less than the sum of its parts and thus potentially of more scholarly or niche interest than some of the texts that the cultural apparatus has identified as the top-tier classics. But then again, in this current age of interrupted hierarchies, aren’t all interests in some sense niche interests?
And that may be one of the most exciting aspects of the reissuing of this particular novel: in addition to having the opportunity to revisit a lost book from America’s literary past, the 2018 edition of The Cliff-Dwellers offers readers a chance to consider different approaches to the category of classic. A press with a mission to reprint them is pulled between two poles: the evaluative versus documentarian, or perhaps the elitist versus the completist. The former might assert something like, Read this because it’s a nonpareil, a pinnacle of its tradition or flawless specimen of its type; whereas the latter might assert something along the lines of, Read this because it existed and was influential, or even if you don’t read it, know we’ve made it available because it’s historically significant.
Met with glowing reviews in its era, The Cliff-Dwellers remains largely forgotten today. As Morgan points out, it fades from view
when compared to the Chicago novels of the next two decades, like Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark (1915), and Sherwood Anderson’s Windy McPherson’s Son (1916). And yet, many of these writers (particularly Dreiser), were heavily influenced by the inward-facing social realism that Fuller pioneered, as evidenced by their own correspondence and the work of literary scholars. In fact, if Chicago literature has a single, definitive point of origin … you now hold it in your hands.
Will you want to hold it in yours? Maybe or maybe not. But thanks to Chicago Review of Books Press, you once again have the option.
May 23, 2024
I honestly do not recall how I became aware of this book because up until recently I had never heard of the book or the author. I suspect my discovery was the possible result of some fact checking of a book I was reading, a fiction, based in turn of the 20th century Chicago, my hometown. The book I was reading was something of historical fiction and I do insist that good historical fiction be absolutely accurate as to its history especially when the history is about Chicago. The Cliff-Dwellers is still available in print probably because it was one of the first, maybe even the first, book whose plot is based in Chicago. The book was published in 1893, the year that Chicago broke onto the world stage with the opening of the 1893 World's Columbian Exhibition. Apparently this event put Chicago in the spotlight in a number of the fields of art including literary art. This book, was an initial entry into a genre of fiction based urban social commentary and as the new kid on the block Chicago seemed to have been a focus of such fictions. The book certainly pre-dates Drieser's Sister Carrie and Sinclair's The Jungle but I can't say that it deserves to rank in their class.
The book I have read is supposedly a faithful reproduction of the original work. In reading the book I discovered numerous printing errors the frequency of which I am not used to encountering in any contemporary work. While I can't necessarily fault the author for this I do not know which printing to fault. Was the original printed this badly and the contemporary copy merely reproducing a bad 19th century publication I cannot say but it was annoying when encountered. The printing is not the author's concern, however, but the writing is and this book had it's faults. While I am aware this is a 19th century novel and should not be held to the standards of a modern fiction the reader should be warned of what they will be getting into if they choose to read this book.
As with all early literary works language is markedly different and much more formal and excessive in descriptive detail. The plot in this book is rather cliche and predictable and strongly resembles a daytime TV soap opera. The story is about a young Bostonian coming to Chicago start working in a bank. The 25 year old man is named George Ogden and his new city puts him in touch with individuals and families engaged in various stages of attempts to acquire wealth and social recognition. There are business successes, mishaps, and failures along with romances well made and those that prove disasters. All the usual soap opera fare but considering the time of their creation probably pretty heady stuff. While the plot has its weaknesses the characterizations are more subject to legitimate criticism. I found the characters to be superficially formed and clumsy, thin in fact. When judged in the light of the events of the plot the author didn't provide enough background for his characters to make their behavior credible. If you really want to read a book from this genre based in Chicago then I highly recommend Drieser's Sister Carrie which is a much better and affecting work. I am afraid the only reason Cliff-Dwellers is still in print is because of its historical significance and in that regard it is interesting and worth reading but don't expect to be blown away by the story. Enjoy.
The book I have read is supposedly a faithful reproduction of the original work. In reading the book I discovered numerous printing errors the frequency of which I am not used to encountering in any contemporary work. While I can't necessarily fault the author for this I do not know which printing to fault. Was the original printed this badly and the contemporary copy merely reproducing a bad 19th century publication I cannot say but it was annoying when encountered. The printing is not the author's concern, however, but the writing is and this book had it's faults. While I am aware this is a 19th century novel and should not be held to the standards of a modern fiction the reader should be warned of what they will be getting into if they choose to read this book.
As with all early literary works language is markedly different and much more formal and excessive in descriptive detail. The plot in this book is rather cliche and predictable and strongly resembles a daytime TV soap opera. The story is about a young Bostonian coming to Chicago start working in a bank. The 25 year old man is named George Ogden and his new city puts him in touch with individuals and families engaged in various stages of attempts to acquire wealth and social recognition. There are business successes, mishaps, and failures along with romances well made and those that prove disasters. All the usual soap opera fare but considering the time of their creation probably pretty heady stuff. While the plot has its weaknesses the characterizations are more subject to legitimate criticism. I found the characters to be superficially formed and clumsy, thin in fact. When judged in the light of the events of the plot the author didn't provide enough background for his characters to make their behavior credible. If you really want to read a book from this genre based in Chicago then I highly recommend Drieser's Sister Carrie which is a much better and affecting work. I am afraid the only reason Cliff-Dwellers is still in print is because of its historical significance and in that regard it is interesting and worth reading but don't expect to be blown away by the story. Enjoy.
Want to read
August 28, 2018
Gutenberg
Opening: On the tenth floor of the Clifton is the office of the Massachusetts Brass Company.
Those whose minds are attuned to an appreciation of upholstery and kindred matters pronounce this little suite the gem of the whole establishment. Even many who are not adepts in the matter of house-furnishing, and who are much too rushed and preoccupied to become such, have been known to pause in their course through the Clifton's long corridors, on occasions when the ribbed glass door of the Brass Company happened to be standing ajar, and to say to themselves, with certain home offices in mind,
September 2, 2012
While I don't think The Cliff-Dwellers, arguably the first novel about metropolitan Chicago, is heartless, I do think it's fair to call it cold.
Henry Blake Fuller tells the story of a promising young Bostonian named George Ogden who moves "out west" to make his fame and fortune in the new frontier city. There, he finds work in the city's newest skyscraper, the Clifton, where his actions and desires quickly intermix with those of the men and women who also work in the building's eighteen floors. The ethnic and class homogeneity of the Clifton -- everyone there is white and either solidly middle-class or wealthy -- is clearly not emblematic of the real social breakdown in Chicago at the end of the nineteenth century, but even so, for Fuller the building is a miniature of the whole "Windy City." The pettiness of Brainard, the underhanded trickery of McDowell, the ultimate despair of Ogden -- we are meant to understand that these are characteristics not contained within the Clifton's walls.
Clearly, Fuller is an artist. His deceptively simply sentences bring together episodes in the text in suggestive ways. And, as just about everyone who reads the book notes, the introduction, which compares the men and women who spend their days and nights in urban skyscrapers to the cliff-dwelling indigenous Americans who once inhabited the southwestern United States (and had been profiled at the 1893 Colombian Exhibition), is clever. But even these formal successes, which remind readers they're studying rather than getting to know the novel's characters, ultimately make the book even less satisfying than its caustic tone, selfish characters, and incredibly dire conclusion would have done on their own. The wind blows crisp in Chicago, from the lake as well as the politicians, and it'll cut you from these pages directly.
Henry Blake Fuller tells the story of a promising young Bostonian named George Ogden who moves "out west" to make his fame and fortune in the new frontier city. There, he finds work in the city's newest skyscraper, the Clifton, where his actions and desires quickly intermix with those of the men and women who also work in the building's eighteen floors. The ethnic and class homogeneity of the Clifton -- everyone there is white and either solidly middle-class or wealthy -- is clearly not emblematic of the real social breakdown in Chicago at the end of the nineteenth century, but even so, for Fuller the building is a miniature of the whole "Windy City." The pettiness of Brainard, the underhanded trickery of McDowell, the ultimate despair of Ogden -- we are meant to understand that these are characteristics not contained within the Clifton's walls.
Clearly, Fuller is an artist. His deceptively simply sentences bring together episodes in the text in suggestive ways. And, as just about everyone who reads the book notes, the introduction, which compares the men and women who spend their days and nights in urban skyscrapers to the cliff-dwelling indigenous Americans who once inhabited the southwestern United States (and had been profiled at the 1893 Colombian Exhibition), is clever. But even these formal successes, which remind readers they're studying rather than getting to know the novel's characters, ultimately make the book even less satisfying than its caustic tone, selfish characters, and incredibly dire conclusion would have done on their own. The wind blows crisp in Chicago, from the lake as well as the politicians, and it'll cut you from these pages directly.
November 15, 2015
I enjoyed Henry Fuller's The Cliff-Dwellers (1893), though mostly because it satisfies many of my fascinations with the intertwining of the physical city, capitalism and social mores. Also, I am going to visit my brother in Chicago for Christmas! So there will be more upcoming about this amazing city. Fuller's writing is pleasant enough though, it might be enjoyable if you loved none of those things. 'The work has been called the first American novel about modern city life', and is centered on the Clifton Building modeled on the 1891 Burnham and Root Monadnock Building.*
Welcome to 1890s Chicago:
There's so much there - the excitement of the new and previously unimagined height of steel and stone, this complete world that human beings have created for themselves. It is the essence of the city boiled down in a way, almost so much so that the rest of the city is superfluous -- yet this is entirely built and run with the wealth generated by the city's building and growing through the destruction of the countryside and the cultures it once nurtured. It is the conversion of the natural world into the human and mechanical, a new kind of landscape.
So that possibly explains what the fuck is going on with the whole tribe thing, the peace-pipe, the campfire -- it's as though by taking the land (destroying it, recreating it in steel and brick) through the murder of its the original inhabitants, these early immigrant Europeans tried to take over some of their souls, some of their rights to the ground they are getting rich on by re-enacting the rituals they associated with Native Americans. Re-enacting them, but in their own vernacular -- the material rewards of unbridled capitalism and the cafes and cigar-shops of the buildings in which all was planned, financed, and brought to fruition. The title itself recalls the beautiful Native American buildings high in the American Southwests' cliffs, I find it an extraordinary and strange appropriation.
There are only white people in this novel, you can be sure of that. Though they are graded.
Back to buildings, this was the view from the top:
This is a book with characters who made early financial successes (and those neither ethically nor legally), but mostly about complete failure. There is plenty of failure here. Only optimism abounds, and a curious portrait of the Chicago 'native':
When it's the ladies doing it, you smile. But when it's arrogant men?
I'm rather fascinated by it all because it feels so alien, so horrible, so particular to a time and a place, yet it has resulted in these cities I know, walk through, even love.
I do love Chicago.
A part of me does love that building.
I am sad that the gross materiality of this world should still exist, as well as its xenophobia -- though anti-immigrant sentiment points in a different direction now. It brings into the view the conflicting levels of racisms:
There's a complete aside further on that sheds some further light on the subject?
Because it's all mixed up with race and class and East v West (or dead centre, but this was still a couple decades before Arizona even became a state, so Chicago could still think of itself as the West I suppose. But California was sitting there, state since 1850)
And of course, for anyone obsessed with real estate and the building of cities and how that enters discourse and culture and also props up capitalism, this is a gold mine. Like this new speculative development built in the marsh:
There are also these descriptions of this great city in a state of existence I can barely imagine knowing the city today, like this progression from centre to suburb in the industrial and not-too-pretty 1890s:
I love this too -- a summer custom even then recognised as brought from country to city, older times to new and now of course changed, but people still sit out on their stoops:
So to end with a conversation that in many ways sums up the great arrogance, the narrowness and racism and a dash of misogyny, and the pride of city that defines this urban area and the people who live within it for Fuller:
-----
*Encyclopedia of the Chicago Literary Renaissance, By Jan Pinkerton, Randolph H. Hudson
Welcome to 1890s Chicago:
It is a wild tract full of sudden falls, unexpected rises, precipitous dislocations. The high and the low are met together. The big and the little alternate in a rapid and illogical succession. Its perilous trails are followed successfully by but few — by a lineman, perhaps, who is balanced on a cornice, by a roofer astride some dizzy gable, by a youth here and there whose early apprehension of the main chance and the multiplication table has stood him in good stead. This country is a treeless country — if we overlook the " forest of chimneys " comprised in a bird's-eye view of any great city, and if we are unable to detect any botanical analogies in the lofty articulated iron funnels whose ramifying cables reach out wherever they can, to fasten wherever they may. It is a shrubless country — if we give no heed to the gnarled carpentry of the awkward frame-works which carry the telegraph, and which are set askew on such dizzy corners as the course of the wires may compel. It is an arid country — if we overlook the numberless tanks that squat on the high angles of alley walls, or if we fail to see the little pools of tar and gravel that ooze and shimmer in the summer sun on the roofs of old-fashioned buildings of the humbler sort. It is an airless country — if by air we mean the mere combination of oxygen and nitrogen which is commonly indicated by that name. For here the medium of sight, sound, light, and life becomes largely carbonaceous, and the remoter peaks of this mighty yet unprepossessing landscape loom up grandly, but vaguely, through swathing mists of coal-smoke.
From such conditions as these — along with the Tacoma, the Monadnock, and a great host of other modern monsters — towers the Clifton. From the beer-hall in its basement to the barber-shop just under its roof the Clifton stands full eighteen stories tall. Its hundreds of windows glitter with multitudinous letterings in gold and in silver, and on summer afternoons its awnings flutter score on score in the tepid breezes that sometimes come up from Indiana. Four ladder-like constructions which rise skyward stage by stage promote the agility of the clambering hordes that swarm within it, and ten elevators — devices unknown to the real, aboriginal inhabitants — ameliorate the daily cliff-climbing for the frail of physique and the pressed for time.
The tribe inhabiting the Clifton is large and rather heterogeneous. All told, it numbers about four thousand souls. It includes bankers, capitalists, lawyers, "promoters"; brokers in bonds, stocks, pork, oil, mortgages; real-estate people and railroad people and insurance people — life, fire, marine, accident; a host of principals, agents, middlemen, clerks, cashiers, stenographers, and errand-boys; and the necessary force of engineers, janitors, scrub-women, and elevator-hands.
All these thousands gather daily around their own great camp-fire. This fire heats the four big boilers under the pavement of the court which lies just behind, and it sends aloft a vast plume of smoke to mingle with those of other like communities that are settled round about. These same thousands may also gather in installments — at their tribal feast, for the Clifton has its own lunch-counter just off one corner of the grand court, as well as a restaurant several floors higher up. The members of the tribe may also smoke the pipe of peace among themselves whenever so minded, for the Clifton has its own cigar-stand just within the principal entrance. Newspapers and periodicals, too, are sold at the same place. The warriors may also communicate their messages, hostile or friendly, to chiefs more or less remote ; for there is a telegraph office in the corridor and a squad of messenger- boys in wait close by.
In a word, the Clifton aims to be complete within itself, and it will be unnecessary for us to go afield either far or frequently during the present simple succession of brief episodes in the lives of the Cliff-dwellers.
There's so much there - the excitement of the new and previously unimagined height of steel and stone, this complete world that human beings have created for themselves. It is the essence of the city boiled down in a way, almost so much so that the rest of the city is superfluous -- yet this is entirely built and run with the wealth generated by the city's building and growing through the destruction of the countryside and the cultures it once nurtured. It is the conversion of the natural world into the human and mechanical, a new kind of landscape.
So that possibly explains what the fuck is going on with the whole tribe thing, the peace-pipe, the campfire -- it's as though by taking the land (destroying it, recreating it in steel and brick) through the murder of its the original inhabitants, these early immigrant Europeans tried to take over some of their souls, some of their rights to the ground they are getting rich on by re-enacting the rituals they associated with Native Americans. Re-enacting them, but in their own vernacular -- the material rewards of unbridled capitalism and the cafes and cigar-shops of the buildings in which all was planned, financed, and brought to fruition. The title itself recalls the beautiful Native American buildings high in the American Southwests' cliffs, I find it an extraordinary and strange appropriation.
There are only white people in this novel, you can be sure of that. Though they are graded.
Back to buildings, this was the view from the top:
A clear day came ; he conducted them up to the roof-observatory and showed them the city, and they numbered the towers thereof.
The old people tiptoed gingerly around the parapet, while Ogden waved his hand over the prospect — the mouth of the river with its elevators and its sprawling miles of railway track; the weakish blue of the lake, with the coming and going of schooners and propellers, and the "cribs" that stood on the faint horizon — "that's where our water comes from," George explained; the tower of the water-works itself, and the dull and distant green of Lincoln Park ; the towering bulk of other great sky-scrapers and the grimy spindling of a thousand surrounding chimneys; the lumber-laden brigs that were tugged slowly through the drawbridges, while long strings of drays and buggies and street-cars accumulated during the wait. (211)
This is a book with characters who made early financial successes (and those neither ethically nor legally), but mostly about complete failure. There is plenty of failure here. Only optimism abounds, and a curious portrait of the Chicago 'native':
Ogden smiled. He saw that he was face to face with a true daughter of the West; she had never seen him before, and she might never see him again, yet she was talking to him with perfect friendliness and confidence. Equally, he was sure, was she a true daughter of Chicago; she had the one infallible local trait — she would rather talk to a stranger about her own town than about any other subject.
When it's the ladies doing it, you smile. But when it's arrogant men?
George felt his heart give an indignant throb. He seemed to see before him the spokesman of a community where prosperity had drugged patriotism into unconsciousness, and where the bare scaffoldings of materialism felt themselves quite independent of the graces and draperies of culture. It seemed hardly possible that one short month could make his native New England appear so small, so provincial, so left-behind.
"You've got to have snap, go. You've got to have a big new country behind you. How much do you suppose people in Iowa and Kansas and Minnesota think about Down East? Not a great deal. It's Chicago they're looking to. This town looms up before them and shuts out Boston and New York and the whole seaboard from the sight and the thoughts of the West and the Northwest and the New Northwest and the Far West and all the other Wests yet to be invented. They read our papers, they come here to buy and to enjoy themselves." He turned his thumb towards the ceiling, and gave it an upward thrust that sent it through the six ceilings above it. " If you'd go up on our roof and hear them talking — "
" Oh, well," said George ; " hadn't we better get something to eat?"
" And what kind of a town is it that's wanted," pursued McDowell, as he pulled down the cover of his desk, " to take up a big national enterprise and put it through with a rush? A big town, of course, but one that has grown big so fast that it hasn't had time to grow old. One with lots of youth and plenty of momentum. Young enough to be confident and enthusiastic, and to have no cliques and sets full of bickerings and jealousies. A town that will all pull one way. What's New York ?" he asked, flourishing his towel from the corner where the wash-stand stood. " It ain't a city at all; it's like London — it's a province. Father Knickerbocker is too old, and too big and logy, and too all-fired selfish. We are the people, right here..." (88-89)
I'm rather fascinated by it all because it feels so alien, so horrible, so particular to a time and a place, yet it has resulted in these cities I know, walk through, even love.
I do love Chicago.
A part of me does love that building.
I am sad that the gross materiality of this world should still exist, as well as its xenophobia -- though anti-immigrant sentiment points in a different direction now. It brings into the view the conflicting levels of racisms:
During the enforced leisure of his first weeks he had gone several times to the City Hall, and had ascended in the elevator to the reading-room of the public library. On one of these occasions a heavy and sudden down-pour had filled the room with readers and had closed all the windows. The down-pour without seemed but a trifle compared with the confused cataract of conflicting nationalities within, and the fumes of incense that the united throng caused to rise upon the altar of learning stunned him with a sudden and sickening surprise — the bogs of Kilkenny, the dung-heaps of the Black Forest, the miry ways of Transylvania and Little Russia had all contributed to it.
The universal brotherhood of man appeared before him, and it smelt of mortality — no partial, exclusive mortality, but a mortality comprehensive, universal, condensed and averaged up from the grand totality of items.
In a human maelstrom, of which such a scene was but a simple transitory eddy, it was grateful to regain one's bearings in some degree, and to get an opportunity for meeting one or two familiar drops. (55-56)
There's a complete aside further on that sheds some further light on the subject?
"Oh, well," began George, with the air proper to a launching out into a broad and easy generalization, " aren't we New England Puritans the cream of the Anglo-Saxon race ? And why does the Anglo-Saxon race rule the globe except because the individual Anglo-Saxon can rule himself?" (225)
Because it's all mixed up with race and class and East v West (or dead centre, but this was still a couple decades before Arizona even became a state, so Chicago could still think of itself as the West I suppose. But California was sitting there, state since 1850)
"Why are things so horrible in this country?" demanded Mrs. Floyd, plaintively.
"Because there's no standard of manners — no resident country gentry to provide it. Our own rank country folks have never had such a check, and this horrible rout of foreign peasantry has just escaped from it. What little culture we have in the country generally we find principally in a few large cities, and they have become so large that the small element that works for a bettering is completely swamped."
He looked almost pityingly on his brother. "This is no town for a gentleman," he felt obliged to acknowledge. "What an awful thing," he admitted further, " to have only one life to live, and to be obliged to live it in such a place as this!" (237-238)
And of course, for anyone obsessed with real estate and the building of cities and how that enters discourse and culture and also props up capitalism, this is a gold mine. Like this new speculative development built in the marsh:
Occasionally it did dry up and stay so for several weeks. Then, on bright Sunday afternoons, folly and credulity, in the shape of young married couples who knew nothing about real estate, but who vaguely understood that it was a "good investment," would come out and would go over the ground — or try to. They were welcomed with a cynical effrontery by the young fellow whom McDowell paid fifty dollars a month to hold the office there. He had an insinuating manner, and frequently sold a lot with the open effect of perpetrating a good joke.
McDowell sometimes joked about his customers, but never about his lands. He shed upon them the transfiguring light of the imagination, which is so useful and necessary in the environs of Chicago. Land generally — that is, subdivided and recorded land — he regarded as a serious thing, if not indeed as a high and holy thing, and his view of his own landed possessions — mortgaged though they might be, and so partly unpaid for — was not only serious but idealistic. He was able to ignore the pools whose rising and falling befouled the supports of his sidewalks with a green slime ; and the tufts of reeds and rushes which appeared here and there spread themselves out before his gaze in the similitude of a turfy lawn. He was a poet — as every real-estate man should be. (104)
There are also these descriptions of this great city in a state of existence I can barely imagine knowing the city today, like this progression from centre to suburb in the industrial and not-too-pretty 1890s:
He had reached the point where he felt it would be a relief to cut away from town and everything in it ... only so many miles of flimsy and shabby shanties and back views of sheds and stables; of grimy, cindered switch-yards, with the long flanks of freight-houses and interminable strings of loaded or empty cars; of dingy viaducts and groggy lamp-posts and dilapidated fences whose scanty remains called to remembrance lotions and tonics that had long passed their vogue; of groups of Sunday loungers before saloons, and gangs of unclassifiable foreigners picking up bits of coal along the tracks ; of muddy crossings over roads whose bordering ditches were filled with flocks of geese; of wide prairies cut up by endless tracks, dotted with pools of water, and rustling with the dead grasses of last summer; then suburbs new and old — some in the fresh promise of sidewalks and trees and nothing else, others unkempt, shabby, gone to seed ; then a high passage over a marshy plain, a range of low wooded hills, emancipation from the dubious body known as the Cook County Commissioners — and Hinsdale. (176-177)
I love this too -- a summer custom even then recognised as brought from country to city, older times to new and now of course changed, but people still sit out on their stoops:
The spring trailed along slowly, with all its discomforts of latitude and locality, and then came the long, fresh evenings of early June, when domesticity brings out its rugs and druggets, and invites its friends and neighbors to sit with it on its front steps. The Brainards had these appendages to local housekeeping — lingering reminders of a quick growth from village to city. Theirs was a large rug made of two breadths of Brussels carpeting and surrounded on all four sides with a narrow border of pink and blue flowers on a moss-colored background. This rug covered the greater part of the long flight of lime-stone steps. In the beautiful coolness of these fresh June evenings Abbie frequently sat there on the topmost step, under the jig-saw lace-work of the balcony-like canopy over the front door, while her mother occupied a carpet camp-chair within the vestibule and languidly allowed the long twilight to overtake her neglected chess-board. (186)
So to end with a conversation that in many ways sums up the great arrogance, the narrowness and racism and a dash of misogyny, and the pride of city that defines this urban area and the people who live within it for Fuller:
" Can it be that there are really any such expectations here as these?" He addressed Fairchild exclusively — the oldest and most sedate of the circle.
"Why not?" returned Fairchild. "Does it seem unreasonable that the State which produced the two greatest figures of the greatest epoch in our history, and which has done most within the last ten years to check alien excesses and un-American ideas, should also be the State to give the country the final blend of the American character and its ultimate metropolis ?"
"And you personally — is this your own belief ?"
Fairchild leaned back his fine old head on the padded top of his chair and looked at his questioner with the kind of pity that has a faint tinge of weariness. His wife sat beside him silent, but with her hand on his, and when he answered she pressed it meaningly; for to the Chicagoan — even the middle-aged female Chicagoan — the name of the town, in its formal, ceremonial use, has a power that no other word in the language quite possesses. It is a shibboleth, as regards its pronunciation ; it is a trumpet-call, as regards its effect. It has all the electrifying and unifying power of a college yell.
"Chicago is Chicago," he said. "It is the belief of all of us. It is inevitable; nothing can stop us now." (248-249)
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*Encyclopedia of the Chicago Literary Renaissance, By Jan Pinkerton, Randolph H. Hudson
January 14, 2019
Fuller's social-realist novel of business and social climbers in 1890s Chicago is a very harsh and unflattering portrait of people who have no interest in anything other than "getting ahead" whether that means transacting shady business deals or breaking into "society" by marrying money. The title refers to The Clifton, a skyscraper in the Chicago Loop (presumably based on the real Monadnock Building) where much of the story takes place. A bleak story with a somewhat melodramatic climax, the city itself is presented as a malevolent force, breaking down anyone who isn't willing to play by its soul-crushing rules.
August 4, 2018
This story is awesome! The Chicago Review of Books Press edition, however, is total bullshit. The editors of this edition should be embarrassed that they put out a book with so many typos. They really ruined a great book. One typo is inexcusable, so a book with a ton of typos is just lazy ass shit.
August 26, 2018
Get ready yer bowl and yer spoon cuz the pot's a-boilin'!
October 16, 2021
Awful pacing, too many characters.
March 12, 2020
This starts out very slow, but picks up after the middle of the book, where everything falls to pieces for the characters.
Taking place in Chicago at the end of the 19th century, it's about the lives of a handful of people who are ready to"clean up" capitalistic-wise. There're suckers to be had, so why not take them. They all do business in a"gigantic" (14-story) skyscraper called The Clifton.
I would have given this 2.5 stars, but I just love this type of storyline: where rich people claw their way over each other, even fooking over their own family members, to make money. And then they reap what they sowed. Hahaha. Does my heart good.
Here's a quote from an especially loathsome character; the owner of the bank at the base of the Clifton. One of his daughters is smitten with a gigolo-type singer in the choir of her church (he is actually paid for this), because he "sings like an angel." She tells her father she "will marry him." Her father forbids it, and when she goes ahead and marries the no-good bum, and ends up beaten, and abandoned, and pregnant, he refuses to even look at her. His other daughter, who is a living saint, implores him to help her:
P.122-3:
"The wretch had struck his daughter - a brutal, hateful thing as regarded his daughter or any daughter or any other woman; but his daughter had defied him, overridden him, and the man whom she had chosen for a master was now the instrument of her punishment. The accounts appeared to balance. However, figures do lie, and his own agitation indicated that the x of human emotion had not been completely eliminated from his problem.
He cleared his throat. 'she has made her bed, Abbie,' he said in a husky tone, 'and now she must lie on it.'
Hateful, hateful thing to do to your own child. But I had experience with this From my own mother.
The language is very old-fashioned and at times, laborious. This author had a big verbal lexicon.
Taking place in Chicago at the end of the 19th century, it's about the lives of a handful of people who are ready to"clean up" capitalistic-wise. There're suckers to be had, so why not take them. They all do business in a"gigantic" (14-story) skyscraper called The Clifton.
I would have given this 2.5 stars, but I just love this type of storyline: where rich people claw their way over each other, even fooking over their own family members, to make money. And then they reap what they sowed. Hahaha. Does my heart good.
Here's a quote from an especially loathsome character; the owner of the bank at the base of the Clifton. One of his daughters is smitten with a gigolo-type singer in the choir of her church (he is actually paid for this), because he "sings like an angel." She tells her father she "will marry him." Her father forbids it, and when she goes ahead and marries the no-good bum, and ends up beaten, and abandoned, and pregnant, he refuses to even look at her. His other daughter, who is a living saint, implores him to help her:
P.122-3:
"The wretch had struck his daughter - a brutal, hateful thing as regarded his daughter or any daughter or any other woman; but his daughter had defied him, overridden him, and the man whom she had chosen for a master was now the instrument of her punishment. The accounts appeared to balance. However, figures do lie, and his own agitation indicated that the x of human emotion had not been completely eliminated from his problem.
He cleared his throat. 'she has made her bed, Abbie,' he said in a husky tone, 'and now she must lie on it.'
Hateful, hateful thing to do to your own child. But I had experience with this From my own mother.
The language is very old-fashioned and at times, laborious. This author had a big verbal lexicon.
September 12, 2007
Realism period circa 1893. This genre is always a slow read for me due to my need for a dictionary, and the penchant for stopping the story for the sake of meticulous description of scenery and characters. Other than that, it's quite telling to see how human drives may change in style but not in substance over the years.
March 30, 2009
Loved this book. Melodrama, sure, but really a fantastic look at fin de sicle Chicago.
Want to read
February 17, 2010Yesterday I went to the library and checked out 8 books.
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