The Mayhew of Chicago

...he marries a rich widow for "pohk chops," and the morning customer cannot understand it...

...In "The Intellectual Awakening in Burton's Row" in Chicago Stories, a neighborhood discussion group started by a pretentious woman promptly turns into cards for the men and gossip for the women...

...Ade told Meine that Record readers were more interested "if they could find familiar characters recurring in the yarns...

...it includes reporting, essays, sketches, stories, fables, parodies, and what all...

...Farrell makes the good point that Ade kept Pink from being a stereotype by putting a lot of himself into the character...

...But Ade knows exactly who is kidding whom...

...Artie, although William Dean Howells praised it as the best study he knew "of American town life in the West," has not worn well...

...Once in a while Ade takes off his wraps, as in broadly comic accounts in Chicago Stories of buying a 50-cent umbrella in a rainstorm, and of a down-home Negro dinner for nostalgic white Southerners exiled in Chicago...

...The columns have been selected and edited, with an introduction, by Franklin J. Meine, and they have their original illustrations, mostly by John T. McCutcheon...

...This sort of woodsman's eye is a necessity in the wilderness, and Ade's Chicago, although he prefers to think otherwise, is still Fort Dearborn...

...The crew of a river tug sits on the rail to eat dinner, and "sometimes in shooting under a bridge the linesman holds up a big potato on his fork to the crowd on the bridge and offers a bite...

...Meine's introduction is dated 1963, but this seems to be a bit of regnery, since its references to Ade and McCutcheon as alive (they died in 1944 and 1949, respectively) make it clear that it is the 1941 introduction...

...Now that I have read them I find Ade much more interesting than I had expected...

...Beneath his comic mispronunciations and his pretence of servility, Pink is a man, or, as he says, "a man among men...

...His writing is deceptively promising...

...What he wants from Pink is "awe," not friendship, and he "invited confidence even while repelling intimacy...

...discipline is enforced by choking the obstreperous...

...The thin comic plot of Pink Marsh consists of the morning customer's regularly impressing Pink by his use of polysyllabic words, which Pink regards as the hallmark of education...

...Meine's selection gives a good idea of Ade's range...

...The language usually operates by means of understatement...

...Artie's love for Mamie reforms him, although he was never really very wicked: his height of sin was buying drinks one night for a self-styled "actorine," after which he passed out chastely...

...But unlike them he could never fully free his imagination...

...Ade does a proud column on the oldest building in town, an incredible antiquity built 60 years before, and in an account of a building that had somehow found time to darken, he writes indignantly that people think everything in Chicago smells of fresh plaster...

...In several of these fantasies the morning customer (equal at last) takes a hand and adds juicy details...

...Meine has selected 56 from these thousands, choosing, he says, those "important for their value in revealing the social life of Chicago rather than for their literary significance, although the latter phase has not been overlooked...

...Ade can...

...One is a brash young office worker named Arthur Blanchard, and another a Negro barbershop bootblack named William Pinckney Marsh...

...Pink daydreams of having a million dollars and hiring a boy to do nothing but think of what might please Pink for dinner...

...Pink despises the ignorant white barbers for whom he works, wants all the civil rights coming to him...

...Artie and Mamie are not really people, but types of Chicago life, and if there is a love story, it is that of the West Side and the North Side falling for each other...

...The Chicago of George Ade's day was a wide-open town, but Ade always stayed buttoned...

...When the barbers in Pink Marsh get excited and compete in their vehemence against England, Pink tells the morning customer that he just missed an attack on London by "fo' million white bahbehs," during which Pink sat terrified by the stove, dodging bullets...

...He writes, of the morning customer: "He could not determine whether Pink's admiration for these words was real or feigned, and it mattered little so long as the boy pretended to be in ecstasy...

...By the end, with the party ruined and the two Barclay girls in their rooms, "squirming with hysteria," comic observation has miraculously become a moving short story...

...Artie is a wonderfully innocent and moral tale...

...After the serving of the refreshments and in the intervals between the mandolin selections Eunice Barclay was to play a violin solo and the minister was to give some of the dialect recitations for which he had become justly famous with the members of his congregation...

...Chicago Stories (Regnery, 278 pp., $5.95) is a reissue of a privately printed 1941 selection of Ade's columns from the Chicago Record...

...Ade seems best able to let his imagination go in some poor character's fantasy of wealth...

...Ade gives Pink's remarks in dialect, a convention of the time, but even that cannot conceal the seriousness with which he takes Pink...

...Ade concludes gently: "Thus it was the Circle of Inquiry became a popular institution in Burton's Row...

...The one short story in the book that seems to me a thorough success, "The Barclay Lawn Party," starts out as a triumph of exact comic observation...

...Here is a sample: The guests were to assemble at 6:30, and there was to be croquet playing in the area back of the grape-arbor...

...Chicagoans keep Ade's memory green, and in October and November, Chicago publishers lovingly reissued three of his books...

...Artie says that he doesn't expect the church show to be "any worse than a barn fight over in Indiana," or remarks of a fancy dresser: "It ain't no cinch he's wearing underclothes...

...He is the Mayhew of Chicago...

...These sketches were collected as Artie (1896) and Pink Marsh (1897...

...Ade sees the morning customer just as clearly...

...After that, when it came time for lighting the Chinese lanterns in the front yard, the company was to be seated at the small tables and provided with ice-cream, lemonade and cake...

...Over the years Ade created and developed a number of these...

...Yet this quiet language often shows real distinction...

...Two artists were to dispense mandolin music...

...Pink says, of a porter courting a fickle girl, that when his money runs out, "ol' Hen'y'll be out on 'e road makin' up loweh seven and guessin' why...

...Eventually the morning customer writes a number of fine polysyllabic letters to get Pink out of scrapes, with a variety of results...

...WRITERS & WRITING The Mayhew of Chicago By Stanley Edgar Hyman Until A few months ago, if anyone had asked me who George Ade was, I would have answered that he was the author of some Fables in Slang that keep appearing in humor anthologies, and that I have never thought very funny...

...Now they have been reissued together (in the Chicago in Fiction series) as Artie and Pink Marsh (University of Chicago Press, 224 pp., $3.95), with the McCutcheon illustrations and an enthusiastic introduction by James T. Farrell...

...Doc' as Lothario" in Chicago Stories begins: "Taken as a whole, the colony at the Alfalfa European Hotel would not have induced a modest woman to come across the street...

...If a man has two cigars in one upper vest pocket and three sharpened pencils and a bone toothbrush in the other, he is a rural telegraph operator...

...The sheer inadequacy of that response shows that I am not a Chicagoan...

...For seven years, from 1893 to 1900, Ade contributed a daily feature, "Stories of the Streets and of the Town," usually illustrated by McCutcheon, to the editorial page of the Record...

...Ade has an importance in American literary history: he links Mark Twain (whom he imitated) with Ernest Hemingway (whom he influenced...

...The most impressive thing about the book is Ade's eye for the telling detail that gives exact social classification...

...In a series of vigorous, slangy monologues to a co-worker named Miller, Artie tells the story of his courtship of Mamie Carroll...

...Ade's humor is generally so low-keyed as to be almost inaudible...

...Anyone wearing a "sashvest" will also have oil on his hair, carry a black silk handkerchief, and wear low shoes and spotted stockings...

...Its politics, as a fine piece called "Some Instances of Political Devotion" shows, is a matter of herding bums into flophouses and guarding them until they can be delivered to the polls on election day...

...A proper coachman will have no beard "except the small patch of side-whisker in front of each ear...

...The cook in a Chicago restaurant "has a back room larger than a telephone booth...

...Ade is like an early Chekhov of the newspaper sketches, who never developed into late Chekhov, or a Synge who reported the life of the Aran Islanders but never turned it into plays...

...is aware that he is using the customers he flatters...

...Pink's being South Side is thus neatly overdetermined...

...In Artie, Ade writes: "Artie did not know the tune or the words, so he merely whistled it on speculation and when he came to the doubtful parts he hundled...

...Pink is the irrepressible half of Ade, as the "morning customer" in whom Pink confides is the respectable half, so that the book is something like a dialogue between Ade's id and superego...

...Ade's stories are less successful than his reporting, and they have an oddly transitional quality, as though he had just invented the idea of fiction, evolving it as Defoe did from factual narrative...

...Pink Marsh is a less dated book...

...A hobo in Chicago Stories dreams of being so rich that, among other excesses, he gives the waiter a dollar to fan him while he eats...

...I suppose that makes me an honorary Chicagoan...

...Unlike Artie, Pink does not marry for love...