“Such days!–Oshkosh, Hartford, Menomonee Falls, Milwaukee, the lake, Chicago & Princeton & YOU!!” What further proof do we need of the transforming power of love than its ability to make Oshkosh seem magical?
Sandburg became famous. Steichen might have. Yet this book is hers, to the extent that she wrote most of the letters, most of the longer ones, and most of the more interesting ones. Steichen was the sister of famed photographer Edward Steichen. Her early life was proof that few possibilities were open to educated women in 1908; a Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Chicago, she ended up teaching English and “expression” in a farm town 100 miles west of Chicago.
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The rest was words. They did not fall in love so much as talk themselves into it. After all, they believed that words could change the world and often improved each other’s socialist propaganda. Every couple in love invent their own private language (Steichen to Sandburg: “Oh–and oh!–and OH! and H’m! H’m!”) with which they reinvent each other. A dazzled Steichen hailed Sandburg: “You glorious man! . . . You miracle!”–a description that anyone else who knew him would probably not have recognized him by. Reading the later letters is like eating cotton candy. Even big bites melt away to nothing and leave you feeling a little ill. “Ten thousand lovebirds, sweetthroated and red-plumed, were in my soul,” sang Sandburg, “in the garden of my under-life.”
Just as the revolutionary Sandburg in time became a Stevenson Democrat, Steichen’s New Woman turned out to be the Old Woman with a degree; they both confused words with acts. While Steichen claimed to be a radical feminist, her conduct was conventional. When they first met in Milwaukee, she had refused the impetuous Sandburg’s invitation to dinner, explaining later that nice girls did not go out with men to whom they had not been properly introduced. She also backtracked on her pledge not to wear a wedding ring, calling what was more likely a concession to mom “a practical rational concession to the people.”
Sandburg has been dead 20 years now, which is long enough for him to be lumped among the artifacts of the past. We have no one quite like him today; younger readers will have to imagine a cross between John Cougar Mellencamp and Senator Paul Simon.
Sandburg moved, with his wife and child, to Chicago in 1912 to write for the Chicago Daily Socialist. A strike had idled the city’s capitalist papers, and the circulation of the Socialist spectacularly–and temporarily–shot up to 600,000. The paper folded six months later. But Sandburg in his mid-30s was still “searching.” He worked for a half dozen magazines and newspapers in those early years in Chicago–never staying very long at any of them and writing poetry on the side. He walked everywhere in the city, but he didn’t live in it, preferring to dwell in Maywood and Elmhurst. Callahan dares to suggest that the bard of Chicago never actually liked the place very much.
So engaging and versatile a fraud was bound to become famous. By the time he died in 1967, Sandburg had made the cover of Life, done the big TV shows, and picked up a Pulitzer. He collected honorary degrees the way some people collect stamps. He even went to Hollywood, where he worked as a high-priced consultant (an expert on mass taste, presumably) in the making of the biblical bore The Greatest Story Ever Told. He played the part of the quintessential midwesterner enthusiastically enough to make some people want to puke. The Sewanee Review said of him, “He participated in all the claptrap of mid-century middlebrow liberalism, blending invocations to democracy, pseudopopulist jargon, and commercialized aesthetics in a souffle heavily flavored with cliche.” He was, in short, the kind of poet they name grade schools after.
