Nine-year wonder
Andro Linklater
THE CHICAGOAN: A LOST MAGAZINE OF THE JAZZ AGE edited by Neil Harris University of Chicago Press, £34, pp. 385, ISBN 9780226-17618. ✆ £27.20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Think quiz. Think quiz. ‘A crescentshaped town, 26 miles by 15, along a great lake. An unchallenged murder record — a splendid university — hobo capital to the country — and the finest of grand opera. Altogether the most zestful spectacle on this earth.’ Where are we? In case of doubt, the city’s short-lived house magazine spelled out the answer in 48 point type, ‘Chi CA go.’ Actually the emphasis should have been on the Chic, because as demonstrated by this elegant collection of covers, illustrations and stories from The Chicagoan, in its heyday Chicago was the most stylish, exciting and quintessentially American of all the cities that encircle the United States landmass. New York looked over its shoulder to Europe, New Orleans pretended to be French, San Francisco was a rootless amalgam of Spanish mission and Pacific piracy, but Chicago sucked pure Americana out of the corn, cattle and railroads of the mid-West to create a culture that was unique to the continent. Forget Al Capone and the stench of the stockyards, this is where Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong and Benny Goodman made an art out of jazz, where Frank Lloyd Wright created modern architecture, where skyscrapers, city parks and suburbs were born.
The Chicagoan lasted only nine years, but they were well chosen, from 1926 to 1935, straddling prohibition, the depression and the jazz age. Although deliberately aping The New Yorker, founded a year earlier, its cover design was entirely its own, a cocktail of art-deco design, slabby poster colours and mordant wit. The sinuous illustrations cascading across the inside pages made it visually far superior to the original. But the cartoons were less polished, the writing more wayward. Thus the motoring correspondent’s smooth take on the 1929 super-luxurious LaSalle sedan, ‘It carries everything but a bathtub, screened porch and coffee percolator’, had to co-exist with a mawkish tribute to the city’s iconic mobster, ‘They have taken Al Capone’s life, but they have not taken his honor’.
More happily, prohibition led the literary editor into an extended riff on his plan to make poetry popular by banning the import of genuine poets like Keats and Shelley, thus encouraging the production of local hooch verse, with raids on poetic speakeasies, ‘wholescale massacres [of poets] on St Valentine’s Day’, and packets of odes slipped to bent coppers at Christmas. It was fun but, lacking Harold Ross’s editorial perfectionism, The Chicagoan soon wobbled and folded. Perhaps it was too beautiful to survive. Magazines need more than good looks. After all, it was not its appearance but the army of grey words Joseph Addison first sent marching across its pages that led to the success of the original Spectator. q
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