CHICAGO VOICES: Michael Burke’s remarks at the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony for Henry Blake Fuller

Presented November 16, 2018, at the Cliff Dwellers Club

Good evening! My husband, magician Robert Charles, and I, love the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame – and we’re proud, “card-carrying” members of the Cliff Dwellers Club. So, it’s a thrill for us to participate in this Hall of Fame induction ceremony for Henry Blake Fuller, which, fittingly, is being celebrated here at the club that bears the name of Fuller’s most popular novel.

I would like thank Don Evans for this opportunity. And I’d like to also thank Bill Getzoff, who years ago wrote about Fuller in the Cliff Dwellers Club newsletter. That was my first introduction to Fuller – so thank you, Bill, for opening my eyes.

I also want to thank Eve Moran, and Don, Victor and Michelle and everyone here at the Cliff Dwellers for making us all feel so welcomed and at home. As you always do.

And, mostly, I want to thank you – “The People,” as Carl Sandburg would sing. Thanks for joining us this evening.

I’m going to read two brief samples – small excerpts from the openings of “Bertram Cope’s Year” and “The Cliff-Dwellers.”

“Bertram Cope’s Year” was published in 1919, just about 100 years ago. It’s become known as the first homosexual novel – so I’m only going to read the dirty parts! Actually, it’s all quite understated and subtle.

In “Bertram Cope’s Year,” the town of Churchton sounds suspiciously like Evanston and the unnamed University seems a lot like Northwestern.

Bertram Cope is an attractive, young English instructor, spending a year on his thesis and advanced degree. Cope becomes the object of desire of an older woman – who we’ll meet in this reading – two older men and three young women. Put another way, Bertram Cope’s dance card was full.

Fuller is a fascinating storyteller – funny, formal, informal; his stories often narrated directly to the reader, which was not uncommon back then or even today.

“Bertram Cope’s Year” has 31 chapters, each titled something like:

1. Cope at a College Tea

2. Cope Makes a Sunday Afternoon Call
3. Cope Is "Entertained"

And so on … So, here’s a portion from Chapter 1: Cope at a College Tea:

“

What is a man's best age? Peter Ibbetson, entering dreamland with complete freedom to choose, chose twenty-eight, and kept there. But twenty-eight, for our present purpose, has a drawback: a man of that age, if endowed with ordinary gifts and responsive to ordinary opportunities is undeniably a “man.”

Whereas, what we require here is something just a little short of that. Wanted, in fact, a young male who shall seem fully adult to those who are younger still and who may even appear the accomplished flower of virility to an idealizing maid or so, yet who shall elicit from the middle-aged the kindly indulgence due a boy.

Perhaps you will say that even a man of twenty-eight may seem only a boy to a man of seventy. However, no septuagenarian is to figure in these pages. Our “elders” will be but in the middle forties and the earlier fifties and we must find for them an age which may evoke their friendly interest and, yet, be likely to call forth, besides that, their sympathy and their longing admiration and, later, their tolerance, their patience, and even their forgiveness.

I think, then, that Bertram Cope, when he began to intrigue the little group which dwelt among the quadruple avenues of elms that led to the campus in Churchton, was but about twenty-four – certainly not a day more than twenty-five. If twenty-eight is the ideal age, the best is all the better for being just a little ahead. Of course, Cope was not an undergraduate, a species upon which many of the Churchtonians languidly refused to bestow their regard.

"They come, and they go," said these prosperous and comfortable burghers; "and, after all, they're more or less alike, and more or less unrewarding."

Besides, the Bigger Town with all its rich resources and all its varied opportunities lay but an hour away. Churchton lived much of its real life beyond its own limits, and the student who came to be entertained socially within them was the exception indeed.

No, Bertram Cope was not an undergraduate. He was an instructor; and he was working along in a leisurely way to a degree. He expected to be an M.A., or even a Ph.D. Possibly a Litt.D. might be within the gift of later years. But, anyhow, nothing was finer than "writing" except lecturing about it.

"Why haven't we known you before?" Medora T. Phillips asked him at a small reception. Mrs. Phillips spoke out loudly and boldly and held his hand as long as she liked. No – not “as long as she liked,” but longer than most women would have felt at liberty to do.

And besides speaking loudly and boldly, she looked loudly and boldly and she employed a determined smile which seemed to say, "I'm old enough to do as I please." Her brusque informality was expected to carry itself off and much else besides. "Of course, I simply can't be half so intrepid as I seem!" it said.

“Known me?" returned Cope, promptly enough. "Why, you haven't known me because I haven't been here to be known."

He spoke in a ringing, resonant voice, returning her unabashed pressure with a hearty good will and blazing down upon her through his clear blue eyes with a high degree of self-possession, even of insouciance. And he explained with a liberal exhibition of perfect teeth that for the two years following his graduation he had been teaching literature at a small college in Wisconsin and that he had lately come back to Alma Mater for another bout.

"I'm after that degree," he concluded.

”

… And Cope’s year unfolds from there.

Because the Cliff Dwellers Club is 22 stories up in the air, it seems fitting to read a portion from Fuller’s novel, “The Cliff-Dwellers,” as well.

“The Cliff-Dwellers” was published in 1893, about 15 or 16 years before “Bertram Cope’s Year.” This would’ve been about 22 years into the rebuilding after the Great Chicago Fire. It opens with some beautiful, language describing the canyons of skyscrapers and downtown buildings of Chicago – then and now. And then it zooms in on a skyscraper called The Clifton, which is where most of the action takes place … I’ll pick it up there and read just a page or two.

“

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, and accident), a host of principals, agents, middlemen, clerks, cashiers, stenographers, and errand-boys as well as 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.

”