George Ade (1964) By Lee Coyle; and George Ade Anthology (6 book volume)

Hidden in plain sight.  Interestingly enough, the sign above marking the George Ade Plaza on the east bound Indiana Toll Road (I-90) is in Portage, IN, the town where I grew up. As a kid did I ever ask who is George Ade? Well, no, not once. Several weeks ago I received an email about a house for sale in Brook, IN (about halfway between Chicago and Lafayette, IN) -- I almost bought a weekend home in that vicinity ten years ago, and have been receiving occasional For Sale listings ever since. Anyway, I went online to see what I could find out about the town.  I had been to Brook before but really couldn't remember much about the place.  In the Wikipedia post it gave the population as 980 (roughly the size of the Chicago high rise I live in) and it mentioned that George Ade's country estate, Hazelden (pictured below), is in Brook.  There was that name again!

My curiosity won ...  Turns out the life of George Ade very much plays to my Indiana childhood, and to my adult life in Chicago. He was born (in 1866, the year after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated) and raised in Kentland, IN -- farmland just south of "the Calumet Region" which in the later half of the 19th century was also farmland. After graduating from high school, he "went away" to that new college just opened up in Lafayette: Purdue University.  In 1924, as an alumnus, he made a major contribution toward the construction of Purdue's football stadium ... he's the second half of Ross-Ade Stadium, home of the Boilermakers.

While at Purdue he was the editor of the its student newspaper.  He had a job at the Morning Star, a mouthpiece for the local Republican party, but left it for a relatively more profitable position at the Lafayette Call, in part because at the Call he got free press passes to performances at the Grand Opera House in downtown Lafayette.

In 1890 he moved to Chicago and with help from his college buddy John T. McCutcheon, got a job with the Chicago Record covering small time breaking news stories.  This time period was the hey day of Chicago journalism with nearly a dozens daily newspapers competing for the next big headline; it was the newspaper era immortalized by the play, then movie The Front Page. McCutcheon, who was originally from South Raub, IN, would find fame as a newspaper cartoonist -- in later years his work would win the Chicago Tribune its first Pulitzer Prize.  He too has a Toll Road Plaza named after him (the west bound Plaza in Portage) -- tollway plazas are apparently the Hoosier equivalent of a Pulitzer.

Working at the Chicago Record, Ade was promoted and given his own column, titled: Stories of the Street, and of the Town.  He built the column into what became a Chicago journalism staple, stories about the common man on the street -- a later master of this would be the famed Mike Royko, whose fictional Slats Grobnik represented the thoughts of everyday neighborhood guys.  While Ade did not have a regular character like Grobnik, what he did have was a mastery of street slang, and an ear for finding humor -- editors initially skoffed at the slang, until they realized the public loved it.  Ade and McCutcheon would frequently "hit the town" in all-night partying and prowling that provided endless inspiration for their respective careers.  The two would later collaborate on several book projects, and do the "grand tour" of Europe together.

Ade's first works published as books were actually collections or longer versions of his newspaper columns.  He showed an astounding ability to capture different cultural backgrounds, with his Stories of Chicago covering the city's ethnic smorgasborg; Ade's Fables about life in small Midwestern towns, and People You Should Know, among other titles -- six of which have been reprinted recently in George Ade Anthology. These works cover such topics as an around the world trip taken by a successful couple who had never been outside of their small Indiana town before; a story about marrying right, and the downside of penny-pinching (death before you can enjoy life).  One of the better known, and still funny, fables is: The Culture Factory, a several page essay about frat life on a college campus (it appears in People You Should Know).

His fame and fortune however, came not from his books, but from his musical comedies. In 1904 George Ade had three plays running simultaneously on Broadway: The County Chairman; The College Widow, and The Sho-gun (set in Korea, it is a revision of his earlier play The Sultan of Sulu, set in the Philippines).  I cannot find any collection of all of his plays, and it appears that several of the manuscripts have been lost to time.  I've located The County Chairman in the archives of the non-circulating Special Collections section of Chicago's Harold Washington Library, and have an appointment to see it next weekend.

The County Chairman, set in fictional Antioch, is inspired from his experience working at the Lafayette Morning Star covering local politics.  The College Widow is as vintage Hoosier as one can get.  The book is about the football rivalry between fictional Billingham and Atwater Colleges -- by the author's own word, it is patterned after the real life rivalry between the Wabash Little Giants and the DePauw Tigers, now distinguished as the annual Monon Bell game.

Ade's only full length novel, The Slim Princess, is a humorist's version of the standard "the older sister must marry first" plot.  In Ade's telling the story is set in Bulgaria where "fat" is valued as a sign of beauty, creating a problem because the desirable scale-tipping younger sister can't get married because her older sister is "slim" and no one in their country wants her.  The "slim and older" sister is eventually married off to an American playboy.

Recommendation: I have to admit this little research project on George Ade was fun -- as a humorist his work stands the test of time (even if his name has faded away). The biography by Lee Coyle is written in the same vein, and is a great read, though only available second hand because it is out of print (my copy was "withdrawn from stock" from the Belfast Reference Library in Northern Ireland; through Amazon).  The more recent George Ade Anthology provides a good overview of his work, though it contains none of the biography -- it does include The Slim Princess.

A Portait Of The Artist As A Young Man (1916) By James Joyce

As I continue toward my goal of finally conquering James Joyce’s classic Ulysses, I began by reading Dubliners several weeks ago, a collection of character studies.  Now, I’ve completed Joyce’s first full length book, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a semi-autobiographical text.

Joyce was born and raised in Ireland, yet chose to flee to Paris after university.  In Portrait of the Artist, the title character is Joyce’s alter ego, Stephen Dedalus.  His coming of age crisis, if one wants to classify it as such, is masterful writing, completely intense, and not at all an easy read, even at a relatively short 224 pages.  The Norton Critical Edition that I read included nearly 400 pages of notes – most of which I passed over.

Without the notes however, one needs a fairly strong knowledge of: Irish history, the Catholic catechism, and Church structure vis-à-vis diocesan and orders (in this case, both Franciscan and Jesuit).  After one chapter of A Portrait, I had to stop and do a review of Irish history, building on a solid basis that I had not realized I had acquired just by living in Chicago, occasionally referred to as Ireland’s County Cook.

The chapters of the book relating to Stephen’s early childhood delve heavily into Irish political history, as discussed at a family dinner party.  The heated discussion laid bare the divide between those who viewed the institution of the Church, as the guarantor of the Irish people, and those who viewed the diocesan structure as selling out to the colonizers. 

When Stephen enters university however, is when his personal dilemmas materialize, and he’s faced with questions of sexual awakening morality.  He has pre-marital sex, which delights him, but then plunges him into the depths of guilt, compounded by priests and a theology that forbids this.  The strongest section of the book details Stephen’s confession, which occurs as he is being urged by his teachers to consider the priesthood, a temptation to most males born in the Church.  His post-confession personal homily is some 40 pages long, intense, and decisive.  He will never be able to live up to the standards of a priest, because he does not believe in those standards.

Some of Joyce’s best narrative is the dialogue between Stephen and his university classmates as they question everything, and then question the answer – an at times vicious circle of academic arrogance and pomposity, as these overly educated people wield their education for sport.  Joyce captures this academic subculture perfectly.

In the end, Stephen prepares to depart Ireland, not out of repudiation, for Joyce will make his life work chronicling the country and its society; but out of a need to find a neutral space where he can think about the world, not respond to it.

Because I have attempted to read Ulysses before (actually, I’ve tried several times), I know that page one of the book will re-introduce Stephen Dedalus to readers.  Now, I think, I’m better prepared for that challenge.   

Recommendation:  James Joyce is a genius writer, but he is not light reading.  Prepare to devote the needed time and thought if you pick up any of his works.