Dil Pickle With One L

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One thing I like about books issued by the venerable Charles H. Kerr Company of Chicago is their antique, gaudy, but essentially accurate titles. The instance at hand is The Rise & Fall of the Dil Pickle: Jazz-Age Chicago's Wildest & Most Outrageously Creative Hobohemian Nightspot (188 pp., $15). Edited and introduced by Franklin Rosemont, who with his wife Penelope keeps Kerr going, this is a collection of first-hand memoirs of a legendary hang-out which has often been referenced in literary history, but has never been properly documented until now. Situated in a short alley near Washington Square, also known as "Bughouse Square" for its soapbox orators, the Dil Pickle was as described, a wild scene. Established in the heady anti-Puritan atmosphere of pre-World War I Chicago, it became a magnet for the dissatisfied, the angry, the bizarre, and the revolutionary, all mixed up together. Its main presiding spirit was Jack Jones, a maverick I.W.W. radical, joined by such as Jim Larkin, the Irish union leader and rebel. It was a kind of free-for-all for Freethought, an open forum not only for wandering lunatics, but professors from the University of Chicago. They were all accorded the same reception, a fair hearing, spiced by heckling and jeers when called for which was often.

Among the great figures who offer their memories: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (who was unsteadily married to Jones for a while), Ben Reitman, Ralph Chaplin, Kenneth Rexroth, Sherwood Anderson, and a host of nearly forgotten observers of low life. Others involved were the gangster Yellow Kid Weil, and Carl Sandburg, who eventually became tame and respectable. And critics are included here too, such as Jack Spiegel, whose entry is entitled "We Communists Were Not Enthusiastic." It's greatly to Rosemont's credit, I think, that he includes such critics, to give a sense of the cultural cross-fire that went on. His own politics are clearly those of anarchism, broadly conceived, but the range of the book makes it a remarkable documentation of a place and an era of American radicalism.

To give a sense of the energy and above all the complexity of the scene, here's Rexroth on the poetry favored by audiences: "All during the period of Proletarian Art I found the discussion of proletarian poetry rather unreal, because I had actually tried poetry on the proletariat, and my experiences didn't match the theories at all. I used to recite Patrick Magill, Service's Songs of a Wage Slave, Belloc's poem to his little son, Vachel Lindsay's socialist poems, Lola Ridge, James Oppenheim, Arturo Giovannitti, and all the other old chestnuts of revolt that can be found in the anthologies of Marcus Graham and Upton Sinclair. This was all right with the stiffs, but what they liked best was the world-weary poetry of the English Decadence—The Rubaiyat, Housman, Ernest Dowson, and best of all, Swinburne's 'The Garden of Proserpine.' This always made a perfect number to go out with and added substantially to the collection. I've often thought, roaring it out into the windy night under a sputtering arc lamp, that its last verses perfectly reflected the hopes and ambitions of the average hard-rock miner, lumberjack, or harvest hand."

I wonder what ever happened to all that? At the first "Midwest Cultural Conference" convened in 1978 by recent-day radicals at the now defunct Foolkiller in Kansas City, many of us met veteran writer Meridel LeSueur for the very first time. At one point, she complained about how polite everyone was: "I can't hear you, no one even gets up on a table and makes a speech!" It's true enough that the Pickle lasted 20 years, circa 1914-1934, but it always had a kind of fugitive character, as if it was a sort of intellectual floating crap-game. Little of its devotion to Free Thought persists in America today.

Note: write the Kerr Company, 1740 West Greenleaf, Chicago, IL 60626 for their latest catalog, which includes not only numerous similarly lively books, but a fascinating profile of its long and distinguished history (founded in 1886, it is the oldest Socialist publisher in the world). See also Allen Ruff's "We Called Each Other Comrade": Charles H. Kerr & Company, Radical Publishers (University of Illinois Press).