The Joyce/Matisse Illustrated Edition of Ulysses

Recently I met Nancy Straus at a Cliff Dwellers event and the conversation between us turned to Ulysses by James Joyce. I was astounded when Nancy mentioned to me that she owned a rare copy of the book that was signed both by Joyce and the French artist Henri Matisse and contained illustrations from etchings done by Matisse, including the front cover with its gold-embossed Nausicaa design.
In 1935, the Limited Editions Club (LEC) published a limited illustration edition of Ulysses after Matisse had been paid $5,000 by George Macy, the founder of the Limited Editions Club, to do the Ulysses-themed artwork. It turned out that Matisse had not read Joyce’s Ulysses in the French translation. Nor did he intend to after he had been commissioned to do the illustrations.
Instead, Matisse proposed to create the artwork based on Homer’s Odyssey, which after all inspired Joyce to craft his modernistic take on the ancient Greek legend. And as it turned out, Joyce had no problem going along with Matisse on his proposal. In fact, Joyce enjoyed this illustrated edition so much that he bought several copies and presented one of them as a Christmas gift to his son and daughter-in-law in 1935.
There were only 250 copies of the LEC Ulysses signed by both Joyce and Matisse. The numbering is not in consecutive order. Nancy’s copy is #353. She was kind enough to send me photos of the cover and signature page of her copy.

Bette Sullivan

Meet Bette Sullivan, another passenger in my book “1001 Train Rides in Chicago” soon to be published by Eckhartz Press.

Growing up on the North Side, Bette Sullivan naturally became a diehard Cubs fan. While she and her husband Fred worked and raised their family in the Ravenswood Manor neighborhood, they only went to a few games a year, despite living a few miles from Wrigley Field. Fred passed away three years ago, and now her three kids and their families are scattered across the country.
In early 2016, a neighbor told her that the Cubs like to hire senior citizens as ushers. Bette thought that this might be a perfect opportunity to keep her busy in a social setting. She went down to the ballpark, filled out some forms, and to her amazement was hired about a month later as a “Guest Services Ambassador.” Even more amazing that year, she was able to be at the park for almost every home game that the Cubs played on the way to their first World Series championship in over a hundred years.
She gets the Brown Line at Rockwell; a one block walk from her home. Bette takes the train to Belmont, and usually walks down Sheffield for three blocks to get to the ballpark. There are so many people milling around Wrigleyville after the game that she always feels safe walking back to Belmont, even at night.
Bette, a social person by disposition, derives great pleasure in ushering. She enjoys kibitzing with the fans and the vendors and has even made a few friends among her usher colleagues. She gets a kick out of wearing her “uniform” of a Cubs shirt and hat. People on the train often chat with her. Sometimes she feels like a celebrity.
She hopes that she continues working there. She really doesn’t care about what she gets paid. It’s pretty much pin money anyway. Fred left her well provided, and if she ever wanted to sell her house, she would probably get a million dollars for it.
The job really keeps her connected to people and the world around her. She misses the action during the off-season, although she enjoys traveling to visit her family out of state. But she constantly dreams about the excitement at being at the ballpark, as she patiently awaits the next Opening Day.

Nelson Algren and Ben Hecht and Their Infamous Exchange of Insults

Recently, as I was doing research on my upcoming classes on Ben Hecht, I came across an interesting piece in the Chicago Tribune dated November 20, 1963, headlined “Hecht Attacks Algren Preface.” This was about Nelson Algren’s preface to Hecht’s 1921 novel “Erik Dorn” which had just been republished by the University of Chicago as part of its new series of novels during the “Chicago Literary Renaissance.”
Hecht had never read Algren’s preface before the book’s republication. In that preface Algren states the novel was a “deterioration of a naturalistic novel into a Grade B scenario.” One wonders why the University Chicago Press allowed this castigation of the book to go into the preface in the first place.
A peeved Hecht declined an invitation to a cocktail party hosted by the University of Chicago Press celebrating the new series by sending a telegram from New York stating that he had “no hankering to pose in your local festivities as a literary patsy.” Hecht went on to tell a reporter concerning Algren that “I have never read his works. I don’t have the faintest idea what he writes like. In this case he stinks.” Moreover, he viewed Algren as having a “Beverly Hillbilly kind of intellectuality.”
Then Algren, who was never shy in verbal counterpunches, goes on to insult Hecht personally in an interview to a newspaper reporter opining that “He hasn’t done anything since ‘Erik Dorn’……. He’s made one or two movies and some awful bad ones.” Algren continues his invective on Hecht’s writing, “It wasn’t gas he ran out of, and surely it wasn’t brass. It was belief.” Jabbing the dagger a little deeper, Algren suggested that Hecht had showed a failure of nerves by “ducking out” of the cocktail party.

News Stories by Peter Nolan

Hearty congratulations to my friend Peter Nolan on the publication of his new book News Stories. Many of you know of Peter through his work as a reporter for NBC news in Chicago where he won three Emmys. Now retired from TV, he recalls in this new memoir many of the fascinating stories he reported on over the years. My career in Chicago government overlapped his reporting career, and I remember his uncanny knack to discover the many stories of political tomfoolery in those times. If you love the comedy and drama of Chicago politics then you will love Peter Nolan’s News Stories, published by Gatekeeper Press.

1001 Train Rides in Chicago

My new book “1001 Train Rides in Chicago” will be published by Eckhartz Press around the 4th of July. It is a work of fiction that contains 64 short vignettes of people who ride the eight lines of CTA trains. The cover design (which you see above) is by Leonid Osseny. Leonid will also be providing some sketches of the passengers on the trains. It is hoped that my readers will experience some empathy with these fictional characters. Their common thread is that they are members of our human community, and like all of us, they seek to find meaning and purpose in what is often a difficult world. I want to share some of my characters with you on this blog. So today please meet Antoine Hargrove.

Antoine Hargrove has been working as a wheelchair attendant at O’Hare for nearly two years. He had never been to the airport before he started working there. Although he is now 27 years old, he still hasn’t flown on an airplane.
He gets to work by hopping on the Clark Street bus heading south. Then he boards the Blue Line at Monroe and Dearborn. O’Hare is the final destination on the train.
Antoine and his mother live in a subsidized low-income apartment in Old Town. The youngest sibling in the family, his brother and sister left a while back. Both his mom and dad use to work years ago at the Oscar Mayer plant in the neighborhood, where the work was steady and the benefits decent. Then the company shut it down and moved the jobs out of state.
His dad was never able to get a decent job after that. His diabetes got really got bad, and soon he passed away, leaving his mom to provide for three children working on the pittance of a salary that a Certified Nursing Assistant earns.
Working as a wheelchair attendant isn’t a bad gig. Most of the people he wheels are old or disabled, sometimes both. Every now and then he’ll have a nice discussion with someone who he is wheeling down the concourse. Frequently though it is pretty much dead silence on the person’s part. They just want to get to Point A to Point B as quick as possible, with no hassles or drama.
He never quite knows how he’s going to make out in tips for the day. He might be stiffed by a guy in a business suit, but a derelict-looking guy might put a twenty in his hand. The two things that he has learned on the job is that life is full of surprises and don’t judge people by their appearances.