Let’s warm up with thoughts of the summer here in Lake Bluff – to be specific, its literary history, which is linked with summer. It’s a thin but interesting subject, and it underscores the importance of both of the words that make up the town’s name. In its early history, Lake Bluff was a resort community of lakeside cottages, a place for Chicago residents to escape the summer heat in those days before air conditioning, by relaxing on the eponymous bluff and beside the eponymous lake.
One of the artistic personages who took advantage of the location was Margaret Anderson, the path-breaking editor and promoter of literary modernism. According to a 1966 book by Dale Kramer, Chicago Renaissance, in 1915 Anderson and some of her free-spirited associates pitched their tents on the Lake Bluff lakefront. Here, she “lived happily, delighted especially by the early morning swimming,” until her group of Bohemians was denounced by stuffy locals for squatting on public land. The police burned the encampment down, and Anderson got back to more important things, like publishing the early work of Ernest Hemingway and Ezra Pound, as well as the first 13 chapters of Ulysses.
A generation later, one of Ray Bradbury’s earliest published stories, “The Lake,” was set in Lake Bluff. Curiously, even though Bradbury had grown up in nearby Waukegan, the story’s narrator vastly overstates Lake Bluff’s population as ten thousand people. At the time the story was written (the 1940s), it was actually fewer than two thousand. “The Lake” is a melancholy story involving childhood memories and a drowned girl. “It was September. In the last days when things are getting sad for no reason” – yes, he caught that feeling pretty well.
Those are the obvious high points, but I’ve found one tantalizing hint of a fictional town that may be modeled on Lake Bluff. It’s from Theodore Dreiser’s 1911 novel Jennie Gerhardt, which has enjoyed a high reputation among some important readers, including H.L. Mencken, who called it “the best American novel I have ever read, with the lonesome but Himalayan exception of Huckleberry Finn.” The novel is also a candidate for the distinction of The Great Great Lakes Novel, since much of the action takes place in Cleveland and Chicago.
At one point Jennie decides to move to “the little town of Sandwood, ‘this side of Kenosha,’ as Jennie had expressed it,” which, we are told, “was only a short distance from Chicago, an hour and fifteen minutes by the local train.” We are further informed that “it had a population of some three hundred families, dwelling in small cottages, which were scattered over a pleasant area of lake-shore property.” Even better, the houses “were harmoniously constructed, and the surrounding trees, green for the entire year, gave them a pleasing summery appearance.” On a visit, Jennie is pleased by “the look of a little white church steeple, set down among the green trees, and the gentle rocking of the boats upon the summer water.”
This description fits Lake Bluff rather well, taking into account that the local Metra train has only become a little faster over the last century. The population has grown and the small cottages have mostly given way to proper houses, but the summery atmosphere “this side of Kenosha” is still much the same. I have no idea if Dreiser ever visited here, but he caught the spirit of the place.
More information on the town’s early artistic history can be found here.