Writer Dawn Raffel’s ‘Boundless as the Sky’ is inspired by Italo Balbo’s flight to Chicago for the World’s Fair
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Inspiration can strike like lightning or it can sneak up on a person. Few know that better than Dawn Raffel.
She is an accomplished writer and her two most recent books grew from inspiration she found while researching the Century of Progress. That world’s fair took place along our city’s lakefront in 1933-34 and provided some relief from the Great Depression with a variety of sights, sounds and other diversions, famously the fan-dancing Sally Rand.
Raffel found a creative con artist and spent four years working on her nonfiction “The Strange Case of Dr. Couney: How a Mysterious European Showman Saved Thousands of American Babies” (Blue Rider Press), which was published in 2018.
Now arrives “Boundless as the Sky” (Sagging Meniscus), a marvelous and arresting book that takes a fictional dive into the fair.
“The Century of Progress is the gift that keeps on giving,” Raffel says.
She was born and raised in Milwaukee but came here often, saying “in my childhood, Chicago became like the Great Emerald City.” She attended, for a time, the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and then began a career as a magazine editor, most notably helping launch “O, The Oprah Magazine,” where she worked for seven years.
Her first book, the short story collection “In the Year of Long Division,” was published in 1995 and she has since produced others, while also editing and teaching.
Her Martin Couney book is, as I wrote in the Tribune, “written with great style and the energy of a can’t-put-down thriller.” Couney was “a fascinating, mysterious and compelling character who leaps to life” in the book,” as he sets up shop at the fair in a building with a huge sign out front shouting “Living Babies in Incubators.”
In short, at a time when hospitals were incapable of or disinterested in caring for premature babies, Couney used the then-controversial technology of human incubators to entertain crowds. In the process, he saved, here and in exhibitions elsewhere, more than 7,000 babies, some of whom Raffel met as adults during her research.
The book was enthusiastically received and that should also be the case with “Boundless as the Sky.”
Do you think this weekend’s NASCAR event is a big deal? You should have been here on July 15, 1933, when hundreds of thousands of people gathered on the lakefront, filling Soldier Field and areas nearby, all eagerly awaiting the arrival of Italo Balbo and 24 seaplanes that Benito Mussolini had sent from Italy as a fascist publicity stunt. It created a frenzy and resulted in Balbo’s name being slapped on what once was 7th Street.
“I was so captured by that day, knowing that so many of the young people, all these little boys there, excitedly watching and cheering, would in a matter of years be fighting in World War II,” said Raffel.
(Next month, my colleague Ron Grossman will take an in-depth look at this event in the paper.)
“I did think for a moment that this book might also be nonfiction but I am not fluent in Italian and so the research would have been difficult,” she says. “The more I thought about it I determined that fiction would be the best route.”
To my mind, a great move, for she has written a compellingly lyrical and entertaining book. Delivered in two parts, and peppered with some arresting photographic images, the book’s first half is a homage of sorts to Italo Calvino’s 1972 “Invisible Cities,” his wildly creative imagining of a conversation between aged Mongol emperor Kublai Khan and young explorer Marco Polo.
Raffel refers to that book as a “masterpiece” and in that portion of her book does it justice and features some elements of the fair. Here’s Sally Rand, captured in part like this: “In the beginning the dancer used fans. The fans were made of feathers. The feathers were ostrich. So skilled was the dance in moving the fans back and forth in front of her body that people believed she was naked beneath them.”
The second portion of the book is a series of short takes from the day of Balbo’s arrival, coming from the minds of citizens and fair denizens.
Here is what she imagines coming from “Burton LaSalle, Mayor, Midget City.”
“From around the great earth, from beyond the horizon, the seaplanes are coming. They are calling it ‘The Roaring Armada of Goodwill’ in all the papers, on the radio.”
“He wishes for them, the people who live in his city, to see what he sees, to feel what he feels: Boundless.”
Two pages on Balbo in this section are captivating. She writes, in part, “He belongs to his country. Yet nowhere is home. He no longer belongs to the earth or the sky or the water. He belongs to this moment, which is already ending.”
The Century of Progress
will likely keep inspiring others.
Raffel again, perhaps?
“I think I am done with the fair. I have gotten it out of my system,” she says, adding, intriguingly, “But you never know.”
