“It is only when you are torn from your mooring and
drift like a rudderless ship I am able to come
near to you.”
The banner has been carried forward by a strong daring man filled with determination.
What is inscribed on it?
It would perhaps be dangerous to inquire too closely. We Americans have believed that life must have point and purpose. We have called ourselves Christians, but the sweet Christian philosophy of failure has been unknown among us. To say of one of us that he has failed is to take life and courage away. For so long we have had to push blindly forward. Roads had to be cut through our forests, great towns must be built. What in Europe has been slowly building itself out of the fibre of the generations we must build now, in a lifetime.
In our father’s day, at night in the forests of Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and on the wide prairies, wolves howled. There was fear in our fathers and mothers, pushing their way forward, making the new land. When the land was conquered fear remained, the fear of failure. Deep in our American souls the wolves still howl.
There were moments after Sam came back to Sue, bringing the three children, when he thought he had snatched success out of the very jaws of failure.
But the thing from which he had all his life been fleeing was still there. It hid itself in the branches of the trees that lined the New England roads where he went to walk with the two boys. At night it looked down at him from the stars.
Perhaps life wanted acceptance from him, but he could not accept. Perhaps his story and his life ended with the home-coming, perhaps it began then.
The home-coming was not in itself a completely happy event. There was a house with a fire at night and the voices of the children. In Sam’s breast there was a feeling of something alive, growing.
Sue was generous, but she was not now the Sue of the bridle path in Jackson Park in Chicago or the Sue who had tried to remake the world by raising fallen women. On his arrival at her house, on a summer night, coming in suddenly and strangely with the three strange children — a little inclined toward tears and homesickness — she was flustered and nervous.
Darkness was coming on when he walked up the gravel path from the gate to the house door with the child Mary in his arms and the two boys, Joe and Tom, walking soberly and solemnly beside him. Sue had just come out at the front door and stood regarding them, startled and a little frightened. Her hair was becoming grey, but as she stood there Sam thought her figure almost boyish in its slenderness.
With quick generosity she threw aside the inclination in herself to ask many questions but there was the suggestion of a taunt in the question she did ask.
“Have you decided to come back to me and is this your home-coming?” she asked, stepping down into the path and looking not at Sam but at the children.
Sam did not answer at once, and little Mary began to cry. That was a help.
“They will all be wanting something to eat and a place to sleep,” he said, as though coming back to a wife, long neglected, and bringing with him three strange children were an everyday affair.
Although she was puzzled and afraid, Sue smiled and led the way into the house. Lamps were lighted and the five human beings, so abruptly brought together, stood looking at each other. The two boys clung to each other and little Mary put her arms about Sam’s neck and hid her face on his shoulder. He unloosed her clutching hands and put her boldly into Sue’s arms. “She will be your mother now,” he said defiantly, not looking at Sue.
The evening was got through, blunderingly by himself, Sam thought, and very nobly by Sue.
There was the mother hunger still alive in her. He had shrewdly counted on that. It blinded her eyes to other things and then a notion had come into her head and there seemed the possibility of doing a peculiarly romantic act. Before that notion was destroyed, later in the evening, both Sam and the children had been installed in the house.
A tall strong Negress came into the room, and Sue gave her instructions regarding food for the children. “They will want bread and milk, and beds must be found for them,” she said, and then, although her mind was still filled with the romantic notion that they were Sam’s children by some other woman, she took her plunge. “This is Mr. McPherson, my husband, and these are our three children,” she announced to the puzzled and smiling servant.
They went into a low-ceilinged room whose windows looked into a garden. In the garden an old Negro with a sprinkling can was watering flowers. A little light yet remained. Both Sam and Sue were glad there was no more. “Don’t bring lamps, a candle will do,” Sue said, and she went to stand near the door beside her husband. The three children were on the point of breaking forth into sobs, but the Negro woman with a quick intuitive sense of the situation began to chatter, striving to make the children feel at home. She awoke wonder and hope in the breasts of the boys. “There is a barn with horses and cows. To-morrow old Ben will show you everything,” she said, smiling at them.
A thick grove of elm and maple trees stood between Sue’s house and a road that went down a hill into a New England village, and while Sue and the Negro woman put the children to bed, Sam went there to wait. In the feeble light the trunks of trees could be dimly seen, but the thick branches overhead made a wall between him and the sky. He went back into the darkness of the grove and then returned toward the open space before the house.
He was nervous and distraught and two Sam McPhersons seemed struggling for possession of his person.
There was the man he had been taught by the life about him to bring always to the surface, the shrewd, capable man who got his own way, trampled people underfoot, went plunging forward, always he hoped forward, the man of achievement.
And then there was another personality, a quite different being altogether, buried away within him, long neglected, often forgotten, a timid, shy, destructive Sam who had never really breathed or lived or walked before men.
What of him? The life Sam had led had not taken the shy destructive thing within into account. Still it was powerful. Had it not torn him out of his place in life, made of him a homeless wanderer? How many times it had tried to speak its own word, take entire possession of him.
It was trying again now, and again and from old habit Sam fought against it, thrusting it back into the dark inner caves of himself, back into darkness.
He kept whispering to himself. Perhaps now the test of his life had come. There was a way to approach life and love. There was Sue. A basis for love and understanding might be found with her. Later the impulse could be carried on and into the lives of the children he had found and brought to her.
A vision of himself as a truly humble man, kneeling before life, kneeling before the intricate wonder of life, came to him, but he was again afraid. When he saw Sue’s figure, dressed in white, a dim, pale, flashing thing, coming down steps toward him, he wanted to run away, to hide himself in the darkness.
And he wanted also to run toward her, to kneel at her feet, not because she was Sue but because she was human and like himself filled with human perplexities.
He did neither of the two things. The boy of Caxton was still alive within him. With a boyish lift of the head he went boldly to her. “Nothing but boldness will answer now,” he kept saying to himself.
They walked in the gravel path before the house and he tried lamely to tell his story, the story of his wanderings, of his seeking. When he came to the tale of the finding of the children she stopped in the path and stood listening, pale and tense in the half light.
Then she threw back her head and laughed, nervously, half hysterically. “I have taken them and you, of course,” she said, after he had stepped to her and had put his arm about her waist. “My life alone hasn’t turned out to be a very inspiring affair. I had made up my mind to take them and you, in the house there. The two years you have been gone have seemed like an age. What a foolish mistake my mind has made. I thought they must be your own children by some other woman, some wo
man you had found to take my place. It was an odd notion. Why, the older of the two must be nearly fourteen.”
They went toward the house, the Negro woman having, at Sue’s command, found food for Sam and respread the table, but at the door he stopped and excusing himself stepped again into the darkness under the trees.
In the house lamps had been lighted and he could see Sue’s figure going through a room at the front of the house toward the dining-room. Presently she returned and pulled the shades at the front windows. A place was being prepared for him inside there, a shut-in place in which he was to live what was left of his life.
With the pulling of the shades darkness dropped down over the figure of the man standing just within the grove of trees and darkness dropped down over the inner man also. The struggle within him became more intense.
Could he surrender to others, live for others? There was the house darkly seen before him. It was a symbol. Within the house was the woman, Sue, ready and willing to begin the task of rebuilding their lives together. Upstairs in the house now were the three children, three children who must begin life as he had once done, who must listen to his voice, the voice of Sue and all the other voices they would hear speaking words in the world. They would grow up and thrust out into a world of people as he had done.
To what end?
There was an end. Sam believed that stoutly. “To shift the load to the shoulders of children is cowardice,” he whispered to himself.
An almost overpowering desire to turn and run away from the house, from Sue who had so generously received him and from the three new lives into which he had thrust himself and in which in the future he would have to be concerned, took hold of him. His body shook with the strength of it, but he stood still under the trees. “I cannot run away from life. I must face it. I must begin to try to understand these other lives, to love,” he told himself. The buried inner thing in him thrust itself up.
How still the night had become. In the tree beneath which he stood a bird moved on some slender branch and there was a faint rustling of leaves. The darkness before and behind was a wall through which he must in some way manage to thrust himself into the light. With his hand before him, as though trying to push aside some dark blinding mass, he moved out of the grove and thus moving stumbled up the steps and into the house.
THE END
Marching Men
First published in 1917, Marching Men was the second to be published by John Lane, under a three-book deal with Anderson. It is the story of Norman “Beaut” McGregor, a young man discontented with the powerlessness and lack of personal ambition among the miners of his hometown. After moving to Chicago he discovers his purpose is to empower workers, rousing them to march in unison. Major themes of the novel include the organisation of labourers, eradication of disorder and the role of the exceptional man in society. The latter theme led post-World War II critics to compare Anderson’s militaristic approach to homosocial order and the fascists of the War’s Axis powers. Certainly, the imposition of order through masculine force is a prevalent theme, as is the idea of the ‘superman’ embodied in the exceptional physical and mental qualities that make McGregor especially fit to be a leader of men.
As with his first novel, Windy McPherson’s Son, Anderson wrote his second while working as an advertising copywriter in Elyria, Ohio between 1906 and 1913, several years before he published his first literary writing and a decade before he became an established writer. Though the author later claimed that he had written his first novels in secret, Anderson’s secretary remembers typing the manuscript on company time “around 1911 or 1912”.
Literary influences for Marching Men include Thomas Carlyle, Mark Twain and Jack London. Inspiration for the novel came in part from the author’s time as a labourer in Chicago between 1900 and 1906 (where he, like his protagonist, worked in a warehouse, went to night school, was robbed and fell in love several times) and his service in the Spanish-American War which took place towards the end of the war and just after the armistice in 1898–99. Of the latter, Anderson wrote in his Memoirs about the time he had been marching and got a rock in his shoe. After separating from his fellow soldiers to remove it, he observed their figures and recalled “I had become a giant. ... I was, in myself, something huge, terrible and at the same time noble. I remember that I sat, for a long time, while the army passed, opening and closing my eyes”.
The first edition
CONTENTS
BOOK I
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
BOOK II
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
BOOK III
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
BOOK IV
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
BOOK V
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
BOOK VI
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
BOOK VII
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
An advertisement for Marching Men, which appeared in the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger
Title page of the first edition
TO
AMERICAN WORKINGMEN
BOOK I
CHAPTER I
UNCLE CHARLIE WHEELER stamped on the steps before Nance McGregor’s bake-shop on the Main Street of the town of Coal Creek Pennsylvania and then went quickly inside. Something pleased him and as he stood before the counter in the shop he laughed and whistled softly. With a wink at the Reverend Minot Weeks who stood by the door leading to the street, he tapped with his knuckles on the showcase.
“It has,” he said, waving attention to the boy, who was making a mess of the effort to arrange Uncle Charlie’s loaf into a neat package, “a pretty name. They call it Norman — Norman McGregor.” Uncle Charlie laughed heartily and again stamped upon the floor. Putting his finger to his forehead to suggest deep thought, he turned to the minister. “I am going to change all that,” he said.
“Norman indeed! I shall give him a name that will stick! Norman! Too soft, too soft and delicate for Coal Creek, eh? It shall be rechristened. You and I will be Adam and Eve in the garden naming things. We will call it Beaut — Our Beautiful One — Beaut McGregor.”
The Reverend Minot Weeks also laughed. He thrust four fingers of each hand into the pockets of his trousers, letting the extended thumbs lie along the swelling waist line. From the front the thumbs looked like two tiny boats on the horizon of a troubled sea. They bobbed and jumped about on the rolling shaking paunch, appearing and disappearing as laughter shook him. The Reverend Minot Weeks went out at the door ahead of Uncle Charlie, still laughing. One fancied that he would go along the street from store to store telling the tale of the christening and laughing again. The tall boy could imagine the details of the story.
It was an ill day for births in Coal Creek, even for the birth of one of Uncle Charlie’s inspirations. Snow lay piled along the sidewalks and in the gutters of Main Street — black snow, sordid with the gathered grime of human endeavour that went on day and night in the bowels of the hills. Through the soiled snow walked miners, stumbling along silently and with blackened faces. In their bare hands they carried dinner pails.
The McGregor boy, tall and awkward, and with a towering nose, great hippopotamus-like mouth and fiery red hair, followed Uncle Charlie, Republican politician, postmaster and village wit to the door and looked after him as with the
loaf of bread under his arm he hurried along the street. Behind the politician went the minister still enjoying the scene in the bakery. He was preening himself on his nearness to life in the mining town. “Did not Christ himself laugh, eat and drink with publicans and sinners?” he thought, as he waddled through the snow. The eyes of the McGregor boy, as they followed the two departing figures, and later, as he stood in the door of the bake-shop watching the struggling miners, glistened, with hatred. It was the quality of intense hatred for his fellows in the black hole between the Pennsylvania hills that marked the boy and made him stand forth among his fellows.
In a country of so many varied climates and occupations as America it is absurd to talk of an American type. The country is like a vast disorganised undisciplined army, leaderless, uninspired, going in route-step along the road to they know not what end. In the prairie towns of the West and the river towns of the South from which have come so many of our writing men, the citizens swagger through life. Drunken old reprobates lie in the shade by the river’s edge or wander through the streets of a corn shipping village of a Saturday evening with grins on their faces. Some touch of nature, a sweet undercurrent of life, stays alive in them and is handed down to those who write of them, and the most worthless man that walks the streets of an Ohio or Iowa town may be the father of an epigram that colours all the life of the men about him. In a mining town or deep in the entrails of one of our cities life is different. There the disorder and aimlessness of our American lives becomes a crime for which men pay heavily. Losing step with one another, men lose also a sense of their own individuality so that a thousand of them may be driven in a disorderly mass in at the door of a Chicago factory morning after morning and year after year with never an epigram from the lips of one of them.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 32