When Hugh stepped into the moonlight around the corner of the house, Clara ran down the steps to meet him, and taking his arm, led him past the barns and over the bridge where as a child she had seen the figures of her fancy advancing towards her. Sensing his troubled state her mother spirit was aroused. He was unfilled by the life he led. She understood that. It was so with her. By a lane they went to a fence where nothing but open fields lay between the farm and the town far below. Although she sensed his troubled state, Clara was not thinking of Hugh’s trip to Pittsburgh nor of the problems connected with the completion of the hay-loading machine. It may be that like her father she had dismissed from her mind all thoughts of him as one who would continue to help solve the mechanical problems of his age. Thoughts of his continued success had never meant much to her, but during the evening something had happened to Clara and she wanted to tell him about it, to take him into the joy of it. Their first child had been a girl and she was sure the next would be a man child. “I felt him to-night,” she said, when they had got to the place by the fence and saw below the lights of the town. “I felt him to-night,” she said again, “and oh, he was strong! He kicked like anything. I am sure this time it’s a boy.”
For perhaps ten minutes Clara and Hugh stood by the fence. The disease of thinking that was making Hugh useless for the work of his age had swept away many old things within him and he was not self-conscious in the presence of his woman. When she told him of the struggle of the man of another generation, striving to be born he put his arm about her and held her close against his long body. For a time they stood in silence, and then started to return to the house and sleep. As they went past the barns and the bunkhouse where several men now slept they heard, as though coming out of the past, the loud snoring of the rapidly ageing farm hand, Jim Priest, and then above that sound and above the sound of the animals stirring in the barns arose another sound, a sound shrill and intense, greetings perhaps to an unborn Hugh McVey. For some reason, perhaps to announce a shift in crews, the factories of Bidwell that were engaged in night work set up a great whistling and screaming. The sound ran up the hillside and rang in the ears of Hugh as, with his arm about Clara’s shoulders, he went up the steps and in at the farmhouse door.
Many Marriages
First appearing in 1923 to generally favourable reviews (F. Scott Fitzgerald went on to name it Anderson’s finest novel), Many Marriages also attracted unwelcome attention as a prurient exponent of immorality, due to its treatment of the new sexual freedom – an attack that led to low sales and impacted Anderson’s reputation.
Despite the title, the novel actually focuses on one marriage, which, it is implied, shares many of the problems and dilemmas that beset “many marriages”. The narrative takes place during the space of one night, unfolding the psychological impact of one man’s decision to escape his confined small-town life and the equally constrained social and sexual mores that go with it.
Cover of the first edition
CONTENTS
AN EXPLANATION
A FOREWORD
BOOK ONE
I
II
III
IV
V
BOOK TWO
I
II
III
IV
BOOK THREE
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
BOOK FOUR
I
II
III
IV
V
Tennessee Claflin Mitchell, the second of Anderson’s four wives, whom he divorced in 1924
TO
PAUL ROSENFELD
AN EXPLANATION
I WISH TO make an explanation — that should perhaps be also an apology — to the readers of the Dial.
To the magazine I make due acknowledgment for the permission to print in this book form.
To the Dial reader I must explain that the story has been greatly expanded since it appeared serially in the magazine. The temptation to amplify my treatment of the theme was irresistible. If I have succeeded in thus indulging myself without detriment to my story I shall be glad.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON.
A FOREWORD
IF ONE SEEK love and go towards it directly, or as directly as one may in the midst of the perplexities of modern life, one is perhaps insane.
Have you not known a moment when to do what would seem at other times and under somewhat different circumstances the most trivial of acts becomes suddenly a gigantic undertaking.
You are in the hallway of a house. Before you is a closed door and beyond the door, sitting in a chair by a window, is a man or woman.
It is late in the afternoon of a summer day and your purpose is to step to the door, open it, and say, “It is not my intention to continue living in this house. My trunk is packed and in an hour a man, to whom I have already spoken, will come for it. I have only come to say that I will not be able to live near you any longer.”
There you are, you see, standing in the hallway, and you are to go into the room and say these few words. The house is silent and you stand for a long time in the hallway, afraid, hesitant, silent. In a dim way you realize that when you came down into the hallway from the floor above you came a-tiptoe.
For you and the one beyond the door it is perhaps better that you do not continue living in the house. On that you would agree if you could but talk sanely of the matter. Why are you unable to talk sanely?
Why has it become so difficult for you to take the three steps towards the door? You have no disease of the legs. Why are your feet so heavy?
You are a young man. Why do your hands tremble like the hands of an old man?
You have always thought of yourself as a man of courage. Why are you suddenly so lacking in courage?
Is it amusing or tragic that you know you will be unable to step to the door, open it, and going inside say the few words, without your voice trembling?
Are you sane or are you insane? Why this whirlpool of thoughts within your brain, a whirlpool of thoughts that, as you now stand hesitant, seem to be sucking you down and down into a bottomless pit?
BOOK ONE
I
THERE WAS A man named Webster lived in a town of twenty-five thousand people in the state of Wisconsin. He had a wife named Mary and a daughter named Jane and he was himself a fairly prosperous manufacturer of washing machines. When the thing happened of which I am about to write he was thirty-seven or eight years old and his one child, the daughter, was seventeen. Of the details of his life up to the time a certain revolution happened within him it will be unnecessary to speak. He was however a rather quiet man inclined to have dreams which he tried to crush out of himself in order that he function as a washing machine manufacturer; and no doubt, at odd moments, when he was on a train going some place or perhaps on Sunday afternoons in the summer when he went alone to the deserted office of the factory and sat for several hours looking out through a window and along a railroad track, he gave way to dreams.
However for many years he went quietly along his way doing his work like any other small manufacturer. Now and then he had a prosperous year when money seemed plentiful and then he had bad years when the local banks threatened to close him up, but as a manufacturer he did manage to survive.
And so there was this Webster, drawing near to his fortieth year, and his daughter had just graduated from the town high school. It was early fall and he seemed to be going along and living his life about as usual and then this thing happened to him.
Down within his body something began to affect him like an illness. It is a little hard to describe the feeling he had. It was as though something were being born. Had he been a woman he might have suspected he had suddenly become pregnant. There he sat in his office at work or walked about in the streets of his town and he had the most amazing feeling of not b
eing himself, but something new and quite strange. Sometimes the feeling of not being himself became so strong in him that he stopped suddenly in the streets and stood looking and listening. He was, let us say, standing before a small store on a side street. Beyond there was a vacant lot in which a tree grew and under the tree stood an old work horse.
Had the horse come down to the fence and talked to him, had the tree raised one of its heavier lower branches and thrown him a kiss or had a sign that hung over the store suddenly shouted saying— “John Webster, go prepare thyself for the day of the coming of God” — his life at that time would not have seemed more strange than it did. Nothing that could have happened in the exterior world, in the world of such hard facts as sidewalks under his feet, clothes on his body, engines pulling trains along the railroad tracks beside his factory, and street cars rumbling through the streets where he stood, none of these could possibly have done anything more amazing than the things that were at that moment going on within him.
There he was, you see, a man of the medium height, with slightly graying black hair, broad shoulders, large hands, and a full, somewhat sad and perhaps sensual face, and he was much given to the habit of smoking cigarettes. At the time of which I am speaking he found it very hard to sit still in one spot and to do his work and so he continually moved about. Getting quickly up from his chair in the factory office he went out into the shops. To do so he had to pass through a large outer office where there was a bookkeeper, a desk for his factory superintendent and other desks for three girls who also did some kind of office work, sent out circulars regarding the washing machine to possible buyers, and attended to other details.
In his own office there was a broad-faced woman of twenty-four who was his secretary. She had a strong, well-made body, but was not very handsome. Nature had given her a broad flat face and thick lips, but her skin was very clear and she had very clear fine eyes.
A thousand times, since he had become a manufacturer, John Webster had walked thus out of his own office into the general office of the factory and out through a door and along a board walk to the factory itself, but not as he now walked.
Well, he had suddenly begun walking in a new world, that was a fact that could not be denied. An idea came to him. “Perhaps I am becoming for some reason a little insane,” he thought. The thought did not alarm him. It was almost pleasing. “I like myself better as I am now,” he concluded.
He was about to pass out of his small inner office into the larger office and then on into the factory, but stopped by the door. The woman who worked there in the room with him was named Natalie Swartz. She was the daughter of a German saloonkeeper of the town who had married an Irish woman and then had died leaving no money. He remembered what he had heard of her and her life. There were two daughters and the mother had an ugly temper and was given to drink. The older daughter had become a teacher in the town schools and Natalie had learned stenography and had come to work in the office of the factory. They lived in a small frame house at the edge of town and sometimes the old mother got drunk and abused the two girls. They were good girls and worked hard, but in her cups the old mother accused them of all sorts of immorality. All the neighbors felt sorry for them.
John Webster stood at the door with the doorknob in his hand. He was looking hard at Natalie, but did not feel in the least embarrassed nor strangely enough did she. She was arranging some papers, but stopped working and looked directly at him. It was an odd sensation to be able to look thus, directly into another person’s eyes. It was as though Natalie were a house and he were looking in through a window. Natalie herself lived within the house that was her body. What a quiet strong dear person she was and how strange it was that he had been able to sit near her every day for two or three years without ever before thinking of looking into her house. “How many houses there are within which I have not looked,” he thought.
A strange rapid little circle of thought welled up within him as he stood thus, without embarrassment, looking into Natalie’s eyes. How clean she had kept her house. The old Irish mother in her cups might shout and rave calling her daughter a whore, as she sometimes did, but her words did not penetrate into the house of Natalie. The little thoughts within John Webster became words, not expressed aloud, but words that ran like voices shouting softly within himself. “She is my beloved,” one of the voices said. “You shall go into the house of Natalie,” said another. A slow blush spread over Natalie’s face and she smiled. “You are not very well lately. Are you worried about something?” she said. She had never spoken to him before with just that manner. There was a suggestion of intimacy about it. As a matter of fact the washing machine business was at that time doing very well. Orders were coming in rapidly and the factory was humming with life. There were no notes to be paid at the bank. “Why, I am very well,” he said, “very happy and very well, at just this moment.”
He went on into the outer office and the three women employed there and the bookkeeper too stopped working to look at him. Their looking up from their desks was just a kind of gesture. They, meant nothing by it. The bookkeeper came and asked a question regarding some account. “Why, I would like it if you would use your own judgment about that,” John Webster said. He was vaguely conscious the question had been concerned with some man’s credit. Some man, in a far-away place had written to order twenty-four washing machines. He would sell them in a store. The question was, when the time came, would he pay the manufacturer?
The whole structure of business, the thing in which all the men and women in America were, like himself, in some way involved, was an odd affair. Really he had not thought much about it. His father had owned this factory and had died. He had not wanted to be a manufacturer. What had he wanted to be? His father had certain things called patents. Then the son, that was himself, was grown and had begun to manage the factory. He got married and after a time his mother died. Then the factory belonged to him. He made the washing machines that were intended to take the dirt out of people’s clothes and employed men to make them and other men to go forth and sell them. He stood in the outer office seeing, for the first time, all life of modern men as a strange involved thing.
“It wants understanding and a lot of thinking about,” he said aloud. The bookkeeper had turned to go back to his desk, but stopped and turned, thinking he had been spoken to. Near where John Webster stood a woman was addressing circulars. She looked up and smiled suddenly and he liked her smiling so. “There is a way — something happens — people suddenly and unexpectedly come close to each other,” he thought and went out through the door and along the board walk toward the factory.
In the factory there was a kind of singing noise going on and there was a sweet smell. Great piles of cut boards lay about and the singing noise was made by saws cutting the boards into proper lengths and shapes to make up the parts of the washing machines. Outside the factory doors were three cars loaded with lumber and workmen were unloading boards and sliding them along a kind of runway into the building.
John Webster felt very much alive. The timbers had no doubt come to his factory from a great distance. That was a strange and interesting fact. Formerly, in his father’s time, there had been a great deal of timber land in Wisconsin but now the forests were pretty much cut away and timber was shipped in from the South. Somewhere, in the place from which had come the boards, now being unloaded at his factory door, were forests and rivers and men going into the forests and cutting down trees.
He had not for years felt so alive as he did at that moment, standing there by the factory door and seeing the men slide the boards from the car along the runway and into the building. How peaceful and quiet the scene! The sun was shining and the boards were of a bright yellow color. A kind of perfume came from them. His own mind was an amazing thing too. At the moment he could see, not only the cars and the men unloading them, but also the land from which the boards came. There was a place, far in the South, where the waters of a low marshy river had spread out
until the river was two or three miles wide. It was spring and there had been a flood. At any rate, in the imagined scene, many trees were submerged and there were men in boats, black men, who were pushing logs out of the submerged forest into the wide sluggish stream. The men were great powerful fellows and sang as they worked, a song about John, the disciple and close comrade of Jesus. The men had on high boots and in their hands were long poles. Those in the boats on the river itself caught the logs when they were pushed out from among the trees and gathered them together to form a great raft. Two of the men jumped out of the boats and ran about on the floating logs fastening them together with young saplings. The other men, back somewhere in the forest, kept singing and the men on the raft answered. The song was about John and how he went down to fish in a lake. And the Christ came to call him and his brothers out of the boats to go through the hot dusty land of Galilee, “following in the footsteps of the Lord.” Presently the song stopped and there was silence.
How strong and rhythmical the bodies of the workers! Their bodies swayed back and forth as they worked. There was a kind of dance in their bodies.
Now two things happened in John Webster’s fanciful world. A woman, a golden-brown woman, came down along the river in a boat and all the workmen stopped working to stand looking at her. She had no hat on her head and as she pushed the boat forward through the sluggish water her young body swayed from side to side, as the bodies of the men workers had swayed when they handled the logs. The hot sun was shining on the body of the brown girl and her neck and shoulders were bare. One of the men on the raft called to her. “Hello, Elizabeth,” he shouted. She stopped paddling the boat and let it float for a moment.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 82