Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson
Page 328
flows in the sunlight.
The hands flayed me like windmills.
The never ceasing hands beat upon me.
My holiness became an insanity.
It became a joy.
It became a relief.
I clung to the little god flung up to me
out of the sea.
I became a holy man.
SECOND WOMAN
I have crept out of the egg into a wide
colorful world.
My hands reach feebly up.
All about me is the color, the smell of life.
There is the color of cut hillsides, of
ships sailing, of seas, of riotous death.
I am born — why do I not die and become colorful?
I am born — why am I not born?
Why am I grey?
Why do I build me grey houses and cities?
Why do I wear grey colorless clothes?
Why do I walk always in grey streets?
I am born — why am I not born?
I am feeble — why do I not become strong?
I am young — why do I not become old?
I am very old — why do I not become
young? —
Why do I not die and fade into colorful
splendor.
I have come out of the egg.
I am born.
Why am I not born?
THE END
The Poems
Ripshin — Anderson’s last home in Troutedale, Virginia, which he had specially designed on the site of an old farm in 1925 by his friend, the architect James Spratling
List of Poems in Chronological Order
THE CORNFIELDS
CHICAGO
SONG OF INDUSTRIAL AMERICA
SONG OF CEDRIC THE SILENT
SONG OF THE BREAK OF DAY
SONG OF THE BEGINNING OF COURAGE
REVOLT
A LULLABY
SONG OF THEODORE
MANHATTAN
SPRING SONG
INDUSTRIALISM
SALVO
THE PLANTING
SONG OF THE MIDDLE WORLD
THE STRANGER
SONG OF THE LOVE OF WOMEN
SONG OF STEPHEN THE WESTERNER
SONG TO THE LOST ONES
FORGOTTON SONG
AMERICAN SPRING SONG
THE BEAM
SONG TO NEW SONG
SONG FOR DARK NIGHTS
THE LOVER
NIGHT WHISPERS
SONG TO THE SAP
RHYTHMS
UNBORN
NIGHT.
A VISIT
CHANT TO DAWN IN A FACTORY TOWN
SONG OF THE MATING TIME
SONG FOR LONELY ROADS
SONG LONG AFTER
SONG OF THE SOUL OF CHICAGO
SONG OF THE DRUNKEN BUSINESS MAN
SONG TO THE LAUGH
HOSANNA
WAR
MID-AMERICAN PRAYER
WE ENTER IN
DIRGE OF WAR
LITTLE SONG TO A WESTERN STATESMAN
SONG OF THE BUG
ASSURANCE
REMINISCENT SONG
EVENING SONG
SONG OF THE SINGER
A YOUNG MAN
ONE WHO LOOKED UP AT THE SKY
TESTAMENT
SONG NUMBER ONE
SONG NUMBER TWO
SONG NUMBER THREE
SONG NUMBER FOUR
THE MAN WITH THE TRUMPET
HUNGER
DEATH
THE HEALER
MAN SPEAKING TO A WOMAN
A DREAMER
MAN WALKING ALONE
TESTAMENT OF AN OLD MAN
HALF GODS
AMBITION
IN A WORKINGMAN’S ROOMING HOUSE
A MAN STANDING BY A BRIDGE
THE RED THROATED BLACK
SINGING SWAMP NEGRO
THOUGHTS OF A MAN PASSED IN A LONELY STREET AT NIGHT
CITIES
A YOUTH SPEAKING SLOWLY
ONE WHO SOUGHT KNOWLEDGE
THE MINISTER OF GOD
A PERSISTANT LOVER
THE VISIT IN THE MORNING
THE DUMB MAN
A POET
A MAN RESTING FROM LABOR
A STOIC LOVER
A YOUNG JEW
THE STORY TELLER
A THINKER
THE MAN IN THE BROWN COAT
ONE PUZZLED CONCERNING HIMSELF
THE DREAMER
A VAGRANT
YOUNG MAN IN A ROOM
NEGRO ON THE DOCKS AT MOBILE, ALA
WORD FACTORIES
MAN LYING ON A COUCH
THE RIPPER
ONE MAN WOULD NOT GROW OLD
THE NEW ENGLANDER
THE BUILDER
YOUNG MAN FILLED WITH THE FEELING OF POWER
A DYING POET
BROTHER
THE LAME ONE
TWO GLAD MEN
ANSWERING VOICE OF A SECOND GLAD MAN
CHICAGO
CHALLENGE OF THE SEA
POET
AT THE WELL
AN EMOTION
DER TAG
ANOTHER POET
A MAN AND TWO WOMEN STANDING BY A WALL FACING THE SEA
THE MAN
SECOND WOMAN
List of Poems in Alphabetical Order
A DREAMER
A DYING POET
A LULLABY
A MAN AND TWO WOMEN STANDING BY A WALL FACING THE SEA
A MAN RESTING FROM LABOR
A MAN STANDING BY A BRIDGE
A PERSISTANT LOVER
A POET
A STOIC LOVER
A THINKER
A VAGRANT
A VISIT
A YOUNG JEW
A YOUNG MAN
A YOUTH SPEAKING SLOWLY
AMBITION
AMERICAN SPRING SONG
AN EMOTION
ANOTHER POET
ANSWERING VOICE OF A SECOND GLAD MAN
ASSURANCE
AT THE WELL
BROTHER
CHALLENGE OF THE SEA
CHANT TO DAWN IN A FACTORY TOWN
CHICAGO
CHICAGO
CITIES
DEATH
DER TAG
DIRGE OF WAR
EVENING SONG
FORGOTTON SONG
HALF GODS
HOSANNA
HUNGER
IN A WORKINGMAN’S ROOMING HOUSE
INDUSTRIALISM
LITTLE SONG TO A WESTERN STATESMAN
MAN LYING ON A COUCH
MAN SPEAKING TO A WOMAN
MAN WALKING ALONE
MANHATTAN
MID-AMERICAN PRAYER
NEGRO ON THE DOCKS AT MOBILE, ALA
NIGHT WHISPERS
NIGHT.
ONE MAN WOULD NOT GROW OLD
ONE PUZZLED CONCERNING HIMSELF
ONE WHO LOOKED UP AT THE SKY
ONE WHO SOUGHT KNOWLEDGE
POET
REMINISCENT SONG
REVOLT
RHYTHMS
SALVO
SECOND WOMAN
SINGING SWAMP NEGRO
SONG FOR DARK NIGHTS
SONG FOR LONELY ROADS
SONG LONG AFTER
SONG NUMBER FOUR
SONG NUMBER ONE
SONG NUMBER THREE
SONG NUMBER TWO
SONG OF CEDRIC THE SILENT
SONG OF INDUSTRIAL AMERICA
SONG OF STEPHEN THE WESTERNER
SONG OF THE BEGINNING OF COURAGE
SONG OF THE BREAK OF DAY
SONG OF THE BUG
SONG OF THE DRUNKEN BUSINESS MAN
SONG OF THE LOVE OF WOMEN
SONG OF THE MATING TIME
SONG OF THE MIDDLE WORLD
SONG OF THE SINGER
SONG OF THE SOUL OF CHICAGO
SONG OF THEODORE
SONG TO NEW SONG
SONG TO THE LAU
GH
SONG TO THE LOST ONES
SONG TO THE SAP
SPRING SONG
TESTAMENT
TESTAMENT OF AN OLD MAN
THE BEAM
THE BUILDER
THE CORNFIELDS
THE DREAMER
THE DUMB MAN
THE HEALER
THE LAME ONE
THE LOVER
THE MAN
THE MAN IN THE BROWN COAT
THE MAN WITH THE TRUMPET
THE MINISTER OF GOD
THE NEW ENGLANDER
THE PLANTING
THE RED THROATED BLACK
THE RIPPER
THE STORY TELLER
THE STRANGER
THE VISIT IN THE MORNING
THOUGHTS OF A MAN PASSED IN A LONELY STREET AT NIGHT
TWO GLAD MEN
UNBORN
WAR
WE ENTER IN
WORD FACTORIES
YOUNG MAN FILLED WITH THE FEELING OF POWER
YOUNG MAN IN A ROOM
The Non-Fiction
Colón, Panama — where Anderson died in 1941, after being hospitalised whilst on a cruise. The cause of death was peritonitis, as a result of the damage caused by a swallowed tooth-pick.
Alice and the Lost Novel
This book, consisting of two autobiographical essays, was published in a limited print run of 530 in 1929, by London publisher Elkin Matthews and Marrott. It was volume ten of the publishers’ Woburn Books series. “Alice” is a meditation on lost love, while “The Lost Novel” is a personal reflection on the relationship between a writer and his art.
CONTENTS
ALICE
THE LOST NOVEL
ALICE
THERE IS A great deal of talk made about beauty but no one defines it. It dings to some people.
Among women now. The figure is something of course, the face, the lips, the eyes.
The way the head sets on the shoulders.
The way a woman walks across the room may mean everything.
I myself have seen beauty in the most unexpected places. What has happened to me must have happened also to a great many other men.
I remember a friend I had formerly in Chicago. He had something like a nervous breakdown and went down into Missouri — to the Ozark mountains I think.
One day he was walking on a mountain road and passed a cabin. It was a poor place with lean dogs in the yard.
There were a great many dirty children, a slovenly woman and one young girl. The young girl had gone from the cabin to a wood pile in the yard. She had gathered an armful of wood and was walking toward the house.
There in the road was my friend. He looked up and saw her.
There must have been something — the time, the place, the mood of the man. Ten years later he was still speaking of that woman, of her extraordinary beauty.
And there was another man. He was from central Illinois and was raised on a farm. Later he went to Chicago and became a successful lawyer out there. He was the father of a large family.
The most beautiful woman he ever saw was with some horse traders that passed the farm where he lived as a boy. When he was in his cups one night he told me that all of his night dreams, the kind all men have and that are concerned with women, were concerned with her. He said he thought it was the way she walked. The odd part of it was that she had a bruised eye. Perhaps, he said, she was the wife or the mistress of one of the horse traders.
It was a cold day and she was bare footed. The road was muddy. The horse traders, with their wagon, followed by a lot of bony horses, passed the field where the young man was at work. They did not speak to him. You know how such people stare.
And then she came along the road alone.
It may just have been another case of a rare moment for that man.
He had some sort of tool in his hand, a corn-cutting knife, he said. The woman looked at him. The horse traders looked back. They laughed. The woman may have sensed what the moment meant to him. The corn- cutting knife dropped from his hand. Women must know when they register like that.
And thirty years later she was still registering.
All of which brings me to Alice.
Alice used to say the whole problem of life lay in getting past what she called the “times between.”
I wonder where Alice is. She was a stout woman who had once been a singer. Then she lost her voice.
When I knew her she had blue veins spread over her red cheeks and short grey hair. She was the kind of woman who can never keep her stockings up. They were always falling down over her shoes.
She had stout legs and broad shoulders and had grown mannish as she grew older.
Such women can manage. Being a singer, of some fame once, she had made a great deal of money. She spent money freely.
For one thing, she knew a great many very rich men, bankers and others.
They took her advice about their daughters and sons. A son of such a man got into trouble. Well, he got mixed up with some woman, a waitress or a servant. The man sent for Alice. The son was resentful and determined.
The girl might be all right and then again —
Alice took the girl’s part. “Now, you look here,” she said to the banker. “You know nothing about people. Those who are interested in people do not get rich as you have.”
“And you do not understand your son either. This affair he has got into. His finest feelings may be involved in this matter.”
Alice simply swept the banker, and perhaps his wife, out of the picture. “You people.” She laughed when she said that.
Of course the son was immature. Alice did really seem to know a lot about people. She took the boy in hand — went to see the girl.
She had been through dozens of such experiences. For one thing, the boy wasn’t made to feel a fool. Sons of rich men, when they have anything worthwhile in them, go through periods of desperation, like other young men. They go to college, read books.
Life in such men’s houses is something pretty bad. Alice knew about all that. The rich man may go off and get himself a mistress — the boy’s mother a lover. Those things happen.
Still the people are not so bad. There are all sorts of rich men, just as there are poor and middle class men.
After we became friends, Alice used to explain a lot of things to me. At that time I was always worried about money. She laughed at me. “You take money too seriously,” she said.
“Money is simply a way of expressing power,” she said. “Men who get rich understand that. They get money, a lot of it, because they aren’t afraid of it.
“The poor man or the middle class man goes to a banker timidly. That will never do.
“If you have your own kind of power, show your hand. Make the man fear you in your own field. For example, you can write. Your rich man cannot do that. It is quite all right to exercise your own power. Have faith in yourself. If it is necessary to make him a little afraid, do so. The fact that you can do so, that you can express yourself makes you seem strange to him. Suppose you uncovered his life. The average rich man has got his rotten side and his weak side.
“And for Heaven’s sake do not forget that he has his good side.
“You may go at trying to understand such a one like a fool if you want to — I mean with all sorts of preconceived notions. You could show just his rottenness, a distorted picture, ruin his vanity.
“Your poor man, your merchant or lawyer. Such men haven’t the temptations as regards women, for example, that rich men have. There are plenty of women grafters about — some of them are physically beautiful, too.
“The poor man or the middle class man goes about condemning the rich man for the rotten side of his life, but what rottenness is there in him?
“What secret desires has he, what greeds buried under a placid, commonplace face?”
In the matter of the rich man’s son and the woman he had got involved with, Alice in some way did manage to get at the bottom of th
ings.
I gathered that in such affairs she took it for granted people were on the whole better than others thought them or than they thought themselves. She got further with it than you would have ever thought possible.
It may be that Alice really had brains. I have met few enough people I thought had.
Most people are so one-sided, so specialized. They can make money, or fight prize-fights or paint pictures, or they are men who are physically attractive and can get women who are physically beautiful, women who can tie men up in knots.
Or they are just plain dubs. There are plenty of dubs everywhere.
Alice swept dubs aside, she did not bother with them. She could be as cruel as a cold wind.
She got money when she wanted it. She lived around in fine houses.
Once she got a thousand dollars for me. I was in New York and broke. One day I was walking on Fifth Avenue. You know how a writer is when he cannot write. Months of that for me. My money gone. Everything I wrote was dead.
I had grown a little shabby. My hair was long and I was thin.
Lots of times I have thought of suicide when I cannot write. Every writer has such times.
Alice took me to a man in an office building. “You give this man a thousand dollars.”
“What the devil, Alice? What for?”
“Because I say so. He can write, just as you can make money. He has talent. He is discouraged now, is on his uppers. He has lost his pride in life, in himself. Look at the poor fool’s lips trembling.”
It was quite true. I was in a bad state.
In me a great surge of love, for Alice. Such a woman! She became beautiful to me.
She was talking to the man.
“The only value I can be to you is now and then when I do something like this.”
“Like what?”
“When I tell you where and how you can use a thousand dollars and use it sensibly. lo give it to a man who is as good as yourself, who is better. When he is down — when his pride is low.”
Alice came from the mountains of East Tennessee. You would not believe it. When she was twenty-four, at the height of her power as a singer, she had seemed tall. The reason I speak of it was that when I knew her she appeared short — and thick.
Once I saw a photograph of her when she was young.
She was half vulgar, half lovely.
She was a mountain woman who could sing. An older man, who had been her lover, told me that at twenty-four and until she was thirty, she was like a queen.
“She walked like a queen,” he said. To see her walk across a room or across the stage was something not to be forgotten.