Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  She had lovers, a dozen of them in her time.

  Then she had a bad period — for two years she drank and gambled.

  Her life had apparently become useless to her and she tried to throw it away.

  But people who believe in themselves make others believe. Men who had been lovers of Alice never forgot her. They never went back on her.

  They said she gave them something. She was sixty when I knew her.

  * * * * * * * * *

  Once she took me up to the Adirondacks. We went together in a big car with a negro driver to a house that was half a palace. It took us two days to get up there.

  The whole outfit belonged to some rich man.

  It was the time when Alice said she was flat. “I got you something once when you were flat, now you come with me,” she had said when she saw me in New York.

  She did not mean flat as regards money. She was spiritually flat.

  So we went and stayed alone together in a big house. There were servants there. They had been provided for. I don’t know how.

  We had been there a week and Alice had been silent. One evening we went to walk.

  This was in a wild country. There was a lake before the house and a mountain at the back.

  It was a chilly night with a clear sky and a moon and we walked in a country road.

  Then we began to climb the mountain. I can remember Alice’s thick legs and her stockings coming down.

  She was short winded too. She kept stopping to puff and blow.

  We ploughed on silently like that. Alice, at herself, was seldom silent.

  We got clear to the top of the mountain before she spoke.

  She talked about what flatness is, how it hits people — floors them. Houses gone all flat, people all flat, life flat. “You think I am courageous,” she said. “The hell with that. I haven’t the courage of a mouse.”

  We sat down on a stone and she began to tell me of her life. It was an odd complex story, told in that way, in little jerks by an old woman.

  There it was, the whole thing. She had come down out of the Tennessee mountains as a young girl to the city of Nashville, in Tennessee.

  She got in with a singing master there who knew she could sing. “Well, I took him as a lover. He wasn’t so bad.”

  The man spent money on her, he interested some Nashville rich man.

  That man also may have been her lover. Alice did not say. There were plenty of others.

  One of them — he must have amounted to less than any of the others — she had loved.

  She said he was a young poet. There was something crooked in him. He did sneaking things.

  That was when she was past thirty and he was twenty- five. She lost her head, she said, and of course lost him.

  It was then she went to drinking, gambled, went broke. She declared she lost him because she loved him too much.

  “But why wasn’t he any good? Why did you have to love that sort?”

  She did not know why. It had happened.

  It must have been an odd experience in the life of such a strong person. It may have been the experience that had tempered her.

  But I was speaking of beauty in people, what an odd thing it is, how it appears, disappears and reappears.

  I got a glimpse of it in Alice that night.

  It was when we were coming back to the house, from the mountain, down the road.

  We were on a hillside and stout Alice was in front. There was a muddy stretch of road and then a wood and then an open space.

  The moonlight was in the open space and I was in the woods, in the darkness of the wood, but a few steps behind.

  She crossed the open space ahead of me and there it was.

  The thing lasted but a fleeting second. I think that all of the rich powerful men Alice had known, who had given her money, helped her when she needed help, and who have got so much from her, must have seen what I saw then. It was what the man saw in the woman by the mountain cabin and what the other man saw in the horse trader’s woman in the road.

  Alice when she said she was flat wasn’t flat. Alice trying to shake off the memory of an unsuccessful love.

  She was walking across the open moonlit stretch of road like a queen, as that man who was once her lover said she used to walk across a room or across a stage.

  The mountains out of which she came as a child must have been in her at the moment and the moon and the night.

  Myself in love with her, madly, for a moment.

  Is anyone in love longer than that?

  Alice shaking her head slightly. There may have been a trick of the light. Her stride lengthened and she became tall, and young. I remember stopping in the woods and staring. I was like the two other men of whom I have spoken. I had a cane in my hand and it fell to the ground. I was like the man in the road and the other man in the field.

  These pages are blank in original copy.

  THE LOST NOVEL

  HE SAID IT was all like a dream. A man like that, a writer. Well, he works for months and, perhaps, years on a book and there is not a word put down. What I mean is that his mind is working. What is to be the book builds itself up and is destroyed.

  In his fancy figures are moving back and forth.

  But there is something I neglected to say. I am talking of a certain English novelist who has got some fame, of a thing that once happened to him.

  He told me about it one day in London when we were on the Embankment of the Thames when he told me about his lost novel.

  He had come to see me early in the evening at my hotel. He spoke of certain stories of my own. “You almost get at something, sometimes,” he said.

  We agreed that no man ever quite got at — the thing.

  If someone once got at it, if he really put the ball over the plate, you know, if he hit the bull’s-eye.

  What would be the sense of any one trying to do anything after that?

  I’ll tell you what, some of the old fellows have come pretty near.

  Keats, eh? And Shakespeare. And George Borrow and Defoe.

  We spent a half-hour going over names.

  We went off to dine together and later walked. He was a little black, nervous man with ragged locks of hair sticking out from under his hat.

  I began talking of his first book.

  But here is a brief outline of his history. He came from a poor farming family in some English village. He was like all writers. From the very beginning he wanted to write.

  He had no education. At twenty he got married.

  She must have been a very respectable, nice girl. If I remember rightly, she was the daughter of a priest of the Established English Church.

  Just the kind he should not have married. But who shall say whom any one shall love — or marry? She was above him in station. She had been to a woman’s college; was well educated.

  I have no doubt she thought him an ignorant man.

  “She thought me a sweet man, too. The hell with that,” he said, speaking of it. “I am not sweet. I hate sweetness.”

  We had got into that sort of intimacy walking in the London night, going now and then into a pub to get a drink.

  I remember that we each got a bottle, fearing the pubs would close before we got through talking.

  What I told him about myself and my own adventures I can’t remember.

  The point is he wanted to make some kind of a pagan out of his woman, and the possibilities weren’t in her.

  They had two children.

  Then suddenly he did begin to burst out writing — that is to say, really writing.

  You know a man like that. When he writes he writes. He had some kind of a job in his English town. I believe he was a clerk.

  Because he was writing he, of course, neglected his job, his wife, his kids.

  He used to walk about the fields at night. His wife scolded. Of course she was all broken up — would be. No woman can quite bear the absolute way in which a man who has been her lover can drop her when he
is at work.

  I mean an artist, of course. They can be first-class lovers. It may be they are the only lovers.

  And they are absolutely ruthless about throwing direct personal love aside.

  You can imagine that household. The man told me there was a little bedroom upstairs in the house where they were living at that time. This was while he was still in the English town.

  The man used to come home from his job and go upstairs. Upstairs he went and locked his door. Often he did not stop to eat, and sometimes he did not even speak to his wife.

  He wrote and wrote and wrote and threw away.

  Then he lost his job. “The hell,” he said when he spoke of it.

  He didn’t care, of course. What is a job?

  What is a wife or child? There must be a few ruthless people in this world.

  Pretty soon there was practically no food in the house.

  He was upstairs in that room behind the door, writing. The house was small and the children cried. “The little brats,” he said, speaking of them. He did not mean that, of course. I understood what he meant. His wife used to come and sit on the stairs outside the door back of which he was at work. She cried audibly and the child she had in her arms cried.

  “A patient soul, eh?” the English novelist said to me when he told me of it. “And a good soul, too,” he said. “To hell with her,” he also said.

  You see, he had begun writing about her. She was what his novel was about, his first one. In time it may prove to be his best one.

  Such tenderness of understanding — of her difficulties and her limitations, and such a casual, brutal way of treating her — personally.

  Well, if we have a soul that is worth something, eh?

  It got so they were never together a moment without quarrelling.

  And then one night he struck her. He had forgotten to fasten the door of the room in which he worked. She came bursting in.

  And just as he was getting at something about her, some understanding of the reality of her. Any writer will understand the difficulty of his position. In a fury he rushed at her, struck her and knocked her down.

  And then. Well, she quit him then. Why not? However, he finished the book. It was a real book.

  But about his lost novel. He said he came up to London after his wife left him and began living alone. He thought he would write another novel.

  You understand that he had got recognition, had been acclaimed.

  And the second novel was just as difficult to write as the first. It may be that he was a good deal exhausted.

  And, of course, he was ashamed. He was ashamed of the way in which he had treated his wife. He tried to write another novel so that he wouldn’t always be thinking. He told me that, for the next year or two, the words he wrote on the paper were all wooden. Nothing was alive.

  Months and months of that sort of thing. He withdrew from people. Well, what about his children? He sent money to his wife and went to see her once.

  He said she was living with her father’s people, and he went to her father’s house and got her. They went to walk in the fields. “We couldn’t talk,” he said. “She began to cry and called me a crazy man. Then I glared at her, as I had done that time I struck her, and she turned and ran away from me back to her father’s house, and I came away.”

  Having written one splendid novel, he wanted, of course, to write some more. He said there were all sorts of characters and situations in his head. He used to sit at his desk for hours writing and then go out in the street and walk as he and I walked together that night.

  Nothing would come right for him.

  He had got some sort of theory about himself. He said that the second novel was inside him like an unborn child. His conscience was hurting him about his wife and children. He said he loved them all right but he did not want to see them again.

  Sometimes he thought he hated them. One evening, he said, after he had been struggling like that, and long after he had quit seeing people, he wrote his second novel. It happened like this.

  All morning he had been sitting in his room. It was a small room he had rented in a poor part of London. He had got out of bed early, and without eating any breakfast had begun to write. And everything he wrote that morning was also no good.

  About three o’clock in the afternoon, as he had been in the habit of doing, he went out to walk. He took a lot of writing-paper with him.

  “I had an idea I might begin to write at any time,” he said.

  He went walking in Hyde Park. He said it was a clear, bright day, and people were walking about together. He sat on a bench.

  He hadn’t eaten anything since the night before. As he sat there he tried a trick. Later I heard that a group of young poets in Paris took up that sort of thing and were profoundly serious about it.

  The Englishman tried what is called “automatic writing.”

  He just put his pencil on the paper and let his pencil make what words it would.

  Of course the pencil made a queer jumble of absurd words. He quit doing that.

  There he sat on the bench staring at the people walking past.

  He was tired, like a man who has been in love for a long time with some woman he cannot get.

  Let us say there are difficulties. He is married or she is. They look at each other with promises in their eyes and nothing happens.

  Wait and wait. Most people’s lives are spent waiting.

  And then suddenly, he said, he began writing his novel. The theme, of course, was men and women — lovers. What other theme is there for such a man? He told me that he must have been thinking a great deal of his wife and of his cruelty to her. He wrote and wrote. The evening passed and night came. Fortunately, there was a moon. He kept on writing. He said it was the most intense writing he ever did or ever hoped to do. Hours and hours passed. He sat there on that bench writing like a crazy man.

  He wrote a novel at one sitting. Then he went home to his room.

  He said he never was so happy and satisfied with himself in his life.

  “I thought that I had done justice to my wife and to my children, to every one and everything,” he said.

  He said that all the love he had in his being went into the novel.

  He took it home and laid it on his desk.

  What a sweet feeling of satisfaction to have done — the thing.

  Then he went out of his room and found an all-night place where he could get something to eat.

  After he got food he walked around the town. How long he walked he didn’t know.

  Then he went home and slept. It was daylight by this time. He slept all through the next day.

  He said that when he woke up he thought he would look at his novel. “I really knew all the time it wasn’t there,” he said. “On the desk, of course, there was nothing but blank empty sheets of paper.”

  “Anyway,” he said, “this I know. I never will write such a beautiful novel as that one was.”

  Of course when he said it he laughed.

  I do not believe there are too many people in the world who will know exactly what he was laughing about.

  The Autobiographies

  Anderson, 1933

  A Story Teller’s Story

  In 1924, Anderson published this memoir. Although ostensibly the story of the author’s life, the writer’s modernist influences are still in play and the book is fragmented in its approach; it is chiefly chronological, but is also fused with tales from the writer’s childhood and events that happened much later – and actual events with episodes from the writer’s novels. Real people are treated with the same impressionistic focus as the fictional character portraits contained in Anderson’s stories. The result is an insight not only into Anderson’s real life, but also his imaginative world – into imagination more generally and how it can survive in the supremely materialistic world of the twentieth century.

  Its self-reflexive insights into the imaginative growth of the writer and the difficulties faced
by the writer in telling his own story has led to A Story Teller’s Story being regarded as a classic of literary autobiography, reflected in the publication of a critical edition by Michigan University Press in 2005.

  Cover of the first edition

  CONTENTS

  BOOK ONE

  NOTE I

  NOTE II

  NOTE III

  NOTE IV

  NOTE V

  NOTE VI

  NOTE VII

  NOTE VIII

  BOOK TWO

  NOTE I

  NOTE II

  NOTE III

  NOTE IV

  NOTE V

  NOTE VI

  NOTE VII

  NOTE VIII

  NOTE IX

  NOTE X

  NOTE XI

  NOTE XII

  NOTE XIII

  NOTE XIV

  NOTE XV

  BOOK THREE

  NOTE I

  NOTE II

  NOTE III

  NOTE IV

  NOTE V

  NOTE VI

  NOTE VII

  BOOK IV

  NOTE I

  NOTE II

  NOTE III

  NOTE IV

  NOTE V

  NOTE VI

  NOTE VII

  NOTE VIII

  NOTE IX

  NOTE X

  EPILOGUE

  Title page of the first edition

  TO ALFRED STIEGLITZ,

  who has been more than father to so many puzzled, wistful children of the arts in this big, noisy, growing and groping America, this book is gratefully dedicated.

  BOOK ONE

  NOTE I

  IN ALL THE towns and over the wide countrysides of my own mid-American boyhood there was no such thing as poverty, as I myself saw it and knew it later in our great American industrial towns and cities.

  My own family was poor, but of what did our poverty consist? My father, a ruined dandy from the South, had been reduced to keeping a small harness-repair shop and, when that failed, he became ostensibly a house-and-barn painter. However, he did not call himself a house-painter. The idea was not flashy enough for him. He called himself a “sign-writer.” The day of universal advertising had not yet come and there was but little sign-writing to do in our town, but still he stuck out bravely for the higher life. At any time he would let go by the board the privilege of painting Alf Mann the butcher’s house (it would have kept him busily at work for a month) in order to have a go at lettering signs on fences along country roads for Alf Granger the baker.