Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  Oh, glorious moment! No more great men again ever, no more bad men or good men, everyone on to everyone else. Was there a sense of something, I at that moment felt, in all American people everywhere? In the old days we Americans had been proud of what we thought of as our distinctive American humor but lately our humor had pretty much settled itself down into the universal dullness of the newspaper funny strip. A really great humorist like Mr. Ring Lardner had come to that. Would it not be a joke on us all if we were all, already, and in reality, pretty far beyond any outward expression of ourselves we were getting?

  And now I was stumbling about in the dark streets of an Ohio manufacturing town poking sharp sticks into the tender flesh of myself and others. There was no one to refute any smart thing I thought and so I had a good time. Like everyone else I would so love to go through life criticizing everyone else and withholding from others any right to criticize me. Oh, the joy of being a king a pope or an emperor!

  “Suppose,” I now thought, “everyone in America really hungers for a more direct and subtle expression of our common lives than we have ever yet had and that we are all only terribly afraid we won’t get it.”

  The notion seemed good. It would explain so much. For one thing it would explain the common boredom with life and with work characteristic of so many so-called successful men I had met. Whether he was a successful railroad-builder or a successful writer of magazine short stories, the brighter man always seemed bored. Also it would explain beautifully our American fear of the highbrow. Suppose the brighter men were really having a good time — on the sly as it were — well, laughing up their sleeves. And suppose some fellow were to come along who was really on to the entire emptiness of the whole success theory of life, the whole absurd business of building bigger and bigger towns, bigger and bigger factories, bigger and bigger houses, but had decided not to be a reformer and scold about it. I fancied such a one going blandly about and really laughing, not fake laughing as in the newspaper funny strips, made by poor driven slaves who think they must be rich or silly to get fun out of life, getting the old American laugh back again, the laugh that came from far down inside, an American Falstaff kind of a laugh.

  Well, now I had got myself into deep water. I had fancied into existence a man I had not nerve or brains enough to be myself and one never likes that. The figure my fancy had made annoyed me as I am sure he would everyone else.

  I had gone in the darkness down along a spur of a railroad track to where my factory had formerly stood and there it was, much as I had left it except that my name had been taken off the front. There was a wall of the building that looked up toward the railroad station and there I had once put a big sign on which was my name in letters three feet high. How proud I had been when the sign was first put up. “Oh, glorious day! I a manufacturer!” To be sure I did not own the building but strangers would think I did.

  And now my name was gone and another man’s name, in letters as large as I had once used, was in its place. I went near the building trying to spell out the new name in the darkness, hating the name with instinctive jealousy, and a man came out at a door of the factory and walked toward me. Oh Lord, it was the former school-teacher, the man who had once been my night watchman and who was now evidently night watchman for my successor. Would he recognize me, lurking about the place of my former grandeur?

  I started walking away along the tracks singing the words of an old ditty my father had been fond of singing in his liquor when I was a boy and that had at that moment popped into my head, and at the same time staggering about as though I were drunk. It was my purpose to make the night watchman think me a drunken workman homeward bound and I succeeded. As I went away from him, staggering along the track, singing and not answering when he demanded to know who I was and what I was doing there, he grew angry, ran quickly up behind and kicked at me. Fortunately he missed and fortunately I remembered that his eyes had gone back on him long since. He now grabbed at me but I eluded his grasp, singing my ditty as I half ran, half staggered away:

  “’Twas a summer’s day and the sea was rippled

  By the softest, gentlest breeze,

  When a ship set sail with her cargo laden

  For a land beyond the seas.

  Did she never come back?

  No, she never came back,

  And her fate is yet unlearned.

  Though for years and years sad hearts have been waiting

  Yet the ship she never returned.”

  NOTE V

  I HAD BECOME a writer, a word fellow. That was my craft. Flinging aside the fake devotion that must always be characteristic of all such jobs as the advertising writing I had been doing for several years I had accepted my passion for scribbling as one accepts the fact that the central interest of one’s whole being lies in carving stone, spreading paint upon canvas, digging in the earth for gold, working the soil, working in wood or in iron. The arts are after all but the old crafts intensified, followed with religious fervor and determination by men who love them and deep down within him perhaps every man wants more than anything else to be a good craftsman. Surely nothing in the modern world has been more destructive than the idea that man can live without the joy of hands and mind combined in craftsmanship, that men can live by the accumulation of monies, by trickery. In the crafts only one may exercise all one’s functions. The body comes in, the mind comes in, all the sensual faculties become alive. When one writes one deals with a thousand influences that motivate his own and other lives. There is, first of all, the respect for what has gone before, for the work of the older craftsmen. One who has written as much as I have written — and for every word printed there are hundreds I have scrawled experimentally that will never be printed — has also read much and often with great joy.

  In Russia England France Germany a writer sat writing. Oh, how well he did his job, and how close I feel to him as I read! What a sharp sense he gives of the life about him! With him one enters into that life, feels the hidden passions of peoples, their little household traits, their loves and hates. There are sentences written by all writers of note in all countries that have their roots deep down in the life about them. The sentences are like windows looking into houses. Something is suddenly torn aside, all lies, all trickery about life gone for the moment. It is what one wants, what one seeks constantly in one’s own craftsmanship, and how seldom it comes. The little faky tricks are always so ready to help over the hard places and when one has used them there is the little flush of triumph followed by — bah! followed always by the sick awakening.

  One need not go too far afield to find sentences and paragraphs that stir deeply. No doubt they were in the Indian language before white men came and the first whites on our shores brought the sense of them. There was that Fredis, sister of that Norseman Eric, who had come to America long before Columbus came and had built him a house in Vinland. The sister was a strong-willed woman who bullied her husband and was avaricious for wealth. Came sailing to Greenland the brothers, Helgi and Finnbogi, with a strong ship, and she induces them to go adventuring with her to Vinland but at the very beginning tricks them. She in her ship is to have thirty men and they are to have thirty but unknown to them she conceals an extra five In her own vessel so that In the far land, where are no white men and white men’s laws are unknown, she shall have the upper hand. They get to Vinland and she will not let them stay in the house, built there by her brother Eric, and they go patiently away and build a hut of their own.

  Still she schemes. See now with what truth, what fidelity and clearness some old writer tells of what happened. Well, the brothers had the larger and better ship and she wanted that too.

  One morning early Fredis arose from her bed and dressed herself, but did not put on her shoes and stockings. A heavy dew had fallen, and she took her husband’s cloak, and wrapped it about her, and then walked to the brothers’ house and up to the door, which had been only partly closed by one of the men, who had gone out but a short time before. She
pushed the door open and stood silently in the doorway for a time. Finnbogi, who was lying on the innermost side of the room, awoke. “What dost thou wish here, Fredis?” She answers: “I wish thee to rise and go out with me, for I would speak with thee.” He did so; and they walked to a tree, which lay close by the wall of the house, and seated themselves upon it. “How art thou pleased here?” says she. He answers “I am well pleased with the fruitfulness of the land, but I am ill content with the breach that has come between us, for methinks there has been no cause for it.”

  “It is even as thou sayest,” says she, “and so it seems to me; but my errand to thee is that I wish to exchange ships with you brothers, for ye have a larger ship than I, and I wish to depart from here.”

  “To this I must accede,” says he, “if it is thy pleasure.” Therewith they parted, and she returned home and Finnbogi to his bed. She climbed up into the bed and awakened Thorvard (her husband) with her cold feet; and he asked her why she was so cold and wet. She answered with great passion. “I have been to the brothers’,” says she, “to try to buy their ship, for I wish to have a larger vessel; but they received my overtures so ill that they struck me and handled me very roughly; that time thou, poor wretch, will neither avenge my shame nor thy own; and I find, perforce, that I am no longer in Greenland. Moreover I shall part from thee unless thou makest vengeance for this.” And now he could stand her taunts no longer, and ordered the men to rise at once and take their weapons; and they then proceeded directly to the house of the brothers, and entered it while the folk were asleep, and seized and bound them, and led each one out when he was bound; and, as they came out, Fredis caused each to be slain.

  Since I had been a boy it had been such passages as the one above that had moved me most strangely. There was a man, perhaps one of Fredis’ men, who had seen a part of what had happened on that dreadful morning in the far western world and had sensed the rest. For such a one there would perhaps have been no thought of interference. One can think of him, the unknown writer of the memorable passage above, as even helping in the dreadful slaying there in the field at the edge of the wood and near the sea, not because he wanted to but because he would have been afraid. He would have done that and later perhaps have gone off alone into the woods and cried a little and prayed a little, as I can imagine myself doing after such an affair. The woman Fredis, after she had got what she wanted, swore all her men to secrecy. “I will devise the means of your death if there is any word of this when we have returned to Greenland,” she said, and after she had gone home with the two vessels loaded and had made up her own lie to tell her brother Eric of what had happened to the brothers and their men in the far place, she made all of her own men handsome presents.

  But there was that scribbler. He would put it down. Fear might have made him take part in the murder but no fear could now keep his hand from the pen. Do I not know the wretch? Have I not got his own blood in me? He would have walked about for days, re-living all of that dreadful morning scene in Vinland and then when he was one day walking he would have thought of something. Well, he would have thought suddenly of just that bit about Fredis crawling back into her husband’s bed, after the talk with Finnbogi, and how her cold wet feet awoke the man. He would have been alone in the wood, back there in Greenland, when that bit came to him, but at once he hurried to his own house. Perhaps his wife was getting dinner and wanted him to go to the store but he would have brushed her aside, and sitting down with ink and paper — perhaps in her angry presence — he wrote all out, just as it is put down above. Not only did he write, but he read his piece to others. “You will get yourself into trouble,” said his wife, and he knew what she said was true but that could not stop him. Do I not know the soul of him? He would have gone about boasting a little, strutting a little. “I say now, Leif, that bit, where Fredis gets into the bed and with her cold feet awakens Thorvald — not bad, eh? I rather nailed her there, now didn’t I old man?”

  “But you yourself helped to do the murder, you know.”

  “Oh, the deuce now! Never mind ‘that. But I say now, you’ll have to admit it, I did rather put a spike into my scene. I nailed it down, now didn’t I, Leify old chap?”

  NOTE VI

  WELL, THERE WAS my father, there was myself. If people did not want their stories told, it would be better for them to keep away from me. I would tell if I could get at the heart of it — as the fellow who went off to Vinland with Fredis told — and for just the reasons that made him tell. And like that fellow, after he returned to Greenland, I would have to walk alone in the woods or in city streets thinking, trying to think, trying to get all in accord, seeking always just that illuminating touch the Norse storyteller had found when he thought up the bit about Fredis — that about her getting into bed and touching the back of her sleeping husband with the cold feet. The foxy devil! Do I not know what happened after that? First he thought of the two in the warm bed — the determined woman and the startled weak man — with a little jump of delight and then he went back over his story and put that in about her having got up in the first place without putting on shoes and stockings and the cold wet dew on the grass and the log against the wall of the house on which they sat. Now he had got going just right and he knew he had got going just right. What a splendid feeling! It was like a dance. How neatly everything fitted in! Words came — ah — just the right words.

  How many times, in these modern days when I have seen how story-tellers and painters have got themselves so often all balled-up with the question of style I have wondered whether the story-tellers among the old Norse and those most marvelous story-tellers of the older Testaments, whether they also did not have their periods of escaping out into words because they had grown weary of seeking after the heart of their stories.

  I dare say they stole when they could without being detected as I have so often done. Well, there was the heart of the tale itself. That had first to be got at and then one had to find the words wherewith to clothe it. One got a bit feverish at times and used feverish words, made his telling too turgid or too wordy. One was like a runner who has a long race to run but who is feverishly forcing the pace. How many times I have sat writing, hoping I had got at the heart of the tale I was trying to put down on the paper when inside myself I knew I had not. I have tried to bluff myself. Often I have gone to others, hoping they would say words that would quiet the voices within. “You have not got it and you know you have not got it. Tear all up. Well, then, be a fool and go on trying to bluff yourself. Perhaps you can get some critic to say you have got what you know well enough you have not got, the very heart, the very music of your tale.”

  NOTE VII

  IN CHICAGO I had ruined my chances of becoming a successful man of affairs because I could not take affairs seriously but that had not bothered me. Often enough, to be sure, I dodged the fact that, after having started on the scent of some tale I turned aside because I could not follow the scent and consoled myself by saying that the need of money had been the cause of my defeat or that the need of leisure had upset me but it was always a lie.

  I was an advertising man in Chicago and sat in a room with some half a dozen others. We had met to discuss some matter of grave importance to say a maker of plows or automobile tires. The matter was really of no importance to me. The man had come to Chicago with three or four others and we were to discuss methods of increasing his sales. So many thousands of tires made, so many thousands of plows. There were other makers of tires, other makers of plows too. Could we be more persuasive than they, more bold and daring in statement, more foxy and clever perhaps?

  We sat in a room to talk it over and near me sat a large man with a beard. Someone had told me that he was the treasurer of the plow company but that had meant little. Now, as he sat there smoking a cigarette and gazing out at a window I saw, just when his head was slightly turned, that he had a long scar on his cheek, that he had grown the beard to conceal the scar. The talk went on but I sat fascinated. “We must devel
op the trade in the southwest, that’s what we must do,” said a voice from some far-distant place. Pictures had begun to form in my fancy. Beside the voices in the room, other voices were making themselves heard. Old memories had begun to stir.

  There was something, a story within me that had been there a long time but had never been told and that the scar under the beard had brought to life. What an unfortunate time for the story to begin asserting itself at just that moment. Now I was to think of the promotion of the sale of plows in the newly opened State of Oklahoma and in Texas.

  I sat with some six or eight men by a large table in a room and some man was talking. He had been to Texas and knew things I would later have to know when I wrote advertisements for the plow company. I tried to appear attentive. There was a trick I had cultivated for just such occasions. I leaned a little forward and put my head in my hands, as though lost in deep thought. Some of the men in the room had heard that I wrote stories and had therefore concluded that I had a good brain. Americans have always a kind of tenderness for such cheats as I was being at the moment. Now they gave me credit for thinking deeply on the subject of plows, which was what I wanted. One of my employers — he was president of our company and his name was Barton — tried to cover up my obvious inattention. Already he had decided I would have to write the plow company’s advertisements but later he would tell me of all that had been said in the room. He would take me into his office and scold me gently, like a mother speaking to a badly behaved child. “Of course you didn’t hear a blamed word they said but here is the gist of it. I had to tell that big man with a beard that you were a genius. My God, what lies do I not tell on your account? When the little man with the glasses was speaking of agricultural conditions in Texas I was afraid that at any moment you might begin to whistle or sing.”