Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  Was there really something new in the air of America? I remember that at about this time someone told me that I was myself something new and how thankful I was to hear it. “Very well,” I said to myself, “if there are certain men launching a new ship from the harbor of New York and if they are willing to take me aboard I’ll sure go.” I was just as willing to be a modern as anything else, was glad to be. It was very sure I was not going to be a successful author and well enough I knew that, not being successful, there would he a great deal of consolation to me in being at least a modern.

  What I at the moment felt toward all the more deeply cultured men whose acquaintanceship I sought and still in a sense feel toward them was something like what a young mechanic might feel when his boss comes into the shop accompanied by his daughter.

  The young mechanic is standing at his lathe there is grease on his face and hands. The boss’s daughter has never been shown over the shop before and is a little excited by the presence of so many strange men and as she and her father approach the lathe where the young workman stands he does not know whether to appear surly and uncommunicative or bold and a bit impudent. (In his place I, being an American, should probably have winked at the girl and been terribly embarrassed and ashamed later.)

  There he stands fumbling about with his fingers and pretending to look out of the window and — the devil! — now the boss has stopped behind his lathe and is attempting to explain something to the daughter, “This is a sprocket post, is it not?” he says to the workman, who is compelled to turn around. “Yes, sir,” he mutters, in embarrassment but his eyes, in just that fraction of a second, have taken a sweeping glance at the daughter.

  And now she is gone and the workman is asking himself questions. “If I was a swell now I suppose maybe I’d be invited to their house.” He imagines himself in a dress suit going up a long driveway to the front of a grand house. He is swinging a cane and there on the front steps is the boss’s daughter waiting to receive him. What will he talk to her about? Dare a man speak in such company of the only things he knows? What does he know?

  He knows that Jack Johnson could probably have whipped Jess Willard if he had really tried. There is a woman lives in his rooming house who is unfaithful to her husband. He knows who with. She is going to have a child but the chances are it is not her husband’s child. Often he has asked himself how she will feel on the night when the child is born and when her husband is so excited and proud.

  After all, the young workman knows a good many things of his own sort, but of how many of them can he, dare he, speak with the boss’s daughter whose voice was so soft and whose skin looked so delicate that day when she came into the shop with her father? “Dare I ask her what she thinks the unfaithful wife will be thinking and feeling when the child is born?”

  Young workmen have a kind of fear of the thing called culture. Most middle-westerners think of it — in spite of their protestations to the contrary — as in some vague way to be breathed in the air of New York. New Yorkers seem to think of it as to be found in London or Paris. Bankers and manufacturers of the Middle-West hope to get it for their sons by sending them to Yale or Harvard and as there are a good many bankers and manufacturers Yale and Harvard are inclined to be crowded. Mark Twain thought he would find it in Boston — a whole generation of Americans thought that.

  To the young workman culture is somewhat like a new suit of clothes that does not fit too well. It binds under the arms when one first puts it on.

  NOTE II

  WHEN I LIVED in Chicago and had first begun to write stories an American critic who had seen some of my work had been very kind about securing the publication of the stories but once, when he was annoyed with me for writing a story he did not like, he wrote me a scolding letter. “You are, after all, nothing but an advertising writer who would like to be something else and can’t make it,” he said and after I had got to New York and had walked about a little looking at the tall arrogant buildings and at the smart alert-looking people in the streets I thought I had better, for the time at least, stay away from the people whose work and whose minds I admired. “They might find out how really little I know,” I said to myself shrewdly.

  I was however not too lonely, having plenty of people at whom I could look, to whom I could listen. My brother, who lived in New York, took me to the Salmagundi Club where I saw any number of successful painters and my boyhood friend Mr. John Emerson took me to the Players and Lambs and also, with other men and women I knew, I penetrated into the life of Greenwich Village.

  How many strings to grasp! How many things I wanted of the city that was, I had no doubt, the artistic and intellectual capital of the country! The city’s wealth did not impress me too much, as I had been in other wealthy places. One could make money as fast in Chicago as in New York, although it could probably not be spent with quite as much style. What I wanted most was the men who would help me solve certain problems connected with the craft to which I was devoted. Could I find such fellows? Would they do it?

  The bitter truth was that of the actors I saw and heard talk none seemed much interested in the craft of the actor and of the painters the same lack of interest in what seemed to me so essential was apparent, and surely we scribblers were no better. The successful men of the arts talked of the market and little else. Writers even went into bookstores to see what kind of books were selling well in order to know what kind of books to write, actors talked of salaries paid and of getting some part that would bring them into prominence and the painters followed the same bent.

  Were the successful practitioners of the arts much less decent fellows than the laborers and business men of the Middle West among whom my life had been spent? I was forced to ask myself that question too.

  NOTE III

  I SAT IN a restaurant in New York thinking of my friends George and Marco in Chicago. We had been lads together and I remembered an evening of our young manhood when we all went out to walk together. We had stopped at a bridge and stood leaning over and I remembered that Marco had said something, expressive at the moment of what we had all felt. “The time’ll come, I’ll bet you what you please the time!! come when I’ll be making my hundred and twenty-five every month,” he had said.

  Well, Marco’s remark had expressed something more than a desire to make money. Later all of us had made money and then when youth was gone we had all tried something else. Marco wrote poetry and George and I wrote stories. None of us knew much of our crafts but we had struggled together with them and in the evenings had sat about talking. What we had all wanted was the leisure money might bring. We had all wanted to go to New York and live among men who knew more of the crafts we were trying to practice than we felt we would ever know.

  And now I had come to New York and was sitting in a restaurant where the more successful of the practitioners of the arts congregated. What did I want? I wanted to hear men of my own craft, who loved the craft, speak of it. I remembered how as a boy in mid-western towns before the factories came in so thick the carpenters, wheelwrights, harness-makers and other craftsmen often gathered about to speak of their work and how I loved to be among them at such times. The factories had brushed such fellows aside. Had the same thing happened in the more delicate crafts? Were the great publishing houses of the city and the magazines but factories and were the writers and picture makers who worked for them but factory hands now?

  If that had happened I thought I understood the men among whom I had now come. The older craftsmen had thought little on the subject of wages and had never talked on the subject when they gathered in groups in the evenings but the factory hands among whom I later worked had talked of little else. They had talked of how much money might be made and had boasted interminably of their potency in sex. Were the practitioners of the more delicate crafts becoming like them?

  In the New York restaurant was a room filled with people, all in some way practitioners of the arts. Near me at a table sat three men and two women. They were talkin
g in rather loud tones and seemed conscious that everything they said was of importance. One had a queer sense of their separateness from each other. Why, when one of them spoke, did he not look at his fellows? Instead he glanced about the room, as though saying to himself, “Is anyone looking at me?”

  And now one of these men arose and walked across the room. There was something strange about his walk. I was puzzled and then the truth came to me. All the men and women in the room were obviously aware of what they thought of as their own importance. No man spoke naturally, walked naturally.

  The man who had got up from the table to go speak to someone at another table did not want really to speak to him. He wanted to walk across the room for the same reason that I am told, nowadays, it is almost impossible to do anything with actors as they all want to get into one spot on the stage — upstage where the light is the clearest.

  What a ghastly separation from life! I sat in the New York restaurant fully aware that what was true of the men and women about me was true also of myself. The people in the restaurant, the actors, painters and writers, had made themselves what the public thought it wanted from its artists, and had been well paid for doing so. What I felt in New York I might have felt with even more terrible certainty in Hollywood.

  I fled from the restaurant and at a street corner stopped and laughed at myself. I remembered that at the moment I had on a pair of socks and a neck-scarf, either of which might have been seen for a mile. “At any rate you’re not such a blushing violet yourself,” I said, grinning with myself at myself.

  NOTE IV

  IT WAS TIME surely for me to review myself. I wanted to know just what I was doing in New York, what I was up to — if I could find out. I had time now to ask myself a lot of questions and I enjoyed doing so. Mornings to walk about, afternoons to go to the parks, sit with people or go to see paintings, evenings of my own. No advertisements to write, for a time anyway. “Crescent Soap Lightens the Day’s Work. Tangletoes Catches the Flies,” etc. For a man living as I lived a few hundred dollars would go far. For the American there are always plenty of books to be had without cost and one may see what the more successful painters are doing by simply walking in at the door of a museum or a gallery. The work of the more unsuccessful ones worth seeing Alfred Stieglitz will show you or tell you about. Cigarettes do not cost very much and there are happy hours to be spent sitting by the window of a room in a side street hearing what people have to say as they walk past. All the women of my street spent the time at the same thing. There was a fat old woman across the way who never left the window from morning till night. I wondered if she was planning to write a novel and was thinking about the characters, dreaming of them, making up scenes and situations in which they were to play a part.

  If my life in the past had been split into two parts it need be that no longer. I have taken a resolution. In the future I would write no more advertisements. If I became broke I would become a beggar and sit with a beggar bowl in Fifth Avenue. Even the police are sentimental enough not to kick an author out. I would not sit swearing at the book publishers, the magazine editors or the public, that I was not rich. I had not tried to accommodate myself to them — why should they bother about me? I sat dreaming of what might be the takings of an author with a beggar bowl in his lap sitting in front of the Public Library on Fifth Avenue. The press of people would prevent the literarily inclined ladies from stopping to discuss books or to tell the author that his philosophy of life was all wrong. Also they could not accuse him of personal immorality. A beggar could not be immoral. He was at once above and below immorality. And the takings! There would be much good silver and I loved silver. If I should become blind my fortune would be made at last. A blind author sitting begging before the Public Library in the city of New York! Who dare say there was not glorious opportunity left in our country?

  Had I less courage than my father? Perhaps I had. He also might have thought of so noble a plan but in my place he might also have put it into execution at once. Ladies often came to the Public Library to meet their lovers. Quarrels started there. One would learn much of life by sitting as I have suggested. No man or woman would hesitate to speak boldly before a beggar. The stones would be cold but perhaps one could have a cushion.

  NOTE V

  WHEN I WENT on my pilgrimage to New York I was not a young man any more. The gray had begun to show in my hair. On the very day after my arrival I chanced to pick up a novel of Turgenev’s, “A House of Gentlefolk,” and saw how that he had made his hero Levretsky an old man, through with life, at forty-five.

  Pretty rough on an American who had not dared think of trying to do what he wanted until he was approaching that age. No American dared think of doing anything he enjoyed until youth was gone. Youth must be given to money making among us and leisure was a sin. A short time after the period of which I am now writing I was given the Dial prize for literature, the intent of which was that it was to be given to encourage some young man just starting out on the hard road of literary effort. It had been offered to me and I wanted it but thought seriously of investing in hair dye before going to call on the editors.

  So little work of any account done! Mornings coming, noons, nights! Many nights of lying awake in my bed in some rooming house in the city thinking!

  I had a penchant for taking my own life rather seriously. Americans in general pretended their own lives did not matter. They were continually talking of devoting their lives to business, to some reform, to their children, to the public. I had been called a modern and perhaps only deserved the title inasmuch as I was a born questioner. I did not take such words people were always saying too seriously. Often enough I used to lie on my bed in my room and on moonlight nights I lit a cigarette and spent some time looking at myself. I lifted up my legs, one after the other, and rejoiced at the thought that they might yet take me into many strange places. Then I lifted my arms and looked long and earnestly at my hands. Why had they not served me better? Why would they not serve me better? It was easy enough to put a pen into the fingers. I myself was perfectly willing to be a great author. Why would not the pen slide more easily and gracefully over the paper? What sentences I wanted to write, what paragraphs, what pages! If reading Miss Stein had given me a new sense of my own limited vocabulary, had made me feel words as more living things, if seeing the work of many of the modern painters had given me a new feeling for form and color, why would my own hands not become better servants to me?

  On some nights, as I lay thus, the noise of the great city to which I had come growing fainter as the night wore on, I had many strange thoughts, brought into my head by reading the works of such men as Mr. Van Wyck Brooks or by talking with such men as my friends Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Rosenfeld. My own hands had not served me very well. Nothing they had done with words had satisfied me. There was not finesse enough in my fingers. All sorts of thoughts and emotions came to me that would not creep down my arms and out through my fingers upon the paper. How much was I to blame for that? How much could fairly be blamed to the civilization in which I had lived? I presume I wanted very much to blame something other than myself if I could.

  The thoughts that came were something like this: “Suppose,” I suggested to myself, “that the giving of itself by an entire generation to mechanical things were really making all men impotent. There was a passion for size among almost all the men I had known. Almost every man I had known had wanted a bigger house, a bigger factory, a faster automobile than his fellows. I had myself run an automobile and doing so had given me a strange sense of vicarious power, mingled with a kind of shame too. I pressed my foot upon a little button on the floor of the car and it shot forward. There was a feeling that did not really belong to me, that I had in some way stolen. I was rushing along a road or through a street and carrying five or six other people with me and, in spite of myself, felt rather grand doing it. Was that because I was in reality so ineffectual in myself? Did so many of my fellow writers want great sales for their
books because, feeling as I did then the ineffectuality of their own hands to do good work, they wanted to be convinced from the outside? Was the desire all modern peoples had for a greater navy, a greater army, taller public buildings, but a sign of growing impotence? Was there a growing race of people in the world who had no use for their hands and were the hands paying them back by becoming ineffectual? Was the Modem after all but the man who had begun faintly to realize what I was then realizing and were all his efforts hut at bottom the attempt to get his hands back on the ends of his arms? ‘It may be that all the men of our age can at best but act as fertilizer,’ Paul Rosenfeld had said to me. Was what I was then thinking in reality what he had meant?”

  I am trying to give as closely as I can a transcript of some of my own thoughts as I lay on my bed in a rooming house in the city of New York and after I had walked about and had talked a little with some of the men I admired. I was thinking of old workers in the time of the crafts and of the new workers I had personally known in the time of the factories. I was thinking of myself and my own ineffectualness. Perhaps I was but trying to make excuses for myself. Most artists spend a large part of their time doing that. In the factories so many of the workers spent so large a part of their time boasting of their sexual effectiveness. Was that because they felt themselves every year growing more and more ineffectual as men? Were modern women going more and more toward man’s life and man’s attitude toward life because they were becoming all the time less and less able to be women? For two or three hundred years the western peoples had been in the grip of a thing called Puritanism. Mr. Brooks and Mr. Waldo Frank, in two books published at about that time, had declared that industrialism was a natural outgrowth of Puritanism, that having renounced life for themselves the Puritans were determined to kill life in others.