Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  I had definite reasons for asking myself many of the questions that came to me as I lay in my bed at night. I had already published several stories and, for some reason I had not clearly understood, many people in reading my stories had been made angry by them. Many abusive letters had been written me. I had been called a pervert, a thoroughly nasty man.

  Was I that? I thought if I was I had better find out. My own hands looked all right to me as I lay on my bed looking at them in the moonlight. Were they unclean hands? There had been a few times, for brief periods only, when they had seemed to me to serve my purpose. I had felt something deeply, been quite impersonally absorbed in something in the life about me and my hands had of a sudden come to life. They had arranged words on paper I thought very skillfully. How clean I had felt during just those moments! It was the feeling I had always been seeking. At last, in a crippled way to be sure but after a fashion, my whole being had become a quite impersonal thing, expressing itself on paper through written words. The life about me seemed to have become my life. I sang as I worked, as in my boyhood I had often seen old craftsmen sing and as I had never heard men sing in the factories.

  And for what I had written at such times I had been called unclean by men and women who had never known me, could have had no personal reasons for thinking me unclean. Was I unclean? Were the hands that, for such brief periods of my life, had really served me, had they been unclean at such moments of service?

  Other thoughts came. Even my friend Paul Rosenfeld had called me “the Phallic Chekhov.” Had I a sex obsession? Was I a goner?

  Another American, Mr. Henry Adams, had evidently been as puzzled as I was at that moment although I am sure he would never have been so undignified as to have written, as I am doing here, of himself as lying on a bed in a New York rooming house and putting his own hands up into the moonlight to stare at them.

  However he had been equally puzzled. “Singularly enough,” he had said in his book, “The Education of Henry Adams,”

  “singularly enough, not one of Adams’ many schools of education has ever drawn his attention to the opening lines of Lucretius, though they were perhaps the finest in all Latin literature, where the poet invoked Venus exactly as Dante invoked the Virgin:

  ‘Quae, quoniam rerum naturam Sola gubernas.’

  “The Venus of Epicurean philosophy survived in the Virgin of the Schools.

  ‘Donna, sei tanto grande, e tanta vali,

  Che quai vuol grazia, e a te non ricorre,

  Sua Disianza vuol volar senz’ ali.’

  “All this was to American thought as though it had never existed. The true American knew something of the facts, but nothing of the feelings; he read the letter, but he never felt the law. Before this historic chasm, a mind like that of Adams felt itself helpless; he turned from the Virgin to the dynamo as though He were a Branly coherer. On one side, at the Louvre and at Chartres, as he knew by the record of work actually done and still before his eyes, was the highest energy ever known to men, the creator of four-fifths of his noblest art, exercising vastly more attraction over the human mind than all the steam engines and dynamos ever dreamed of; and yet this energy was unknown to the American mind. An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist.”

  NOTE VI

  IF MR. ADAMS had not spent his time as I was doing, lying on a bed and looking at his own hands, he had at least spent his time looking about. “An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist,” he had said and it was an accusation that an American could neither love nor worship.

  At any rate I was a man of the Middle West. I was not a New Englander. For my own people, as I had known them, it was absurd to say they had neither love nor reverence. Never a boy or man I had known at all intimately but that had both in him. We had simply been cheated. Our Virgins and Venuses had to be worshiped under the bush. What nights I had spent mooning about with middle-western boys, with hungry girls too. Were we but trying to refute the older men of New England who had got such a grip on our American intellectual life, the Emersons, Hawthornes and Longfellows? It was perhaps true to say of the intellectual sons of these men that a Virgin would never dare command, that a Venus would never dare exist. I knew little of New England men in the flesh but it was not necessarily true of us, out in my country. Of that I was pretty sure.

  As for my own hands I continued looking at them. Questions kept coming. I was myself no longer young. Having made a few bicycles in factories, having written some thousands of rather senseless advertisements, having rubbed affectionately the legs of a few race horses, having tried blunderingly to love a few women and having written a few novels that did not satisfy me or anyone else, having done these few things, could I begin now to think of myself as tired out and done for? Because my own hands had for the most part served me so badly could I let them lie beside me in idleness?

  I did not dare make such a surrender, nor did I dare dodge the issue with myself by going off into that phase of New York life I had already come to dislike, that phase of life which allows a man to employ his hands merely in writing smart and self-satisfying words regarding the failures of other men. In reality I was not trying to look at other men’s lives just then and as for other men’s work — it meant something to me when it taught me something. I was a middle-westerner who had come East to school if I could find the school.

  I wanted back the hands that had been taken from me if I could get them back. Mr. Stark Young had talked to me one day of what thinking might be and his words kept ringing in my ears. Such words as he had said to me always excited like music or painting. He was a man who had been a professor in colleges and knew what was conventionally called thinking and he had said that thinking meant nothing at all unless it was done with the whole body — not merely with the head. I remember that one night I got out of bed and went to my window. I had a room far over on Twenty-second Street, near the Hudson River, and often, late at night, sailors from the ships lying in the river came along my street. They had been drinking, seeing the girls, having a time, and were now going back to the ships to sail away over the world. One of them, a very drunken sailor who had to stop every few steps and lean against a building, sang in a hoarse throaty voice:

  “Lady Lou. Lady Lou.

  I love you.

  Lady Lou.”

  I looked at my own hands lying on the window sill in the moonlight and I dare say had anyone seen me at that moment he might have decided I had gone quite insane. I talked to my own hands, made them promises, pleaded with them, “I shall cover you with golden rings. You shall be bathed in perfumes.” Perhaps there was an effort to be made I had not the courage or strength to make. When it came to tale-telling there were certain tales that fairly told themselves, but there were others, more fascinating, that needed a great deal of understanding, of myself first and then of others.

  NOTE VII

  AND SO THERE I was, an American rapidly approaching middle life, sitting in my room over in west Twenty-second Street at night after a day spent listening to the talk of the new men and trying with all my might to be one of the new men myself. Below me in the street the common life of people went on but I tried to put it away from me for the time, was having too good a time thinking of myself to think much of ordinary people. It is a mood that has appeared and reappeared in me at various times and I am trying to clear it out of my system by writing this book. When I have done that I hope to shut up on the subject for keeps. In my book I have had something to say of my father, emphasizing the showman side of his nature. I have perhaps lied now and then regarding the facts of his life but have not lied about the essence of it.

  He was a man who loved a parade, bands playing in streets and himself in a gaudy uniform somewhere up near the head of the procession and I have myself had a pretty hard time not making a parade out of my own life.

  Some time after the period of which I am now writing, my friend Mr. Paul Rosenfeld was w
ith me in London stopping at the same hotel and one day I got away from him and when he wasn’t watching wandered into a gents’ furnishing store. When he came into the hotel later I took him to my room and displayed before him the things I had bought. He almost wept but there was little he could do. “Don’t,” he said. “Come out of the room. Promise me you won’t wear these things until you get out again to Chicago.”

  I was in New York and was the son of my father. The New Movement in the Arts was under way. If it was going to be a parade I wanted, ached, to be in it. Was I but trying to put myself over to the literary world as formerly I had been employed to put over automobile tires to the public?

  It was a question I was compelled to keep asking myself as it had something to do with the ineffectualness of my own hands lying before’ me on the window sill. I kept thinking of middle-western men like Dreiser, Masters, Sandburg and the others. There was something sincere and fine about them. Perhaps they had not worried, as I seemed to be doing, about the whole question of whether they belonged to the New Movement or not. I thought of them as somewhere out in the Middle West quietly at work, trying to understand the life about them, trying to express it in their work as best they could. How many other men were there in towns and cities of that great middle-western empire — my own land — younger men coming along. I had been unable to make my own beginning until most of the stronger years of my own life had passed. Perhaps I could not have begun at all but for them and perhaps, because of them, other men could now begin ten years younger than myself.

  “The eastern men, among whom I had now come, were perhaps right in demanding something more than courage from American artists,” I began telling myself. It was apparent there were two steps necessary and it might well be that we middle-western men had taken but one step. One had first of all to face one’s materials, accept fully the life about, quit running off in fancy to India, to England, to the South Seas. We Americans had to begin to stay, in spirit at least, at home. We had to accept our materials, face our materials.

  There was one thing, but there was something else too. We had to begin to face the possibilities of the surfaces of our pages.

  Ah, here was something very difficult and delicate indeed! Was I right after all in sitting in the darkness of my room and looking at my own hands, pleading with my own hands? Had I really come to New York — not to find out and digest abstract thoughts about American life but to find there the men who would direct me more truly to the training of my own hands for my task?

  In the days of the old crafts men became apprenticed craftsmen at fifteen. Had the men of the new day to live nearly three times that long before they found out they need go looking for the masters?

  NOTE VIII

  I WAS LIVING in a rooming house in a side street in New York and had spent more years of my life than I cared to think about in just such places. When I first began writing I used to read a great deal, in George Moore and others, of writers, painters, poets and the like sitting in cafés. That however happened in Paris, not in New York or Chicago. Everyone has read about it. You know how they do. In the evening one by one they come in at the door of the cafe. On the arm of the painter there may chance to be a beautiful grisette. The writers are less fortunate with the ladies and are glad to sit in silence listening to the talk. And how brilliant the talk! Such things are said! There is always an old wit, someone in the manner of Whistler or Degas. The old dog sits at a table keeping everything in order. I remember that two or three men I knew in New York tried something of the sort but did not quite pull it off. Let someone get a little “hifalutin’” — some scribbler, let us say. Suppose he sighs and says “The beautiful must remain the unattainable,” or something like that. Or let some other scribbler go off on a long solemn pronouncement about government, “All government should be done away with. It’s nonsense.” Bang! The Jimmy Whistler or the Degas of the café has shot him right between the eyes. There was a sense in which Miss Jane Heap of The Little Review supplied the need of such a one in New York, but she and Miss Margaret Anderson could not cover the whole field. That was impossible.

  And, in any event, neither New York nor Chicago has any cafés. When I first went to New York drinking was still publicly going on but one stood up at a bar with the foot on a rail and shot the drink into oneself. There might be a moment of conversation with the bartender. “What chance you think the Giants got?” etc. Nothing specially helpful in that and anyway what one secretly hoped was that the White Sox of Chicago would win.

  Everyone lived in rooms, except those who had rich parents and most young American artists gathered in the city, ate at cafeterias. In Chicago, before I left, they had begun taking the chairs out of the restaurants and one fancied that, in a few years, all Chicagoans would eat as they drank, standing. It would save time.

  We more solemn and serious American scribblers, painters, etc., for the most part lived in rooms and I have myself a memory of rooms in which I have lived, that is like a desert trail. I can no longer recall all of them. In a sense they haunt my whole life. At a little distance they become gray, little gray holes into which I have crept.

  And we Americans have enough of the blood of the northern races in us that we must have our holes into which to creep, to contemplate ourselves, to say our prayers. In Paris, during a summer when I loitered there, I found myself able to sit all afternoon in a café, watching the people pass up and down a little street. At another café across a small square a young student made love to a girl. He kept touching her body with his hands and laughing and occasionally he kissed her. That happened and carts passed. One side of my mind made little delightful mental notes. The French teamsters did not make geldings of their horses. Magnificent stallions passed drawing dust carts. Why did Americans unman stallions while the French did not? The teamster walked in the road with his hat cocked to the side of his head and a bit of color in the hat. The stallion threw back his head and trumpeted. The teamster made some sort of sarcastic comment to the student with the girl, who answered in kind but did not quit kissing her. There was a small church on the west side of the square and old women were going in and coming out. All these things happened and I was alive to them all and still I sat in a café writing a tale of life in my own Ohio towns. How natural it seemed, in Paris, to lead one’s secret inner life quite openly in the streets and how unnatural the same sort of thing would have seemed in an American city.

  In Chicago alone there had been enough rooms, in which I myself had lived, had hidden myself away, to have made a long street of houses. How much had my own outlook on life been made by the rooms? How much were the lives of all Americans made by the places in which they lived? When Americans grew tired of their houses — or rooms — and went into the street there was no place to sit unless one went into a movie or went to eat expensive and unnecessary food in a crowded restaurant. In the movies signs were put up:— “Best place in town to kill time.”

  Time then was a thing to be killed. It would seem an odd notion, I fancy, to a Frenchman or an Italian.

  NOTE IX

  ONE GOES FROM Chicago to New York on a modern train very quickly but in the short time while the train is tearing along, while one sleeps and awakens once, one cuts the distance between oneself and Europe immeasurably. To the American, and in spite of the later disillusionment brought by the World War Europe remained the old home of the crafts. Even as the train goes eastward in one’s own country, there is an inner ferment of excitement. Turgenev, Gogol, Fielding, Cervantes, De Foe, Balzac — what mighty names marched through the mind with the click of the car wheels. To the man of the American West how much the East means. How deeply buried the great European craftsmen had been in the soil out of which they had come. How intimately they had known their own peoples and with what infinite delicacy and understanding they had spoken out of them. As one sat in the train one found oneself bitterly condemning many of our own older craftsmen for selling out their inheritances, for selling out the younger men
, too. Why were they not more consciously aware of what they, as craftsmen, were at? What had they got — a few automobiles, suburban homes, a little cheap acclaim.

  Moments of wrath and then a smile too. “My boy, my boy, keep your shirt on!”

  In the next seat a Detroit man talking loudly. “Advertising pays. What you got to do is put it across in a hurry.”

  Only yesterday there was myself too, talking so, pounding tables in offices, crying the gospel of size, of hustle.

  ‘Keep your shirt on! Listen! You are starting rather late to do much. Perhaps if you are patient, if you listen work and learn you shall yet tell delicately a few tales.”

  As one approaches the Atlantic Coast there is a feeling comes that one, not horn, not having lived, through youth and young manhood in the Middle or Far West will never quite understand. Near my own room in the city, lying in the Hudson River, were vessels that to-morrow would set sail for Europe, other vessels that had arrived from Europe but the day before. As I lay on my cot in my room at night I could hear the steamboats crying in the river. At night when there was a fog they were like cows lost in a forest, somewhere out in the Middle West, lost and bawling for the warm barns.

  One went down to walk in the street facing the river. People were arriving on boats, departing on boats. They took the whole matter calmly, as one living in Chicago would entrain for Indianapolis. Out in my own country, when I was a boy, going to Europe meant something tremendous, like going to war for example. It was of infinitely more importance than, let us say, getting married. One got married or even went to war without writing a book about it but no man went to Europe from Ohio at least, without later writing a book about his travels.