Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  Thoughts went through my mind like voices talking.

  “Something within a man is betrayed. There is but the shell of a man walking about. What a man wants is to be able to justify himself to himself. What I as a man want is to be able, some time in my life, to do something well — to do some piece of work finely just for the sake of doing it — to know the feel of a thing growing into a life of its own under my fingers, eh?”

  IV

  What I am trying to convey to you, the reader, is a sense of the man in the bedroom, and myself looking at each other and thinking each his own thoughts and that these thoughts were a compound of our own and other people’s thoughts too. In the restaurant Edward and myself, while wanting to do so very much, had yet been unable to come close to each other. The man from prison, wanting us also, had been frightened by our presence and now here was this new man, a writer like myself and Edward, trying to thrust himself into the circle of my consciousness.

  We continued looking at each other. The man was a popular American short story writer. He wrote each year ten, twelve, fifteen magazine stories which sold for from five hundred to fifteen hundred dollars each.

  Was he tired of writing his stories? What did he want of me? I began to grow more and more belligerent in my attitude toward him. It is, with me, a common effect of feeling my own limitations. When I feel inadequate I look about at once for someone with whom I may become irritated.

  The book I had been reading a half hour before, the book of “The Tales of Balzac,” lay on a table near where the man sat and his fingers now reached out and took hold of it. It was bound in soft brown leather. One who loves me and who knew of my love for the book had taken it from my room in a house in Chicago and had carried it off to an old workman who had put it in this new suit of soft brown leather.

  The fingers of the man on the bed were playing with the pages of the book. One got the notion that the fingers wanted to begin tearing pages from the hook.

  I had been trying to reassure him. “Do stay, I have nothing to do,” I had said and he smiled at my words as a child might smile. “I am such an egotist,” he explained. “You see, I want to talk of myself. I write stories, you see, but they aren’t any good. Really they aren’t any good at all but they do bring me in money. I’m in a tight hole, I tell you. I own an automobile and I live on a certain scale that is fixed — that’s what I mean — that’s what’s the trouble with me. I am no longer young, as you’ll see if you look at my hair. It’s getting gray. I’m married and now I have a daughter in college. She goes to Vassar. Her name is Elsie. Things are fixed with me. I live on a certain scale — that’s what I mean — that’s what’s the trouble with me.”

  It was apparent the man had something of importance to himself he wanted to say and that he did not know how to begin.

  I tried to help. My friend Edward had told me a little of his story. (For the sake of convenience and really to better conceal his identity we will call him Arthur Hobson — although that is not his name.) Although he was born in America he is of Italian descent and there is in his nature, no doubt, something of the Italian spirit of violence, strangely mingled, as it so often is in the Latins, with gentleness and subtlety.

  However, he was like myself in one thing. He was an American and was trying to understand himself — not as an Italian but as an American.

  And so there was this Hobson — born in America of an Italian father — a father who had changed his name after coming to America and had prospered here. He, the father, had come to America to make money and had been successful. Then he had sent his son to an American college, wanting to make a real American of him.

  The son had been ambitious to become a well-known football player and to have, during his college days, the joy of seeing his name and picture in the newspapers. As it turned out however, he could not become one of the great players and to the end of his college career remained what is called a substitute — getting into but one or two comparatively unimportant games to win his college letter.

  He did not have it in him to be a great football player and so, in a world created in his fancy, he did what he could not do in life. He wrote a story concerning a man who, like himself, was of Italian descent and who also remained through most of his college career a substitute on a football team — but in the story the man did have, just at the end of his days in college, an opportunity of which he took brilliant advantage.

  There was this Hobson in his room writing on an afternoon of the late Fall. It was the birth of a Story-teller. He moved restlessly about the room, sat a long time writing and then got up and moved about again.

  In the story he wrote that day in his room long ago he did what he could not do in the flesh. The hero of his story was a rather small square-shouldered man like himself and there was an important game on, the most important of the year. All the other players were Anglo-Saxons and they could not win the game. They held their opponents even but could make no progress toward scoring.

  And now came the last ten minutes of play and the team began to weaken a little and that heartened the other side. “Hold ’em!... hold ’em!... hold ’em!” shouted the crowd. At last, at the very last, the young Italian boy was given his chance. “Let the Wop go in! We are going to lose anyway. Let the Wop go in!”

  Who has not read such stories? There are infinite variations of the theme. There he was, the little dark-skinned Italian-American and who ever thought he could do anything special! Such games as football are for the nations of the North. “Well, it will have to be done. One of the halfbacks has injured himself. Go in there, you Wop!”

  So in he goes and the story football game, the most important one of the year for his school, is won. It is almost lost but he saves the day. Aha, the other side has the ball and fumbles, just as they are nearing the goal line. Forward springs the little alert dark figure. Now he has the ball and has darted away. He stumbles and almost falls but... see... he has made a little twisting movement with his body just as that big fellow, the fullback of the opposing team, is about to pounce upon him. “See him run!” When he stumbles something happens to his leg. His ankle is sprained but still he runs like a streak. Now every step brings pain but he runs on and on. The game is won for the old school. “The little Wop did it! Hurrah! Hurrah!”

  The devil and all! These Italian fellows have a cruel streak in them, even in their dreams. The young Italian-American writer, writing his first story, had left his hero with a slight limp that went with him all through life and had justified it by the notion that the limp was in some way a badge of honor, a kind of proof of his thorough-going Americanism.

  Anyway, he wrote the story and sent it to one of our American magazines and it was paid for and published. He did, after all, achieve a kind of distinction during his days in college. In an American college a football star is something but an author is something, too. “Look, there goes Hobson. He’s an author! He had a story in the National Whiz, and got three hundred and fifty dollars for it. A smart fellow, I tell you! He’ll make his way in the world. All the fraternities are after the fellow.”

  And so there was Hobson and his father was proud of him and his college was proud of him and his future was assured. He wrote another football story and another and another. Things began to come his way and by the time he left college he was engaged to be married to one of the most popular girls of his class. She wasn’t very enthusiastic about his people but one did not need to live in the same city with them. An author can live where he pleases. The young couple came from the Middle-West and went to live in New England, in a town facing the sea. It was a good place for him. In New England there are many colleges and Hobson could go to football games ail Fall and get new ideas for stories without traveling too far.

  The Italian-American has become what he is, an American artist. He has a daughter in college now and owns an automobile. He is a success. He writes football stories.

  V

  He sat in my room in the hotel in New
York, fingering the book he had picked up from the table. The deuce! Did he want to tear the leaves? The fellow who came into the restaurant where Edward and I sat was in my mind perhaps — that is to say, the man who had been in prison. I kept thinking of the story writer as a man trying to tear away the bars of a prison. “Before he leaves this room my treasured book will be destroyed,” a corner of my brain was whispering to me.

  He wanted to talk about writing. That was his purpose. As with Edward and myself, there was now something between Hobson and myself that wanted saying. We were both story-tellers, fumbling about in materials we too often did not understand.

  “You see now,” he urged upon me, leaning forward and now actually tearing a page of my book, “You see now, I write of youth... youth out in the sun and wind, eh? I am supposed to represent young America, healthy young America. You wouldn’t believe how many times people have spoken to me saying that my stories are always clean and healthy and the editors of magazines are always saying it too. ‘Keep on the track,’ they say. ‘Don’t fly off the handle! We want lots of just such clean healthy stuff.’”

  He had grown too nervous to sit still and getting up began to walk back and forth in the narrow space before the bed, still clinging to my book. He tried to give me a picture of his life.

  He lived he said, during most of the year, in a Connecticut village by the sea and for a large part of the year did not try to write at all. The writing of football stories was a special thing. One had always to get hold of the subject from a new angle and so, in the Fall, one went to many games and took notes. Little things happened on the field that could be built up and elaborated. Above all, one must get punch into the stories. There must be a little unexpected turn of events. “You understand. You are a writer yourself.”

  My visitor’s mind slipped off into a new channel and he told me the story of his life in the New England town during the long months of the Spring Summer and early Fall when, as I understood the matter, he did no writing.

  Well, he played golf, he went to swim in the sea, he ran his automobile. In the New England town he owned a large white frame house where he lived with his wife, with his daughter when she was at home from school, and with two or three servants. He told me of his life there, of his working through the Summer months in a garden, of his going sometimes in the afternoons for long walks about the town and out along the country roads. He grew quieter and putting my book back on the table sat down again on the edge of the bed.

  “It’s odd,” he said. “You see, I have lived in that one town now for a good many years. There are people there I would like to know better. I would like really to know them, I mean. Men and women go along the road past my place. There is a man of about my own age whose wife has left him. He lives alone in a little house and cooks his own food. Sometimes he also goes for a walk and comes past my place and we are supposed to be friends. Something of’ the kind is in the wind. He stops sometimes by my garden and stands looking over and we talk but do not say much to each other. The devil, that’s the way it goes you see — there he is by the fence and there am I with a hoe in my hand. I walk to where he stands and also lean on the fence. We speak of the vegetables growing in my garden. Would you believe it we never speak of anything but the vegetables or the flowers perhaps? It’s a fact. There he stands. Did I tell you his wife has left him? He wants to speak of that — I’m sure of it. To tell the truth when he set out from his own house he was quite determined to come up to my place and tell me all about everything, how he feels, why his wife has left him and all about it. The man who went away with his wife was his best friend. It’s quite a story, you see. Everyone in our town knows about it but they do not know how the man himself feels as he sits up there in his house all alone.

  “That’s what he has made up his mind to talk to me about but he can’t do it, you see. All he does is was thinking of him and of something else at the same time. I wanted to save my Balzac if I could. Already the football-story man had torn a page of the book. Were he to get excited again he might tear out more pages. When he had first come into my room I had been discourteous, standing and staring at him, and now I did not want to speak of the book, to warn him. I wanted to pick it up casually when he wasn’t looking. “I’ll walk across the room with it and put it out of his reach,” I thought but just as I was about to put out my hand he put out his hand and took it again.

  And now as he fingered the book nervously his mind jumped off in a new direction. He told me that during the Summer before he had got hold of a book of verses by an American poet, Carl Sandburg.

  “There’s a fellow,” he cried, waving my Balzac about. “He feels common things as I would like to be able to feel them and sometimes as I work in my garden I think of him. As I walk about in my town or go swimming or fishing in the Summer afternoons I think of him.” He quoted:

  “Such a beautiful pail of fish, such a beautiful peck of apples, I cannot bring you now. It is too early and I am not footloose yet”

  It was pretty evident the man’s mind was jerking about, flying from place to place. Now he had forgotten the man who on Summer days came to lean over his fence and was speaking of other people of his New England town.

  On Summer mornings he sometimes went to loiter about on the main street of the town of his adoption, and there were things always going on that caught his fancy, as flies are caught in molasses.

  Life bestirred itself in the bright sunlight in the streets. First there was a surface life and then another and more subtle life going on below the surface and the football-story writer felt both very keenly — he was one made to feel all life keenly — but all the time he kept trying to think only of the outside of things. That would be better for him, he thought. A story writer who had written football stories for ten or fifteen years might very well get himself into a bad way by letting his fancy play too much over the life immediately about him. It was just possible — well you see it might turn out that he would come in the end to hate a football game more than anything else in the world — he might come to hate a football game as that furtive fellow I had seen in the restaurant that afternoon no doubt hated a prison. There were his wife and child and his automobile to be thought about. He did not drive the automobile much himself — in fact driving it made him nervous — but his wife and the daughter from Vassar loved driving it.

  And so there he was in the town — on the main street of the town. It was, let us say, a bright early Fall morning and the sun was shining and the air filled with the tang of the sea. Why did he find it so difficult to speak with anyone regarding the half-formed thoughts and feelings inside himself? He had always found it difficult to speak of such things, he explained, and that was the reason he had come to see me. I was a fellow writer and no doubt I also was often caught in the same trap. “I thought I would speak to you about it. I thought maybe you and I could talk it over,” he -said.

  He went, on such a morning as I have described, into the town’s main street and for a time stood about before the post office. Then he went to stand before the door of a cigar store.

  A favorite trick of his was to get his shoes shined.

  “You see,” he exclaimed, eagerly leaning forward on the bed and fingering my Balzac, “you see there is a small fish stand right near the shoe-shining stand and across the street there is a grocery where they set baskets of fruit out on the sidewalk. There are baskets of apples, baskets of peaches, baskets of pears, a bunch of yellow bananas hanging up. The fellow who runs the grocery is a Greek and the man who shines my shoes is an Italian. Lord, he’s a Wop like myself.

  “As for the man who sells fish, he’s a Yank.

  “How nice the fish look in the morning sun!”

  The story-teller’s hand caressed the back of my book and there was something sensual in the touch of his fingers as he tried to describe something to me, a sense he had got of an inner life growing up between the men of such oddly assorted nationalities selling their merchandise on the streets
of a New England town.

  Before coming to that he spoke at length of the fish lying amid cracked ice in a little box-like stand the fish merchant had built. One might have fancied my visitor also dreamed of some day becoming a fish merchant. The fish, he explained, were brought in from the sea in the evening by fishermen and the fish merchant came at daybreak to arrange his stock and all morning whenever he sold a fish he re-arranged the stock, bringing more fish from a deep box at the back of his little coop. Sometimes he stood back of his sales counter but when there were no customers about he came out and walked up and down the sidewalk and looked with pride at the fish lying amid the pieces of cracked ice.

  The Italian shoe-shiner and the Greek grocer stood on the sidewalk laughing at their neighbor. He was never satisfied with the display made by his wares but was always at work changing it, trying to improve it.

  On the shoe-shining stand sat the writer of football stories and when another customer did not come to take his place at once he lingered a moment. There was a soft smile on his lips.

  Sometimes when the story writer was there, sitting quietly on the shoe-shining stand, something happened at the fish-stand of which he tried to tell me. The fat old Yankee fish merchant did something — he allowed himself to be humiliated in a way that made the Greek and the Italian furious — although they never said anything about the matter.

  “It is like this,” the story writer began, smiling shyly at me. “You see now — well, you see the fish merchant has a daughter. She is his daughter but the American, the Yank, does not have a daughter in the same way as a Greek or an Italian. I am an American myself but I have enough memory of life in my father’s house to know that.

  “In the house of an Italian or a Greek the father is king. He says— ‘do this or that,’ and this or that is done. There may be grumbling behind the door. All right, let it pass! There is no grumbling in his presence. I’m talking now of the lower classes, the peasants. That’s the kind of blood I have in my veins. Oh, I admit there is a kind of brutality in it all but there is kindness and good sense in it, too. Well, the father goes out of his house to his work in the morning and for the woman in the house there is work too. She has her kids to look after. And the father — he works hard all day, he makes the living for all, he buys the food and clothes.