Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  “Why not? Have you not learned that anything can happen anywhere? If a thing can happen in my imaginative world it can of course happen in the flesh and blood world. Upon what do you fancy my imagination feeds?”

  My own belief is that the writer with a notebook in his hand is always a bad workman, a man who distrusts his own imagination. Such a man describes actual scenes accurately, he puts down actual conversation.

  But people do not converse in the book world as they do in life. Scenes of the imaginative world are not real scenes.

  The life of reality is confused, disorderly, almost always without apparent purpose, whereas in the artist’s imaginative life there is purpose. There is determination to give the tale, the song, the painting Form — to make it true and real to the theme, not to life. Often the better the job is done the greater the confusion.

  I myself remember with what a shock I heard people say that one of my own books, Winesburg, Ohio, was an exact picture of Ohio village life. The book was written in a crowded tenement district of Chicago. The hint for almost every character was taken from my fellow-lodgers in a large rooming house, many of whom had never lived in a village. The confusion arises out of the fact that others besides practicing artists have imaginations. But most people are afraid to trust their imaginations and the artist is not.

  Would it not be better to have it understood that realism, in so far as the word means reality to life, is always bad art — although it may possibly be very good journalism?

  Which is but another way of saying that all of the so-called great realists were not realists at all and never intended being. Madame Bovary did not exist in fact. She existed in the imaginative life of Flaubert and he managed to make her exist also in the imaginative life of his readers.

  I have been writing a story. A man is walking in a street and suddenly turns out of the street into an alleyway. There he meets another man and a hurried whispered conversation takes place. In real life they may be but a pair of rather small bootleggers, but they are not that to me.

  When I began writing, the physical aspect of one of the men, the one who walked in the street, was taken rather literally from life. He looked strikingly like a man I once knew, so much like him in fact that there was a confusion. A matter easy enough to correct.

  A stroke of my pen saves me from realism. The man I knew in life had red hair; he was tall and thin.

  With a few words I have changed him completely. Now he has black hair and a black mustache. He is short and has broad shoulders. And now he no longer lives in the world of reality. He is a denizen of my own imaginative world. He can now begin a life having nothing at all to do with the life of the red-haired man.

  If I am to succeed in making him real in this new world he, like hundreds of other men and women who live only in my own fanciful world, must live and move within the scope of the story or novel into which I have cast him. If I do tricks with him in the imaginative world, sell him out, I become merely a romancer. If, however, I have the courage to let him really live he will, perhaps, show me the way to a fine story or novel.

  But the story or novel will not be a picture of life. I will never have had any intention of making it that.

  AFTER SEEING GEORGE BELLOWS’ MR. AND MRS. WASE

  THE PARROT BOTHERED me at first and then the book she holds in her hand. The book may be a Bible. Later I understood about the parrot. Mrs. Wase’s sister sent it to her from Florida. She was a Freer and when her husband got killed she got his life insurance. She went to Florida one winter and sent the parrot home to Martha. When she was down there they tried to sell her an orange grove, but she knew how to hang onto her money. The real estate agent was pretty slick. He could talk.

  The Freer boys like games of all kinds and Ike Freer got to be a baseball pitcher. He was in the Texas League once, with Fort Worth, but his arm went bad on him.

  He’s a house painter now.

  Mr. Wase is an engineer on the Wheeling Railroad, a road that goes from Wheeling, West Virginia, to Toledo, Ohio, and carries coal mostly.

  The Wases had one boy, Ed Wase. He was a good boy, but he got killed in the war. It seemed to draw Mr and Mrs. Wase closer to each other, but Mrs. Wase hasn’t ever been the same woman since it happened. You can’t hardly get her to look on the cheerful side of things much.

  The relation between the artist and the workman is very subtle and difficult to define. Some artists feel it, others do not. There are artists who would like to deny it. They would like to think of themselves as aristocrats.

  What a notion! The artist must work with his hands. He must feel within himself some deep relationship between himself, as a man, and the world of nature, of materials.

  The earth in which men have always plowed and planted, trees, stones lying in fields, seas breaking on shores, a world filled with materials out of which he is to try to create something with his hands.

  Workingmen also express themselves through their hands. Look at the hands of Mr and Mrs. Wase. Years of touching things, doing things. The fingers, in the end, often become more alive than all the rest of the body.

  Looking at this painting you get a new feeling about Mr. George Bellows. I myself did not know the man well, only met him once or twice, quite casually. He must have had in him that quality of masculine tenderness that is so rare and precious. It expresses itself, in a man, in the way he touches things, what it means to him to touch things — life in trees, in stones, color, materials of all sorts.

  The arts are always being swept here and there by movements. It would be so satisfactory to us all if we could get the arts defined, if there were only some definite rule or formula by which, when we stand before a work of art, we could say “this is good or that is bad.” Workmen in stone, in color, in sound, in words are always being bothered by the same desire. Mr. George Bellows must always have been on the hunt, trying one approach and then another. He died too soon. There are few enough such men.

  My notion is that we would all chuck all of the arts out of our lives if we could. They are such a bother. The challenge is always there. “Get a little closer. Give more of yourself. Be more impersonal. Love more.”

  “Love what?”

  Well, say this life in which we all live. That’s something, isn’t it? Life as it is in stones, trees, skies, seas, people, too.

  Few enough people realize that all art that has vitality must have its basis in love. You see women sometimes of whom it might be said that they find direct and simple expression of the need for giving love in their relations with people about them, but with men that is some what difficult. It may be impossible. It may be that men are intended primarily to be workmen, that they must find an outlet for the inner needs in their work or they will not find it at all.

  As for myself I find an expression of all I am trying to say here in this painting by Mr. Bellows. Men are seldom so tender, so understanding, so cleanly courageous as Mr. Bellows must have been when he faced this canvas. You get back to the people painted by Mr. Bellows and forget him and that is as it should be. That is what the artist intends and wants when he is really feeling the thing on which he is at work.

  Mr. Wase going to his job every day. When he isn’t at work he thinks of his job. There are ways to get by with a job, but that isn’t enough. You want to do it a little better and a little better and a little better. Life is short, after all. You just begin to learn a little something and then you die. What you realize, what every man dimly realizes, is that what a man feels toward his work, he is. We have all in the end got to square ourselves with ourselves if we can.

  The challenge is always there. “Get a little closer. Give more of yourself. Be more impersonal before the possibilities of the materials you touch with your fingers. Love more.”

  Mr and Mrs. Wase, both in their dumb way, keep telling you things. They are telling you that Mr. George Bellows died too young. They are telling you that he was after something, that he was always after it.

  I’LL
SAY WE’VE DONE WELL

  FOREWORD

  I AM compelled to write of the State of Ohio reminiscently and from flashing impressions got during these last ten years, although I was born there, spent my young manhood within its borders, and later went back and spent another five or six years as a manufacturer in the State. And so I have always thought of myself as an Ohioan and no doubt shall always remain, inside myself, an Ohioan.

  Very well, then, it is my State and there are a thousand things within it I love and as many things I do not like much at all. And I dare say I might have some difficulty setting down just the things about Ohio that I most dislike were it not for the fact that what I am to write is to appear in The Nation, and The Nation, being — well, anyway, what they call broadminded, cannot well refuse room to my particular form of broadening out, as it were.

  Ohio is a big State. It is strong. It is the State of Harding and McKinley. I am told that my own father once played in the Silver Cornet Band at Caledonia, Ohio. Warren G. might have remembered him as Teddy, sometimes called Major Anderson. He ran a small harness shop at Caledonia. Just why he was called Major I never knew. Perhaps because his people came from the South. Anyway, I ought to have got a job at Washington. Everyone else from that county did.

  And now Ohio has got very big and very strong and its Youngstown, Cincinnati, Akron, Cleveland, Toledo, and perhaps a dozen other prosperous industrial cities, can put themselves forward as being as ugly, as noisy, as dirty, and as careless in their civic spirit as any American industrial cities anywhere. “Come you men of ‘these States,’” as old Walt Whitman was so fond of saying, in his windier moods, trot out your cities. Have you a city that smells worse than Akron, that is a worse junk-heap of ugliness than Youngstown, that is more smugly self-satisfied than Cleveland, or that has missed as unbelievably great an opportunity to be one of the lovely cities of the world as has the city of Cincinnati? I’ll warrant you have not. In this modern pushing American civilization of ours you other States have nothing on our Ohio. Credit where credit is due, citizens. I claim that we Ohio men have taken as lovely a land as ever lay outdoors and that we have, in our towns and cities, put the old stamp of ourselves on it for keeps.

  Of course, you understand, that to do this we have had to work. Take, for example, a city like Cincinnati. There it sits on its hills, the lovely southern Ohio and northern Kentucky hills, and a poet coming there might have gone into the neighboring hills and looked down on the site of the great city; well, what I say is that such a poet might have dreamed of a white and golden city nestling there with the beautiful Ohio at its feet. And that city might, you understand, have crept off into the green hills, that the poet might have compared to the breasts of goddesses, and in the morning when the sun came out and the men, women, and children of the city came out of their houses and looking abroad over the sweet land of Ohio —

  But pshaw, let’s cut that bunk.

  We Ohioans tackled the job and we put the kibosh on that poet tribe for keeps. If you don’t believe it, go down and look at our city of Cincinnati now. We have done something against great odds down there. First, we had to lick the poet out of our own hearts and then we had to lick nature herself, but we did it. Today our river front in Cincinnati is as mean looking a place as the lake front in Chicago or Cleveland, and you please bear in mind that down there in Cincinnati we had less money to work with than they did up in Chicago or even in Cleveland.

  Well, we did it. We have ripped up those hills and cut out all that breasts-of-goddesses stuff and we’ve got a whanging big Rotary Club and a few years ago we won the World Series, or bought it, and we’ve got some nice rotten old boats in the river and some old sheds on the waterfront where, but for us, there might not have been anything but water.

  And now let’s move about the State a little while I point out to you a few more things we have done. Of course we haven’t any Henry Ford over there, but just bear in mind that John D. Rockefeller and Mark Hanna and Harvey Firestone and Willys up at Toledo and a lot of other live ones are Ohio men and what I claim is — they have done well.

  Look at what we had to buck up against. You go back into American history a little and you’ll see for yourself what I mean. Do you remember when La Salle was working his way westward, up there in Canada, and he kept hearing about a country to the south and a river called the Ohio? The rest of his crowd didn’t want to go down that way and so, being a modest man and not wanting to set himself up against public opinion, he pretended to be down of a bad sickness. So the rest of the lot, priests and Indians and others, went on out west and he just took a couple of years off and cut out southward alone, with a few Indians. And even afoot and through the thick woods a man can cover quite a considerable amount of territory in two years. My notion is he probably saw it all.

  I remember that an old man I knew when I was a boy told me about seeing the Ohio River in the early days, when the rolling hills along its banks were still covered with great trees, and what he said I can’t remember exactly, but anyway, he gave me the impression of a sweet, clear and majestic stream, in which a man could swim and see the sand of the bottom far below, through the sparkling water. The impression I got from the old man was of boys swimming on their backs, white clouds floating overhead, the hills running away and the branches of trees tossed by the wind like the waves of a vast green sea.

  It may be that La Salle went there and did that. It wouldn’t surprise me if some such scandal should creep out about him. And then, maybe, after he got down to where Louisville, Kentucky, now stands, and he found he couldn’t get any further with his boats because of the falls in the river — or pretended he couldn’t because he was so stuck on the fine Ohio country up above — it may be, I say, that he turned back and went northward along eastern Ohio and into a land of even more majestic hills and finer forests and got finally into that country of soft-stepping little hills, up there facing Lake Erie.

  I say maybe he did and I have my own reasons. You see this fellow La Salle wasn’t much of a one to talk. He didn’t advertise very well. What I mean is he was an uncommunicative man. But you go look him up in the books and you will see that later he was always being condemned, after that trip, and that he was always afterward accused of being a visionary and a dreamer.

  From all I’ve ever been able to hear about Ohio, as it was before we white men and New Englanders got in there and went to work, the land might have done that to La Salle, and for that matter to our own sons too, if we, Godfearing men, hadn’t got in there just when we did, and rolled up our sleeves and got right down to the business of making a good, up-and-coming, Middle-Western American State out of it. And, thank goodness, we had the old pep in us to do it. We original northern Ohio men were mostly New Englanders and we came out of cold, stony New England and over the rocky hills of northern New York State to get into Ohio.

  I suppose the hardship we endured before we got to Ohio was what helped us to bang right ahead and cut down trees and build railroads and whang the Indians over the heads with our picks and shovels and put up churches and later start the Anti-saloon League and all the other splendid things we have done. I’ll tell you what the country makes no mistake when it comes to our State for Presidents. We train our sons up right over there.

  Why, I can remember myself, when I was a boy, and how I once got out of a job and went one fall with a string of race horses all over our State. I found out then what La Salle was up against when our State was what you might call new, in a way of speaking. Why, I got as dreamy and mopy, drifting along through the beautiful Ohio country that fall, as any no-account you ever saw. I fooled along until I got fired. That’s how I came out.

  Then, of course, I had to go into the cities and get a job in a factory and the better way of life got in its chance at me, so that for years I had as good a bringing up and knew as much about hustling and pushing myself forward and advertising and not getting dreamy or visionary as any American there is. What I mean is that if I have sli
pped any since I do not blame the modern Ohio people for it. It’s my own fault. You can’t blame a town like Toledo or Cleveland or Akron or any of our up-and-coming Ohio cities if a man turns out to be a burn American and doesn’t care about driving a motor at fifty miles an hour or doesn’t go to the movies much evenings.

  What I mean to say is that this business of writing up the States in the pages of The Nation is, I’ll bet anything, going to turn out just as I expected. There’ll be a lot of knocking, that’s what I’ll bet. But I’m not going to do that. I live in Chicago now and our motto out here is, “Put away your hammer and get out your horn.” Mayor Thompson of Chicago got that up. And, anyway, I think it is pretty much all silliness, this knocking and this carping criticism of everything American and splendid I hear going on nowadays. I’m that way myself sometimes and I’m ashamed of it.

  The trouble with me is that I once had a perfectly good little factory over in Ohio, and there was a nice ash-heap in a vacant lot beside it, and it was on a nice stream, and I dumped stuff out of my factory and killed the fish in it and spoiled it just splendid for a while. What I think now is that I would have been all right and a good man too, but on summer afternoons I got to moping about the Ohio hills alone, instead of going over to the Elks Club and playing pool where I might have got in with some of the boys and picked up some good points. There were a lot of good bang-up Ohio pushers over in that Ohio town I had my factory in and I neglected them. So, of course, I went broke and I’ll admit I’ve been rather a sorehead ever since. But when I come down to admit the honest truth I’ll have to say it wasn’t Ohio’s fault at all.

  Why, do you know, I’ve had times when I thought I’d like to see that strip of country we call Ohio, just as that Frenchman La Salle must have seen it. What I mean is with nothing over there but the dear green hills and the clear sweet rivers and nobody around but a few Indians and all the whites and the splendid modern cities all gone to — I won’t say where because it’s a thought I don’t have very often and I’m ashamed of it.