Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  I have escaped and am walking under the stars with the professor. When we are alone together we both become human. I look at him and he looks at me. We laugh a little. I have a hunch about him. It may be his hand, I suddenly see quite clearly as we walk under a street lamp, that betrays him. “Were you ever a farmer? Did you ever hold the handles of a plow?” I ask and it turns out that he was indeed once a young farmer in a county of Ohio where I also as a young man worked on a farm. “Perhaps we once plowed adjoining fields,” I think but do not inquire too closely as I like the picture that now floats up into my mind. I fancy him plowing on a sloping hillside while on another hillside, across a valley, I am also plowing. It is spring. How sweet the earth smells under our feet.

  And now I am at my hotel in the university town and have gone upstairs to my room. The other plowman is now lecturing every day in this university and I am going about delivering lectures about the art of writing.

  “You cannot be a great man and be human. I would like to be a great man. I so detest men who think themselves important. It is so nice to be unknown, to slip quietly through streets, seeing life while remaining unseen, feeling life, yourself unseen and unknown.” Dancing thoughts in my head now. Alone in my room I could make such a wonderful speech.

  I am ashamed to light the light in my room at the hotel. Why am I not a praying man? It would be so helpful to pray, for wisdom let us say. “This lecturing business is so exciting and interesting. I love it.

  “This lecturing business is so terrible. It makes me feel so cheap.”

  And now I have crawled into bed and my light is out for the night. Faces crowding up to me, lips ask questions. I float off to sleep accompanied by a sea of floating questioning faces.

  But just before I sleep I think — there was that place in my lecture. By making it just a little different I shall get more of a rise out of my audiences.

  It is the showman in me who comes back and who takes command just before I float off to sleep.

  NOTES OUT OF A MAN’S LIFE

  NOTE 17

  YOU LIE IN bed in the early morning half asleep, half awake. Someone is moving in the house. In the street outside feet are shuffling on the sidewalk.

  Full consciousness is just before you and back of you lies the lack of consciousness, sleep and dreams. Chance may send you either road.

  In such a state I invariably become something other than myself. This morning I became an old Frenchman living in the city of New Orleans. My wife was younger than myself. There was a flirtation going on between her and another Frenchman. The other Frenchman had long been my friend.

  He came often to see me, wanting really to see my wife. To get him she would have to break down his loyalty to me.

  For a long time the play went on. There was material for a complete novel as the swift scenes passed racing through the field of my fancy. Although I had become the old Frenchman, felt all he felt, knew his thoughts, his feelings, he was also outside me and presented himself as a charming ridiculous old fellow.

  NOTE 18

  I have often wondered at the relationship of people to the animal side of life.

  Farmers, cattle-raisers, steamboat men, railroad men — know certain things about life, about animals, others do not know.

  A poet I know was not well and went into the country to restore his health. As he was poor he had to work and so hired himself to a farmer. He was set to pitching manure.

  Days and days of that. In time the green fields became to him but great heaps of manure. All became manure in the end.

  The literature of the South is far removed from the soil. The stench is gone out of it. New Orleans, for example, is a city of smells. It reeks with smells from the earth, the sea, the river, the houses, the markets, the swamps. In the moist heavy air the smells hang all day and all night but in Southern stories nothing is mentioned but the magnolia.

  As though in resentment at thus being singled out the magnolia will not be touched. It is a great white flower — splendid like a splendid woman — but touch it with but the tip of the finger or the nose and it becomes black. It also becomes manure.

  NOTE 19

  The writer is seeking a certain tune, a rhythm. When he has caught it the words and sentences flow freely. There is a new cunning, a new majesty to his thoughts. To speak of him as working is absurd. As well speak of a stream working as it flows down to the sea.

  Tales are everywhere. Every man, woman and child you meet on the street has a tale for you. In the old days in Chicago I used to come out of my room after writing for three or four hours and sometimes had to walk along looking down at the sidewalks.

  When I had been working well there was a kind of insanity of consciousness. There may be little nerves in the body that, if we could bear having them become sensitive enough, would tell us everything about every person we meet.

  I confess I am more sensitive to women than to men. If I had actually — with my body — made love to all the women toward whom I have felt love I would be dead long since.

  For several years now I have been a semipublic character. My person, my morals, my character, my impulses as a writer have been discussed in public prints.

  I have never thought any of the critics who have dissected me have got me right. Perhaps no man ever thinks another has got him right.

  The point is that there is no use concealing anything. I am a sort of showman. If it were possible I would like to be a quiet retiring gentleman, concealing everything from my fellows.

  There is no flavor to such nakedness. Nothing worthwhile knowing can be concealed. Telling what you already know is an insult to your intelligence.

  And anyway, surfaces — houses in which people live, the clothes they wear — these things have their own value — their own possibilities of beauty.

  In the streets of Chicago I walked with my eyes on the sidewalk refusing to look at people because their faces all had stories to tell and I could not receive them.

  There was no strength in me to tell the tales. I bumped against people and several times came near being killed by motors.

  I went to the lake. The lake, the sea, trees, rivers, negroes working in fields, these things rested me so that I could feel and work again.

  When I was rested I went into a room where a woman sat. Let us suppose this to have happened when I was young. Her being married or not married had nothing to do with the matter.

  She spoke of the theater, of the work of some painter — of music. If she were of an age that made her physically attractive to me two conversations went on. We spoke certain words and thought others. Often things hung in the balance. A word from her or from me would have opened up vast reservoirs of possibilities in our relations.

  When I was younger, stronger, and perhaps more foolish, I used to think it would be well if everyone spoke their hidden thoughts aloud. Later I grew away from that notion. No one is good enough, strong enough, rich enough.

  What I have just now been writing related to work, that is to say to writing, singing, dancing, painting, is difficult to say in words.

  The relation you seek always exists. The rhythm you are seeking in any of the arts lies just below the surface of things in nature. To get below the surface, to get the lower rhythm into your hands, your body, your mind, is what you seek but having achieved it you are soon exhausted. It is necessary to come back to the surface, to be like a tree or a field. Men who can work at any time in any art have no relation to their art at all. Their relation to their work has no more reality than the giving of her body by a prostitute has to do with the reality of love.

  NOTE 20

  A woman reappears with whom I am presumed to have had an affair. In reality the affair did not come off but now she is quite convinced it did.

  For some months — during a summer several years ago — the woman and I were much together. She was at a hotel in the mountains and I had gone to visit an acquaintance, a painter, in a nearby cabin.

  The painter ha
d been very lonely until I came and then, after I came, he suddenly began working.

  That was all right for him but I could not work. I was in one of my dead indolent periods. His industry drove me mad. I could not bear the sight of him, working madly.

  Like an idle woman I became a flirt to pass the time. I took up with the woman at the hotel who was glad enough to have me. She was one of the sort destined to play always along the dead line, never by any chance stepping over.

  Well, I served her purpose, she mine. I walked with her in the fields, in the woods.

  At night sometimes we came back to her hotel at two o’clock. All the other guests at the hotel gossiped. My friend, the painter, laughed. He was working. “Why do you not work? What are you up to? Such a woman — the devil.”

  He did not understand that I could not work. I was nasty inside, a mess.

  So was the woman. We were fellows — for the time.

  Her reputation was being ruined — or made. In reality she wanted the name of having affairs with men without having them. There are many such women.

  One night — the moon was shining — it was midnight.

  We sat down in the darkness by a little creek. In an open field nearby two little wild animals made love.

  Afterward I thought we came near something but I was wrong. In the woman’s fancy, later, that may have been the time and place when it happened.

  Suddenly I was through with her. I left my friend and went away to the city. After another month I began working. Inside myself some minute readjustment had been made. I felt clean and healthy again.

  I did not see the woman, did not think of her. My sudden disappearance had stirred up endless talk. I was heartless — had taken what I wanted and had gone away. The woman went about looking sad, a wronged woman. My friend, the painter, used to tell about it and laugh.

  When two years later I saw her she took me aside, into the darkness, and talked to me. It was at a party at a friend’s house. She talked of the danger she had been in. For a month she did not know. What a relief when she found nothing serious had happened.

  “I would not have asked you to marry me. You are an artist. We women must lead our own lives, take our own chances.”

  The woman has a conviction. I have not disturbed it. Some of her friends, to whom she has talked, think she has been badly treated.

  I shall do nothing to disturb her conviction. It may be that such fancied experiences with men are the only kind she will ever have.

  NOTE 21

  A man came yesterday and told me a story of his first affair with a woman. How we got on the subject I can’t remember. Men often drift to it unconsciously. All relations are difficult and puzzling.

  The man talking to me was fifty and gray, a dignified looking man with a mustache. As he talked his voice was somewhat sad. No doubt he regretted the passing years.

  When he was fifteen he was employed about the house of a storekeeper. The storekeeper was forty-five and had married a woman of twenty-five. Often the man went away, for three or four days at a time.

  The young man worked about the stable and in the house. He slept on a cot in a little room downstairs while the merchant and his younger wife slept upstairs.

  At that time, my visitor told me, he had no idea of anything happening. When a woman was married she was married. What was settled was settled. About young unmarried girls he had thoughts enough but older married women — well, he did not think of them at all.

  He was half a servant in the house where he then lived but when the man of the house went away his position changed. He and the young woman began to play about. As he walked along a hallway she came creeping up behind. She pushed him and ran away laughing.

  When the storekeeper was out of town they were one day washing windows. The woman put the water on the windows and washed them clean and the young man dried them with a cloth. She had put on old clothes and her dress was torn. Perhaps she had purposely torn it. He kept catching glimpses of her round breasts. She looked at him and laughed.

  That night on his cot he could not sleep and she could not sleep in her room. He had left the door of his room partly open and she came down stairs and creeping to the door looked in. He pretended to sleep and then, when she had returned to her own room upstairs, he crept up and looked in at her.

  He did it three times and she did it three times and then, when he was doing it the fourth time, she whispered to him from the dark room.

  He went in to her and all was silent. The whole affair was carried on in darkness and silence. In the daytime, after that, she never spoke to him except about his work and whereas, in the past, she had been rather indulgent she now became severe.

  He was sure that, in the daytime, she succeeded in quite convincing herself nothing had happened.

  Once when she had been very severe and had rebuked him in the presence of her husband he flared up and left the place.

  There was an odd moment, the man woman and boy standing facing each other. Later the boy hoped she had been hurt by his desertion. He could not tell. She stood stoutly by her guns, as though nothing had happened. In the darkness and silence she had been very tender with him. Now she was as hard as a stone.

  At any rate, my visitor said, if there had ever been any suspicion, she must, by her brutality, have firmly established herself with her husband that day when he left.

  NOTE 22

  I had put a fellow novelist into one of my books. In a certain situation he had failed to draw the line and I said so.

  He came to visit me. His personal life was also involved and difficult. When I saw the position into which he had got himself by failing to draw the line in life, as he had failed to draw it in the fanciful life of his books, I took out of my book the brutal note in the reference to him.

  It is all very well to call a man names who can get even with you but it is dreadful when you know he can’t.

  AN APOLOGY FOR CRUDITY

  FOR A LONG time I have believed that crudity, is an inevitable quality in the production of a really significant present-day American literature. How indeed is one to escape the obvious fact that there is as yet no native subtlety of thought or living among us? And if we are a crude and childlike people how can our literature hope to escape the influence of that fact? Why indeed should we want it to escape?

  If you are in doubt as to the crudity of thought in America, try an experiment. Come out of your offices, where you sit writing and thinking, and try living with us. Get on a train at Pittsburgh and go west to the mountains of Colorado. Stop for a time in our towns and cities. Stay for a week in some Iowa cornshipping town and for another week in one of the Chicago clubs. As you loiter about read our newspapers and listen to our conversations, remembering, if you will, that as you see us in the towns and cities, so we are. We are not subtle enough to conceal ourselves and he who runs with open eyes through the Mississippi Valley may read the story of the Mississippi Valley.

  It is a remarkable story and we have not yet begun to tell the half of it. A little, I think, I know why. It is because we who write have drawn ourselves away. We have not had faith in our own people and in the story of our people. If we are crude and childlike that is our story and our writing men must learn to dare to come among us until they know the story. The telling of the story depends, I believe, upon their learning that lesson and accepting that burden.

  To my room, which is on a street near the loop in the city of Chicago, come men who write. They talk and I talk. We are fools. We talk of writers of the old world and the beauty and subtlety of the work they do. Below us the roaring city lies like a great animal on the prairies, but we do not run out to the prairies. We stay in our rooms and talk.

  And so, having listened to talk and having myself talked overmuch, I grow weary of talk and walk in the streets. As I walk alone an old truth comes home to me and I know that we shall never have an American literature until we return to faith in ourselves and to the facing of our own limitations.
We must, in some way, become in ourselves more like our fellows, more simple and real.

  For surely it does not follow that because we Americans are a people without subtlety we are a dull or uninteresting people. Our literature is dull but we are not. Remember how Dostoievsky had faith in the simplicity of the Russians and what he achieved. He lived and he expressed the life of his time and people. The thing that he did brings hope of achievement for our men.

  But we should first of all accept certain truths. Why should we Americans aspire to an appearance of subtlety that belongs not to us but to old lands and places? Why talk of intellectuality and of intellectual life when we have not accepted the life we have? There is death on that road and following it has brought death into much of American writing. Can you doubt what I say? Consider the smooth slickness of the average magazine story. There is often great subtlety of plot and phrase but there is no reality. Can such work be important? The answer is that the most popular magazine story or novel does not live in our minds for a month.

  And what are we to do about it? To me it seems that as writers we shall have to throw ourselves with greater daring into life. We shall have to begin to write out of the people and not for the people. We shall have to find within ourselves a little of that courage. To continue along the road we are traveling is unthinkable. To draw ourselves apart, to live in little groups and console ourselves with the thought that we are achieving intellectuality is to get nowhere. By such a road we can hope only to go on producing a literature that has nothing to do with life as it is lived in these United States.

  To be sure the doing of the thing I am talking about will not be easy. America is a land of objective writing and thinking. New paths will have to be made. The subjective impulse is almost unknown to us. Because it is close to life it works out into crude and broken forms. It leads along a road that such American masters of prose as James and Howells did not want to take but if we are to get anywhere we shall have to travel the road.