Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  Ernest Hemingway parodied Dark Laughter in his early short work The Torrents of Spring. Hemingway’s novella mocked the pretensions of Anderson’s style and characters. Gertrude Stein, his former mentor, objected to the young writer’s parody of a writer that had helped him get published and they had a falling-out.

  The novel was included in Life magazine’s list of the 100 outstanding books of 1924-1944.

  The first edition

  CONTENTS

  BOOK ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  BOOK TWO

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  BOOK THREE

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  BOOK FOUR

  CHAPTER TEN

  BOOK FIVE

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  BOOK SIX

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  BOOK SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  BOOK EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  BOOK NINE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  BOOK TEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  BOOK ELEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  BOOK TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Cover of the first edition of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ (1922), which influenced Anderson’s modernist style

  DEDICATED

  TO

  JANE W. PRALL

  BOOK ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  BRUCE DUDLEY STOOD near a window that was covered with flecks of paint and through which could be faintly seen, first a pile of empty boxes, then a more or less littered factory yard running down to a steep bluff, and beyond the brown waters of the Ohio River. Time very soon now to push the windows up. Spring would be coming soon now. Near Bruce at the next window, stood Sponge Martin, a thin wiry little old man with a heavy black moustache. Sponge chewed tobacco and had a wife who got drunk with him sometimes on pay-days. Several times a year, on the evening of such a day, the two did not dine at home but went to a restaurant on the side of the hill in the business part of the city of Old Harbor and there had dinner in style.

  After eating they got sandwiches and two quarts of Kentucky-made “moon” whisky and went off fishing in the river. This only happened in the spring, summer and fall and when the nights were fair and the fish biting.

  They built a fire of driftwood and sat around, having put out catfish lines. There was a place up river about four miles where there had formerly been, during the river’s flush days, a small sawmill and a wood-yard for supplying river packets with fuel and they went there. It was a long walk and neither Sponge nor his wife was very young but they were both tough wiry little people and they had the corn whisky to cheer them on the way. The whisky was not colored to look like the whisky of commerce but was clear like water and very raw and burning to the throat and its effect was quick and lasting.

  Being out to make a night of it they gathered wood to start a fire as soon as they had got to their favorite fishing place. Then everything was all right. Sponge had told Bruce dozens of times that his wife didn’t mind anything. “She’s as tough as a fox terrier,” he said. Two children had been born to the couple earlier in life and the oldest, a boy, had got his leg cut off hopping on a train. Sponge spent two hundred and eighty dollars on doctors but might as well have saved the money. The kid had died after six weeks of suffering.

  When he spoke of the other child, a girl playfully called Bugs Martin, Sponge got a little upset and chewed tobacco more vigorously than usual. She had been a rip-terror right from the start. No doing anything with her. You couldn’t keep her away from the boys. Sponge tried and his wife tried but what good did it do?

  Once, on a pay-day night in the month of October, when Sponge and his wife were up river at their favorite fishing place, they got home at five o’clock the next morning, both still a little lit up, and what did Bruce Dudley think they had found going on? Mind you, Bugs was only fifteen then. Well, Sponge had gone into the house ahead of his wife and there, on the new rag carpet in the front hallway was that kid asleep and beside her was a young man also asleep.

  What a nerve! The young man was a fellow who worked in Mouser’s grocery. He didn’t live in Old Harbor any more. Heaven knows what had become of him. When he woke up and saw Sponge standing there with his hand on the door-knob he jumped up quick and lit out, almost knocking Sponge over as he rushed through the door. Sponge kicked at him but missed. He was pretty well lit up.

  Then Sponge went after Bugs. He shook her till her teeth fairly rattled but did Bruce think she hollered? Not she! Whatever you might think of Bugs she was a game little kid.

  She was fifteen when Sponge beat her up that time. He whacked her good. Now she was in a house in Cincinnati, Sponge thought. Now and then she wrote a letter to her mother and in the letters she always lied. What she said was that she was working in a store but that was the bunk. Sponge knew it was a lie because he had got the dope about her from a man who used to live in Old Harbor but who had a job in Cincinnati now. One night he went out to a house and saw Bugs there raising hell with a crowd of rich young Cincinnati sports but she never saw him. He kept himself in the background and then later wrote Sponge about it. What he said was that Sponge ought to try to straighten Bugs out but what was the use making a fuss. She had been that way since she was a kid, hadn’t she?

  And when you came right down to it what did that fellow want to butt in for. What was he doing in such a place — so high and mighty afterwards? He had better keep his nose in his own back yard. Sponge hadn’t even shown the letter to his old woman. What was the use of getting her all worked up? If she wanted to believe that bunk about Bugs having a good job in a store why not let her? If Bugs ever came home on a visit, which she was always writing her mother some day maybe she would, Sponge wouldn’t ever let on to her himself.

  Sponge’s old woman was all right. When she and Sponge were out that way, after catfish, and they had both taken five or six good stiff drinks of “moon,” she was like a kid. She made Sponge feel — Lordy!

  They were lying on a pile of half-rotten old sawdust near the fire, right where the old wood-yard had been. When the old woman was a little lit up and acted like a kid it made Sponge feel that way too. It was a cinch the old woman was a good sport. Since he had married her, when he was a young man about twenty-two, Sponge hadn’t ever fooled around any other women at all — except maybe a few times when he was away from home and was a little soused.

  CHAPTER TWO

  IT WAS A fancy notion all right, the one that had got Bruce Dudley into the position he was now in — working in a factory in the town of Old Harbor, Indiana, where he had lived as a child and as a young lad and where he was now masquerading as a workman under an assumed name. The name amused him. A thought flashing across the mind and John Stockton had become Bruce Dudley. Why not? For the time being anyway he was letting himself be anything that it pleased his fancy to be. He had got the name in an Illinois town to which he had come from the far south — from the city of New Orleans to be exact. That was when he was on his way back to Old Harbor to which he had also come following
a whim. The Illinois town was one where he was to change cars. He had just walked along the main street of the town and had seen two signs over two stores, “Bruce, Smart and Feeble — Hardware” and “Dudley Brothers — Grocery.”

  It was like being a criminal. Perhaps he was a kind of criminal, had suddenly become one. It might well be that a criminal was but a man like himself who had suddenly stepped a little out of the beaten path most all men travel. Criminals took other people’s lives or took goods that did not belong to them and he had taken — what? Himself? It might very well be put that way.

  “Slave, do you think your own life belongs to you? Hocus, Pocus, now you see it and now you don’t. Why not Bruce Dudley?”

  Going about the town of Old Harbor as John Stockton might lead to complications. It wasn’t likely anyone there would remember the shy boy who had been John Stockton, would recognize him in the man of thirty-four, but a lot of people might remember the boy’s father, the school-teacher, Edward Stockton. It might even be that the two looked alike. “Like father like son, eh?” The name Bruce Dudley had a kind of something in it. It suggested solidity and respectability and Bruce had got an hour’s amusement, while waiting for the train up to Old Harbor by walking about the streets of an Illinois town and trying to think of other possible Bruce Dudleys of the world. “Captain Bruce Dudley of the American Army, Bruce Dudley, Minister of the First Presbyterian Church of Hartford, Connecticut. But why Hartford? Well, why not Hartford? He, John Stockton, had never been to Hartford, Connecticut. Why had the place come into his mind? It stood for something, didn’t it? Very likely it was because Mark Twain lived there for a long time and there had been a kind of connection between Mark Twain and a Presbyterian or a Congregational or a Baptist minister of Hartford. Also there was a kind of connection between Mark Twain and the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers and John Stockton had been fooling along, up and down the Mississippi River for six months on that day when he got off the train at the Illinois town bound for Old Harbor. And wasn’t Old Harbor on the Ohio River?

  T’witchelty, T’weedlety, T’wadelty, T’wum,

  Catch a nigger by the thumb.

  “Big slow river crawling down out of a wide rich fat valley between mountains far away. Steamboats on the river. Mates swearing and hitting niggers over the heads with clubs. Niggers singing, niggers dancing, niggers toting loads on their heads, nigger women having babies — easy and free — half white a lot of the babies.”

  The man who had been John Stockton and who suddenly, by a whim, became Bruce Dudley, had been thinking a lot about Mark Twain during the six months before he took the new name. Being near the river and on the river had made him think. It wasn’t strange after all that he chanced to think of Hartford, Connecticut, too. “He did get all crusted up, that boy,” he whispered to himself that day when he went about the streets of the Illinois town bearing for the first time the name Bruce Dudley.

  “A man like that, eh — who had seen what that man had, a man who could write and feel and think a thing like that Huckleberry Finn, going up there to Hartford and —

  T’witchelty, T’weedlety, T’wadelty, T’wum,

  Catch a nigger by the thumb, eh?

  “Oh, Lord!

  “What a lot of fun to think, feel, cut the grapes, put some of the grapes of life into the mouth, spit the seeds out.

  “Mark Twain, learning to be a river pilot on the Mississippi in the early days in the valley. What things he must have seen, felt, heard, thought! When he wrote a real book he had to put all aside, all he had learned, felt, thought, as a man, had to go back into childhood. He did it bouncing well, now didn’t he?

  “But suppose he had really tried to put into books a lot of what he had heard, felt, thought, seen as a man on the river. What a howl raised! He never did that, did he? Once he wrote a thing. He called it “Conversations in the Court of Queen Elizabeth,” and he and his friends used to pass it around and chuckle over it.

  “Had he got right down into the valley, in his day, as a man, let’s say, he might have given us many memorable things, eh? It must have been a rich place, rank with life, fairly rancid with life.

  “Big slow deep river crawling down between the mud banks of an empire. Corn growing rank up north. Rich Illinois, Iowa, Missouri lands getting their hair cut of tall trees and then corn growing. Down further south, forests still, hills, niggers. The river getting slowly bigger and bigger. Towns along the river — tough towns.

  “Then — away down — moss growing on the banks of the rivers and the land of cotton and sugar-cane. More niggers.

  “‘If you ain’t never been loved by a brown skin you ain’t never been loved at all.’

  “After years of that — what — Hartford, Connecticut! Those other things— ‘The Innocents Abroad,’

  ‘Roughing It’ — stale jokes piled up, everyone applauding.

  T’witchelty, T’weedlety, T’wadelty, T’wum,

  Catch your nigger by the thumb —

  “Make a slave of him, eh? Tame the lad.”

  Bruce didn’t look much like a factory hand. It had taken more than two months to grow a short thick beard and to let his moustache grow and while it was growing his face itched all the time. Why had he wanted to grow it? When he left Chicago and his wife he had cut out to a place called La Salle in Illinois and had started down the Illinois River in an open boat. Later he lost the boat and spent nearly two months, while he was growing the beard, in getting down river to New Orleans. It was a little trick he had always wanted to do. Since he was a kid and had read Huckleberry Finn, he had kept some such notion in mind. Nearly every man who lived long in the Mississippi Valley had that notion tucked away in him somewhere. The great river, lonely and empty now, was, in some queer way, like a lost river. It had come to represent the lost youth of Middle America perhaps. Song, laughter, profanity, the smell of goods, dancing niggers — life everywhere! Great gaudy boats on a river, lumber rafts floating down, voices across the silent nights, song, an empire unloading its wealth on the face of the waters of a river! When the Civil War came on, the Middle West got up and fought like the Old Harry because it didn’t want its river taken away. In its youth the Middle West had breathed with the breathing of a river.

  “The factory men were pretty smart, weren’t they? First thing they did when they got the chance was to choke off the river, take the romance out of commerce. They may not have intended anything of the sort, romance and commerce were just natural enemies. They made the river as dead as a door-nail with their railroads and it has been that way ever since.”

  Big river, silent now. Creeping slowly down past mud banks, miserable little towns, the river as powerful as ever, strange as ever, but silent now, forgotten, neglected. A few tugs with strings of barges. No more gaudy boats, profanity, song, gamblers, excitement, life.

  When he was working his way down river, Bruce Dudley had thought that Mark Twain, when he went back to visit the river after the railroads had choked to death the river life, that Mark might have written an epic then. He might have written of song killed, of laughter killed, of men herded into a new age of speed, of factories, of swift, fast-running trains. Instead of which he filled the book mostly with statistics, wrote stale jokes. Oh, well! You can’t always be offending someone, can you, brother scribblers?

  CHAPTER THREE

  WHEN HE HAD got to Old Harbor, the place of his boyhood, Bruce did not spend much time thinking of epics. That wasn’t his lay just then. He was after something, had been after it for a year. What it was he couldn’t have said in so many words. He had left his wife in Chicago, where she had a job on the same newspaper he had worked on, and suddenly, with less than three hundred dollars to go on, had started off on an adventure. There was a reason, he thought, but he was willing enough to let reason lie, for the time being anyway. His growing the beard had not been because his wife would make any special effort to find him when he turned up missing. It had been a whim. It was such fun to think of himself as goin
g thus, unknown, mysteriously through life. Had he told his wife what he was going to do there would have been no end of talk, arguments, the rights of women, the rights of men.

  They had been that kind in their relations to each other — he and Bernice — had got started together that way and had kept it up. Bruce hadn’t thought his wife to blame. “I helped start things wrong myself — acted as though she were something superior,” he thought, grinning. He remembered things he had said to her concerning her superiority, her mind, her talent. They had expressed a kind of hope that something graceful and fine would flash up out of her. Perhaps, in the beginning he had talked that way because he wanted to worship. She had half seemed the great person he had called her because he seemed to himself so worthless. He had played the game that way, not thinking much about it and she had fallen for it, had liked it, had taken what he said with entire seriousness and then he did not like what she had become, what he had helped make her.

  Had he and Bernice ever had children perhaps what he had done would have been an impossibility, but they had none. She hadn’t wanted any. “Not by a man like you. You’re too flighty,” she had said.

  And Bruce was flighty. He knew it. Having drifted into newspaper work he had kept on drifting for ten years. All the time he had wanted to do something — write perhaps — but every time he had tried his own words and ideas, put down, made him weary. Perhaps he had got too deep into the newspaper cliché, the jargon — jargon of words, ideas, moods. As he had gone along Bruce had put words down on paper less and less. There was a way to be a newspaper man, get by, without writing at all. You phoned your stuff in, let someone else write it up. There were plenty of the scribbling kind of fellows about — word-slingers.