He still clung to the notion that at any moment he might come upon Aline making her way painfully up the path. Occasionally he stopped to listen. When he had got down to the lower road, he stood for some minutes. Near him there was a place where the current ran in close to the shore and a part of the old river-road had been eaten away. Someone had tried, by dumping wagon-loads of rubbish, the brandies of trees, a few tree-trunks, to stop the river’s hungry gnawing at the land. What a silly notion — that a river like the Ohio could be turned aside from its purpose so easily. Someone might, however, be concealed in the pile of brush. Fred went toward it. The river made a soft rushing sound at just that place. Away off somewhere, up or down river, there was the faint sound of a steamer’s whistle. It was like someone coughing in a dark house at night.
Fred had determined to kill Bruce. That would be the thing now, wouldn’t it? After it was done, no more words need be said. There need be no more terrible words from Aline’s lips. “The child I am expecting is not your child.” What an idea! “She can’t — she can’t be such a fool.”
He began to run along the river-road toward the ‘town. There was a thought in his mind. It might be that Bruce and Aline had gone to Sponge Martin’s house and that he would find them there. There was some kind of conspiracy. The man, Sponge Martin, had always hated the Greys. When Fred was a boy, in Sponge Martin’s shop. Well, insults had been hurled at Fred’s father. “If you try it I’ll beat you up. This is my shop. I won’t be hurried into doing bum work by you or anyone else” A man like that, a little workman in a town where Fred’s father was the principal citizen.
Fred kept stumbling as he ran but held the handle of the revolver tightly. When he had got to the Martin house and found it dark he went boldly up and began pounding on the door with the handle of the revolver Silence. Fred grew furious again, and when he had got into the road fired the revolver, not, however, at the house, but at the silent dark river. What a notion. After the shot all was still. The sound of the shot had aroused no one. The river flowed on in the darkness. He waited. In the distance somewhere there was a shout.
He began walking back along the road and now he had grown weak and tired. He wanted to sleep. Well, Aline had been like a mother to him. When he was discouraged or upset she was someone to talk to. Lately she had been more and more like a mother. Could a mother so desert a child? He again became sure that Aline would come back. When he had got back to the place where the path went up the side of the hill she would be waiting. It might be true she loved the other man but there could be more than one kind of love. Let that go. He wanted peace now. Perhaps she got something from him that Fred could not give, but, after all, she had only gone away for a time. The man was just getting out of the country. He had two bags when he went away. Aline had but gone down the hillside path to bid him good-bye. The lovers’ parting, eh? A woman who is married has her duties to perform. All old-fashioned women were like that. Aline was not a new woman. She came from good people. Her father was a man to be respected.
Fred had become almost cheerful again, but when he got to the brush-pile at the foot of the path and found no one there he again gave way to grief. Sitting down on the log in the darkness he let the revolver fall to the ground at his feet and put his face in his hands. He sat for a long time, crying as a child might have cried.
CHAPTER FORTY
TΗΕ NIGHT CONTINUED very dark and silent. Fred had got up the steep hill and into his own house. Going upstairs and into his room he undressed quite automatically, in the darkness. Then he got into bed.
In the bed he lay exhausted. The minutes passed. In the distance he heard footsteps, then voices.
Were they coming back now, Aline and her man, did they want to torture him some more?
If she came back now! She would see who was master in the Grey house.
If she did not come, there would have to be some sort of explanations.
He would say she had gone to Chicago.
“She has gone to Chicago. — She has gone to Chicago.” He whispered the words aloud.
The voices in the road before the house belonged to the two negro women. They had come up from their evening down in town bringing two negro men with them.
“She has gone to Chicago. — She has gone to Chicago.”
After all, people would have to stop asking questions after a time. In Old Harbor, Fred Grey was a strong man. He would go right ahead with his advertising plans, get stronger and stronger.
That Bruce! Shoes twenty to thirty dollars a pair. Ha!
Fred wanted to laugh. He tried but couldn’t. Those absurd words kept ringing in his ears. “She has gone to Chicago.” He could hear himself saying it to Harcourt and others — smiling while he said it.
A brave man. What one does is to smile.
When one gets out of anything there is a sense of relief. In war, in a battle, when one is wounded — a sense of relief. Now Fred would not have to play a part any more, be a man to some woman’s woman. That would be up to Bruce.
In war, when you are wounded, a strange feeling of relief. “That’s done. Now get well.”
“She has gone to Chicago.” That Bruce! Shoes twenty to thirty dollars a pair. A workman, a gardener. Ho, ho! why couldn’t Fred laugh? He kept trying but failed. In the road before the house one of the negro women now laughed. There was a shuffling sound. The older negro woman tried to quiet the younger, blacker woman, but she kept laughing the high shrill laughter of the negress. “I knowed it, I knowed it, all the time I knowed it,” she cried, and the high shrill laughter ran through the garden and into the room where Fred sat upright and rigid in bed.
THE END
Tar: A Midwest Childhood
A fictionalised memoir, Tar (1926) was originally published by Boni & Liveright and has since been republished several times, including a 1969 critical edition. The book is made up of episodes in the childhood of Edgar Moorehead (nicknamed Tar-heel, or Tar, because of his father’s North Carolina origin). The novel’s fictional location bears a resemblance to Camden, Ohio, where Anderson was born, despite him having spent only his first year there. An episode from the book later appeared, in a revised form, as the short story “Death in the Woods” (1933).
According to the Sherwood Anderson scholar Ray Lewis White, it was in 1919 that the author first mentioned in a letter to his publisher at the time, B. W. Huebsch, that he was interested in composing a series of stories based on “...country life at the edge of a middle-western small town.” Nothing came of the idea, however, until around February 1925, when the popular monthly magazine The Woman’s Home Companion expressed an interest in serialising such a series. Over that year, including the summer during which Anderson boarded with a family in Troutdale, Virginia, where he wrote in a log cabin, Tar: A Midwest Childhood was drafted. Though progress on the book was slower than expected over the summer, Anderson reported to his agent Otto Liveright in September 1925 that roughly two-thirds of the book was finished. This was enough that in February 1926, the instalments for The Woman’s Home Companion were sent off and duly published between June 1926 and January 1927. Anderson then completed the rest of the book, which was published in November 1926.
Cover of the first edition
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
PART I
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
PART II
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
PART III
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
PART IV
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
PART V
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CH
APTER XXII
A modern view of the small town of Troutdale, Virginia, where Anderson wrote part of the book
Anderson close to the time of publication
TO
ELIZABETH ANDERSON
FOREWORD
I HAVE A confession to make. I am a story teller starting to tell a story and cannot be expected to tell the truth. Truth is impossible to me. It is like goodness, something aimed at but never hit. A year or two ago I determined to try to tell the story of my own childhood. Very well, I set to work. What a job! I went at the task bravely but presently came to a dead halt. Like every other man and woman in the world I had always thought the story of my own childhood would be an absorbing[ly interesting] one.
I began to write. For a day or two all went well. I sat at my desk scribbling away. I, Sherwood Anderson, an American man, in my youth did so and so. Well, I played ball, stole apples out of orchards, began presently, being male, to think of the female, was sometimes afraid in the dark at night. What nonsense to speak of it all. I grew ashamed.
And yet there was something I had wanted of which I need not be ashamed. Childhood is something wonderful. Manhood, sophistication, is something worth striving for but innocence is somewhat sweeter. It may be the greater wisdom to remain innocent but it can’t be done. I wish it could.
In a New Orleans restaurant I heard a man explaining the fate of crabs. “There are two good kinds,” he said. “Busters are so young they are sweet. Soft shell crabs have the sweetness of age and weakness.”
It is my weakness to want to speak of my youth, a sign perhaps I am getting old, but I am ashamed. There is a reason for my shame. All writing of self is egotistical. There is however another reason.
I am a man who has brothers living and they are strong, and I daresay hard-hitting, fellows. Suppose it please my fancy to have a certain kind of father or mother. That is the [one] great privilege of being a writer — that life may be constantly recreated in the field of fancy. But my brothers, respectable men, may have quite different notions of how these worthy people, my parents and theirs, should be presented to the world. We modern writers, have got a reputation for boldness, for too much boldness most people think, but none of us like to be knocked down or cut on the street by former friends or by our relatives. We are not prize-fighters or [horse wranglers, most] of us. A poor enough lot, if the truth be told. Cæsar was quite right in detesting scribblers.
Now it happens that my friends and relatives have already stood much from me. I am forever writing of myself and dragging them in, re-creating them to suit my fancy, and they have been a forbearing lot. It is dreadful really having a scribbler in the family. Avoid it if you can. If you have a son who has a leaning that way hurry him into industrial life. If he become a writer he may give you away.
You see, if I began writing of my childhood, I had to ask myself how much more these people would stand. Heavens knows what I might do to them when I got going.
I kept writing and tearing up. Oh, pshaw! My progress was too lamentably slow. I could not very well create a lot of little Lord Fauntleroys growing up in a Middle-western American town. If I made myself too good I knew it would not work and if I made myself really bad — which was a temptation — no one would believe. Bad people, when you come close to them, are such simpletons.
“Where is the Truth?” I asked myself, “Oh, Truth, where are you? Where have you hidden yourself?” I looked under my desk, under the bed, went out and looked up and down the road. I have always been looking for the rascal but have never been able to find him. Where does he keep himself?
“Where is Truth?” What an unsatisfactory question to be compelled to keep asking, if you are a teller of tales.
Let me explain — if I can.
The teller of tales, as you must all know, lives in a world of his own. He is one thing, as you see him walking in the street, going to church, into a friend’s house, [or] into a restaurant, and quite another fellow when he sits down to write. While he is a writer nothing happens but that it is changed by his fancy and his fancy is always at work. Really, you should never trust such a man. Do not put him on the witness stand during a trial for your life — or for money — and be very careful never to believe what he says under any circumstances.
Take myself for example. I am, let us say, walking on a country road and there is a man running in a nearby field. Such a thing happened once and what a tale I made of it.
I see the man running. Nothing else actually happens. He runs across the field and disappears over a hill but now look out for me. Later I may tell you a tale of the man. Leave it to me to make up a tale of why the man ran and to believe my own tale after it is made.
The man lived in a house just beyond the hill. Sure there was a house there. I created it. I ought to know. Why, I could draw you a picture of the house, although I never actually saw it. He lived in a house behind the hill and something absorbingly interesting and exciting just now happened in the house.
I tell you the tale of what happened with the straightest face in the world, believe the tale myself, at least while I am telling it.
You see how it is. When I was a child this faculty I have was a nuisance. It kept getting me into hot water. Everyone thought me a little liar and of course I was. I went ten yards beyond the house and stood behind an apple tree. There was a gentle rising hill and near the top of the hill a clump of bushes. A cow came out of the bushes, nibbled grass no doubt, and then went back into the bushes. It was fly time and I daresay the bushes were a comfort to her.
I made up a tale concerning the cow. She became for me a bear. There had been a circus in a nearby town and a bear had escaped. I had heard father speak of reading an account of the escape in the newspapers. I gave my story a certain air of probability and the strange part of all this is that, having thought out the tale, I believed it myself. All children, I think, do tricks like that. It worked so well that I had the men of the neighborhood, with guns on their shoulders, scouring the woods for two or three days and all the neighborhood children shared in my fright and excitement.
[A literary triumph — and I so young.] All tale telling is, in a strict sense, nothing but lying. That is what people cannot understand. To tell the truth is too difficult. I long since gave up the effort.
However, when it came to the telling of the tale of my own childhood — well, for once, I said to myself, I will hew to the line. An old pit I had often fallen in before I fell in again. Bravely I set myself to my task. I pursued Truth back through my own memory like a dog chasing a rabbit through dense bushes. What toil, what sweat dropped upon the sheets of paper before me. “To be honest,” I said to myself, “is to be good, and for once I will be good. I will prove how essentially sterling is my character. People who have always known me and who have perhaps, in the past, had too much reason for doubting my word will now be surprised and delighted.”
I had dreams of people giving me a new name. As I went along the street people would whisper to each other. “There goes Honest Sherwood.” Perhaps they would insist on electing me to Congress or sending me as an ambassador to some foreign country. How happy all of my relatives would be.
“At last he is giving all of us a good character. He has made us out respectable folk.”
As for the people of my native town, or towns, they also would be happy. Telegrams would be received, meetings held. There might be an organization formed for raising the standard of citizenship of which I would be elected president.
I have always so wanted to be president of something. What a splendid dream.
Alas — it would not work. I wrote one sentence, ten, a hundred pages. They had to be torn up. Truth had disappeared into a thicket so dense that it could not be penetrated.
Like everyone else in the world I had so thoroughly recreated my childhood, in my own fancy, that Truth was utterly lost.
And now for a confession. I have a love of confessions. I do not remember the face of my [own mother, of my] own f
ather. My wife is in the next room as I sit writing, but I do not remember what she looks like.
My wife is to me an idea, my mother, my sons, my friends are ideas.
My fancy is a wall between myself and Truth. There is a world of the fancy into which I constantly plunge and out of which I seldom completely emerge. I want every day to be absorbingly interesting and exciting to me and if it will not, I, with my fancy, try to make it so. If you, a stranger, come into my presence there is a chance that for a moment I shall see you as you are but in another moment you will be lost. You say something that starts my fancy working and I am off. Tonight perhaps I shall dream of you. We will have fancied conversations. My fancy will throw you into strange, noble — or perhaps even mean situations. Now I have no scruples. You are my rabbit and I am a hound pursuing you. Even your physical being changes under the driving lash of my fancy.
And here let me say something regarding a writer’s responsibility for the characters he creates. We writers are always getting out of it by disclaiming responsibility[. We deny responsibility] for our dreams. How absurd. How often, for example, have I dreamed of making love to some woman who actually wouldn’t have me. Why deny responsibility for such a dream? I do it because I like it [° — although I do not do it consciously. We writers must take the responsibility of the unconscious, too — it seems].
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 121
