Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  “She tried something on me. She was ill and announced that she was about to die.

  “‘Tell the truth. I will forgive you. I am about to die,’ she said. But it didn’t phase me. It had become, to me a kind of scientific experiment. I had, I may say, the attitude of a scientist.

  “It took a year, nearly two years, but in the end I won.

  “I saw doubt come into her eyes. I had, you understand, by this time, almost convinced myself.

  “For long periods I really did convince myself and, of course, I convinced her.

  “She broke down. She surrendered. I am quite sure that now, after several years of persistent lying to her, that she believes. She thinks there was some sort of hallucination. I have spoken from time to time of this, have told her of experiences of my own.

  “And now, when I come to speak of all this, I am myself in a very strange state. I may be lying to you. I may just be amusing myself.

  “At any rate, as I have always said to myself it is persistence that does it. There is nothing in the world so powerful as persistence.”

  The Short Stories

  Anderson’s early home in Clyde, Ohio

  List of Short Stories in Chronological Order

  THE DUMB MAN

  I WANT TO KNOW WHY

  SEEDS

  THE OTHER WOMAN

  THE EGG

  UNLIGHTED LAMPS

  SENILITY

  THE MAN IN THE BROWN COAT

  BROTHERS

  THE DOOR OF THE TRAP

  THE NEW ENGLANDER

  WAR

  MOTHERHOOD

  OUT OF NOWHERE INTO NOTHING.

  FOREWORD

  DREISER

  I’M A FOOL

  THE TRIUMPH OF A MODERN

  UNUSED

  A CHICAGO HAMLET

  THE MAN WHO BECAME A WOMAN

  MILK BOTTLES

  THE SAD HORN BLOWERS

  THE MAN’S STORY

  AN OHIO PAGAN

  DEATH IN THE WOODS

  THE RETURN

  THERE SHE IS — SHE IS TAKING HER BATH

  THE LOST NOVEL

  THE FIGHT

  LIKE A QUEEN

  THAT SOPHISTICATION

  IN A STRANGE TOWN

  THESE MOUNTAINEERS

  A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY

  A JURY CASE

  ANOTHER WIFE

  A MEETING SOUTH

  THE FLOOD

  WHY THEY GOT MARRIED

  BROTHER DEATH

  SISTER

  THE WHITE STREAK

  OFF BALANCE

  I GET SO I CAN’T GO ON

  MR. JOE’S DOCTOR

  THE CORN PLANTING

  FEUD

  HARRY BREAKS THROUGH

  A MOONLIGHT WALK

  TWO LOVERS

  WHITE SPOT

  NOBODY LAUGHED

  A LANDED PROPRIETOR

  THE PERSISTENT LIAR

  List of Short Stories in Alphabetical Order

  A CHICAGO HAMLET

  A JURY CASE

  A LANDED PROPRIETOR

  A MEETING SOUTH

  A MOONLIGHT WALK

  A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY

  AN OHIO PAGAN

  ANOTHER WIFE

  BROTHER DEATH

  BROTHERS

  DEATH IN THE WOODS

  DREISER

  FEUD

  FOREWORD

  HARRY BREAKS THROUGH

  I GET SO I CAN’T GO ON

  I WANT TO KNOW WHY

  I’M A FOOL

  IN A STRANGE TOWN

  LIKE A QUEEN

  MILK BOTTLES

  MOTHERHOOD

  MR. JOE’S DOCTOR

  NOBODY LAUGHED

  OFF BALANCE

  OUT OF NOWHERE INTO NOTHING.

  SEEDS

  SENILITY

  SISTER

  THAT SOPHISTICATION

  THE CORN PLANTING

  THE DOOR OF THE TRAP

  THE DUMB MAN

  THE EGG

  THE FIGHT

  THE FLOOD

  THE LOST NOVEL

  THE MAN IN THE BROWN COAT

  THE MAN WHO BECAME A WOMAN

  THE MAN’S STORY

  THE NEW ENGLANDER

  THE OTHER WOMAN

  THE PERSISTENT LIAR

  THE RETURN

  THE SAD HORN BLOWERS

  THE TRIUMPH OF A MODERN

  THE WHITE STREAK

  THERE SHE IS — SHE IS TAKING HER BATH

  THESE MOUNTAINEERS

  TWO LOVERS

  UNLIGHTED LAMPS

  UNUSED

  WAR

  WHITE SPOT

  WHY THEY GOT MARRIED

  The Plays

  The Anderson home in Elyria, Ohio, where the family lived from 1902 to 1914

  Plays, Winesburg and Others

  CONTENTS

  AN EXPLANATION

  NOTE

  A DEDICATION

  WINESBURG, OHIO

  NOTES ON PRODUCTION

  THE CAST

  SCENE I

  SCENE II

  SCENE III

  SCENE IV

  SCENE V

  SCENE VI

  SCENE VII

  SCENE VIII

  SCENE IX

  THE TRIUMPH OF THE EGG

  CHARACTERS

  NOTE

  THE TRIUMPH OF THE EGG

  MOTHER

  CHARACTERS

  MOTHER

  THEY MARRIED LATER

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  THEY MARRIED LATER

  AN EXPLANATION

  THE SHORT PLAY, “The Triumph of the Egg,” is included in this book by the courtesy of The Dramatic Publishing Company, 59 E. Van Buren Street, Chicago, which company also controls the amateur rights. The play was made from the short story “Triumph of the Egg,” from the book by that title. Practically all of the work of making a play from the story was done by Mr. Raymond O’Neil. The play was produced in New York, at the old Provincetown Theatre, under the direction of Mr. Kenneth McGowan.

  As for the play “Winesburg,” the author tried, with several collaborators, to make a play of the Winesburg tales but without much success. There were several versions made that all rather sharply violated the spirit of the book. Finally all of these efforts had to be thrown aside and an entirely new play made by the author. In this work he was however assisted, rather tremendously, by Jasper Deeter, Roger Sergei, and others. The play was produced at the Hedgerow Theatre, Moylan-Rose Valley, Pennsylvania, and has been in the repertoire there for three years. In the play the author has not tried to follow the exact pattern of the stories in the book but has tried rather to retain only the spirit of the stories. The right to use the title Winesburg for the play has been graciously given the author by The Viking Press. The agent for the play “Winesburg” is Mr. Harold Freeman, c/o Brandt and Brandt, 101 Park Avenue, New York, and the amateur rights to all of the plays, excepting only “The Triumph of the Egg,” are in the hands of Dramatists Play Service, 6 East 39th St., New York.

  Of the short plays only “The Triumph of the Egg” and “Mother” have been produced. The play “Mother” was produced by the players of Johns Hopkins University under the direction of Mr. N. B. Fagin.

  NOTE

  TO THOSE READERS of my play who may also have read the book of tales, called Winesburg, Ohio, I think a brief explanation should be made. In the play I have not tried to follow exactly the theme of the tales. Many of the characters of the book do not appear in the play while others are brought into a new prominence. In the play I have merely tried to capture again the spirit of the tales, to make the play fit the spirit of the tales as regards time and place.

  And let me add that I am particularly grateful to the Viking Press for the permission they have given to use some of the materials of the book of tales in my play.

  A DEDICATION

  IT WAS THE author’s intention to dedicate this book of plays to Mr. Jasper Deeter but, in thinking it over, he dec
ided to reprint instead an article on Mr. Deeter and the Hedgerow Theatre, written for Esquire. Let the article, reprinted on the following pages, serve as a dedication.

  JASPER DEETER

  ALTHOUGH Jasper Deeter, known to his intimates as “Jap,” is but forty-two, he has been pretty much right down the whole story of what has happened to the theatre since the coming of the pictures, was deep in the very significant Provincetown movement and saw the Little Theatre flare, grow, and become what it has become. He was born over among the Pennsylvania Dutch, at Mechanicsburg, in 1894. Having certain convictions regarding the theatre, Deeter has stuck.

  He has stuck to the idea of building and maintaining an experimental repertoire theatre, making it go, keeping it alive. He has done it under what would seem to most men impossible conditions, without rich patrons, with the theatre tucked away on a side road some twenty miles out of the city of Philadelphia, hard to find, housed in an old stone mill, with patrons put to the task of finding the theatre, and knowing it is a theatre in a tangle of tree-lined country roads.

  They come. They do find Jasper Deeter’s Hedgerow Theatre, every year, in increasing numbers. For some fourteen years the Hedgerow has been going on, actors in some way living, with every year new plays, often by new writers, being given a hearing, with old plays by old masters kept alive. There have been nearly a hundred and fifty plays produced at Hedgerow since the day when Jasper Deeter, with Ann Harding and some three or four other determined ones, went theatre hunting. They must have taken the old mill because it was already half a theatre. There was a room that might seat two hundred people. There was a great cellar that could be used as storeroom for properties, a workroom, a place for little holes that could be made into dressing rooms.

  It is in the blood of some men and in many women, this desire, this hunger to act, to have a theatre. Jasper Deeter’s mother, Sarah Deeter, must have had it. She was a singer, a soprano, married to a millworker, a slender comely woman, intellectually alive, a music-lover, booklover, life lover, living her life out among the Pennsylvania Dutch, in the Hex country. She is nearing seventy now but she could come pretty near running a theatre herself, keeping actors up to it, making it go. This son of hers, living as he does largely on cigarettes and black coffee, likely any night after the play to begin a rehearsal that will last until daylight, working often with thirty or forty actors for twenty hours at a stretch, never apparently weary of it, ready anytime, day or night, to work hour after hour with some actor, leading, pushing, explaining, caring apparently little for the fame and applause that are so much a part of the dreams of most men of the theatre, not in the least interested in going off to Hollywood and getting a stone mansion on Beverly Hills. Nevertheless, he has managed to find in his theatre what must seem to him the good life.

  Jasper Deeter came to his Hedgerow Theatre experiment already a more or less established theatre man. He had begun as so many such young men do begin, as a schoolboy, by joining a dramatic club. He went off from that, trying his hand for a short time as newspaper reporter and newspaper copy reader in Harrisburg and Philadelphia, but it didn’t interest. He threw that job up and went off to Chautauqua, New York, where S. H. Clark, the father of another well-known figure of the theatre, Mr. Barrett H. Clark, was running a school of expression. It runs in families, this theatre hunger. It may be that Jap’s mother once sang at Chautauqua. He learned to be a short order cook and waiter. The knowledge came in handy later, when he got to New York, living in little rooms. He worked first with the Coburns, down in the Greenwich Village Theatre. —

  They were doing “The Better ‘Ole” and his salary was $18.50 per. He got $15 per when he went over to the Provincetown, that is to say, he got it when he worked and when there was $15. He was probably class-conscious, a proletarian among young actors. There is a story that when “The Better ‘Ole” went uptown and began to make money, Jap, in some minor rôle, began to ad-lib. He made cracks about underpaid actors. The man has always been more interested in actors and in acting than in audiences. Even today, and after the long struggle gone through to keep going, to feed and clothe his actors over at Hedgerow, he rarely knows whether there are twenty people in the audience or whether the house is full. This sounds like an impossible statement regarding a theatre man. It is a true one.

  Some one handed Jap a copy of Susan Glaspell’s play, “Bernice,” and told him about the Provincetown, of Glaspell and Cook and O’Neill and Robert Edmond Jones. It is believable that although at the time the Provincetown was already making a stir in the world of the theatre he had never heard of it. The man seldom looks at a newspaper. He has never learned to run a car. Once, after the Provincetown began to get uptown-conscious, began to take its shows uptown, its directors, scene makers, actors beginning to get offers from uptown producers, O’Neill’s later success already in sight, he did take a job at what must have seemed to him a tremendous salary. He was in Capek’s “The World We Live In” and got $225 per. Oh, Glory! He took a room at the Brevort. There is a fable that he bought himself a new suit but it is no doubt apocryphal. The idea of hiring taxis frightened him and he could never find subway entrances, so he bought himself a pair of roller skates. He skated to and from his job.

  At the Provincetown, Jasper Deeter got his chance as did many another. O’Neill, Jones, James Light, Charles Gilpin, Susan Glaspell, Cleon Throckmorton, Ann Harding, Mary Morris, Mary Blair, Margaret Wycherly, Ida Rauh, Edna St. Vincent Millay. Clare Eames, and Catherine Cornell came down and played. For a time writers, scene painters, directors, and actors worked and in a sense at least lived together. Their minds ran together. The actors, scene painters, directors and writers were as yet unknown. Most of them were poor. A day’s work was done on a hamburger sandwich and a cup of coffee. Experimental plays by O’Neill, Glaspell, Dell, Jack Reed, Dreiser, E. E. Cummings, Kreymborg, Edmund Wilson, Mike Gold, David Pinski, Laurance Langner, Max Bodenheim, Wilbur Daniel Steele, and many others were produced.

  It was a curiously alive time, not only in the theatre but in painting, in writing, and in poetry. It was in some way connected with, came out of the same curious Robin’s Egg Renaissance that started in painting with the famous Armory Show in New York, in poetry with Sandburg, Masters, Lindsay and William Carlos Williams, and in writing with Dreiser, Lewis and their fellows, largely of the Middle West.

  It was down Jasper Deeter’s alley. It was his meat. In a book on the Provincetown by Helen Deutsch and Stella Hanau he is described as “ecstatic and irascible.” As player he made his first hit in Lewis Beach’s “Brothers” and he was in Edna Ferber’s “The Eldest,” Irwin Granich’s “Money,” Kreymborg’s “Vote the New Moon,” Cloyd Head’s “Grotesques” and O’Neill’s “Exorcism”; and he was the grubby little Englishman, Smithers, in O’Neill’s “Emperor Jones,” the Provincetown’s first big smash hit, the whole town talking of it, long lines of people before a little box office in Macdougal Street.

  Success! Success!

  There was a run of the show uptown and a long road trip. All the Little Theatres still depend on the play to buck up box offices. It changed things for the Provincetown and for O’Neill and the others. It may be that the Provincetown had done its job. It had brought obscure and talented men and women into prominence. There must have been a stir inside the organization itself. If Deeter was really, during the life of the Provincetown, the “ecstatic and irascible,” he must have scolded and stormed. The man has at times a bitter ironic tongue. See him at a rehearsal at Hedgerow. There may be some young actor who is on his way to stealing a show. He has forgotten there are others on the stage, has become a point-maker. “Cut it out,” says Deeter. “There isn’t any New York producer in this theatre watching your work.” It isn’t that Deeter wants to hold his young actors from the experience of the New York stage. I found nothing stuffy at Hedgerow. He constantly declares to his players that life doesn’t center in his particular theatre experiment. His interest, he says, is in developing talent. It isn’t his
concern how or where the talent, once developed, is used. He isn’t a Messiah and if he is a tyrant the actors do not seem to know it.

  After his experience as successful actor uptown Deeter went back to the Provincetown. He produced the Pulitzer Prize play, Paul Green’s “In Abraham’s Bosom,” and there was another big stir in the town. Negroes, so often born actors, were for the first time really brought into our theatre.

  There must, after success came, always have been two roads for the Provincetown people, men and women, to take. There was the big road, Hollywood, money, your own publicity man, fame, your picture in the papers. It is pretty generally accepted as the natural road. “Go get the money. Then come back and do some good work at your leisure.” Deeter must have had fat offers. “What ‘ell!” he would have said. “What’s that got to do with it? How do you make sense out of that?”

  The whole question must have come up constantly at Hedgerow. The theatre is a co-operative venture. It has been kept going through these years, the theatre rather slowly and painfully bought and paid for, and some few conveniences of life got. There are no salaries paid, although I believe each actor does now get a small sum each week for spending money — if it is needed. Some of the players come from rich or well-to-do families or have small incomes. What the others get Deeter gets. The others are always at him to buy himself a new suit of clothes but he won’t. The players, those who are really in, live together in a big frame house on a hill above the theatre. New ones have to serve for a time on the edge. They find rooms in the neighborhood. They get nothing. Applicants must prove themselves able to be of value in some capacity outside acting. Stage experience doesn’t count much. It may stand in the way of the applicant. Back of the house there is a garden and an old red barn, now used as a theatre workshop. Some chicken coops in the back yard have been converted into tiny cabins in which actors sleep. There may be some thirty to thirty-five actors living in the house and yard and there are several cats, a half dozen sheep in the apple orchard near the house, and a Great Dane, given to the company by Libby Holman, who recently spent a summer working at Hedgerow.