Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  What of the sensual love of life, of surfaces, words with a rich flavor on the tongue, colors, the soft texture of the skin of women, the play of muscles through the bodies of men?

  The cry of fear— “that way lies sin.”

  In the new land, in that older time, too much maleness. Deep mud in the streets of the little towns, built in the forest along rivers or on the stage roads. Bearded, rough-handed men gathered about the saloons. Abe Lincoln proving his manhood by lifting a barrel of whisky and drinking from the bunghole. The ruffian of the frontier, father of the modern gunman of our cities, proving his manhood by murder — Slinky Morgan of Ohio, Jesse James of Missouri, Slade of the Overland Route to the gold and silver camps of the Far West — these the heroes of that life.

  A slow culture growing up, however — growing as culture must always grow — through the hands of workmen.

  In the small towns artisans coming in’ — the harness-maker, the carriage-builder, the builder of wagons, the smith, the tailor, the maker of shoes, the builders of houses and barns too.

  As Slade and James were to be the fathers of the modern gunmen, so these the fathers of the artists of the generations to come. In their fingers the beginning of that love of surfaces, of the sensual love of materials, without which no true civilization can ever be born.

  And then, like a great flood over it all the coming of the factories, the coming of modern industrialism.

  Speed, hurried workmanship, cheap automobiles for cheap men, cheap chairs in cheap houses, city apartment houses with shining bathroom floors, the Ford, the Twentieth Century Limited, the World War, jazz, the movies.

  The modern American youth is going forth to walk at evening in the midst of these. New and more terrible nerve tension, speed. Something vibrant in the air about us all.

  The problem is to survive. If our youth is to get into his consciousness that love of life — that with the male comes only through the love of surfaces, sensually felt through the fingers — his problem is to reach down through all the broken surface distractions of modern life to that old love of craft out of which culture springs.

  NOTE VII

  THE END OF the second year after mother’s death was at hand and our family was at the point of falling to pieces. No more sitting by the fire in the kitchen through the long fall and winter evenings with mother at the ironing board. The kitchen of our house was cold and cheerless. The spirit of the household had fled. It had gone down into the ground with the body of the woman out of whose living body had come five strong sons.

  Mother had died swiftly, mysteriously, without warning. It was as though she had got out of bed on a fall morning and had taken a long look at her sons. “It’s about the time when they will have to push out into the world. Any influence I may have on their lives has already been exerted. There is no time to think of any other purpose in life for myself, and anyway, I am too tired. Having lived out my life, now I shall die.”

  It was as though she had said something of the sort to herself, and had then laid down her life as one might lay down a finished book. On a rainy dismal day in the fall there she was, coming in at the kitchen door from hanging a wash out on the line, temporarily strung up in our woodshed, smiling quietly, making one of her quick soft ironic observations, sweetening always the air of the room into which she came with her presence.

  On such a rainy morning in the fall she was like that, as she will live always in the memory of her sons, and then, on another equally wet dismal fall day two or three weeks later, she was dead.

  What there had been of family life among us was going to pieces. It was sure that father was not one to hold it together. No one could think of him as destined to hold that or any other fort. That surely wasn’t his line.

  There was a period of waiting. The older son had already found his place in life. He had already become what he was to remain to the end, an American artist, a painter. The making of little designs for the gravestones of village merchants was for him a passing phase. Perhaps it was, at that time, the only form of expression one, having a tendency toward the plastic arts, could find in our towns.

  And so there was his destiny fixed — but what of us others? We did not often speak openly of the matter among ourselves, but it was obvious something had to be done and soon. In the few talks we had concerning the matter in our broken household, while the one remaining daughter (destined to die before her life could be really developed) was acting as our temporary housekeeper, father held out strongly for the learning of one of the trades. He talked of long years of apprenticeship to some craft, and it was characteristic of him that as he talked he became in fancy himself such a craftsman. One was trained slowly and surely in one’s craft. Then one became a journeyman and went on his travels, going from shop to shop, watching the master craftsmen. “It’s something at your back,” father said, “something that can be depended upon. It makes a man able to stand up as a man before his fellows.”

  Did it? We boys listened and thought our own thoughts. As for father — he had picked up a smattering knowledge of several crafts; and how eloquently he, dear word fellow, could speak of them, sling the jargon of the crafts! He had at various times been a harness-maker, house-painter, sign-writer of a feeble sort, such an actor as I have described, the tooter of a cornet in the village band.

  In reality he was a tale-teller, but that was no craft among us. No union had been formed among taletellers. The Authors’ League, the Pen Women, the Poet’s Club, etc., had not yet been formed or, if there were such organizations in existence, they at any rate did not reach down into mid-American towns. At that time even the rumors of the vast sums to be made by turning out clever plot stories for the popular magazines or the movies had not been whispered about.

  Other and more significant-seeming stories were floating however. A new kind of hero, tarnished somewhat later, filled the popular eye. As we boys went about in the main street of our town, citizens, feeling a kindly interest in the motherless sons, continually stopped us. Everyone was singing a new little song:

  “Get on. Make money. Get to the top. A penny saved is a penny earned. Money makes the mare go.”

  “Save up your money, and save up your rocks.

  And you’ll always have tobacco in the old tobacco box,” sang Sil West, the smith, who was shoeing a horse in the alleyway back of the stores on our main street.

  The factories were calling. One went into a factory, did his work with care and skill, became foreman, superintendent, part owner, married the banker’s daughter, got rich and went off to Paris to sin the sins neglected during so busy a youth and early manhood.

  It sounded reasonable and possible. Learning a craft was slow business and one was in a hurry. “Hurry” was the battle cry of the day.

  And the time of the factories was just at hand. At that time they were coming into Ohio, and into all the mid-American states in great numbers, and no town was without hope of becoming an industrial centre. The bicycle had come, followed by the automobile, and even the quiet country roads were taking on the new spirit of speed.

  Something was in the air. One breathed a new spirit into the lungs. The paradise, later to be represented by the ford, the city apartment building with tiled bathroom floors, subways, jazz, the movies — was it not all just at hand? I myself and long afterward tried a little, in a novel of mine called, “Poor White,” to give something of the feeling of life in our towns at that time.

  Oil and gas were spurting out of the ground in Ohio and the discovery of oil and gas meant the coming of factories, it meant the New Age, prosperity, growth going onward and upward. “Death to everything old, slow and careful! Forward the Light Brigade! Theirs not to ask the reason why! Theirs but to do or die” — the light brigade in our particular town consisting of every merchant, doctor, workman, lawyer, who had saved a few pennies that could be invested. In our ears rang stories of the Lima Boom, the Gibsonburg boom, the Finley boom.

  And was it not simple? One bor
ed a hole deep down into the ground and out came wealth — oil and gas, followed by the coming of the factories. If we, in our town, did not quite “cut it,” did not “make the grade,” could not become later another fragrant Akron or blissful Youngstown, Ohio, it wasn’t because we didn’t try.

  A hole was being bored at the edge of the town in a field near a grove of hickory trees where we lads had formerly gone for nuts and squirrel shooting on the fall days. In the field — a meadow — there had also been a baseball diamond, and sometimes visiting circuses set up their tents there; but now the hole had gone far down below the usually required depth and nothing had happened. Rumors ran through the streets. The well-drillers had come from over near Gibsonburg. Only a week or two before a stranger had got off a train, had walked about through the streets, and had then visited the place where the drilling was going on. He had been seen to speak with the drillers. No doubt our drillers were in “cahoots” with the Rockefellers, the Morgans, or some of that crowd. Perhaps John D. himself had been pussyfooting about. One couldn’t tell. Stranger things than that had happened. Were we to be caught napping? It was decided to do what was called “shooting the well.”

  Surely here was something for a boy to take into account. Mysterious whisperings among our elders on the streets in the evening; plot and counterplot; dark doings among the capitalists— “stand back, villain, unhand the fair figure of our hopes and dreams” — ah! an explosion at the mysterious hour of dawn, far down in the bowels of Mother Earth. Old Mother Earth to be given an emetic of a stirring sort. Forth would flow wealth, factories, the very New Age itself.

  One didn’t ask oneself how a participating interest in all these new glories was to be achieved, and in the whole town no man was more excited than father who had never owned a share of stock in anything. He ceased speaking of the crafts and only shook his head in sorrow. “I’d just like to be alive two hundred years from now,” he said. “Why, I’ll tell you what; there’ll be a vast city right here — right on the very spot on which I am now standing there’ll be, why there’ll be a huge office building, like as not.”

  So sure was he of all this that the wealth of the future became in his fancy a thing of the present, even of the past. He felt himself magnificently wealthy and, one day when he had been drinking and when, because of what we thought his lack of dignity, we youngsters had treated him to a rather thorough snubbing, he grew angry. Night came and it rained. He went up into the garret of the house in which we then lived and presently came down with a package of papers in his hand. Were they old love letters, from the ladies he had known in his youth, or unpaid grocery bills? It is a mystery that may never be solved.

  He went into the little back yard of the house and, making a pile of the papers, burned them solemnly. We boys crowded to the kitchen window to watch. There was the little flare of the flame and above it, and leaning over, father’s stern face — and then darkness.

  Back he came into the house and before he went away, to spend the rest of the evening whispering of the wealth of the future with other men in the barrooms, he told us what had happened. “Do you know what those papers were?” he asked sharply. “They were deeds to the whole business section of the City of Cincinnati. I have been concealing from you the fact that I had such papers, intending to leave them to you as an inheritance but —

  “Well, you have not seen fit to treat me with respect and I have burned them,” he declared, tramping out of the house.

  Romance and mystery. There was the imagined figure of the shooter of wells. The thing was done with nitro-glycerine. One put “nitro” and “glycerine” together, one fancied, and there was this terrible result. One did not know what “nitro” was, but had seen and felt “glycerine.”

  “Ah! chemistry. You wait and you’ll see what will be done with chemistry,” said father.

  And so there was this mysterious stuff frozen into solid cakes and carted through the night, along unfrequented roads, by the heroic well-shooter.

  Now, there was a man to suit a boy’s fancy, that well-shooter, a fellow going nonchalantly along with the frozen cakes in the wagon behind him. Is he worried? Not at all! He lights his pipe. He looks at the stars. He sings a little ditty. “My bonny lies over the ocean. My bonny lies over the sea. My bonny lies over the ocean — Oh, bring back my bonny to meeeeeee.”

  In the wagon back of him that stuff. A jar, a sudden jolt of the wagon, the breaking of a wagon axle and then —

  We boys whisper about it when we meet on the streets. One of the boys holds up his thumb. “You see that thumbnail?” he asks. “Well, a little bit of that stuff, no more than would cover that thumbnail, would blow him and his wagon to smithereens.” The question asked was, how much farther would, say a ton of the stuff, blow the outfit? Was there a land as far beyond smithereens as the stars from earth, to which the fellow might be sent, in the wink of an eye?

  A glimpse of the infinite added to all the other excitement and mystery.

  My first glimpse of the Industrial Age — with one of my brothers I got out of bed one morning, before dawn, and crept away into the darkness to lie in a grove of trees near the meadow and see the well shot. Several other boys came. The father of one of our town boys, who had stock in the gas-well company, had let slip the carefully hoarded secret of the hour when the fearful thing was to happen.

  And so, there we were, ten or twelve of us, lying concealed in the wood. Dawn began to break. Birds and squirrels awoke in the trees over our heads. On the road that came out from town buggies and surreys appeared. The visitors tied their horses far away, by an old sawmill, near the town’s edge, and came afoot to the field.

  Now it was quite light and we could begin to recognize the men of the party, solid respectable men, with money in the bank. There was Penny Jacobs, who kept a little candy store; Seth McHugh, cashier of the bank; Wilmott the lawyer, a dozen others. No doubt Em Harkness was there. Of that I cannot be quite sure. He was a man of our town, who ran a small general store and brother, I believe, to that other Harkness who later became a man of vast wealth and a figure in the Standard Oil Company. His money built the Harkness Memorial at Yale, and if our town did not achieve the prominent position in the Industrial Age of which we all at that moment dreamed, we had at least among us the kin of royalty. We were not entirely left in the cold outside world. A Harkness was a Harkness and we had a Harkness.

  But to return to that significant moment in the field. As we lads lay in the wood, well concealed from the eyes of our elders, we were silent. Solemnity lay like a frost over our young souls. Even the giggling and whispering that had gone on among us died now. The well-shooter was there and he had turned out to be just an ordinary looking teamster with whiskers, but that did not matter.

  Greater and more significant things were astir. Even the birds stopped singing and the squirrels chattered no more.

  A long tube, containing no doubt the nitro-glycerine, had been lowered into the hole in the ground and the honored guests of the occasion ran quickly across the field and stood among the trees near our hiding place.

  They were dressed, these serious-minded citizens, as for a wedding or a funeral. Even Penny Jacobs had put on what was called among us “a boiled shirt.”

  What an occasion! Now we were, all of us, as we stood or lay under the trees — we were all one thing; and presently there would be a terrific explosion, far down in the earth, below our bellies as we lay sprawled in the wet grass — there would be this explosion, and then would we not all, at that moment, become something else?

  “Bang!” we would go into the New Age — that was the idea. In the presence of our elders, who now stood in silence very near us, we lads all felt a little ashamed of our ragged clothes and our unwashed faces. Perhaps some of us had been to Sunday school and had heard the parable of the virgins who did not keep their lamps trimmed and filled.

  In shame we hid our faces before the glory of the vision before us. There we were, sons of house-painters, carpent
ers, shoemakers, and the like. Our fathers had worked with their hands. They had soiled their clothes and their faces with common labor. Poor, benighted men! What did they know of what Mark Twain called, “the glorious, rip-roaring century, greatest of all the centuries?” A man could make a wagon that would stand up, or shoe a horse, or build a house slowly and well, but what was that?

  Shucks! There would be this terrific rumble in the bowels of the earth, and then the little cunning machines would come. Men would walk about smoking twenty-five-cent cigars; they would put their thumbs in the armholes of their vests and laugh at the past. Men would fly through the air, dive under the sea, have breakfast in Cleveland, Ohio, and lunch in London. A fellow couldn’t tell what would happen now.

  Why, no one would work at all maybe — well, that is to say, not really work. Some of our fathers had read a book called “Looking Backward” and had talked about it in the homes and in the stores. Then we lads had talked. Well, a fellow would maybe roll downtown from his country home in the late morning and turn a few cranks or pull a few levers. Then he would go and play, make love to some beautiful female or take an afternoon’s ride over to Egypt to see the Pyramids, or visit the Holy Land. A fellow had to get up an appetite for dinner, dang it all!

  Anyway, that was that, and there we were. The well-shooter dropped a heavy weight down the hole and cut out for the woods. When he was halfway across the meadow the rumbling explosion occurred, down in the earth.