Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  And so there we were, just boys from an Ohio country town with officers from the same town in a wood in the South being made into soldiers and I am much afraid not taking the whole affair too seriously. We were heroes and we accepted the fact. It was enough. In the southern cities ladies invited us to dine at their houses on our days off in town. The captain of our company had been a janitor of a public building back in Ohio, the first lieutenant was a celery raiser on a small farm near our town and the second lieutenant had been a knife grinder in a cutlery factory.

  * * * *

  In the camp I marched with the others for several hours each day and in the evening went with some other young soldier for a walk in the wood or in the streets of a southern city. There was a kind of drunkenness of comradeship. So many men so like oneself, doing the same thing with oneself. As for the officers — well, it was to be admitted that in military affairs they knew more than ourselves but there their superiority ended. It would be just as well for none of them to attempt to put on too much side when we were not drilling or were not on actual military duty. The war would soon be over and after a time we would all be going back home. An officer might conceivably “get away” with some sort of injustice for the moment — but a year from now, when we were all at home again.... Did the fool want to take the chance of four or five huskies giving him a beating some night in an alleyway?

  The constant marching and manoeuvring was a kind of music in the legs and bodies of men. No man is a single thing, physical or mental. The marching went on and on. The physical ruled. There was a vast slow rhythm, out of the bodies of many thousands of men, always going on and on. It got into one’s body. There was a kind of physical drunkenness produced. He who weakened was laughed at by his comrades and the weakness went away or he disappeared. One was afloat on a vast sea of men. There was a kind of music on the surface of the sea. The music was a part of oneself. One was oneself a part of the music. One’s body, moving in rhythm with all these other bodies, made the music. What was an officer? What was a man? An officer was but one out of whose throat came a voice.

  The army moved across a great open field. One’s body was tired but happy with an odd new kind of happiness. The mind did not torture the body, asking questions. The body was moved by a power outside itself and as for the fancy, it played freely, far, freely and widely, over oceans, over mountain tops too.

  Beyond him not the ghost of shores,

  Beyond him only shoreless seas.

  And now the voice and the words, caught up and repeated by other voices, harsh voices, tired voices, thin high pitched voices.

  Fours right into line —

  Fours right into line

  Three young men having run the guard line together are walking along a dark road toward a southern city. In the city and later when they have stood on street corners and walked through the section of the city where only Negroes live — being Ohio boys and fascinated by the strangeness of the notion of a race thus set aside — they go into a saloon where they sit drinking beer. They discuss their officers, the position of the officer in relation to his men. “I think it’s all right,” says a doctor’s son. “Ed and Dug are all right. They have to live off by themselves and act as though they were something special, kind of grand and wise and gaudy. It’s a kind of bluff, I guess, that has to be kept up, only I should think it would be kind of tough on them. I should think they might get to feeling they were something special and get themselves into a mess.”

  And now Ed, the raiser of celery, comes into the saloon. He is saving all he can of his officer’s pay hoping to buy a few additional acres of land when he gets back home and he doesn’t much like spending money. He sees the three sitting there and wants to join them but hesitates. Then he calls to me and he and I go off together along a street and into another saloon.

  The celery raiser is a devout Catholic and he and I get into a discussion. I have some money and am buying the beer and so it goes on for a long time. I speak of the feeling I have when I have marched for a long time in rhythm with many other men and Ed nods his head. “It’s the same way I feel about the Church,” he says. “That’s just the way we Catholics get to feeling about the Church.”

  At the camp Ed, being an officer, can walk boldly in but I, being but a corporal and having gone off to town without leave, must creep along the guard line to where a fellow from my own town is stationed. “Who goes there?” he demands sternly; and “Ah, cut it Will, you big boob. Don’t make such a racket,” I answer as I go past him and creep away in the darkness to my tent.

  And now I am in the tent, awake beside five sleeping men and I am filled with drinks and thinking of war. What a strange idea that men should need a war to throw many of them for a time into a common mood. Is there unison only in hatred? I do not believe it but the idea fascinates me. Men form a democracy but in the end must throw the democracy aside in order to make the army that shall protect and preserve democracy. The guard and myself creeping past him to my tent are as soldiers a little absurd. Is all feeling of comradeship, of brotherhood between many men, a little absurd?

  BOOK THREE

  NOTE I

  “THERE IS NO lighter burden, nor more agreeable, than a pen. Other pleasures fail us, or wound us while they charm; but the pen we take up with rejoicing and lay down with satisfaction, for it has the power to advantage not only its lord and master, but many others as well, even though they be far away — sometimes, indeed, though they be not born for thousands of years to come. I believe I speak but the strict truth when I claim that as there is none among earthly delights more noble than literature, so there is none so lasting, none gentler, or more faithful; there is none which accompanies its possessor through the vicissitudes of life at so small cost of effort or anxiety.”

  — Petrarch’s letter to Boccaccio.

  I ONCE knew a devout smoker who went to spend the winter in Havana and when he had got there and was unpacking his trunk he began to laugh, realizing suddenly that he had packed the trunk half full of boxes of cigars, and I have myself on more than one occasion when going from one city to another on some affair of business carried with me thousands of sheets of paper, fearing, I presume, that all the stationers in the new place had died. The fear of finding myself without paper, ink or pencils is a kind of disease with me and it is with a good deal of effort only that I restrain myself from stealing such articles whenever I am left unobserved in a store or in someone’s house. In houses where I live for some time I cache small stores of paper as a squirrel stores nuts and at one time in my life I had forcibly to be separated, by a considerate friend, from something like half a bushel of lead pencils I had for a long time carted about with me in a bag. There were enough pencils in the bag to have rewritten the history of mankind.

  To the writer of prose, who loves his craft, there is nothing in the world so satisfying as being in the presence of great stacks of clean white sheets. The feeling is indescribably sweet and cannot be compared with any reaction to be got from sheets on which one has already scribbled. The written sheets are already covered with one’s faults and oh, it is seldom indeed these sentences, scrawled across these sheets, can compare with what was intended! One has been walking in a street and has been much alive. What stories the faces in the streets tell! How significant the faces of the houses! The walls of the houses are brushed away by the force of the imagination and one sees and feels all of the life within. What a universal giving away of secrets! Everything is felt, everything known. Physical life within one’s own body comes to an end of consciousness. The life outside oneself is all, everything.

  Now for the pen or the pencil and paper and I shall make you feel this thing I now feel — ah, just that boy there and what is in his soul as he runs to look in at the window of the neighboring house in the early evening light; just what that woman is thinking as she sits on the porch of that other house holding the babe in her arms; just the dark, brooding thing in the soul of that laborer going homeward under thos
e trees. He is getting old and was born an American. Why did he not rise in the world and become the owner or at least the superintendent of a factory and own an automobile?

  Aha! You do not know, but I do. You wait now, I shall tell you. I have felt all, everything. In myself I have no existence. Now I exist only in these others.

  I have run home to my room and have lighted a light. Words flow. What has happened? Bah! Such tame, unutterably dull stuff! There was something within me, truth, facility, the color and smell of things. Why, I might have done something here. Words are everything. I swear to you I have not lost my faith in words.

  Do I not know? While I walked in the street there were such words came, in ordered array! I tell you what — words have color, smell; one may sometimes feel them with the fingers as one touches the cheek of a child.

  There is no reason at all why I should not have been able, by the instrumentality of these little words, why I should not have been able to give you the very smell of the little street wherein I just walked, made you feel just the way the evening light fell over the faces of the houses and the people — the half moon through the branches of that old cherry tree that was all but dead but that had the one branch alive, the branch that touched the window where the boy stood with his foot up, lacing his shoe. And there was the dog sleeping in the dust of the road and making a little whining sound out of his dreams and the girl on a nearby street who was learning to ride a bicycle. She could not be seen but her two young brothers laughed loudly every time she fell to the pavement.

  These the materials of the story-writer’s craft, these and the little words that must be made to run into sentences and paragraphs; now slow and haltingly, now quickly, swiftly, now singing like a woman’s voice in a dark house in a dark street at midnight, now viciously, threateningly, like wolves running in a winter forest of the North.

  Oh! This unutterable rot spoken sometimes about writing. “One is to consider the morals of the people who read, one is to please or amuse the people with these words and sentences. One lives in an age when there is much talk of service — to automobile owners, to riders on trains, to buyers of packages of food in stores. Is no one to do service to the little words, the words with which we make love, defend ourselves with lies after we have killed the friend who stole the woman we wanted — the words with which we bury our dead, comfort our friend, with which we are in the end to tell each other, if we may, all the secrets of our dreams and hopes?

  I am servant to the words. Are you to tell me what words I shall put aside and not write? Are you to be the master of my mood, caught from yourself perhaps as you walked in the street and I saw you when you did not see me and when you were more sweet and true in all your bearing than you have ever been before, or when alas you were more vicious and cruel. Bah! The words I have put here on this paper!

  But there are the clean sheets, the unwritten sheets. On them I shall write daringly, boldly and truly — to-morrow.

  The writer has just come from the stationer’s, where he has got him a fresh supply of sheets. He had money with him and bought five thousand. Ah, the weight of them on the arm as he walked off along a street to his own house. Four thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine times he may destroy the sheet on which he has been writing and there, lying before him, will be again the fresh white surface.

  Makers of paper, I exclude you from all the curses I have heaped upon manufacturers when I have walked in the street breathing coal dust and smoke. I have heard your industry kills fish in rivers. Let them be killed. Fishermen are, in any event, noisy lying brutes. Last night I dreamed I had been made Pope and that I had issued a bull, excommunicating all owners of factories, consigning them to burn everlastingly in hell, but ah, I left you out of my curses, you busy makers of paper. Those who made paper at a low price and in vast quantities somewhere up in the forests of Canada, I sainted. There was one man — I invented him — named Saint John P. Belger, who furnished paper to indigent writers of prose free of charge. For virtue I put him, in my dream, almost on a level with Saint Francis of Assisi.

  And now the writer has got to his room and has stacked the bundles of paper on the desk where he sits to write. He goes to a window and throws it open and there is a man passing. Who is the man?

  The writer does not know but is tempted to throw a dish or a chair at his head, merely to show his contempt of the world. “Take that mankind! Go to Hades! Have I not five thousand sheets?”

  It is without doubt a moment! In my boyhood I knew an old woodworker who on Sundays went ta walk alone in a forest. Once I was lying on my back by a clump of bushes and saw his actions when he thought there was no one about.

  What has mankind, in America, not missed because men do not know, or are forgetting, what the old workman knew? There was Sandro Botticelli who knew. He was in danger once of becoming married to a woman but at the critical moment he fled. All night he ran in the streets of Florence wrestling with himself and in the end won the victory. The woman was not to come between him and his surfaces, those cathedral walls, those dumb strips of canvas on which he was to paint — not all his dreams — what he could of his dreams. Nothing was to come between him and his materials.

  The old woodworker in the forest approached a living tree and then walked away. He went close again and let his eye travel up along the tree’s trunk. Then, hesitatingly, lovingly he touched the tree with his fingers. That was all. It was enough.

  It was the workman en rapport with his materials. Oh, there is a feeling in the breasts of men that will not die. Ages come and go, but always the feeling is alive, haltingly, in the breasts of the few. To the workman his materials are as the face of his God seen over the rim of the world. His materials are the promise of the coming of God to the workman.

  Ford factories cannot kill the love of materials in the workmen and always and in the end the love of materials and tools in the workmen will kill the Fords. Standardization is a phase. It will pass. The tools and materials of the workmen cannot always remain cheap and foul. Some day the workmen will come back to their materials, out of the sterile land of standardization. If the machine is to survive it will come again under the dominance of the hands of workmen, as it already no doubt is doing, in a hundred, perhaps a thousand unknown places. The day of re-discovery of man by man may not be so far off as we fancy. Has there not been, in our own time, a slackening of the impulse toward purely material ends? Has not the cry for success and material growth become already a bore to the average American?

  These the thoughts of a man. To the boy lying in the silent place on the Sunday afternoon long ago and seeing the old workman touching so tenderly the tree that he dreamed might some day become the materials of his craft no such thoughts.

  What happened? Just a tightening of the cords of the boy’s body. There was an inclination to be at the same time sad and full of joy. A door had been jerked open by the hand of the workman but the boy could not see within the house. He was, I remember, known as something of a “nut” in our town — a silent old chap — and once he went away to work in a city factory but later came back to his own little shop. He was a wagon-maker and the making of wagons by individual workmen lasted out his time. But he had no young workman to whom he taught the love of his trade. That died with him.

  Not quite, perhaps. The picture of the old workman and just the way his fingers touched the trunk of a tree on a certain Sunday afternoon and of how, as he walked away along a path, he kept stopping to turn back and take another look at his materials, stayed in a boy’s mind through long years of being smart, of trying mightily to be shrewd and capable in a world where materials did not matter, in the company of workmen vulgarized by the fact that the old workman’s love of materials was unknown to them.

  The writer with his sheets in a room. Will he accomplish his purpose? It is sure he will not. And that too is a part of the joy of his fate. Do not pity the workman, you who have succeeded in life. He wants no pity. Before him always there is the unsolve
d problem, the clean white unwritten sheets, and the workman also knows his moments of surrender, of happiness. There will always be the moments when he is lost in wonder before the possibilities of the materials before him.

  As for myself I had been, at the time in my life of which I am now writing a man of business for many years, had been buying and selling, but had all the time been secretly scribbling in my room at night.

  During the day I for years wrote advertisements — of soaps, of plows, house paints, incubators for the hatching of chickens.

  Was there something hatching in me? With all my scribbling had I something to say? Were there tales I had picked up I might in the end tell truly and well? I had seen and known men and women, going from their homes to their work, going from their work to their homes, had worked with them in offices and shops. On all sides the untold tales looked out at me like living things.

  I had bought and sold but had no real interest in buying and selling. All day I wrote advertisements and perhaps the advertisements helped sell So-and-so many dollars’ worth of goods. As I walked homeward through streets, across bridges, I could not remember what I had been writing about.

  At times too there was a sharp sense of uncleanliness. In my room the white sheets looked up at me. I remembered the workman seen in the forest in the presence of the tree when I was a boy. “I will launch out upon new adventures,” I said to myself.

  NOTE II

  ON AN EVENING of the late summer I got off a train at a growing Ohio industrial town where I had once lived. I was rapidly becoming a middle-aged man. Two years before I had left the place in disgrace. There I had tried to be a manufacturer, a moneymaker, and had failed, and I had been trying and failing ever since. In the town some thousands of dollars had been lost for others. An effort to conform to the standard dreams of the men of my times had failed and in the midst of my disgrace and generally hopeless outlook, as regards making a living, I had been filled with joy at coming to the end of it all. One morning I had left the place afoot, leaving my poor little factory, like an illegitimate child, on another man’s doorstep. I had left, merely taking what money was in my pocket, some eight or ten dollars.