Men and women of the Middle West became famous by way of European trips. Such and such a one had been to Europe three times. He was consulted upon all occasions, was allowed to sit on the platform at political meetings, might even claim the privilege of carrying a cane. Even the men of the barrooms were impressed. The bartender settled a quarrel between two men by referring the matter to Ed Swarts, who had been home to Germany twice. “Well, he’s traveled. He has an education. He knows what he’s talking about,” the bartender said.
Had I myself come to New York, half wanting to go on to Europe and not quite daring? At least there was not in me the naïve faith in Europe my father must have had. I found myself able to go into the presence of men who had spent years in Europe without trembling, visibly at least, but something pulled. It was so difficult to understand life and the impulses of life here. There was so much phrase-making to cover up the reality of feelings, of hungers. Would one learn something by going to the sources of all this vast river of mixed bloods, mixed traditions, mixed passions and impulses?
Perhaps I thought that in New York I should find men, Americans in spirit and in fact, who had digested what Europe had to give America and who would pass it on to me. I was middle-western enough to think it a bit presumptuous of me to strike out as a man of letters, set myself up as a man of letters. I wanted to, but didn’t quite dare.
However I took a long breath and plunged. All about me were men talking and talking. There was, at just that time, a distinct effort to awaken in New York something like the group life among artists and intellectuals for which Paris had long been famous. There was the extreme radical political and intellectual group, gathered about The Masses; the Little Review with its sledgehammer pronouncements and a kind of flaunting joy of life, of which the others were both scornful and afraid; The Seven Arts group, inclined to make itself small and exclusive; the liberals, always apparently trembling on the edge of a real feeling for the crafts and never quite making it, that gathered about The New Republic and The Nation, and besides these Mencken and Nathan, knights errant at large, with pistols always loaded, ready at any moment to shoot anyone if the shooting would make a bit of stir in the town.
Among these men I walked and after walking went back to my room to lie on my cot. I began checking off names. As for myself I had no serious intention of becoming a New Yorker. I was a middle-westerner born and bred. All the rest of my days I might drift here and there about America but at heart I would be, to the New Yorker, a man from beyond the mountains, an Ohio man to the end.
I was a middle-westerner trying to pick up cultural scraps in New York, trying to go to school there.
I made little lists of names on the walls of my mind. There was Van Wyck Brooks, the man who never wrote a line that did not give me joy, but his mind seemed altogether occupied with what had happened to Twain, Howells, Whitman, Poe and the New Englanders, men for the most part dead before I was born. I was sorry they had the rotten luck to be born in a new land but could not stay permanently sorry. I had to live myself in the moment, in America as it was, as it was becoming. Often I thought of Brooks. “He has a theme. It is that a man cannot be an artist in America. The theme absorbs ah his time and energy. He has little or no time to give to such fellows as myself and our problems.” I did not put Brooks aside. He put me aside.
There were however others. Alfred Stieglitz, Waldo Frank, Henry Canby, Paul Rosenfeld, Leo Ornstein, Ben Huebsch, Alfred Kreymborg, Mary and Padraic Colum, Julius Friend, Ferdinand Schevill, Stark Young when I came to him later, Lawrence Gilman, Gilbert Seldes, Jane Heap, Gertrude Stein. Not all of them New Yorkers, but none of them, except Miss Heap and Ferdinand Schevill middle-westerners like myself.
There were in New York and Chicago no end of people who were willing to talk to me, listen to my talk, cry out for any good thing I did, condemn with quick intelligence what I did that was cheap or second-rate. Not one among them but had thought further than myself, that could tell me a hundred things I did not know. What a debt of gratitude I owe to men like Paul Rosenfeld, Stark Young, Alfred Stieglitz, Waldo Frank and others, men who have willingly taken long hours out of their busy lives to walk and talk with me of my craft.
I used to lie in my room thinking of them, in relation to myself, in relation to other writers who were coming out of the Middle West and who would come. It was rather odd how many of them had Jewish blood in their veins. I did not believe I was too much prejudiced because the people I have named liked certain work of my own. Often enough they did not like it and I had opportunity to realize their reactions to other men’s work, had seen how Stieglitz had labored for Marin, Hartley, O’Keefe, Dove and others, how Waldo Frank had given Sandburg the intelligent appreciation he must have so wanted, had watched with glowing pleasure the subtle workings of the minds of men like Rosenfeld and Young.
I tried to feel and think my way into the matter because it had I thought some relation to my own problem which as you will remember was to try to find footing for myself, a basis of self-criticism.
I wanted, as all men do, to belong.
To what? To an America alive, an America that was no longer a despised cultural foster child of Europe, with unpleasant questions always being asked about its parentage, to an America that had begun to be conscious of itself as a living home-making folk, to an America that had at last given up the notion that anything worth while could ever be got by being in a hurry, by being dollar rich, by being merely big and able to lick some smaller nation with one hand tied behind its broad national back.
As for the men of Jewish blood, so many of whom I found quick and eager to meet me half way, my heart went out to them in gratitude. They were wanting love and understanding, had in their natures many impulses that were destructive. Was there a sense of being outlaws? They did not want their own secret sense of separateness from the life about them commented upon but it existed. They themselves kept it alive and I thought they were not unwise in doing so. I watched them eagerly. Did they have, in their very race feeling, the bit of ground under their feet it was so hard for an Ohio man to get in Cleveland Cincinnati or Chicago or New York? The man of Jewish blood, in an American city, could at any rate feel no more separateness from the life about him than the advertising writer in a Chicago advertising agency who had within him a love of the craft of words. The Jewish race had made itself felt in the arts for ages and even our later middle-western anti-Jewish crusader Henry Ford had no doubt as a child been taught to read the Bible written by old Jewish word-fellows.
As far as I myself could understand, the feeling of separateness from the life about was common to all Americans. It explained the everlasting get-together movements always going on among business men and as for race prejudices, they also were common. There was the South with its concern about the Negroes, the Far West and its orientals, the whole country a little later with its sudden hatred of the Germans and in the Middle West all sorts of little cross-currents of race hatreds as the factory hands came into the towns from all over Europe. No American ever met another American without drawing a little back. There was a question in the soul. “What are your people? Where did they come from?”
“What kind of blood flows in your veins?”
Could it not very well be that the men of Jewish blood who had given themselves to the crafts in America could look at life a bit more impersonally, go out more quickly and warmly to individuals, throw up out of the body of the race more individuals who could give themselves wholeheartedly to the cultural life because of the very fact of a race history behind them?
One had always to remember that we Americans were in the process of trying to make a race. The Jews had been a part of the life of almost every race that had come to us and were for perhaps that very reason in a better position than the rest of us to help make our own race.
NOTE X
A GRAY MORNING and myself, no longer young, sitting on a bench before the little open space that faces the cathedral of Chartres. Thought
s flitting across a background of years. Had I finally accepted myself, in part at least, as a tale-teller, had I come that far on the road toward manhood?
It was sure I had been traveling, wandering from place to place, trying to look and listen. At that moment I was very far away from that land, the background of my tales, the Middle West of America. I was perhaps even farther away spiritually than physically. In my day men covered huge physical distances in a short time. As I sat there nearly all the reality of me was still living in the Middle West of America, in mining towns, factory towns, in sweet stretches of Ohio and Illinois countryside, in great smoke-hung cities, in the midst of that strange, still-forming muddle of peoples that is America.
I had drawn myself out of that for the time, had been in New York among the other writer folk, among the painters, among the talkers too. That after the years of active participation in life, in modern American life, cheating some, lying a good deal, scheming, being hurt by others, hurting others.
The younger years of being a business schemer, trying to grow rich — I have said little enough of those years in my book. However, the book is long enough, perhaps far too long.
Had I ever really wanted to be rich? Perhaps I had only wanted to live, in my craft, in the practice of my craft. It was certain I had not, for many years of my life, known what I wanted. After years of striving, to get money, to get power, to be successful, I had found in the end well-nigh perfect contentment in looking and listening, in sitting lost in some little corner, writing, trying to write all down. “A little worm in the fair apple of progress,” I had called myself laughing — the American laugh.
Now, for a few years, I had been looking abroad.! think it was Joseph Conrad who said that a writer only began to live after he began to write. It pleased me to think I was, after all, but ten years old.
Plenty of time ahead for such a one. Time to look about, plenty of time to look about.
Well, I had been looking about. I an American middle-westerner, ten years old, had been looking at old London, at strong arrogant young New York, at old France too.
It was apparent that although in France, in the eleventh twelfth and thirteenth centuries, there had been many men alive who had cared greatly for the work of their hands, present-day Frenchmen obviously did not. The cathedral before me was faced on one side by ugly sheds, such as some railroad company might have put up on the shores of a lake facing a city of mid-America. I had taken a second leap from New York to Paris, had been brought there by a friend who now sat on the bench beside me. The man was a friend dear to my heart. We had been sitting for days on just that bench, wandering about the cathedral. Visitors came and went, mostly Americans, middle-western Americans like myself no doubt. Some of them looked at the cathedral without stopping the motors of theirs cars. They were in a hurry, had got the hurry habit. One day a little drama played itself out in the open space before the cathedral door. An American came with two women, one French the other American, his wife or his sweetheart. He was flirting with the French woman and the American woman was pretending she did not see. My friend and I watched the drama flit back and forth for two or three hours. There before us was a woman losing her man, and she did not want to admit it to herself. Once when they had all three gone inside the cathedral, the American woman came out and stood for a moment by the massively beautiful door, the old eleventh-century door facing us. She did not see us and went to lean against the door itself, crying softly. Then she wiped her eyes and went inside again to join the others. They were all presumably getting culture there, in the presence of the work of the old workmen. The stooped figures of old Frenchwomen with shawls about their shoulders kept hurrying across the open space, going into the cathedral to worship. My friend and I were also worshiping at the cathedral, had been doing that for days.
Life went on then, ever in the same tragic comic sweet way. In the presence of the beautiful old church one was only more aware, all art could do no more than that — make people, like my friend and myself, more aware. An American girl put her face against the beautiful door of Chartres Cathedral and wept for her lost lover. What had been in the hearts of the workmen who once leaned over the same door carving it? They were fellows who had imaginations that flamed up. “Always wood for carvers to carve, always little flashing things to stir the souls of painters, always the tangle of human lives for the tale-tellers to mull over, dream over,” I told myself. I remembered what an excited young man had once said to me in Chicago. We had stood together in Lake Street, that most noisy and terrible of all Chicago’s downtown streets. “There are as many tales to be found here as in any street of any city in the world,” he had said a little defiantly. Then he looked at me and smiled. “But they will be different tales than would be found in any street of any of the old world cities,” he added.
I wondered.
My own mind was in a ferment, thoughts scurrying across a background of fancies as shadows play across the walls of a room when night comes on. My friend sat in silence. He had got hold of Huysmann’s “Cathedral” and was reading. Now and then he put the book down and sat for a long time in silence looking at the gray lovely old building in that gray light. It was one of the best moments of my own life. I felt free and glad. Did the friend who was with me love me? It was sure I loved him. How good his silent presence.
How good the presence of my own thoughts tool There was my friend, the Cathedral, the presence of the little drama in the lives of the three strange people who would presently come out of the church and go away, the packed storehouse of my own fancy too. The end of the story immediately before me I would never know but some day, when I was alone, in Chicago perhaps, my fancy would take it up and play with it. Too bad I was not a Turgenev or someone equally skillful. Were I such a one I might make of what I had seen some such a tale as, say Turgenev’s “Smoke.” There was just the material for a tale, a novel perhaps. One might fancy the man a young American who had come to Paris to study painting and before he came had engaged himself to an American girl at home. He had learned French, had made progress with his work. Then the American girl had set sail for Paris to join him and, at just that moment, while she was at sea, he had fallen desperately in love with a French woman. The deuce, the French woman was skillful with men and she imagined the young American to be rich. With what uncertain thoughts was the breast of the young American torn at that moment.
The three of them just suddenly came out of the church together and walked away together in silence. That was all. All tales presented themselves to the fancy in just that way. There was a suggestion, a hint given. In a crowd of faces in a crowded street one face suddenly jumped out. It had a tale to tell, was crying its tale to the streets but at best one got only a fragment of it. Once, long after the time of which I am now writing, I tried to paint in an American desert. There was something about the light. My eyes were not accustomed to it. There was a wide desert and beyond the desert hills floating away into the distance. I could lie on my back on the sands of the desert and watch the evening light fade away over the hills and such forms come! I thought all I had ever felt could be expressed in one painting of those hills but when later I took a brush into my hands I was only dumb and stupid. What appeared on the canvas was dull and meaningless. I walked about swearing at myself and then at the desert light and the very hills that so short a time before had so filled me with peace and happiness. I kept blaming the light. “Nothing stands still in this light,” I said to myself.
As though anything ever stood still anywhere. It was the artist’s business to make it stand still — well, just to fix the moment, in a painting, in a tale, in a poem.
Sitting there with my friend, facing the cathedral, I remembered something. On my desk, somewhere back in America, was a book in which I had once written certain lines. Well, I had made a poem and had called it, “One who would not grow old.” Now it came sharply back:
I have wished that the wind would stop blowing, that birds would stop dead sti
ll in their flight, without falling into the sea, that waves would stand ready to break upon shores without breaking, that all time, all impulse, all movement, mood, hungers, everything would stop and stand hushed and still for a moment.
It would be wonderful to be sitting on a log in a forest when it happened.
When all was still and hushed, just as I have described, we would get off the log and walk a little way.
The insects would all lie still on the ground or float, fixed and silent in the air. An old frog, that lived under a stone and that had opened his mouth to snap at a fly, would sit gaping.
There would be no movement, in New York, in Detroit, in Chicago down by the stock exchange, in towns, in factories, on farms.
Out in Colorado, where a man was riding a horse furiously, striving to catch a steer to be sent to Chicago and butchered —
He would stop, too, and the steer would stop.
You and I would walk a little way, in the forest, or on a prairie, or on the streets of a town, and then we would stop. We would he the only moving things in the world and then one of us would start a thought rolling and rolling, down time, down space, down mind, down life too.
I am sure I would let you do it if later you would keep all of the voices of your mind hushed while I did it in my turn. I would wait ten lives while others did it for my turn.
That impulse gone long since as I sat that day before the cathedral of Chartres! It was an impulse that had come time and again to every artist but my own moments had come often enough. I had no cause to quarrel with my own life.
Such moments as I had already had in it. “Life owes me nothing,” I kept saying over and over to myself. It was true enough. For all one might say about American life it had been good to me. On that afternoon I thought that if I were suddenly to be confronted with death in the form of the old man with a sickle in his hand, I would be compelled to say, “Well, it’s your turn now, old fellow. I’ve had my chance. If I had done little enough, it’s my fault, not yours.” At any rate life in America had poured itself out richly enough. It was doing that still. As I sat on the bench before Chartres on that gray day I remembered such moments.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 360
