“Does he want to come home and hear talk of the rights of women and children, all that sort of bosh? Does he want to find an American or an English feminist perhaps, enshrined in his house?
“Ha!” The story writer jumped off the bed and began again walking restlessly hack and forth.
“The devil!” he cried. “I am neither the one thing nor the other. And I also am bullied by my wife — not openly hut in secret. It is all done in the name of keeping up appearances. Oh, it is all done very quietly and gently. I should have been an artist but I have become, you see, a man of business. It is my business to write football stories, eh! Among my people, the Italians, there have been artists. If they have money — very well and if they have no money — very well. Let us suppose one of them living poorly, eating his crust of bread. Aha! With his hands he does what he pleases. With his hands he works in stone — he works in colors, eh! Within himself he feels certain things and then with his hands he makes what he feels. He goes about laughing, puts his hat on the side of his head. Does he worry about running an automobile? ‘Go to the devil,’ he says. Does he lie awake nights thinking of how to maintain a large house and a daughter in college? The devil! Is there talk of keeping up appearances for the sake of the woman? For an artist, you see, — well, what he has to say to his fellows is in his work. If he is an Italian his woman is a woman or out she goes. My Italians know how to be men.”
“Such a beautiful pail of fish, such a beautiful peck of apples, I cannot bring you now. It is too early and! am not footloose yet
VII
The story writer again sat down on the edge of the bed. There was something feverish in his eyes. Again he smiled softly but his fingers continued to play nervously with the pages of my book and now he tore several of the pages. Again he spoke of the three men of his New England town.
The fish-seller, it seemed, was not like the Yank of the comic papers. He was fat and in the comic papers a Yank is long and thin.
“He is short and fat,” my visitor said, “and he smokes a corncob pipe. What hands he has! His hands are like fish. They are covered with fish scales and the backs are white like the bellies of fish.
“And the Italian shoe-shiner is a fat man too. He has a mustache. When he is shining my shoes sometimes — well, sometimes he looks up from his job and laughs and then he calls the fat Yankee fish-seller — what do you think — a mermaid.”
In the life of the Yankee there was something that exasperated my visitor as it did the Greek grocer and the Italian who shined shoes and as he told the story my treasured book, still held in his hand, suffered more and more. I kept going toward him, intending to take the book from his hand (he was quite unconscious of the damage he was doing) but each time as I reached out I lost courage. The name Balzac was stamped in gold on the back and the name seemed to be grinning at me.
My visitor grinned at me too, in an excited nervous way. The seller of fish, the old fat man with the fish scales on his hands, had a daughter who was ashamed of her father and of his occupation in life. The daughter, an only child lived during most of the year in Boston where she was a student at the Boston Conservatory of Music. She was ambitious to become a pianist and had begun to take on the airs of a lady — had a little mincing step and a little mincing voice and wore mincing clothes too, my visitor said.
And in the Summer, like the writer’s daughter, she came home to live in her father’s house and, like the writer himself, sometimes went to walk about.
To the New England town during the Summer months there came a great many city people — from Boston and New York — and the pianist did not want them to know she was the daughter of the seller of fish. Sometimes she came to her father’s booth to get money from him or to speak with him concerning some affair of the family and it was understood between them that — when there were city visitors about — the father would not recognize his daughter as being in any way connected with himself. When they stood talking together and when one of the city visitors came along the street the daughter became a customer intent upon buying fish. “Are your fish fresh?” she asked, assuming a casual lady-like air.
The Greek, standing at the door of his store across the street and the Italian shoe-shiner were both furious and took the humiliation of their fellow merchant as in some way a reflection on themselves, an assault upon their own dignity, and the story writer having his shoes shined felt the same way. All three men scowled and avoided looking at each other. The shoe-shiner rubbed furiously at the writer’s shoes and the Greek merchant began swearing at a boy employed in his store.
As for the fish merchant, he played his part to perfection. Picking up one of the fish he held it before his daughter’s eyes. “It’s perfectly fresh and a beauty, Madam,” he said. He avoided looking at his fellow merchants and did not speak to them for a long time after his daughter had gone.
But when she had gone and the life that went on between the three men was resumed the fish merchant courted his neighbors. “Don’t blame me. It’s got to be done,” he seemed to be saying. He came out of his little booth and walked up and down arranging and re-arranging his stock and when he glanced at the others there was a pleading look in his eyes. “Well, you don’t understand. You haven’t been in America long enough to understand. You see, it’s like this—” his eyes seemed to say, “ — we Americans can’t live for ourselves. We must live and work for our wives, our sons and our daughters. We can’t all of us get up in the world so we must give them their chance.” It was something of the sort he always seemed to be wanting to say.
It was a story. When one wrote football stories one thought out a plot, as a football coach thought out a new formation that would advance the ball.
But life in the streets of the New England village wasn’t like that. No short stories with clever endings — as in the magazines — happened in the streets of the town at all. Life went on and on and little illuminating human things happened. There was drama in the street and in the lives of the people in the street but it sprang directly out of the stuff of life itself. Could one understand that?
The young Italian tried but something got in his way. The fact that he was a successful writer of magazine short stories got in his way. The large white house near the sea, the automobile and the daughter at Vassar — all these things had got in his way.
One had to keep to the point and after a time it had happened that the man could not write his stories in the town. In the Fall he went to many football games, took notes, thought out plots, and then went off to the city, where he rented a room in a small hotel in a side street.
In the room he sat all day writing football stories. He wrote furiously hour after hour and then went to walk in the city streets. One had to keep giving things a new twist — to get new ideas constantly. The deuce, it was like having to write advertisements. One continually advertised a kind of life that did not exist.
In the city streets, as one walked restlessly about, the actuality of life became as a ghost that haunted the house of one’s fancy. A child was crying in a stairway, a fat old woman with great breasts was leaning out at a window, a man came running along a street, dodged into an alleyway, crawled over a high board fence, crept through a passageway between two apartment buildings and then continued running and running in another street.
Such things happened and the man walking and trying to think only of football games stood listening. In the distance he could hear the sounds of the running feet. They sounded quite sharply for a long moment and then were lost in the din of the street cars and motor trucks. Where was the running man going and what had he done? The old Harry! Now the sound of the running feet would go on and on forever in the imaginative life of the writer and at night in the room in the hotel in the city, the room to which he had come to write football stories, he would awaken out of sleep to hear the sound of running feet. There was terror and drama in the sound. The running man had a white face. There was a look of terror on his face and for a moment a kind
of terror would creep over the body of the writer lying in his bed.
That feeling would come and with it would come vague floating dreams, thoughts, impulses — that had nothing to do with the formation of plots for football stories. The fat Yankee fish-seller in the New England town had surrendered his manhood in the presence of other men for the sake of a daughter who wished to pass herself off as a lady and the New England town where he lived was full of people doing strange unaccountable things. The writer was himself always doing strange unaccountable things.
“What’s the matter with me?” he asked sharply, walking up and down before me in the room in the New York hotel and tearing the pages of my book. “Well, you see,” he explained, “when I wrote my first football story it was fun. I was a boy wanting to be a football hero and as I could not become one in fact I became one in fancy. It was a boy’s fancy but now I’m a man and want to grow up. Something inside me wants to grow up.
“They won’t let me,” he cried, holding his hands out before him. He had dropped my book on the floor. “Look,” he said earnestly, “my hands are the hands of a middle-aged man and the skin on the back of my neck is wrinkled like an old man’s. Must my hands go on forever, painting the fancies of children?”
VIII
The writer of football stories had gone out of my room. He is an American artist. No doubt he is at this moment sitting somewhere in a hotel room, writing football stories. As I now sit writing of him my own mind is filled with fragmentary glimpses of life caught and held from our talk. The little fragments caught in the field of my fancy are like flies caught in molasses — they cannot escape. They will not go out of the house of my fancy and I am wondering, as no doubt you, the reader, will be wondering, what became of the daughter of the seller of fish who wanted to be a lady. Did she become a famous pianist or did she in the end run away with a man from New York City who was spending his vacation in the New England town only to find, after she got to the city with him, that he already had a wife? I am wondering about her — about the man whose wife ran away with his friend and about the running man in the city streets. He stays in my fancy the most sharply of all. What happened to him? He had evidently committed a crime. Did he escape or did he, after he had got out into the adjoining street, run into the arms of a waiting policeman?
Like the writer of football stories, my own fancy is haunted. To-day is just such a day as the one on which he came to see me. It is evening now and he came in the evening. In fancy again I see him, going about on Spring Summer and early Fall days, on the streets of his New England town. Being an author he is somewhat timid and hesitates about speaking with people he meets. Well, he is lonely. By this time his daughter has no doubt graduated from Vassar. Perhaps she is married to a writer of stories. It may be that she has married a writer of cowboy stories who lives in the New England town and works in a garden.
Perhaps at this very moment the man who has written so many stories of football games is writing another. In fancy I can hear the click of his typewriting machine. He is fighting, it seems, to maintain a certain position in life, a house by the sea, an automobile and he blames that fact on his wife, and on his daughter who wanted to go to Vassar.
He is fighting to maintain his position in life and at the same time there is another fight going on. On that day in the hotel in the city of New York he told me, with tears in his eyes, that he wanted to grow up, to let his fanciful life keep pace with his physical life but that the magazine editors would not let him. He blamed the editors of magazines — he blamed his wife and daughter — as I remember our conversation, he did not blame himself.
Perhaps he did not dare let his fanciful life mature to keep pace with his physical life. He lives in America, where as yet to mature in one’s fanciful life is thought of as something like a crime.
In any event there he is, haunting my fancy. As the man running in the streets will always stay in his fancy, disturbing him when he wants to be thinking out new plots for football stories, so he will always stay in my fancy — unless, well unless I can unload him into the fanciful lives of you readers.
As the matter stands I see him now as I saw him on that Winter evening long ago. He is standing at the door of my room with the strained look in his eyes and is bewailing the fact that after our talk he will have to go back to his own room and begin writing another football story.
He speaks of that as one might speak of going to prison and then the door of my room closes and he is gone. I hear his footsteps in the hallway.
My own hands are trembling a little. “Perhaps his fate is also my own,” I am telling myself. I hear his human footsteps in the hallway of the hotel and then through my mind go the words of the poet Sandburg he has quoted to me:
“Such a beautiful pail of fish, suck a beautiful peck of apples,! cannot bring you now. It is too early and I am not footloose yet.”
The words of the American poet rattle in my head and then I turn my eyes to the floor where my destroyed Balzac is lying. The soft brown leather back is uninjured and now again, in fancy, the name of the author is staring at me. The name is stamped on the back of the book in letters of gold.
From the floor of my room the name Balzac is grinning ironically up into my own American face.
Sherwood Anderson’s Notebook
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
FROM CHICAGO
FOUR AMERICAN IMPRESSIONS
NOTES OUT OF A MAN’S LIFE
AFTER SEEING GEORGE BELLOWS’ MR. AND MRS. WASE
I’LL SAY WE’VE DONE WELL
A MEETING SOUTH
NOTES OUT OF A MAN’S LIFE
NOTES ON STANDARDIZATION
ALFRED STIEGLITZ
NOTES OUT OF A MAN’S LIFE
WHEN THE WRITER TALKS
NOTES OUT OF A MAN’S LIFE
AN APOLOGY FOR CRUDITY
KING COAL
NOTES OUT OF A MAN’S LIFE
The first edition’s title page
DEDICATED TO
TWO FRIENDS M. D. F.
AND
JOHN EMERSON
Some of the essays, tales, fragments, notes and articles in this book have appeared in The Literary Review, The Nation, The Survey, The Double Dealer, The New Republic, The Seven Arts, Vanity Fair, The Dial. To these publications the author makes grateful acknowledgment.
“Ahab had seventy sons in Samaria”
FOREWORD
MY DEAR HORACE Liveright, Here is a book — my note book — I send for you to publish in the spring if you are so minded. It is a fragmentary thing. The wind blows and water runs away under many bridges. A man should do something — in the spring.
In the meantime we scribblers occasionally become preachers. We say this or that is so and so. Sometimes some of us in America go about delivering lectures to clubs. In one place I myself spoke to a thousand people, in another place to fifteen hundred. You might have thought I was running for congress but I wasn’t. What I was doing was trying to earn money to buy me a small hillside farm and plant some flowering bushes. I was salting away dollars to build a house on it too.
In some of my lectures I spoke in a most derogatory way of Mr. Henry Ford and the well-known product of his huge factory but with some of the money got so speaking I plan to buy me a Ford.
I mention this as a comfort to Mr. Ford if he has ever heard of me, which I doubt.
Well-a-day, people are so and so. They will come in large numbers to hear me talk, paying often a dollar at the gate, but when they want to read one of my books they so often borrow it from the library or from a friend.
At one place where I spoke, the chairman of the meeting highly recommended to the audience that they all borrow my books and read them.
Up I jumped shouting. “For God’s sake,” I cried, “if you respect me as a writer, do not borrow my books, buy them.” It was ill-natured of me but there was a point I wanted to make.
The same good people would not, you see, borrow a theater ticke
t. They pay their fare on a railroad train. They do not go to a hotel, where they respect the cook, and ask permission to borrow a dinner.
All of this borrowing comes from the overmuch making of cheap books. Can any man ever respect books again who goes in to visit a critic friend and sees the books scattered about, piled on the floor, thrown aside in heaps? I wish the critics would send them to me — freight collect. Modern books are gayly colored. They are very decorative on shelves in rooms in the country.
Go to visit in his workshop Mr. Llewellyn Jones, Mr. Stuart Sherman, Mr. Henry Mencken. (I trust Mr. Mencken and Mr. Sherman will forgive me for putting their two names thus on the same line, so warmly close to each other. I am not trying to interrupt their ancient enmity.)
To resume — my dear Horace, there they are, banked in by books.
And Mr. Robert Lovett, Mr. Glenn Frank, Mr. Rascoe, Mr. Hansen, Mr. Broun, Mr. Stallings — all buried.
There are critics I would like to see quite buried under the pile of books so that they could never crawl out but I will not mention their names. There is already too much name mentioning going on.
What I really want to say is something about this modern disregard of books.
The public is not after all to blame. If books have become a commonplace of life, like Ford cars and installment-plan furniture it comes back to the workmen in the end.
There may be extenuating circumstances for you, the publisher, and for me, the scribbler. We are caught in the hurried shoddy industrial rush like everyone else.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 363
