But we must not expect the book buyers to take our excuses into account.
The mess of cheapness into which the modern world has got is a workman’s mess.
What a day it would be — the day I mean when all workmen come to a certain decision — that they would no longer put their hands to cheap materials or do cheap hurried work — for their manhood’s sake.
And what a day also — when those who are so concerned with the fate of mankind quit talking so much about housing, food, starving children and wages.
As well let the body starve or freeze at once as to go on forever starving and freezing the workman impulse in men.
What I am trying to say, you see, is that the blame for the lowered taste for the book physical and for the contents of the book is too much thrown off on the public.
It is up to the workman in you the publisher and in me the writer. As you have done one book for me in such charming good taste I have no fear in thus addressing you.
The contents of the books you publish for me are up to me.
If I am not too hurried, too casual, if my own respect for my own books does not become corrupt, something of that respect is bound to carry over to the public. They will want my books to stand permanently on their shelves, will not want to borrow them.
They will be willing enough that I, the workman, get my pay as a workman, and do not have to go gabbing and gadding for my bread and cakes.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
FROM CHICAGO
“I AM MATURE, a man child, in America, in the great valley of the Mississippi. My head arises above the corn fields. I stand up among the new corn.
I am a child, a confused child in a confused world. There are no clothes made that fit me. The minds of men cannot clothe me. Great projects arise within me. I have a brain and it is cunning and shrewd.
I want leisure to become beautiful but there is no leisure. Men should bathe me with prayers and with weeping but there are no men.
Now — from now — from today I shall do deeds of fiery meaning. Songs shall arise in my throat and hurt me.
I am a little thing, a tiny little thing on the vast prairies. I know nothing. My mouth is dirty. I cannot tell what I want. My feet are sunk in the black swampy land but I am a lover. I love life. In the end love shall save me.
The days are long. It rains. It snows.
I am an old man. I am sweeping the ground where my grave shall he.
Look upon me, my beloved, my lover who does not come. I am raw and bleeding, a new thing in a new world. I run swiftly over bare fields. Listen! There is the sound of the tramping of many feet. Life is dying in me. I am old and palsied. I am just at the beginning of my life.
Do you not see that I am old, oh my beloved? Do you not understand that I cannot sing, that my songs choke me? Do you not see that I am so young I cannot find the word in the confusion of words?”
MID-AMERICAN CHANTS.
1
WHILE he is still young and pregnant with life it behooves a man to attempt to extend the province of his life through his work; and the attempt may fairly be said to fall under the head of an effort to extend the possibilities of all life.
What to the living is more sweetly vital than life? Fearing as all true men do and must the danger of the approach of that self-satisfaction that is death, the young man will find upon this road difficulties that destroy self-satisfaction. Knowing that all about him in the world are men and women striving to fasten upon him their own insanity of conformity, the young and valiant soul will find here a constant demand upon his resources that will be to him a tonic against the insidious poison of association with the weak.
The driving impulse is, I should say, something like this — that a man, having taught himself to look keenly and constantly at himself, must realize that of all the figures in the world his is the most fortunate. Standing upon the high place and watching the struggle of his soul upon the wall of life, the young man, among all men so standing, knows that his soul has at least the chance of success in the struggle.
In a quite practical way also the young man whose imagination is still alive is one upon whom riches have been bestowed. Does he arise in the morning half ill of the perplexities of his life, a half hour of surrender to the impulses always being awakened within by the play of his imagination shall restore him. By a bridge near a river he stands and is stirred by the sight of the giant mechanism by which the bridge is raised for the passage of a ship. His quick imagination sees the workers in the great factories making the mechanism. If by good fortune he has been at some time also a laborer he shears in fancy the crashing blows of the great hammers and sees the beauty of the bodies of men absorbed in physical tasks. What to him at the moment is the fact that the laborer is cheated of the reward of his labor or that his own coat is somewhat shabby? In a flash his fancy has restored to him the sweetness of a day. One of a million little beauties of every street scene or of every country roadside has revealed itself to him.
By his side stand men who are waiting for the footway over the bridge to be re-established that they may cross the river. One of them, a plumber, has a heavy wrench in his hand. He begins talking to a second man and speaking of the ship that is passing. He uses nautical terms, throwing them about with more zeal than skill. The imaginative man turns quickly. A light dances in his eyes. He has seen behind the plumber, who is young and muscular, a pretty waitress. He knows that the young male is but swaggering before the female, that he is not trying to deceive the men in the crowd by his assumed knowledge of ships but is honestly striving to awaken admiration in the mind of the woman. One of the hundred little interplays of human relations with which each of the imaginative man’s living hours is colored has come to take his mind off the rather second-rate breakfast he must eat.
In all of the concerns of his life, in the perplexities of love, in the muddle of affairs that compel him to spend hours, to him divinely precious, in the treadmill of making a living, the living fancy of the young dreamer is as a strong arm protecting him.
And so the young man having within him youth and the courage that has made him a dreamer, begins to aspire, humbly and for the most part in secret, to make to life some return for the riches that have been given him. If he be a craftsman he will be at first appalled by the difficulties of the task to which he sets himself. Old masters, men long dead, strong true men have put in his hand a tool so fitting to the work he wants to do that it seems at times absurd that he should strive to make for himself his own tools. The names of old workmen dance before him. To attempt where they have accomplished seems a kind of sacrilege. If he be of a fine quality and set upon modesty the young man will make the attempt but will make it with a certain humbleness and always, first of all, for the fun of making it.
2
The novelist is about to begin the writing of a novel. For a year he will be at the task and what a year he will have. He is going to write the story of Virginia Borden, daughter of Fan Borden, a Missouri river raftsman. There in his little room he sits, a small hunched up figure with a pencil in his hand. He has never learned to run a typewriter and so he will write the words slowly and painfully, one after another, on the white paper.
What a multitude of words! For hours he will sit perfectly still, writing madly and throwing the sheets about. That is the happy time. The madness has possession of him. People will come in at the door and sit about, talking and laughing. Sometimes he jumps out of his chair and walks up and down. He lights and relights his pipe. Overcome with weariness he goes forth to walk. When he walks he carries a heavy black walking-stick and goes muttering along.
The novelist tries to shake off his madness but he does not succeed. In a store he buys more writing paper and, sitting on a stone near where some men are building a house, begins again to write. He talks aloud and occasionally fingers a lock of hair that falls down over his eyes. He lets his pipe go out and relights it nervously.
Days pass. It is raining and again the nov
elist is in his room writing. After a long evening of work he throws all he has written away.
What is the secret of the madness of the writer?
He is a small man and has a torn ear. A part of his ear has been carried away by the explosion of a gun. Above the ear there is a spot, as large as a child’s hand, where no hair grows.
The novelist is a clerk in a store in Wabash Avenue in Chicago. When he was quite young he began to clerk in the store and for a time promised to be successful. He sold goods and there was something in his smile that won its way into hearts. He was interested in the people who came into the store and the people liked him for his interest.
In the store now the novelist does not promise success. There is a kind of conspiracy. Although he tries earnestly he makes mistakes, and all of his fellows conspire to forgive and conceal his mistakes. Sometimes when he has muddled things badly they are impatient and the manager of the store, a huge fat fellow with thin gray hair, takes him into a room and scolds him.
The two men sit by a window and look down into Wabash Avenue. It is snowing and people hurry along with bowed heads. So much do the novelist and the fat gray-haired man like each other that the scolding does not last. They begin to talk and the hours pass. Presently it is time to close the store for the night and the two go down a flight of stairs to the street.
On a corner stand the novelist and the storekeeper, still talking, and presently they go together to dine. The manager of the store looks at his watch and it is eight o’clock. He remembers a dinner engagement made with his wife and hurries away. On the street car he blames himself for his carelessness. “I should not have tried to reprimand the fellow,” he says, and laughs.
It is night and the novelist works in his room. The night is cold but he opens his window. There is, in his closet, a torn woollen jacket given him by a friend and he wraps the jacket about him. It has stopped snowing and the stars are in the sky.
The talk with the store manager has inflamed his mind. Again he writes furiously. What he is now writing will not fit into the life-story of Virginia Borden, but, for the moment, he thinks it will and he is happy. Tomorrow he will throw all away but that will not destroy his dream.
Who is this Virginia Borden of whom the novelist writes and why does he write of her? He does not know that he will get money for his story and he is growing old. What a foolish affair. Presently there may be a new manager in the store and the novelist will lose his place. Once in a long while he thinks of that and shivers with cold.
The novelist is not to be won from his purpose. Virginia Borden is a woman who lived in Chicago. The novelist has seen and talked with her. Like the store manager she forgot herself talking to him. She forgot the torn ear and the bare spot where no hair grew and the skin was snow-white. To talk with the novelist was like talking aloud to herself. It was delightful.
For a year she knew him and then went away to live with a brother in Colorado where she was thrown from a horse and killed.
When she lived in Chicago many people knew Virginia Borden. They saw her going here and there in the streets. Once she was married to a man who was leader of an orchestra in a theater but the marriage was not a success. Nothing that Virginia Borden did in the city was successful.
The novelist is to write the life-story of Virginia Borden. As he begins the task a great humbleness creeps over him. He is afraid and trembles.
In the woman who walked and talked with him the novelist has seen many strange, beautiful, unexpected little turns of the mind and the body. He knows that in Virginia Borden there was a spirit that, but for the muddle of life, might have become a flame. To him her body was a flame at which he warmed himself when he was cold.
It is the dream of the novelist that he will make men understand his feeling for the woman they saw in the streets. He wants to tell the store manager of her and the little wiry man who has a desk next his own. In the Wabash Avenue store there is a woman who sits on a high stool with her back to the novelist. He wants to tell her of Virginia Borden, to make her feel the reality of his own sense of the woman’s beauty, to make all see that such a woman once lived and went about among the women of Chicago.
As the novelist works events grow in his mind. His mind is forever active and he is continually making up stories about himself. As the Virginia Borden men saw was but a caricature of the Virginia Borden who lived in the mind of the novelist, so he knows that he is himself but a shadow of something very real.
And so the novelist puts himself into the book. In the book he is a large, square-shouldered man with tiny eyes. He is one who came to Chicago from a village in Poland and was a leader in an orchestra in the theater. As the orchestra leader, the novelist married Virginia Borden and lived in a house with her.
You see the novelist wants to explain himself also. He is a lover and so vividly does he love that he has the courage to love even himself. And so it is the lover who sits writing and the madness of the writer is the madness of the lover. As he writes he is making love. Surely all can understand that.
3
Consider the tantalizing difference in the quality of work produced by two men. In the first we get at times an almost overwhelming sense of proficiency in his craft. The writer, we feel, knows form, knows construction, knows words. How he slings the words about. Almost every one of his lines is quotable.
And this other fellow. His words do not cling, his art forms become at times shapeless, he stumbles, going crudely and awkwardly forward.
And how breathlessly we follow. What is he doing that he holds us so tightly? What is the secret of our love of him, even in the midst of his awkwardness?
He is revealing himself to us. See how shamelessly and boldly he is trying to tell us of the thing that is a never-ceasing marvel to him — the march of his own life, the complete story of his own adventure in the midst of the universal adventure.
4
It is Sunday evening and I am dining alone in a restaurant. The day is cold and cheerless and since morning I have been at work in my room.
I have been revising a book that is partly good, partly bad. That it is at all bad has chilled the fires in me. The thing should not have been bad. What a fine figure I was as the labor leader. How strange and wonderful my thoughts as I went through the city nights, hurrying from place to place, stirring the soul of labor. And how feebly I have expressed my thoughts. In the restaurant I jab at the tablecloth with my fork. “I should have done more with myself in so fine a rôle.”
Some two weeks before that evening I had met a woman in another restaurant. She was an Englishwoman with a long thin face and when I came upon her she sat at a table with a party of friends. One of the party beckoned and I went to sit at the table. I sat by the Englishwoman.
Between the Englishwoman and myself much laughing talk. Here and there we turned, laughing and shouting at the people seated at the table.
And then in a moment all was changed. A new quality came to color our brief acquaintanceship. There amid the noise and the laughter our two bodies ran out to meet each other. For five, perhaps for ten minutes we sat stupidly looking at each other. Like two wide-eyed children in a world full of unaccountable people and impulses we tried to be intellectual. We talked, I have forgotten of what, and all the time something inside us kept meeting and embracing.
“We must talk a whole evening away,” I pleaded, thinking still it was talk we both wanted. “After these few moments we would be fools not to do that.”
The hand of the woman, lying on the table, trembled. My hand trembled also. Even now as I sit writing of the woman, my hand, that plays back and forth on the paper, shakes with the memory of her.
We walked in Jackson Park in Chicago, going along the paths in silence. How dark it was. In so brief a time there had been built up in each of us a background of much feeling. Already our two lives were colored, each by the other. After a time words came. She was lonely in America and talked of her own country and of a wide moor that ran away
toward the sunset beyond her own town. On Sundays she had gone upon the moor with the people with whom she lived and whom she loved. With a man she loved she had walked hand in hand and had talked as she and I had talked in the restaurant.
In the park it was cold and dark and we met no people. Presently we got upon a wide open space. The dreary persistent wind roared in distant trees. In the night the open space was mysteriously vast.
Again we walked along in silence. I put out my hand and in it she put her hand.
And then another problem presented itself to the woman and me. We had stopped beneath a small tree. Away in the distance a street car ran past the front of the park. It seemed immeasurable miles away. The cold wind beat about her slender figure.
I took the woman into my arms. In her face as it looked up into mine was all of the loveliness of woman. How I longed for beauty within myself, beauty with which to match her beauty, the quiet, submissive, waiting loveliness in her.
When it passed I took her by the hand and led her back to walk again upon gravel paths.
We talked then. Words welled up in me. “Never,” I cried, “shall I find beauty to match your beauty.” Aimlessly I stumbled about, saying words, trying to make her understand how truly in my poor way I loved her.
In the restaurant I pay my bill, and go out into the street. What matter if my hands tremble and I have forgotten to eat? What matter if the woman of the park later got lost in the rush of Chicago? What matter if I never saw such a woman, if I merely walked alone in the windswept park? What matter if I never in all my life knew such a woman?
Is my story for all these reasons the less true? Is the moment in which I look down into the loveliness of a woman’s eyes less a part of my life because it happened in fancy?
5
I am walking in the street at evening of a summer day. The rush of people homeward bound has passed and something of the jaded weariness of their faces remains in my mind.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 364
