Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  A cry. Oh, ah ho, ah ho, ah ho. Las’ sack now. Soon de las’ sack. Oh, ah ha, ah ha.

  A dance in the bodies now. Swaying bodies going empty handed, dancing down a gangplank. (If you ever have to go all night down a steep hill try that step. See how easy it is. See how it rests the body. )

  Dance going down-hill, rest that way, dance then coming up with two hundred pounds on your shoulders.

  Keep dancing, rest dancing.

  De las’ sack, de las’ sack.

  On Sunday go ride in the white man’s engine. Rest riding.

  But keep the song, black man, don’t lose the song.

  When you lose that, we’ve got you, we whites.

  We’ll get you in the end, of course.

  That’s what makes the song sweet to hear while it lasts.

  Will love of words be lost? Success, standardization, big editions, money rolling in.

  When you get money you are respectable.

  What has respectability to do with loving words? What words do you love? Who has passed on them? What authority has said they are respectable?

  Words for every act of the body, for dart and gay thoughts.

  The little singing sound made by a pen or paper. The tale whispered in the night and then forgotten.

  Words going the way of the blacks, of song and dance.

  Can you imagine sweet words in a factory sing them, dance them?

  In the end they will make factory hands of US writers too.

  The whites will get us. They win.

  Don’t turn your back on the modern world. Sing that too, if you can, while the sweet words last.

  NOTES ON STANDARDIZATION

  THERE HAS BEEN, for a long time now, and with America and Germany as the most outstanding leaders of the movement, a tremendous standardization of life going on in every country of the western world.

  As an example of what I am trying to get at, let me start by restating a fact, well known to every American past forty, the obvious fact that within our own day there has come a great change in the mechanics of the everyday life of every American man, woman and child.

  There have been these two things — the speeding up and the standardization of life and thought, the one impulse no doubt the result of the other.

  In my own father’s day, for example, there was not a man of our Ohio town, counting himself at all a person of intelligence, who did not know the name of the editor of every outstanding New York, Chicago, Cincinnati or New Orleans newspaper. Not only the names but the personalities and dominant characteristics of many of these editors were known to men within the radius of the territories in which their newspaper circulated, and often far outside. The entire daily press of the country was dominated by men of strong individuality who were continually making a direct and powerful appeal out of their own complex minds to readers all over the country.

  You have but to compare the city newspaper of today with that of a generation ago to get a quite startling realization of what has happened. In the newspaper world now are there any such towering figures as our fathers knew? If there are, who are they?

  When it comes to that, does the average citizen of any American city today know or care who is editor of the newspaper he reads in the morning? A man doesn’t think of personalities in connection with newspapers any more. The passing from active service of Colonel Henry Watterson, of the Louisville Courier-Journal, saw pass also the last of the old type of unique individuals impressing their personalities on people in general through the ownership or editorship of newspapers. Chicago, a city of the gods know how many hundred thousands nameless human beings drifting daily through crowded, noise-haunted streets, in and out of the doors of apartment and office buildings, department stores and factories, has two morning newspapers, printed in English.

  Paris, a city half the size of Chicago, has some thirty French daily newpapers.

  And Paris, you will remember, is inhabited by one people while Chicago has within its limits a conglomeration of peoples from all over the world, newly come together and trying to make of themselves one people — a new people — the Americans of the future.

  There is something very amazing indicated by all this.

  In one city the attempt is being made to channel the minds of all men into one iron groove while in the other the idiosyncrasies of individuals and groups are given breathing space and many channels of expression. The impulse has its roots in the somewhat strange notion, that has for a long time been becoming more and more prevalent among us, a notion that to conform to type is man’s highest mission.

  A rather strange doctrine, that, to be so universally accepted in “the land of the free and the home of the brave?”

  It was I believe a doctrine held in high esteem in Germany in the days of the Hohenzollerns. There they succeeded in making the doctrine the national ideal. They made every man a soldier, disciplined every citizen with an iron hand, crushed the individuality out of everyone and succeeded finally in creating the terrible military machine that made the rest of the world tremble in anticipation of the time when it would be set going against them but that, by an ironic turn of fate, the French, perhaps the most individualistic people in the world, did manage to turn aside at the Marne.

  What I have said about the newspaper field is equally true of the general magazine field and it is pretty much true nowadays of the whole book-publishing business.

  In the beginning the publication of magazines and books in America was almost entirely a cultural undertaking, with thoughts of profit taken into consideration only as a secondary element. Nowadays single organizations own, edit and publish sometimes as many as a dozen magazines. These magazines are run through the shops in bunches, as the modern factory turns out cheap furniture. I beg of you, if you are under the illusion that there is left any individuality among them, go to the nearest news stand and run your eye over the covers of a dozen popular magazines.

  On the cover of each magazine is to be seen the same Broadway conception of womanly beauty. She has tilted her head a little more or less to this or that side. Now she is swinging a golf stick, now driving an automobile. Oh, ho, it is winter. She is now setting forth for the frozen lake clad in expensive furs and with a pair of skates on her shoulder.

  There is one thing for which I have always been devoutly thankful. I have never seen this magazine cover female in the flesh and I hope I never shall. I try to be a gentleman and would dislike being caught in the act of throwing a brick at the head of a lady.

  As for the contents of these magazines some of them have been able to develop a type of writer who is really quite amazingly clever.

  When you bear in mind that all of these magazines are run primarily for the purpose of the advertising pages and that the first thing always to be borne in mind by the editors is the building up and holding of tremendous circulations, it will be easily understood why America had to develop a special type of writer to meet the demand.

  A sort of continual and terrible perversion of life goes on. After all there are human men and women in America. Where among us live these creatures of the popular magazine short story, the best-selling novel or the moving picture? You read the stories published in these magazines and they are very skilfully done. There is a strange exterior semblance of life in the people who parade before us and do for our edification these brave clever or humorous stunts.

  The trick when analyzed is very simple. The appearance of life is given by exterior means entirely. The doctor’s office, the city street, the vacant lot beside the factory, are described with an amazing finality and fulsomeness of detail. Into these places people are cast, wearing ordinary clothes such as a man is accustomed to see wrapped about the bodies of his friends and neighbors.

  There is a kind of legerdemain that with practice may be acquired. Having tricked your reader by these purely mechanical details into having faith in the people you are writing about, you simply make these people do and say things no human being has ever r
eally been known to do or say.

  In the pages of these magazines no one ever acts as people do in life or thinks as people do in life and of course the writers of the stories care nothing for human life. To begin caring for human life, thinking of human life and trying to understand it a little, would so quickly destroy their technique, stop incomes and jerk the writers down off the pasteboard thrones.

  The point is that such writers are, one and all, men who might have been at least half artists under decent conditions. They have been twisted out of their natural function as artists.

  A magazine having a circulation of a million is in a rather ticklish position when it comes to handling any such matter as honest reactions to life. There are so many things the editors of all such magazines have to be careful about. All such basic human attributes as sex hungers, greed and the sometimes twisted and strangely perverted desires for beauty in human beings have to be let alone. The basic stuff of human life that all real artists, working in the medium of prose, have handled all through the history of writing has to be thrown aside. The writer is perpetually called upon to seem to be doing something while doing nothing at all. There is the perpetual tragedy of unfulfilment.

  Every intelligent man knows that, since Eve tempted Adam with the apple, no such thing as a pure man or woman has ever existed in the world but these poor devils are compelled to believe, against all the dictates of their common sense, that purity is a kind of universal human attribute and departure from it a freakish performance. In order that none of the million subscribers be lost or any good advertiser offended they are forced to spend their lives firing off blank cartridges or shooting pith-balls at pig bladder.

  I remember that my father, a man given to outbursts of picturesque cursing, used to sometimes startle us children by some such pronouncement as this (some neighbor had perhaps won his disfavor): “Damn his hide. I hope he has to live all the rest of his days in a pie factory with a muzzle on,” he cried, shaking his fist at the neighbor’s house.

  The man in the street, engaged in the important matter of watching the baseball score, or wondering how he can beat the income tax or the races, will also be wondering what all this has to do with human life in America.

  It has a good deal to do with it I should say.

  When one thinks of America as it was, but a few generations ago, a vast wilderness across which railroads had to be laid, whose forests had to be cut away and whose cities were yet to be built, one can understand that there was a time in America when to be perpetually on the go, to be a hustler and a go-getter, was a kind of moral duty.

  Then perhaps there was no time to be wasted in this foolishness of trying to understand each other, of trying to really call up before ourselves, through the work of our artists, something of the inner quality of lives. To be a go-getter was then perhaps a moral duty. A tree might have fallen on the head of the pioneer who for a moment lost himself in the effort to understand his neighbor. Alertness was the mood of the times.

  It may be now that a time has come to ask ourselves questions.

  Are our lives worth living?

  Is it living at all to spend all of our best years in helping to build cities larger, increase the number and size of our factories, build up individual fortunes, make more dirt and noise and indulge in an ever-increasingly louder talk of progress?

  Or is there a quieter, more leisurely and altogether more charming way of life we might begin to live, here in America, instead of having to run off to Europe to find it?

  Whether the time has come to ask the question or not, it is being asked. That is the most important question the younger generation is asking. A sharp and ever more and more searching criticism of all the old American shibboleths is going on. Books are being written and printed today that simply could not have found a publisher five or ten years ago and a new and vastly more intelligent audience has already been developed for these books. In the future — sometime perhaps — we will have less loud talk of freedom and a more determined individual effort to find freedom for expression of lives.

  When it comes to the Arts it is probably true that there is today more vitality expressed in America in sculpture, painting and writing, than in any of the older cultural centers of Europe.

  The simple fact of the matter is that, if America will but begin to turn more of its natural vitality into the Arts, and if we begin to think more of quality than of quantity and more of living than of accumulating, and also if we can bear, without too much flinching, a determined criticism, I myself believe — and I am far from alone in this belief — that the center of culture for the whole western world may be shifted to America. In short America may become the center for a new channeling of life through the Arts, for a new renaissance.

  In this article I have used the word “culture” several times, perhaps too often. It is a rather dangerous word to use to Americans and frightens some of us horribly. As a people we have always been most fearfully afraid of being called cultural. The idea has become mixed up in our heads with the study of geometry, the translation of Homer in schools, and such things. Not fancying these things we have become almighty proud of our low-browishness. There is however no necessity of our being too proud of our lack of subtlety in definitions.

  ALFRED STIEGLITZ

  OLD MAN — perpetually young — we salute you.

  Young man — who will not grow old — we salute you.

  I DO not know, cannot know, when the thing happened to Alfred Stieglitz that made him a man beloved of many men. It may have been when he was a young fellow but, as he is an American, it perhaps did not happen with him — within him — until he had come into middle life. In any event any man going into the presence of Alfred Stieglitz knows that, on a day long ago, something did happen that has sweetened the man’s nature, made him a lover of life and a lover of men. It has come about that many men go gladly and freely in and out of this man’s presence. Knowing the man you may not agree with his judgments on this or that piece of work, you may say to yourself that he talks too much, is too much and sometimes too consciously the prophet of the new age, but in a moment, and after you have gone out of his physical presence, something happens within you too.

  You are walking in a city street and suddenly you walk more gladly and lightly. Weariness goes out of you. You are in a street lined with buildings, for the most part ugly and meaningless, but something within is now telling you that a breath can blow even this colossal stone and brick ugliness away. Again, and now quite definitely and permanently, you know that although men have blundered terribly in building up the physical world about themselves and although most men have been incurably poisoned by the ugliness created by men there is at the very heart of humanity a something sweet and sound that has always found and always will find among men, here and there, an individual to strive all his life to give voice to man’s inner sweetness and health.

  As for myself, I have quite definitely come to the conclusion that there is in the world a thing one thinks of as maleness that is represented by such men as Alfred Stieglitz. It has something to do with the craftsman’s love of his tools and his materials. In an age when practically all men have turned from that old male love of good work well done and have vainly hoped that beauty might be brought into the world wholesale, as Mr. Ford manufactures automobiles, there has always been, here in America, this one man who believed in no such nonsense, who perhaps often stood utterly alone, without fellows, fighting man’s old fight for man’s old inheritance — the right to his tools, his materials, and the right to make what is sound and sweet in himself articulate through his handling of tools and materials.

  There is something definite to be said in this matter, something very important to be said. Whether or not I am clear-headed enough to say it I can’t be sure. What I do know is that in some way the figure of Alfred Stieglitz stands at the heart of the matter. What I think, I believe, is that we Americans, in the age that has just passed, have been a very sick people. L
et me speak of that for a moment. To me it seems that the outward signs of that impotence that is the natural result of long illness are all about us in America. It is to be seen in our architecture, in the cowboy plays in our moving picture theaters and in our childish liking of the type of statesman who boasts of walking softly and carrying a big stick. True maleness does not boast of its maleness. Only truly strong men can be gentle tender patient and kindly; and sentimental male strutting is perhaps always but an outpouring of poison from the bodies of impotent men. Might it not be that with the coming into general use of machinery men did lose the grip of what is perhaps the most truly important of man’s functions in life — the right every man has always before held dearest of all his human possessions, the right in short to stand alone in the presence of his tools and his materials and with those tools and materials to attempt to twist, to bend, to form something that will be the expression of his inner hunger for the truth that is his own and that is beauty. A year ago Mr. Gilbert Cannan made this dark and threatening comment on our modern life. “Befoul the workman’s tools and materials long enough,” said Mr. Cannan, “and in the end the workman will turn on you and kill you.”

  I myself think we have gone rather far on the road of befouling. To me it seems that the Ford automobile is about the final and absolute expression of our mechanical age — and is not the Ford car an ugly and ill-smelling thing? And against the Ford car and the vast Ford factories out in Detroit I would like to put for a moment the figure of Alfred Stieglitz as the craftsman of genius, in short the artist. Born into a mechanical age and having lived in an age when practically all American men followed the false gods of cheapness and expediency, he has kept the faith. To me his life is a promise that the craftsmen, who are surely to be reborn into the world, will not have to kill in order to come back into their old inheritance. Against the day of their coming again Alfred Stieglitz has held to the old faith with an iron grip. Through perhaps almost the single strength of this man something has been kept alive here in America that we had all come near to forgetting.