Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  The road is rough. Who, knowing our America and understanding the life in our towns and cities, can close his eyes to the fact that life here is for the most part an ugly affair? As a people we have given ourselves to industrialism and industrialism is not lovely. If anyone can find beauty in an American factory town I wish he would show me the way. For myself I cannot find it. To me, and I am living in industrial life, the whole thing is as ugly as modern war. I have to accept that fact and I believe a great step forward will have been taken when it is more generally accepted.

  But why, I am constantly asked, is crudity and ugliness necessary? Why cannot a man like Mr. Dreiser write in the spirit of the early Americans, why cannot he see fun in life? What we want is the note of health. In the work of Mark Twain there was something wholesome and sweet. Why cannot the modern man be also wholesome and sweet?

  To this I make answer that to me a man, say like Mr. Dreiser, is wholesome. He is true to something in the life about him and truth is always wholesome. Twain and Whitman wrote out of another age, out of an age and a land of forests and rivers. The dominant note of American life in their time was the noisy swaggering raftsman and the hairy-breasted woodsman. Today it is not so. The dominant note in American life today is the factory hand. When we have digested that fact, we can begin to approach the task of the present-day novelist with a new point of view.

  It is, I believe, self-evident that the work of the novelist must always lie somewhat outside the field of philosophic thought. Your true novelist is a man gone a little mad with the life of his time. As he goes through life he lives, not in himself, but in many people. Through his brain march figures and groups of figures. Out of the many figures one emerges. If he be at all sensitive to the life about him and that life be crude the figure that emerges will be crude and will crudely express itself.

  I do not know how far a man may go on the road of subjective writing. The matter, I admit, puzzles me. There is something approaching insanity in the very idea of sinking yourself too deeply into modern American industrial life.

  But it is my contention that there is no other road. If a man would avoid neat slick writing he must at least attempt to be brother to his brothers and live as the men of his time live. He must share with them the crude expression of their lives. To our grandchildren the privilege of attempting to produce a school of American writing that has more delicacy and color may come as a matter of course. I hope that will be true but it is not true now. And that is why, with so many of the younger Americans, I put my faith in the modern literary adventurers. We shall, I am sure, have much crude blundering American writing before the gift of beauty and subtlety in prose shall honestly belong to us.

  KING COAL

  AT one time in my life I lived for nearly a KING year in mining towns, going from one of them to another and doing the work at which I then made my living and the experiences of that year did something to me, left on my sensibilities a kind of raw and tender place that has never quite healed. A great deal of water has run under my particular bridge since that year but sometimes yet I awake at night and find myself in imagination again on the main street of one of those towns and feel again, in the human beings about me, a kind of dreary horror of life unmatched anywhere except in the most dismal slum streets of our cities.

  During the night it is true such towns, seen from some nearby hill, have a kind of magnificence. I walked from the hotel, through the main street, past stores, and in the old days past saloons. Nowadays I dare say the saloons have become bootlegging establishments with a frontage of bottles of grape juice and Coca Cola and their proprietors are more prosperous.

  Some ten or twelve years ago, however, they were poor enough places. And over the goods on the shelves of the general store as over the faces of the idlers in the saloons and the sheets in the beds at your hotel lay a fine thin film of black dust. These millions of tons of black stones that burn, jerked so violently up out of the ground and hurled here and there in long trains over the country to distant towns and cities had not come out of ground without protest. They had at least left this ineffaceable trail of black dust behind. It was everywhere, on the little patches of grass that tried to struggle up out of the ground beside the miners’ houses in the spring, on the leaves of the poor diseased-looking trees scattered about, in the little creases under the eyes of children, in the hems of the garments of the women, in the hair and beards of the men. The little nerves of the nostrils became coated so that there was an almost permanent dulling of the sense of smell and I constantly tasted coal dust in the food at the hotels.

  When at night, however, I had walked through the town and had climbed by a winding earth road into the hills I looked back with a little gasp of astonishment that a thing seen near at hand could be so dismal and dreary and at a distance and at night so magnificent. Perhaps I am destined to get always, when I stand a little away and look at it, these two distinct impressions of every aspect of our industrial age. Always there is this feeling of the futility and the apparent meaninglessness of individual lives against this background of something huge, uncontrolled, and diabolically strong tramping over the land and leaving this black trail of dust behind.

  I was in the hills above a mining town and it was night. In the darkness the sense of black dust lying over everything was lost. As I stood looking down the main street, the stores, with the dirty dust-covered windows, the miserable shed-like houses and the black-faced men tramping homeward through the streets, were lost to sight. Of the mining town in which these men and women were to live out whole lives there was nothing left but the street lamps that now looked like fireflies in the soft darkness below.

  And the mines. The mines make themselves felt in the darkness. If the coal that came from the mines of the town above which I stood was coking coal there was also the long lines of coke ovens stretching away to the right and left and making each a soft glow of light in the darkness.

  Noises arose. There was the rattling bang of a half carload of coal that went roaring down from the tipple. Engines were shunting coal cars about. They had a great rattling machine, larger than a miner’s dwelling, that was bouncing and sorting the coal in a long shed perched high in the air above the mouth of the mine. I got sharply the sense of something huge breathing down there. The imagination leaped across the little space between sanity and insanity. At any rate the miner, the individual man or woman in the town below, became lost. He was now as indistinguishable as an ant, one of the swarm of ants that scurry away in all directions when you have kicked over an ant hill in the fields. Now and then a human could be seen in the distance. There was a glare of light from the headlight of a locomotive or from a torch burning beside the tracks and across the little patch of light the dark figure flitted.

  There was no doubt something living there. Buried away under the ground men were boring and digging and blasting. There was even another railroad beneath the surface of the ground. In the darkness the rows of coke ovens were like the glistening teeth of a giant. Something sleeping in the ground under the hills was being troubled in its inner digestive parts and was ill. The giant was being made to spew forth coal that men in a million houses might be warmed on cold nights and that factories might be run both day and night in many towns and cities. As the Rotary Club member would say, “The old pep was being put into the modern industrial world.” How sad that the process of doing it should involve all this dreariness, this thankless labor and this endless breathing, eating and wearing, like a veil over the garments, this film of black dust.

  As for myself, I suppose there was something in me that perversely would not see splendor where splendor was so obviously intended. Since boyhood I had been told — first by my own father and by the older men of my home town in Ohio, the men who were interested in me and did want with all their hearts to set me going straight in life, and later by other men I met everywhere, in the cities and on trains and in the pages of magazines and newspapers and even by men of the colleges — that a
ll of this roaring noise, this breathing of smoke and black dust, this quick throwing up and tearing down of cities, this thing we so grandiloquently call America’s Industrial Progress, was a thing of meaning. Ye gods of darkness, get ye behind me. Give me eyes to see into the darkness at the foot of this hill. To me the whole thing has no meaning at all. I am unconvinced that mankind is going anywhere by this road. Show me wherein all this tickling of the lining of Earth’s stomach until he becomes ill and spews forth these millions of tons of coal, wherein all this endless blackening of lives has brought anything at all of light beauty or meaning into the life of miner or mine owner, factory worker or stockholder in the shares of factories, and by my ungrown beard I swear I shall join the Elks, the Rotary Club and all the Progress Clubs that will have me and for the rest of my days shall write nothing but pep editorials for Chicago or Detroit newspapers.

  Some evil fate it is that has made me so bad an American. I myself came from a town in Ohio that has not, at the time I write, become the stirring industrial center its Chamber of Commerce would like to make it. But all about it are towns that have been more successfully ambitious.

  I have in mind now such a town. A few years ago it was an American village inhabited only by ex-farmers, by artisans, by a few professional men, doctors, lawyers and the like, and by the merchants. And what another thing altogether it has become now.

  It happened that I saw life in the town in the days before the factories came and before mountains of coal lay heaped beside the railroad tracks.

  The older life in such an American town of the Middle West was not, I suppose, ideal, but I have always had the feeling that something I very much value had begun to grow there before it became choked with coal dust. Mr. Van Wyck Brooks, Mr. Waldo Frank and others who have analyzed the influence of such towns have not told all the story. A little there was recognition of the rights of the individual to his idiosyncrasies. Queer Rabelaisian old fellows who knew how to laugh and how to arouse deep laughter in others abounded. In the stores and on the streets in the evening men talked of baseball, horseracing, the best and fastest way to husk corn and how was the best way to get along with a woman. And there were among us not a few men who had a love for books and learning.

  In the town of which I am now speaking I remember there was an old man who had come there to rest from his adventures. Why he came I cannot say. He had been some sort of officeholder in the South during the reconstruction days after the Civil War and had perhaps made away with unlawful moneys which he thought had better be spent in an obscure place.

  There was a good deal of rascality in him, let us say. Into his old eyes a wicked gleam came at times and I have walked with him and have seen how the figure of a handsome woman in the street made him strut like an old turkey cock, but he did love books and knew well his Shakespeare, his Burns, Milton, Goethe and Keats. To his house I went sometimes on summer evenings with other fellows of the place, mere fledgling boys like myself, to sit on the front porch and to be his guest.

  The house stood with its back to a small river that made a murmuring sound in the quiet evening and from the front porch we could look down, a half dozen blocks, into Main Street.

  We gathered there on summer evenings to hear the old man spout poetry and we did not bring our “girls,” the event being, we felt, a sort of “men only” affair.

  The old man, who perhaps secretly regretted that he had not become a Keene or a Booth rather than a carpet-bagger, was given to moments of a sort of Rabelaisian broadness of development of the theme touched upon by the poet. He had little patches of white hair brushed forward from the back of his skull and as he walked up and down under a hanging lamp inside the house and behind a screen door he made a great business of running his hands through it.

  I get inevitably a sharp contrast between these nights and later nights in the hills above mining towns and in the streets of roaring hustling industrial towns. For one thing there was leisure. The sleeping giant had not really been disturbed under the hills and had not yet set out upon his conquests.

  And in the meantime, on the porch of the old man’s house, we lads sat mightily impressed by his learning and from inside the house came the cadence of the words of the poets.

  Before us lay the short residence street and at the end of that the main street. The Ford and the movies, products also of the Age of Progress, of the Age of Coal, had not yet come and automobiles of any sort were a rare sight.

  We sat, you see, not thinking but having the songs of old singers poured into us. In all the houses along the streets lived people my companions knew. Even at that distance when a man or a woman went across the patch of light that marked the debouchment of the residence street into Main Street he was known to the young men sitting about me, by his gait, by the way he carried his shoulders or by a peculiar swing of the arms. There came a pause in the old man’s proclaiming of the verses of the poets. I am somewhat loath to mention such details to sensitive readers but the truth is the old man was a great chewer of finecut tobacco and had a spittoon in the front room of his house beside the table on which his books lay.

  “Well, now I am going to read you one of the greatest poems ever written in our language.” He always said that no matter what poem he was about to read. He paused to put a fresh quid of tobacco into his mouth and to tuck it away out of the track of his tongue. Did not Demosthenes put little stones so when he spouted poetry by the seashore?

  In any event there was a period of silence and at that moment a man passed through the spot of light at the end of the street. “There goes Ed Prousey. His daughter Emma has got into trouble. I bet you what, Will Tuttle will have to marry her now,” said one of my companions.

  I remember that after such an evening we youngsters walked home rather quietly in the darkness. — I boarded at the house of one Trundle, a teamster, and had to go the last three blocks alone. The man spent his days out of doors doing heavy work and except on Saturdays evenings the house was early silent and dark.

  Perhaps I romanticize this whole matter. I cannot quite make out. It seems to me now that, as I stumbled forward over uneven sidewalks in the darkness and sat afterward in the darkness on the Trundles’ front porch looking at the blue-black summer sky and listening to the occasional night noises, the barking of a dog or the sharp sound of hoof beats on a distant road where some young farmhand was hurrying homeward after an evening in town with his girl; that at such moments something happened to me more deeply significant in my own life than any number of millions of tons of coal mined in a year, the profits and losses of coal mining companies, or the wage to be paid miners. For an hour I sat, and it seems to me that in that hour and by way of the old carpet-bagger something came floating down to me from many men of the old times who, on distant hills and in the streets of cities of an older world, had made songs that now were being resung within me. Sentences that, when the old man read them, had not issued clearly from among the march of many sentences now stepped forth and got themselves looked at and listened to. My lips reformed the sentences the lips of men now dead had formed and, perhaps, caught a little the rhythm, the swing, and the significance of them, and I am sure something of the same sort must have happened to the other lads who had spent the evening with me in the company of the old man. I was at that time intent upon learning the mysteries of the house-painters’ trade and as I went through the streets on the next day clad in my overalls I perhaps met one of my companions of the evening before. We stopped and stood talking for a moment. Then he threw his arms above his head and began stretching and yawning. “I didn’t get to sleep very early last night. After I went to bed I got to thinking and couldn’t sleep at all,” he said.

  The whole point of which meandering tale being, I think, that it is entirely possible that we Americans may some day awaken to find we have long been traveling a blind trail toward fullness of life. It is true, isn’t it, that what we want is leisure, a chance to live more fully? Does not the preamble to our Declarati
on of Independence say something about the pursuit of happiness?

  For my own part the people I know and love all live in industrial towns and are all in some way slaves to that giant we have disturbed in his sleep under the ground, disturbed without really putting the harness upon him. I rather expect I shall myself live and die in such towns and I do not like the prospect, even though I may care greatly for the people who are in the same fix as myself. Things have moved with unbelievable rapidity in not only one but a thousand towns of Mid-America since I sat with my comrades on the porch of the carpetbagger’s house and heard from his lips the voices of poets. Within the year I have revisited that place.

  On the particular street along which we looked on the summer evenings now stands a long row of factories, their grim walls reëchoing at night to the footsteps of a new kind of men. It is quite true and must not be denied. The America of today is not the America of a very few years ago. As to the future America: can a youth spent at the movies, spent whirling through the streets in motor cars, or in the grim residence districts that almost inevitably grow up about factories in our towns or cities, be of the same quality as the youth of the last generation? Surely not. I do not deny to this newer youth its quality. Perhaps the only trouble with me is that there is something here I cannot digest. You see I’m only asking questions after all.

  And there is one question keeps coming back and back, whenever my mind gets on this subject. It seems to me that love has much to do with the fiber and quality of men as citizens of a country and the whole matter of hustling pushing coal-mining factory-building modern life for the most part remains in my mind in the form of annoying and to me unanswerable questions. I find myself going about day after day and asking myself such questions as these: “Can a man love a coal mine or a coal-mining town, a factory, a real-estate boomer, the Twentieth Century Limited, a Ford, a movie or a movie actress, a modern daily newspaper, or a freight car? If a man live in a street in a modern industrial town can he love that street? If a man does not love the little patch of ground on which his own house may stand can he in any sense love the street, the city, the state, the country of which it is a part?” The questions are disquieting. The love of country is to my mind a necessary part of a full and happy life and I do not like to think that love of country may in the end be a thing like modern religion, occasionally pumped into temporary life by some political Billy Sunday and by propaganda in the newspapers.