Book IV Note I
I walked about the city of New York looking at people. I was not too young any more and could not make myself over to fit a new city. No doubt certain characteristics of my own nature had become fixed. I was a man of the mid-western towns who had gone from his town to the mid-western cities and there had gone through the adventures common to such fellows as myself. Was there some salt in me? To the end of my life I would talk with the half slovenly drawl of the middle-westerner, would walk like such a middle-westerner, have the air of something between a laborer, a man of business, a gambler, a race horse owner, an actor. If I was, as I then fully intended, to spend the rest of my life trying to tell such tales as I could think and feel my way through, I would have to tell the tales of my own people. Would I gain new power and insight for the telling by having come East, by consorting with other story-tellers? Would I understand better my own people and what had made the tragedies, the comedies and the wonders of their lives?
I was in New York as a guest, as an onlooker, wondering about the city and the men of the city and what they were thinking and feeling. There were certain men I wanted to see, who had written things I thought had given me new lights on my own people, the subjects of my tales.
I dare say there was a good deal of a certain half-rural timidity in me.
There was Mr. Van Wyck Brooks, whose book “America’s Coming-of-Age,” had moved me deeply. He with Mr. Waldo Frank, Paul Rosenfeld, James Oppenheim and others had just started a magazine, The Seven Arts (that after its death was to be replaced by The Dial, published by a quite different group), and the magazine had not only offered to publish some of my things but its editors had asked me to come to see them.
I wanted to go and was at the same time a little afraid. At that time there was a good deal of talk abroad as to a new artistic awakening in America. Mr. Waldo Frank’s “Our America” must have been in preparation at just about that time and it could not have been much later that Mr. William Allen White wrote in The New Republic, an article the import of which was that “The King is dead! Long live the King!” If there were new kings in the land, I wanted to see and consort with them if I could.
As for The Seven Arts magazine, there had been rumors of its coming birth, even in Chicago. Miss Edna Kenton had come from New York to Chicago at about that time and a meeting was held. There was a large party in a large house and upstairs somewhere the new day was under discussion. We, downstairs, did not just know what was being discussed but there was a kind of tingling sensation in the air. Little groups of us gathered in the rooms below. “What’s up?” It is to be remembered this was in Chicago and we were all young and no doubt naïve. “What they whispering about upstairs?” “Don’t you know?” Not to know was, we all felt, a kind of cultural blight. I had run from one group to another trying to find out and at just that moment a young doctor, who in his spare moments wrote poetry, came into the house and went hurriedly upstairs. A rather ribald fellow among the guests—Ben Hecht perhaps—who like the rest of us was angry that he had not been let into the secret, made an announcement. “I know what it is. Someone’s having a baby,” he said.
What about the men of New York, the writers whose work I admired, the painters whose work I admired? I had always wanted to be a painter myself, was always having sensations and seeing forms that could perhaps have been expressed in paint and in no other way but the materials of the painter’s craft seemed to me to lie far outside my way of life. One had to know drawing, to know what green did to yellow and yellow to brown. When one talked to painters they spoke of things that lay far outside one’s pathway. There had been one painter I had known quite well. He had lived in a room near my own in Chicago and painted landscapes. Rather he painted one landscape over and over. There was an old stone building that looked like pictures one had seen of peasants’ cottages. It was evening and two cows were coming home along a road, to a barn one fancied, but the barn could not be seen for the deep shadows that had gathered behind the house. Then there were some trees, the tops of which could be but faintly seen on the horizon. The last rays of the sun had splashed the sky with red. Often in the evening the painter, a large man with red hair, came into my room and spoke to me. He also had been touched with the new day and had read Paul Gauguin’s notebook and a work by Mr. Clive Bell. “The new fellows have nothing on me,” he declared and taking me into his room he showed me half a dozen of his canvases and how that in one the tops of the trees could just be seen above the roof of the house and in another that there were really no trees at all. “What you think is trees is only clouds,” he declared, “and what you think is the sun going down is really the moon coming up.”
Returning with me to my room he had talked so long and well of the effect of light on color, of form and its significance, of the new cubistic and post-impressionistic movements, the import and significance of which he declared scornfully he had measured and for the most part discarded, that I became frightened and did not for years afterwards try to paint. Once in Chicago I went into a store, intending to buy some colors with which to play at idle moments in my room but a certain air of the clerk had frightened me. My own father, when he was alive, had often received from manufacturers certain cards on which the house-painter’s colors were shown and the trade name of each color printed below and I had thought I might find such a card lying on a counter in the art store but saw none and was ashamed to ask. Perhaps I wanted the clerk to think me a painter who knew his craft. How glibly the red-haired man had reeled off the names of colors. I was like one who has wandered into a church where people are kneeling in prayer. I began walking on tiptoes. “I only wanted to buy a pencil eraser,” I said.
And so now there I was in the city of New York and there were certain men in the city to whom I would have liked to go, to talk with them of my craft, but when I thought of doing so I was afraid.
My own position was something like this: there were in my head certain tales I knew but could not yet tell and certain others I had told but felt I had told badly or haltingly. Was there a certain formula one could learn that might help one out of the difficulty? There was a sense in which I thought of myself as an ignorant man. The tales I had already put down on paper had been as a sort of growth in me. There was The Little Review, run by two Chicago women who had preceded me to New York. They had published tales of mine and might publish more. When I went to see them we had much fun together and Miss Anderson and myself had in common a fondness for rather striking clothes and for strutting a bit upon the stage of life that drew us closely together but being at bottom fellow Chicagoans we were bound not to take each other too seriously—at least not under the rose.
Did I want, above everything else, to be taken seriously? No doubt I did. That may have been the notion I had in coming to the city. And I suppose I wanted also to find superior craftsmen at whose feet I could sit. I already had my own notions concerning American story-tellers in general.
I was walking in the street or sitting in a train and overheard a remark dropped from the lips of some man or woman. Out of a thousand such remarks, heard almost every day, one stayed in my head. I could not shake it out. And then people constantly told me tales and in the telling of them there was a sentence used that intoxicated. “I was lying on my back on the porch and the street lamp shone on my mother’s face. What was the use? I could not say to her what was in my mind. She would not have understood. There was a man lived next door who kept going past the house and smiling at me. I got it into my head that he knew all that I could not tell mother.”
A few such sentences in the midst of a conversation overheard or dropped into a tale someone told. These were the seeds of stories. How could one make them grow?
In telling tales of themselves people constantly spoiled the tale in telling. They had some notion of how a story should be told got from reading. Little lies crept in. They had done something mean and tried to justify some action that for the tale’s sake did not need justification.
There was a notion that ran through all story-telling in America, that stories must be built about a plot and that absurd Anglo-Saxon notion that they must point a moral, uplift the people, make better citizens, etc. The magazines were filled with these plot stories and most of the plays on our stage were plot plays. “The Poison Plot,” I called it in conversation with my friends as the plot notion did seem to me to poison all story-telling. What was wanted I thought was form, not plot, an altogether more elusive and difficult thing to come at.
The plots were frameworks about which the stories were to be constructed and editors were inordinately fond of them. One got “an idea for a story.” What was meant was that a new trick had been thought out. Nearly all the adventure stories and the well-known American western stories were so constructed. A man went into the redwood forests or into the deserts and took up land. He has been a rather mean, second-rate chap in civilization but in the new place a great change comes over him. Well, the writer had got him out where there was no one looking and could do as he pleased with the fellow. Never mind what he had been. The forests or the deserts had changed him completely. The writer could make a regular angel of him, have him rescue downtrodden women, catch horse thieves, exhibit any kind of bravery required to keep the reader excited and happy.
A word of good sense dropped in anywhere would have blown the whole thing to pieces but there was no danger. In all such writing all consideration for human beings was thrown aside. No one lived in such tales. Let such a writer begin to think of human beings, care a little for human beings, and his pasteboard world would melt before his eyes. The man in the desert or in the redwood forests was of course the same man he had been before he went there. He had the same problems to face. God knows we would all flee to the forests or the deserts at once if going there could so transform anyone. At least I know I should waste no time in getting there.
In the construction of these stories there was endless variation but in all of them human beings, the lives of human beings, were altogether disregarded. An Alabama Negro was given the shrewdness of a Connecticut Yankee, a trick that made some writer temporarily famous and brought him wealth. Having made his Negro think like a Yankee, having made him practice all the smart cute tricks of the Yankee, there was nothing to stop the writer producing a thousand tales with the hybrid Negro as the hero of them all. Only the giving out of the patience of the editors or of the public could stop him, and both seemed inexhaustible.
As to what the writer himself suffered under these circumstances, that was a different matter. One supposed that any man who attempted the writer’s craft had, at the beginning, some real interest in the people about him but this was quickly lost. The imaginative life of the romancer must be lived entirely in a queer pasteboard world.
It was a peculiarity of the writer’s craft that one must of necessity give oneself to the people about whom one wrote, must in a quite special way believe in the existence of these people, and a peculiar childlike credulousness must result to the writer who so completely separated himself from actual life. Having acquired sudden fame and wealth such a writer woke up some morning to find himself irrevocably dead. The actuality of life could not reach him. On all sides of him people suffered, were touched with moments of nameless joy, loved and died, and the manufacturer of society detectives, desert heroes and daring adventures by sea and land could no longer see life at all. With unseeing eyes, deaf ears and benumbed senses he must walk through life—a movie hero, a stage star or a rich and successful manufacturer of romances—no longer a human being at all. One had no notion of giving oneself to that kind of death in life but to find out what one did not want to do was but half the battle.
After all the tales themselves came quickly. In certain moods one became impregnated with the seeds of a hundred new tales in one day. The telling of the tales, to get them into form, to clothe them, find just the words and the arrangement of words that would clothe them—that was a quite different matter. I wanted to find, if I could, the men who would help me toward the solution of that problem.
For even an unknown and unsuccessful scribbler in America the situation is difficult enough. Even the very sweetness of our people in their attitude toward our writers is destructive. You have seen how I myself was allowed to play like a reckless child among advertising men, constantly forgiven for my impudence, often paid an absurd figure for writing an unimportant advertisement—that any one of forty men, not authors, would have gladly written with more care at half my price—simply because I was an author.
Well, I had published certain tales over my own name and my fate was sealed. That the tales were not liked by many of the critics did not matter too much. To be sure, my books did not sell, but I was discussed in the newspapers and literary magazines and my picture was occasionally printed and finally a very second-rate English writer of romances, very popular in our country, spoke well of me and Mr. Frank Harris spoke ill of me.
Ye gods, I was lost and must flee. The very grocer at the corner, with whom I was wont to sit on the steps by the back door of the store on summer evenings while he talked of his life as a young sailor on a lake steamer looked at me with new eyes. He began speaking like a very movie hero. His tales, that had been so naturally and humanly told, became grotesques of tales. The fellow had some idea I might make him the hero of some improbable romance of our inland seas, one always holding the helm in some desperate storm or jumping overboard to rescue some broker’s daughter, and tried heroically to supply me with materials. He had in his youth read some novel of the seas and now he began to lie valiantly, telling me all the desperate escapades of which he had heard or read as having happened to himself. Shades of Defoe and Melville, such a sea and such a sailor’s life as he manufactured! I remembered almost with tears in my eyes the little homely real stories he had formerly been in the habit of telling of himself, and left him never to return. I was even vicious enough to rob him, for his defection, of my grocery trade.
How utterly all my life had been changed by a little public attention! Even some of my friends went the road of the grocer. I remember that I had, at just that time, done a deed affecting my personal life that had lost me the respect of some of my acquaintances. One of them saw my picture, printed I think in the Literary Digest, and immediately afterward wrote me a letter. “You are a great artist and may do anything you please. I forgive you everything,” he wrote and as I read the letter my heart went sick within me. “At any rate why do they want to dehumanize us?” I asked myself. Violently then I cursed the romancers. They were in reality at the bottom of it all. Not satisfied with the cowboys the sailors and the detectives they had descended upon their brothers of the pen and the brush. A poet was a certain kind of man with long hair and no food who went about muttering to himself. There was no escape for him. That he was and his fate was fixed. To be sure I had myself known some American poets and had found them in their everyday life much like all the other people I knew except that they were a trifle more sensitive to life and its beauties and, before they became widely known as poets, sometimes wrote beautiful bits describing their inner reaction to some flash of beauty that had come to them. They were that before they became widely known as poets and then later they were usually goners.
That was how it was with the poet. The painter usually starved in a garret and went about his small room pale and emaciated, with a palette stuck on his thumb, and then one day a lovely lady came along the street, saw how that he was a genius and married him. I’ll say this for us scribblers and the actors. We got off better. We usually, in the romances, sat on a park bench with the tramps and had a dirty newspaper blown to us by a cold wind. On the front page of the newspaper was a large picture of ourselves and an announcement that fame had come. Then we went and bought the tramps a breakfast with our last dollar before we went to live in a great house with servants. We scribblers and the actors got off the least shamefully in the romances but then, it is to be remembered, fellows of our own craft got up these yarns that had so stuck in the public mind and that they had for that reason perhaps a little pity for us.
All of this however concerned the materials for tales. One had to do one’s own winnowing in any event. I was in New York and was after something other than stories. Would I find what I wanted? I was somewhat afraid of the writers, particularly of the ones whose work I most admired because I thought they must be a special kind of being, quite different from the men I had known. (No doubt I was myself the victim of the same romancers I have just been cursing.) There were certain men I thought had written of America and American writing with an understanding that had been a help to me. I was what I was, a rough and tumble participant in life. As yet there had been little time for study, for quiet thought.
As for these other men, the fellows of the East, what of them? I fancied in them an erudition the contemplation of which made me afraid. Now I understood how Mark Twain felt when he went up to Boston. Did he, like myself, want something without knowing just what he wanted?
For such men as myself you must understand there is always a great difficulty about telling the tale after the scent has been picked up. The tales that continually came to me in the way indicated above could of course not become tales until I had clothed them. Having, from a conversation overheard or in some other way, got the tone of a tale, I was like a woman who has just become impregnated. Something was growing inside me. At night when I lay in my bed I could feel the heels of the tale kicking against the walls of my body. Often as I lay thus every word of the tale came to me quite clearly but when I got out of bed to write it down the words would not come.
I had constantly to seek in roads new to me. Other men had felt what I had felt, had seen what I had seen—how had they met the difficulties I faced? My father when he told his tales walked up and down the room before his audience. He pushed out little experimental sentences and watched his audience narrowly. There was a dull-eyed old farmer sitting in a corner of the room. Father had his eyes on the fellow. “I’ll get him,” he said to himself. He watched the farmer’s eyes. When the experimental sentence he had tried did not get anywhere he tried another and kept trying. Beside words he had—to help the telling of his tales—the advantage of being able to act out those parts for which he could find no words. He could frown, shake his fists, smile, let a look of pain or annoyance drift over his face.
These were his advantages that I had to give up if I was to write my tales rather than tell them and how often I had cursed my fate.
How significant words had become to me! At about this time an American woman living in Paris, Miss Gertrude Stein, had published a book called “Tender Buttons” and it had come into my hands. How it had excited me! Here was something purely experimental and dealing in words separated from sense—in the ordinary meaning of the word sense—an approach I was sure the poets must often be compelled to make. Was it an approach that would help me? I decided to try it.
A year or two before the time of which I am now writing an American painter, Mr. Felix Russman, had taken me one day into his workshop to show me his colors. He laid them out on a table before me and then his wife called him out of the room and he stayed for half an hour. It had been one of the most exciting moments of my life. I shifted the little pans of color about, laid one color against another. I walked away and came near. Suddenly there had flashed into my consciousness, for perhaps the first time in my life, the secret inner world of the painters. Before that time I had wondered often enough why certain paintings, done by the old masters, and hung in our Chicago Art Institute, had so strange an effect upon me. Now I thought I knew. The true painter revealed all of himself in every stroke of his brush. Titian made one feel so utterly the splendor of himself; from Fra Angelico and Sandro Botticelli there came such a deep human tenderness that on some days it fairly brought tears to the eyes; in a most dreadful way and in spite of all his skill Bouguereau gave away his own inner nastiness while Leonardo made one feel all of the grandeur of his mind just as Balzac had made his readers feel the universality and wonder of his mind.
Very well then, the words used by the tale-teller were as the colors used by the painter. Form was another matter. It grew out of the materials of the tale and the teller’s reaction to them. It was the tale trying to take form that kicked about inside the tale-teller at night when he wanted to sleep.
And words were something else. Words were the surfaces, the clothes of the tale. I thought I had begun to get something a little clearer now. I had smiled to myself a little at the sudden realization of how little native American words had been used by American story-writers. When most American writers wanted to be very American they went in for slang. Surely we American scribblers had paid long and hard for the English blood in our veins. The English had got their books into our schools, their ideas of correct forms of expression were firmly fixed in our minds. Words as commonly used in our writing were in reality an army that marched in a certain array and the generals in command of the army were still English. One saw the words as marching, always just so—in books—and came to think of them so—in books.
But when one told a tale to a group of advertising men sitting in a barroom in Chicago or to a group of laborers by a factory door in Indiana one instinctively disbanded the army. There were moments then for what have always been called by our correct writers “unprintable words.” One got now and then a certain effect by a bit of profanity. One dropped instinctively into the vocabulary of the men about, was compelled to do so to get the full effect sought for the tale. Was the tale he was telling not just the tale of a man named Smoky Pete and how he caught his foot in the trap set for himself?—or perhaps one was giving them the Mama Geigans story. The devil. What had the words of such a tale to do with Thackeray or Fielding? Did the men to whom one told the tale not know a dozen Smoky Petes and Mama Geigans? Had one ventured into the classic English models for tale-telling at that moment there would have been a roar. “What the devil! Don’t you go high-toning us!”
And it was sure one did not always seek a laugh from his audience. Sometimes one wanted to move the audience, make them squirm with sympathy. Perhaps one wanted to throw an altogether new light on a tale the audience already knew.
Would the common words of our daily speech in shops and offices do the trick? Surely the Americans among whom one sat talking had felt everything the Greeks had felt, everything the English felt? Deaths came to them, the tricks of fate assailed their lives. I was certain none of them lived felt or talked as the average American novel made them live feel and talk and as for the plot short stories of the magazines—those bastard children of De Maupassant, Poe and O. Henry—it was certain there were no plot short stories ever lived in any life I had known anything about.
Did it come to this, that Americans worked, made love, settled new western states, arranged their personal affairs, drove their fords, using one language while they read books, wanted perhaps to read books, in quite another language?
I had come to Gertrude Stein’s book about which everyone laughed but about which I did not laugh. It excited me as one might grow excited in going into a new and wonderful country where everything is strange—a sort of Lewis and Clark expedition for me. Here were words laid before me as the painter had laid the color pans on the table in my presence. My mind did a kind of jerking flop and after Miss Stein’s book had come into my hands I spent days going about with a tablet of paper in my pocket and making new and strange combinations of words. The result was I thought a new familiarity with the words of my own vocabulary. I became a little conscious where before I had been unconscious. Perhaps it was then I really fell in love with words, wanted to give each word I used every chance to show itself at its best.
It had then not occurred to me that the men I had really come to New York hoping to see and know, fellows of the schools, men who knew their Europe, knew the history of the arts, who knew a thousand things I could not know, it had never occurred to me that in the end I would find them as frankly puzzled as myself. When I found that out there was a new adjustment to make. It was then only the trick men, the men who worked from the little patent formula they had learned, the critics who could never get English literature out of their heads, who thought they were sure of their grounds? That knowledge was a relief when I found it out but I was a long long time finding it out. It takes a long time to find out one’s own limitations and perhaps a longer time to find out the limitations of one’s critics.
Was there really something new in the air of America? I remember that at about this time someone told me that I was myself something new and how thankful I was to hear it. “Very well,” I said to myself, “if there are certain men launching a new ship from the harbor of New York and if they are willing to take me aboard I’ll sure go.” I was just as willing to be a modern as anything else, was glad to be. It was very sure I was not going to be a successful author and well enough I knew that, not being successful, there would be a great deal of consolation to me in being at least a modern.
What I at the moment felt toward all the more deeply cultured men whose acquaintanceship I sought and still in a sense feel toward them was something like what a young mechanic might feel when his boss comes into the shop accompanied by his daughter. The young mechanic is standing at his lathe and there is grease on his face and hands. The boss’s daughter has never been shown over the shop before and is a little excited by the presence of so many strange men and as she and her father approach the lathe where the young workman stands he does not know whether to appear surly and uncommunicative or bold and a bit impudent. (In his place I, being an American, should probably have winked at the girl and been terribly embarrassed and ashamed later.)
There he stands fumbling about with his fingers and pretending to look out of the window and—the devil!—now the boss has stopped behind his lathe and is attempting to explain something to the daughter, “This is a sprocket post, is it not?” he says to the workman, who is compelled to turn around. “Yes, sir,” he mutters, in embarrassment but his eyes, in just that fraction of a second, have taken a sweeping glance at the daughter.
And now she is gone and the workman is asking himself questions. “If I was a swell now I suppose maybe I’d be invited to their house.” He imagines himself in a dress suit going up a long driveway to the front of a grand house. He is swinging a cane and there on the front steps is the boss’s daughter waiting to receive him. What will he talk to her about? Dare a man speak in such company of the only things he knows? What does he know?
He knows that Jack Johnson could probably have whipped Jess Willard if he had really tried. There is a woman lives in his rooming house who is unfaithful to her husband. He knows who with. She is going to have a child but the chances are it is not her husband’s child. Often he has asked himself how she will feel on the night when the child is born and when her husband is so excited and proud.
After all, the young workman knows a good many things of his own sort, but of how many of them can he, dare he, speak with the boss’s daughter whose voice was so soft and whose skin looked so delicate that day when she came into the shop with her father? “Dare I ask her what she thinks the unfaithful wife will be thinking and feeling when the child is born?”
Young workmen have a kind of fear of the thing called culture. Most middle-westerners think of it—in spite of their protestations to the contrary—as in some vague way to be breathed in the air of New York. New Yorkers seem to think of it as to be found in London or Paris. Bankers and manufacturers of the Middle-West hope to get it for their sons by sending them to Yale or Harvard and as there are a good many bankers and manufacturers Yale and Harvard are inclined to be crowded. Mark Twain thought he would find it in Boston—a whole generation of Americans thought that.
To the young workman culture is somewhat like a new suit of clothes that does not fit too well. It binds under the arms when one first puts it on.
Note II
When I lived in Chicago and had first begun to write stories an American critic who had seen some of my work had been very kind about securing the publication of the stories but once, when he was annoyed with me for writing a story he did not like, he wrote me a scolding letter. “You are, after all, nothing but an advertising writer who would like to be something else and can’t make it,” he said and after I had got to New York and had walked about a little looking at the tall arrogant buildings and at the smart alert-looking people in the streets I thought I had better, for the time at least, stay away from the people whose work and whose minds I admired. “They might find out how really little I know,” I said to myself shrewdly.
I was however not too lonely, having plenty of people at whom I could look, to whom I could listen. My brother, who lived in New York, took me to the Salmagundi Club where I saw any number of successful painters and my boyhood friend Mr. John Emerson took me to the Players and Lambs and also, with other men and women I knew, I penetrated into the life of Greenwich Village.
How many strings to grasp! How many things I wanted of the city that was, I had no doubt, the artistic and intellectual capital of the country! The city’s wealth did not impress me too much, as I had been in other wealthy places. One could make money as fast in Chicago as in New York, although it could probably not be spent with quite as much style. What I wanted most was the men who would help me solve certain problems connected with the craft to which I was devoted. Could I find such fellows? Would they do it?
The bitter truth was that of the actors I saw and heard talk none seemed much interested in the craft of the actor and of the painters the same lack of interest in what seemed to me so essential was apparent, and surely we scribblers were no better. The successful men of the arts talked of the market and little else. Writers even went into bookstores to see what kind of books were selling well in order to know what kind of books to write, actors talked of salaries paid and of getting some part that would bring them into prominence and the painters followed the same bent.
Were the successful practitioners of the arts much less decent fellows than the laborers and business men of the Middle West among whom my life had been spent? I was forced to ask myself that question too.
Note III
I sat in a restaurant in New York thinking of my friends George and Marco in Chicago. We had been lads together and I remembered an evening of our young manhood when we all went out to walk together. We had stopped at a bridge and stood leaning over and I remembered that Marco had said something, expressive at the moment of what we had all felt. “The time’ll come, I’ll bet you what you please the time’ll come when I’ll be making my hundred and twenty-five every month,” he had said.
Well, Marco’s remark had expressed something more than a desire to make money. Later all of us had made money and then when youth was gone we had all tried something else. Marco wrote poetry and George and I wrote stories. None of us knew much of our crafts but we had struggled together with them and in the evenings had sat about talking. What we had all wanted was the leisure money might bring. We had all wanted to go to New York and live among men who knew more of the crafts we were trying to practice than we felt we would ever know.
And now I had come to New York and was sitting I in a restaurant where the more successful of the practitioners of the arts congregated. What did I want? I wanted to hear men of my own craft, who loved the craft, speak of it. I remembered how as a boy in mid-western towns before the factories came in so thick the carpenters, wheelwrights, harness-makers and other craftsmen often gathered about to speak of their work and how I loved to be among them at such times. The factories had brushed such fellows aside. Had the same thing happened in the more delicate crafts? Were the great publishing houses of the city and the magazines but factories and were the writers and picture makers who worked for them but factory hands now?
If that had happened I thought I understood the men among whom I had now come. The older craftsmen had thought little on the subject of wages and had never talked on the subject when they gathered in groups in the evenings but the factory hands among whom I later worked had talked of little else. They had talked of how much money might be made and had boasted interminably of their potency in sex. Were the practitioners of the more delicate crafts becoming like them?
In the New York restaurant was a room filled with people, all in some way practitioners of the arts. Near me at a table sat three men and two women. They were talking in rather loud tones and seemed conscious that everything they said was of importance. One had a queer sense of their separateness from each other. Why, when one of them spoke, did he not look at his fellows? Instead he glanced about the room, as though saying to himself, “Is anyone looking at me?”
And now one of these men arose and walked across the room. There was something strange about his walk. I was puzzled and then the truth came to me. All the men and women in the room were obviously aware of what they thought of as their own importance. No man spoke naturally, walked naturally.
The man who had got up from the table to go speak to someone at another table did not want really to speak to him. He wanted to walk across the room for the same reason that I am told, nowadays, it is almost impossible to do anything with actors as they all want to get into one spot on the stage—upstage where the light is the clearest.
What a ghastly separation from life! I sat in the New York restaurant fully aware that what was true of the men and women about me was true also of myself. The people in the restaurant, the actors, painters and writers, had made themselves what the public thought it wanted from its artists, and had been well paid for doing so. What I felt in New York I might have felt with even more terrible certainty in Hollywood.
I fled from the restaurant and at a street corner stopped and laughed at myself. I remembered that at the moment I had on a pair of socks and a neck-scarf, either of which might have been seen for a mile. “At any rate you’re not such a blushing violet yourself,” I said, grinning with myself at myself.
Note IV
It was time surely for me to review myself. I wanted to know just what I was doing in New York, what I was up to—if I could find out. I had time now to ask myself a lot of questions and I enjoyed doing so. Mornings to walk about, afternoons to go to the parks, sit with people or go to see paintings, evenings of my own. No advertisements to write, for a time anyway. “Crescent Soap Lightens the Day’s Work. Tangletoes Catches the Flies,” etc. For a man living as I lived a few hundred dollars would go far. For the American there are always plenty of books to be had without cost and one may see what the more successful painters are doing by simply walking in at the door of a museum or a gallery. The work of the more unsuccessful ones worth seeing Alfred Stieglitz will show you or tell you about. Cigarettes do not cost very much and there are happy hours to be spent sitting by the window of a room in a side street hearing what people have to say as they walk past. All the women of my street spent the time at the same thing. There was a fat old woman across the way who never left the window from morning till night. I wondered if she was planning to write a novel and was thinking about the characters, dreaming of them, making up scenes and situations in which they were to play a part.
If my life in the past had been split into two parts it need be that no longer. I have taken a resolution. In the future I would write no more advertisements. If I became broke I would become a beggar and sit with a beggar bowl in Fifth Avenue. Even the police are sentimental enough not to kick an author out. I would not sit swearing at the book publishers, the magazine editors or the public, that I was not rich. I had not tried to accommodate myself to them—why should they bother about me? I sat dreaming of what might be the takings of an author with a beggar bowl in his lap sitting in front of the Public Library on Fifth Avenue. The press of people would prevent the literarily inclined ladies from stopping to discuss books or to tell the author that his philosophy of life was all wrong. Also they could not accuse him of personal immorality. A beggar could not be immoral. He was at once above and below immorality. And the takings! There would be much good silver and I loved silver. If I should become blind my fortune would be made at last. A blind author sitting begging before the Public Library in the city of New York! Who dare say there was not glorious opportunity left in our country?
Had I less courage than my father? Perhaps I had. He also might have thought of so noble a plan but in my place he might also have put it into execution at once. Ladies often came to the Public Library to meet their lovers. Quarrels started there. One would learn much of life by sitting as I have suggested. No man or woman would hesitate to speak boldly before a beggar. The stones would be cold but perhaps one could have a cushion.
Note V
When I went on my pilgrimage to New York I was not a young man any more. The gray had begun to show in my hair. On the very day after my arrival I chanced to pick up a novel of Turgenev’s, “A House of Gentlefolk,” and saw how that he had made his hero Levretsky an old man, through with life, at forty-five.
Pretty rough on an American who had not dared think of trying to do what he wanted until he was approaching that age. No American dared think of doing anything he enjoyed until youth was gone. Youth must be given to money making among us and leisure was a sin. A short time after the period of which I am now writing I was given the Dial prize for literature, the intent of which was that it was to be given to encourage some young man just starting out on the hard road of literary effort. It had been offered to me and I wanted it but thought seriously of investing in hair dye before going to call on the editors.
So little work of any account done! Mornings coming, noons, nights! Many nights of lying awake in my bed in some rooming house in the city thinking!
I had a penchant for taking my own life rather seriously. Americans in general pretended their own lives did not matter. They were continually talking of devoting their lives to business, to some reform, to their children, to the public. I had been called a modern and perhaps only deserved the title inasmuch as I was a born questioner. I did not take such words people were always saying too seriously. Often enough I used to lie on my bed in my room and on moonlight nights I lit a cigarette and spent some time looking at myself. I lifted up my legs, one after the other, and rejoiced at the thought that they might yet take me into many strange places. Then I lifted my arms and looked long and earnestly at my hands. Why had they not served me better? Why would they not serve me better? It was easy enough to put a pen into the fingers. I myself was perfectly willing to be a great author. Why would not the pen slide more easily and gracefully over the paper? What sentences I wanted to write, what paragraphs, what pages! If reading Miss Stein had given me a new sense of my own limited vocabulary, had made me feel words as more living things, if seeing the work of many of the modern painters had given me a new feeling for form and color, why would my own hands not become better servants to me?
On some nights, as I lay thus, the noise of the great city to which I had come growing fainter as the night wore on, I had many strange thoughts, brought into my head by reading the works of such men as Mr. Van Wyck Brooks or by talking with such men as my friends Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Rosenfeld. My own hands had not served me very well. Nothing they had done with words had satisfied me. There was not finesse enough in my fingers. All sorts of thoughts and emotions came to me that would not creep down my arms and out through my fingers upon the paper. How much was I to blame for that? How much could fairly be blamed to the civilization in which I had lived? I presume I wanted very much to blame something other than myself if I could.
The thoughts that came were something like this: “Suppose,” I suggested to myself, “that the giving of itself by an entire generation to mechanical things were really making all men impotent. There was a passion for size among almost all the men I had known. Almost every man I had known had wanted a bigger house, a bigger factory, a faster automobile than his fellows. I had myself run an automobile and doing so had given me a strange sense of vicarious power, mingled with a kind of shame too. I pressed my foot upon a little button on the floor of the car and it shot forward. There was a feeling that did not really belong to me, that I had in some way stolen. I was rushing along a road or through a street and carrying five or six other people with me and, in spite of myself, felt rather grand doing it. Was that because I was in reality so ineffectual in myself? Did so many of my fellow writers want great sales for their books because, feeling as I did then the ineffectually of their own hands to do good work, they wanted to be convinced from the outside? Was the desire all modern peoples had for a greater navy, a greater army, taller public buildings, but a sign of growing impotence? Was there a growing race of people in the world who had no use for their hands and were the hands paying them back by becoming ineffectual? Was the Modern after all but the man who had begun faintly to realize what I was then realizing and were all his efforts but at bottom the attempt to get his hands back on the ends of his arms? ‘It may be that all the men of our age can at best but act as fertilizer,’ Paul Rosenfeld had said to me. Was what I was then thinking in reality what he had meant?”
I am trying to give as closely as I can a transcript of some of my own thoughts as I lay on my bed in a rooming house in the city of New York and after I had walked about and had talked a little with some of the men I admired. I was thinking of old workers in the time of the crafts and of the new workers I had personally known in the time of the factories. I was thinking of myself and my own ineffectualness. Perhaps I was but trying to make excuses for myself. Most artists spend a large part of their time doing that. In the factories so many of the workers spent so large a part of their time boasting of their sexual effectiveness. Was that because they felt themselves every year growing more and more ineffectual as men? Were modern women going more and more toward man’s life and man’s attitude toward life because they were becoming all the time less and less able to be women? For two or three hundred years the western peoples had been in the grip of a thing called Puritanism. Mr. Brooks and Mr. Waldo Frank, in two books published at about that time, had declared that industrialism was a natural outgrowth of Puritanism, that having renounced life for themselves the Puritans were determined to kill life in others.
I had definite reasons for asking myself many of the questions that came to me as I lay in my bed at night. I had already published several stories and, for some reason I had not clearly understood, many people in reading my stories had been made angry by them. Many abusive letters had been written me. I had been called a pervert, a thoroughly nasty man.
Was I that? I thought if I was I had better find out. My own hands looked all right to me as I lay on my bed looking at them in the moonlight. Were they unclean hands? There had been a few times, for brief periods only, when they had seemed to me to serve my purpose. I had felt something deeply, been quite impersonally absorbed in something in the life about me and my hands had of a sudden come to life. They had arranged words on paper I thought very skillfully. How clean I had felt during just those moments! It was the feeling I had always been seeking. At last, in a crippled way to be sure but after a fashion, my whole being had become a quite impersonal thing, expressing itself on paper through written words. The life about me seemed to have become my life. I sang as I worked, as in my boyhood I had often seen old craftsmen sing and as I had never heard men sing in the factories.
And for what I had written at such times I had been called unclean by men and women who had never known me, could have had no personal reasons for thinking me unclean. Was I unclean? Were the hands that, for such brief periods of my life, had really served me, had they been unclean at such moments of service?
Other thoughts came. Even my friend Paul Rosenfeld had called me “the Phallic Chekhov.” Had I a sex obsession? Was I a goner?
Another American, Mr. Henry Adams, had evidently been as puzzled as I was at that moment although I am sure he would never have been so undignified as to have written, as I am doing here, of himself as lying on a bed in a New York rooming house and putting his own hands up into the moonlight to stare at them.
However he had been equally puzzled. “Singularly enough,” he had said in his book, “The Education of Henry Adams,” “singularly enough, not one of Adams’ many schools of education has ever drawn his attention to the opening lines of Lucretius, though they were perhaps the finest in all Latin literature, where the poet invoked Venus exactly as Dante invoked the Virgin:”
‘Quae, quoniam rerum naturam Sola gubernas.’
“The Venus of Epicurean philosophy survived in the Virgin of the Schools.”
‘Donna, sei tanto grande, e tanta vali,
Che qual vuol grazia, e a te non ricorre,
Sua Disianza vuol volar senz’ ali.’
“All this was to American thought as though it had never existed. The true American knew something of the facts, but nothing of the feelings; he read the letter, but he never felt the law. Before this historic chasm, a mind like that of Adams felt itself helpless; he turned from the Virgin to the dynamo as though he were a Branly coherer. On one side, at the Louvre and at Chartres, as he knew by the record of work actually done and still before his eyes, was the highest energy ever known to men, the creator of four-fifths of his noblest art, exercising vastly more attraction over the human mind than all the steam engines and dynamos ever dreamed of; and yet this energy was unknown to the American mind. An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist.”
Note VI
If Mr. Adams had not spent his time as I was doing, lying on a bed and looking at his own hands, he had at least spent his time looking about. “An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist,” he had said and it was an accusation that an American could neither love nor worship.
At any rate I was a man of the Middle West. I was not a New Englander. For my own people, as I had known them, it was absurd to say they had neither love nor reverence. Never a boy or man I had known at all intimately but that had both in him. We had simply been cheated. Our Virgins and Venuses had to be worshiped under the bush. What nights I had spent mooning about with middle-western boys, with hungry girls too. Were we but trying to refute the older men of New England who had got such a grip on our American intellectual life, the Emersons, Hawthornes and Longfellows? It was perhaps true to say of the intellectual sons of these men that a Virgin would never dare command, that a Venus would never dare exist. I knew little of New England men in the flesh but it was not necessarily true of us, out in my country. Of that I was pretty sure.
As for my own hands I continued looking at them. Questions kept coming. I was myself no longer young. Having made a few bicycles in factories, having written some thousands of rather senseless advertisements, having rubbed affectionately the legs of a few race horses, having tried blunderingly to love a few women and having written a few novels that did not satisfy me or anyone else, having done these few things, could I begin now to think of myself as tired out and done for? Because my own hands had for the most part served me so badly could I let them lie beside me in idleness?
I did not dare make such a surrender, nor did I dare dodge the issue with myself by going off into that phase of New York life I had already come to dislike, that phase of life which allows a man to employ his hands merely in writing smart and self-satisfying words regarding the failures of other men. In reality I was not trying to look at other men’s lives just then and as for other men’s work—it meant something to me when it taught me something. I was a middle-westerner who had come East to school if I could find the school.
I wanted back the hands that had been taken from me if I could get them back. Mr. Stark Young had talked to me one day of what thinking might be and his words kept ringing in my ears. Such words as he had said to me always excited like music or painting. He was a man who had been a professor in colleges and knew what was conventionally called thinking and he had said that thinking meant nothing at all unless it was done with the whole body—not merely with the head. I remember that one night I got out of bed and went to my window. I had a room far over on Twenty-second Street, near the Hudson River, and often, late at night, sailors from the ships lying in the river came along my street. They had been drinking, seeing the girls, having a time, and were now going back to the ships to sail away over the world. One of them, a very drunken sailor who had to stop every few steps and lean against a building, sang in a hoarse throaty voice:
“Lady Lou. Lady Lou.
I love you.
Lady Lou.”
I looked at my own hands lying on the window sill in the moonlight and I dare say had anyone seen me at that moment he might have decided I had gone quite insane. I talked to my own hands, made them promises, pleaded with them, “I shall cover you with golden rings. You shall be bathed in perfumes.”
Perhaps there was an effort to be made I had not the courage or strength to make. When it came to tale-telling there were certain tales that fairly told themselves, but there were others, more fascinating, that needed a great deal of understanding, of myself first and then of others.
Note VII
And so there I was, an American rapidly approaching middle life, sitting in my room over in west Twenty-second Street at night after a day spent listening to the talk of the new men and trying with all my might to be one of the new men myself. Below me in the street the common life of people went on but I tried to put it away from me for the time, was having too good a time thinking of myself to think much of ordinary people. It is a mood that has appeared and reappeared in me at various times and I am trying to clear it out of my system by writing this book. When I have done that I hope to shut up on the subject for keeps. In my book I have had something to say of my father, emphasizing the showman side of his nature. I have perhaps lied now and then regarding the facts of his life but have not lied about the essence of it.
He was a man who loved a parade, bands playing in streets and himself in a gaudy uniform somewhere up near the head of the procession and I have myself had a pretty hard time not making a parade out of my own life.
Some time after the period of which I am now writing, my friend Mr. Paul Rosenfeld was with me in London stopping at the same hotel and one day I got away from him and when he wasn’t watching wandered into a gents’ furnishing store. When he came into the hotel later I took him to my room and displayed before him the things I had bought. He almost wept but there was little he could do. “Don’t,” he said. “Come out of the room. Promise me you won’t wear these things until you get out again to Chicago.”
I was in New York and was the son of my father. The New Movement in the Arts was under way. If it was going to be a parade I wanted, ached, to be in it. Was I but trying to put myself over to the literary world as formerly I had been employed to put over automobile tires to the public?
It was a question I was compelled to keep asking myself as it had something to do with the ineffectualness of my own hands lying before me on the window sill. I kept thinking of middle-western men like Dreiser, Masters, Sandburg and the others. There was something sincere and fine about them. Perhaps they had not worried, as I seemed to be doing, about the whole question of whether they belonged to the New Movement or not. I thought of them as somewhere out in the Middle West quietly at work, trying to understand the life about them, trying to express it in their work as best they could. How many other men were there in towns and cities of that great middle-western empire—my own land—younger men coming along. I had been unable to make my own beginning until most of the stronger years of my own life had passed. Perhaps I could not have begun at all but for them and perhaps, because of them, other men could now begin ten years younger than myself.
“The eastern men, among whom I had now come, were perhaps right in demanding something more than courage from American artists,” I began telling myself. It was apparent there were two steps necessary and it might well be that we middle-western men had taken but one step. One had first of all to face one’s materials, accept fully the life about, quit running off in fancy to India, to England, to the South Seas. We Americans had to begin to stay, in spirit at least, at home. We had to accept our materials, face our materials.
There was one thing, but there was something else too. We had to begin to face the possibilities of the surfaces of our pages.
Ah, here was something very difficult and delicate indeed! Was I right after all in sitting in the darkness of my room and looking at my own hands, pleading with my own hands? Had I really come to New York—not to find out and digest abstract thoughts about American life but to find there the men who would direct me more truly to the training of my own hands for my task?
In the days of the old crafts men became apprenticed craftsmen at fifteen. Had the men of the new day to live nearly three times that long before they found out they need go looking for the masters?
Note VIII
I was living in a rooming house in a side street in New York and had spent more years of my life than I cared to think about in just such places. When I first began writing I used to read a great deal, in George Moore and others, of writers, painters, poets and the like sitting in cafés. That however happened in Paris, not in New York or Chicago. Everyone has read about it. You know how they do. In the evening one by one they come in at the door of the café. On the arm of the painter there may chance to be a beautiful grisette. The writers are less fortunate with the ladies and are glad to sit in silence listening to the talk. And how brilliant the talk! Such things are said! There is always an old wit, someone in the manner of Whistler or Degas. The old dog sits at a table keeping everything in order. I remember that two or three men I knew in New York tried something of the sort but did not quite pull it off. Let someone get a little “hifalutin’”—some scribbler, let us say. Suppose he sighs and says “The beautiful must remain the unattainable,” or something like that. Or let some other scribbler go off on a long solemn pronouncement about government, “All government should be done away with. It’s nonsense.” Bang! The Jimmy Whistler or the Degas of the café has shot him right between the eyes. There was a sense in which Miss Jane Heap of The Little Review supplied the need of such a one in New York, but she and Miss Margaret Anderson could not cover the whole field. That was impossible.
And, in any event, neither New York nor Chicago has any cafés. When I first went to New York drinking was still publicly going on but one stood up at a bar with the foot on a rail and shot the drink into oneself. There might be a moment of conversation with the bartender. “What chance you think the Giants got?” etc. Nothing specially helpful in that and anyway what one secretly hoped was that the White Sox of Chicago would win.
Everyone lived in rooms, except those who had rich parents and most young American artists gathered in the city, ate at cafeterias. In Chicago, before I left, they had begun taking the chairs out of the restaurants and one fancied that, in a few years, all Chicagoans would eat as they drank, standing. It would save time.
We more solemn and serious American scribblers, painters, etc., for the most part lived in rooms and I have myself a memory of rooms in which I have lived, that is like a desert trail. I can no longer recall all of them. In a sense they haunt my whole life. At a little distance they become gray, little gray holes into which I have crept.
And we Americans have enough of the blood of the northern races in us that we must have our holes into which to creep, to contemplate ourselves, to say our prayers. In Paris, during a summer when I loitered there, I found myself able to sit all afternoon in a café, watching the people pass up and down a little street. At another café across a small square a young student made love to a girl. He kept touching her body with his hands and laughing and occasionally he kissed her. That happened and carts passed. One side of my mind made little delightful mental notes. The French teamsters did not make geldings of their horses. Magnificent stallions passed drawing dust carts. Why did Americans unman stallions while the French did not? The teamster walked in the road with his hat cocked to the side of his head and a bit of color in the hat. The stallion threw back his head and trumpeted. The teamster made some sort of sarcastic comment to the student with the girl, who answered in kind but did not quit kissing her. There was a small church on the west side of the square and old women were going in and coming out. All these things happened and I was alive to them all and still I sat in a café writing a tale of life in my own Ohio towns. How natural it seemed, in Paris, to lead one’s secret inner life quite openly in the streets and how unnatural the same sort of thing would have seemed in an American city.
In Chicago alone there had been enough rooms, in which I myself had lived, had hidden myself away, to have made a long street of houses. How much had my own outlook on life been made by the rooms? How much were the lives of all Americans made by the places in which they lived? When Americans grew tired of their houses—or rooms—and went into the street there was no place to sit unless one went into a movie or went to eat expensive and unnecessary food in a crowded restaurant. In the movies signs were put up: “Best place in town to kill time.”
Time then was a thing to be killed. It would seem an odd notion, I fancy, to a Frenchman or an Italian.
Note IX
One goes from Chicago to New York on a modern train very quickly but in the short time while the train is tearing along, while one sleeps and awakens once, one cuts the distance between oneself and Europe immeasurably. To the American, and in spite of the later disillusionment brought by the World War Europe remained the old home of the crafts. Even as the train goes eastward in one’s own country, there is an inner ferment of excitement. Turgenev, Gogol, Fielding, Cervantes, De Foe, Balzac—what mighty names marched through the mind with the click of the car wheels. To the man of the American West how much the East means. How deeply buried the great European craftsmen had been in the soil out of which they had come. How intimately they had known their own peoples and with what infinite delicacy and understanding they had spoken out of them. As one sat in the train one found oneself bitterly condemning many of our own older craftsmen for selling out their inheritances, for selling out the younger men, too. Why were they not more consciously aware of what they, as craftsmen, were at? What had they got—a few automobiles, suburban homes, a little cheap acclaim.
Moments of wrath and then a smile too. “My boy, my boy, keep your shirt on!”
In the next seat a Detroit man talking loudly. “Advertising pays. What you got to do is put it across in a hurry.”
Only yesterday there was myself too, talking so, pounding tables in offices, crying the gospel of size, of hustle.
“Keep your shirt on! Listen! You are starting rather late to do much. Perhaps if you are patient, if you listen work and learn you shall yet tell delicately a few tales.”
As one approaches the Atlantic Coast there is a feeling comes that one, not born, not having lived, through youth and young manhood in the Middle or Far West will never quite understand. Near my own room in the city, lying in the Hudson River, were vessels that to-morrow would set sail for Europe, other vessels that had arrived from Europe but the day before. As I lay on my cot in my room at night I could hear the steamboats crying in the river. At night when there was a fog they were like cows lost in a forest, somewhere out in the Middle West, lost and bawling for the warm barns.
One went down to walk in the street facing the river. People were arriving on boats, departing on boats. They took the whole matter calmly, as one living in Chicago would entrain for Indianapolis. Out in my own country, when I was a boy, going to Europe meant something tremendous, like going to war for example. It was of infinitely more importance than, let us say, getting married. One got married or even went to war without writing a book about it but no man went to Europe from Ohio at least, without later writing a book about his travels. 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 all 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. Thoughts 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. I 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 too! 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 still 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 be 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.
A hot afternoon at Saratoga. I had gone to the races with two men from Kentucky, one a professional gambler and the other a business man who could never succeed because he was always running off to the horse races or some such place with such no-accounts as the little gambler and myself. We were smoking big black cigars and all of us were clad in rather garish clothes. All about us were men just like us but with big diamonds on their fingers or in their neckties. On a stretch of green lawn beneath trees a horse was being saddled. Such a beauty! What a buzz of colorful words! The professional gambler, a small man with crooked legs, had once been a jockey and later a trainer of race horses. It was said he had done something crooked, had got himself into disgrace with other horsemen but of that I knew little. At the sight of such a horse as we were now watching as the saddle was put on something strange happened to him. A soft light came into his eyes. The devil! I had once or twice seen just such a light in the eyes of painters at work, I had seen such a light in the eyes of Alfred Stieglitz in the presence of a painting. Well, it was such a light as might have come into the eyes of a Stark Young holding in his hands some piece of old Italian craftsmanship.
I remember that as the little old gambler and I stood near the horse I spoke to him of a painting I had once seen in New York, that painting of Albert Ryder’s of the ghostly white horse running beneath a mysteriously encircled moon on an old race track at night.
The gambler and I talked of the painting. “I know,” he said, “I like to hang around race tracks at night myself.”
That was all he said and we stood watching the horse. In a few minutes now that tense trembling body would be at ease, fallen into the ease of its long, swinging stride, out there on the track.
The gambler and I went away to stand by a fence. Were men less fortunate than horses? Did men also seek but to express themselves beautifully as in a few minutes now the horse would do? The gambler’s body trembled as did my own. When the horse ran (he broke the record for the mile, that day) he and I did not speak to each other. We had together seen something we together loved. Was it enough? “At least,” I told myself, “we men have a kind of consciousness that perhaps the horses haven’t. We have this consciousness of one another. That is what love is, perhaps.”
There was a child, a young boy of fourteen walking beside his mother in a park at Cleveland, Ohio. I sat on a bench there and saw him go by and after that one moment of his passing never saw him again but I’ll never forget while I live. The moment was like the moment of the running of the horse. Could it be that it was the boy’s most beautiful moment? Well, I had seen it. Why was I not made to be a painter? The boy’s head was thrown a little back, he had black curly hair and carried his hat in his hand. In just that moment of his passing the bench on which I sat his young body was all alive, all of the senses fully alive. Whose son was he? Such a living thing as that, to be thrown into the life of Cleveland, Ohio or of Paris or Venice either for that matter.
I am always having those moments of checking up like a miser closing the shutters of his house at night to count his gold before he goes to bed and although there are many notes on which I might close this book on my own imaginative life in America, it seems to me good enough to close it just there as I sat that day before Chartres Cathedral beside a man I had come to love and in the presence of that cathedral that had made me more deeply happy than any other work of art I had ever seen.
My friend kept pretending to read his book but from time to time I saw how his eyes followed the old tower of the church and the gladness that came into him too.
We would both soon be going back to America to our separate places there. We wanted to go, wanted to take our chances of getting what we could out of our own lives in our own places. We did not want to spend our lives living in the past, dreaming over the dead past of a Europe from which we were separated by a wide ocean. Americans with cultural impulses had done too much of that sort of thing in the past. The game was worn out and even a ladies’ literary society in an Iowa city was coming to know that a European artist of the present day was not necessarily of importance just because he was a European.
The future of the western world lay with America. Everyone knew that. In Europe they knew it better than they did in America.
It was for me a morning of such thoughts, such memories—just there before Chartres with my friend.
Once, in one of my novels, “Poor White,” I made my hero at the very end of the book go on a trip alone. He was feeling the futility of his own life pretty fully, as I myself have so often done, and so after his business was attended to be went to walk on a beach. That was in the town of Sandusky, in the state of Ohio, my own state.
He gathered up a little handful of shining stones like a child, and later carried them about with him. They were a comfort to him. Life, his own efforts at life, had seemed so futile and ineffectual but the little stones were something glistening and clear. To the child man, the American who was hero of my book and, I thought, to myself and to many other American men I had seen, they were something a little permanent. They were beautiful and strange at the moment and would be still beautiful and strange after a week, a month, a year.
I had ended my novel on that note and a good many of my friends had told me they did not know what I was talking about. Was it because, to most Americans, the desire for something, for even little colored stones to hold in the hand now and then to glisten and shine outside the muddle of life, was it because to most Americans that desire had not become as yet conscious?
Perhaps it had not but that was not my story. At least in me it had become conscious, if not as yet well directed or very intelligent. It had made me a restless man all my life, had set me wandering from place to place, had driven me from the towns to the cities and from one city to another.
In the end I had become a teller of tales. I liked my job. Sometimes I did it fairly well and sometimes I blundered horribly. I had found out that trying to do my job was fun and that doing it well and finely was a task for the most part beyond me.
Often enough I sat thinking of my wasted years, making excuses for myself, but in my happier moments and when I was not at work on my job I was happiest when I was in the mood into which I had fallen on the day when I sat before the cathedral—that is to say, when I sat rolling over and over the little colored stones I had managed to gather up. The man with the two women had just dropped another into my hands. How full my hands were! How many flashes of beauty had come to me out of American life.
It was up to me to carve the stones, to make them more beautiful if I could but often enough my hands trembled. I wasn’t young any more, but I had sought teachers and had found a few. One of them was with me at that moment sitting on the bench before the cathedral and pretending to read a book about it. He grew tired of the pretense and taking out a package of cigarettes offered me one, but then found he hadn’t any match. To such confirmed smokers as my friend and myself the French notion of making a government monopoly of matches is a pest. It is like so much that is European nowadays. It is like the penuriousness of an old age of which at least there is none in America. “The devil!” said my friend. “Let’s go for a walk.”
We did walk, down through the lovely old town, the town made lovely not by the men who live there now but by men of another age, long since fast asleep. If we were neither of us so young in years any more, there was a way in which we were both young enough. We were young with that America of which we both at that moment felt ourselves very much a part, and of which, for many other reasons aside from the French monopoly in matches, we were glad in our hearts to be a part.