IT must have been about this time that my own imaginative life began
to take form. Having listened to the tales told by my father, I wanted
to begin inventing tales of my own. At that time and for long years
afterward, there was no notion of writing. Did I want an audience,
someone to hear me tell my tales? It is likely I did. There is
something of the actor in me.
When later I began to write I for a time told myself I would never
publish, and I remember that I went about thinking of myself as a kind
of heroic figure, a silent man creeping into little rooms, writing
marvelous tales, poems, novels--that would never be published.
Perhaps it never went quite that far. They would have to be published
sometime. My vanity demanded that. Very well--I had died and had been
buried in some obscure place. In my actual physical life I had been a
house-painter, a workman in a factory, an advertising writer--whatever
you please. I had passed unnoticed through the throng, you see. “I say,
John, who is that fellow over there?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve seen him about. He looks like a movie actor or
a gambler to me.”
You see, I dreamed of something like that--dead and buried away--and
then one day a man is snooping about in a garret in an old empty house.
He finds a pile of papers and begins looking them over, lazily, without
much interest. But look! “Hello here! Say, here is something!”
You get the notion. I’ll not go into it further. It might have been
a good card had I found within myself the courage to play it, but I
didn’t.
As to that first tale of mine and its invention. It grew out of
dissatisfaction with my father and a desire to invent another to take
his place. And professional jealousy may have had something to do with
it. He had been strutting about long enough. “Get out from under the
spotlight for a time, daddy. Give your son a chance to see what he can
do,” I perhaps really wanted to say.
It was fall and father had taken me with him to do a house-painting
job in the country. The year was growing old and bad rainy weather had
come. Perhaps we could not finish the painting job we were about to
begin, but, as father had explained to the farmer who had just built a
new house, we could at least put on a priming coat.
If the worst happened and we lost a good deal of time, waiting
about--“well,” said father winking at me, “you see, kid, we’ll eat.”
The farmer came for us in the early morning, driving in a spring wagon
into which was to be packed the ladders, pots and other materials of
our trade, and by the time we had got to his place the rain, that had
persisted for several days, began again. The carpenters were still at
work inside the house, so that nothing could be done there, and father
went off to the old cabin in which the farmer and his family were
living until the new house could be finished. He would spend the day
gossiping with the women folk or perhaps reading some book he had found
in the house. The farmer had a barrel of hard cider in his cellar. The
day promised to be not too depressing for father.
As for myself, I made the acquaintance of the farmer’s son, a lad my
own age, and we decided to go squirrel hunting in the near-by woods.
“You wait ’til father drives down into the new clearing. He’s going
to bring up some fence posts. Then we’ll take the gun and cut out. If
he gets onto us he’ll give me some job, make me wheel out manure, or
whitewash the henhouse, or something like that.”
We spent the morning and early afternoon tramping through muddy fields
to visit the wood lots on neighboring farms and came home too late for
the noon meal, but my new-found friend managed to get some sandwiches,
made of huge slices of bread and cold meat, and bring them to the barn.
We were tired and wet and had got no squirrels and so we crawled up
into the hay loft and burrowed down into the warm hay.
When we had finished eating our lunch and had got ourselves comfortably
warm my companion, a fat boy of perhaps sixteen, wanted to talk.
We talked as young males do, of hunting and what naturally good shots
we were but that we were not used to just the kind of gun we had been
handling. Then we spoke of riding horses and how nice it would have
been had we both been cowboys, and finally of the girls we had known.
What was a fellow to do? How was he to get close to some girl who
wasn’t too hoity-toity. The fat boy had a sister of about his own age
that I wanted to ask about but didn’t dare. What was she like? Was she
too hoity-toity?
We spoke vaguely of other girls we had been seated near at school,
or had met at boy-and-girl parties. “Did you ever kiss a girl? I
did once,” said the fat boy. “Kiss, eh? Is that all you’ve done?” I
answered, feeling the necessity of maintaining a kind of advantage, due
to my position as a town boy.
The hay into which we had burrowed deeply, so that just our heads were
in the outer air, was sweet to the nostrils and warm and we began to
grow sleepy. What was the use of talking of girls? They were silly
things and had in some queer way the power to unman a boy, to make a
fellow act and feel nervous and uneasy.
We lay in silence, thinking each his own thoughts, and presently the
fat boy closed his eyes and slept.
Father came upon the floor of the stable with his employer the farmer,
and the two men pulled boxes to the door looking out into the barnyard
and began to talk.
The farmer explained that he had come into our country from New
England, from Vermont, when he was a young man, and had gone into debt
for two hundred acres of land, when land could be had cheap. He had
worked and he had achieved. In time the farm had been paid for and
fifty additional acres bought. It had taken time, patience, and hard
labor. Much of the land had to be cleared. A man worked day and night,
that’s how he managed to get on.
And now he was building a new house. “Well,” he had said to his wife;
“Mary, you have been a good wife to me and I want you to have every
comfort.” The house was to have a bathroom and a bathtub. It would cost
money and maybe it would be all foolishness, but he wanted his wife
to have it. When a man was young he didn’t mind splashing about in a
washtub in a woodshed on Saturday evenings, but when he got a little
older and had, now and then, a touch of rheumatism, well, he thought
his wife deserved to have a bathtub in the house if she wanted it, no
matter what it cost.
Father agreed with his host. (It is perhaps as well to think of him
as our host and ourselves as guests since we stayed two weeks and
worked but two days.) He said that he had always felt just that way
himself. Women were the weaker sex and a man had to take that into
consideration. “You take a woman, now, that is like a horse and I don’t
like her,” said father. He spoke of mother as though she had been a
weak, gentle thing, entirely dependent upon the strength in himself in
getting through her life. “I married my wife up in your own state, up
in Vermont,” father said, indulging in one of his characteristic quick
imaginative flights.
And now that he had got a start I knew there was no telling where his
flight might end and I listened for a time, and then, turning away in
disgust, I began working my way downward into the hay. My mother, now
dead, was something I prized. He had just said she was born in Vermont
of an old decayed English gentle family. She wasn’t very strong but
would have children. They were born one after the other, but, thank
God! because of his own great natural strength his boys were strong.
“The one I have out here with me now was born in Kentucky,” he said.
“I took my wife down there on a visit to my own father’s place and he
was born during the visit. I thought his mother would die that time,
but she didn’t--I saved her. Night and day I stayed in her sick room,
nursing her.”
Now he had got himself launched and I knew the farmer would have
no more chance to do his own bragging. Father would invent another
decayed, gentle family in Kentucky to match the one he had just so
lightly brought into existence in the cold barren hills of Vermont.
But I was getting deeper and deeper down into the hay now and the
sounds of his voice grew faint, words could no longer be distinguished.
There was only a gentle murmuring sound, far off--like a summer breeze
just stirring the leaves of a forest; or, better yet, like the soft
murmur of some southern sea. Already, you see, I had begun reading
romances and knew, in fancy, just how the seas of the South murmured
and beat upon coral islands; and then how the fearful hurricane came
ramping along and swept the seas clear of ships. No one reads as a boy
reads. The boy gives himself utterly to the printed page and perhaps
the most blessed of all the tribe of the inkpots are those who write
what we used to call “dime novels”--blessed in their audience, I mean,
to be sure.
So there I was, sunk far down into a mythical Southland, my own
Southland, product of my own imaginings--not father’s. One could go
deep down into the hay and still breathe. All sounds became faint,
even the gentle sound of the snoring of the fat boy some ten feet away.
One closed the eyes and stepped off into a fragrant new world. Mother
was in that new world, but not father. I had left him out in the cold.
I considered the matter of births--my own birth in particular. The idea
of being born in Kentucky--the result of a union between two decaying,
gentle families--did not strike my fancy, not much.
The devil! Even then I felt myself a little the product of a new age
and a new land. Could I then have had all the thoughts I am now about
to attribute to myself! Probably not. But these notes make no pretense
of being a record of fact. That isn’t their object. They are merely
notes of impressions, a record of vagrant thoughts, hopes, ideas that
have floated through the mind of one present-day American. It is likely
that I have not, and will not, put into them one truth, measuring by
the ordinary standards of truth. It is my aim to be true to the essence
of things. That’s what I’m after.
And haven’t we Americans built enough railroads and factories, haven’t
we made our cities large and dirty and noisy enough, haven’t we been
giving ourselves to surface facts long enough? Let us away with the
fact of existence, for the moment at least. You, the reader, are to
imagine yourself sitting under a tree with me on a summer afternoon;
or, better yet, lying with me in the sweet-smelling hay in an Ohio
barn. We shall let our fancies loose, lie to ourselves if you please.
Let us not question each other too closely.
There is America, now. What is America? Whee! I say, now, don’t begin
with such a gigantic question as that.
Let’s think a little about what it isn’t. It isn’t English, for one
thing, and--isn’t it odd?--the notion persists that it is. If we are
ever to have a race of our own here--if the melting pot we are always
talking about ever really melts up the mass--how English, how German,
how Puritanic will it be? Not very much, I fancy. Too many Slavs,
Poles, Wops, Chinese, Negroes, Mexicans, Hindoos, Jews, whatnot, for
the old influences to hold in the end.
But is it not odd how that old notion persists? A few English came and
settled in that far-away frozen northeast corner--New England--and
their sons did the book-writing and the school-teaching. They did not
get themselves--physically--as breeders--very deeply into the new blood
of the land, but they made their notion of what we are and of what we
are to be stick pretty well.
In time, however, the basic cultural feeling of the land must change
too. Mind cannot persist without body. Blood will tell.
And in my own time I was to see the grip of the old New England, the
Puritanic culture, begin to loosen. The physical incoming of the Celts,
Latins, Slavs, men of the Far East, the blood of the dreaming nations
of the world gradually flowing thicker and thicker in the body of
the American, and the shrewd shop-keeping money-saving blood of the
northern men getting thinner and thinner.
But I run far, far ahead of myself. Did my own fancy, even then, as
a boy, lying in the hay in the barn, did it run ahead of my own day
and my own time? Of that I cannot say, but of one thing I am quite
certain--in all my life I have never for a moment subscribed to the
philosophy of life as set forth by the _Saturday Evening Post_,
the _Atlantic Monthly_, _Yale_, “Upward and Onward,” “The
White Man’s Burden,” etc.
There was always within me a notion of another aspect of life--at least
faintly felt--a life that dreamed a little of more colorful and gaudy
things--cruelty and tragedy creeping in the night, laughter, splashing
sunlight, the pomp and splendor of the old tyrants, the simple devotion
of old devotees.
Had I not seen and did I not then sharply remember that old grandmother
from the southeast of Europe, she with the one eye and the quick, dark
and dangerous temper! There were possibilities of cruelty in her. Once
she had tried to kill my sister with a butcher knife, and one could
think of her as killing with a laugh on her lips. Having known her one
could easily conceive of the possibility of a life in which cruelty had
its place too.
At that moment as I lay deeply buried in the warm hay and when the
fancy of my own flesh-and-blood father, down on the floor of the barn,
was giving me a birthright of decaying Germanic gentlefolk the dark old
woman who was my grandmother was more in my line.
And no doubt the warmth of the hay itself may have had something to do
with the setting and the mood of my first invented tale, as you will
perceive as you read of it. Cruelty, like breadfruit and pineapples, is
a product, I believe, of the South.
By the tale, told me by my parents, I had myself been born in a place
called Camden, Ohio, and in the articles touching on my birthplace that
have appeared in newspapers that town has always been named. It was one
of the towns through which father and mother had trekked when they were
first married.
Father must have had a little money at that time, as there is a
tradition of his having been a merchant, and of course there were not,
at that time, so many children. One could get up and out more easily.
Moving, perhaps at night, from town to town, to escape bill collectors,
was not so difficult. And then I fancy that, at first his own people,
from time to time, sent him money. However, I know little of his people
and only have the notion because I cannot conceive of his having earned
it or of his having made it by his shrewdness.
And so he was a merchant then, the grandest thing one could be in a
small Ohio town at that time. He kept shop in places known as Camden,
Morning Sun and Caledonia, Ohio. I believe he and President Harding
once played in the same brass band at Caledonia.
He was in the saddlery and harness business and you cannot fail to
catch the flavor of that. There would be a little shop on the town’s
main street with a leather horse collar hanging on a peg over the
sidewalk before the door. Inside there would be shiny new harness
hanging on the shop walls and, in the morning when the sun crept in,
the brass and nickel buckles would shine like jewels.
Young farmers coming in with great work harnesses on their shoulders
and throwing them with a great rattle and bang on the floor--the rich
pungent smell of leather--an old man, a workman, a harness-maker,
sitting on his horse and sewing a strap--on the floor by the stove a
wooden box filled with sawdust into which the workmen and the visiting
farmers, all of whom would chew tobacco, could spit--
Father prancing about--the young merchant then, with the young
merchant’s heavy silver watch and gold chain--a prospective Marshall
Field, a Wanamaker, a Julius Rosenwald, in his own fancy, perhaps.
“Hello, you, Ted. When you go’en a get that trace sewed up? These
new fangle factory harnesses ain’t worth a tinker’s dam. How’s wheat
looking out your way? No, the frost ain’t all out of the ground yet.
What do you think of elections, eh? D’you hear what that fellow
said--‘all Democrats ain’t horse thieves, but all horse thieves is
democrats’? Do you think Frank Means will make it for sheriff?”
That--in just that tone--and in a small frame house on a side street of
the town myself waiting to be born.
What is a birth? Has a man no rights of his own?