“There is no lighter burden, nor more agreeable, than a pen. Other
pleasures fail us, or wound us while they charm; but the pen we take
up with rejoicing and lay down with satisfaction, for it has the power
to advantage not only its lord and master, but many others as well,
even though they be far away--sometimes, indeed, though they be not
born for thousands of years to come. I believe I speak but the strict
truth when I claim that as there is none among earthly delights more
noble than literature, so there is none so lasting, none gentler, or
more faithful; there is none which accompanies its possessor through
the vicissitudes of life at so small cost of effort or anxiety.”
--Petrarch’s letter to Boccaccio.
I ONCE knew a devout smoker who went to spend the winter in Havana and
when he had got there and was unpacking his trunk he began to laugh,
realizing suddenly that he had packed the trunk half full of boxes of
cigars, and I have myself on more than one occasion when going from one
city to another on some affair of business carried with me thousands
of sheets of paper, fearing, I presume, that all the stationers in
the new place had died. The fear of finding myself without paper, ink
or pencils is a kind of disease with me and it is with a good deal of
effort only that I restrain myself from stealing such articles whenever
I am left unobserved in a store or in someone’s house. In houses where
I live for some time I cache small stores of paper as a squirrel stores
nuts and at one time in my life I had forcibly to be separated, by a
considerate friend, from something like half a bushel of lead pencils
I had for a long time carted about with me in a bag. There were enough
pencils in the bag to have rewritten the history of mankind.
To the writer of prose, who loves his craft, there is nothing in the
world so satisfying as being in the presence of great stacks of clean
white sheets. The feeling is indescribably sweet and cannot be compared
with any reaction to be got from sheets on which one has already
scribbled. The written sheets are already covered with one’s faults and
oh, it is seldom indeed these sentences, scrawled across these sheets,
can compare with what was intended! One has been walking in a street
and has been much alive. What stories the faces in the streets tell!
How significant the faces of the houses! The walls of the houses are
brushed away by the force of the imagination and one sees and feels all
of the life within. What a universal giving away of secrets! Everything
is felt, everything known. Physical life within one’s own body comes to
an end of consciousness. The life outside oneself is all, everything.
Now for the pen or the pencil and paper and I shall make you feel this
thing I now feel--ah, just that boy there and what is in his soul as
he runs to look in at the window of the neighboring house in the early
evening light; just what that woman is thinking as she sits on the
porch of that other house holding the babe in her arms; just the dark,
brooding thing in the soul of that laborer going homeward under those
trees. He is getting old and was born an American. Why did he not rise
in the world and become the owner or at least the superintendent of a
factory and own an automobile?
Aha! You do not know, but I do. You wait now, I shall tell you. I have
felt all, everything. In myself I have no existence. Now I exist only
in these others.
I have run home to my room and have lighted a light. Words flow.
What has happened? Bah! Such tame, unutterably dull stuff! There was
something within me, truth, facility, the color and smell of things.
Why, I might have done something here. Words are everything. I swear to
you I have not lost my faith in words.
Do I not know? While I walked in the street there were such words came,
in ordered array! I tell you what--words have color, smell; one may
sometimes feel them with the fingers as one touches the cheek of a
child.
There is no reason at all why I should not have been able, by the
instrumentality of these little words, why I should not have been able
to give you the very smell of the little street wherein I just walked,
made you feel just the way the evening light fell over the faces of the
houses and the people--the half moon through the branches of that old
cherry tree that was all but dead but that had the one branch alive,
the branch that touched the window where the boy stood with his foot
up, lacing his shoe. And there was the dog sleeping in the dust of the
road and making a little whining sound out of his dreams and the girl
on a near-by street who was learning to ride a bicycle. She could not
be seen but her two young brothers laughed loudly every time she fell
to the pavement.
These the materials of the story-writer’s craft, these and the little
words that must be made to run into sentences and paragraphs; now
slow and haltingly, now quickly, swiftly, now singing like a woman’s
voice in a dark house in a dark street at midnight, now viciously,
threateningly, like wolves running in a winter forest of the North.
Oh! This unutterable rot spoken sometimes about writing. One is to
consider the morals of the people who read, one is to please or amuse
the people with these words and sentences. One lives in an age when
there is much talk of service--to automobile owners, to riders on
trains, to buyers of packages of food in stores. Is no one to do
service to the little words, the words with which we make love, defend
ourselves with lies after we have killed the friend who stole the woman
we wanted--the words with which we bury our dead, comfort our friend,
with which we are in the end to tell each other, if we may, all the
secrets of our dreams and hopes?
I am servant to the words. Are you to tell me what words I shall put
aside and not write? Are you to be the master of my mood, caught from
yourself perhaps as you walked in the street and I saw you when you did
not see me and when you were more sweet and true in all your bearing
than you have ever been before, or when alas you were more vicious and
cruel. Bah! The words I have put here on this paper!
But there are the clean sheets, the unwritten sheets. On them I shall
write daringly, boldly and truly--to-morrow.
* * * * *
The writer has just come from the stationer’s, where he has got him a
fresh supply of sheets. He had money with him and bought five thousand.
Ah, the weight of them on the arm as he walked off along a street to
his own house. Four thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine times he may
destroy the sheet on which he has been writing and there, lying before
him, will be again the fresh white surface.
Makers of paper, I exclude you from all the curses I have heaped
upon manufacturers when I have walked in the street breathing coal
dust and smoke. I have heard your industry kills fish in rivers. Let
them be killed. Fishermen are, in any event, noisy lying brutes.
Last night I dreamed I had been made Pope and that I had issued a
bull, excommunicating all owners of factories, consigning them to
burn everlastingly in hell, but ah, I left you out of my curses, you
busy makers of paper. Those who made paper at a low price and in vast
quantities somewhere up in the forests of Canada, I sainted. There was
one man--I invented him--named Saint John P. Belger, who furnished
paper to indigent writers of prose free of charge. For virtue I put
him, in my dream, almost on a level with Saint Francis of Assisi.
And now the writer has got to his room and has stacked the bundles
of paper on the desk where he sits to write. He goes to a window and
throws it open and there is a man passing. Who is the man? The writer
does not know but is tempted to throw a dish or a chair at his head,
merely to show his contempt of the world. “Take that mankind! Go to
Hades! Have I not five thousand sheets?”
It is without doubt a moment! In my boyhood I knew an old woodworker
who on Sundays went to walk alone in a forest. Once I was lying on my
back by a clump of bushes and saw his actions when he thought there was
no one about.
What has mankind, in America, not missed because men do not know, or
are forgetting, what the old workman knew? There was Sandro Botticelli
who knew. He was in danger once of becoming married to a woman but
at the critical moment he fled. All night he ran in the streets of
Florence wrestling with himself and in the end won the victory. The
woman was not to come between him and his surfaces, those cathedral
walls, those dumb strips of canvas on which he was to paint--not all
his dreams--what he could of his dreams. Nothing was to come between
him and his materials.
The old woodworker in the forest approached a living tree and then
walked away. He went close again and let his eye travel up along the
tree’s trunk. Then, hesitatingly, lovingly he touched the tree with his
fingers. That was all. It was enough.
It was the workman en rapport with his materials. Oh, there is a
feeling in the breasts of men that will not die. Ages come and go, but
always the feeling is alive, haltingly, in the breasts of the few. To
the workman his materials are as the face of his God seen over the rim
of the world. His materials are the promise of the coming of God to
the workman.
Ford factories cannot kill the love of materials in the workmen and
always and in the end the love of materials and tools in the workmen
will kill the Fords. Standardization is a phase. It will pass. The
tools and materials of the workmen cannot always remain cheap and foul.
Some day the workmen will come back to their materials, out of the
sterile land of standardization. If the machine is to survive it will
come again under the dominance of the hands of workmen, as it already
no doubt is doing, in a hundred, perhaps a thousand unknown places. The
day of re-discovery of man by man may not be so far off as we fancy.
Has there not been, in our own time, a slackening of the impulse toward
purely material ends? Has not the cry for success and material growth
become already a bore to the average American?
These the thoughts of a man. To the boy lying in the silent place on
the Sunday afternoon long ago and seeing the old workman touching so
tenderly the tree that he dreamed might some day become the materials
of his craft no such thoughts.
What happened? Just a tightening of the cords of the boy’s body. There
was an inclination to be at the same time sad and full of joy. A door
had been jerked open by the hand of the workman but the boy could not
see within the house. He was, I remember, known as something of a
“nut” in our town--a silent old chap--and once he went away to work in
a city factory but later came back to his own little shop. He was a
wagon-maker and the making of wagons by individual workmen lasted out
his time. But he had no young workman to whom he taught the love of his
trade. That died with him.
Not quite, perhaps. The picture of the old workman and just the way his
fingers touched the trunk of a tree on a certain Sunday afternoon and
of how, as he walked away along a path, he kept stopping to turn back
and take another look at his materials, stayed in a boy’s mind through
long years of being smart, of trying mightily to be shrewd and capable
in a world where materials did not matter, in the company of workmen
vulgarized by the fact that the old workman’s love of materials was
unknown to them.
* * * * *
The writer with his sheets in a room. Will he accomplish his purpose?
It is sure he will not. And that too is a part of the joy of his fate.
Do not pity the workman, you who have succeeded in life. He wants no
pity. Before him always there is the unsolved problem, the clean white
unwritten sheets, and the workman also knows his moments of surrender,
of happiness. There will always be the moments when he is lost in
wonder before the possibilities of the materials before him.
As for myself I had been, at the time in my life of which I am now
writing, a man of business for many years, had been buying and selling,
but had all the time been secretly scribbling in my room at night.
During the day I for years wrote advertisements--of soaps, of plows,
house paints, incubators for the hatching of chickens.
Was there something hatching in me? With all my scribbling had I
something to say? Were there tales I had picked up I might in the end
tell truly and well? I had seen and known men and women, going from
their homes to their work, going from their work to their homes, had
worked with them in offices and shops. On all sides the untold tales
looked out at me like living things.
I had bought and sold but had no real interest in buying and selling.
All day I wrote advertisements and perhaps the advertisements helped
sell So-and-so many dollars’ worth of goods. As I walked homeward
through streets, across bridges, I could not remember what I had been
writing about.
At times too there was a sharp sense of uncleanliness. In my room the
white sheets looked up at me. I remembered the workman seen in the
forest in the presence of the tree when I was a boy. “I will launch out
upon new adventures,” I said to myself.