ON an evening of the late summer I got off a train at a growing Ohio
industrial town where I had once lived. I was rapidly becoming a
middle-aged man. Two years before I had left the place in disgrace.
There I had tried to be a manufacturer, a moneymaker, and had failed,
and I had been trying and failing ever since. In the town some
thousands of dollars had been lost for others. An effort to conform
to the standard dreams of the men of my times had failed and in the
midst of my disgrace and generally hopeless outlook, as regards making
a living, I had been filled with joy at coming to the end of it all.
One morning I had left the place afoot, leaving my poor little factory,
like an illegitimate child, on another man’s doorstep. I had left,
merely taking what money was in my pocket, some eight or ten dollars.
What a moment that leaving had been! To one of the European artists
I afterward came to know the situation would have been unbelievably
grotesque. Such a man could not have believed in my earnestness about
it all and would have thought my feelings of the moment a worked-up
thing. I can in fancy hear one of the Frenchmen, Italians or Russians I
later knew laughing at me. “Well, but why get so worked up? A factory
is a factory, is it not? Why may not one break it like an empty
bottle? You have lost some money for others? See the light on that
field over there. These others, for whom you lost money, were they
compelled to beg in the streets, were their children torn by wolves?
What is it you Americans get so excited about when a little money is
lost?”
A European artist may not understand but an American will understand.
The devil! It is not a question of money. No men are so careless and
free with money as the Americans. There is another matter involved.
It strikes rather deeply at the roots of our beings. Childish as it
all may have seemed to an older and more sophisticated world, we
Americans, from the beginning, have been up to something, or we have
wanted to think we were up to something. We came here, or our fathers
or grandfathers came here, from a hundred diverse places--and you may
be sure it was not the artists who came. Artists do not want to cut
down trees, root stumps out of the ground, build towns and railroads.
The artist wants to sit with a strip of canvas before him, face an
open space on a wall, carve a bit of wood, make combinations of words
and sentences, as I am doing now--and try to express to others some
thought or feeling of his own. He wants to dream of color, to lay hold
of form, free the sensual in himself, live more fully and freely in
his contact with the materials before him than he can possibly live
in life. He seeks a kind of controlled ecstasy and is a man with a
passion, a “nut,” as we love to say in America. And very often, when he
is not in actual contact with his materials, he is a much more vain and
disagreeable ass than any man, not an artist, could possibly be. As a
living man he is almost always a pest. It is only when dead he begins
to have value.
The simple truth is that in a European country the artist is more
freely accepted than he is among us, and only because he has been
longer about. They know how harmless he really is--or rather do not
know how subtly dangerous he can be--and accept him only as one might
accept a hybrid cross between a dog and a cat that went growling mewing
barking and spitting about the house. One might want to kill the first
of such strange beasts one sees but after one has seen a dozen and has
realized that, like the mule, they cannot breed their own kind one
laughs and lets them live, paying no more attention to them than modern
France for example pays to its artists.
But in America things are somewhat different. Here something went
wrong in the beginning. We pretended to so much and were going to do
such great things here. This vast land was to be a refuge for all the
outlawed brave foolish folk of the world. The declaration of the rights
of man was to have a new hearing in a new place. The devil! We did get
ourselves into a bad hole. We were going to be superhuman and it turned
out we were sons of men who were not such devilish fellows after all.
You cannot blame us that we are somewhat reluctant about finding out
the very human things concerning ourselves. One does so hate to come
down off the perch.
We are now losing our former feeling of inherent virtue, are permitting
ourselves occasionally to laugh at ourselves for our pretensions, but
there was a time here when we were sincerely in earnest about all this
American business, “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” We
actually meant it and no one will ever understand present-day America
or Americans who does not concede that we meant it and that while we
were building all of our big ugly hurriedly--thrown together towns,
creating our great industrial system, growing always more huge and
prosperous, we were as much in earnest about what we thought we were
up to as were the French of the thirteenth century when they built the
cathedral of Chartres to the glory of God.
They built the cathedral of Chartres to the glory of God and we really
intended building here a land to the glory of Man, and thought we were
doing it too. That was our intention and the affair only blew up in the
process, or got perverted, because Man, even the brave and the free
Man, is somewhat a less worthy object of glorification than God. This
we might have found out long ago but that we did not know each other.
We came from too many different places to know each other well, had
been promised too much, wanted too much. We were afraid to know each
other.
Oh, how Americans have wanted heroes, wanted brave simple fine men! And
how sincerely and deeply we Americans have been afraid to understand
and love one another, fearing to find ourselves at the end no more
brave heroic and fine than the people of almost any other part of the
world.
I however digress. What I am trying to do is to give the processes
of my own mind at two distinct moments of my own life. First, the
moment when after many years of effort to conform to an unstated and
but dimly understood American dream by making myself a successful
man in the material world I threw all overboard and then at another
moment when, having come back to the same spot where I passed through
the first moment, I attempted to confront myself with myself with a
somewhat changed point of view.
As for the first of these moments, it was melodramatic and even silly
enough. The struggle centred itself at the last within the walls of a
particular moment and within the walls of a particular room.
I sat in the room with a woman who was my secretary. For several years
I had been sitting there, dictating to her regarding the goods I had
made in my factory and that I was attempting to sell. The attempt to
sell the goods had become a sort of madness in me. There were certain
thousands or perhaps hundreds of thousands of men living in towns or
on farms in many states of my country who might possibly buy the goods
I had made rather than the goods made in another factory by another
man. How I had wheedled! How I had schemed! In some years I gave myself
quite fully to the matter in hand and the dollars trickled in. Well,
I was about to become rich. It was a possibility. After a good day or
week, when many dollars had come, I went to walk and when I had got
into a quiet place where I was unobserved I threw back my shoulders and
strutted. During the year I had made for myself so many dollars. Next
year I would make so many more, and the next year so many more. But my
thoughts of the matter did not express themselves in the dollars. It
never does to the American man. Who calls the American a dollar-lover
is foolish. My factory was of a certain size--it was really a poor
haphazardly enough run place--but after a time I would build a great
factory and after that a greater and greater. Like a true American, I
thought in size.
My fancy played with the matter of factories as a child would play with
a toy. There would be a great factory with walls going up and up and a
little open place for a lawn at the front, shower baths for the workers
with perhaps a fountain playing on a lawn, and up before the door of
this place I would drive in a large automobile.
Oh, how I would be respected by all, how I would be looked up to by
all! I walked in a little dark street, throwing back my shoulders. How
grand and glorious I felt!
The houses along the street in which I walked were small and ugly and
dirty-faced children played in the yards. I wondered. Having walked,
dreaming my dream for a long time I returned to the neighborhood of
my factory and opening my office went in to sit at my desk smoking a
cigarette. The night watchman came in. He was an old man who had once
been a school-teacher but, as he said, his eyes had gone back on him.
When I had walked alone I had been able to make myself feel somewhat
as I fancied a prince might have felt but when anyone came near me
something exploded inside. I was a deflated balloon. Well, in fancy,
I had a thousand workmen under me. They were children and I was their
father and would look out for them. Perhaps I would build them model
houses to live in, a town of model houses built about my great factory,
eh? The workmen would be my children and I would look out for my
children. “Land of the free--home of the brave.”
But I was back in my factory now and the night watchman sat smoking
with me. Sometimes we talked far into the night. The devil! He was a
fellow like myself, having the same problems as myself. How could I be
his father? The thought was absurd. Once, when he was a younger man,
he had dreamed of being a scholar but his eyes had gone back on him.
What had he wanted to do? He spoke of it for a time. He had wanted to
be a scholar and I had myself spent those earlier years eagerly reading
books. “I would really like to have been a learned monk, one of those
fellows such as appeared in the Middle Ages, one of the fellows who
went off and lived by himself and gave himself up wholly to learning,
one who believed in learning, who spent his life humbly seeking new
truths--but I got married and my wife had kids, and then, you see, my
eyes went back on me.” He spoke of the matter philosophically. One did
not let oneself get too much excited. After a time one got over any
feeling of bitterness. The night watchman had a boy, a lad of fifteen,
who also loved books. “He is pretty lucky, can get all the books he
wants at the public library. In the afternoon after school is out and
before I come down here to my job he reads aloud to me.”
* * * * *
Men and women, many men and many women! There were men and women
working in my factory, men and women walking in streets with me, many
men and women scattered far and wide over the country to whom I wanted
to sell my goods. I sent men, salesmen, to see them--I wrote letters;
how many thousands of letters, all to the same purpose! “Will you buy
my goods?” And again, “Will you buy my goods?”
What were the other men thinking about? What was I myself thinking
about? Suppose it were possible to know something of the men and women,
to know something of oneself, too. The devil! These were not thoughts
that would help me to sell my goods to all the others. What were all
the others like? What was I myself like? Did I want a large factory
with a little lawn and a fountain in front and with a model town built
about it?
Days of endlessly writing letters to men, nights of walking in strange
quiet streets. What had happened to me? “I shall go get drunk,” I said
to myself and I did go and get drunk. Taking a train to a near-by city
I drank until a kind of joy came to me and with some man I had found
and who had joined in my carousal I walked in streets, shouting at
other men, singing songs, going sometimes into strange houses to laugh
with people, to talk with people I found there.
Here was something I liked and something the others liked too. When I
had come to people in strange houses, half drunk, released, they were
not afraid of me. “Well, he wants to talk,” they seemed to be saying
to themselves. “That’s fine!” There was something broken down between
us, a wall broken down. We talked of outlandish things for Anglo-Saxon
trained people to speak of, of love between men and women, of what
children’s coming meant. Food was brought forth. Often in a single
evening of this sort I got more from people than I could get from
weeks of ordinary intercourse. The people were a little excited by the
strangeness of two unknown men in their houses. With my companion I
went boldly to the door and knocked. Laughter. “Hello, the house!” It
might be the house of a laborer or that of a well-to-do merchant. I had
hold of my new-found friend’s arm and explained our presence as well as
I could. “We are a little drunk and we are travelers. We just want to
sit and visit with you a while.”
There was a kind of terror in people’s eyes, and a kind of gladness
too. An old workman showed us a relic he had brought home with him from
the Civil War while his wife ran into a bedroom and changed her dress.
Then a child awoke in a near-by room and began to cry and was permitted
to come in in her nightgown and lie in my arms or in the arms of the
new-found friend who had got drunk with me. The talk swept over strange
intimate subjects. What were men up to? What were women up to? There
was a kind of deep taking of breath, as though we had all been holding
something back from one another and had suddenly decided to let go.
Once or twice we stayed all night in the house to which we had gone.
And then back to the writing of letters--to sell my goods. In the city
to which I had gone to carouse I had seen many women of the streets,
standing at corners, looking furtively about. My thoughts got fixed
upon prostitution. Was I a prostitute? Was I prostituting my life?
What thoughts in the mind! There was a note due and payable at the
bank. “Now here, you man, attend to your affairs. You have induced
others to put money into your enterprises. If you are to build a great
enterprise here you must be up and at it.”
How often in after years I have laughed at myself for the thoughts
and emotions of that time. There is a thought I have had that is very
delicious. It is this, and I dare say it will be an unwelcome thought
to many, “I am the American man. I think there is no doubt of it. I am
just the mixture, the cold, moral man of the North into whose body has
come the warm pagan blood of the South. I love and am afraid to love.
Behold in me the American man striving to become an artist, to become
conscious of himself, filled with wonder concerning himself and others,
trying to have a good time and not fake a good time, I am not English
Italian Jew German Frenchman Russian. What am I? I am tremendously
serious about it all but at the same time I laugh constantly at myself
for my own seriousness. Like all real American men of our day I wander
constantly from place to place striving to put down roots into the
American soil and not quite doing it. If you say the real American man
is not yet born, you lie. I am the type of the fellow.”
This is somewhat of a joke on me but it is a greater joke on the
reader. As respectable and conventional a man as Calvin Coolidge has me
in him--and I have him in myself? Do not doubt it. I have him in me
and Eugene Debs in me and the crazy political idealists of the Western
States and Mr. Gary of the Steel Trust and the whole crew. I accept
them all as part of myself. Would to God they would thus accept me!
* * * * *
And being this thing I have tried to describe I return now to myself
sitting between the walls of a certain room and between the walls of a
certain moment too. Just why was that moment so pregnant? I will never
quite know.
It came with a rush, the feeling that I must quit buying and selling,
the overwhelming feeling of uncleanliness. I was in my whole nature a
tale-teller. My father had been one and his not knowing had destroyed
him. The tale-teller cannot bother with buying and selling. To do so
will destroy him. No class of men I have ever known are so dull and
cheerless as the writers of glad sentimental romances, the painters of
glad pretty pictures. The corrupt unspeakable thing that had happened
to tale-telling in America was all concerned with this matter of buying
and selling. The horse cannot sing like a canary bird nor the canary
bird pull a plow like a horse and either of them attempting it becomes
something ridiculous.