ON the evening when I returned to the town my mood was quite another
one. I was on my way from Chicago to the city of New York. Why had
I wanted to stop? The impulse had come suddenly, as I stood at the
railroad ticket window in Chicago.
It rained when I got off the train and the night promised to be dark
but half an hour later the rain ceased and the stars came out. At
the station I escaped notice. Already in the town I and my struggles
had been forgotten. At the moment when I had so dramatically walked
away from my factory there had been some little local newspaper
furore--“Well-known business man mysteriously disappears. Not known
to have had any troubles,” etc. I went into a baggage check room and
left my bag and then to a ticket window where I bought a ticket to New
York on a later train. Both the check room boy and the ticket-seller
were strangers to me. It was evident the town had grown, suddenly and
furiously, as industrial towns do grow. Had it become a centre for the
manufacture of automobiles shoes rubber tires or chewing gum? I did not
know. In the station waiting room ten or twelve people stood or sat
about and several taxi drivers were shouting at the door.
I walked away in the drizzling rain and stood on a bridge until the
night cleared. Now it was plain to me that I had wanted to spend an
evening alone with myself in the midst of the shadows of a former life.
Since I had left the town much had happened. All during the last years
of my life as a manufacturer and later as a Chicago advertising man
I had secretly been writing tales and now they were beginning to be
published. In some places they had been praised, in others blamed. I
had loved the praise. It had made me feel very much as I had felt as a
manufacturer when I had made a little money and had begun to dream of
building a great factory and being father to workmen--that is to say,
rather grand and noble. When my tales displeased people and when some
critic wrote condemning me and calling me a dull or an unclean man I
got furiously angry but always tried quickly to conceal my anger. I
was really so angry that I did not want, on any account, to let the
other fellow know how angry and hurt I was. Often the critic seemed
merely to want to hurt. I had had a moment of exaltation, of joy in
thinking I had penetrated a little into the life story of some man or
woman. The person about whom I had been writing had been swept by some
passion, of the flesh or spirit and I had been swept along with him. At
such times I, as an individual, had no existence. Sometimes I had been
seated writing all night at my desk and could not have told whether I
had been there two hours or ten. Then the morning light streamed in at
my window and my hands trembled so that I could no longer hold the pen.
What a sweet clean feeling! During those hours there had been no life
of my own at all. I had lived but in the characters I was trying to
bring to life in my story and in the early morning light I felt as one
shriven of all grossness, of all vanity, of all cheapness in himself.
The process of writing had been for me purifying and fine. It had been
curative and later I was filled with unholy wrath when someone said
that, during that period of work, I had been unclean or vile.
And most of all I was furiously angry when someone said that the people
of whom I wrote, being only such people as I myself had known, were
of a lower, more immoral, less healthy order of beings. They were not
respectable, were queer and did unaccountable things. I had myself been
a respectable man and at one time in my life all of my friends had been
respectable men and women and had I not known what was underneath the
coats of many such, what they were too? I was furious for the men and
women about whom I had written and furious for myself too but actually,
on the outside, in the face of scurrilous criticism, had always assumed
a sort of heavy bucolic genial manner, something in the manner of a
certain type of benevolent old gentleman I had always detested. “They
may be right,” I said aloud generously when inside myself I thought the
critics often enough only dogs and fools.
I was thinking of myself and my critics as I walked that evening in the
rain and I presume that what I had wanted in coming back thus to the
Ohio town was to try to arrive at some sort of basis for self-criticism.
It was going to be a somewhat difficult undertaking, finding such a
basis, of that I was sure. When I had been doing my writing, unknown
and unseen, there was a sort of freedom. One worked, more or less in
secret, as one might indulge in some forbidden vice. There were the
bankers and others who had put money into my enterprises. They had
expected I would be giving myself wholly to the matter in hand and
I had been cheating and did not want them to know. One wrote tales,
played with them. One did not think of publication, of a public that
was to read. In the evening one came home to one’s house and going
upstairs closed the door to a room. There was before one the desk and
paper.
In a neighboring garden a man was picking potato bugs off potato vines.
His wife came to the kitchen door and began to scold. He had forgotten
to bring home five pounds of sugar from the store and now she was angry
about it. There came one of those strangely vital little domestic
flare-ups, the man with a tin can in which were the captured bugs,
looking ridiculous as he stood listening to his wife, and she in turn
looking unnecessarily angry about the small matter of the sugar.
They were in their garden unconscious of me and I was unconscious of
a dinner being put on a table downstairs in my house, unconscious of
any need of food I would ever feel again, unconscious of the regime of
my own household, of the affairs of my factory. A man and a woman in
a garden had become the centre of a universe about which it seemed to
me I might think and feel in joy and wonder forever. People had outer
motives that seemed to control their lives. Under certain circumstances
they said certain words. Stealthily I went to lock the door of my room.
A domestic regime would be upset by my determination, the affairs
of a certain factory might be ruined by my inattention but what did
all that, at the moment, matter to me? I became cruelly impersonal
and could not avoid becoming so. Had a god been in my way or intent
on disturbing me just then I would have at least tried to brush him
aside. “You Jove, sit in that chair over there and keep your mouth
shut! You Minerva, get down that stairway, go into the front room of my
house and sit in a rocking-chair with your hands folded until I have
attended to the business before me! At the moment I am concerned with
a man standing in a potato patch with a can of potato bugs held in his
hand and with a certain perplexed baffled look in his eyes and in the
eyes of the wife in a gingham apron who is unnecessarily angry about a
trifling matter of sugar not brought home from a store. You must see
that I am a swimmer and have stripped myself of the clothes which are
my ordinary life. You, my dear Minerva, should not stay in the presence
of a naked man. People will say things about you. Get down the stairway
at once. I am a swimmer and am about to leap off into the sea of lives,
into the sea of present-day American lives. Will I be able to swim
there? Will I be able to keep my head above water? That is a matter for
greater gods than yourself to decide. Get out of here!”
* * * * *
Utter obscurity, the joy of obscurity. Why could not one cling to that?
Why the later vanity that made one want to be proclaimed? I remember
an evening alone in my room. I was not always writing. Sometimes I
read the work of other men. There was a scene being depicted by an old
master of prose. Three men were in a little room talking. What was
attempted was that there should be actual words said while the reader
should be given the sense of things felt for which there were no words.
One of the men kept talking in the most affable and genial manner while
at the same time there was murder in his heart. The three had been
eating and now the man who wanted to kill was fingering the handle of a
knife.
I remember that I sat in my room with tears streaming out of my own
eyes. Oh, so delicately and well was the scene being handled! There was
everything in just the way the man’s hands played with that knife. That
told the whole story. The writer had not said too much about it. He had
just, by a stroke of his pen, centred your attention there, upon the
fingers of a hand fiddling with the handle of a knife at the edge of
the table.
How easy to say too much! How easy to say too little! I remember that
I half read through the scene and then put the book down and ran
nervously up and down in my room. “He can’t do it! He can’t do it! No
man can do a thing so beautifully restrained and sure!” Do you think,
dear reader, I cared a hang about the social standing of the three men
in that room, what kind of morals they had, their influence for good or
evil on the characters of others, what they were up to? Indeed I did
not. It is a long time at least since I have been such a child as that.
A master had started to do a scene and I was in mortal terror lest he
fail to draw his line sharp and true. I had never yet drawn my own line
sharp and true, was not man enough to do so, was too timid, too weak
vain and fearful.
But ah, that master, that man who had written the scene I was reading!
Faith came back and I ran to pick up the book and read on and on. Oh,
the delicate wonder of it, the joy of it! At the moment I could have
crawled across the floor of my room and bathed with my happy tears
the feet of the man who in another room long before had held his pen
firmly, had spread upon a sheet of white paper, with such true and
vital an economy of ink, the complete sense of his scene.
* * * * *
Utter obscurity, the joy of obscurity. Why had I not been content with
it? In the nights alone in my room I had realized fully the danger of
coming out of my obscurity and yet never did I write a tale, at all
approaching good handling, but that I must need run down out of my room
and go eagerly from one person to another asking praise. Time and again
I said to myself: “You are an ignorant man. Every artist who goes to
pieces and takes the joy of complete abandonment from his task, and
the joy from his own life too, does so because he lets some outside
impulse, want of fame, want of money, want of praise, come between
him and his materials. The white surfaces before him become muddy
and dirty, the scene before his mind’s eye fades or becomes dim and
blurred.”
These things I had a thousand times said to myself and had made a dream
of a life I was to live. I was to keep in obscurity, work in obscurity.
When I had left the life of a manufacturer I would get, in Chicago or
some other city, a clerkship or some other minor job that would just
provide me with a living and would give me as much leisure as possible.
Well, I would live somewhere in a cheap room on a street of laborers’
houses. Clothes would not matter to me. I would live wholly for
something outside myself, for the white clean surfaces on which, if the
gods were good, I might some day have the joy of writing at least one
finely drawn and delicately wrought tale.
As I had walked away from my factory on a certain day these had been
the thoughts in my mind and now, after two years and after a few of my
tales had been printed and I had been a little praised I was going to
New York for the obvious purpose of doing everything possible to make
myself better known, to strut before the very people I was trying to
understand so that I could write of them fully and truly. What a tangle!
It was a dramatic moment in my own life and if, on that particular
evening as I walked alone in the streets of the Ohio town, I achieved a
certain victory over myself, it was not to be a lasting one. The kind
of workman I had wanted to be I could not be but I did not know it at
the moment. It was not until long afterward I came to the conclusion
that I, at least, could only give myself with complete abandonment to
the surfaces and materials before me at rare moments, sandwiched in
between long periods of failure. It was only at the rare moment I could
give myself, my thoughts and emotions, to work and sometimes, at rarer
moments, to the love of a friend or a woman.
I went from the railroad station along a street and onto a bridge where
I stood leaning over and looking at the water below. How black the
water in the dim light! From where I stood I could look along the river
bottom to the factory district where my own factory had stood. The
bridge led into a street that was in the fashionable residence district
of the town and presently a fat gray-haired old man, accompanied by
a friend, walked past. They were smoking expensive cigars and the
fragrance hung heavy on the air so that I also wanted tobacco and lit
a cigarette. The fat man had formerly been my banker and no doubt had
he recognized me might have told me a tale of money lost through me, of
promises unfulfilled. The deuce! I smiled at the thought of how glad
I was he had not recognized me. Would he have been nasty about the
matter or would he and I have laughed together over the thought of the
foolish impulse in himself that had led him to conclude I was a man to
be trusted and one likely to succeed in affairs--a good banker’s risk?
“Hello,” I said to myself, “I’d better get out of here.” Some of the
men of the town I had succeeded in getting worked up to the point of
investing in the wild business scheme I had formerly had in my head
might at any moment pass along the bridge and recognize me. That might
bring on an embarrassing moment. They might want their money back and
I had no money to give. In fancy I began to see myself as a desperado
revisiting the scene of some former crime. What had I done? Had I
robbed a bank, held up a train, or killed someone? It might well be
that at some time in the future I would want to write a tale of some
desperate fellow’s having got into a tight hole. Now he had to pass,
say in a park, the wife of a man he had murdered. I slunk away off the
bridge, throwing my cigarette into the river and pulling my hat down
over my eyes, becoming in fancy as I passed a man accompanied by a
woman and a child the murderer my own fancy had created. When I had
got to them my heart stopped beating and quite automatically I put my
hand to my hip pocket as though there had been a pistol there. “Well, I
was an enemy to society and if the worst came to the worst would sell
my life as dearly as possible.”
More absurdity in myself, endless absurdities. My own childishness
sometimes amused me. Would it amuse others? Were others like myself,
hopelessly childish? Many men and women seemed, in outward appearance
at least, to comport themselves in life with a certain dignity. All
history was filled with the stories of men who had managed to get
through life with at least an outward dignity. Was all history a lie?
There was a man who owned a bank or an automobile factory or who was a
college professor or a judge. He rode about through the streets of a
city in an automobile, was called a great man. How did that affect him
inside, how did it make him feel? I began now wondering about myself.
Suppose someone were suddenly to call me a great man. I imagined a tall
serious-looking man with whiskers saying it. “He writes novels and
tales. He is a great man.”
And now as there was no one else to say the words set down above I said
them myself and at first I liked the sound of them and then a desire to
laugh took possession of me and I not only wanted to laugh at myself
but I wanted everyone in America to laugh with me, at myself and at
themselves too.
Oh, glorious moment! No more great men again ever, no more bad men or
good men, everyone on to everyone else. Was there a sense of something,
I at that moment felt, in all American people everywhere? In the
old days we Americans had been proud of what we thought of as our
distinctive American humor but lately our humor had pretty much settled
itself down into the universal dullness of the newspaper funny strip. A
really great humorist like Mr. Ring Lardner had come to that. Would it
not be a joke on us all if we were all, already, and in reality, pretty
far beyond any outward expression of ourselves we were getting?
And now I was stumbling about in the dark streets of an Ohio
manufacturing town poking sharp sticks into the tender flesh of myself
and others. There was no one to refute any smart thing I thought and
so I had a good time. Like everyone else I would so love to go through
life criticizing everyone else and withholding from others any right to
criticize me. Oh, the joy of being a king a pope or an emperor!
“Suppose,” I now thought, “everyone in America really hungers for a
more direct and subtle expression of our common lives than we have ever
yet had and that we are all only terribly afraid we won’t get it.”
The notion seemed good. It would explain so much. For one thing it
would explain the common boredom with life and with work characteristic
of so many so-called successful men I had met. Whether he was a
successful railroad-builder or a successful writer of magazine short
stories, the brighter man always seemed bored. Also it would explain
beautifully our American fear of the highbrow. Suppose the brighter men
were really having a good time--on the sly as it were--well, laughing
up their sleeves. And suppose some fellow were to come along who was
really on to the entire emptiness of the whole success theory of life,
the whole absurd business of building bigger and bigger towns, bigger
and bigger factories, bigger and bigger houses, but had decided not to
be a reformer and scold about it. I fancied such a one going blandly
about and really laughing, not fake laughing as in the newspaper funny
strips, made by poor driven slaves who think they must be rich or silly
to get fun out of life, getting the old American laugh back again, the
laugh that came from far down inside, an American Falstaff kind of a
laugh.
Well, now I had got myself into deep water. I had fancied into
existence a man I had not nerve or brains enough to be myself and one
never likes that. The figure my fancy had made annoyed me as I am sure
he would everyone else.
I had gone in the darkness down along a spur of a railroad track to
where my factory had formerly stood and there it was, much as I had
left it except that my name had been taken off the front. There was a
wall of the building that looked up toward the railroad station and
there I had once put a big sign on which was my name in letters three
feet high. How proud I had been when the sign was first put up. “Oh,
glorious day! I a manufacturer!” To be sure I did not own the building
but strangers would think I did.
And now my name was gone and another man’s name, in letters as large
as I had once used, was in its place. I went near the building trying
to spell out the new name in the darkness, hating the name with
instinctive jealousy, and a man came out at a door of the factory and
walked toward me. Oh Lord, it was the former school-teacher, the man
who had once been my night watchman and who was now evidently night
watchman for my successor. Would he recognize me, lurking about the
place of my former grandeur?
I started walking away along the tracks singing the words of an old
ditty my father had been fond of singing in his liquor when I was a
boy and that had at that moment popped into my head, and at the same
time staggering about as though I were drunk. It was my purpose to
make the night watchman think me a drunken workman homeward bound and
I succeeded. As I went away from him, staggering along the track,
singing and not answering when he demanded to know who I was and what
I was doing there, he grew angry, ran quickly up behind and kicked at
me. Fortunately he missed and fortunately I remembered that his eyes
had gone back on him long since. He now grabbed at me but I eluded his
grasp, singing my ditty as I half ran, half staggered away:
“’Twas a summer’s day and the sea was rippled
By the softest, gentlest breeze,
When a ship set sail with her cargo laden
For a land beyond the seas.
Did she never come back? No, she never came back,
And her fate is yet unlearned.
Though for years and years sad hearts have been waiting
Yet the ship she never returned.”