I HAD become a writer, a word fellow. That was my craft. Flinging aside
the fake devotion that must always be characteristic of all such jobs
as the advertising writing I had been doing for several years I had
accepted my passion for scribbling as one accepts the fact that the
central interest of one’s whole being lies in carving stone, spreading
paint upon canvas, digging in the earth for gold, working the soil,
working in wood or in iron. The arts are after all but the old crafts
intensified, followed with religious fervor and determination by men
who love them and deep down within him perhaps every man wants more
than anything else to be a good craftsman. Surely nothing in the modern
world has been more destructive than the idea that man can live without
the joy of hands and mind combined in craftsmanship, that men can live
by the accumulation of monies, by trickery. In the crafts only one may
exercise all one’s functions. The body comes in, the mind comes in, all
the sensual faculties become alive. When one writes one deals with a
thousand influences that motivate his own and other lives. There is,
first of all, the respect for what has gone before, for the work of the
older craftsmen. One who has written as much as I have written--and for
every word printed there are hundreds I have scrawled experimentally
that will never be printed--has also read much and often with great
joy.
In Russia England France Germany a writer sat writing. Oh, how well he
did his job, and how close I feel to him as I read! What a sharp sense
he gives of the life about him! With him one enters into that life,
feels the hidden passions of peoples, their little household traits,
their loves and hates. There are sentences written by all writers of
note in all countries that have their roots deep down in the life about
them. The sentences are like windows looking into houses. Something is
suddenly torn aside, all lies, all trickery about life gone for the
moment. It is what one wants, what one seeks constantly in one’s own
craftsmanship, and how seldom it comes. The little faky tricks are
always so ready to help over the hard places and when one has used them
there is the little flush of triumph followed by--bah! followed always
by the sick awakening.
One need not go too far afield to find sentences and paragraphs that
stir deeply. No doubt they were in the Indian language before white
men came and the first whites on our shores brought the sense of them.
There was that Fredis, sister of that Norseman Eric, who had come
to America long before Columbus came and had built him a house in
Vinland. The sister was a strong-willed woman who bullied her husband
and was avaricious for wealth. Came sailing to Greenland the brothers,
Helgi and Finnbogi, with a strong ship, and she induces them to go
adventuring with her to Vinland but at the very beginning tricks them.
She in her ship is to have thirty men and they are to have thirty
but unknown to them she conceals an extra five in her own vessel so
that in the far land, where are no white men and white men’s laws are
unknown, she shall have the upper hand. They get to Vinland and she
will not let them stay in the house, built there by her brother Eric,
and they go patiently away and build a hut of their own.
Still she schemes. See now with what truth, what fidelity and clearness
some old writer tells of what happened. Well, the brothers had the
larger and better ship and she wanted that too.
One morning early Fredis arose from her bed and dressed herself, but
did not put on her shoes and stockings. A heavy dew had fallen, and
she took her husband’s cloak, and wrapped it about her, and then
walked to the brothers’ house and up to the door, which had been only
partly closed by one of the men, who had gone out but a short time
before. She pushed the door open and stood silently in the doorway for
a time. Finnbogi, who was lying on the innermost side of the room,
awoke. “What dost thou wish here, Fredis?” She answers: “I wish thee
to rise and go out with me, for I would speak with thee.” He did so;
and they walked to a tree, which lay close by the wall of the house,
and seated themselves upon it. “How art thou pleased here?” says she.
He answers “I am well pleased with the fruitfulness of the land, but I
am ill content with the breach that has come between us, for methinks
there has been no cause for it.” “It is even as thou sayest,” says
she, “and so it seems to me; but my errand to thee is that I wish to
exchange ships with you brothers, for ye have a larger ship than I,
and I wish to depart from here.” “To this I must accede,” says he,
“if it is thy pleasure.” Therewith they parted, and she returned home
and Finnbogi to his bed. She climbed up into the bed and awakened
Thorvard (her husband) with her cold feet; and he asked her why she
was so cold and wet. She answered with great passion. “I have been
to the brothers’,” says she, “to try to buy their ship, for I wish to
have a larger vessel; but they received my overtures so ill that they
struck me and handled me very roughly; that time thou, poor wretch,
will neither avenge my shame nor thy own; and I find, perforce, that
I am no longer in Greenland. Moreover I shall part from thee unless
thou makest vengeance for this.” And now he could stand her taunts no
longer, and ordered the men to rise at once and take their weapons;
and they then proceeded directly to the house of the brothers, and
entered it while the folk were asleep, and seized and bound them, and
led each one out when he was bound; and, as they came out, Fredis
caused each to be slain.
Since I had been a boy it had been such passages as the one above that
had moved me most strangely. There was a man, perhaps one of Fredis’
men, who had seen a part of what had happened on that dreadful morning
in the far western world and had sensed the rest. For such a one there
would perhaps have been no thought of interference. One can think of
him, the unknown writer of the memorable passage above, as even helping
in the dreadful slaying there in the field at the edge of the wood and
near the sea, not because he wanted to but because he would have been
afraid. He would have done that and later perhaps have gone off alone
into the woods and cried a little and prayed a little, as I can imagine
myself doing after such an affair. The woman Fredis, after she had got
what she wanted, swore all her men to secrecy. “I will devise the means
of your death if there is any word of this when we have returned to
Greenland,” she said, and after she had gone home with the two vessels
loaded and had made up her own lie to tell her brother Eric of what had
happened to the brothers and their men in the far place, she made all
of her own men handsome presents.
But there was that scribbler. He would put it down. Fear might have
made him take part in the murder but no fear could now keep his hand
from the pen. Do I not know the wretch? Have I not got his own blood in
me? He would have walked about for days, re-living all of that dreadful
morning scene in Vinland and then when he was one day walking he would
have thought of something. Well, he would have thought suddenly of
just that bit about Fredis crawling back into her husband’s bed, after
the talk with Finnbogi, and how her cold wet feet awoke the man. He
would have been alone in the wood, back there in Greenland, when that
bit came to him, but at once he hurried to his own house. Perhaps his
wife was getting dinner and wanted him to go to the store but he would
have brushed her aside, and sitting down with ink and paper--perhaps
in her angry presence--he wrote all out, just as it is put down above.
Not only did he write, but he read his piece to others. “You will
get yourself into trouble,” said his wife, and he knew what she said
was true but that could not stop him. Do I not know the soul of him?
He would have gone about boasting a little, strutting a little. “I
say now, Leif, that bit, where Fredis gets into the bed and with her
cold feet awakens Thorvard--not bad, eh? I rather nailed her there,
now didn’t I old man?” “But you yourself helped to do the murder, you
know.” “Oh, the deuce now! Never mind that. But I say now, you’ll have
to admit it, I did rather put a spike into my scene. I nailed it down,
now didn’t I, Leify old chap?”