There was Mr. Van Wyck Brooks, whose book “America’s Coming-of-Age,”
had moved me deeply. He with Mr. Waldo Frank, Paul Rosenfeld, James
Oppenheim and others had just started a magazine, _The Seven Arts_
(that after its death was to be replaced by _The Dial_, published
by a quite different group), and the magazine had not only offered to
publish some of my things but its editors had asked me to come to see
them.
I wanted to go and was at the same time a little afraid. At that time
there was a good deal of talk abroad as to a new artistic awakening in
America. Mr. Waldo Frank’s “Our America” must have been in preparation
at just about that time and it could not have been much later that Mr.
William Allen White wrote in _The New Republic_, an article the
import of which was that “The King is dead! Long live the King!” If
there were new kings in the land, I wanted to see and consort with them
if I could.
As for _The Seven Arts_ magazine, there had been rumors of its
coming birth, even in Chicago. Miss Edna Kenton had come from New York
to Chicago at about that time and a meeting was held. There was a large
party in a large house and upstairs somewhere the new day was under
discussion. We, downstairs, did not just know what was being discussed
but there was a kind of tingling sensation in the air. Little groups
of us gathered in the rooms below. “What’s up?” It is to be remembered
this was in Chicago and we were all young and no doubt naïve. “What
they whispering about upstairs?” “Don’t you know?” Not to know was,
we all felt, a kind of cultural blight. I had run from one group to
another trying to find out and at just that moment a young doctor,
who in his spare moments wrote poetry, came into the house and went
hurriedly upstairs. A rather ribald fellow among the guests--Ben Hecht
perhaps--who like the rest of us was angry that he had not been let
into the secret, made an announcement. “I know what it is. Someone’s
having a baby,” he said.
What about the men of New York, the writers whose work I admired, the
painters whose work I admired? I had always wanted to be a painter
myself, was always having sensations and seeing forms that could
perhaps have been expressed in paint and in no other way but the
materials of the painter’s craft seemed to me to lie far outside my way
of life. One had to know drawing, to know what green did to yellow and
yellow to brown. When one talked to painters they spoke of things that
lay far outside one’s pathway. There had been one painter I had known
quite well. He had lived in a room near my own in Chicago and painted
landscapes. Rather he painted one landscape over and over. There was an
old stone building that looked like pictures one had seen of peasants’
cottages. It was evening and two cows were coming home along a road,
to a barn one fancied, but the barn could not be seen for the deep
shadows that had gathered behind the house. Then there were some trees,
the tops of which could be but faintly seen on the horizon. The last
rays of the sun had splashed the sky with red. Often in the evening the
painter, a large man with red hair, came into my room and spoke to me.
He also had been touched with the new day and had read Paul Gauguin’s
notebook and a work by Mr. Clive Bell. “The new fellows have nothing on
me,” he declared and taking me into his room he showed me half a dozen
of his canvases and how that in one the tops of the trees could just be
seen above the roof of the house and in another that there were really
no trees at all. “What you think is trees is only clouds,” he declared,
“and what you think is the sun going down is really the moon coming up.”
Returning with me to my room he had talked so long and well of the
effect of light on color, of form and its significance, of the
new cubistic and post-impressionistic movements, the import and
significance of which he declared scornfully he had measured and for
the most part discarded, that I became frightened and did not for years
afterwards try to paint. Once in Chicago I went into a store, intending
to buy some colors with which to play at idle moments in my room but a
certain air of the clerk had frightened me. My own father, when he was
alive, had often received from manufacturers certain cards on which
the house-painter’s colors were shown and the trade name of each color
printed below and I had thought I might find such a card lying on a
counter in the art store but saw none and was ashamed to ask. Perhaps I
wanted the clerk to think me a painter who knew his craft. How glibly
the red-haired man had reeled off the names of colors. I was like one
who has wandered into a church where people are kneeling in prayer. I
began walking on tiptoes. “I only wanted to buy a pencil eraser,” I
said.
And so now there I was in the city of New York and there were certain
men in the city to whom I would have liked to go, to talk with them of
my craft, but when I thought of doing so I was afraid.
My own position was something like this: there were in my head certain
tales I knew but could not yet tell and certain others I had told but
felt I had told badly or haltingly. Was there a certain formula one
could learn that might help one out of the difficulty? There was a
sense in which I thought of myself as an ignorant man. The tales I had
already put down on paper had been as a sort of growth in me. There was
_The Little Review_, run by two Chicago women who had preceded me
to New York. They had published tales of mine and might publish more.
When I went to see them we had much fun together and Miss Anderson and
myself had in common a fondness for rather striking clothes and for
strutting a bit upon the stage of life that drew us closely together
but being at bottom fellow Chicagoans we were bound not to take each
other too seriously--at least not under the rose.
Did I want, above everything else, to be taken seriously? No doubt I
did. That may have been the notion I had in coming to the city. And I
suppose I wanted also to find superior craftsmen at whose feet I could
sit. I already had my own notions concerning American story-tellers in
general.
* * * * *
I was walking in the street or sitting in a train and overheard a
remark dropped from the lips of some man or woman. Out of a thousand
such remarks, heard almost every day, one stayed in my head. I could
not shake it out. And then people constantly told me tales and in the
telling of them there was a sentence used that intoxicated. “I was
lying on my back on the porch and the street lamp shone on my mother’s
face. What was the use? I could not say to her what was in my mind. She
would not have understood. There was a man lived next door who kept
going past the house and smiling at me. I got it into my head that he
knew all that I could not tell mother.”
A few such sentences in the midst of a conversation overheard or
dropped into a tale someone told. These were the seeds of stories. How
could one make them grow?
In telling tales of themselves people constantly spoiled the tale
in telling. They had some notion of how a story should be told got
from reading. Little lies crept in. They had done something mean and
tried to justify some action that for the tale’s sake did not need
justification.
There was a notion that ran through all story-telling in America, that
stories must be built about a plot and that absurd Anglo-Saxon notion
that they must point a moral, uplift the people, make better citizens,
etc. The magazines were filled with these plot stories and most of the
plays on our stage were plot plays. “The Poison Plot,” I called it
in conversation with my friends as the plot notion did seem to me to
poison all story-telling. What was wanted I thought was form, not plot,
an altogether more elusive and difficult thing to come at.
The plots were frameworks about which the stories were to be
constructed and editors were inordinately fond of them. One got
“an idea for a story.” What was meant was that a new trick had been
thought out. Nearly all the adventure stories and the well-known
American western stories were so constructed. A man went into the
redwood forests or into the deserts and took up land. He has been a
rather mean, second-rate chap in civilization but in the new place a
great change comes over him. Well, the writer had got him out where
there was no one looking and could do as he pleased with the fellow.
Never mind what he had been. The forests or the deserts had changed
him completely. The writer could make a regular angel of him, have him
rescue downtrodden women, catch horse thieves, exhibit any kind of
bravery required to keep the reader excited and happy.
A word of good sense dropped in anywhere would have blown the whole
thing to pieces but there was no danger. In all such writing all
consideration for human beings was thrown aside. No one lived in such
tales. Let such a writer begin to think of human beings, care a little
for human beings, and his pasteboard world would melt before his eyes.
The man in the desert or in the redwood forests was of course the same
man he had been before he went there. He had the same problems to face.
God knows we would all flee to the forests or the deserts at once if
going there could so transform anyone. At least I know I should waste
no time in getting there.
In the construction of these stories there was endless variation but in
all of them human beings, the lives of human beings, were altogether
disregarded. An Alabama Negro was given the shrewdness of a Connecticut
Yankee, a trick that made some writer temporarily famous and brought
him wealth. Having made his Negro think like a Yankee, having made him
practice all the smart cute tricks of the Yankee, there was nothing to
stop the writer producing a thousand tales with the hybrid Negro as the
hero of them all. Only the giving out of the patience of the editors or
of the public could stop him, and both seemed inexhaustible.
As to what the writer himself suffered under these circumstances,
that was a different matter. One supposed that any man who attempted
the writer’s craft had, at the beginning, some real interest in the
people about him but this was quickly lost. The imaginative life of the
romancer must be lived entirely in a queer pasteboard world.
It was a peculiarity of the writer’s craft that one must of necessity
give oneself to the people about whom one wrote, must in a quite
special way believe in the existence of these people, and a peculiar
childlike credulousness must result to the writer who so completely
separated himself from actual life. Having acquired sudden fame and
wealth such a writer woke up some morning to find himself irrevocably
dead. The actuality of life could not reach him. On all sides of him
people suffered, were touched with moments of nameless joy, loved and
died, and the manufacturer of society detectives, desert heroes and
daring adventures by sea and land could no longer see life at all.
With unseeing eyes, deaf ears and benumbed senses he must walk through
life--a movie hero, a stage star or a rich and successful manufacturer
of romances--no longer a human being at all. One had no notion of
giving oneself to that kind of death in life but to find out what one
did not want to do was but half the battle.
After all the tales themselves came quickly. In certain moods one
became impregnated with the seeds of a hundred new tales in one day.
The telling of the tales, to get them into form, to clothe them,
find just the words and the arrangement of words that would clothe
them--that was a quite different matter. I wanted to find, if I could,
the men who would help me toward the solution of that problem.
For even an unknown and unsuccessful scribbler in America the situation
is difficult enough. Even the very sweetness of our people in their
attitude toward our writers is destructive. You have seen how I myself
was allowed to play like a reckless child among advertising men,
constantly forgiven for my impudence, often paid an absurd figure
for writing an unimportant advertisement--that any one of forty men,
not authors, would have gladly written with more care at half my
price--simply because I was an author.
Well, I had published certain tales over my own name and my fate was
sealed. That the tales were not liked by many of the critics did
not matter too much. To be sure, my books did not sell, but I was
discussed in the newspapers and literary magazines and my picture was
occasionally printed and finally a very second-rate English writer of
romances, very popular in our country, spoke well of me and Mr. Frank
Harris spoke ill of me.
Ye gods, I was lost and must flee. The very grocer at the corner, with
whom I was wont to sit on the steps by the back door of the store on
summer evenings while he talked of his life as a young sailor on a
lake steamer looked at me with new eyes. He began speaking like a very
movie hero. His tales, that had been so naturally and humanly told,
became grotesques of tales. The fellow had some idea I might make him
the hero of some improbable romance of our inland seas, one always
holding the helm in some desperate storm or jumping overboard to
rescue some broker’s daughter, and tried heroically to supply me with
materials. He had in his youth read some novel of the seas and now he
began to lie valiantly, telling me all the desperate escapades of which
he had heard or read as having happened to himself. Shades of Defoe and
Melville, such a sea and such a sailor’s life as he manufactured! I
remembered almost with tears in my eyes the little homely real stories
he had formerly been in the habit of telling of himself, and left
him never to return. I was even vicious enough to rob him, for his
defection, of my grocery trade.
How utterly all my life had been changed by a little public attention!
Even some of my friends went the road of the grocer. I remember that
I had, at just that time, done a deed affecting my personal life that
had lost me the respect of some of my acquaintances. One of them saw my
picture, printed I think in the _Literary Digest_, and immediately
afterward wrote me a letter. “You are a great artist and may do
anything you please. I forgive you everything,” he wrote and as I read
the letter my heart went sick within me. “At any rate why do they
want to dehumanize us?” I asked myself. Violently then I cursed the
romancers. They were in reality at the bottom of it all. Not satisfied
with the cowboys the sailors and the detectives they had descended
upon their brothers of the pen and the brush. A poet was a certain kind
of man with long hair and no food who went about muttering to himself.
There was no escape for him. That he was and his fate was fixed. To be
sure I had myself known some American poets and had found them in their
everyday life much like all the other people I knew except that they
were a trifle more sensitive to life and its beauties and, before they
became widely known as poets, sometimes wrote beautiful bits describing
their inner reaction to some flash of beauty that had come to them.
They were that before they became widely known as poets and then later
they were usually goners.
That was how it was with the poet. The painter usually starved in a
garret and went about his small room pale and emaciated, with a palette
stuck on his thumb, and then one day a lovely lady came along the
street, saw how that he was a genius and married him. I’ll say this for
us scribblers and the actors. We got off better. We usually, in the
romances, sat on a park bench with the tramps and had a dirty newspaper
blown to us by a cold wind. On the front page of the newspaper was a
large picture of ourselves and an announcement that fame had come. Then
we went and bought the tramps a breakfast with our last dollar before
we went to live in a great house with servants. We scribblers and the
actors got off the least shamefully in the romances but then, it is to
be remembered, fellows of our own craft got up these yarns that had so
stuck in the public mind and that they had for that reason perhaps a
little pity for us.
All of this however concerned the materials for tales. One had to do
one’s own winnowing in any event. I was in New York and was after
something other than stories. Would I find what I wanted? I was
somewhat afraid of the writers, particularly of the ones whose work I
most admired because I thought they must be a special kind of being,
quite different from the men I had known. (No doubt I was myself the
victim of the same romancers I have just been cursing.) There were
certain men I thought had written of America and American writing with
an understanding that had been a help to me. I was what I was, a rough
and tumble participant in life. As yet there had been little time for
study, for quiet thought.
As for these other men, the fellows of the East, what of them? I
fancied in them an erudition the contemplation of which made me afraid.
Now I understood how Mark Twain felt when he went up to Boston. Did he,
like myself, want something without knowing just what he wanted?
For such men as myself you must understand there is always a great
difficulty about telling the tale after the scent has been picked up.
The tales that continually came to me in the way indicated above could
of course not become tales until I had clothed them. Having, from a
conversation overheard or in some other way, got the tone of a tale, I
was like a woman who has just become impregnated. Something was growing
inside me. At night when I lay in my bed I could feel the heels of the
tale kicking against the walls of my body. Often as I lay thus every
word of the tale came to me quite clearly but when I got out of bed to
write it down the words would not come.
I had constantly to seek in roads new to me. Other men had felt what I
had felt, had seen what I had seen--how had they met the difficulties
I faced? My father when he told his tales walked up and down the room
before his audience. He pushed out little experimental sentences
and watched his audience narrowly. There was a dull-eyed old farmer
sitting in a corner of the room. Father had his eyes on the fellow.
“I’ll get him,” he said to himself. He watched the farmer’s eyes. When
the experimental sentence he had tried did not get anywhere he tried
another and kept trying. Beside words he had--to help the telling of
his tales--the advantage of being able to act out those parts for which
he could find no words. He could frown, shake his fists, smile, let a
look of pain or annoyance drift over his face.
These were his advantages that I had to give up if I was to write my
tales rather than tell them and how often I had cursed my fate.
How significant words had become to me! At about this time an American
woman living in Paris, Miss Gertrude Stein, had published a book called
“Tender Buttons” and it had come into my hands. How it had excited me!
Here was something purely experimental and dealing in words separated
from sense--in the ordinary meaning of the word sense--an approach I
was sure the poets must often be compelled to make. Was it an approach
that would help me? I decided to try it.
A year or two before the time of which I am now writing an American
painter, Mr. Felix Russman, had taken me one day into his workshop to
show me his colors. He laid them out on a table before me and then his
wife called him out of the room and he stayed for half an hour. It
had been one of the most exciting moments of my life. I shifted the
little pans of color about, laid one color against another. I walked
away and came near. Suddenly there had flashed into my consciousness,
for perhaps the first time in my life, the secret inner world of the
painters. Before that time I had wondered often enough why certain
paintings, done by the old masters, and hung in our Chicago Art
Institute, had so strange an effect upon me. Now I thought I knew. The
true painter revealed all of himself in every stroke of his brush.
Titian made one feel so utterly the splendor of himself; from Fra
Angelico and Sandro Botticelli there came such a deep human tenderness
that on some days it fairly brought tears to the eyes; in a most
dreadful way and in spite of all his skill Bouguereau gave away his own
inner nastiness while Leonardo made one feel all of the grandeur of
his mind just as Balzac had made his readers feel the universality and
wonder of his mind.
Very well then, the words used by the tale-teller were as the colors
used by the painter. Form was another matter. It grew out of the
materials of the tale and the teller’s reaction to them. It was the
tale trying to take form that kicked about inside the tale-teller at
night when he wanted to sleep.
And words were something else. Words were the surfaces, the clothes
of the tale. I thought I had begun to get something a little clearer
now. I had smiled to myself a little at the sudden realization of how
little native American words had been used by American story-writers.
When most American writers wanted to be very American they went in for
slang. Surely we American scribblers had paid long and hard for the
English blood in our veins. The English had got their books into our
schools, their ideas of correct forms of expression were firmly fixed
in our minds. Words as commonly used in our writing were in reality an
army that marched in a certain array and the generals in command of the
army were still English. One saw the words as marching, always just
so--in books--and came to think of them so--in books.
But when one told a tale to a group of advertising men sitting in a
barroom in Chicago or to a group of laborers by a factory door in
Indiana one instinctively disbanded the army. There were moments then
for what have always been called by our correct writers “unprintable
words.” One got now and then a certain effect by a bit of profanity.
One dropped instinctively into the vocabulary of the men about, was
compelled to do so to get the full effect sought for the tale. Was the
tale he was telling not just the tale of a man named Smoky Pete and
how he caught his foot in the trap set for himself?--or perhaps one
was giving them the Mama Geigans story. The devil. What had the words
of such a tale to do with Thackeray or Fielding? Did the men to whom
one told the tale not know a dozen Smoky Petes and Mama Geigans? Had
one ventured into the classic English models for tale-telling at that
moment there would have been a roar. “What the devil! Don’t you go
high-toning us!”
And it was sure one did not always seek a laugh from his audience.
Sometimes one wanted to move the audience, make them squirm with
sympathy. Perhaps one wanted to throw an altogether new light on a tale
the audience already knew.
Would the common words of our daily speech in shops and offices do
the trick? Surely the Americans among whom one sat talking had felt
everything the Greeks had felt, everything the English felt? Deaths
came to them, the tricks of fate assailed their lives. I was certain
none of them lived felt or talked as the average American novel
made them live feel and talk and as for the plot short stories of
the magazines--those bastard children of De Maupassant, Poe and O.
Henry--it was certain there were no plot short stories ever lived in
any life I had known anything about.
Did it come to this, that Americans worked, made love, settled new
western states, arranged their personal affairs, drove their fords,
using one language while they read books, wanted perhaps to read books,
in quite another language?
I had come to Gertrude Stein’s book about which everyone laughed but
about which I did not laugh. It excited me as one might grow excited in
going into a new and wonderful country where everything is strange--a
sort of Lewis and Clark expedition for me. Here were words laid before
me as the painter had laid the color pans on the table in my presence.
My mind did a kind of jerking flop and after Miss Stein’s book had
come into my hands I spent days going about with a tablet of paper in
my pocket and making new and strange combinations of words. The result
was I thought a new familiarity with the words of my own vocabulary. I
became a little conscious where before I had been unconscious. Perhaps
it was then I really fell in love with words, wanted to give each word
I used every chance to show itself at its best.
It had then not occurred to me that the men I had really come to New
York hoping to see and know, fellows of the schools, men who knew their
Europe, knew the history of the arts, who knew a thousand things I
could not know, it had never occurred to me that in the end I would
find them as frankly puzzled as myself. When I found that out there was
a new adjustment to make. It was then only the trick men, the men who
worked from the little patent formula they had learned, the critics who
could never get English literature out of their heads, who thought they
were sure of their grounds? That knowledge was a relief when I found it
out but I was a long long time finding it out. It takes a long time to
find out one’s own limitations and perhaps a longer time to find out
the limitations of one’s critics.
* * * * *
Was there really something new in the air of America? I remember that
at about this time someone told me that I was myself something new and
how thankful I was to hear it. “Very well,” I said to myself, “if there
are certain men launching a new ship from the harbor of New York and if
they are willing to take me aboard I’ll sure go.” I was just as willing
to be a modern as anything else, was glad to be. It was very sure I was
not going to be a successful author and well enough I knew that, not
being successful, there would be a great deal of consolation to me in
being at least a modern.
What I at the moment felt toward all the more deeply cultured men whose
acquaintanceship I sought and still in a sense feel toward them was
something like what a young mechanic might feel when his boss comes
into the shop accompanied by his daughter. The young mechanic is
standing at his lathe and there is grease on his face and hands. The
boss’s daughter has never been shown over the shop before and is a
little excited by the presence of so many strange men and as she and
her father approach the lathe where the young workman stands he does
not know whether to appear surly and uncommunicative or bold and a bit
impudent. (In his place I, being an American, should probably have
winked at the girl and been terribly embarrassed and ashamed later.)
There he stands fumbling about with his fingers and pretending to look
out of the window and--the devil!--now the boss has stopped behind his
lathe and is attempting to explain something to the daughter, “This is
a sprocket post, is it not?” he says to the workman, who is compelled
to turn around. “Yes, sir,” he mutters, in embarrassment but his eyes,
in just that fraction of a second, have taken a sweeping glance at the
daughter.
And now she is gone and the workman is asking himself questions. “If
I was a swell now I suppose maybe I’d be invited to their house.” He
imagines himself in a dress suit going up a long driveway to the front
of a grand house. He is swinging a cane and there on the front steps is
the boss’s daughter waiting to receive him. What will he talk to her
about? Dare a man speak in such company of the only things he knows?
What does he know?
He knows that Jack Johnson could probably have whipped Jess Willard if
he had really tried. There is a woman lives in his rooming house who is
unfaithful to her husband. He knows who with. She is going to have a
child but the chances are it is not her husband’s child. Often he has
asked himself how she will feel on the night when the child is born and
when her husband is so excited and proud.
After all, the young workman knows a good many things of his own sort,
but of how many of them can he, dare he, speak with the boss’s daughter
whose voice was so soft and whose skin looked so delicate that day when
she came into the shop with her father? “Dare I ask her what she thinks
the unfaithful wife will be thinking and feeling when the child is
born?”
Young workmen have a kind of fear of the thing called culture. Most
middle-westerners think of it--in spite of their protestations to the
contrary--as in some vague way to be breathed in the air of New York.
New Yorkers seem to think of it as to be found in London or Paris.
Bankers and manufacturers of the Middle-West hope to get it for their
sons by sending them to Yale or Harvard and as there are a good many
bankers and manufacturers Yale and Harvard are inclined to be crowded.
Mark Twain thought he would find it in Boston--a whole generation of
Americans thought that.
To the young workman culture is somewhat like a new suit of clothes
that does not fit too well. It binds under the arms when one first puts
it on.