WHEN I went on my pilgrimage to New York I was not a young man any
more. The gray had begun to show in my hair. On the very day after
my arrival I chanced to pick up a novel of Turgenev’s, “A House of
Gentlefolk,” and saw how that he had made his hero Levretsky an old
man, through with life, at forty-five.
Pretty rough on an American who had not dared think of trying to do
what he wanted until he was approaching that age. No American dared
think of doing anything he enjoyed until youth was gone. Youth must
be given to money making among us and leisure was a sin. A short time
after the period of which I am now writing I was given the _Dial_
prize for literature, the intent of which was that it was to be given
to encourage some young man just starting out on the hard road of
literary effort. It had been offered to me and I wanted it but thought
seriously of investing in hair dye before going to call on the editors.
So little work of any account done! Mornings coming, noons, nights!
Many nights of lying awake in my bed in some rooming house in the city
thinking!
I had a penchant for taking my own life rather seriously. Americans in
general pretended their own lives did not matter. They were continually
talking of devoting their lives to business, to some reform, to their
children, to the public. I had been called a modern and perhaps only
deserved the title inasmuch as I was a born questioner. I did not
take such words people were always saying too seriously. Often enough
I used to lie on my bed in my room and on moonlight nights I lit a
cigarette and spent some time looking at myself. I lifted up my legs,
one after the other, and rejoiced at the thought that they might yet
take me into many strange places. Then I lifted my arms and looked
long and earnestly at my hands. Why had they not served me better? Why
would they not serve me better? It was easy enough to put a pen into
the fingers. I myself was perfectly willing to be a great author. Why
would not the pen slide more easily and gracefully over the paper? What
sentences I wanted to write, what paragraphs, what pages! If reading
Miss Stein had given me a new sense of my own limited vocabulary, had
made me feel words as more living things, if seeing the work of many of
the modern painters had given me a new feeling for form and color, why
would my own hands not become better servants to me?
On some nights, as I lay thus, the noise of the great city to which
I had come growing fainter as the night wore on, I had many strange
thoughts, brought into my head by reading the works of such men as
Mr. Van Wyck Brooks or by talking with such men as my friends Alfred
Stieglitz and Paul Rosenfeld. My own hands had not served me very
well. Nothing they had done with words had satisfied me. There was not
finesse enough in my fingers. All sorts of thoughts and emotions came
to me that would not creep down my arms and out through my fingers
upon the paper. How much was I to blame for that? How much could fairly
be blamed to the civilization in which I had lived? I presume I wanted
very much to blame something other than myself if I could.
The thoughts that came were something like this: “Suppose,” I suggested
to myself, “that the giving of itself by an entire generation to
mechanical things were really making all men impotent. There was a
passion for size among almost all the men I had known. Almost every
man I had known had wanted a bigger house, a bigger factory, a faster
automobile than his fellows. I had myself run an automobile and doing
so had given me a strange sense of vicarious power, mingled with a kind
of shame too. I pressed my foot upon a little button on the floor of
the car and it shot forward. There was a feeling that did not really
belong to me, that I had in some way stolen. I was rushing along a road
or through a street and carrying five or six other people with me and,
in spite of myself, felt rather grand doing it. Was that because I was
in reality so ineffectual in myself? Did so many of my fellow writers
want great sales for their books because, feeling as I did then the
ineffectually of their own hands to do good work, they wanted to be
convinced from the outside? Was the desire all modern peoples had for
a greater navy, a greater army, taller public buildings, but a sign
of growing impotence? Was there a growing race of people in the world
who had no use for their hands and were the hands paying them back by
becoming ineffectual? Was the Modern after all but the man who had
begun faintly to realize what I was then realizing and were all his
efforts but at bottom the attempt to get his hands back on the ends
of his arms? ‘It may be that all the men of our age can at best but
act as fertilizer,’ Paul Rosenfeld had said to me. Was what I was then
thinking in reality what he had meant?”
I am trying to give as closely as I can a transcript of some of my
own thoughts as I lay on my bed in a rooming house in the city of New
York and after I had walked about and had talked a little with some of
the men I admired. I was thinking of old workers in the time of the
crafts and of the new workers I had personally known in the time of
the factories. I was thinking of myself and my own ineffectualness.
Perhaps I was but trying to make excuses for myself. Most artists
spend a large part of their time doing that. In the factories so many
of the workers spent so large a part of their time boasting of their
sexual effectiveness. Was that because they felt themselves every year
growing more and more ineffectual as men? Were modern women going more
and more toward man’s life and man’s attitude toward life because
they were becoming all the time less and less able to be women? For
two or three hundred years the western peoples had been in the grip
of a thing called Puritanism. Mr. Brooks and Mr. Waldo Frank, in two
books published at about that time, had declared that industrialism
was a natural outgrowth of Puritanism, that having renounced life for
themselves the Puritans were determined to kill life in others.
I had definite reasons for asking myself many of the questions that
came to me as I lay in my bed at night. I had already published several
stories and, for some reason I had not clearly understood, many people
in reading my stories had been made angry by them. Many abusive letters
had been written me. I had been called a pervert, a thoroughly nasty
man.
Was I that? I thought if I was I had better find out. My own hands
looked all right to me as I lay on my bed looking at them in the
moonlight. Were they unclean hands? There had been a few times, for
brief periods only, when they had seemed to me to serve my purpose.
I had felt something deeply, been quite impersonally absorbed in
something in the life about me and my hands had of a sudden come to
life. They had arranged words on paper I thought very skillfully. How
clean I had felt during just those moments! It was the feeling I had
always been seeking. At last, in a crippled way to be sure but after a
fashion, my whole being had become a quite impersonal thing, expressing
itself on paper through written words. The life about me seemed to have
become my life. I sang as I worked, as in my boyhood I had often seen
old craftsmen sing and as I had never heard men sing in the factories.
And for what I had written at such times I had been called unclean
by men and women who had never known me, could have had no personal
reasons for thinking me unclean. Was I unclean? Were the hands that,
for such brief periods of my life, had really served me, had they been
unclean at such moments of service?
Other thoughts came. Even my friend Paul Rosenfeld had called me “the
Phallic Chekhov.” Had I a sex obsession? Was I a goner?
Another American, Mr. Henry Adams, had evidently been as puzzled as
I was at that moment although I am sure he would never have been so
undignified as to have written, as I am doing here, of himself as lying
on a bed in a New York rooming house and putting his own hands up into
the moonlight to stare at them.
However he had been equally puzzled. “Singularly enough,” he had said
in his book, “The Education of Henry Adams,” “singularly enough, not
one of Adams’ many schools of education has ever drawn his attention
to the opening lines of Lucretius, though they were perhaps the finest
in all Latin literature, where the poet invoked Venus exactly as Dante
invoked the Virgin:”
‘Quae, quoniam rerum naturam Sola gubernas.’
“The Venus of Epicurean philosophy survived in the Virgin of the
Schools.”
‘Donna, sei tanto grande, e tanta vali,
Che qual vuol grazia, e a te non ricorre,
Sua Disianza vuol volar senz’ ali.’
“All this was to American thought as though it had never existed. The
true American knew something of the facts, but nothing of the feelings;
he read the letter, but he never felt the law. Before this historic
chasm, a mind like that of Adams felt itself helpless; he turned
from the Virgin to the dynamo as though he were a Branly coherer. On
one side, at the Louvre and at Chartres, as he knew by the record of
work actually done and still before his eyes, was the highest energy
ever known to men, the creator of four-fifths of his noblest art,
exercising vastly more attraction over the human mind than all the
steam engines and dynamos ever dreamed of; and yet this energy was
unknown to the American mind. An American Virgin would never dare
command; an American Venus would never dare exist.”