IF Mr. Adams had not spent his time as I was doing, lying on a bed
and looking at his own hands, he had at least spent his time looking
about. “An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus
would never dare exist,” he had said and it was an accusation that an
American could neither love nor worship.
At any rate I was a man of the Middle West. I was not a New Englander.
For my own people, as I had known them, it was absurd to say they had
neither love nor reverence. Never a boy or man I had known at all
intimately but that had both in him. We had simply been cheated. Our
Virgins and Venuses had to be worshiped under the bush. What nights I
had spent mooning about with middle-western boys, with hungry girls
too. Were we but trying to refute the older men of New England who
had got such a grip on our American intellectual life, the Emersons,
Hawthornes and Longfellows? It was perhaps true to say of the
intellectual sons of these men that a Virgin would never dare command,
that a Venus would never dare exist. I knew little of New England men
in the flesh but it was not necessarily true of us, out in my country.
Of that I was pretty sure.
As for my own hands I continued looking at them. Questions kept coming.
I was myself no longer young. Having made a few bicycles in factories,
having written some thousands of rather senseless advertisements,
having rubbed affectionately the legs of a few race horses, having
tried blunderingly to love a few women and having written a few novels
that did not satisfy me or anyone else, having done these few things,
could I begin now to think of myself as tired out and done for? Because
my own hands had for the most part served me so badly could I let them
lie beside me in idleness?
I did not dare make such a surrender, nor did I dare dodge the issue
with myself by going off into that phase of New York life I had already
come to dislike, that phase of life which allows a man to employ his
hands merely in writing smart and self-satisfying words regarding the
failures of other men. In reality I was not trying to look at other
men’s lives just then and as for other men’s work--it meant something
to me when it taught me something. I was a middle-westerner who had
come East to school if I could find the school.
I wanted back the hands that had been taken from me if I could get them
back. Mr. Stark Young had talked to me one day of what thinking might
be and his words kept ringing in my ears. Such words as he had said to
me always excited like music or painting. He was a man who had been a
professor in colleges and knew what was conventionally called thinking
and he had said that thinking meant nothing at all unless it was done
with the whole body--not merely with the head. I remember that one
night I got out of bed and went to my window. I had a room far over
on Twenty-second Street, near the Hudson River, and often, late at
night, sailors from the ships lying in the river came along my street.
They had been drinking, seeing the girls, having a time, and were now
going back to the ships to sail away over the world. One of them, a
very drunken sailor who had to stop every few steps and lean against a
building, sang in a hoarse throaty voice:
“Lady Lou. Lady Lou.
I love you.
Lady Lou.”
I looked at my own hands lying on the window sill in the moonlight and
I dare say had anyone seen me at that moment he might have decided I
had gone quite insane. I talked to my own hands, made them promises,
pleaded with them, “I shall cover you with golden rings. You shall be
bathed in perfumes.”
Perhaps there was an effort to be made I had not the courage or
strength to make. When it came to tale-telling there were certain tales
that fairly told themselves, but there were others, more fascinating,
that needed a great deal of understanding, of myself first and then of
others.