AND so there I was, an American rapidly approaching middle life,
sitting in my room over in west Twenty-second Street at night after
a day spent listening to the talk of the new men and trying with all
my might to be one of the new men myself. Below me in the street the
common life of people went on but I tried to put it away from me for
the time, was having too good a time thinking of myself to think much
of ordinary people. It is a mood that has appeared and reappeared in
me at various times and I am trying to clear it out of my system by
writing this book. When I have done that I hope to shut up on the
subject for keeps. In my book I have had something to say of my father,
emphasizing the showman side of his nature. I have perhaps lied now
and then regarding the facts of his life but have not lied about the
essence of it.
He was a man who loved a parade, bands playing in streets and himself
in a gaudy uniform somewhere up near the head of the procession and I
have myself had a pretty hard time not making a parade out of my own
life.
Some time after the period of which I am now writing, my friend Mr.
Paul Rosenfeld was with me in London stopping at the same hotel and one
day I got away from him and when he wasn’t watching wandered into a
gents’ furnishing store. When he came into the hotel later I took him
to my room and displayed before him the things I had bought. He almost
wept but there was little he could do. “Don’t,” he said. “Come out of
the room. Promise me you won’t wear these things until you get out
again to Chicago.”
I was in New York and was the son of my father. The New Movement in the
Arts was under way. If it was going to be a parade I wanted, ached, to
be in it. Was I but trying to put myself over to the literary world as
formerly I had been employed to put over automobile tires to the public?
It was a question I was compelled to keep asking myself as it had
something to do with the ineffectualness of my own hands lying before
me on the window sill. I kept thinking of middle-western men like
Dreiser, Masters, Sandburg and the others. There was something sincere
and fine about them. Perhaps they had not worried, as I seemed to be
doing, about the whole question of whether they belonged to the New
Movement or not. I thought of them as somewhere out in the Middle West
quietly at work, trying to understand the life about them, trying to
express it in their work as best they could. How many other men were
there in towns and cities of that great middle-western empire--my
own land--younger men coming along. I had been unable to make my own
beginning until most of the stronger years of my own life had passed.
Perhaps I could not have begun at all but for them and perhaps, because
of them, other men could now begin ten years younger than myself.
“The eastern men, among whom I had now come, were perhaps right in
demanding something more than courage from American artists,” I began
telling myself. It was apparent there were two steps necessary and it
might well be that we middle-western men had taken but one step. One
had first of all to face one’s materials, accept fully the life about,
quit running off in fancy to India, to England, to the South Seas. We
Americans had to begin to stay, in spirit at least, at home. We had to
accept our materials, face our materials.
There was one thing, but there was something else too. We had to begin
to face the possibilities of the surfaces of our pages.
Ah, here was something very difficult and delicate indeed! Was I right
after all in sitting in the darkness of my room and looking at my own
hands, pleading with my own hands? Had I really come to New York--not
to find out and digest abstract thoughts about American life but to
find there the men who would direct me more truly to the training of my
own hands for my task?
In the days of the old crafts men became apprenticed craftsmen at
fifteen. Had the men of the new day to live nearly three times that
long before they found out they need go looking for the masters?