ONE goes from Chicago to New York on a modern train very quickly
but in the short time while the train is tearing along, while one
sleeps and awakens once, one cuts the distance between oneself and
Europe immeasurably. To the American, and in spite of the later
disillusionment brought by the World War Europe remained the old home
of the crafts. Even as the train goes eastward in one’s own country,
there is an inner ferment of excitement. Turgenev, Gogol, Fielding,
Cervantes, De Foe, Balzac--what mighty names marched through the mind
with the click of the car wheels. To the man of the American West how
much the East means. How deeply buried the great European craftsmen
had been in the soil out of which they had come. How intimately they
had known their own peoples and with what infinite delicacy and
understanding they had spoken out of them. As one sat in the train one
found oneself bitterly condemning many of our own older craftsmen for
selling out their inheritances, for selling out the younger men, too.
Why were they not more consciously aware of what they, as craftsmen,
were at? What had they got--a few automobiles, suburban homes, a little
cheap acclaim.
Moments of wrath and then a smile too. “My boy, my boy, keep your shirt
on!”
In the next seat a Detroit man talking loudly. “Advertising pays. What
you got to do is put it across in a hurry.”
Only yesterday there was myself too, talking so, pounding tables in
offices, crying the gospel of size, of hustle.
“Keep your shirt on! Listen! You are starting rather late to do much.
Perhaps if you are patient, if you listen work and learn you shall yet
tell delicately a few tales.”
As one approaches the Atlantic Coast there is a feeling comes that one,
not born, not having lived, through youth and young manhood in the
Middle or Far West will never quite understand. Near my own room in the
city, lying in the Hudson River, were vessels that to-morrow would set
sail for Europe, other vessels that had arrived from Europe but the
day before. As I lay on my cot in my room at night I could hear the
steamboats crying in the river. At night when there was a fog they were
like cows lost in a forest, somewhere out in the Middle West, lost and
bawling for the warm barns.
One went down to walk in the street facing the river. People were
arriving on boats, departing on boats. They took the whole matter
calmly, as one living in Chicago would entrain for Indianapolis. Out
in my own country, when I was a boy, going to Europe meant something
tremendous, like going to war for example. It was of infinitely more
importance than, let us say, getting married. One got married or even
went to war without writing a book about it but no man went to Europe
from Ohio at least, without later writing a book about his travels.
Men and women of the Middle West became famous by way of European
trips. Such and such a one had been to Europe three times. He was
consulted upon all occasions, was allowed to sit on the platform at
political meetings, might even claim the privilege of carrying a cane.
Even the men of the barrooms were impressed. The bartender settled a
quarrel between two men by referring the matter to Ed Swarts, who had
been home to Germany twice. “Well, he’s traveled. He has an education.
He knows what he’s talking about,” the bartender said.
Had I myself come to New York, half wanting to go on to Europe and not
quite daring? At least there was not in me the naïve faith in Europe my
father must have had. I found myself able to go into the presence of
men who had spent years in Europe without trembling, visibly at least,
but something pulled. It was so difficult to understand life and the
impulses of life here. There was so much phrase-making to cover up the
reality of feelings, of hungers. Would one learn something by going to
the sources of all this vast river of mixed bloods, mixed traditions,
mixed passions and impulses?
Perhaps I thought that in New York I should find men, Americans in
spirit and in fact, who had digested what Europe had to give America
and who would pass it on to me. I was middle-western enough to think it
a bit presumptuous of me to strike out as a man of letters, set myself
up as a man of letters. I wanted to, but didn’t quite dare.
However I took a long breath and plunged. All about me were men
talking and talking. There was, at just that time, a distinct effort
to awaken in New York something like the group life among artists
and intellectuals for which Paris had long been famous. There was
the extreme radical political and intellectual group, gathered about
_The Masses_; the _Little Review_ with its sledgehammer
pronouncements and a kind of flaunting joy of life, of which the others
were both scornful and afraid; _The Seven Arts_ group, inclined
to make itself small and exclusive; the liberals, always apparently
trembling on the edge of a real feeling for the crafts and never quite
making it, that gathered about _The New Republic_ and _The
Nation_, and besides these Mencken and Nathan, knights errant at
large, with pistols always loaded, ready at any moment to shoot anyone
if the shooting would make a bit of stir in the town.
Among these men I walked and after walking went back to my room to lie
on my cot. I began checking off names. As for myself I had no serious
intention of becoming a New Yorker. I was a middle-westerner born
and bred. All the rest of my days I might drift here and there about
America but at heart I would be, to the New Yorker, a man from beyond
the mountains, an Ohio man to the end.
I was a middle-westerner trying to pick up cultural scraps in New York,
trying to go to school there.
I made little lists of names on the walls of my mind. There was Van
Wyck Brooks, the man who never wrote a line that did not give me joy,
but his mind seemed altogether occupied with what had happened to
Twain, Howells, Whitman, Poe and the New Englanders, men for the most
part dead before I was born. I was sorry they had the rotten luck to
be born in a new land but could not stay permanently sorry. I had to
live myself in the moment, in America as it was, as it was becoming.
Often I thought of Brooks. “He has a theme. It is that a man cannot be
an artist in America. The theme absorbs all his time and energy. He has
little or no time to give to such fellows as myself and our problems.”
I did not put Brooks aside. He put me aside.
There were however others. Alfred Stieglitz, Waldo Frank, Henry Canby,
Paul Rosenfeld, Leo Ornstein, Ben Huebsch, Alfred Kreymborg, Mary and
Padraic Colum, Julius Friend, Ferdinand Schevill, Stark Young when I
came to him later, Lawrence Gilman, Gilbert Seldes, Jane Heap, Gertrude
Stein. Not all of them New Yorkers, but none of them, except Miss Heap
and Ferdinand Schevill middle-westerners like myself.
There were in New York and Chicago no end of people who were willing
to talk to me, listen to my talk, cry out for any good thing I
did, condemn with quick intelligence what I did that was cheap or
second-rate. Not one among them but had thought further than myself,
that could tell me a hundred things I did not know. What a debt of
gratitude I owe to men like Paul Rosenfeld, Stark Young, Alfred
Stieglitz, Waldo Frank and others, men who have willingly taken long
hours out of their busy lives to walk and talk with me of my craft.
I used to lie in my room thinking of them, in relation to myself, in
relation to other writers who were coming out of the Middle West and
who would come. It was rather odd how many of them had Jewish blood
in their veins. I did not believe I was too much prejudiced because
the people I have named liked certain work of my own. Often enough
they did not like it and I had opportunity to realize their reactions
to other men’s work, had seen how Stieglitz had labored for Marin,
Hartley, O’Keefe, Dove and others, how Waldo Frank had given Sandburg
the intelligent appreciation he must have so wanted, had watched with
glowing pleasure the subtle workings of the minds of men like Rosenfeld
and Young.
I tried to feel and think my way into the matter because it had I
thought some relation to my own problem which as you will remember was
to try to find footing for myself, a basis of self-criticism.