I feel like a starved man who is so bewildered by the first sight of
food that he wants to grab and devour the ice-cream, the roast and the
entrée all in one gulp. For ages and ages, my people in Russia had no
more voice than the broomstick in the corner. The poor had no more
chance to say what they thought or felt than the dirt under the feet.
And here, in America, a miracle has happened to me. I can lift up my
head like a person. After centuries of suppression I am allowed to
speak. Is it a wonder that I am too excited to know where to begin?
All the starved, unlived years crowd into my throat and choke me. I
don’t know whether it is joy or sorrow that hurts me so. I only feel my
release is wrung with the pain of all those back of me who lived and
died, their dumbness pressing down on them like stories on the heart.
My mother, who dried out her days fighting at the pushcarts for
another potato, another onion into the bag, wearing out her heart
and soul and brain with the one unceasing worry--how to get food for
the children a penny cheaper--and my father, a Hebrew scholar and
dreamer who was always too much up in the air to come down to such
sordid thoughts as bread and rent, and the lost and wasted lives of my
brothers and sisters and my grandfather and grandmother, and all those
dumb generations back of me, are crying in every breath of every word
that is struggling itself out of me.
I am the mad mob at a mass meeting, shouting, waving with their hands
and stamping with their feet, to their leader: “Speech! Speech!” And
I am also the bewildered leader struggling to say something and make
myself heard through the deafening noise of a thousand clamouring
voices.
I envy the writers who can sit down at their desks in the clear, calm
security of their vision and begin their story at the beginning and
work it up logically, step by step, till they get to the end.
With me, the end and the middle and the beginning of my story whirl
before me in a mad blur. And I cannot sit still inside myself till the
vision becomes clear and whole and sane in my brain. I’m too much on
fire to wait till I understand what I see and feel. My hands rush out
to seize a word from the end, a phrase from the middle, or a sentence
from the beginning. I jot down any fragment of a thought that I can get
hold of. And then I gather these fragments, words, phrases, sentences,
and I paste them together with my own blood.
Think of the toil it takes to wade through a dozen pages that you must
cut down into one paragraph. Sometimes the vivisection I must commit on
myself to create one little living sentence leaves me spent for days.
I thought when the editor asked me to write mostly about myself,
telling of my own life, it would be so simple the thing would write
itself. And just look at me at my desk! Before me are reams of jumbled
pages of madness and inspiration, and I am trying to make a little
sense of it all.
What shall I keep, and what shall I throw away? Which is madness, and
which is inspiration? I never know. I pick and choose things like a
person feeling his way in the dark. I never know whether the thoughts
I’ve discarded are not perhaps better than the thoughts I’ve kept.
With all the physical anguish I put into my work, I am never sure of
myself. But I am sure of this, that the utterance of the ignorant like
me is something like the utterance of the dying. It’s mixed up and
incoherent, but it has in it the last breath of life and death.
I am learning to accept the torture of chaos and confusion and doubt
through which my thoughts must pass, as a man learns to accept a hump
on his back, or the loss of an arm, or any affliction which the fates
thrust upon him.
I am learning, as I grow older, to be tolerant with my own inadequacy.
I am learning slowly to stop wasting myself trying to make myself over
on the pattern of some better organized, more educated person than I
am. I no longer waste precious time wishing for the brains of a George
Eliot, or the fluency of a George Sand, or the marvellous gift of words
of a May Sinclair. Here I am as I am, and life is short and work is
long. With this limited brain of my inadequate self I must get the most
work done. I can only do the best I can and leave the outcome in the
hands of the Higher Powers.
I am aware that there’s a little too much of I--I--I, too much of
self-analysis and introspection in my writing. But this is because I
was forced to live alone with myself so much. I spent most of my youth
at work I hated, work which called only for the use of the hands,
the strength of my body--not my heart, not my brain. So my thoughts,
instead of going out naturally to the world around me, were turned in
upon myself.
I look upon my self-analysis and introspection as so much dirt through
which I have to dig before I can come into the light of objectivity and
see the people of the worlds around me.
Writing is to me a confession--not a profession. I know a man, a
literary hack who calls himself a dealer in words. He can write to
order on any subject he is hired to write about. I often marvel at the
swift ease with which he can turn from literary criticism to politics,
or psycho-analysis. A fatal fluency enables him to turn out thousands
of words a day in the busy factory of his brain, without putting
anything of himself into it.
But I can never touch the surfaces of things. I can only write from the
depths. I feel myself always under the aching weight of my thoughts.
And words are luring lights that beckon to me through the thick mist of
vague, dumb thoughts that hang over me and press down on me.
I am so in love with the changing lights and shades of words that
I almost hate their power over me, as you hate the tyranny of the
people you love too much. I almost hate writing, because I love so
passionately to express the innermost and outermost of my thoughts
and feelings. And the words I write are never what I started out to
express, but what came out of my desire for expression.
Often I read my own writing as though it were somebody else’s. My own
words mock at me with their glaring unreality. Where is that burning
vividness of things that possessed me when I began? Why did I kill
myself so for nothing? Are these stiff, stilted words me?
I stare at the pages that represent so many days and nights of labour
more bitter, more violent, than childbirth. What has happened? Has my
terrific passion for giving out my experiences only built a barrier of
barren words against the experience that I held so close?
It’s as if every kiss, every embrace of the lover and the beloved
instead of fusing them into a closer oneness only drew them farther and
farther apart. Every written word instead of bringing the vision nearer
only pushed it farther and farther away.
But the sense of failure never stops me. It only spurs my sleeping
senses with ever new inexhaustible energy to do the one thing over
and over and over again till I touch nearer the edge of that flaming
reality just beyond reach.
Writing is ordinarily the least part of a man. It is all there is of
me. I want to write with every pulse of my blood and every breath of
my spirit. I want to write waking or dreaming, year in and year out. I
burn up in this all-consuming desire my family, my friends, my loves,
my clothes, my food, my very life.
And yet the minute my writing gets into print I hate the sight of it. I
have all the patience in the world to do over a page a thousand times.
But the moment it gets out of my hand I can’t bear to touch it with a
pitchfork. The minute a manuscript gets into print it’s all dead shells
of the past to me.
I know some people who hate the books I write, and because they hate
my books they hate me. I want to say to them now that I, too, hate the
stuff I write. Can’t we be friends and make the mutual hatred of my
books a bond instead of a barrier? My books are not me.
Is this a contradiction of anything I said in the page above? I do not
claim to be logical or consistent. I do not claim to think things out;
I only feel out my feelings, and the only thing true about feelings is
that they change and become different in the very process of utterance.
The minute I say a thing with the absolute sincerity of my being, up
rushes another thought that hits my most earnest sincerity in the face
and shows it up for a lie.
I am alive, and the only thing real in my aliveness is the vitality of
unceasing change. Sometimes I wake up in the morning with a fresh new
thought that sweeps out of the window all of the most precious thoughts
of the day before.
Perhaps by the time I shall have reached the end of this little sketch
I shall have refuted every statement I tried to make at the beginning.
I cannot help it. I am not attempting to write a story to fit into
the set mould of a magazine. I am trying to give you the changing,
baffling, contradictory substance of which my life is made.
* * * * *
I remember my mother’s ecstatic face when she burst into the house and
announced proudly that, though she never had had a chance to learn the
alphabet, she could read the names of the streets and she could find
her way to the free dispensary without having to be led by us.
“I’m no longer blind,” she cried, tossing up her market basket in a
gesture of triumph. “The signs of the streets are like pictures before
my eyes. Delancey Street has the black hooks one way, and Essex Street
has black hooks the other way.” She tore off her blue-checked apron. “I
can also be a lady and walk without having to beg people to show me the
way.”
Something of my mother’s wonder was mine when, without knowing the
first alphabet of literature, I had discovered that Beauty was anywhere
a person tries to think out his thoughts. Beauty was no less in the
dark basement of a sweat-shop than in the sunny, spacious halls of a
palace. So that I, buried alive in the killing blackness of poverty,
could wrest the beauty of reality out of my experiences no less than
the princess who had the chance to live and love and whose only worry
was which of her adorers should she choose for a husband.
I did not at first think it as clearly as I write it now. In fact, I
did not think then at all. I only felt. And it gave me a certain power
over the things that weighed over me, merely saying out on paper what I
felt about them.
My first alphabet of self-expression was hatred, wrath and rebellion.
Once during lunch-hour while the other girls in the shop were eating
and talking and laughing, I wrote out on my greasy lunch-bag the
thoughts that were boiling in me for a long, long time.
“I hate beautiful things,” I began. “All day long I handle beautiful
clothes, but not for me--only for others to wear. The bloated rich
with nothing but cold cash can buy the beautiful things made with the
sweat of my hands, while I choke in ugliness.” Merely writing out the
wildness running through my head enabled me to wear the rags I had to
wear with a certain bitter defiance.
But after a while, raving at things in the air ceased to bring me
relief. I felt a little like my mother yelling and cursing at the
children and the worries around her without knowing what or where.
I felt like a woman standing in the middle of her upset house in
the morning--beds not made, dishes not washed, dirty clothes and
rags hanging over the chairs, all the drawers pushed out in mixed-up
disorder, the broom with the dirt in the middle of the floor--and she
not knowing where to begin.
I wanted order, order in my head. But then I was too mixed up with too
many thoughts to put anything in its place. In a blind sort of way, in
groping for order I was groping for beauty. I felt no peace in what I
wrote unless I could make my words laugh and cry with the life of the
poor I was living. I was always digging, digging for the beauty that I
sensed back of the dirt and the disorder. Until I could find a way to
express the beauty of that reality there was no rest in me. Like the
woman who makes the beds or sweeps the house and lets the rest go, so I
took hold of one idea at a time and pushed all the other ideas out of
my head. And day and night I burned up my body and brain with that one
idea till it got light all around me--the light of an idea that shaped
itself in a living picture of living people.
When I saw my first story in print I felt bigger than Columbus who
discovered the New World. I felt bigger than the man who built Brooklyn
Bridge or the highest skyscraper in New York. I walked the streets,
holding the magazine tight in my hands, laughing and crying to myself:
“I had an idea and I thought it out. I did it, I did it! I’m not a
crazy fool, I’m not a crazy fool!”
But the next day all my fiery gladness turned cold. I saw how far from
the whole round circle of the idea was my printed story. And I was
burning to do the same thing over again from another side, to show it
up more.
Critics have said that I have but one story to tell, and that I tell
that one story in different ways each time I write. That is true. My
one story is hunger. Hunger driven by loneliness.
But is not all of human life but the story of our hunger, our
loneliness? What is at the root of economics, sociology, literature and
all art but man’s bread hunger and man’s love hunger?
When I first started to write I could only write one thing--different
phases of the one thing only--bread hunger. At last I’ve written out my
bread hunger. And now I can write only the different phases of the one
thing only--loneliness, love hunger, the hunger for people.
In the days of poverty I used to think there was no experience that
tears through the bottom of the earth like the hunger for bread. But
now I know, more terrible than the hunger for bread is the hunger for
people.
I used to be more hungry after a meal than before. Years ago, the food
I could afford to buy only whetted my appetite for more food. Sometimes
after I had paid down my last precious pennies for a meal in one of
those white-tiled restaurants, I’d get so mad with hunger I’d want to
dash the empty dishes at the heads of the waiters and cry out like a
lunatic: “Don’t feed me with plates and forks and tablecloths. I want
real food. I want to bite into huge chunks of meat. I want butter and
quarts of milk and eggs--dozens of eggs. I want to fill up for once in
my life.”
This unacted madness used to be always flying through my brain,
morning, noon and night. Whenever I wanted to think, my thoughts were
swept away by the sight of thick, juicy steaks and mounds of butter and
platters full of eggs.
Now I no longer live in a lonely hall-room in a tenement. I have won
many friends. I am invited out to teas and dinners and social affairs.
And I wonder, is my insatiable hunger for people so great because for
so many centuries my race has been isolated in Ghettos, shut out of
contact with others? Here in America for the first time races, classes
and creeds are free to meet and mingle on planes as high and wide
as all humanity and its problems. And I am aching to touch all the
different races, classes and creeds at all possible points of contact,
and I never seem to have enough of people.
When I first came to America the coldness of the Americans used to
rouse in me the fury of a savage. Their impersonal, non-committal air
was like a personal insult to me. I longed to shake them out of their
aloofness, their frozen stolidity. But now when I meet an Anglo-Saxon
I want to cry out to him: “We’re friends, we’re friends, I tell you! We
understand the same things, even though we seem to be so different on
the outside.”
Sometimes a man and a woman are so different that they hate each other
at first sight. Their intense difference stabs a sharp sword of fear
into each heart. But when this fear that froze each into his separate
oppositeness ever has a chance for a little sun of understanding, then
the very difference that drew them apart pulls them closer than those
born alike. Perhaps that accounts for the devouring affinity between my
race and the Anglo-Saxon race.
* * * * *
In my early childhood my people hammered into me defeat, defeat,
because that was the way they accepted the crushing weight of life.
Life had crushed my mother, so without knowing it she fed defeat with
the milk of her bosom into the blood and bone of her children. But this
thing that stunted the courage, the initiative, of the other children
roused the fighting devils in me.
When yet barely able to speak, I began to think and question the
justice of the world around me and to assert my rights.
“Mamma,” I asked out of a clear sky, “why does Masha Stein have butter
on her bread every morning, and why is our bread always hard and dry,
and nothing on it?”
“Butter wills itself in you!” shrieked my mother, as she thrust the
hash of potato peelings in front of me for my noonday meal. “Have you
got a father a business man, a butcher or a grocer, a breadgiver, like
Masha Stein’s father? You don’t own the dirt under Masha’s doorstep.
You got a father a scholar. He holds himself all day with God; he might
as well hang the beggar’s bag on his neck and be done with it.”
At the time I had no answer. I was too young to voice my revolt against
my mother’s dark reasoning. But the fact that I did not forget this
speech of so many years ago shows how her black pessimism cut against
my grain.
I have a much clearer memory of my next rebellion against the thick
gloom in which my young years were sunk.
“Mamma, what’s a birthday?” I cried, bursting into the house in a
whirl of excitement. “Becky, the pawnbroker’s girl on the block, will
have a birthday to-morrow. And she’ll get presents for nothing, a cake
with candles on it, and a whole lot of grand things from girls for
nothing--and she said I must come. Could I have a birthday, too, like
she?”
“Woe is to me!” cried my mother, glaring at me with wet, swollen eyes.
“A birthday lays in your head? Enjoyments lays in your head?” she
continued bitterly. “You want to be glad that you were born into the
world? A whole lot you got to be glad about. Wouldn’t it be better if
you was never born already?”
At the harsh sound of my mother’s voice all my dreams took wing. In
rebellion and disappointment I thrust out my lips with a trembling
between retort and tears. It was as if the devil himself urged my
mother thus to avenge herself upon her helpless children for the aches
and weariness of her own life. So she went on, like a horse bolting
downhill, feeling the pressure of the load behind him.
“What is with you the great joy? That you ain’t got a shirt on your
back? That you ain’t got no shoes on your feet? Why are you with
yourself so happy? Is it because the landlord sent the moving bill, and
you’ll be laying in the street to-morrow, already?”
I had forgotten that we had received a notice of eviction, for unpaid
rent, a few days before. A frenzy of fear had taken possession of my
mother as she anticipated the horror of being thrown into the street.
For hours at a time I would see her staring at the wall with the glassy
stare of a madwoman.
“With what have you to be happy, I ask only?” she went on. “Have you
got money laying in the bank? Let the rich people enjoy themselves.
For them is the world like made to order. For them the music plays.
They can have birthdays. But what’s the world to the poor man? Only one
terrible, never-stopping fight with the groceryman and the butcher and
the landlord.”
I gazed at my mother with old, solemn eyes, feeling helplessly sucked
into her bitterness and gloom.
“What’s a poor man but a living dead one?” she pursued, talking more
to herself than to me. “You ought to light a black candle on your
birthday. You ought to lie on your face and cry and curse the day you
was born!”
Crushed by her tirade, I went out silently. The fairy dream of the
approaching birthday had been rudely shattered. Blinded with tears, I
sat down on the edge of the gutter in front of our tenement.
“Look, these are the pink candles for the birthday cake!” A poke in the
back from Becky startled me. “Aren’t they grand? And mamma will buy me
a French doll, and papa said he’d give me a desk, and my aunt will give
me a painting set, and every girl that comes will bring me something
different.”
“But what’s the use?” I sobbed. “I ain’t got nothing for no present,
and I can’t come--and my mother is so mean she got mad and hollered
like hell because I only asked her about the birthday, and----”
A passionate fit of sobbing drowned my words.
In an instant Becky had her arms about me. “I want you to come without
a present,” she said. “I will have a lot of presents, anyhow.”
Assured of her welcome I went the next day. But as I opened the door
fear seized me. I paused trembling, holding the knob in my hand, too
dazed by the sight before me to make a step. More than the strangeness
of the faces awed me. Ordinary home comforts, cushioned chairs, green
ferns between white curtains, the bright rugs on the floor were new and
wonderful to me. Timorously I edged my way into the room, so blinded by
the shimmering colours of the cakes and fruits and candies that covered
the table that I did not see Becky approaching me with outstretched
arms.
“Mamma, this is that little immigrant girl who never had a birthday,”
she said, “so I wanted to show her mine.”
Becky’s father glanced at her all in white, with pink ribbons on her
curls, as she stood beside me in my torn rags reeking with the grime of
neglect. A shudder of revulsion went through him at the sight of me.
“See what Becky has to mix up with on the block,” he whispered to his
wife. “For God’s sake, give her a nickel, give her some candy, give her
anything, but let her run along.”
Street child that I was, my instinct sensed the cold wave of his
thought without hearing the exact words. Breaking away from Becky’s
detaining hand I made for the door.
“I want to go home! I want to go home!” I sobbed as I ran out of the
room.
Whitman has said, “It is as lucky to die as it is to be born.”
And I put his thought into my own words, “It is as lucky not
to have advantages as it is to have them.” I mean that facing
my disadvantages--the fears, the discouragements, the sense of
inferiority--drove me to fight every inch of the way for things I
demanded out of life. And, as a writer, the experience of forcing my
way from the bottomest bottom gave me the knowledge of the poor that
no well-born writer could possibly have.
I am thinking, for instance, of Victor Hugo and his immortal book,
“Les Misérables.” It’s great literature, but it isn’t the dirt and the
blood of the poor that I saw and that forced me to write. Or take the
American, Jack London: when he wrote about tramps he roused the sense
of reality in his readers, because he had been a tramp. But later, when
he tried to make stories of the great unwashed of the cities--again
this was only literature.
The clear realization that literature is beyond my reach, that I must
either be real or nothing, enables me to accept my place as the cobbler
who must stick to his last, and gives my work any merit it may have. I
stand on solid ground when I write of the poor, the homeless and the
hungry.
* * * * *
Like many immigrants who expected to find America a realized Utopian
dream, I had my disillusions. I quote here from an article which was
published in _Good Housekeeping_ in June, 1920.
* * * * *
When the editor told me that he would give me the chance to speak to
the Americans out of my heart and say freely, not what I ought to
feel--not what the Americans want me to feel--but what I actually
do feel--something broke loose in me--a tightness that had held me
strained like one whose fists are clenched--resisting--resisting----
Resisting what? Had I not come to America with open, outstretched arms,
all my earthly possessions tied up in a handkerchief and all the hopes
of humanity singing in my heart?
Had I not come to join hands with all those thousands of dreamers who
had gone before me in search of the Golden Land? As I rushed forward
with hungry eagerness to meet the expected welcoming, the very earth
danced under my feet. All that I was, all that I had, I held out in my
bare hands to America, the beloved, the prayed-for land.
But no hand was held out to meet mine. My eyes burned with
longing--seeking--seeking for a comprehending glance. Where are the
dreamers? cried my heart. My hands dropped down, my gifts unwanted.
I found no dreamers in America. I found rich men, poor men,
educated men, ignorant men--struggling--all struggling--for bread,
for rent, for banks, for mines. Rich and poor, educated and
ignorant--straining--straining--wearing out their bodies, their
brains, for the possession of things--money, power, position--their
dreams forgotten.
I found in this rich land man still fighting man, as in the poorest
part of the old country. Just as the starving Roumanian Jews, who
had nothing to eat in their homeland but herring, when they became
millionaires still ate herring from gold plates at banquets, so,
throughout America, the dollar fight that grew up like a plague in
times of poverty, killing the souls of men, still goes on in times of
plenty.
I had expected to work in America, but work at the thing I loved--work
with my mind, my heart, prepared for my work by education. I had
dreamed of free schools, free colleges, where I could learn to give
out my innermost thoughts and feelings to the world. But no sooner
did I come off the ship than hunger drove me to the sweatshop, to
become a “hand”--not a brain--not a soul--not a spirit--but just a
“hand”--cramped, deadened into a part of a machine--a hand fit only to
grasp, not to give.
Time came when I was able to earn my bread and rent. I earned what
would have been wealth to me in Poland. My knotted nerves relaxed.
I begun to breathe like a free human being. Ach! Maybe I could yet
be at home in America. Maybe I could yet make something of myself.
My choked-in spirit revived. There was a new light in my eyes, new
strength in my arms and fingers. New hopes, new dreams beckoned
to me. Should I take a night course in college, or buy myself the
much-longed-for books, or treat myself to a little vacation to have
time to think?
Then the landlady came with the raise in rent. The loaf of bread
that was five cents became ten. Milk that was eight cents a quart
became eighteen. Shoes, clothes, everything doubled and tripled in
price. I felt like one put on a rack--thumb-screws torturing my
flesh--pay--pay--pay!
What had been enough to give me comfort yesterday became starvation
to-day. Always the cost of living leaping over the rise in wages. Never
free from poverty--even in America.
And then I clenched my hands and swore that I would hold my dream of
America--and fight for it. I refuse to accept the America where men
make other men poor--create poverty where God has poured out wealth. I
refuse to accept the America that gives the landlord the right to keep
on raising my rent and to drive me to the streets when I do not earn
enough to meet his rapacious demands.
I cry out in this wilderness for America--my America--different from
all other countries. In this America promised to the oppressed of all
lands, there is enough so that man need not fight man for his bread,
but work with man, building the beauty that for hundreds of years,
in thousands of starved villages of Europe, men have dreamed was
America--beautiful homes--beautiful cities--beautiful lives reaching up
for higher, ever higher visions of beauty.
I know you will say what right have I to come here and make demands
upon America. But are not my demands the breath, the very life of
America? What, after all, is America, but the response to the demands
of immigrants like me, seeking new worlds in which their spirits may
be free to create beauty? Were not the Pilgrim Fathers immigrants
demanding a new world in which they could be free to live higher lives?
Yes, I make demands--not in arrogance, but in all humility. I
demand--driven by my desire to give. I want to give not only that which
I am, but that which I might be if I only had the chance. I want to
give to America not the immigrant you see before you--starved, stunted,
resentful, on the verge of hysteria from repression. I want to give a
new kind of immigrant, full grown in mind and body--loving, serving,
upholding America.
* * * * *
By writing out my protests and disillusions, I aired and clarified
them. Slowly, I began to understand my unreasoning demands upon America
and what America had to offer. I saw that America was a new world in
the making, that anyone who has something real in him can find a way
to contribute himself in this new world. But I saw I had to fight for
my chance to give what I had to give, with the same life-and-death
earnestness with which a man fights for his bread.
What had I with my empty hands and my hungry heart to give to America?
I had my hunger, my homelessness, my dumbness, my blind searchings
and gropings for what I knew not. I had to give to America my
aching ignorance, my burning desire for knowledge. I had to give to
America the dirt and the ugliness of my black life of poverty and my
all-consuming passion for beauty.
As long as I kept stretching out my hands begging, begging for others
to understand me, for friendship, for help--as long as I kept begging
them to give me something--so long I was shut out from America. But the
moment I understood America well enough to tell her about herself as
I saw her--the moment I began to express myself--America accepted my
self-expression as a gift from me, and from everywhere hands reached
out to help me.
With the money I earned writing out stories of myself and my people, I
was enabled to go abroad and to take another look around the Old World.
I travelled from city to city. My special purpose was to talk to the
poor people in the different countries and see how their chance to live
compared with the chances of those in America.
I find that in no other country has the new-comer such a _direct_
chance to come to the front and become a partner in the making of the
country. Not where you come from, but what is in you and what you are,
counts in America.
In no other country is there such healthy rebellion, such vital
discontent, as there is among the poor in America. And the rebellion
and discontent of the poor is in proportion to how well off they are.
The poor people demand more of America than they ever dared to demand
of their homeland, because America is brimming over with riches enough
for everybody.
Life in America is a swift, sharp adventure. In the old countries
things are more or less settled. In America the soil is young, and the
people are young blossoming shoots of a new-grown civilization.
The writers of Europe can only be stylists, because life and traditions
are fixed with them. In America life is yet unexplored, and lived new
by each new-comer. And that is why America is such virgin stuff for the
novelist.
Fiction is a mirror of life as it is being lived at the moment. And the
moments are more static in Europe than in America. I admit that art
is not so good in America as in Europe, because art is a decoration,
and America is a young country too turbulent with life to take time to
decorate itself.
I who used to be the most violent rebel of an immigrant, I now find
myself the most ardent defender of America. I see every flaw of
America perhaps more clearly than ever before. I know the ruthless
commercialism of our big cities, the grabbing greed of landlords since
the war making the thought of home almost impossible to the poor. I
know that the gospel of success which rules in America hurts itself,
because failure and defeat have revelations for humanity’s deeper
growth, to which success is deaf and dumb and blind.
I know how often the artists, the makers of beauty, in America are
driven to the wall by the merciless extortion of those who sell the
means of existence. But I know, too, that those of the artists who
survive are vitalized by the killing things which had failed to kill
them. America has no place for the dawdling, soft-spined, make-believe
artists that swarm in the Paris cafés.
In the sunshine of the opportunities that have come to me, I am
always aware of those around me and behind me who lacked the terrific
vitality, the brutal self-absorption with which I had to fight for my
chance or be blotted out. My eyes will always turn back with loneliness
and longing for the old faces and old scenes that I loved more than my
life. But though it tears my heart out of my body to go on, I must go
on.
There’s no going back to the Old World for anyone who has breathed
the invigorating air of America. I return to America with the new
realization that in no other country would a nobody from nowhere--one
of the millions of lonely immigrants that pour through Ellis Island--a
dumb thing with nothing but hunger and desire, get the chance to become
articulate that America has given me.