Chapter XIV: Book IV: Note I (1)

I WALKED about the city of New York looking at people. I was not too young any more and could not make myself over to fit a new city. No doubt certain characteristics of my own nature had become fixed. I was a man of the mid-western towns who had gone from his town to the mid-western cities and there had gone through the adventures common to such fellows as myself. Was there some salt in me? To the end of my life I would talk with the half slovenly drawl of the middle-westerner, would walk like such a middle-westerner, have the air of something between a laborer, a man of business, a gambler, a race horse owner, an actor. If I was, as I then fully intended, to spend the rest of my life trying to tell such tales as I could think and feel my way through, I would have to tell the tales of my own people. Would I gain new power and insight for the telling by having come East, by consorting with other story-tellers? Would I understand better my own people and what had made the tragedies, the comedies and the wonders of their lives?

I was in New York as a guest, as an onlooker, wondering about the city and the men of the city and what they were thinking and feeling. There were certain men I wanted to see, who had written things I thought had given me new lights on my own people, the subjects of my tales.

I dare say there was a good deal of a certain half-rural timidity in me.

There was Mr. Van Wyck Brooks, whose book “America’s Coming-of-Age,” had moved me deeply. He with Mr. Waldo Frank, Paul Rosenfeld, James Oppenheim and others had just started a magazine, _The Seven Arts_ (that after its death was to be replaced by _The Dial_, published by a quite different group), and the magazine had not only offered to publish some of my things but its editors had asked me to come to see them.

I wanted to go and was at the same time a little afraid. At that time there was a good deal of talk abroad as to a new artistic awakening in America. Mr. Waldo Frank’s “Our America” must have been in preparation at just about that time and it could not have been much later that Mr. William Allen White wrote in _The New Republic_, an article the import of which was that “The King is dead! Long live the King!” If there were new kings in the land, I wanted to see and consort with them if I could.

As for _The Seven Arts_ magazine, there had been rumors of its coming birth, even in Chicago. Miss Edna Kenton had come from New York to Chicago at about that time and a meeting was held. There was a large party in a large house and upstairs somewhere the new day was under discussion. We, downstairs, did not just know what was being discussed but there was a kind of tingling sensation in the air. Little groups of us gathered in the rooms below. “What’s up?” It is to be remembered this was in Chicago and we were all young and no doubt naïve. “What they whispering about upstairs?” “Don’t you know?” Not to know was, we all felt, a kind of cultural blight. I had run from one group to another trying to find out and at just that moment a young doctor, who in his spare moments wrote poetry, came into the house and went hurriedly upstairs. A rather ribald fellow among the guests--Ben Hecht perhaps--who like the rest of us was angry that he had not been let into the secret, made an announcement. “I know what it is. Someone’s having a baby,” he said.

What about the men of New York, the writers whose work I admired, the painters whose work I admired? I had always wanted to be a painter myself, was always having sensations and seeing forms that could perhaps have been expressed in paint and in no other way but the materials of the painter’s craft seemed to me to lie far outside my way of life. One had to know drawing, to know what green did to yellow and yellow to brown. When one talked to painters they spoke of things that lay far outside one’s pathway. There had been one painter I had known quite well. He had lived in a room near my own in Chicago and painted landscapes. Rather he painted one landscape over and over. There was an old stone building that looked like pictures one had seen of peasants’ cottages. It was evening and two cows were coming home along a road, to a barn one fancied, but the barn could not be seen for the deep shadows that had gathered behind the house. Then there were some trees, the tops of which could be but faintly seen on the horizon. The last rays of the sun had splashed the sky with red. Often in the evening the painter, a large man with red hair, came into my room and spoke to me. He also had been touched with the new day and had read Paul Gauguin’s notebook and a work by Mr. Clive Bell. “The new fellows have nothing on me,” he declared and taking me into his room he showed me half a dozen of his canvases and how that in one the tops of the trees could just be seen above the roof of the house and in another that there were really no trees at all. “What you think is trees is only clouds,” he declared, “and what you think is the sun going down is really the moon coming up.”

Returning with me to my room he had talked so long and well of the effect of light on color, of form and its significance, of the new cubistic and post-impressionistic movements, the import and significance of which he declared scornfully he had measured and for the most part discarded, that I became frightened and did not for years afterwards try to paint. Once in Chicago I went into a store, intending to buy some colors with which to play at idle moments in my room but a certain air of the clerk had frightened me. My own father, when he was alive, had often received from manufacturers certain cards on which the house-painter’s colors were shown and the trade name of each color printed below and I had thought I might find such a card lying on a counter in the art store but saw none and was ashamed to ask. Perhaps I wanted the clerk to think me a painter who knew his craft. How glibly the red-haired man had reeled off the names of colors. I was like one who has wandered into a church where people are kneeling in prayer. I began walking on tiptoes. “I only wanted to buy a pencil eraser,” I said.

And so now there I was in the city of New York and there were certain men in the city to whom I would have liked to go, to talk with them of my craft, but when I thought of doing so I was afraid.

My own position was something like this: there were in my head certain tales I knew but could not yet tell and certain others I had told but felt I had told badly or haltingly. Was there a certain formula one could learn that might help one out of the difficulty? There was a sense in which I thought of myself as an ignorant man. The tales I had already put down on paper had been as a sort of growth in me. There was _The Little Review_, run by two Chicago women who had preceded me to New York. They had published tales of mine and might publish more. When I went to see them we had much fun together and Miss Anderson and myself had in common a fondness for rather striking clothes and for strutting a bit upon the stage of life that drew us closely together but being at bottom fellow Chicagoans we were bound not to take each other too seriously--at least not under the rose.

Did I want, above everything else, to be taken seriously? No doubt I did. That may have been the notion I had in coming to the city. And I suppose I wanted also to find superior craftsmen at whose feet I could sit. I already had my own notions concerning American story-tellers in general.

* * * * *

I was walking in the street or sitting in a train and overheard a remark dropped from the lips of some man or woman. Out of a thousand such remarks, heard almost every day, one stayed in my head. I could not shake it out. And then people constantly told me tales and in the telling of them there was a sentence used that intoxicated. “I was lying on my back on the porch and the street lamp shone on my mother’s face. What was the use? I could not say to her what was in my mind. She would not have understood. There was a man lived next door who kept going past the house and smiling at me. I got it into my head that he knew all that I could not tell mother.”

A few such sentences in the midst of a conversation overheard or dropped into a tale someone told. These were the seeds of stories. How could one make them grow?

In telling tales of themselves people constantly spoiled the tale in telling. They had some notion of how a story should be told got from reading. Little lies crept in. They had done something mean and tried to justify some action that for the tale’s sake did not need justification.

There was a notion that ran through all story-telling in America, that stories must be built about a plot and that absurd Anglo-Saxon notion that they must point a moral, uplift the people, make better citizens, etc. The magazines were filled with these plot stories and most of the plays on our stage were plot plays. “The Poison Plot,” I called it in conversation with my friends as the plot notion did seem to me to poison all story-telling. What was wanted I thought was form, not plot, an altogether more elusive and difficult thing to come at.

The plots were frameworks about which the stories were to be constructed and editors were inordinately fond of them. One got “an idea for a story.” What was meant was that a new trick had been thought out. Nearly all the adventure stories and the well-known American western stories were so constructed. A man went into the redwood forests or into the deserts and took up land. He has been a rather mean, second-rate chap in civilization but in the new place a great change comes over him. Well, the writer had got him out where there was no one looking and could do as he pleased with the fellow. Never mind what he had been. The forests or the deserts had changed him completely. The writer could make a regular angel of him, have him rescue downtrodden women, catch horse thieves, exhibit any kind of bravery required to keep the reader excited and happy.

A word of good sense dropped in anywhere would have blown the whole thing to pieces but there was no danger. In all such writing all consideration for human beings was thrown aside. No one lived in such tales. Let such a writer begin to think of human beings, care a little for human beings, and his pasteboard world would melt before his eyes. The man in the desert or in the redwood forests was of course the same man he had been before he went there. He had the same problems to face. God knows we would all flee to the forests or the deserts at once if going there could so transform anyone. At least I know I should waste no time in getting there.

In the construction of these stories there was endless variation but in all of them human beings, the lives of human beings, were altogether disregarded. An Alabama Negro was given the shrewdness of a Connecticut Yankee, a trick that made some writer temporarily famous and brought him wealth. Having made his Negro think like a Yankee, having made him practice all the smart cute tricks of the Yankee, there was nothing to stop the writer producing a thousand tales with the hybrid Negro as the hero of them all. Only the giving out of the patience of the editors or of the public could stop him, and both seemed inexhaustible.

As to what the writer himself suffered under these circumstances, that was a different matter. One supposed that any man who attempted the writer’s craft had, at the beginning, some real interest in the people about him but this was quickly lost. The imaginative life of the romancer must be lived entirely in a queer pasteboard world.

It was a peculiarity of the writer’s craft that one must of necessity give oneself to the people about whom one wrote, must in a quite special way believe in the existence of these people, and a peculiar childlike credulousness must result to the writer who so completely separated himself from actual life. Having acquired sudden fame and wealth such a writer woke up some morning to find himself irrevocably dead. The actuality of life could not reach him. On all sides of him people suffered, were touched with moments of nameless joy, loved and died, and the manufacturer of society detectives, desert heroes and daring adventures by sea and land could no longer see life at all. With unseeing eyes, deaf ears and benumbed senses he must walk through life--a movie hero, a stage star or a rich and successful manufacturer of romances--no longer a human being at all. One had no notion of giving oneself to that kind of death in life but to find out what one did not want to do was but half the battle.

After all the tales themselves came quickly. In certain moods one became impregnated with the seeds of a hundred new tales in one day. The telling of the tales, to get them into form, to clothe them, find just the words and the arrangement of words that would clothe them--that was a quite different matter. I wanted to find, if I could, the men who would help me toward the solution of that problem.

For even an unknown and unsuccessful scribbler in America the situation is difficult enough. Even the very sweetness of our people in their attitude toward our writers is destructive. You have seen how I myself was allowed to play like a reckless child among advertising men, constantly forgiven for my impudence, often paid an absurd figure for writing an unimportant advertisement--that any one of forty men, not authors, would have gladly written with more care at half my price--simply because I was an author.

Well, I had published certain tales over my own name and my fate was sealed. That the tales were not liked by many of the critics did not matter too much. To be sure, my books did not sell, but I was discussed in the newspapers and literary magazines and my picture was occasionally printed and finally a very second-rate English writer of romances, very popular in our country, spoke well of me and Mr. Frank Harris spoke ill of me.

Ye gods, I was lost and must flee. The very grocer at the corner, with whom I was wont to sit on the steps by the back door of the store on summer evenings while he talked of his life as a young sailor on a lake steamer looked at me with new eyes. He began speaking like a very movie hero. His tales, that had been so naturally and humanly told, became grotesques of tales. The fellow had some idea I might make him the hero of some improbable romance of our inland seas, one always holding the helm in some desperate storm or jumping overboard to rescue some broker’s daughter, and tried heroically to supply me with materials. He had in his youth read some novel of the seas and now he began to lie valiantly, telling me all the desperate escapades of which he had heard or read as having happened to himself. Shades of Defoe and Melville, such a sea and such a sailor’s life as he manufactured! I remembered almost with tears in my eyes the little homely real stories he had formerly been in the habit of telling of himself, and left him never to return. I was even vicious enough to rob him, for his defection, of my grocery trade.

How utterly all my life had been changed by a little public attention! Even some of my friends went the road of the grocer. I remember that I had, at just that time, done a deed affecting my personal life that had lost me the respect of some of my acquaintances. One of them saw my picture, printed I think in the _Literary Digest_, and immediately afterward wrote me a letter. “You are a great artist and may do anything you please. I forgive you everything,” he wrote and as I read the letter my heart went sick within me. “At any rate why do they want to dehumanize us?” I asked myself. Violently then I cursed the romancers. They were in reality at the bottom of it all. Not satisfied with the cowboys the sailors and the detectives they had descended upon their brothers of the pen and the brush. A poet was a certain kind of man with long hair and no food who went about muttering to himself. There was no escape for him. That he was and his fate was fixed. To be sure I had myself known some American poets and had found them in their everyday life much like all the other people I knew except that they were a trifle more sensitive to life and its beauties and, before they became widely known as poets, sometimes wrote beautiful bits describing their inner reaction to some flash of beauty that had come to them. They were that before they became widely known as poets and then later they were usually goners.

That was how it was with the poet. The painter usually starved in a garret and went about his small room pale and emaciated, with a palette stuck on his thumb, and then one day a lovely lady came along the street, saw how that he was a genius and married him. I’ll say this for us scribblers and the actors. We got off better. We usually, in the romances, sat on a park bench with the tramps and had a dirty newspaper blown to us by a cold wind. On the front page of the newspaper was a large picture of ourselves and an announcement that fame had come. Then we went and bought the tramps a breakfast with our last dollar before we went to live in a great house with servants. We scribblers and the actors got off the least shamefully in the romances but then, it is to be remembered, fellows of our own craft got up these yarns that had so stuck in the public mind and that they had for that reason perhaps a little pity for us.

All of this however concerned the materials for tales. One had to do one’s own winnowing in any event. I was in New York and was after something other than stories. Would I find what I wanted? I was somewhat afraid of the writers, particularly of the ones whose work I most admired because I thought they must be a special kind of being, quite different from the men I had known. (No doubt I was myself the victim of the same romancers I have just been cursing.) There were certain men I thought had written of America and American writing with an understanding that had been a help to me. I was what I was, a rough and tumble participant in life. As yet there had been little time for study, for quiet thought.

As for these other men, the fellows of the East, what of them? I fancied in them an erudition the contemplation of which made me afraid. Now I understood how Mark Twain felt when he went up to Boston. Did he, like myself, want something without knowing just what he wanted?

For such men as myself you must understand there is always a great difficulty about telling the tale after the scent has been picked up. The tales that continually came to me in the way indicated above could of course not become tales until I had clothed them. Having, from a conversation overheard or in some other way, got the tone of a tale, I was like a woman who has just become impregnated. Something was growing inside me. At night when I lay in my bed I could feel the heels of the tale kicking against the walls of my body. Often as I lay thus every word of the tale came to me quite clearly but when I got out of bed to write it down the words would not come.

I had constantly to seek in roads new to me. Other men had felt what I had felt, had seen what I had seen--how had they met the difficulties I faced? My father when he told his tales walked up and down the room before his audience. He pushed out little experimental sentences and watched his audience narrowly. There was a dull-eyed old farmer sitting in a corner of the room. Father had his eyes on the fellow. “I’ll get him,” he said to himself. He watched the farmer’s eyes. When the experimental sentence he had tried did not get anywhere he tried another and kept trying. Beside words he had--to help the telling of his tales--the advantage of being able to act out those parts for which he could find no words. He could frown, shake his fists, smile, let a look of pain or annoyance drift over his face.

These were his advantages that I had to give up if I was to write my tales rather than tell them and how often I had cursed my fate.

How significant words had become to me! At about this time an American woman living in Paris, Miss Gertrude Stein, had published a book called “Tender Buttons” and it had come into my hands. How it had excited me! Here was something purely experimental and dealing in words separated from sense--in the ordinary meaning of the word sense--an approach I was sure the poets must often be compelled to make. Was it an approach that would help me? I decided to try it.

A year or two before the time of which I am now writing an American painter, Mr. Felix Russman, had taken me one day into his workshop to show me his colors. He laid them out on a table before me and then his wife called him out of the room and he stayed for half an hour. It had been one of the most exciting moments of my life. I shifted the little pans of color about, laid one color against another. I walked away and came near. Suddenly there had flashed into my consciousness, for perhaps the first time in my life, the secret inner world of the painters. Before that time I had wondered often enough why certain paintings, done by the old masters, and hung in our Chicago Art Institute, had so strange an effect upon me. Now I thought I knew. The true painter revealed all of himself in every stroke of his brush. Titian made one feel so utterly the splendor of himself; from Fra Angelico and Sandro Botticelli there came such a deep human tenderness that on some days it fairly brought tears to the eyes; in a most dreadful way and in spite of all his skill Bouguereau gave away his own inner nastiness while Leonardo made one feel all of the grandeur of his mind just as Balzac had made his readers feel the universality and wonder of his mind.

Very well then, the words used by the tale-teller were as the colors used by the painter. Form was another matter. It grew out of the materials of the tale and the teller’s reaction to them. It was the tale trying to take form that kicked about inside the tale-teller at night when he wanted to sleep.

And words were something else. Words were the surfaces, the clothes of the tale. I thought I had begun to get something a little clearer now. I had smiled to myself a little at the sudden realization of how little native American words had been used by American story-writers. When most American writers wanted to be very American they went in for slang. Surely we American scribblers had paid long and hard for the English blood in our veins. The English had got their books into our schools, their ideas of correct forms of expression were firmly fixed in our minds. Words as commonly used in our writing were in reality an army that marched in a certain array and the generals in command of the army were still English. One saw the words as marching, always just so--in books--and came to think of them so--in books.

But when one told a tale to a group of advertising men sitting in a barroom in Chicago or to a group of laborers by a factory door in Indiana one instinctively disbanded the army. There were moments then for what have always been called by our correct writers “unprintable words.” One got now and then a certain effect by a bit of profanity. One dropped instinctively into the vocabulary of the men about, was compelled to do so to get the full effect sought for the tale. Was the tale he was telling not just the tale of a man named Smoky Pete and how he caught his foot in the trap set for himself?--or perhaps one was giving them the Mama Geigans story. The devil. What had the words of such a tale to do with Thackeray or Fielding? Did the men to whom one told the tale not know a dozen Smoky Petes and Mama Geigans? Had one ventured into the classic English models for tale-telling at that moment there would have been a roar. “What the devil! Don’t you go high-toning us!”

And it was sure one did not always seek a laugh from his audience. Sometimes one wanted to move the audience, make them squirm with sympathy. Perhaps one wanted to throw an altogether new light on a tale the audience already knew.

Would the common words of our daily speech in shops and offices do the trick? Surely the Americans among whom one sat talking had felt everything the Greeks had felt, everything the English felt? Deaths came to them, the tricks of fate assailed their lives. I was certain none of them lived felt or talked as the average American novel made them live feel and talk and as for the plot short stories of the magazines--those bastard children of De Maupassant, Poe and O. Henry--it was certain there were no plot short stories ever lived in any life I had known anything about.

Did it come to this, that Americans worked, made love, settled new western states, arranged their personal affairs, drove their fords, using one language while they read books, wanted perhaps to read books, in quite another language?

I had come to Gertrude Stein’s book about which everyone laughed but about which I did not laugh. It excited me as one might grow excited in going into a new and wonderful country where everything is strange--a sort of Lewis and Clark expedition for me. Here were words laid before me as the painter had laid the color pans on the table in my presence. My mind did a kind of jerking flop and after Miss Stein’s book had come into my hands I spent days going about with a tablet of paper in my pocket and making new and strange combinations of words. The result was I thought a new familiarity with the words of my own vocabulary. I became a little conscious where before I had been unconscious. Perhaps it was then I really fell in love with words, wanted to give each word I used every chance to show itself at its best.

It had then not occurred to me that the men I had really come to New York hoping to see and know, fellows of the schools, men who knew their Europe, knew the history of the arts, who knew a thousand things I could not know, it had never occurred to me that in the end I would find them as frankly puzzled as myself. When I found that out there was a new adjustment to make. It was then only the trick men, the men who worked from the little patent formula they had learned, the critics who could never get English literature out of their heads, who thought they were sure of their grounds? That knowledge was a relief when I found it out but I was a long long time finding it out. It takes a long time to find out one’s own limitations and perhaps a longer time to find out the limitations of one’s critics.

* * * * *

Was there really something new in the air of America? I remember that at about this time someone told me that I was myself something new and how thankful I was to hear it. “Very well,” I said to myself, “if there are certain men launching a new ship from the harbor of New York and if they are willing to take me aboard I’ll sure go.” I was just as willing to be a modern as anything else, was glad to be. It was very sure I was not going to be a successful author and well enough I knew that, not being successful, there would be a great deal of consolation to me in being at least a modern.

What I at the moment felt toward all the more deeply cultured men whose acquaintanceship I sought and still in a sense feel toward them was something like what a young mechanic might feel when his boss comes into the shop accompanied by his daughter. The young mechanic is standing at his lathe and there is grease on his face and hands. The boss’s daughter has never been shown over the shop before and is a little excited by the presence of so many strange men and as she and her father approach the lathe where the young workman stands he does not know whether to appear surly and uncommunicative or bold and a bit impudent. (In his place I, being an American, should probably have winked at the girl and been terribly embarrassed and ashamed later.)

There he stands fumbling about with his fingers and pretending to look out of the window and--the devil!--now the boss has stopped behind his lathe and is attempting to explain something to the daughter, “This is a sprocket post, is it not?” he says to the workman, who is compelled to turn around. “Yes, sir,” he mutters, in embarrassment but his eyes, in just that fraction of a second, have taken a sweeping glance at the daughter.

And now she is gone and the workman is asking himself questions. “If I was a swell now I suppose maybe I’d be invited to their house.” He imagines himself in a dress suit going up a long driveway to the front of a grand house. He is swinging a cane and there on the front steps is the boss’s daughter waiting to receive him. What will he talk to her about? Dare a man speak in such company of the only things he knows? What does he know?

He knows that Jack Johnson could probably have whipped Jess Willard if he had really tried. There is a woman lives in his rooming house who is unfaithful to her husband. He knows who with. She is going to have a child but the chances are it is not her husband’s child. Often he has asked himself how she will feel on the night when the child is born and when her husband is so excited and proud.

After all, the young workman knows a good many things of his own sort, but of how many of them can he, dare he, speak with the boss’s daughter whose voice was so soft and whose skin looked so delicate that day when she came into the shop with her father? “Dare I ask her what she thinks the unfaithful wife will be thinking and feeling when the child is born?”

Young workmen have a kind of fear of the thing called culture. Most middle-westerners think of it--in spite of their protestations to the contrary--as in some vague way to be breathed in the air of New York. New Yorkers seem to think of it as to be found in London or Paris. Bankers and manufacturers of the Middle-West hope to get it for their sons by sending them to Yale or Harvard and as there are a good many bankers and manufacturers Yale and Harvard are inclined to be crowded. Mark Twain thought he would find it in Boston--a whole generation of Americans thought that.

To the young workman culture is somewhat like a new suit of clothes that does not fit too well. It binds under the arms when one first puts it on.

NOTE II

WHEN I lived in Chicago and had first begun to write stories an American critic who had seen some of my work had been very kind about securing the publication of the stories but once, when he was annoyed with me for writing a story he did not like, he wrote me a scolding letter. “You are, after all, nothing but an advertising writer who would like to be something else and can’t make it,” he said and after I had got to New York and had walked about a little looking at the tall arrogant buildings and at the smart alert-looking people in the streets I thought I had better, for the time at least, stay away from the people whose work and whose minds I admired. “They might find out how really little I know,” I said to myself shrewdly.

I was however not too lonely, having plenty of people at whom I could look, to whom I could listen. My brother, who lived in New York, took me to the Salmagundi Club where I saw any number of successful painters and my boyhood friend Mr. John Emerson took me to the Players and Lambs and also, with other men and women I knew, I penetrated into the life of Greenwich Village.

How many strings to grasp! How many things I wanted of the city that was, I had no doubt, the artistic and intellectual capital of the country! The city’s wealth did not impress me too much, as I had been in other wealthy places. One could make money as fast in Chicago as in New York, although it could probably not be spent with quite as much style. What I wanted most was the men who would help me solve certain problems connected with the craft to which I was devoted. Could I find such fellows? Would they do it?

The bitter truth was that of the actors I saw and heard talk none seemed much interested in the craft of the actor and of the painters the same lack of interest in what seemed to me so essential was apparent, and surely we scribblers were no better. The successful men of the arts talked of the market and little else. Writers even went into bookstores to see what kind of books were selling well in order to know what kind of books to write, actors talked of salaries paid and of getting some part that would bring them into prominence and the painters followed the same bent.

Were the successful practitioners of the arts much less decent fellows than the laborers and business men of the Middle West among whom my life had been spent? I was forced to ask myself that question too.

NOTE III

I SAT in a restaurant in New York thinking of my friends George and Marco in Chicago. We had been lads together and I remembered an evening of our young manhood when we all went out to walk together. We had stopped at a bridge and stood leaning over and I remembered that Marco had said something, expressive at the moment of what we had all felt. “The time’ll come, I’ll bet you what you please the time’ll come when I’ll be making my hundred and twenty-five every month,” he had said.

Well, Marco’s remark had expressed something more than a desire to make money. Later all of us had made money and then when youth was gone we had all tried something else. Marco wrote poetry and George and I wrote stories. None of us knew much of our crafts but we had struggled together with them and in the evenings had sat about talking. What we had all wanted was the leisure money might bring. We had all wanted to go to New York and live among men who knew more of the crafts we were trying to practice than we felt we would ever know.

And now I had come to New York and was sitting I in a restaurant where the more successful of the practitioners of the arts congregated. What did I want? I wanted to hear men of my own craft, who loved the craft, speak of it. I remembered how as a boy in mid-western towns before the factories came in so thick the carpenters, wheelwrights, harness-makers and other craftsmen often gathered about to speak of their work and how I loved to be among them at such times. The factories had brushed such fellows aside. Had the same thing happened in the more delicate crafts? Were the great publishing houses of the city and the magazines but factories and were the writers and picture makers who worked for them but factory hands now?

If that had happened I thought I understood the men among whom I had now come. The older craftsmen had thought little on the subject of wages and had never talked on the subject when they gathered in groups in the evenings but the factory hands among whom I later worked had talked of little else. They had talked of how much money might be made and had boasted interminably of their potency in sex. Were the practitioners of the more delicate crafts becoming like them?

In the New York restaurant was a room filled with people, all in some way practitioners of the arts. Near me at a table sat three men and two women. They were talking in rather loud tones and seemed conscious that everything they said was of importance. One had a queer sense of their separateness from each other. Why, when one of them spoke, did he not look at his fellows? Instead he glanced about the room, as though saying to himself, “Is anyone looking at me?”

And now one of these men arose and walked across the room. There was something strange about his walk. I was puzzled and then the truth came to me. All the men and women in the room were obviously aware of what they thought of as their own importance. No man spoke naturally, walked naturally.

The man who had got up from the table to go speak to someone at another table did not want really to speak to him. He wanted to walk across the room for the same reason that I am told, nowadays, it is almost impossible to do anything with actors as they all want to get into one spot on the stage--upstage where the light is the clearest.

What a ghastly separation from life! I sat in the New York restaurant fully aware that what was true of the men and women about me was true also of myself. The people in the restaurant, the actors, painters and writers, had made themselves what the public thought it wanted from its artists, and had been well paid for doing so. What I felt in New York I might have felt with even more terrible certainty in Hollywood.

I fled from the restaurant and at a street corner stopped and laughed at myself. I remembered that at the moment I had on a pair of socks and a neck-scarf, either of which might have been seen for a mile. “At any rate you’re not such a blushing violet yourself,” I said, grinning with myself at myself.

NOTE IV

IT was time surely for me to review myself. I wanted to know just what I was doing in New York, what I was up to--if I could find out. I had time now to ask myself a lot of questions and I enjoyed doing so. Mornings to walk about, afternoons to go to the parks, sit with people or go to see paintings, evenings of my own. No advertisements to write, for a time anyway. “Crescent Soap Lightens the Day’s Work. Tangletoes Catches the Flies,” etc. For a man living as I lived a few hundred dollars would go far. For the American there are always plenty of books to be had without cost and one may see what the more successful painters are doing by simply walking in at the door of a museum or a gallery. The work of the more unsuccessful ones worth seeing Alfred Stieglitz will show you or tell you about. Cigarettes do not cost very much and there are happy hours to be spent sitting by the window of a room in a side street hearing what people have to say as they walk past. All the women of my street spent the time at the same thing. There was a fat old woman across the way who never left the window from morning till night. I wondered if she was planning to write a novel and was thinking about the characters, dreaming of them, making up scenes and situations in which they were to play a part.

If my life in the past had been split into two parts it need be that no longer. I have taken a resolution. In the future I would write no more advertisements. If I became broke I would become a beggar and sit with a beggar bowl in Fifth Avenue. Even the police are sentimental enough not to kick an author out. I would not sit swearing at the book publishers, the magazine editors or the public, that I was not rich. I had not tried to accommodate myself to them--why should they bother about me? I sat dreaming of what might be the takings of an author with a beggar bowl in his lap sitting in front of the Public Library on Fifth Avenue. The press of people would prevent the literarily inclined ladies from stopping to discuss books or to tell the author that his philosophy of life was all wrong. Also they could not accuse him of personal immorality. A beggar could not be immoral. He was at once above and below immorality. And the takings! There would be much good silver and I loved silver. If I should become blind my fortune would be made at last. A blind author sitting begging before the Public Library in the city of New York! Who dare say there was not glorious opportunity left in our country?

Had I less courage than my father? Perhaps I had. He also might have thought of so noble a plan but in my place he might also have put it into execution at once. Ladies often came to the Public Library to meet their lovers. Quarrels started there. One would learn much of life by sitting as I have suggested. No man or woman would hesitate to speak boldly before a beggar. The stones would be cold but perhaps one could have a cushion.

NOTE V

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?