Chapter XV: Book IV: Note I (2)

Other thoughts came. Even my friend Paul Rosenfeld had called me “the Phallic Chekhov.” Had I a sex obsession? Was I a goner?

Another American, Mr. Henry Adams, had evidently been as puzzled as I was at that moment although I am sure he would never have been so undignified as to have written, as I am doing here, of himself as lying on a bed in a New York rooming house and putting his own hands up into the moonlight to stare at them.

However he had been equally puzzled. “Singularly enough,” he had said in his book, “The Education of Henry Adams,” “singularly enough, not one of Adams’ many schools of education has ever drawn his attention to the opening lines of Lucretius, though they were perhaps the finest in all Latin literature, where the poet invoked Venus exactly as Dante invoked the Virgin:”

‘Quae, quoniam rerum naturam Sola gubernas.’

“The Venus of Epicurean philosophy survived in the Virgin of the Schools.”

‘Donna, sei tanto grande, e tanta vali,
Che qual vuol grazia, e a te non ricorre,
Sua Disianza vuol volar senz’ ali.’

“All this was to American thought as though it had never existed. The true American knew something of the facts, but nothing of the feelings; he read the letter, but he never felt the law. Before this historic chasm, a mind like that of Adams felt itself helpless; he turned from the Virgin to the dynamo as though he were a Branly coherer. On one side, at the Louvre and at Chartres, as he knew by the record of work actually done and still before his eyes, was the highest energy ever known to men, the creator of four-fifths of his noblest art, exercising vastly more attraction over the human mind than all the steam engines and dynamos ever dreamed of; and yet this energy was unknown to the American mind. An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist.”

NOTE VI

IF Mr. Adams had not spent his time as I was doing, lying on a bed and looking at his own hands, he had at least spent his time looking about. “An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist,” he had said and it was an accusation that an American could neither love nor worship.

At any rate I was a man of the Middle West. I was not a New Englander. For my own people, as I had known them, it was absurd to say they had neither love nor reverence. Never a boy or man I had known at all intimately but that had both in him. We had simply been cheated. Our Virgins and Venuses had to be worshiped under the bush. What nights I had spent mooning about with middle-western boys, with hungry girls too. Were we but trying to refute the older men of New England who had got such a grip on our American intellectual life, the Emersons, Hawthornes and Longfellows? It was perhaps true to say of the intellectual sons of these men that a Virgin would never dare command, that a Venus would never dare exist. I knew little of New England men in the flesh but it was not necessarily true of us, out in my country. Of that I was pretty sure.

As for my own hands I continued looking at them. Questions kept coming. I was myself no longer young. Having made a few bicycles in factories, having written some thousands of rather senseless advertisements, having rubbed affectionately the legs of a few race horses, having tried blunderingly to love a few women and having written a few novels that did not satisfy me or anyone else, having done these few things, could I begin now to think of myself as tired out and done for? Because my own hands had for the most part served me so badly could I let them lie beside me in idleness?

I did not dare make such a surrender, nor did I dare dodge the issue with myself by going off into that phase of New York life I had already come to dislike, that phase of life which allows a man to employ his hands merely in writing smart and self-satisfying words regarding the failures of other men. In reality I was not trying to look at other men’s lives just then and as for other men’s work--it meant something to me when it taught me something. I was a middle-westerner who had come East to school if I could find the school.

I wanted back the hands that had been taken from me if I could get them back. Mr. Stark Young had talked to me one day of what thinking might be and his words kept ringing in my ears. Such words as he had said to me always excited like music or painting. He was a man who had been a professor in colleges and knew what was conventionally called thinking and he had said that thinking meant nothing at all unless it was done with the whole body--not merely with the head. I remember that one night I got out of bed and went to my window. I had a room far over on Twenty-second Street, near the Hudson River, and often, late at night, sailors from the ships lying in the river came along my street. They had been drinking, seeing the girls, having a time, and were now going back to the ships to sail away over the world. One of them, a very drunken sailor who had to stop every few steps and lean against a building, sang in a hoarse throaty voice:

“Lady Lou. Lady Lou.
I love you.
Lady Lou.”

I looked at my own hands lying on the window sill in the moonlight and I dare say had anyone seen me at that moment he might have decided I had gone quite insane. I talked to my own hands, made them promises, pleaded with them, “I shall cover you with golden rings. You shall be bathed in perfumes.”

Perhaps there was an effort to be made I had not the courage or strength to make. When it came to tale-telling there were certain tales that fairly told themselves, but there were others, more fascinating, that needed a great deal of understanding, of myself first and then of others.

NOTE VII

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?

NOTE VIII

I WAS living in a rooming house in a side street in New York and had spent more years of my life than I cared to think about in just such places. When I first began writing I used to read a great deal, in George Moore and others, of writers, painters, poets and the like sitting in cafés. That however happened in Paris, not in New York or Chicago. Everyone has read about it. You know how they do. In the evening one by one they come in at the door of the café. On the arm of the painter there may chance to be a beautiful grisette. The writers are less fortunate with the ladies and are glad to sit in silence listening to the talk. And how brilliant the talk! Such things are said! There is always an old wit, someone in the manner of Whistler or Degas. The old dog sits at a table keeping everything in order. I remember that two or three men I knew in New York tried something of the sort but did not quite pull it off. Let someone get a little “hifalutin’”--some scribbler, let us say. Suppose he sighs and says “The beautiful must remain the unattainable,” or something like that. Or let some other scribbler go off on a long solemn pronouncement about government, “All government should be done away with. It’s nonsense.” Bang! The Jimmy Whistler or the Degas of the café has shot him right between the eyes. There was a sense in which Miss Jane Heap of _The Little Review_ supplied the need of such a one in New York, but she and Miss Margaret Anderson could not cover the whole field. That was impossible.

And, in any event, neither New York nor Chicago has any cafés. When I first went to New York drinking was still publicly going on but one stood up at a bar with the foot on a rail and shot the drink into oneself. There might be a moment of conversation with the bartender. “What chance you think the Giants got?” etc. Nothing specially helpful in that and anyway what one secretly hoped was that the White Sox of Chicago would win.

Everyone lived in rooms, except those who had rich parents and most young American artists gathered in the city, ate at cafeterias. In Chicago, before I left, they had begun taking the chairs out of the restaurants and one fancied that, in a few years, all Chicagoans would eat as they drank, standing. It would save time.

We more solemn and serious American scribblers, painters, etc., for the most part lived in rooms and I have myself a memory of rooms in which I have lived, that is like a desert trail. I can no longer recall all of them. In a sense they haunt my whole life. At a little distance they become gray, little gray holes into which I have crept.

And we Americans have enough of the blood of the northern races in us that we must have our holes into which to creep, to contemplate ourselves, to say our prayers. In Paris, during a summer when I loitered there, I found myself able to sit all afternoon in a café, watching the people pass up and down a little street. At another café across a small square a young student made love to a girl. He kept touching her body with his hands and laughing and occasionally he kissed her. That happened and carts passed. One side of my mind made little delightful mental notes. The French teamsters did not make geldings of their horses. Magnificent stallions passed drawing dust carts. Why did Americans unman stallions while the French did not? The teamster walked in the road with his hat cocked to the side of his head and a bit of color in the hat. The stallion threw back his head and trumpeted. The teamster made some sort of sarcastic comment to the student with the girl, who answered in kind but did not quit kissing her. There was a small church on the west side of the square and old women were going in and coming out. All these things happened and I was alive to them all and still I sat in a café writing a tale of life in my own Ohio towns. How natural it seemed, in Paris, to lead one’s secret inner life quite openly in the streets and how unnatural the same sort of thing would have seemed in an American city.

In Chicago alone there had been enough rooms, in which I myself had lived, had hidden myself away, to have made a long street of houses. How much had my own outlook on life been made by the rooms? How much were the lives of all Americans made by the places in which they lived? When Americans grew tired of their houses--or rooms--and went into the street there was no place to sit unless one went into a movie or went to eat expensive and unnecessary food in a crowded restaurant. In the movies signs were put up: “Best place in town to kill time.”

Time then was a thing to be killed. It would seem an odd notion, I fancy, to a Frenchman or an Italian.

NOTE IX

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.

I wanted, as all men do, to belong.

To what? To an America alive, an America that was no longer a despised cultural foster child of Europe, with unpleasant questions always being asked about its parentage, to an America that had begun to be conscious of itself as a living home-making folk, to an America that had at last given up the notion that anything worth while could ever be got by being in a hurry, by being dollar rich, by being merely big and able to lick some smaller nation with one hand tied behind its broad national back.

As for the men of Jewish blood, so many of whom I found quick and eager to meet me half way, my heart went out to them in gratitude. They were wanting love and understanding, had in their natures many impulses that were destructive. Was there a sense of being outlaws? They did not want their own secret sense of separateness from the life about them commented upon but it existed. They themselves kept it alive and I thought they were not unwise in doing so. I watched them eagerly. Did they have, in their very race feeling, the bit of ground under their feet it was so hard for an Ohio man to get in Cleveland Cincinnati or Chicago or New York? The man of Jewish blood, in an American city, could at any rate feel no more separateness from the life about him than the advertising writer in a Chicago advertising agency who had within him a love of the craft of words. The Jewish race had made itself felt in the arts for ages and even our later middle-western anti-Jewish crusader Henry Ford had no doubt as a child been taught to read the Bible written by old Jewish word-fellows.

As far as I myself could understand, the feeling of separateness from the life about was common to all Americans. It explained the everlasting get-together movements always going on among business men and as for race prejudices, they also were common. There was the South with its concern about the Negroes, the Far West and its orientals, the whole country a little later with its sudden hatred of the Germans and in the Middle West all sorts of little cross-currents of race hatreds as the factory hands came into the towns from all over Europe. No American ever met another American without drawing a little back. There was a question in the soul. “What are your people? Where did they come from?” “What kind of blood flows in your veins?”

Could it not very well be that the men of Jewish blood who had given themselves to the crafts in America could look at life a bit more impersonally, go out more quickly and warmly to individuals, throw up out of the body of the race more individuals who could give themselves wholeheartedly to the cultural life because of the very fact of a race history behind them?

One had always to remember that we Americans were in the process of trying to make a race. The Jews had been a part of the life of almost every race that had come to us and were for perhaps that very reason in a better position than the rest of us to help make our own race.

NOTE X

A GRAY morning and myself, no longer young, sitting on a bench before the little open space that faces the cathedral of Chartres. Thoughts flitting across a background of years. Had I finally accepted myself, in part at least, as a tale-teller, had I come that far on the road toward manhood?

It was sure I had been traveling, wandering from place to place, trying to look and listen. At that moment I was very far away from that land, the background of my tales, the Middle West of America. I was perhaps even farther away spiritually than physically. In my day men covered huge physical distances in a short time. As I sat there nearly all the reality of me was still living in the Middle West of America, in mining towns, factory towns, in sweet stretches of Ohio and Illinois countryside, in great smoke-hung cities, in the midst of that strange, still-forming muddle of peoples that is America.

I had drawn myself out of that for the time, had been in New York among the other writer folk, among the painters, among the talkers too. That after the years of active participation in life, in modern American life, cheating some, lying a good deal, scheming, being hurt by others, hurting others.

The younger years of being a business schemer, trying to grow rich--I have said little enough of those years in my book. However the book is long enough, perhaps far too long.

Had I ever really wanted to be rich? Perhaps I had only wanted to live, in my craft, in the practice of my craft. It was certain I had not, for many years of my life, known what I wanted. After years of striving to get money, to get power, to be successful, I had found in the end well-nigh perfect contentment in looking and listening, in sitting lost in some little corner, writing, trying to write all down. “A little worm in the fair apple of progress,” I had called myself laughing--the American laugh.

Now, for a few years, I had been looking abroad. I think it was Joseph Conrad who said that a writer only began to live after he began to write. It pleased me to think I was, after all, but ten years old.

Plenty of time ahead for such a one. Time to look about, plenty of time to look about.

Well, I had been looking about. I an American middle-westerner, ten years old, had been looking at old London, at strong arrogant young New York, at old France too.

It was apparent that although in France, in the eleventh twelfth and thirteenth centuries, there had been many men alive who had cared greatly for the work of their hands, present-day Frenchmen obviously did not. The cathedral before me was faced on one side by ugly sheds, such as some railroad company might have put up on the shores of a lake facing a city of mid-America. I had taken a second leap from New York to Paris, had been brought there by a friend who now sat on the bench beside me. The man was a friend dear to my heart. We had been sitting for days on just that bench, wandering about the cathedral. Visitors came and went, mostly Americans, middle-western Americans like myself no doubt. Some of them looked at the cathedral without stopping the motors of theirs cars. They were in a hurry, had got the hurry habit. One day a little drama played itself out in the open space before the cathedral door. An American came with two women, one French the other American, his wife or his sweetheart. He was flirting with the French woman and the American woman was pretending she did not see. My friend and I watched the drama flit back and forth for two or three hours. There before us was a woman losing her man, and she did not want to admit it to herself. Once when they had all three gone inside the cathedral, the American woman came out and stood for a moment by the massively beautiful door, the old eleventh-century door facing us. She did not see us and went to lean against the door itself, crying softly. Then she wiped her eyes and went inside again to join the others. They were all presumably getting culture there, in the presence of the work of the old workmen. The stooped figures of old Frenchwomen with shawls about their shoulders kept hurrying across the open space, going into the cathedral to worship. My friend and I were also worshiping at the cathedral, had been doing that for days.

Life went on then, ever in the same tragic comic sweet way. In the presence of the beautiful old church one was only more aware, all art could do no more than that--make people, like my friend and myself, more aware. An American girl put her face against the beautiful door of Chartres Cathedral and wept for her lost lover. What had been in the hearts of the workmen who once leaned over the same door carving it? They were fellows who had imaginations that flamed up. “Always wood for carvers to carve, always little flashing things to stir the souls of painters, always the tangle of human lives for the tale-tellers to mull over, dream over,” I told myself. I remembered what an excited young man had once said to me in Chicago. We had stood together in Lake Street, that most noisy and terrible of all Chicago’s downtown streets. “There are as many tales to be found here as in any street of any city in the world,” he had said a little defiantly. Then he looked at me and smiled. “But they will be different tales than would be found in any street of any of the old world cities,” he added.

I wondered.

My own mind was in a ferment, thoughts scurrying across a background of fancies as shadows play across the walls of a room when night comes on. My friend sat in silence. He had got hold of Huysmann’s “Cathedral” and was reading. Now and then he put the book down and sat for a long time in silence looking at the gray lovely old building in that gray light. It was one of the best moments of my own life. I felt free and glad. Did the friend who was with me love me? It was sure I loved him. How good his silent presence.

How good the presence of my own thoughts too! There was my friend, the Cathedral, the presence of the little drama in the lives of the three strange people who would presently come out of the church and go away, the packed storehouse of my own fancy too. The end of the story immediately before me I would never know but some day, when I was alone, in Chicago perhaps, my fancy would take it up and play with it. Too bad I was not a Turgenev or someone equally skillful. Were I such a one I might make of what I had seen some such a tale as, say Turgenev’s “Smoke.” There was just the material for a tale, a novel perhaps. One might fancy the man a young American who had come to Paris to study painting and before he came had engaged himself to an American girl at home. He had learned French, had made progress with his work. Then the American girl had set sail for Paris to join him and, at just that moment, while she was at sea, he had fallen desperately in love with a French woman. The deuce, the French woman was skillful with men and she imagined the young American to be rich. With what uncertain thoughts was the breast of the young American torn at that moment.

The three of them just suddenly came out of the church together and walked away together in silence. That was all. All tales presented themselves to the fancy in just that way. There was a suggestion, a hint given. In a crowd of faces in a crowded street one face suddenly jumped out. It had a tale to tell, was crying its tale to the streets but at best one got only a fragment of it. Once, long after the time of which I am now writing, I tried to paint in an American desert. There was something about the light. My eyes were not accustomed to it. There was a wide desert and beyond the desert hills floating away into the distance. I could lie on my back on the sands of the desert and watch the evening light fade away over the hills and such forms come! I thought all I had ever felt could be expressed in one painting of those hills but when later I took a brush into my hands I was only dumb and stupid. What appeared on the canvas was dull and meaningless. I walked about swearing at myself and then at the desert light and the very hills that so short a time before had so filled me with peace and happiness. I kept blaming the light. “Nothing stands still in this light,” I said to myself.

As though anything ever stood still anywhere. It was the artist’s business to make it stand still--well, just to fix the moment, in a painting, in a tale, in a poem.

Sitting there with my friend, facing the cathedral, I remembered something. On my desk, somewhere back in America, was a book in which I had once written certain lines. Well, I had made a poem and had called it, “One who would not grow old.” Now it came sharply back:

I have wished that the wind would stop blowing, that birds would stop dead still in their flight, without falling into the sea, that waves would stand ready to break upon shores without breaking, that all time, all impulse, all movement, mood, hungers, everything would stop and stand hushed and still for a moment.

It would be wonderful to be sitting on a log in a forest when it happened.

When all was still and hushed, just as I have described, we would get off the log and walk a little way.

The insects would all lie still on the ground or float, fixed and silent in the air. An old frog, that lived under a stone and that had opened his mouth to snap at a fly, would sit gaping.

There would be no movement, in New York, in Detroit, in Chicago down by the stock exchange, in towns, in factories, on farms.

Out in Colorado, where a man was riding a horse furiously, striving to catch a steer to be sent to Chicago and butchered--

He would stop, too, and the steer would stop.

You and I would walk a little way, in the forest, or on a prairie, or on the streets of a town, and then we would stop. We would be the only moving things in the world and then one of us would start a thought rolling and rolling, down time, down space, down mind, down life too.

I am sure I would let you do it if later you would keep all of the voices of your mind hushed while I did it in my turn. I would wait ten lives while others did it for my turn.

* * * * *

That impulse gone long since as I sat that day before the cathedral of Chartres! It was an impulse that had come time and again to every artist but my own moments had come often enough. I had no cause to quarrel with my own life.

Such moments as I had already had in it. “Life owes me nothing,” I kept saying over and over to myself. It was true enough. For all one might say about American life it had been good to me. On that afternoon I thought that if I were suddenly to be confronted with death in the form of the old man with a sickle in his hand, I would be compelled to say, “Well, it’s your turn now, old fellow. I’ve had my chance. If I had done little enough, it’s my fault, not yours.”

At any rate life in America had poured itself out richly enough. It was doing that still. As I sat on the bench before Chartres on that gray day I remembered such moments.

* * * * *

A hot afternoon at Saratoga. I had gone to the races with two men from Kentucky, one a professional gambler and the other a business man who could never succeed because he was always running off to the horse races or some such place with such no-accounts as the little gambler and myself. We were smoking big black cigars and all of us were clad in rather garish clothes. All about us were men just like us but with big diamonds on their fingers or in their neckties. On a stretch of green lawn beneath trees a horse was being saddled. Such a beauty! What a buzz of colorful words! The professional gambler, a small man with crooked legs, had once been a jockey and later a trainer of race horses. It was said he had done something crooked, had got himself into disgrace with other horsemen but of that I knew little. At the sight of such a horse as we were now watching as the saddle was put on something strange happened to him. A soft light came into his eyes. The devil! I had once or twice seen just such a light in the eyes of painters at work, I had seen such a light in the eyes of Alfred Stieglitz in the presence of a painting. Well, it was such a light as might have come into the eyes of a Stark Young holding in his hands some piece of old Italian craftsmanship.

I remember that as the little old gambler and I stood near the horse I spoke to him of a painting I had once seen in New York, that painting of Albert Ryder’s of the ghostly white horse running beneath a mysteriously encircled moon on an old race track at night.

The gambler and I talked of the painting. “I know,” he said, “I like to hang around race tracks at night myself.”

That was all he said and we stood watching the horse. In a few minutes now that tense trembling body would be at ease, fallen into the ease of its long, swinging stride, out there on the track.

The gambler and I went away to stand by a fence. Were men less fortunate than horses? Did men also seek but to express themselves beautifully as in a few minutes now the horse would do? The gambler’s body trembled as did my own. When the horse ran (he broke the record for the mile, that day) he and I did not speak to each other. We had together seen something we together loved. Was it enough? “At least,” I told myself, “we men have a kind of consciousness that perhaps the horses haven’t. We have this consciousness of one another. That is what love is, perhaps.”

There was a child, a young boy of fourteen walking beside his mother in a park at Cleveland, Ohio. I sat on a bench there and saw him go by and after that one moment of his passing never saw him again but I’ll never forget while I live. The moment was like the moment of the running of the horse. Could it be that it was the boy’s most beautiful moment? Well, I had seen it. Why was I not made to be a painter? The boy’s head was thrown a little back, he had black curly hair and carried his hat in his hand. In just that moment of his passing the bench on which I sat his young body was all alive, all of the senses fully alive. Whose son was he? Such a living thing as that, to be thrown into the life of Cleveland, Ohio or of Paris or Venice either for that matter.

I am always having those moments of checking up like a miser closing the shutters of his house at night to count his gold before he goes to bed and although there are many notes on which I might close this book on my own imaginative life in America, it seems to me good enough to close it just there as I sat that day before Chartres Cathedral beside a man I had come to love and in the presence of that cathedral that had made me more deeply happy than any other work of art I had ever seen.

My friend kept pretending to read his book but from time to time I saw how his eyes followed the old tower of the church and the gladness that came into him too.

We would both soon be going back to America to our separate places there. We wanted to go, wanted to take our chances of getting what we could out of our own lives in our own places. We did not want to spend our lives living in the past, dreaming over the dead past of a Europe from which we were separated by a wide ocean. Americans with cultural impulses had done too much of that sort of thing in the past. The game was worn out and even a ladies’ literary society in an Iowa city was coming to know that a European artist of the present day was not necessarily of importance just because he was a European.

The future of the western world lay with America. Everyone knew that. In Europe they knew it better than they did in America.

It was for me a morning of such thoughts, such memories--just there before Chartres with my friend.

Once, in one of my novels, “Poor White,” I made my hero at the very end of the book go on a trip alone. He was feeling the futility of his own life pretty fully, as I myself have so often done, and so after his business was attended to be went to walk on a beach. That was in the town of Sandusky, in the state of Ohio, my own state.

He gathered up a little handful of shining stones like a child, and later carried them about with him. They were a comfort to him. Life, his own efforts at life, had seemed so futile and ineffectual but the little stones were something glistening and clear. To the child man, the American who was hero of my book and, I thought, to myself and to many other American men I had seen, they were something a little permanent. They were beautiful and strange at the moment and would be still beautiful and strange after a week, a month, a year.

I had ended my novel on that note and a good many of my friends had told me they did not know what I was talking about. Was it because, to most Americans, the desire for something, for even little colored stones to hold in the hand now and then to glisten and shine outside the muddle of life, was it because to most Americans that desire had not become as yet conscious?

Perhaps it had not but that was not my story. At least in me it had become conscious, if not as yet well directed or very intelligent. It had made me a restless man all my life, had set me wandering from place to place, had driven me from the towns to the cities and from one city to another.

In the end I had become a teller of tales. I liked my job. Sometimes I did it fairly well and sometimes I blundered horribly. I had found out that trying to do my job was fun and that doing it well and finely was a task for the most part beyond me.

Often enough I sat thinking of my wasted years, making excuses for myself, but in my happier moments and when I was not at work on my job I was happiest when I was in the mood into which I had fallen on the day when I sat before the cathedral--that is to say, when I sat rolling over and over the little colored stones I had managed to gather up. The man with the two women had just dropped another into my hands. How full my hands were! How many flashes of beauty had come to me out of American life.

It was up to me to carve the stones, to make them more beautiful if I could but often enough my hands trembled. I wasn’t young any more, but I had sought teachers and had found a few. One of them was with me at that moment sitting on the bench before the cathedral and pretending to read a book about it. He grew tired of the pretense and taking out a package of cigarettes offered me one, but then found he hadn’t any match. To such confirmed smokers as my friend and myself the French notion of making a government monopoly of matches is a pest. It is like so much that is European nowadays. It is like the penuriousness of an old age of which at least there is none in America. “The devil!” said my friend. “Let’s go for a walk.”

We did walk, down through the lovely old town, the town made lovely not by the men who live there now but by men of another age, long since fast asleep. If we were neither of us so young in years any more, there was a way in which we were both young enough. We were young with that America of which we both at that moment felt ourselves very much a part, and of which, for many other reasons aside from the French monopoly in matches, we were glad in our hearts to be a part.

EPILOGUE