Chapter I: Foreword

I have a confession to make. I am a story teller starting to tell a story and cannot be expected to tell the truth. Truth is impossible to me. It is like goodness, something aimed at but never hit. A year or two ago I determined to try to tell the story of my own childhood. Very well, I set to work. What a job! I went at the task bravely but presently came to a dead halt. Like every other man and woman in the world I had always thought the story of my own childhood would be an absorbingly interesting one.

I began to write. For a day or two all went well. I sat at my desk scribbling away. I, Sherwood Anderson, an American man, in my youth did so and so. Well, I played ball, stole apples out of orchards, began presently, being male, to think of the female, was sometimes afraid in the dark at night. What nonsense to speak of it all. I grew ashamed.

And yet there was something I had wanted of which I need not be ashamed. Childhood is something wonderful. Manhood, sophistication is something worth striving for but innocence is somewhat sweeter. It may be the greater wisdom to remain innocent but it cannot be done. I wish it could.

In a New Orleans restaurant I heard a man explaining the fate of crabs. “There are two good kinds,” he said. “Busters are so young they are sweet. Soft shell crabs have the sweetness of age and weakness.”

It is my weakness to want to speak of my youth, a sign perhaps I am getting old, but I am ashamed. There is a reason for my shame. All writing of self is egotistical. There is however another reason.

I am a man who has brothers living and they are strong, and I dare say hard-hitting fellows. Suppose it please my fancy to have a certain kind of father or mother. That is the great privilege of being a writer--that life may be constantly re-created in the field of fancy. But my brothers, respectable men, may have quite different notions of how these worthy people, my parents and theirs, should be presented to the world. We modern writers have got a reputation for boldness, for too much boldness most people think, but none of us like to be knocked down or cut on the street by former friends or by our relatives. We are not prize-fighters or horse wranglers, most of us. A poor enough lot, if the truth be told. Cæsar was quite right in detesting scribblers.

Now it happens that my friends and relatives have already stood much from me. I am forever writing of myself and dragging them in, re-creating them to suit my fancy, and they have been a forbearing lot. It is dreadful really having a scribbler in the family. Avoid it if you can. If you have a son who has a leaning that way hurry him into industrial life. If he becomes a writer he may give you away.

You see, if I began writing of my childhood, I had to ask myself how much more these people would stand. Heavens knows what I might do to them when I got going.

I kept writing and tearing up. Oh, pshaw! My progress was too lamentably slow. I could not very well create a lot of little Lord Fauntleroys growing up in a Middle-western American town. If I made myself too good I knew it would not work and if I made myself really bad--which was a temptation--no one would believe. Bad people, when you come close to them, are such simpletons.

“Where is the Truth?” I asked myself, “Oh, Truth, where are you? Where have you hidden yourself?” I looked under my desk, under the bed, went out and looked up and down the road. I have always been looking for the rascal but have never been able to find him. Where does he keep himself?

“Where is Truth?” What an unsatisfactory question to be compelled to keep asking, if you are a teller of tales.

Let me explain--if I can.

The teller of tales, as you must all know, lives in a world of his own. He is one thing, as you see him walking in the street, going to church, into a friend’s house, into a restaurant, and quite another fellow when he sits down to write. While he is a writer nothing happens but that it is changed by his fancy and his fancy is always at work. Really, you should never trust such a man. Do not put him on the witness stand during a trial for your life or for money--and be very careful never to believe what he says under any circumstances.

Take myself for example. I am, let us say, walking on a country road and there is a man running in a nearby field. Such a thing happened once and what a tale I made of it.

I see the man running. Nothing else actually happens. He runs across the field and disappears over a hill but now look out for me. Later I may tell you a tale of the man. Leave it to me to make up a tale of why the man ran and to believe my own tale after it is made.

The man lived in a house just beyond the hill. Sure there was a house there. I created it. I ought to know. Why, I could draw you a picture of the house, although I never actually saw it. He lived in a house behind the hill and something absorbingly interesting and exciting just now happened in the house.

I tell you the tale of what happened with the straightest face in the world, believe the tale myself, at least while I am telling it.

You see how it is. When I was a child this faculty I have was a nuisance. It kept getting me into hot water. Every one thought me a little liar and, of course, I was. I went ten yards beyond the house and stood behind an apple tree. There was a gentle rising hill and near the top of the hill a clump of bushes. A cow came out of the bushes, nibbled grass, no doubt, and then went back into the bushes. It was fly time and I dare say the bushes were a comfort to her.

I made up a tale concerning the cow. She became for me a bear. There had been a circus in a nearby town and a bear had escaped. I had heard father speak of reading an account of the escape in the newspapers. I gave my story a certain air of probability and the strange part of all this is that, having thought out the tale, I believed it myself. All children, I think, do tricks like that. It worked so well that I had the men of the neighborhood, with guns on their shoulders, scouring the woods for two or three days and all the neighborhood children shared in my fright and excitement.

A literary triumph--and I so young.

All tale telling is, in a strict sense, nothing but lying. That is what people cannot understand. To tell the truth is too difficult. I long since gave up the effort.

However, when it came to the tellings of the tale of my own childhood--well, for once, I said to myself, I will hew to the line. An old pit I had often fallen in before I fell in again. Bravely I set myself to my task. I pursued Truth back through my own memory like a dog chasing a rabbit through dense bushes. What toil, what sweat dropped upon the sheets of paper before me. “To be honest,” I said to myself, “is to be good, and for once I will be good.

“I will prove how essentially sterling is my character. People who have always known me and who have perhaps, in the past, had too much reason for doubting my word will now be surprised and delighted.”

I had dreams of people giving me a new name. As I went along the street people would whisper to each other, “There goes Honest Sherwood.” Perhaps they would insist on electing me to Congress or sending me as an ambassador to some foreign country. How happy all of my relatives would be.

“At last he is giving all of us a good character. He has made us out respectable folk.”

As for the people of my native town, or towns, they also would be happy. Telegrams would be received, meetings held. There might be an organization formed for raising the standard of citizenship of which I would be elected president.

I have always so wanted to be president of something. What a splendid dream.

Alas--it would not work. I wrote one sentence, ten, a hundred pages. They had to be torn up. Truth had disappeared into a thicket so dense that it could not be penetrated.

Like every one else in the world I had so thoroughly re-created my childhood, in my own fancy, that Truth was utterly lost.

And now for a confession. I have a love of confessions. I do not remember the face of my own father. My wife is in the next room as I sit writing, but I do not remember what she looks like.

My wife is to me an idea, my mother, my sons, my friends, are ideas.

My fancy is a wall between myself and Truth. There is a world of the fancy into which I constantly plunge and out of which I seldom completely emerge. I want every day to be absorbingly interesting and exciting to me and if it will not, I, with my fancy, try to make it so. If you, a stranger, come into my presence there is a chance that for a moment I shall see you as you are but in another moment you will be lost. You say something that starts my fancy working and I am off. To-night perhaps I shall dream of you. We will have fancied conversations. My fancy will throw you into strange, noble--or perhaps even mean situations. Now I have no scruples. You are my rabbit and I am a hound pursuing you. Even your physical being changes under the driving lash of my fancy.

And here let me say something regarding a writer’s responsibility for the characters he creates. We writers are always getting out of it by disclaiming responsibility for our dreams. How absurd. How often, for example, have I dreamed of making love to some woman who actually wouldn’t have me. Why deny responsibility for such a dream. I do it because I like it--although I do not do it consciously. We writers must take the responsibility of the unconscious, too--it seems.

Am I to blame? I am made that way. I am like all people. You are yourself more like me than you would care to admit. After all the fault was partly your own. Why did you interest my fancy? Dear reader, I am sure that, if you came into my presence, my fancy would at once be caught.

Judges and lawyers who have had to handle witnesses during trials in court know how common is the disease I have, know how little people are to be depended upon for the truth.

As I have suggested, when it came to writing of myself, I, the teller of tales, would be all right if there were no living witnesses to check up on me. They, of course, will also have changed the actual happenings of our common lives to suit their own fancies.

I am doing it.

You are doing it.

Everybody’s doing it.

Much better to meet the situation as I have done here--create a Tar Moorehead to stand for myself.

At least that lets my friends and relatives out. It is, I admit, a writer’s trick.

And anyway, it was only after I had created Tar Moorehead, had brought him into life in my own fancy, that I could sit down before my sheets and feel at ease. It was only then I faced myself, accepted myself. “If you are a born liar, a man of the fancy, why not be what you are?” I said to myself, and having said it I at once began writing with a new feeling of comfort.