A story teller's story

by Sherwood Anderson

NOTE VI

BUT I wander from my subject to leap into the future, to become a prophet, and I have no prophet’s beard. In reality I am thinking of a certain young man who once came rushing, full of vitality and health, into a mechanical age and of what happened to him and to the men among whom he worked.

There was in the factories where I worked and where the efficient Ford type of man was just beginning his dull reign this strange and futile outpouring of men’s lives in vileness through their lips. Ennui was at work. The talk of the men about me was not Rabelaisian. In old Rabelais there was the salt of infinite wit and I have no doubt the Rabelaisian flashes that came from our own Lincoln, Washington and the others had point and a flare to them.

But in the factories and in army camps!

Into my own consciousness, as I, a young man wishing vaguely to mature, walked in a factory street wishing childishly for a golden smile and a wicked left to cross over to the chin of some defender of the new age there was burned the memory of the last place in which I had worked before I had come to the warehouse to roll the kegs of nails.

It was a bicycle factory where I was employed as an assembler. With some ten or twelve other men I worked at a bench in a long room facing a row of windows. We assembled the parts that were brought to us by boys from other departments of the factory and put the bicycles together. There was such and such a screw to go into such and such a screw hole, such and such a nut to go on such and such a bolt. As always in the modern factory nothing ever varied and within a week any intelligent quick-handed man could have done the work with his eyes closed. One turned certain screws, tightened certain bolts, whirled a wheel, fastened on certain foot pedals and passed the work on to the next man. Outside the window I faced there was a railroad track lined on one side by factory walls and the other by what had started to be a stone quarry. The stone of this quarry had not, I presume, turned out to be satisfactory and the hole was being filled with rubbish carted from various parts of the city and all day carts arrived, dumped their loads—making each time a little cloud of dust—and over the dump wandered certain individuals, men and women who were looking among the rubbish for bits of treasure, bottles I fancy and bits of cloth and iron that could later be sold to junk men.

For three months I had worked at the place and listened to the talk of my companions and then I had fled. The men seemed everlastingly anxious to assert their manhood, to make it clear to their fellows that they were potent men able to do great deeds in the realms of the flesh and all day I stood beside a little stand-like bench, on which the frame of the bicycle was stuck upside down, tightening nuts and screws and listening to the men, the while I looked from their faces out the window to the factory walls and the rubbish heap. An unmarried man had been on the evening before to a certain house in a certain street and there had happened between himself and a woman what he now wished to talk about and to describe with infinite care in putting in all the details. What an undignified stallion he made of himself! He had his moment, was allowed his moment by the others and then another, a married man, took up the theme, also boastfully. There were days as I worked in that place when I became physically ill and other days when I cursed all the gods of my age that had made men—who in another age might have been farmers, shepherds or craftsmen—these futile fellows, ever more and more loudly proclaiming their potency as they felt the age of impotency asserting itself in their bodies.

In the bicycle factory I had repeatedly told the other men that I was subject to sick headaches and I used to go often to a window, throw it open and lean out, closing my eyes and trying to create in fancy a world in which men lived under bright skies, drank wine, loved women and with their hands created something of lasting value and beauty and seeing me thus, white and with trembling hands, the men dropped the talk that so sickened me. Like kind children they came and did my work or, after the noon hour, brought me little packages of remedies they had bought at the drug store or had carried to me from their homes.

I had worked the sick headache racket to the limit and then, feeling it had become wornout, had quit my job and had gone to the place where I worked with the young athlete I now wanted to beat with my fists.

And on a certain day I tried. I had now convinced myself that the feint, the cross and the golden smile were all in good working condition and that no man, least of all the young athlete who could not stand up to his drink, could stand up against me.

For weeks I had been as nasty as I could be to my fellow-workman. There was a trick I had learned. I gave one of the kegs I was rolling down the incline just a little sudden turn with my foot so that it struck him on the legs as he came into the house through a door. I hit him on the shins and when he howled with pain expressed the greatest regret and then as soon as I could, without arousing too much suspicion, I did it again.

We ceased speaking and only glared at each other. Even the dull-witted teamsters knew there was a fight brewing. I waited and watched, making my lips do the nearest thing possible to a golden smile, and at night in my room and even sometimes when I was walking with Nora and had come into a quiet dark street I practiced the feint and the cross. “What in Heaven’s name are you doing?” Nora asked, but I did not tell her but talked instead of my dreams, of brave men in rich clothes walking with lovely women in a strange land I was always trying to create in a world of my fancy and that was always being knocked galley-west by the facts of my life. Regarding the queer sudden little movements I was always making with my shoulders and hands I tried to be very mysterious and once I remember, when we had been sitting on a bench in a little park, I left her and went behind a bush. She thought I had gone there out of a natural necessity but it was not true. I had remembered how Harry Walters and Billy McCarthy, when they were preparing for a fight, did a good deal of what is called shadow boxing. One imagines an opponent before oneself and advances and recedes, feints and crosses, whirls suddenly around and gives ground before a rushing opponent only to come back at him with terrific straight rights and lefts, just as his attack has exhausted itself.

I wanted, I fancy, to have Nora grow tired of waiting for me and to come look around the bush and to discover my secret—that I was not as she thought, a rather foolish but smart-talking fellow inclined to be something of a cloud man. Ah, I thought, as I danced about on a bit of grass back of the bush, she will come to peek and see me here in my true light. She will take me for some famous fighter, a young Corbett or that famous middleweight of the day called “The Nonpareil.” What I hoped was that she would come to some such conclusion without asking questions and would go back to the bench to wait for my coming filled with a new wonder. A famous young prizefighter traveling incognito, not wanting public applause, a young Henry Adams of Boston with the punch of a Bob Fitzsimmons, a Ralph Waldo Emerson with the physical assurance of a railway brakeman—what painter, literary man or scholar has not had moments of indulging in some such dream? A burly landlord has been crude enough to demand instant pay for the room in which one is living, or some taxi driver, who has all but run one down at a corner, jerked out of his seat and given a thorough beating in the face of an entire street. “Did you see him pummel that fellow? And he such a pale intellectual looking chap, too! You can never tell how far a dog can jump by the length of his tail.” Etc., etc.

Men lost in admiration going off along a street talking of one’s physical prowess. Oneself flecking the dust off one’s hands and lighting a cigarette, while one looks with calm indifference at a red-faced taxi driver lying pale and quite defeated and hopeless in a gutter.

It was something of that sort of admiration I wanted from Nora but I did not get it. Once when I was walking in a street with her and had just gone through with my exercises she looked at me with scorn in her eyes. “You’re a nice fellow but you’re bughouse all right,” she said and that was all I ever succeeded in getting out of her.

But I got something else at the warehouse.

The fight came off on a Wednesday at about three in the afternoon and the athlete and myself had two teamsters as witnesses to the affair.

All day I had been bedeviling him—being just as downright ugly and nasty as I could, clipping him on the shins with several flying kegs, making my apologies as insolently as possible and when he started telling one of his endless nasty tales to the teamsters starting a loud conversation on some other subject just as he was about to come to the nub of his story. The teamsters felt the fight brewing and wanted to encourage it. They purposely listened to me and did not hear the nub.

He thought, I dare say, that I would never be foolish enough to fight him and I must have taken his scorn of me for timidity for I suddenly grew very bold. He was coming in at the door of the house just as I was on my way out behind one of the kegs and I suddenly stopped it, looked him squarely in the eyes and then, with an attempt at the golden smile on my lips, sent the keg flying directly at him.

He leaped over the keg and came toward me in silence and I prepared to bring my technique into play. Really I had, at the moment, a great deal of confidence in myself and began at once rocking my head, making queer little shifting movements with my feet and trying to establish a kind of cross rhythm in my shoulders and head that would, I felt, confuse him.

He looked at me lost in astonishment and I decided to lead. Had I been content to hit him in the belly with my right, putting all my strength back of the blow and then had I begun kicking, biting and pummeling furiously, I might have come out all right. He was so astonished—no doubt, like Nora, he thought me quite bughouse—that the right would surely have landed, but that, you see, was not the technique of the situation.

The thing was to feint for the belly and then “pull one’s punch” as it were, and immediately afterwards whip over the powerful left to the jaw. But my left was not powerful and anyway it did not land.

He knocked me down and when I got up and started my gymnastics again he knocked me down a second time and a third and a fourth. He knocked me down perhaps a dozen times and the two teamsters came to the door to watch and all the time there was the most foolish look on his face and on their faces. It was a look a bulldog attacked by a hen might have assumed—no doubt by my bullyragging I had convinced them, as I had myself, I could fight—but presently both my eyes were so swollen and my nose and mouth so bruised and cut that I could not see and so I got to my feet and walked away, going out of the warehouse in the midst of an intense silence on the part of all three of the spectators.

And so along a street I went to my room, followed by two or three curious children who perhaps thought I had been hit by a freight train and succeeded in also getting my door bolted against any sudden descent of Nora. My eyes were very evidently going to be badly discolored, my nose bled and my lips were badly cut, and so, after bathing my face in cold water, I put a wet towel over it and went and threw myself on the bed.

It was one of those moments that come, I presume, into every man’s life. I was lying on my bed in my room, in the condition already described, the door was bolted, Nora was not directly about and I was out from under the eyes of my fellowmen.

I tried to think as one will at such moments.

As for Nora, I might very well have gone to my door and called to her—she was at work somewhere on the floor below and would have gladly come running to offer her woman’s sympathy to my hurt physical self—but it was not my hurt physical self that I thought wanted attention. As far as that is concerned I was then, as I have been all my life, not so much concerned with the matter of physical discomfort or pain. Always it has been true of me that a framed water lily on a wall or a walk in a factory street can hurt me worse than a blow on the jaw and long afterward when I became a scribbler of tales I was able to take advantage of this peculiarity of my nature to do my work under conditions that would have disheartened a more physically sensitive man. As I was destined to live most of my life and do most of my work in factory towns and in little, ill-smelling, hideously-furnished rooms, freezing cold in winter and hot and cheerless in summer, it turned out to be a good and convenient trait in me and in the end I had so trained myself to forget my surroundings that I could sit for hours lost in my own thoughts and dreams, or scribbling oftentimes meaningless sentences in a cold room in a factory street, on a log beside some country road, in a railroad station or in the lobby of some large hotel, filled with the hurrying hustling figures of business men, totally unconscious of my surroundings, until my mood had worn itself out and I had sunk into one of the moods of depression common, I think, to all such fellows as myself. Never was such an almighty scribbler as I later became and am even now. Ink, paper and pencils are cheap in our day and I have taken full advantage of that fact and have during some years written hundreds of thousands of words which have afterward been thrown away. Many have told me, in print or by word of mouth, that all should have been thrown away and they may be right, but I am one who loves, like a drunkard his drink, the smell of ink, and the sight of a great pile of white sheets that may be scrawled over with words always gladdens me. The result of the scribbling, the tale of perfect balance, all the elements of the tale understood, an infinite number of minute adjustments perfectly made, the power of self-criticism fully at work, the shifting surface of word values and color in full play, form and the rhythmic flow of thought and mood marching forward with the sentences—these are things of a dream, of a far dim day toward which one goes knowing one can never arrive but infinitely glad to be on the road. It is the story I dare say of the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” and the sloughs and sink holes on the road are many but the tale of that journey is known to other men than scribblers.

The consolation of ink and paper came, however, long after the time with which I am now concerned, and what a consolation it is! How much easier it is to sit in a room before a desk and with paper before one to describe a fight between oneself as hero of some tale and five or six burly ruffians than with the fists to dispose of one baseball player on the platform of a warehouse.

In the tale one can do any such job as it should be done and in the doing give satisfaction both to oneself and the possible reader, for the reader will always share in the emotions of the hero and gloat with him over his victories. In the tale, as you will understand, all is in order. The feint and the cross, the powerful left to the jaw, the golden smile, the shifting movements of the shoulders that confuse and disconcert the opponent, all work like well-oiled machines. One defeats not one baseball player or ruffian of the city streets but a dozen if the need arises. Oh, what glorious times I have had, sitting in little rooms with great piles of paper before me; what buckets of blood have run from the wounds of the villains, foolish enough to oppose me on the field of honor; what fair women I have loved and how they have loved me and on the whole how generous, chivalrous, open-hearted and fine I have been! I remember how I sat in the back room of a small bootlegging establishment at Mobile, Alabama, one afternoon, long after the time with which I am now concerned and while three drunken sailors discussed the divinity of Christ at a near-by table wrote the story of little, tired-out and crazed Joe Wainsworth’s killing of Jim Gibson in the harness shop at Bidwell Ohio, that afterward was used in the novel “Poor White”; and of how at a railroad station at Detroit I sat writing the tale of Elsie Leander’s westward journey, in “The Triumph of the Egg,” and missed my own train—these remain as rich and fine spots in a precarious existence.

But at the time of which I am speaking the consolation of ink and paper was a thing of the future and my bunged-up eyes and hurt spirits were facts.

Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well

As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.

I lay on my back on my bed, trying to get up courage to face facts. As for the throbbing of the hurt places, the pain was a kind of satisfaction to me at the moment.

There was the warehouse where I had been more or less a spiritual bully but where I would now have to eat crow. Well, I need not go back. The day before had been payday and I would, by never going near the place again, lose little money and save myself the humiliation of facing the teamsters. And when it came to the scratch, I thought, there was the city I was in, the state, the very United States of America itself—I could if I chose desert them all. I was young, had been well trained in poverty, had no family ties, no social position to uphold, I was unmarried and as yet childless.

I was a free man, I told myself, sitting on the bed and staring about the room through swollen eyelids. Was I free? Did any man ever achieve freedom? I had my own life before me. Why did I not, by some grand effort, begin to live a life?

I lay on the bed with the wet towel thrown aside thinking, trying to make plans. A faint suspicion of something permanently wrong with me had begun to creep into my consciousness. Was I, alas, a fellow born out of his place and time? I was in a world where only men of action seemed to thrive. Already I had noted that fact. One wanted a definite thing to go after, money, fame, a position of power in the big world, and having something definite of the sort in mind one shut one’s eyes and pitched in with all the force of one’s physical and mental self. I squirmed about trying to force myself to face myself. My body was strong enough for all practical purposes, when not scarred and bruised by the blows of an angry ball player, and I was not such a bad-looking fellow. I was not lazy and on the whole rather liked hard physical labor. Need I be what I at the moment seemed to myself to be, a useless and foolish dreamer, a child in a world filled with what I thought to be grown-up men? Why should I myself not also grow up, take the plow by the handle, plow vast fields, become rich or famous? Perhaps I could become a man of power and rule or influence many other men’s lives.

There is a trick the fancy has. Start it in any direction and it goes prancing off at a great rate and that trick my own fancy now did.

Although my body ached as a result of my recent plunge into the field of action I, in fancy, plunged in again and began thinking of myself as holding the handle of a plow and plowing the fields of life, turning great furrows, planting perhaps the seeds of new ideas. Oho, for the smell of new-turned earth, the sight of the sower casting his seed!

I was off again. On that day Nora had done the work in my room early but now she was sweeping and dusting on the floor below and I could hear her moving about.

Why should I not first of all conquer Nora? That, I at that moment thought, was surely the beginning of manhood, to conquer some woman, and why not Nora as well as another? It would be something of an undertaking that was sure. Nora was not beautiful nor perhaps too subtle in her outlook on life but then was I myself subtle? She was direct and simple and had, I thought, a direct and simple mind and after I had conquered her, had bent her to my own will, what might we not do together? There was to be sure the sailor with whom she was to live and to whom she was promised but I brushed him aside. “I can cook his goose in some way,” I thought to myself, much as I had thought I could easily dispose of the ball player by my feints and crosses.

We might, I thought, following up the fancy I had just had, begin by being tillers of the soil. We could go West somewhere and take up land. Already I had read many tales of the West and had a fancy for casting in my fortunes with the West. “Out where the smile lasts a little longer, out where the handclasp is a little stronger,” etc. “Oho, for the land where men are men and gals are gals!” I thought my fancy running away like a wild horse broken out of its stall. I saw myself owning vast farms somewhere in the Far West and saw, I am afraid, Nora doing most of the plowing, planting and the harvesting of crops, the while I rode grandly over the estate on a black stallion, receiving the homage of serfs.

But what would I do with my odd moments? I had tried talking to Nora of the things that interested me most, the play of light over a factory chimney, seen amid smoke as darkness came on, odd expressions caught from the lips of passing men and women, the play of the fancy over the imagined lives of men and women too. Had Nora understood or cared? Could I go on always talking and talking in the face of the fact that I knew she was not much interested?

With a rush of resolution I threw my doubts aside. Oh, to be one who made two blades of grass where but one had grown before! With Nora at my side I would in some field become great and powerful. I was at the moment but a bunged-up fellow lying on the bed in a cheap rooming house but what did that matter? All about me was the great American world rushing on and on to new mechanical and material triumphs. Teddy Roosevelt and the strenuous life had not yet come but he was implicit in the American mood. Imperialism had already come. It was time, I told myself, to be up and doing.

Behind him lay the gray Azores,

Behind the Gates of Hercules;

Before him not the ghost of shores;

Before him only shoreless seas.

The good mate said, “Now must we pray,

For lo, the very stars are gone.

Brave Admr’l speak.” “What shall I say?”

“Why say: ‘Sail on, sail on and on.’”