As for myself I had been, at the time in my life of which I am now writing, a man of business for many years, had been buying and selling, but had all the time been secretly scribbling in my room at night.
During the day I for years wrote advertisements—of soaps, of plows, house paints, incubators for the hatching of chickens.
Was there something hatching in me? With all my scribbling had I something to say? Were there tales I had picked up I might in the end tell truly and well? I had seen and known men and women, going from their homes to their work, going from their work to their homes, had worked with them in offices and shops. On all sides the untold tales looked out at me like living things.
I had bought and sold but had no real interest in buying and selling. All day I wrote advertisements and perhaps the advertisements helped sell So-and-so many dollars’ worth of goods. As I walked homeward through streets, across bridges, I could not remember what I had been writing about.
At times too there was a sharp sense of uncleanliness. In my room the white sheets looked up at me. I remembered the workman seen in the forest in the presence of the tree when I was a boy. “I will launch out upon new adventures,” I said to myself.
NOTE II
ON an evening of the late summer I got off a train at a growing Ohio industrial town where I had once lived. I was rapidly becoming a middle-aged man. Two years before I had left the place in disgrace. There I had tried to be a manufacturer, a moneymaker, and had failed, and I had been trying and failing ever since. In the town some thousands of dollars had been lost for others. An effort to conform to the standard dreams of the men of my times had failed and in the midst of my disgrace and generally hopeless outlook, as regards making a living, I had been filled with joy at coming to the end of it all. One morning I had left the place afoot, leaving my poor little factory, like an illegitimate child, on another man’s doorstep. I had left, merely taking what money was in my pocket, some eight or ten dollars.
What a moment that leaving had been! To one of the European artists I afterward came to know the situation would have been unbelievably grotesque. Such a man could not have believed in my earnestness about it all and would have thought my feelings of the moment a worked-up thing. I can in fancy hear one of the Frenchmen, Italians or Russians I later knew laughing at me. “Well, but why get so worked up? A factory is a factory, is it not? Why may not one break it like an empty bottle? You have lost some money for others? See the light on that field over there. These others, for whom you lost money, were they compelled to beg in the streets, were their children torn by wolves? What is it you Americans get so excited about when a little money is lost?”
A European artist may not understand but an American will understand. The devil! It is not a question of money. No men are so careless and free with money as the Americans. There is another matter involved.
It strikes rather deeply at the roots of our beings. Childish as it all may have seemed to an older and more sophisticated world, we Americans, from the beginning, have been up to something, or we have wanted to think we were up to something. We came here, or our fathers or grandfathers came here, from a hundred diverse places—and you may be sure it was not the artists who came. Artists do not want to cut down trees, root stumps out of the ground, build towns and railroads. The artist wants to sit with a strip of canvas before him, face an open space on a wall, carve a bit of wood, make combinations of words and sentences, as I am doing now—and try to express to others some thought or feeling of his own. He wants to dream of color, to lay hold of form, free the sensual in himself, live more fully and freely in his contact with the materials before him than he can possibly live in life. He seeks a kind of controlled ecstasy and is a man with a passion, a “nut,” as we love to say in America. And very often, when he is not in actual contact with his materials, he is a much more vain and disagreeable ass than any man, not an artist, could possibly be. As a living man he is almost always a pest. It is only when dead he begins to have value.