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.