A story teller's story

by Sherwood Anderson

In the life of the Yankee there was something that exasperated my visitor as it did the Greek grocer and the Italian who shined shoes and as he told the story my treasured book, still held in his hand, suffered more and more. I kept going toward him, intending to take the book from his hand (he was quite unconscious of the damage he was doing) but each time as I reached out I lost courage. The name Balzac was stamped in gold on the back and the name seemed to be grinning at me.

My visitor grinned at me too, in an excited nervous way. The seller of fish, the old fat man with the fish scales on his hands, had a daughter who was ashamed of her father and of his occupation in life. The daughter, an only child lived during most of the year in Boston where she was a student at the Boston Conservatory of Music. She was ambitious to become a pianist and had begun to take on the airs of a lady—had a little mincing step and a little mincing voice and wore mincing clothes too, my visitor said.

And in the Summer, like the writer’s daughter, she came home to live in her father’s house and, like the writer himself, sometimes went to walk about.

To the New England town during the Summer months there came a great many city people—from Boston and New York—and the pianist did not want them to know she was the daughter of the seller of fish. Sometimes she came to her father’s booth to get money from him or to speak with him concerning some affair of the family and it was understood between them that—when there were city visitors about—the father would not recognize his daughter as being in any way connected with himself. When they stood talking together and when one of the city visitors came along the street the daughter became a customer intent upon buying fish. “Are your fish fresh?” she asked, assuming a casual lady-like air.

The Greek, standing at the door of his store across the street and the Italian shoe-shiner were both furious and took the humiliation of their fellow merchant as in some way a reflection on themselves, an assault upon their own dignity, and the story writer having his shoes shined felt the same way. All three men scowled and avoided looking at each other. The shoe-shiner rubbed furiously at the writer’s shoes and the Greek merchant began swearing at a boy employed in his store.

As for the fish merchant, he played his part to perfection. Picking up one of the fish he held it before his daughter’s eyes. “It’s perfectly fresh and a beauty, Madam,” he said. He avoided looking at his fellow merchants and did not speak to them for a long time after his daughter had gone.

But when she had gone and the life that went on between the three men was resumed the fish merchant courted his neighbors. “Don’t blame me. It’s got to be done,” he seemed to be saying. He came out of his little booth and walked up and down arranging and re-arranging his stock and when he glanced at the others there was a pleading look in his eyes. “Well, you don’t understand. You haven’t been in America long enough to understand. You see, it’s like this—” his eyes seemed to say, “—we Americans can’t live for ourselves. We must live and work for our wives, our sons and our daughters. We can’t all of us get up in the world so we must give them their chance.” It was something of the sort he always seemed to be wanting to say.

It was a story. When one wrote football stories one thought out a plot, as a football coach thought out a new formation that would advance the ball.

But life in the streets of the New England village wasn’t like that. No short stories with clever endings—as in the magazines—happened in the streets of the town at all. Life went on and on and little illuminating human things happened. There was drama in the street and in the lives of the people in the street but it sprang directly out of the stuff of life itself. Could one understand that?

The young Italian tried but something got in his way. The fact that he was a successful writer of magazine short stories got in his way. The large white house near the sea, the automobile and the daughter at Vassar—all these things had got in his way.