As for the fancies themselves, they have always seemed to me like trees that have grown without having been planted. Later, after the period in my own life of which I am now writing, I worked for many years as a laborer in many places, and gradually as I stood all day beside a lathe in some factory, or later went about among business men trying to sell some article, in which I was myself not interested, I began to look at other men and to wonder what absurd fancies went on in secret within them. There was that curiosity and there was something else. I had perhaps, as I have no doubt all people have, a great desire to be loved and a little respected. My own fancies rule me. Even to-day I cannot go into a movie theatre and see there some such national hero as, say, Bill Hart, without wishing myself such another. In the theatre I sit looking at the people and see how they are all absorbed in the affairs of the man on the stage. Now he springs lightly off a horse and goes toward the door of a lonely cabin. We, in the theatre, know that within the cabin are some ten desperate men all heavily armed with guns and with them, bound to a chair, is a fair woman, another virgin got off the reservation, as it were. Bill stops at the door of the cabin and takes a careful look at his guns, and we, in the audience, know well enough that in a few minutes now he will go inside and just shoot all of those ten fellows in there to death, fairly make sieves of them, and that he will get wounded himself but not seriously—just enough to need the help of the virgin in getting out of the cabin and onto his horse—so he can ride to her father’s ranch house and go to bed and get well after a while, in time for the wedding.
All these things we know, but we love our Bill and can hardly wait until the shooting begins. As for myself I never see such a performance but that I later go out of the theatre and, when I get off into a quiet street alone, I become just such another. Looking about to see that I am unobserved, I jerk two imaginary guns out of my hip pockets and draw a quick bead on some near-by tree. “Dog,” I cry, “unhand her!” All my early reading of American literature comes into my mind and I try to do a thing that is always being spoken of in the books. I try to make my eyes narrow to pin points. Bill Hart can do it wonderfully in the pictures and why not I? As I sat in the movie house it was evident that Bill Hart was being loved by all the men women and children sitting about and I also want to be loved—to be a little dreaded and feared, too, perhaps. “Ah! there goes Sherwood Anderson! Treat him with respect. He is a bad man when he is aroused. But treat him kindly and he will be as gentle with you as any cooing dove.”
* * * * *
As a boy lying buried in the hay I presume I had some such notion as that, and later as a man standing by a lathe in some factory some such notion must have still been in my mind. I wanted then to be something heroic in the eyes of my own mother, now dead, and at the same time wanted to be something heroic in my own eyes too.
One could not do the thing in actual life, so one did it in a new world created within one’s fancy.
And what a world that fanciful one—how grotesque, how strange, how teeming with strange life! Could one ever bring order into that world? In my own actual work as a tale-teller I have been able to organize and tell but a few of the fancies that have come to me. There is a world into which no one but myself has ever entered and I would like to take you there; but how often when I go, filled with confidence, to the very door leading into that strange world, I find it locked! Now, in the morning, I myself cannot enter the land into which all last night, as I lay awake in my bed, I went alone at will.
There are so many people in that land of whom I should like to tell you. I should like to take you with me through the gate into the land, let you wander there with me. There are people there with whom I should like you to talk. There is the old woman accompanied by the gigantic dogs who died alone in a wood on a winter day, the stout man with the gray eyes and with the pack on his back, who stands talking to the beautiful woman as she sits in her carriage, the little dark woman with the boyish husband who lives in a small frame house by a dusty road far out, in the country.
These and many other figures, all having a life of their own, all playing forever in the field of my fancy. The fanciful shadowy life striving to take on flesh, to live as you and I live, to come out of the shadowy world of the fancy into the actuality of accomplished art.
When I had grown to be a man, and had begun to try a little to organize this inner life, I wondered often if a woman, being pregnant, and walking about through the streets, past factory doors, in the “loop district” of Chicago, let us say, if such a woman being conscious of something alive within—that is, at the moment a part of herself, flesh of her flesh, and that will presently come out of herself to live its own life, in a world her eyes now see passing before her—if such a woman does not have dreadful moments of fear.
To the tale-teller, you must understand, the telling of the tale is the cutting of the natal cord. When the tale is told it exists outside oneself and often it is more living than the living man from whom it came. The imagined figure may well live on and on in the fanciful life of others after the man from whose lips it came, or whose fingers guided the pen that wrote the tale, long after he is forgotten, and I have myself had some curious experiences of this sort. A public speaker, in speaking of my Winesburg tales, praised me as a writer but spoke slightingly of the figures that lived in the tales. “They weren’t worth telling about,” he said; and I remember that I sat at the back of the room, filled with people, hearing him speak, and remember sharply also just the sense of horror that crept over me at the moment. “It is a lie. He has missed the point,” I cried to myself. Could the man not understand that he was doing a quite unpermissible thing? As well go into the bedroom of a woman during her lying-in and say to her: “You are no doubt a very nice woman, but the child to which you have just given birth is a little monster and will be hanged.” Surely any man can understand that, to such a one, it might be permitted to speak at any length regarding her own failings as a woman, but—if the child live—surely this other thing must not be done. “It must not be condemned for the failings of the mother,” I thought, shivering with fright. As I sat listening certain figures, Wing Biddlebaum, Hugh McVey, Elizabeth Willard, Kate Swift, Jesse Bentley, marched across the field of my fancy. They had lived within me, and I had given a kind of life to them. They had lived, for a passing moment anyway, in the consciousness of others beside myself. Surely I myself might well be blamed—condemned—for not having the strength or skill in myself to give them a more vital and a truer life—but that they should be called people not fit to be written about filled me with horror.