A story teller's story

by Sherwood Anderson

I sat under the apple trees smiling to myself and wondering why I smiled. Was there possible such a thing as goodness in men, a goodness that was not stuffy and hateful? Like most young men I had a contempt of goodness. Had I been making a mistake? The man before me now did not, like Judge Turner, say wise and witty things that remained fixed in the mind and that could afterward be passed off in conversations as one’s own. Later in New York and in other American cities I was to see a good many men of a sort not unlike Judge Turner but few like Alonzo Berners. The smart fellows of the American Intelligentsia sat about in restaurants in New York and wrote articles for the political and semi-literary weeklies. A smart saying they had heard at dinner or at lunch the day before was passed off as their own in the next article they wrote. The usual plan was to write of politics or politicians or to slaughter some second-rate artist—in short, to pick out easy game and kill it with their straw shafts and they gained great reputations by pointing out the asininity of men everyone already knew for asses. For a great many years I was filled with admiration of such fellows and vaguely dreamed of becoming such another myself. I wanted then, as a young man, I think, to sit with Alonzo Berners and his friends and suddenly say something to upset them all. Alonzo’s life of physical suffering was forgotten by me as by the others but unlike them there was in me a kind of unpleasant dislike of him, a dislike he saw and understood but let pass as being boyish vanity. The smart-seeming things I thought of to say sounded flat enough when I said them over to myself and I remained silent. Occasionally Alonzo turned to me and smiled. I had done him a kindness, had risked something for him, and I was his guest. Perhaps he thought me not mature enough to understand him and his kind of men. Would I ever become mature?

NOTE XI

DID I in reality also love the man?

I had found him, on a Saturday evening, very drunk in a saloon in Chicago. It was about nine o’clock and some time after I had fled from Nora. I was nearly broke and thought I had better be thinking of doing something that would bring me in a little money. What should I do? The devil! It was apparent I would soon have to go to work again with my hands. After some weeks of idleness my hands had become soft and velvety to the touch and I liked them so. Now they were hands to hold a pen or a paint brush. Why was I not a writer or a painter? Well, I fancied one had to be a fellow of the schools before one dared approach the arts. Often I went about cursing the fate that had not permitted me to be born in the fifteenth century instead of the twentieth with its all-pervading smell of burning coal, oil and gasoline, and with its noises and dirt. Mark Twain might declare the twentieth the most glorious of all the centuries but it did not seem so to me. I thought often of the fifteenth century in Italy when the great Borgia was just coming into power, was at that time full of the subject. What glorious children! Why could not I be a glorious child? Aha! the Lord Rodrigo de Lancol y Borgia, Cardinal-Bishop of Porto and Santa Rufina, Dean of the Sacred College, Vice-Chancellor of the Holy Roman Church, etc., had just been made Pope. Did I not myself have an Italian grandmother? What a place and a time that might have been for me! It was the day of the coronation of the new Pope and all Rome was excited. On the day before four mules, laden with silver, had gone from Cardinal Rodrigo’s house to the house of Cardinal Sforza-Visconti. It was the gentle privilege of the Romans in those fine days to pillage the house of a cardinal when he had been made pope. Was it not said, in the sacred laws, that the vicar of Christ should give his substance to the poor? Fearing he might not do it the poor went and took. Armed bands of desperate fellows, with feathers in their hats, roamed the streets of the old city at such times and a turn of the wheel of fortune might at any moment make any one of them rich and powerful, a patron of the arts, a rich and powerful grandee of Church or State. How I longed to be a richly gowned, soft-handed cunning but scholarly grandee and patron of the arts!

How much better times those than my own for such haphazard fellows as myself, I thought, and cursed the twentieth century and the fate that had thrown me into it. At that time in Chicago I knew a young Jew named Ben Hecht, not yet a well-known writer, and sometimes he and I went forth to do our cursing together. Outwardly he was a more adept curser than myself but inwardly I felt I could outdo him and often we had walked together, he cursing aloud our common fate and declaring dramatically that life was for us an empty cup, a vessel turned upside down, a golden goblet with cracks in the bowl, the largest crack being the fact that we both unfortunately had our livings to make, and I striving to cap his every curse with a more violent one. We went together into a street and stood under the moon. Before us were many huge ugly warehouses. “I hope they burn,” I said feebly, but he only laughed at the weakness of my fancy. “I hope the builders die slowly of a painful inflammation of the membranes of the bowels,” he said, while I envied.

I had been walking alone on the streets of Chicago on that Saturday evening when I found the younger Berners and had crossed the river to the west side. I was gloomy and distraught and on a side street, off West Madison Street and near the Chicago River, went into a small, dark saloon. Several men sat at a small table at the back, among whom was Alonzo Berners and there was a red-faced bartender leaning over the bar and watching the group at the table. To all these I at the moment paid no attention.

I was absorbed in the contemplation of my own difficult position in life and was thinking only of myself. Sitting at a table I called for a glass of brandy and when it was paid for realized that I had but two dollars left in my pocket. I took the two dollars in my hand and looked at them and putting them away continued looking at my empty hands. They had, at the moment, as I have said, grown soft and velvety and I wanted them to remain so. Wild dreams floated through my mind. Why had I not more physical courage? It was all very well to talk with Ben Hecht of the many advantages to be gained by being an Italian desperado of the fifteenth century, but why had I not the courage to be a desperado of the twentieth? Surely Rome or Naples or Florence, in the days of their glory, never offered any better pickings than the Chicago of my own day. In the older day a man slipped a slender knife delicately between his victim’s neck and spine and made off with a few ducats at the risk of his life but in Chicago men habitually got thousands of dollars by robbery apparently without any risk at all. I looked at my own hands and wondered. Could they hold a pistol steadily to the head of a timid bank clerk or a mail-wagon driver? I decided they could not and was ashamed of myself. Then I decided they might some day be induced to hold a pen or a painter’s brush but reflected that the great patrons of the arts were all long since dead and that my own brother, a painter, had been compelled to make magazine covers for commercial “gents” in order to get the slender amount necessary to educate himself in his craft. “Huh!” I said to myself, not wanting I’m afraid, to work for any commercial “gent” at all. Drinking my brandy I looked about the room into which I had wandered.

It was a desperately dark little hole, lighted by two gaslights and with two beer-stained tables in the semi-darkness at the rear. I looked at the bartender, who had a large flat nose and bloodshot eyes and decided it was just as well I had but two dollars. “I may be robbed before I leave this hole,” I told myself and ordered another glass of brandy, thinking I might as well drink up the little money I had rather than have it taken from me.

And now the men at the other table in the room caught and held my attention. With the exception of Alonzo Berners, whom the others had picked up on the street, they were a hard-looking lot. One did not think of them as desperate fellows. They were of the sort one saw hanging about the places of Hinky Dink, Bathhouse John or of Conners, the gray wolf, men famous in Chicago at that time, sullen fellows without money, by no means desperate but hangers-on of the desperate, fellows who robbed full of fright at their own temerity but the more dangerous sometimes because of their fears.

I looked at them and at the man who had fallen into their clutches and who was now spending his money upon them and at the same moment they seemed to have become aware of my presence. Sullen eyes looked at me sullenly. I was not of their world. Was I a fly cop? Their eyes threatened. “If you are a fly cop or are in any way connected with the man we have so fortunately picked up, a man quite apparently helplessly drunk and having money, you had better be minding your business. As a matter of fact it would be well for you to get out of here.”