The modern writer

by Sherwood Anderson

I am bringing no personal accusation against the factory owner or the publishers of factory-made literature. They are business men and if I were a business man I would try to be a good one. I would try to make money. And anyway the individual factory owner or the individual owner or owners of a magazine with a circulation of hundreds of thousands has no more to do with the matter than have you and I. They also are caught in a trap. Present day conditions are but the natural result of our living in an industrial age. Until the impulse for vast production of second-rate goods and the tendency to be satisfied with second-rate art wears itself out or people grow tired of it things will go on just as they are.

Back of it all, of course, lies the silly notion that people can get happiness out of success, out of making money, the silly notion that any man can be happy doing poor or sloppy work no matter how much temporary success or praise he may win.

You must bear in mind that the mass of people here in America are pretty much what the mass of people have always been in every other country in every age, that is to say, rather lazy-minded, pretty immature. We are given to childish pretense, to pretending to be the thing we secretly admire rather than to go to all the trouble of being it. We accept what is given us. For most of us, I suspect, bad hurried cheap work doesn’t matter too much. It is the craftsman really who suffers.

Now if you will consider with me what I have just said and will bear in mind that the manufacturer of stories for popular magazines has nothing at all to do with writing, and if you will also bear in mind that the writer is but the workman whose materials are human lives you will get at what I am trying to say and will understand the attitude toward his work that the so-called Modern is trying to take.

The individual impulse in men to do good work goes on. Men are arising everywhere who are trying to be true to the very complex materials they have to try to handle. In spite of standardization the individual impulses of men as workmen cannot quite be put down.

As I have gone about in the streets of American towns and cities I have noticed that even the Ford cannot escape the workman impulse. Boys buy second hand Fords and rebuild them into ‘Bugs’ and these ‘Bugs’ are often enough light, graceful and fine. Ugly lines have been cut away. Something altogether lacking in grace has been made graceful and it would be worth while if people could come to understand that the boy who does that is a craftsman following a craftsman’s impulse and is more important to the community than a dozen manufacturers of cheap novels, little tame verses or cheap magazine stories. He is meeting the aesthetic needs of his nature with the materials at hand, and a Cezanne, a Matisse, a Turgenieff or a Shakespeare could do no more than that. The artist is after all but the craftsman working more intensively in more complex and delicate materials.

The artist who works in stone, in color, sounds, words, building materials, and often in steel, as in the designing of bodies for some of the finer automobiles, is but the craftsman working in materials that are often elusive and difficult to handle and bringing into his work not only the skill of the craftsman but also the attempt at an expression of some need of his own inner being. That is the whole story.

The Modern Movement, then, seen from this point of view, is in reality an attempt on the part of the workman to get back into his own hands some control over the tools and materials of his craft. In certain fields it is very difficult. In the theatre, for example, the artist, to work at all, has to have an expensive equipment. There is needed a large investment and money doesn’t like to take chances. It is much safer when the theater wants to be artistic to run into Belasco realism, bring a Child’s restaurant onto the stage or have a real automobile cross the stage at thirty miles an hour—something of that sort, some stunt, is safer when large sums of money have to be spent.

However, the workman in words or in color has a better chance. If, for example, I can make my living by going somewhere and delivering a dull sermon, something like this, to a lot of good-natured patient people, or by working six months of the year in an advertising agency writing soap advertisements, I can perhaps save enough money to write disregarding the magazines for another six months. I know one very good modern painter who becomes a house painter when he is broke, and one of America’s finest poets works as a reporter on a newspaper. In America, just now, it is not too hard for a man to make a living, particularly if he is discreet enough not to have children.

And then things are slowly getting better. In his “Life on the Mississippi” Mark Twain said something to the effect that the writer in the end always wrote what the public and the editors wanted. “We often write what we think and feel but in the end we scratch all out and give them what they want,” he said. I am not quoting exactly. You will find it in the book. The fact is that it was pretty much true in Twain’s day and isn’t quite so true now.