Sherwood Anderson

“ About Wilson's verse—it was Greek to me. Well now, to get right down to hardpan in this matter, it was and it wasn't. The stuff made me feel just a little bit woozy when I took a whole sheaf of it and sat alone in my room reading it at night. It was all about walls and deep wells and great bowls with young trees standing erect in them and trying to find their way to the light and air over the rim of the bowl.
Queer crazy stuff, every line of it, but fascinating too in a way. One got into a new world with new values, which after all is I suppose what poetry is all about. ”

“ What was known was that he had come to Chicago from a town in Kansas and that he had run away from the Kansas town with another man's wife.
As to her story, I knew little enough of it. She had been at one time I imagine a rather handsome thing, in a big strong upstanding kind of way, but her life, until she met Wilson, had been rather messy. In those dead flat Kansas towns, lives have a way of getting ugly and messy without anything very definite having happened to make them so. One can't imagine the reasons. ”

“ He felt, I fancy, that in the field of poetry he had something to express that could never be expressed until he had found a woman who could, in a peculiar and absolute way, give herself in the world of the flesh, and that then there was to be a marriage out of which beauty would come for all people. ”

“ What I am trying to do is to give you a sense of something I got from having read Wilson's stuff, from having known him a little, and from having seen something of the effect of his personality on others.
He felt quite definitely that no one in the world could feel or even think alone. And then there was the notion that if one tried to think with the mind without taking the body into account one got all balled up. True conscious life built itself up like a pyramid. ”

“ At any rate I have told you the man's story, have been compelled to try to tell you his story. There was a kind of power in him, and the power has been exerted over me as it was exerted over the woman from Kansas and the unknown hunchback girl kneeling on the floor in the dust and peering through a keyhole.
Ever since the woman died we have all been trying and trying to drag the man Wilson back up out of the sea of doubt and dumbness into which we feel him sinking deeper and deeper, and to no avail. ”

“ There he had been, you see, before he found the woman, wandering about in the world, digging himself deeper and deeper into the deep wells he talked about in his poetry, building the wall between himself and all us others constantly higher and higher. ”

“ First the body and mind of a beloved one must come into one's thinking and feeling and then, in some mystic way, the bodies and minds of all the other people in the world must come in, must come sweeping in like a great wind or something of that sort. ”

“ He also was an old fireplace, stuffed with old thoughts, scraps of unwritten poems, God knows what rubbish. Often he had gone at night to the theatre, where the woman was employed, to walk home with her; and now the people were coming out of a small moving-picture house. They had been in there seeing a play called The Light of the World.
Wilson walked into the midst of the crowd, lost himself in the crowd, smoking his cigarette, and then he took off his hat, looked anxiously about for a moment, and suddenly began shouting in a loud voice. ”

“ There were these old residences, made into boarding-houses, and with unbelievably dirty lace curtains at the windows, and now and then an utterly disreputable old tumble-down frame house, in one of which Wilson lived with his woman.
The place is a sight. Someone owns it I suppose who is shrewd enough to know that in a big city like Chicago no section gets neglected always. Such a fellow must have said to himself, "Well, I'll let the place go. The ground on which the house stands will some day be very valuable, but the house is worth nothing. ”

“ There was the world of fact we all know or think we know, the world of flat buildings and Middle-Western farms with wire fences about the fields and Fordson tractors running up and down, and towns with high schools and advertising billboards and everything that makes up life, or that we think makes up life. ”

“ The room into which they went was dark, but with the sure instinct of an animal the woman walked across the room to the fire-place while the man stopped and stood some ten feet from the door, thinking and thinking in his peculiarly abstract way. The fireplace was filled with an accumulation of waste matter, cigarette ends—the man was a hard smoker—bits of paper on which he had scribbled—the rubbishy accumulation that gathers about all such fellows as Wilson. ”

“ Men had themselves built the walls and now stood behind them, knowing dimly that beyond the walls there was warmth, light, air, beauty, life in fact—while at the same time, and because of a kind of madness in themselves, the walls were constantly being built higher and stronger. ”

“ It made pretty good newspaper stuff—the poet who killed his mistress, and all that.
To get back to the poetry itself for a moment. I just wanted to explain that all through the book there ran this notion that men had erected walls about themselves and that all men were perhaps destined to stand for ever behind the walls, on which they constantly beat with their fists, or with whatever tools they could get hold of. One couldn't quite make out whether there was just one great wall or many little individual walls. Sometimes Wilson put it one way, sometimes another. ”

“ I could blow a thousand people out through the roof of one tall building into the sky, into the unknown. Building after building I could consume as I consume the cigarettes in this box. I could throw the burning ends of cities over my shoulder and out through a window. ”

“ As for Wilson, he wrote poetry of a sort I've never seen before, although, like most newspaper men, I've taken a turn at verse-making myself now and then, both of the rhymed kind and the newfangled vers libre sort. I rather go in for the classical stuff myself. ”

“ Here is one of his things. It is not directly concerned with the walls, the bowl, or the deep well theme, as you will see; but it is one we ran in the paper during the trial and a lot of folks rather liked it as I'll admit I do myself. Maybe putting it in here will give a kind of point to my story by giving you some sense of the strangeness of the man who is the story's hero. In the book it was called merely number ninety-seven and it went as follows:
"The firm grip of my fingers on the thin paper of this cigarette is a sign that I am very quiet now. ”

“ It was said she had got the job because some man connected with the theatre or a company playing there had a passion for her, but one can always pick up stories of that sort about any woman who works about the theatre—from the scrub-woman to the star. ”

“ Within a year or two she married a man, an honest enough fellow, but from all accounts rather uninteresting. He was a drug clerk and a frugal man, after a short time managed to buy a drug store of his own. ”