Sherwood Anderson

“ What it really means is that when men are devoted to their work there will still remain a wide difference of opinion as to methods, treatments of the subject, the baffling question of form achieved or not achieved—the question of when a craftsman's work becomes also a work of art. These are old questions about which all craftsmen have always struggled among themselves. It is all a queer and fascinating game just as life itself is queer and fascinating.
The real reward I fancy lies just in the work itself, nowhere else. ”

“ There is, you see, a modern movement in America. We are not so self-satisfied as we must often seem to strangers, to men from foreign parts. We still walk about and talk things over among ourselves. There is, if you are sensitive enough to feel it, a wistful something in the air here. You will feel it in any large crowd. At present the Modern Movement is perhaps a groping ill-defined movement but it exists. ”

“ That is in reality the effect desired in the manufacture of any popular art. It is the effect produced in reality by all the successful men, by the realists who pretend to give you photographic reproductions of life itself, by the respectable fine writers of the more conservative magazines and publishing houses, as well as the men who fill the pages of the cheap adventure magazines, the men called by the newspaper fraternity "the bunk shooters." You must seem to give a lot while really giving nothing. No one must be hurt. No one must be offended. No one must be made to think or feel. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To take the lives of these people and bend or twist them to suit the needs of some cleverly thought out plot to give your readers a false emotion is as mean and ignoble as to sell out living men or women. For the writer there is no escape, as there is no real escape for any craftsman. If you handle your materials in a cheap way you become cheap. The need of making a living may serve as an excuse but it will not save you as a craftsman. Nothing really will save you if you go cheap with tools and materials. ”

“ It is to the man what love of children is to the woman. When you are considering what it is that makes the younger generation so restless, what makes the workers on your buildings and in your factories such indifferent workmen, what makes so much of contemporary art cheap and transitory, consider also what the industrial age has tended to do to this old love of craft so deeply rooted in men. ”

“ Henry Mencken says that in America any man not a complete fool cannot help make a living, and there is some truth in what he says. If you have no money and no one will give you any, make your living in some other way and keep the real side of yourself for the honest work you want to do in your own craft. There are worse fates than being poor. If you have talent do not sell out your birthright. My own belief is that there never was a people in the world more anxious for men of talent to stay on the track and be true to the crafts than we Americans. ”

“ How are we to know that truth to ourselves, to the work of our own hands, to our own inner impulses, is the most vital thing in life? It has become almost a truism here in America that no man does good work in the arts until he is past forty. Nearly all the so called Moderns, the younger men, so called, are already gray. It takes a long time for most men to get ground under their feet, to find out a little their own truth in life. ”

“ Very well then—if you are a writer intent on catching and holding the fancy of the crowd you have got to have a technique. You have got to become the artful dodger, have got to invent or learn the trick of creating in the mind of your audience the sensations of terror, delight, amusement, suspense, without in any way actually touching the reality of lives. ”

“ In reality I think many men of talent might be saved for the doing of good work in the arts if the whole situation could be clearly stated. Too often the younger man or woman who has talent does not get the situation in hand until he is too old to save himself. We have all been brought up with the notion, firmly planted in us, that to succeed in a material sense is the highest end for a life. ”

“ It is totally unnecessary to know life, and in fact it will be better for you to let life alone. Life, you see, is a complex delicate thing. Anything may happen in life. We all know that. People hardly ever do as as we think they should. There are no plot short stories in life. All the clever tricks by which effects are to be got on the printed page are in reality a selling out of ourselves. ”

“ In the first place, there has been for a long time now, and particularly among our younger men and women, a rather intense boredom with the more obvious impulses of our American life. There is a new restlessness that is more and more expressing itself in individual revolution against the social laws and customs of another age. Old gods are dead and we have all gone hunting new gods. ”

“ In America the writer is faced with a situation that is unique. Our country is vast. In it are to be found so many different conditions of life, so many different social traditions that the writer who attempts to express in his work something national is in an almost impossible position. At best, as yet, he can only snatch at fragments. California is not Maine. North Dakota is not Louisiana. Ohio is not North Carolina. We are as yet strangers to each other. We are all of us just a little afraid of each other. Time only can weld us together, make us one people, make us understand each other. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Although the modern man and woman of the streets has been pretty effectually standardized as regards his hat, the cigarette he smokes, the automobile he drives, he cannot in reality be standardized. Few of us will as yet order our wives from a mail order house. Although in America and during the long period during which we have all been so busy conquering the mechanical world we have in general looked upon the poet or the artist as rather a sissy, a nut, a man who had better be brushed aside, we all have something of the poet and lover in us. ”

“ To speak again of the way out for the Moderns—for the young man or the young woman who wishes to do work for which he need not, in the end and when the temporary acclaim that so often follows cheap and flashy work has passed, be ashamed, well, there is one. In America it is not too difficult to make a living. ”

“ Life was to be spent in preparation for a life after death. Love of his fellow man did not enter into the New Englander’s scheme, and the arts were made the servants of morality. There was so much of life of which the New Englander was forbidden to speak, toward which he did not dare be too sympathetic that as a result and while New England ruled, gentility and respectability became the passion of our writers. In literature sins might be committed in France or in some vague place far away like the South Seas, but among the heroes and heroines of the writer’s fancy there must be no sin. ”

“ As everyone knows, there is in the world at this time what is broadly termed a Modern movement. It has expressed itself in a great many ways. In a short time within the last fifteen or twenty years, it has practically revolutionized painting all over the world. It has crept into the writing of prose, into the making of{4} song, into sculpture, into architecture. Although you may not realize it the fact is that the neckties worn by many men in our city streets and the dresses worn by the women have been influenced by the movement. ”

“ The New England states, all cold, hard and stony, produced a rather cold and stony culture, but the New Englander, like so many repressed and defeated peoples, was intellectually energetic. He spread his notion of life out over the country. Living as he did in a land where the ground was cold and comparatively unproductive underfoot and the skies cold and forbidding overhead, he spent a great deal of his time cultivating God. His art impulse was non-sensual, intellectual. Life to the New Englander was not to be lived here and now. Life was to be spent in preparation for a life after death. ”

“ I am in my nature a teller of tales, not a preacher, and I have been told that in trying to address any considerable number of people on a large subject it is a mistake to try to cover too much ground, that the writer should confine himself to the making of a few points, but how I am to do that on such a subject as Modernism I do not know. ”

“ Writers of the popular sort often make incomes of bankers or brokers, live during the summer in villas in Maine or in the California Carmel Highlands, drive expensive motor cars, own yachts and have a simply splendid time apparently and never during a long lifetime make a single contribution to the art of writing or write anything that a living soul would ever think of reading after the writer has died or his temporary vogue has passed. ”

“ We all know something is wrong with the flood of cheap work we are always getting. The literary clubs and the various kinds of culture clubs that spring up everywhere are perhaps rather silly in some of their gropings but they mean something. Often enough the man who spends all of his own life absorbed in money making would really like his wife and children to have something else as an end in life. ”

“ The writer, the painter, the musician, the practitioner of any of the arts who wants to do real work and honest work has got to put money making aside. He has got to forget it. There is but one way in which the young man or woman of talent can defeat the corrupting influence of the present day magazines and most of the book publishers and that is by forgetting their existence and giving all his attention to his work. ”

“ We cannot, at least not as yet, spend our hours of leisure outside factory and office hours just looking at advertisements of factory products and becoming excited because some man has performed the heroic feat of going from the city of New York to San Francisco, getting there in twenty-four hours in an aeroplane—instead of taking four or five days on a train, has found a machine that will get him there. We are really interested in the man in the machine—not in the machine itself. ”

“ In painting there are a number of men who have stopped making pleasant enough drawings of the old swimming hole and the magazine cover lady, who have thrown overboard the tricks of realism and representation and the absorption in surface technique and who are trying to bring feeling and form back into painting. The same thing is going on in the writing of poetry. Architecture is freeing itself from imitation of dead impulses and is taking new life.
In prose the movement is expressing itself in a growing number of men who are really trying to be honest to the materials in which they work. ”

“ Honest painting that isn't just pretty picture making begins to sell. Puritanism, as such, is pretty well licked. It cannot any longer so easily suppress books of artistic merit because some housewife is afraid the morals of her daughter, who has just come home from the movies or the Follies, will be ruined by being told how babies happen to be born. The force of the New England moralistic culture is spent. Today in America any man of talent who writes a book that is significant, a work of art, can get it published and there will be critics to acclaim him. ”

“ I hope you understand, however, that all this has nothing at all to do with the art of writing, that is to say in any sense in which real writers of the world, men who have cared something about their craft have always thought of it. These men have no more to do with the art of writing than the average American movie star has to do with the art of acting or the men who make the girls’ heads you see on the covers of our American magazines have to do with the art of painting. ”

“ The modern movement is beginning to express itself in buildings. In our residences we are less inclined to copy the impulses of old lands. Architecture, long one of the most dead and dreary of the arts as practiced in America, is becoming alive. ”

“ So anxious are we as a people for men of talent that it takes but the merest show of talent to get recognition among us. Why, any man or woman who wants to be respected has but to set himself up as a poet. ”