When I Left Business for Literature

by Sherwood Anderson

On an evening of the late summer I got off a train at a growing industrial Ohio town where I had once lived. I was rapidly becoming a middle-aged man. Two years before I had left the place in disgrace. There I had tried to be a manufacturer, a money-maker, and had failed. Some thousands of dollars had been lost for others. An effort to conform to the standard dreams of the men of my times had failed, and in the midst of my disgrace and generally hopeless outlook as regards making a living I had been filled with joy at coming to the end of it all. One morning I had left the place afoot, leaving my poor little factory, like an illegitimate child, on another man’s door-step. I had left, merely taking what money was in my pocket, some eight or ten dollars.

What a moment that leaving had been!  To one of the European artists afterward came to know the situation would have been unbelievably grotesque. Such a man could not have believed in my earnestness about it all and would have thought my feelings of the moment a worked-up thing. I can in fancy hear one of the Frenchmen, Italians, or Russians I later knew laughing at me.

“Well, but why get so worked up?  A factory is a factory, is it not?  Why may not one break it like an empty bottle?  You have lost some money for others?  See the light on that field over there. These others, for whom you lost money, were they compelled to beg in the streets, were their children torn by wolves?  What is it you Americans get so excited about when a little money is lost?”

A European artist may not understand, but an American will understand. The devil!  it is not a question of money. No men are so careless and free with money as the Americans. There is another matter involved.

It strikes rather deep at the roots of our beings. Childish as it all may have seemed to an older and more sophisticated world, we Americans, from the beginning, have been up to something, or we have wanted to think we were up to something. We came here, or our fathers or grandfathers came here, from a hundred diverse places, and you may be sure it was not the artists who came. Artists do not want to cut down trees, root stumps out of the ground, build towns and railroads. The artist wants to sit with a strip of canvas before him, face an open space on a wall, carve a big of wood, make combinations of words and sentences, as I am doing now, trying to express to others some thought or feeling of his own. He wants to dream of color, to lay hold of form, free the sensual in himself, live more fully and freely in his contact with the materials before him than he can possibly live in life. He seeks a kind of controlled ecstasy and is a man with a passion, a “nut,” as we love to say in America. And very often, when he is not in actual contact with his materials, he is a much more vain and disagreeable ass than any man not an artist could possibly be. As a living man he is almost always a pest. It is only when dead he begins to have value.

The simple truth is that in a European country the artist is more freely accepted than he is among us, and only because he has been longer about. They know how harmless he really is, or, rather, do not know how subtly dangerous he can be, and accept him only as one might accept a hybrid cross between a dog and a cat that went growling, mewing, barking, and spitting about the house. One might want to kill the first of such strange beasts he sees about, but after he had seen a dozen and has realized that, like the mule, they cannot breed their own kind, he laughs, and let them live, paying no more attention to them than modern France, for example, pays to its artists.

But in America things are somewhat different. Here something went wrong in the beginning. We pretended to so much and were going to do such great things here. This vast land was to be a refuge for all the outlawed brave, foolish folk of the world. The declaration of the rights of man was to have a new hearing in a new place. The devil!  we did get ourselves into a bad hole!  We were going to be superhuman, and it turned out we were sons of men who were not such devilish fellows after all. You cannot blame us that we were somewhat reluctant about finding out the very human things concerning ourselves. One does so hate to come down off the perch!

We are now losing our former feeling of inherent virtue, are permitting ourselves to laugh occasionally at ourselves for our pretensions; but there was a time here when we were sincerely in earnest about all this American business, the land for the free and the home for the brave. We actually meant it, and no one will ever understand present-day America or Americans who does not concede that we meant it and that while we were building all of our big, ugly, hurriedly thrown-together towns, creating our great industrial system, growing always more huge and prosperous, we were as much in earnest about what we thought we were up to as were the French of the thirteenth century when they built the Cathedral of Chartres to the glory of God.

They built the Cathedral of Chartres to the glory of God, and we really intended building here a land to the glory of man and thought we were doing it, too. That was our intention, and the affair only blew up in the process, or got perverted because man, even the brave and the free man, is somewhat a less worthy object of glorification than God. This we might have found out long ago but that we did not know one another. We came from too many different places to know one another, had been promised too much, wanted too much. We were afraid to know one another.

Oh, how Americans have wanted heroes, wanted brave, simple, fine men!  And how sincerely and deeply we Americans have been afraid to understand and love one another, fearing to find ourselves at the end no more brave, heroic, and fine than the people of almost any other part of the world!

I, however, disagree. What I am trying to do is to give the processes of my own mind at two distinct moments of my own life. First, the moment when, after many years of effort to conform to an unstated and but dimly understood American dream by making myself a successful man in the material world, I threw all overboard, and then, at another moment, when, having come back to the same spot where I passed through the first moment, I attempted to confront myself with myself in a somewhat changed point of view.

As for the first of these moments, it was melodramatic and even silly enough. The struggle centered itself, at the last, within the walls of a particular moment and within the walls of a particular room.

I sat in the room with a woman who was my secretary. For several years I had been sitting there, dictating to her regarding the goods I had made in my factory and that I was attempting to sell. The attempt to sell the goods had become a sort of madness in me. There were certain thousands, or perhaps hundreds of thousands of men, living in towns or on farms in many States of my country who might possibly buy the goods I had made rather than the goods made in another factory by another man. How I had wheedled!  How I had schemed!  In some years I gave myself quite fully to the matter in hand, and the dollars trickled in. Well, I was about to become rich. It was a possibility. After a good day or week, when many dollars had come, I went to walk, and when I had got into a quiet place where I was unobserved I threw back my shoulders and strutted. During the year I had made for myself so many dollars. Next year I would make so many more, and the next year so many more. But my thoughts of the matter did not express themselves in the dollars. It never does to the American man. Who calls the American a dollar-lover is a fool. My factory was of a certain size,—it was in reality a poor haphazard-enough-run place,—but after a time I would build a great factory and after that a greater and greater. Like a true American, I thought in size.

My fancy played with the matter of factories as a child would play with a toy. There would be a great factory with walls going up and up, and a little open place for a lawn at the front, shower-baths for the workers, with perhaps a fountain playing on a lawn, and up before the door of this place I would drive in a large automobile.

Oh, how I would be respected by all, how I would be looked up to be all!  I walked in a little, dark street, throwing back my shoulders. How grand and glorious I felt!

The houses along the street in which I walked were small and ugly, and dirty-faced children played in the yards. I wondered. Having walked, dreaming my dream for a long time, I returned to the neighborhood of my factory and, opening my office, went in to sit at my desk, smoking a cigarette. The night watchman came in. He was an old man who had once been a schoolteacher, but, as he said, his eyes had gone back on him.

When I had walked alone I had been able to make myself feel somewhat as I fancied a prince might have felt, but when any one came near me something exploded inside. I was a deflated balloon. Well, in fancy, I had a thousand workmen under me. They were children, and I was their father and would look out for them. Perhaps I would build them model houses to live in, a town of model houses, built about my great factory, eh. The workmen would be my children, and I would look out for my children. “Land of the free, home of the brave.”

But I was back in my factory now, and the night watchman sat smoking with me. Sometimes we talked far into the night. The devil!  He was a fellow like myself, having the same problems as myself. How could I be his father?  The thought was absurd. Once, when he was a younger man, he had dreamed of being a scholar, but his eyes had gone back on him. What had he wanted to do?  He spoke of it for a time. He had wanted to be a scholar, and I myself had spent those earlier years eagerly reading books.

“I would really like to have been a learned monk, one of those fellows such as appeared in the Middle Ages, one of the fellows who went off and lived by himself and gave himself up wholly to learning, one who believed in learning, who spent his life humbly seeking new truths; but I got married and my wife had kids, and then, you see, my eyes went back on me.”

He spoke of the matter philosophically. One did not let oneself get too much excited. After a time one got over any feeling of bitterness. The night watchman had a boy, a lad of fifteen, who also loved books.

“He is pretty lucky, can get all the books he wants at the public library. In the afternoon after school is out and before I come down here to my job he reads aloud to me.”

Men and women!  Many men and women!  There were men and women working in my factory, men and women walking in streets with me, many men and women scattered far and wide over the country to whom I wanted to sell my goods. I sent men, salesmen, to see them:  I wrote letters, how many thousands of letters, all to the same purpose. “Will you buy my goods?”  And again, “Will you buy my goods?”

What were the other men thinking about?  What was I myself thinking about?  Suppose it were possible to know something of the men and women, to know something of oneself, too. The devil!  these were not thoughts that would help me to sell my goods to all the others. What were all the others like?  What was I myself like?  Did I want a large factory with a little lawn and a fountain in front and with a model town built about it?

Days of endlessly writing letters to men, nights of walking in strange, quiet streets—what had happened to me?  “I shall go get drunk,” I said to myself, and I did go and get drunk. Taking a train to a near-by city I drank until a kind of joy came to me and, with some man I had found and who had joined in my carousal, I walked in streets, shouting at other men, singing songs, going sometimes into strange houses to laugh with people, talk with people I found there.

Here was something I liked, and something the others liked, too. When I had come to people in strange houses half drunk, released, they were not afraid of me. “Well, he wants to talk,” they seemed to be saying to themselves. “That’s fine!”  There was something broken down between us, a wall broken down. We talked of outlandish things for Anglo-Saxon trained people to speak of, of love between men and women, of what children’s coming meant. Food was brought forth. Often in a single evening of this sort I got more from people than I could get from weeks of ordinary intercourse. The people were a little excited by the strangeness of two unknown men in their houses. With my companion I went boldly to the door and knocked. Laughter, “Hello, the house!”  It might be the house of a laborer or that of a well-to-do merchant. I had hold of my new-found friend’s arm and explained our presence as well as I could. “We are a little drunk and we are travelers. We just want to sit and visit with you a while.”

There was a kind of terror in people’s eyes and a kind of gladness, too. An old workman showed us a relic he had brought home with him from the Civil War, while his wife ran into a bedroom and changed her dress. Then a child woke in a near-by room and began to cry and was permitted to come in in her nightgown and lie in my arms or in the arms of the new-found friend who had got drunk with me. The talk swept over strange, intimate subjects. What were men up to?  What were women up to?  There was a kind of deep taking of breath, as though we had all been holding something back from one another and had suddenly decided to let go. Once or twice we stayed all night in the house to which we had gone.

And then back to the writing of letters to sell my goods. In the city to which I had gone to carouse I had seen many women of the street, standing at corners, looking furtively about.

What thoughts in the mind!  There was a note due and payable at the bank. “Now, here, you man, attend to your affairs. You have induced others to put money into your enterprises. If you are to build a great enterprise here, you must be up and at it.”

How often in after years I have laughed at myself for the thoughts and emotions of that time. There is a thought I have had that is very delicious. It is this, and I dare say it will be an unwelcome thought to many. “I am the American man. I think there is no doubt of it. I am just the mixture, the cold, moral man of the North, into whose body has come the warm pagan blood of the South. I love and am afraid to love. Behold in me the American man striving to become an artist, to become conscious of himself, filled with wonder concerning himself and others, trying to have a good time and not fake a good time. I am not English, Italian, Jew, German, Frenchman, Russian. What am I?  I am tremendously serious about it all, but at the same time I laugh constantly at myself for my own seriousness. Like all real American men of our day, I wander constantly from place to place, striving to put down roots into the American soil and not quite doing it. If you say the real American man is not yet born, you lie. I am the type of the fellow.

This is somewhat of a joke on me, but it is a greater joke on you readers, too. As respectable and conventional a man as President Coolidge has me in him, and I have him in myself. Do not doubt it. I have him in me and Eugene Debs in me and the crazy political idealists of the Western States and Mr. Gary of the Steel Trust and the whole crew. I accept them all as a part of myself. Would to God they would thus accept me!

And being this thing I have tried to describe, I return now to myself sitting between the walls of a certain room and between the walls of a certain moment, too. Just why was that moment so pregnant? I will never quite know.

It came with a rush, the feeling that I must quit buying and selling, the overwhelming feeling of uncleanliness. I was in my whole nature a tale-teller. My father had been one, and his not knowing had destroyed him. The tale-teller cannot bother with buying and selling. To do so will destroy him. No class of men I have ever known are so dull and cheerless as the writers of glad, sentimental romances, the painters of glad, pretty pictures. The corrupt, unspeakable thing that had happened to tale-telling in America was all concerned with this matter of buying and selling. The horse cannot sing like a canary bird, or the canary bird pull a plow like a horse, and either of them attempting it becomes something ridiculous.

There was a door leading out from my office to the street. How many steps to the door?  I counted them, “five, six, seven.”  “Suppose,” I asked myself, “I could take those five, six, seven steps to the door, pass out at the door, go along that railroad track out there, disappear into the far horizon beyond. Where was I to go?  In the town where my factory was located I had still the reputation of being a bright young business man. In my first years there I had been filled with shrewd, vast schemes. I had been admired, looked up to. Since that time I had gone down and down as a bright young man, but no one yet knew how far I had gone. I was still respected in the town, my word was still good at the bank. I was a respectable man.

Did I want to do something not respectable, not decent?  I am trying to give you the history of a moment, and, as a tale-teller, I have come to think that the true history of life is but a history of moments. It is only at rare moments we live. I wanted to walk out at a door and go away into the distance. The American is still a wanderer, a migrating bird not yet ready to build a nest. All of our cities are built temporarily, as are the houses in which we live. We are on the way—toward what?  There have been other times in the history of the world when many strange peoples came together in a new strange land. To assume that we have made an America, even materially, seems to me now but telling ourselves fairy-tales in the night. We have not even made it materially yet, and the American man has only gone in for money-making on a large scale to quiet his own restlessness, as the monk of old days was given the Regula of Augustine to quiet him and still the lusts in himself. For the monk, kept occupied with the saying of prayers and the doing of many little sacred offices, there was no time for the lusts of the world to enter in, and for the American to be perpetually busy with his affairs, with his automobiles, with his movies, there is no time for unquiet thoughts.

On that day in the office at my factory I looked at myself and laughed. The whole struggle I am trying to describe, and that I am confident will be closer to the understanding of most Americans than anything else I have ever written, was accompanied by a kind of mocking laughter at myself and my own seriousness about it all.

Very well, then, I wanted to go out of the door and never come back. How many Americans want to go!  But where do they want to go?  I wanted to accept for myself all of the little restless thoughts of which I and the others had been so afraid, and you, who are Americans, will understand the necessity of my continually laughing at myself and at all things dear to me. I must laugh at the thing I love the more intensely because of my love. Any American will understand that.

It was a trying moment for me. There was the woman, my secretary, now looking at me. What did she represent?  What did she not represent?  Would I dare be honest with her?  It was quite apparent to me I would not. I had got to my feet, and we stood looking at each other. “It is now or never,” I said to myself, and I remember that I kept smiling. I had stopped dictating to her in the midst of a sentence. “The goods about which you have inquired are the best of their kind made in the -----“ 

I stood, and she sat, and we were looking at each other intently.

“What’s the matter?” she asked. She was an intelligent woman, more intelligent, I am sure, than I, just because she was a woman and good, while I have never been good, do not know how to be good. Could I explain all to her?  The words of a fancied explanation marched through my mind.

“My dear young women, it is all very silly, but I have decided no longer to concern myself with this buying and selling. It may be all right for others, but for me it is poison. There is this factory. You may have it, if it pleases you. It is of little value, I dare say. Perhaps it is money ahead, and then again it may well be it is money behind. I am uncertain about it all and now I am going away. Now at this moment, with the letter I have been dictating, with the very sentence you have been writing left unfinished, I am going out that door and never come back. What am I going to do?  Well, now, that I don’t know. I am going to wander about. I am going to sit with people, listen to words, tell tales of people, what they are thinking, what they are feeling. The devil!  it may even be I am going forth in search of myself.”

The woman was looking into my eyes the while I looked into hers. Perhaps I had grown a little pale, and now she grew pale. “You’re sick,” she said and her words gave me an idea. There was wanted a justification of myself not to myself, but to the others. A crafty thought came. Was the thought crafty or was I at the moment a little insane, a “nut,” as every American so loves to say of every man who does something a little out of the groove.

I had grown pale, and it may be I was ill, but nevertheless I was laughing, the American laugh. Had I suddenly become a little insane?  What a comfort that thought would be, not to myself, but to the others!  My leaving the place I was then in would tear up roots that had gone down a little into the ground. The ground I did not think would support the tree that was myself and that I thought wanted to grow.

My mind dwelt on the matter of roots, and I looked at my feet. The whole question with which I was at the moment concerned became a matter of feet. I had two feet that could take me out of the life I was then in and that, to do so, would need but take three or four steps to a door. When I had reached the door and had stepped out of my little factory office, everything would be quite simplified, I was sure. I had to lift myself out. Others would have to tackle the job of getting me back once I had stepped over that threshold.

Whether at the moment I merely became shrewd and crafty or whether I really became temporarily insane I shall never quite know. What I did was to step very close to the woman and, looking directly into her eyes, I laughed gaily. Others beside herself would, I knew, hear the words I was now speaking. I looked at my feet.

“I have been wading in a long river, and my feet are wet,” I said.

Again I laughed as I walked lightly toward the door and out of a long and tangled phase of my life, out of the door of buying and selling, out of the door of affairs.

“They want me to be a ‘nut,’ will love to think of me as a ‘nut,’ and why not?  It may just be that’s what I am,” I thought gaily, and at the same time turned and said a final confusing sentence to the woman, who now stared at me in speechless amazement. “My feet are cold, wet, and heavy from long wading in a river. Now I shall go walk on dry land,” I said, and as I passed out at the door a delicious thought came. “Oh, you little tricky words, you are my brothers. It is you, not myself, have lifted me over this threshold. It is you who have dared give me a hand. For the rest of my life I will be a servant to you,” I whispered to myself, as I went along a spur of railroad track, over a bridge, out of a town, and out of that phase of my life.

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