TAR A Midwest Childhood

COPYRIGHT 1926 :: BY BONI & LIVERIGHT, Inc. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES

TO ELIZABETH ANDERSON

Portions of this book appeared as short sketches in Woman’s Home Companion, The American Mercury and the author here makes due acknowledgment of the graciously given permission to reprint.

[ix]

FOREWORD

I have a confession to make. I am a story teller starting to tell a story and cannot be expected to tell the truth. Truth is impossible to me. It is like goodness, something aimed at but never hit. A year or two ago I determined to try to tell the story of my own childhood. Very well, I set to work. What a job! I went at the task bravely but presently came to a dead halt. Like every other man and woman in the world I had always thought the story of my own childhood would be an absorbingly interesting one.

I began to write. For a day or two all went well. I sat at my desk scribbling away. I, Sherwood Anderson, an American man, in my youth did so and so. Well, I played ball, stole apples out of orchards, began presently, being male, to think of the female, was sometimes afraid in the dark at night. What nonsense to speak of it all. I grew ashamed.

And yet there was something I had wanted of [x] which I need not be ashamed. Childhood is something wonderful. Manhood, sophistication is something worth striving for but innocence is somewhat sweeter. It may be the greater wisdom to remain innocent but it cannot be done. I wish it could.

In a New Orleans restaurant I heard a man explaining the fate of crabs. “There are two good kinds,” he said. “Busters are so young they are sweet. Soft shell crabs have the sweetness of age and weakness.”

It is my weakness to want to speak of my youth, a sign perhaps I am getting old, but I am ashamed. There is a reason for my shame. All writing of self is egotistical. There is however another reason.

I am a man who has brothers living and they are strong, and I dare say hard-hitting fellows. Suppose it please my fancy to have a certain kind of father or mother. That is the great privilege of being a writer—that life may be constantly re-created in the field of fancy. But my brothers, respectable men, may have quite different notions of how these worthy people, my parents and theirs, should be presented to the world. We modern writers have got a reputation for boldness, for [xi] too much boldness most people think, but none of us like to be knocked down or cut on the street by former friends or by our relatives. We are not prize-fighters or horse wranglers, most of us. A poor enough lot, if the truth be told. Cæsar was quite right in detesting scribblers.

Now it happens that my friends and relatives have already stood much from me. I am forever writing of myself and dragging them in, re-creating them to suit my fancy, and they have been a forbearing lot. It is dreadful really having a scribbler in the family. Avoid it if you can. If you have a son who has a leaning that way hurry him into industrial life. If he becomes a writer he may give you away.

You see, if I began writing of my childhood, I had to ask myself how much more these people would stand. Heavens knows what I might do to them when I got going.

I kept writing and tearing up. Oh, pshaw! My progress was too lamentably slow. I could not very well create a lot of little Lord Fauntleroys growing up in a Middle-western American town. If I made myself too good I knew it would not work and if I made myself really bad—which was a temptation—no one would believe. Bad [xii] people, when you come close to them, are such simpletons.

“Where is the Truth?” I asked myself, “Oh, Truth, where are you? Where have you hidden yourself?” I looked under my desk, under the bed, went out and looked up and down the road. I have always been looking for the rascal but have never been able to find him. Where does he keep himself?

“Where is Truth?” What an unsatisfactory question to be compelled to keep asking, if you are a teller of tales.

Let me explain—if I can.

The teller of tales, as you must all know, lives in a world of his own. He is one thing, as you see him walking in the street, going to church, into a friend’s house, into a restaurant, and quite another fellow when he sits down to write. While he is a writer nothing happens but that it is changed by his fancy and his fancy is always at work. Really, you should never trust such a man. Do not put him on the witness stand during a trial for your life or for money—and be very careful never to believe what he says under any circumstances.

Take myself for example. I am, let us say, [xiii] walking on a country road and there is a man running in a nearby field. Such a thing happened once and what a tale I made of it.

I see the man running. Nothing else actually happens. He runs across the field and disappears over a hill but now look out for me. Later I may tell you a tale of the man. Leave it to me to make up a tale of why the man ran and to believe my own tale after it is made.

The man lived in a house just beyond the hill. Sure there was a house there. I created it. I ought to know. Why, I could draw you a picture of the house, although I never actually saw it. He lived in a house behind the hill and something absorbingly interesting and exciting just now happened in the house.

I tell you the tale of what happened with the straightest face in the world, believe the tale myself, at least while I am telling it.

You see how it is. When I was a child this faculty I have was a nuisance. It kept getting me into hot water. Every one thought me a little liar and, of course, I was. I went ten yards beyond the house and stood behind an apple tree. There was a gentle rising hill and near the top of the hill a clump of bushes. A cow came out of the bushes, [xiv] nibbled grass, no doubt, and then went back into the bushes. It was fly time and I dare say the bushes were a comfort to her.

I made up a tale concerning the cow. She became for me a bear. There had been a circus in a nearby town and a bear had escaped. I had heard father speak of reading an account of the escape in the newspapers. I gave my story a certain air of probability and the strange part of all this is that, having thought out the tale, I believed it myself. All children, I think, do tricks like that. It worked so well that I had the men of the neighborhood, with guns on their shoulders, scouring the woods for two or three days and all the neighborhood children shared in my fright and excitement.

A literary triumph—and I so young.

All tale telling is, in a strict sense, nothing but lying. That is what people cannot understand. To tell the truth is too difficult. I long since gave up the effort.

However, when it came to the tellings of the tale of my own childhood—well, for once, I said to myself, I will hew to the line. An old pit I had often fallen in before I fell in again. Bravely I set myself to my task. I pursued Truth back [xv] through my own memory like a dog chasing a rabbit through dense bushes. What toil, what sweat dropped upon the sheets of paper before me. “To be honest,” I said to myself, “is to be good, and for once I will be good.

“I will prove how essentially sterling is my character. People who have always known me and who have perhaps, in the past, had too much reason for doubting my word will now be surprised and delighted.”

I had dreams of people giving me a new name. As I went along the street people would whisper to each other, “There goes Honest Sherwood.” Perhaps they would insist on electing me to Congress or sending me as an ambassador to some foreign country. How happy all of my relatives would be.

“At last he is giving all of us a good character. He has made us out respectable folk.”

As for the people of my native town, or towns, they also would be happy. Telegrams would be received, meetings held. There might be an organization formed for raising the standard of citizenship of which I would be elected president.

I have always so wanted to be president of something. What a splendid dream.

[xvi]

Alas—it would not work. I wrote one sentence, ten, a hundred pages. They had to be torn up. Truth had disappeared into a thicket so dense that it could not be penetrated.

Like every one else in the world I had so thoroughly re-created my childhood, in my own fancy, that Truth was utterly lost.

And now for a confession. I have a love of confessions. I do not remember the face of my own father. My wife is in the next room as I sit writing, but I do not remember what she looks like.

My wife is to me an idea, my mother, my sons, my friends, are ideas.

My fancy is a wall between myself and Truth. There is a world of the fancy into which I constantly plunge and out of which I seldom completely emerge. I want every day to be absorbingly interesting and exciting to me and if it will not, I, with my fancy, try to make it so. If you, a stranger, come into my presence there is a chance that for a moment I shall see you as you are but in another moment you will be lost. You say something that starts my fancy working and I am off. To-night perhaps I shall dream of you. We will have fancied conversations. My [xvii] fancy will throw you into strange, noble—or perhaps even mean situations. Now I have no scruples. You are my rabbit and I am a hound pursuing you. Even your physical being changes under the driving lash of my fancy.

And here let me say something regarding a writer’s responsibility for the characters he creates. We writers are always getting out of it by disclaiming responsibility for our dreams. How absurd. How often, for example, have I dreamed of making love to some woman who actually wouldn’t have me. Why deny responsibility for such a dream. I do it because I like it—although I do not do it consciously. We writers must take the responsibility of the unconscious, too—it seems.

Am I to blame? I am made that way. I am like all people. You are yourself more like me than you would care to admit. After all the fault was partly your own. Why did you interest my fancy? Dear reader, I am sure that, if you came into my presence, my fancy would at once be caught.

Judges and lawyers who have had to handle witnesses during trials in court know how common [xviii] is the disease I have, know how little people are to be depended upon for the truth.

As I have suggested, when it came to writing of myself, I, the teller of tales, would be all right if there were no living witnesses to check up on me. They, of course, will also have changed the actual happenings of our common lives to suit their own fancies.

I am doing it.

You are doing it.

Everybody’s doing it.

Much better to meet the situation as I have done here—create a Tar Moorehead to stand for myself.

At least that lets my friends and relatives out. It is, I admit, a writer’s trick.

And anyway, it was only after I had created Tar Moorehead, had brought him into life in my own fancy, that I could sit down before my sheets and feel at ease. It was only then I faced myself, accepted myself. “If you are a born liar, a man of the fancy, why not be what you are?” I said to myself, and having said it I at once began writing with a new feeling of comfort.

PART I

[3]

CHAPTER I

Poor people have children without much feeling of exaltation. Alas, the children just come. It is another child and children come easily. On such an occasion a man is for some obscure reason a little ashamed. The woman escapes because she is ill. Let’s see, now there were two boys and one girl. This makes only three so far. It is well this last one is another boy. He won’t cost much for a long time. He can wear the castoff clothing of his older brother and then, when he gets older and demands things of his own, he can work. It is the common fate of man to work. That was provided for in the beginning. Cain killed Abel with a club. It happened at the edge of a field. There is a picture of the scene in the Sunday School leaflet. Abel lies dead on the ground and Cain stands over him with a club in his hand.

In the background is one of God’s angels pronouncing [4] the dreadful sentence. “By the sweat of your brow shall you eat your bread.” That sentence to go reverberating down through the ages to catch a small Ohio boy among all the others. Well, boys find places more readily than girls. They earn more.

The boy, named Edgar Moorehead, was called Edgar only while he was very young. He lived in Ohio but his father was a North Carolina man and North Carolina men are in derision called “Tar-heels.” A neighbor spoke of him as another little “Tar-heel” and after that he was called, first “Tar-heel” and then simply “Tar.” What a black sticky name!

Tar Moorehead was born in the town of Camden, Ohio, but when he left there he went in his mother’s arms. As a conscious human being he never saw the town, never walked in its streets and later when he grew to manhood he was careful never to go back.

Being an imaginative child and not fond of disillusions he preferred having one place all his own, the product of his own fancy.

Tar Moorehead became a writer and wrote tales of people in small towns, how they live, what they think, what things happen to them, but he [5] never wrote of Camden. As a matter of fact there is such a place. It is on a railroad, tourists go through there, stopping to have their gas tanks filled. There are stores that sell chewing gum, electric fixtures, automobile tires, canned fruits and vegetables.

Tar discarded all these things when he thought of Camden. He thought of it as his own town, the product of his own fancy. Sometimes it sat at the edge of a long plain and the people of the town could see from the windows of their houses a vast expanse of earth and sky. Such a place to walk in the evening, out on the grassy plain, such a place to count the stars, feel the evening wind on the cheek, hear, coming from a distance, the little sounds of the night.

As a man Tar awoke, let us say, in a city hotel. All of his life he had been trying to put life into the tales he wrote but his job was difficult. Modern life is complex. What are you going to say about it? How are you going to get things straight?

There is a woman, for example. How are you, being a man, going to understand women? Some men writers pretend they have solved the problem. They write with great confidence and when you [6] read the printed tale you are quite swept off your feet but later, when you think things over, it appears all false.

How are you going to understand women when you cannot understand yourself? How are you ever going to understand any one or anything?

As a man Tar sometimes lay in his bed in a city and thought of Camden, the town in which he was born and which he never saw and never intended to see, the town filled with people he could understand and who always understood him.

There was a reason for his love of the place. He owed no one money there, had never cheated any one, had never made love to a Camden woman he found out later he did not want.

Now Camden had become, for him, a place among hills. It was a little white town in a valley with high hills on each side. You reached it by a stagecoach, going up from a railroad town twenty miles away. Being a realist in his writing and thinking, Tar did not make the houses of his town very comfortable or the people particularly good or in any way exceptional.

They were what they were, plain people, leading rather hard lives, digging a living out of small fields in the valleys and on the hillsides. [7] Because the land was rather poor and the fields steep, modern agricultural implements could not be introduced and anyway the people had no money to buy.

The town of Tar’s birth, this purely fanciful place, which has nothing to do with real Camden, had no electric lights, there was no waterworks, no one there owned an automobile. By day men and women went into the fields to plant corn by hand, they harvested wheat with a cradle. At night, after ten o’clock, the little streets with the poor little houses scattered about were unlighted. Even the houses were dark, except an occasional one where there was sickness or where company had come. It was, in short, such a place as might have been found in Judea in Old Testament days. Christ on his mission and followed by John, Matthew, that queer neurotic Judas and the rest, might well have visited just such a place.

A place of mystery—the home of romance. How thoroughly the citizens of the real Camden, Ohio, might have disliked Tar’s conception of their town.

To tell the truth Tar was trying, through the creation of a town of his own fancy, to get at something it was almost impossible to get at in [8] the reality of life. In real life people never stood still. Nothing in America stands still very long. You are a boy in a town and go away to live for a mere twenty years. Then one day you come back and walk through the streets of your town. Nothing is as it should be.

The shy little girl who lived on your street and whom you thought so wonderful has now become a woman. She has protruding teeth and her hair is already getting thin. What a shame! When you knew her, as a boy, she seemed the most wonderful creature in the world. You used to go far out of your way, coming home from school, just to go past her house. There she was in the front yard and when she saw you coming she ran to the door and stood just within the house in the half light. You stole one glance and then did not dare look again. But in fancy how lovely she had been.

A sorry day for you when you go back to the real place of your childhood. Better go to China or the South Seas. Sit on the deck of a ship and dream. The little girl is married now and the mother of two children. The boy who played shortstop on the baseball team and whom you envied until it hurt has become a barber. Everything [9] has gone wrong. Much better to adopt Tar Moorehead’s plan, move away from your town early, so early that you can remember nothing very definitely, and then never go back.

Tar kept the town of Camden as something special in his life. Even when he had become a grown man and was called successful he clung to his dreams of the place. He had been spending the evening with some men at a big city hotel and did not go to his room until late. Well, his head was tired, his spirit tired. There had been talk and more talk, perhaps some kind of disagreement. He had quarreled with a fat man who wanted him to do something he did not want to do.

Then he went up into his room and closed his eyes and at once he was back in the town of his fancy, his birthplace, the town he had never consciously seen, in Camden, Ohio.

It was night and he walked in the hills above the town. The stars shone out. A little wind was making the leaves of the trees rustle.

When he had walked in the hills until he was tired he could come down through meadows where cows were being pastured and get among the houses.

[10]

He knew the people in every house along the little streets, knew all about them. They were what he had dreamed people were like when he was a small boy. The man he had thought brave and kind was really brave and kind; the little girl he had thought lovely had grown into a beautiful woman.

It is coming close to people that hurts. We find out people are like ourselves. Better, if you want peace, keep far off, dream about people. The men who make a romance of life are perhaps right after all. The reality is too terrible. “By the sweat of your brow shall you earn your bread.”

By cheating too, by all kinds of dodges.

Cain made things hard for all of us that time he killed Abel at the edge of the field. He did it with a club. What a mistake it was to be carrying clubs about. If Cain had not had the club with him that day long ago the Camden of fact, where Tar Moorehead was born, might have been more like the Camden of his dreams.