An Apology for Crudity

by Sherwood Anderson

　　For a long time I have believed that crudity is an inevitable qualityin the production of a really significant present-day Americanliterature. How indeed is one to escape the obvious fact that thereis as yet no native subtlety of thought or living among us? And ifwe are a crude and childlike people how can our literature hope toescape the influence of that fact? Why indeed should we want it toescape? If you are in doubt as to the crudity of thought in America, try anexperiment. Come out of your offices, where you sit writing andthinking, and try living with us. Get on a train at Pittsburg and gowest to the mountains of Colorado. Stop for a time in our townsand cities. Stay for a week in some Iowa corn-shipping town andfor another week in one of the Chicago clubs. As you loiter aboutread our newspapers and listen to our conversations, remembering,if you will, that as you see us in the towns and cities, so we are.We are not subtle enough to conceal ourselves and he who runswith open eyes through the Mississippi Valley may read the storyof the Mississippi Valley. It is a marvelous story and we have not yet begun to tell the half ofit. A little, I think I know why. It is because we who write havedrawn ourselves away. We have not had faith in our people and inthe story of our people. If we are crude and childlike, that is ourstory and our writing men must learn to dare to come among usuntil they know the story. The telling of the story depends, Ibelieve, upon their learning that lesson and accepting that burden. To my room, which is on a street near the loop in the city ofChicago, come men who write. They talk and I talk. We are fools.We talk of writers of the old world and the beauty and subtlety ofthe work they do. Below us the roaring city lies like a great animalon the prairies, but we do not run out to the prairies. We stay in ourrooms and talk. And so, having listened to talk and having myself talkedovermuch, I grow weary of talk and walk in the streets. As I walkalone, an old truth comes home to me and I know that we shallnever have an American literature until we return to faith inourselves and to the facing of our own limitations. We must, insome way, become in ourselves more like our fellows, moresimple and real. For surely it does not follow that because we Americans are apeople without subtlety, we are a dull or uninteresting people. Ourliterature is dull, but we are not. One remembers how Dostoevskyhad faith in the simplicity of the Russians and what he achieved.He lived and he expressed the life of his time and people. Thething that he did brings hope of achievement for our men. But let us first of all accept certain truths. Why should weAmericans aspire to a subtlety that belongs not to us but to oldlands and places? Why talk of intellectuality and of intellectual lifewhen we have not accepted the life that we have? There is deathon that road and following it has brought death into much ofAmerican writing. Can you doubt what I say? Consider the smoothslickness of the average magazine story.There is often great subtlety of plot and phrase, but there is noreality. Can such work live? The answer is that the most popularmagazine story or novel does not live in our minds for a month. And what are we to do about it? To me it seems that as writers weshall have to throw ourselves with greater daring into the life here.We shall have to begin to write out of the people and not for thepeople. We shall have to find within ourselves a little of thatcourage. To continue along the road we are travelling isunthinkable. To draw ourselves apart, to live in little groups andconsole ourselves with the thought that we are achievingintellectuality, is to get nowhere. By such a road we can hope onlyto go on producing a literature that has nothing to do with life as itis lived in these United States. To be sure, the doing of the thing I am talking about will not beeasy. America is a land of objective writing and thinking. Newpaths will have to be made. The subjective impulse is almostunknown to us. Because it is close to life, it works out into crudeand broken forms. It leads along a road that such Americanmasters of prose as James and Howells did not want to take, but ifwe are to get anywhere, we shall have to travel that road. The road is rough and the times are pitiless. Who, knowing ourAmerica and understanding the life in our towns and cities, canclose his eyes to the fact that life here is for the most part an uglyaffair? As a people we have given ourselves to industrialism, andindustrialism is not lovely. If anyone can find beauty in anAmerican factory town, I wish he would show me the way. Formyself, I cannot find it. To me, and I am living in industrial life,the whole thing is as ugly as modern war. I have to accept that factand I believe a great step forward will have been taken when it ismore generally accepted. But why, I am asked, is crudity and ugliness necessary? Whycannot a man like Mr. Dreiser write in the spirit of the earlyAmericans, why cannot he see fun in life? What we want is thenote of health. In the work of Mark Twain there was somethingwholesome and sweet. Why cannot the modern man be alsowholesome and sweet? To this I make answer that to me a man, say like Mr. Dreiser, iswholesome. He is true to something in the life about him, and truthis always wholesome. Twain and Whitman wrote out of anotherage, out of an age and a land of forests and rivers. The dominantnote of American life in their time was the noisy, swaggeringraftsman and the hairy-breasted woodsman. To-day it is not so.The dominant note in American life to-day is the factory hand.When we have digested that fact, we can begin to approach thetask of the present-day novelist with a new point of view. It is, I believe, self-evident that the work of the novelist mustalways lie somewhat outside the field of philosophic thought. Yourtrue novelist is a man gone a little mad with the life of his times.As he goes through life he lives, not in himself, but in manypeople. Through his brain march figures and groups of figures. Outof the many figures, one emerges. If he be at all sensitive to thelife about him and that life be crude, the figure that emerges willbe crude and will crudely express itself. I do not know how far a man may go on the road of subjectivewriting. The matter, I admit, puzzles me. There is somethingapproaching insanity in the very idea of sinking yourself toodeeply into modern American industrial life. But it is my contention that there is no other road. If one wouldavoid neat, slick writing, he must at least attempt to be brother tohis brothers and live as the men of his time live. He must sharewith them the crude expression of their lives. To our grandchildrenthe privilege of attempting to produce a school of Americanwriting that has delicacy and color may come as a matter ofcourse. One hopes that will be true, but it is not true now. And thatis why, with so many of the younger Americans, I put my faith inthe modern literary adventurers. We shall, I am sure, have muchcrude, blundering American writing before the gift of beauty andsubtlety in prose shall honestly belong to us.