And when you retrace your steps, even if it’s your intention to change them, the path you’ve already worn down deepens; it is increasingly difficult to escape your first mistakes, really to see a fresh new way of solving some repeating problem; while certain points along the route, like places where you’ve fallen often, threaten your nerve, so that you are inclined to seek trails around the mountain which won’t require you to climb in the cold and cross it.
Meanwhile the mind whispers reasons to the soul which explain why a bad line is a lovely one; how all your strategies have superbly succeeded; why you may march confidently on in cardboard shoes, for no one will notice. My training had stocked me with rationalizations like a pond. I had merely to throw a line in to catch one. The poor phrase, the campy connection, the cheap joke, the trite observation, the cute twist you’ve contrived, the smart aleck attitude, the infantile ideas and innumerable alliterations, the glib topping you’ve just poured on a paragraph: these and other ‘awfuls’ are a part of you; they come from the deepest cave; and they must be sent back like a bad bottle no matter what the label says, or the degree of your humiliation.
There is much fright. It settles like a cloud of acid in the stomach. Doctors prescribe milk. They know there is no calcium in kindness. Although unwell, one tries to stick one’s words together well; but perhaps, as I write this, the sentences these sentences are supposed to front are melting like icicles, and pointedly passing away; so that, reader, when you turn the final pages of this preface, you will be confronted with a pale, pretentious blank; and if that happens, I know which of us will be the greater fool, for your few cents spent on this book are a little loss from a small mistake; think of me and smile: I misspent a life.
My journal begins to sputter — gutters out. No more little plans, no more recorded glooms or glorious exhortations, and no more practice paragraphs either, like scales run over in the street. For several years before I began ‘The Pedersen Kid,’ I had practiced them (and single sentences, too, and imaginary words, and sounds I hoped had fallen out of Alice); three of which I have put in this preface like odd bits of fruit in a pudding — just a change of texture and a little action for the teeth — and these exercises were another idiocy, because I knew that words were communities made by the repeated crossing of contexts the way tracks formed towns, and that sentences did not swim indifferently through others like schools of fish of another species, but were like lengths of web within a web, despite one’s sense of the stitch and knot of design inside them.
Once more right about art and wrong about the world, the Idealist philosophers had argued the same way, Leibniz suggesting that every truth was an analytic one, and that all legitimate predicates would eventually be found (by God) embedded like so many weevils in a single subject there wouldn’t be any biscuit; but, then, conversely, was a sentence like that flower in its crannied wall, that speck of sand we might see a world in, and could one observe inside its syntactically small self the shape of a busy populace? would the unity of a well-formed sentence serve as a model for the unity of All or Any? I guess I hoped so.
Hours of insanity and escape… hours inventing expressions like ‘kiss my teeth,’ and then wondering what they meant… hours of insanity and escape… hours spent looking at objects as if they were women, sketching ashtrays, for instance, and noting of a crystal one
… the eyes, the lines of light, the living luster of the glass — the patterns, the ebb and flow — shadows, streaks — the flowing like water in the quiet streams with the sun on it — the foam and bubble of the glass…
and concluding the study grandly (who was I pretending to be? Maupassant tutored by Flaubert? with this command:
Never mention an ashtray unless you can swiftly make it the only one of its kind in the world.
A rule I obeyed by never mentioning an ashtray.
As should be obvious from my collection of words about the ashtray, I could not teach myself to see without, at the same time, teaching myself how to write, for the words, and the observation they comprise, coalesce. If one is not alive and lustrous, neither is the other. Here I had made nothing to snuff a smoking end in — a gathering as burnt out and gray as ash.
Thus, obscurely and fortuitously, chance brought these stories forth from nowhere. Icicles once dripped solidly from my eaves, for instance. I thought them remarkable because they seemed to grow as a consequence of their own grief, and I wondered whether my feelings would freeze to me by the time they had traveled my length, and whether each of us wasn’t just the size of our consciousness solidified; but these fancies scarcely crept into the story which, like ‘Order of Insects,’ and everything I’ve written since, is an exploration of an image. I was impressed not only by their cold, perishable beauty, but by the feeling I had that they were mine, and that, though accident had fixed them to my gutters the way it had hung them everywhere, no one had a right to cause their premature destruction. Yet where may the eye fall now its sight is not bruised by vandals and their victims? No matter. The story merely began from this thought, it did not create itself entirely as an icicle should, so that passions warmed elsewhere would cool as they passed along the text until, at the sharp tip, they became themselves text. That would have been ideal. That would have been something!
Hours of insanity and escape… collecting names in the hope they’d prove jackpotty, and stories would suddenly shower out like dimes…
Horace Bardwell, Ada Hunt Chase, Mary Persis Crofts, Kelsey Flowers, Annie Stilphen, Edna Hoxie, Asher Applegate, Amos Bodge, Enoch Boyce, Jeremiah Bresnan, James G. Burpee, Curtis Chamlet, Decius W. Clark, Revellard Dutcher, Jedediah Felton, Jethro Furber, Pelatiah Hall, George Hatstat, Quartus Graves, Leoammi Kendall, Truxton Orcutt, Plaisted Williams, Francis Plympton, Azariah Shove, Peter Twiss; and in addition the members of the cooking club of Mt. Gilead, Ohio, 1899: Dean Booher, Floy Buxton, Nellie Goorley, Ira Irwin, Bessie Johnson, Clara Kelly, Sadie McCracken, Clara Mozier, Josie Plumb, Sarah Swingle, Maude Smith, Anna, Belle, Deane, and Ivan Talmadge, Roberta Wheeler.
Round, ripe, seedful names like these are seldom found and cannot be invented, though they might be more sweetly arranged. I could not have shaken them from any local tree because I have no locality. I am not a man from Warren. What is it to be from Warren? or weakly half-Protestant, half-Catholic? nondescript in half-wasp white? of German and Scandinavian blood so pale even pure Aryans are disgusted? and with a name made for amusement, and one which, even in German, means ‘alley.’ Though I am, Gassy was not the worst I was called. I am no one’s son, or father, it appears. Not Northern, not American, not a theosophist, not a scholar, not Prufrock, not the Dane. Yet I gathered these names all the same. From a book… books… from the pages that are my streets.
Nature rarely loops. Nature repeats. This spring is not a former spring rethought, but merely another one, somewhat the same, somewhat not. However, in a fiction, ideas, perceptions, feelings, return like reconsiderations, and the more one sees a piece of imaginative prose as an adventure of the mind, the more the linearities of life will be bent and interrupted. Just as revision itself is made of meditative returns, so the reappearance of any theme constitutes the reseeing of that theme by itself. Otherwise there is no advance. There is stagnation. The quiet spiral of the shell, a gyre, even a whirlwind, a tunnel towering in the air: these are the appropriate forms, the rightful shapes; yet the reader must not succumb to the temptations of simple location, but experience in the rising, turning line the wider view, like a sailplane circling through a thermal, and sense at the same time a corkscrewing descent into the subject, a progressive deepening around the reading eye, a penetration of the particular which is the partial theme of ‘Mrs. Mean’—at once escape and entry, an inside pulled out and an outside pressed in, as also is the case with my single short story, ‘Order of Insects.’