Below, Sherwood Anderson to actress friend Miriam Philips, on the price of honest artistic expression and the importance of cultivating, in the face of rejection, hardship and disappointment, an “inner laughter.” (Pryor”, referred to frequently below, was the booking agent who had arranged Miriam’s theater troupe’s tour, and whom Miriam had accused of caring more for profit than for artistry.)
TO MIRIAM PHILIPS
November 22, 1935, New York
Dear Mim . . .
Woman, do you tempt me? Do you deliberately set out to tempt me from my honest labor, divert, confuse, set me galloping amid stars? This letter of yours has about it that touch…the touch that would tempt any American penman to go on and on, whole volumes written.
Pryor
Oscar Ameringer
Letter written from Tonkawa
Huckins Hotel
Wistful soul of America, as in the Pryor, gone alas sour.
Woman be gone. Skidoooo. What, after all, are you, Jap, Katy with her “soul of Bernard Shaw,” the whole gang of you…strolling players, eh, come into the king’s court…King Business…setting yourself up, expecting, why, why, why, why? Did you not know the colleges, universities, theatres, public buildings, yeh even government are subject to that king?
But serioushishishishly Mims…it just happens that I yesterday took a walk, alone in a winter wood. I was thinking of all this, very much as set down by your pen. As it happens I have recently had a very moving experience. I bought…at a ghastly price…the letters of Vincent Van Gogh, the painter, to his brother Theo. Regardless of the price I am going to have them for Hedgerow. They should be there, always at hand, ready for any honorable player who happens to have an hour to pick up a book, the letters so terribly close to all life, sometimes to just what you have all been feeling, so tender often.
Then there came here a simply gorgeous exhibition of the man’s work. I have already written Jap of this, fairly commanding him to see it. It must happen to you too. It is at the Modern Museum, on 52nd Street, I think.
As to myself, as I have written Jap, I expect to be here until about Dec. 15th. My youngest son, John, is coming up here, getting here about the 9th, and will stay four or five days. I have already suggested that Jap come over and ride back to Hedgerow with us when we start for Virginia. Why not you and Katy too. It would be wonderful for the whole crowd to see the show. I had planned that John and I would stop for a day with you all on the way down. Eleanor cannot come down to Virginia until later, just a day or two before Christmas.
But let me go back to my walk, thoughts, etc. I have it figured this way Mims. What has happened to all of you happens to everyone who attempts something.
Attempts what?
Why, I should say, an approach to life, to reality, in any art. You speak of your failures, bad night, etc. Of course. You can escape always by attempting less. You see, Jap could have gone on, had success as an actor, acting any material put up to him, not wanting to get down into the material also, had success, even a pleasant enough life…
As in writing…to keep always on the surface etc. You understand.
Why I do think it is plain…this, that if in any art you really attempt to take the responsibility of your art, you have to suffer. Why not. But isn’t it also true that the taking of that very responsibility is the only road to life?
I was trying to think what happened to people, and why, during the walk above mentioned. I think it’s like this. The hurt affects people in two ways…they become silent or resentful…this probably from the notion that they and they have been so hurt…or they get what I like to call “inner laughter,” and I wonder if that isn’t just maturity.
But it is the thing and, Mims, I’ll tell you a secret, women get the thing of which I am speaking oftener than men, I don’t know why but it seems to me true…the thing that is in Jap’s mother and in Eleanor’s mother.
I suppose, don’t you, that it comes to this…Work the best you can, don’t expect much, don’t depend on fellows like Pryor, and if you do depend on them and they sell you down river, grin.
It’s all curious enough, God knows. I think this is true, that if you do at all good work, in any art, you begin to disturb people. Closeness to life always hurts. Well, you do not want to hurt but these darts fly out from under your pen wounding people. It takes, I presume, faith that in the long end it won’t hurt and may perhaps even heal.
I must quit jabbering and go to work. I know how your gang always heals me, that I get health when I am among you. It is something, by God, to have made a place like that.
Of course I’ll see you all sometime during the holiday season.
Sherwood
I feel that my letter was inadequate…too highfalutin perhaps. The real point is after all Pryor, what he stands for, what such fellows do. I used to call them, in my own mind, “the little children of the arts.” They mess on the floor, do such dirty things like all children.
There is resentment in them too. Let’s say such a one has got dimly a look into the land of reality…for the imaginative world in which the artist is sometimes permitted to live at least for moments is more real than the real world. I think they don’t stick because the test is too hard for them. There isn’t strength.
Then, curiously enough, they begin to hate, can’t help hating those who do not turn back.
It is curious about these fellows in writing. I’ve known so many. There are the fellows who go Sat. Eve. Post…or Hollywood. They are both too humble and too arrogant. They approach you fawning, wanting, through you, to get back something. It can’t be had that way, through another. They grow arrogant, hurtful. You have to go away from them, let them alone.
The idea I did try to express is perhaps sound enough, that the protection we must always seek is that inner laughter…that is to say, I presume, to try to take it also as a part of the total picture, this damn fascinating thing…life.
Jesus, even at its worst, I wish sometimes I could have a thousand years of it…
S.A.