Under the Open Sky My Early Years.Pdf
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92 N567 Keep Your Card in This Pocket Books will be issued only on presentation of proper library cards. Unless labeled otherwise, books may be retained for four weeks. Borrowers finding books marked, de-i faced or mutilated are expected to report same at" library- desk; otherwise the last borrower will be held! responsible for all imperfections discovered. The card holder is responsible for all books drawn on this card. for over-due books 2c a cost Penalty day plus ofy- notices. Lost cards and change of residence must be re- ported promptly. Public Library Kansas City, Mo. Keep Your Card in This Pocket 18 -5-7 UNDER THE OPEN SKY THQ OPE;N SKY Years My Cjarly BY MARTIN ANDERSON NEX6 AUTHOR OF "PEIXE THE CONQUEROR" TRANSLATED FROM THE DANISH BY J. B. C. WATKINS 9 3 THE VANGUARD PRESS NEW YORK COPYRIGHT, 1938, BY THE VANGUARP PRESS, INC. in without No portion af this book, may be reprinted any form permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in SL magazine or newspaper. DESIGNER: ERNST REICHL MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY H. WOLFF, NEW YORK 955423 * 26 "28 UNDER THE OPEN SKY reaching the age of sixty, I have more and more often been asked when I was going to write my autobiography. At first I was annoyed that I should be thought old enough for that; I myself had no feeling of having reached the memoir stage. My links with the past have always lain in the unconscious; it is the present and the future that live in me conscious and alert. I have, of course, vigorous roots in the past, but I have always felt that they nourished and strengthened me best when they were allowed to work in conceal- ment. Moreover, when a man is in the thick of the battle, where it is raging fiercest, and when he has a boy of a year and a half bouncing about under his desk like a freshly pumped up rubber ball, he is not much disposed to turn his mind backward. Surely, too, there was enough known about me already. I have written a goodly amount, and the critics have always energetically maintained without paying much attention to an occasional mild protest on my part that the content of my work is mainly auto- biographical, slightly remolded, of course, to meet the require- ments of fiction. Now this is not altogether true; for even where I have used material from my own life, I have lied quite grossly, have been forced to lie in order to get on speaking terms with people at all. I have often had to laugh when people have complained of my crass realism; if they only knew what the reality was like! If I had described the episodes in question as I actually experienced them, I should have been hissed perhaps stoned out of existence. But it might be rather tempting to do this, to set up the stark reality beside the picture of it. Thus, without wishing to, I drifted along, until one day I found [3] I had become reconciled to the idea of surveying my whole life entire. But then, I thought, I will permit myself for once to tell the naked, unvarnished truth, Now that I am well started, however, I am forced to ask myself what the truth really is. For I have met with sundry truths in my lifetime, perhaps hundreds! The number of truths is infinite; and when we have met them all, then perhaps we have truth itself. But it is infinitely far off! Perhaps the only way for the individual to arrive at the truth is to create it for himself by lying, to invent it, or let others invent it for him. The truth about Father and Mother, for example surely that should be obvious to one who was begotten by them, who grew up under their eye, and who lived the most wide-awake time of his life, his childhood, together with them day by day. And yet there is no problem more complicated than that of judging between them I simply cannot do it. Now the one is in the right in my mind and now the other, and generally it is Mother. But then sometimes I have to side with Father; it depends upon the mood of the moment, and that, in turn, upon the particular situation which is uppermost at the time and dominates the memory. And the older I grow, the harder it becomes! I think I know more about Father and Mother today than when they were alive, more, indeed, than when I had them constantly before my eyes. But their life together is as much a mystery to me as ever. Of myself, with whom I have had to do battle now for sixty- three yearsj I know still less. There I can find nothing at all to call the truth, however I look at it; not even the fragments of truth will answer. When I was young, ah, then I knew to a T who and I what and how was; now I am entirely at sea. There is, I am ashamed to confess, something about this state that appeals to me. The uncertainty about everything is in itself attractive to the mind; the world becomes larger, life becomes richer. And above all it gives the mind something of that free, untrammeled feeling usually attributed to youthl Sometimes at least! I must say that if I look at life from the standpoint of technical development, it seems to me that I, as a human being, am a devil of a smart fellow to whom nothing is impossible. But if I apply spiritual standards I discover myself to be the most miserable of creatures. Our science is constantly extending the bounds of the universe, but the result is simply that we children of men appear more and more insignificant. We are parasites on the face of the earth, almost like lice in the beard of a creator! We encompass the grandest gestures in our technique, but we fail to catch the heartbeat of * the universe. If we know practically nothing about ourselves, we persuade our- selves, to make up for it, that we know a great deal about people who do not concern us. But there is nothing very substantial in this knowledge. Whenever I am confronted with people who live their lives, satisfied with themselves and at peace with existence, I always wonder whether they are really, in their innermost hearts, so sure of things as they seem to be; whether there is not, deep down within them, a worm that gnaws, a doubt about themselves, a feel- ing of boundless insufficiency. Am I really a creature apart simply because I usually feel myself a scurvy rogue who has misunderstood life's purpose with me? All my life I have been pursued by the feel- ing that I was two beings : one I that nobody could call to account, so sovereign was it, so exalted above all doubt and criticism; and another I, a ghastly failure, that 7 held in my hands and must try to mold into shape. The result is that I have always labored with myself striven inhumanly, I may say and often bungled. Have I suc- ceeded with the years in molding myself, at least in part, along those basic lines which seem to be laid down deep within me? Or has it gone the other way? Has the abortion contrived to hold its own at the expense of what was originally a greatly conceived being? I do not know but at least I have succeeded in bringing more balance into my life and in getting some relief from a sense of responsibility at times positively burdensome. [5] As I look back it seems to me that my life has been one long effort to some sort of struggle with chaos, an endless bring whole of a a out of a heap of chance scraps. They speak putting cat, dog, and a porcupine together in the same sack. I have been just some such sackful of incongruities. That I have been able to hold the fragments together at all is quite incomprehensible to me. If I have also man- aged, as some people think, to accomplish a few things in life, it is really nothing short of a miracle. I certainly have not found exist- ence dull. My life thus far has run a wide gamut; it has been atro- ciously hard and it has been incredibly happy. Every experience has been intense, with bitterness or sweetness; partly, perhaps, because I have usually had the tick of a deathwatch in my ear as accompani- ment to everything. It is invigorating once you have got used to it. Until I was nearing forty, I cannot remember ever having passed a single day when I enjoyed that wonderful unawareness of the body that goes with perfect health. Some organ or other always made itself felt unpleasantly, when there was not something more serious the matter. And this wretched husk has had to hold together all manner of incompatibles, scraps of multifarious physical and intel- lectual abilities and powers, which do not belong together but seem to have been picked up on life's wharf and put into a sack from 1 the same place perhaps by a Knight of the Seven. It has, as I have said, cost no end of effort merely to get the sack to hold together, and it has seemed hopeless that its chaotic contents could ever be united into a harmonious and productive whole.