Letters

Sherwood Anderson

Discovery of a Father

Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941) was an American short-story writer, essayist, and novelist whose writing often reflected his own confusion about man in the modern world of the machine, but whose keen insights into human beings continue to illuminate life for readers of his collection of short stories, Winesburg, Ohio (1919), his novels, Many Marriages (1922) and Dark Laughter (1925), and his semiautobiographical A Story Teller’s Story (1924). In “Discovery of a Father,” from Anderson’s Memoirs (1939), the boy’s negative, even contemptuous, attitude toward his father undergoes a radical change: his earlier wish that his father would be someone else gives way to the secure knowledge that he would never again want another father.

      One of the strangest relationships in the world is that between father and son. I know it now from having sons of my own.

      A boy wants something very special from his father. You hear it said that fathers want their sons to be what they feel they cannot themselves be, but I tell you it also works the other way. I know that as a small boy I wanted my father to be a certain thing he was not. I wanted him to be a proud, silent, dignified father. When I was with other boys and he passed along the street, I wanted to feel a glow of pride: “There he is. That is my father.”

      But he wasn’t such a one. He couldn’t be. It seemed to me then that he was always showing off. Let’s say someone in our town had got up a show. They were always doing it. The druggist would be in it, the shoe-store clerk, the horse doctor, and a lot of women and girls. My father would manage to get the chief comedy part. It was, let’s say, a Civil War play and he was a comic Irish soldier. He had to do the most absurd things. They thought he was funny, but I didn’t.

      I thought he was terrible. I didn’t see how Mother could stand it. She even laughed with the others. Maybe I would have laughed if it hadn’t been my father.

      Or there was a parade, the Fourth of July or Decoration Day. He’d be in that, too, right at the front of it, as Grand Marshal or something, on a white horse hired from a livery stable.

      He couldn’t ride for shucks. He fell off the horse and everyone hooted with laughter, but he didn’t care. He even seemed to like it. I remember once when he had done something ridiculous, and right out on Main Street, too. I was with some other boys and they were laughing and shouting at him and he was shouting back and having as good a time as they were. I ran down an alley back of some stores and there in the Presbyterian Church sheds I had a good long cry.

      Or I would be in bed at night and Father would come home a little lit up and bring some men with him. He was a man who was never alone. Before he went broke, running a harness shop, there were always a lot of men loafing in the shop. He went broke, of course, because he gave too much credit. He couldn’t refuse it and I thought he was a fool. I had got to hating him.

      There’d be men I didn’t think would want to be fooling around with him. There might even be the superintendent of our schools and a quiet man who ran the hardware store. Once, I remember, there was a white-haired man who was a cashier of the bank. It was a wonder to me they’d want to be seen with such a windbag. That’s what I thought he was. I know now what it was that attracted them. It was because life in our town, as in all small towns, was at times pretty dull and he livened it up. He made them laugh. He could tell stories. He’d even get them to singing.

      If they didn’t come to our house they’d go off, say at night, to where there was a grassy place by a creek. They’d cook food there and drink beer and sit about listening to his stories.

      He was always telling stories about himself. He’d say this or that wonderful thing happened to him. It might be something that made him look like a fool. He didn’t care.

      If an Irishman came to our house, right away father would say he was Irish. He’d tell what county in Ireland he was born in. He’d tell things that happened there when he was a boy. He’d make it seem so real, if I hadn’t known he was born in southern Ohio, I’d have believed him myself.

      If it was a Scotchman, the same thing happened. He’d get a burr into his speech. Or he was a German or a Swede. He’d be anything the other man was. I think they all knew he was lying, but they seemed to like him just the same. As a boy that was what I couldn’t understand.

      And there was Mother. How could she stand it? I wanted to ask but never did. She was not the kind you asked such questions.

      I’d be upstairs in my bed, in my room above the porch, and Father would be telling some of his tales. A lot of Father’s stories were about the Civil War. To hear him tell it he’d been in about every battle. He’d known Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and I don’t know how many others. He’d been particularly intimate with General Grant so that when Grant went East, to take charge of all the armies, he took Father along.

      “I was an orderly at headquarters and Sam Grant said to me, ‘Irve,’ he said, ‘I’m going to take you along with me.’ “

      It seems he and Grant used to slip off sometimes and have a quiet drink together. That’s what my father said. He’d tell about the day Lee surrendered and how, when the great moment came, they couldn’t find Grant.

      “You know,” my father said, “about General Grant’s book, his memoirs. You’ve read of how he said he had a headache and how, when he got word that Lee was ready to call it quits, he was suddenly and miraculously cured.

      “Huh,” said Father. “He was in the woods with me.

      “I was in there with my back against a tree. I was pretty well corned. I had got hold of a bottle of pretty good stuff.

      “They were looking for Grant. He had got off his horse and come into the woods. He found me. He was covered with mud.

      “I had the bottle in my hand. What’d I care? The war was over. I knew we had them licked.”

      My father said that he was the one who told Grant about Lee. An orderly riding by had told him, because the orderly knew how thick he was with Grant. Grant was embarrassed.

      “But, Irve, look at me. I’m all covered with mud,” he said to Father.

      And then, my father said, he and Grant decided to have a drink together. They took a couple of shots and then, because he didn’t want Grant to show up potted before the immaculate Lee, he smashed the bottle against the tree.

      “Sam Grant’s dead now and I wouldn’t want it to get out on him,” my father said.

      That’s just one of the kind of things he’d tell. Of course, the men knew he was lying, but they seemed to like it just the same.

      When we got broke, down and out, do you think he ever brought anything home? Not he. If there wasn’t anything to eat in the house, he’d go off visiting around at farm houses. They all wanted him. Sometimes he’d stay away for weeks, Mother working to keep us fed, and then home he’d come bringing, let’s say, a ham. He’d got it from some farmer friend. He’d slap it on the table in the kitchen. “You bet I’m going to see that my kids have something to eat,” he’d say, and Mother would just stand smiling at him. She’d never say a word about all the weeks and months he’d been away, not leaving us a cent for food. Once I heard her speaking to a woman in our street. Maybe the woman had dared to sympathize with her. “Oh,” she said, “it’s all right. He isn’t ever dull like most of the men in this street. Life is never dull when my man is about.”

      But often I was filled with bitterness, and sometimes I wished he wasn’t my father. I’d even invent another man as my father. To protect my mother I’d make up stories of a secret marriage that for some strange reason never got known. As though some men, say the president of a railroad company or maybe a Congressman, had married my mother, thinking his wife was dead and then turned out she wasn’t.

      So they had to hush it up but I got born just the same. I wasn’t really the son of my father. Somewhere in the world there was a dignified, quite wonderful man who was really my father. I even made myself half believe these fancies.

      And then there came a certain night. Mother was away from home. Maybe there was church that night. Father came in. He’d been off somewhere for two or three weeks. He found me alone in the house, reading by the kitchen table.

      It had been raining and he was very wet. He sat and looked at me for a long time, not saying a word. I was startled, for there was on his face the saddest look I had ever seen. He sat for a time, his clothes dripping. Then he got up.

      “Come on with me,” he said.

      I got up and went with him out of the house. I was filled with wonder but I wasn’t afraid. We went along a dirt road that led down into a valley, about a mile out of town, where there was a pond. We walked in silence. The man who was always talking had stopped his talking.

      I didn’t know what was up and had the queer feeling that I was with a stranger. I didn’t know whether my father intended it so. I don’t think he did.

      The pond was quite large. It was still raining hard and there were flashes of lightning followed by thunder. We were on a grassy bank at the pond’s edge when my father spoke, and in the darkness and rain his voice sounded strange.

      “Take off your clothes,” he said. Still filled with wonder, I began to undress. There was a flash of lightning and I saw that he was already naked.

      Naked, we went into the pond. Taking my hand, he pulled me in. It may be that I was too frightened, too full of a feeling of strangeness, to speak. Before that night my father had never seemed to pay any attention to me.

      “And what is he up to now?” I kept asking myself. I did not swim very well, but he put my hand on his shoulder and struck out into the darkness.

      He was a man with big shoulders, a powerful swimmer. In the darkness I could feel the movements of his muscles. We swam to the far edge of the pond and then back to where we had left our clothes. The rain continued and the wind blew. Sometimes my father swam on his back, and when he did he took my hand in his large powerful one and moved it over so that it rested always on his shoulder. Sometimes there would be a flash of lightning and I could see his face quite clearly.

      It was as it was earlier, in the kitchen, a face filled with sadness. There would be the momentary glimpse of his face, and then again the darkness, the wind and the rain. In me there was a feeling I had never known before.

      It was a feeling of closeness. It was something strange. It was as though there were only we two in the world. It was as though I had been jerked suddenly out of myself, out of my world of the schoolboy, out of a world in which I was ashamed of my father.

      He had become blood of my blood; he the strong swimmer and I the boy clinging to him in the darkness. We swam in silence, and in silence we dressed in our wet clothes and went home.

      There was a lamp lighted in the kitchen, and when we came in, the water dripping from us, there was my mother. She smiled at us. I remember that she called us “boys.” “What have you boys been up to?” she asked, but my father did not answer. As he had begun the evening’s experience with me in silence, so he ended it. He turned and looked at me. Then he went, I thought, with a new and strange dignity, out of the room.

      I climbed the stairs to my room, undressed in darkness and got into bed. I couldn’t sleep and did not want to sleep. For the first time I knew that I was the son of my father. He was a storyteller as I was to be. It may be that I even laughed a little softly there in the darkness. If I did, I laughed knowing that I would never again be wanting another father.

Suggestions for Discussion

1.   How does the author bring the subject into focus?

2.   Account for the feelings the narrator had toward his father’s public behavior?

3.   How do the sentence structure and diction contribute to purpose and tone?

4.   How do you explain the father’s action in taking the boy swimming? How do you account for the boy’s changed view of his father?

Suggestions for Writing

1.   Write on one of those topics: a portrait of my father; imaginary parents.

2.   Write a narrative in which a seemingly simple event effects a change in attitude.