A Story Tellers Story TO ALFRED STIEGLITZ, who has been more than father to so many puzzled, wistful children of the arts in this big, noisy, growing and groping America, this book is gratefully dedicated. A Story Tellers Story A STORY-TELLERS STORY IN all the towns and over the wide countrysides of my own mid-American boyhood there was no such thing as poverty, as I myself saw it and knew it later in our great American industrial towns and cities. My own family was poor, but of what did our poverty consist My father, a ruined dandy from the South, had been reduced to keeping a small harness repair shop and, when that failed, he became osten sibly a house-and-barn painter. However, he did not call himself a house-painter. The idea was not flashy enough for him. He called himself a sign-writer. The day of universal advertising had not yet come and there was but little sign-writing to do in our town, but still he stuck out bravely for the higher life. At any time he would let go by the board the privilege of painting Alf Mann the butchers house it would have kept him busily at work for a month in order to have a go at lettering signs on fences along country roads for Alf Granger the baker. There was your true pilgrimage abroad, out into the land. Father engaged a horse and a spring wagon and took the three older of his sons with him, My older brother and the one next younger than myself were, from the first, adept at sign-writing, while both father and myself were helpless with a finish in our 3 hands. And so I drove the horse and father super vised the whole affair. He had a natural boyish love for the supervision of affairs and the picking out of a particular fence on a particular roadbecame to him as important a matter as the selection of a site for a city, or the fortification that was to defend it. And then the farmer who owned the fence had to be consulted and if he refused his consent the joy of the situation became intensified. We drove off up the road and turned into a wood and the farmer went back to his work of cultivating corn. We watched and waited, our boyish hearts beating madly. It was a summer day and in the small wood in which we were concealed we all sat on a fallen log in silence. Birds flew overhead and a squirrel chattered. What a delicate tinge of romance spread over our common place enough business Father was made for romance. For him there was no such thing as a fact. It had fallen out that he, never having had the glorious opportunity to fret his little hour upon a greater stage, was intent on fret ting his hour as best he could In a money-saving pros perous corn-shipping, cabbage-raising Ohio village. He magnified the danger of our situation. He might have a shotgun, he said, pointing to where in the distance the farmer was again at work. As we waited in the wood he sometimes told us a story of the Civil War and how he with a companion had crept for days and nights through an enemy country at the risk of their lives. We were carrying mes sages, he said, raising his eyebrows and throwing out his hands. By the gesture there was something implied, Well, it was an affair of life or death. 4 Why speak of the matter My country needed me and I, and my intrepid companion, had been selected because we were die bravest men in the army, the raised eyebrows were saying. And so with their paint pots and brushes in their hands my two brothers presentlycrept out of the wood and ran crouching through cornfields and got into the dusty road. Quickly and with mad haste they dabbed the name of Alf Granger on the fence with the declara tion that he baked the best bread in the State of Ohio, and when they returned to us we all got back into the spring wagon and drove back along the road past the sign. Father commanded me to stop the horse. Look 1 he said, frowning savagely at my two broth ers, your N is wrong...
