Henry James once said that he who would aspire to be a writer must inscribe on his banner the one word “Loneliness.” In the case of my students, their need was not to ward off society, but to get into it. Their problem was that on their banners “Loneliness” had been inscribed despite them, and so they aspired to be writers. Without exception the letters I received were from people suffering from terrible loneliness in all its better-known forms, and in some I had never even dreamed of. Writing, especially writing to Mr. Margolies, was a way of being less alone. To be printed, and to be “famous,” would be an instant shortcut to identity, and an escape from solitude, because then other people would know one as admirers, friends, lovers, suitors, etc.
In the forms they filled out, they gave their ages and occupations. There were a good many cowboys and ranch hands. One of them printed his lessons, not with the printing taught for a while in fashionable schools, although it resembled it, but with the printing of a child concentrating on being neat and careful. There was a sheepherder, a real shepherd, who even said he was lonely, “in my line of work.” Writing cheered him up because “sheep aren’t much company for a man (ha-ha).” There were the wives of ranchers as well. There were several sailors, a Negro cook, a petty officer on a submarine, and a real lighthouse keeper. There were a good many “domestics,” some of whom said they were “colored,” and several students writing from addresses in the Deep South told me, as if they had to, that they were Negroes.
Of all the letters and lessons I read during my stay at the U.S.A. School, only one set showed any slight sign of “promise” whatever. They were the work of a “lady cattle-rancher and poultry farmer,” an “old maid,” she wrote, living at an R.F.D. address somewhere in Kansas. The stories she sent in, regardless of the nature of the assignment, were real stories. The other students’ heartbreaking attempts were always incoherent, abrupt, curtailed. Hers bounced along exuberantly, like a good talker, and were almost interesting, with a lot of local color and detail. They were filled with roosters, snakes, foxes, and hawks, and they had dramatic and possibly true plots woven around sick and dying cows, mortgages, stepmothers, babies, wicked blizzards, and tornadoes. They were also ten times longer than anyone else’s stories. After I gave up my job, I used to look into farm magazines, like The Country Gentleman, on the newsstands, hoping that she might have made publication at last, but I never saw her name again.
Most of my pathetic applicants seemed never to have read anything in their lives, except perhaps a single, memorable story of the “True Confession” type. The discrepancy between the odd, colorless, disjointed little pages they sent me and what they saw in print just didn’t occur to them. Or perhaps they thought Mr. Margolies would wave his magic wand and the little heaps of melancholy word-bones, like chicken bones or fish bones, would put on flesh and vitality and be transformed into gripping, compelling, thrilling, full-length stories and novels. There were doubtless other, deeper reasons for their taking the “course,” sending in all their “lessons,” and paying that outrageous forty dollars. But I could never quite believe that most of my students really thought that they too could one day write, or even that they would really have to work to do so. It was more like applying for application blanks for a lottery. After all, they might win the prize just as well as the next person, and everyone knows those things aren’t always run honestly.
There seemed to be one thing common to all their “primitive” writing, as I suppose it might be called, in contrast to primitive painting: its slipshodiness and haste. Where primitive painters will spend months or years, if necessary, putting in every blade of grass and building up brick walls in low relief, the primitive writer seems in a hurry to get it over with. Another thing was the almost complete lack of detail. The primitive painter loves detail and lingers over it and emphasizes it at the expense of the picture as a whole. But if the writers put them in, the details are often impossibly or wildly inappropriate, sometimes revealing a great deal about the writer without furthering the matter in hand at all. Perhaps it all demonstrates the professional writer’s frequent complaint that painting is more fun than writing. Perhaps the ranchers’ wives who sent in miserable little outlines for stories with no conversation and no descriptions of people or places wouldn’t hesitate to spend long afternoons lovingly decorating birthday cakes in different-color icings. But the subject matter was similarly banal in both the paintings and the writing. There was also the same tendency in both primitive painting and writing to make it all right, or of real value to the world, by tacking on a grand, if ill-fitting, “moral,” or allegorical interpretation. My students seemed to be saying: “Our experiences are real and true and from them we have drawn these unique, these noble conclusions. Since our sentiments are so noble, who could have the heart to deny us our right to Fame?”
What could I possibly find to say to them? From what they wrote me it was obvious they could hardly wait to receive my next analysis. Perhaps they hoped, each time, that Mr. Margolies would tell them he had found a magazine to publish their last lesson and was enclosing the check. All of them were eager, if not hardworking, or felt they had to pretend to be. One man wrote: “I slept on a hair all night, waiting to hear from you.” They apologized for their slowness, for their spelling, for their pens or pencils (they were asked to use ink but quite a few didn’t). One boy excused his poor handwriting by saying, “This is being written on the subway,” and it may have been true. Some referred to the lessons as their “homework,” and addressed Mr. Margolies as “Dear Teacher.” One woman decorated her lessons with Christmas seals. To my surprise, there were two or three male students who wrote man-to-man obscenities, or retold well-worn dirty jokes.
I took to copying out parts of their letters and stories to take home with me. A Kansas City janitor wanted to learn to write in order to publish “a book about how to teach children to be good radicals, of the George Washington Type or the Jesus Christ Type.” One woman revealed that her aged mother approved of her learning how to write to such an extent that she had given her the forty dollars and “her own name to write under.” The daughter’s name was Emma, the mother’s was Katerina. Would I please address her as Katerina in the future?
Next to my “lady cattle-rancher and poultry farmer” I grew fondest of a Mr. Jimmy O’Shea of Fall River, aged seventy, occupation “retired.” His was the nearest approach to a classical primitive style. His stories were fairly long, and like Gertrude Stein, he wrote in large handwriting on small pieces of paper. He had developed a style that enabled him to make exactly a page of every sentence. Each sentence — it usually began with Also or Yes—opened at the top left-hand and finished with an outsize dimple of a period in the lower right. Goodness shone through his blue-lined pages as if they had been little paper lanterns. He characterized everything that appeared in his simple tales with three, four, or even five adjectives and then repeated them, like Homer, every time the noun appeared. It was Mr. O’Shea who wrote me a letter which expressed the common feeling of time passing and wasted, of wonder and envy, and partly sincere ambition: “I wasn’t feeling well over my teeth, and I had three large ones taken out, for they made me nervous and sick sometime, and this is the reason I couldn’t send in my lesson. I am thinking of being able to write like all the Authors, for I believe that is more in my mind than any other kind of work. Mr. Margolies, I am thinking of how those Authors write such long stories of 60,000 or 100,000 words in those Magazines, and where do they get their imagination and the material to work upon? I know there is a big field in this art.”