Dark Laughter

Sherwood Anderson

Description

Dark Laughter (1925) is a novel by Sherwood Anderson. Inspired by his own decision to abandon his family and career in order to establish himself as a professional writer, Anderson explores the guilts, routines, desires, and disappointments driving the lives of many Americans in the early-twentieth century. Although he is known today for his story collection Winesburg, Ohio, a pioneering work of Modernist fiction admired for its plainspoken language and psychological detail, Anderson’s Dark Laughter was his only bestseller. Inspired by the stream of consciousness style of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Anderson produced a novel that remains controversial for its depictions of race, class, and sexuality. >“Bruce Dudley stood near a window that was covered with flecks of paint and through which could be faintly seen, first a pile of empty boxes, then a more or less littered factory yard running down to a steep bluff, and beyond the brown waters of the Ohio River.” Bruce, a factory worker in Old Harbor, Indiana, is your average working man. He lives a simple life, keeps a low profile, spends his money at the bar with his friends, and tries not to get fired. As far as anyone knows, there is nothing special about him whatsoever; he is a drifter who found his way to Old Harbor by chance and settled down to make himself some money. But Bruce was born in Old Harbor; raised on its streets and educated in its schools, he lived most of his life by another name: John Stockton, Indiana native turned Chicago reporter. Married with kids, he was happy as far as anyone could tell. Up until the day he left, he was still John Stockton, but the change that came over him late in life was too great to resist. He needed a new name, a new life. He wanted to start over in the place where he began. When an opportunity comes to work as a gardener for the factory owner’s wife, Bruce soon finds it impossible to resist her brazen advances. Dark Laughter is a tale of guilt, identity, and shame from master storyteller Sherwood Anderson. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Sherwood Anderson’s Dark Laughter is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.

Sujets

• Midwest
• Literary
• Medio Oeste de Estados Unidos
• Nueva Orleans
• Años 1920
• African-American neighborhood
• List of novelists from the United States
• Midwestern United States
• New Orleans
• 1920s
• Middle West
• La Nouvelle-Orléans
• Fiction
• Chicago

Informations

• Publié par: Mint Editions
• Date de parution: 03 août 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781513288499
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Dark Laughter
Sherwood Anderson
 
Dark Laughter was first published in 1925.
This edition published by Mint Editions 2021.
ISBN 9781513283470 | E-ISBN 9781513288499
Published by Mint Editions®
minteditionbooks.com
Publishing Director: Jennifer Newens
Design & Production: Rachel Lopez Metzger
Project Manager: Micaela Clark
Typesetting: Westchester Publishing Services
 
C ONTENTS B OOK I I II III IV B OOK II V VI B OOK III VII VIII IX B OOK IV X B OOK V XI XII XIII XIV B OOK VI XV XVI XVII XVIII XIX XX B OOK VII XXI XXII B OOK VIII XXIII XXIV XXV XXVI B OOK IX XXVII XXVIII B OOK X XXIX XXX B OOK XI XXXI XXXII XXXIII XXXIV XXXV XXXVI XXXVII B OOK XII XXXVIII XXXIX XL
 
BOOK I
 
I
B ruce Dudley stood near a window that was covered with flecks of paint and through which could be faintly seen, first a pile of empty boxes, then a more or less littered factory yard running down to a steep bluff, and beyond the brown waters of the Ohio River. Time very soon now to push the windows up. Spring would be coming soon now. Near Bruce at the next window, stood Sponge Martin, a thin wiry little old man with a heavy black mustache. Sponge chewed tobacco and had a wife who got drunk with him sometimes on pay-days. Several times a year, on the evening of such a day, the two did not dine at home but went to a restaurant on the side of the hill in the business part of the city of Old Harbor and there had dinner in style.
After eating they got sandwiches and two quarts of Kentucky-made “moon” whisky and went off fishing in the river. This only happened in the spring, summer and fall and when the nights were fair and the fish biting.
They built a fire of driftwood and sat around, having put out catfish lines. There was a place up river about four miles where there had formerly been, during the river’s flush days, a small sawmill and a wood-yard for supplying river packets with fuel and they went there. It was a long walk and neither Sponge nor his wife was very young but they were both tough wiry little people and they had the corn whisky to cheer them on the way. The whisky was not colored to look like the whisky of commerce but was clear like water and very raw and burning to the throat and its effect was quick and lasting.
Being out to make a night of it they gathered wood to start a fire as soon as they had got to their favorite fishing place. Then everything was all right. Sponge had told Bruce dozens of times that his wife didn’t mind anything. “She’s as tough as a fox terrier,” he said. Two children had been born to the couple earlier in life and the oldest, a boy, had got his leg cut off hopping on a train. Sponge spent two hundred and eighty dollars on doctors but might as well have saved the money. The kid had died after six weeks of suffering.
When he spoke of the other child, a girl playfully called Bugs Martin, Sponge got a little upset and chewed tobacco more vigorously than usual. She had been a rip-terror right from the start. No doing anything with her. You couldn’t keep her away from the boys. Sponge tried and his wife tried but what good did it do?
Once, on a pay-day night in the month of October, when Sponge and his wife were up river at their favorite fishing place, they got home at five o’clock the next morning, both still a little lit up, and what did Bruce Dudley think they had found going on? Mind you, Bugs was only fifteen then. Well, Sponge had gone into the house ahead of his wife and there, on the new rag carpet in the front hallway was that kid asleep and beside her was a young man also asleep.
What a nerve! The young man was a fellow who worked in Mouser’s grocery. He didn’t live in Old Harbor any more. Heaven knows what had become of him. When he woke up and saw Sponge standing there with his hand on the door-knob he jumped up quick and lit out, almost knocking Sponge over as he rushed through the door. Sponge kicked at him but missed. He was pretty well lit up.
Then Sponge went after Bugs. He shook her till her teeth fairly rattled but did Bruce think she hollered? Not she! Whatever you might think of Bugs she was a game little kid.
She was fifteen when Sponge beat her up that time. He whacked her good. Now she was in a house in Cincinnati, Sponge thought. Now and then she wrote a letter to her mother and in the letters she always lied. What she said was that she was working in a store but that was the bunk. Sponge knew it was a lie because he had got the dope about her from a man who used to live in Old Harbor but who had a job in Cincinnati now. One night he went out to a house and saw Bugs there raising hell with a crowd of rich young Cincinnati sports but she never saw him. He kept himself in the background and then later wrote Sponge about it. What he said was that Sponge ought to try to straighten Bugs out but what was the use making a fuss. She had been that way since she was a kid, hadn’t she?
And when you came right down to it what did that fellow want to butt in for. What was he doing in such a place—so high and mighty afterwards? He had better keep his nose in his own back yard. Sponge hadn’t even shown the letter to his old woman. What was the use of getting her all worked up? If she wanted to believe that bunk about Bugs having a good job in a store why not let her? If Bugs ever came home on a visit, which she was always writing her mother some day maybe she would, Sponge wouldn’t ever let on to her himself.
Sponge’s old woman was all right. When she and Sponge were out that way, after catfish, and they had both taken five or six good stiff drinks of “moon,” she was like a kid. She made Sponge feel—Lordy!
They were lying on a pile of half-rotten old sawdust near the fire, right where the old wood-yard had been. When the old woman was a little lit up and acted like a kid it made Sponge feel that way too. It was a cinch the old woman was a good sport. Since he had married her, when he was a young man about twenty-two, Sponge hadn’t ever fooled around any other women at all—except maybe a few times when he was away from home and was a little soused.
 
II
I t was a fancy notion all right, the one that had got Bruce Dudley into the position he was now in—working in a factory in the town of Old Harbor, Indiana, where he had lived as a child and as a young lad and where he was now masquerading as a workman under an assumed name. The name amused him. A thought flashing across the mind and John Stockton had become Bruce Dudley. Why not? For the time being anyway he was letting himself be anything that it pleased his fancy to be. He had got the name in an Illinois town to which he had come from the far south—from the city of New Orleans to be exact. That was when he was on his way back to Old Harbor to which he had also come following a whim. The Illinois town was one where he was to change cars. He had just walked along the main street of the town and had seen two signs over two stores, “Bruce, Smart and Feeble—Hardware” and “Dudley Brothers—Grocery.”
It was like being a criminal. Perhaps he was a kind of criminal, had suddenly become one. It might well be that a criminal was but a man like himself who had suddenly stepped a little out of the beaten path most all men travel. Criminals took other people’s lives or took goods that did not belong to them and he had taken—what? Himself? It might very well be put that way.
“Slave, do you think your own life belongs to you? Hocus, Pocus, now you see it and now you don’t. Why not Bruce Dudley?”
Going about the town of Old Harbor as John Stockton might lead to complications. It wasn’t likely anyone there would remember the shy boy who had been John Stockton, would recognize him in the man of thirty-four, but a lot of people might remember the boy’s father, the school-teacher, Edward Stockton. It might even be that the two looked alike. “Like father like son, eh?” The name Bruce Dudley had a kind of something in it. It suggested solidity and respectability and Bruce had got an hour’s amusement, while waiting for the train up to Old Harbor by walking about the streets of an Illinois town and trying to think of other possible Bruce Dudleys of the world. “Captain Bruce Dudley of the American Army, Bruce Dudley, Minister of the First Presbyterian Church of Hartford, Connecticut. But why Hartford? Well, why not Hartford? He, John Stockton, had never been to Hartford, Connecticut. Why had the place come into his mind? It stood for something, didn’t it? Very likely it was because Mark Twain lived there for a long time and there had been a kind of connection between Mark Twain and a Presbyterian or a Congregational or a Baptist minister of Hartford. Also there was a kind of connection between Mark Twain and the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers and John Stockton had been fooling along, up and down the Mississippi River for six months on that day when he got off the train at the Illinois town bound for Old Harbor. And wasn’t Old Harbor on the Ohio River?
T’witchelty. T’weedlety, T’wadelty, T’wum,
Catch a nigger by the thumb.
“Big slow river crawling down out of a wide rich fat valley between mountains far away. Steamboats on the river. Mates swearing and hitting niggers over the heads with clubs. Niggers singing niggers dancing, niggers toting loads on their heads, nigger women having babies—easy and free—half white a lot of the babies.”
The man who had been John Stockton and who suddenly, by a whim, became Bruce Dudley, had been thinking a lot about Mark Twain during the six months before he took the new name. Being near the river and on the river had made him think. It wasn’t strange after all that he chanced to think of Hartford, Connecticut, too. “He did get all crusted up, that boy,” he whispered to himself that day when he went about the streets of the Illinois town bearing for the first time the name Bruce Dudley.
“A man like that, eh—who had seen what that man had, a man who could write and feel and think a